Authors: Kate Rockland
No, it was Billy and his diagnosis of cancer that set the course of the new Alexis, as spring bled into summer and the flocks of tourists in all their suitcase-dragging glory roamed the streets. The bicyclists came out of the woodwork, block parties lit the nights with color and fire, pedestrians were dripped on by air-conditioners humming along in high-rise apartments, and Alexis’s life turned over on its belly and was suddenly, and most completely, changed forever.
Alexis got Billy squeezed in to a doctor’s appointment right away, and Billy came home the afternoon of his meeting with Aldo (Alexis had a hard time calling him Dr. Martinez, since she saw him frequently at the gym wearing dorky, navy blue knee-high socks to play racquetball) looking distracted. Noah had long since gone home to care for Oliver, and Alexis was staring at the muffins on the counter as she tidied up the apartment, rebandaged her finger, and reminded herself of the ice-cream bars the night before. Fatness was a slippery slope. For all she knew, ice cream was a gateway … snack.
Vanya had showered and dressed in a black velvet cape over black jeans and gotten on her broomstick … well, not really. But she’d walked off to whatever job she worked at during the night. But not before talking to Alexis for the first time since she’d handed her a rent deposit in all silver dollars gathered together in a sparkly purple scarf that had littered pixie dust all over the floor when she opened it. Her voice was surprisingly feminine and little-girlish.
“Nice guy,” she’d said, putting her hand high in the air to indicate she was talking about the very tall man who had the softest, most plump lips Alexis had ever kissed.
“Er, yes. Seems like it. Thanks,” Alexis answered, hesitant to say anything else. Princess Pinkerton leaped onto her desk in a blur of gray fur and she shooed him off.
“He looks a little like Cernunnos.”
“Who’s that?”
“The horned god.”
Alexis stared.
Vanya wasn’t kidding.
“But he doesn’t
have
horns,” Alexis said, not really knowing whether to ask for more info.
Vanya drew her cape (
wasn’t she roasting?
) around her in a huff. “It was meant to be a compliment. Cernunnos is the god of fertility. Wiccans, my people, worship him.” And with that, she seemed to levitate down the hallway, until Alexis heard the front door slam. She rushed to the window to watch if Vanya actually flew away, knowing she was being silly, but Vanya simply turned left and disappeared into the crowd pushing and shoving their way home after a long and grueling day at work.
Out of the mass she saw a familiar lone figure, slight and stooped, and her breath caught in her throat as Billy walked home from the subway, the brown leather purse he sometimes carried (“My murse!”) held away from his body. He walked stooped like someone much older. His head was down as though he were watching the sidewalk retreat behind his feet, his shoulders turned in like wings. She couldn’t read the expression on his face from the distance of the window but something about his demeanor was different. It was as if someone had sucked out all the pizzazz, all the confident
Billyness
.
She hardly ever saw him alone, he usually insisted on at least Alexis plus a boyfriend or two to go everywhere with him, grocery shopping or manicures or a museum opening or to the movies … but for his meeting with Aldo he’d insisted she not come. She followed his slow shuffle up the street, and had the door to their apartment flung open before he could get out his key.
He’d arranged his expression to hide what came off him in waves, fear. But Alexis knew fear immediately; it was an emotion she was familiar with because it had painted the walls in her house after Mark was killed in Iraq. Her parents feared they’d never get over it, feared their own searing emotions, feared Alexis, their child who was still alive … It had been the catalyst to end their marriage, because although her parents still were legally married, in the months after the funeral Alexis almost never saw them speak to one another. Her father slept in the guest room, or in a hotel near his office. Fear was the secret ingredient sprinkled in with the vodka tonics her mother drank by the truckload each day. Having this knowledge, being able to sniff it out in people, was a skill Alexis learned from her father, who had a near-perfect success rate in the courtroom. Though she’d stepped off the path on her way to becoming a lawyer, this skill made Alexis win every argument. And now her Billy, the person she loved most in the world, was pretending nothing was wrong. Yet she knew
something
was definitely wrong. Everything about his posture read: scared. Whatever it was, it was bad.
“So?” she asked, trying to keep her tone neutral.
He was startled, lost in thought and not expecting Alexis to be waiting for him. He put down his bag and flopped onto the couch, placing his feet on the coffee table and draping his left arm over his eyes. His black hair shone under the lights.
“Ugh. Turn the light off,” he said.
She rushed over and did so. He said nothing, so she followed his lead and sat back down next to him gingerly, hoping she was giving off a supportive vibe.
She listened to him breathe.
After a few minutes, a dark eye peered at her from beneath his blue cashmere Ralph Lauren sweater. “Where’d beefcake go?”
She smiled. “You mean Noah?”
“Yeah, Noah. I like him. I like him for you.”
“But we don’t like anybody,” she said, putting her arm around him, the side of her forehead against his. She settled down onto the couch, tucking her feet underneath her.
“True,” Billy said. He was eyeing the beer muffins, and after a moment got up to put three on a plate before sitting back down. Alexis rested her hand on his skinny thigh. He stuffed a large piece in his mouth.
After a couple moments of chewing, he returned to the conversation. “But the man is
something
.”
It was true. She had to admit, Noah certainly
was
something.
“Did he slip you the salami?” Billy asked, eating another beer muffin.
“Of course,” she said. Alexis was no prude. She always told Billy about the guys she slept with. Sometimes with full details of sexual capability. They swapped stories and techniques. They were that close.
“And?” He wiggled his eyebrows at her.
She turned toward him. “And nothing. I don’t know. I actually might keep it to myself.” She glanced at him anxiously.
Billy was moody. He was known to turn in an instant from relaxed to bitchy. He was notorious for his stubbornness; once, he’d dumped a boyfriend over an argument while on a date at the Museum of Natural History. Wanting to wander off on his own, he’d asked the guy, a lawyer, to meet him at the Tyrannosaurus bones. After showing up at the designated time and not seeing him, Billy waited nearly two hours before locating his date on the third floor, wandering, confused. “There are Tyrannosaurus bones up here as well,” he’d related to Billy.
“Everyone knows that one is made out of a mold, the real bones are in the lobby!” Billy had exclaimed. “How am I supposed to date such an airhead?”
Alexis had pointed out that it was an innocent mistake to make, she wasn’t sure
she
knew which bones were real, but Billy had moved on.
To her surprise, now on the couch, he nodded, seeming to make up his mind about something. “That’s how you know.”
“Know what?”
“That he’s The One. Because you don’t want to ruin it by talking about it.”
Crap, he was right.
“Just tell me one thing,” Billy said, rising to place yet another muffin on his plate.
“Hmmm?” She took the bandage off her finger and peered at her stitches, which itched.
“Did he have a big one?”
“Huge.”
They grinned at each other.
It was only later, much further into the night, after they’d split a bottle of wine and gotten Chinese takeout (from that shady place on Broadway they loved that always seemed to have stray cats hanging around), that he told her what had happened.
Dr. Martinez had sat in his office, listening closely to Billy explain his symptoms. He’d then furrowed his brow and examined Billy.
“That was when I first knew something was up, when he frowned like that,” Billy said. “He didn’t seem like a frowny kind of guy.”
He’d then been brought to another sterile steel and tile room, where Dr. Martinez had taken a painful yet quick biopsy of the lump underneath his arm, now on a slide in transport to a lab. Did Billy feel swollen anywhere else? No, he’d responded. They’d have the lab results in a day or two.
Just to be sure, the doctor had felt around Billy’s throat and groin, asking, “Are you sure you haven’t had any other lumps? Does it hurt when you swallow?”
“That’s when I
really
knew I was screwed,” Billy said matter-of-factly now, putting his plate on the coffee table and resting his head back on Alexis’s shoulder. She reached up and cupped his cheek awkwardly and they sat like that for a long time. Eventually the cat jumped between them and settled in for petting, her soft fur a white spray on Alexis’s leg.
Two days later, Billy was called back in and this time let Alexis tag along. When told he had stage two Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Billy had turned and said, “He’s kidding, right? Korean people don’t
get
Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” Alexis had immediately burst out crying, and then had the peculiar experience of being comforted by Dr. Martinez and Billy, as though
she
were the one with cancer. Billy had held a tissue up to her nose and ordered, “Blow, bitch.”
She’d been emotional a lot since that appointment, so unlike her. Since her botched cooking class and meeting Noah, they had spent every day together. She’d gone to see the new Angelina Jolie flick with him just last week after Billy literally threw her out of the apartment because she’d been hovering over him, making sure he took his zillion pills and rested, and she’d cried during the movie. When sleeping over at Noah’s Brooklyn apartment last week, she’d been struck with an odd and overwhelming love for his large, stinky dog Oliver, and even let the dog curl up next to her in the bed, letting go of the hatred for large pooches she’d harbored since childhood when a neighbor’s German shepherd had eaten her Malibu Barbie. She’d petted him deep into the night, and had shed large, fat tears into his fur.
Somehow, Alexis had gone from not shedding one tear when Mark had died to crying nearly every day since Billy’s diagnosis. She cried while lifting weights with Sarah at Soho Gym. She cried in Off the River Ale House when she knocked down a wall with a hammer while wearing a pair of four-inch pink Max Azria stilettos. She cried while she read the
Post
’s Page Six out loud to Billy during chemotherapy, where he now went three times a week.
Billy’s grandmother Nana Kay visited him only once, as she was quite elderly and feeble now, though she still wore her bright red lipstick when she came to visit. Alexis called her weekly with updates on Billy’s spirits. She spoke very little English, but Alexis made the effort anyway, as she was the only person from Billy’s family he had a relationship with.
Nana Kay had stood over Billy where he lay on the couch and spoken to him in rapid Korean, between bouts of yelling. After a little while she hobbled away on her cane. Alexis ran after her to be sure she had money for cab fare.
“What was she yelling at you about?” Alexis asked after she returned, fascinated.
“She said I’m not eating enough,” Billy muttered, staring blankly out the window. It was something they would have laughed about before (Alexis thought of everything as
before
and
after
Billy got sick), but Nana Kay’s famous temper didn’t seem funny now.
Alexis had secretly called Billy’s parents and told them he was sick; had he found out he would have been furious, as they had disowned him when he came out of the closet. Surely, with him so sick they would relent, she thought.
“Call me if he needs money,” his mother had said quietly. “Otherwise, do leave us alone.” They lived in Philadelphia, easily close enough to drive up.
“He doesn’t need money,” Alexis had responded, fury a red-hot fire burning in her heart. “And shame on you. You have an amazing son and you’re too stubborn to have a relationship with him when he needs you most.”
The dial tone in her ear told her everything she needed to know.
And then, on an ordinary Tuesday morning, Alexis
really
cried when she went against Noah’s wishes, stepped on a scale, and read with growing shock that she’d gained fifteen pounds. She cried at H&M when she had to buy a pair of size-four pants that looked suspiciously like mom jeans to Alexis, although they were just plain gray slacks, and
still
several sizes smaller than what the average woman in America wore. She had a moment of almost psychic connection with that fat girl Shoshana from
Oprah,
wondering what she would think of her, crying over buying size-four pants. She wouldn’t understand, Alexis thought cattily as she handed over her debit card at the register. Shoshana probably surpassed a size four sometime around kindergarten.
Something was clearly up, and one day, after editing an article about refreshingly low-fat, cooling summer soups like cucumber or carrot, Alexis found herself sitting at her writing desk, deep in thought.
Something
was different and it was right on the tip of her tongue. It was a balmy Monday morning at the end of June, and she’d set up a fan on her desk, having decided they couldn’t afford the electricity bill for air-conditioning this summer. Noah was across the street at his restaurant talking with the contractor, who would help install the kitchen equipment and countertops bought from a restaurant on the Lower East Side that went out of business; she could see his tall body and spring of curls from her window as he walked around. The sign, which read
OFF THE RIVER ALE HOUSE
in a strong Kelly-green, had just arrived that morning and hung in the window, which made everything feel more official and lent the day a certain fast-paced excitement.