Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(3)

“Libby? Are you okay?” Tom rushed at me, taking me by the shoulders. Thank goodness, he was home. Tom was employed by a small architecture and urban-planning firm that didn’t adhere to strict office hours, so he often left as early as three or four in the afternoon to go wander around the city, then finished the rest of his work in our home office in the evening.

“Tom!” I wailed. “How could this happen?”

“Libby . . . ,” he said cautiously, and let me go. This caught me off guard; wasn’t he supposed to be stroking my hair and comforting me? “You know, don’t you?”

“Of course I know!” My head was spinning. I knew, but how did Tom? Weren’t there laws specifying that you couldn’t share a person’s medical history without her consent? Although I had put his info down on that privacy sheet I filled out before surgery. Maybe Dr. Sanders was alarmed about the way I’d fled his office and had called ahead to warn Tom.

“Oh boy,” he said. “I didn’t want you to find out this way. Did O’Reilly spill the beans?” he asked, referring to his best friend, who had been known by his surname as long as I could remember.

How would O’Reilly know I was dying of cancer? I was officially confused. I wiped my eyes on my jacket sleeve, then fumbled around in the drawer under the kitchen island, where I kept an extra pair of glasses. After jabbing myself with a pair of scissors, I located the glasses and put them on. One of the arms was missing, so they were slightly askew on my nose, and the prescription wasn’t quite right anymore, but they were effective enough that I could see Tom’s face was, well, mildly terrified. My heart lurched in my chest: perhaps he would not be quite as brave as I’d originally anticipated. Be strong, Libby, I commanded myself. Tom needs you.

“It’s just that I’ve been seeing a new therapist . . . ,” he said.

Was he? Good. I didn’t think Tom was really the type to visit a shrink, but at least it would help him deal with my dying.

“Libby, did you hear me?” he asked, staring at me intently.

I blinked. “What? No. What did you say?”

“I think I might be . . . gay.”

A dizzy spell came over me, and I felt my backbone smash against the edge of the cold stone counter. “Oh my,” I said, reaching out for Tom’s arm.

“Libby,” he said, pulling me to him, “I am so terribly sorry. Are you okay?”

“I’m—I’m fine,” I said, because that was what I always said when someone asked me this question.

As Tom looked down at me, his eyes were moist with unshed tears. “Thank you,” he said, his voice warbly. “Thank you for saying that. You knew for a long time now, didn’t you? Deep down, at least.”

Up until that point, everything he’d said had been hitting me without my actually absorbing it. Now it all sank in at once. Was he nucking futs? I knew global warming was killing polar bears, the Chinese population blew past one billion several years ago, and rhythms was the longest word without a vowel in the English language. I did not know, however, that my childhood sweetheart, the man I had loved for nearly twenty years (twenty years!) was sexually attracted to men.

“No, no—no,” I said, pulling my head back in a way that made my neck disappear, a phenomenon I was aware of only because my boss Jackie was always telling me not to do it after she made yet another outrageous request (“Libby, buy a cream-colored, brown-spotted alpaca throw for me on your nonexistent lunch hour, and please stop doing that thing with your neck because you look like a turtle, okay?”).

“I’m not saying this is the end of our marriage,” Tom said, hugging me tight. “I love you so much; you know that. It’s just that—well, I’m trying to figure out who I am. This is something I’ve been struggling with for years, and I’m—Libby? Libby, what are you doing?”

I wasn’t sure I could answer that question, but I had unlatched myself from him and found myself rifling through yet another drawer, this one where we kept our silverware, which still looked as shiny as it did when we selected it for our wedding registry eight years ago. I took a fork out and held it up to admire it. It sparkled in the light of the dining room chandelier—pardon me, light sculpture—that Tom spent a fortune on, even though we were still paying off his graduate school loans.

“It’s just that—” I said, then brought the fork down on his hand, which he’d placed on the marble island.

“Gahhh! Why did you do that?” he yelped. The fork had fallen to the floor, so I knew it hadn’t gone in that deep, but Tom was jumping around and pumping his arm up and down like he’d been burned, or, you know, stabbed. “I pour my heart out to you, and you spear me like a piece of meat? What is wrong with you, Libby?”

“What is wrong with me?” I stared at him, wild-eyed; I was feeling a wee bit feral. “What is wrong with me?!”

What was wrong with me was becoming a very long list in a remarkably short period of time. Previously, my problems amounted to incurably frizzy hair, a butt that was too big for otherwise well-fitting pants, and an awareness that although I was quite good at it, I hadn’t actually enjoyed my job since Bush Jr. was in office. Now I was dying of cancer and wanted to murder my husband, who, as it turned out, was attracted to a chromosome makeup distinctly different from my own.