Rich Katherine Russell - Red Devil

TRANQUEBAR PRESS
THE RED DEVIL

Katherine Russell Rich is the author of Dreaming in Hindi, which was named one of the top ten books of the year by O, the Oprah magazine. Shes written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue and Slate.

The Red Devil

TO HELL WITH CANCERAND BACK

Katherine Russell Rich

TRANQUEBAR PRESS
An imprint of westland ltd
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First published by Crown Publishers, Random House, USA 1999
First published in India by TRANQUEBAR PRESS 2010

Copyright Katherine Russell Rich 2010

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Cond Nast Publications: Portions of Fight and Rock originally appeared in Allure, 1997. Hal Leonard Music: Excerpt from Cruisin, words and music by William (Smokey) Robinson and Marvin Tarplin. Copyright 1979 by Bertram Music Company. All rights and controlled by EMI April Music, Inc. on behalf of Jobete Music Co., Inc. New Issues Press: Variations on My Room in the Bone Marrow Unit from The Woman With a Cubed Head by Julie Moulds. Copyright 1998. D. Nurkse: How We are Made Light by D. Nurkse.

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-93-80658-51-3

For sale in the Indian Subcontinent only

Typeset in Adobe Garamond by SRYA, New Delhi

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.

To
Henry and sally Creech

Contents

When we stand
On the low rungs
Of the ladder of sorrow,
We cry.

When we come
To the middle
Were silent
But when we climb
To the top
Of the ladder
Of sorrow,
We convert sadness into song.

Ancient Hebrew poem

I found the lump twenty minutes before breakfast, three weeks after my marriage broke up. I was taking a shower, soaping myself down, when my fingers slid into it and stopped. They pushed on a little, flew off, returned to confirm that, yes, there was something hard and alien in my left breast. After a pause, they resumed their investigation. But now my brain had seized up, and so the information my fingers were attempting to relay remained stalled, unprocessed, in touch. Perhaps thats why I retain such a strong sense memory of what they found: a mass die size of a pigeons egg, a blob that felt like oatmeal packed in casing. I was puzzledthe thing hadnt, I swear, been there the day beforebut not perplexed. I knew instantly what it was.

At work I phoned a friend. Michelle, I whispered. On top of everything, I found a lump in my breast. I cant do it: I cant go on! Those were the days when I still liked hyperbole, before an excess of real drama killed my taste for the manufactured kind.

My friend soothed and reassured me; she presented the facts: all women find lumps; I was only thirty-two; the odds were this was absolutely nothing. The case she constructed was sure and ordered. Yeah, youre right, I agreed, allowing myself to be seduced into calm, willing, temporarily, to forget my certainty, illogical as it was.

My evidence, had I spoken it, was this: my life was spinning to hell; my marriage had busted up at the end of August; Id promptly moved eleven cartons of possession into a sublet where I wasnt supposed to smoke but I did; and now, in September, I was about to take a new job. Of course that lump was cancer. What else was it going to be.

And those were my surefire arguments. If I wasnt going to bring them up, I certainly wasnt going to mention that, six months before, in a journal, Id written, I cant stay in this marriage any longer. If I do, Ill get cancer. Or how, not long after, Id experienced some weird psychic breast cancer flash. Diego, Im not kidding, Im getting the strongest feeling that somebody in one of our families has it, Id told my husband. To be safe, why dont you call your mother down in Buenos Aires and tell her to get a mammogram. Spooked, she rushed to get the test, which came back normal.

Nor did I mention another recent occurrence, but only, I would have told you then, because it had slipped my mind. Fear, I realize now, was blocking the memory of how, a few months earlier, in bed, my husband had frozen while caressing me. I dont want to scare you, he said softly, but I think I found a lump here. When he tried to locate it again, it wasnt there. I chalked the incident up to projectile hypochondria.

Diego and I were absolute opposites about a lot of things, and illness was one of them. Ah! I think I have a cancer! he would announce, lying prostrate on the bed. What a baby, Id say, not at all amused or compassionate. My father was a Christian Scientist, and while my mother insisted on raising my brother, sister, and the Episcopalian, his beliefs suffused the house. We werent expected to deny disease as he was, but we were strongly encouraged to rise above it. Its just mortal error, my father would counsel me when I was laid low by some ailment. I didnt have a clue what he was a talking about, but I did know that mortal error was the reason why, in tenth grade, for instance, shimmery with a fever from bronchitis, I was still expected to haul myself to school. Coming into the adult world, I assumed everyone was like this. Diego, for one, was not.

I have a headache! I cannot move, he declared from the floor of the Denver airport on Christmas Eve, where hed flung himself just as the extended family was about to transfer to a flight to Breckenridge for a ski vacation. Pedestrians stepped over him. My parents stared down, flabbergasted. Theyd never seen behaviour like this. I had, a couple of times.

Just ignore him, I advised my mother.

But Kathy, she said. He really looks sick.

He is, I sneered. Sick in his head.

Id met Diego when he was thirty-one and I was twenty-five, at a party he threw at his apartment on East Fourteenth Street. When Id rung the bell, hed opened the door and done a double take. I was pleased by his show of interest, but I had to look away, for if he was thunderstruck, I was more so. He was blond and all-boy, sexy like a rugby player, and though Id heard from our mutual friend that he was Argentine, I noticed he spoke with a slight twang, like someone out of Texas.

The inflection puzzled me for a long time, till I realized hed picked up his American listening to Boy Dylan. As for his English, hed learned that while attending a private Irish school in Buenos Aires, after which hed gone on to study architecture for a few years before being sidetracked by marriage, two sons, and a job at a radical newspaper. Journalism in the States can be a high-risk profession, but in Argentina in the seventies, it was flat-out dangerous, particularly when practiced at a left-wing publication. The far-right government was waging a Dirty War against anyone who disagreed with its positions, and journalists as a group were high on the hit list. Students and intellectuals were being dragged from their homes in the middle of the night and brought to detention centers, where they were tortured and frequently killed. After a number of Diegos friends had disappeared, his name turned up in some wrong address books and the police detained him twice. In the year before he fled the country, he got used to sleeping with a pistol under his pillow.