What Remains (23 page)

It’s day four in the ICU. Anthony’s immune system is helpless. He is at the mercy of every kind of infection, vulnerable to everything. His body has a septic infection and his organs are systematically shutting down, one by one. Each day that he holds on increases his chances of surviving. Each day they can keep him stable increases the likelihood he will pull through. But some systems won’t be able to recover.

As if the ICU isn’t gloomy enough by itself, there is a run of spinal meningitis while we’re here. Bodies are wheeled by under white sheets. The first time I see this, the white sheet draped over a stretcher, I don’t know what it is. By the second time it is clear.

None of us says anything to Anthony. No one talks about death in a hospital; it seems like bad luck.

I am following his creatinine level, because I think this is something I know about. It is rising steadily each day—four to five to six. It stops around six and a half, and I am relieved.
Thank God,
I think,
it’s not kidney failure.

The interns make their rounds every morning with their charts—clipboards with the numbers of Anthony’s life: blood pressure, cell counts, hematocrit levels, culture reports, and creatinine levels. The ER doctor stops by to check on his patient. He is amazed that Anthony has survived. He looks at the chart and takes the time to explain it.

“This is what’s going on with his kidneys,” he tells me, showing me the charts and reports from the chemo. He shows me the creatinine levels rising: 1.5 after the third round, 1.9 after the fourth. Anthony’s kidneys were beginning to fail long before our 4 a.m. cab ride to the ER, and the doctor is explaining to me how it happened, and that we can’t do anything about it. He stops and waits for me to catch up, to understand that Anthony’s kidneys will never recover.

What I don’t understand before talking to the doctor is that at a creatinine level of 2 his kidneys are functioning at 50 percent. He essentially has one working kidney. You would think, or at least I thought, that
5
is 50 percent, not
2.
The range is
1
to
10.
And because I thought this, I didn’t panic when his level was 2. I thought we had room.
Even if it gets to 5,
I thought,
5 is okay
.
You can live at 50 percent,
I thought,
on one kidney
. But I’m wrong. This doctor is telling me that a level of 2 is as far, really, as he can go.

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I feel a quick and dizzying whirl of emotions: fury, devastation, hatred, as if I’m a windup toy and he has just pulled the string. And then I stop. I am too stunned to feel anything.

Later that day Dr. Best of the Best stops by in his pressed white lab coat. He is standing at the nurses’ station checking Anthony’s chart and I ask him what happened. Cancer patients, he says, are always at risk for infections after having chemo. “As for the kidneys,” he adds, “there’s no way to know exactly what caused it. It could well have been the thalidomide.” It is the last time I ever see him.

When I get home that night I find a copy of
Elle Decor
in our mailbox. The cover reads, “Big Ideas for Small Spaces.” Anthony and I are on page 198, “Paradise on Park.” There is a full-page photo, taken eight months ago, before his last thoracotomy in March. We’re walking arm in arm on the sidewalk in front of our apartment, Anthony, in a grey cashmere sweater and slacks, gazing down at me. Both of us smiling, a portrait of carefree lives. We look as if we have it all. There is a three-page photo spread of the apartment packed with the antiques, the furnishings, the subtle reincarnations of Anthony’s history that I raced to put together. A past and a future assembled from our precarious present.

Diane’s husband, Mike, comes to the ICU every day at 1 p.m. with a bag of cookies and sandwiches that he passes out to all the nurses. He is an old family friend of Anthony’s and John’s. We’re all friends—he was at our wedding, we see each other at get-togethers, and I work with Diane—but I haven’t really gotten to know him well until now.

He sits with me in the ICU, and if Anthony is awake, the three of us talk. If he is asleep, Mike and I talk, or sometimes we don’t. He understands the awkward rhythm of hospital days, of having to entertain in a strange place, of feeling obligated to host. He comes in and sits down in the chair without hesitation, as if he’s been coming here for ten years and is just now running into us. Mike distrusts doctors, so when the interns come around and discuss Anthony’s condition among themselves as though he is deaf or dead, I have someone to look at across the room. While they tick off the succession of things that are going wrong, I have someone to hate them with.

It is very stressful, this stay, because we are in New York, and Anthony is narrowly cheating death. Word spreads quickly, and soon everyone comes, and I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to see anyone, but I feel guilty turning them away. I don’t want this to seem like a viewing, a stream of people parading in to pay respects. The phone rings all day.
You tell me, when do you think I can come see him?
I don’t want these calls. I don’t want to schedule. I don’t want them to come, but when they do sometimes it’s nice. I don’t want to be involved in it. Mike never calls. He shows up. He doesn’t make me decide. He is a comfort to me during this stay.

After seven days in the ICU Anthony is stable enough to move to a room. We get the Sunny von Bülow room, informally named after the heiress who lived here in a coma for so many years.

She haunts the room, the penthouse suite at Columbia Presbyterian. There is a story told that she started whistling one day while an intern was changing her feeding tube. Whistling, out of nowhere, after years of lying mute. Of all the hospital rooms, this is my favorite. It has full-length windows and a beautiful view. The picture window looks as if it was framed right around the George Washington Bridge. It is bigger than the ones in other rooms and has cream-colored curtains with a pattern of light-blue flowers. A city hospital room done in country chic. The bedspread and the shower curtain are made from the same fabric, and on a hook behind the door is a small table that unfolds to hold dinner for two. I sleep on a cot I make up with crisp white hospital sheets. I set it up between Anthony’s bed and the window so I can stare out at the lights. The magic dots moving on the bridge. People coming and going with their stories—to the theater, in cocktail dresses, to apartments, to concerts, to dinners, to celebrate. It’s enchanting, this view. The first thing people notice when they come. This is nice for Anthony, because it makes him the second thing. Most of the people who visit us are shocked. They don’t realize we are this far along. We have managed a good front until now, and I can see it in their stretched smiles, their round eyes.
Oh, my God, what happened?

Our world is beginning to narrow drastically. There are few people Anthony wants to see. This is his secret, this disease. I carefully filter the information I give to my family, to colleagues at work. There is no one we can talk to about it, because he still wants to pretend it is all fine. It certainly isn’t.

In Year Five Carolyn and I make up a game we call The Townhouse: a conversation, really, that she humors me with when I’m down. There are days I call her and say, “Let’s talk about the townhouse,” and then she knows it’s bad but doesn’t ask. We play it in the hospitals or on the phone late at night in New York.

The townhouse as we know it is straight from Edith Wharton—a tottering mansion in Gramercy Park sitting remote and dreamy on an empty lot, towering over the neighborhood. There are four floors and sixteen-foot ceilings and a wrought-iron gate. Heavy velvet drapes cross the windows, and we sometimes peek out from them.

“
Grey Gardens
in Manhattan!” I dub it, and she shrieks at this, delighted.

“I’ll be Big Edie,” she says. “No, Little Edie, with a sun hat and halter, reading
The National Enquirer.
” Her smile spreads out, and her eyes become huge. “Oh, my God, that will be us. The Beales! People will say, ‘Whatever happened to Carole and Carolyn? They had so much promise.’ And we’ll be locked up behind our gate, ordering takeout and dressed in vintage Dior gowns.”

It is a house well-suited for dinner parties, so that’s what we do, plan them over and over, or more specifically, plan who will come. They are the sorts of parties that cause heads of state to postpone summits. Such is the grandeur we assign.

Everyone wants to be here, and because of this we spend hours deciding on our guests. Carolyn has a schoolgirl crush on Steven Tyler, the singer from Aerosmith, so he is given a seat. I’ve just seen
The English Patient,
so I put Ralph Fiennes on the list. “We have to be selective about whom we have over,” I say. “It will be
very
exclusive. No reporters. No interviews. And they have to be able to soft shoe and tell a good joke.”

We expect there to be cameras clumped in the hedges at all times, waiting for us to appear—it suits us fine, since in the tradition of
Grey Gardens
we will rarely step outside. We imagine that everyone will want to talk to us, and we also imagine it quiet. We are wanted, yet left alone—the clamor entirely at our disposal.

“I’ll be the eccentric, aged beauty,” Carolyn says. “We’ll have all these pictures of me—the young me—around and I’ll bring them out for visitors.”

The floors are dark wood, “very shiny,” she says. “Walnut.” And the closets are an acre wide filled with gowns and bejeweled shoes that we will change for every meal.

Our guests are completely enthralled with us, spellbound by our stories. They will stay until dawn, we imagine, and listen to us breathlessly, humbled and grateful for our splendor.

We are always dressed in our townhouse—fashionable spinsters with nowhere to go. “You, the ‘Widow Radziwill,’” Carolyn says. “Who’s going to date you?”

“Oh,
really,
look who’s talking,” I shoot back. “Mrs. John F. Kennedy Jr.”

We are Lucy and Ethel, Ginger and Mary Ann, the tortoise and the hare. Pick a twosome—one dazzle and charisma, the other flannel-lined jeans. In the townhouse she lets me shine. She lets me have an
after
—in a grand, gothic style. It is a place where my husband isn’t dying and she isn’t expected to embody Camelot. Just a glittery room set apart from our world, where we live trouble-free, whiling our days away on guest lists.

In Year Five, Anthony almost dies three times.

Christmas is precarious. We make appearances. We haven’t seen my family in a long time. They are aware of his cancer, but I keep them at a distance, making excuses for missed birthday parties. But Christmas is hard to avoid, so we go to my parents’ house and exchange presents with my brothers and sisters. It’s awkward. They haven’t seen him like this. The house fills up and I flit around, work the room. I am louder and happier in hopes that no one will notice him. I try to be present enough for the both of us while zealously guarding his position on the couch. He barely moves from it. He is thinner now than anyone in my family has ever seen him. There is no hiding anything today, and no one knows what to say.

I am glad when we leave and drive back to the city for Christmas dinner with Carolyn and John. There is nervous energy around all of us. We plan a trip to Cuba and Greece. We are trying to ramp a lifetime into a few short years.

The next day Anthony and I fly down to Florida to spend New Year’s with Holly. We stay with her father and stepmother, Pete and Joan, in their guesthouse in Vero Beach. Anthony is still very weak, but he wants to go, to be with Holly and her family, to swim in the pool and enjoy the beach. I feel guilty because I don’t want to be here. At work people were talking about ski trips and vacations; couples were doing this and that. I was sick of death, sick of blood, sick of bile and walking with canes. I am tired, and I want only to sleep. I sleep on a chaise by the pool and dream about a beach in Cuba. But Anthony isn’t there in my dream. I can’t imagine how we can possibly get him there. I don’t say it to anyone. It terrifies me when a little voice whispers it to me.
I want to be free.

“It’s not good. I think I’m in trouble.”

I look at the clock; it is six in the morning. Anthony’s standing over the sink. I jump out of bed and run to the bathroom.

“Oh. Wow. Okay. Okay, I need to call. We need to get to a hospital.” He has been throwing up in the dark so he won’t wake me, and when I flip on the light the sink looks as if it’s filled with bright-red paint.

I call Joan and Pete in the main house and tell them I need an ambulance. Florida, it seems, is organized for medical emergencies. Joan pushes a button in the house, a direct line to the ambulance service, and four minutes later two men arrive at the front door.

Pete walks out of the main house when the ambulance pulls up.

“Are you okay? Anthony?”

“We’re fine, Pete. I’m okay.” Anthony is sitting up on the stretcher, and I get in the ambulance beside him. We ride away watching Pete standing in the driveway.

At the hospital, the ER staff sees it is bad, and we go to the consent forms fast. I give them the background on his sarcoma and his surgical history.

“We need to do a bronchoscopy.”

“Okay,” I say. “What is that? What will you be doing?”

“It’s obvious he’s bleeding somewhere; there could be a rupture in his lungs. We have to put a tube down his throat with a camera on it, and we’ll be able to see what’s going on.”

“Is it painful?” I ask. “Is it complicated? How long does it take?”

It doesn’t take long, and they can do it in the ER, the doctor tells me. I sign the consent forms, and it all happens so fast. I am running down the list in my head of the drugs he was treated with in chemo, of allergies, of operations.

They give him Versed to knock him out, and he will have no memory of the procedure. I am standing next to his bed while he waits for it to kick in, the doctors anxious to begin the procedure.
This is it,
I think. Still, I know not to say good-bye. “I love you—I’ll see you soon. I’ll be right outside.” He looks up at me and whispers, “Don’t kiss any other boys.” And then he falls unconscious.

I have been hoarding, like a squirrel for winter, all my acorns of hysteria. Nudging them as they come to a little place in my head for later. There hasn’t been time to fall apart—Anthony won’t tolerate it. Worry, panic, fear simply serve no useful purpose. The important thing is to keep them apart from one another, because I am afraid if they touch, these tight little balls of suppressed heartache, they will explode, and I am trying my best to save this for some fuzzy uncertain point in the future. When everything is over. When there is no more bad news and nothing to be afraid of and nothing left to worry about.
There will be a time,
I tell myself.
It will be clear, and I will have some
period of time to look out above the clouds.
A period of time, long enough to let it all out like the air in a balloon.

Joan and Holly have followed us here, and they have been standing speechless, listening to me recite medical histories and medications.

“I have to go outside,” I tell them. “I’ll be right back.” Carolyn and John are in Sun Valley for the holiday. I have my phone in my hand to call her, but before I call I sit on the curb between two cars in the parking lot of the Vero Beach hospital. I’m wearing pajama pants I grabbed from the floor before we left, and I let my body shake with sobs. I indulge myself. The kind of crying you can do when there’s no one around to see.

Anthony didn’t bleed to death. The doctors did the bronchoscopy, put the tube down his throat with the camera, and saw nothing. The bleeding had stopped, and they couldn’t see where it had been coming from. “As if it simply healed itself,” they tell me.

“You cleaned up the room!” Holly tells me the next day when we get back to the house. She looks at me as though I’m crazy. “I went to the room to see what happened, and there was a pile of towels in the hamper. You cleaned it all up before the ambulance came.” I don’t remember actually doing this, but I am relieved when she tells me. I knew Anthony would not have wanted anyone to see the blood. We have an early dinner with champagne and make a toast.
To a better year.