It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (7 page)

He had hardly spoken a word to her. He barely knew who she was, had no idea what he thought of her or whether he would want to see her again. In two days he would be home. He tried to imagine it, but his mind went blank. He put his hand in his pocket. There was the scrap of paper with the phone number. Get rid of it, he told himself; chuck it in the ravine ... He looked over at Stewart, who was busy setting up his camera, smiling to himself and whistling a little tune. Taking the paper from his pocket, Abel saw that the number was in fact written in lipstick. The scent of Xenia’s mouth wafted from it, wavering through him like a hot, soft flame. With a weird clarity, he found himself picturing Antonia catching sight of the piece of paper among his things as he unpacked, picking it up, turning to him questioningly... A strange-sounding laugh escaped from his throat.

He stood motionless, looking out into the gulf of empty space.

Richard Timmerman, principal of an elementary school in the town of Aurelia, noticed a swelling under his chin one morning. Ignoring it (he assumed he was just fighting off some virus), he shaved and went to work. It was still there a week later, but he continued to ignore it. He had a busy job, a family, and plenty of other things to think about.

Among the latter was a problem that had been troubling him for several weeks now. His parents, who had died within months of each other the previous year, had left their house to him and his sister. Ellen, the sister, had moved in with them a few years earlier, ostensibly to help take care of their ailing father, but in reality (as everyone knew who knew the family) because she couldn’t afford to buy or rent a place of her own. She had been a reckless spirit when she was young, traveling with a theater troupe in Europe, then living on ashrams in India, and had hit middle age with a crash: twice divorced, with a small son, large debts, and no prospects of making a decent living. Now she was refusing to move out of the house.

It wasn’t a big house, but Richard certainly could have used his share of whatever it was worth. He would have hired a lawyer to deal with the matter, but he had qualms about evicting his own sister and was also a little afraid of how this might affect his reputation in the small community where they lived. Being put in this position, of having to be either a victim of Ellen’s selfish stubbornness or else a bully, further upset him. Above all, he disliked how the problem, with all the childish feelings it aroused, seemed to have taken over his mind, vexing him whenever he lay in bed or drove to work. Whether he was inwardly fuming at Ellen or trying to force himself to feel more charitable toward her than he did, he could think of nothing else. He considered himself an idealistic person, above this sort of pettiness, but there it was, filling him with its tedious drone every time he had a moment’s peace. If she’d had the decency to express guilt or even just some regret about depriving him of what he was owed, he might have found it easier to make allowances for her. But she seemed to think she had every right to stay put and, instead of asking him nicely to be generous or patient, had taken a position of self-righteous hostility, as if he were the one in the wrong. Furthermore, even as she made him feel vaguely criminal for being so much better off than she was (as if siblings somehow had a natural right to equal shares of whatever the world had to offer), she had a way of conveying lofty contempt for precisely the comforts—a decent car, occasional vacations, enough money to shop at the all-organic store in town rather than have to hunt for bargains in the Wal-Mart produce aisles—that distinguished his life from hers. Their phone conversations had become icy in the extreme.

Three weeks after he’d noticed it, the swelling still hadn’t gone down. At his wife’s urging, he made an appointment to see Dr. Taubman, the family physician, in East Deerfield.

The doctor was a small, trim, dapper man with a neatly shaped goatee and a pair of sparkling half-moon glasses. Largely on the basis of the latter, Richard had formed an idea of him as a person of intellectual leanings, like himself, though also like himself more interested in the nurturing of others (their bodies in his case, while in Richard’s it was their young minds) than in the selfish pursuit of learning for its own sake. He felt an affinity with him, and although their conversations had never gone very far, he sensed that an unspoken mutual respect existed between them.

Dr. Taubman picked up a silver pen after examining the lump. He was silent for a moment; then he cleared his throat.

“I don’t want to say this is anything like lymphoma,” he said, swiveling the pen in his fingers. “It could be perfectly benign, just a swollen lymph node from an infection, as you suggested. But at this point you need to have a specialist take a look at it, and I think you should probably have it removed.”

Richard blinked, momentarily too stunned to speak.

“You mean, surgically?” he asked.

“Oh yes.”

Smiling oddly, the doctor told Richard to schedule a CAT scan as soon as possible and to make an appointment to see an ear, nose, and throat specialist for a biopsy. As if foreseeing that Richard would attempt to stave off the fear mounting inside him with the hope that these tests might turn out negative, he cautioned him that some tumors were not radiopaque and would therefore not show up on the scan. He added that the specialist would probably opt for surgery regardless of the biopsy results since these also were not entirely reliable.

Recommending a local colleague, he stood up, still smiling and clearly expecting Richard to observe some unwritten clinic protocol in which it was agreed to behave as if a diagnosis of probable cancer were nothing out of the ordinary and certainly nothing to get upset about, at least not in his office. Considering his high regard for the man, Richard couldn’t help feeling that he was being dealt with rather brusquely. He stumbled out into the parking lot with a sense of having been sent on his way with an armful of enormous, unwieldy objects that had been pressed on him against his wishes and for which he had no conceivable use.

He had intended running some errands in East Deerfield after the appointment, but he drove home instead, his hands slippery on the cold plastic of the steering wheel.

In the driveway he stood for a moment, feeling dizzy. The white clapboard and blue trim of the house gleamed in the spring sunshine. Beyond, spaced across the broad lawn, were the shade trees that had outlasted several generations of humans: the weeping willow, the giant and festive blue spruce, the sugar maple and horse chestnut standing close to each other, their branches interlaced. All just as he had left them an hour and a half earlier and yet charged with an air of circumspection now, as if the news had already reached them.

Sara, his wife, appeared from around the back of the house in her gardening gloves, her short graying hair clinging in damp wisps to her face.

“What did the doctor say?”

She nodded silently as he told her. A stranger observing might have imagined her oddly unconcerned by the news. But this subdued reaction was simply her manner, the manifestation of a slow but scrupulous way she had of registering important matters. It was she who insisted that Richard go down to New York for both the scan and the biopsy, rather than have them done locally, and it was she, in her unobtrusively efficient way, who made the arrangements.

A week later he took the train to New York and entered a building on the Upper West Side. He had barely slept since his visit to Dr. Taubman. Some over-the-counter pills had given him a few hours of light oblivion each night, after which the feeling of dread they had held in precarious abeyance spilled back, filling his mind with a cold, pulsating wakefulness for the rest of the night. It happened to be a busy week at his school—a meeting with trustees, a planning session for a new science building, the monthly assembly for the “Tribes” program that he had recently introduced—and the effort of trying to conduct himself in his usual genial manner compounded the stress, leaving him with a muffled, torpid, leaden sensation that was somehow at the same time one of weightlessness and raw-nerved exposure.

Utter silence filled the elevator; it seemed not to move at all, so that when the doors opened, it was as if the lobby had merely transformed itself into a corridor with a glass sign etched with the words
LIFESTREAM RADIOLOGY.

He went into the waiting room, feeling the fear inside him glow a little brighter. Was it death itself that frightened him? Not exactly. Nonexistence had never seemed a particularly disturbing concept, and he had often wondered why people made such a fuss about it. More upsetting was the prospect of being reassigned in the minds of others from the category of the living to that of the dying, which appeared to him a kind of sudden ruin, an abrupt, calamitous coming down in the world, with all the disgrace and shame that accompany such a circumstance. And then beyond that there was the process, terrifying to contemplate, of being slowly, forcibly, painfully torn from one’s own existence. Already, it seemed to him, the process had begun; a fissure had opened between him and the life he had made for himself: the wife and children he loved, the home in which their happiness had flourished, his demanding but inexhaustibly satisfying job. The fissure was still invisible, but like an ice floe that had cracked, it was only a matter of time before the two sides began to move apart.

After twenty minutes his name was called, and he was shown to a room where the radiologist, a woman with straggling gray hair and a wooden cross at her neck, prepared him for the scan.

“I’ll be giving you a power surge injection of iodine for radio-graphic contrast,” she said with a strained, bulging-eyed look, “after which you may become nauseous or feel the need for a bowel movement. But it’s important that you lie completely still and try not to swallow as that can affect the image.”

He hung his head, restraining a childish desire to sob.

“We’ll go on in if you’re ready . . .”

The walls of the scanning room were windowless, hung with huge, glowing photographic panels depicting sapphire waterfalls and emerald green alpine meadows. In the center stood the monumental white ring of the scanner with the gurney projecting below. From pictures he had seen of these machines, Richard had noted their strange fusion of the space age with the primeval, but even so, the vast size and eerie fluorescence of the instrument startled him. He lay down on the narrow dais. The woman plunged a needle into his arm. A tingling, pressurized heat surged into him. Not painful exactly, but shocking. The word “insult,” in its medical sense, came to him as the substance raced through his veins. Something in him seemed to flinch in corresponding outrage or mortification. Was he going to throw up? Were his bowels going to betray him? Two lit faces suspended in darkness watched from behind a glass partition. The scanner began to hum. Above him the radiologist stood with her slight aghast expression, her stringy hair bluish in the light from the machine. She pressed a switch, and the gurney slid his prone body slowly under the machine’s arching panel of dials and sensors. By nature a respecter of limits and thresholds, he stared up at the great circular gateway towering over him with a feeling of horror.

He swallowed suddenly, the reflex too strong to control.

“Sorry!”

“It’s all right. I think we have what we’re looking for.”

Before he could fully absorb these words, the woman had retreated behind the glass partition, conferring inaudibly with the two figures stationed there. A few minutes later she reemerged, carrying a large envelope. The wooden cross gleamed dully at her throat. She handed him the envelope, speaking slowly: “This is what you’re going to bring with you to your specialist.”

He thanked her, putting on his jacket. On his way out he turned back, hearing himself ask in a thick voice: “Did you—did you see something?”

She looked away from him, facing the machine.

“Oh, I don’t really read the scans.”

She had seen something! She was religious, and even a small lie made her uncomfortable. He left, staggering out into the cool spring sunlight. The specialist’s office was in midtown. He walked, moving in the same daze of fear as before, only more deeply interred in its cause. Here was Broadway, billboards and scaffolding and more billboards over the scaffolding. A truck, turning, belched soot across a pool of white tulips. Why had this happened to him? he wondered. Had he committed some transgression without knowing it? Violated some fundamental law governing his life? He had been brought up in a churchgoing household, and although he no longer believed in a god or an afterlife, the habit of looking for meaning in the events that befell him was second nature. He carried with him a sense of having discovered at a certain point the precise terms on which existence was prepared to nourish his particular qualities as a human being, and of having abided by these terms as conscientiously as he could. He had been interested in many things: folk music, mathematics, philosophy, design. He had thought of becoming an academic, another time considered a career in engineering. But always at the point of embarking along one of these paths some stubborn element in his makeup had protested that although these professions might be fascinating, they lacked a particular radiance without which his own nature was not going to fulfill itself. This was the radiance of active virtue; direct, self-sacrificing involvement in the upward-aspiring efforts of his fellow humans. How this had become such a vital necessity to him he had not thought necessary to investigate, but there it was, in him like a compass needle, and he had followed it faithfully as it led him into the field of education, guiding him within that field to the progressive theories that articulated his own instincts, pointing the way forward at every juncture in his career . . . Educators, he had read in an essay that had inscribed itself on his memory, were “the life-priests of the new era.” They were “adepts”—he knew the passage as he had once known the Nicene Creed—“in the dark mystery of living, fearing nothing but life itself, and subject to nothing but their own reverence for the incalculable life gesture . . .”