Lily went to close the windows, trying to suppress her ear to ear delight. After putting on a cardigan, she settled into her side of the couch, like always, and he into his, but watching a simple movie was less simple and was greatly improved by its newly acquired lack of simplicity. Something about Spencer looking at her breasts hit Lily right in the stomach with its delicious pleasure. He had always put up such a stoic, sexless front. But this Spencer might just be a man!
She knew what it was. She knew exactly what it was. It was the new weight. It was the Milanos and Krispy Kremes, where they had settled between her skin and her bones, in her shoulders, on her chest, it was the vanilla ice cream on her breasts, Chunky Monkey ice cream on her thighs, on her hips, all round, all around.
Soo Min, Hannah, Dana were right. Perhaps even Spencer was not immune to the creme custard sways of hips, the roundness of buttocks, softness of thighs, stretched-out calves, eager nipples pushing out through sheer cotton, bring it on, baby, where is the cheesecake, where’s the butter and the marmalade? Maybe when I get enormous he won’t be able to keep not just his eyes off me. And so Lily ate and ate voraciously, and when she went shopping she didn’t buy just fleece sweatshirts from the Gap like before, but velour H. Starlet snug sexy sweats from Bloomingdales for $120, that were sooo low rise with silk stitching—kind of like how Lily would describe herself. When she put them on, the top triangle of her black thong showed, the tops of her newly returned round buttocks showed. She shopped thoroughly at Victoria’s Secret, at LaPerla, at Sak’s lingerie department. Lily needed a new apartment for all the g-strings, all the lacy, see-through bras she was buying.
She put mousse in her hair to spike it up, and balm and gloss on her lips, and lots of it, as if she were a thirteen-year-old at a roller skating rink, hoping to catch the eye of the sixteen-year-old, standing in the corner with his teenage buddies. She put lotion on her body, to make it softer, to make it smell nice so when he sat on the couch he could smell her. She found a pair of jeans to die for in Bergdoff’s. When Spencer schlepped in one Thursday at eight, changed into his Levi’s and his Yankees baseball jersey and his Yankees cap, and saw Lily with her new high-heeled boots and her new jeans, with her reddest lips, her blackest mascara, and newly gelled clumpy hair, he stood looking at her as if he were in the wrong apartment. “Where are we going?” he said after a moment.
“Odessa,” Lily stammered.
“Oh, okay. I thought for a sec I’d forgotten something. Are you going clubbing after I leave here, Lil?” Spencer said, smiling. “Did that good old Rachel finally fix you up?”
Her low-slung spirits just slung lower, Lily mumbled something incoherent in return, and dinner was a silent affair, after which he dropped her back home and without a note in his voice said cheerfully, “Have a really good time tonight. You deserve to have some fun.”
Just great, just friggin’ great.
44
The Muse
Lily started, ever so slowly, to get a following. The same people came every Saturday to see if she had anything new. She started to think about her week—Sundays, she was in the studio, painting before Spencer came. Mondays and Wednesdays she traveled the breadth of Manhattan, sketching possible subjects and objects into her book. Tuesdays after the hospital, she had lunch with Spencer, and then painted at home. Thursdays she sketched Brooklyn, because she was with Grandma. Fridays and Saturdays, she rendered the sketches into acrylics or watercolors, or oil pastels. Very rarely did she do an oil on canvas, though she loved them best. They just took too long and never dried, but they did always sell first, giving her the idea that she simply wasn’t charging enough for them—but here was the thing, no matter how much she charged, they always sold, and they sold first.
Would Lily consider painting live nudes on oil on canvas? Would she consider painting the Serengeti plain for a baby’s nursery? What about a woman naked and very pregnant? A wife and a husband making love on their tenth wedding anniversary?
On oil on canvas from memory Lily painted Spencer’s face. From memory his whole person. His hands first, knotty and tense, she noticed them right after the eyes for expression and the lips for movement. Spencer was standing next to his desk and the phone was to his ear. He was looking right at Lily, not smiling. He was not a smiler. He had strong white teeth. He had a great smile. He just didn’t smile much.
He was standing wearing gray slacks, a black belt, a white shirt open at the collar, a thin black tie loosely on. His clothes were loose, too, he was slim; Spencer, who looked as if he ran twice around the damned reservoir three times a week. Lily painted him with compact deltoids under his white shirt, and biceps and pecs. He was all in shades of black and white except for his lips and eyes, for which she procured blues and reds, and gave dye to his eyes and mouth. The artist in her appreciated the esthetics of both. His mouth was—from an artist’s perspective—a perfect human mouth. A sharp line of the plump seagull on top, sitting on a plump bowl at the bottom, a Cupid mouth like a wrapped gift from God. With slight shame Lily realized how well she knew Spencer’s lips, how etched they were in the place in her heart from which she painted. His eyes deep-set, open wide, day blue, but relentless—a bloodhound’s eyes, framed by his thin black-rimmed glasses. Lily gave Spencer thick wavy hair, because his long hair meant no sickness in her. She gave his face stubble and cheekbones and a set square jaw and an exposed, large forehead. She was embarrassed at the care she took in painting him.
“This is not me,” Spencer said to her when he saw the picture. “I’ve never looked this good. Where are the bloodshot eyes, the bags under them, the pale face, the coffee stains on the tie – and my shirt is pressed, come on! This is definitely art, not life.”
“Who is going to want to buy you if I draw you the way you are?” Lily said teasingly. “I’m trying to make a living here.”
On the street on Saturday, she refused to sell it, even though she was offered a thousand dollars for it(!).
Spencer came by, looked at the picture of himself standing inclined on an easel. “I told you no one wants to buy me.”
“That’s because you’re not for sale,” Lily replied.
Just then a woman walked by looking. “How much is that doggie in the window?” she asked, pointing at Spencer.
“Sorry, display only, not for sale.”
The woman shrugged at Spencer, then did a double take, first at the painting, then back at him. Spencer shrugged himself. “Picture’s better, right?”
“She is obviously very talented,” said the woman, walking away.
“Nice,” said Spencer, turning to Lily.
It doesn’t do you justice, Lily wanted to say, busying herself with counting her money.
45
A Masters Course in Chemo
Mid-March, another Tuesday, another blood test.
Lily usually waited about an hour. This time it was closer to two. When DiAngelo came back he said nothing at first. He was quiet, and Joy, though all gussied up, was quiet, and she wasn’t smiling, and he wasn’t looking at her. “Did I ever mention Alkeran to you?” DiAngelo asked.
“No, what is that?”
“Just a little pill. You take it three times a week. Important not to skip.”
“What’s it for?”
“Just to keep you all nice and clean inside.”
Lily said in a low voice, “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. Remember I told you this is a process? Well, sometimes the process takes a tiny step back. We’ve taken gigantic leaps forward. But your white blood cells are increasing again…”
Lily shook her head.
“And your reds are not producing as well as I’ve been hoping. You’re still on the low end for the counts on those. So a little maintenance therapy…”
Lily kept shaking her head.
“Don’t worry, this is why we check you every week.”
“That’s impossible!”
“I know. I’m sorry. But Alkeran is easy an
d very effective. You can take it by mouth with a little prednisone, it’s only for a few weeks, and it’ll fix you right up.”
“Please. It’s impossible.”
“Compared to what you’ve been through, it’s nothing.”
“Please, no. No, no, no.”
“Lily.”
She couldn’t take it.
DiAngelo and Joy sat near her bed, saying nothing.
Alkeran would make her nauseated again, and it had an unfortunate side effect of destroying the very bone marrow it was trying to save. It would reduce her ability to withstand infection—she’d be the girl in the plastic bubble tent again, afraid of a Kleenex in someone else’s hands. A white thin soft tissue scarier than Scream 3. No more public places, no more movie theatres, lunches, parades. Possibly no more art sales on Saturday mornings.
Maintenance therapy! Maintenance therapy, as if Lily is an old car in need of an oil change, a tune-up, possibly new belts and hoses all around.
She stayed in the hospital through the morning for another aspiration biopsy, for a quick red cell transfusion. The biopsy showed that the marrow was once again producing blastocytes. Her sister Anne showed up, in an Armani suit paid for by the lottery money, and threw up her wool-jacketed arms. “I told you,” Anne hissed to the doctor out in the hall when she was outside of Lily’s hearing, or when she thought she was outside of Lily’s hearing, because Lily could hear. “I told you this three months ago. How long are you going to torture her? You gave her false hope, you kept her artificially healthy, and now look. Have you any idea how excited she was, thinking it was never going to come back?”
“I know she’s disappointed, but this is very normal, this is nothing to worry about yet.”
“Maybe not for you.”
“Mrs. Ramen, she’s got cancer. This is what cancer does. So we treat it again. And again if we have to. She’s entering a small relapse, we want to stop it. Lily understands that.”
“She’s only pretending to understand that! I don’t understand it.”
“Anne!”
Anne continued talking.
“Anne!” Lily called again. She walked out into the hall, dragging her IV stand with her. “Anne, can I see you at my bed, please?”
And inside the hospital room she said, “Stop it, this isn’t helping.”
“He told us it would be all gone!”
“And it was all gone. All except one little cell that the January biopsy couldn’t detect. And that one little cell is now two million. We have to do what we have to do.”
“Oh my God, oh my God.” Anne grabbed her hair as if it were she who was about to have more chemo. “When is this going to end? When is this going to be over? How long are you going to have to suffer like this?”
Lily turned away. Her guess was, until the end.
After she was dressed and released, she said no to being accompanied home, and slowly walked down Fifth Avenue by herself, pulling closed her red Prada rainslicker, and pulling her beret tighter over her head. She opened her huge red umbrella. It was raining.
Lily came inside the nearly empty St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 51st and Fifth and sat in the front pew. She took off her beret for respect, and cried because she thought the burning incense made her cry, and a priest in robes came by and sat next to her. It must have been her tears and her clumpy thin hair that drew him to her; he must have seen the things she could not express except through painting. “Are you a Catholic?” he asked.
“I’m a New York Catholic,” replied Lily. When he raised his eyebrows in a question, she said, “Means I haven’t been to church since my confirmation.”
“Ah, yes. Many people who come to me are like you.”
“So they do come, eventually?”
“They do. Looking for answers.”
He was an older priest, very kind, and gray, and soothing. “I saw you crying. And I wanted to tell you that in some of our churches during mass, the babies would cry, cry so loud that we couldn’t go on with the service, and so we would have a room for them where their mothers could take them, and they would spend mass there. It was called the crying room.”
And Lily said, “I wish I had a mother who could take me to the crying room.” For a few moments she said nothing else.
At last she spoke. “Trouble is, I think my mother went in there once herself and never left.”
“Many people who come to me are similarly afflicted,” said the priest. “The Bishop of Rome also goes into the crying room. Did you know that? Right before he puts on his papal robes. The mightiest, the mystics, they all go in.”
Lily listened, nodded, tried to understand.
“My advice is, whatever you can do to give yourself comfort, do. Whatever you can do. Isn’t there anything that brings you joy?”
Oh, God, why was she always eking out a long hour of comfort when what she desperately needed was an eternal moment of extreme distress? Well, she had her distress now, didn’t she? Lily glanced at him through the veil of her own emotions. Saw something familiar around his eyes, something Claudia Vail carried, a knowing weariness. “Do you know my grandmother?”
The priest smiled. “She is from the war generation then? Where we’ve seen things we can’t forget and these things-enable us to find comfort in the smallest things?”
“Well, if only the rest of us could’ve been starved and tortured. We’d all be better off,” said Lily without rancor.
“What’s your name?”
“Lily.”
“What a wonderful name. Lily, you’re upset about the things you don’t have? What about all the things you do have? What about all the things you don’t have that you don’t want?”
“I don’t know about any of that. I have too many things that I don’t want. I have cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“My best friend has disappeared without a trace. I don’t want that either. No one can find her, no one knows where she is.”
“How awful for her parents.”
“Yes. But explain to me my mother. She has suffered greatly, yet can’t find comfort anywhere.”
“Ah, no. Your mother must find great comfort in her suffering.”
Lily struggled up. “I think she must. So where’s this crying room, Father? Take me there.”
The priest made the sign of the cross on her. “You carry it with you wherever you go, my child. That’s the mark of the afflicted. We all go inside. The question is, do we leave there? Do we remain there? Who do we drag in there with us?”
She came home and didn’t go into her studio, didn’t go into her bedroom. She took off her shoes, and went into the kitchen to get a drink, and was weighted down, pulled down by the anchors of her life, and suddenly she found herself on the floor, against the wall. She couldn’t get up.
The phone rang. Lily picked it up without looking at the caller ID. She thought it was Spencer.
But it was Jan McFadden calling to invite her and Paul and Rachel to an eighth birthday party for her two children. “With Amy not here, I think it’ll be better for all of us to see you kids. Will you promise you’ll come?”
Lily wanted to tell her about herself, but Mrs. McFadden sounded like she herself was down on the tiles of her kitchen floor. “We’ll be there,” Lily said. “Of course we will.”
She heard the familiar knock, and then the key in the door. She heard his voice. “Lil?” He dropped the keys on the table, came into the kitchen. She was on the floor and didn’t look up. He stood silently in the archway, and then sat down on the floor by her side. “Hey,” he said.
“You must’ve heard,” Lily said dully.
“Yes, when I didn’t hear from you the whole day, I called DiAngelo. But what are you so glum about? So you take a little pill. I take twenty Advil a day, do you see me on the floor?”
Lily turned to him, her face wet.
“Come on,” he said, jumping up and putting his hands under her arms to lift her. “I’ll take you to Odessa, sparing no exp
ense, and then Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas is playing at Union Square.”
Spencer helped her down the stairs. He was wearing his suit, a dark raincoat. He opened the large red umbrella for her, he held it over their heads. He gave her his arm, and this time Lily took hold of him as they walked to Odessa in the March rain. She told him about the priest and the crying room. Pensively he rubbed his chin, saying nothing but seeming to agree. At the movies he bought them just one popcorn, but ate most of it himself while Lily’s hands remained on her sad lap.
While walking back home, Spencer, who knew quite a bit about music from before her time, sang the Bob Dylan song from the movie, “Things Have Changed.” “I’ve been trying/to get away as far from myself as I can…” he sang.
Lily had dozens of requests for paintings of children, nurseries, dogs, cats, some fish and an anaconda. She turned most of them down. How to tell them that she was taking Alkeran every other day now, and any day Dr. D. was going to tell her she needed to go back into the hospital for an infusion of VePesid. She made self-portraits, of herself sick, losing her hair, bald, with a Hickman in her chest, and then just the scar, and then just eyes on a page with black anguish around them. Spencer took that one. And gave her some advice. He said she was undercharging for her work, which was why she was drowning in requests. The next Saturday Lily started charging more and the requests died down a bit.
46
The Mighty Quinn
Lily, Paul, and Rachel took the train to Port Jefferson at the end of March to go to Amy’s siblings’ birthday party. Lily, who had stopped eating like she used to, and whose hair had stopped growing out at the same uneven but flagrant rate, was nonetheless holding up. Her good blood was being killed by the Alkeran, but her bad blood was being killed by it, too—so somehow it was all working out. The party was on a Saturday. When she saw Spencer two days earlier, she didn’t tell him she was going. She didn’t know why she didn’t tell him. Perhaps it was because she was entertaining thoughts of calling her brother’s house, which was just a few miles away from Amy’s. Maybe it was because Lily hadn’t seen the detective in Spencer’s blue eyes for a while and didn’t want to.