Lunch at the North Pole

Existere, Volume 39, Issue 1, March 2020.

Bill and I met, fell in love, and got married soon thereafter. We have stayed together for thirty-eight years, seldom apart. Needing and wanting to always be together has defined who we are, our relationship, and now, our cancers. But first the Good Part.

In 1980 I was working in Philadelphia as the executive director of a small nonprofit organization. One of my board members was a partner at a large public accounting firm. I asked him if he could help me prepare a complex financial report required for a grant application. The staff person he assigned to work with me was Bill.

In a plush lobby a stately receptionist in a tweed suit asked me to wait as she notified Bill I had arrived. When he came to greet me, I was struck right away by his dark good looks and height. He looked to be a foot taller than me. I followed him down a hallway to a conference room and was struck by something else. My line of vision was almost level with his behind where, it seemed to me, an anatomical part of him had gone missing. It made me slightly self-conscious because I wasn’t as thin but I put it behind me.

It was the days of smoking. He offered me a cigarette, which he lit with a sterling silver lighter, monogrammed, his hand extending out from a starched, white cuff, also monogrammed. I had a quick flash of doubt that perhaps he might be too fancy pants for me, but found his childlike eagerness, bordering on comical, endearing. He could not hide his attraction to me, and it drew me in. We had a number of meetings and then several more. We planned our last on a Friday afternoon to be followed by drinks at the Happy Rooster. I had bourbon; Bill was still drinking Glenlivet at the time. He always tells the story this way, how I drank him under the table and he was in the bathroom throwing water on his face to keep up. I think we were both nervous because we knew this was serious: We were in love.

When I told my artsy friends that I had started dating an accountant, they were horrified. An accountant? Does he have a pocket protector? Green eyeshades? My attraction to him surprised me too because there seemed to be more differences between us than similarities.

I was born in Turkey and grew up in Europe; Bill was born and raised in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh. There was also the height thing: he was six-foot-two and I was five-foot-four. Like Bill, I wore conservative clothes for work but any other time preferred to dress like a bohemian, in jeans with a peasant shirt and espadrilles. Bill preferred his custom suits, hand-made shirts and polished Oxfords and for down-time, khakis, button-downs, and Top-Siders. He was like someone out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel who, unsurprisingly, was one of Bill’s favorite authors. When he invited me over for dinner, his antique-filled apartment with monogrammed towels and Baccarat crystal glasses confirmed what I already knew. Bill had fine tastes but, as it turned out, cooking was another matter.  

He made broiled steak, frozen peas in a bag, and a salad with bottled bacon ranch dressing. Everything tasted fine but he repeated the same menu on our next date and the date after that. Not wanting to hurt his feelings, I asked if he liked any other kinds of foods. He said he did, that he had eaten a lot of Chinese food during his graduate school days at Penn. Growing up, however, the kinds of food his mother made and served had been limited to accommodate his diabetic father. Mostly bland stuff he explained, like no spices, no sugar, and no carbs.

I rubbed my hands together like a sorceress preparing to cast a spell and invited him to dinner. I was more worried about what he would think of my apartment than what I would cook for him. I lived in a beautiful, historic building on Rittenhouse Square, but my furnishings, with the exception of a grand Turkish rug, were hardly antiques. It didn’t matter.

The dishes I made for him—Chicken Provençal, Pasta Carbonara, grilled eggplant with fresh tomato sauce, salads with Dijon vinaigrette—turned into a spiritual awakening, as if he had never eaten before. He gobbled up everything with a passion and eagerness of someone who had figured out a way to eat love. The joy of eating turned out to be one of many similarities that began to open up, like little presents.

We discovered we were both reading the same book, The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye. We found a shared passion in museum-going and spending hours in bookstores. We went to Chinese restaurants and drank carafes of wine. But there was something more: Beneath his high polish and bespoke suits was a kindred spirit. In his beautiful, brown eyes, I found swirling, troubled oceans: the familiar glint of loneliness and of pain held at bay.

In late-night pillow talks (a habit we continue), he revealed his traumatic childhood, and I, in turn, revealed mine. Our scarred pasts surfaced slowly and carefully, like we were testing the waters, afraid our horrific memories might scare the other away. Our fathers, both doctors and surgeons, had invested their time and energy in their careers, not in their families. Our mothers, who catered to their demanding husbands and bore the brunt of raising children alone, closed themselves off to us and others. Bill and I shared how, as kids, our individuality was seen as a minus, not a plus, how we were both misunderstood and mistreated. In Bill’s case the shaming and abuse was verbal; in mine, physical.

The way we both had survived, by retreating into ourselves, building protective walls, became our bond, like we were two frightened kids clinging to each other for comfort. Our love was intimate, visceral; we needed the feel and touch of warm skin, to drink in the steady rhythm of each other’s breathing at night. We confessed our greatest fear was never finding someone to love and be loved back with equal measure. We were different but the same; each other’s gift. We bought a center-city townhouse, worked like demons in our respective careers, raised two boys. We held together, through good and bad times, summer vacations in Maine, getting the boys off to college, taking care of aging parents, because it was the life we chose and wanted. Our blanket of protection was togetherness, and with it we could face all that was wrong with the world until cancer turned that world upside down.

In September 2017, Bill was diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer. There was no way around it; the numbers were the numbers. We were devastated, shocked a healthy, robust man like Bill could get sick. I held his hand after the surgery and comforted our family, but I was a total wreck. The doctors assured us over and over that he would be fine. I carried this hope around with me like a talisman, telling myself that our lives would soon return to normal, but things were not that easy. Bill was fine, but at a cost: The invasive surgery took his man-ness and pride and replaced it with cruel indignities. He was convinced he was not the same man and would never be. No matter how many times I said he was the same to me, that I loved him no matter what, he refused to listen. He went to work dressed in neon-blue sneakers and policy-breaking ripped jeans, as if in defiance, to prove he was nothing like his well-dressed former self. He was adamant that our lives had changed forever (another trait we share is Ultimate Stubbornness). Feeling alone and afraid, we fell into separate, unreachable zones of sadness. It was as if we had defaulted into our former survivor selves, locked behind our protective walls, not knowing how to help ourselves or each other. At my urging we went to see David, a therapist who had helped us through rough times in the past.

In his reassuring and professional manner, he shed light on what troubled us the most: Bill’s loss of identity and my loss of hope; our anger. David invited us to be more forgiving and understanding, not angry. He cautioned us not to let the illness infect our hearts too. Bill and I got back to our routine pillow talk at night and began the slow process of reconnecting. The summer came. Bill went back to work, and I went to our house in Maine to write. We were on the path to finding our way again—until I got cancer too.

In early August I came back to Philly from Maine to go with Bill to see his oncologist, an important meeting where we would learn more about his upcoming treatments. That night I had terrible stomach cramps, something I had been experiencing now and then over the past year, but these were far worse. An emergency room visit the next morning confirmed I had a colonic stricture and needed to be admitted to the hospital as soon as possible. The blockage turned out to be stage three colon cancer. While the surgery removed the tumor and infected lymph nodes, I would need six months of chemotherapy.

Now we were back where we started a year ago, both of us in shock and in denial. This could not possibly happen to us. Hadn’t we already been through enough already? Apparently not. The three-hour infusion of Oxaliplatin into my system was the worst thing I have ever experienced. It took a full two weeks after each infusion to feel somewhat normal again. Bill came to the infusion ward each time to drive me home. The nurses looked surprised when he told them he had just come from his daily radiation treatment.

“You mean you both got cancer? At the same time?”

“Yes,” he confirmed.

“Boy, you guys have to do everything together, don’t you?” they asked.

Everyone who knows us, and those who don’t, make the same little joke. We understand they are trying to make light of a difficult situation. True enough, we are closer than we have ever been before. We have to be. The ground beneath our feet keeps changing, from steady to shaky, to an uncertain path with a horizon that is hard to see. This is what we know: Cancer spares no one. Its deadly cells show no discrimination for race, gender, ethnicity, and culture, eating up bones, organs, blood, lymphomas, and brains. Our lives hang on meat hooks; the threat of cancer’s return is ever-present. And even though we are together in this battle, there is always that feeling that catches in the back of the throat if we dare think about the unbearable, of life without the other.

It is a year later and our treatments are over; we are in remission. We have come to our house in Maine to recover, relaxing, reading, and cooking great dinners with the best seafood on earth. Thankfully Bill has learned to cook many wonderful dishes other than the ones he made for me on our first dates. We don’t drink as much now, mostly because of what the treatments did our waistlines, but we still enjoy a snort or two of bourbon to which Bill is a happy convert.

There is a glimmer of hope here, like the silver waters of the cold ocean stretched out in front of us. We talk of summer, of going to the beach, maybe a trip overseas, little things in the past but big things to us now, pushing us to think positively no matter what, to believe there is a horizon.

In the kitchen, having our morning coffee, Bill asks me what I’m going to do for the day. “I don’t know,” I reply, happy not to have anything planned. “What are you going to do?” I ask. He gets up and kisses me on the head.

“I’m going to the bedroom to read,” he announces.

He says this slowly, our eyes locking because we know what the other is thinking. The bedroom is only a few feet away, but when we pause to think about what happened, what could happen, it feels as far away as the North Pole. I hope he’s back in time so we can have lunch, together.

THE END