“Oh, jeez, Marla, I am so sorry. You don’t need to deal with this by yourself. I’ll see if I can get a flight for later today, or at worst I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”
“No,” Marla said tiredly, “don’t come now. My mother’s been visiting us for the past few days; she leaves at the end of the week. Come then. I’d much rather have you here than her, but at least she can take care of the girls so I can go with James to his appointments. And the whole situation is . . . just so weird. It’s all happened so quickly. I feel as though I’m in the middle of a particularly awful nightmare. I keep thinking that if I could wake myself up everything would be okay. Oh, Lizzie, evidently there was so much blood two days ago that James finally realized he needed to tell me, and of course I panicked and insisted he finally see a doctor, and here we all are.”
“Is he home? Can I talk to him? What does the doctor say?”
“He’s lying down. You’re probably the only person he could bear to talk to now, but I don’t want to disturb him. We have an appointment this afternoon to discuss the next steps, but nobody’s hopeful. I can tell that from the way they look at us. Oh God, Lizzie, he’s going to die, I know he is. I wish you were here. I always wish you were here, but I feel like I need to save you for the even worse times that are coming.”
“That’s ridiculous. You don’t need to save me for anything. I’m coming now,” Lizzie said. “And I’ll be with you whatever happens.”
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it,” Marla said, “to live in the same place again.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can get a flight to Albuquerque, and I’ll rent a car,” Lizzie promised, “so you don’t have to come get me.”
“Do you remember Mama Marla and Auntie Lizzie?” Marla asked.
“Of course I remember.”
“That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Lizzie said simply. “It was a pretty long time ago. Tell James I love him, and the girls too.”
Nothing had exactly returned to normal in the days since George and Lizzie had their Difficult Conversation. They were being very careful with each other. Lizzie made sure to turn off the lights when she left a room (a pet peeve of George’s) and to put whatever she took out of the refrigerator back in the exact same place she’d found it (another pet peeve of George’s). She tried her best to roll up his clean socks the way George liked them (yet another of his pet peeves) and when she failed he didn’t remind her that he’d showed her how to do it numerous times in the past and couldn’t understand why she didn’t grasp the process. She made dinners from George’s childhood that she knew from Elaine he loved, especially the mac and cheese from The Joy of Cooking and the pork chops with scalloped potatoes from the I Hate to Cook Book. She baked mandel bread, which took hours of her time, but since she made the decision not to go to the library to try to find Jack in the city phone books, she had a lot of time for baking. George bought a whole gallon of peanut-butter-cup ice cream because it was Lizzie’s favorite. He ironed two of her blouses that she’d left on top of the dryer. He cleaned out the drains in both the kitchen and bathroom sinks. He formally thanked Lizzie for making his favorite dinners and Lizzie formally acknowledged his thanks. Besides that, and a few stray comments like “I’m going to take a bath” or “We need more Life cereal,” silence reigned. When they were both home they tended to stay in different rooms, and at night in bed George didn’t put his arm around her and draw her close to him, which Lizzie had always found a great comfort. Neither one slept well. A lot of warm milk was drunk, but they didn’t play any word games. Lizzie thought it was like living with a ghost. George was concentrating on all the tips and techniques that he taught in order to resist looking ahead to a future that didn’t include Lizzie.
As she was dialing the phone to tell George about James, a passing thought occurred to her. How had it happened, when had it happened, that nothing in her life seemed completely real until she shared it with George? Was it possible that having told George about Jack would change her memories of Jack in some way? Maybe not the specific details, but the important place that he still had in her life?
“There’s terrible news,” she blurted out without any preliminary niceties when he answered. She went on without giving him a chance to reply, “But, George, promise that you’re not going to get all Opportunity for Growth-ish. Please don’t tell me it’s not terrible. I’m not one of your feel-good groupies, remember?”
“C’mon, Lizzie, don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to promise that. What’s happened?”
“It’s James: he has stage-four small-cell lung cancer. Marla told me that the doctors think it’s probably past the point that chemo will help, but she wants to try it anyway. I don’t know yet what James wants to do. I need to be there with them.”
For a moment George remained silent, then said, “Of course you should go, as soon as you can.”
“It’s a tragedy, right? I mean, if anything can qualify as a tragedy in your philosophy of life, it has to be this. He’s young, he has a devoted wife, three beautiful daughters, a job he loves and is good at, and he’s going to die. And don’t tell me that we’re all going to die. I know we are, but it’s not the same.”
Once again George paused before speaking. “Do you want me to tell you what I think?”
“You might as well. I know you’ll insist on telling me eventually, or it’ll come up in some speech you’re giving. I already know I’m going to hate what you say and totally disagree with it. You’re going to say it isn’t a tragedy, right? Go ahead, then, and when you’re done I’ll call the airlines.”
Taking a deep breath, George began. “Someone backing out of the driveway and running over their child is a tragedy. The Holocaust is a tragedy. People abusing their children is a tragedy. None of those things have to happen. But it’s in the nature of things for people to get sick and die, sometimes of cancer. And the outliers get it young. It’s just statistics. Contrary to what you might believe, even I am nowhere near optimistic enough to believe that we can ever have a world in which there’s no disease. That’s the realm of science fiction.”
“George, listen to me for once. James is dying. Don’t you care?”
“I hear that he’s dying, and of course I care. What kind of person do you think I am that I wouldn’t care? I feel terrible that James is dying. I feel terrible for Marla and the girls. And you, I feel terrible for you too, because I know how much he means to you. And I feel terrible for me, because he’s become a good friend. All our lives are going to change because of his death. But that’s not a tragedy. Don’t you see that?”
“No, I don’t see. And you can’t make me.”
George laughed. “Are you sticking your tongue out at me? Nyah, nyah, you can’t make me agree with you.”