People Who Knew Me (24 page)

“Do you have any idea how long I've wanted to kiss you?” he said, still just inches from my face. I pressed my lips together like I did after putting on balm or gloss.

“I have a pretty good idea.”

I wanted to say more. I wanted to ask what this meant. I wanted to ask where it would go from here,
if
it could go from here. And, most of all, I wanted to ask,
Should we feel guilty?
because I knew he would comfort me by saying,
No
.

I was quiet, though. I wanted him to say the next words, make the next moves. Somehow, in my mind, this made me a passive participant, less at fault.

He took my hand and, for me, that would have been enough excitement for the night—to hold that hand until dawn. There was a single hallway leading to the one bedroom. He led us until I stopped him.

“I can't,” I told him. I didn't want to cross the threshold, as if I held some superstitious belief about what may happen if I did, as if Drew would hear an alarm in his head the second I stepped into another man's bedroom.
Step on a crack, break your mother's back
.

“You're being awfully presumptuous, Ms. Overton,” he said. He'd never accepted Morris.

“I just want to sleep—actually sleep—with you,” he said.

It was a trick, I was sure. We'd get into bed with this lazy intention to “just sleep” and end up doing anything but that. Promising to behave ourselves would only make it more alluring not to.

“Sleep is good,” I said, accepting the trickery. “It is a school night.”

He took my hand and led me into his bedroom. He had a large king bed—unmade, which assured me he hadn't planned for this, hadn't anticipated talking me into this. Aside from the bed, there was a single nightstand on the right side of the bed—“his” side, I concluded—and a dresser with the top drawer opened slightly. There were no candles, none of the usual tools for romancing. Maybe he didn't do this all the time. Maybe I was a little wrong about him.

He straightened out the sheets, which were disarrayed and pulled over to the one side—the nightstand side, “his” side. He unbuttoned his shirt like it was nothing, like we had already shared some kind of domestic bliss. His chest was bare—he either trimmed the hair or there wasn't much there to begin with. His muscles were as defined as they'd been in my mind, putting to rest the cynic's notion that nothing is as good as you imagine it to be. Then he unbuckled the belt of his pants, let them fall to the floor. There he was, standing in front of me, in a pair of silk boxers—black. I sat on the bed, waiting for him to tell me what to do. He walked over to me, stood over me, one leg on either side of my two pressed-together thighs. Then he started unbuttoning my blouse, slowly, looking at me with each button as if to ask,
Is this okay?
I gave him small nods. When he was done, he rubbed his hands along my sides, up and over the front of my bra. He kissed me, his weight compelling me to lie back on the bed. We pressed against each other, his boxers and my skirt the only barriers to what we really wanted.

We must have done that—just pressed against each other and kissed—for an hour, maybe two. My mouth got dry, my chin and cheeks reddened by the stubble on his face. After one o'clock in the morning, he pulled me under the covers with him. I rested on his chest—now sweaty, even though restraint was all we'd exercised.

“What am I going to do tomorrow?” I asked. “I don't have anything with me. I can't wear the same clothes I wore yesterday. People will know. Cassie will know.”

Cassie, the receptionist, the gossip every office has, there to provide the entertainment necessary for mundane hours to pass.

He felt my forehead with the back of his hand. “You feel feverish,” he said. My mom used to love that Peggy Lee song—
you give me fever
. She'd play it when getting ready for dates.

“You should take a sick day. You can relax here,” he said. “Eat those Moroccan leftovers in the fridge.”

I liked the idea of lying in bed at his place, sipping his coffee from one of his mugs while wearing one of his football T-shirts. He was a Jets fan. More than anything, I liked that he trusted me to stay there. Either he knew I wouldn't snoop, or he didn't have anything to hide.

“And next time,” he said, “bring a change of clothes.”

 

TWENTY

Nurse Amy said most people have fewer side effects with Taxol. Apparently I'm not most people. I have “the weird breast cancer.” And, thanks to Taxol, I also have joint and muscle pain, tingling in my hands and feet, and most enjoyable of all—diarrhea. I also have a horrifically bad attitude.

A lady at the infusion center gave me a book called
Getting Through Cancer
after I politely declined an invitation to her church. She just reached into her purse and handed it to me. Either she carries around copies on a regular basis to share with fellow patients, or she had me targeted as “a troubled person” and was waiting to pounce. I skimmed it. It's full of all kinds of hokey tips and Bible quotes. It says I should list five things I'm grateful for every day. It says that cancer is “an emotional journey.” It says the grief of a diagnosis has the five stages of any heart-wrenching event—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I am only familiar with anger.

There are days I want to take up Al on his offer for paid leave. Sometimes I can't stand being around normal, healthy people. Their worries are so petty, their laughs so careless, their priorities so mind-boggling. I overheard a distraught woman saying to her girlfriend, “I will just
die
if he doesn't call me,” and I wanted to grab her by her neck and say,
No, you will not die
. That's just it—life goes on with all its silliness and stupidity while I'm dying. Perspective isn't always a good thing; sometimes it makes you feel fucking alone.

Last week at the bar, this husband and wife came in. I'd never seen them before. They were talkers, yammering on and on about how they used to live in Topanga Canyon and how they remember seeing Charles Manson around. They were just teenagers at the time and claimed he was “as strange as you'd suspect.” The woman sipped on a Long Island iced tea while her husband pounded back scotch on the rocks. Then they turned the discussion to me.

“How long have you had cancer?” the woman asked.

I was wearing my scarf but, like Claire said, it doesn't really hide that I have cancer; it just makes my cancer a little prettier to look at.

“Diagnosed in September,” I said.

“Breast?” the woman asked. It's strange how people assume bartenders are so willing to share details of their personal lives, as some kind of fair exchange.

When I nodded, the woman turned to her husband and said, “Mary St. Clair had cancer, remember?” And they had a little sidebar about Mary St. Clair while I cleaned out some glasses, trying my best to exit the conversation.

“She is totally cancer-free now,” the woman said to me, an unwelcome invitation back. People do this a lot—use examples of their cancer survivor friends, lovers, neighbors, family members to insinuate that I have nothing to worry about. Al, bless his heart, mentioned his Aunt Pauline. Even JT said a “lady friend” of his beat breast cancer—twice. They don't know I have this rare and aggressive kind of breast cancer, though. If I die, they might think I was just weak, not up to the fight. I need to tell Al the percentages. He needs to know my odds aren't good. Because Claire may need him. The conversation will happen. I'm procrastinating.

*   *   *

As much as I hate my chemo treatments, I don't dread coming to the infusion center as much as I used to. I like Nurse Amy—even though I'm giving her a childish cold shoulder for getting my hopes up about the Taxol side effects. And I don't mind Paul. Some days I even like him. Because, unlike other people—at the bar, in the world—he doesn't offend me or annoy me or belittle my cancer. He knows this shit is real, even though he persists in smiling.

“I think cancer has made me a total bitch,” I tell him while I get pumped full of the anti-nausea meds.

“That's one of the side effects they don't list.”

Amy comes by to start my Taxol and I force myself to apologize to her for being edgy.

“I'm used to it,” she says. “You're tired of all this. I understand.”

“Paul doesn't seem tired of it,” I say.

“Oh, no, I am,” he says. “Trust me, I am.”

Amy shakes her head in amusement at the two of us. We've become a duo—Abbott and Costello, playing off each other to pass the time.

“How's Claire?” he asks. He always asks.

“Distant,” I say. “Still.”

Since the lunch date, when I told her I could die, she's been giving me the silent treatment, using only monosyllabic words and grunts when I ask her a direct question. It's impressive, really, this monklike discipline she has. She's not making me breakfast anymore. She hasn't mentioned the road trip. The map of the United States is still tacked to her wall, but she has stopped putting pushpins into places of interest.

“She'll come around. It's hard on her, I'm sure,” Amy says, before vanishing to tend to other patients.

“Chuck is pissed at me, too,” Paul says. “He thinks I'm going to leave him.”

Chuck is Paul's dog, a pit bull–Labrador mix, two years old. I give Paul a look. Is he really trying to make a joke out of my daughter's newfound hatred of me?

“I'm serious,” Paul says. “He peed in the house the other day. He
never
does that.”

He really does remind me of Drew sometimes.

I humor him: “Have you thought about what you'd do with Chuck if, you know…?”

For Paul, the question is purely hypothetical. His chance of survival is above ninety percent. I've looked it up.

“I've thought about it. Hell, the day after I got diagnosed, I paid some online legal service to create a living trust for me. Chuck would go to my sister, Eileen.”

A living trust. That's on my to-do list.

“She's Mormon. I don't love the idea of my dog being raised by a Mormon, but if I'm dead, I suppose it doesn't matter.”

It bugs me sometimes, his lightheartedness. I know it's just his way of coping, or whatever, but it still bugs me.

“You're worried about Claire,” he says. Unlike other people in my life, Paul knows the percentages, the odds. When I told him that most people with my cancer are terminal, he waved me off and said, “We're all terminal.”

“Yeah. I mean, I have a friend, my boss at the bar, actually, who said, years ago, that he'd take care of her if something ever happened to me. I need to have a serious talk with him,” I say.

“What about family?”

“There's someone,” I say.

“Nearby?”

“New York, actually.”

“You from there?”

Nobody out here in California knows the truth. Maybe Paul can be the first. Because I might die. Because even if I don't, I'm unlikely to see him again. Because we're in this infusion center where war stories are traded on a daily basis and secrets seem safe.

“Yes,” I say.

He has no idea that, with that one-word reply, he now possesses a bit, a piece, of me that nobody else does. He shrugs it off like it's nothing, because to him, it is.

“What brought you out here?”

“Change of life,” I say, which is pretty much true.

“Well, maybe you should contact that person,” he says, “in New York.”

I swallow hard.

“Claire might like New York. Lots of things going on. You should make that part of your road trip.”

He keeps talking because I don't say anything. This is another reason I like him. He gives me no silences that need filling.

“Considering she's barely talking to me, I'm not sure the road trip will happen.”

“It will. She's just acting out.”

“Claire never acts out.”

“Cancer changes people,” he says. A plain and simple truth.

My eyes well up like they sometimes do when I'm just sitting here thinking too much.

“We shouldn't even be talking about this,” he says. “You're going to be fine.”

“Right,” I say.

“Right,” he repeats.

Maybe I should tell him more, the rest of the story. He probably thinks that after cancer, nothing can shock him, but he is wrong. How will he see me—despicable, selfish, cowardly? Actually, the better question is how he could
not
see me as those things. Even with the added compassion that comes with cancer—compassion for the others in the secret club of suffering, those people who are all too aware that life is painfully short—he will see me differently. He will judge me. And he should.

*   *   *

I decide to stop at the bar on the way home from chemo. To talk to Al. It needs to be done. I need to have a plan for Claire, to put her mind at ease. I need her to stop hating me.

“Honey, I have to swing by the bar,” I say, calling her on my drive.

“Fine, whatever,” she says. “I'm ordering pizza.”

She used to ask me if she could order pizza. It's like she's playacting what it will be like when I'm gone, when I won't be there to give permission, advice, hugs.

“Okay, there's money in the kitchen—”

“In the drawer. I know.”

*   *   *

Thankfully, the bar is quiet for a Thursday at five o'clock. It will get busy in an hour or so, after people flee their jobs. When I walk in, Al looks up from behind the counter and says, “You're not working today, Con.” I've come in accidentally on a couple occasions, thinking I'm working. Chemo brain.

“I know,” I say.

He looks worried now. I don't usually make social calls.