But no sooner did he and Phoebe return to Manhattan — where they lived in apartments some thirty blocks apart — than he mysteriously fell ill. He lost his appetite and his energy and found himself nauseated throughout the day, and he could not walk a city block without feeling weak and woozy.
The doctor could find nothing wrong with him. He had begun to see a psychoanalyst in the aftermath of his divorce, and the psychoanalyst attributed his condition to envy of a fellow art director who had just been promoted to a vice presidency in the agency.
"It makes you sick," the analyst said.
He maintained that his colleague was twelve years his senior and a generous coworker whom he only wished well, but the analyst continued to harp on "deep-seated envy" as the hidden reason for the malaise, and when circumstances proved him wrong, the analyst appeared unperturbed by his mistaken judgment.
He went to the medical doctor's office several more times in the succeeding weeks, whereas ordinarily he saw him only for a minor problem every couple of years. But he'd lost weight and the bouts of nausea were getting worse. He'd never before felt so rotten, not even after he'd left Cecilia and the two small boys and the court battle ensued over the terms of the separation and he was characterized to the court by Cecilia's attorney as "a well-known philanderer" because of the affair he was having with Phoebe, who was a new copywriter in the agency (and who was referred to in court by the plaintiff on the witness stand — aggrieved, overwrought, as though she found herself bringing charges against the Marquis de Sade — as "number thirty-seven in his parade of girlfriends," when in fact she was looking too far into the future and Phoebe was as yet number two). At least back then there'd been a recognizable cause for all the misery he felt. But this was his turning overnight from someone who was bursting with health into someone inexplicably losing his health.
A month passed. He couldn't concentrate on his work, he gave up his morning swim, and by now he couldn't look at food. On a Friday afternoon he left work early and took a taxi to the doctor's office without having made an appointment or even a phone call. The only one he phoned was Phoebe, to tell her what he was doing.
"Admit me to a hospital," he told the doctor. "I feel like I'm dying."
The doctor made the arrangements, and Phoebe was at the hospital's information desk when he arrived. By five o'clock he was settled into a room, and just before seven a tall, tanned, good-looking middle-aged man wearing a dinner jacket came into the room and introduced himself as a surgeon who had been called by his physician to take a look at him. He was on his way to some formal event but wanted to stop by first to do a quick examination. What he did was to press his hand down very hard just above the groin on the right side. Unlike the regular physician, the surgeon kept pressing and the pain was excruciating. He felt on the verge of vomiting. The surgeon said, "Haven't you had any stomach pain before?" "No," he said. "Well, it's your appendix. You need an operation." "When?" "Now."
He saw the surgeon next in the operating room. He'd changed out of the evening clothes into a surgical gown. "You've saved me from a very boring banquet," the surgeon said.
He didn't wake up until the next morning. Standing at the foot of the bed, along with Phoebe, were his mother and father, looking grim. Phoebe, whom they did not know (other than from Cecilia's denigrating descriptions, other than from the telephone tirades ending, "I pity this Little Miss Muffet coming after me — I honestly do pity the vile little Quaker slut!"), had phoned them and they'd immediately driven over from New Jersey. As best he could make out, a male nurse seemed to be having trouble feeding some sort of tube up his nose, or maybe the nurse was trying to extract it. He spoke his first words — "Don't fuck up!" — before falling back into unconsciousness.
His mother and father were seated in chairs when he came around again. They seemed still to be tormented and weighed down by fatigue as well.
Phoebe was in a chair beside the bed holding his hand. She was a pale, pretty young woman whose soft appearance belied her equanimity and steadfastness. She manifested no fear and allowed none in her voice.
Phoebe knew plenty about physical misery because of the severe headaches that she'd dismissed as nothing back in her twenties but that she realized were migraines when they became regular and frequent in her thirties. She was lucky enough to be able to sleep when she got one, but the moment she opened her eyes, the moment she was conscious, there it was — the incredible ache on one side of her head, the pressure in her face and her jaw, and back of her eye socket a foot on her eyeball crushing it. The migraines started with spirals of light, bright spots moving in a swirl in front of her eyes even when she closed them, and then progressed to disorientation, dizziness, pain, nausea, and vomiting. "It's nothing like being in this world," she told him afterward. "There's nothing in my body but the pressure in my head." All he could do for her was to remove the big cooking pot into which she vomited, and to clean it out in the bathroom, and then to tiptoe back into the bedroom and place it beside the bed for her to use when she was sick again. For the twenty-four or forty-eight hours that the migraine lasted, she could not stand another presence in the darkened room, any more than she could bear the thinnest sliver of light filtering in from beneath the drawn shades. And no drugs helped. None of them worked for her. Once the migraine started, there was no stopping it.
"What happened?" he asked her.
"A burst appendix. You had it for some time."
"How sick am I?" he asked weakly.
"There's a lot of peritonitis. There are drains in the wound. They're draining it. You're getting big doses of antibiotics. You're going to pull through. We're going to swim across the bay again."
That was hard to believe. Back in 1943 his father had come close to dying from undiagnosed appendicitis and severe peritonitis. He was forty-two with two young children, and he had been in the hospital — and away from his business — thirty-six days. When he got home, he was so weak he could barely make it up the one little flight to their flat, and after he'd been helped by his wife from the entry-way into the bedroom, he sat on the edge of the bed, where, for the first time in the presence of his children, he broke down and cried. Eleven years earlier, his youngest brother, Sammy, the adored favorite of eight children, had died of acute appendicitis in his third year at engineering school. He was nineteen years old, having entered college at sixteen, and his ambition was to be an aeronautical engineer. Only three of the eight children had got as far as high school, and Sammy was the first and only one to go to college. His friends were the smartest boys in the neighborhood, all of them the children of Jewish immigrants who met regularly at one another's houses to play chess and to talk heatedly about politics and philosophy. He was their leader, a runner on the track team and a mathematics whiz with a sparkling personality. It was Sammy's name that his father intoned as he sobbed in the bedroom, astonished to find himself back among the family whose provider he was.
Uncle Sammy, his father, now him — the third of them to have been felled by a burst appendix and peritonitis. While he drifted in and out of consciousness for the next two days, it was not certain whether he would meet Sammy's fate or his father's.
His brother flew in from California on the second day, and when he opened his eyes and saw him at the side of the bed, a big and gentle presence, unperturbed, confident, jolly, he thought, I cannot die while Howie is here. Howie bent over to kiss his forehead, and then no sooner did he sit down in the bedside chair and take the patient's hand than time stopped, the present disappeared, and he was returned to childhood, a small boy again, preserved from worry and fear by the generous brother who slept in the bed beside his.
Howie stayed for four days. In four days he sometimes flew to Manila and Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and back. He had started at Goldman Sachs as a runner and quickly went from relaying messages to top dog on the currency-trading desk and began investing for himself in stocks. He had ended up in currency arbitrage for multinational and large foreign corporations — winemakers in France and camera makers in West Germany and automakers in Japan, for whom he turned francs and deutsche marks and yen into dollars. He traveled frequently to meet with his clients and continued investing in companies he liked, and by thirty-two he had his first million.
Sending their parents home to rest, Howie joined with Phoebe to see him through the worst of it and prepared to fly out only after receiving the doctor's assurances that the crisis was over. On the last morning, Howie quietly said to him, "You've got a good girl this time. Don't screw it up. Don't let her go."
He thought, in his joy at having survived, Was there ever a man whose appetite for life was as contagious as Howie's? Was there ever a brother as lucky as me?
He was in the hospital for thirty days. The nurses were mostly agreeable, conscientious young women with Irish accents who seemed always to have time to chat a little when they looked in on him. Phoebe came directly from work to have dinner in his room every night; he couldn't imagine what being needy and infirm like this and facing the uncanny nature of illness would have been like without her. His brother needn't have warned him not to let her go; he was never more determined to keep anyone. Beyond his window he could see the leaves of the trees turning as the October weeks went by, and when the surgeon came around he said to him, "When am I going to get out of here? I'm missing the fall of 1967." The surgeon listened soberly, and then, with a smile, he said, "Don't you get it yet? You almost missed everything."