Joy finds Lily crying in the bath, water pink from the blood that trickles from her nose.
She tells Joy how grateful she is that she and Joshua broke up before he could see her like this, this sick, her body this destroyed. That is something she is truly thankful for—that Joshua didn’t have an opportunity to break up with her after he had seen her go through her greatest distress.
Joy wipes Lily’s face, helps her stand up, gives her a towel, dries her. “Spencer’s here,” Joy says quietly. “He brought you Jell-O.”
Lily is losing her power of speech. Not just of speech, but of sight, too. Certainly of smell; she can’t smell anything. And could she be wrong? Have the trees stopped rustling in the wind, or can she just not hear them anymore? New York is getting quieter, no fire engines, no police cars, no women screaming drunkenly at their boyfriends early on Sunday mornings instead of quietly going to church. Even the women are mute. Lily turns up the TV, sits closer.
Nearly four months shut off from the world. Four months.
Soon it will be over.
That is the light at the end of the tunnel. Not life, but death.
37
Beautiful People
Today was Sunday. Spencer was coming over soon. Before the phone rang, Lily had been sprawled out on her bed, crucifixion-style. She thought that death might be a day like this, cool wind, the golden yellow light reflected off the bare oaks, the gray maples, soft sounds of Sunday cars, Sunday strollers, the cat sunning on a window across the yard, the old lady down below in her garden sitting in her coat having her coffee and reading the paper. There would be no pain after death, no bleeding, no vomiting, no weakness. Just happiness, and lightness of heart—
And that’s when the phone rang.
In heaven there would be no phone. No one would ever interrupt you. You’d never feel annoyed or frustrated. Death would be an eternal Sunday.
And now, I submit to you that no matter how bad you thought you were feeling on Sunday, it wasn’t as bad as you thought.
Maybe it was her father. There was always that possibility.
“Hello?” Lily said, expectantly.
“Finally! She picks up the phone!”
It wasn’t her father. Lily struggled with the next line. “Hi, Mom.”
“Well, that’s a fine hello. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. What’s the matter?”
Lily’s mother didn’t sound drunk, her speech wasn’t slurred, wasn’t slow, it was just a little sharp.
“So how are you?”
“I’m good, thanks,” said Lily. She thought of asking her mother how she was, but didn’t care and couldn’t fake it.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how I am?”
Big breath in. “How are you, Mother?”
“I’m fine now. Don’t worry. The tumor was benign.”
Lily closed her eyes. “What…tumor?”
“What, your father didn’t tell you? He’s too busy telling you lies about me, not actual information about my health. So what’s the matter with you? Are you still taking that chemo?”
“Yes. Still taking that chemo. Four more treatments.”
“And then you’re all better?”
“I don’t know.”
“So what’s wrong now? You sound like you swallowed a can of worms.”
“No, no, I’m fine.” Lily didn’t say anything else.
Allison said slowly, “I’ve been meaning to call you more often, but I’ve been really sick, Lil. Your father didn’t tell you…I had to go to the hospital. They took X-rays of my lungs. They think I might have a spot on one of them. God!”
“Surprising,” Lily said. “He didn’t tell me.”
“You know you could pick up the phone once in a while and call your mother. Your arm wouldn’t fall off.”
“I’ve been busy, Mom.”
“Doing what?”
“I’ve been very, very sick.”
“Oh, stop being so melodramatic. You’re just like your father. You should hear the stories he tells about Andrew to his former co-workers. He’s always on the phone with them. He’s got Andrew practically in the White House already, after that whole missing girl fiasco was cleared up. How is your brother?”
“I have no idea.” Lily had not spoken a private word to Andrew since May.
“Hmm. You don’t call him either. Well, that’s surprising. You know the doctor told me I was depressed. He said I was clinically depressed. He put me on Prozac, but it didn’t agree with me. I kept throwing it up.”
Lily, the phone slightly away from her ear, turned sideways on the bed so she could look out the window and smell the air. She breathed in and out to teach herself detachment. She was quiet. “Mom, I have to go.”
“Go? I just called you. We haven’t spoken for months! Why is that? Do I not call you? Do I not leave messages?”
“I don’t know, do you?” Did her mother think she had left messages with a machine? Lily said, “Sometimes when you call, I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
“I don’t know why, I’m speaking perfect English. Well, I’m calling you now. Tell me how you are.”
“I told you, I’m great.”
“Grandma says you’re hanging in there. Amanda, too. Annie is really concerned for you, she is being a very good sister.”
“Mom…do you know, I’ve been sick since August, and this is the first time you and I have spoken?”
“You never pick up your phone! No matter when I call, you don’t pick up. And when you do, you sound like this.”
“How do I sound?”
“You sound almost as depressed as I am, Lil.”
Lily made an exasperated sound. If she had any hair left on her body, it would have all stood on end. “Got. To. Go. Mom,” she said through a closed mouth. A perfectly good Sunday ruined. She couldn’t press the TALK button sharply enough. So dissatisfying. She threw the phone across the bedroom at the opening door and hit Spencer in the shin as he was walking in.
He raised his hands in surrender. She turned away to the window.
They watched LA Story because Lily was convinced the answer to life’s riddle was there.
She didn’t find it there.
So they watched Parenthood. Maybe it was there.
Spencer said, “Tell the truth, are you watching it for the answer to life’s riddle, or are you watching it for Keanu?”
“Am I that transparent?” said Lily.
The movie was about fathers and sons, but Lily couldn’t help thinking about mothers and daughters. When Spencer asked why she was not laughing, she PAUSED the movie and turned to him. “Do you know what the problem with my mother is?”
He turned to her. “Well, you’ve told me. She’s got some issues.”
“She is too beautiful,” said Lily. “And worse—she’s always thought so. Not just beautiful, but more beautiful than anyone else. You’ve seen pictures of my mother in Maui.”
“Yes,” said Spencer noncommittally.
“What? She’s still beautiful. Older now.”
“That’s not it.”
Lily knew it wasn’t. “I know she’s not looking as well as she used to. But I’m telling you, something happens to beautiful people. They think that something extra is owed to them by life, by God, by all the people around them. They think their life has to be better, more dramatic, happier—in color, not black and white.”
“Everyone wishes their life were happier.”
Lily shook her head. “No. Not like beautiful people. They walk this earth, their chin up to the rest of us, and think that great happiness, great love, great joy is their right and their prerogative. Passion as the entitlement of the beautiful, the way power is the entitlement of the rich.” Lily paused. “Especially when it comes to love. Beauty and love become somehow synonymous. How can plain people have great love? They can’t, that’s how. They can have average love, mediocre love, but their hearts can’t soar. Only beautiful hearts can soar.”
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“I think you’ve hit on the nail right there,” said Spencer. “Beautiful people don’t necessarily have beautiful hearts.”
“But it doesn’t matter, don’t you see? You don’t fall in love with a heart. You fall in love with a woman’s face, with her body, with her hair, with her smell. That’s first, everything else is secondary. My mother’s beauty when she was young was so extreme that she didn’t understand how every man who met her didn’t love her in extremis.”
“Did your father?”
Lily nodded. “He did. Another problem—after nearly forty-three years of marriage, she still wants him to.”
Spencer didn’t say anything for a while, and Lily thought he was thinking about what she just told him, but the next thing that came out of Spencer’s mouth was, “Was Amy beautiful?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Spencer!” Lily turned to the TV and pressed PLAY on the remote, cranking up the volume. Leaning over, he took the remote out of her hands and pressed PAUSE.
“Why do you always do that?” Lily said, not looking at him. “Why do you always, always turn the conversation back to that?”
“Because that is what I do, and you’re not answering me.”
“Yes, she was beautiful, yes, yes, yes, but I don’t want to talk about her right now, I don’t want to talk about her or him, or about them. I don’t want to think about them, can’t you understand?”
She fell quiet, he fell quiet. The movie remained on PAUSE. Finally Spencer said, “Tell me, was your father handsome?”
Lily sighed. “Very. He was very popular with the girls, my grandmother tells me. But he didn’t think much of his face except as a way to get girls. He thought much more of his brain. He was too smart to give much credence to his external features.”
“But your mother…”
“She was also smart, but she didn’t care a whit about that. When she looked in the mirror she saw Botticelli. And all the men around her saw it, too. So when she fell in love—with someone before my father—she thought it was going to be forever, because her beauty seemed eternal. So when he ended it after only a few months, she was shocked, she couldn’t believe it.”
“Why did he end it?”
“I don’t know. She never said. I don’t think she’s ever told anyone why, even my father. But we know one thing—she burned two cigarette butts into her wrists by way of dealing with this unfathomable rejection.”
Spencer raised his eyebrows. Lily smiled. “Told you. Cuckoo as a bird.”
“So tell me, who is Andrew like?”
“Spencer!”
“All right, all right.” He took a breath. “You know, you’ve turned out surprisingly well.”
“Hmm, no, I don’t think so.”
Spencer was quiet. “Do you think love belongs only to the beautiful?”
Lily pondered. There are things about you I could never love. “Yes,” she said reluctantly. “I don’t want to admit it, but I do. I don’t want to believe that Joshua would have left me anyway, but I can’t help feeling he would not have left had I been more beautiful.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” said Spencer. “And didn’t that boy leave your mother despite her beauty?”
“Yes, but that just confirmed to my mother that inside her was a black hole that her beauty hid from the rest of the world but not so well from her lovers.” Lily fell silent. Did Spencer just say, I don’t see how that’s possible? She stared at him from across the couch but he had turned back to the TV. “Andrew is nothing like my mother,” Lily said, pressing PLAY. “To answer your stupid question.”
Spencer smiled. “Liliput,” he said, “stop denying your rightful place in the universe. You don’t want your mother’s extreme beauty, nor her black hole. Look where it leads.”
The doorbell rang. Not the downstairs bell. The apartment door bell. Lily pressed PAUSE. It was six in the evening.
“Are you expecting someone?” Spencer got up.
“No,” she said. “Maybe it’s Rachel. Go see.”
Spencer went to the door to go see. Slowly he turned to Lily. “I don’t know how to say this. It’s your family.”
Lily put her hand over her face. “Oh, no! Which ones?”
“Um—all of them.”
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” The doorbell rang again, but Lily’s confusion was so great, she couldn’t even get up from the couch.
“I have to open the door, Lily.”
“Spencer, they’re going—” He let them in.
To have a cow, Lily thought, seeing even before she saw, the looks on their faces when they walked in, Amanda, Anne, Grandma, holding trays of pasta, of brownies, pitchers of Kool-Aid, bags of potato chips and found Spencer, extremely casual, comfortable, worn-in jeans, a sweatshirt, his off-duty weapon on the coffee table, his boots by the door, letting them into a tiny, darkened apartment where there was only him and Lily.
No one, not even Spencer, had any idea what to say.
It was Lily who spoke first. “Grandma, Annie, Mand, you remember Detective O’Malley.”
They said nothing, still holding the food out.
He took his gun, his jacket, put his boots on. “I’ll see you, Lily.”
“Yeah, see ya.”
After he closed the door behind him, they whirled on her, and she fell back on the couch. They stared at her so accusingly demanding an answer, an explanation, but she didn’t know what to say. Did he come on police business, harassing a girl in her tenth week of chemo? Or did he come to sit with her awhile?
And which was worse?
“I don’t know what you want me to say. He gives Joy Sundays off.”
“Of all the people in New York City, you let that man into your house?”
It was a short, stifled visit. Twenty minutes later they were all out the door and Lily was alone.
38
Cancer Shmancer
Lily’s family stopped speaking to her, except for Anne, who was remarkably still calling and asking Lily if she needed anything, and Lily tiredly would say, “I need nothing. Do you need anything?” Amanda had stopped calling. Grandma regressed back into her house, citing Joy and her returned agoraphobia as the reasons she no longer had to come and see Lily. Her father didn’t call.
But it was her mother who made things clear for her—oh, why does Lily ever pick up that damn phone! Her mother who said to her one fine cold day, “Everyone’s furious with you, you know, for taking up with that scalawag.”
“What scalawag?”
“You know very well who I’m talking about. Aside from the fact that he’s old enough to be your father, have you got absolutely no shame? He wants to put your brother behind bars for something he didn’t do. Your brother!”
“I haven’t taken up with him, what are you talking about?”
“Oh, come now! Stop playing games. Yes, there’s a generation between you two, but you’re a twenty-five-year-old woman, not a child. He has set out to destroy your family and you’re letting him in your house? He is sent by the devil. He is the enemy. There is something wrong with you, Lily, if you can’t see that. Really, you simply have no soul and no conscience.”
“Mom, what are you talking about? I have cancer. He brings me food…”
“Oh, cancer shmancer. Don’t use your cancer as an excuse, Lil, as a weapon against the rest of us. You still have to make good decisions, smart decisions. Why can’t you tell him your brother is innocent?”
“I do, and I don’t want to talk about this. I have to go.”
“Amanda tells me your quality of life is terrible. She says you’re not doing anything to help yourself, you’re not going out, you’re not exercising, or reading, or painting. No wonder you’ve taken up with him. You’re bored, Lil, but you need to get yourself together.”
“I’m together, Mom. Are you together?”
“Why do you think your brother doesn’t want to speak with you anymore—”
Lily slammed down the phone.
How c
ould she say this, how could she say this, how—could—she—say—this.
Groaning, Lily lay on her bed, trying to drown out the words that were pounding like drums in her entrails. Mothers…so much power, so many knives…so many ways to stick it to you.
Oh, why in the name of all that was holy did Lily pick up the damned phone…
Dare she think it? She would prefer her mother bitterly drunk and unavailable than her mother like this and blind sober.
The cumulative effects of four months of chemo were destroying her. There was no joy in knowing it would soon be over, because every single day felt as if it would all be over. As in, oh, would that it all be over.
Just two more treatments. One was right before Christmas.
For Christmas, Lily reluctantly went with Spencer—who would not take no for an answer—to his mother’s house in Farmingville. She didn’t want to go and said she was going to Andrew’s, but Spencer said, “You told me that lie at Thanksgiving and then I found out you were here by yourself. You are not going to be by yourself on Christmas, Lily, that’s all there is to it.”
So she went.
In the car Lily said, “How are you going to explain me?”
“I’m a big boy. Why do I have to explain anything?”
Spencer’s family was an army division without the discipline. He introduced her as “Lily.” As in, “This is Lily.” And that was all. Two of the sisters—she couldn’t remember anyone’s name—did a slow double take, from him to her and back to him for a lingering look—and that was all. The family shouted, they drank, the music was loud, the children were louder, the adults tried to out-shout both. Lily’s bald head, unprotected by an acoustic curtain of hair had every sound emission echo and bounce off it until the head became a large red ball of viral nerve endings, one more whisper and she would be spun into a spectacular neural overload. Still, the kids didn’t care about her head, they all wanted to touch it, despite the shouts from the adults, including “Uncle Spence,” to “leave the girl alone!”
“Uncle Spence already has a girlfriend,” said Sam, Spencer’s eight-year old nephew who was turning forty-seven next month. “She is in Chicago with her family. Mommy says he only brought you because you have cancer.”