Chapter Eighteen
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Life changed after Bill’s diagnosis. The disease, oncologists said, was aggressive.
Joan and Bill stopped going on bicycle rides and began to measure time as the waiting period between appointments.
At first Bill was hopeful: there were a million ways to solve a problem, he said.
Specialists to call, treatments to try. The trick was to remain calm and methodically work toward a solution.
It was simple, and yet most people couldn’t manage this. It was why he’d been so successful.
When the expected reversal didn’t come, Bill became depressed and then angry.
He was angry about many things: why the doctors had not given him a body scan earlier; why Joan had not nagged him to obtain one.
Why he had drunk alcohol and smoked cigars and indulged in all the other pleasures that season life but supposedly shorten it.
He lost energy and was resentful when others had it.
Gene and Patty learned to keep out of his way—he would sometimes snap if he felt one of the cars wasn’t done to standard.
It was only the children, Bill said, whom he was always happy to see now.
“With the little ones, I have a few glimmers where I think it might be natural,” he said to Joan. “That it might be time for me to go. The cycle of life.
“Of course,” he continued, “you don’t know anything about it. Being younger. Sometimes I think it would be better to endure this with someone my own age who’d understand.”
“I’m trying to understand.”
“You have no goddamn idea. You’re not even forty, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’m thirty-nine,” Joan said, knowing how stupid she sounded.
“Do you know how it feels to be sixty-five and about to die? Do you know what it’s like to watch people around you who are older, who’ve treated their bodies far worse, go blithely about their days while you sit with this over your head?
Sometimes I want to go up to people and tell them: You’re going to die.
You’re going to wake up, and something’s going to be wrong, and when you go to fix it, they’re going to tell you there is no fix, that it’s all over and the only thing you can do is prepare.
” Bill dropped his head in his hands. “It’s so fucking lonely. ”
Joan rubbed his back. She willed herself not to cry; she knew both she and Bill would hate it. “I don’t want you to be lonely.”
“Despite what you may wish, I am.”
“Do you want me to call Juliet and Theo?” Joan had tried to arrange some gatherings with Bill’s family, to share the news and to spend time together.
Bill left these dinners irritated, however, and his family seemed in denial, Juliet droning on about her holiday plans in Morocco.
Only Theo appeared to understand that something was wrong; last week Joan had found him inside Bill’s office, staring at a shell-shaped dish Bill kept on his bookshelf.
“Are you okay?” Joan had ventured. “Do you want—”
“You have no idea,” Theo had said, cutting her off. He’d left after that.
Bill waved a hand now. “I don’t want to see anyone. Like I said, you wouldn’t understand.”
Would a wife Bill’s own age really be better?
Joan wondered. What if she’d become sick first?
Would he have cared for her? Would he have thought events so natural then?
Bill had never minded her age before; really, if Joan were to state matters bluntly, it had been precisely her lack of age that had attracted him.
Perhaps if they’d been married longer, he would have eventually left her, as he had the last three; he’d spun the wheel of wife roulette so many times, and it was only by random chance that he had landed on her for what was to be his last round.
But Joan couldn’t say such things. Bill could be frustrated with his life, his health, and his marriage—she could not.
Joan tried to take Bill out, to restaurants or museums or back to Stanford. Occasionally he would consent, but once they arrived he would stare off, not listening, until he said he was tired and wished to leave. Finally one morning Bill announced he did want to do something: see a movie.
“A movie! Let’s go today,” Joan said.
“And I want to eat sandwiches,” Bill added.
“Sandwiches!” Joan exclaimed.
She went to the deli first, without Bill.
He tired easily now, and she wanted to prepare as much in advance as possible, like she did for the children.
She regretted that it was a school day—perhaps she should have picked Lee and Jamie up early, but that would have been strange, missing school to watch a movie—they knew Bill was sick, but so far they had kept their activities as usual.
Papa isn’t feeling well, she told them. We all hope he gets better.
While she waited for her order, Joan rested the back of her head against the glass of the deli fridge.
She was tired, not only from the work around Bill’s condition but, if she were being honest, Bill himself.
Dying people are not excepted from being unpleasant; they have more reason than most to be such a way.
Joan reminded herself of this, and then her number was called and she retrieved the sandwiches.
At the theater, Bill didn’t eat the sandwich but said he was happy with it; he liked its smell.
During the trailers, he grasped her hand.
The movie itself was nonsensical, something with trains and hostages.
There was no part of it during which Joan was surprised, but due to the sheer joy of being out, engaged in something ordinary, she found herself gasping and laughing all the same.
In the middle of the movie—right at the point when the bumbling and gregarious teammate was revealed to be employed by the foreign-accented villain—Bill walked out.
Joan assumed he was going to the bathroom. “Bill?” she whispered, to see if he needed help, but he didn’t turn. “Bill?” she whispered, louder this time.
“Quiet!” someone called from above. Joan ducked and raised her hand in apology and darted out of the theater. She spotted Bill walking away. “Bill!” she called.
She walked faster—it felt almost disrespectful to outpace him so easily, but she needed to catch up and didn’t want to keep yelling. “Bill! What’s wrong? Are you in pain?” She rounded the corner and stood in front of him and pressed a hand to his forehead. He shoved it off and stalked to a bench.
“I can’t be with you when you’re like this,” he said.
Joan sat next to him. Absurdly she thought of their popcorn and soda left in the theater. All the tiny bubbles popping in their drink, turning it into a sick syrup. Soda was satisfying only for a little while; if you left it longer, it wasn’t any good at all.
“You’re being insensitive,” Bill said.
“I’m trying to understand—”
“I think about dying,” Bill cut her off. “Of everything I know and love being erased, my own consciousness going dark. Forever. And you’re sitting next to me in that theater and laughing !”
Slowly, gently, Joan petted the back of his head. He still had his hair, although it was patchier. The skin underneath was pink and soft.
“It breaks my heart that I’m going to leave and you’re going to stay here and keep on going.”
“The treatments could work.”
“Let’s talk realistically,” Bill said. “I married you because I liked that side of you.”
They sat facing a poster that featured a starlet in a long gown, opposite an exceptionally attractive farmer. Joan didn’t like most new movies these days; she didn’t understand the storylines, which she found illogical. “If I could, I would give you ten years from my life.”
“You have no idea what you’re saying. You don’t know how much you really want to keep going at the end.”
“Still. I would.”
He clasped her hand. “To tell the truth, I would probably take it.” A movie was being let out; the doors opened and the audience streamed forth, blinking in the light.
“Motherfuckers,” Bill whispered, watching them.
Bill continued to diminish. At night Joan would bring him a cup of cranberry juice, his favorite drink from childhood, and if he was asleep, she would leave it by the bed and kiss his cheek.
She became religious about kissing his cheek; she felt she was showing bad faith to the gods if she didn’t do so (though Joan was undecided what gods, if any, she believed in).
“Do you regret marrying me?” Bill asked one evening.
“Of course not.”
“Even when I saw other women?”
“There’s no reason to talk about that now.”
Joan was no longer bitter about Bill’s indiscretions.
Perhaps in his position, she might even have done the same.
It seemed to her a blessing that she had not left him, as she would only have had to return and visit, as each of his ex-wives had, and witness how little she meant to him now.
Agatha and Evie had come days apart; Joan had seen how they arrived expecting some significant farewell from Bill, tears or heavy words, because there once was a time when he had loved no one more than each of them—but in the end he’d waved them away with the same emotion that he might have for an acquaintance.
You tried hard to make yourself matter to others; you chased after and thought of them, and then you didn’t.
You cared about people in the moment, and then they dropped away.
Children were the only exception to this, and even then, not always.
Pointless, was the word that kept coming into Joan’s head. Pointless, pointless, pointless.
“Do you think you should just kill me?” Bill asked another night. It had been an uneventful evening, one without much pain or nausea. He had not required assistance on the toilet, nor in the shower that morning.
“No.”
“It’s something we should at least discuss.”