Things You Should Know(55)

He is standing outside another examination room, chart in hand.

He nods. “We’ll take it through your vagina. We’ll take the ovaries, the uterus, cervix, omentum, and your appendix, if they didn’t already get it in Southampton. And then we’ll put a port in your chest and sign you up for chemotherapy—eight rounds should do it.”

She nods.

“See you Friday.”

We leave. I am holding her hand, holding her pocketbook on my shoulder, trying to be as good as anyone can be.

“Why don’t they just say ‘eviscerate’? Why don’t they just come out and say, on Friday at nine we’re going to eviscerate you—be ready.”

“Do you want a little lunch? Some soup? There’s a lovely restaurant near here.”

She looks flushed. I put my hand to her forehead. She’s burning up. “You have a fever. Did you mention that to the doctor?”

“It’s not relevant.”



Later, when we are home, I ask, “Do you remember our third date? Do you remember asking—how would you kill yourself if you had to do it with bare hands? I said I would break my nose and shove it up into my brain, and you said you would reach up with your bare hands and rip your uterus out through your vagina and throw it across the room.”

“What’s your point?”

“No point—I just suddenly remembered it. Isn’t Kibbowitz taking your uterus out through your vagina?”

“I doubt he’s going to throw it across the room,” she says. There is a pause. “You don’t have to stay with me now that I have cancer. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. I don’t need anything.”

“If I left, I wouldn’t be leaving because you have cancer. But I would look like an ass, everyone would think I couldn’t take it.”

“I would make sure they knew it was me, that I was a monster, a cold steely monster, that I drove you away.”

“They wouldn’t believe you.”

She suddenly farts and runs, embarrassed, into the bathroom—as though this is the first time she’s farted in her life. “My life is ruined,” she yells, slamming the door.

“Farting is the least of it.”

When she comes out she is calmer, she crawls into bed next to me, wrung out, shivering.

I hold her. “Do you want to make love?”

“You mean one last time before I’m not a woman, before I’m a dried old husk?”

Instead of fucking we fight. It’s the same sort of thing, dramatic, draining. When we’re done, I roll over and sleep in a tight knot on my side of the bed.

“Surgical menopause,” she says. “That sounds so final.” I turn toward her. She runs her hand over her pubic hair. “Do you think they’ll shave me?”

I am not going to be able to leave the woman with cancer. I am not the kind of person who leaves the woman with cancer, but I don’t know what you do when the woman with cancer is a bitch. Do you hope that the cancer prompts the woman to reevaluate herself, to take it as an opportunity, a signal for change? As far as she’s concerned there is no such thing as the mind-body connection; there is science and there is law. There is fact and everything else is bullshit.



Friday morning, while she is in the hospital registration area waiting for her number to be called, she makes another list out loud: “My will is in the top left drawer of the dresser. If anything goes wrong, pull the plug. No heroic measures. I want to be cremated. Donate my organs. Give it away, all of it, every last drop.” She stops. “I guess no one will want me now that I’m contaminated.” She says the word “contaminated” filled with disgust, disappointment, as though she has failed, soiled herself.

It is nearly eight P.M. when Kibbowitz comes out to tell me he’s done. “Everything was stuck together like macaroni and cheese. It took longer than I expected. I found some in the fallopian tube and some on the wall of her abdomen. We cleaned everything out.”

She is wheeled back to her room, sad, agitated, angry.

“Why didn’t you come and see me?” she asks accusatorily.

“I was right there the whole time, on the other side of the door, waiting for word.”

She acts as though she doesn’t believe me, as though I screwed with a secretary from the patient services office while she was on the table.

“How’re you feeling?”

“Like I’ve taken a trip to another country and my suitcases are lost.”

She is writhing. I adjust her pillow, the position of the bed.

“What hurts?”

“What doesn’t hurt? Everything hurts. Breathing hurts.”