John Irving - Until I Find You

“I blame the delay on Pam Hoover,” Maureen mumbled again as she let Jack in. She was wearing her hotel robe, too—sans the stupid white slippers. (Jack kicked his off at the door.)

“You came all the way from Vancouver for what ?” he asked, untying her robe.

“To have too much sex with you,” Maureen Yap said, untying his. Never mind that it sounded like “To shave my legs for you”; Jack knew what she meant.

She was a tiny woman: the cavity of her pelvis couldn’t have been bigger than a thirteen-year-old girl’s. The skin on her breasts had the transparency of a child’s—a faint bluish tone, as if her veins, although unseen, lent their color to her skin. Jack could touch the fingers of his hands together when he encircled her thigh.

“My femur is smaller than your humerus,” Maureen told him; there’s no describing what that sounded like, but he somehow managed to understand her.

Maureen’s husband and son called her in her hotel room at 9:45 A.M.—6:45 in Vancouver, where the father was getting the little boy up for school. Maureen covered one of Jack’s ears with her cupped palm—pressing his head, and his other ear, into her flat tummy. He could still hear her endearments to her husband, who was also a doctor, and her young son—not that Jack could follow word-for-word what she told them. Maureen was in tears; Jack could feel the taut muscles in her lower abdomen.

It was the sadness of Emma’s memorial service, she told her family—it still made her cry to think about it. Jack heard Pam Hoover’s name again—there was mention, he thought, of how Pam seemed “shaken” and was “lately insane.” Only after the phone call would Jack figure out that Maureen Yap had said she was “taking a later plane to Vancouver.”

It was also after the phone call when Jack reminded Maureen that, from their bed in the Four Seasons, they were very close to the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, which prompted Maureen to show him her fruit-bat and vampire-bat imitations. Naturally, this led them to enact Emma’s squeezed-child saga—all three endings.

“There is no way to have too much sex with you,” The Yap told him later, when he was having some difficulty peeing in her bathroom. He heard this, of course, as: “It is no fair I bathe all bare for you,” or something like that.

“My mother has cancer,” Jack called from the bathroom. (Not too loudly; the door was open.) “She’s dying.”

“Come back to bed,” Maureen said distinctly. Once they’d moved on to medical matters, he had no trouble understanding her. Dr. Yap spoke very clearly.

What would happen to his mother’s brain? Jack wanted to know. It must have sounded to Maureen like a child’s question, because she held him in her arms, with his head against her breasts, and talked to him as if he were a child. “It probably won’t be as bad for her as it will be for you, Jack,” she began, “depending on where in her brain the tumor is. You should send me the MRI.”

“Okay,” Jack said. He noticed he was crying.

“If it’s in her visual cortex, she’ll go blind. If it’s in the speech cortex—well, you get the picture. If the cancer eats through a blood vessel, she will hemorrhage and die without ever knowing or feeling what has happened to her. Or, as her brain swells, she will simply slip away.”

“Will she be in a coma?” he asked.

“She could be, Jack. She could die peacefully in a coma—she could simply stop breathing. But along the way, she might think she was someone else. She might have hallucinations—she might smell strange, nonexistent smells. Truly anything is possible. She will go fairly quickly and painlessly, but she may not know who she is when she goes. The hard part for you, Jack, is that you may not know who she is, either.”

The hard part for Jack, as he would tell Maureen, was that he’d never known who his mother was. The description of her ultimate death seemed almost familiar.

“Do you mind if I call you Dr. Yap?” Jack asked Maureen, when they were saying good-bye.

“Not if you call me incessantly,” she said.

He wouldn’t, of course; Maureen knew that. When Jack sent her his mom’s MRI, he already had a pretty good idea of where the tumor was—the so-called space-occupying lesion. Alice knew, too. Dr. Yap’s interpretation of the MRI would merely confirm the prognosis. The tumor was in the limbic system—the emotional center of the brain.

“Well, isn’t that fucking great !” Leslie Oastler would say. “I suppose that Alice will think the whole thing is terribly funny, or she’ll be laughing one minute and crying the next—an emotional yo-yo, either telling grossly inappropriate jokes or drowning in some inexpressible sorrow!”

Of course, from Jack’s point of view, his mom had always been that way; that a malignant tumor now occupied the emotional center of her brain seemed unremarkable, even normal.

“If it’s gone this far, Jack,” Maureen Yap had forewarned him, “I’m sure that your mother has already come to terms with dying. Just imagine how much she’s thought about it. She even decided, somewhere along the line, not to tell you. That means to me that she’s thought about it a lot—enough to have the peace of mind to keep it to herself. It’s Mrs. Oastler who can’t come to terms with it. And you— you won’t have time to come to terms with it until she’s gone. It’ll happen that fast, Jack.”

“She’s only fifty-one!” he’d cried against her thirteen-year-old’s breasts, her child-size body.

“Cancer likes you when you’re young, Jack,” Maureen had told him. “Even cancer slows down when you’re old.”

There was no slowing down Alice’s cancer; it would run away with her in a hurry, befitting a disease that had a twenty-year head start. Later that same morning—after he’d said good-bye to Dr. Yap—Jack got himself down to Queen Street and once more entered the tattoo world of Daughter Alice, where he and his mother had a little talk. (A little dance would more accurately describe it.)

“Do you still take your tea with honey, dear?” his mom asked him, when he walked into the shop. “I just made a fresh pot.”

“No honey, Mom. We have to talk.”

“My, aren’t we serious this morning!” his mother said. “I suppose Leslie spilled the beans in her dramatic fashion. You’d think she was the one who’s dying—she’s so angry about it!”

Jack didn’t say anything; he just let her talk, knowing she might clam up at any moment. “Of course Leslie has a right to be angry,” Alice went on. “After all, I’m leaving her—and I promised her I never would. She let me go to all those tattoo conventions, where there’s a lot of fooling around. But I always came back.”

“I guess you’re leaving me, too,” Jack said. “When were you planning to tell me?”

“The only person I ever wanted to agonize over me was your father, Jack, and he simply refused. He didn’t want me—even knowing that, if he rejected me, I would never let him be with you.”

Perhaps it was being with Maureen Yap that made Jack wonder if he’d misheard what his mother had said, but he could tell by the way she suddenly gave his cup of tea her complete attention that she might have said a little more than she’d meant to say.

“He wanted to be with me?” Jack asked her.

“ I’m the one who’s dying, dear. Don’t you think you should ask me about me ?”

He watched her put a heaping teaspoon of honey in his tea; her hands, like Mrs. Oastler’s at the kitchen table, were shaking slightly as she stirred the spoon in the cup.