Heard In Room 303        Mission Hospital, Laguna Beach July 2010    

What a girl’s gotta do to get a date.    

Lyn’s words to the room at large, but specifically to Ulysses, a Latino Greek with metal rimmed incisors, black hair lopped off unevenly, stocky build, his grandfather (he shared early on) still alive at 105. Ulysses’s face is now crimson, his arms lost beneath Lyn’s teal hospital gown as he searches for the sensors come loose from their snaps for the heart reading, his fingers grazing her stomach, her back, trying to avoid brushing her breasts, but not. Lyn winks, parades a wicked smile.  

I put a tip jar here. Everyone pay on the way in. End of day, I’m a rich woman.  

Anna’s words to the assemblage of frequent and constantly varying visitors gathered around Lyn. The main nurse on duty, Anna is a Romanian beauty--auburn hair, painted green eyes, a sultry swing--her drab nurse attire does nothing to stifle her drama. One imagines her draped in a film noire fur, cigarette poised in a long holder, diamond rocks at her neck. “You want a good story. I have a good story,” she tells me when she learns I’m a writer, hands on her hips tossing back her hair, the perfect eastern European flirt.

Stalin would have killed that mechanic.  

Valentina, the wandering Russian nurse, speaking of the local auto repairman who insisted he replace all the breaks in her jeep, which she later found out wasn’t necessary. She paces from the door to Lyn’s bed and back again, a nurse without a patient in this curiously overstaffed hospital a block from the beach, finding her way into Room 303, like so many of the others. She pops into the bathroom to check for any fluids to save, trash to discard, a reason to stay. Disappointed, she returns bedside, pressing two fingers to Lyn’s wrist to capture a pulse, and continues with her tale, sputtering about the disgrace. “America," she says. "Falling apart."    

It’s been a hell of a week.   

Lyn to long-time friend Josh after she reiterates the facts: on Thursday, publisher Houghton Mifflin’s sudden decline of support for her and her national music project (following months of negotiations, the contract all but signed). On Friday, the fender bender driving home from the gym. On Saturday in the ER, the news of stage 4 Adenocarcinoma. She ends the list with a doleful belly laugh.  

Mrs. Gould, this your husband?   

An administrator checking the personal data sheet as Ben enters the room and introduces himself. True, for siblings, they look nothing alike: Ben is dark, round. Lyn is blond, athletically fit. “No,” Lyn says, “my baby brother.” Lyn lets the Mrs. go as she threads her fingers between mine. “This here is my darling.” 

Like a bear.  

Ben to me, stating what is clearly the obvious when I ask how he slept. He arrives midmorning, gripping a venti Starbucks latte, refreshed, exuberant. He’s flown in from Pennsylvania, staying in my beach cottage while I stay in-room with Lyn—she, too, revved up, having dreamed through the night’s interruptions of blood pressure checks and IV refills, aided by a generous dose of Ativan. When friends Janie and Sara come to visit shortly afterward, arms laden with organic granola, apples, and books, their glances swing from Lyn to Ben to me, lingering on me. “When was the last time you had a shower?” Janie says, taking me aside. “You need to get out of here.”

Katherine Heprin.  

What Lyn calls the Heparin blood thinner, pulsing into her through an I.V.. It was a severe cramp in her right shin which brought us to the ER, where they found the cause of the cramp to be a clot, and the cause of the clot to be a cell-multiplying monster, this fact announced by an on-duty physician matter-of-factly, as if this were routine, as if the world hadn’t just lurched and forever spilt its loveliness, the shock alone altering the trajectory of all that is to come. Josh brings a fistful of glowing white lilies. There’s no water. “Let’s give them some of Katherine’s juices,” says Lyn.

Now that’s uplifting. 

Janie to the crucifix inside the room just above the door, Jesus dangling, red splats on his face, chest, and palms. Janie takes a paper plate from Lyn’s untouched lunch, draws a star of David, asks Sara to give her a boost, and covers the crucifix with the star. Round of applause. Something in my Catholic gut objects, but only briefly, for I see what they see: an innocent being, ravaged, lost to circumstances beyond his control.

He-e-e-e-llo there!  

Ben to striking Dr. Espelita, a Tiger Woods look-alike, look-better, puppy eyes, two short scars under his left brow, sitting on the bed next to Lyn providing a convincing argument for a lung biopsy which she’d earlier declined, Ben moving in closer, closer to this hunk of a man, this Espelita with so many beautiful, pearly teeth, trying to spy his left ring finger. Ben’s gentle smile when it’s found jewelry-free. 

Looks like an SM contraption.  

Lyn to Ulysses, back again, as he wheels from the room a gurney with a metal hook swinging above the mattress. With a glance from Lyn to Ben, Ulysses says, “Don’t you give him any ideas.” Ben, not missing a beat: “Oh, don’t worry, I’ve already had all of ‘em.”   

Never never never give up.   

Winston Churchill to who knows? (but at the very least to himself), though now the sentiment is directed to Lyn, hand-written in black on a 3x5 card deposited anonymously on her steel side table, the up’s “p” curling off and down, then swelling into a bug-shaped blotch, the ink sprung new life having bumped into some liquid (Katherine’s juices?). Who wrote the words will likely remain a mystery, but my guess is the oncologist who visited the afternoon Lyn was wheeled up to this third floor for what will be a full week’s stay. It seems he alone appreciates the gravity. The nurses don’t; they either haven’t checked her chart, or choose to ignore what they see there, for Lyn is a fountain of rollicking jokes and 70’s band tales: her encounters with Cosby in Vegas, Dylan on the Cape, Sammy Davis Jr. in Monte Carlo. Room 303 is the fun room, the cool place to hang.

You wanna be poor?

Lyn to Jimmy, the orderly who daily brings her breakfast (a small plate of oatmeal, applesauce in an airtight plastic cup, an 8 ounce carton of milk), when he, sprung from his shyness, his eyes now bright, confides he is ready to make the move, to quit his job and start a band. “I love music,” Jimmy says, blond hair slicked smooth with a bit of gel, the fuzzy beginnings of a beard, his hospital cottons a pressed, plum purple, “It’s my life.” Lyn looks him dead on. “Listen, man, I love music, too,” she says, “but we can love many things.” Then: “My parents thought I’d be a lawyer. I thought I’d be a rabbi.” Jimmy nods; to his credit, he knows not to snicker. “Life would have been a hell of a lot easier," she says. "As a lawyer. Or a rabbi." Jimmy stands, arms dropped at his sides, waiting for something more. She lifts a hand punctured with an IV line. He extends his, clasps hers, holds on. 

We had so many plans.  

I to Josh in the room when he arrives, Lyn away for a scan. Spoken again in the hallway. In the elevator. While in line for coffee downstairs. Each time he wraps me in a hug and doesn’t let go. I tell him my mother died from the same lung cancer eight years before. Five young grandchildren she was just getting to know. She was only 72. Only, I think now, as images of the future fall away, petals dropping in clumps from a ripe, perfect blossom. Lyn is 58.

Zeke needs some lovin’. Would you?  

Lyn. And I say yes, of course, not because I have any special affection for her hefty cat, but because he’s her man. Because she’s asked. The hospital doors shluuckkk open, and in view across the street and down the hill is the Pacific, a dramatic sweep of ocean there all along, a solid, undeniable blue. I drive the four miles up the coast to Lyn’s cottage, park out front. A young woman I don’t know saunters by at a near skip, dreads flopping at her shoulders. “Hey! how’s it going?” she waves, and continues on. Zeke spots me moving up the walkway and becomes frantic. Visible through the window, his eighteen pounds of muscle and billowing fur spring from piano to sofa to piano. He stares me down from atop Lyn’s grand, a paw smashed against the glass. Wa wa Wa wa WAH!  Where is she? He wants to know. Angry. Only slightly consoled. Confused. 

And you are...?  

Anna, on duty, with genuine, possibly jealous, curiosity, as she enters the room, Jimmy on her heels, the question posed to wandering Valentina, who’s slipped in for a renegade return visit, relaxing at the end of Lyn’s bed in her nursing digs, stethoscope round her neck. Jimmy arranges Lyn’s morning meal on the lap tray, a harmonica bobbing suspiciously in his front shirt pocket. "I vish I knew," Valentina answers dryly, a respectable answer considering she and Lyn have been discussing existential Russian philosophy for the better part of an hour, and it’s not yet 9 am. Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, The Fourth Way. Lots of ponderous spirituality. I actually read The Fourth Way in its entirety some years ago, but I’ve no interest in any of this now. Lying on the room’s spare cot, I pretend to read, but here’s what I do:  breathe in, breathe out. If the gods bring to you / a strange and frightening creature, poet Jane Hirshfield implores me from the open page, accept the gift / as if it were one you had chosen.

The web’s got all the answers. 

Ben is staring into his laptop. When Lyn’s dozing, like now, he searches, asks all kinds of questions. Best gay hangs in Miami? Best real estate deals in South Beach? (He needs a change.) Mostly it’s cancer, lung cancer: stages, treatments, prognoses. “I know Lynnie says she’s not a statistic, but ... ” and nudges the laptop my way. There’s a graph, a red line diving precipitously. Somewhere on the screen the word longevity. I shove it back to him. Now he’s got Wikihow up. He nudges the laptop over again. Four Ways to Overcome Fear, with clickable subtopics: Define its contours. Make it a source of fascination! Start seeing it as opportunity! Ben’s hand is deep in a bag of Krispy Kremes. He lifts out a fat, sugar-dusted special, his fifth since he arrived a half hour ago. I slam the laptop lid closed. He pauses, looks at Lyn, then looks away, dropping the donut onto a napkin. His sigh is deep. He nudges me the bag. “One left,” he says.

Nearly rolled you over!  

Gorgeous Dr. Espelita, strolling in behind an empty wheel chair, barely missing knocking Ben on his way out for another coffee. Ben laughs his delicious deep howl, turns on his heels and trails Espelita back into the room. Lyn sleeps. Espelita glances at the overhead monitor which since early this morning has stopped emitting its insane chirp. He looks at Ben. “Did you..?” Ben tosses his head my way. “I’m guilty,” I say, having accessed through the control panel a way to turn the volume not down, but off. I’m expecting to be scolded for altering the equipment, something about an egregious affront to the hospital’s protocol. But he says simply, “Glad you did.” I’m holding Lyn’s hand, and as he reaches out to take it from me to get a pulse, he sandwiches our two between his. Lyn stirs. “Hey, Jazz Lady,”  he says quietly, a white-white smile. He wiggles the wheelchair. “The biopsy. It’s time.” 

It might not be cancer at all. 

Lyn to those gathered, assuring them that until further results are in, nothing is certain. They’ve been drawn into the orbit of her outrageous optimism, these friends who arrive tentative and weepy, and depart almost happy. She looks at Ben—they just buried their parents a year before—looks, and rolls her eyes toward me. As if to say, Take care of her, will you, I struggling to remain stoic in all this strangeness, convulsing nevertheless each time she’s wheeled out, as if she’s not coming back.

That’s a guilt trip I don’t need right now. 

Lyn to me, before dawn, as I snuggle with her in bed, stretched along the edge of the skinny mattress, sharing her pillow, her thin blanket, tubes in her arms, tubes everywhere, when after five nights of little sleep, I whisper from a tear swollen face What will I possibly do, how will I make it without her?

Are you with me on this?   

Lyn, an hour later—neither of us understanding the immensity of what she is asking—my YES firm, the early sun slipping into the room, its light sifting through the eucalyptus soaring beyond the window, her face for a moment raw and impenetrable, then softening, though still resolute. She is warm—a slight fever—and I hold her, hold the heat of her body against the cool of my own. Someone in the hall moves a cart, its rattle jars the morning’s calm. A screech of rubber-soled shoes, a sigh of tedium from a nightshift nurse longing for the eight hours to end. “Darling, we’ll get through this,” Lyn says, blue eyes alertly pensive, as if mentally stepping through some cosmic plan. There is something at work within her; prayer, yes, but something more. She floats off. I begin to slide from the bed. She guides her hand under my shirt, along my spine, and pulls me in. 

Think there’s a lock on that door?  

Now she’s stroking my back, her gaze wild, and I remember the first time she ate me with those eyes, ate the all of me. A gaze erotic yet respectful. She thought then she was being covert, but no, and this recognition drew me to her in a blush of delirium. We’d known each other for nearly a year and yet suddenly there was this. It was a warm, red evening, a moonless sky. She’d invited me to a salon she was hosting, a room filled with friends and admirers. When we clasped hands to say good-bye, the air around us quivered and blurred, and in that moment I knew I would offer myself to her, a carnal desire I’d never before imagined or felt for a woman. It was molecular, quantum. It could not be reasoned with. It still can’t, I tell myself as our lips touch, willing my mind to halt its withering chatter. The door swings open, a tunnel of light. A head pops in. Anna.    

I tell you, what a night.  

Her perfume charges into the room from where she stands in the open door, backlit by the ceiling fluorescents in the corridor. “You awake?” her voice lowered to a whisper. Black stilettos, a black silk sheath of a dress that sways with the slightest jingle of her hips. "No,”  Lyn and I respond in unison. Anna slips her arms into a nurse coat hanging behind the door, drags a chair bedside and joins us, kicking off her shoes with a dramatic sigh, a ruby-lipped pout. Swathed in a cloud of hyacinth and citrus, she fastens the coat’s buttons with piercing concentration, saying nothing more, clearly waiting for Lyn’s inquisitive lead, her usual, winsome “What’s up, girl?” which doesn’t come, Lyn’s lips pressed to the back of my neck, her breath exciting my skin.     

It can wait. 

Espelita standing suddenly bedside, I still nestled with Lyn, having dozed off, the sun now risen in the sky, Lyn’s breakfast, I see, delivered and displayed as she likes it, extra milk, and today an espresso—Jimmy remembered—still slightly steaming, Espelita with news of the biopsy, I know, though he doesn’t yet say, only again “It can wait,” whispered, then a slow nod as his eyes meet mine.