Five Days (12 page)

That last sentence came back to haunt me many times after her death. Just as it returned yet again today as I sat through the final session of the early evening, listening to a ‘radiology fellow' at the Rockefeller Institute engaging in a long, wildly technical discourse on future possibilities of imaging early-stage cancer. Might a next-generation MRI system actually trope malignant cellular activity? Had it been functioning three years ago would it have helped detect the pancreatic cancer early enough to save my mother? Then again, pancreatic cancer is a largely silent disease; ‘the Trojan Horse of cancers', as my mother's oncologist described it, and almost always a death sentence. The problem with life-taking illnesses is: you can never completely control them. You can zap them, tame them, try to get them to disintegrate or take another course. Even when subdued or even temporarily vanquished they so often reassemble their forces for another toxic push for control. In this sense you can't truly control their strange logic any more than you can control the actions of someone whose behavior you want to change . . . or, worse yet, whom you want to love you.

But can we ever know the truth about another person? How can we ever really understand the inner workings of someone else if we so barely grasp all that is transpiring in ourselves?

Why is everything, everyone, such a damn mystery? And why did I allow that woman's happiness to so devastate me?

When the last session finished I drifted out into the lobby. It was after six p.m. and I needed to eat. There was a restaurant in the hotel, but it looked just a little greasy and depressing. Why give myself an additional dose of grimness tonight? So I headed up to my room, checked my phone for messages en route (there were none), then grabbed my raincoat against the evening chill and returned downstairs to the parking lot and my car. Twenty minutes later I found myself in Cambridge and got lucky, finding a parking spot on a side street right off Harvard Square. I wandered into a diner that I remembered once eating in around twenty years ago – when I came down with Dan from U Maine for a weekend. We were both seniors. We had no money, and we had just made several big decisions about our joint future together which I was already beginning to rue (correction: I had rued it from the start). Still, it had been a peerless late spring day in Cambridge, we'd found a cheap hotel near Harvard (they still existed back then) and had just spent the morning at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (my choice – there was a big Matisse show on at the time), then sat in the upper deck at Fenway Park, watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees in ten innings (Dan's choice – though I actually rather like baseball). Then we came back to Cambridge and had grilled cheese sandwiches in this diner opposite the university. Though we were the same age and generation as all the students in the place, between us there was that unspoken discomfort of being around all these representatives of academic privilege and prestige – and how they would have an easier entree into the adult world with their Harvard degrees.

Then one of the undergraduates at a nearby booth – clearly drunk and preppy with an entitlement complex – began to berate the Latino waiter taking his order. The guy's Harvard cohorts egged him on. The waiter was very distressed by the way they were chiding him for his bad English. Dan and I listened to this in tense silence. When the preppy ringleader began to tell the guy that he ‘should really get the next bus back to Tijuana', Dan suddenly stood up and told him to stop the trash talk. The preppy stood up, towering over Dan, and told my boyfriend to mind his own damn business. Dan stood his ground and said: ‘If you say another racist thing to this man, I'm getting the cops. And then you can explain to the police – and the Harvard administration – why you like to bully people and make cracks about their background.'

The preppy got even more belligerent.

‘You think I'm scared of some hayseed nobody like you?' he asked Dan.

To which my boyfriend replied:

‘Actually, yeah, I do think you're scared. Because you're wasted and breaking the law. And if I call the police, you're going to get expelled . . . or force your rich daddy to build a new science center at Harvard to keep you from being thrown out . . .'

‘Fuck you,' the preppy said.

‘Have it your way,' Dan said, and headed towards the front door. But when the preppy grabbed hold of his jacket his Harvard friends were on their feet, restraining him, and quickly apologized.

‘Fine then,' Dan said. ‘I presume there will be no more trouble.'

As he slid down opposite me in the booth I looked at him wide-eyed with admiration.

‘Wow,' I whispered. ‘That was amazing.'

He just shrugged and said:

‘I hate bullying . . . almost as much as I hate preppies.'

That was the moment when I thought I really did want to marry Dan – because who doesn't swoon when someone stands up to unfairness and shows himself to be so chivalrous? Though part of me was still dubious about our future together, another part of me reasoned after this incident:
He is that rare thing, a decent, honest guy who would be there for me.

Such are the ways futures are made – out of an incident in a coffee shop and a need for certainty at a moment after everything had been so profoundly painful.

I wandered into that diner off Harvard Square. Everything else about this area had changed. The big revival-house cinema that faced the square was long gone. So too the countless number of used bookshops that once seemed to be an intrinsic part of Cambridge life. In their place were fashion boutiques, upmarket chain stores, cosmetic emporiums, places to buy exotic teas, and yes, the one constant from that time twenty years ago, the Harvard Coop. And, of course, this coffee shop.

I went inside. It was just after seven; that quiet time before the arrival of all the students who would roll in much later on, fresh from whatever the evening had brought them. The waitress told me to take any booth I wanted. On the way in I'd passed by an on-the-street red box and picked up a copy of the
Boston Phoenix
, remembering when it cost a dollar. I liked paying for it (rather than getting it free now), as it felt as if you were funding a little corner of the counterculture. I ordered, for old times' sake, a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate milkshake (promising myself an hour on the cross-trainer in the hotel gym tomorrow to atone for all the comfort-food indulgence). Then opening the
Phoenix
and going directly to the arts pages, I considered taking in the eight p.m. show at the Brattle Cinema. It was the last remaining revival-house movie theater in the Boston area. They were showing
The Searchers
. When was the last time I saw a classic old western on a big screen? And God knows, I didn't need to be running back to that grim hotel in a hurry, as the first seminar of the morning began at ten and I'm certain I could get an hour in at the gym beforehand, and . . .

I suddenly wanted to speak to Dan, to tell him where I was. So I dug out my cellphone and hit the autodial button marked ‘Home'. He answered on the second ring.

‘You will not believe where I am sitting right now,' I told him.

When I informed him of the location his response was muted:

‘That was a long time ago.'

‘But I still remember how you stood up to those Harvard guys.'

‘I can't really recall much about it.'

‘Well, I certainly can. In fact, all of the details came rushing back just now.'

‘By which you mean happier times?'

He didn't pose that comment in the form of a question; rather as a statement of fact, and one so bluntly delivered that it took me a little aback.

‘By which I mean,' I said carefully, ‘I was just recalling how wonderful you were . . .'

‘During my one unrepeated “profile in courage”?' he said.

‘Dan . . .'

‘If you remember I start work Monday morning at four in the morning – which means I am trying to adjust to this new brutal schedule by getting to bed every night by eight. It's now nearly nine-fifteen and you woke me up with this call, which is why I am sounding grumpy. Because you should have thought about that before phoning. So if you'll excuse me . . .'

‘Sorry for waking you,' I said.

With a click, he was gone.

The grilled cheese sandwich and the milkshake arrived moments after I put my cellphone down. I suddenly had no appetite. But I couldn't let the food go to waste. I ate the sandwich and drank the shake and settled the check. Then I wandered down the street to The Brattle. There were only a handful of people standing outside the box office. I bought a ticket and went upstairs. What a little gem this place turned out to be: maybe three hundred seats, including a balcony, in a room that looked like it was once a small chapel, but which had been outfitted as the perfect place to watch old movies. The seats were very 1950s. The screen was stretched across a small stage, and the lights were just bright enough to squint at the program of forthcoming films. There couldn't have been more than ten of us in the cinema. Just as the lights came down a man came rushing in, dropping into the row in front of me. He looked a little out of breath, as if he was truly high-tailing it in here to make it just before the film started. I noticed immediately the blue suit, the graying hair, the tan raincoat – all of which seemed out of place among this largely student crowd. As this businessman stood up again to take off his raincoat his gaze happened upon me. At which moment he smiled and said:

‘Well, hello there! Didn't know you liked westerns.'

It was the insurance man from the hotel. The insurance man from Maine. It was Richard Copeland.

Before I could reply – not that I knew how I should reply to this greeting – the cinema went dark and the screen burst into technicolor life. I spent the next two hours watching John Wayne riding across the empty spaces of the American West, struggling with his demons as he tried to find his way back to a place he might just call home.

I RARELY CRY
in the movies. But there I was, sobbing over a western I'd never seen before. It centered around a man who carries so many griefs and furies with him – such anger at the world – that he spends years trying to track down his young niece who was kidnapped by the Apaches when she was just a girl. When he finally discovers her as a young woman – and now one of the wives of the chieftain who had slaughtered her family – his initial instinct is to kill her. Until a profound sense of personal connection kicks in and he saves her, returning her to her remaining relatives. As they welcome her back with open arms, the man who has endured so much while searching for her watches as she disappears inside their home. Then, as the door closes behind her, he turns and heads off into the vast nowhere of the American West.

It was in this final scene of the film that I found myself crying – and being surprised by the fact that I was crying. Was the reason due to the fact that, like the John Wayne character in the movie, I so
wanted
to go home? But was that ‘home' I so longed for just an idealized construct, with no bearing on reality? Do we all long for homes that have no bearing on those we have built for ourselves?

All these thoughts came cascading out in the last minute or so of the film – along with the tears that once more arrived out of nowhere and made me so uncomfortable.

The lights were now coming up – and I was racing around my handbag for a Kleenex, trying to dry my eyes in case that man decided to engage me in further chat. I really was hoping he'd do the easier thing, maybe nod to me goodnight, then be on his way.

I dabbed my eyes. I stood up, along with the other ten or so people who were seated in the downstairs part of the cinema, and deliberately walked the other way out of the theater to avoid running into Richard Copeland. But when I reached the exit door and turned back I saw that he was still in his seat, lost in some sort of reverie. Immediately I felt a little ashamed about wanting to get away from a man who was simply trying to be nice to me in the few moments we'd spoken together, and who had been as touched by the film as I'd been. So, without thinking too much about what I was doing, I lingered for a moment or so in the lobby until he came out. Up close I could see that his eyes were red from crying. Just as he was registering the fact that mine were red too.

‘Quite a film,' I said.

‘I never cry in movies,' he said.

‘Nor do I.'

‘Evidently.'

I laughed. An awkward pause followed, as neither of us knew what to say next. He broke the silence.

‘You get talking with a guy standing in line for the hotel reception, next thing you know he's at the same movie theater as you.'

‘Quite a coincidence.'

‘I'd just had dinner with a client of mine who runs a machine tool company in Brockton. Not a particularly interesting town – in fact, it's the wrong side of grim – and not the most interesting guy in the world either. Still, he's been a loyal client for eleven years – and we knew each other back in high school in Bath. And I've no darn idea why I'm telling you this, bending your ear. But would a glass of wine interest you now?'

I hesitated – as I was somewhat thrown by the invite, even if I was not displeased by it either.

‘Sorry, sorry,' he said in the wake of my silence. ‘I completely understand if . . .'

‘Is there somewhere nice around here? Because the hotel bar . . .'

‘Agreed, agreed. It's pretty damn awful. I think there's a place next door.'

Again I hesitated – and simultaneously glanced at my watch.

‘Listen,' he said, ‘if it's far too late . . .'

‘Well, it is just after ten o'clock. But it's not a school night, right?'

‘Right.'

‘OK – let's go next door, Richard.'