Half Empty (24 page)

I try to comfort myself with the first-person accounts I’ve heard of those who die on operating tables and come back: the light, the warmth, and the surge of love from one’s dead ancestors urging you forward. But even that doesn’t help as I wonder
what on earth the Old World, necromancing Litvak primitives from whom I am descended would make of me?
You’re forty-four and not married? You’re a what? We had one in the shtetl and he was chased from the town with brickbats. How much
treyf
do you eat? What kind of writing? And from this you make a living?

This does not help. Neither does contemplating the fact that my surrounding physical world will have a similar paucity of beauty in concert with my soon-to-be monstrous form. I have, in the past, inveighed against those whose aesthetic tyranny made them have only three perfect teacups in their home, say. What happens when one has four people to tea? Now, at the threshold of becoming dependent on gadgetry from low-tech button hooks to strange cyborgian hydraulics, should they become available, all my principled outrage comes tumbling down. I think of all the devices that will govern my future life, a host of tools encroaching on my elegant and lovely apartment, all of them rendered in functional plastic in that super-ugly shade of almond, the universal hue of therapeutic aid.

I can recall seeing many un-legged souls, but armless fellows, far fewer. I have a vague memory of a white-haired war veteran, the empty sleeve of his suit jacket tucked inside the pocket. He is wearing a medal-festooned beret along with a red felt poppy pinned to his lapel, standing at one of the many parades in honor of those who fell in the Great War, an event of annual frequency in my Anglo Canadian youth. Will I manage a similar elegance and dignity, I wonder? It’s doubtful. An old quip springs to mind about people who used to marvel at the remarkable spryness of the aged Katharine Hepburn, saying, “I hope
I
look that good when I’m ninety.” To which one need only point out that, unless
one was a marble-featured, lithe beauty who looked like her in
The Philadelphia Story
now, the odds were slim to none.

I fly back to New York to see more doctors and get the apartment ready for one-armed living, although I haven’t a clue what that means. Airport security is a scary affair in what it bodes. The simple act of discarding the metal from my pockets has me panic that I am holding folks up. I cheat and use my left arm for the first time in days. Undoubtedly there will be special lines for people like me, but I can’t get rid of the dark visions of being victimized. Not by society or anything of that nature. (I promise not to feel alienated when fashion spreads in magazines refuse to run photos of amputees. I already feel sufficiently distant and ignored by the world and concerns of models.) I mean literally victimized, targeted as an easy mark, rolled, mugged, or worse. And I confess that some of these grimmer scenarios involve people of low degree, who I will have invited into my home myself. I can’t really envision a future where anything resembling consensual physical contact is in the cards. Whatever sex I have from here on out will most probably have to be purchased. With my days as an eligible bachelor or anything remotely resembling a catch almost up, it’s now entirely too late for me to hoodwink someone into sticking around for the horror show.

The dream is fairly classic, by which I mean, utterly banal. I have somehow pissed off a mobster by not watching my mouth and letting loose some bit of unchecked criticism. I am bundled into his car, where I begin sucking up in my fear, even as I loathe myself for my cowardice. He starts telling me about his
estate somewhere near Palm Beach, or France, where he does his big-game hunting, and I’m in his car the whole time, conversing, shucking, jiving, drawing him out sycophantically to distract him. As we approach my apartment, it’s clear that I’m not simply going to be allowed out of the vehicle. I must pay a price for my words: a short wooden stake plunged directly through my (yawn) left hand. It will be a mark of my betrayal. “Please,” I say. “I’ll blow you!” I offer desperately. He’s a very ugly man. There is only desperation and not a trace of the erotic in this gesture. “Ah, I don’t like blow jobs, really,” he replies. (As a child at a picnic, rocking a hula hoop or something, another child came up to me asking to use it. “I’ll be your best friend,” he entreated. “Best friend?” I said, all of seven years old but already a prig in the making. “I hardly
know
you.”) I am desperate not to be stabbed. “Stop being so anxious about it, and it will be much easier,” he says.

A friend asks if I’ve “picked out” my prosthetic yet, as though I’d have my choice of titanium-plated cyborgiana at my disposal, like some amputee Second Life World of Warcraft character. Another friend, upon hearing my news, utters an unedited, “Oh my God, that’s so depressing!” Over supper, I am asked by another, “So if it goes to the lungs, is it all over?” Regrettably very possibly, I reply, and when I go on to mention as how they no longer give much radiation for Hodgkin’s, he says, “Well, you got twenty-five years out of it,” as if the radiation was a defenseless washing machine I was maligning, and what did I expect, really?

But here’s the point I want to make about the stuff people say. Unless someone looks you in the eye and hisses, “You fucking
asshole, I can’t
wait
until you die of this,” people are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let’s all give each other a pass, shall we?

I go to a production of
Our Town
. The play about the inhabitants of Grover’s Corners at the turn of the century is moving in its simplicity. With the exception of maybe a bowl of string beans, all the props are mimed. The costumes are minimal and not period in any way. In the last act, Emily, now dead, begs to return for just one more day among the living. Her wish granted, she leaves her grave—a folding chair—and pulls aside a curtain, and behind it, there is Life! A fully decorated set of her childhood home’s kitchen, with frost on the windows and a sink with a pump that works and her mother, young again and now in 1900s dress making breakfast on an actual stove. Such sound and activity, it is almost too much joy, too much physical presence for both Emily and us. And then, the director David Cromer’s brilliant coup: the smell of the bacon that is really cooking slowly reaches us all in the audience. That great, domestic olfactory “Yes!” (except for the pigs, for whom it’s a “no” about as definitive as they come), and I want it all: I want the bacon and all it entails, I want my arm, but even more than that, I want the years. I cry. It is my Susan Hayward moment.

My mother calls with potentially good news. The most recent MRI might have shown that the arm doesn’t need to be taken.
Keep your powder dry
, I think. I continue to do most things
one-handed. Returning too soon to the world of ambidexterity would show ingratitude for my gifts. It would be tantamount to stepping on the loaf of bread to protect my pretty shoes.

I meet the surgeon, Carol Morris. An elegant and calming presence, she’s like a cross between Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Obama. When she finally says, “I don’t see a need for amputation,” I burst into tears. It seems I’m racking up the Susan Hayward moments.

And so: five weeks of radiation to sterilize and cauterize the remaining tumor, and then surgery, the hope being that they can get it all this time. They will, however, have to sever some nerves to get it out. I won’t be able to use my triceps. If I lift my arm over my shoulder, it will flop back down onto my head. Again, I welcome the thought of years of being smacked in the face by my own left hand.

The first week of radiation is almost euphoric. Such an exciting task ahead of me. It’s the scene where the teacher comes to the small village. The children, sleek-limbed and beautiful, in pressed white shirts, stand in formation in front of the one-room school that will also serve as the teacher’s new home. They sing a song of welcome and all seems absolutely right and bursting with promise.

To wit: the rosy sunrises that greet me each morning as I walk out at 6:45 to get the bus on First Avenue. And then, as we reach Thirty-seventh Street, to our right the East River and the big sky above it opens up in an expanse of newest day. And how lucky that, here it is, February, and not really so cold as all that, and the handy Purell dispensers everywhere in the hospital that dribble out palmfuls of the disinfectant with an automatic salivary whir, just by putting your hand under them, will keep me healthy and antiseptic. Plus, free graham crackers on every floor. Everyone in the hospital is so unbelievably kind that just going
is therapeutic in and of itself. I start to regret what I’ve done with my life, seriously calculating whether, if I manage to beat this, I could make a change and enter one of the helping professions. I sound like the narrator of
Bleak House
, a female of such treacly aspect that, as I vaguely remember, she almost cries out with delight when she contracts smallpox. Oh, what marvelous life lessons she’ll learn, what a curative to the venality and sin that were surely festering just behind her unmarred visage. So what if there is an interval most every morning when the wide plate of the radiation machine positions itself directly in front of my face—like some curious and possibly hungry predator, studying me dispassionately as its scrim of lead rods reassemble themselves, leaving a gap that resembles California through which the radiation will pass and penetrate my neck—and my heart starts to beat like a panicked bird in a rapidly heating cage. And who cares if that leads my thoughts to turn yet again to my lungs, invaded, Jackson Pollocked with cancer like a spatter pattern in a crime scene. Just listen to the Billie Holiday CD I brought in, recite the Elizabeth Bishop:
In your next letter I wish you’d say / where you are going and what you are doing …
 Get through it.

And it remains eminently manageable, even as it gets harder to run to the bus stop in the morning. That scene of school-in-the-village perfection is starting to show some cracks as the weeks go on. A perplexing rustling in the thatch of my roof. When I ask one of my students about it, he says the local word for cockroach, and then places his thumb and forefinger an uncomfortably long distance apart to indicate the size of the critters. Oh well, no bother yet. Ever gaily forward, slather on the greasy moisturizer to protect your radiated skin, realize that no one can really give you the assurance that you will beat this thing, no matter how many times you ask them. Pay no mind to the older brother of one of your students who starts to show up
every day and stands at the back of the classroom wearing army fatigues and holding a machine gun.

It is something of a comfort not to feel like one is twisting in the wind alone. Julie Norem’s age of discontent seems to have dawned. Most everyone I know is having trouble, some fuzziness that blurs the borders between the micro and the macro, momentarily conflating their own personal problems and the global economic meltdown. It seems to all of us that the center is not holding anywhere, everything is prone to breakdown, entropy, the world feels lethally friable. The best-laid plans, one’s most fastidious contingency strategies have revealed themselves in the cold light of day to be laughably inadequate, no match for the happenstance that seems of late only to promise death, mayhem, poverty, flood. And here you are, having spent all that time protecting your home from the oncoming elements only to find that it has been shored up with crackers.

I might be the cutest patient on the floor, a dubious honor on a cancer ward. Not so the results of my surgery, which are an unambiguous gold medal. Dr. Morris was able to peel the entire tumor away. It went better than even she had hoped. I will have use of my triceps, and as for the margins, “They’re clean but close,” she says. Cancer is pass-fail. I’ll take it.

I stay four days in the hospital, two of which are challenged by my (generally very good, paid for out of pocket) insurance company, their official reasoning being that I could hobble to the toilet and take my pain meds by mouth, as if I was some robust malingerer or had checked myself in for a boob job. We appeal. We win. But may I briefly say … 
what the fuck?
I paid my hefty premiums, even as I ran out of money due to my unproductive year-plus of pain, plus hospital bills. But I am
lucky in my background and prospects, my connections that allow me to marshal, at a moment’s notice, three oncologists to save my arm, or another dear friend who is an attorney to challenge the insurance company. All of it means that I remained essentially affluent despite a near-zero bank balance. How are people supposed to manage? How did elected officials have the balls to even try to spin their wrong-side-of-history bullshit as being in our interests? Or moral? It is the duty of society to take care of its individuals, plain and simple. We will never be healthier than our sickest member.

In Trader Joe’s, not two hours post-discharge from the hospital, in a coincidence to make even the most melodramatic fiction-workshop hack throw up his hands and say “Oh,
come
on!,” I walk by a guy with no left arm or shoulder. I swear it. Everything but a sandwich board saying “There but for the grace of God …” From my safe vantage, I can say, he doesn’t look half bad.

I am still in pain, two months later. A chatty e-mail takes it out of my arm and exhausts me. I am unproductive, which embarrasses me. At a birthday party, a nice young woman in a Marimekko-ish dress tells me about her book proposal and her project sounds so smart and erudite that I can only hear it as an indictment of myself and my sloth. Only the next morning do I remember that this is what I felt two decades prior when I moved back to New York post-treatment, having been out of the slipstream for eighteen months and feeling hopelessly behind the curve. I would be out delivering a package—one of the necessary humiliations of assistant-hood in the book trade—and would see acquaintances from college up ahead and start announcing
from a distance of twenty feet away to people I barely knew and shouldn’t have cared about, “I’m not a messenger!”