The Wrong Heaven Read online

  Now, it seemed, people could call each other whatever they wanted to. Her daughter Colleen had a friend who was not only gay, but in a “polyamorous triad.” It had taken ten minutes of explanation for Katie to understand this arrangement, in theory—and she still had so many practical questions. Did the three men share one giant bed, or take turns? Was it a perfect triangle, or was one person the hypotenuse?

  One of the three, Colleen had explained, was “the floater.” Katie pictured a man in an inner tube, alone in the center of a vast, silent blue swimming pool, his tanned face tilted up toward the sun. Perhaps, in another life, she might have enjoyed such an arrangement: a glowing corona of solitude, a modest acre of freedom. In her youth there had been exactly one option: find a person, marry him, create other people who then became your whole life. She’d had no solitude at all, for decades—and then, suddenly, it was all she had. And what was she supposed to do with it?

  Yes, the old arrangement was cruel—but at least it was simple. Was it worth it, today? All the different options, the excitement and confusion? While devising these new forms of sex, had they succeeded in making it kind?

  “Partners.” Perhaps this was the best word for her and Doris, after all. They didn’t sleep together, of course. But “friends” seemed like a hollow word for what they’d become: their lives peeled down like carrots, so that they were the only ones left standing. Her children moving away, with families of their own; Evan returning after leaving her—twice—just in time to get Parkinson’s; then Fareed passing away too, a year after Evan, facedown in the flowerbeds.

  Then again, in some ways the two women were less like partners—willing intimates—than like survivors of the same catastrophe: thrust together yet always a bit apart, each insulated by her own ghosts.

  Katie sighed and looked at her watch. Eleven minutes. She glanced at the young receptionist, but the girl was otherwise occupied, staring down at a fingernail with intense focus.

  Suddenly, Katie wanted to ask her all sorts of questions. Or maybe just one: What is it like to be you?

  Two arms, two legs, two ovaries, two breasts. The body’s symmetry forced you to think this way: my other one. My good one. My spare. Doris’s paper gown tented above her left breast’s absence as she listened to Dr. Patel’s approaching footsteps.

  “How are we doing?” he asked, shutting the door behind him, flashing his soap-opera-doctor smile. Later, for Katie’s benefit, Doris would crack a joke—“That young doctor can probe me anytime he wants to”—something like that. In truth, though, she felt sexless as an insect these days.

  “All right,” said Doris. “I’m an old pro.” She smiled.

  He slid his stethoscope into the gown’s rear opening and pressed its cold metal against her back. It was the most intimate touch she’d had in months. “So,” he said. “You say you may have found another lump?”

  “I think so.”

  He slid the instrument farther down her back. “Try to breathe like you would normally.”

  She inhaled. “Normal enough?”

  He laughed. “Nothing seems normal when you’re thinking about it,” he said. “Why don’t you go ahead and lie down.”

  She stretched out on the table, closed her eyes, and felt his fingers touch her skin. She opened them again when he found the lump. The doctor’s brow grew wrinkled like a bulldog’s, his eyes dark with alarm.

  “When did you say you’d found this?”

  “Oh, just a few days ago.”

  Actually, it had been weeks—over a month, if she was honest. This lump outweighed the one in the other breast—and a sequel, to boot. And yet she’d delayed in making the appointment; she hadn’t told Katie.

  There was a lot she didn’t tell Katie. She didn’t tell her friend about the nights she sat at home trapped in a dark mood: feeling herself slowly blending into the furniture, becoming furniture, hoping to become even less—as though, through sustained inaction, she might cease to be herself.

  Also: once, decades ago, when Katie had taken Colleen upstairs to nurse, Doris went into the kitchen to refresh her drink, and Katie’s husband, Evan, came in and turned her around and pushed her into the bathroom. She could have stopped him but didn’t. She was still fuming at her own husband over his own recent indiscretion; she’d flirted with Evan all night.

  She worried for weeks: counting down the days till her period, forcing herself to imagine the worst possible outcome. The scrape of the cold steel instrument, or Evan O’Toole’s smug face staring out of her firstborn child’s. These dark fantasies were deliberate, part of her punishment.

  The other part was that she never got pregnant—not even later, when she wanted to. She told Fareed she was all right, that she only needed him. But it turned out even that was a lot to need. No one had warned her about this part: the lonely length of a life, the way new moments kept arriving like empty boxes on her doorstep. Each day, a fresh nothing.

  Last month she’d discovered the lump and felt a strange, dark excitement. Every morning she checked it, felt the secret growing like a baby. She imagined she could feel it kick.

  If Katie ever discovered this deception, she’d interpret it as some kind of misguided independence, or reckless courage. Katie was always telling Doris how brave she was. And wasn’t it better, in the end, for them both to believe this—that Doris was brave?

  Katie finished the Gwyneth Paltrow article and stood up to stretch her legs. For the first time, she noticed a beige leather couch out along the far wall. She walked across the room, and read the plaque hung above: THIS SOFA DONATED IN LOVING MEMORY OF DONNA HIRSCH.

  Fascinating. Why, she wondered, had Donna Hirsch’s family chosen this sofa, instead of a park bench somewhere, or a donation to a cancer foundation? Had they spent hours and hours sitting in this room, stranded on uncomfortable chairs? Had this been poor Donna’s modest dying wish—a cushion for weary behinds?

  Slowly, Katie sat down on the Memorial Sofa.

  It was comfortable, but not that comfortable. She felt disappointed. And sorry for Donna Hirsch—was this all she’d be remembered by? A mildly comfortable sofa? She’d want more than that, if she died of cancer.

  But no—Katie would surely live to a sad age, brittle-boned in a nursing home, sustained by sparse, pitying visits from her children. Doris would go first, with a handsome young doctor by her side. Doris would make even death seem glamorous. It angered her sometimes, what Doris could get away with.

  Doris with her cheekbones and dark bob and throaty laugh. Many nights, entertaining, Katie slaved away in the kitchen while Doris told jokes, played poker with the men, raised one eyebrow in a manner Katie could not imitate (she’d tried). No matter what Katie put on the table—a Moroccan stew with exotic, unpronounceable spices, or a roast lamb that had taken all day to prepare—the party always seemed to be about Doris, somehow. Sometimes she’d hear one of Evan’s friends remark to him, leaving, “Your Katie’s a lovely woman.” But she knew: none of them touched his wife in the dark and fantasized about her.

  She stood up, leaving a slight indent in the Memorial Sofa.

  Lately—with increasing frequency, since Evan passed—she’d experienced attacks of what she called “the byesies.” She’d just be knitting in her armchair, minding her own business, or tending the roses in her front yard, and she’d feel the sudden urge to flee. Her heart would pound and she’d grow dizzy—until she got into her car and drove away, clarity returning to her body with the purr of the laboring engine.

  Now the feeling rose up within her, as strong as ever, but she had nowhere to go. She began to pace, trying to give her body the illusion of covering distance. But it didn’t work. Nausea seized her, and the room started to sway.

  She sat down, pulled a handkerchief out of her purse, and began to mop her face. Soon the dizziness would possess her completely, and she would either run away or pass out. Which would be more humiliating?

  “Hey,” said the receptionist. “Are you OK?”
/>   “Yes,” said Katie. “No. I don’t know.” She lowered her head to her knees to try to stop the room from spinning.

  “You look like crap,” said the girl. “No offense. Listen, you probably need some air. I know this balcony.” She came over, took Katie’s hand, and pulled her to her feet.

  Too stunned to resist, Katie let the girl lead her away. She followed all the way to the hallway’s dead end, then watched as the girl opened a door marked NO ENTRY in faded yellow letters.

  “Are you sure this is all right?”

  “It’s cool.” The girl motioned for her to follow through.

  The “balcony,” it turned out, was a fire escape, looking out over the parking lot to the trees and hills beyond. “Don’t tell anyone I took you here,” said the girl. “I’m not even supposed to know about it, but my friend Ratface is a janitor on this floor and he comes out here all the time to smoke.”

  “Your friend is named Ratface?”

  “His real name is Matthew.”

  They sat down. Katie had to admit, it felt good out here in the cool air. She breathed in and closed her eyes. “It’s all right for you to leave your desk?” she asked.

  “Whatever,” said the girl. “I’m just here on community service.” She pulled something out of the front pocket of her shirt. “You smoke?”

  Katie shook her head. But even as she protested, she saw herself extending a hand, accepting the joint, bringing it up to her lips.

  “That’s it,” said the girl. “Inhale slowly.”

  She hadn’t done this since college. It was like taking fire into her body. She coughed.

  “That’s all right. In and out. Nice, huh?”

  Doris removed the paper gown and climbed into her bra, slipping the falsie in place with a familiar motion. She used to leave secret notes here, for Fareed. One of their games. Of course, this was when she had two actual breasts. He’d stick his hand up her shirt and say, “Don’t mind me. Just checking my messages.”

  Sometimes the note contained a joke they’d shared. Sometimes a piece of trivia, usually invented: Did you know that duck spit cures snakebite? Sometimes, in a mood, she wrote a simple instruction. Touch this. Do that. Now.

  In their one bad season, the season of the redheaded insurance adjuster, he left the notes. Taped to the nutmeg jar. On the back of a cigarette pack. On the steering wheel of her car. The messages only ever said one thing. Forgive me.

  On the day she finally did—the day she resolved to confess about Evan—she said, “I think someone left a message for you.” He reached up into her bra, keeping his eyes locked on hers.

  “Did you know,” said the note, “that in outer space, astronauts can only open one eye at a time, or their hearts will explode?”

  That was how they’d survived their remaining years: by looking at each other, but not too directly. Love, it turned out, had nothing to do with transparency, with a faithful reckoning of accounts. So much could be repaired, so much forgotten, in the alchemical heat of embrace.

  Even as she got older—as her skin grew slack and her limbs heavy—Fareed still rolled toward her every morning, still sought her warm specific body. The absence of this animal heat was like losing something much larger—like losing her own blood.

  Dr. Patel had recommended a biopsy. And so it would start. Her body—its stink and decay, its mutiny—would become the subject of discussion by a team of professionals, and eventually by everyone she knew. Katie would bring pie she was too sick to eat, intended to comfort Doris; acquaintances would send cards with hollow words, meant to comfort themselves. The only thing that would help was the tin of rolled joints in the back of her sock drawer—another thing she never told Katie, the rule follower.

  Even amid her own crises, Doris sometimes felt a faint pity for her friend; she doubted Katie had ever known the pleasure of succumbing to disorder, of inhaling sweet smoke while the world went to hell. Fastening the final button on her shirt, Doris held this pity for her friend in her mind, like water cradled in two hands. In its presence she’d enjoy Katie’s company much more; in a generous mood one might mistake this pity for kindness, or even love.

  Katie pushed the door open and went back inside the hospital, leaving the young receptionist out on the fire escape. (“Just come get me if you need to, like, sign out or whatever.”)

  She stopped at the ladies’ room, inspecting her image in the mirror to see if anything looked different. Were her eyes bloodshot? She thought so, but couldn’t be sure. She’d never really looked at her own eyes that closely. Maybe that was how they looked all the time. She did feel a pleasant absence from herself, like her mind was a balloon hovering a few feet above her body. But was that really a result of the drug? Or just of the excursion to the fire escape—the thrill of a minor transgression, the way the landscape had opened beneath her, familiar yet strange?

  The Oncology reception desk, of course, was empty; so was the waiting room. Surveying it, Katie experienced a brief, godlike feeling of ownership. She walked over and took a seat behind the desk, in the receptionist’s chair.

  Yes, she was definitely a little bit high. She swiveled the seat experimentally. She tried on a slouch, then an erect, queenly posture. She put her hand on the computer’s mouse and watched the screen come to life.

  She hadn’t intended to actually look at the computer, but once she did, she couldn’t look away. Up on the screen was Doris’s chart. LANSING, DORIS. (Doris had kept her maiden name; at the time this had seemed so daring to Katie, so bold.) AGE: 65. REASON FOR VISIT:

  Katie jumped up from the chair, grabbed her purse, and backed away. She looked around to make sure no one had seen; then she ran back to the bathroom. In front of the mirror, she splashed cold water on her face, over and over, hoping to wake herself up—hoping this whole excursion might turn out to be some kind of dream, or drug-induced illusion.

  But no. The omens had told the truth, and Doris had not: this was more than a routine test.

  She looked at her wet face in the mirror; it suddenly looked so old in the harsh, merciless fluorescent light. This was the truth: Doris had lied to her. Doris was probably dying.

  She felt nauseous, like she’d swallowed something she shouldn’t have, and possessed by an infantile urge to un-know; new fears and old grievances sprang up like sudden weeds. She went into a bathroom stall, sat down on the cold toilet seat, and tried to summon some of the courage she’d felt a few minutes before.

  Doris returned to the reception room and found that both Katie and the teenage receptionist had vanished. Odd: Katie, like a nervous little dog, rarely moved from the spot you’d left her in.

  She sat down and looked around the waiting room. She had never spent any time here by herself, so she’d never noticed its starkness. No windows, nothing on the walls. Well, all the better. It was insulting the way some hospitals tried to distract you: the fake flower displays, the paintings of European castles and people in boats. This wasn’t a bed-and-breakfast. There would be no laundry service, no complimentary scones.

  She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. When she opened them, Katie was leaning in the doorway, staring at her with red-rimmed eyes.

  “So,” said Katie. “How was he? I mean, how was it?”

  In the car, they did not speak. Katie stared straight ahead at the road like a pilot on some singular mission. Usually, Katie would fill the car with chatter: cat litter prices at Stop&Shop, some new Japanese method for organizing closets, whatever other minutiae occupied her mind. Doris had often found this irritating, but now she wished it back. In the absence of speech she could hear the machine beneath them, all its mysterious churnings and hums. She wished for something cold with gin in it. She wished for home.

  But when they stopped at the red light, at the intersection where you turned right for Doris’s house, Katie turned on her left blinker instead.

  “Where are we going?”

  Katie didn’t answer. Instead, she pulled the car over to the side
of the road, put it in park, and turned to face her friend. “Doris,” she said. “I want to tell you something.”

  Doris’s heart began to pound, but she only said, “Oh? What’s that?”

  Katie sat still for a long moment, as if considering how to phrase a delicate confession. Then she turned toward Doris, a strange smile on her face. “Well,” she said. “I’m—I’m a little bit high, I think.”

  “High? What do you mean, high?”

  Katie let out a strange, manic giggle; then she explained how the young receptionist had taken her out on the fire escape and offered a hit. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know why I did it. I haven’t smoked, in any form, in probably…thirty years. But I needed to escape. I just feel that way sometimes. For no good reason, really. Does that make any sense?”

  Doris considered this for a moment. “It does.”

  “And, Doris,” said Katie. “I know that you do it too.”

  “That I do what?”

  “I never judged it,” she said, “not one bit. I’m sure it helped you, when—well, that it’s helped you.” Katie smiled. “I know you wanted to be private about it. But I raised four teenagers. I’d know the smell of marijuana from a mile away.”

  Doris opened her mouth to respond, to defend herself—but instead what came out was a noise somewhere between a giggle and a snort. It suddenly seemed hilarious: Katie taking a prim hit from the receptionist, then confessing; Doris hiding her habit like a teenager. They might be sixty-five-year-old widows with arthritis, but they were also still the girls they’d been in that long-ago dorm, making prank phone calls in funny accents or discussing birth control in tones of hushed excitement. Suddenly they were both laughing, harder than they had in years.

  “By the way,” said Doris, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes, “you shouldn’t be driving.”