Do Not Resuscitate Page 12

  Greta wasn’t a hippie liberal, per se. She liked to think of herself as a custodian. “Go ahead and do what you want with the planet,” she used to say, “but you better have a damn good custodian you can call when you make a mess of it.”

  Greta carved out a little niche for herself isolating endangered strains of plant species, which in and of itself justified the funding, but also lent itself marvelously to DuPont’s mad science. She put out a few academic papers a year, enough to appease the funding gods, and spent the rest of her time cataloguing genomes, making recommendations to the Jardin des Plantes, and helping DuPont engineer the world’s first bananaberry.

  Then, in 2008, she got a call from her old friend Dr. Gerard Boule. He had the perfect job for a young scientist looking to save the world.

  “Okay, why not?” she said.

  CHAPTER 21

  LAST NIGHT I SNUCK OUT to see the opera at the Bastille. It was the premiere of Adama Busceppi’s tragic tale Il Vecchio e La Commessa. The curtain opens on an old man on his deathbed. His nurse asks if there is anyone she can call.

  “No,” he says, “there is no one.”

  The nurse laments, “But signor, you are a good man who has devoted his life to serving God and the people. Your charity and kindness are hailed throughout the land. Good sir, you are admired by all.”

  “And loved by no one,” he replies.

  This is a rough translation. The opera was in Italian, of course.

  The nurse attempts to make the old man more comfortable, but he insists, “There is nothing to do now but wait. I will sleep like the pharaohs in a few short hours.”

  The nurse contents herself to sit at the old man’s bedside and read aloud to him from the complete works of the Archpoet, and presently she falls asleep. The old man is left staring at the ceiling, contemplating heaven. This aria, sung in an airy falsetto, makes a play on the Italian word cielo, which can mean both sky and heaven.

  The aria comes to a gentle close, and a single flickering candle on the old man’s nightstand burns out. But soon a light appears from offstage, and an angel descends from the wings.

  She addresses the old man: “Good signor, you have spent your whole life in the service of God and the people. For this you are to be rewarded.”

  The angel tells the old man she will grant him three more days of life.

  The old man protests, “Oh, good angel, do not waste three days of breath on an old man like me.”

  The angel laughs, “Good signor, I also grant you youth!”

  Here the old man is lifted from his bed as if by an invisible hand. The bedcovers sweep over him like great waves in an ocean, and when the tumult settles, the old man has become a young, spry lad with rosy cheeks and a fine head of thick auburn hair.

  “Hark, the sun rises,” the angel says, indicating the brightening sky. “Go and live!”

  The man, full of youth and vigor, thanks the angel and grabs his coat and rushes out the door. The angel exits.

  The nurse wakes to find the bed empty and the old man missing.

  “Mio Dio!” she cries. “Where has the old fool gone?” She rushes out to look for him.

  The next scene finds the man on a busy city street, joyfully extolling the virtues of youth, which, he says, are wasted on the young. He helps an old innkeeper lift a wine barrel; he joins in a children’s game of pitch-and-toss; he leaps over a puddle of mud and ducks under two men carrying a wooden beam; he belts out a cantata in full voice from atop a soapbox, and all the villagers applaud.

  “To breathe a full breath of air and hear no rattle, to gaze upon the distant stars and see no spots, to take a step and never falter, to dance and never touch the ground—that is what it is to be young, my friends! Cherish it,” he sings to a passing line of schoolchildren.

  The nurse enters stage left, asking bystanders if they have seen an old man in poor health who has wandered out alone. He is sickly, with white hair and a crooked back, she says, and he can’t have gone very far. The man sees the nurse, and knowing she will never recognize him in his transformed state, offers, in a bit of jest, to help her look for the missing man.

  “Is he tall?” he asks the nurse.

  “He was once very tall, like you are, signor,” she says, “but now he is shrunken like a gnome.”

  “Is he handsome?” he asks.

  “So far as a gnome can be handsome,” she says.

  “Does he have all his teeth?” he asks.

  “Only when he puts them in,” she says, “but he has left them on the nightstand. Mio Dio, how can I have let him out all alone, and without his teeth!”

  Together they search for the old man, but finding no evidence of him anywhere, the nurse rushes offstage to look for him in another avenue.

  The man is amused.

  “Dear woman,” he says. “Look how she worries herself sick over me. She plays a hopeless game of hide-and-seek.”

  But then he repents.

  “I must go and apologize for playing such a wicked hoax. Flowers will do the trick.”

  He ducks into the flower shop.

  He is greeted by a beautiful young shopgirl with whom he falls madly in love. The rest of the opera proceeds like Cyrano de Bergerac. The old man, disguised as a handsome young buck, pursues the shopgirl. The shopgirl falls for the handsome young buck, unaware of his true identity.

  The audience, privy to the full story, waits expectantly for the shit to hit the fan.

  The romance progresses rapidly into the second day, and the man wrestles inwardly with the knowledge that he is not what his love thinks he is, and in three days’ time, all will be revealed.

  The whole mess is brought to a head on the third day when the nurse recognizes the old man’s coat on the rosy-cheeked lad. She confronts him in private, and he confesses to everything. The nurse, sympathetic, advises him to face the shopgirl and tell the truth.

  “To play a young man’s game,” she cautions, “is to suffer a young man’s heartache.”

  The man thanks the nurse for her prudent advice and goes at once to tell the shopgirl the truth. They meet in the woods. It is the eve of the third day. The shopgirl is full of fanciful chatter, but the man stops her short and explains that she must quit him now, that he is a rascal and a liar.

  “I am an old man and will not live through the night,” he says.

  “Absurd,” she says. “Look at you! You are the picture of health.”

  “It is a mirage that will fade with the coming light,” he says. “I am young for but a few hours more. Then dawn will reveal the misshapen old fool that I am.”

  The shopgirl is insulted and offended, and we are led to suppose it is because she has been grievously misled. But she surprises us when she reveals the true nature of her distress.

  “You would brush me off so easily!” she cries. “You think me so vain as to flee at the first sign of trouble. Love is a ship you command on the high sea, through thick and thin. I will not leap overboard at the first whisper of an ill wind. I will go down with my ship. Come now, do not cast me off. Let us make the most of the time we have left.”

  The man is overjoyed, and they embrace as the lights fade to black. The final scene finds the man returned to his original state, much like the one I find myself in now, gray and weathered and bent. He is locked in an embrace with the young shopgirl as the sun rises over the woods. She sleeps undisturbed.

  The old man sings a Latin refrain from the Archpoet’s masterpiece, “His Confessions.” Then the angel descends from the ceiling and takes the old man away to who knows where.

  The shopgirl wakes and wonders if she has dreamed the whole affair, and then wonders if anything on this earth is any more lasting than a dream.

  “The dream appears one moment, vivid and bright. We are fooled into thinking it will last forever. And then it is gone in a puff of smoke, and the angels on high laugh at our mortal folly.”

  There is the fury of trumpets and bass drums, and the curtain falls.


  Something to think about.

  I felt much the same way when Greta died. The doctor came into the waiting room. Little Eliza was asleep in my lap. Spencer was playing with a toy truck on the floor, and Kendra Ann was curled up beside him.

  “Poof,” the doctor said. “She’s gone.”

  We didn’t even suspect anything was wrong until it was much too late. Greta was never one to make a fuss, and when she started vomiting, we initially suspected she was pregnant again. But when several pregnancy tests and a sonogram revealed she was no more pregnant than I was, we started to worry. We got her in to see Dr. Mitzner right away. He was an eighty-two-year-old Holocaust survivor with whom Greta had some previous relationship of which I was always unclear, but I think they knew each other from Antwerp. I should really write Duncan to find out.

  Dr. Mitzner had a small family practice out in Palo Alto, and Greta swore by him, so we drove all the way out there anytime one of the kids was sick or if Greta and I needed a checkup. This trip was different, though.

  Greta went in to see Dr. Mitzner alone. About thirty minutes later, she came out and said we had an appointment that afternoon with a specialist, Dr. Cara Johnson over at Stanford University, in oncology.

  Oncology! I remember that being one of those punch-in-the-stomach moments when you feel like the wind has been knocked out of you and you don’t think you’ll ever be able to breathe again.

  We hadn’t held hands in a long time—we were still going through the aftermath of the affair. We held hands all the way to the Stanford Medical Center and didn’t let go until a nurse pulled Greta into a CT scan.

  The cancer had already metastasized. Dr. Johnson wanted to keep Greta overnight to run some more tests. I went home to feed the kids. Eliza was ten, and she was furious with me because I had left them with the babysitter for much longer than I had promised, and Eliza hated it when things didn’t run on schedule. That hasn’t changed much.

  Spencer was seven, and Kendra Ann had just turned six. They asked where their mother was, and I told them she wasn’t feeling well, and she was sleeping at the hospital so she could get better faster. It was the only thing I could think of to say.

  She never did get better.

  She died six months later. Little Eliza was devastated. We had a rough time of it, Eliza and I. She blamed me for some things; I never quite knew what. She was only ten years old, after all, and I’m not sure she knew what she blamed me for, either.

  I blamed myself for some things, too. I thought of every time in the last five years Greta had said something in passing about her stomach hurting or about how she didn’t have an appetite.

  “It’s probably just gas,” was my go-to explanation for everything.

  I even thought of things from a decade before, when there couldn’t have been a single cancerous cell in her body: how beer made her violently ill, how she itched whenever she ate carrots, and how she fainted for no apparent reason in the bathroom of the Beverly Hilton when we were down south for my father’s funeral.

  I also thought about Greta’s father, who had died at the age of forty-six, they said from an enlarged heart. Somehow that seemed like a warning sign, too.

  Dr. Johnson said it was most likely because Greta smoked. And no one could argue that—Greta smoked. At least a pack a day. But never in the house and never in front of the kids. In fact, the kids say they don’t remember ever seeing their mother with a cigarette.

  Greta was good at hiding things. That’s how the kids never found out she smoked. That’s how she could manage to sneak around North Korea without getting caught. That’s how she could have an affair right under my nose, with Norman McCredie, the real estate agent who sold us the house on Gough Street.

  The affair started some years after we had bought the house on Gough Street. In couples therapy Greta admitted that she had felt a spark for Norman the Real Estate Agent the moment she met him back in 2019, when we were looking to upgrade from the house on Ortega to something more roomy. But at the time, Greta didn’t have the energy to get involved in a messy affair. Kendra Ann was still breastfeeding, and Eliza had just started preschool.

  But then sometime in 2022, I don’t know precisely when, Greta ran into Norman McCredie at an art auction. She went to art auctions all the time, even though she never bid on anything. She bought the Degas at an art auction. And two Gerhard Richters. That was it. She bought those sometime in 2022, maybe the same time she ran into Norman McCredie. I don’t know. The therapist said it was best if we didn’t hash out the minor details of the affair.

  I can’t ask Greta now about the minor details of the affair. And I can’t ask Norman McCredie, either. He is dead, too. A skiing accident in 2037. Serves him right.

  I guess when they bumped into each other at the art auction in 2022, Norman McCredie mentioned something about trouble with the missus at home. The therapist said that was a common pickup line among serial adulterers, saying there was trouble at home. If that’s the case, then Greta took the bait, hook, line, and sinker.

  She and I weren’t exactly Mr. and Mrs. Happily-Ever-After, either. I had become a bit of a do-nothing ever since we had come into my father’s money. I took a few jobs for Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc., which I knew by then to be a cover for InfraGen Tech’s illicit dealings. And I spent the rest of my time at home smoking pot and making bad investments in high-tech start-ups that eventually went bust. Thank goodness for the few that didn’t. They more than made up for the difference. But not right away, and not in 2022.

  Greta had taken a “real” job as a researcher for InfraGen Tech in Livermore, about a forty-minute commute from the city. She was still interested in saving the world. And she was single-handedly raising the kids. I conceded as much in therapy. Obviously all that changed when she died and left me a single dad.

  When Norman McCredie waltzed into her life complaining of troubles at home, of course Greta was seduced. Here was a man who understood what she was going through.

  I would bet anything he had used that line before: troubles at home. He’d had at least one other affair before. He told Greta as much. The therapist said that telling her about his previous affair was his way of planting the idea in her head and seeing how it would take.

  It took.

  The affair went on for about a year. I was completely oblivious. I didn’t know she was lying about having to work late. For as long as I’d known her, she’d had to work late. They carried the whole thing out in the recently vacated condos of unsuspecting homeowners who had given Norman McCredie their business—and their front door keys.

  This was a common practice in the real estate world, said the marriage counselor. She knew of a dozen other such cases.

  Greta stopped seeing Norman the Real Estate Agent around Christmas of 2022. A New Year’s resolution, she said in therapy. I’d have never found out. But six months later, Norman called me up out of the blue and confessed to the whole thing.

  Why? He had become a born-again Christian and wanted to ask my forgiveness, presumably because he wanted to improve his chances of getting into heaven.

  If this were Eugene’s story, and I were the badly burned captain of the Jolly Roger, you know what I’d have given Norman McCredie? Three minutes in deep space without a space suit.

  It took less than twenty seconds for Norman to explain what had happened. He wanted to go on, to elaborate.

  I didn’t give him the chance. I said, “Thank you very much. Now go fuck yourself,” and hung up.

  Let the record show, those were somebody’s last words to Norman McCredie: “Go fuck yourself.” Surely that will mean a whole lot of extra paperwork at border control in heaven.

  Greta was repentant. She didn’t make excuses or try to turn it around on me, as she could have. For the kids’ sake, we stuck it out under the same roof and tried to sort through our feelings the best we could in the few quiet moments we had to ourselves. But the rest of the world kept spinning, and we were like rats on
a treadmill trying to keep up with the manic pace we had set for ourselves: dance recitals, karate lessons, baseball games, family vacations, renovating, redecorating, dinner parties. Not to mention my substantial investments in the high-tech industry and Greta’s ongoing research at InfraGen Tech. We were bogged down in that time of life Dr. Laura Sully, our marriage counselor, dubbed “yuppie adolescence.”

  We found Dr. Laura Sully entirely by accident. She was one of the other prominent donors seated at our table during a fund-raiser dinner for CALS—Cure Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. She had a father who had died, like Marilee had, of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2017, and she said Marilee had been a great inspiration to her family.

  We asked what Dr. Laura Sully did for a living.

  “Marriage counseling,” she said and handed us her card.

  Sometimes it’s that simple.

  A few months after Dr. Sully came into our lives and just before Greta was diagnosed with cancer, things started looking up. We were talking again. Our sex life had improved. I was getting to know our children. The stock market rallied. And Greta was awarded the Xiao Ho-Chin Award for a paper she had published on genetic sequencing and evolution.

  Dr. Sully gave us what she called the “Gold Star of Progress.”

  Then Dr. Johnson gave Greta six months to live.

  It was just like Il Vecchio e La Commessa. Here I was in love with a ticking time bomb.

  Then poof, she was gone.

  I kept seeing Dr. Laura Sully after Greta died. From marriage counselor to grief counselor. Then our relationship took a romantic turn. And that took my mind off things for a while. But I couldn’t shake the feeling Greta was in the room whenever we made love. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Greta was everywhere I went, watching everything I did.

  You see, for as long as I’d known Greta, I’d thought we shared the same idea of death. When you’re gone, you’re gone. Finished. Kaput. She never really talked about God. She’d say from time to time, “If God could see what we’ve done to this place…” talking, of course, about the planet and how we’d trashed it like a couple of teenagers whose parents were out of town. But in all our conversations, God was always mysteriously absent, away on business or some other such thing. “If God knew what a mess we’ve made of things,” she’d say.