What Remains (19 page)

The cancer reprieve ends with a bang. There are shadows on Anthony’s CT scan at the checkup in May, and there is no mistaking them. It is three weeks before graduation. Anthony has planned a party and invited my entire class to the apartment for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. We schedule the operation for the week after.

Carolyn and I get off the plane at Reagan National, and it’s as though no time has passed at all. Anthony has come down before us; Lee is just behind. We check into the hotel, wait for Lee, and then pick up Anthony at the hospital. We drive to Positano’s for an early dinner and then take Anthony back; he stays overnight now. The doctors are more cautious as these visits go on. There are more tests, more pre-op, and they want to monitor him overnight.

In the morning when the alarm goes off, I drag myself out, and Carolyn grumbles. She’s sharing my room and stays in bed while I start to get ready—my “Miss America” routine, she calls it.

I wash my hair and blow it dry with a round brush. I pull on the flannel-lined jeans and a sweater.

“Lamb, it’s June. Do you really have to wear those?” she says.

I go through the assorted products in the bathroom and carefully apply face moisturizer and concealer under my eyes.

She gets up, brushes her teeth, pulls her hair back into a ponytail, puts on her jeans and a T-shirt, and then freezes in the ICU.

Anthony does push-ups in his room while he waits for the gurney. We are a picture of tranquillity—Lee in her light-blue sweater, me in my flannel jeans. Carolyn kisses Friday and hangs him on the wall. “Look at him, he’s a movie star,” she says.

“You have an unhealthy obsession with that dog,” I tell her. “You can’t have kids, you know, you’ll drive them crazy.”

“No, I won’t. Just you.”

Lying on the gurney, Anthony smiles at us. He is getting groggy. He grips my hand tight all the way to the double doors. And then he’s gone.

Lee goes back to the hotel. Carolyn and I find an empty room to sleep. We all know what to do. None of us is surprised to be here again. It doesn’t seem as though any time has passed at all.

There’s a complication after the surgery, and when we arrive the next morning the nurse pulls me aside—there’s been an air leak.
Subcutaneous emphysema,
she calls it. It’s when air leaks out of the lungs during surgery. It seeps into the soft tissue under the skin and forms pockets. The doctors call it
Rice Krispies,
because when you poke the skin it crunches, like the cereal.

“I don’t want you to be upset when you see him,” she warns me. “It looks worse than it actually is.” We have been doing this for too long for me to be upset or alarmed at anything I see. But it is very odd, and I flinch just slightly when I walk in.

“Hey there, good morning.” I smile. His entire body is puffed up like a balloon, his skin stretched tight. His face is moon-shaped and swollen. All of his features are puffed out of proportion, and his skin crinkles when I touch it. “It’s crunchy!” I poke him, trying to make light of it.

“Stop it, Carole.”

“Listen to it, crunch, crunch.”

He gives me a look.

He is not amused by this, my poking him, though he’s not concerned either. It’s another day, and he’s trying to watch the news on the television behind me.

Anthony is on suction on the wall for over a week to get out all the air. There are no trips for him. No Hamburger Hamlet, no walks, even, down the hall.

Carolyn rubs his crunchy feet. She brings back a loofah and peppermint lotion from The Body Shop. I am here, but she does the work. She holds his hand while they watch TV. She takes out her pedicure kit and soaks his feet. When we leave the hospital for a break, she never fails to bring something back for him. Anthony, I know, is uncomfortable with this level of attention. He is not the sort for this, but I don’t try to change anything. I don’t step in for him, redirect her as I do the others, because I need her here, and he knows that.

He’s in the ICU for four days, and when he sleeps we go out into the sun, into the air, where there are cars and traffic and people on lunch breaks and mothers pushing strollers.

I do not have a photograph of the two of us. As far as I know, such a thing does not exist. We did not, as a rule, take pictures, but if I could pick a scene to freeze, it might be this: Carolyn driving the rented white Sunbird on 495 South, our windows rolled down, with the radio turned up. Her left foot resting on the dashboard, her fingers tapping the wheel. The two of us throwing our heads back, shouting along to Tina Turner, “Oh, you better be good to me / because I don’t have the time for your overloaded lies…”

We drive to Tysons Corner in search of Hush Puppies. “It’s all about a Hush Puppy,” she declares. “You aren’t leaving this town without them.” We stop at Bloomingdale’s and give each other makeovers at the MAC counter. We order sticky rolls at Cinnabon. At a Clarks shoe store we try on every style of Hush Puppy they have until I settle on the black-suede slip-ons. While we are boxing up the shoes, I feel someone watching us. I look up and see an older black woman a few feet away, beaming toward us—shivering, it seems, with happiness, so much that I’m afraid for a moment she might cry.

She is completely overcome, and then Carolyn sees her and walks over. “Hi,” she says, reaching for the woman’s hand.

“Oh, my God.” She says it softly, but we hear her and smile.

“Oh, my goodness. Are you Mrs. Kennedy?” She puts her hand to her mouth and then into her purse, searching for something. “I don’t have anything to write on—an envelope, here. Would you please, can I have your autograph?”

“Oh, you don’t want that. What would you do with it?” Carolyn puts her hand on the woman’s arm and then grabs mine. “This is my cousin, Princess Radziwill,” she says mischievously. She knows I will cringe. Then she adds, “She has three Emmys.” The woman looks at me, still smiling, but confused. We ask her where she’s from and talk to her for a few minutes. She has grandchildren, and she shows us their pictures.

“I can’t believe I’m talking to you!” she says. “I can’t believe you’re just out here. All by yourself! Don’t you have security?”

Carolyn holds the woman’s hand and tells her it was nice talking with her. I take my Hush Puppies to the register to pay, and we drive back to the hospital.

The White House is screening a Tom Hanks film about the moon tonight. John has put him on the cover of his magazine,
George
, and he and Carolyn need to be there. He flies down in the afternoon and comes to the hospital to pick her up. Anthony is still in the ICU. The swelling has gone down, but he looks weaker and is hooked up to so many machines. It’s a jarring sight. John is taken aback. Anthony knows this, and he knows to break the ice.

“Try not to embarrass yourself tonight,” he says. John has a funny boyish way of eating, with his head bent down and one arm around the plate, as if he is guarding it, the other shoveling in the food. Anthony always teases him about it. “Try to keep your tie clean.”

“I’m sorry I have to leave, Sweetie,” Carolyn says to Anthony. It is ridiculous, she thinks, to go to the White House to see a movie while he’s here in this room. Here is where she wants to be. But that is their life.

Before they leave, she takes a makeup bag into the small hospital bathroom. She combs her hair up in a bun, clips it into place, and applies MAC Studio Fix powder on her face. “Before…after,” she says, as she dots the circles under her eyes. She finishes up with Ruby Stain.

“I’ll come back in the morning,” she says as she straightens the picture of Friday. She kisses Anthony good-bye, and then me. She grabs her black Yohji dress to change in the car. When she arrives at the dinner, photographers will be stacked on top of one another to take her picture.

Before we left New York for the NIH, Carolyn had given me an amethyst ring for my graduation to match hers, so when we get back we go to Tiffany’s to get them inscribed.

“You’re driving her crazy,” she says to me at the counter. We’ve been standing here for fifteen minutes now, the saleswoman patiently waiting for us to make up our minds and leave the rings.

“I just want to make sure it looks right.”

We decide on our initials and then “secret friends forever.” It is important for me to make sure that the inscription is accurate, with “s.f.f.” in lowercase and our initials in caps. I want to know what the font will look like and whether they can do italics on the “s.f.f.” but not the initials.

I live in the details, Carolyn in the big picture.

When I order food, I always ask how they will prepare it. If I am getting takeout, I ask for the fries to be separate, because I don’t like mushy fries. It is my clumsy way of explaining myself, I suppose. A need to define myself as something, the sort of person who prefers her fries to be crisp. If I was always this way or if I’m just controlling what I can during the cancer, I don’t remember.

“Lambie, just tell her what you want!”

“I want our initials,” I tell the saleswoman. “But it needs to be on the opposite side. Hers first on my ring and mine first on hers. Can you center it with the amethyst? So the ‘s.f.f.’ lines up with the stone?”

And now I am simply stalling, because I don’t want to leave. I want to stand here in the pretty store arguing about silly things forever. I don’t want to walk out of the store, kiss her good-bye, take a cab back to my office. So I keep asking questions about the ring. I keep changing the font.

“Don’t you have a job?” Carolyn teases me. “Don’t you have to go to work?”

We all picked roles at the beginning. His mother picked one; Anthony picked one. I was the good wife. This was my thing. I was going to
do this, handle it. Leave it to me.
At first, I was emboldened with the idea that I could, that if I managed it and researched it, I could direct it. And by the time I realized it wasn’t the role I wanted to have, it was too late. I was too afraid of disappointing them. Hadn’t they trusted me, hadn’t they said how courageous I was? Didn’t I know all the medical words, the latest clinical studies, and where to find an extra blanket in the supply closet?

I had been hoping that someone would step in at some point and grab the wheel.
Okay, that’s enough now, Carole. We’ll take it from here.
I was waiting for someone to recognize how unsuited I was and take it away. It was a desperate and lonely feeling to realize that it was more or less up to me. Carolyn saw that and stepped in.

“You are completely screwed up.” She is upset with me. “You can’t do this every day, without help. Why aren’t you seeing a therapist?”

I only think about it when Carolyn brings it up. “I don’t have time,” I tell her.

“That’s bullshit. You don’t go because you think you don’t matter.” She says this in a matter-of-fact tone.

“What am I going to tell a shrink?”

“You’re kidding me, right? Your husband has cancer, you’re taking care of him pretty much on your own, you married into the royal family, and you wonder what you’ll have to talk about?”

It has never occurred to me to see a therapist. It’s not that I think therapy is a sign of weakness. It never occurs to me that I am depressed. This is hard and overwhelming and too much to do alone, but I like it when people say that I am
amazing,
that I am
handling it all so well.
It makes me feel good for a moment. I don’t want to let go of it.

I can say
Washington
now with enough cool nonchalance that nobody questions it.
I can’t make it Saturday, I’m in Washington,
I say. Or,
Anthony’s in Washington this week. Can we reschedule?
One thing about cancer is that it makes your priorities crystal clear. It trumps everything else. There is no worrying,
Where should I be in my life?
No wondering why there are no children yet. The hospital schedules are nonnegotiable. The focus is on cancer and all that goes with it. My hobbies? Cancer. My interests? Cancer. My specialties, education, concentration? Cancer.

This is our fifth thoracotomy. Al Gore’s mother-in-law is in the ICU this time, in the room next to us. She doesn’t have cancer, but she is here in this barely occupied ward of the National Cancer Institute. It’s a good place to hide, which is why we love it. We are thankful for her, Carolyn and I, because we are here for long stretches of time with nothing to do and she lights the place up. She is old, with deep lines etched in her face like parentheses around her nose, her mouth. Her eyes are small and deep-set, but bright. She wears a fabulous cashmere floor-length coat over her hospital gown that reaches almost to her slippers, and she takes short shuffling steps down the hall searching for cigarettes. “Where are my cigarettes? Someone stole my cigarettes!”

“Oh, my God, I
love
her! “Carolyn whispers to me the first time we find her in the hall.

We are delighted when she mistakes us for private nurses and sends us on errands. We sneak Italian ices from the freezer in the staff lounge and take them to her room. We bring in extra blankets and check in on her throughout the night. We are secret comrades, the three of us, all tucked away where nobody knows. Carolyn and I know a little about the unique rhythm of this place, and we help initiate her.

Her daughter comes to visit on our third day and a man in a dark suit asks us to close our door. “No,” I tell the man, annoyed. This is
our
hospital, I think. We’re putting in more time here than anyone. No, we are not going to close the door.

There is some distress about this, some unpleasantness. The Secret Service, it seems, is concerned about our visitor—Sam Donaldson, a close friend and colleague. His voice is unmistakable from the other room. But he doesn’t care about the mother of Tipper Gore. Sam is here to see a friend, his friend is confined to bed, and he struggles to give the impression he doesn’t notice. He is not the least bit curious about our neighbor. It is a small battle and I lose. I quietly close the door.

The next morning, we move to the regular ward.

The operations are getting harder, the risk of infection is greater. We take Anthony for walks with the buckets of blood; Carolyn and I taking turns carrying the bag. But I’m a reluctant accomplice. Anxious, gripping the clamps in my pocket.

Anthony wants to leave the moment he can swing out of bed, to go for longer walks, drive farther away. I start to dread these trips, and I haven’t said so but Anthony senses it. He recruits Hamilton when he comes down for the weekend, and they run off, sneaky, like men stealing off to happy hour.
Don’t tell the wife.

They drive to the mall because Anthony needs new shirts. He carries the Plexiglas box without the gym bag, bare. He carries it like a briefcase, because he knows Hamilton will think it is funny to set the box with blood swirling around in it on the counter at Neiman Marcus. He knows it will be funny to shock the saleswoman, when he politely asks for the blue pinstriped shirt in a size sixteen and a half, thirty-four, the blood at his elbow, the hoses visible under his shirt. By the time they get back, I am waiting in the room, angry. It is funny, hilarious to them in the retelling. Anthony prodding Hamilton along as if this is just a fun weekend away with friends.