Talk, Talk

Almost an exact replay of that time seven years ago.

Uncanny really.

I spent my time driving RTT to and from the hospital and on various (mostly) medically related errands, helping RTT clean the bathroom, buying RTT such small gifts as might make him feel spoiled (under the circumstances), and trying to remember the words to Musee des Beaux Arts.

Was it: They never remembered
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course?

Or was it: They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course?

The bit about the doggy life and the torturer’s horse scratching its innocent behind, I remembered.

###

Got there Monday.

Meet me at the hospital, RTT had texted.

Ben was in the ICU. The doctors had finally diagnosed him: It was his liver again. He’d been sliding back into another encephalitic hepatic coma; the blood he’d been vomiting was from esophageal varices; the edema that made his legs look like tree trunks was portal vein backup.

The ICU waiting room was empty, so I went looking for B’s room, to alert RTT to the fact that I was there.

B was conscious, and when he saw me, he snarled.

For the record, when B snarls, he makes Sid Vicious look like a rank amateur.

“A word with you,” he hissed, and RTT, his brother Lew, and Sarolta obediently trotted out of the room.

“What are you doing here? I don’t want you here—“

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t want to be here. I came for Robin—“

“He didn’t know that you were coming—“

“Of course, he knew that I was coming. And so did Sarolta.”

Now that his liver could no longer exert its calming, mediating influence on the toxins floating around in his blood, all sorts of uncurated thoughts were pouring out of B’s mouth.

He did apologize once his bilirubin levels crept down a little.

“No worries,” I told him with an enormous smile. “If Bill Hare showed up in my hospital room while I was lying there half-naked with tubes sticking out of me, I’m sure I’d have exactly the same reaction.”

“I thought you were all gathered round my bedside to say goodbye,” he said, scanning my face anxiously. “I thought I was dying.”

You need to learn to forgive, I told myself sternly.

It’s something I’ve told myself plenty of times in the past.

But somehow I never get around to it.

###

I’d thought that B’s near brush with death might have changed him for the better. The coma, the fatal diagnosis, the Sovaldi miracle cure!

But as it turned out, that thought was overly optimistic.

Apparently, he told Sarolta that he’d legally adopted Max.

When Robin told me this, we both burst out laughing.

“After he got to the hospital, we were trying to make a list of the people he should call. And she said, ‘Call Max! I know they’re estranged, but he needs to know his father is sick!’,” said Robin. “And I said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘His father,’ and I said, ‘That’ll be news to Bill Hare.’”

“Oh, my Gawd,” I said. “And he probably laid it on really thick about how I was the person who’d come between him and his son!”

“Well. Maybe he just told her he thinks of Max as his adopted son, and she misunderstood—“

“No, Robin,” I said. “I know exactly how your father’s lies work. He adopted Max, and they had the closest relationship you can possibly imagine! He read To Kill a Mockingbird and Bleak House aloud to the infant Max, bought him toy gavels, even took him on field trips to criminal trials at the Alameda County Superior Courthouse, and that’s how come Max ended up becoming a lawyer. It is the greatest tragedy in his life that he and his son are estranged.”

“Don’t tell Max about the adoption thing.”

“Oh, I won’t. He wouldn’t find it funny at all.”

“Sarolta was crying. You know what she said to me? She said, ‘If only I’d met your father 30 years ago!’”

“But then you wouldn’t have been born,” I pointed out.

“Well, exactly. I thought it was a pretty weird thing to say to me, actually. But I didn’t say anything.”

###

Robin and I spent much of Tuesday sitting with Ben in the hospital room to which they transferred him when Cayuga Medical Center figured they could no longer make the Big Buck$$$ out of an ICU stay.

Ben had also neglected to tell Sarolta about his liver.

“Sarolta is just physically and emotionally exhausted,” Ben told us. “As you can imagine, all this has taken a dreadful toll, and we are going to need to talk—“

“She’s upset because you didn’t tell her about the cirrhosis,” Robin told him bluntly.

“But I didn’t have cirrhosis,” Ben said.

I sighed because this had been a subject of much heated debate between Ben and I over the past couple of years. Yes, the liver can regenerate. But it regenerates in under half of all formerly-hep-C-infected individuals. Of course, I wasn’t privy to the results of all his post-Sovaldi liver function tests. But given the severity of his liver damage—I mean, Jesus! It put him in a coma for 72 hours!—it seemed highly unlikely to me that he wouldn’t have ended up with a scarred liver.

He denied it.

Told me his doctors had given him a clean bill of health.

Given Ben’s multiple and wavering relationship with the truth, I suspected this was not the case, and he knew it.

But, hey! Not my problem.

“She’s also gonna talk about the Max adoption thing—“ Robin began.

“Can we please, please, please not talk about that?” I said. “Please?”

There was a pause.

“Sarolta would like to paint the apartment,” Ben continued pleasantly. “It would help her feel more at home there.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Robin said. “The landlord got really upset when you painted that one wall.”

“Well, the landlord can get as upset as he wants to get,” Ben said. “New York State tenant law is on our side. If we want to paint the apartment, we can paint the apartment, and Robin, you’re going to help.”

“I think it would be more help if I cleaned the apartment,” Robin said. “Mom said she’d help.”

“Oh. Well. No. I’ve thought about that, too, and here’s what I’ve decided to do. I told Sarolta, ‘We’ll hire Molly Maids to give the place a thorough cleaning.’ Since I can’t really help right now with cleaning the way that life partners do for each other. Help. Each other. Because they’re partners. My family’s already said don’t worry about money, we’ll give you money—“

###

“I wonder who said they’d give him money,” said Robin after the nurses chased us from the room so they could do some nursey thing. “Not Lew.”

“Oh, definitely not Lew,” I said.

“Lew really doesn’t like Dad very much,” Robin said. “I guess he never forgave Dad for the summer that he and Sharee lived with Grandma Nancy, and they stole all that money from her.”

“I guess not,” I said.

“You know what he told me? He told me he thought that Dad had never even been in the Peace Corps. In Honduras.”

“Huh,” I said. That thought had never even occurred to me. But now that I had been introduced to it, I figured I should spend some time getting acquainted. It was entirely plausible.

“Lew said somebody should give Sarolta the talk. Like Grandma Nancy gave you.”

I remembered that talk.

Too little, too late, as the saying goes.

Since I’d already given birth to Robin and was in way over my head emotionally.

Ben had told me that a female friend of his named Debbie was really his sister. But that his mother hated her.

And also that he’d begotten a daughter on a high school sweetheart and that it was the great tragedy of his life that another man was raising her, that he was allowed to have nothing to do with her.

So, I rather innocently asked Nancy—who already hated me for reasons that were never clear to me—whether she might ever consider reconciling with her estranged daughter.

And Nancy gave me this look.

And began telling me how from the get-go, she had determined to stay out of it.

And that was what I mostly remember about the talk.

That Nancy was determined to stay out of it.

But also that Ben whose IQ was in uncharted territory, whose potential was so unlimited it was scary, had decided to spend his life being downwardly mobile—I believe that may have been her exact phrase: “downwardly mobile.” He’d been a heroin addict. He’d cooked meth. He lied obsessively. He stole when you let him.

“You saved his life,” she told me. She hurled the words at me like an accusation. “You saved his life.”

So, who was I supposed to believe? This old woman who didn’t like me or this man who knew my thoughts before I had the words to say them, who helped me write like an angel, who gave me 15 orgasms a night?

I’ll take Really, Really Bad Life Choices for $1,000, Alex!

###

Anyway.

They discharged Ben from the hospital yesterday.

I went by his apartment this morning to drive Robin to work, and I was shocked and disgusted by the squalor of the sickroom he's stashed in. By the squalor of the whole apartment really even after Robin and I scrubbed the bathroom. But particularly of that sickroom.

Ben seemed a lot less lucid to me at home than he had been in the hospital, and I wondered whether it was that awful room or whether he was exceeding the recommended dose of narcotics.

The fantasy is that he can resume his chemotherapy on Monday, but I can’t imagine how they’re gonna give chemotherapy to someone who’s in liver failure.

Not my place to have that talk with anyone.

I wouldn’t even have that talk with Robin.

But somebody needs to have that talk.

That’s why they pay doctors the big bucks.

Robin won’t leave Ben because Ben begged him to stay. Robin is a mensch.

But boy, oh boy, I would give anything to get Robin out of that situation.

And I was so-o-o-o happy to get home where everything is bright and clean and pretty and not dysfunctional.

I’ll do anything for Robin, but I surely do not want to make dancing attendance Ben’s medical crises any kind of a regular habit.