Cancer Wife

The doctors say he should wake up. I didn't know -- because I didn't care to -- that cancer can put you in a coma, but it has been weeks without him at home. It gets so quiet there. The antiseptic hum of the hospital is almost a relief by comparison.

Months ago, I stopped telling people my husband had cancer. At first, the sympathy was welcome, but the pity in their eyes overwhelmed any satisfaction.

When your husband has cancer, everything is about him. I couldn't have a bad day without being reminded. "Oh, a client was rude to you? My prostate is swelling up, killing me with cell division barely controlled by radioactive poison. You poor baby, wanna trade?"

He'd never say this, of course, but I could tell.

Julian loved the attention. He loved that his every flaw could be forgotten. Cancer gave him a Get Out of Jail Free card on every conversation he didn't want to have. How can you pick a fight with a dying man?

He isn't dying. This form of cancer has an eighty percent recovery rate. For a man in his twenties, for someone who caught it this early, it's in the nineties. He will get better and will have to remember how to have a personality aside from "cancer patient."

I'm fooling no one. Even once he recovers, that will be all he talks about, how he bravely fought off certain death, nestled in his ass. I won't be the wife of a man with cancer. I'll be the wife of a man in recovery. I won't ever get to be myself again, only an accessory to his story. I will only be allowed to be strong because he was once weak, and I was his crutch.

That's why I cannot tell people. If I do, I will disappear before their eyes, replaced by who I am in his journey, a supporting player in my own life.

I am not even allowed to be mad at him. I'm not allowed to be anything but a sponge for his need and the expectations of others.

I had a dream the other night that I was the one with cancer. It didn't hurt. It gave me the excuse to lie on my sofa and be doted over. In the dream, Julian did that for me. I no longer knew that he would have, had the situation been reversed. I am mostly grateful that I wouldn't have to find out. It is pathological to envy a loved one for having cancer.

His mother calls nightly to talk to me. No, to talk at me. I have nothing to say that hasn't been said. She hated me when Julian and I were dating. I swear she rolled her eyes at our wedding when I said my vows. I liked her hatred better than her commiseration. Her annoyance that I was her daughter-in-law was white-hot. Her treating me as though we are on the same cheerleading squad against the Grim Reaper feels like mud sucking me down.

I've spent months trying to deal with all this while he sat there, being sick. He told me that the chemo made him too tired to deal with insurance paperwork. He called me a bitch for broaching the subject of a will with him.

"It's like you want me to die."

No, you bastard. I want you to live and give my husband back to me. You are not Julian. You are the cancer eating away at him, taking him hostage. Once he wakes up, he will kick your ass for every night I spent at the hospital. We'll go on dates again like we used to. My handsome husband will whisk me away from the frail, balding creature in that bed, hooked up to wires and tubes, the one who smells of bedpans and chemical decay.

She approaches me leaving the hospital.

I had nearly exhausted my accruals at work. I couldn't miss many more days. I thought that I had better save them up, just in case. In case, I suppose, that he is not in the 90%.

"You're Susan, right?"

I tell her I am. I couldn't be sure of anything else so early in the morning, my hair wild from the night I spent at Julian's unresponsive side. I knew his friends and family better now than I had ever wanted to, but I did not know her. I would guess she was in college if pressed. Maybe one of his students. She has the prettiness that youth and makeup give, the kind drained from me being the wife of a cancer patient.

"I'm Rachel." She does not extend her hand or offer an unsolicited hug, though I hate this from anyone I do not consider family. She looks guilty and pained, my first clue. Sympathetic, mournful, scared, all those make sense. Not this. "Can I buy you breakfast?"

There was a diner a block away from the hospital, faux stone face and decor that had seen better decades. I was too exhausted, too out of it to demand confirmation for all I suspected in that instant. I could be late to work, I thought, without serious repercussions. Who would punish Cancer Wife for stopping to eat?

As the waiter pours us coffees, Rachel hems and haws before admitting that she had been sleeping with Julian. Of course she had. Of course. I had given years of my life to Julian, been his nurse as much as his wife, supported him with my labor, and he had been sneaking off to fuck this girl.

A mini-jukebox was affixed to the wall of our booth-one play for a quarter, five for a dollar. The list of songs the previous occupant flipped to were all sappy ballads. There was the song we danced to at our wedding as some cosmic joke. I hated that song even then.

I look her over again, seeing every line under her eyes and those reaching to the ends of her frown. Not a college student, no, but not by much. I try to see what Julian must have in her, as an experiment, as torture. Brown hair. Brown eyes. A bulky aqua sweater that concealed whatever figure she might have. Younger than me, that's all that registers. I could find no beauty in the rest of the world, certainly not in myself. I could not have the generosity to allow the idea that this woman was so gorgeous as to invalidate my husband's vows of loving and honoring, even as I was deep into the "in sickness" part of mine.

"How long?" I ask, surprised I could manage even these two words without snarling.

"I don't think-- you don't want to know that."

A high laugh, more crazed than I meant, escapes me. "I do. I absolutely do. You're telling me that my husband has been sleeping around on me? You are damn well going to give me details."

"Five years, off and on," she confesses, holding her mug between us as if it might shield her from my wrath.

We had been together six years, married for four. Julian only got diagnosed last fall after he fainted while playing soccer with our nephews.

She takes some printouts from her purse and lays them on the table. My eyes catch a few sentences of what he would like to do to her, what he had done with her, some "I love yous" never meant for my eyes. Sexual obviously, but it hurts more to see romantic overtures. I pushed these back at her, knocking coffee onto them.

"You can see from the dates," she says, tapping the pages around the coffee. "When you were away on business. When you went to visit your sister. That's when we would--"

I cut her off. "What kind of a monster sleeps with a married man, then shows up like this?"

"A lonely one," she says. "That's all. He said you weren't serious until you got married, then he said that he only married you because you got pregnant."

"I was never pregnant."

She swallows whatever emotion this provokes in her. Did this remind her that the man she had taken to bed, knowing he was married, could not be trusted? "I know. I mean, I found that out. But I loved him and wanted to hope." She does not meet my eyes. "He said you were getting a divorce."

"Once he got sick?" I ask. "Were you with him after he got diagnosed?"

She looks up. "What does that matter?"

"Just tell me."

"A couple of times, just after." She shrugs -- a reaction, a habit, but not a gesture meant to convey anything to me. "I don't think he wanted me to see him get sick."

What a blessing that he forced me to hold his hand as it turned gray while this woman last saw him vital, himself.

She looks on the brink of tears, which helps me to hate her a little more. She wouldn't be crying for me or even for Julian. If she cries now, it would be for herself, because she wants comfort that she is not owed as a homewrecker. If Julian had not been diagnosed, she would not have repented. She would have kept carrying on with him whenever I had my back turned for a few hours.

"What do you want from me?"

Her lips go tight. "I just found out he was in the hospital and... is he... he's going to beat this, right?"

"He's in a coma," I reply, savoring the cruelty of the pain in her eyes. "That's not a good sign."

My breath catches. I wanted to wound her with that grenade, but the shrapnel perforates my body. I had not admitted the truth of this to myself. He could beat prostate cancer. Now that it had put him in that coma, his chances had precipitously dwindled. Julian might die. The man I love more than anything, even knowing about Rachel, might not survive this.

"Is there anything I can do?"

My mind flashes on a few choice things she had done for Julian. Everyone always wants me to give them something they could do as if running some chore would kill his cancer. As if it could quit their guilt when all they really wanted was to be as far away as they could be from Julian's dying. They wanted me to give them a way to flee from this experience with a clear conscience.

"You stay the hell away from my husband."

She bursts into tears, and I know I have been kind to her. She will never know this, but I have. Now, she can return to her life with a story where she is, in some small way, the aggrieved party. She gets to leave the experience of Julian behind her, following my command.

She does not say another word but gets up from the table and leaves the diner. I do not look up from my coffee to see. I hope never to see her again.

The waiter brings two breakfasts, looking at her empty seat.

"She's in the bathroom."

I eat my breakfast, savoring the cloying syrup and the rubbery eggs. I ask for a box for hers. When I motion for the bill, the waiter says it was already paid.

Maybe she was grateful.

I call out of work on my walk back to the hospital. The nurses eye me but wave me through. By now, I had come to be a fixture in the ward. As they did not have to give me medicine or check my vitals, they had learned to ignore me. I don't make a fuss.

I leave the extra breakfast at their counter for them to pick over.

Julian lies there, vapid and useless as I left him. I want to hate him. Even before the diagnosis, no one could ever hate him. He had a natural charisma. He seemed to be the guest of honor at any party that he attended. In high school, he lettered in three sports. It would have been more, but he needed time for forensics and drama. Any remaining time not spent dating, he devoted to attending his classes. He was not a great student, but he knew people well enough that no teacher could stand to fail him, to hear his mother tell it.

We met in college. When I relate the story, it is barely a meet-cute. When Julian told it, at bars and other people's weddings, it was destiny. He spent weeks wooing me away from my boyfriend. Each retelling increased in complexity and humor until I fell in love with him all over again whenever I heard him detail how I'd done it the first time.

The body in the bed, monitors beeping, bears little resemblance to my Julian. It is a pitiful shell, a wax mummy.

Rachel gave me something I had not been allowed to have: rage at something other than his cancer. I could almost be grateful myself because now I had a reason to hate Julian that might trump his cancer.

I take his hand in mine, kissing the knuckles, calling him a bastard, and kissing them again.