A Ticket to the Circus (52 page)

Dick and Doris Goodwin came to visit that night, and by that time
Norman was awake, but still on the Percocet, and he had never been more garrulous and funny. He told us that if we took the elevator down to the first floor, we would be in Miami, and then if we crossed the courtyard to the right, we would be in London. At one of the tables at the outdoor café, there would be a couple of Nazi agents in uniforms, we’d have no trouble recognizing them. He wanted us to go up to them and explain that Nazism was bad, and what they were doing was a really bad thing. Somehow he had Dan Quayle involved in it, too, and the more we laughed, the more entertaining he thought he was being, so he laughed along with us, having no idea he wasn’t making perfect sense, and thinking he was at his most charming. I was almost sorry when he got off the Percocet, he was so much fun.

He went into hip rehab for a couple of weeks, and I went back to Provincetown, where the pain in my back got worse. I went to see my local doctor, Brian O’malley. He sent me to Hyannis to a specialist who looked like he was about twenty years old, and he was most eager to do an exploratory
surgery because he had never seen anything like what I had. I wanted someone who
had
seen what I had. So I got a referral to Doris and Dick Goodwin’s doctor at MGH, who examined me and sent me straightaway to see Arlan Fuller, their top man in gynecological cancer surgery.

Arlan was the kind of doctor who inspired confidence in you the minute you met him. He was about fifty, had the most intense blue eyes outside of Norman or Paul Newman, and he radiated kindness and intelligence. He said he thought there was a good possibility it wasn’t cancer. It could be that the fallopian tube that was left in was infected, and he told me not to worry about that until he found out for sure. I checked in for a day surgery. Danielle had come up to be with me and drive me home. If I had known what was going to happen, I never would have allowed her to come alone. Of course it was cancer, and she was all by herself when he came out to tell her. It was so upsetting for her. I remember waking up and seeing Arlan’s blue eyes looking at me with compassion, and him saying, “It’s cancer.” I was so out of it I could hardly speak, but I asked, “Is it terminal?” and he said, “No.”

It turned out that the fallopian tube the other doctor couldn’t remove had a sarcoma in it, and there was another small one as well. Dr. Fuller had just done a laparoscopic biopsy, so we set a date for a larger surgery. There’s nothing more boring than having someone recount their surgeries to you, but it was a big deal in my life and I have to go into it a bit. You can skip this part if you want to. The prognosis for the kind of sarcoma I have, GI stromal tumor, was not good. Most people didn’t live more than a year or two after being diagnosed. (I don’t recommend Googling your illness, by the way.) I don’t know why, but for some reason I was never afraid of dying, but the family was certainly distraught. Every one of them came to Boston for my surgery. Barbara; her husband, Al; and her son, Peter; all the kids and in-laws and grandchildren crowded around my bed at five in the morning and walked me down to the elevator as far as they could go with me. I felt like the luckiest woman in the world to have a family like that. They were determined I was going to be all right, and that gave me a lot of courage. I had my first book coming out in a couple of months. I had to go on a book tour. I couldn’t have cancer!

Arlan took out the tumors, I began chemo and radiation, and I finished the treatments in June, just in time to go on the book tour for
Windchill Summer.
My hair, of course, fell out, and while I was in the hospital, my friend Diane Fisher found the best wig place in New York (Bitz-n-Pieces on Columbus Circle, ask for Gwen) and she sent me a wig that looked just exactly like my hair, only better. Plus, she wouldn’t let me pay for it. How’s that for a good friend?

I set out on the tour, twelve cities, in the wig, determined that I was going to be one of those who beat the dismal statistic of this disease. I soon learned that touring for an unknown’s first novel is not the same as touring for a Norman Mailer novel. He always had crowds lined up out the door to hear him, and I was lucky if I had four people in the audience. Once, in Kansas City, they booked me into a big church and there was nobody there at all except the people from the bookstore, who were so embarrassed. I sat on the edge of the stage and talked to them and read, and we had a good time anyhow. I looked upon it as practice—I’d discovered I was good at reading. All those years of acting had given me a stage voice, and I was funny. The book was set in Arkansas in 1969, so I got to do all the accents, which I loved.

In Atlanta, I was in the hotel elevator when two cute young girls got on. They were nudging each other and whispering. I thought they were talking about me, which made me uncomfortable, when one of
them said, “Excuse me, but we just wanted to tell you how beautiful your hair is. I bet you never had a bad hair day in your life.” I grinned. I wanted so badly to grab the wig and whisk it off, but I knew they would faint (I was not a lovely bald woman, although Norman said I looked like a beautiful alien), so I just said, “Oh, I can assure you I’ve had a few bad hair days. But thank you.” Like my home ec teacher, Mrs. Gay, used to tell me, “When you get a compliment, all you have to say is thank you. Otherwise, you insult their taste.”

It has been ten years since I had that first surgery, and I’m still here. I beat the odds—up to now, anyhow. I’ve had seven more major surgeries and too many small procedures to count. I’ve had 40 percent of my small intestine removed because of radiation damage, I’ve worn a colostomy bag and a nephrostomy bag, and I still have an internal stent in my kidney. I have lost so much weight that my former model’s weight looks chubby, but I’m still here. Three times, a doctor has told me that there is nothing they can do for me and it will be just a matter of time. I don’t know why I keep on going, but I’m not questioning it. Maybe it is all the prayers my family and friends have prayed. I don’t know how much longer I have to live, but then none of us does. If I go tomorrow, I will still be ahead. I’m living on borrowed time, but borrowed time is sweet. I don’t want to go, I’m having too good a life this time out, but I do believe that we get another chance, maybe a lot more chances, to live life here, and the price of our admission is to learn lessons. I think I’ve learned a few this go-around; I know I’ve learned a lot from having cancer. I think I’m more compassionate, more patient. (“That’s why they call us patients!” I said to someone once when we were being made to wait too long for some procedure.) I’ve given up on my vanity. I’m just happy if I can get up, get dressed, and throw on some makeup. I don’t have to be glamorous anymore. If I’d had only my own cancer to battle, and it is a battle, that would have been quite enough to give me an abundance of lessons, but there was more in store.

   
I DID PRETTY WELL
for a couple of years after
the first surgery and the treatments. Norman and I went to Wales for the Hay-on-Wye book fair. I got to read from my book and be on a panel of writers, and for the first time I was part of it all as a writer, not just as Norman’s wife. Some of my ancestors are Welsh, and it meant a lot for me to go there. I did feel a kinship with the people and kept seeing my relatives in the faces of the local population. My hair grew back in and was dark—almost black—thick and curly. I had been told it might be totally different from my real hair, and I was sort of hoping it would come in snow-white, like my novel’s character, Cherry, but it gradually turned chestnut-auburn again and regained its straighter wave.

In the couple of years before I got cancer, I gained a lot of weight, maybe because of menopause, or inactivity. I’d stopped doing yoga, and then after the first surgery, I didn’t do any kind of exercise. I felt really unattractive and bad about myself but couldn’t seem to diet. I needed food as a comfort, I guess. I still hate to see pictures of myself during that time. We were living in Provincetown all year by then, so the two of us didn’t do much except hang around the house and write or watch TV. We had a few friends in for dinners and went out to eat once or twice a week, but life was definitely in the slow lane.

In order to have something to do in the community, I joined the board of the Provincetown Repertory Theatre, and in 2002 there was a crisis and the director quit. I volunteered to take over and plan a season that year. I thought I could do it for little money, as we used to do at the Actors Studio, and somehow we pulled it off. John Buffalo came up with some of his friends from Wesleyan, one of whom was Tommy Kail, who went on to direct
In the Heights
, which was written by another friend of theirs, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and which won the Tony for best musical in 2008. They did a series of short plays that we once had done at the Actors Studio that were cheap and funny and were a big hit. I called in a couple of my studio friends, too, to do one-person shows, and somehow we put together a season. Which was truly a miracle, because a week after I volunteered to do all this, I got a call that my father had gone to the hospital again and wasn’t expected to live.

Everything came crashing down. I turned over the theater business to my assistant, David Fortuna, who single-handedly saved everything, and I went to Arkansas. My father had severe heart damage. Over the years he’d had heart attacks and two bypass surgeries, and he wore a pacemaker and defibrillator. My parents and I spoke on the phone twice a day, a habit we started when I got sick, and when I had
spoken to him that morning, he’d been in a great mood. The previous night he had cooked chicken and dumplings and homemade peach pie while my mother worked in the beauty shop. They invited a neighbor for dinner, and I remember him saying, “I haven’t felt this good in years. I have so much energy.” Then, only an hour or so after he hung up, the defibrillator started going off and it wouldn’t stop. He likened it to being kicked in the chest by a horse, and usually once it went off, that was it, the heart went back into rhythm and life went on, but not this time.

They called my aunt Chloe and uncle Ira, who came and picked them up to take them to the hospital in Little Rock, a drive of more than an hour. By the time they got there, my father was in agony, repeatedly being kicked without pause, over and over. They didn’t expect him to make it through the night, so I got there as quickly as I could. But the staff at the Arkansas Heart Hospital were heroic. They brought him around, and somehow he got better. I stayed a couple of weeks, sleeping on a lounge chair in his room, my mother on a sleeping bench, or we went back and forth to Atkins, which was a tiring drive. Then we brought him home. He was not able to do much for himself, and my mother, who was eighty-three, wasn’t able to take care of him, so we hired a nurse to come in every day to help with his bath, meds, and generally take care of things. I rented a hospital bed, which we set up in the dining room.

Then when I thought they would be okay, I went back to Provincetown and tried to work on the theater stuff and be with Norman, who was not doing so well by himself, either. Not long after I got home, my father had to go back to the hospital. That began five months of going and coming, back and forth, to the hospital and home. John or some of the other kids started coming to stay with Norman while I was away, and Matt came to Arkansas to help me with my father a few times. Or John would come with me to Arkansas and Matt would stay with Norman.

All of this was made even crazier by a project Norman and I had gotten ourselves involved with that George Plimpton had started, a play about the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway called
Zelda, Scott and Ernest.
It started when John Irving’s wife, Janet, wrote and asked Norman and me to do a reading of A. R. Gurney’s play
Love Letters
as a
benefit for a school she and John had founded called the Maple Street School. Norman said that he wasn’t the right type to play the role, which was a patrician WASP, but why didn’t I do it with George Plimpton? I called George, who was willing, but he said, “I have a play we all three can be in.” It was a blast of fresh air in our staid existence at that time. It was written by George and Terry Quinn, all taken from the works of Zelda, Scott, and Ernest, from letters and books, stories and essays. I loved being onstage again, and the two of them were such hams that it was marvelous to watch them. Norman wore his safari jacket, and George wore an orange Princeton tie. I wore some kind of twenties era glamorous garb and did a broad Alabama accent. We had a great time, the audience loved it, and the second time we did it was in Provincetown for a benefit, which raised a lot of money for the theater.

Then somehow, thanks to George, it took wing and we started doing it everywhere. We did it at the Ninety-second Street Y in New York, at the Folger library in Washington, D.C., and at the Fitzgerald Festival in Saint Paul, Minnesota. George was splendid at finding venues for us. He arranged a seven-city tour of Europe, and we did it in London, Paris, Vienna, Moscow (in the presence of the mayor, Yury Luzhkov), Amsterdam, Berlin, and Prague. I began to feel a kinship with Zelda that went beyond an actress’s passion for her character. We shared real elements of life. We were both Southern, married to talented well-known writers; I was a painter, as was she; and we both were writers. I was not a dancer, but longed to be one. If dancing hadn’t been on the sin list, I would have taken ballet as a little girl, and always was wistful I didn’t get to do that.

Norman was a nicer man to me than Scott Fitzgerald was to Zelda, but he didn’t especially want me to be a writer. He discouraged me in the beginning and never really took what I did seriously. He liked a few of my paintings, but he preferred abstract impressionism, the favored painting of the fifties, the background of his best young years. It was the same with jazz. He always said he loved jazz, but in fact he didn’t really like the music part of it at all. He liked the ambiance of jazz, the language of jazz, the hipness of jazz. If we were in the car on a trip and I put on some Sonny Stitt or Thelonious Monk, he would ask me to turn it off. He preferred silence when we were driving, either silence or
conversation or napping. I couldn’t listen to audio books on our car trips, either. Those set his teeth on edge worse than music, and he couldn’t bear it.