It was nearly lunchtime when Joan heard him coming down the hall. She knew from the time that he was stopping off directly on the way home from Endicott. When he came in the room he was dressed as he was always dressed. Blue corduroy Levi jacket, blue Adidas with a white stripe, sunglasses. He was carrying her briefcases.
“They prefer me,” he said. “They claim I’m better looking and smarter and they want me to stay.”
“How did it go?”
“Fine.”
“Did they ask much about me?”
“Yeah, some. Where were you, could they send a card, what were visiting hours, like that.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them you had to have some surgery, that you were here, and that I’d let them know about visiting hours and when they could come.”
“You didn’t tell them about the mastectomy?”
“No.”
“Did anyone ask what the surgery was?”
“No.”
“Did anyone tell you I was wonderful?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
He unpacked the briefcases and set the tape recorder up on the windowsill so that she could do more taping if she had a chance. A nurse came in with lunch under the covered dishes on a tray. Served that way it always looks tasty, he thought, even when it isn’t. Joan asked about a low-calorie diet.
“I’m eating like a pig in here, Norah,” she said. “I’ll look like the Goodyear blimp.”
“I’ll ask the dietician to come by later,” Norah said. “She can help you work out what you want. Remember you’ll need a lot of nourishment after surgery. This isn’t a time to starve yourself.”
“I know,” Joan said. “But I’m so hungry. I’m hungry all the damn time.”
“Now you know how I feel,” Ace said. “That’s the story of my life. I’ve been hungry and thirsty and horny since I was eight months old.”
“No wonder you wanted a private room,” Norah said. All of them laughed. The nurse left. He reached over and took the cover off one of the dishes. Tuna salad. There were two pickles on the plate with the salad. He took one. “Why don’t I run down and get a sandwich and a coffee from the cafeteria and bring it up and eat lunch with you?” he said.
“Okay, but make it quick; I’m having a hunger tantrum now.”
He got his sandwich and a black coffee to go and carried it back up to her room. They ate in relative quiet. There was little to say. But they had been together long, and having nothing to say was not awkward. When they were through he left.
“I’ll come back around suppertime with the kids and we’ll, like, have supper with you.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to bring food in.”
“No, we’ll eat at home, but early, so we can come down and be with you while you eat. I assume you have stuff this afternoon.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, see ya.”
“Bye-bye.”
She heard his step recede down the corridor and heard him joke with Nurse Pike, the head nurse, as he passed the charge desk, and then he was gone. He always made her feel stronger. She knew he could do everything that had to be done. Absolutely everything, she thought. Take my courses, take care of the kids, whatever. He is always there. Always. There was about him a quality of massive stability. It was hard to remember when he hadn’t been there.
A half hour after Ace left, Dr. Helen Walsh, the anesthesiologist, came to visit. She asked Joan about allergies and loose teeth and things anesthesiologists need to know. But she had also come to talk. For Joan she was a pleasure, a doctor, a woman, and a warm concerned person.
“This is Connie Coward, Helen. I’m afraid of pain.”
“There will be medication,” Helen said. “We can deal with pain all right.”
“Will I be crazy, screaming, bothering people? I don’t want to do badly.”
Helen shook her head. “You won’t be. It won’t be that bad. Some discomfort yes, but not pain. Nothing medication won’t get you through fine. You really needn’t worry about that.”
It was true what Jude had told her, and now Helen had said it and Joan believed it. She seems to respect me. That helps. Her respect is helpful.
In the late afternoon Judy and John came to visit. John was a hockey coach, a muscular jock-ethic man who used humor as they themselves did as a means of concealment and a tool of communication.
For Joan he was in a way the symbolic male, the one who had to accept her loss of sexuality on behalf of all males. She dreaded the first meeting, fearing what she might sense, afraid he might feel something he could not conceal, conscious that she must put him at once at ease, nervous that perhaps she couldn’t. It was a real hurdle for her, and an indication of her postoperative state of mind. Her breast was still there, but already she acted as if it were gone.
As she waited for them to come she reflected partially about the degree to which being the object of sexual desire was one base of her relationship with men. It was not that she slept around or wanted to, though she’d always been as she said to Ace, “curious.” She had been only with her husband and it seemed very likely now that she only would be. But being desired seemed, now that she feared she wouldn’t be, to have been a larger part in her male friendships than she had thought. It was not so much that she perceived desire from them as that she felt herself desirable. John, because he was in some ways an extreme of masculinity, loomed to her as a test case. If John were not visibly put off, perhaps men wouldn’t be. Ace, for all his maleness, was no test. They both knew that. His feelings were irrevocable, as fixed as the sun.
The thing she had been saying to people about her upcoming surgery was, “Easy come, easy go.” And she used it on John and Jude when they came. It was a good start and John seemed to like the remark and treat her as before. He did not seem to see her as grotesque or as grotesque-to-be. If he did he concealed it so well that she got no sign of it. They talked as easily and humorously, their humor full of put-downs, as they always did. When they left her she was buoyed by their visit. No one seemed horrified, no one was full of pity. Everyone expected her to recover and be what she had been.
Monday afternoon David went to the library and looked up breast cancer. He’d had the feeling when his mother and father went yesterday to the hospital that more than a simple cyst was involved.
Dad didn’t seem like a man driving his wife to the hospital for a little cyst operation. He seemed like a man driving his wife to the hospital with breast cancer.
He spent an hour in the town library researching breast cancer and when he left he was certain his mother had it. But he said nothing to anyone.
In Tuesday’s mail there had come, also, a note from Billy Ganem — she had known him since she had known Ace — and the letter, like John and Jude’s visit, helped her through another day. It was an honest expression of pain at her illness and of love that would endure beyond any illness. It surely had been a hard letter to write. Billy, like John and like Ace, for that matter, was a product of the fifties, and of assumption about male behavior that limited displays of emotion. It was another piece in the structure of support that built up around her that spring, a structure as important to her as the medical skills that the hospital supplied and the capacities of Eliopoulos’s hands.
The boys and Ace came and stayed with her at supper, and watched television for some time afterward. It was little different than it would have been at home except that they all had to watch the same program, and Ace, who hated almost all television equally, got restless and walked around the room and up and down the corridors and bitched about the programming. At home he could retire to another room. Dan called weather and time on Joan’s phone, fascinated with a private phone of one’s own.