The Saving Graces (22 page)

Isabel.
I've discovered purgatory. Not hell-it's too boring. Purgatory is low-lit and industrial-carpeted, mauve-walled, library-quiet except for a wall-mounted television permanently tuned to CNN. It's called the Diagnostic Imaging Department.
My heart rate invariably drops in the waiting room. I sit on one of the thinly upholstered, pine-and-tweed chairs and feel my facial muscles go limp. I don't see well; the air is blurred, grainy. My nerves, my energy, everything drains into the pastel walls and the soft-tiled ceiling, the flaccid Renoir reproductions. Someone take care of me, please, I'm reduced to pleading. Be tender. Don't hurt me. It's a giving over, a relinquishment, the medical version of "Into Thy hands." Utter passivity.
Nothing I can do. It's a relief to let go, stop trying to be in charge of my life, if only for this little bit of time.
Today I'm here for a chest X ray. Before, it was days and days of radiation therapy for my hip. Whatever they did, it fixed me up-I have very little pain now, and I walk without a limp. Given that, you might think I'd like this place better. But no. I remind myself of Grace: they've never really hurt her at the vet's, but she begins to shake in terror as soon as she sniffs the parking lot.

   But no one looks frightened here, not even the children. I make a covert study of my radiology comrades, hunting for signs of despair, - panic, devastation. I'm never successful. No one weeps silently, huddled into herself; no one ever breaks down. Do I look like these people? They could be waiting for their insurance agent, the- dentist. Is my face that flat and accepting? That empty of drama?
"Mrs. Kurtz?" A thin young woman with freckles and wispy hair smiles at me from the double doors. I follow her down two short corridors to the changing area. "Hi, how are you today?" she asks as we walk. She zips a curtain back from one of the tiny booths. "Everything off from the waist up, and put on one of these -robes. I'll be back to get you in a minute. Okay?" I strip out of my sweater, blouse, prosthetic bra, and put on the blue cotton robe. It makes me look hippy, cinched in at the waist over my slacks. My face is ghastly in the fluorescent glare, and yet I feel a rush of love for myself, a painful tenderness. Oh, poor Isabel.
The technician comes back. The tag on her uniform says she's Ms. Willett. Inside the spacious X-ray room, I start to undo my robe, but she says, "That's okay," and stands me up in front of a white square of wood or plastic, like a basketball backboard, my arms at my sides. She disappears. I hear her voice from across the room; she's gone behind the protective shield. "Okay, very still. Deep breath. Hold it, hold it. And relax."

   Another picture from the side, and then one more from the back. "Okay, that should do it. Wait here for a minute, okay? I'll be right back." It's never a minute, it's always longer, five, frequently ten. She's finding the radiologist, who will check to see if she got the pictures right. Sometimes they have to-take them over again. This is the worst part, waiting for the technician to return. When she doe-s, she never tells you anything, so the tension is pointless, but I feel it anyway. My fear and fatalism and self-pity reach their peak at this stage. I always go to the magazine stand and pull out People or Woman's Day, anything. I stand with my face to the wall and flip the pages of slimming chicken recipes, articles on the miracle of antioxidants, fashion ads, "pants that slink and shimmer are the sexiest option for after dark." - "All right," Ms. Willett says brightly, coming back into the room empty-handed. "You can get dressed." I search her face. Was that sympathy in her voice? She knows what the X-rays showed, Did the doctor point to a spot on the film and shake his head with her? No, it couldn't be. Her smile is too chipper. I couldn't have a lung metastasis-she wouldn't look like that.
Right or wrong, I feel better by the minute. Getting dressed in the booth is the precise reverse, emotionally, mentally, of getting undressed. Riding up in the elevator to the first floor, striding through the automatic doors to the sidewalk, breathing in the clean, nonmedicinal air-I'm a new woman. Out here, I'm one of the normal ones, not defined by my illness anymore, indistinguishable from the rushing, bustling, oblivious, healthy people. Just like them, I could be immortal. - -

   I walked across Pennsylvania Avenue and started up K Street, -taking my time. On my way to the hospital, I hadn't much noticed what kind of day it was. If I had, I might have resented it. Because it was perfect, one of those golden days when summer is ending but autumn hasn't begun. The air smelled sweet and the sun slanted in the tired, aging, still-green leaves of the trees as if through a sympathetic photographer's gauze filter. Rush hour had just begun, but passersby looked relaxed, not harried, as seduced by the softness of the afternoon as I was.
But I was tired by the time I reached Farragut Square, too tired to stand on Connecticut and wait for the bus. I bought a cup of coffee from a street vendor- the only vice I have left is caffeine; otherwise my diet is strictly macrobiotic-and sat down on a bench in the park.
And fell into a morbid game I catch myself playing at odd times. Wrinkled old ladies, children, young men, pretty girls, mothers with toddlers, surly teenagers, old men-to each of them as they strode or hobbled or ambled past me, I thought, You're dying. You're dying, and you're- dying, and you're dying, and you're dying, and you're dying, and you're dying, and you're dying. I didn't do this for comfort, certainly. Perhaps it was a way to persuade myself of the unthinkable, the outlandish- that no one gets out alive. The truth is, I still have trouble believing in death. Yes, even now.
Perhaps it's not important anyway. Maybe it's enough to be alive and know it. In this never-to-be-repeated instant in the vastness of time, I, Isabel, have the miraculous privilege to exist. Sipping hot coffee softened with a delicious nondairy powdered creamer. It's really tasty. Starlings are tuning up in the oak trees. The air smells like perfume, then auto exhaust, then perfume again. I love the worn feel of this bench under my fingers, smoothed to velvet softness by a million behincls. Here I am in the world, right now, this minute. I never was before, never will be again. I simply exist, and it's glorious. An honor and a privilege. A marvel beyond belief. - "Mind?" I looked up to see a man bending toward me at the side of the bench, smiling widely. I was perplexed until he made a stiff-armed gesture toward the empty space beside me. "Yes-no, I don't, go ahead." I moved over a few inches, pulling my purse closer to my hip.
He came around with a series of short, dragging steps and slowly, creakily, lowered his backside to the seat. His breath came out in a long ahhh of relief, and he sat back by degrees, settling himself on the bench the way an old dog settles itself on a front porch floor. From the corner of my eye I saw him take a handkerchief out of one pocket of a heavy maroon cardigan, much too warm for the mild September afternoon, and dab under his nose daintily with a horny, discolored hand. -He turned to me, full-faced, and pulled his thin lips into the widest smile I've ever seen, practically ear to ear, and said, "Pretty day, isn't it?" "Beautiful," I nodded. "I don't like that humidity." "No, I don't either. None today, though." "Pretty day today." "It's lovely." He pushed his mottled cheeks out, froglike, and turned his affable, pale-eyed gaze from me to the branches overhead. He shoved his hands under one knee and hauled it up, crossing it over the other with a huff of breath. His feet bulged out of beige socks and worn brown sandals, as if he had bunions and corns and who knew what else. "Where'd you get that coffee?" he asked.
"Across the street." I pointed.
He smiled and said, "Huh," nodding his head. "Smells good." "Do you want some? I could get you a cup." "No, no! Thank you very much!" He grinned, showing bright white false teeth. "I've given it up, it was getting on my nerves. Still like the smell, though. Not like cigarettes. Gave them up, and they smell horrible now, - smell like hell, -You smoke?" "No, I never did." "Very wise. My wife didn't smoke, either." He broke off to cough into his handkerchief, a rough, wet, old man's cough. He turned away to spit discreetly into the handkerchief, then stuffed it back into his pocket. He reached inside his sweater and brought out, presumably from his shirt pocket, a photograph. No, two photographs. "Here's Anna, my wife. We met over in Italy during the war. She was Italian." He wanted me to take the pictures, not just look at them in his hand. I did, and saw two versions of Anna, slim and pretty in the first, plump and pretty in the second, smiling the same mysterious smile in both. Mysterious to me-it's hard to know what a stranger's smile means.
"I lost her in 1979." He pushed his cheeks in and out, in and out.
"How did she die?" A too-personal question I couldn't stop myself from asking.
"She had cancer of the cervix." "I'm sorry. Do you have children?" - He shook his head. "A baby," he said, "but we lost her very quickly, very quickly. After that, we couldn't have any more." "I'm so very sorry." I barely stopped myself from touching him. And I'd said that too fervently; it was so long ago, my sympathy must sound extreme.
He spread his fingers wide over the knees of his shiny brown trousers, a kind of digital shrug. "Thank you," he said with much dignity. "Are you married, if I can ask?" "No." For some reason I added, "I have a son." "Is he married?" "No. But he lives with someone." A woman I've only heard about, never met. Susan; she's an elementary school teacher. When did I lose Terry? He went away to school in Montreal and never came back. I tried for a long time not to call it an escape, but after so many years, that's no longer possible. Terry ran away from his father and me. I don't blame him, and I don't believe in life-long regrets, but that failure is the singular tragedy of my life.
"They do that nowadays, don't they," the old man said. "Nobody thinks a thing of it." - I nodded. "Shacking up, we used to call it." - "That's right. Shacking up." He laughed merrily. "My name's Sheldon Herman. I won't shake because I've got a cold." - "I'm Isabel." - "Pleased to meet you. Look here." He took out another picture. "That's Moxie." A floppy-eared mongrel, mostly German shepherd, red-eyed from the flashbulb. "Man's best friend," Sheldon Herman said, rough-voiced. "She was quite a girl. Lotta heart. Kept me good company after I lost my wife. She passed on in '88, age of thirteen." - I made a sympathetic sound.
"I buried her in the backyard. Gave her a little funeral, you know, flowers on top, and her tennis ball down there with her. Near her paws." "Yes." "After that I had to move. You know how it is when you get old, they make you move. So now I live in a home for old fellers, It's okay. Could be worse." He turned his slack, shapeless body toward me. Crevasses that probably used to be dimples scored his whitewhiskered cheeks. It was hard to say what his coloring might have been, fair or dark or in between. He was washed out now. He was almost gone.
"What I missed most," he said, "was having something to take care of. Where I live we're all on our own, pretty much. They got me in a private room. It's all men." He looked me over, smiling the nice, wide-faced smile. "You a squeamish kind of girl, Isabel?" "Pardon?" - "You the kind of a lady who's scared of spiders and whatnot?" - "No," I said slowly, "I wouldn't say I'm squeamish in that way. Why, Mr. Herman?" "Now, don't go swooning on me," he said, looking down, reaching into the far pocket of his bulky sweater. I stiffened a bit, not really -alarmed but definitely on guard. He brought out-something, I couldn't see what until he opened his spotty, veiny hand. A mouse.
"Found 'er in a trap they set in the kitchen. Her paw's smashed, see? She limps. I could show you, but you might faint dead away. I call her Brownie. She's my little pal now." "Cute." She was. Bright-eyed and pink-toed, with a smooth, russet coat. Perched on his hand, she looked around nervously, twitching her whiskers.
"I feed her cheese and bread and whatnot. Salad. I don't know if they know I've got her, but nobody bothers me about her. Pet her?" His faded eyes twinkled, daring me. - - I stroked my finger along the mouse's satiny back.
"She's company for you," I said.
"That's it. You got to have something. Anything, as long as it's alive. Can't be a thing, it has to breathe, but that's the only requirement. I've always thought that. More than ever these days, Part of getting old, I guess." "I guess." "You know, I cared for my wife more than anything, more than my own life, but when I look back it doesn't feel like even that was enough. I wish I had her again, so I could do it better. I would, too." He lifted the mouse and kissed the top of its head with his thin lips. Then he put it back in the pocket of his sweater with great care, like a mother laying her baby down. "Pretty day," he said with a sigh, leaning back to stare up at the tree branches over our heads. "Summer's about up, hm? Not too many more days like this, I'll bet." "No," I agreed. "Not too many more." -

   A few minutes later, I saw my bus coming down K Street. 1 said good-bye to Mr. Herman and left him on the bench, smiling after me while the waning sun threw shadows over his slope-shouldered figure.
When I got home, I didn't go inside immediately. I wandered around to the back of the building to look at my garden. Kirby's garden, really; he did the heavy work of digging and tilling for me last spring, when I was reeling from my first chemo sessions. He did plenty of weeding and watering in the summer, too, when I'd drag home from a late class, too exhausted for anything but bed. Without Kirby, I wouldn't have bothered with a garden this year, although it's by far the nicest perk that comes with my lease. Mrs. Skazafava, my landlady, used to cultivate all the grounds behind the building herself, an area of two thousand square feet or so. Now she's too old, and a few years ago she divided it into four plots for the use of the tenants. Surprisingly, not all the plots get taken every year, even though the building has twelve units. I've taken one every summer since I moved-this is my third year. I love to garden. It's a passion.
Kirby found a wooden spool in the alley last-spring and rolled it in to use for a garden seat. My legs had begun to ache; I sat down on the spool. Most of the tenants grow vegetables, but I prefer flowers. This late in the year I had more foliage than flora, but the pink and white cleome were still blooming, and the asters and nicotiana, my transplanted boltonia, the hardy Chelone obliqua with their pink turtle heads. Twilight closed in. A bee buzzed in the coleus, then flew up and headed home. The birds were tuning up for one last fling before dark. Across the alley, my neighbor Helen put her head out the back door and sang the hopeful, two-note croon mothers use to call in their children.
I heard a step, and turned to see Kirby coming clown the concrete walk that bisects the garden plots, two on a side. He had on his summer uniform-cut-off army fatigue pants, dun-colored T-shirt, and old Birkenstock sandals, no socks. The sandals made me think of Mr. Herman and his bulging, pained-looking feet. A soft drift of melancholy settled over me.
Kirby stopped beside me, hands in his flap pockets.
"Hi," we said in unison, smiling and nodding. But his - hooded eyes looked sharp. "It's almost time to plant chrysanthemums," I said. "Look how well the anemone's doing, and the cimicifuga. You put them in the perfect spot." He squatted down beside me, resting his forearms on his bony knees, clasping his hands. "How did it go?" I didn't know what he meant for a second. "Oh, the X ray? Fine, it went fine." "Did they say anything?" "No. But they never do-the doctor calls you if there's anything." "I see."-He frowned, but said no more. He's-lovely that way. I know he cares, but he confines his sympathy for me to deeds, not words. And he's one of those rare men who don't feel bound to have an opinion on everything. Or worse, a solution.
He bent his head to gaze at the ground. His slender neck looked naked and tender, like a young boy's. I had an urge to touch the tight tendons, the soft hair that came to a point in the center. I put out my hand. He turned, and my fing€~rs just grazed his cheek. Instead of withdrawing, I let my hand fall open and press lightly against the side of his face. I caressed him.
"Isabel," he said, quietly astounded.
"I might die," I said. "I might get out of it, there's a chance, but I might not. Probably not. You know that, don't you?" "Yes." "No, but do you really? Do you know it, do you really understand?" "Yes. I know all about it." He moved the palm of my hand to his mouth. I started to pull away, but he held on. We hadn't touched, not like this, since the night he'd kissed me under the streetlight.
I brushed my fingers across his gaunt cheekbone. His lashes swept down, hiding his eyes. "I'm sick, Kirby, and I'm bald, I'm not the real Isabel in my -body. I don't know how you could want that, but if..." "But if. . ." "If you do I was struck dumb by the most idiotic shyness. And a superstitious dread of putting into words the thing I'd just realized I wanted most.
He stood up, still holding my hand, and carefully raised me. "I haven't changed. Not at all. I've just been waiting." He looked so thankful. He put his arms around my shoulders and held me.
It felt too good, I could hardly trust it. "Only if you want me," I mumbled against his shirt, "not for sympathy. Please, please don't lie." He pulled back, gripping me hard. "What's happened?" "Nothing-" "You're not worse?" "No!" "You swear?" "I'm fine, nothing's happened. Truly." Nothing I could explain to him yet, anyway. A change of my heart. It had to do with regrets, and trying to eliminate as many as I could, while I could. And realizing it doesn't matter where love comes from, or when, or what it looks like. I don't want to end wishing I could do everything over again, better, differently, fuller. This is it. My life. Here, now.
"All right, then," Kirby said. "Stop saying stupid things, Isabel, and let's go inside." *** I dreamed I was locked in a tall black closet. I kept flailing with my hands, my fingertips, at the thin, faint strip of light at the bottom of the locked door, crying out, "Help, someone help me, let me out," until the light dimmed and disappeared, and I was alone in absolute darkness. I screamed and screamed, but I had no voice, and when I woke up my face was streaming with tears.
Kirby slept on his side, facing away. He never stirred when I eased the fingers of my right hand under him, between the mattress and his warm-skinned waist. I waited while the soft throbbing of-a pulse, his or mine, calmed me down.
Anyway, it was an old dream. 1 knew what it meant, and I'd dreamt it so often it had lost the power to squeeze me in an icy vise until dawn. I concentrated on the rhythm of Kirby's breathing, soothing as a heartbeat, and drifted back to sleep.
When I awoke, it wasn't to that moment of vague anxiety that suddenly bursts into cold, bright panic. It stops my heart, makes me flush with heat. Cancer is in my body again, and this time it's going to kill me. I waited, but for a change the act of waking was safe, not treacherous. - Turning my head, I saw Kirby's sharp-nosed profile in the chalky dawn light. He was either meditating or sleeping. Sleeping, I supposed, although the lines of his austere face weren't lax, and the breath coming and going through his fine white nostrils was inaudible. I thought of Gary, and tried not to make comparisons.
Making love with someone for the first time is always awkward-I assume; until last night, I'd only had the experience once before. Making love with a one-breasted bald woman for the first time-that ought to outdo awkwardness. For me, after Gary, the novelty of lying with a man shaped like Kirby was enough to smother passion and fill me with skittishness and misgiving. And sometimes the anticipation of disaster is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Kirby saved us-I take no credit. I almost ruined it. When we took our clothes off and got in my bed, I lay there and marveled at the toughness of his body, and thought about Gary, and wondered if Kirby were thinking of his wife, and worried that he might feel only pity now that he had me, pity and regret-and all he did was touch me. He had such caring in his hands. Another first, for me. - In the end, I was so easily seduced. "Don't think," he said, pressing hard inside, giving me his fierce, romantic kisses. Easier said than done, I thought, and yet I did forget. He made me forget the strangeness, my clumsiness, the freakishness-some would say-of our joining. For a second I even forgot the worst thing, the deep fear that never leaves. Light burst in and dazzled me. But immediately I thought, This letting go is a-rehearsal-spoiling it. A morbid fancy; I rather shocked myself.