Friday, Jul 25, 2008
A woman with cancer rediscovers her body through a passionate love affair.
Nov 8, 1999 | After that first night of compressed desire, when he'd turned to me in the blue-gray light of the video we'd rented and said, "This may be a mistake, but I'd really like to hug you," after he left my apartment at four a.m., then phoned midmorning the next day to ask, "Did I leave my belt there?" with such an obvious purr of happiness that I was reduced to embarrassed mumbling, right exactly after that, I closed my office door, phoned the shrink, and relayed what had happened, declaring, as melodramatically as whispering would allow, "I can't believe it. I wish he would die."
No you don't, Neden replied. I could tell he was as surprised as I. But professional training prevented him from indulging in the pleasures of double-speak hyperbole.
"All right, not die," I said. "Move to China. Not call again."
What's the matter? Neden asked. He'd thought I liked Ben.
I did. I adored Ben. In the last couple of months, Ben had been tenacious about investigating metastatic breast cancer on my behalf. He hounded the disease as best he could, and best for him meant research. He was a journalist. Information, as he saw it, was my strongest defense.
"Package here for you," the receptionist would unexpectedly phone back to say every so often. I'd come out to find another gray envelope thick with clippings, some from obscure medical journals. I preferred these, the articles with the tangled footnotes that Bell had cryptically circled. It was reassuring to stumble on sentences like "Identification and purification of the 'stem cell' responsible for repopulation of marrow and for sustained hematopoietic cell renewal have long been a goal of experimental hematologists." Scientists were clearly moving on the problem, though I couldn't always tell where. I hated the stories torn from popular newsstand magazines. In the quiet of my office, words like dismal and two-year survival would jump off the page at me like barking dogs.
Since I'd become sick, Ben had shown a deep, fraternal concern. I'd begun to regard him as a brother, and that was half the trouble. The other half was, I just didn't get it.
"It's like he's making fun of me," I was trying to explain on the phone. "I don't understand. What would make him want to get involved with me now?"
Why don't you ask him? the shrink proposed.
"I was going to bring it up if you hadn't," Bell said at the restaurant that night, shooting a quick glance up from his tureen of mussels. An intolerable shyness had overcome us both. To surrounding tables, we must have appeared to be two people speaking into our plates.
"Courage," he said somberly, addressing a green fleck in the broth. "Courage is a real turn-on. I was really turned on by how courageous you've been. And beauty. Courage and beauty. I've always liked you and thought you were attractive, but since you've gone to the magazine, you've really looked good."
By the time the waiter set down the Belgian-chocolate mousse, we were sitting up straighter, as if there'd been a shift of air pressure in the room. I examined his face as we discussed how to proceed, agreed to go slow. The slight pulsing light coming off his skin had no discernible source. Ben was beaming.
Outside my apartment building, before we went upstairs, he paused and held me. "I wish time would stop," he said.
Later he said, "You're like that dessert. Wicked. And sweet."
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