Copyright Daniel Akst
All rights reserved.

When Elizabeth emerges at last from her apartment building, she is swathed in cotton, her dry blonde hair in a turban, her eyes hidden behind big dark glasses. She looks pale. Richard, squinting against the sun, turns up the car's air conditioner as soon as he spots her.

"I thought I was rid of you," she says, patting his thigh. "I figured you were in remission."

"I could say the same about you," he answers, smiling.

Already Richard is getting on her nerves. She notices that he is on his best driving behavior, piloting the car through the streets of Santa Monica in that stately way people adopt with children or grandparents buckled in beside them, avoiding sudden stops and negotiating turns with funereal grace. He has the classical station going on the radio.

"Are you cold?" he asks with concern.

She presses the radio buttons in annoyance, searching for something, anything, and settles finally on some jazz. His unhurried driving and their melancholy progress along Wilshire toward the doctor's office remind her unpleasantly of their trip to the ob-gyn one rainy day six years ago, to nip whatever vitality might have sprung from their time together. She hadn't blamed him for that, although she might be angry now if she allowed herself, now that she is beyond children. He had been solicitous, at least, and had even left it to her. She was the one who had made the decision, he liked to emphasize. Elizabeth takes off her sunglasses and looks at him sitting earnestly behind the wheel, a man intent on seeming to do right, and wonders what their child might have had from him. His pleasant face, perhaps, his attached earlobes, his canine and indiscriminate need to be liked. He glances at her, but she doesn’t care, she is feeling entitled and will stare if she wants. He looks the same, just older. His sandy hair is thinning, and his soft cheeks are red from their morning scraping. He'd had a close shave.

At the clinic the familiar man with the clownish plaid suit and handlebar mustache performs the familiar procedure, the freezing, the slicing, the cheerful assurances. He appears to be someone who eats all the wrong things, his ruddy skin a topographical map of capillaries and pores. Elizabeth is a picture framer, and looking up at him makes her feel that she has brought her face very close to a cracked and mottled painting of some florid dead Dutchman. "You'll see, still only skin deep," he is saying. She is no longer stunned by the price when she stops at the front desk to pick up the bill from the aloof Israeli émigré in the white outfit. What is money in such circumstances?

On the way home, in the car, Elizabeth and Richard sit in uneasy silence, the waiting already perched like some uncouth hitchhiker on the seat between them. But as they drive, Elizabeth's spirits began to lift. She recalls drives back from visits to somebody's parents, drives away from bad movies and disappointing meals, escapes by car from all sorts of tiresome people and unpleasant places, Richard forever conveying her to safety. It is the same car, it had the same smell. She sighs deeply and then thinks to peek across at him; his face shows puzzlement, worry, and she is pleased. She knows he won’t understand, for hers is a sigh of contentment, a sigh of the moment. A transcendent sigh. Stealing another glance at Richard, who has never suffered a day's illness in all the years she has known him, she feels not sick but well— glad to have him there on the seat next to her, glad not to have to drive herself, comfortable with him this way even though he isn't in remission. Even though, for her, he seems incurable.

"So I didn't even ask, are you still with Alicia?"

"Alicia?" Richard says, smiling. "No. You're two or three girlfriends behind."

"And you knew I wasn't with anybody."

"I didn't know. I just wanted to help. We're supposed to be friends."

"Except I only see you when I get cancer. You're like the oncologist that way."

It had been back once before in the years since they had ceased to be a couple, and on that occasion too Richard had appeared with his excruciating understanding, loyally providing transportation and hand-holding. Elizabeth joked that scientists could forget about cancer. They needed to find a cure for her ex-boyfriend.

"It's not cancer, it's a mole," he says firmly. "Besides, there are all kinds of friendships. You know how attached to you I am, whether I'm attached to anyone else or not."

"Yes, Richard. You're the last sentimentalist."

Instantly, mildly, she regrets this, considering it too gentle a rebuke, a sign of weakness even, but she is weary of posturing and uneasy in the campy outfit she has chosen, as if cancer could be no match for insouciance. It was warm; she feels mummified, bleary, and can’t wait to get undressed, have a drink, go to bed. Since discovering the evidence on the inside of her left calf she had assumed the worst, in order to avoid worrying herself to death before the biopsy results came back.

Three days later, when Elizabeth calls and asks him to come, she knows he will hurry over without asking why. When she opens the door, she can see that he is surprised not to be able to read the news in her face. Probably he'd given careful thought to handling this moment. Should he just ask immediately? Should he wait a bit, see what she might reveal without prompting? He would want to make it easy for her, for both of them, but he wouldn't know precisely how.

"It's back," she sighs, not looking at him. "It's back, Richard. It's back."

She’d worried that they would both begin to cry, but she gets there first and so he comforts her. Later she gives him some beer and fixes herself gin and tonic.

"Is that good for you?" he asks.

"It's very good for me. I plan to do a lot of this."

The apartment is stifling. It is summer, but Richard, she knows, has concluded that she must be cold all the time. He drinks his beer fast, getting up for another because he seems to need one, and perhaps also to grant her a little respite from his pity. He is sensitive, Richard, and she likes this in him.

"Don't you have to be back?" she calls from the living room.

"No," he says, rooting through a drawer for the opener. "I'm all yours."

They talk quietly as they drink away the afternoon, luxuriating in this sudden extravagance of time. Elizabeth imagines herself in a clearing, a traveler between planes, her worries out of reach. She feels cozy from the alcohol, and has taken the precaution of unplugging the telephone.

"Life is incredible," she says, making noise with the ice in her glass. "You were living with a dyslexic, so now you're here. Is that incredible?"

Richard says nothing, and Elizabeth, rapidly giving herself to the drink, pictures short, tense Martin, the corners of his mouth turned down even when his face is in repose. Martin had been Richard's roommate in those days, in Los Feliz, and his slight learning disability sometimes made him screw up phone messages. Once, in taking a message for Richard from another woman, he transposed a pair of numbers, so that when Richard tried to return the call he got Elizabeth by mistake, and because she sounded young and attractive, he stayed on the line.

"Do you ever wonder," she asks now, "what our lives might have been like if not for those transposed numbers?"

"I don't think it's possible to know. I'm not even sure it's possible for those numbers not to be transposed."

"When you're young you're open to things," she says, and is surprised to feel a lump in her throat. Lumps will be her downfall, she thinks. She has taken her lumps with Richard.

"Everything seems possible, but I wonder whether any of it really is. I mean, maybe it is all laid out in some way, in our genes or something."

"Where is Martin now?" she asks.

"I don't know," Richard says with surprise. "I have no idea."

"We've been martinized," Elizabeth observes, gazing through her glass at the window. "Like at the cleaners."

The two of them drink on, comfortable with silence when it falls and relieved at the let-bygones-be-bygones tone of things. Elizabeth wants to giggle. Beforehand, she had a vision of herself hairless, hollow-eyed, brittle-boned, perhaps falling out of some humiliating dressing gown. But now she has banished this grisly picture, holding in her mind instead the image of Richard's naked torso rising from her solid thighs, filling her with that warmth she never wanted to go away. They drink some more, and after awhile both of them know what is in the air, the two of them just making conversation to fill the time until finally she returns from the kitchen with a refill and sits next to him on what had been their sofa. She chooses not to wait a decent interval following this move, and instead takes his face in her hands and kisses him. Richard is reluctant, she knows, ambivalent, and so she kisses him well, in that delicate way she knows he likes, her kisses a question but also a direction. Let us have desire in place of pity, they say. She hopes they do not come across as a plea, although she knows that if they do he will have no way to resist.

Afterwards, in bed, Richard propped on his elbow, she can't stop smiling at him. It is hard for balding men not to look sloppy, she thinks, as if at their age it is silly to be doing such things. She imagines that she must look haggard as well, with dark sacs under her eyes in the bright light of her bedroom at midday. The air conditioner, tickled by the thermostat, suddenly shudders into action.

"Thanks for coming today," she says. They both laugh, and she blushes, whispering, "You know what I mean."

"Lizzie, why didn't you ask me to go with you? When they called, I mean. For the results. I would have come."

"I didn't want anybody to see me." She grabs for his private parts. She wants this to be lewd, wants him to see that she is no pushover. "It's so stupid. They call you and tell you they can't tell you over the phone, you have to come in. As if it's not obvious right then."

It shocks her how easy it is to lie. It is something she so rarely does, and yet here it is, natural as love, easy as sleep. Perhaps this is only when you’ve already experienced the truth of a thing, tested it out in your mind, so that when it turns out to be false, the truth isn't erased but simply thrust into the past, inserted there like some medical device implanted in the body of our consciousness.

"They want to begin the chemo right away," she would say. Richard would be silent for an instant on the other end of the phone.

"Do they have any plans for surgery?"

"No. It's metastatic. They can't operate."

She would be dying, everyone would think. She sees herself shaving her head, taking bits of arsenic to heighten her pallor, losing the weight she has wanted to lose. Disease does this to you. She starts to cry, and he holds her.

"I can't do it," she weeps, wetting his skin. "Richard, I can't. I can't."

"I'll help you, I'll help you," he says, frantic with consolation. "Any way I can, anything you need."

"You're no help." She squeezes him with all her might. "Oh, you're no goddamn help at all."