Chapter 37
37
Jane
On the day that Jane is first diagnosed—cervical cancer, late stage II—she walks to the Park. The office is on Sixty-Seventh and Madison and Jane goes one block west, two north, and enters between the green benches, burdensome stone walls, a broken flowerpot and a fan of discarded business cards, gray and wet, stuck to the pavement like skin.
How much of Jane’s life, Jane wonders, has been spent entering and leaving this Park? Max in the stroller, hand in hand with Abe, alone, between runners and unhoused, green sandaled, bundled, elated, distraught, recently rushing south to north, to meet Bea for jam pastries, to tell her, because Bea has always understood, about how the art has made Jane feel whole again. After so long and so much doubt.
Today, Jane is wearing old brown leather boots and a cashmere scarf that Abe did not buy her. She bought it for herself. Still, she is cold and uncomfortable. The doctor’s office must have been sixty degrees and she shivered for the entire appointment—no one to cover her. Even now, the chill won’t quit. The day is raw. Jane is suddenly aware of the sky (darkening), the cyclists (speeding), and the cobblestones (so tricky). It wasn’t this way before. Safety only flourishes in indifference, she thinks. And she is bleeding again. She can feel it.
At the office, Jane asked the doctor if it would have helped had she come in earlier.
How much earlier? the doctor asked.
A few months, Jane said. When I started feeling unwell.
The doctor shook his head.
Cancer started long before that, he said. Let’s take it from here. Let’s see how we go.
At first, Jane was in disbelief. As in, not that she didn’t believe him. She did. She knew. But it’s like trying to wrap string around snow. Nearly impossible to conceptualize oneself not living as one is. Jane can walk and talk and breathe and sneeze and make things with string still. And yet, there must have been some loose plastic rattling, she thinks, that she refused to get up and address all this time. One must suspend one’s disbelief. One must believe in the possible even when it feels impossible.
Jane passes a man selling hot dogs, steaming and pungent. She heads quickly north and then west. She is not sure of where she is going; she only hopes not to bump into Abe, or Max with Abe’s mother, on a little adventure after school.
Or Alice.
Jane has no idea what she’d tell any of them—where to even begin? But she knows that she is not ready to say anything yet. She wants to wait, first, for something to settle in her body, some engine to shut off. She is ratcheted up. What if she waited for a good moment? A positive note? When might that be?
For a moment, Jane looks up to the sky as if for answers. There are none. Just black clouds, sick with weather. She walks slowly. She will not be rushed. She sets the pace now, she thinks. Time thickens. Coasting comes to a sudden halt.
For a moment, Jane stops. She leans against a tree, needs to catch her breath. It is like this more and more, lately: the air thins; Jane gasps. She used to be able to hold her breath longer than anyone. She’d search for shells on the sea floor for so long that Abe would wonder if she’d gotten lost. She’d come up with a fistful, panting, yards and yards down the beach—and make them into a collage of a school of fish and waves.
From the tree, Jane watches a mother and her son, maybe a bit older than Max, but with the same mop of hair, white-white teeth, and legs so long they seem to belong to a different animal: flamingo, gazelle. They are holding hands, mother and son, not quite skipping but not quite not. Every once in a while, they lock eyes to corroborate or conspire. The mother laughs and touches her heart now. The boy puts his head into his mother’s belly.
Jane longs for such affection. It makes her own belly hurt.
So often Jane has wondered about being a different mother from the start. What if her mind and body hadn’t betrayed her? What if she’d been able to come to the Park every sunset, Max swaddled to her chest, a big brown coat pulled all the way around them? Would that have changed things?
Do you feel that? she’d say of the sunset to her boy. Do you hear that? she’d say of the birds. She’d kiss his downy head, rock him to a song that only they could intuit.
They might have been head to belly now. And maybe she and Abe…
What then?
Jane thinks of her art. She can imagine a piece she hasn’t yet made: a giant steel sculpture, flat, except for a swath of nearly imperceptible textured flowers on the front. You’d have to squint to see them, get close, and only then. And only in certain light. And only if you’re lucky. Art gives only to those wide open.
It heartens her that Max seems so interested in art already: shapes and pencils and glue. If that is the only thing.
For a moment, Jane wonders how much art is left for her. How many long, hot showers? Crisp apples? Pots of tea? Will she ever fly to a place with blue-blue water again? Will she ever swim? Ride on inspiration like a buoyant wave? Will she ever be so lucky?
Will Max hug her? Will she ever let Abe?
The doctor could not say.
Perhaps, Jane thinks, if she’d been the kind of mother she’d hoped, she wouldn’t be counting in this way. Perhaps disappointment is as insidious a chemical as the cancer cells themselves. It has poisoned them both. It strikes her then that perhaps she will not die from disappointment, a wound, a bus, her heart even. Her heart is a fist, full of disappointment.
The cancer grew, she thinks, when her studio door was shut.
Jane reaches into her bag for a tissue but there isn’t one. Instead, she finds the almonds from Abe. She stuffs them into her mouth, one by one, then in one fell swoop. She chews hard and fast as if scrubbing something clean in her head. She nearly chokes.
She wants to thank Abe, despite everything, but he isn’t here.
Soon, there is a runner in his thirties, whizzing by.
For a moment, Jane tries to imagine Max at that age, years from now, not running and not alone but with his own son maybe, throwing a ball, sharing a pint of figs. Jane thinks, as she finds her way back to the Lower Loop: Max is sharing a picnic blanket with a wife and child. They are eating cheese and apples. There is a red kite and a soccer ball and a Frisbee nearby. They’ve just come from MoMA. Max has so much time to grow into that kind of person, doesn’t he?
Please.
Long legs. White teeth.
How many more hours will Jane have with him? How many more slammed doors?
And Abe?
There will be good times, she thinks, closing her eyes, rubbing them with her thumb and forefinger. Jane is curled around Max on the floor. Their apartment is warm and safe, plenty of carpets, beef leftovers in the fridge, Jane’s art on every surface, heavy or precarious, full of color, string or metal or clay; there is a plant, watered and well by the window in a terra-cotta pot. Abe is waiting for her in the living room, hands in his lap in the dark. He wants to help. He is such a brilliant writer. He has worked so hard. And for them too. He has put the wings on her back.
There has been so much good between them, Jane thinks. Jane doesn’t have to remind herself of that or rouse it. She feels it like sun.
Jane has been far from perfect.
She is almost to the other side of the Park. For a moment, the clouds drop and there is a wild orange glow that opens up the fist in Jane’s chest. She thinks of Abe. It is not forgiveness that she feels so much as surrender.
Was it the art that pulled Jane away or Jane herself? She was so desperate to find land again after Max. To heave onto shore, warm and solid. To get up, no belly over which to hoist. To make her way, strong legs, intact insides, big heart, heavy but hopeful, no wings. To come out alive.
Jane had to make something.
Without art, there is no daydream, forgiveness, trust. There is no ground, unwavering. There is no Abe even. Just sea. And Jane adrift, maybe even swallowed down.
It seemed like the only way to stay alive, to make things, didn’t it? But what about now? The art cannot save Jane exactly. Though maybe Max’s baby body could have. Or maybe more dinners with Abe. Or warm sheets, the three of them together, reading a book, making a fort, laughing laughing laughing.
Or maybe not.
When the lights go off, the sculptures are alone in the dark.
The art alone is life-giving in the moment but it never promised to give more life.
Whereas love.
Maybe Jane can save her life twice, she thinks. It is a messy business, illogical and bloody. Jane touches her heart. She isn’t crying. She isn’t laughing either. What she feels, perhaps, is life coursing through her still. It is like lightning, gasoline, prayer.
Jane is dizzy, breathless. She focuses on one foot in front of the other to keep from falling, and also running too fast. She longs to be with her family then—if not to tell them that she loves them, then to just sit close, palpitations in her heart and fingers from hope and anticipation and inspiration—and to draw for them a picture of all the things they hold so dear. A picture of everything. All that she can do.
Draw love.