CHAPTER 6
I went with him to some things, or Jonathan and I did, and on occasion it was only Jonathan, who was happy to serve as a fourth in a Sunday bridge game that Eddie had been a part of for years.
My husband and my stepfather played bridge.
Skip played bridge, but he often canceled at the last minute, unable to get away from the responsibilities of Darien.
Sometimes Leda and Steve met Eddie for dinner, and I wouldn’t hear about it until after the fact, and twice over the summer he took Steve and Leda’s son, Henry, to the Blue Note because Henry was cultivating an interest in jazz.
Eddie was a popular man, and the few members of our family didn’t begin to fill his social calendar.
We accepted the invitations that were extended, and we offered invitations in return.
But I got to take him to chemo. I was clear about that.
“Okay,” he said. “Time to go.”
It was July again, and so there was nothing I needed to cancel.
I picked him up at his apartment, and Jonas, the doorman, hailed us a cab.
Eddie had a cane now, not a statement piece but the kind you buy at Duane Reade.
There was a bit of a struggle getting it into the taxi, closing the door. “I have become a tri-ped,” he said.
“It is the natural progression of time.”
“Just think,” he said, touching my sleeve, “if you’d left me in that car to freeze all those years ago, none of this would have happened.”
The day was hot and bright, and it seemed almost funny to remember how cold we’d been. How alone. Forty-five years later we were stuck in traffic on the FDR, watching the boats slicing their way up the East River.
The sunny waiting room was crowded. In some cases you didn’t know who was the patient and who was coming along for the ride, but then there were the people who looked like they’d been assembled from a bone kit, translucent and bald in their wheelchairs, their sock hats pulled low against the air conditioner’s chill.
We made our way through, found two empty seats.
“Will you tell them we’ve arrived?” Eddie asked me, and lowered himself into his chair.
Taxi to the curb, across the sidewalk, into the building, across the lobby, into the elevator, out of the elevator, down the hall, through the door, it had exhausted him.
I carried his canvas tote bag—a thick book, a yellow legal pad, potato chips with half the salt.
I went to sign him in. When I came back, his head was tipped against the glass behind him.
“Not sleeping,” he said.
“You can if you want,” I said.
“Dr. Ocean knows exactly how long I can go before I start to wear out. Then she beats back the rising tide of white cells with her elixir.”
“She’s very good,” I said, and it was true. I, too, had become attached to Dr. Ocean, this place, our routine. I had become attached to Eddie’s life.
“I love her,” he said.
“Lucky Dr. Ocean.”
“I love you more,” he said.
“Then lucky me.”
“Tell me about your mother. Was she able to get a mushroom casket for Lucas?”
The casket, of course, was months ago. I had told Eddie the first half of the story, then failed to follow up. “She did! I don’t know who she paid off, but she did it. They told her it wasn’t going to be possible, and the next thing I knew, he was going into the ground in a hemp basket.”
Eddie nodded. “Every publicist should have the privilege of burying at least one of her authors.”
“Certainly the authors they marry. Oh! and she sold the house.”
“She told me that,” he said. “I asked her about the house. I didn’t think it was my place to ask her about the casket.”
“You’ve been talking to my mother?”
“We write each other notes, back and forth, back and forth. It’s like texting for people with large collections of stationery.”
“That’s awfully nice of you,” I said.
“Your mother and I both have a small shard of glass in our hearts where the other is concerned: her disappointment, my shame, her regret and my regret. This helps to pry it loose. All these years later, you can still pry something loose. There’s no sense carrying shame and regret into the next life. ”
I assumed he was speaking metaphorically and so, metaphorically, I agreed.
“She says she might come to see me,” he said.
“Really?” My mother never came to see me.
Eddie, reading my mind, said she hadn’t been able to leave Lucas, not when he was well and not when he was in decline. “She has the flexibility now.”
“Meaning what, she would have been visiting you all these years if it hadn’t been for Lucas?”
“No. I think she’s feeling a little left out is all. If you and I are friends, then she thinks it might be nice if she and I were friends. After all, your mother was once a great friend of mine.”
I took a moment of interior assessment to see if this bothered me and found it did not.
We continued to wait. Chemo was running behind schedule. The people who were so much sicker, the ones who were already here when we arrived, they were waiting as well.
Eddie opened his eyes, checked his watch. “Late,” he said.
“They are.”
He smiled at me and closed his eyes again. “I appreciate the fact that you’re not going to the desk to tell them how long we’ve been here.”
I laughed. “Chemo takes as long as it takes. They can’t pull out one person’s line to get the next person in there faster.”
“Once upon a time, at my first chemo appointment, the friend who accompanied me, we need not say her name, lost her ever-loving mind when we were kept waiting. She marched back to the desk and told the woman that she knew people, lots of people, and they best see me right away.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The only people I know are other English teachers. We have no sway.”
Eddie was quiet. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”
“What? You didn’t say anything.”
Eddie nodded. “Thank you. I’ve made an important decision,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I’m never going to be angry at anyone ever again,” he said, and then he fell asleep.
It was another hour before his name was called.
The waiting room for oncology patients was always quiet, unlike some other waiting rooms where they kept a television going with HGTV.
In the oncology waiting room, people were less likely to talk on their phones.
They conserved their energy so as to take inventory of the heart’s collected shards of glass.
We were in the quiet car now, both the patients and their guests.
I read the novel I’d brought while Eddie slept.
Every now and then I put my hand on his wrist because I could.
The nap did him a world of good. When at last we were taken back to the hallway of frosted-glass pods, we were given the same room on the left that we’d had the time before.
The coincidence made us giddy—giddy!—though only a hopeless person would see such a thing as a promising sign.
Eddie handed me the cane and settled himself back into the dentist’s chair.
“Let Jonathan know I’ll be keeping you out later than expected,” he said.
“I will.”
“I’ve been reading about impermanence. That’s the part about retiring that no one tells you, how you get to read any book you want to read.”
It was a different nurse than the one he had the last time, but right away we liked her just as much. One imagines generalizations could be made about oncology nurses: nice people.
“No port,” she said, looking at his chart. “Old-school.”
“I don’t come in much,” he said.
“Good for you,” she said. “And good for me. You’re keeping my skills fresh.” She left and came back with her packaged needle on a silver tray, her clear plastic bags. She rolled the vein with her gloved fingers until she got it where she wanted it. “Stick and a sting,” she said.
I always turned away.
“What about impermanence?” I asked once the nurse had gone.
“That’s all there is!” he said cheerfully. “Every single thing is going to end, so you need to get used to it. Then, when our time comes, we won’t get stuck in the bardo.”
“Eddie, what are you talking about?”
“The bardo,” he said. “You know. You read the George Saunders novel. Apparently death can be confusing, and it’s hard for the dead person to accept that they’re dead because no one likes change and life is all we’ve ever known.
The bardo is supposed to be a place of transition, but if you don’t accept your death, you get stuck there, which would be like getting stuck in Penn Station for eternity. ”
Perish the thought of such a perishing. “I think you’d know if you were dead,” I said, but the truth was I’d never thought of it one way or the other.
Eddie shook his head. “Think of Lucas lying in the lilac bed. Do you think he accepted the fact that he was dead? Lucas, who still hadn’t accepted that the Positivity series dried up in 1985?
Lucas, who, at ninety, refused to sell his five-thousand-square-foot house with no bedroom on the first floor because he didn’t like change?
What if his soul is still out there in the grass somewhere, yelling for your mother to come get him up? ”
“Then it’s good she sold the house.” Though it probably wasn’t the sort of thing that should be disclosed to potential buyers.
“You’re supposed to talk to the dead person right after he or she dies. Talk to them for a couple of days, keep telling them they’re dead. Tell them it’s fine, this life is over, and now they need to go.”
“Where was he supposed to go?”
“Forward,” Eddie said firmly. “It’s a whole process.”
“There are a lot of other things I’d have to accept before I could accept that Lucas is still in the lilac bed.”
“Sure, sure, but this is chemo,” Eddie said.
“For the sake of this conversation, let’s say it’s true and this is the way the system works: no one wants to change even though change is the never-ending engine of existence.
We are attached to our life, so we want to stay alive even though we know we’re going to die. Are you following me here?”