Nadine Gordimer: Get A Life

– They'll operate. Should be right away. -

Both were confronted with what would be the evidence to challenge, postpone whatever this mutilation was going to be: look at the man, the clear architrave of the rib cage containing the rise and fall of life-breath beneath the muscular pads of pectorals, the smooth hard contour of biceps, the strong lean forearms – nature's complete evolutionary construction for all functions. There's a pretty phrase for it that's obsolete: the picture of health.

He could not avoid her holding his presence as if keeping a statue in vision while he strapped on his watch, went about the business of dressing. The victim is led to the scaffold – there are doctors to do it if there are no jailers – without the one who loves him. That one shut out. He must do something for her. He turned back to where she lay, bent to put his arms round her against the soft give of the pillows and kissed each wet cheek. But she pulled her hands free roughly and seizing his head pushed his mouth hard against hers, opened his lips with a stiff tongue and the kiss was about to become a passionate prelude when the child was heard demanding from the adjoining room, calling, calling. He lifted himself from her, they awkwardly disentangled and she ran barefoot to answer the insistent summons of the life they had passed on some night from an embrace in this bed.

Everything evolves into what has to be done next. There were more specialist consultations, more laboratory tests and the wise men in surgeons' white coats, if not wizards reading the firmament or sangomas reading the bones, made their decisions. All one had to do, oneself, was comply, present one's body. It belonged to the men in white coats (in fact, one of the specialists is female, so the body is taken over by a woman in a manner never before, asexual. Not something in a healthy young male's experience!). While the preliminary processes for surgery were going on, he and the real woman, Benni, made love every night. Only at night, and in this way, could fear bury itself. The unbelievable become one flesh.

Her own parents were divorced and both farther and further separated by the seas between the Southern and Northern Hemispheres; she did not know whether to write to one or both about what had invaded her – the dread, certainty – she put off the attempt at composition of such a letter. Her mother flying back to the country of her outlived past to support her daughter – the idea brought recoil at the vision of the airport where that composite figure of childhood and absence would appear. Her father, there he was reading out to his third wife the letter of this daughter from a failed episode in his life who had made – he'd decide? – his way of dealing with it – an unfortunate marriage to some fellow who turned out to be seriously ill at thirty-something.

Lyndsay and Adrian. His parents. The parents. Benni had to admit to herself and the few intimate friends to whom she was willing to disclose what had fallen upon Paul like the wrath of an Almighty neither he nor she believed in – his parents were marvellous. Although he was their son, she and Paul had had an even relationship to them, he didn't see them more intimately, or more often than he and she did together and mainly on occasions of family gatherings, the birthdays, Christmas, a treat out at a restaurant or round the table, siblings and their attachments, where he and his sisters had grown up; the next generation, the grandchildren, urged to play together because they were something called cousins. No closeness to his parents, really. But now as if there were a normal course of events to be provided for in closeness, Lyndsay and Adrian offered – went ahead and made – practical arrangements the son and his wife had no thought for. Lyndsay absented herself from chambers of the legal firm where her name was one of So-and-So amp; Partners and took charge of the child, fetching him from playschool to care for him for the end of each day in the house where his father had run about at this same lively age, while Benni, her clients, computers, and copywriters left to others, accompanied Paul to the waiting rooms of clinics and pathology laboratories where the pre-operative test rituals were performed.

After recovery from surgery, thyroidectomy's the scientific term, he was allowed to go back to the ordinary: Benni, the small son, work. Recovery: an interim four weeks while an obligatory period passed before the radioactive iodine treatment the doctors had found, by means of a scan, was necessary to what's their word, ablate residual cancerous tissue. He, and Benni and his parents under the unspoken sacred authority of the life-threatened one, lived the four weeks as if they were the usual progress of daily preoccupations. Ordinary. He timed a field trip that brought him from the wilderness the day before he presented himself back at the hospital for this ablation process.

He and his wife were told, in the most tactful way such Outer Space instructions may be conveyed, that when he was discharged after a few days of total isolation in hospital he still would be radioactive and a threat to those in contact with him. His wife came to tell Adrian and Lyndsay, who were together in the family home, the old house. It was not for a moment necessary to wonder what to do. Lyndsay spoke at once, for both of them, and it was there, in the tightening of Adrian 's forehead and his darkly fixed eye, that she was certainly so doing. – He'll come to us. Until it's safe. -

Taken for granted.

It would have been somehow intrusive to bring up the risk to them; clearly that final of all matters, the value of life and death, had long been discussed ultimately and privately, and resolved between them. Don't break down in emotion of gratitude. What decision other than this should she have expected a mother and father make? What conception of their own parenthood did their son and his wife have, then.

Only when they saw her off at her car did she turn without knowing what she was doing or as if to pick up some object left behind, and put her arms round Adrian, her head coming only to the level of his chest, a first-time embrace after five years of the peck on either cheek at Christmas and birthdays. Then to Lyndsay, two women touching breast-to-breast for a moment. The three had not spoken to one another on the walk from the house to the car. The last exchange had been as Adrian stood back to let the women pass through the front door: he had asked when was the probable date of Paul's discharge, and she had told him maybe two days, still.

Lyndsay's spread hand shaded her eyes from the sun. – Well, soon as you know… I'll fetch him from the hospital. – Only logical, she was already committed to being in contact with whatever it was that he would represent.

Benni with slow precision contained, restrained herself with the seat belt, turned the key in the ignition, slotted the gear, released the brake. Nothing else for her. The car had automatic transmission, at once moving over the gravel with the sound that came to her as grit grinding between clenched teeth, the doors snapped locked. Shut out of the process that was taking him over, herself detained in the prison of safety. She could not imagine what this kind of isolation would be like. For the first time since she took the call with his diagnosis, she was thinking not of him but of herself, herself. If there had been tears now as she drove they would have been for her.

The house is listening. Every now and then it is interrupted by the hum of the refrigerator turning itself on to maintain its ski resort temperature in the warm kitchen. He meant to get up and appear at breakfast with them but the doctors hadn't wanted to discourage him by telling him how deathly tired he would feel even after excusing himself to get to bed early and sleeping eight hours. His limbs, those biceps and forearms, thighs and calves, would not move. He could not even tremble into effort; there was no summoning it.