“As you may have noticed,” he said. “I am not Joan Parker.”
No one smiled. They all stared at him solemnly.
“Mrs. Parker had to have some surgery,” he went on, “and she has asked me to cover for her for a bit. She’s taped her lectures and I’m here to play them and assist in whatever way I can. Which is not much, because I know less than you do about the subject.”
A hand went up. “What about the final exam?”
“We’ll worry about that when it’s time to. You won’t suffer for it, whatever the situation.”
Another hand. “When will she be back?”
“How quickly you tire of me,” he said. “I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Could you tell us where she is, so we can send her a card?”
“Sure.” He wrote the address on the board.
“Can we visit?”
“Not yet. I’ll tell you when. Any other questions?”
There were none. “Now the good news. There will be no class Wednesday.” He took an extension cord from one of the briefcases and plugged in the tape recorder. “Okay,” he said. “Here we go.”
Joan’s voice came from the recorder. “Good morning, ladies...” He realized he could not stand to listen. “I’ll be back in a while,” he said over the tape, and headed for the door. Her voice had a hoarse faintly shaky sound to it, as it drifted out with him. He shut the door behind him.
As Joan waited outside of X-ray she thought about James Stacey. Sitting alone her first day in the hospital and reading People magazine she had come across a picture of James Stacey, young movie star, who had been badly maimed in an accident, losing a leg and an arm. The picture stayed with her. There he was on one leg with one arm balancing on skis on a steep slope. The empty leg of his ski pants was pinned up and the poles were of an unusual kind that would help him balance, and on his face was a broad smile. Just the biggest smilingest face, she thought, out on the goddamned slopes in Vermont or someplace and he’s obviously having a hell of a good time. She remembered her talk with Ace about not being hacked to bits, and his promise. Well, maybe I could take some hacking. Look at Stacey. He took a hell of a lot and was still extracting pleasure from life. Maybe if they do have to cut away at me. Maybe if it’s spread out I could go on. I could have some fun. I would have a different kind of life. I would have to set an example for people. I’ll have to be a different kind of Joan. A Joan people don’t like to look at. A Joan people would feel funny about. People would be saying, ‘Jesus-I-don’t-want-that-to-happen-to-me!’ But maybe I can use myself as an example. Maybe I can find a way to have some kind of dignity and a way of life that is somehow productive even though it may be in a whole other direction than I ever intended to go. Maybe I can do that. Could do that if it happened. It always struck her that she owed James Stacey something and they’d never met and he’d never know.
For such introspection there was little time, however. Every nurse who came in to escort her to X-ray or take a blood sample or take her temperature or bring her lunch went far beyond the necessities of her work. They talked with Joan. They initiated conversation. They told her about aunts and mothers and sisters and former patients who had undergone breast surgery and whose recovery had been comfortable and complete. It’s like everyone loves me. I feel, for God’s sake, I feel loved in here.
And Benny, the respiration therapist. He was there from the first day. Under the stress of panic in Dr. Eliopoulos office that first day, she had smoked two cigarettes which Ace had bummed for her from the receptionist. Under the impression that she was a heavy smoker, Eliopoulos had prescribed presurgical respiration therapy. Benny was a short heavy cheerful man who wheeled his respiration machine in three times a day on Monday and another three on Tuesday and talked and joked with her, and taught her how to use the machine, and seemed to care how she felt, not professionally but in fact. They talked a bit of her fears, although mostly she breathed in and out according to his instructions and he talked to her. He talked of certain postsurgical black periods in his own life and how he’d gotten through them. He was a very kind man and Joan looked forward to his visits.
On the floor below was Gerry Wilkinson, a neighbor who had the previous week fallen from a stepladder and broken her ankle. It was a bad break for a woman in her fifties and she would be a long time bedridden. Joan went down to visit her frequently during her free moments and drew strength from Gerry’s calm acceptance of what might be a crippling injury.
“I will pray for you, Joan,” Gerry had said. “And I will ask Warren and the children to pray for you too.” Gerry’s God was Catholic and immediate, a God whose eye was on the fall of a sparrow and she gained strength from Him. Joan didn’t believe, but she gained strength in some odd way from Gerry’s belief. It was comforting to think that people were praying for her, to a God they believed in. Joan always felt calmer after talking with Gerry Wilkinson.
Across the hall Mrs. Bacheldor and her roommate Helga were good to talk with. Mrs. Bacheldor promised to put Joan in touch with a friend who had survived a mastectomy in flourishing health. She promised to put Joan in touch with her after the operation.
While Joan’s tapes were running, Ace drove into Beverly, looking for a cup of coffee. He found a Dunkin’ Donut stand and got a large black to go. He drove to a drugstore and bought a copy of the Boston Globe. He drove back to the campus and sat in the car and drank the coffee and read the paper. The children from the Lab School kindergarten came out while he sat there and played and ran about, under the supervision of a head teacher and some students. He noticed that several of the children staved by themselves and he felt bad for them.
Joan’s first class ended at ten-fifteen and he went in to shut off the tapes. The students were already starting to file out. He smiled at them vaguely as they passed, his mind busy with other things, impatient that he must be here.
During the second class he drove down along the shore road into Manchester and back, sightseeing, listening to the radio, remembering when they were very young and not yet married how the two of them had driven down to a club in Magnolia to hear Sarah Vaughan. He noticed that thinking about it neither increased nor decreased the ache of anxiety in him. Generally he didn’t like to remember the time before they were married, for those were times when he didn’t have her and she was still uncertain if she would marry him and he felt retrospective fear that a matter of such moment to him had been entrusted to such unskilled hands as his had been at nineteen. I could have lost her. What would have happened to me if I had lost her? If I lose her now at least I’ll have had her. I’ll have had eighteen years and eight months. And now I have my sons. Then I would have had nothing and I wouldn’t have even been what I am now. I had potential hut I was an awful turkey. She took a chance and she knew it. She was always more pragmatic than I was. She calculated and weighed and said, ‘Okay, it’s my best shot.’ And she did it, and she was right. But it was a gamble and at that time in her life she wasn’t a gambler. Jesus Christ. It’s like remembering when you were shot at and missed.
Thinking of the past depressed him. And he drove in silence, trying to concentrate simply on the music and the August houses that rolled by on the winding road. Thinking of the future isn’t an upper either. Carpe diem, babe.