Writers & Lovers(69)

‘Yup,’ he says, but he seems to be thinking of something else, too.

We reach his Le Car. I touch the hole in the passenger door. ‘What happened, on our last date? Why didn’t you kiss me?’ It feels like liquid nitrogen coming out of me.

He’s surprised by the bald question but not resistant to it. Something in his body relaxes. He leans against his car, props his heels against the curb. ‘I felt like something was off that night. There’d been this ease between us, at least I thought so, and it was gone. You seemed sort of out of reach. I was still pretty sick, so I figured maybe it was me.’ He’s watching his shoe scrape the granite edge. ‘I was going to bring it up the next time I saw you, but then I was at Oscar’s and I heard his kid talking about the drawings on the fridge. He said one of them was Casey, his father’s girlfriend. I called you a few times to see if that was true, and when you didn’t call back I figured I had my answer.’ He looks up and it feels like we’re touching.

You know your horse, I hear Dana say.

My body starts clenching involuntarily, and I hope he can’t see this.

‘I get it,’ he says. ‘He’s the full package. Three books, great house, cute kids.’ He kicks the curb. ‘He does have a bum knee, though.’

‘Really?’ I say, though I want to say other things.

‘When he’s been sitting for a while, yeah.’ He pushes himself off the car and bends his legs a little and comes up. ‘My knees are excellent.’ He gets his keys out of his pocket and goes around to the driver’s side and looks over the car’s roof at me. ‘FYI.’ He starts the car and rolls down the windows. ‘Good luck tomorrow.’

I don’t know what he’s talking about.

‘At the doctor’s,’ he says.

He puts it into first. I remember the night when Lou Reed was singing and how horny his hand shifting gears made me.

‘Can we do something sometime?’ I say, desperate at the sound of the revving engine.

‘No.’ He eases the clutch. ‘I can’t get all tangled in your ropes.’

It sounds like something Star of Ashtabula would say.

He lurches into traffic and dips under the bridge, and it takes me a long time to walk away from that spot on Oxford Street.





The next morning I walk to my appointment at Longwood. It’s not far. I walk slowly and people come from behind and pass me with their coffee cups and their medical thoughts. Others come toward me from the hospitals in rumpled scrubs and drained faces.

I think about that time in high school when I was scared of killing myself in my sleep and I wonder if there is some part of me now that wants to die, wants to hoist the white flag and admit defeat. What if my body is done trying to make things work? What if it doesn’t want what I want? I stop and stare at a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, the slender trunk of a small bare tree. What if this is all the life I get?

Muriel and Harry are in the waiting room. I don’t know how they knew. I don’t remember telling either of them the name of the doctor. They have me squeeze between them on a fake leather loveseat. The people around us are sick. Hairless heads, oxygen tanks, a caved-in mouth. Muriel picks up a People magazine. There’s an article about Joni Mitchell and her reunion with the daughter she gave up for adoption in Canada in 1965. Muriel and I have been following this story, but Harry barely knows who she is. He’s never heard the song ‘Little Green,’ so we have to explain and sing parts of it for him, the part about icicles and birthday clothes and the part about having a happy ending. Muriel and I work ourselves into some tears about it, and Harry laughs at us.

‘Camila,’ a nurse says in a doorway.

Harry and Muriel are surprised when I stand up.

I sit on the edge of the examining table in the white johnnie with blue squares, ankles crossed, socks on, hands folded, begging for life. I’m aware of not having the strongest case. In the waiting room there was a woman with no eyebrows balancing a toddler on her knees and nursing a tiny baby tucked behind him. My disappearance from this earth won’t make much of a ripple. But I beg anyway.

Two quick raps and the doctor comes in. He’s very tall and very thin, a knife blade of intensity. He moves quickly, washing his hands and drying them as we speak, the knobs of his wrists raised and pointed like spurs. Where is the lump? How long? Is it sore? He lifts my right arm and feels around. He breathes through his sharp nose onto my shoulder.

‘Where is it?’ He’s in a hurry. People are waiting. People are dying.

I find it with my fingers quickly. ‘Here.’

I feel him find it. It’s sore because of how often I prod it. His fingers make a quick circle around it and pull away.

‘That’s a lymph node.’ He’s at the sink again, washing in quick jerks. ‘Regular size. Not much fat on you, so it’s easier to feel.’

‘But I can’t find it on the other side.’

He shrugs. Pulls two paper towels from the dispenser. Rolls them around in his palm and tosses them out. ‘Exit is to the left.’ He yanks open the door and slides through.

Muriel and Harry are startled I’m out so soon. I signal to them across the room and push through the door. Then another door. Down a hallway and more doors. I wait for them outside in the sun. I didn’t know it was sunny. Everything feels so much clearer, like I’ve gotten glasses. Above us is one thick square cloud that looks cut from marble. Traffic whips by.