The Dying Animal (12 page)

I said, "Are you afraid right now?" And she said, "Very. Very much afraid. I'm all right for two minutes, I'm thinking of something else, and then the bottom falls out of my stomach and I can't believe what's happening. It's a roller coaster, and it doesn't stop. It can't stop unless the
cancer
stops. My chances," she said, "are sixty percent to survive and forty percent to die." And then she dropped into the talk about how life is so worthwhile and how she feels sorry for her mother, above all—the banal talk that's inevitable. I wanted to do so many things, I had so many plans, and so on. She began telling me about how foolish all her little anxieties of a few months back now seemed, the worries about work and friends and clothes, and how this had put everything in perspective, and I thought, No, nothing puts anything in perspective.

I was watching her, listening to her, and when I couldn't hear any more, I said, "Do you mind if I touch your breasts?" She said, "No, go ahead." "You don't mind?" "No. I do mind kissing you, though. Because I don't want anything sexual. But I do know how much you like my breasts, so touch my breasts." So I touched them—and with trembling hands. And of course with an erection. I said, "Is it your left breast or your right breast?" and she said, "It's my right breast." So I put my hand on her right breast. There is a combination of eroticism and tenderness, and it melts you and arouses you, and that's what was happening. You get a hard-on and melt, both at the same time. So we're sitting there with her breast in my hand, and we're talking, and I said, "You don't mind?" And she said, "I even want more of you. Because I know you love my breasts." I said, "What do you want?" "I want you to feel my cancer." I said, "I'll do that. Okay. But later, we'll do that later on."

It was too soon. I wasn't ready for that. So we talked, and
she
started to cry, and I tried to comfort her, and then suddenly she stopped crying and became very energetic, very determined. She said to me, "David, I came to you, in fact, with only one request, one question." And I said, "What is it?" And she said, "After you, I never had a boyfriend or a lover who loved my body as much as you loved it." "Have you had boyfriends?"

At it again. Forget about the boyfriends. But I couldn't. "Have you, Consuela? "Yes, but not many." "Have you slept with men regularly?" "No. Not on a regular basis." "How was your job? Was there nobody at your job who fell in love with you?" "They all did." "I can understand that. But then what," I said. "Were they all gay? Didn't you meet straight men?" "I do, I did, but they're no good." "Why are they no good?" "They're just masturbating on my body." "Well, this is a pity. This is stupid. This is insane." "But you loved my body. And I was proud of it." "But you were proud of it before." "Yes and no. You've seen my body at its most glorious. So I wanted you to see it before it is ruined by what the doctors are going to do." "Stop talking that way, don't think that way. Nobody's going to ruin you. What do the doctors say they're going to do?" And she said, "I've had chemotherapy. That's why I don't take off my cap." "Of course. But where you're concerned, I can stand anything. Do whatever you want." She said, "No, I don't want to show it to you. Because a strange thing happens to your hair. After the chemotherapy, it starts to come out in handfuls. A sort of baby hair begins growing on your head. It's very strange." I asked, "Does your pubic hair disappear?" "No," she said, "it doesn't, it stays. Which is strange too." I said, "Did you ask the doctor?" "Yes," she said, "and the doctor can't explain it. She only answered, 'That's a good question.' Look at my arms," Consuela said. She has long, slender arms and that white-white skin, and the fine lovely hair on her arms was indeed still there. "Look," she said, "there's hair on my arms but not on my head." "Well," I said, "I've known bald men, so why can't I see a bald woman?" She said, "No. I don't want you to see."

Then she said, "David, may I ask you a big favor?" "Of course. Anything." "Would you mind saying goodbye to my breasts?" I said, "My dear girl, my darling girl, they're not going to demolish your body, they're not." "Well, I'm lucky that I have so much breast, but they're going to have to take out about a third. My doctor's trying everything to keep the surgery minimal. She's humane. She's wonderful. She's not a butcher. She's not a heartless machine. She's trying first to shrink the cancer with chemo. Then when they operate they can take out as little as possible." "But they can restore it, rebuild it, can't they, whatever it is they take out?" "Yes, they can put in some silicone stuff. But I don't know if I'll want it. Because this is my body and that won't be my body. That won't be anything." "And how do you want me to say goodbye? What do you want? What are you asking me, Consuela?" And at last she told me.

I got my camera, which is a Leica with a zoom lens, and she stood up. We closed the curtains, we put on all the lights, I found the right Schubert and put that on, and she didn't quite dance then, but it was, rather, an exotic, Oriental sort of movement when she started to undress. Very elegant and so vulnerable. I was sitting on the sofa, and she was standing and undressing. And the way in which she undressed and dropped each item, it was spellbinding. Mata Hari. The spy undressing for the officer. And all the time so extremely vulnerable. She took off her blouse first. Then her shoes. Extraordinary to take off her shoes then. Then she took off her bra. And it was as though a man who had undressed had forgotten to pull his socks off, which makes him look slightly ludicrous. A woman in a skirt with naked breasts is not erotic to me. The skirt somehow confuses the picture. Naked breasts with trousers is very erotic, but over just a skirt it doesn't work. You'd be better off to keep on your bra with a skirt, but a skirt alone with naked breasts is to feed somebody.

So she showed herself to me. She undressed until she had only the panties on. She said, "Could you touch my breasts?" "Is that the picture you want, my touching them?" "No, no. Touch them first." So I did. And then she said, "I want pictures facing the camera, and in profile, and then hanging over."

I took about thirty pictures of her. She chose the poses, and she wanted everything. She wanted to have her hands underneath, holding them. She wanted to be squeezing them. She wanted them from the left side, from the right side, she wanted them photographed while she was bending forward. Finally she pulled off her panties, and you could see that her pubic hair was there as it had always been, as I described it: sleek, lying flat. Asian hair. She appeared to be all at once aroused by taking off her panties and my looking at her with nothing on. That happened suddenly. You could see by her nipples that she was aroused. Though by now I no longer was. Still, I asked her, "Do you want to stay for the night? Do you want to sleep with me?" She said, "No. I don't want to sleep with you. I want to be in your arms, though." I was fully dressed, as I am now. And she was sitting on the sofa in my arms, very close to me, and then she took my wrist and she laid my hand on her armpit in order for me to feel the cancer. Felt like a stone. A stone in the armpit. Two small stones, one bigger than the other, meaning that there is a metastasis originating in her breast. But you couldn't feel it in her breast. I asked, "Why can't I feel it in your breast?" and she said, "My breasts are too big. There's too much tissue to feel it. It's deep inside the breast."

I couldn't have slept with her, not even I who'd licked the blood from her. After the years of dwelling on her, just seeing her would have been difficult enough had she shown up under normal circumstances and not in this bizarrely wretched way. So, no, I couldn't have slept with her, and yet I kept thinking about it. Because they're so beautiful, her breasts. I cannot say it often enough. It was so mean, so degrading, these breasts, her breasts—I just thought, They can't be destroyed! As I told you, I'd been masturbating over her without interruption during all the years we were apart. I have been in bed with other women, and I have thought of her, of her breasts, of what it was like with my face sinking into them. Thought of their softness, their smoothness, the way I could sense their weight, their soft weight, and this while my mouth nuzzles somebody else. But at that moment I knew hers was no longer a sexual life. What was at stake was something else.

So I said to her, "Should I go with you to the hospital? I'll do that if you want me to. I insist on doing it. You're virtually alone." She said she wanted to think about it. She said, "It's sweet of you to offer, but I don't know yet. I don't know if I'll want to see you immediately after I've been operated on." She left about half past one; she'd arrived about eight o'clock. She didn't ask what I was going to do with the photographs she'd wanted me to take. She didn't ask me to send her prints. I haven't had them developed yet. I'm curious to see them. I'll enlarge them. I'll send her a set, of course. But I'll have to find somebody I trust to develop them. I should long ago, with my interests, have learned how to develop film myself, but I never did. It would have been useful.

She should be going to the hospital any time now. I'm expecting a message from her any moment, any day. Since I saw her three weeks ago, I haven't heard a word. Will I? Do you think I will? She told me not to contact her. She didn't want anything more from me—that's what she said when she left. I've been all but keeping a vigil by the phone for fear of missing her call.

Ever since her visit, I've myself been on the phone to people I know, to doctors I know, trying to find out about breast cancer treatment. Because I had always understood that the procedure for this sort of thing was surgery first and then the chemotherapy. And that was worrying me while she was here—I kept thinking, There's something about her case I'm failing to understand. Now I learn that giving chemo before isn't entirely unheard of, that it's becoming the standard of care for treatment of locally advanced breast cancer, but the question is, apparently, is that the treatment right for her? What did she mean about sixty percent chance of survival? Why only sixty? Did someone tell her that or did she read it somewhere or, in her panic, did she make it up? Or are they gambling with long-term survival for purposes of vanity? Maybe this is merely a response to the shock—a typical enough response at that—but I can't stop thinking that there's something about her story, either that she didn't tell me or that she herself hasn't been told ... Anyway, that was the story, as I got it, and I haven't as yet heard any more.

She left me at about one-thirty
A.M.
, after the New Year reached Chicago. We had some tea. We drank a glass of wine. Because she asked me to, I turned on the television, and we watched the replay of the New Year beginning in Australia and sweeping across Asia and Europe. She was slightly sentimental. Telling stories. About her childhood. About her father taking her to the opera since she was a little girl. She told a story about a florist. "I was buying flowers on Madison Avenue with my mother last Saturday," she told me, "and the florist said, 'What a nice hat you're wearing,' and I said, 'It's there for a purpose,' and he understood, and he blushed and apologized and gave me a dozen roses for free. So there you see how people respond to a human being in distress. They don't know what to do. Nobody knows what to say or to do. So I'm very grateful to you," she said.

How did I feel? The greatest pain I felt that night was over her being alone and panicking in her bed. Panicking about death. And what will happen now? What do you think? I guess she's not going to ask me to go with her to the hospital. She was pleased that I offered to, but when the time comes, she'll go to the hospital with her mother. She may just have gone berserk New Year's Eve because she was too miserable and frightened to go to the party where she'd been invited and too miserable and frightened to be alone. I don't think she will phone me when she's in a panic. She wanted the offer, but she won't use it.

Unless I'm wrong. Unless two or three months from now she comes to me and says she wants to sleep with me. With me rather than a younger man because I'm old and far from perfect myself. With me because, though still this side of desiccation, the decomposing corpse is no longer quite so well concealed as it is with the men at my gym who managed not to be born before Roosevelt took office.

And will I be able to do it? In all my years, I've never slept with a woman who has been mutilated in this manner. I can speak only of one woman I knew some years ago, and on the way to my apartment, she said, "I have to tell you—because of an operation, I've only got one breast. So I don't want you to be shocked by it." Now, no matter how unflinching you like to think you are, if you're honest about it, the prospect of seeing a woman with one breast is not very inviting, is it? I was able to act a little surprised, but seemingly not about the one breast, and I don't think I exhibited my nervousness at trying to put her at her ease. "Oh, don't be silly, we're not going there to sleep together. We're just good friends and I think we should stay good friends." I once slept with a woman who had a dark brownish wine stain—between her breasts and partly over her breasts, a huge birthmark. This woman was also a tall woman. Six five. The only woman I've ever had to kiss by standing on my toes and craning my neck. I got a crick in the neck from kissing her. When we went to bed, she started to undress by pulling off her skirt and her panties, which women normally don't do. They usually take off the blouse first, they start to undress their upper body. But she kept on her sweater and her bra. I said, "Aren't you going to take off your bra and your sweater?" "Yes, but I don't want you to be surprised." She said, "There's something wrong with me." I smiled, tried to make light of it. "Tell me, what is wrong?" She said, "Well, there's something about my breasts that will shock you." "Oh, don't worry. Show me." And so she did. And I started overdoing things. Kissing the birthmark. Touching it. Playing with it. Being polite. Making her feel happy with it. Saying I loved it. Such things aren't easy to take in stride. But you're supposed to be able to take charge, to act unsymmetrically, to deal with such things with grace. Not to recoil from anything that a body must abide. That wine stain. It was tragic for her. Six foot five. Men drawn to her, as I was, by this amazing height. And with every man, the same story: "There's something wrong with me."