She was twenty minutes late today, because demonstrators opposed to some sort of esoteric research at the nuclear power plant near the Taconic Parkway exit had blocked the road. Grigor was not in his room, but the nurse called Jane, at her desk in the hall, grinned hello, and said, “He’s faxing.”
“Thanks.”
It no longer struck anyone odd to have a patient in a cancer research hospital in upstate New York — within ten miles of a nuclear power plant, no less — faxing jokes to Moscow. In Russian. Susan had spent days searching New York last spring, and at last had found a typewriter dealer named Tytell who had come up with a Cyrillic-alphabet typewriter, a used one he’d gotten years before from the Soviet U.N. mission. So now Grigor could tap out his gags two-fingered and not subject some long-suffering secretary in Moscow to his truly terrible penmanship.
In truth, Susan didn’t think Grigor’s jokes were particularly runny, but she understood she wasn’t his intended audience. The Russian television people at the other end of the fax machine seemed pleased, and that was what counted.
And also what counted was that Grigor’s spirits were kept reasonably buoyant. Susan could make the drive up from the city only on weekends, and it seemed to her now that every week he’d declined visibly, become thinner, slower, feebler. His eyes were deep-set now, ringed in gray. The gums were steadily receding from his teeth, so that more and more he looked like a skull, particularly when he laughed. Realizing that, he did his laughing with closed lips these days, or covered his mouth with his hand. It broke Susan’s heart to see the embarrassed way he brought that hand up, the haunted eyes looking out at her as he laughed in secret; laughing was so much a part of his life, and to have it hampered and hedged seemed unnecessarily cruel.
The fax machine was in a small windowless room — a big closet, really — stuffed with the machinery of the clerical trade: a large copying machine, a Mr. Coffee, a paper cutter, several staplers, and a tall gray metal cabinet full of stationery supplies. Grigor sat hunched on the room’s one small typist’s chair, back to the doorway, punching out the phone number with his bony forefinger. Shoulder blades protruded sharply against the back of his shirt, like stubby angel wings. She wanted to put her arms around him, but never had.
Sensing movement, Grigor turned, saw Susan, and smiled with his lips held close together, like a prissy man sipping from a straw “A remarkable machine, this,” he said, by way of hello. “I merely touch a few numbers, and in no time at all I can hear a busy signal eleven thousand miles away.”
Smiling back, not showing him anything except the smile, Susan said, “Is that one of the jokes you’re sending?”
“One of the jokes I’m not sending,” he said, and punched the numbers again. “No, the fax isn’t common enough in the Soviet so far. I sent one gag— Ah, the busy signal.” He broke the connection, turned back to Susan. “I did send one: The Moscow/Washington hot line is by fax now. The only trouble is, the KGB made us attach ours to a shredder.’ Boris Boris didn’t like it.” He peered at her shrewdly. “Neither do you.”
“Try again,” she said gently, gesturing at the machine.
He turned to it. “This fax should be attached to a yacht,” he said, tapping out the number. “It would make a fine anchor. Ah, yes, the signal of busyness. The only sign of economic activity in all Moscow, the fax machine at Soviet Television TV Center on Korolyov Street.”
After three more tries, the call did at last go through, and Grigor fed his two pages of jokes, asides, and suggestions into the machine, then carried the originals back to his room, paused to take his medicines, and at last they could leave for their drive in the country.
This was probably the last cycle of the seasons Grigor would ever see. Susan’s cousin Chuck Woodbury, the AIDS research doctor, had soon after Grigor’s arrival in the States passed him on to other doctors, experts in his particular kind of radiation-induced cancer, and while various medicinal combinations they’d tried had put his illness into slight remission for short periods of time, the advance of the disease was still inexorable, and gradually accelerating its pace.
Grigor had arrived in this mountainous terrain, less than a hundred miles north of New York City, in late May, and had so far seen the finish of spring’s green burgeoning and the flowered lushness of summer. Now he was seeing the first of the great autumn foliage display; every day, more leaves on more branches had turned to russet and ruby and gold. He would most likely see this change all the way through to bare black trees against a white sky, standing in great drifts of rusty leaves; he would probably see the first snowfall of winter. But would he experience the end of winter? Unlikely.
The country rolled, rich in reds and yellows, backed by the dark green of pines. Susan drove through little gray-stone towns and newer clapboard or aluminum-sided developments.
Grigor talked about the beautiful vistas of this new land he’d never known he would visit, and sometimes talked about the beautiful vistas of Russia as well; unstated between them was the knowledge that he would never see those Russian vistas again.
The drive was tiring for Grigor eventually. “I hate to go back,” he finally said, “but...”
“There’s tomorrow,” she reminded him. She almost always spent Saturday night at a motel near the hospital, so she and Grigor could have the two weekend days together. He’d never come to the motel with her, nor had either of them raised the suggestion that he might.
That was a taboo area, by mutual consent. Susan wondered sometimes if her feelings for Grigor were merely self-defensive, if she were just protecting herself from a real, adult, dangerous relationship with a man by concentrating so exclusively on someone who simply could not offer a long-term commitment. But her feelings for Grigor seemed so much stronger than that, more profound. She’d even thought at times about the possibility of having his child, helping him to leave some echo or reminder of himself in the world. She’d never mentioned that idea to him, knowing instinctively that, rather than please him, the prospect of fathering a child he would never see, who would never be alive in his lifetime, would appall and sadden him.
Was he even capable of sex? Weakened, all the systems of his body slowing and failing, would it be possible for him any more? Susan shied away from the question, uncomfortable even to find herself thinking about it.
She’d forgotten the anti-nuclear demonstration. Their roundabout aimless drive, drifting through the falling leaves, had taken them to another approach toward the hospital, and all at once, as they topped a low hill, flanked by yellowing birch and beech and elm and dark green pine, there it was laid out before them, as frenzied yet compact as a scene in a movie. Which in a way it was, since almost all demonstrations are actually composed for television news coverage. So it was in the usual manner that the triumvirate of demonstrators and police and television technicians boiled away furiously together down there, enclosed within an invisible pot; one inch outside camera range, pastoral placidity reigned.
“I think I can get past,” Susan said, hands gripping the wheel as she braked, coming slowly down the slope.
The left side of the road here was flanked by tall chain-link fence with razor wire at the top. Behind it, the woods were, if anything, more lush than anywhere else in the neighborhood, since the power company had added extra trees, mostly pine, to hide the plant tucked into the folds of hills. Only the access road, with its electric gate and guardpost and discreet sign, suggested what lay inside.