Benny & Ray 58

In Sickness

 

  

Benny says I should keep a journal; write down how I’m feeling through all this.  Why do that? I know how I’m feeling; it’s no big mystery. I feel lousy. Physically and mentally.

 

I’m lying here in a tube, shot full of radioactive gallium.   I’ve had so many medical tests lately that I feel like it’s all I’ve ever done.  I feel like I’ve given this hospital gallons of my body fluid.  How much more did they have to check? Just give me the drugs already.

 

I have cancer. I’m going to die.  Benny tells me I shouldn’t say such things, or think that way, but how can I not?  I have cancer. Why is this my life, God? 

 

Dr. Taddeo tells me this test will stage my cancer.  I’m in a PET scan machine.  It’s warm and dark in here, kind of restful, really.  The technician is in another room behind a window.  Is this safe for me? Shouldn’t I be behind a window, too?  Is this going to make me radioactive? 

 

My eyelids are getting heavy; I didn’t sleep much last night.  Neither did Benny. I could hear him puking in the bathroom, in the middle of the night.  He came back to bed after a few minutes.  I asked him if he were alright, and he said very curtly that yes, he was fine.  He had turned his back to me, and curled on his side.  The next morning, his eyes were puffy and bloodshot.

 

As hard as it was going to be on me, it was going to be hard on Benny, too.  When Dr. Chapman told me I had cancer, I had turned to Benny, thinking I wasn’t hearing him right.  He didn’t just tell me I had cancer, did he?  How could that be?  Ben was white as a ghost.  He had looked at me with such helplessness that I almost pitied him.

 

He was eerily quiet on the drive from the doctor’s office to the house.  I knew he had gone to his dark place.  Benny had his moods.  Not too often, but every once in a while, he just….goes away, checks out.  If I didn’t know him like I did, I’d be scared to death of him at times like that.  Well, maybe I was anyway, a little.

 

Benny drove us back to the house in my car.  Ma sobbed in the back seat, which set me off, too.  The two of us bawled our eyes out on the way home.

 

By the time she got home, Ma had whipped herself and me into a frenzy.  We were both crying even harder as the reality sunk in. Benny silently helped us both out of the car.  Frannie had been waiting for at the house, knowing I’d have the results when we got back.  She came running to the door as soon as we got in. She screamed and began to cry before I could even get the words out.  She threw her arms around my neck, and I told her I had cancer.  Ma and Fran both clung to me.

 

Maria had come to the door to see what all the screaming was about.  Benny told her, which set Maria off.  Maria ran upstairs and told Tony.  Tony came downstairs cursing. Ma got weak in the knees and had to be helped to the couch before she fainted.  The place was in complete pandemonium.  Except for Benny. He was silent as a stone.

 

Lying here in the machine, I close my eyes and try not to think of yesterday, but I can’t help myself.  It just keeps playing over and over in my head like a horror movie I can’t get out of my mind.

 

Dr. Chapman had personally walked us to Dr. Taddeo’s office. Because she was a hematologist that specialized in oncology, she was going to keep my case.  Dr. Taddeo gave me the full name of what I have:  Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma. It was a pretty aggressive type, she told me, and as soon as the staging tests were completed, she was going to start me on chemo.  She had them do a CT scan on my neck to look at my swollen right lymph node again.  She was concerned that it was going to get so big that it was going to press on my windpipe and interfere with my breathing, so she wanted to shrink it quickly with some radiation.

 

Benny asked her a ton of questions about everything, and I mean everything.  Ma, too.  I couldn’t keep up. For a while there, it sounded like they were talking Greek.  Immunophenotyping, immunodefiencies, lymphoproliferative disorders, follicular lymphomas. Yeah, right. Just give me the drugs to make me better, will ya?

 

I asked Dr. Taddeo to just explain to me in English what was happening to me.  She told me that my B-cells basically had gone crazy (my words) and were forming clusters of tumors, cells just growing out of control,  instead of regular cells that lived and died.  They didn’t know what caused this cancer.

 

Benny asked her where she had trained and studied.  She answered so easily that I could tell that she got asked that all the time.  She was a very young-looking person. She looked like she coulda barely been out of high school.  It was hard to believe she’d completed med school.  She did a pretty good job of not sounding offended when she answered. 

 

Dr. Taddeo went to Harvard Med School and did a residency at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.  Then she worked at the Mayo Clinic for two years before coming back home to Chicago.  She promised to take good care of me, and I believed her.

 

**

 

The technician shook me. My eyes snapped open.

 

“Raymond,” he said, “You’re all done.”

 

I sat up, blinking.  “Sorry I fell asleep on ya.”

 

“No problem.  Happens all the time.  Sit tight.  One of the orderlies is going to come and take you up to the lab for a bone marrow sample now.”

 

“How do they do that?”

 

“They insert a needle into your hipbone.”

 

“Is that going to hurt?”

 

“Probably.”

 

“Oh.”

 

Ma came with me, and held my hand.  It wasn’t painful, but it felt weird.  One of the nurses scrubbed my right hip down with antiseptic, and shot me full of lidocaine.  After a few minutes, Dr. Taddeo came in with the needle (which I refused to look at) and inserted it.  I felt the pressure, and I felt a pulling sensation down my leg.  It was a gross feeling.  I squeezed Ma’s hand, and she squeezed back.  She rubbed my forehead.  She used to do that to me when I was a little kid.  It felt nice.

 

Ma helped me get dressed after the procedure.  Then we headed out to the waiting room, looking for Benny.

 

VVVVVV

 

Saturday afternoon.  Benny and I had decided to spend the weekend at the house.  Ma was cooking an early supper, pasta fagioli….mmmm!  We had watched a couple of old movies on the VCR.  Benny picked them out.  “Some Like It Hot” (couldn’t help but think of “Miss Fraser” when we watched this) and “Duck Soup”.  Hey, those old black and white movies weren’t that bad once you got used to them.  They were both pretty funny.  Raphy, Donny, Maria and Tony joined us for “Some Like It Hot”, and Ma joined us for “Duck Soup” after she got the food on.  Ma loves Groucho Marx.  She laughed through the whole thing.  It was good to hear my Ma laugh again. 

 

“Benny’s girl” Marissa had fallen asleep in his arms, having climbed up on his lap halfway through “Duck Soup” and Benny had cradled and kissed her.  Raphy sat next to his Uncle Benny, squeezing in, just wanting to be close to him, too.  Maria got up and took a picture of Benny with her two children.

 

God. This was the kind of stuff I’d miss if I was gone.  What is this dying stuff? I can’t leave here. Not now. Benny and I have a life together.  A good life. One better than I thought I could ever have.

 

Looking at Benny and Marissa and Raphy together at that moment, I saw the future for me and Benny, sitting in our own house, with our own children.  Ben looked up from gazing at the sleeping baby and caught my eye.  We locked eyes, and I glanced at the baby, and met his eyes again.  He smiled at me, understanding what I meant. 

 

My brother Paul called me last night.  Fran had called him and given him the news. He told me he wanted to be there for my first chemo; as a pharmacist, he knew all about that stuff.  He wanted to talk to Dr. Taddeo about what she was going to put me on and see how I did on it.  He told me if need be, he’d stay, as long as necessary.  He’d moved if he had to, find a job out here.  It’d be nice if he would anyway.  I miss having my brother in my life on a regular basis.

 

Paul and I had a nice long talk.  About not just the cancer and chemo, but everything.  He wanted to know about Benny and me and how we were doing.  We talked about 9-11 and Valerie. He wanted to know about Ma and Maria, and Fran.  We talked about Pop and what he had done to us, which was something we NEVER talked about as adults. 

 

We ended up talking until midnight.  At the end, he told me he loved me.  Don’t know if he’d ever said that to me before.  I told him I loved him back.  It felt a little weird to be talking to my brother that way.  But after I hung up, I decided that was stupid.  That was Pop talking.  I can just hear him now: A man never tells another man he loves him! That’s for queers.  Yeah, yeah, Pop, get over it. Oh yeah, and for the record, I AM a queer.

 

After I got off the phone with Paul, Ben came to bed.  He had been off on his own in the study for the duration of the call. He had been reading in his text books, trying to catch up from all the classes he missed. 

 

I put my arms around him and started kissing him once he got settled in.  He wasn’t really getting into it.  He had on those stupid red long johns that I hate so much, mostly because they’re a pain in the ass to get off of him. I started to undo the buttons, but he pulled away, rebuttoning them.

 

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

 

“We shouldn’t,” he replied.

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because you’re sick.”

 

I sighed.  “Benny, I have cancer; my dick’s not broken.  We can still, you know, do it. Don’t you want to? Or do I turn you off now?”

 

“Oh Ray! No! I want to make love but …”

 

“But what?”

 

“I…I…I don’t know.”

 

I pulled back from Benny, and just looked at him, appraising.  I don’t know what was up with him, he just seemed ‘off’.  I’d expected Benny to come around and spring back to his usual Pollyanna self by now.

 

“Is there something bothering you, babe, that you want to talk about?” I asked.

 

Benny quickly shook his head.  “I’m fine, Ray.  Don’t worry about me. We need to worry about you.”

 

“I think we should worry about the two of us.  I mean, we’re partners, aren’t we, Benny? In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, and all that stuff?”

 

Benny did his best to put on a smile, eyes tearing and spilling over his cheek. 

 

“Don’t cry, babe.  We’re going to be okay. Comere. Mmmm.”  I crushed him to me in a bear hug.  “Hey…let’s do it, all right?  You’ll feel better….” I kissed that luscious mouth of his, over and over and after a minute, he finally responded to me.  The sweet kiss just went on and on.  Finally, I pulled away. “And I’ll feel better, too,” I continued, grinning.   I went back to kissing him again, climbing on top of him.

 

I kissed him until we were both hard, moaning into each other’s mouth.  I started unbuttoning all those red buttons again.  And this time, he let me.

 

VVVVVV

 

 

The door buzzer was sounding loudly when I awakened.  It was an ugly way to wake up on a Sunday morning.  I sat up slowly in the empty bed.

 

Benny answered the door, and I heard Margarita Gamez practically shout, “Good morning, Benton! Nice to see you again. How have you been?”

 

I heard the voice of Micky Doyle too, greeting Benny, and even…Lt. Welsh?

 

I slipped on a sweatshirt and sweatpants and grabbed some socks—Benny’s— from the night before. I shuffled out to the living room.

 

Yeah, it was Welsh alright.  His voice had sounded so soft and subdued it hadn’t sounded like him at first. He spoke softly to Benny, hand on shoulder.   And there was Micky, and Marg, and a tall kid, standing behind Marg, who carried a huge bunch of balloons.  “Mario?” I asked in complete disbelief.  The last time I saw him was when Marg first started working at the station, and that had to be at least two years ago.  It looked like the kid had shot up about a foot since then.

 

“What’s up?” he said, in that shy, uncomfortable way that teens got around adults.

 

“’Sup,” I replied, and gave him a street kind of shake, trying to keep things casual.

 

“Micky,” I said.  “Hey, man. Lieu.”

 

“How ya doin’ kid?” the Lieu asked. “Hangin’ in there?”

 

I shrugged with one shoulder.  “I’m all right, I guess.”

 

Marg took the balloons from Mario and handed them to me.  “These are for you.”  There were a bunch of shiny ‘get well’ balloons and lots of latex ones in every color.  It was cool; I always liked balloons.

 

“Thanks,” I said.  “That was real nice of you, guys.”  Pearson, having heard the voices, had already come out to investigate.  The balloons had a weight tied to all the ribbons and I had walked them over to our dining room table let them settle there.  She jumped up on the table and immediately started pulling at the ribbons with her teeth.

 

“Pearson!” Benny snapped.  “Down! You know better.”  Benny was completely dressed, in navy blue slacks, a blue Oxford shirt and polished black leather dress shoes, which meant he was planning on going to mass.  She immediately jumped down, and managed to look sad and pitiful, like Benny just hit her or something. She whined, to get the full effect.

 

Mario walked over and patted her head, and she perked right up, sniffing, then licking his hand.  What a con artist.

 

Benny and Micky moved into the kitchen by themselves, and I could hear their low voices, no doubt talking about me.

 

“Look,” Lt. Welsh said.  “We didn’t mean to impose, but we just wanted to stop by and wish you well.” The Lieu gave me a pat on the shoulder.  “Give me a call when you know more.  When are you seeing the doctor?”

 

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

 

“Good. Good.”

 

I invited them to sit down, and Marg and her son and the lieutenant sat on the couch.  I sat across from them in our recliner.  We shot the breeze for a while.  I don’t think any of us were all that comfortable with this.  It was a weird situation.

 

I talked to Mario for a few minutes, asked him what his plans held, and he told me he was applying to colleges in the south for next year, wanted to play basketball for the A.C.C, maybe Duke or Carolina, or Georgia Tech or Clemson. 

 

“You that good?” I asked.

 

Marg answered for her son. “Oh, he’s pretty good, alright.  And, he’s got the grades to get into those schools.  We’re praying for a scholarship,” she said hopefully, looking at her son.  “That’s the only way.”

 

“Wow.  Best of luck to ya, man,” I said to Mario.

 

“Thanks,” he muttered, barely looking at me, but pride shining through.

 

Benny and Micky walked back into the room.  Welsh stood.

 

“Listen, why don’t you take a few days off until things shake out?  I’ve already got H.R. looking into your disability benefits.  We can get someone in temporarily if need be, to help Mick out.”

 

“Awww, Lieu, I told you.  I can handle things while Ray’s out.” Micky complained.

 

“I don’t want any of my men working without a partner.”

 

“Huh? What about me, Lieu?” I asked.  “I worked without a partner for years and you didn’t care.”

 

“It wasn’t for lack of caring, Vecchio; I just couldn’t find anybody to put up with your shenanigans.”  But Lt. Welsh smiled at me, slapping me on the shoulder.

 

Marg and Mario stood too.  Marg held out her arms and I gave her a hug.  She grabbed and held on tight for a long moment.  When she pulled back, her eyes were filled with tears.  She turned and left the apartment without another word, hand over mouth.

 

Geez…way to make a guy feel like he’s dying here.

 

Mario and I slapped hands again, Micky gave me hug, and the Lieu gave me a fatherly pat on the back again. 

 

“Take it easy, Ray,” Micky said.  “Is it okay if I come by in a few days?”

 

“Sure it is, Mick.”  That Micky Doyle is a hell of a partner.

 

They took off, and the door closed quietly behind them.  Ben turned to me.  I reached for him and we just stood there holding each other for a while.

 

“Are you picking Ma up, or is she coming to get you?”

 

“I thought I’d walk over to the house and we’d go from there.  She was going to drive.”

 

“You two want some company, or you want to be alone so you can canoodle?”

 

“Oh Ray!” Ben said in admonishment.

 

“Benny, I think Ma loves you more than she loves me,” I teased.

 

We separated from our hug.  Ben looked at me affectionately.  Then he threw his arms around me again.  “Ray, did I ever thank you for giving me a mother again? It’s wonderful.”

 

“And it’s good for her, too, Benny. You’ve been good for all of us.”

 

“You’ll come to mass with us?” He asked hopefully.

 

“Do I have time to take a quick shower?”

 

“We’ll wait for you. I’ll call Ma. ”

 

I was already on the move, calling to him over my shoulder.  “Alright. I’ll be quick. Pick out some clothes for me?”

 

“Okay, love,” he said. He began to move toward our bedroom.

 

I detoured on my way to the bathroom and followed behind Benny instead.  “Oh, Benny?”

 

“Yes, Ray?”  He turned in the doorway to our bedroom.

 

“Did I tell you I loved you today?” I asked.

 

“As a matter of fact, no, you didn’t, Ray.”

 

“Well, here it is:  I love you, Benton Fraser.”

 

He answered just as formally. “I love you, Raymond Vecchio.” He flashed me a genuine, honest-to-goodness, from-the-heart smile, the first one I’d seen in days. I turned toward the bathroom, heart full of hope.