“The bad news,” Dr. Lola Bridesmith said, two weeks later, “is that it’s malignant.”
I had gone the next day to see the MD/nutritionist, and she took X-rays because I hadn’t had any in over ten years. These revealed a growth in my abdomen, and so an appointment was made with an oncologist cut-man for the next week.
I called off the tryst with Rachael, because sex and infatuation took a back seat to cancer and possible death.
“The good news is,” Dr. Bridesmith said, “that it doesn’t look like it has spread. After a full-body MRI you’ll have a simple operation, followed by three to five weeks of radiation treatments and then a two-stage regimen of chemotherapy. That approach might very well clear it up completely.”
“I have to have all that?”
“To be sure.”
* * *
Lana left me because, while trying to help around the apartment, she came upon the e-mails between Rachael and me. There were a few questionable pictures involved.
Rachael stopped responding after the mention of cancer, and Blythe somehow got it in her head that I had shorted her on the alimony payments and was taking me to court.
The good news was that my various employers had no problem keeping me busy. As long as I could keep awake and focused, they had work for me to do. Brian Jurgens, of de Palma Distributers, did suggest that I wear a wig when I addressed the senior officers of the company.
“You wouldn’t want to make them uncomfortable,” he said. “They might talk about replacing you if you remind them of their own mortality.”
Brian had been a philosophy major at Princeton, and so he gave highly sophisticated explanations for every pedestrian suggestion he made.
I was sleeping thirteen hours a day and working ten; seven days a week, seven days a week.
The MRI had revealed other growths, and so I had to have a few more biopsies. The good news was that the new polyps were, so far, benign. The operation cut out the malign growth. The radiation did nothing against the missing cancer, but a woman on the subway told me how healthy my fake hair looked. The good news was that there were no other malignancies—that they could see.
I lost most of my clients because I was making too many mistakes.
The forensic accountant that the New York State court forced me to hire found that I had shorted Blythe by exactly $549.27. The good news was that I didn’t have to pay it. The bad news was that because the suit had merit, however slim, I was ordered to pay Blythe’s $12,347.92 legal fees.
I’d saved enough money to live as I had been living for maybe three years; that was something.
The only thing good about chemotherapy was Maura O’Reilly. She was beautiful, I think; it’s hard to tell, because my memory was impacted by the disease and, to a greater degree, the cure. Maura was part of the MVNP, the Metro Visiting Nurse Program, and came every Tuesday and Friday to make up for the days that were lost to me in between. She had a lilt to her voice that came with her from Ireland, and there was something about the way she bathed me that made me feel as if I were just starting out—if I didn’t die first.
“What I love about you, Samson Diehl,” Maura said to me one Friday, “is your name and how you’re always trying to see the best in what’s going on.”
“Maura, I love you, but I’m about the most cynical person you’ve ever met.”
“Not at all.”
“How do you figure?”
“Didn’t you tell me that you hated Trump, but he was still the best among the Republicans, even if he wasn’t one himself?”
That made me laugh. I spent Wednesday and Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday waiting for Maura and vomiting. I was waiting for laughter, and she never failed, not once, to deliver.
The poisons I took, the doctors assured me, were wreaking more havoc on the possible cancer than they were on the rest of me. If there was any cancer left, it would be absent by the time I was dead and buried.
I weighed less than I had when I was thirteen.
The last month of the regimen had me bedridden. Maura would drop by most mornings just to see if I had expired in the night. Sometimes I’d come awake and see her folding my clothes and putting them into drawers.
“The good news is that you’re cancer-free,” oncology coordinator Myron Eddlesworth told me on a beautiful spring day. “We’ll have to monitor you for five years, but I’m very optimistic. Going through what you had to endure is like a Dark Ages peasant surviving famine or a war—even the bubonic plague. And here you are, with a full head of hair and a healthy physique.”
Yes, the other good news was that I was still thin. I had been eating Cherry Garcia like it was going out of production, but the cancer had been more ravenous than I.
I walked home from the doctor’s office on Thirty-Fourth Street and took the five flights of stairs to my room. I don’t know what made me think about it, but I searched out my collection of solid-gold coins from ancient Greece. I had purchased them over a twenty-seven-month period when I made triple salary working for a Persian billionaire who sold oil in the East, what people used to call the Orient.
I found the black-velvet box, but it was empty. All seventeen coins—with faces of Athena, Alexander, and even Socrates—were gone. Their value at that time was over two hundred thousand dollars. I was hoping to extend my convalescence with their sale, if that became necessary.
“Hello?” a young woman’s sweet voice said over the phone.
“Hi. My name is Sammy Diehl, and I’m calling to speak to Maura O’Reilly.”
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Diehl. Maura moved out.”
“Oh. Did she leave a forwarding number or address?”
“She went back to Ireland.”
“When?”
“Two weeks ago.”
I had a padded maroon chair sitting by the hallway door. There were always books and papers in the seat and clothes draped along the back. The only time I had ever sat in it was the day I saw it and bought it at the one and only Plantation Furniture outlet store.
I hung up the phone, dumped the clothes, books, and other detritus from the heavy chair, and pulled it over to the window. The wooden legs dragging on the oak floor sounded like an elongated fart. I sat down, thinking that the only good news was that the sun was shining and I could still feel its heat on my skin.
I wasn’t broke or homeless, dying at that particular moment, or fat for the time being. I had time to read, even if I didn’t use it, and to watch movies that had come and gone while I was subjected to a procedure that future ages would compare to medical bloodletting. My eyesight had worsened, but I could still see. Russia had retreated from Syria, for the moment, and data interpretation was still a profession that one could ply, if one so desired.