by Amy Bloom
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 sc
arf 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.
