Jonathan Tropper Read online

  “Dr. Laurence Sanderson. He’s on Park Avenue. Go see him as soon as you can.”

  “Do you think it’s something serious?”

  “Probably nothing,” he says with less conviction than I’d like. “But you need to get it checked out. Tell Dr. Sanderson that I said he should see you today, okay?”

  I hang up and quickly call the urologist. His receptionist grudgingly squeezes me in for a lunchtime appointment. “You might have to wait a little,” she warns me in a clipped Russian accent before hanging up.

  Chapter 5

  Dr. Sanderson has salt-and-pepper hair, an impeccably trimmed beard, and sharp eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He looks exactly like what you would want your doctor to look like, except that at thirty-two years old, you don’t want your doctor to look like anything, really, because you shouldn’t need a goddamn doctor, shouldn’t have to attempt to articulate the sensations you may or may not have felt in your dick while you were pissing blood this morning.

  “Has this ever happened before?” he asks me.

  “No.”

  “Have you had any injuries recently, any trauma to your stomach or sides?”

  “No.”

  “Any pain during urination?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a smoker?”

  “No,” I say. “I mean, I was, back in college, but not anymore. I mean, not regularly. Sometimes, in bars, you know? When I’m having a few drinks.”

  “Would you characterize yourself as a heavy drinker?”

  “No. That is, um, sometimes. Rarely.” I have to remind myself that I’m not interviewing for a job.

  “Do you jog?”

  “No.”

  “Play any contact sports?”

  “No.”

  “Are you on any pain medication?”

  “Tylenol or Excedrin, sometimes, for headaches.”

  “Do you get a lot of headaches?”

  I’ve got one right now. “Not really.”

  I wish he would just cut to the chase and look inside me already. I’ve already filled out enough forms in the waiting room to apply for a loan and, on the instructions of the pretty Hispanic physician’s assistant, disrobed and donned a gown made out of the thinnest cotton known to man. I’ve done my part; now let’s get on with it. Dr. Sanderson finally has me lie down on my side on the examination table and squeezes some clear gel onto my side and lower back. The gel is shockingly cold and my whole body clenches in surprise.

  “I know. It’s cold, isn’t it?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. Fucking sadist probably refrigerates it to watch his patients squirm.

  “What I’m doing is just a routine ultrasound, to get a look at your kidneys. Hematuria can be caused by any number of things, kidney stones, urinary tract infections, jarring physical activity. . . .” His voice trails off as he begins to rub the probe on me and a colorful image appears on the machine’s small television screen. After a minute or so, he tells me to roll over onto my other side. It would be nice if he’d give some indication as to what he thought about the first kidney, but apparently he likes to take in the whole show before offering his review, and while I could ask him, I’m suddenly superstitious about upsetting his ritual, so I roll over silently, the gown sticking to me uncomfortably where the gel remains. He spends another minute or so examining my left kidney and then says, “Lie flat on your back, please.”

  The left kidney seems to take even less time than the right, which is probably a good sign, indicating that there was simply nothing to see. Unless the left kidney was so obviously cancer infested, just riddled with throbbing tumors, that it only took an instant for him to know that I’m totally fucked, and now he’s having me lie on my back in case I pass out when he breaks the news to me. Or maybe the right kidney is the bad one, so all the left one required was a perfunctory check, because he’s already ascertained that I’m totally fucked. I lie on my back, and now I’m sweating, can feel my heart accelerating in my chest. Forget the cancer—I’m going to die of a massive coronary right here.

  He pulls up my gown like a perverted uncle and squirts some more of the cold gel all over my pelvis. I close my eyes and try to concentrate on nothing but moving the air in and out of my lungs. I do this for a while, until it occurs to me that he’s been working down there for quite some time, rubbing the probe just off my pelvic bone and clicking his mouse repeatedly. I open my eyes and am instantly terrified by the furrow in his brow and the way his eyebrows seem to be raised. “What are you doing?” I ask him.

  “I’m looking at your bladder,” he tells me distractedly as if he’s forgotten there was a person attached to the lower half he was examining.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Hmm,” he says.

  You never, under any circumstances, want to hear your doctor say “Hmm.” “Hmm” being medical jargon for “Holy shit.” “What is it?” I say.

  He turns the TV monitor toward me and I’m treated to the sight of the dark, quivering horror movie of my bladder wall. “There,” he says, using a mouse to draw a small circle on the screen. “Do you see that?”

  “What?”

  “This brighter spot over here.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “What is it?”

  Dr. Sanderson peers intently at the screen, nodding slowly. “I’m not sure,” he says, and just like that, everything changes.

  I sit in a puddle of my own sweat, my gown pasted to my gel-splattered sides as my bladder pulsates grotesquely before me, and the room starts to spin. I stare at the little spot distorted into gray nothingness by the TV monitor, and say nothing. The doctor is telling me that it could be some aggregate capillaries, nothing to worry about, and I need to come back tomorrow for a cystoscopy so he can get a better look, just to be sure, but his voice is distant and hollow sounding. He may not know yet what that spot is, but I know what it is definitely not.

  It’s not nothing.

  Chapter 6

  I leave the doctor’s office in a haze, thoughts of cancer running rampant through my head. I won’t make a good cancer patient; this much I know. I won’t discover within me heretofore untapped reserves of strength, will not lift everyone else’s spirits with my courage, will not be funny and frank about my illness and wear a clever hat when my hair falls out. I am just not movie-of-the-week material. Probably, I’ll be a weeping, vomiting mess, will hide in my room, curled up pathetically in a self-pitying fetal ball as I fade into nothingness. I will be a big, fucking baby.

  I want my mother.

  My cell phone tells me that I have seven missed calls. The middleman must always be reachable. I resist the powerful, almost inborn instinct to check my voice mails. There’s no way I can work with this hanging over me. I hold up the cell phone and just look at it, wondering what the hell to do. I should call Hope. That’s what you do in these situations, right?

  But when I finally make a call, it’s Tamara’s number that my fingers dial.

  “Hey, it’s me.”

  “Zack! What’s up, babe?”

  “You feel like a visit?”

  “Sure. You coming for dinner?”

  “I thought I’d blow off work and come now. Take Sophie to the park, hang out a little.”

  “You’re going to blow off work?” she asks skeptically.

  “I do it all the time,” I say.

  “Fine,” Tamara says. “Except, no you don’t. Not ever. So what’s going on?”

  “I’m just in a foul mood.”

  “So you figured you’d bring your coal to Newcastle.”

  “Misery loves company,” I say.

  “That it does,” she says. “Come on over. I’ll do my best to make your problems pale by comparison.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  Tamara laughs. “What a team we make. You want me to pick you up from the train?”

  “No. I’ll take Jed’s car. I’ll see you in about an hour.”

  “Good. I’ll wake the little monster up from her
nap.”

  Jed keeps his car, a Lexus SC 430 convertible, in a garage around the corner from our apartment. The attendants know me by now, since, with both Tamara and my mother living in Riverdale, I tend to use the car a lot more than Jed, who never seems to go anywhere anymore. I often wonder why he bothers keeping the car at all, and paying the exorbitant monthly garage fees, but I suppose when money’s no object, you’re willing to pay just to have the option available to you, yet another case of his conspicuous consumption benefiting my freeloading ass. Before I go to get the car, though, I take a shower and touch up my shave. Tamara will kiss my cheek and give me a hug, and I want to smell good when she gets that close.

  When Rael and Tamara got married, the plan had been to stay in Manhattan, but when Sophie was born, their studio apartment became too cramped, and they bought a small split-level in Riverdale, less than a mile away from where Rael and I grew up. Although he didn’t like to admit it, Rael was thrilled to be back in Riverdale, saw symmetry in raising his daughter in his own hometown. But then he died, leaving Tamara a stranger in a strange town, with a daughter and a mortgage and no idea of where to go and what to do with herself.

  Tamara’s house. She’s sitting cross-legged on the round kitchen table in shorts and a tank top, sipping at a Diet Coke, her long dark hair partially concealing her face as she intently reads a People magazine. She has no interest in celebrity divorces and red-carpet fashion faux pas. Without having to look, I know she’s reading one of those tearjerkers about a child, the little girl who suffered burns on ninety percent of her body when her mother’s car was struck by a drunk driver and exploded, the young boy being treated for an exotic form of leukemia, whose classmates all shaved their heads in solidarity, the teenager from Cambodia who received a kidney from a retired postal worker in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Since Rael’s death, Tamara has cultivated an obsession with sick and dying children. She’s all Sophie has now, and she’s terrified that she’s not up to the task.

  Faster than a heartbeat, I take in Tamara’s legs, which are pale and not particularly shapely, but always appear as if they would be satiny soft to the touch, the soft curves where her triceps meet her broad, athletic shoulders, and the buoyant presence of her breasts, somewhat obscured, but no less formidable under the tank top. With all beautiful women, there’s always one feature that puts them over the top, and on Tamara it’s her lips, which are full, and a deep crimson that no lipstick could ever hope to achieve. They seem to have been extruded like putty out of her face, pulling her porcelain skin taut into a robust, sensuous, and wholly unintentional pout. Sure, her emerald eyes, each set under a thick dark brow, would be captivating all on their own, but those lips are the kicker, and when you first see them, you have to remind yourself that you’re not seeing her undressed, because for the first moment, that’s always how it feels, and you suddenly understand what the Muslims were going on about when they invented the burka. Lips, done right, are as much a sex organ as any of the more obvious ones.

  This is what it’s come to, a secret, devoted inventory taken at light speed, like I’m guilty of some kind of perversion. The radio is playing loudly, and she hums along with an Eminem song as she reads. On the tiled floor, Sophie has spilled a carton of milk and is taking Cheerios out of a cup, one by one, dipping them into the milk puddle, and eating them. “Zap here!” she says when she sees me. She drops her cup of Cheerios and quickly gets to her feet, running up to my thighs, crunching Cheerios underfoot as she goes, her chubby hands already raised for me to pick her up. I do, kissing each of her soft apple cheeks. “Pok,” she says urgently to me. “Zap tape Sophie pok.”

  “I told her you’re taking her to the park,” Tamara says, putting down the magazine and leaning past Sophie to kiss me on the cheek. I never react to these kisses given in greeting, but every time she gives me one, I realize I’ve been waiting for it, and it is received with a great deal more consciousness than I will ever admit to. These visits used to be innocent, I’m sure of it, weekly gestures of friendship and support, looking in on my best friend’s widow and the baby he left behind. But somewhere along the line, something changed, and she became unbearably beautiful in her quiet grief, in the way she bravely embraced the new solitude of her life, in her serene acceptance of her own tragic circumstances, and something was born in me, something that comes alive only in her presence, that dreams unspeakable things and considers a wide range of absurd possibilities.

  “You okay?” she asks me, her eyes demanding in their concern.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You want to tell me?”

  “Later,” I say. “Are you coming to the park?”

  “Nah,” Tamara says. “I’ll clean the place up while you’re gone.”

  “You smell something?”

  Tamara nods. “She needs her diaper changed before she goes out.”

  “Zap change you,” Sophie says.

  “I guess you’re elected,” Tamara says, patting my arm with a smirk. She is not big on changing diapers, is not one of those mothers who lovingly bury their noses in their babies’ behinds to determine, through the layers, if they’ve soiled their diapers. She steps over the spilled milk and pads down the hall, her bare feet barely making a sound on the floor. I watch her from behind, so strong and still so vulnerable, all at the same time. The rush of illicit affection is a hot, liquid burst in my chest, like inhaling in a steam room. In my arms, Sophie pulls herself into an upright position and farts into her diaper.

  “Fart!” she says gleefully.

  In the park, there are climbers and swingers. Sophie is a swinger. “Higher,” she cries, not instructing but observing, and she laughs deliciously when I tickle her legs as I push. Her fine blond hair, so much like Rael’s, falls in her eyes whenever she swings forward, lending her the illusion of an older girl being coy. My weekly trips to the park with her have become something larger to me, a stage on which I get to play myself in another life. We are surrounded by children and their mothers, with the occasional nanny thrown in for good measure, and as far as they’re all concerned, I’m a devoted father taking time off work to play with my daughter. Or else I’m unemployed, which makes me somewhat pathetic. But maybe I’m just self-employed, an author or a musician, and thus able to put in this quality time on a regular basis. I wear no ring, so I’m divorced or maybe a widower, and either way that hikes up my appeal quotient.

  Tamara didn’t want children, but Rael wore her down. That was his specialty. He was the consummate salesman. Ice cubes to Eskimos and all that. So they had Sophie, and then Rael died, leaving Tamara alone with the lifetime commitment he’d talked her into. Since Sophie was only ten months old when he died, I am now the closest thing to a father figure that she has, and while that’s tragic, I can’t deny that I enjoy the sense of pride and possessiveness I have when it comes to her. When she finally acquiesces to being removed from the swing, she hugs me snugly, and I run my free hand along the soft, plump skin of her narrow, unformed shoulders. The aroma of baby shampoo and lotion fills my nostrils, and when she rests her cheek on my shoulder, it feels perfect, like each was designed specifically to fit the other, a matching set. Holding her like this, I feel trusted and reliable and altogether more useful than at any other time in my life.

  “ABCDEFG,” she sings into my ear, her voice high, sweet, and cutely off-key.

  “How I wonder what you are,” I sing back. It’s our little game.

  “QRSTUV,” she sings.

  “Like a diamond in the sky.”

  She laughs, from her belly, and it’s more musical than her singing. “Zap funny.”

  Zap is funny. Zap has the hots for your mother, who, even if she weren’t too wrapped up in the tragic clusterfuck of her own life to notice, would probably be out of his league anyway. And she’s the wife of his best friend, which comes with a whole other set of complications, not to mention the minor fact that Zap is, in fact, engaged to another woman, and thus ineligible for competition to beg
in with. Zap has got himself caught in a theoretical love triangle, although it’s really more like a love square, since Rael’s presence can’t be discounted, even in death. And just to spice things up further, to juice up the sitcom of his life for sweeps week, Zap may have a malignant tumor in his bladder, which, if true, will throw a colossal monkey wrench into the proceedings.

  “Zap funny,” Sophie says again, giggling tiredly and clutching my chin in her little fingers.

  I grab her hand and press her palm against my cheek. “Yeah,” I say. “Zap hysterical.”

  Later, Tamara and I sit outside, in the porch swing Rael ordered from a SkyMall catalog while on a business trip. We sit in the fading afternoon light, not because it’s particularly scenic or to enjoy the weather, which is actually overcast and unseasonably muggy for October, but because Sophie fell asleep in the stroller on the walk home and she doesn’t transfer well. If we attempt to move her to the crib, she’ll wake up screaming and refuse to be put down for a half hour. I’d like to think that, like me, Tamara wants Sophie to keep sleeping because she cherishes our quiet time together, but the truth is, she just doesn’t want to deal with a screaming baby. She knew in advance she wasn’t mother material, but Rael assured her that she’d fall in love and that would all change. He was old-fashioned enough to think that all women are mothers waiting to emerge, and he didn’t live long enough to be disabused of that notion. In actuality, Tamara dotes on Sophie, but she clings to the bad-mommy act as a way of dealing with her feelings of maternal inadequacy.

  “So what’s going on with you?” Tamara says.

  I tell her about the blood in my piss and the bright spot on my ultrasound. “Tomorrow I have to go back for a cystoscopy,” I tell her.

  Hope would want to know the statistics, the odds. She would want me to run the scenarios, would talk about specialists and delve into family histories. Tamara just nods and says, “Are you scared?”