The Forever Marriage (7 page)

Carmen took the last swallow and lay back as Danny used both hands to massage her breasts then moved his mouth slowly down her body, finding the place he wanted between her legs. She couldn’t even talk to her lover, revealing that she wasn’t simply relieved; she was, to her surprise, constantly wistful, thinking about Jobe. His death had released memories that puzzled more than distressed her, but he was always present in her thoughts—even now. She closed her eyes and floated on the sensation of Danny’s gentle licking and it became like a series of warm rings that kept expanding out. Infinite golden zeros. At the same time, something was happening to the part of her body farthest from Danny, who was crouched inside her knees. It felt like two oversized palms—one on her forehead and the other at the nape of her neck—supporting her head.

After she came, he plunged into her like a javelin, practically making an arc with his small body as he leaped up from the foot of the bed. They were almost exactly the same size, Carmen often thought: like two matching toys designed to be locked together. No wonder this had always worked so well.

Little had changed since Jobe’s death, at least on the surface of their meetings. Danny still held to the same schedule: every other week, on Tuesday, from one to four. How he’d worked this out with the library, she never knew, though he had a relationship with the director that led Carmen to believe they’d slept together at least once. She imagined the woman with her proper suits and tight hair getting a little tipsy after a party—something to celebrate the digital conversion
of the card catalog perhaps—making out with Danny in some dark corner, tomes about botany sitting dustily on the shelves around them, taking him back to her office where there likely was a comfortable couch. The woman was married, and an indiscretion would have given Danny leverage, leeway. It was a small price to pay for freedom. This, Carmen understood.

One thing did feel different, however. It was something that Carmen had trouble naming. The sex was just as good, and Danny’s manner with her was, if anything, even more accommodating. That could be because she had insisted on paying all three times for the hotel, putting a stop to that odd moment at the front desk where they usually negotiated quickly whose turn it was, feeling guilty about the $5 million insurance check, which had arrived and sat in her bank account like a phantom that had taken up residence. Despite Jobe’s parents’ wealth, they’d never lived like anything but a professor’s family: comfortable and scruffy. Now, her return to work had become a choice, a diversion. And this affair somehow no longer was.

It reminded Carmen vaguely of unloading the dishwasher, taking bundles of forks out and setting them in a drawer. Not unpleasant, by any means, and satisfying in its way. Her relationship with Danny still seemed necessary, but more in the way of an everyday task. The daring otherness of it had evaporated. No longer was this the secret that gave dimension to her unfulfilling home life. These days, with Jobe gone, it felt simply like three recreational hours in a cheap hotel.

She scissored up to sit in bed, using her abdominal muscles the way she’d been taught in Pilates class. It wasn’t like Carmen to beg but she was desperate to shake Jobe from her thoughts. “What I need is a change of scenery,” she said to Danny, who had turned the other way and was reaching down for his boxers. “I know you can’t get
away
. But let’s do something, I don’t know, different. Maybe a museum in D.C.? It’s not like Mega has spies. We could get a room at the Monaco; have dinner somewhere really nice. I have some extra cash right …”

Danny made the motions of putting two legs through the holes of his shorts then turned to look at her, his face set and mournful in a way it never was.

“Carmen,” he said, putting one hand on her sheeted leg and staring at her exposed breasts, rather than her face.

“Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to leave your wife.” She inhaled, defiantly jutting her chest out. “All I want is some room service, a little champagne. C’mon. I’m a little rattled, frankly. I don’t think this is too much to ask.”

“It’s not that.” Danny shook his head and when he raised it, his face was sad. Carmen never thought of him as Indian, but seated there with a stony expression and his broad bare chest he reminded her of the photos she’d seen of warriors, sitting atop horses, feathered head-dresses blowing in the wind. “I, uh, felt something, earlier. I’ve been trying to think of a way to tell you. It’s right …” He reached out and touched two fingers—so lightly that Carmen suspected he actually was hovering a single electron orbit’s distance away from her surface—to the outer curve of her left breast. “Here.”

She sat perfectly still. Danny withdrew his hand and revolved slowly so he was facing her, cross-legged on the bed. He took both her hands, the concerned gesture of a husband or old friend. Carmen was certain he did it to keep her from touching herself in the same spot.

“You felt something like … what?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “It was smaller than a golf ball, bigger than a marble, I guess. Kind of rough and”—he took a breath—“very hard. From everything I’ve read, it’s probably something you need to get checked out.”

“You’ve read about this?” Even she could hear how sarcastic and frightened her tone was.

“People call the library for information. You’d be surprised. Sometimes it’s the first thing they do after talking to a doctor.”

Terror was licking at her now, icy against her temples and neck. “Lucky me. I can just bypass that medical part, seeing as how I have the librarian’s ear.” She pulled her right hand free and Danny
let her but kept gripping the other. Gently, as if afraid of hurting herself, she traced the outside of her left breast, starting at the top, around one o’clock, thinking of all the self-exams she hadn’t done, pressing the pads of her fingers into the skin more deeply as she went along.

There was nothing there! He was wrong. He must have been imagining it; could it be he wanted her to be sick, wanted her out of the way now that she was free of her marriage and could become a bother? A stalker. Showing up at his house late at night, slashing Mega’s spandex clothes with a steak knife, boiling rabbits on his …

Carmen’s fingers ran into the knot just at the point where she had become too confident and started digging down in earnest. Why anyone would call this a lump, she couldn’t understand. The word implied a softness, like the lumps of flour in gravy that could be easily batted apart with a wooden spoon. This thing was more like something you’d encounter in the bark of a tree, heavy and coarse, with an odd, spiraling tail that seemed to trail down into the space under her arm.

“Oh,” she heard herself cry, just before Danny moved in and closed his arms around her.

“It could be nothing,” he said into her ear. “In most cases, that’s what happens. You go in, they take a biopsy, and it’s perfectly benign.” He had the loamy smell of unshowered sex and Carmen knew she should warn him: He must not go home to his wife this way. Instead, she let him hold her until a few minutes before four o’clock when they both scrambled for the rest of their clothes.

“You’ll make an appointment tomorrow?” Danny asked as he pulled his pants on and started fastening his belt with its complicated silver buckle in the shape of a wolf, his Cherokee clan. She was silent, and he stopped what he was doing. “Carmen?”

She looked up at him from where she was sitting on the unmade bed, holding her long dress socks in one hand, not moving. Danny sighed and sat next to her, lacing his hands together. She shifted her
gaze to them, the very fingers that had detected her (she refused even to think the word
lump
) comet made of stone.

What if she’d never come here with him?
Carmen played the game. What if she’d loved her husband better and grieved him right, staying home to rearrange his clothes in the closet and weep? What if, back when she’d sat in a room with Jobe and heard the doctor say non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she had never felt even the slightest twinge of reprieve? Any one of those things might have changed what was happening right now. Perhaps thoughts have weight—enough to push the balance of events from one outcome to another—and every action alters molecules in tiny but profound ways. This cancer—because she was certain that no matter what Danny said, that that’s what it was—had been shaped by everything she’d done and wished for over the past many years. It was the product of her life: an evolving enemy living in the pocket under her left arm.

“Look, if you want me to, I’ll call in sick and take you. Maybe there’s a clinic in Frederick where we could go.”

“No.” Her voice came out calm, almost ghostly. “That would be stupid.” What she meant was that Baltimore had one of the best medical facilities in the civilized world—it hadn’t helped Jobe, but still, one did not leave the Johns Hopkins system to be examined by country doctors with flickering, outdated X-ray machines. Danny, however, took it another way.

“Okay,” he said. “I suppose you’re right. There’s no need to take the risk, because you’re probably just fine. They’ll do a little minor surgery and take out this … cyst.” He made a hand gesture she took to mean the swipe of a knife. “I’ll be careful of the stitches next time and spend a lot of time helping you relax and recover.” He’d been caressing her thigh but Carmen saw Danny turn his hand so he could look at his watch, as he bit the inside of his cheek.

“Listen, I hate to do this, but I have a dinner thing …” he said finally.

“Go.” Carmen was still holding her socks in one hand. It was possible she might go barefoot, she decided. The weather was warm. May. Things were growing; if you were very still, you could feel it in the air. “I have a couple phone calls I want to make and the room is paid for.”

Danny shot her a look, but she hadn’t meant anything by the comment—or if she had, it wasn’t worth going into. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Call me at work tomorrow, will you? Tell me what you find out?”

“Of course.” She lifted her face, prompting him to rise from the bed and kiss her. Then he took ahold of her shoulders and tipped her chin up farther, so she was looking into his eyes, where the Irish blood shone through Indian skin with two gleams of ocean green. “Carmen, I love you. Maybe not in the traditional way, but I do. And if you need something, you can call. I’ll find a way to explain it to Mega.”

She nodded and blinked, wishing there were tears there. Why, if she could cry for the man she’d disdained couldn’t she cry for this man, whom she’d dreamed of since she saw him sitting behind his desk decorated with leather and turquoise two years before? But rather than returning his feelings, she felt only a vague, unfair anger toward Danny, who had changed everything in a single afternoon: first by diagnosing her with his busy hands and then by proclaiming his love.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Carmen lied. “But I’ll let you know.”

The attendant brought her tea, in a cup with a saucer and a linen napkin and a tiny spoon. This was like being at Olive’s house, Carmen thought, only in an ugly pink fleece robe and jeans, waiting for her turn to have her breasts smashed between the plates of a huge machine.

“So you’ve had … one mammogram? Is that right?” The woman sitting next to her had a clipboard and a springy bracelet
around her wrist with a key that she used to open the dressing room doors.

“Yes. I had a baseline at thirty-nine. My mother died of breast cancer, so I wanted to be careful.”

The interviewer grimaced. “But nothing since?” Carmen turned to the woman, who had drawn on eyebrows with what must have been a felt-tip marker. They were weird and furry-looking but perfectly flat. “We recommend mammograms every year after forty,
especially
for first-degree relatives. For you it’s been”—she flipped back to a previous page—“more than two.”

There was a pause. No point in reviewing the fact that she’d been told something completely different when she was in last time; back then, the technician had said if the scan was clean, Carmen could wait safely until forty-five.

“Well, my husband was very ill and I seem to have forgotten,” Carmen said. This was like a tactical checkmate, a move you couldn’t use until the opportunity was presented directly to you, but then it worked every time. Not that Carmen was much interested in chess. But Jobe had been determined to teach Luca—even buying a set with the characters from
Alice in Wonderland
to help capture him—and sometimes after dinner she would watch them play.

“He passed away last month,” Carmen said, though she was still picturing the two of them hunched over the board. “I guess I haven’t been thinking clearly since.”

“Oh, Lordy.” The woman’s face went through a montage of sad expressions; then she put her hand on Carmen’s arm and squeezed. “You’ve been through
everything
, haven’t you, dear? I don’t know how people like you stay so strong.”

“Are there any other options?” Carmen asked, then immediately felt bad. If she was going to use Jobe’s death to elicit sympathy, she should at least be grateful when that’s what came her way.

“Now, dear, I want you to show me where you found the lump.” The woman sat, pen poised.

Carmen looked around the room, where half a dozen women
sat. There were also two husbands—if they were here, the X-ray probably was not routine for their wives either. She pointed with her right finger to her left breast. “Here.”

“I need an exact spot, if you can,” said the woman, pulling out a sheet with a crude outline of a female form. “Can you still feel it? Has the lump gone away since that first time?”

Carmen shook her head, amazed that her fantasy was such an ordinary possibility. She’d been prodding herself obsessively, hoping the comet would simply disappear. But each time she’d checked, it was in the exact place where Danny discovered it nine days earlier.

Now, she slipped her hand inside the robe and palpated her breast until she homed in on the location, touching herself directly above. “It’s right here,” she said, and the woman with the key made a neat cross on the top left side of the drawing. Like a treasure map.