Sunset in St. Tropez Read online

  “I hope so. How does she look now? Is she breathing?”

  “I’m not sure.… She looks so terrible.” He was crying, terrified of what was happening, panicked by how she looked. And as he wrestled with everything he felt, the bell rang from downstairs, and he ran to press the buzzer in the hall to let them in. He unlocked the front door, and left it standing wide, and then rushed back to her. When he got back to Anne, nothing had changed, but within instants, the paramedics were on his heels, and standing in the bathroom. There were three of them, from fire rescue, and they pushed him aside and knelt over her. They listened to her heart, checked her eyes, and the man in charge told the other two to get her on the gurney they had brought, and all Robert could hear in the muddle of their words was “defibrillator,” as he followed them downstairs. He was still in his pajamas, and he barely had time to grab his coat and put on his shoes, as he shoved his phone into the pocket of his coat, grabbed his wallet off the dresser, and ran after them at a dead run. They already had Anne in the ambulance by the time he came outside, and he just had time to jump in next to her before they pulled away.

  “What happened? What’s happening to her?” He wondered if she had choked on something she vomited, and had been strangling quietly, but the paramedics told him that she had had a heart attack. And as they explained it to him, one of them tore open her nightgown and put the defibrillator on her chest. Her breasts were exposed, and Robert wanted to cover her, but he knew this was no time to worry about modesty. She looked like she was dying. Her heart had stopped and she was already wearing an oxygen mask as Robert watched in horror as her whole body convulsed, and they did it again. “Oh my God … oh my God … Anne,” he whispered as he stared at her and took her hand in his, “baby … please … please …” Her heart started again then, but it was obvious that she was in dire straits, and Robert had never felt so helpless in his life. Only hours before, they had been having dinner with their friends, and she looked tired, but nothing that would have suggested something as dramatic as this, or he would have taken her to the emergency room right away.

  The paramedics were too busy to talk to him, but they seemed satisfied with her condition momentarily, as they spoke to the nearest hospital on their radio, and Robert dialed Eric on his cellular, with shaking hands. It was four-twenty-five in the morning by then, and Eric answered on the second ring.

  “I’m in an ambulance, with Anne,” Robert said in a shaking voice, “she had a heart attack, and her heart just stopped. They just started it again, oh God, Eric, she’s gray and her lips are blue,” he was sobbing incoherently, as Eric instantly stood up and turned on the light, and Diana stirred. She was used to the late-night calls he got from the labor room, and she rarely woke up anymore, but something about the tone of his voice was different this time, and she opened an eye, and squinted up at him.

  “Is she conscious?” Eric asked quietly.

  “No … I found her on the bathroom floor … I thought maybe she hit her head … I don’t know … Eric, she looks like … she …” He could barely string the words together.

  “Where are they taking her?”

  “Lenox Hill, I think.”

  It was only a few blocks away for him. “I’ll be there in five minutes. I’ll meet you in the emergency room, or Cardiac ICU. I’ll find you … and Robert, she’ll be okay … just hang in.” He wanted desperately to reassure him, and hoped he was right.

  “Thank you” was all he could say, and he ended the call, as the paramedics held the defibrillator poised again, but her heart kept beating until they arrived at the hospital, and there was already a cardiac team waiting for her on the sidewalk there. They covered her with a blanket, and she was out of the ambulance and into the hospital before Robert could thank anyone, or say anything. The gurney virtually flew past him, and all he could do was run into the hospital behind her. They took her straight up to Coronary ICU, as Robert stood there feeling useless in his overcoat and pajamas. He suddenly looked and felt a thousand years old, and all he wanted to do was be with his beloved Anne. He didn’t want to abandon her to strangers.

  Within minutes, a resident came to ask him a series of questions, and five minutes later, Eric was standing in the corridor beside him, and Diana was with him. She had woken up the minute she had heard Eric’s questions to Robert, and insisted on coming to the hospital with him. They were both wearing jeans and raincoats, and desperately worried faces. But Eric was at least outwardly calm, and knew to ask the right questions. He went inside the coronary unit, and left Robert with Diana. And when he came back, it was obvious that he didn’t have good news.

  “She’s fibrillating again. She’s putting up a hell of a battle.” It was apparently the second time Anne’s heart had stopped since they brought her into the unit. And the resident cardiologist had told Eric he didn’t like the look of her vitals. She had been close to gone when they got her. “When did this start?” Eric asked Robert, as Diana held tightly to their friend’s hand, and Eric put an arm around him, while Robert cried pitifully as he told them what had happened.

  “I don’t know. I woke up at four. She was coughing, and I thought she was vomiting by the way she sounded. I waited a few minutes, and then she got very quiet, and when I went in, she was already unconscious.”

  “Did she have chest pains when you got home last night?” Eric frowned as he asked, not that it mattered now. Whenever it had started, the attack had hit her hard, and there was clearly a doubt in the cardiologist’s mind as to whether she would survive. It was not looking good.

  “She was just very tired, but she seemed fine otherwise. She talked about the house in the South of France, and going to a movie tomorrow.” His mind was spinning, and then he looked down at Diana from his considerable height, but his eyes seemed almost not to see her. He was in shock over everything that had just happened. “I should call the kids, shouldn’t I? But I hate to scare them.”

  “I’ll call them,” Diana said quietly. “Do you remember their numbers?” He reeled off a series of numbers as Diana jotted them down, and left Robert with Eric when she went to call them. She knew them well enough to assume the responsibility of bearing bad tidings.

  “Oh my God,” Robert rambled as Eric forced him to sit down, “what if …”

  “Just wait. People do survive things like this. Try to stay calm. It’s not going to help her if you fall apart or get sick. She’s going to need you to be strong, Robert.”

  “I need her,” he said in a strangled voice, “I couldn’t live without her.” Eric was silently praying he wouldn’t have to, but that didn’t look like a sure thing by any means. He could only imagine how hard this was for him. He knew how devoted they were to each other, and how happy they had been for nearly forty years. Sometimes, like all people who had lived together successfully for that long, they seemed like two halves of the same person.

  “You just have to hang on right now,” Eric said, standing close to him, and patting his shoulder, as Diana rejoined them. She had reached all three of their children, and they said they would come immediately. Both boys lived on the Upper East Side, and their daughter Amanda lived in SoHo, but at that hour, it would be easy to get cabs, it was five o’clock in the morning by then. It was nearly an hour since Robert had found her, and the nightmare had started.

  “Will they let me see her?” Robert said in a voice filled with panic. He had never felt so weak, so unequal to any task. For all intents and purposes, he had always thought of himself as a strong man, as had Anne, but without her, he suddenly felt his whole world, his life, crumbling around him, and all he could think of was how she had looked, lying on the bathroom floor, gray and unconscious.

  “They’ll let you see her as soon as they can,” Eric said reassuringly. “I think they’re working pretty hard now, and there’s a lot going on. Your being in there will only add to the confusion.” Robert nodded, and closed his eyes as Diana sat down on the couch next to him and held his hand tightly. She was pr
aying for Anne, but she didn’t want to say as much to Robert. She hadn’t even stopped to comb her hair before running out with Eric.

  “I want to see her,” Robert said finally, with a frantic air, and Eric volunteered to go into the depths of the Coronary ICU and see how Anne was doing. But when he got there, what he saw wasn’t a reassuring sight. They had intubated her, and she was on a respirator, and there were half a dozen monitors beeping frantically all around her. They had an IV line in by then, and the full team was working on her, and the head of the team was shouting commands to the others. Eric knew with one glance that there was no way they were going to let Robert in to see her, and for the moment, he thought it was just as well that they didn’t. It would have terrified Robert.

  When Eric went back out to him again, in the waiting room, both Robert’s sons had arrived, with worried faces, and Amanda arrived only a few minutes later. Everyone seemed to have talked to Anne in the past few days, and all of them were stunned. She had seemed fine, healthy, busy as usual, and completely in control, and now, in one instant, she lay fighting for her life, and they were all helpless to save her. Mandy put an arm around her younger brother and cried as they stood in the hallway, and Robert’s older son was sitting next to him, as Diana sat on the other side, still holding his hand. But there was nothing any of them could do as they waited.

  It was just after seven o’clock when the head cardiologist came to tell them that she had had another massive heart attack, without regaining consciousness, and he didn’t need to tell them how grave the situation was, they all knew it. And Robert put his face in his hands and cried. He was completely undone by what had happened, and not ashamed to show it. If loving her would have brought her back, what he felt for her would have done it.

  It was a long, grim night, and just after eight o’clock in the morning, as Diana came back from the cafeteria with a tray of coffee for everyone, the cardiologist returned to the waiting room with a solemn expression. Eric saw him first, and knew without a word what had happened, as did Robert.

  Robert stood straight up and looked at him, as though wanting to ward off his words before he said them. “No,” he said, as though refusing to believe what hadn’t even been said yet. “No. I don’t want to hear it.” He looked terrified, but strong suddenly, and almost angry. His eyes were wild and unfamiliar to all who knew him. It was heartbreaking to see him.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Smith. Your wife didn’t survive the second coronary. We did everything we could. She never regained consciousness. We massaged her heart … she just gave out on us. I’m so very sorry.” Robert stood staring at him, looking as though he were about to collapse, and in an instant Amanda was in his arms, sobbing uncontrollably over the loss of her mother. None of them could believe what had just happened. It seemed impossible, only hours before they had been having dinner with friends, and now she was gone. Robert couldn’t even begin to absorb it, and he felt wooden as he held his daughter, and when he looked over her shoulder, all he could see were Eric and Diana, crying, and his two sons with their arms around each other, sobbing.

  The doctor told him as gently as possible that he would have to speak to someone about making arrangements, and they would keep Anne there in the meantime. And as Robert listened to him, he began sobbing. “What arrangements?” he asked hoarsely.

  “You’ll need to call a funeral home, Mr. Smith, and talk to them about it. I’m very sorry,” he repeated, and then drifted back to the desk in the ICU to talk to the nurses. There were forms he had to fill out before he went off duty, as Robert and the others stood aimlessly in the waiting room, while other visitors began to drift in. It was nearly nine o’clock on Saturday morning by then, and people were coming to visit other patients.

  “Why don’t we go back to our place for a while?” Eric suggested quietly, wiping his eyes, and putting a firm arm around Robert. “We can have coffee and talk,” he said, eyeing Diana, and she nodded. She took Amanda under her wing, and Robert walked out of the waiting room, flanked by both of his sons, with Eric just behind them. They walked blindly through the hospital, and outside into the winter morning. It was icy cold after the rain the night before, and it looked as though there was another storm brewing. But Robert saw nothing. He felt deaf, dumb, and blind, as he slipped into a cab with his children. Eric and Diana took another just behind them, and five minutes later they were at the Morrisons’ apartment.

  Diana moved quickly and quietly around her kitchen, making coffee and toast for all of them, as Robert sat in her living room, looking devastated, with the others.

  “I just don’t understand it,” he said as she set a mug of coffee in front of him on the coffee table. “She was fine last night. We had such a good time, and the last thing she said before she went to sleep was how much she was looking forward to the house in France next summer.”

  “What house in France?” Jeff, his elder son, asked numbly.

  “We rented a house in St. Tropez with the Donnallys and your parents for next August,” Eric explained. “We were looking at pictures of it last night, and your mother seemed fine then. Although now that I think of it, she looked tired and pale, but all New Yorkers do in winter. I didn’t think anything of it.” Eric was angry at himself now for not suspecting something.

  “I asked her on the way home,” Robert said, going over it in his mind again, “if she was okay. She seemed exhausted, but she always works so hard, it didn’t seem unusual. She was going to sleep late this morning.” And now she was sleeping forever. Robert felt a rising sense of panic as he realized that he hadn’t asked to see her, but he assumed he would have a chance to later. He hadn’t been thinking of anything except the overwhelming loss he had just sustained. And it was as though he felt now that if he played the film back often enough in his head, it would end differently than it just had. As though in viewing it again, he would see that she was more than tired, and be able to save her. But the exercise in torture he had devised was pointless, and they all knew it.

  He only took two sips of the coffee, and never touched the toast Diana made them. He couldn’t think of eating anything at all, and all he wanted to do now was see her and hold her.

  “What do we do now?” Amanda asked, blowing her nose on one of the tissues from the box Diana had discreetly left on the table. Amanda was twenty-five years old, and had never experienced a loss like this one, or any other. Death was entirely unfamiliar to her. Her grandparents had died when she was too small to remember. She hadn’t even lost a pet in her entire life. And this was a big one to start with.

  “I can take care of some of that for you,” Eric said gently. “I’ll call Frank Campbell this morning.” It was a prestigious funeral parlor that had taken care of New Yorkers for years, even some as illustrious as Judy Garland. “Do you have any idea what you want to do, Robert? Do you want her cremated?” The question demolished him in an instant. He didn’t want her cremated, he wanted her alive again, in the Morrisons’ living room, asking them all why they were being so silly. But this wasn’t silly. It was unbearable, unthinkable, intolerable, to her husband, and her children. They were actually handling it better than he was.

  “Can I do something to help, Dad?” Jeff offered quietly, and his younger brother Mike tried to rise to the occasion. They had both called their wives, and told them the news, and a few minutes later, Diana slipped away to call Pascale and John. They were stunned when she told them that Anne had died that morning. At first, they couldn’t understand it.

  “Anne? But she was fine last night,” Pascale insisted, just as everyone else had. “I can’t believe it.… What happened?” Diana told her as much as she knew, and Pascale was crying when she went to tell John, while he was reading the paper. Half an hour later, they arrived at the Morrisons’ too, and it was after one o’clock when Robert finally went back to his apartment to get dressed. And when he saw the lights on, and the towels on the floor in the bathroom, which he had put there to cover and warm her, he broke into ag
onized sobs again, and when he lay on their bed, he could smell her perfume on his pillow. It was all beyond bearing.

  Eric went to Campbell’s with him that afternoon, and helped him go through the unbearable agonies that were required of him, making decisions, ordering flowers, picking a casket. He chose a handsome mahogany, with a white velvet interior. The whole thing was a nightmare, and they told him that he could see his wife later that afternoon when she arrived from the hospital. And when he did, with Diana standing next to him, it completely unglued him. He held Anne’s lifeless form to him, while Diana watched them, silently crying. That night he went to Jeff’s to have dinner with his children. Jeff and his wife insisted that he spend the night with them, and he was relieved to do it. Mandy was staying with Mike and his wife Susan at their apartment. None of them wanted to be alone, and they were grateful to have each other.

  The Donnallys and Morrisons had dinner together that night, still unable to believe what had happened. Only the night before Anne had been with them, and now she was gone, and Robert was a shambles.

  “I hate to bring up something so tactless under the circumstances,” Diana said cautiously as they looked mournfully at their plates and scarcely touched the Chinese takeout they’d ordered. No one was hungry, and at Jeff’s house, Robert was literally starving. He hadn’t touched food since the night before and didn’t want to. “But I was just thinking about what we should do with the house in St. Tropez.”

  “As long as you’re being tactless,” John looked as grim as the others, “I will be too. The house is too expensive divided by two and not three couples. We’ll have to let it go,” he said firmly, as Pascale glanced uncomfortably at her husband.