“They got me up this morning.”
“How was that?”
“Okay. Moving around makes my arm hurt but other than that it was okay.”
“Want to get up with me?”
“Not right now. Maybe before you go I’ll go to the bathroom.”
“You want visitors?”
“Yes. I get tired sometimes, but otherwise I’d like them.”
“Want me to tell the students to come?”
“You can tell them they can come if they want to.”
“Want me to tell them what happened?”
“No. I will do that. I should. They should hear it from me.”
“What time do you have to be at the theater?”
“Matinee begins at two o’clock. I’ll get the kids out of school early. I already sent a note. We’ll come down here around noon, visit you for an hour and then go into town.”
“Are you eating out?”
“Yes. I have dinner reservations at the Ritz.”
“I feel bad not being there for Dave’s birthday.”
“I think it was very selfish of you to have breast cancer on your son’s sixteenth birthday.”
“I went to the bicentennial Patriot’s Day parade though.”
“You’re not all bad,” he said. “Have you seen your incision yet?”
“No. Maybe today. I’m kind of afraid to look. How bad could it be though? The bandage isn’t that big. Eliopoulos is very happy with it. He says it’s one of the best jobs he’s done.”
“I like a man that takes pride in his work,” Ace said. “I would think that the sooner you looked the better off you’d be. Same for me.”
“I don’t want you to see it. Not yet anyway.”
“I should see it sometime. It’s not curiosity. It’s simply better to know than not to know.”
“Not yet.”
“Sure, not yet. But when you can. When you’re ready. The thought doesn’t appall me. It doesn’t excite me either. I mean I’m not a scar freak. I just think it should be like everything else, something that we share. I know you got cut, but it’s still our surgery, not just yours. It’s been harder on you, but only a little.”
“I know. Eunie said today they’d change the bandages and she’ll tell me if it’s okay to look.”
“What do you mean okay?”
“Eunie will look and tell me if it’s too yukky for me to look at still.”
“Yeah, okay.” He felt slightly jealous of Eunie. He wanted to be the one to look first and decide on such matters. But he was also a little relieved. Maybe it was quite yukky. Maybe it was better for Eunie to look first. He also knew that there was a matter of shared femaleness there that he could not violate, even if he wished to, and part of him did.
“I think I’ll try walking to the bathroom. You want to stand over here.”
She sensed his jealousy, his sense of exclusion. She wanted him to help her now, to let him participate, to feel important. For all the mature strength he had, she knew also there was a lot of small boy in there as well. It would help him if now he took her arm and helped her walk.
He stood by her as she moved very carefully to swing her feet off the bed. “Let me take your arm,” she said. “You just stand still and I’ll hold on to you, okay.”
As she got out of bed her arm had the sharp pain in it for a moment until she was upright. She held his arm and pulled herself upright. He was heavy and thick and easy to lean on. As she moved with him toward the bathroom an object like a canteen bumped against his leg. He could see it hanging from her shoulder. “What the fuck is that?” he said.
“It’s a, if you’ll pardon the expression, drain.”
“Yargh.”
“I know. Isn’t it gross?”
“There’s a tube from the incision?”
“Yes, keeps blood and fluid from collecting.”
“Okay, okay. I know all I want about that. Does it hurt?”
“No, not all, I don’t even notice it.”
With her leaning on his arm and him wheeling the IV apparatus besides her, they moved across the room to the bathroom, where she used the toilet, and then he brought her back.
In bed again she felt tired. As if she had walked a long way at a fast pace, and needed now to rest.
“Eliopoulos been in this morning?”
“Yes, early, I think. I’m very blurry.”
“What did he say?”
“Everything’s fine. They will have to wait for the lymph node biopsy to come back, but everything else is fine.”
“How long for the lymph nodes?”
“Two or three days, they said.”
“Naturally that takes us into Saturday and naturally that means not till Monday.”
“Maybe Friday.”
“Not likely,” he said.
“Well, we just have to wait.”
“Yep. We’ve come this far. I guess we can go a little farther.”
A nurse came in. She was their age, dark-haired and tall, her uniform very crisp. Joan said, “Ace, have you met my friend Eunie. Eunie, this is my husband.”
“Hello.”
“Hello, Eunie.”
“Your wife is the hit of the floor,” Eunie said.
“Laugh a minute,” he said.
“She really is. She’s a super patient.”
“You should see her whine when you’re not around, Eunie.”
“Not me,” Joan said. “A little soldier.”
“We’ve got some things to do,” Eunie said. “You’ll have to step out for a little while.”
“What time is it?” He never wore a watch.
“Eleven-ten,” Eunie said. “It’ll only take a few minutes. You could go down in the coffee shop.”
“No, that’s okay, I’ve got to get my kids anyway. I’ll pick them up and come back around noon.”
“Okay,” Joan said. “Bye.”
He gestured goodbye with his hand and went out. Eunie closed the door behind him and he went down the corridor, feeling again vaguely shut out.
Chapter 18
Joan’s lunch came at five of twelve and she was just beginning to eat it when Ace and the boys arrived. She knew Ace had been there less than an hour ago. But she couldn’t remember exactly what they said. The boys had each brought her a get-well card.
Dan’s, illustrated with a series of drawings, said, “Some have two, some have a hundred, some have none, but we love you best with just one.”
David’s displayed a busty and sensuous Jane Russellesque woman on a gatefold card. When you opened the fold one breast disappeared. The card said,
The cards elated her. She felt a little high. Some of this perhaps was the waning effects of anesthesia, some was relief that surgery was over, some was a sense that the family was intact, the cards were loving and relaxed, and the boys were well. They would bear no scars, she knew. But there’s something in it for me, she thought. It’s a burden I won’t have to bear. I won’t have to scheme and work to see that this surgery doesn’t damage them. They are not shaken by it, and I don’t have that to deal with. That’s fantastic.
“I have a treat for you too, heart of mine,” Ace said. “So that your recovery time is not frittered away on daytime TV and gossip with the nurses, I have some reading matter.” He brought from behind his back another stack of movie magazines.
She was thumbing through the magazines talking with the boys as she did. Eunie came to take away Joan’s empty tray.
“Eunie, look at the cards the boys made.”
Eunie read them and laughed. She had children. She understood why Joan wanted her to see the cards. “That’s great,” she said. “That’s super.”
“Where did the flowers come from?” Dan asked. There were several plants and two vases of cut flowers in the room.