Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (31 page)

The next morning I was to go back to work and he was going to play golf. Neither of us had slept very much, so as I went off to hair and makeup, and he said he wasn’t feeling well, a bit tired and out of it, I didn’t think much of it. He had had a hard week himself. Teddy decided to take it easy, to go to the beach or read the paper by the pool. That did seem a little odd to me—Teddy loved golf.

As soon as we landed back in New York there was a lot of work to catch up on with the jewelry company. And there was also a ton of planning and preparation for the lawsuit. The rest of January was a blur. I spent most of my energy trying to get our collection done for the buyers we had coming through the showroom in late February. February also meant the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament, in which Teddy usually played. This year, he had asked his younger son, Everest, an excellent golfer, to take his place. Teddy seemed even more invested in the competition now that he was rooting for Everest, and even Judy—a dear friend and ex-girlfriend of Teddy’s who had functioned as a mother of sorts to the boys—came with us to Northern California. Golf was something they
did together, and they all loved it. I loved being there, and getting to see Judy was a treat, even if I personally did not know which end of the golf club was up. I was happy to be out of New York and to focus on Teddy and Everest and Krishna, leaving my troubles behind, if only temporarily.

I knew that, privately, Teddy was feeling bittersweet about bowing out of the tournament. But, he said, lately his swing just wasn’t what it used to be—and he felt he hadn’t had adequate time to practice. His swing had also become somewhat unpredictable. He could not control his shots as much as he felt he should’ve been able to, especially when he was normally a scratch player with a zero handicap. Teddy was hard on himself and had trouble accepting his limitations, but he was smart enough to know when he wasn’t up to playing. So having Everest out on the green was a great plan. Secretly, selfishly, I wasn’t upset about it at all. It gave Krishna and me a chance to spend more time with Teddy. I remember lying in the grass near the sea after breakfast, with him uncharacteristically joining us on the ground just looking up at the clouds. He had been slow to get up that morning. We lay there and Krishna sat on his stomach, and the three of us were just sunning ourselves in the chill early-spring air. “Isn’t this better than walking miles and miles just to whack a ball with a stick?” I said jokingly. “I am not going to answer that,” he said to me. Patting Krishna on the back, he said, “But Madam Junior, you understand that playing is better than watching any old day, right, kiddo?” He had taken to calling the baby “Madam Junior,” or “Madam Squared” as a joke. Teddy got up then; he could never sit or lie still for long. I was struck by how he struggled to get on his feet. That was unlike him.

Later that day, when we were walking the course, with me pushing Krishna in her stroller as we followed Everest’s progress, I noticed Teddy had trouble keeping his balance. He had almost tripped, over nothing, an invisible stone. When I went to help him, he pulled his arm away, saying he had just underslept and was tired—something he had been saying a lot lately.
I suppose I really didn’t start to truly notice or worry about Teddy’s health until that trip to Pebble Beach. Teddy was turning seventy-one that week. I had never been around a man that age who was as fit as Teddy. In fact, few men I had known, at any age, were as fit as Teddy. So when he started to slow down, I assumed it was the normal slowing down of someone in his stage of life. Also, he had come back from the African safari the year before with a case of spinal meningitis, or so it had been diagnosed. He had suffered terrible headaches ever since, and everyone kept saying it took a very long time to get over something like that. He was, after all, of a certain age.

But Judy hadn’t seen him in a while, and she noticed the difference right away. From the moment she had boarded Teddy’s plane in L.A., she had let him have it. “Teddy, hon, you don’t look good,” she’d drawled in her thick southern accent. “What the heck is wrong with you? Are you eating well? Padma, honey, are you keeping him out too late?” I could only point to Krishna, whom I was nursing under a blanket, a gesture meant to contain the whole of
Does it look like I’ve been having many nights out, with or without Teddy?
“Teddy, go see a doctor. Padma, drag him if you have to,” she ordered.

I felt horrible that I hadn’t noticed the severity of the change in him. But Teddy was proud and hated to seem weak in any way, and I am sure he hid many small signs from not only me, but also the world, just as he had tried to hide almost tripping on the sideline at Pebble Beach. We landed back in L.A. after the tournament. He and I spent the next two days in a specialist’s office, as Teddy took test after test. He did every test his doctor could think of, and nothing turned up. I tried to celebrate his birthday by calling a few of his friends for a dinner at his house in Beverly Hills. In the end I called them all back to cancel. Teddy did not feel like company. He said he wanted only to be at home, alone together.

The next month he would, in frustration, check into the Mayo Clinic the minute they had an opening. There he would finally have an MRI,
which Teddy had resisted getting because of his extreme claustrophobia. I offered to go to the Mayo Clinic with him, but he declined. He said I had too much going on, and he didn’t want the baby dragged there. I think he was scared. I think he knew something was not right at all, and he didn’t want me there to witness it with him. Teddy prided himself on seeming invincible to me, and as far as I was concerned, he
was
invincible. I tried to protest, but I was also aware of how compartmentalized Teddy’s life was, even at the best of times. He had definite ideas about when and where he wanted to let people in. Having gone through a very intimate health crisis myself, I understood his need for privacy, and I respected it. But I did not like it just then. Teddy had always been there for me, even though perhaps I had not always deserved it. It was hard to let him go without me.

A few days later, my cell phone rang as I was boarding a flight to Florida, where I was headed to the Home Shopping Network to sell my Easy Exotic brand of culinary products. I saw that it was Teddy. I was struggling with the baby and the stroller, and getting both on the plane. So I called him back when we were settled into our seats. He was still at the Mayo Clinic. He said they’d found something in his head. The MRI had come back showing a mass around his brain. The doctors advised him that it could be an infection or something much worse. They referred him to a specialist surgeon at Sloan Kettering. I wanted desperately to get up with the baby and run off that plane. You did not get referred to Sloan Kettering unless there was a serious problem. They treated only one kind of malady there. Teddy told me to stay put. Suddenly, my little budding spice and tea business seemed trifling at best. I felt trapped by the plane’s shutting door. “I will meet you in New York at the end of this weekend,” I whispered into the phone. Tears streamed down my face, and I tried to turn toward Krishna in order to hide my face from the cabin crew standing right over me ready to demonstrate the safety procedures. Just weeks before, we had been in the Bahamas, and Teddy had been consoling
me
as I received what
I thought was my worst nightmare. Now I wished, with all my being, to be with him and confront together what actually
was
our worst nightmare. It seemed impossible. I spent the rest of the flight clutching Krishna to my chest and sobbing quietly under a blanket.

In early April, Teddy would have brain surgery at Sloan Kettering. He went to see a surgeon there named Dr. Gutin in the last days of March. Gutin explained that the mass could be a brain infection, a benign tumor sitting on his brain, or glioblastoma, the most serious form of brain cancer, for which there was no cure. Teddy said we needed to pray for a brain infection. He wanted to do the operation right away. He wanted to get it over with and get to the bottom of what was invading his head. The doctor said he would go in surgically and relieve pressure on the brain, but also remove anything he safely could that didn’t belong there. I could understand Teddy’s hurry, but my mother had by phone prepared me for what he might be like after the operation. I wanted just one more week, or month, or year, with Teddy and Krishna and me together. I wanted desperately to have a stretch of time that was calm, that was some form of normal, if only so we could taste what it felt like. I needed more time.

The September before, I had turned forty. On a hot, sweaty late-summer night we celebrated with much fanfare. The party, held at the restaurant Indochine, had a Toulouse-Lautrec theme, a marching band, and cancan girls traipsing through the restaurant. Among a sea of faces, many of whom he did not know, Teddy had toasted me. He spoke of how he thought I was “very capable, of doing whatever she sets out to do.” I didn’t feel capable at all at times. In fact, his unwavering belief in me outshone any real confidence I had in myself by a mile. But he was a great dreamer, a motivator, a doer, and a leader. As he toasted me
,
I found myself thinking about him
,
about the depth and indefatigability of his love and loyalty.
He was not my baby’s father, but he loved her, more than life itself, provenance be damned. He was there when I delivered her. He was the first one to hold her. When they took turns waking each other up at night—she with her crying, he with his snoring—I laughed, exhausted and enraptured. She was not permitted to watch TV, but she was allowed to play at his feet when he watched hours of golf and tennis during those summer afternoons at the beach house when I deemed it too hot for her to play outside in the sun. That night, I had blown out the candles on my cake and wished for some harmony in our lives, to be able to simply love each other and have some laughs.

Everything had seemed so hard; even the good was mixed with strife and stress. The lawsuit only compounded that. But the news of something in Teddy’s brain made all that had passed seem like child’s play. Since Teddy’s MRI, the lawsuit had turned into a menacing white noise. It hissed insistently in the background, following me everywhere, but I barely heard it now. It was a big stone in my shoe, but I kept walking. That was the terrible blessing of Teddy’s health crisis: it had a shockingly clarifying power.

I woke up very early on April 5 and left the baby at home with the nanny. I traveled up the FDR by taxi, as I had done so many times, to meet Teddy at his home before accompanying him the few short blocks to Sloan Kettering. He had tried to keep me away, but I wouldn’t agree. I think it was again because Teddy didn’t want me to see him be afraid. He was always my rock, and still wanted to be. We were escorted to the pre-op room. It had the stale smell of rubbing alcohol and surgical tape. It was moderately crowded and humming already with uniformed nurses and surgeons milling about busily. Most of the other beds were occupied, with one or two people surrounding them. I remember thinking it was cold in there, and even felt the breeze coming down from an air-conditioning vent. The room was large and had several beds, each near a totem pole of stacked square computerized machines sprouting tubes that whizzed and
whirred and lit up in sections, depending on who was hooked up to them. I could hear the hiss of a breathing machine. I heard a gurney traveling fast, far away down the hall.

I could tell by his body language that Teddy hated it here; he was physically irate. I pulled a thin white curtain around the bed to give him some privacy. He sat on the squishy hospital bed. The rubberized mattress beneath the cotton bedding squeaked under his weight. He removed his clothes, and as I folded them, he put on a wrinkled and flimsy cotton gown with ties in the back. He handed me the gold chain he wore around his neck and never took off. It had two gold Catholic pendants, and an oval tin one with Mary on it that I had given him. Mother Teresa had given it to me when I visited her in Calcutta years ago, and I had given it to him a couple of years back because it was the most precious thing I owned. When we pulled back the drape, the nurse suggested he wear the hospital-provided socks with slip guard strips, as the floor was slippery and not too clean, either. I kneeled down to put them on his feet. “Aww, jeez, would you getta load of
this
scene,” he said, incredulous and looking down. “Hey, this is
exactly
the kind of thing I’ve been trying to avoid all along,” I shot back. We both had a good laugh. I was glad to be there. I answered all the questions on the clipboard the nurse was holding, while another nurse started an IV on Teddy’s arm.

During the surgery, I waited upstairs near his room with his sons for the doctor to call us down. I remember lying on a leather couch and dozing there long enough for my cheek to stick to the cushion. Two hours or so later, Margot, a woman from Teddy’s office who was also waiting with the boys and me, came from the nurses’ station and said Dr. Gutin had come out of surgery, and while they weren’t finished with Teddy, he wanted to speak with us.

Dr. Gutin came into the small private room where we waited. It had pale-gray walls, wall-to-wall carpeting, and puce-colored faux leather and
wood sofas. It was as bland and nondescript a room as possible, designed not to make any kind of impression on its occupants while they received potentially devastating news that would forever change their lives. There were four chairs facing each other, two on the left and two on the right. A couch was beyond them against the wall. Margot and Siya sat across from Everest and me. When he came in, the doctor still had on his OR scrubs and looked a bit sweaty and tired. He said that they had found the worst. The tumor had crossed the brain barrier to both lobes, and it was the deadliest of possibilities: glioblastoma. When I asked the doctor what that meant, he said “six to nine months or a year to live, maybe more if he has treatment; a year and a half if he’s really lucky. But he must start treatment right away or he will be dead within six months.”