There Are No Grown-ups Page 7

  Fired up from this experience, I spend most of the next eighteen months at my computer, finishing my book. It’s about what I’ve learned from observing how the French raise children. I hardly see friends, I hand over most parenting duties to my husband, and I eat a disturbing amount of cake. (It’s a little-known fact that writing books makes you fat.) For the first time since moving to France, I even skip the soldes, the twice-annual sales in Parisian shops. I don’t even take time off to treat the head lice that I seem to have caught from my children. I just sit at my computer for hours, scratching my scalp.

  One April day, after consuming an entire panettone, I press “send” on an email containing my entire manuscript. There will still be another six months of edits, but the bulk of the work is done.

  Ten minutes later, I collapse into bed. For months, I’d been running on adrenaline and carbohydrates. Now I realize that my whole body aches, especially my back. I sleep for twelve hours and barely leave my bed for two days.

  When I finally get up, the pain in my back is still there. I assume this is because I’ve just spent an unnatural amount of time hunched over my desk. I order a footrest and a new computer screen that forces me to sit upright. I also go across town to see my doctor, who advises me to get a massage.

  I get many massages, but the pain worsens. Within a few months I can’t lift my sons or turn my head more than a few millimeters to either side. Soon the pain keeps me awake at night. When one of the boys flings himself onto my lap, it hurts so much I weep.

  At the end of August, lumps appear on either side of my groin. I go back to the same doctor who, four months earlier, had recommended massage. When she sees the lumps, she looks panicked. She immediately orders blood tests and sends me to an internist, who has the unruly hair and frazzled bedside manner of a mad scientist. He reads the test results and says, in heavily accented English, “You ’ave some-ting veee-ry seee-rious.” He says he doesn’t know what it is.

  I spend the next few weeks getting more tests. I soon know the French for MRI—it’s IRM—and I lie facedown on a table as a doctor extracts bone marrow—the impossible to pronounce moelle osseuse—from my hip. (The doctor is a ringer for the silver-haired Dominique de Villepin, France’s foreign minister during the Iraq War.) A few days later, I watch as a different doctor carries away a glass dish containing one of my lymph nodes; it looks like a glistening red jelly bean.

  I spend my days on the Paris métro, holding oversized plastic bags that contain my various scans. (In America the doctors keep them; in France the patient does.) Whenever I show the slightest worry, doctors offer me prescriptions for Xanax. Soon I’m sharing the little white pills with Simon, and neither of us can sleep without them.

  As all of this is happening, I’m editing my book. On the same day that I send back the corrected proofs, I lie in a PET scan—in French it’s called a TEP scan-NER—as a man’s voice issues instructions in French: “Don’t breathe.” “Don’t move.” I’ve only just figured out how to be the decider. Inside that tube, I realize that I no longer am.

  I arrive home from all these procedures in time to cook dinner. Even before whatever is happening happened, my husband and I were overwhelmed by our responsibilities. Now, when three children come rushing into our bedroom each morning at seven a.m., we face both the exhaustion of living through this and the terror that I won’t.

  Usually I’m keen to talk to Simon about everything, and he’s irked by my endless need to analyze our relationship. Now all I can bear to discuss is the timing of my next appointment. For the first time, we’ve entered a realm where words can’t go.

  Finally, we’re summoned to the hospital for my diagnosis. We sit in front of a large desk as two physicians, including the Dominique de Villepin look-alike, examine papers for several minutes. When the men finally speak to us, they describe my symptoms, but they don’t say what I have.

  Finally, I interrupt.

  “Is it cancer?” I ask. (This is the same word as in English but pronounced “cancer.”) Both doctors seem relieved that I’ve broken the ice. One of them says that, yes, it’s a blood cancer called lymphome non hodgkinien—non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

  After he says this, I have the sensation that I’m falling back in my chair in slow motion. It’s as if I’m sinking without moving. This must be what people mean when they say they’re “reeling.”

  Though I’ve just spent several weeks in a state of terror, I still have to rearrange my brain to accommodate this new fact: I’m not in pain because I sat incorrectly at my desk. I’m in pain because I have cancer in the bones of my back. One of the doctors says I must immediately begin a three-month course of chemotherapy and immunotherapy.

  Simon and I have never discussed the worst-case scenario. But in the courtyard of the hospital, I ask him to tell me what his plan is, in case I die. I know he must have one. He’s quiet for a moment. “We’ll move to London, to be near my sister,” he says.

  No one at my publisher has any idea that I’m ill, or that I’ve been editing my manuscript in doctors’ waiting rooms. I’m afraid that if they find out, they’ll panic and pull back on the publicity. And I reason that, thus far, my illness hasn’t interfered with my work.

  But I still need a photo for the book jacket, and I will have to take it before my hair falls out. So the day before my first round of chemotherapy, I meet a photographer at a café in my neighborhood. He snaps a picture of me reaching for a cup of espresso and staring confidently into the camera.

  As a journalist, I usually over-research everything. But with this illness I don’t. In fact, I barely grasp what’s happening inside my body. I can’t remember which blood cells I have too many of, and which I don’t have enough of. Just as I’d been feeling more grown up, the illness infantilized me. I have no choice but to throw myself into the care of my doctors and trust them to heal me.

  And yet, I also feel a kind of adult calm. I can see it in the jacket photo. This is the most consequential situation I’ve ever faced. The bad news isn’t patio-distance away anymore; it’s inside of me. And I suddenly know one thing very clearly: if it was just me, I could cope with dying. But it isn’t. And because of that, I have to survive. I have to raise these children. I cannot leave Simon to do it alone.

  * * *

  —

  When I learn that a public hospital near my house specializes in treating blood cancers, I ditch the fancy private hospital across town and go to the public one instead. Gone are the English-speaking secretaries and valet parking. The state hospital was built by Henry IV in the seventeenth century to house victims of the plague. It’s no-frills, clean and efficient. My doctor there is a stern, pretty blond woman who listens patiently as I try to pronounce lymphome non hodgkinien.

  I arrive for my first treatment—reassuringly called a cure in French—wearing a fashionable terry-cloth sweatshirt, shredded jeans and black running shoes. It’s a deliberate fashion choice: I look like a hipster, and hipsters don’t die. A secretary directs me to an outpatient unit called the hôpital de jour, which makes me think of soup. I watch American sitcoms on my laptop to distract myself, as a nurse inserts a needle into my arm.

  One immediate effect of chemotherapy is that I lose weight. For the first time in my adult life, I can eat an enormous bowl of pasta in cream sauce for dinner, then wake up to discover I’ve lost a pound.

  By my second treatment, I’m panicked over a hard bump that has appeared at the base of my spine. The on-duty oncologist inspects it, then laughs. “That’s your bone,” she says. “You were too fat to feel it before.”

  Getting ill is a crash course in other minds. I learn that there are people who secretly love bad news, and that certain women will be jealous of how skinny you are, no matter what’s causing it. A surprising number of people urge me to get a pedicure. The woman who’d worn a white dress to my wedding doesn’t contact me at all.

  I’m su
rprised by the sheer variety of inappropriate reactions to my illness. Several friends note the exciting coincidence: someone they know died of exactly the same disease! A former classmate informs me that cancer is caused by “emotion,” and that it can be cured by eating miso soup. One woman walks into my house, wails like Antigone in front of my children, then envelops me in a painful embrace. Another friend warns, “Don’t read the statistics!” making it clear that he already has.

  And yet other people, some of whom had been just acquaintances before my diagnosis, make me feel like they are literally holding me aloft above despair. I relate best to those who have been through major illnesses, too: a man who had a heart attack; a former colleague who was hospitalized twice for depression; a childhood friend who’s being treated for breast cancer. They feel like wartime comrades.

  And I’m moved to see that—though I can be awkward and distant—some people are fond of me anyway. A woman from my book group drops off a lasagna. Relatives in Florida send a cozy throw blanket for me to wrap myself in. (I highly recommend this as a get-well gift.) Even N., my threesome partner, offers to babysit, though I decline.

  I hesitate to disclose my illness to my friend whose boyfriend writes for the New Yorker and who’d witnessed my failed fortieth birthday party. New York’s literary world is tiny, and word could get back to my publisher. But when I finally tell her, they’re both exceptionally caring. The boyfriend puts me in touch with an American blood-cancer specialist he knows. My friend gives me a soft black beret that once belonged to her grandfather.

  I wear the beret everywhere, to cover my thinning hair. I’ve decided that, instead of shaving it off the way cancer patients do in the movies, I’ll just let it fall out. I’d like to keep at least some hair as long as possible. And I like the poetic way that, in French, they say your hair is “falling.”

  Soon there’s a very unpoetic coating of highlighted blond hair on all my coats and sweaters. It mostly falls from a circle on the top of my head, like male pattern baldness. The remaining hair is too fragile to brush or wash, so it gathers into ropelike clumps. By about eight weeks into chemo, I look like Larry David with dreadlocks. Simon is so unnerved by the sight of my uncovered head, he asks me to wear the beret to bed.

  Every three weeks, I walk to the hospital for another cure. When an attending doctor discovers that I’m a writer, he gives me the manuscript of his novel. It’s about a young woman with cancer who dies at the end of the book.

  At my next cure, I hand the manuscript back to him. “Just one suggestion,” I say. “Don’t kill the protagonist.”

  * * *

  —

  The editor of my book still doesn’t know about my illness, but she’s growing worried about something else: publishing a parenting book by someone who’s had a well-publicized ménage à trois. I remind her that the essay isn’t a salacious exposé about me; it’s an essay that I wrote about myself. There’s hardly even any sex in it. (Curiously, the essay doesn’t bother my British editor at all.) A publicist calls from New York to coach me on how to respond if journalists question me about the threesome. She suggests saying, “Yes, I tried that. But I didn’t really like it.”

  I’m mostly worried about doing a book tour while bald. My mother flies to Paris and shops for wigs with me. At a store near the Paris opera, a saleswoman ushers us into a private room, then brings out a series of expensive real-hair wigs. She assures us that they’re made from European hair, “not Indonesian,” and she keeps forgetting what kind of cancer I have. I opt for a synthetic blond bob, both because it seems less racist and because it’s a third of the price.

  We also shop for clothes for my book tour. Before my treatment, I was an American size six—not overweight, but far from the Parisian ideal. When I tried on outfits, French saleswomen would ask neutrally, “What do you think?”

  Now I’m barely a size two. When I emerge from dressing rooms at this size—even wearing the beret—they smile approvingly and suggest adding belts to sweaters and blazers. I’m used to choosing clothes based on whether or not they make me look fat. Now, for the first time in my adult life, nothing does. I buy a flurry of tight minidresses and belt-able jackets, simply because I can.

  My mother and I discuss my illness a bit, but mostly she’s just patient and present. I realize that there’s something hopeful about shopping, the activity we’ve always done together. Buying clothes implies that there will be a future in which to wear them. Though when I choose a black dress—a short-sleeved sweater attached to a high-waisted silk skirt, which I’ll wear in publicity photos—it crosses my mind that I might also be buried in it.

  When the publicist calls to say that I’m booked on a morning TV show in America, the strain of keeping my secret becomes too much.

  “I need to tell you something,” I say. I deliver my news in a breathless, detached rush, since if I slow down, I’ll cry. I explain that my chemotherapy is scheduled to end a few weeks before the book comes out.

  Everyone at the publishing house is extremely kind. They’re also still concerned about the threesome essay. I reassure them that if anyone grills me about the threesome, I’ll pivot and mention the cancer.

  Anyway, my parenting advice now boils down to two words: don’t die. I’ve told my kids I’m sick but that I’m getting treatment to make me better. And this is true. Midway through chemotherapy, I’m no longer in agonizing back pain. For the first time in months, I can turn my head.

  I wear the black beret everywhere. “My mother is bold,” my awkwardly bilingual daughter announces, whenever she catches me without it.

  In January, a few days after my final cure, I have another PET scan. It’s the one that will show whether the treatments have worked. I lie in the tube and obey the Frenchman’s voice. A week later, Simon and I head through freezing rain to drop the kids at their school. Then we rush to the hospital to meet with the blond doctor, who will give us the scan’s results. When we walk into her office, she smiles for the first time since we met her. She begins talking before we even sit down.

  “I have very good news for you,” she says. I’m in rémission complète—complete remission. This time, I have no trouble understanding the French.

  A few weeks later, I have my head shaved, which I instantly realize I should have done months earlier. Then I fly to New York to launch my book. I’m not used to wearing the wig, so just before I go on the morning show, I decide to put the beret on top of it. It’s my comfort object, and makes me feel less jittery. (I may have just survived cancer, but I’m still nervous before going on live TV.) The combination of wig and beret makes me look like a Satmar Hasidic wife, or an undernourished Basque peasant. Viewers assume that I’m trying to look “French.”

  “Lose the beret,” my agent texts me, as soon as I’m off the air. In the show’s online chatrooms, strangers gleefully inform me that berets haven’t been in fashion in France for seventy-five years. (As a resident of Paris for a decade, I did know this.)

  But I’m cheered when one reviewer describes me—or at least my literary persona—as “likable.” And I get notes from strangers who say that after reading the book, they feel like they know me. What I know is that I’m forty-one years old, and I’m alive. And I’m on my way to becoming a person.

  You know you’re in your forties when . . .

  You can tell when something is ridiculous.

  You can calm someone down.

  You realize that you can manipulate people, and that some of them have long been manipulating you.

  You’re loyal but watchful.

  You know that extreme jealousy is a deal breaker.

  You’re surprised to realize that someone is flirting with you. You had written yourself off too soon.

  9

  how to be an expert

  TO MY ASTONISHMENT, my parenting book becomes an immediate best seller and ta
kes on a life of its own. After a reading at a bookstore in Manhattan, two young women holding babies approach me with strange expressions on their faces. It takes me a minute to work out what these expressions mean: they’re nervous about meeting me.

  Not everyone likes the book, but it becomes part of the cultural conversation. I’m spoofed by the New Yorker and mocked by Forbes (in an article titled “No thanks. I’d rather raise a billionaire.”) A TV news show in Oregon runs a segment about a mother who imposes all-French practices on her unwitting children, complete with forbiddingly gourmet meals. Online, I discover an animated Taiwanese video in which an Asian-looking woman in a beret, who’s supposed to be me, drinks red wine and teaches her child to paint the Mona Lisa. A lady Skypes me from Mongolia to say that she wants to publish a translation there. People around the world write to ask me for parenting advice. Hardly anyone mentions the threesome essay.

  It’s a small jolt of minor fame. But it means that, practically overnight, I’m no longer an obscure journalist begging for work. I’m now considered an expert.

  Am I really one? It’s one thing to go on TV for a few minutes, to sum up my book for people who probably don’t know much about France. But I panic when I’m invited to address the French department of a major American university. Can I convincingly make my case for an hour in front of actual experts? I did lots of research for the book, as a journalist. But at this talk, I’ll be speaking to professors and graduate students, all of whom study France, and some of whom are French themselves. I’m an amateur anthropologist; some of them are real ones. I suspect that they’ve invited me there to humiliate me.

  Just before the talk starts, I drink several espressos and stress-eat a package of M&M’s. I hope to compensate, in caffeinated energy, for what I lack in academic rigor. The large room is packed with dozens of people. Some are standing in the rear. There are recording devices everywhere. I sit down at the front and a professor introduces me.