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“Wyatt?”
“Hmm?”
“What is it like?” From the tone of her voice, it was clear what she meant.
Rolling the glass between my hands, I looked down into its orange swirl. “I met a young woman when I was taking my last treatment. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Cancer of the throat that had spread down into her chest… the works. She would have fooled me if I hadn’t known what to look for, because she’d done a good job of disguising herself. Had all her hair, or at least a very good wig, and lots of natural color in her cheeks. But that’s another thing you learn to recognize—what’s real and what’s makeup, wigs, ta
“What’s it like? Get cancer or start to die and you quickly see how people work. It’s very different from what you thought all your life, believe me. Anyway, this woman told me something chilling. Said she’d just received her last radiation treatment. There’s only so much you can be given before it stops helping and starts to destroy you. They give you so-and-so many doses and then that’s it—if all those rads or whatever they’re called don’t work, you’re out of luck. But know what else they told her? Not to get near babies. And certainly don’t touch any, because she was so full of radiation that she would be dangerous to them.”
“No!”
“That’s the truth. As if dying’s not bad enough, huh? It’s that kind of humiliation too. The worry you might throw up in the restaurant if you don’t take your medicine at the right time. Or suddenly not being able to lift yourself out of a chair. Or when pain becomes so unbearable that you have to ask a stranger in a voice that won’t scare them to call you an ambulance. What’s it like? It’s like being the radioactive woman. Except you’re radioactive to the whole healthy world. Everyone looks at you as if there’s something wrong with you. As if you glow, or are infectious, and no matter how many times they’re told that’s not true, they secretly think it is. But there isn’t anything wrong with you – it’s what entered you that’s wrong. There’s… I’m going in circles. What’s it like? It’s like being the radioactive girl. You’re not living anymore; you’re juggling. It’s such a mistake to think you can escape.”
“This makes me so depressed, I have to eat something. I’m going to the kitchen. Do you want some more orange juice?”
“Yes, that would be very nice.”
She got up and jingled her way across the patio, followed by Lulu. Lulu, the black French bulldog who, halfway through her comfy life, grew cataracts on her eyes and went blind. Sophie bought a small tinkly bell which she wore on one of her slippers so that the dog always knew where to find her in the house.
Sophie and Lulu. The three of us spent a great deal of time together. Sophie’s late husband, Dick, had owned a rare bookstore in downtown L.A. that was one of my favorite hangouts. He was a man who loved books and taught you how to love them too. I never could figure out which of the two I liked more. When Dick passed away, Sophie and I became close. We talked on the phone almost every day and ate di
“Wyatt! Come in here, you’ve got to see this!”
“What?”
“Just come in here. Fast!”
I quick-stepped from the baking sunlight into the shade of the eaves. Swung open the screen door and walked up the two steps to her kitchen. First thing I saw was Sophie with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. Then I heard before I saw the frantic clitter of Lulu’s toenails on the linoleum. Clickety-stickety-click she spun in panting, snuffling circles, then jumped up against the counters all in a mad rush because she knew something wonderful besides her mistress was in the room.
Something wonderful was a small calico cat sitting on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. It was cleaning its head by licking a paw and then wiping it over its face. I’d not seen the cat before, but it acted with the calm and deliberation of an animal completely at home in its surroundings.
“You gotta see this. It’s our daily ritual. That’s Roy, the neighbor’s cat. He climbs in through the window and sits there, waiting for Lulu to smell that he’s here. Since she went blind, her nose has gotten extrasensitive. Once she catches a whiff of him, she proceeds to go nuts and hunt for him as if he’s the golden fleece. But she’s so stupid because he always does the same thing. In through the window, sit over the sink, wait. Now watch what happens.”
The dog became more frantic the closer she got to the cat. Roy seemed bored by her scrabbling and twitching. Perhaps he only saw it as his due for deigning to be there. He kept cleaning his head, with an occasional frozen pause to check on the whereabouts of his fan.
“Every day this happens?”
“Every day. It’s like a Noh play—each goes through exactly the same moves, same roles, everything. Wait, though; part two is about to begin. First Lulu has to get tired and give up.”
We waited for that to happen and it did a few minutes later. She collapsed in a gasping, exhausted heap on the floor, her head held up high so that she could pull in more air. Roy, finished washing, stared like an indifferent god at her. Lulu had definitely given up.
Slowly His Majesty dropped down from the windowsill to the sink to the floor with nary a sound. But the dog heard; she perked right up again. Roy walked over to her and swatted at her rear end, just barely touching it. She turned, but he was already in front, swatting at her face. Now she went crazy. Like a skilled boxer, the cat leaped and parried and pranced and was wonderful the way he stayed out of harm’s way. Sophie and I started laughing because the two of them really got in the most extraordinary workout. After a few more seconds of this leaping and lunging, Lulu now thoroughly out of her mind with excitement and frustration, Roy sprang back up on the sink and right out the window.
“The phantom strikes again.”
“And it happens every day?”
“More or less.”
“Fabulous. But I think she likes it.”
“She loves it! Once by accident she got hold of his paw and was so startled that she didn’t know what to do. And you know, I was just thinking. Know what it reminds me of, Wyatt?”
“What?”
“Your thing with hope. What you were just talking about.”
“How do you mean?”
“You’re like Lulu with the cat. You’re blind, but you know it’s there. You can smell it and feel it. It keeps tweaking your tail. The closer it gets, the more you whip around and around, trying to catch it. Till now, when you’ve given up and are down on the floor.”
“And whatever it is that’ll save my life pokes and torments me to remind me it’s there? That’s stretching it a bit, Sophie.”
“It is not! You and I have been talking about this ever since you got sick. I remember the things you’ve said. Maybe you want to give up hope or think you have now, but I don’t believe it. And neither do you because both of us know it’s still there. ‘Cause that’s what hope is. We can’t really see it, but it keeps brushing its paw past our face close enough so that we feel the breeze. It’s always there but sometimes we catch hold of it and having it scares the hell out of us, and we let go. Like dumb Lulu the one time she caught Roy.