A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

Rowing to Eden

“The Barcelona Cancer Center,” Charley says. “Where are the tapas? Maybe there should be castanets at the nurses’ station. Paella Valenciana everywhere you look.”

He says this every time they come for chemotherapy. The Barcelona family made millions in real estate and donated several to St. Michael’s; there is almost nothing worth curing that the Barcelonas have not given to.

Charley puts his hands up in the air and clicks his fingers. Mai ignores him; the person with cancer does not have to be amused.

Ellie smiles. She has already had breast cancer, and her job this summer is to help her best friend and her best friend’s husband.

“How about the internationally renowned Sangria Treatment? Makes you forget your troubles.” Charley stamps his sneakers, flamenco style. Since Mai’s mastectomy he has turned whimsical, and it does not become him. Mai knows Charley is doing the best he can, and the only kindness she can offer is not to say, “Honey, you’ve been as dull as dishwater for twenty years. You don’t have to change now.”

Ellie believes that all straight men should be like her father: stoic, handy, and unimaginative. They should be dryly kind, completely without whimsy or faintly fabulous qualities. As far as Ellie’s concerned, gay men can be full-blown birds of paradise, with or without homemaking skills. They can just lounge around in their marabou mules, saying witty, brittle things that reveal their hearts of gold. Ellie likes them that way, that’s what they’re for, to toss scarves over the world’s lightbulbs, and straight men are for putting up sheetrock.

Mai sits between Charley and Ellie in the waiting room as if she’s alone. Charley makes three cups of coffee from the waiting room kitchenette. The women don’t drink theirs.

“This is disgusting,” Charley says.

“I’ll get us some from the lobby.”

Ellie heads for the Java Joe coffee bar, a weirdly joyful pit stop at the intersection of four different Barcelona family wings, with nothing but caffeine and sugar and attractively arranged carbohydrates; everyone who is not confined by an IV drip or a restricted diet eats there. Mai sips herbal tea all through chemo, but Ellie goes down and back a few times, for a currant scone, for a cappuccino, for a mango smoothie. She is happy to spend three dollars on a muffin, grateful that she lives in a country where no one thinks there’s anything wrong or untoward in the AM A-approved pursuit of profit at the expense of people’s grief and health.

Ellie prepares a little picnic on the seat next to Charley. Coffee the way he likes it, two different kinds of biscotti, a fist-size apple fritter, two elephant ears sprinkling sugar everywhere, and enough napkins to make this all bearable to Charley, who is two steps short of compulsive. Ellie presents him with the food-covered seat.

“This is great,” says Charley. “Treats. Honey, look how she takes care of me. Yes, folks, that’s a wife.”

This is supposed to be funny, because Ellie is a lesbian and therefore unlikely to be anyone’s wife. If Ellie lived with another woman, neither Ellie nor Charley nor Mai would think of Ellie as a wife. Ellie is pretty sure that her days of looking for a spouse are over; Mai thinks so too, and used to imagine that when Charley died, at a suitable but not horribly advanced age, of a swift-moving but not painful disease, she and Ellie would retire to her parents’ house in Oslo, or buy the little yellow house on Pearl Street in Provincetown that they walked past on spring break twenty-one years ago. Now it seems possible that Ellie will sit on a porch slugging back brandy with some other old lady, and that Charley will grow old with someone who has two breasts and a full head of hair.

Ellie gives Charley a napkin, and he kisses her hand, which smells of coffee and antibacterial soap and of Ellie, a scent for which he has no particular name. Mai has always smelled like clove; since November she smells like seaweed, and Charley, like a pregnant woman, has lost his taste for sushi, for lobster, and for salt.

They sit for two hours. Women in scarves, women in floppy denim hats, women in good wigs, even enviable wigs, and women in wigs so bad they would look better in sombreros; weary, frightened husbands; girls with tons of silky, curly, bouncing hair, whom Mai, Charley, and Ellie all take to be the daughters and friends of the patients. There are a few teenagers, the sweetest signs of their youth distorted, creamy, luminous skin swollen and ashy from chemo, nothing left of their immortal shields, so that even the women who shuffle along on their skinless feet, even the old women whose aged ears hang off their heads like tree fungus, even they cannot bear to look at the children with cancer.

Mai’s favorite nurse, Ginger, an old vaudevillian’s idea of a nurse, busty and long-legged in the only tight white uniform Mai’s seen, showgirl perfect except for her snub-toed rubber-soled shoes, leads them to Corner C of Room T4, the best chemo room as far as Mai and Ellie are concerned. Charley kisses Mai at the door, as if this were the dressing room or a gynecological exam, as if everyone knows that he would stay if he could but the rules forbid it.

Ellie is disgusted, but Mai is fine. Relieved. Sitting agitates Charley, and for the same reason that she would rather do the laundry than wait for him to volunteer, and for the same reason that she does not complain when he turns on the light at five a.m. to iron his shirt by their bedside before going to his office at seven, she does not mind his leaving. He is who he is. It is what it is. She says these things to herself a hundred times a day under normal circumstances. Now she says them two hundred times a day. When Mai repeats these things to Ellie, Ellie stares at her and says, “I hope that makes you feel better.” Ellie is an endless fixer and shaper and mender; she is as sure that life’s events can be reworked and new endings attached as Mai is that they cannot and that any new ending will either mimic the first or make you long for it.

Mai prays that Ginger will stay to do the IV stick. She is the only one who can get it right, and when she walks out, without washing her hands, Mai turns her face to the wall. She can feel Ellie rise from the visitor’s chair, ready to run down the hall, and the mental image of her Ellie, brown curls and horn-rims flying behind her as she chases showgirl Ginger, cheers Mai up. She puts her hand on Ellie.

“It’ll be fine,” she says.

“It better be. If you get that cow again, she gets two tries and she’s out of here.”

It is the cow, and she sticks Mai four times, all over her hand. As she tries again, Mai can feel her perspiration, and she looks down to see that tiny hives have broken out along the nurse’s slick hairline. Flop sweat, Mai thinks, and wonders how she knows that phrase. It must be from Ellie’s theater days. Mai closes her eyes tightly, willing the stupid bitch to find a vein.

The stupid bitch leaves and returns with Ginger, who does it right, slapping and massaging the back of the left hand until a small vein lifts up, offering itself. The anonymous nurse slumps out, gratifyingly ashamed, and Ellie forgives her; at least she cares enough to feel bad. Mai forgets her as soon as the saline starts, the fat little bag hung on the curling candelabrum that holds all the drugs, each pouch attached with nursery-blue clips and clamps, clear tubing leading to the pump. Ellie has memorized everything on the machine, including the fact that it is made by the Baxter Manufacturing Company of Dearborn, Michigan. There’s a column of four black buttons — Back Light, Silence, Time, Stop — and next to them the red digital letters flash on and off. Most of the time they just say Normal. When the nurses have to unplug the machine so Mai can pee, it beeps like crazy.

“Oh, Jesus, the hot packs,” Mai says. This is the only thing that eases the burning of the Taxol. Once they have been through the saline and the Benadryl and the Zoloft, its time to get down to business, and the business of Taxol is a small well of fire at the point of entry, shooting up Mai’s arm like a gasoline trail. The instant hot packs are godsends, and Ellie collects them, along with lightweight blankets from all the other patient corners, so that when Mai lies down there is a small mountain of plastic on her night-stand and a pile of thermal-weave cotton at the foot of her bed. The hot packs release their heat immediately, after one hard squeeze on their thin plastic edges. It’s exactly like cracking an egg one-handed, which Ellie also likes to do for her own pleasure. Mai smiles like a junkie as soon as she hears the pop of the inner casing, and Ellie tucks three blankets up around her.

They have made a list of everything that makes Corner C in Room T4 the best bed for chemo. First, the privacy curtain pulls smoothly on its track. It’s terrible to pull on the curtain, making it clear that you do not wish to watch someone else’s unspeakable anguish or let them gaze upon yours, only to find yourself unable to close it fully, leaving both parties stuck with eye contact and insult. Also, all the gloves used in Barcelona seemed to be stored in T4: Chemo Plus, the Rubbermaid of latex gloves, thick-cuffed and a matte pale blue; Sensicor, sheer as muslin, ghost fingers spilling out of a dozen cardboard boxes. Mai and Ellie even like the battered plastic hospital trays filled with three kinds of tape, tongue depressors, and test tubes with lavender, red, blue, and lime green rubber stoppers. The trays are not hospital clean; they could be holding dirty silver in the kitchen of any inner-city diner. There are pastel water-colors of lopsided seaside cottages, saccharine prints produced by Posters International of Toronto. Ellie had a lavender-and-white gingerbread cottage right in front of her the whole summer she had chemo. In Corner A, under three small rowboats permanently askew, two women lie side by side, a young woman curled up beside her bald mother. The daughter’s eyes are shut, but the mother’s are wide open as she stares at the ceiling, her free hand curled around her daughter’s shoulder.

The Taxol drips steadily for three and a half hours, from an old-fashioned glass bottle, solid and pale blue. All the other stuff drips from Jetson-style packets, flimsy and benign. Taxol is a heavyweight in an upside-down jug, one fat bubble at a time floating up to the undersurface, entering the transparent slice of silver bubbles before it is bumped aside by the next rising bubble. Charley will be at Fishers Island by the time the Taxol is gone, making food that Mai will not eat. Ellie will eat the lamb kabobs at midnight, will eat the shepherd’s pie or crab cakes for lunch, while Mai sips ginseng tea and eats barbecue potato chips.

Ellie drives them onto the ferry, and they sit in the car for the entire crossing. Mai leans her head back, and although she is always beautiful to Ellie, even Ellie can see that she looks bad. There’s nothing wrong with bald babies; everything about them, even the ugly ones, is made to be revealed, and every feature is nicely in proportion to their big, satiny heads. Every time Ellie looks at Mai, she misses her silver-blond braid and is grateful that her eyebrows, narrow gold tail swipes, have held on. Mai’s naked head has a pair of dents halfway up the back, and a small purplish birthmark behind the left ear, and although her skin has always been amazingly soft and poreless, the disappearance of even her fine body hair is a little jarring to both of them. They know each other’s pubic hair and leg-shaving rituals and scars, completely and without comment. Ellie is furry and tan, Mai is smooth and white. But smooth is one thing, Mai says, egg is another.

When Mai and Ellie studied the wig catalogue, before going for the high-end, handmade, real-hair wigs that are brought to your house, and then to your hairdresser for final adjustment, Mai contemplated auburn pixie cuts and platinum bouffants and even a long jet-black pageboy, parted in the middle à la mid-career Cher. Charley walked in and out four times while they flipped through the catalogue, and finally he called Mai into the bedroom so he could speak to her privately.

“I don’t think you need a wig,” he said.

It is love, of course, that makes Charley tell Mai that no wig is necessary, that he likes her bald and odd, and that no pretense is called for, or even tolerable, between them. It is love that he intends to convey.

“Okay. I’ll see.” I’m an intelligent woman, Mai thinks, how did I marry the village idiot? After twenty years, during which you have presumably been paying some kind of dim attention to the kind of person I am, how could you imagine that I would want to parade around my own home grotesque and vulnerable? Do you think, would thinking at all lead you to believe that it would somehow please me to have you now be kind about my appearance?

“It might be fun to experiment. I’ve never been an exotic brunette — this could be your last chance,” Mai says.

Charley does not want an exotic brunette. He wants his cool, white, lanky wife back, with her normal spicy smell and her pale silky hair pulled into a smooth knot. The thought of her suddenly appearing in public with her chemically puffed face and a witch’s wig makes him miserable, and so ashamed of his pettiness that he wishes Mai were completely healthy or dead.

“Whatever you want. Maybe it will liven things up around here.” They have not made love since Mai was diagnosed.

“Maybe. Don’t hold your breath.” The privilege of cancer is that Mai is allowed to close her eyes, as if she is all worn out from surgery and chemo, and not look at Charley’s lonely, frightened face.

Charley puts his hand on Mai’s shoulder, although he thinks it may be the wrong thing to do, and she stiffens. He pulls his hand back and Mai pulls it forward, wrapping his arm around her neck. She lays her warm, inflated cheek against his skin.

“I like you very much,” she says.

“I like you very much too.”

They hear Ellie’s heavy, quick step before they see her, and they are a couple again, even before she announces that she has, as always, burned the contents of whatever pan Charley has left unattended. This happens so often not even Charley thinks it’s an accident. He believes that Ellie should learn how to cook. Mai can cook, of course, not that she has ever needed to, having been the most beautiful girl at college, being the only beautiful and brilliant woman Charley knows. But Ellie should learn how to cook, and if Charley followed his own thoughts, they would lead to Ellie cooking and fussing sweetly, as she does for Charley at times, and somehow, under his tutelage, revealing to herself, and then to some nice man, her hidden, heterosexual, marriageable self.

Ellie does cook. At home she cooks for friends who have never met Charley and Mai. She cooks, very well, from M.F.K. Fisher and Bobby Flay and Alice Waters, for friends who would find it hard to believe that she ever wore a mint green sheath and three-inch dyed-to-match heels for Charley and Mai’s Fishers Island wedding, the spikes digging into the lawn, a rose-covered veranda in front of her and Block Island Sound behind. Mai stood like an angel on treetop, sleeveless white silk to her ankles, plain white ballet slippers on her narrow feet, and three luminous ropes of plain white pearls, donated with great affection and expectation by Charley’s grandmother, one of the Fishers Island Cushings. Charles Cushing stood beside his new wife, beaming, sunburned, and slightly giddy at having escaped a future of dating Cushing cousins’ friends, Cushing cousins’ friends’ sisters, and the huge net of Cushing friends of friends.

At Fishers, where they now have a small house of their own, Charley is the chef, but when he goes back to New Haven, Ellie and Mai eat kitchen-sink omelets, microwave popcorn tossed with grated Parmesan and kosher salt, peanut butter out of the jar. They drink Red Stripe beer and smoke exactly five cigarettes apiece, burying the butts out by the Cushing family pet cemetery, home to four generations of chocolate Labs, white Persians, and Charley’s own late cocker spaniel. The graves are not marked with “Dearest Companion” headstones, too baroque and eccentric for the Cushings, the sort of thing they imagine Italians might do; nor are they unmarked, as if it doesn’t matter that the little bodies are there, as if commemoration is unnecessary. Each of the twelve plots sports something both woodsy and distinct: a large chunk of mica-flecked stone, a wreath of barbed wire tamped down into the soil, and, for Charley’s Pogo, a toy sailboat lashed to a two-inch dowel. It is more gushing sentiment than Ellie has seen in twenty years of Cushings, and as she stands in the cemetery, carefully placing her cigarette under the chunk of granite over Queen of Sheba, she likes Charley right then more than she sometimes does in person, and remembers the big-eared boy he was at college as if he’d been her friend and not a source of fond, irritated puzzlement and occasional drunken entertainment. It was with Charley, not Mai, that Ellie dressed the comatose football captain in drag and tied him to his bed; it was Charley and Ellie wading through Thomas Hardy and toasting marshmallows while Mai and Ellie’s girlfriend skied Mount Snow until dark; and even now it is Charley and Ellie dancing for hours at endless Cushing weddings and anniversaries. Products of two very different but effective dance instructors, they move well together; Charley leads more firmly than Ellie would have thought, and she follows him neatly, as if she’d been beside him at Junior Dance Assembly, hearing his Miss Elizabeth say, again, “The gentleman is the frame, ladies, you are the picture.” Mai sits out with Charley’s sharp-eyed father, and they talk about island real estate, politics, and indiscretions. Mr. Cushing cannot talk to Charley, who cooks and dances, but he likes his clever, pretty daughter-in-law more than almost anybody.

At the Spring Dance, Charley and Ellie drank two Manhattans apiece and began with a Viennese waltz and then a fox-trot and then another break for drinks. When Ellie put an open-hip twist into their rumba, Charley laughed out loud and whispered, slurring in Ellie’s ear, “I wish I was Jewish. Then I’d only have to come to the big weddings. No one would expect me to play eighteen fucking holes of golf at the Big Club with these imbeciles tomorrow.”

Ellie said, “I could convert and play golf with them, and you could become a lesbian.”

Charley twirled them around Mr. and Mrs. Fairbrother and slid his hand down Ellie’s firm, damp back. “I am a lesbian, aren’t I? How am I not a lesbian? You’re no help. My uncle Albert is the biggest fruit in Rhode Island, and he’s teeing off with us at one. No women on the links on Saturday. Really, Jewish would be better.”

When Charley and Ellie’s jitterbug slid them onto the ivy-patterned chintz couch, Mai kissed her father-in-law, gathered their coats, and put them both in the backseat. It may be true that alcohol has played a central part in every good time Ellie and Charley have had together, but even when they begin to find each other affected, possessive, and frankly a little pathetic (his lack of sperm, her lack of spouse), they remind themselves that no amount of alcohol can create affection where there is none and that they must really be very fond of each other after all.

“I never know what time to make dinner,” Charley says. He pours Scotch into a glass, and a quick stream over the chicken. “Or what to make.”

If Mai’s not going to join them, he might as well make something interesting. For the last three days he’s cooked soft-boiled eggs, Cream of Wheat, crustless white toast. At two in the morning he made a dozen ramekins of egg custard so that Mai could try again no matter how many times she threw up.

“Coq au Scotch?” This doesn’t seem like a bad idea to Ellie.

“It’ll be our little secret,” Charley says.

Charley has brought hummus, pita chips, fresh mozzarella, and a case of wine from home. Ellie takes the corn onto the back porch, sorry she had a blueberry muffin and half of Mai’s milkshake just an hour ago.

“Do you want to nap? I’ll finish,” says Charley, sitting down to help shuck more corn than the two of them will ever eat.

“Nap? No, I’m fine. You lie down if you want to. I can set the table, make the salad.” Ellie knows there will be corn bisque tomorrow, possibly black-bean-and-corn salad. If there’s too much food, they will have the Cushings senior over, and Ellie will feel like the visiting troll.

“No thanks, it’s done already.”

Mai calls it the 66 Hemlock Drive Ironman Competition. When she was well, she got up first, went to bed last, and swam sixty laps in Hay Harbor, bringing crullers and the Times back from the bakery. Charley and Ellie were forever, contentedly, runners-up.

Charley sips his Scotch, watching the sailboats rock in their moorings. When Mai sails, she looks like Neptune’s daughter, streaming gold and white across the water. One of the things Charley does like about Ellie is her ability and her willingness to do nothing, for several hours at a time. Even though Charley believes that Mai will live, her illness makes everything else, every activity and wish, smoky and false. He watches himself going to the office, making deals he has hoped for, making more money than he had expected, and thinks, This doesn’t matter, and what matters I can’t do a thing about.

Charley looks into his glass. “You know, I know you’ve always been in love with her. I do understand.” And he does. He feels sorry for Ellie, he loves her for trailing after his beautiful Mai for twenty years, making do, admirably, with friendship, while having to contemplate Charley, every night, in the place she would like to be.

“I don’t know what you understand. I’ve never been in love with Mai. I love her, I love her to the ends of the earth, but not in love.” It has puzzled Ellie sometimes. Darling Mai, all that perfect equipment and not a lick of chemistry.

“Well, it’s not the kind of thing one argues about, but I see you’ve never been really serious with anyone. I don’t blame you, you know, she’s wonderful.” And Mai does seem, just now, really wonderful, irresistible, even easy to love.

“Of course Mai’s wonderful. I’m not arguing about that either. I don’t seem cut out for domestic life, Charley, and it’s not because I’ve been carrying a torch for twenty years.”

Ellie chews the ice in her drink. She had come close to domestic life with a college sweetheart who moved back in with her old boyfriend three months after they all graduated; fairly close with the clothing designer who moved to Ghana, which Ellie would not even consider; and very close just five years ago, and it is clear to Ellie now, when she runs into this woman and her good-looking girlfriend and their two happy Chinese children, black smooth bangs and big white smiles, in cuddly green fleece jackets with matching hats and adorable green sneakers, that the one right door had swung open briefly and Ellie had just stood there, her lame and hesitant soul unwilling to leave her body for the magnificent uncertainty of Paradise.

When they were nineteen, she and Mai lay on Ellie’s twin bed in their bikini underpants, with only the closet light on. Mai’s breasts were lit in a narrow yellow strip. Mai put Ellie’s left hand on her right breast.

“Is this what you do?”

Ellie patted Mai’s collarbone. “It’s what I do with a girlfriend.”

Mai smiled in the dark. “Goody for them. I’m your best friend.”

“Yup,” said Ellie, and they both rolled to the right, as they did every Sunday night, Mai in front, Ellie behind, and slept like spoons.

Ellie tucks Mai in. Mai wears Ellie’s old “If you can walk you can dance, if you can talk you can sing” T-shirt and Charley’s Valentine’s Day boxer shorts.

“I’m a fashion don’t,” Mai says.

“Yeah,” says Ellie, “not like me.”

“But that’s okay, Elliedear, you always dress like shit.” Elliedear and Maidarling is what Mrs. Cushing has called them for twenty years. “All sociologists dress like shit. E, did your feet go numb? I don’t know what it is. I thought they were cold, but they’re just nothing. No feeling.”

“It’s okay. Mine did too.” Ellie smooths out the top sheet and unfolds one of the beautifully faded Cushing quilts over Mai, who sweats and freezes all night.

“Did the feeling come back?”

“No.”

“You’re supposed to follow that with a positive remark, like ‘No, but now I don’t need shoes, and with the money I’ve saved—’”

“With the money I’ve saved, I’m moving to another planet.”

“That suggests that these feelings of homicidal irascibility will not be passing,” Mai says.

“Honey,” Ellie says, kissing Mai’s forehead, “how should I know? I was born bad-tempered.”

“When I’m better,” Mai says, and closes her eyes.

Ellie turns out the light and hopes that Mai will sleep until morning. When Mai has a bad night and Charley takes care of her, Ellie wakes up feeling useless and duped.

“When I’m better,” Mai says in the dark, “we’re getting you a girlfriend. Grace Paley’s soul in Jennifer Lopez’s body.”

Mai dreams that she is with her parents, skiing at Kvitfjell. The trees rush past her. The yellow goggles she had as a little girl cover her face, and she’s wearing her favorite bright yellow parka and the black Thinsulate mittens Charley got her last Christmas. Her parents are in front, skiing without poles, shouting encouragement to her over their shoulders. Her mother’s hair is still blond, still in a long braid with a blue ribbon twisting through it, and she calls out Mai’s name in her sweet, breathy voice. The wind carries her father’s words away, but she knows they want her to drop her poles. As Mai loosens her grip, her mother raises an arm, as if to wave, and catches something, Mai’s parka. Mai is skiing in just her turtleneck now, and it whips up over her head, tangling with her bra. Her yellow goggles work themselves loose and her scarf unwinds, wiggling down the ice toward her parents. Her black overalls unsnap, flying off her legs like something possessed, tumbling a hundred feet down to her father. Her parents catch each item quickly and toss it into the trees. “Skynde seg, come on.” Mai has only her boots and her mittens now, and the wind drives hard and sharp, right up her crotch, pressing her skin back into her bones. Her bare chest (two breasts again, she notices, even while sleeping) aches under the stinging blue snow, her eyelids freeze shut. She is skiing blind and naked. She wakes up, fists knotted in her wet pillowcase, thinking, How obvious. It seems to Mai that even her subconscious has lost its subtlety. Mai is famous for her subtle humor, her subtle beauty, her subtle understanding of the Brontë sisters, of nineteenth-century England, of academic politics and the art of tenure, which she got at thirty. Now she feels as subtle as Oprah and not even as quick.

Mai hears Charley on the stairs and closes her eyes. If you love me, please don’t come in. Don’t make me look at you, don’t make me act like I know you. I don’t need food or attention right now. If there is anything you can give me, darling, one little thing I would ask for, it’s just your absence. A bag of chips, a glass of seltzer with a slice of lemon would be okay, and if you can spare me even that quick, soft look that suggests that I am somehow connected to you, I’ll be more grateful than you can imagine and I’ll tell everyone how I could not have made it through this without you. Just let me live on this nice dark side of the moon a while longer.

It’s not Ellie who should be alone, Mai thinks, it’s me. Ellie may have missed the romantic boat a few times, may have misjudged a turn or two, but she is not incapable of love. Mai is. She cannot do, for even a minute, any of the wise, kind, self-affirming, reassuring things recommended in her stack of books. People have sent flowers and brought gifts. She would have preferred more flowers and different gifts. She now has a small library on breast cancer: How to Think Yourself Healthy, How to Have More Fun with the Rest of Your Life, Curing Your Cancer with Fruits and Vegetables, Meeting the Challenge of Mastectomy, feminist approaches and feminine approaches, and none of them telling her how to find her way back to the cheerful, steely, enviable person she has been for forty-three years. The books are story after story of breast cancer survivors — they never use the word “victim” now, they are all warriors in the great fight, drumming their way out of the operating room, shakin’ a tail feather all the way to the specialty bra shop. Mai feels like a victim. She had been walking down a sunny street, minding her own business, doing no harm, when something sank its teeth into her breast, gnawed it from her body, stripped her skin off with its great claw and dangled her, hairless head first, over a great invisible chasm while poor Charley stood on the other side, befogged but hopeful, mistaking everything he saw and heard for something that had to do with him.

Mai rolls over to face the wall, her good arm tucked under her head. She can hear Charley breathing in the doorway, and when he leaves after just a few seconds and pulls the door closed behind him, the dark in the room is the deep, delicious gray cloud she remembers from childhood; she is Thumbelina, tucked in a giant velvet pouch, comforted by the smell of pipe tobacco and leftover potatoes and by the sound of her parents’ conversation.

Mai hears Charley walking away. God bless you, she thinks.

“That chicken’s got awhile to go,” Ellie says.

Charley pours another Scotch. “Let’s watch the sun set,” he says.

They twist themselves around on the porch to watch the orange sun and the brief, wavering vermilion circles on the water. The white hydrangeas turn pink, then deep rose, then their color disappears.

Charley stands up to stretch and pulls off his sweatshirt. “I’m just rank. I’m going to take a swim, and then I’ll finish dinner. You?”

“No. I’ll sit. I’ll cheer.”

Charley walks down to the end of the dock, shedding his jeans and briefs. He stands with his back to Ellie, dimly white against the dark. His ass is small and high around its shadowy cleft, deeply dimpled in the middle of each cheek, and his thighs bow out like a sprinter’s. Ellie can see each round knot in his back, muscles bunching and moving like mice across his shoulders, unexpected slabs of muscle curving over each shoulder blade, smooth, thick lines of muscle lying on either side of his spine.

Ellie would rather that Charley was sick in bed and Mai was swimming, but looking at him now, she thinks, as she does occasionally in the face of certain art forms to which she is largely indifferent, Even I can see how beautiful this is.

Charley does a long, thrashing crawl for a quarter-mile and a breaststroke back to the dock, head lifting toward home. Ellie waves and opens a bottle of Meursault; since chemo, even the smell of red wine, even the sight of the red-tipped damp cork, makes Mai ill. Mr. Cushing sends over a case of his own golden white wines every few weeks, just for Mai. Ellie and Charley drink a couple of bottles every weekend — Mai drinks a glass the day after chemo, before the nausea kicks in.

Charley climbs onto the dock, hopping from foot to foot to shake the water out of his ears, patting himself dry with his underpants.

In the living room, sitting on the wicker divan, feet up on the wicker coffee table, Charley and Ellie toast a few things: Mai, the Cushing wine cellar, the last chemotherapy session, only two weeks away, old friends.

“I have no idea …” Charley shrugs. Water drips slowly from his hair to his sweatshirt.

“No idea what?”

“What was it like for you?” Charley and Mai spent an entire summer hiking through the dales and woodlands and lesser hamlets of the Yorkshires; they left before Ellie had even had her mammogram and came home two weeks after her last chemo.

“Pretty much like this. It sucked. You remember how pooped I was that fall.”

Charley does remember, vaguely. They brought flowers and butter crunch and a big straw hat as soon as they got back. Ellie didn’t come to Fishers, but Mai was at Ellie’s place half the week all that fall. By Christmas, Ellie’s hair was dark brown again and wildly curly, and she and Mr. Cushing were winning at Dictionary.

“What, Charley?”

“How much does it hurt?”

“Now, or then?”

“Then.” Charley hopes, of course, that it doesn’t still hurt, but his concern is with Mai. Ellie is clearly fine.

Ellie sighs. “You mean, what’s it like for Mai now? How much pain is she in now?”

Charley nods.

“Lots of aching. Numb feet. Mai has that. Stiff arm. Itchy. You know, everyone’s different. You could ask her.” Ellie says this to be encouraging, but it seems unlikely to her, and to Charley, that he will ask, and if he does they both expect that Mai will say, “Not too bad,” like a true Minnesotan, or else, in the manner of her father-in-law, “Not worth discussing.”

“But right where … where the breast was, how is that? How is that now? How does it look?” Charley keeps his eyes on the coffee table.

“Didn’t Mai show you?” Charley and Mai are the only couple Ellie knows well. Surely not all heterosexual couples are so reticent, so determinedly unobservant. Ellie knows another straight couple who taped not only the birth of their baby but the burying of the placenta and the subsequent bris. Certainly she prefers Charley and Mai’s approach, even with its obvious pitfalls. When you can share panties and Tampax and earrings with the person you have sex with, a little blurring is to be expected, a certain rapid slippage of romantic illusion, and that is not a plus as far as Ellie is concerned. On the other hand, no one except Mai and Ellie’s mother has seen her scar, and Mai’s mother is dead, so she and Ellie are actually even in the boldly-show-your-scar department.

Charley shakes his head.

“It hardly hurts now. And my arm is fine. Almost fine.” Ellie makes a circle with her left arm, and it is a pretty good circle if you don’t know how she was able to move it before.

“Good. I’m really glad it’s better.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Charley, what?”

“Forget it.”

Charley finishes his wine; Ellie does too.

“If you say no, I’ll understand. If this makes you really angry, I apologize in advance. Could I see it?”

Ellie unbuttons her shirt, one of Charley’s old shirts that she and Mai wear around the house. On Ellie, it saves the trouble of shorts. She is not wearing a bra and wishes there were some way to show only the clinically useful part of her body.

“Ah.” Charley gets on his knees in front of Ellie, his eyes almost level with hers. Ellie keeps her eyes on the fireplace.

On the left side of Ellie’s narrow chest, a hand’s length below her small, pretty collarbone, a few inches from the edge of her suntan, there is a smooth ivory square of skin bisected by a red-blue braid of scar tissue. In the middle of the scar is a dimple.

“That?” says Charley, pointing without touching.

“Where the nipple was.”

“Ah.” Charley wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. He cups Ellie’s breast in his palm and leans forward, his other arm around her waist. He lays his cheek against the scar.

“Can you feel this?”

“I can feel pressure. That’s all I feel right there.”

“Not hot or cold?” Charley can feel the water between his rough and Ellie’s smooth skin, and the tiny bumps of her scar coming up lightly against his cheek.

“I don’t think so. I feel your hair higher up.”

Ellie puts both hands in Charley’s wet hair, the silver-blond waves coming up between her fingers. He smells of salt.

“Shut your eyes, Ellie.” Her elbows rest on his shoulders. She smells like fresh corn, of course, and underneath that, peonies.

Charley traces the tiny red rope rising from Ellie’s pale marble blankness, in and out, its tight twists and shrugs crisscrossing each other under his tongue, growing bigger in his mouth. He circles the indentation in the middle, over and over, as if it will open to him, as if underneath the scar is the whole breast, not gone, but concealed.

Ellie knows it is Charley’s lips and tongue, and she feels them with the muffled longing of a woman watching rain fall.