They gave him back his old room. Because he'd forgotten to take the DO NOT DISTURB sign off the door, and the hotel maids hadn't been informed that he'd checked out, it was almost as if he'd never left the hotel--and never been to Forest Hill and back--except for the news that his mother was dying.
It crossed Jack's mind to call Maureen. "This is room service, Dr. Yap," he might say. "Would you like to have Jack Burns with your breakfast?"
Jack could only imagine Maureen saying, "Yes, please," but he didn't feel like joking around. When Maureen had told him she was staying at the hotel under her maiden name, she hadn't been kidding.
Jack took a quick shower and put on the hotel bathrobe and the stupid white slippers, as if he were on his way to or from the swimming pool. He knew Maureen Yap's room number; his fans at the front desk had told him, although they weren't supposed to. After all, he was Jack Burns; if he'd called the front desk and asked them to send him a pepperoni pizza with two hookers, they'd have had the pizza and the prostitutes at his door in about forty-five minutes.
The movies had taught Jack the power of presenting himself without words, and the little peephole in Maureen Yap's hotel-room door offered Maureen an unexpected close-up of her favorite actor. Her breakfast had arrived only moments before--now here was Jack Burns in a bathrobe!
"I blame the delay on Pam Hoover," Maureen mumbled again as she let Jack in. She was wearing her hotel robe, too--sans the stupid white slippers. (Jack kicked his off at the door.)
"You came all the way from Vancouver for what?" he asked, untying her robe.
"To have too much sex with you," Maureen Yap said, untying his. Never mind that it sounded like "To shave my legs for you"; Jack knew what she meant.
She was a tiny woman: the cavity of her pelvis couldn't have been bigger than a thirteen-year-old girl's. The skin on her breasts had the transparency of a child's--a faint bluish tone, as if her veins, although unseen, lent their color to her skin. Jack could touch the fingers of his hands together when he encircled her thigh.
"My femur is smaller than your humerus," Maureen told him; there's no describing what that sounded like, but he somehow managed to understand her.
Maureen's husband and son called her in her hotel room at 9:45 A.M.--6:45 in Vancouver, where the father was getting the little boy up for school. Maureen covered one of Jack's ears with her cupped palm--pressing his head, and his other ear, into her flat tummy. He could still hear her endearments to her husband, who was also a doctor, and her young son--not that Jack could follow word-for-word what she told them. Maureen was in tears; Jack could feel the taut muscles in her lower abdomen.
It was the sadness of Emma's memorial service, she told her family--it still made her cry to think about it. Jack heard Pam Hoover's name again--there was mention, he thought, of how Pam seemed "shaken" and was "lately insane." Only after the phone call would Jack figure out that Maureen Yap had said she was "taking a later plane to Vancouver."
It was also after the phone call when Jack reminded Maureen that, from their bed in the Four Seasons, they were very close to the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, which prompted Maureen to show him her fruit-bat and vampire-bat imitations. Naturally, this led them to enact Emma's squeezed-child saga--all three endings.
"There is no way to have too much sex with you," The Yap told him later, when he was having some difficulty peeing in her bathroom. He heard this, of course, as: "It is no fair I bathe all bare for you," or something like that.
"My mother has cancer," Jack called from the bathroom. (Not too loudly; the door was open.) "She's dying."
"Come back to bed," Maureen said distinctly. Once they'd moved on to medical matters, he had no trouble understanding her. Dr. Yap spoke very clearly.
What would happen to his mother's brain? Jack wanted to know. It must have sounded to Maureen like a child's question, because she held him in her arms, with his head against her breasts, and talked to him as if he were a child. "It probably won't be as bad for her as it will be for you, Jack," she began, "depending on where in her brain the tumor is. You should send me the MRI."
"Okay," Jack said. He noticed he was crying.
"If it's in her visual cortex, she'll go blind. If it's in the speech cortex--well, you get the picture. If the cancer eats through a blood vessel, she will hemorrhage and die without ever knowing or feeling what has happened to her. Or, as her brain swells, she will simply slip away."
"Will she be in a coma?" he asked.
"She could be, Jack. She could die peacefully in a coma--she could simply stop breathing. But along the way, she might think she was someone else. She might have hallucinations--she might smell strange, nonexistent smells. Truly anything is possible. She will go fairly quickly and painlessly, but she may not know who she is when she goes. The hard part for you, Jack, is that you may not know who she is, either."
The hard part for Jack, as he would tell Maureen, was that he'd never known who his mother was. The description of her ultimate death seemed almost familiar.
"Do you mind if I call you Dr. Yap?" Jack asked Maureen, when they were saying good-bye.
"Not if you call me incessantly," she said.
He wouldn't, of course; Maureen knew that. When Jack sent her his mom's MRI, he already had a pretty good idea of where the tumor was--the so-called space-occupying lesion. Alice knew, too. Dr. Yap's interpretation of the MRI would merely confirm the prognosis. The tumor was in the limbic system--the emotional center of the brain.
"Well, isn't that fucking great!" Leslie Oastler would say. "I suppose that Alice will think the whole thing is terribly funny, or she'll be laughing one minute and crying the next--an emotional yo-yo, either telling grossly inappropriate jokes or drowning in some inexpressible sorrow!"
Of course, from Jack's point of view, his mom had always been that way; that a malignant tumor now occupied the emotional center of her brain seemed unremarkable, even normal.
"If it's gone this far, Jack," Maureen Yap had forewarned him, "I'm sure that your mother has already come to terms with dying. Just imagine how much she's thought about it. She even decided, somewhere along the line, not to tell you. That means to me that she's thought about it a lot--enough to have the peace of mind to keep it to herself. It's Mrs. Oastler who can't come to terms with it. And you--you won't have time to come to terms with it until she's gone. It'll happen that fast, Jack."
"She's only fifty-one!" he'd cried against her thirteen-year-old's breasts, her child-size body.
"Cancer likes you when you're young, Jack," Maureen had told him. "Even cancer slows down when you're old."