Charles Bock - Alice & Oliver

“Where have you been, Howie ?” Alice called. “I thought you’d abandoned me.”

It was evident Dr. Eisenstatt was not accustomed to being teased, especially not by patients. His already flushed face turned a deeper shade. The doctor seemed to stare through his chart. He did that thing where he pinched the bridge of his nose. Rubbing his eyelids with his thumbs, he murmured something unheard, took a few breaths. In the scoop of his undone smock, Alice recognized his starched and narrow pin collar, replete with gold bar running behind the raised tie knot — a flourish that defined custom-made, high-end dress shirts. Alice also noticed that his shirt was a bit too large, couldn’t have been custom made. The thought flashed through her mind that the doctor’s mother bought it for him at a Barneys Warehouse sale. Alice chided herself but also felt nourished — not merely by the doctor’s brain freeze, his vulnerability, or even his confusion, but rather, by the vehemence of her own cattiness.

“Aside from your concerns with my tardiness,” Eisenstatt said, “which I certainly understand and can sympathize with, and apologize for.” Eisenstatt refocused and paused, gracious. “Now that I’ve finally managed to get here, from all indications, things appear to be going quite well, which is heartening.” He stepped toward the bed. “It also came to my attention that you and the nurse had a meeting of the minds.”

Breezing past the nurse to whom he’d just referred, and whose name apparently did not matter to him, Eisenstatt stopped at the side of the bed. “Mrs. Culvert, let me assure you. You are exactly where you need to be. If the cancer was present, you’d be back in reinduction, understand?” His intelligence added weight to each sentence, and his focus impacted this weight, landing smack between Alice’s eyes. “We want to keep your cancer in remission. This is the treatment.”

Alice’s silence conveyed acquiescence. Readying the late pages of a tattered notebook, she followed the doctor as best she could, scribbling along while Eisenstatt explained that her consolidation chemo cycle was scheduled to run over the course of six days. Alice would get her dose at 7:00 P.M. and 7:00 A.M. Would have a day of rest afterward, on-off, this the pattern through her six-day cycle.

“So before and after seven, Doe can come.” She wrung out her writing hand.

“She misses you,” Oliver said. “I’ll have her here.”

On her side, Requita was wrapping a blood pressure sleeve around the arm nearest her port.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Alice told her. “I’m not meaning to be difficult.”

Eisenstatt watched the nurse undo the sleeve. “A lot of our patients take for granted that consolidation is routine,” he said, a hint of the scolding father coming through. “Assuming things go according to plan, you’ll feel fine for most of your stay. When you go home and your numbers start to drop, that’s when you’ll get weak and tired. Probably half my patients end up coming back to the hospital — not from the chemo but from infections. Consolidation chemo is actually more potent than the induction.”

“Already you are bringing clouds of doom, O Jewish granny. Does this officially make you a yenta? Is that the term?” Motioning to the pictures on the bedside table, she spoke to Oliver. “Little kumquat.”

“You’ve been through this already, I understand. But we don’t want expectations working against you. It is not uncommon. After patients have been through chemotherapy once, they think they know what’s coming.”

“Doctor, is it possible for me to hold the drugs?”

Howard Eisenstatt, MD, looked at her as if she were from another planet.

“The chemotherapy drugs. Before we start?”

The ripple of confusion swelled, extending into uncertain looks. But he had no reason to refuse. The bottle itself was thick as a jelly jar, without a single contour: it came off the tree. Alice let it rest in her lap, then she pressed her palms until they were flat against each side. She shut her eyes, kept pressing her palms until the atoms of her flesh merged into the smoothness, until flesh and glass and medicine were one being, one thing. Inside the eye of her mind, Alice envisioned a smooth whiteness — flowing through her, pushing out stray thoughts, flattening worry. She inhaled up through her diaphragm, felt her chest rise, felt air swell through her, made her inner self as massive, as empty as possible. She took a long exhalation, pushing all of this gathered swelling energy out through her nose, feeling those flat stray worries push out of her body. Alice lingered on her child. Her friends. Her mother. Her passed father. Her husband. Her child. Love palpitated through her, and she channeled this love, harnessed it. “You have an important job,” Alice told the clear contents of the jar between her palms. “Welcome to my body.”

Exhaling again through her nose, Alice felt her skin alive and vibrating; and she was not scared. Handing back the bottle to Carmen, she gave thanks. Oliver was lowering himself with care onto the opposite side of the bed, making sure he did not land on her; he was lying sideways, at once next to her and on her, his chest warm on her arm and shoulder without being too heavy, his groin rubbing into her hip, the sensations wonderful, his leg now wrapping itself over hers, his touch tantalizing. Alice grabbed her husband’s hand. He kissed her on the neck, nibbled her hanging lobe. The nurses could have used popcorn, gawking the way they were.

“I was thinking a little ‘Captain Jack,’ ” Oliver said.

She laughed. “So hideous.”

“Right to ‘Piano Man’ then?”

“At least that has ambition. The ambition is what makes it so perfect in its terribleness.” She searched out Carmen’s face, signaled it was fine to begin.

“You want it that way, we go to the heavyweights.” Oliver put his arms around her, used the lower part of her eardrum as his microphone. “Love on the rocks. Ain’t no surprise.” He paused. “Most self-pitying song in the history of the world.”

Alice’s face was luminous, basking. “Pour me a drink.” She rushed through the next sung phrase.

Perplexity; laughter from the cheap seats, one of the nurses complaining, she liked that song. Single drops were being released, in a maudlin and constant time signature, through the thumb-operated drip clamp, down into the tubing.

Their nightly crooning sessions had been neck and neck with the laps they walked together through Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s hallways, the twin peak joys of their time in New Hampshire: eighties hair metal ballads; self-pitying alcoholic nightclub crooners; the worst tripe they could come up with.

They paused, Alice asking if Dr. Eisenstatt wanted to join them, and took more than a little joy in his demurring smile, his uncertainty about whether they were still making fun of him. She and Oliver kept belting, side by side, all but joined together and at the same time forgetting themselves, their joy palpable, emanating. Contentedness? Love? Whatever this feeling, Alice felt it: intangible, inviolable, invulnerable. At the same time, she recognized something else. This feeling had its underside, its darkness. However, the contrast allowed her to focus that much more, gave her access. For now she understood that this palpable feeling of hers was so very fragile, nothing more than glued together, the reconstructed shell of a once-shattered egg.

SHE MANAGED TO eat almost a third of the black bean soup that he’d picked up from a Greek diner, and the food was sitting in her stomach without problems, so maybe the steroids were starting to work. Her blood pressure had normalized, one hundred over seventy. Her temp was stable. She was cleaning Oliver’s clock at rummy pretty good, the two of them snug together in the bed, idly discussing movies Oliver could rent for the next day, whether they had enough time together to do her walking laps. Their inside hands were entwined, her left, his right, and this mingling had its own associations: Oliver coming to bed late after a programming jaunt, Alice, half-asleep, reaching for his hand; that white-knuckled delivery room and him counting out breaths for her while she all but crushed his fingers; the pleading need while the paramedics lifted her on the stretcher, Alice not wanting to let go.