Attachment (19 page)

L
urching into
the city from Kennedy Airport, Jean didn’t want to distract the driver—a stressed Sikh shouting into his cell phone—by asking him to slow down. Was he plotting a murder, or putting in one very exacting dinner order? Forget him and his girlish nape with its long black hairs, and look at your own hometown—right there on the horizon, glowing in smoggy, timeless monochrome. The grimy heat extended a wobbly carpet to the great mirage that was Gotham, and Jean was excited to be back and happy, her life recently returned to her. Scully had given her the all clear (“though we’ll want to have another look in six months”), and she received the stay of execution, the papal waiver, with elation and, very soon, with oblivious entitlement. She’d picked over this (hoping as ever for column yield), the physics of fear: how mortal fright could take you and hold you in its Kong-like grip and then,
phttt,
it was just over, like falling out of love, and you were frowning with incomprehension at all the medical notes you’d scribbled only the week before. Could it really be as if it never happened? Wasn’t there some residue or stain—the fear itself taking years off your life, even if for now the cancer had been run out of town?

The taxi toiled along the Van Wyck Expressway, then onto Queens Boulevard with its soot-caked clusters of nursing homes so unutterably grim that only the most despised old people could be remanded here. From this approach you hardly noticed the loss—less than two years before—of the Twin Towers, she thought, noticing all the same. It seemed to her that she alone remembered how hated they once were. But her early views were the voice of a mob, acquired when she went as a kid on a march protesting against their construction, with Auntie Eunice, Bill Warner’s charismatic, conservation-minded law partner.

A pack of implacable New Yorkers plus Jean, they’d walked down the Avenue of the Americas from the West Village to city hall, chanting, “Too ugly! Too tall!” Her mother had thought marching not only ineffectual but tacky. Dad was proud: the making of a citizen. For Jean now, it was sobering to remember the simple rectitude of that protest, the passionate certainty. She’d come to recognize this day as the birth of her lawyer’s heart, but the image that seized on her developing mind then was not the World Trade Center—it was the women’s prison on Greenwich Avenue, and the thin arms waving through slit windows to the marchers below; a dozen Rapunzels trapped in another ugly tower.

After that march, like a tourist in her own city, Jean had gotten into the habit of looking up instead of down, and she went to the Village whenever she could—to the secondhand shops where she acquired a first style, composed from men’s shirts and suits, and to Washington Square, grayer but more intimate than any corner of Central Park, the drug dealers more forthright. “Sense, sense, sense,” they’d say, for sensemilla, and “Pass me by, won’t get high…” Among the dealers, she had a “friend,” Wayne something, who come to think of it was not unlike Christian in St. Jacques—gap toothed, flirtatious, and
black. “Need something for your head?” he’d ask; Jean always said no but was thrilled by such adult consideration. (At the time she was still coating her face each night with Phyllis’s cold cream and then, on top of that, talcum powder, in the mysterious belief that this combination would blanch her freckles.) One afternoon, worried would Wayne lose interest in her, she bought a nickel bag. When he invited her back to his place to smoke it, she said no and never returned to Washington Square.

The prison was torn down, Jean didn’t know when, and now the Twin Towers were also gone; so improbably from the view of thirty years ago, they were greatly mourned: they were too ugly, too tall—but they were ours. Billy died only six months after that protest; his lift from the party plowed into a lamppost; his rib poked a hole in his heart. In the cab speeding to her ailing father, Jean was glad the masterful Sikh didn’t permit air-conditioning. She wanted to feel everything. Today was Friday: she’d timed her trip to land her in town the moment Dad arrived back home and was ready for visitors. Or so she thought. But the day before, Phyllis had told her, “The doctors are keeping him in intensive care for observation.”

“What does that mean?” Two days had passed since the surgery.

“Well, what it sounds like, I guess. They just want to keep an eye on him.”

“In intensive care? That’s a lot of eyes.”

“I know. Thank goodness his insurance covers it. For a hundred days. Heaven forfend. The doctor told me his anatomy is
unusual.
Things are not where they’re supposed to be. So it took them twelve hours to finish what should’ve been more or less routine. Now what I want to tell you, honey, is that the
operation
has been a great success, but of course anything like this is a trauma to the body.”

Prescription phrases—Phyllis sounded like she was reading from notes—although Jean noticed she no longer said “procedure.”

“He was more or less
frozen
for all that time. Shut down. And then they actually lifted his organs over to one side.”

Jean could hear the fascination in her mother’s voice, and she could understand that, but she wanted to get past it. “Isn’t the hospital the most dangerous place? All those sick people and supergerms.”

“There are plenty of people worse off than your father. That I can vouch for. And some of them are in the waiting room. Oh my God, Jean, you have no idea. The
asses
on these people. You don’t know what America is…”

Her mother was having trouble concentrating. Jean couldn’t tell if this was a bad sign or a good sign. Good, she decided. How serious could things be if she was talking about American asses?

“They’re all Dominicans up there,
packed
into clothes two, three sizes too small. Physically impossible, in fact.”

“Mom, you must be wrecked. Is there anyone with him now?”

“Well, nobody. Nobody except a dozen or so nurses. You can’t believe the hours they put in, nurses from around the globe—darling Irish girls, Africans, Filipinos…or should that be Filipin
as
? There’s even a male nurse—fag, of course. With not one but two earrings, like a Gypsy. A girl Gypsy. They need male nurses to move the patients around, though you wouldn’t want to meet some of the
fe
male nurses in a dark alley. Good people, though, Jean. Saints, really.”

“Mom! I’m going to get an early flight tomorrow,” she’d said—and here she finally was, once again unable to connect with her mother. Phyllis must be in intensive care, where they surely banned the use of cell phones.

Slowing down in Washington Heights, Jean got a blast of city sounds and smells: sizzling meat and fried dough from a quilted-silver vendor’s cart on the island of the wide avenue; samba blaring, New Yorkers honking any chance they got—and today the sound struck Jean as convivial. And then, suddenly before the wide steps of Columbia-Presbyterian, it hardly looked anymore like New York City—instead a steeply pitched, leafy suburb. Along the steps, a pale wall—a great slope glittering with mica dust—was adorned by a frieze of white-and-blue-uniformed hospital workers, sitting, stretching, smoking, and chatting. Through the glass doors and into the chilled lobby, where Jean’s suitcase, a discreet wheelie, attracted the unsmiling attention of security: check that in, then to the sign-in queue, show ID, get a large color-coded pass like a flash card for the sight-impaired.

It was in this final line that fatigue hit Jean with a powerful command to get horizontal. At least she was in a hospital, she thought, gripping the cool handrail in the elevator and silently watching the numbers climb until she was at last disgorged onto the fifth floor. Past the young doctors in the hall confiding to their cell phones, past the crowded waiting room, through the swinging double doors to the reception island, Jean was grateful all over again for her clean bill of health. But she didn’t see her father.

The unsmiling nurse didn’t even look up—sullen posing as efficient, too busy, no, too senior—when she asked for him. This isn’t a hotel, you know. Steeling herself, Jean began her own rounds, reading the paper name card in the aluminum slot beside each curtained-off cubicle. Expecting to discover shellac-yellow patients choking on vomit, she started to peek behind the curtains.

Major surgery was the kind of surgery they did here: the clotted hearts of old men. But it was the sight of an old woman asleep with her head flung back, displaying her narrow rodentlike teeth, that made Jean want to leave. And then she spotted his feet—those high arches and extra-long toes—at the bottom of a pair of inflated gray tubes fitted like wine-bottle coolers around his calves against deep-vein thrombosis.

The bed was full. Dad, of course, though he didn’t look like himself in that ancient-mariner beard, but also Phyllis, slotted along the edge beside him, the metal side bar especially lowered to make room. He was asleep, and she looked like she was, too, her small hand resting on Bill’s naked oatmeal chest. A modern rendition of the Arundel Tomb, Jean thought.
What will survive of us is love.

Her mother knew she’d be arriving around now, which only increased Jean’s displeasure at finding her in bed with him. Wasn’t it insanely proprietary, even dangerous, given his delicate condition? Or was it just unseemly? The sight offended, she would later realize, not because of where they were or because he was apparently comatose, not because they were long divorced and everyone had gotten used to that; it was because they were her parents.

But what had she expected to find? A young dark-haired Dad sitting behind his big brown desk in weekend corduroy, smiling at her over his folded
New York Times
as she came in, back home from Saturday-morning gymnastics? And then she noticed, across the cubicle on the window ledge, the bowl of green apples—Granny Smith, the kind they used to share on those mornings, cut into wedges with the skin left on and smeared with peanut butter.

Jean stood hesitating at the curtain, looking in, glad now for the staff’s indifference. Everywhere she saw evidence of Phyllis’s ministrations, her sandbagging against helplessness: the stack of CDs, classical compilations and Peggy Lee; skin lotion and a comb; a brief skyline of Tupperware containers with their
shadowy sealed treats. Other items, Jean grasped, had been specially selected for their settled civility, their reassuringly expensive cheer, such as the engraved silver vase, a wedding present filled with pink ranunculus. But it was his aftershave that got Jean, the ornate bottle of 4711; she’d certainly cry if she smelled it. Her throat constricted again, her toes pressed onto the floor through thin soles.

There was nothing to do but wait. She moved to the window, careful not to knock into any of the equipment crowding the space: mechanical bed, respirator, heart monitor, the tangled rack of tubes and bags… She looked down to the shiny river Bill wouldn’t be able to see from his bed, a silver snake soundlessly wending its way to the sea.

Jean remembered a trip around the island with Larry Mond on the Circle Line the summer she worked for Dad’s firm. It had been unbearably hot and humid—their bid for the river began in torpor. On the boat, just past the Statue of Liberty, it began to drizzle and then to pound and bounce on the slippery painted surface, a great clattering New York summer downpour; and, instead of following her inside the small cabin packed with tourists, Larry had held her back and smuggled her hand into his pocket, those joined hands soon the only dry part of their combined body, alone on the open deck. It had just been the right thing to do.

The right thing. Jean, reflexively fingering the biopsy spot, turned to look again at the slumbering parents, their bodies alternately rising and falling like carousel horses in the final lap. Standing there, helplessly watching, it was unbearable even to think of losing either one of them. Instead, she thought about the night she got Scully’s good news.

An elated Mark had arrived back from Germany just in time to take his girls out for a festive dinner at Chez Julien, a large, noisy French brasserie in Soho. For the first time in months she’d actively wanted his company. He excelled at celebration—a talent she lacked, which was perhaps why, she suddenly thought, she’d been quite so pleased she’d been
able
to gambol and frolic unfretfully that night with Dan, never mind any special daring. She had a glimmer here, midreminiscence about their family dinner, that she might possibly consider her crawl around Dan’s grotto, that swinging orange lantern in Hox-ton, as a kind of Saturnalia, with Dan as the Lord of Misrule. Hadn’t she played the master serving the slave, just as in the Roman feast?

Over champagne at Chez Julien, Victoria had at first been upset not to have been told about the biopsy. But she accepted her mother’s familiar mystical reasoning, that she hadn’t wanted to make it real by saying the words: breast cancer. Jean allowed herself to be teased—the superstitious, hex-attuned health columnist—and then she changed the subject. “Do you think the paparazzi outside are waiting for someone in particular or just hanging around on the off-chance?” Jean asked.

“Paparazz-
o,
” Victoria corrected, “and an obvious employee of the restaurant. Lends an air of glamour. At Chez Julien’s everyone’s a star.”

“Actually,” Mark said, draining his glass, “the snapper was waiting for me—the man with the two loveliest women in London. Garçon!” He called after a passing waiter, holding up his empty flute. He’d positively enjoyed being ribbed about the contraceptive cream—How had he put it? “What if I’d used your friend’s depilatory cream instead.” There were toasts, and Jean’s mistaken order of foie gras. She’d stared at the organ floating in broth as if expecting it to twitch, a tumor, obviously malignant, a spongy cyst extracted entire—imagine a thing like
that
in your breast and then getting it for dinner; and Jean had expected a slab of paste, the nursery color of dried
calamine lotion. She managed to unload the unprocessed liver on Mark with a joke: he couldn’t refuse with
bonne foi.

That night, they’d made love for the first time in months. Energy and ease drawn from champagne and from relief. She was so grateful to be alive, to be given all these extra chances. To these they’d added another relief: everything still worked. Jean badly wanted to tell Vic, and sometime she would tell her: Mark was so proud of you he didn’t stop grinning all evening. In bed the next morning, she thought with amused tenderness how he hadn’t realized the approving nods from nearby tables were a response not so much to Victoria herself, but to his ruddy pleasure in her.