Did Leah consider me the oldest person ever? She didn’t seem awed, if so. I turned the hot water back on and reviewed our encounter so far. When we’d arrived at her house, she’d asked whether I wanted a drink, either mature for her age or an actual grown-up. I’d been confused by the question; it seemed so clear to me that we’d called off all the rules that her polite, “What can I get you?” seemed almost a parody, so old-fashioned as to be off.
“Oh,” I’d said, stunned quiet either by her youth or by my own, running behind me, catching up, knocking me over in this strange, possibly gross moment.
“Um, I’ll have whatever you’re having.” I never said um. Until now.
And neither did Leah, even now, because that was when she’d said, “I’m having you,” and pulled me to her without ceremony. My mind caught fire and burned blank.
Charles was so critical of faithlessness and those with pathetic morals that riling him up used to give me an illicit charge. In the beginning, we both liked it—he found it funny and scandalous to hear what gossip I could concoct, and not only about sex, but also about human behavior in general.
Later, even though he was less enthusiastic, I still liked to provoke him with dirty, presumptuous, and judgmental stories, but maybe there was some tragic or poetic logic to my compulsion. In any case, the gossip seemed crueler and less frivolous now that I was either already or about to be the object of it. Charles never even hovered near a tempting flame himself; he was genuinely above such antics. His father James often said, usually apropos of nothing, “Human beings are morons. No one ever lost money overestimating the stupidity of other people,” and, “The world operates at a C-minus level.”
He meant those without the exclusive blessing of his genetics, of course, including me—he’d always counted me among the humans who collectively brought down the universe’s GPA. A disastrous match for his son. Of course, now he had incontestable evidence that he was right: not only was I illness-prone, but I was also a faithless disappointment to Charles. If I died, either on the table or because they couldn’t cure whatever poison was in my cells, then he’d be even more right. He preferred being right to anything else and was, frankly, selfish enough to enjoy this latest victory, even if it came at the cost of his own son’s marriage and happiness. Not that marriage and happiness are the same.
Now I heard Leah’s feet slip and pad along the kitchen floor, heard the fridge door open, hot splash of butter hit the skillet. I looked down at myself in the now-cool water. My hips, bluish skin, the slip of my belly, cheating legs.
I stood, dizzy, and put a hand on the wall, grabbing a discarded towel and wrapping it around my waist. I wiped the mirror above the sink and saw myself surrounded by the fog like a tacky school photo, misty with me in the middle, my stupid face wet with steam. My skin was tight, mouth expressionless and familiar—the bottom lip so full it suggested pouting, the upper one thin enough to contradict it and give me some sternness I’d once been grateful for, but now just made me look old. And predatory. I opened the cabinet to punish myself: mini o.b. tampons, a little glass bowl of rings for her belly button, which I’d noticed in the bath had a small silver object in it. And endless ChapSticks and round tubs of lip gloss, which surprised me. She didn’t seem the type.
Someone my daughter’s age. It was a good thing I don’t believe in God, because otherwise I’d be high on the list for smiting. Charles and I used to gossip about the trolls who drank the youth of students and then either abandoned stunned wives or traded entire lives of actual thinking and living for epic sessions of couples therapy. I always thought counseling was talking that happened at the expense of living, that if you had to discuss your relationship all the time, you probably weren’t busy or happy enough having it. Hence, Charles and I never went to couples therapy, although I guess I didn’t really get to keep gloating about that now.
And as for the gossiping, it was really just me. I gossiped while Charles furrowed his face and cleared his throat occasionally to demonstrate that he hadn’t died of boredom or judgmental-ness.
I peered out into Leah’s hallway, steeling myself against additional innocence: beige plastic bins everywhere, likely for everything from toiletries to paperclips. There were socks strewn about, cheap throw rugs, pillows on a futon. A futon! Until this, I hadn’t had sex on a futon in fifteen years. When I said so, Leah joked that maybe this was my version of buying a new car and fucking my secretary, which would be funnier if it weren’t so obvious.
“Where’s my convertible, then?” I asked, trying to flirt. “And where’s my secretary?”
“You’re an academic,” she replied, tartly. “You have too much irony and too little money for a real mid-life crisis. And I’m your secretary.”
I felt defensive then, because I wasn’t the type to force my TAs to do secretarial tasks. I didn’t even have a TA; I taught poetry to twelve students. But if I had one. And I had plenty of money, too, although there was no reason my students would suspect that. I didn’t come to class dripping with jewels, in spite of Charles’s wealth. We exuded quiet evidence of the care that comes with expensive food, exercise, potions for the skin, good medicine. My clothes also probably cost more than their simplicity suggested, but none of that was recognizable to young eyes.
I wondered if Charles had it in him to punish me with money. I doubted it somehow. He’d always been generous about sharing everything, and in any case, he preferred moral judgment and remaining blameless himself. He’d be kind about cash, whether by continuing to allow me access to our shared bank accounts or in alimony payments, if we ever actually formalized the utter ruin of our lives. Especially since I was sick. Maybe he wouldn’t punish me at all, would just let me have this. Our marriage wasn’t in crisis, I don’t think—I just got sick and wanted to burn the world down. Still want to burn the world down. Or the parts of it that are trapping me, anyway.
I stood in the hallway. A line of photos on canvas: Leah and somebody, probably her mother, an anemic-looking blonde. What did her mother think of her lovely, boyish girl? I pushed the question from my mind. Here were Leah and another girl in sunglasses, the other girl in a small bikini, Leah in some kind of short wetsuit, a giant body of water behind them. Next, Leah holding a baby I assumed was someone else’s. I knew nothing about her family or life and hoped not to learn much.
How little could I hear and say, and still keep her close and naked? Or was she keeping me? She’d driven the day. Who even was I? I stood staring at a nail hole in Leah’s wall, just under the bottom edge of the canvas print of her and the baby; she’d probably tried to hide it with that photo but hung it just slightly too high. I itched to fix it.
And in that moment, it came to me: I would tell no one about my surgery. Just like I’d say nothing about Leah, obviously. I wouldn’t tell the department that I might be dying, would teach my way through the entire thing while averting my eyes. If I needed additional treatment, chemotherapy, radiation, poison they would have to pump into whatever was left of me after, I’d cross the question of whether to admit any of that later. I felt ecstatic relief. If I didn’t tell anyone, then maybe none of this would have happened.
I just had to get to and through the surgery, and then it would be Thanksgiving. Alexi would be home. We would eat pies and strip my drains and then hopefully by the following week, I would prop myself up and teach. Fake my way through until it was true that I was fine. I felt, for the first time since the diagnosis, like I would be alive someday, on the other side of this.
Of course, if that was true, what the hell was I doing in a towel in my student’s hallway?
“Sam?” Leah peered her head into the hallway, hair