Chemistry of Fire Read online

  The maddening thing was how little of her was left in the end. Charlie wasted no time in having her cremated, her ashes sent back to her surviving relatives in Hungary. I had nothing but a sheet of my typing paper on which she had written her name and a few phrases in German. “Wo sich die Füchse gute Nacht sagen.” I had a few photographs of her, at the zoo one day with me, water-skiing on those powerful legs on Walloon Lake that terrible summer. I still had her ivory-colored copy of Licht im August.

  I suppose I could have stayed at TriQuarterly and continued to be an editor. It was a prestigious magazine. Charlie had taken the student literary magazine and turned it into an international success. I could have cranked out a PhD. I had already taught Charlie’s class a couple of times. With our matching PhDs, Carolyn and I would have made a fabulous faculty couple. I would have grown a beard, worn the tweed, smoked a pipe, taught English, written some critical essays and some bad poems. And like the family secret of a disappearing baby, Ibi would have faded into mist and have never been mentioned again.

  But the situation was just too weird. I was still an undergraduate, but I had a faculty identification card because of my job at TriQuarterly. When I ate in the faculty dining room, with my wild hair and my rock-and-roll clothes, surrounded by the pipe-smoking professors who eyed me warily, I felt audacious and ridiculous all at once. I realized how little I had in common with those academics. And I couldn’t envision myself plodding onward, publishing E. M. Cioran, W. S. Merwin, Robert Coover, and Mark Strand for the rest of their lives if not mine. But Ibi’s suicide—the reality of it—had shaken me up to such an extent that I knew I had to plunge into writing as a way of staying alive. Only many years later would I understand how Ibi and I had recognized each other in the stream as kindred spirits. I could have as easily been the one who committed suicide, like the toddler flushing himself down the toilet. I quit school. I left TriQuarterly. I devoted myself to the hypnagogic flow of writing every day.

  At the time I had given up diving as my major serial obsession and had taken up pool, as in pocket billiards. The thunderbolt crack of the break, the quiet tap of the ball, the sizzle as it raced across the Belgian wool, the pleasant tick of its contact with another ball, the leap of the rebound off the rails, and then at last the satisfying pocket drop—even the yellow lighting on the green Simonis felt added to the soothing that I experienced when playing pool. I was so obsessed that I took my custom-made Craig Peterson pool cue on my honeymoon with Carolyn, which happened to be at a remote house in the jungle of Mexico, where los indios, my ancestors, had never heard of pocket billiards.

  14

  The Chemistry of Fire

  SITTING IN THE hospital with my wife, Debbie, and my former wife, Carolyn, I saw Carolyn’s green eyes flash with a defiant confidence. But she also conveyed a subtle joy and determination in her task. She sat in a beige faux leather reclining lounge chair. An IV ran from a stainless-steel stand into her chest. That flashing look carried me back to the time when I first met her and she refused to go out with me or have lunch with me or even go for coffee with me until we had become properly acquainted.

  Autumn 1969. At last Carolyn had agreed to a walk by the lake. We met at the park on a sunny day when a warm spell lured the monarchs down from their migration to Mexico. This was the chemistry of fire: We walked the parkland along Lake Michigan, marveling at the millions of blossoming wings hung about us in the naked trees. She was tall and thin with straight brown hair that fell to her waist—long waist, long legs—and those flashing green eyes that drew me in. She was working on her PhD in English. We talked about literature late into the night. We were in our early twenties, dazzled by life. We were beautiful. We were immortal. We were heedless, burning the days. Across town, Debbie had just met the man she wanted to marry.

  February 26, 2007. Evanston Hospital. My elder daughter, Elena, was ready with her Square Deal Marble Memo notebook. My younger daughter, Amelia, was away at college. Carolyn, their mother, sat between me and Dr. Rodriguez, a small dark man in a blue-gray lab coat, pockets bristling. Carolyn and I had been divorced for many years, and I considered it an honor that she had wanted me to lend support at this meeting. Debbie and I had been married for several years at that point. “Of course, you have to go,” she had told me.

  The doctor spoke. When I heard the words, I felt an electric current run through me. Ovarian cancer. My guts turned to liquid. I wanted to reach out and grab hold of Elena’s hand, get on the phone, and fetch Amelia back home so that we could all huddle together. It seemed as if we’d just been told that our plane was going down. There was no place to hide. Elena’s wedding to Simon was approaching in May. We had to think fast.

  Within weeks the surgery was over, and we all began making the excursions to Highland Park Hospital for daylong rounds of chemotherapy. We became famous among the nurses. The girls—Elena and Amelia—would come with movies and music, and Debbie would bring tea for Carolyn. We would spread out in a noisy celebration as the hopeful poison drained into Carolyn’s veins. Debbie recalled these sessions: “There was music and laughter, food and drinks. It was a joyous occasion. It was a party.” That was Carolyn.

  Once a nurse, preparing Carolyn for the day’s infusion, looked at me and looked back at Carolyn and observed my wedding ring, her lack of one, and asked her, “So who is he?”

  “Sometimes,” said Carolyn, “a repentant ex-husband is much better than a real one.”

  The girls and I took turns attending the meetings at Evanston Hospital with Carolyn and Dr. Rodriguez and his oncology nurse, Anne. Full-figured Anne with her pink and gleaming skin. Kind and pretty Anne, plumply radiating round her the sheer energy of life. She always focused the force of her concern on Carolyn and whisked her down the hall as if ushering her onto a stage. We took copious notes in our little notebooks. No detail of this menace would evade our powers of observation, as if we would fix it with our words and pin it down and revise fate itself. And indeed, the medicine worked. Right after her first round of chemotherapy, Carolyn took Debbie aside at a family dinner and said, sotto voce, “It’s working. I’m in remission.” And they embraced in tears.

  Her first remission lasted twenty months, from March 2007 until November 2008. When the cancer returned, it was maddening. Her CA-125, the marker for ovarian cancer, was only 7.6, completely normal. CA-125 is a notoriously bad marker. It works for some people some of the time and not others. The cancer was there on the film.

  On Christmas, with the sirens warning us to move our cars off the street during the winter snow emergency, guests arrived to find a great ten-point buck standing out in the blowing snow as still as a statue at the entrance to the tiny dead-end street on which Debbie and I live. Like a sign. We were all looking for signs. But signs of what?

  Carolyn returned to treatment with carboplatin in 2009. Carboplatin is a kind of chemotherapy drug that contains the metal platinum, which is poisonous. Since cancer cells grow faster than normal cells, it kills them first. It takes longer to kill most normal cells, but the cells that grow hair and the lining of the intestine grow fast, so they are harmed along with the cancer cells. Genetic testing that spring had shown that Carolyn had a mutation of the BRCA2 gene that raises the risk for breast and ovarian cancer. She’d had breast cancer in 1989. That treatment had worked: the breast cancer never came back. Yet the fact that her uncle Bill had had breast cancer was a very bad sign. Breast cancer doesn’t ordinarily appear in men unless they are from a genetic line strongly prone to cancer.

  After her second round of chemotherapy, her ovarian cancer went into remission again. Her hair grew back, and she appeared the picture of health. Carolyn believed that she should have lived in post-Victorian times, perhaps as part of the Bloomsbury Group, as an intimate of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. She dressed the part. She was an expert seamstress. She designed and sewed many of her own clothes, including purses, hats, and accessories. She sometimes arrived at parties two hours late but always made a sw
eeping entry, dazzling her large and devoted circle of friends. She gave extravagant parties, especially when the girls were little, when she would throw them magical birthday parties imbued with the most outrageous fantasy. In college Carolyn had dated a professional actor named Johnny. The girls called him Mr. John Mohrlein. Carolyn recruited him to play the villain in a Nancy Drew mystery party. He stole all the presents, and the children had to find them. In a Wizard of Oz party, the children marched around the block on a yellow brick road that led to the ruby slippers, crushed under someone’s garage door. Friends of Elena and Amelia still talk about those parties.

  Now that Carolyn was back to her old self, she raced across the city and the nation and even the globe with Elena and Amelia. We gave parties and arranged outings that she might live every incandescent moment to its utmost intensity. Amelia, who had lived two years in Parma and spoke fluent Italian, took Carolyn to Italy in 2011. We had Christmases and chemo and birthdays and chemo, and Carolyn went ice skating weekly, the better to live in the whirling dizziness of the moment. An eight-year-old torpedoed her on the ice, and we then began taking her to therapy for her broken wrist and drove her places until she could drive herself again.

  She wrote a note to us all, saying, “I told the doctor that I felt that I was standing over a deep chasm, walking on a tightrope covered in ice, with only cleats on my toes keeping my grip on the rope. And he said I had damn good cleats, damn good cleats!”

  December 2011. I drove Carolyn to the University of Chicago, where she enrolled in an experimental trial using a drug called Cytoxan. Carolyn’s latest CT scan had come back with an interpretation that said, “No evidence of disease.” Her CA-125 was nine, well within the normal range. I sent my progress report to the girls with notes that said, “We will find a way.”

  Our strategy of taking notes was clearly working. We were revising the future. One of Carolyn’s notes from that period ended, “We take the success we have had so far, and, wrapped in a sheath of support and love, aim high for the future. Listening to Van Morrison now. . . . Crazy Love! c”

  I read that the speed of light is not really an absolute limit. But if you do manage to go faster than the speed of light, you begin to travel backward in time. I took that as an encouraging idea. It’s what my youngest child, my son, Jonas, called a “do-over.” Debbie always said that whenever she watched Romeo and Juliet, she hoped right up until the end that they wouldn’t really die.

  October 2, 2012. Morning light, a slow coagulation. A drizzling rain. Carolyn had been feeling a fullness in her abdomen. Pressure on the right side since the summer. We went to see Dr. Rodriguez. Anne greeted us, rosy and taut within her scrubs. Dr. Rodriguez’s exam was inconclusive. Anne drew blood. Over the five years of living with ovarian cancer, Carolyn had responded to carboplatin with long periods of remission and strength. Now, just a few weeks after her last round of chemo, Dr. Rodriguez thought there should be no cause for alarm. Perhaps the level of CA-125 from her blood work would tell us the answer. Perhaps not.

  We had the answer the next day: her CA-125 had jumped from 9 to 348. The figure leapt off the page in lurid color as if her very blood had splashed there. The cancer had become resistant to platinum, and there were no good choices left. All the drugs that might help her now might also kill her.

  I had a dream that we were all in Door County, Wisconsin, Debbie and Carolyn, the girls and their husbands (only they were still children), my mother (alive at ninety-one) and my father (dead since 2007), Jonas, and my six brothers, all of us on vacation together. Our family was whole, and Debbie had the family she’d always longed for. At age twenty-seven, her cervical cancer had taken that choice from her.

  While Carolyn made piecrust in the rented cottage, I picked berries with all the children. Green meadows fell away around us, tumbling down to the lake, and bees were murmuring among the apples, which hung with heavy promise in the trees. The girls carried wicker baskets of red berries. Apprenticed to her mother, Florence Lorence, Carolyn had learned to make pies that were legendary in our family. No one could make a crust to match. The prayer card at Carolyn’s memorial service would bear Randolph Rogers’s sculpture The Lost Pleiad on one side and her recipe for piecrust on the other. We knew nothing of that in the dream, as we ate our pie among the pines by the black and gleaming lake, the girls, their mother, and I, Debbie and Jonas and the brothers, beneath the starry dome. I woke to the acute sense that danger was near.

  I had been going more and more often, staying longer and longer at Carolyn’s house. In part it was to give the girls some respite, to try to allow them to live their lives. Debbie was there at times, too, working quietly to make everything happen according to a reasonable plan. She took care of our grandson, Emmett, born in February 2012. She brought us lunch and made sure things went smoothly. She fulfilled her role as a strong and generous member of the team.

  One evening she took me aside and said, “Go as early as you need to. It’s the right thing to do. Alan did it for me when I was sick, and Margie let him do it. Now it’s your turn to do it for Carolyn and my turn to give you my blessing. To do anything else would be stupid.” She knew from experience.

  Debbie and Alan were a couple for fourteen years. But that relationship eventually ended. Alan moved on to Margie. In the summer of 1996, Debbie was living on her own. She came down with something that looked like the flu. Bedridden, she began to lose weight. She couldn’t work. She couldn’t eat. Eventually, she couldn’t stand. She lay in her apartment watching the leaves turn to fall colors. Her skin had turned a deep bronze, too. She shrank to a skeleton. The doctors were useless.

  Alan was beside himself with worry. Here was a woman he had loved and lived with for a decade and a half. Yet he was in a new relationship with Margie that needed tending. He had no idea what to do.

  Hearing of Debbie’s condition, Margie told Alan, “You get over there and find out what’s wrong. I’ll be here when you get back.” Alan rushed to Debbie’s apartment. He picked her up like a baby and carried her to a hematological oncologist.

  Dr. Olga Zuk took one look and said, “I think you have Addison’s disease.” The skeletal visage, the bronze skin. It was a classic presentation. Her immune system had turned against her and destroyed her adrenal glands. Dr. Zuk gave her a large dose of cortisone. About forty-eight hours later, Debbie was on her feet and hungry. Within the week she was gaining weight. Today you would never know that she had been days from death.

  At that time, Debbie and I were still worlds apart, yet our orbits were flinging us closer and closer together. Many years later we would plot our paths through the neighborhoods of Chicago and discover how close we had come to meeting. We went to the same restaurants, coffee shops, and grocery stores. We had attended the same theaters, the art fairs along the lake. One year we were at the same Elton John concert. We both went to breakfast at a small café on Main Street in Evanston. We most likely saw each other. Indeed, our grandfathers—railroad men—had worked a few yards from each other at Union Station in Saint Louis. Our dry cleaning had hung on the same racks, like spirits waiting to be reanimated.

  I began arriving at Carolyn’s at six or seven in the morning. Sometimes a friend or one of the girls would be there. But often Carolyn was alone. We had discussed moving her into an apartment with no stairs. The girls had taken her to look at half a dozen apartments. But Carolyn would have to give up some of her stuff, some of her beloved library. We had all been working hard going through her things and preparing her for the smaller apartment. It was a race against the clock, and her needs changed by the week, often too quickly for us to keep up with. So during those long days in the changing light, I would go to a shelf and examine the books. I’d find one that I thought she might let go of and present it to her where she sat beneath a blanket on her maroon plush couch.

  “Ruskin,” she’d say, studying the buckram cover, turning the book in her handsome hands. “One has to keep some Ruskin. Put that one back.” Viewing
a popular science book called Your Inner Fish, she said, “You take that one. That’s more your kind of book.” And so a small pile of books would grow throughout the day, and as evening descended I’d carry them out to my car and drive to the library to give some of them away and keep the ones I wanted.

  One morning I came in early, and she was not about. I called out but heard nothing. I climbed the stairs and found her sitting up in bed. Apart from being weak, she seemed all right. So I went downstairs and made her tea and toast and returned with her bed-sitting tray.

  I went to the bookshelf and collected a stack of books. “Eliot you have to keep,” she said. “Jane Austen. I won’t read those anymore. Maybe the girls . . . Conrad. Yes, keep that. And Virginia Woolf.” So went the morning. But when I suggested that we go down for lunch, I realized that she had not eaten her toast. Getting down the stairs was alarmingly difficult. She very nearly fell. I very nearly carried her. Later that week she gave me a deposit to put down on an apartment on a high floor overlooking the lake. “Look at the lake,” she said. “Always look at the lake.”

  By Thanksgiving she was using a heating pad to ease the discomfort in her abdomen. She was having trouble eating. A brief experiment with a drug called Doxil failed, giving her a terrible rash on her hands and sores in her mouth and further destroying her appetite.

  For months on end, Elena, Amelia, and I all had stomachaches. Our bodies were already mourning. Everyone around her had started to mourn as we reached out to her even as she faded before our eyes.