It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (10 page)

In the spring of 1999 I spent five thousand dollars on an engagement ring. It seems a paltry sum, in retrospect, for a symbol of everlasting commitment and devotion. But my thoughts about it at the time were mixed. I was happy that my fiancée, Patricia, was repulsed by more ostentatious – and costly – jewelry. I was simultaneously amazed to witness the transformation of this formerly utilitarian, status-abhorring, non-makeup-wearing woman into a wide-eyed, diamond-crazed consumer. I don’t care how grotesque a generalization it is – and it
is
one – but something happens to the vast majority of otherwise left-of-center American women when confronted with the iconography of a diamond engagement ring. When confronted with the dueling sentimental and consumerist realities of their force-fed-since-birth fantasy: The Wedding.

After more than a half-dozen trips together to Tiffany, interspersed with stops on
Forty-seventh Street to seek out bargains, I finally became disgusted with myself for contributing to the dilution of what should have been a romantic gift. So one day, while Patricia was at work, I went to Tiffany alone, screwed up my courage, and purchased the ring that had given her the biggest smile – but with slightly larger stones. It was a platinum band, styled with the classic Tiffany taper, accented by gold settings, which held a single diamond, bordered on either side by slightly smaller rubies. A very classic engagement ring. Quite beautiful. From Tiffany. The ring was placed into a black, velvet, spring-loaded presentation case. The case was then placed into the iconic powder blue Tiffany gift box, which was nestled amid tissue paper in an identically colored Tiffany bag. I paid the bill with a credit card, took my tiny package, and was out on the street.

“Never pay retail,” echoed in my head. I knew a similar ring could have been created for less than half the price. But that process, in our two trips to Forty-seventh Street, had seemed tawdry. It involved sketches and planning, handling crude lumps of metal that were yet to be transformed into delicate bands, and selecting gems from scattered splotches of stones that made them seem the cheap pebbles they actually are.

On the street outside Tiffany I headed for the bus. A single finger supported the braided string from which dangled the bag holding my five-thousand-dollar cargo. A bag too small to hold a sandwich. The wind could have blown it away. I’ve never been frugal with money. I enjoy having it, whenever I have, and enjoy the items and experiences it can purchase. As generous as I’ve been toward others, and myself, I’ve rarely plunked down five thousand dollars on any single item with one swipe of a pen. I was feeling giddy about the surprise awaiting Patricia that evening, imagining her delight and even experiencing some myself. I was overjoyed to have finally stuck with a relationship long enough to get even close to marriage. And I was feeling nauseated by the size of the expenditure.

“It’s the cost of doing business,” I told myself.

I didn’t mean it coldly. It’s a line I’ve found useful in my professional life. If you want to play in the big leagues, you’ve got to invest the way others are willing to. Travel the coasts, wear decent clothes to your meetings. This is the woman you want to spend your life with. You want to make her happy, and this is a gesture. This is, after all, the beginning of your marriage. It’s the price you pay to be in the game.

In October of 2001 I traveled across town to Sotheby’s to sell the ring. It had already been sitting in the back of a drawer for more than a year, since it had been returned to me. Another gesture. I’d hung onto the ring just as I’d hung onto the idea that the relationship could be rescued. When rescue failed, I continued to cling to the ring and some small semblance of hope, but this time for resuscitation. When it became clear there’d be neither, I decided to offer a gesture to myself. I called Sotheby’s and scheduled an appointment to have the ring appraised and listed for auction.

It’s an embarrassing call to make. It involves explaining to a number of strangers, as you’re handed from department to department, that you’ve got a barely used engagement ring to sell. It involves describing the ring over the phone, and admitting that for your five thousand dollars you purchased a diamond of less than half a carat, and two rubies that combined weigh barely more than that. It involves pulling that same pale blue gift box out of a drawer, opening it, and peering inside that black velvet case. It involves wrestling with the memory of the gift, and the joy it once gave you. It involves remembering the odd thrill I got from kissing her ring finger, of holding it in my mouth while we made love.

At Sotheby’s, an officiously polite blond woman several years younger than I was joined me in a small cubicle and sat down behind a desk. On her left hand was a diamond several times larger than the one I had come to sell. I’d glanced through the auction catalogues scattered on the desk while waiting for her and seen spectacular jewelry, including diamond engagement rings, with prices ranging from thirty thousand to six and a half million dollars. I was hoping to get twenty-five hundred.

“Please place the sale item on the tray,” the woman said, extending a plastic tablet toward me. After noting that I was listing my item along with a ring case and a Tiffany gift box, she left the room to have the stones examined and appraised.

As impressed as my unassuming fiancée had been with my decision to graduate to larger stones, the Sotheby’s executives were equally underwhelmed. They were all pleasant, in their decidedly impersonal way. Their behavior was how I would expect funeral home employees to comport themselves. Professional. Discreet. But never for a moment are they going to join you in your grief.

The appraisers estimated the sale value of the ring at between twenty-five hundred and three thousand dollars, and I was convinced to list it with a reserve – or minimum price – of two thousand. Sotheby’s would take 20 percent of my revenues, as well as 20 percent from the purchaser. That means should the ring sell for its minimum (as it eventually did), I would receive sixteen hundred dollars for the five-thousand-dollar ring. Sotheby’s would rake in eight. Only back out on the street did I think about eBay.

It was a cold day, still not even noon, and I was already exhausted. I felt despondent and on the verge of tears. Emotions piled up in layers, each one complicating the one underneath. It’s awful to break up. And it’s awful to deal with the dirty business of dissolving financial entanglements. The fact that a substantial loss of money came into play was painful, but even more painful was the realization that, in the face of the emotional loss, I still gave a shit about the money at all. But I did.

“The price of doing business,” I told myself again. “That’s what it costs to get out of the game.”

I wanted to call Patricia. I wanted to share the pain with someone, to announce that the ring had been sold. Who would be better able to appreciate the horror than she? But I reminded myself that that wasn’t appropriate. She’d suffered her own black hell in returning the ring to me in the first place. In hunting for an apartment in the worst real estate market anywhere, ever, and moving out of the home we’d shared. This was my mess to clean up. I fingered the cell phone in my pocket, itching to dial someone. And then I realized where I was.

I’d been wandering south in a daze from Sotheby’s location at Seventy-second Street and York Avenue. I looked up to see that I was standing across the street from the hospital I’d almost died in, several times, many years before. It had been over thirteen years since I’d set foot inside that building. Almost exactly sixteen years since the first time in, and over thirteen since the last time out. I’d thought about stopping in many times, whenever I passed close by on foot, or in a bus or taxi, heading up First Avenue past Sixty-eighth Street. But I’d always decided not to make the turn and travel east. This was the first time I’d had the entrance in sight. The first time in over thirteen years I’d ventured this close.

I tried to rouse myself from the swamp of despair that was beginning to envelop me. I seized on the glimpse of the hospital as a means to remind myself how far I’d traveled since those awful days. No matter how painful my current emotional state was, I was lucky to be alive and experiencing it. I found myself crossing the street toward the doorway, just to have a peek. Just to see if what I remembered was true. I thought about the ring I’d left behind at Sotheby’s, the break I’d made with the past, in that regard, and I wondered if today would be the day I went back to visit a more distant portion of it. I got to the main entrance of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where the stunned, the stupefied, and the devastated got in and out of taxis, and I walked in through the door.

My reluctance to return to Sloan-Kettering for almost a decade and a half wasn’t simply a matter of emotional fragility and bad memories, though they played their parts. My experiences there had been horrifying, and my life, in my opinion, had been endangered by disease and indifference in equal measure. Still, my decision to steer clear of the building for so long had little to do with my feelings toward the hospital and its employees. It stemmed from my expectation of ill will on their parts toward
me
.

I hadn’t simply retreated from Sloan-Kettering years before, happy to have recovered and regained my life and liberty. I’d written an off-Broadway play and a book about my experiences, in which I excoriated the institution and many of the individuals who worked there. I outlined the methods I’d developed for circumventing debilitating hospital rules and procedures. While promoting the book I was interviewed by newspapers, on radio, and television – local and national – over the course of two separate ten-city book tours. I used every opportunity to malign an institution I’d come to see as corrupt in its complacency, and abusive – sadistic even – toward its captive customers. If that wasn’t enough, I’d spent a good portion of five or six years performing my brand-name-specific show for groups of medical professionals at conferences and symposiums in Boston, Orlando, Houston, New York, Las Vegas, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The last time I did the show was at an event that kicked off a difficult post-engagement vacation for my fiancée and me. It was May of 1999, and we flew to Europe, where I was slated to give the keynote address at the international meeting of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Stockholm, Sweden. I told my tale gleefully, seducing
world-renowned physicians and administrators into laughing at my portraits of their boorish colleagues. I relished the revenge I was able to exact upon the institution I felt had pushed me around. My fiancée was in the audience that day, twirling the Tiffany ring on her finger. I wasn’t concerned about upsetting
myself
that day at Sloan-Kettering. I was afraid of being recognized by an irate employee who might try to knock my head off.

I had to lie to gain admittance for my return. Security measures were in place, due to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and only patients, family members, and other authorized visitors were allowed up the escalator and into the reception area.

“I’m here to visit a patient,” I told the uniformed guard, who directed me up to the information desk. I rode the escalator, passed the desk without speaking, and walked into the heart of the lobby. The room, as seems to always be the case years later, was smaller than I remembered. The gift shop was at one end, with cushioned chairs spreading out from it, facing picture windows overlooking the sidewalk.

Those chairs were a special destination fifteen years before. They were reserved for the privileged, those who were well enough to travel off the hospital floor and gain a closer glimpse of the outside world, perhaps never to be experienced again. I’d sat there with friends I’d grown up with, with friends from drama school and beyond. Me, hairless, hooked up to an IV pole, and, at 111 pounds, twenty pounds thinner than at high school graduation eight years earlier. I spouted optimistic slogans at my freaked-out companions, who searched my gaunt face for the terror behind my proselytizing eyes. More than twenty years ago now. I’m not in touch with any of them anymore.

I scanned the room, studying the faces and postures of the people huddled about. It was a busy place. But the ingredient I was searching for – the pain – wasn’t readily apparent. A few were clearly patients, dressed in robes and attached by tubing to IV poles, but fear wasn’t shrieking off them like I’d have expected. I saw a couple of dozen people dressed in street clothes collapsed in chairs, presumably visitors, packages piled at their feet. They weren’t crying, though; no one was being consoled. They seemed just like anyone else in Manhattan: tired and stressed, perhaps, but doing their best to make it through another day.

I wondered how much time I’d spent living in that building. Between six and eight months was my guess, spread out over the course of two or three years. Thank God I got sick before insurance companies instituted the “managed care” nightmare. I chose where I thought I’d be best treated based on information I gathered, as best I could decipher it. I made some mistakes along the way, but far fewer than would have been made on my behalf by a company looking to cut corners.

That residency time estimate doesn’t include the dozens of full days spent as an outpatient, in waiting rooms and examination rooms, or strapped into gargantuan, groaning machinery. Those six or eight months were the ones I spent with my clothes hung up in the closet. With trinkets and false comforts on the side table next to my hospital bed, failing miserably at creating some semblance of home.

I had the urge to explore. The cafeteria was the hospital’s melting pot, where nurses, physicians, patients, technicians, family members, and administrators all mingled. I knew it was only a few steps from the end of the lobby opposite the gift shop, but I was afraid to go. Even standing in the lobby, the easiest place in the eighteen-story structure to remain anonymous, I felt conspicuous. I don’t know why I feared discovery so much. I hadn’t been seen or heard from by any of the people I’d insulted for nearly a decade and a half. Unless they went to the movies or watched television. Or read newspapers, or listened to the radio. Or leafed through magazines, or browsed through bookstores. Or attended medical conferences, or…well, you get the idea. Though from my memory, few of those people actually
did
any of those things. What I remember of the oncologists at that hospital was the single most isolated, non-pop-culture consuming group I’d ever come across. I remember one of my first doctors there, a man named Leonard Zweig – a monstrous, sadistic schlub, as I recalled – telling me about the marvels of the brand-new technology of compact discs,
years
after most people’s vinyl collections had already cracked, mildewed, and crusted over. He shared his discovery with me as he screwed a large needle into the back of my hipbone to extract bone marrow. I had no idea if any of the people I’d been treated by fifteen years earlier still even worked at the joint. There’s a high burnout rate in a field where 80 percent of your patients die from the disease you’re attempting to treat.