Life #6. Diana Wagman
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me on a pedestal.
My high school tour group came noisily into the gallery and I stood up and smiled at them. Twenty or so tenth graders, mostly Latino, looking both bored and happy to be out of the classroom. Their teacher stood in the back, white, rumpled, tired, his brown necktie askew over his beige short-sleeved shirt.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Fiona. Welcome to the Getty Villa.” Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art had been my concentration as an art history major in college. This was the perfect job for me, spending three days a week talking about something I loved. And I liked the kids, younger than my son, from public schools all over the city, most of whom had never seen a real marble statue before. I could share the myths, the stories these artworks told, explain how they were the movies and Nintendo of their time.
Two boys in the back whispered to each other in Spanish. They snickered about naked Venus behind me. A girl beside them in tight jeans and a tighter purple top looked over and pretended to be annoyed, but I saw the start of a smile on her glazed lips, the twinkle in her thickly made-up eye. She shushed the boys and then giggled. Would she have cancer one day? Would those fresh fifteen-year-old breasts in her pink push-up bra betray her? I looked at Venus and again envied being made of stone.
The teacher cleared his throat.
“Right,” I said, coming back to the waiting group. “Okay. Let’s begin. Who is depicted in this statue behind me? Why does she have a dolphin beside her? Why is she naked? Can anybody tell me?”
I walked backwards, I said the words, I even got a few laughs from those who were paying attention, but for the entire tour, my hand kept straying to my left breast or my hair, wondering if I would lose one or the other or both. I’d had a biopsy and the tiny suture stung when I touched it. Which I couldn’t stop doing. It was not my best tour. At the end, the students sat down to fill out a questionnaire and I apologized to their teacher.
“What?” His eyes were as empty as a statue’s. “They’re a pain in my ass.” He thought I was talking about their behavior, not mine.
“They were pretty good. That boy in the front is smart.”
“One out of seventy-five ain’t bad.”
I tried to chuckle sympathetically.
I had two more tours and did my best to push my diagnosis out of my mind and concentrate on the art. It wasn’t easy. The rain refused to begin and the clouds were pregnant and overdue. I felt the earth’s expectancy, the ponderous hesitation before the water broke. I was antsy and so were the students. We all kept looking up to the sky, our limbs trembling like the skinny branches on the olive trees, anticipating the deluge.
On my way to the staff parking lot, I stopped to look at the Lansdowne Herakles, Roman, circa A.D. 125, more than six feet tall, with a lion skin in one hand and his club over his shoulder, the marble so sumptuously carved it looked alive. He was a perfect six-packed specimen I’d seen a thousand times, but in the unusual gloom he was different. The shadows made his head seem to turn more sharply toward me. His curls glittered as if moving in the waning light. His Cupid’s bow lips looked on the verge of speaking. The curve of his bicep, the strength of his thigh. I held my breath. He was Luc in marble. Of course he had always been there. I knew in every statue, in every relief and fresco, I could see my lost Greek boy, my vanished Luc—if I allowed it, which I didn’t. That day I was caught by surprise, by the impending rain, the gray light, my terrifying diagnosis. I would never see Luc again. I was forty-nine, married, with a son in college, and I had cancer. There was nothing on my horizon but a solitary voyage through ever darkening waters. I leaned my head against the cool wall and closed my eyes. Someone tapped on my shoulder and I jumped. It was another educator, a friend, Eileen.
“You okay?”
“Just tired.”
“No kidding,” she said. “It’s the weather. See you Friday.”
“Yup. Thanks. Bye.”
In my car, I took out my cell phone and listened again to the message from my doctor, the woman who had delivered my son twenty years earlier. “Hi. It’s Carolyn. I’m so sorry. The biopsy came back positive I’m afraid.”
She was sorry? She was afraid? What did she know about fear or sorrow? Her husband was also a doctor. Their two girls attended the city’s most expensive private school. They lived out here in Malibu, close to this incredible museum. Oh yes, she said when I told her I gave tours, I can see the Getty from my deck. I’m afraid. I’m sorry. Well, me too. I hadn’t called Harry, my husband. I knew he was home in his usual spot on the couch in front of CNN. Two years earlier he’d lost his job after seventeen years as a reporter for the LA Times. He was angry and agitated. He’d taken it very, very personally despite his hundred or more colleagues who had been fired with him. All over the country older, respected, highly paid journalists were out of work. Harry had almost given up looking for a new job. There wasn’t much out there and his frustration made him a difficult candidate in an interview. We were broke. My three days a week didn’t make a dent in the monthly bills, our refinanced mortgage, our son’s college tuition. I felt sick when I thought of how much cancer might cost. Blue Cross could, might, probably would find some reason to cancel our already exorbitantly expensive insurance. Harry would say it didn’t matter, I knew he would be willing to sell the house, the cars, whatever it took. But then where would we be? If I died—if I died after all the treatment anyway—there was no point to leaving my family destitute.
I blinked. I’d driven down the Getty’s driveway and turned left onto the Pacific Coast Highway on automatic pilot. At this rate, a car accident would kill me before cancer. I still had my cell phone in one hand. I dropped it into my bag. Harry certainly didn’t need to hear the bad news over the phone. I would tell him, but at home, when I could look in his gray eyes. I’m sorry, I would say, it’s cancer I’m afraid.
The heavens opened—my mother’s phrase—and it poured. I crept along, traffic bumper-to-bumper. There was plenty of time to look out at the ocean beside me. The water was choppy, the color of an old file cabinet except for the fleshy froth. Even through my closed windows I could smell the fish and brine. Why anyone found the beach appealing was a mystery to me. A couple jogged along the sand in the rain. Idiots. Harry’s favorite word. I smiled. Fucking idiots, his favorite two-word phrase. As crazy as he was these days, he could still make me smile.
In sickness and in health. For richer and poorer. It’s too much to ask. Our wedding invitation is framed and hanging in the hallway by the laundry room. It reads, “Join us as we exchange our vows.” Perhaps that’s all Harry and I should have offered each other: to exchange our vows, our promises, our obligations however small. You do mine and I will do yours. Before the dearly beloved gathered together we should have sworn, “I will write all your thank you notes. I will have dinner with your boring cousin. I will sit through that monotonous meeting at work. Whatever awful thing you have sworn to do will now be my task.” Forget rich, poor, healthy, sick, honoring, cherishing and ‘til death do us part. Promise something reasonable.
I turned inland and onto the eastbound freeway, relieved to leave the sea.
Fiona climbed up the ladder to the deck before the sun cleared the horizon. Her eyelids were heavy and her face swollen from crying and not sleeping. Overnight she had become Neanderthal.
She and Nathan had spent the night before searching all over Newport for Luc. He had gone on an errand for Nathan—to buy a spool shackle, whatever that was—early in the morning and not come back. She and Nathan had driven the streets of Newport, back and forth, up and down. Nathan had been exhausting, parental, asking about Luc and his habit, how long, how she could stand it. She had answered as ambiguously as possible—he didn’t understand, couldn’t understand Luc’s life—until finally, finally she saw him through the window of an all-night donut shop. He was nodding off in the back booth, a cup of untouched coffee in front of him. He looked up when she said his name and took her hands. He was wobbly, unmoored, his muscles oddly disconnected from his skin,