But fuck the cheerful, hypothetical version of the facts. Suddenly, for the first time in my nicety life, I’d prefer to fillet my own heart than sit through another brunch with Charles’s or my colleagues—than ask or be asked, “What are you working on?”—than cook, write, sleep, teach, think, do what was right, or remain me. In fact, I wanted to crack open my own cage of bones and run straight out of myself. Or, failing that, could I just sleep with my student Leah every second until the doctors knocked me out?
This turn was only surprising because I’d been such a polite pleaser and goody-two-shoes until now. But maybe that life was a dishonest dress rehearsal for this, my actual final performance. Or maybe it was simpler than that—this impulse toward recklessness predated my “condition,” and I just wanted the wreckage of sex with Leah in the way that drinking too much at a party made you want something you already wanted, and if you drank enough, let you do it. Cancer was letting me do this! Thank you, cancer!
Or maybe my case was, in fact, dire, and therefore forgivable? What if I had very little time left to do anything that took place naked? Or, what if the numbers were off, or I was in that small percent of the bad side of the numbers, the two percent of people who didn’t wake up? (I mean, once it happened to you, then the chances were 100 percent, right?) What if I was one of the ones who was going to die on the table, or just after? Then I would have no time to do anything at all, so that was why I had to risk my entire life. Just to identify what that life was.
Or—let’s say I do survive this. I might still no longer be myself once I’m housed in an altered body. So how can I count on that later self to do anything that might benefit the me I am right now? In fact, what holds a person together at all? I acted in my own self-interest. So this is an excuse.
And in any case, forgivable or not, this chaos felt worth revving the engines in my blood. The way I saw it, I was sparking something I might keep, or at least get to remember after Drs. A and B cut the circuits in my brain with anesthesia. After they “did the removal” of my tissue, which Dr. A described to me at the very-large-breast (hereafter referred to as “VLB”) appointment as “external.” She was reassuring me; the idea was that mastectomies were easy. Maybe among the reasons she seemed to hate me is that I had the gall to ask about the tissue she was lusting to excavate: “External to what?”
And she and Charles had looked at each other, each saying to the other with eyes meeting over me, “See what I have to deal with?”
Charles is the most rational person I’ve ever met. Our daughter Alexi is nineteen, which—if you love math—means we had her when I was twenty-three, which—surprise, surprise—means my pregnancy was probably an accident. Which makes us seem wilder than we ever were.
I hate math. When I see numbers, a dusty velvet curtain drops over my mind and I can’t think. By the time she was in fourth grade, I had to study for hours just to help Alexi with her fractions and least common whatever, multiples? I was intent on not allowing her to believe that women are worse at math, so I rallied. I also made Charles or the repairmen we hired work at night or while Alexi was at school when they fixed things, so I could say I’d fixed them. And I learned the basics, could unscrew a pipe, find what was wrong with the washing machine or dishwasher, turn on the digital TVs, etc. So, I lied until it was true, in other words. Ish.
It’s true that when Charles and I got married, we were young and knocked up. But Alexi was only an accident in the sense that we hadn’t planned to have a baby at that moment. We’d had a lot of rollicking sex, and I liked the extreme-sport-unprotected variety—wasn’t it enough that I was so monogamous? Plus, I was such a jittery teenage boy of a person and body; I never really believed I could get pregnant. This body? Morph into something big and earthy and productive? Ha! I had always considered my body a vehicle for pleasure. I didn’t have the capacity to imagine it building other people’s spines and eyeballs.
Charles always suggested protection—was always sane, thoughtful, “let me get a condom”-ing me, but by the time I met him I was petulant and distracted. I no longer liked to have the plot interrupted, to roll out of the story into the nightstand drawer, rip open a plastic package and find the slippery, vending-machine prize inside, only to have to unroll it and wrap up the present I had just unwrapped. No! So there it was. My lunacy shaping the rest of our lives.
And yet—even though it was my love of reckless sex that landed us with tiny Alexi, when I showed Charles the stick with the double lines, he hugged me right off the ground and laughed with happiness. At dinner that night he was pleased and pragmatic; it was just a little earlier than we’d expected but good, now we’d be young, which meant our chances of having a healthy baby were excellent and we’d be fine. He’d always known we were going to stay together forever, what was a few years early on the baby front? Maybe he’d been thrilled that we were getting a jump on middle-age stability.
I told Leah none of this, of course, just put my mouth on her mouth, then her neck, shoulders, breasts, stomach, thighs. I didn’t reveal anything about my diagnosis or personal life, because obviously such confidences are inappropriate in a student-teacher relationship.
Here’s how yesterday happened: she came to my office hours. And sat in my giant green chair, wearing tight, straight-leg jeans, work boots, and a tee shirt with a tiny rhino icon on the left breast. Was I looking? I’d never really noticed in any sort of real detail what my students looked like, but for some reason she came into clear view. Her hair, short and red, looked like a lit wick, and she said, “Professor Baxter, can I ask you something?”
And whatever she asked was about love poetry, but I didn’t hear her. And then she cocked her articulate, angular face to the side and said, “Hey, do you want to come over and chat about this someplace quiet? Someplace—” She looked around slowly at the walls of my office, and I noticed how big her eyes were on her face, how far apart, and I saw the walls she was looking at and suddenly felt trapped, almost consumed by them.
“Well,” she laughed, a throaty, boundary-shattering laugh. “Someplace not here, anyway. Professor?”
And I said, “Yes,” without a pause long enough even to honor what had once been rules I lived by. And she moved her boots in a way that looked like dancing or clicking her heels together. And stood.
More mysterious than my life-dissolving “yes” was how Leah had the bravado to know to invite me to her house. Maybe she was in the habit of getting the things she wanted, which wouldn’t be surprising. There was something very strange and appealing about her, her particular toughness, the brave eye contact thing she did, the way she took my clothing off like it and I belonged to her. She was entitled to all her appetites, delicious. And I, an utter stranger to myself, went shy when I tried to unbuckle the belt I hadn’t noticed she was wearing. And unzip her jeans. She laughed while I moved them down her hips, slim like a boy’s—or what I thought was like a boy’s, because I’d been, up until this point, somewhat unimaginative.
Then we were in the tub, because she said, “Let’s take a bath. I have a very good tub,” and it was true. Old-school, with feet, claws.
In the water, she tried to sit in the back behind me, but I didn’t like this idea, wanted her in front of me, so I could see and not be seen. She didn’t object too strenuously when I positioned myself, just climbed in and leaned her smooth, straight back against my front. The feeling of her spine, skin, and neck caused me to float above the scene we’d created, taking certain stock: a late-fall day at the equator of my medical experience, three weeks after the initial lump and crisis, three weeks before the surgery. There were slick, sand-colored tiles, Leah, bubbles, hot water, and even a very flattering image of me, a blameless extra in someone else’s unforgivably banal, clichéd—well, okay, kind of hot and titillating story.
She turned and looked right at me with her giant, straightforward eyes. I felt shocked, even though it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, either that I was in this situation or