Life and Other Near-Death Experiences (2 page)

TWO

Then this happened:

“Tom? Tom?” I was crying so hard that my contacts had fallen out, and I couldn’t really tell if the blob hovering around the kitchen island was my husband.

The torrent of tears started the minute I left Dr. Sanders’s office; it was a miracle that I managed to make it from the maze-like medical building on Lake Shore Drive to Michigan Avenue and flag down a cab without being flattened by a bus. At nearly five o’clock on a Monday evening, it took half an hour to make it to our condo in Bucktown, and as every quarter mile passed, I became more distraught. When I thought of my life—as in the big-picture, full-screen version—this was not how the story ended. I still needed to learn Spanish and quit my job and see the world and maybe adopt a child or two (I couldn’t seem to get pregnant, for reasons my ob-gyn had yet to identify). The ashy particulates in the urn that would rest on our fireplace, which was soon to become just Tom’s fireplace (sob!), were supposed to be at least seventy years old, not thirty-four.

“Marriage troubles?” the cabdriver asked at one point, handing me a tissue. This made me cry even harder, because my beloved Tom would soon learn he was about to become a widower. Tom! So loving, so brave. He wouldn’t let me see him cry, but I could just imagine how I would wake in the middle of the night to find him weeping silently in front of his computer (he had insomnia and was often up until two or three in the morning). I felt worse for him than almost anyone, except for my dad and Paul, as they had already lived through my mother’s death. Even now, her absence was as palpable as a newly missing limb; all these years later, the three of us still hadn’t learned to balance or ignore the phantom ache.

“Libby? Are you okay?” Tom rushed at me, taking me by the shoulders. Thank goodness, he
was
home. Tom was employed by a small architecture and urban-planning firm that didn’t adhere to strict office hours, so he often left as early as three or four in the afternoon to go wander around the city, then finished the rest of his work in our home office in the evening.

“Tom!” I wailed. “How could this happen?”

“Libby . . . ,” he said cautiously, and let me go. This caught me off guard; wasn’t he supposed to be stroking my hair and comforting me? “You know, don’t you?”

“Of
course
I know!” My head was spinning. I knew, but how did Tom? Weren’t there laws specifying that you couldn’t share a person’s medical history without her consent? Although I
had
put his info down on that privacy sheet I filled out before surgery. Maybe Dr. Sanders was alarmed about the way I’d fled his office and had called ahead to warn Tom.

“Oh boy,” he said. “I didn’t want you to find out this way. Did O’Reilly spill the beans?” he asked, referring to his best friend, who had been known by his surname as long as I could remember.

How would O’Reilly know I was dying of cancer? I was officially confused. I wiped my eyes on my jacket sleeve, then fumbled around in the drawer under the kitchen island, where I kept an extra pair of glasses. After jabbing myself with a pair of scissors, I located the glasses and put them on. One of the arms was missing, so they were slightly askew on my nose, and the prescription wasn’t quite right anymore, but they were effective enough that I could see Tom’s face was, well, mildly terrified. My heart lurched in my chest: perhaps he would not be quite as brave as I’d originally anticipated.
Be strong, Libby,
I commanded myself.
Tom needs you.

“It’s just that I’ve been seeing a new therapist . . . ,” he said.

Was he? Good. I didn’t think Tom was really the type to visit a shrink, but at least it would help him deal with my dying.

“Libby, did you hear me?” he asked, staring at me intently.

I blinked. “What? No. What did you say?”

“I think I might be . . . gay.”

A dizzy spell came over me, and I felt my backbone smash against the edge of the cold stone counter. “Oh my,” I said, reaching out for Tom’s arm.

“Libby,” he said, pulling me to him, “I am so terribly sorry. Are you okay?”

“I’m—I’m fine,” I said, because that was what I always said when someone asked me this question.

As Tom looked down at me, his eyes were moist with unshed tears. “Thank you,” he said, his voice warbly. “Thank you for saying that. You knew for a long time now, didn’t you? Deep down, at least.”

Up until that point, everything he’d said had been hitting me without my actually absorbing it. Now it all sank in at once. Was he nucking futs? I knew global warming was killing polar bears, the Chinese population blew past one billion several years ago, and
rhythms
was the longest word without a vowel in the English language. I did not know, however, that my childhood sweetheart, the man I had loved for nearly twenty years (twenty years!) was sexually attracted to men.

“No, no—no,” I said, pulling my head back in a way that made my neck disappear, a phenomenon I was aware of only because my boss Jackie was always telling me not to do it after she made yet another outrageous request (“Libby, buy a cream-colored, brown-spotted alpaca throw for me on your nonexistent lunch hour, and please stop doing that thing with your neck because you look like a turtle, okay?”).

“I’m not saying this is the end of our marriage,” Tom said, hugging me tight. “I love you so much; you know that. It’s just that—well, I’m trying to figure out who I am. This is something I’ve been struggling with for years, and I’m—Libby? Libby, what are you doing?”

I wasn’t sure I could answer that question, but I had unlatched myself from him and found myself rifling through yet another drawer, this one where we kept our silverware, which still looked as shiny as it did when we selected it for our wedding registry eight years ago. I took a fork out and held it up to admire it. It sparkled in the light of the dining room chandelier—pardon me,
light sculpture—
that Tom spent a fortune on, even though we were still paying off his graduate school loans.

“It’s just that—” I said, then brought the fork down on his hand, which he’d placed on the marble island.

“
Gahhh!
Why did you do that?” he yelped. The fork had fallen to the floor, so I knew it hadn’t gone in that deep, but Tom was jumping around and pumping his arm up and down like he’d been burned, or, you know, stabbed. “I pour my heart out to you, and you spear me like a piece of meat? What is wrong with you, Libby?”

“What is wrong with me?” I stared at him, wild-eyed; I was feeling a wee bit feral. “What is wrong with me?!”

What was wrong with me was becoming a very long list in a remarkably short period of time. Previously, my problems amounted to incurably frizzy hair, a butt that was too big for otherwise well-fitting pants, and an awareness that although I was quite good at it, I hadn’t actually enjoyed my job since Bush Jr. was in office. Now I was dying of cancer and wanted to murder my husband, who, as it turned out, was attracted to a chromosome makeup distinctly different from my own.

“You’re always doing this,” I told him.

Still clutching his hand, he took a step back. “What do you mean?”

I could feel the crazy coming on again. “Upstaging me!”

It was not entirely lost on me that his commandeering my big reveal was probably not the right dilemma to be dwelling on, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. It was as though the spirit of Jackie, she of the many long-winded outbursts, had slithered into my body. “Every time, Tom!” I screeched as he stared at me with horror. “Every time!”

In high school, Tom won rave reviews for his rousing performance of Curly in
Oklahoma!
while I was relegated to the understudy for Laurey, a role I did not once bring to fruition while pining for Tom from the chorus. His custom-tailored suit for our wedding was far nicer than my dress, and it was all anyone could talk about at our ceremony. If anyone could steal the thunder of my cancer diagnosis, it was Tom.

Now, I know, I know: Musicals? Designer suits? Surely, Libby, you must have been aware that your husband was perhaps not as hetero as he’d let on? But Paul had been out and proud from the minute he emerged from his amniotic sac. I knew from gay men. At least, I thought I did.

“I’m dying,” I said. “I. Am. Dying!”

“Libby, please don’t be dramatic,” he said. “I understand that you’re upset. I am, too. But we can’t move forward if you’re screaming at me.”

“Tom,” I said, eyeing the recently sharpened steak knives, which hung from a magnetic strip just above the sink, “don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you should leave before I do something we’ll both regret.”

He recoiled. “Libby, don’t you have any sympathy for me? Do you know how hard that was? I’ve been working on this for months now.”

How lovely. Even as my tumor grew from a pea to an olive to a lime just beneath my skin—not far from the very area where the baby I pined for should have been reaching similar milestones—Tom had been perfecting his I’m-breaking-up-our-marriage elevator speech.

“Tom, Tom, Tom,” I said, fingering the top of the knife bar, which was dusty; I’d take care of that later. “You lost the right to ask for sympathy about three minutes ago. Now get out of our home before I stab you again.”

THREE

Would I have gone off the deep end if the whole mess with Tom hadn’t unfolded as it did? Hard to say. Tom would have come out eventually, although I suspect that if I’d had the chance to tell him my Really Bad News before he told me his, he probably would have kept his secret under wraps until after I’d died. How convenient that would have been for him. I could just imagine him telling people, “I loved my wife so much that after her untimely passing, I just couldn’t feel that way about another woman again—ever. So now I date men.”

But as these things go, Tom couldn’t wait to open his trap, and the news that came flying out was so terrible I could barely breathe, let alone tell him about the grenade in my gut.

I can’t say for sure exactly what happened after Tom left, although I do remember lying on the floor in front of the apartment door, pressing my cheek against the cool wood, and wishing that I could disappear, perhaps permanently. Tom’s confession had hit me like a sonic boom delivering shock waves:
My husband is gay?
“I’m trying to figure out who I am.”
Even if he sort of likes men, he loves me so much it doesn’t matter . . . right?
“I’m not saying this is the end of our marriage.”
Maybe I can pretend I didn’t hear him.
“You knew for a long time now, didn’t you?”
Perhaps we can just forget this all happened and carry on as usual, at least until I die.
“What is wrong with you, Libby?”

At any rate, I was irrational enough to decide
not
to call Paul, telling myself he was probably on his way to the Yale Club or Barney Greengrass or who knows where to wine and dine some random investor for the hedge fund he managed. (Besides, I liked to play this little game in which I waited to see if he received the distress signals I was sending out over the telepathic twin transmitter system, whose existence I had always been rather skeptical about.) When I was finally able to pull myself off the floor, I located Tom’s sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, took one, then decided to take another, and except for some sobbing and the frenzied consumption of an entire sleeve of chocolate chip cookies, the rest is a bit of a blur.

I woke the next morning in a pool of drool. A bleating ring was coming from my cell phone, which I eventually located between the couch cushions.

“Morningpaul,” I mumbled. It was still dark out, but Paul was one of those psychotic types who didn’t require more than six hours of sleep; since he had discovered prescription amphetamines, that number was now closer to four or five.

“What is it?” he asked, as though I’d been the one calling him. (Perhaps there was something to the twin clairvoyance phenomenon, but don’t expect me to admit it out loud.)

I contemplated whether to ask him if he wanted to hear the bad or the ugly, but even with the sleeping-pill fog still hanging around my head, it occurred to me that I couldn’t tell him about the cancer, not yet. I could hear his twin sons, Toby and Max, playing in the background, and in his own Paul way, he sounded sort of chipper. And that a life-sapping tumor would reduce our nuclear family to just two—well, that was news that needed to be delivered in person.

“Tom is gay,” I said.

Paul hooted. “Charlie, wake up!” he said to his partner, who was not a morning person and was undoubtedly dozing nearby. “You have to hear this!”

“
That
is your first response?” I said, tears pricking behind my eyelids.

“Libs, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m—well, I’m gobsmacked. How on earth could he do this to you? Are you all right?”

“No,” I admitted. “I’m in a very bad place right now.”

“Oh, Libs,” he cooed. “I hate Chicago, too. Will you consider moving out to the East Coast, preferably the United Republic of Manhattan? You would be so much happier here.”

“Paul.”

“Brooklyn?”

“Paul.”

“I’m sorry, Libs. I’m only joking because I’m upset. You know how I get. So this actually happened? What did he say? What did
you
say?!”

“It happened,” I said miserably. “I might have stabbed him with a fork.”

“Mad Libs, I
love
it! Though . . .”

“Though what?” I asked sharply.

Paul hesitated. “Is Tom okay? This must be awful for him.”

“Tom?” I said. “Is mother-fudging
Tom
okay?” (One of the things I remember about my mother is that she despised swearing, so I figure the least I can do to honor her memory is scrub my vocabulary of curse words.)

“Libs, you know what I mean.”

“Don’t Libs me.” I sniffed, thinking of how Tom only blurted the truth out after he thought I already knew. “And yes, he’s fine.”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said again in a way that told me we’d be revisiting the topic sooner rather than later. “What are you going to do now?”

That was a very good question. I pushed my glasses up on my nose and eyed the clock; I had about an hour before I had to be at the office. Of course, I could call in, but that would mean I’d spend the day crying in the home I shared with the man who had torn my beating heart from my chest. Bad enough that I’d just learned my body was disease-ridden; I would be damned if my husband’s accidental outing was going to be the thing that took me out of the game of life.

“I’m going to shower. Then I’m going to get dressed. Then I’m going to work.”

“You will do nothing of the sort! Tell Jackie to shove it. One’s husband coming out necessitates at least a full week off, if not a month.”

I did a mental rundown of my day, which meant I was really taking a survey of my boss’s day. Jackie, who was the head of advertising at a large media conglomerate that had a hand in radio, television, and custom print publications across the US, had a breakfast meeting with one of the company’s publishers at eight forty-five; conference calls, which I would facilitate, with various heads of sales at ten, ten thirty and eleven; then an early lunch with the CEO at the Ritz, which would buy me an hour of downtime, although I would need to pick up her gown for the Joffrey event this evening, or at least find a messenger competent enough not to get it caught in the spokes of his bike while playing bumper cars on LaSalle—

I have cancer, I realized yet again, as though for the first time. I felt around my stomach, wincing as I fingered the still-bandaged incision to the left of my belly button. If the tumor was out, but I still had cancer, did that mean there were malignant cells lingering in the area right now? Or were they already speeding through my body, like microscopic surveyors trying to figure out where to set up their next subdivision?

Where the cancer was didn’t matter. The only thing of importance was that I was
dying
that very second. If I said this to Paul, he would point out that we’re all dying every second we’re alive. But as I mentioned, I wasn’t ready to drop the C-bomb on him just yet, for reasons pertaining not only to his psychological well-being, but also my own. I needed a few days to evaluate the barren desert of my mental landscape before I started telling people.

If only I could confide in Tom,
I thought, fresh tears springing to my eyes. Unlike Paul, he would not launch into strategy mode or offer advice I wasn’t ready to take. He would hold me until I was done crying, and he would ask me what I wanted to do next, a question that—only when he asked it—always seemed to help me point myself in the right direction. But for all intents and purposes, there was no Tom anymore.

Regardless, Paul was right: I should take some time off work. But I was going to do it on my own terms.

Unaware that a good chunk of my anguish was due to something even worse than my imploded marriage, Paul was still thinking about Tom. “If it helps, I always had my doubts about him.”

“You suspected he was gay?” I spat. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Libby, love, if I suspected
that
, you would have been the very first to know. Trust me, this is as shocking to me as it is to you. I just felt that you could do better.”

This, at least, was not news. A week before my wedding, Paul pleaded with me to put it off. “You’re so young, Libby. Go date other guys, figure out if you really want to settle for Tom.”

“I’m not settling,” I told him. “I’ve had ten years to think about this, Paul, and I know that love like this doesn’t come along more than once in a lifetime.”

“Libby, that’s like saying Long John Silver’s has the best fish in the world when you’ve never even tried a Maine lobster.”

“Lobster is a crustacean, and you’re jealous,” I said, even though we both knew the latter comment wasn’t even the tiniest bit true. Paul asked me again if I was sure—really and truly sure—the night before our ceremony, though he did stand beside me as my de facto maid of honor.

I was sure then. Now, not so much. I’d always been so proud that Tom never gave himself whiplash when a woman in skintight yoga pants walked by, but clearly I’d been searching for the wrong warning signs. What else had I overlooked while I was mentally high-fiving myself for scoring such a perfect husband?

“Well, I didn’t
want
to do better,” I sniffed to Paul. “And I thought I was good in bed.”

“Although I must vomit in my mouth a little in order to admit this, I’m sure you are very good in bed, Libs. You do know this has nothing to do with you, right? Tell me you know that.”

I’d brought it up, yes, but now that we were having this conversation, I wasn’t quite ready for it. “I know. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Love you.”

“Love you more.”

“No, I love
you
more,” he said, and hung up before I could respond.

“Liiiibbbyy!”
Jackie had this peculiar way of yodeling my name, which, despite seven years of working for her, still managed to make my hair corkscrew even tighter. She kept hollering, although I hadn’t stepped into her office yet. “Do you know I’ve been here since six thirty this morning? I expected you to be here early to make up for that disappearing act you pulled yesterday, not to mention the day off last week. The city is full of doctors who work nights and weekends, you know. You don’t see me taking off for personal appointments in the middle of the day, do you?”

In fact, two days before, she left at four to get a manicure, and yesterday I was fairly certain her noon meeting was actually a quickie with her Argentine boy toy; but I was not about to point out either instance.

Instead, I opened her door and said, “Good morning, Jackie!” Yes, it was odd to be pleasant if not vaguely chipper to this hurricane of a human being, but after facing so much upheaval in such a short window of time, it was easy—comforting, even—to fall right back into my role of well-paid sycophant.

Now, Libby, one might ask, why would you willingly work as an assistant to someone so awful? Don’t you have any self-respect? I do, but as someone who watched her father nearly go bankrupt as a result of her dead mother’s medical bills, I also have respect for the almighty dollar. Under Paul’s careful tutelage, I had quit on four separate occasions, and each time, human resources rewarded me with more money and a fancier title. This is because while Jackie is a miserable person, she happens to be so good at luring advertisers, and so bad at keeping the staff needed to fulfill the contracts made with those advertisers, that it is worth it for the company to pay her assistant (whose résumé, for the record, reads “vice president of media management”) a solid hundred and twenty grand a year. Jackie acted as if my compensation were her personal gift to me: “You know that’s a man’s salary, don’t you, Libby? I’m breaking glass ceilings for you,” she would say in her smoker’s brogue, shortly before throwing her cell phone at the wall, not far from my head. Then I would spend the afternoon replacing the phone and reprogramming her data. I often reminded myself that working for Jackie was a necessary evil, not unlike a colonoscopy or a friendly fondling from airport security personnel.

“Do you know I could hire an assistant in Pakistan for eight dollars an hour?” Jackie said from behind her
Tribune
.

“But would she bring you this?” I asked, producing a vegan bran muffin from behind my back. I was still operating on autopilot, so I’d stopped at the deli as I always did, purchasing Jackie’s usual and a large frosted cinnamon bun for myself. I’d heard that sugar fed cancer, but it was too late to worry about it.

“Hmph,” Jackie said, and put down her paper to hold out her hand for the muffin; breakfast meeting or not, she had a weakness for freebies and carbohydrates. She shoveled cardboard crumbs into her mouth while dictating the list of daily to-dos that were to be done in addition to my already scheduled duties: call this guy, call that guy, order flowers for her mother, smooth things over with this woman, send these contracts to that company, and so on. “Jackie,” I interrupted at one point. “Could you please give me a minute to jot down the last few?” I was feeling unfocused and a bit dizzy, and it was hard to keep up with her.

“No,” she snapped. Ignoring my glare, she continued rattling off her demands until I had a legal pad filled with tasks that would take an e-assistant a month to complete.

When she was done, she handed me her crumb-covered wrapper to toss out like a good little underling, even though there was a wastebasket under her desk. I narrowed my eyes and looked at it for a moment, then sighed, plucked the wrapper from her fingers, and marched it out to the trash basket near my cube. When I returned, I perched on the edge of the clear Plexiglas chair in front of her desk.

She furrowed her brow in a way that made it clear she was not pleased by my presence. Normally I let her nastiness slide off me like water off an otter’s back, but as the minutes ticked by, it seemed less and less likely that I was going to be able to ignore the disease and impending divorce debacle hanging over my head. In fact, I was feeling surprisingly pissy. “Jackie,” I said, glowering back at her, “I’m kind of going through some stuff, and I’d like to take a week or two off. I can work today and tomorrow as planned.”