Five Days Page 9

  Then I sent a fast text to Sally:

  I know things can get difficult between you and your father. Just as sometimes we get up each other’s noses (excuse the metaphor!). Please know I am always here for you, always in your corner. If you need me this weekend just pick up the phone day or night. Love you – Mom

  Once the text was sent, I had two more duties. The first was a call to Dan – but I got his voicemail, making me think he might have headed to the gym or the beach. He started work again at four a.m. Monday morning – and though I was certain he was already dreading the job I hoped that, at least, he was finding a way of relaxing for these three final days before he was back in the workaday world. I also hoped that he was taking a long view when it came to the job and saw it as a way back into the company which had tossed him away like an ill-fitting shoe twenty-one months earlier; a stepping stone to better things.

  You really do try to see the best in everything, don’t you?

  But is there anything truly wrong with that? What else can any of us do except travel hopefully?

  ‘Hi, hon,’ I said, speaking after the beep commanded me to leave him a message. ‘In Boston. The hotel could be better. And it would be lovely if you were here to share the city with me. I hope to go there sometime tomorrow. Anyway, just wanted to say hi, hope you’re having a lovely day. Miss you . . .’

  As I clicked the phone shut it struck me that I hadn’t said: ‘Love you.’ Did I still love Dan? Did he still love me?

  No. Not now. Not this weekend.

  The endless refrain.

  I stood up. I checked my watch. I glanced down at the convention welcome pack on the bed. I saw that the talk on ‘CT Scanning and Inoperable Stage Three Lung Cancer’ was beginning in ten minutes. Better than loitering in here, thinking, thinking. Imagine using a seminar like that the way most of us use a movie we know isn’t going to be very good – as a form of pure escapism. Still, anything is better than this room.

  I grabbed my convention badge, attached to a red ribbon. I dropped it over my neck and gave myself a fast glance in the mirror, thinking: God, I’m looking older. Then I headed downstairs, thinking over that curious conversation I had with the insurance man from Bath – and how I had enjoyed the banter, the harmless flirtation, before he began to sound like a knee-jerk Republican.

  No, that’s not fair. He was literate (who makes a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne these days?) and clearly well-informed and, like me, nervously enjoying this exchange. And you overreacted when he said something that you took the wrong way.

  Was I overreacting because I was flirting with him? Was my petulance bound up in the sense that I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing . . . that I can never recall having done before during all the years of my marriage?

  Oh, please. It was conversational give-and-take, nothing more. The guy was as awkward as you are – so it was clearly something he didn’t engage in very often either. But he was also far more intelligent than any insurance man you’ve ever encountered . . . not that you’ve exactly encountered vast numbers of men selling you indemnity against life’s possible horrors.

  Still, I shouldn’t have snapped at him like that.

  In the elevator going down to the main lobby there was a woman who stood about five foot four. Slight to the point of being petite, yet with eyes that seemed so animated. She was wearing a plain mid-brown pants suit. Her gray hair was cut simply. She was a woman so unimposing that you would pass her on the street without noticing her. Until you caught sight of her smile. A smile which hinted that she was one of those rare souls who have a sanguine way of looking at the world. I glanced at her conference badge: Ellen Wilkinson / Regional Memorial Hospital / Muncie, Indiana. Standing next to her (with her back to me) was a tall, spindly woman, also in her mid-fifties. As the elevator door closed behind me I heard Ellen Wilkinson tell this lofty woman:

  ‘. . . what can I say? I come home after a day full of horror in the scanning room. And Donald is there. And after thirty-eight years together I still look at the guy and think: Lucky me. And from the way he always smiles at me – even if he too has had a terrible day – I know he’s thinking the same thing. Lucky us.’

  Out of nowhere I found myself lowering my head as my eyes filled up with tears. I turned away, not wanting these two women to see my distress; a distress that had caught me so unawares. But Ellen Wilkinson of Muncie, Indiana, clearly caught sight of my upset, as she put her hand on my shoulder and asked:

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’

  To which I could only quietly reply:

  ‘Lucky you indeed.’

  Then the elevator door opened and I walked straight into the seminar about ‘CT Scanning and Inoperable Stage Three Lung Cancer’.

  Three

  SOMEWHERE DURING THE third seminar of the late afternoon – no, it was now early evening – the thought struck me: I’ve not absorbed a word of anything I’ve heard. Deep technical discussions about the new MRI techniques for uncovering cerebral arterial sclerosis. A long, badly delivered, but still important (I suppose) paper from a research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute about the complexities of coronary valve imaging. Two radiographic technologists from St Louis doing a double act on a pioneering technique they developed for early ultrasound detection of ectopic pregnancies (I was cheered by my fellow technologists being saluted for a breakthrough that research scientists usually handle – and which they discovered through sheer application of all their years of technical knowledge). And a talk about advances in intravenous radiographic dyes and their heightened efficacy.

  Yes, I did listen to everything being said in these back-to-back sessions. Yes, my brain occasionally did register interest in what was being discussed. But, for the most part of the long afternoon I spent in that large, overheated conference room, I was elsewhere. It was all due to that overheard conversation in the elevator. A declaration of long-term marital love that I’d never heard expressed in such a direct and simple and touching way. And behind my distress was a certain envy. How I so wanted to look at the man who shares my life and think: Lucky us. But that was simply not our story. And that made me cry. In public. A fact which so unnerved me. Because, yet again, tears arrived without warning, and I had let my guard down. The same heavily guarded self which had enabled me, for all these years, to never hint to anyone (outside of Lucy) that I come home to unhappiness night after night. Then again, I was brought up with the idea that complaining was a shabby thing to do. My mother couldn’t tolerate anyone who moaned about how difficult things were in their life. ‘You can complain all you want when you’re dead – and then not be able to do a damn thing about it. But while you’re alive and kicking, you just keep working. Complaining is lashing out against things over which you largely have no control . . . like the smallness of other people.’

  Mom said all that to me on a Saturday afternoon four years ago when I went up to see her at her home. She had just completed her last chemotherapy session and was rail thin with little hair.

  ‘The oncologist is making all sorts of noises about him being the General Patton of cancer doctors, and leading an onslaught against all those crazy T-cells that have landed me in this mess. But I’m not convinced.’

  ‘Oncologists rarely say positive things until they believe they can deliver good results,’ I said.

  ‘Well, this guy would tell a man already half-eaten by a shark: “Hang in there, there’s still a way out of this.” But I know my body better than anyone. And my body is telling me: This is a battle we’re going to lose. I am resigned to that. Just as I am resigned to the fact that I should have done more with the time I had . . .’

  ‘Mom, you’ve done loads . . .’

  ‘Now you are talking nonsense. I’ve had a rather small, little life. Outside of your father, yourself and a few friends, my passing will be noted by no one. I am not being excessively morbid, just honest. I have spent my whole life in one corner of Maine. I have worked in a library. I have been ma
rried to the same curious man for forty-four years and have raised a daughter – who is a much more accomplished person than she gives herself credit for. And that’s about the sum total of it all . . . besides the fact that I should have made more of things over the years.’

  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.