Amy Bloom: A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

Mai hears Charley on the stairs and closes her eyes. If you love me, please don’t come in. Don’t make me look at you, don’t make me act like I know you. I don’t need food or attention right now. If there is anything you can give me, darling, one little thing I would ask for, it’s just your absence. A bag of chips, a glass of seltzer with a slice of lemon would be okay, and if you can spare me even that quick, soft look that suggests that I am somehow connected to you, I’ll be more grateful than you can imagine and I’ll tell everyone how I could not have made it through this without you. Just let me live on this nice dark side of the moon a while longer.

It’s not Ellie who should be alone, Mai thinks, it’s me. Ellie may have missed the romantic boat a few times, may have misjudged a turn or two, but she is not incapable of love. Mai is. She cannot do, for even a minute, any of the wise, kind, self-affirming, reassuring things recommended in her stack of books. People have sent flowers and brought gifts. She would have preferred more flowers and different gifts. She now has a small library on breast cancer: How to Think Yourself Healthy, How to Have More Fun with the Rest of Your Life, Curing Your Cancer with Fruits and Vegetables, Meeting the Challenge of Mastectomy, feminist approaches and feminine approaches, and none of them telling her how to find her way back to the cheerful, steely, enviable person she has been for forty-three years. The books are story after story of breast cancer survivors — they never use the word “victim” now, they are all warriors in the great fight, drumming their way out of the operating room, shakin’ a tail feather all the way to the specialty bra shop. Mai feels like a victim. She had been walking down a sunny street, minding her own business, doing no harm, when something sank its teeth into her breast, gnawed it from her body, stripped her skin off with its great claw and dangled her, hairless head first, over a great invisible chasm while poor Charley stood on the other side, befogged but hopeful, mistaking everything he saw and heard for something that had to do with him.

Mai rolls over to face the wall, her good arm tucked under her head. She can hear Charley breathing in the doorway, and when he leaves after just a few seconds and pulls the door closed behind him, the dark in the room is the deep, delicious gray cloud she remembers from childhood; she is Thumbelina, tucked in a giant velvet pouch, comforted by the smell of pipe tobacco and leftover potatoes and by the sound of her parents’ conversation.

Mai hears Charley walking away. God bless you, she thinks.

“That chicken’s got awhile to go,” Ellie says.

Charley pours another Scotch. “Let’s watch the sun set,” he says.

They twist themselves around on the porch to watch the orange sun and the brief, wavering vermilion circles on the water. The white hydrangeas turn pink, then deep rose, then their color disappears.

Charley stands up to stretch and pulls off his sweatshirt. “I’m just rank. I’m going to take a swim, and then I’ll finish dinner. You?”

“No. I’ll sit. I’ll cheer.”

Charley walks down to the end of the dock, shedding his jeans and briefs. He stands with his back to Ellie, dimly white against the dark. His ass is small and high around its shadowy cleft, deeply dimpled in the middle of each cheek, and his thighs bow out like a sprinter’s. Ellie can see each round knot in his back, muscles bunching and moving like mice across his shoulders, unexpected slabs of muscle curving over each shoulder blade, smooth, thick lines of muscle lying on either side of his spine.

Ellie would rather that Charley was sick in bed and Mai was swimming, but looking at him now, she thinks, as she does occasionally in the face of certain art forms to which she is largely indifferent, Even I can see how beautiful this is.

Charley does a long, thrashing crawl for a quarter-mile and a breaststroke back to the dock, head lifting toward home. Ellie waves and opens a bottle of Meursault; since chemo, even the smell of red wine, even the sight of the red-tipped damp cork, makes Mai ill. Mr. Cushing sends over a case of his own golden white wines every few weeks, just for Mai. Ellie and Charley drink a couple of bottles every weekend — Mai drinks a glass the day after chemo, before the nausea kicks in.

Charley climbs onto the dock, hopping from foot to foot to shake the water out of his ears, patting himself dry with his underpants.

In the living room, sitting on the wicker divan, feet up on the wicker coffee table, Charley and Ellie toast a few things: Mai, the Cushing wine cellar, the last chemotherapy session, only two weeks away, old friends.

“I have no idea …” Charley shrugs. Water drips slowly from his hair to his sweatshirt.

“No idea what?”

“What was it like for you?” Charley and Mai spent an entire summer hiking through the dales and woodlands and lesser hamlets of the Yorkshires; they left before Ellie had even had her mammogram and came home two weeks after her last chemo.

“Pretty much like this. It sucked. You remember how pooped I was that fall.”

Charley does remember, vaguely. They brought flowers and butter crunch and a big straw hat as soon as they got back. Ellie didn’t come to Fishers, but Mai was at Ellie’s place half the week all that fall. By Christmas, Ellie’s hair was dark brown again and wildly curly, and she and Mr. Cushing were winning at Dictionary.

“What, Charley?”

“How much does it hurt?”

“Now, or then?”

“Then.” Charley hopes, of course, that it doesn’t still hurt, but his concern is with Mai. Ellie is clearly fine.

Ellie sighs. “You mean, what’s it like for Mai now? How much pain is she in now?”

Charley nods.

“Lots of aching. Numb feet. Mai has that. Stiff arm. Itchy. You know, everyone’s different. You could ask her.” Ellie says this to be encouraging, but it seems unlikely to her, and to Charley, that he will ask, and if he does they both expect that Mai will say, “Not too bad,” like a true Minnesotan, or else, in the manner of her father-in-law, “Not worth discussing.”

“But right where … where the breast was, how is that? How is that now? How does it look?” Charley keeps his eyes on the coffee table.

“Didn’t Mai show you?” Charley and Mai are the only couple Ellie knows well. Surely not all heterosexual couples are so reticent, so determinedly unobservant. Ellie knows another straight couple who taped not only the birth of their baby but the burying of the placenta and the subsequent bris. Certainly she prefers Charley and Mai’s approach, even with its obvious pitfalls. When you can share panties and Tampax and earrings with the person you have sex with, a little blurring is to be expected, a certain rapid slippage of romantic illusion, and that is not a plus as far as Ellie is concerned. On the other hand, no one except Mai and Ellie’s mother has seen her scar, and Mai’s mother is dead, so she and Ellie are actually even in the boldly-show-your-scar department.

Charley shakes his head.

“It hardly hurts now. And my arm is fine. Almost fine.” Ellie makes a circle with her left arm, and it is a pretty good circle if you don’t know how she was able to move it before.

“Good. I’m really glad it’s better.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Charley, what?”

“Forget it.”

Charley finishes his wine; Ellie does too.

“If you say no, I’ll understand. If this makes you really angry, I apologize in advance. Could I see it?”

Ellie unbuttons her shirt, one of Charley’s old shirts that she and Mai wear around the house. On Ellie, it saves the trouble of shorts. She is not wearing a bra and wishes there were some way to show only the clinically useful part of her body.