Piecework

Knowing what you will soon lose makes living even more precious, and the middle-aged man becomes infinitely more concerned with time. I find myself more conscious of light, because light is the most primitive measure of time; I spend as many hours as possible in the country, where the movement of the sun is so much more obvious and poignant than it is in the city. I arrange my social life in different ways, avoiding whenever possible the brittle chatter of cocktail parties, the strained social performances at formal dinners. I try to avoid all fads and fashions and to be skeptical of flattery. I seldom read books when they are published and find myself drawn back to the classics, to a few books that I first read years ago and failed to understand and that now seem to be about my own time on earth. More frequently now, I read history, biographies, memoirs, and journals because they have the effect of lengthening my life backward into the past, and because the complicated stories of other lives layer and multiply my own.

And because living seems more extraordinary than ever, I sleep less. In this, among so many other things, I resemble my father. In the last thirty years of his life (he died at eighty), he rose before dawn, rattling teacups, furious in some inarticulate way if his sons slept late. He never said so, but I’m certain now that the fury was about the waste of living. We have these dwindling hours and days to savor and use; it is almost sinful to occupy them with death’s sweet brother, sleep. Ancl so I am awake. Look (I say to my wife, her hand warm in the chilly dawn): the snow is melting in the fields outside the house. The trees are noisy with birds. The lake is making churning sounds, as the ice breaks and the bass stir at the bottom. In a few more weeks, they’ll be playing the first games of another season, and we can watch a fresh new rookie try to hit the curveball. The world will soon be green again. We’ll read Trollope beside the pond. And around these parts, fruit always ripens in the autumn.

ESQUIRE,

June 1988

REPRIEVE

That evening, when I returned to the hotel room in Miami, the message light was blinking on the telephone like an extra pulse. I sat down wearily on the edge of the bed and dialed the operator. My wife had called. And two sources for the story I was reporting. And my doctor… my doctor? Calling me from New York? The weariness vanished. In fifteen years, he’d never once called me anywhere unless I’d called him first. A week earlier I had submitted to my annual physical. All was normal. But here he was, calling me in a hotel in Miami. I glanced at my watch: a few minutes before 7:00. Probably gone home, but I called his office anyway. He was still there. And he went straight to the point.

“Last week’s chest X ray?” he said. “Well, we looked at it again and there’s something on it we don’t like. …”

I laughed out loud. I’d been expecting some variation of this sentence for years. After all, I was a three-packs-a-day man, and at fifty-something, each year’s physical was a kind of lottery. When it was over, and I was declared healthy, I always thought: Okay, got away with it again. Now, a few days after granting me my latest pass, the doctor was suddenly taking it back.

“What don’t you like?”

“It’s small, a dot really, on the upper part of your right lung.”

“What is it?” I asked.

A pause, and then the doctor said: “When are you coming home?”

I flew home the next day and soon began a new rhythm of days and nights. I had no symptoms of anything: no cough, no rebellious blood, no weakness, no pain; but I swiftly entered the strange and private universe of the sick. My doctor sent me to another man, who specialized in the lungs. He in turn dispatched me to NYU Medical Center for a CAT scan. That propelled me down many bland new corridors to a series of desks where I was asked to pay first and be tested later. This was something new to me in my life in America, and oddly original; it was like a restaurant extorting payment before serving me food. At every step of this process, money came first. There was a wonderfully cynical assumption behind the most elemental contact in this new world: You are all potential deadbeats.