Nov

A stage-three love story

Photo by Mark Haymond
I was late to class. All around me, the kids looked like Christmas had been canceled. The professor walked up and down the rows dropping blue books as he went. When one landed on the desk of the girl next to me, she looked like she was going to puke. She stared at it like it was an organ in a jar. “What is this about?” I asked with a spooky calm.
“The midterm.” She looked at me like I was an organ in a jar.
“No shit?” Now the entire class was looking at me the same way. “Man, I totally forgot.” I gingerly took out a pencil and dug in.
This was the best part of my day, after all. Jess was at home with a pretty nasty case of the ole Ovarian Cancer. A surprise midterm seemed like a lazy Saturday watching Looney Tunes compared to being at home. I didn’t have much of a life before I knew Jess. That is not exaggeration. I literally wasn’t on this earth for very long when we first crossed paths. Jess and I rode the same bus to grade school starting in the second grade. She was actually in the first grade, so I was way too cool to acknowledge her existence, but she was there, toe headed and buried behind glasses thicker than the safety glass they use on basement windows. For me, she would still have been a catch; the me with the three missing teeth, speech impediment, pigeon-toed feet; the me who still sometimes meekly emerges under the strain of harsh criticism or a bullying tone.
Years passed, miles grew between us. She lost the glasses. Actually, she donated them to NASA and they now make up over fifty percent of the Hubble space telescope’s advanced lenses (of course I’m kidding). My teeth grew in, I learned to properly say the letter ‘r.’ Pubescence sprung on us with a whole new set of awkward deficiencies, and we met again. She was lovely, long and blond, skinny and funny, smarter than me in every way. I liked her, in the off-putting way of a stoned fifteen-year-old, but I never told her. We hung out in basements and in front of pizza joints. I made her laugh.
More years. I moved to Texas after high school and spent some time trying to find myself and sleeping on couches. I found myself (I had been on a couch in Texas the whole time!) and moved to Mississippi. There, I tried love and decided it wasn’t for me. I packed my car with everything I owned and fled the Old South. When I crossed the Waffle House/IHOP line that separates the South from the North, I took a deep breath and swore off love forever. I spent the next three years celibate, dodging women like bullets. That’s the way I choose to remember it, at least.
Every now and then, my mother would tell me that a pretty young artist had told her to tell me hello. I didn’t recognize her last name, she had gotten married, I assumed it was just another stalker following me online. She sent me a friend request on a social network and I turned her down, saying that I was only friends with people who I was actually friends with. I did this with some trepidation, having browsed through her pictures, but that was my policy, and the years without sex had made it fairly easy to ignore a beguiling smile. Jess told me who she was and I excepted her online friendship gladly.
From the very beginning, we wrote every night. She was divorced, a new love-hater, and I welcomed her to our ranks. As the days bled into weeks, I found myself checking the computer earlier and earlier. If there was no new message, I would read the old one, take it apart, look for any sign that she was thawing like me. There were never any misspellings, there was never any lazy internet shorthand, every message read like a letter on paper. She never said LOL, which may have been a deal breaker at that early stage. What we didn’t know was that as our feelings for each other grew, something else was growing as well.
She avoided me for months before finally agreeing to meet me at a local dive bar. When she walked in, my life as I had known it was over. Most of her head was shaved, she had a pokey blond Mohawk, and she was still the most feminine creature there. She didn’t see me, and I let her walk by my booth. I needed a second to say goodbye to my old life. I actually thought that at the time. How rare to see things as they truly are when they are happening. She turned around and looked at me and I exhaled years of bitterness and cynicism in a single “hello.”
The first kiss was in her driveway. I fought the urge to chew her face off. If you think that sounds crazy, you have never been in love. We got a place together, a hellhole with a landlord and a basement that were both usually full of crap. Things were good.
A year later, she got sick. Jess was 27 years old, a drug-free nonsmoking vegetarian. I eat meat every day, smoked for a decade, practically lobbied the universe for cancer. By some cosmic spin of a roulette wheel, it went to her instead.
It started with pain in her abdomen. The problems were misdiagnosed as ovarian cysts, a fairly common, but painful, malady. It was as if she walked into a hospital with a bullet in her head and was told that it was a headache, go home and take some Advil. After months and several hospital visits, the truth was revealed. Her gynecologist, the one who had misdiagnosed her, stood in front of her parents and me, hat in hand, and told us to get a good oncologist.
It was stage three. Her oncologist sounded like a radio ad for a closing Saturn dealership. “Fifty percent chance of survival! Everything must go!”
The surgery was arduous; the recovery seemed like a dark lifetime.
“But wait, there’s more! Buy a Saturn today and I will throw in six months of intensive chemotherapy! No money down! I will even throw in a free Beyonce wig!”
When they pulled out her reproductive system, they added some new hardware. A port is a temporary diaphragm, made of rubber and metal that is inserted inside the chest to allow smoother and more complete insertion of chemo medicines. The outline of the apparatus is clearly visible through the skin. It’s wild; “We are going to take these ovaries, but don’t worry, we left you a little extra something. Just think of it as a third nipple.”
There are places where everything is more real, pockets where we can’t hide from the truth. A room crowded with oncology patients getting chemotherapy is one of those places. I have been in cathedrals, stood within Stonehenge. When it comes to spiritual strength, these piles of rocks don’t have anything on Tri-County Oncology and Hematology. It is a shrine to the temporary and fleeting nature of life, and the coffee is always fresh.
Before Jess got sick, I was in the clinic on business. I could feel the eyes of the damned on me. I felt pity for the patients, lined up in rows reading magazines and watching soap operas while young nurses hooked them to machines and attempted to poison the death out of them. Once Jess was a patient there I understood something about the people hooked to those tubes; they were more alive than I have ever been. While I looked at them with pity, they were looking through me. I was just another shell, wasting my life by not loving it as much as I should.
When I think about that place now, I can smell the German chocolate blend coffee, and I can see Jess in that chair, tubes poking out, throwing up gang signs for the camera.
Work was a daily exercise in zen. A customer would call with a complaint or the boss would lash out, and I had to fight the urge to smile. It was like watching children argue about something ridiculous and having to pretend that what they are saying is important. “Don’t you care that you are two minutes late?” I didn’t, of course, but I wished that I did. All I wanted in the world was to care about the insignificant things that plague most people.
School was my escape, a universe outside of cancer, or as much outside as possible. My professors were understanding and kind, only occasionally looking at me like an unknown specter carrying an unknowable weight. My grades stayed good, in spite of the fact that I didn’t buy a textbook for three semesters. I still don’t remember much of what I learned in class, except in odd flashbacks. Even now, sometimes during dinner I will look up and proclaim something like “Did you know John Wilkes Booth was in Harper’s Ferry when John Brown was hanged?” I don’t remember learning that, but I bet it’s true! I was the only ghost on the dean’s list.
My classmates’ reaction was slightly different from my professors. I always make at least one male friend in each class, but the dudes all avoided me as though my emotional fragility was contagious. They looked at me like I was in Fight Club, an unstable element that just wasn’t worth their time. The girls, some of whom I had classes with before the cancer, seemed to gravitate towards me. When they saw me, some primal Mommy Button was pressed in them and a loudspeaker rattled in their heads, “I must take care of him, right now!” Hey guys, want to meet women? Add some tragedy to your life; you will be irresistible. I just wanted to be left alone. After a while, I was, at which point I was lonely. I was going more than a little crazy.
I got an A on the exam that I hadn’t studied for. For those semesters, I got mostly A’s. It was as though my professors, God bless them, knew that the education I was getting at school paled in comparison to the one I was getting at home. I think they also knew that I needed school. I was a caretaker for her, and they were caretakers for me. They also knew that somehow I was learning the material.
Back at home, her hair started to fall out, and rather than let her blondness go quietly, she shaved her head. “You can’t fire me, I quit,” she told the universe, that spinner of roulette wheels, and that act of defiance made me love her even more. I saw for the first time the steel in her, the fire that couldn’t be extinguished by surgery or chemo. I felt like kissing her like I did in her driveway. I felt like a coward. I can’t sleep for days before a dentist appointment, at the first sign of a cold I wave a white flag and reach for the NyQuil. I looked at her, standing before the horde unfazed. She was like Joan of Arc with shorter hair. All I could offer was laughter.
Humor was our armor. I did my best to maintain the facade of a sunny and light outlook. My father had given me great advice: If I have to cry, do it in the shower. To this day, the smell of panic and fear is the piquant aroma of Irish Spring. The little boy with the pigeon toes and three missing teeth emerged in the shower to fret about the girl with the thick glasses. I was watching the person I love more than anyone suffer horribly, every day professing that love while being secretly afraid to feel it, everyday feeling more alone in the world. What kind of person wouldn’t laugh in that situation?
One night, she dozed with her glasses on top of her head. When I glanced over, I nearly had a heart attack. The way her glasses sat, it looked like she was a person with no face, glasses floating oddly on a blank pink plane. It was an amazing metaphor for what cancer does to a person, and it was hilarious. I took a picture, I had to, she had to see this. When her nap was over I showed it to her, she laughed, and we had an impromptu photo shoot, her modeling her blank face, me spouting out commands in a terrible French accent. “That’s it, now show me naughty! Beautiful!” We laughed, and then I took a nice long shower.
Every chance I got, I would don one of her many wigs. The Beyonce is a classic choice for any classy lady looking to cover her glossy bald dome, or any man singing a falsetto version of “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” in front of said classy lady. The wilder hot pink number was good for any occasion, really, the little black dress of cancer wear.
I was a clown, a zen master and a maniac, rolled into one very clean package. As she fought her battle, I quietly fought my own. Whatever the outcome, it was going to be a long time before either one of us got better, if we ever would.
Two years have passed, faster than the mind and heart can comprehend. There have been no signs of cancer since the end of her chemotherapy. Maybe the universe isn’t such a sick bastard, after all.
When it was happening, I thought that this experience would totally change me, make me somehow immune to the fears of the average person. If she survived, I pictured myself rejoicing in every minute of life like a scarred Buddha. Of course, that hasn’t been the case. My nightmares have slowly reverted from watching my love waste away to things like forgetting about work or showing up to class and finding out there is a midterm I haven’t studied for. In short, I care about the insignificant things again, and that’s all right for some of us, sweating the small stuff holds a joy all its own.
A few weeks ago I slept through my alarm and missed an important class. I was raving like a lunatic, damning a universe cruel enough to hijack my alarm clock.
She rolled over, blond hair draped across her face, and looked at me.
“It’s not the end of the world.”

blog comments powered by Disqus