Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

  The twenty-ninth of June fell on a Thursday that year and after the surgeons had completed their final case of the day, they swarmed from the island of Manhattan like a pack of rats, taking off for Long Island or the Cape or Bimini or wherever successful surgeons go to celebrate the independence of their country. They were absolutely, unequivocally absent. They were taking off Friday and Monday because Tuesday was the fourth, and everyone was taking off the fourth. On the Saturday of their desertion, July 1, all new surgical residents began their first rotation. It would have been difficult to find a worse calendar moment to have a bone taken out of one’s leg.

  Because the hospital was so radically understaffed, and because visitors were not allowed to stay past eleven-thirty, our only option was to hire a private nurse to sit with Lucy during the night to keep her from choking on her own vomit. This was her first night out of the ICU and so we made a few phone calls and wrote out our checks. I went back to Lucy’s apartment and fell asleep in my clothes on her couch.

  To be in New York City on a long Fourth of July weekend is to have the place to yourself. As I walked at six in the morning from Lucy’s apartment to the NYU Medical Center on Thirty-first and First, I felt like I was in some postapocalyptic film: newspapers blowing through the hot, empty streets, one lone cab shooting through an endless line of open green lights, and me, pushing through the revolving glass doors.

  It is too self-referential to even consider a bad case of hives when sitting at the bedside of a friend who is now wearing her fibula in her jaw, but they were there, and they were formidable, so much so that the people on the elevators pressed back against the metal walls of the box when I stepped inside. On the surgical floor, the other patients stared at me with open sympathy. There were egg-sized lumps on my arms, neck, and face. My scalp had taken on a startling topography that no amount of hair could disguise. One of my eyes (and I felt grateful that it was only one) was closed. All I was missing was a tower and a set of bells. It would have been impossible to say if I looked diseased or beaten, or which of the two scenarios would have been worse. When the rare nurse or much rarer junior doctor entered Lucy’s room, their eyes scanned quickly over the girl in the bed and then landed on me. They appeared to be genuinely startled. “What happened?” was the first question. They already knew what had happened to Lucy.

  “Hives,” I said. I was getting used to them.

  Lucy could go on for hours and then days about the smallest inner workings of her emotional suffering, but in the face of physical pain she was both stoic and philosophical. In her life she was in some kind of pain a great deal of the time, something she would only acknowledge if you asked her, but for the most part she didn’t mention it, which was why I knew the pain she was in now was so wrenching. She laid in her bed with her eyes closed and she cried. She hadn’t counted on the pain in her leg being so excruciating, but worse than that was an impossible headache. She held on to my hand and whispered over and over again, “Please make them do something.”

  I was ready to make them do anything. My stepfather was a surgeon and I had spent a large chunk of my youth in hospitals and in those antiseptic hallways I was fearless. As a child I had driven in from the country with him on the weekends and sat in the doctor’s lounge eating doughnuts and drinking orange soda while he made rounds. If he was gone too long, I took the elevator to the obstetrics floor to look at the babies in their plastic boxes. Sometimes in the summer months he would bring me and my sister or one of my stepsisters to surgery during the week when we were bored because there was nothing else to do. My stepbrothers had only gone once and never tried it again. We would stand in the operating rooms for hours, first watching the patients flail through their intubation. Then we’d watch as another doctor neatly sliced open the skin and peeled back the useless flap of the ear and began to saw through the skull with an electric drill that made a horrible high-pitched whine and filled the room with a smoky, burning smell. We’d have to step back from the table in our oversize scrubs to avoid getting a chip of bone in our eye as it spun into the air, a small blowing geyser of snow above the patient’s resting head. When all that work was finished and there was a clear hole into the brain, we were each allowed to look at it through a surgical microscope. Then my stepfather would come in and the nurses and doctors would stop telling jokes. He would reach into the brain, with the tiniest hook and knife and cut away the thing that wasn’t needed. Among the children in the family, it was a contest to see who could make it all the way to the end without fainting and one by one they all hit the floor except for me. I never fainted, so every time I was allowed to go back.

  Which is all to say that while I have no medical knowledge, I was not an unhandy person to bring to a hospital. I knew how to ask for things. I knew how to ask for things repeatedly, firmly, and, when it was absolutely necessary, unkindly. “My friend, who has a more complicated understanding of pain than anyone working in this hospital, says she is in pain, right now, so tell me what you’re going to do.” I kept track of her pills, what they were, when she got them, and in what dosage. I knew what was shot into the plastic line of her IV tube, and when she was due for another round. I could always find the nurse. And when Lucy continued to cry, I’d find her again.

  I found the linen closet and made myself at home, my hive-studded feet stuck into a pair of outsize scuff slippers as I skated through the halls. I gave Lucy her baths and changed her sheets and talked a nurse into stowing the gel ice pack for her eyes in the staff’s refrigerator. The nurses were nice to me. Even if I was overvigilant about Lucy’s medications, I also held her up while she vomited and then cleaned her. I gave them one less patient to worry about.

  At eleven o’clock in the morning the junior doctors swept into the room in a pack, all men, all white, all dully pretty in that way plastic surgery residents so often seem to be. They had never seen Lucy before and they scanned over her chart as they stood at the end of her bed, asking me about my hives.

  “Miss Grealy,” the young man said in a slow, loud voice that one uses with the elderly and mentally handicapped, “You Need To Be Up And Walking.”

  This from a doctor who didn’t look old enough to order a beer in a bar.

  “I can’t walk,” Lucy said quietly. “My leg hurts.”

  “The fibula isn’t a weight-bearing bone,” he said brightly. “Its removal will have no effect on your ability to walk. Here, does this hurt?” He pressed against the bottom of her foot with his hand and she gasped, both from the pain and the stupid unkindness of the gesture.

  “Stop that,” I said, and put my hand on his shoulder. I felt myself walking into a tangle of Scottish drunks on the bridge in Aberdeen. I felt again that desire to tear apart a stranger’s neck with my hands. “Listen to her. She has a headache.”

  He took me for what I was, a woman too ugly for him to ever repair. “We’ll get her some Tylenol.”

  “It isn’t that kind of headache.”

  “Sometimes we can get a little headache after surgery.” His voice turned loud for Lucy. “It’s perfectly natural.”

  “I can’t stand it. It isn’t natural.” She started to cry, even though crying in front of a doctor, even a baby doctor, broke every rule of conduct.

  “She’s had more surgeries than you’ve sat in on,” I said. “If she says this is this worst headache of her life, then it is. Get her something.”

  He didn’t answer me. He left with his party, but five minutes later the nurse came in and gave her a shot of Demerol. When she asked for another one late in the day, she got it.

  The only real doctor around was Stuart Lewis, Lucy’s internist, who Lucy had spoken of with great fondness. Even when he showed up in a white coat, I never had any idea if he was a doctor visiting a patient or a guy who was visiting a sick friend in the hospital. Stuart was our age, which made him ancient by the standards I had seen around the halls, and while he looked over her chart and asked a few questions about how she was feeling, what he really wa
nted to talk about were the Orwell essays she had loaned him. The attention seemed to pick her up as much as the Demerol and she rallied for a little conversation. I liked him because he stayed for a long time and never once took notice of my hives.

  By late in the day I was barely standing. I wanted to scoot Lucy over and crawl in the bed beside her. When Lucie B-B came to relieve me at five, again dressed in white, I wanted to kiss her. She had come with all the energy I lacked, all of the positive chatter, the silly jokes. “LuLu!” she said. “You look gorgeous!” I made a mental note to myself to lighten up.

  There were so many people I’d heard about for years that I got to know in the hospital. Some of them, like Lucie, I’d only met for a minute in the past, one of us going out a door while the other was coming in, but now there was plenty of time to visit. Lucy loved to see her friends together. What she wanted was for us to talk to one another and let her take in the sound of our voices without having to muster up the energy to participate. She was the unspoken center of attention, the only reason why any of us would have been there at all, except for her friend Shahid, a poet who had a brain tumor who spent a great deal of time in the neuro ICU. He waved and chatted to all the nurses who flocked into Lucy’s room whenever he came by. I met Joy Nolan and Sophie Cabot-Black and Ben Taylor. I met Stephen Powers, the centerpiece of so many of Lucy’s childhood stories, her oldest friend. Other people, like Nancy Green-Medea and Marion Ettlinger, were people I knew from other places and hadn’t seen in ages. Her room became a sort of artists’ salon. I met half the writers living in New York as they filed through with soft chocolate truffles and stuffed animals and flowers. Andy came by all the time but Lucy complained about his visits. If he talked to her, she said he was expecting her to entertain him, and if he watched television or talked to someone else, he wasn’t paying enough attention to her. He was a valiant ex-boyfriend and he took the criticism in stride. He came back again the next day with flowers, and the next and the next.

  For the most part we were lucky and had the room to ourselves, but for one day there was a patient with dyed red hair and a loud voice on the other side of the curtain. She was in for back surgery and was sealed into a plastic brace like a turtle in a tight shell. When she dragged herself past Lucy’s bed to go to the bathroom, she would say how nice it was that some people had so many friends to take care of them, and would I be able to get her some ice and an extra blanket, which I did. On one of her passes, when Lucy was still very ill and crying quietly, the woman stopped at the foot of her bed.

  “One of the nurses told me that you’ve had thirty-six operations,” she said.

  Lucy told her that was true.

  “Well, I’ve had thirty-nine. Thirty-nine. Can you even imagine having that many?”

  We simply stared at her.

  “So listen to me, the voice of experience, I know it doesn’t seem now like things are going to get better, but they will. When you’ve lived through as much as I have, you’ll understand. God loves you, and He’s not giving you anything more than you can handle. That’s why you’ve got all these nice friends to take care of you.”

  “Okay,” Lucy said, sounding exhausted. The woman waited for more, some questions perhaps about what she had endured in her life. But none came, and so she shuffled away. I went to the nurses’ station and requested a transfer to another room.

  Watching Lucy in the hospital was like watching a fast-forward documentary of a little plant that pushes out of the ground, grows leaves, and then flowers, all in a matter of a minute. I carried her to the bathroom and to her chair to sit up, and then she could hobble to the chair, and then hobble to the hall holding on to me and her IV pole, and then just holding the pole, and then I would walk behind her, pushing the pole. She began to put out requests for meat loaf and mashed potatoes and flan, which poured into the hospital with all the regular guests. Soon the party at the foot of the bed was one that Lucy was attending, and the nurses came in and made us weed out our ranks. I was always the first to go. I had plenty of time with Lucy and anyway, I was grateful for the chance to walk down the street by myself and sit on a bench and try to take in everything that had happened. On the Fourth of July everyone came at night and packed into Lucy’s room and we watched the fireworks slice up the darkness over the East River. Lucy’s room had the most spectacular view I had ever seen.

  The next day I washed her hair and scrubbed her down well, dressed her in two clean hospital gowns, and took her downstairs. We didn’t ask permission (it was suspiciously easy to slip away unnoticed); we just went to the elevator and got on. The elevators at the N.Y.U. Medical Center were as packed as subway cars at rush hour and it always took a certain amount of aggressiveness to get inside, especially with a wheelchair. One of the elevators was designed for Orthodox patients and visitors and so it stopped on every single floor so that no one needed to push a button. Being on the twelfth floor, I tried to remember to avoid that one altogether.

  It was hot and bright and the courtyard was filled with smokers and family members and patients who weren’t so terribly sick trying to get a little sun. Lucy adored the heat and was thrilled to be out of the air conditioning. She tilted back her head as far as she could to feel the sun on her face. Everyone who passed us stopped and turned and stared with blatant curiosity, at me. Lucy couldn’t stop laughing. “This is my childhood dream come true,” she said. “I’ve just had major surgery and no one is looking at me. If only I had known to hang out with someone who had hives.”

  “I live to serve,” I said.

  When we got back to the floor, the nurses scolded us for taking the wheelchair without permission.

  The next day Lucy was discharged, one week after surgery. I got her in the cab and then stashed the enormous haul from the hospital in the trunk: flowers, plants, boxes of candy, toys, along with her luggage, crutches, and the walker. When we got back to the National Arts Club, I ran all of her possessions to the desk, paid the fare, and then picked Lucy up and carried her down the long, long hallway to the elevator, and to her apartment. “Thank God it’s my smallest friend who had a bone taken out of her leg,” I said, panting.

  “I’ve been training you for this for years,” she said, her arms looped around my neck like a happy bride.

  When I ran back downstairs to get the rest of her things the cabdriver was standing next to his car, waiting. “I wanted to make sure nobody took your stuff.”

  “Oh,” I said, touched and a little amazed. “Thank you.”

  He was a dark-skinned man, Indian or Pakistani, with graying hair and sad eyes. He wasn’t that much bigger than I was. “I would have carried her,” he said. “You got her out too fast and I didn’t know you were going to carry her all that way.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “She doesn’t weigh anything.”

  He looked at me and shook his head. “What kind of a woman can carry someone like that?”

  I carried Lucy a lot over the next couple of days. If she walked all the way from the elevator to the sidewalk, she would be completely spent and we would have to turn right back around. Even though she could walk, her leg was in terrible pain and she was easily exhausted. So I carried her through the building and around the corner to Park Avenue. It is amazingly easy to hail a taxi with a girl in your arms. Lucy was never happier than in the moments she was held and despite everything she had been through, she was incredibly happy to be out on the street in my arms. She had several friends who could carry her. There wasn’t any trick to it. She was a sparrow, a match. The trick would have been to figure out a way to do it all the time so that she could have always been happy. I carried her in and out of buildings, through rounds of doctor’s appointments. Dr. Stuart gave me a handful of Claritin, which decreased the insanity of my itching for a couple of hours and then, like every other pill I had tried, never worked for me again. Lucy collected prescriptions at every stop, Percoset and Darvoset and Tylenol III with Codeine. She liked to rotate them, as one made her constip
ated and another one kept her up and the other did very little for the pain. After I had taken her out for undercooked pancakes, I carried her home and went to the pharmacy. They gave me everything I wanted and I put it on my credit card and nobody asked me why I wasn’t Lucy Grealy or what I was doing with so many pills.

  At home Lucy and I stretched out on a couch that had been unfolded into a bed and watched the video of the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. Those had been our favorite songs to dance to in Iowa when Lucy had been so in love with David Byrne.

  “You know, I met him once,” she said as he slid across the little television screen wearing a big white suit.

  “You met David Byrne and you didn’t tell me?”

  “It was a couple of years ago, I think. There were writers and musicians reading together at Central Park and I ran into him backstage. I told him that when I was a teenager, hearing his music had saved my life. I guess it was a stupid thing to say but he was very nice about it. He was kind of shy.”