7
S
ix days later, I dug into my plastic vial of antibiotics, gulped the horse pill down with water, then slammed the glass down onto the kitchen counter as if I'd just toasted the Russian fleet with vodka.
Six days without a drink. I would have to remember that the next time I worried about being recruited by AA. Of course, I still had a few days left on the medication, but since it was Sunday, I figured that a glass of wine with Emma wouldn't kill me. We had decided to take in a movie,
The Last Samurai,
then grab dinner. Afterwards, we landed at Duke's, where it was so crowded we decided to eat at the bar, where our friend Macy was dispensing white wines faster than quantum speed.
“What's with all these people?” I asked Macy, eyeing the invasion of uninvited guests who swamped my favorite watering hole.
“Duke rented out the back room for a Christmas party,” she said. “Then he had the nerve to go skiing with his girlfriend. Noah and I are up to our elbows here.”
Emma and I turned to each other and exploded: “His girlfriend?” at the same time.
“Owe me a Coke!” Emma said, squeezing my arm. “What girlfriend? Who's the girlfriend? We've never met her.”
“And you never will.” Macy placed two glasses of chardonnay in front of us. “He won't bring her around here. The man won't play in his own backyard.”
“Well, there's a mystery solved.” I lifted my wineglass and held it midair. “Here's to you, Duke, for keeping us guessing.”
Macy laughed and shimmied her shoulders. “I had him pegged all along. I knew he liked sisters.”
“I might have to take him off my list,” Emma said sadly. “If he's serious enough to go away with this girl for the weekend, they might be a couple.” Emma had a running list of men she'd sleep with in a minute, which she was constantly revising when one of those men got married. She thought it was pure evil to break up a marriage, and almost as bad to cause a rift in an otherwise healthy relationship.
“You had Duke on your list?” Macy rolled her eyes. “You need to get out more, girlfriend.”
“Well, I added him when I had to pull Russell Crowe.”
“I thought you replaced Russell with Tom Cruise,” I said, knowing that Tom had gone back on the list soon after he and Nicole split.
Emma shook her head. “No, Tom came back on a while ago, and after seeing
Last Samurai,
I'm glad he did.”
“Uhm-hm. Mr. Cruise can ride my horse anytime,” Macy tossed off as she carried two tall drinks down the bar.
“What are the specials today?” I said, looking up at the chalkboard. Emma ran her finger around the stem of her wineglass, her mind elsewhere. “Hello? Are we eating here, or what?”
“He called me,” she said. “This week . . . yesterday, he called me. He wants to get back together.”
Tom Cruise?
Then the ugly truth hit me. “Jonathan?”
She nodded. “I've been sick about it. I don't even know if I can eat. Can you believe that? All those hours in the gym trying to burn carbs, and now one phone call and I'm fasting.”
I squeezed her wrist. “Don't tell me you're actually entertaining the idea. Oh, Emma . . . no!”
“He reminded me that New Year's Eve would be our one-year anniversary,” Emma said dolefully.
“I see he still has a penchant for drama.” I remembered last December, when Emma had first connected with Jonathan. She and I were partying it up in a pack of tourists huddled on Times Square. Emma wore a silly paper crown and I had a wig of foil streamers over my head and the air was so charged with intoxicating spirit that I didn't mind giving up champagne for a few minutes of noisy revelry in the cold.
Emma and I were laughing when the crowd shifted and a bunch of people shoved into us, knocking Emma into one of the blue wooden police barricades. Two cops rushed over and quickly helped Emma to her feet. One of them took a special interest in brushing off her coat. Officer Jonathan Thompson lit into Emma with his blue eyes. She fell for his tousled dark curls, unmarred by a riot helmet, his easy laugh, his street stories. From that moment on, Emma was a hopeless cop groupie. She started watching all the crime shows on television. She waved to every passing patrol car and smiled at uniformed officers hanging out on street corners. She started telling me about Jonathan's exciting days and nights, his “jobs,” the chatter of the dispatcher that she heard through his cell phone, his “gun runs” and “ten-thirteens.” In Emma's eyes, Jonathan lived on the edge of danger (though I suspected he inflated his superhero stories when trying to impress chicks). Somehow, by having sex with him she felt connected to that exciting underworld, not to mention that seducing an officer fulfilled some weird sense of civic duty.
Bottom line: Emma was smitten.
Personally, I thought Jonathan was a big blowhard, but since she was the one who fell against the barricade and into his arms, my opinion didn't matter much.
“I know you don't see the allure, and I'm sure you could do a rip-roaring critique of him,” Emma had told me when she and Jonathan first started sleeping together, “but thanks. Thanks for . . . for not doing that.”
And so I'd bitten back my sardonic commentary on this show-stealing, blue-eyed hunk who was far too gorgeous to be soiling his hands dragging perps to jail. It didn't take long to realize that Jonathan was acutely aware of his own buff beauty; he possessed a portfolio of head shots which he'd been shopping around to modeling agencies, and had appeared as an extra on a few of the daytime dramas shot in New York. In the past few months I had begun to see him as an actor who had opted out of waiting tables to bring home a heftier check from the NYPD. I had also noticed that Jonathan liked the ladiesâthe big dawg!âand I was about to confront Emma about it when their breakup spared me the agony.
Macy returned to our end of the bar and dumped empty glasses into a bin. “Who died?” she asked casually.
“It's the ghost of boyfriends past,” I said. “Emma's ex wants her back.”
“Sure he does. They all do, once they have to spend a night or two alone.” Macy wiped the bar, her silver rings shining against her chocolate-brown skin. “Men are all horndogs at heart. Once they miss the sugar, they suddenly have big ol' broken hearts.”
“He sounded sincere.” Emma twirled an orange curl around one finger, looking so wistful I could cry. “He wants to get together and talk.”
“And you're going to meet him? Why torture yourself, Em? You don't miss himâyou said so yourself,” I said.
“I don't miss him,” she admitted. “What I miss is being part of a couple. It's sad to think of spending Christmas alone.”
“You're going to be with Ricki and me,” I said, “and don't drift into that Christmas romance shit. Men are horndogs year-round; they don't suddenly earn halos when December comes along.”
“My brain knows you're right, but my heart is telling me to pick up my cell and call him.”
“I won't let you do that!” I snatched her purse from the bar shelf and hugged it to my chest. “Nobody make any fast moves here, until we figure this out.”
Emma's face puckered in a worried expression. “Remind me why I can't call him. I need an itemized list of reasons.”
“Typical banker,” I said, shaking my head. “Do you want me to be honest?”
“Brutally.”
“Number one, you could never rely on him when you were living together. There were nights when he didn't come home, didn't callâ”
“Out with the guys,” she recalled.
“Whatever. You couldn't count on him.”
Emma nodded. “Point taken.”
“Item two: Jonathan was a scene stealer. Remember the last party we went to at the Met? He always had a tale that was more grandiose than the next person, and honestly, did you believe all of those police anecdotes he told? I swear, he stole them from
NYPD Blue.”
Emma frowned. “I think that's two items.”
“And also, he wants to be a
model.”
I winced. “High ick factor.”
“We love to look at those model types,” Macy said as she scooped ice into the blender, “but you can't take them anywhere.”
“He was really into himself,” Emma admitted. “He used to work out in front of the mirror, watch his muscles pop. I think he got off on that.”
Macy and I made an “Eeeew” face at each other.
“And then there's the flirt factor,” I said. “He likes to sniff around. Teenagers, waitresses . . . he doesn't seem to be too discriminating.”
“Did you notice that, too?” Emma asked. “I thought I was being paranoid.”
“Oh, no,” Macy said, “I've seen him chasing some ass in here. More than once.”
Emma sighed. “He really is awful. We don't belong together at all. And to think I came this close to calling him.” She turned to me. “Thanks for being honest. You're really good at sizing up guys.”
“Really,” Macy agreed. “You have an amazing talent for seeing right through the bullshit.”
“Is it a talent, or a curse?” I sat back, folding my arms. “I can't stand my sister's boyfriend Nate. I've decided to tell Carter to take a hike, and I'm just not in the mood to start up with someone new. Men are so much work.”
“I hear ya,” Macy said, checking her watch. “Hey, I get off at six tonight, and I've got passes to a new club where my friend is the bouncer. You two want to hang?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“I should get home,” Emma said. “I've got an early day tomorrow, and I need every ounce of energy to deal with the telemarketing division.”
“You're not slipping away,” I told her. “We can't have you home alone when Jonathan calls. Let's get this party started.”
Emma lifted her wineglass. “Maybe just for a while.”
Â
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“A while” turned into an eight-hour party, starting at the new club and ending up at a bar where Macy knew the bartender, a mysterious, dark-eyed college kid named Zade. My single glass of wine turned into a succession of drinks, so many that I lost track of the booze, but I clung to Emma, refusing to let her leave my sight and fly back into Jonathan's slippery arms. At one point Emma insisted that she go since it was almost midnight, and I released her as it dawned on me that Macy had already left and the bar was emptying. After that I talked with Zade, and somehow I ended up sitting on the bar and making out with him, the two of us kissing and petting like a couple of teenagers. And then the bar was empty except for the two of us, and he went out front to roll down the gate and I pulled him back onto the shiny laminated wood and kissed him again and let my hand press the crotch of his pantsâthose loose, printed things that look like pajamas.
He stopped, a little hesitant, saying something about regrets.
“Honey,” I drawled, “if you have a hard-on and a Trojan, there's no reason to regret anything.”
My brain was foggy, but I remember the dark intensity of his eyes as he pressed me down onto the bar, his body lean and wiry as he did push-ups over me. No regrets. No strings. No problems.
8
M
onday morning . . . Ugh.
My head felt huge as I dragged myself out of bed and stepped under the hot jet of the shower. Why did I feel so hungover? Probably the drinking. I should have stopped after the second glass of wine. Or the Irish coffees. And I definitely didn't need that snifter of brandy. Ugh.
I pulled on black clothes so I wouldn't have to make any fashion choices and hid behind a pair of sunglasses, even in the dark of the subway stairs. Maybe I'd feel better after coffee and a cigarette.
Oh, hell, I'd quit smoking. I was never going to feel better.
I emerged from the elevator to the office with my collar turned up and my sunglasses on. With the inflated pain in my head, a day in the bull pen was going to be murder. Oren's psycho laugh would be liked machine-gun fire, and the simplest gesture from Genevieve would trigger annoyance overload. But how do you hide in a sea of reporters? The
Herald
used to have a society editor who wore rhinestone cat's-eye sunglasses every day of her lifeâand that was years before they became retro. In her time, Lulu Bettincourt was as much a fixture at debutante balls as gilded chairs and white gloves, but Lulu had retired to Florida last year, taking her tinted spectacles to true sunglass territory.
I passed Ed, who was tapping on the glass of the fish tank. “Can you knock a little softer?” I asked, but Ed just stared at the glass in consternation. I longed to collapse at my desk and cuddle my coffee cup, but this was my buddy Ed. “I was kidding, Ed. Ed? Something wrong?”
Truman Nagasian, one of the national editors, popped out of his cubicle. “The buzz is that the president is going to raise the alert to orange,” he reported. “We're all kind of freaking out today.”
“Really?” I said. “What does that mean?”
“They've heard chatter from terrorist cells,” Truman said. “Rumor that there'll be a spectacular attack.”
I unbuttoned the top of my coat. “But what does that mean to us?”
Truman shrugged. “Longer lines at the airports?”
I turned to Ed. “Should I be scared?”
“After twenty years spent reporting the news, I find that if you let yourself be frightened by some of it you cannot cope with any of it,” said a distracted Ed.
I peered into the tank. Piggy looked, well, like Piggy to me. Bulging eyes, luminescent scales, whispery fins. “Looks normal to me.”
“She's just not behaving in her typical fashion,” Ed lamented.
I have to admit, I adored the fact that this man could disengage from pressing matters like national security and still care deeply about a goldfish. Even through my fat, aching head it endeared Ed to me. I fumbled in my bag for two Advils, popped them, and chugged down a sip of coffee while Ed relayed Piggy's symptoms to me. We discussed possible fish ailments, I tried to be reassuring, then dragged myself to my cubicle, where I found Genevieve reading one of my pieces.
“What the hell . . .” I winced, wanting to slap her manicured hand away.
“I have a fix for you,” she said innocently.
“Excuse me?”
“I know how you can fix this profile.”
“Like I give a rat's ass. What are you doing at my desk . . . reading stuff on my desk?” I asked, appalled.
All around us heads lifted and fingers stopped clacking on keyboards. Genevieve had violated the cardinal rule: privacy of the cubicle.
“Well, I was . . . I was going to leave you a note, but then I started reading this. I mean, it was sitting out on your desk and all . . .”
“Next time leave the note in my in-box. Or better yet, e-mail me.”
That way, you won't be able to pirate my files away.
That had been Genevieve's modus operandum since she'd joined the staff last spring. Every time I pitched a new person to profile, Genevieve stole my thunder, claiming that she'd been planning the same pitch at the very same meeting. For a while, Marty let her pitch first at the meeting, which worked for a time; at least, until I suspected that she was spying on me, trying to find my list of pitches. Lately I'd begun to keep my pitch ideas at home or write them in anagram. I had become the Nancy Drew of the obit pages.
I pushed past her, dropped my coat on the visitor's chair, and pulled out my chair. “What was the note about?”
“I . . . it was . . .” She collapsed from the pressure, melting under the disapproving eyes of staff writers. “It's not that important. I'll ask Lincoln.”
Translation: You'll rob him blind,
I thought as I watched her disappear. She was ruining my already bad hangover day, and it wasn't even ten yet. I turned on my computer and checked my e-mail as I warmed my fingers on my latte. Antoinette Lucas confirmed our lunch for the next day, which was good since she'd made headline news over the weekend and I'd been afraid she would ditch me, feeling too important to spend time with an obit writer. Apparently Ms. Lucas had turned down a lucrative new contract with the network to start her own production company. For once, I was really interested in monitoring the development of this story.
I went over my calendar for the week, glad that Ricki wasn't coming till next week because I had way too many profiles to infuse with “compassion” before then. I continued my online search for information on Antoinette Lucas, whose name now yielded google hits galore.
When the phone rang, I kept my eyes on the screen, my thoughts in one of Antoinette's college anecdotes. “Jane Conner.”
“This is Dr. Parson's office, Ms. Conner. Dr. Parson would like to speak with you. Can you hold?”
I blinked. Wow, a doctor who called
me?
A doctor I could speak to without falling into the black hole of a voice mail directory. “Certainly.” I spun away from the computer screen and propped my low heels up on the visitor's chair. Dr. Parson was calling me. Maybe he was a mensch, after all.
The line clicked and the doctor came on. “Ms. O'Conner?”
“It's Conner.” If I had a nickel for every time that happened. “Yes?”
“Dr. Parson. I have the test results from your visit here last week.”
I smiled. “All better. I can breathe again.”
“About the lump on your thyroid.”
Oh. I flashed back to the long, skinny needle.
“You have a malignant growth in the left lobe,” he went on. “You need surgery on your thyroid.”
Surgery? Me? It had to be a joke, but the drive in his voice clutched at my sense of drama and held it tight. I was stepping into a scene from ERâthe big phone call from the concerned doctor.
“I do?” was my brilliant answer.
“The cells found from the fine needle aspiration are consistent with a papillary tumor.”
The music of my medical drama ground to a halt with the word: tumor. Let's face it, that is one ugly word, and it set off a quivering sensation deep inside me. Call me a fatalist, but in my experience tumors were not a good thing. Tumors led to surgery, which led to gut-wrenching chemo, which led to damaging radiation, which led to people surrounding you with flowers and a morphine drip and asking if they can do anything for you. That was the way my mother had gone out of this world, and damned if it didn't start with a tumor.
Dr. Parson was still talking, something about the thyroid and how it was best to remove it all, about working with an endocrynologist to regulate synthetic hormones. The tremor rippling through me was shaking my legs now, and suddenly I was acutely aware of the activity around me: laughter from the Sports section, some kind of bet being waged between Oren and Lincoln, a phone bleeping endlessly at one of the desks down near the rest rooms. Dr. Parson spoke of
no need to panic . . . schedule the surgery . . . time off to recuperate . . . radioactive iodine therapy
but I was twenty giant steps behind him, picturing a wormlike tumor.
A gray, gooey squid wrapping around my skinny neck.
A tumor. So that meant he was talking about the “C” word, right? Throughout his explanation, he had not said the word.
I was scared shitless, but I had to know. “Are you talking about cancer?” I asked, my voice cracking, raw.
“Yes, it's a papillary carcinoma, a type of cancer, but something we can treat.”
I started to curse but the words couldn't make it past the knot in my throat.
Cancer!
I have cancer.
I was not ready to leave this world. I'd barely had a chance to live, to really live, and here was this thing, this tumor and surgery, this cancer, taking my life from me.
“Ms. Conner?” Dr. Parson sounded stern. “Don't let this ruin your holiday. In the world of cancers, this is a minor inconvenience.”
I wanted to laugh at the ludicrousness of that statement and the odd sense of relief it gave me. How inconvenient to get cancer right before the holidays! I imagined women in his Park Avenue waiting room saying, “Oh, Muffy, how inconvenient! Had I known about this neck thing, I could have scheduled the chin tuck at the same time!”
I doubted that Dr. Parson had ever experienced the “inconvenience” of cancer.
“I can't talk anymore,” I told him.
“Don't put it off,” he warned me. “We need to take care of this.”
Take care of this. Snip it out. Get me in the hospital, in the hands of professionals who would cheerfully monitor my progress into hell.
I placed the phone in its cradle and bit back a feeling of panic as I grabbed my bag and coat and swung toward the elevators. I was well on my way to a meltdown and the office bull pen was not a good place to cry your heart out, fall to your knees and ask “Why me?” (Believe me, I've seen grown women and men break down in the office at deadline; it is not a pretty sight.)
Outside the brass-trimmed revolving door of the
Herald
Building I stepped into the scattering cloud of smoke and fished in my bag for a cigarette. Where the hell . . . ? Of course I couldn't find any. I'd quit smoking last week. Right. Quit smoking so that you don't get cancer.
I wanted to bum a cigarette from one of the other smokers, but I knew if I opened my mouth a sob would escape and I just couldn't let that happen. Clutching my bag to my chest, I listened as Drucie from advertising told a story about her son's Christmas list. “Half the items on the list don't even exist. He's invented these toysâlike a hovering skateboard and a snowball slingâand he's drawn illustrations to show Santa's elves exactly how it should be built.”
“How old is he?” someone asked.
“Just turned seven. Can you believe it? You want your kids to have their hearts' desires, but really, it's an impossible chore for old Santa.”
My eyes welled with tears as people chuckled over the story. Drucie shot me a look over her shoulder, but didn't say anything, thank God. She must have sensed my silent desperation as I realized I didn't belong here. I didn't have any cigarettes, my whole body was shaking so much I probably didn't have the manual dexterity to smoke, and the craving had fled with my peace of mind.
That's when I started running. My hair whipped in my face and my coat blew open and I was probably going to break an ankle running in these shoes, but did that matter now?
Running was a release, despite the burning in my chest. After a few blocks my eyes were blurred with tears from the cold and I slowed to a fast stroll. I was headed west, toward the Hudson, which sent a nasty wind blustering up Twenty-third Street. It was too fucking cold.
I ducked into a dark bar and paused inside the dank vestibule. Music was playing, not too loud, and two skeletal patrons were engaged in friendly conversation with the bartender, who was leaning back and switching channels on the television.
This would be a fine place to hide. My heels clicked loudly as I dove into the back of the bar, miles away from the men. The bartender came down to bring me a shot of tequila, which I took into the corner booth facing away from all the action. The drink burned my throat as I tossed it back. I hugged myself with a pang of despair. Cancer. Cancer! How did it happen? How did my body whip out of control like that?
My mother had asked the same questions. A smoker all her life, and suddenly her lungs had defied her, revolting with cancerous cells that had worked their way from the lungs to the lymph nodes before anyone knew of their existence. My cancer was in a different place, but what if it started somewhere else and spread to the thyroid from there?
I fished the cell phone out of my bag and called Emma. Two rings, and she picked up.
“Jane, I can't talk now,” she whispered. “Where are you?”
“In a bar on Twenty-third Street.”
“Drinking before noon? That's a new low, even for you.”
“I have cancer,” I sobbed, then shoved a fist against my jaw to stop that horrible moaning sound. “I just found out.”