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CHAPTER TWO

IT WAS JUST TWO DAYS LATER—yesterday, November 3rd—that I found myself in a bathtub five floors above University Street, soaping up one of my graduate students.

I don’t mean this as an excuse, since bathing my student was a low I never thought I’d sink to, but I’m certain that I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t just discovered that I was literally coming apart. I don’t mean “found myself” in a spiritual sense or to suggest it wasn’t by my own agency that I took—or, well, Leah took—my clothes off. Or that I didn’t leap into the tub voluntarily, basically singing my consent. I just mean the situation itself gave me a new perspective from which to view my body, which was about to be transformed forever. Demoted, I thought, although I also tried to convince myself I’d be bionic, perky, invincible. They’d clean the terrors out of me, and in my improved body, I would also find myself somebody new.

But fuck the cheerful, hypothetical version of the facts. Suddenly, for the first time in my nicety life, I’d prefer to fillet my own heart than sit through another brunch with Charles’s or my colleagues—than ask or be asked, “What are you working on?”—than cook, write, sleep, teach, think, do what was right, or remain me. In fact, I wanted to crack open my own cage of bones and run straight out of myself. Or, failing that, could I just sleep with my student Leah every second until the doctors knocked me out?

This turn was only surprising because I’d been such a polite pleaser and goody-two-shoes until now. But maybe that life was a dishonest dress rehearsal for this, my actual final performance. Or maybe it was simpler than that—this impulse toward recklessness predated my “condition,” and I just wanted the wreckage of sex with Leah in the way that drinking too much at a party made you want something you already wanted, and if you drank enough, let you do it. Cancer was letting me do this! Thank you, cancer!

Or maybe my case was, in fact, dire, and therefore forgivable? What if I had very little time left to do anything that took place naked? Or, what if the numbers were off, or I was in that small percent of the bad side of the numbers, the two percent of people who didn’t wake up? (I mean, once it happened to you, then the chances were 100 percent, right?) What if I was one of the ones who was going to die on the table, or just after? Then I would have no time to do anything at all, so that was why I had to risk my entire life. Just to identify what that life was.

Or—let’s say I do survive this. I might still no longer be myself once I’m housed in an altered body. So how can I count on that later self to do anything that might benefit the me I am right now? In fact, what holds a person together at all? I acted in my own self-interest. So this is an excuse.

And in any case, forgivable or not, this chaos felt worth revving the engines in my blood. The way I saw it, I was sparking something I might keep, or at least get to remember after Drs. A and B cut the circuits in my brain with anesthesia. After they “did the removal” of my tissue, which Dr. A described to me at the very-large-breast (hereafter referred to as “VLB”) appointment as “external.” She was reassuring me; the idea was that mastectomies were easy. Maybe among the reasons she seemed to hate me is that I had the gall to ask about the tissue she was lusting to excavate: “External to what?”

And she and Charles had looked at each other, each saying to the other with eyes meeting over me, “See what I have to deal with?”

Charles is the most rational person I’ve ever met. Our daughter Alexi is nineteen, which—if you love math—means we had her when I was twenty-three, which—surprise, surprise—means my pregnancy was probably an accident. Which makes us seem wilder than we ever were.

I hate math. When I see numbers, a dusty velvet curtain drops over my mind and I can’t think. By the time she was in fourth grade, I had to study for hours just to help Alexi with her fractions and least common whatever, multiples? I was intent on not allowing her to believe that women are worse at math, so I rallied. I also made Charles or the repairmen we hired work at night or while Alexi was at school when they fixed things, so I could say I’d fixed them. And I learned the basics, could unscrew a pipe, find what was wrong with the washing machine or dishwasher, turn on the digital TVs, etc. So, I lied until it was true, in other words. Ish.

It’s true that when Charles and I got married, we were young and knocked up. But Alexi was only an accident in the sense that we hadn’t planned to have a baby at that moment. We’d had a lot of rollicking sex, and I liked the extreme-sport-unprotected variety—wasn’t it enough that I was so monogamous? Plus, I was such a jittery teenage boy of a person and body; I never really believed I could get pregnant. This body? Morph into something big and earthy and productive? Ha! I had always considered my body a vehicle for pleasure. I didn’t have the capacity to imagine it building other people’s spines and eyeballs.

Charles always suggested protection—was always sane, thoughtful, “let me get a condom”-ing me, but by the time I met him I was petulant and distracted. I no longer liked to have the plot interrupted, to roll out of the story into the nightstand drawer, rip open a plastic package and find the slippery, vending-machine prize inside, only to have to unroll it and wrap up the present I had just unwrapped. No! So there it was. My lunacy shaping the rest of our lives.

And yet—even though it was my love of reckless sex that landed us with tiny Alexi, when I showed Charles the stick with the double lines, he hugged me right off the ground and laughed with happiness. At dinner that night he was pleased and pragmatic; it was just a little earlier than we’d expected but good, now we’d be young, which meant our chances of having a healthy baby were excellent and we’d be fine. He’d always known we were going to stay together forever, what was a few years early on the baby front? Maybe he’d been thrilled that we were getting a jump on middle-age stability.

I told Leah none of this, of course, just put my mouth on her mouth, then her neck, shoulders, breasts, stomach, thighs. I didn’t reveal anything about my diagnosis or personal life, because obviously such confidences are inappropriate in a student-teacher relationship.

Here’s how yesterday happened: she came to my office hours. And sat in my giant green chair, wearing tight, straight-leg jeans, work boots, and a tee shirt with a tiny rhino icon on the left breast. Was I looking? I’d never really noticed in any sort of real detail what my students looked like, but for some reason she came into clear view. Her hair, short and red, looked like a lit wick, and she said, “Professor Baxter, can I ask you something?”

And whatever she asked was about love poetry, but I didn’t hear her. And then she cocked her articulate, angular face to the side and said, “Hey, do you want to come over and chat about this someplace quiet? Someplace—” She looked around slowly at the walls of my office, and I noticed how big her eyes were on her face, how far apart, and I saw the walls she was looking at and suddenly felt trapped, almost consumed by them.

“Well,” she laughed, a throaty, boundary-shattering laugh. “Someplace not here, anyway. Professor?”

And I said, “Yes,” without a pause long enough even to honor what had once been rules I lived by. And she moved her boots in a way that looked like dancing or clicking her heels together. And stood.

More mysterious than my life-dissolving “yes” was how Leah had the bravado to know to invite me to her house. Maybe she was in the habit of getting the things she wanted, which wouldn’t be surprising. There was something very strange and appealing about her, her particular toughness, the brave eye contact thing she did, the way she took my clothing off like it and I belonged to her. She was entitled to all her appetites, delicious. And I, an utter stranger to myself, went shy when I tried to unbuckle the belt I hadn’t noticed she was wearing. And unzip her jeans. She laughed while I moved them down her hips, slim like a boy’s—or what I thought was like a boy’s, because I’d been, up until this point, somewhat unimaginative.

Then we were in the tub, because she said, “Let’s take a bath. I have a very good tub,” and it was true. Old-school, with feet, claws.

In the water, she tried to sit in the back behind me, but I didn’t like this idea, wanted her in front of me, so I could see and not be seen. She didn’t object too strenuously when I positioned myself, just climbed in and leaned her smooth, straight back against my front. The feeling of her spine, skin, and neck caused me to float above the scene we’d created, taking certain stock: a late-fall day at the equator of my medical experience, three weeks after the initial lump and crisis, three weeks before the surgery. There were slick, sand-colored tiles, Leah, bubbles, hot water, and even a very flattering image of me, a blameless extra in someone else’s unforgivably banal, clichéd—well, okay, kind of hot and titillating story.

She turned and looked right at me with her giant, straightforward eyes. I felt shocked, even though it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, either that I was in this situation or that eye contact might be required at some points during it. The right half of Charles’s blond, familiar face loomed in my mind like a blimp over a stadium, even as I met Leah’s gaze. I saw his half-gray unibrow, thought, I love him, and grimaced, because even my thoughts were now badly wrought. And because what difference did it make if I loved him or not? Nothing about dutiful or romantic love had prevented me from leaping into my student’s life and frolicking as if I were either an unmoored teenager myself—or worse, one of my ancient male colleagues, dragging a beautiful youngster down the drain of my midlife morbidity.

I even thought, well, at least Alexi, our daughter, was an undergraduate, so she and Leah couldn’t really be considered the same age. What a hideous witch I’d become! And yet, what fun. No wonder this shit was what men did all the time. Although most of the men I knew who had gone this route seemed to have been in positions of greater power than I felt I was in, somehow. Was I an old man? A powerful professor of poetry taking advantage of my vulnerable student? It didn’t feel that way. Slipping down an existential cliff, I began to make small, repetitive circles on Leah’s hip. Leah, the redhead whose poems and papers, although unexceptional, had made my stomach lurch.

Leah was laughing, and I was glad. I told myself that this was fun for her, fun in the way things are fun when you’re young and have no sense of consequences. She turned the water back on with a sleek foot, and a jet of heat spread up my calves. I closed my eyes and rested my head on an inflatable neck pillow secured to the tub’s back ledge.

How much time did Leah spend bathing? She was the one who’d suggested getting in, so maybe she diligently read my assignments while half-submerged: Beowulf with lavender sea salts, Thomas Hardy as the water turned gray, Elizabeth Bishop while Leah loofa-ed. Now she leaned even more fully back into me, letting her knees fall against the sides of the tub. Her red hair, although short, haloed out in the water, suddenly less spiky. I wondered what she put in it, how she combed it to make it look so prickly when dry. Now it had become soft strands.

I moved my hand from her stomach up first, onto the landscape of her breasts, trailing bubbles over her nipples, then moving my fingers down under the water to her rib cage and stomach, flat and hard. And even so, the next image arrived in my mind: a set of stacking bath dolls I once bought for Alexi, rubber renditions of Russian nesting dolls, but with hair—who thought that was a good idea for a bath toy? Water remained between them no matter how long they dried or how vigorously I scrubbed, so mold grew all over them like disfiguring birthmarks or cancers.

I said, “Leah,” out loud, reality trumping the mottled dolls momentarily.

“Yeah?”

I had nothing. The next image was me, dead, Charles and the forensics team finding my blue body here in the tub, bloated as a carnival doll. The dead star of a show I wouldn’t be willing to watch.

“Sam?” she asked.

Um. Sam? I got that I couldn’t really expect her to call me Professor Baxter in this context, but I would have preferred Samantha at least, as if those two additional syllables could help correct for some of this.

“Hello? You okay?”

“I’m fine, Leah. I was just making sure you’re still here.” I liked her name, Leah. It reminded me of Star Wars, something quirky and sci-fi, otherworldly. Like her.

I GATHERED MORE bubbles from the surface of the water and rubbed them into the slight dip of Leah’s hip bone, felt them disappear, felt the jut of her hips for as long as I could stand not to move my fingers down, slowly. As I traced the shape of her, sliding my fingers between her open legs, a bunch of disconnected nouns surged back: first, the sidewalk we’d just walked down on University Street came at me—pavement squares, a parking meter, wheels, the curb rolling like punctuation. Parentheses. Leah’s skin. All outside matter was merging dangerously with inside.

Leah was rubbery, the warm water dissolving whatever was left of my clear thinking, early boundaries. She moved like a mermaid, wiggling against me. I was counting, holding my breath, whatever used to be selective about my permeability vanishing. I was borderless, without outlines, and therefore no longer myself. Convenient, because then I could keep moving my fingers, feeling the steam rise around us as Leah slid around and the tub filled.

The bubbles rose above its edge and oozed over, onto Leah’s (face it, Sam), angry-emoji-shaped bathmat. The nouns came back, and I had the sense I’d often had lately—that I was literally asleep, dreaming atop our green sheets, a set sent by Charles’s mother, geraniums blooming across them. That I might wake up any moment with his arm draped over me, or his foot tangled around my ankle.

Even as I tried to focus on Leah’s sea creature-y signals, I thought of sheets Charles and I had shared, how for nineteen years I’d washed and stretched the sets out again and again over the tight corners of a series of mattresses that seemed suddenly like an ill-conceived art installation. What if I lined up every mattress we’d ever slept on? I could bounce from bed to bed and maybe make it across the entire planet.

“Don’t stop,” Leah whispered, arching her back and pressing into my hand, moving harder against it. I didn’t increase the pressure of my fingers, just kept a soft, consistent movement inside and outside of her, letting Leah move against me until she made a cricket sound in the back of her throat, a chirping signal of pleasure almost painful. Then she relaxed into the water, laughing. “Okay, now you can stop.”

That sound! My life dissolved like an old-fashioned slideshow catching fire. Each image melted and curled: Charles’s hands, knotted, arms tight and sinewy, cradling his head on a pillow. He’d slept like that when we were young, holding his own face as if it were a baby, and then later—after we’d lived in two cities and three apartments—holding one of my arms, as though he’d exchanged his head for it. From there, the slope was dangerous; he began to fall asleep with any part of himself wrapped around or holding or lying directly on part of me: an arm, leg, foot, shoulder on my shoulder, sometimes even his head on my chest. It was a weight and tangle I thought kept me awake, except I must have fallen asleep each night, because I’d wake later having glided out from under Charles into my own cool space.

Here were Charles’s size thirteen feet. Here, the fallen tree shapes his legs made under the quilt. Here, his chest rising, falling, breathing. Here was Alexi, toddling up the first porch step, a clean diaper on her head like a little barrister wig. My mother, coming out of the door of her house onto the porch, clapping.

And in the treacherous eye of my mind, here was Alexi again, this time in a cap and gown, grinning sideways at her best friend, Siobhan, ignoring my camera. Alexi, with the tattoo high on her collarbone, a tiny lightning bolt that signified some secret between her and Siobhan, one she never revealed to me, and which I could hardly hold against her now, no matter what it was. Alexi never looked directly into a camera, but always sideways—always away from whoever wanted to capture her, maybe especially me. Or maybe she was like me, cagey, fast, distractible. Here—kill me—was Charles’s mother, visible from across a stretch of golf-able lawn, raising the pale drink in her hand up to meet her angry mouth.

Leah turned over and flattened herself on top of me. She looked down as if deciding something, then put a hand on my stomach before climbing out of the tub, careful not to crush me. She stepped onto a damp pile of clothes on the floor: her jeans and belt, a black tank top, infinitesimally small and complicated underpants.

“You want a cheese sandwich?”

In order to have wanted a cheese sandwich less, I would have had to be dead already. I imagined cutting a sandwich in half for Alexi, the insides oozing out. I imagined knives. How do doctors get knives under human skin? Do they peel the skin back and then scrape the tissue out? Does skin peel away in a pure sheet? Doesn’t it tear? Scrunch up? Bleed? What happens to the blood? Do they suck it away with one of those loud tubes like water from the back of my open mouth at the dentist?

I didn’t move or speak. The water was cooling creepily.

“Stay there,” Leah said. “I’ll bring it. I don’t want you to go hungry at my house.”

I imagined a sandwich floating in the bath with me. Leah dropped the towel to the floor and walked naked out of the room. My stomach fluttered with multiple wings. Desire—how far would it take me? It had certainly taken a statistically meaningful number of my colleagues into affairs, and, in at least two recent cases (including that of the former dean of arts and sciences, who left his wife for a male adjunct), new states. Some it drove straight into the ground. The original chair of our department had a heart attack twelve years ago, after which we all learned he’d been sleeping with our three best graduate students that year. Maybe not the worst way to go. At the time, I was thirty, the newest hire. I’d considered him to be an absolute fossil, ready for death, was only shocked he even had it in him. He was probably fifty.

Did Leah consider me the oldest person ever? She didn’t seem awed, if so. I turned the hot water back on and reviewed our encounter so far. When we’d arrived at her house, she’d asked whether I wanted a drink, either mature for her age or an actual grown-up. I’d been confused by the question; it seemed so clear to me that we’d called off all the rules that her polite, “What can I get you?” seemed almost a parody, so old-fashioned as to be off.

“Oh,” I’d said, stunned quiet either by her youth or by my own, running behind me, catching up, knocking me over in this strange, possibly gross moment.

“Um, I’ll have whatever you’re having.” I never said um. Until now.

And neither did Leah, even now, because that was when she’d said, “I’m having you,” and pulled me to her without ceremony. My mind caught fire and burned blank.

Charles was so critical of faithlessness and those with pathetic morals that riling him up used to give me an illicit charge. In the beginning, we both liked it—he found it funny and scandalous to hear what gossip I could concoct, and not only about sex, but also about human behavior in general.

Later, even though he was less enthusiastic, I still liked to provoke him with dirty, presumptuous, and judgmental stories, but maybe there was some tragic or poetic logic to my compulsion. In any case, the gossip seemed crueler and less frivolous now that I was either already or about to be the object of it. Charles never even hovered near a tempting flame himself; he was genuinely above such antics. His father James often said, usually apropos of nothing, “Human beings are morons. No one ever lost money overestimating the stupidity of other people,” and, “The world operates at a C-minus level.”

He meant those without the exclusive blessing of his genetics, of course, including me—he’d always counted me among the humans who collectively brought down the universe’s GPA. A disastrous match for his son. Of course, now he had incontestable evidence that he was right: not only was I illness-prone, but I was also a faithless disappointment to Charles. If I died, either on the table or because they couldn’t cure whatever poison was in my cells, then he’d be even more right. He preferred being right to anything else and was, frankly, selfish enough to enjoy this latest victory, even if it came at the cost of his own son’s marriage and happiness. Not that marriage and happiness are the same.

Now I heard Leah’s feet slip and pad along the kitchen floor, heard the fridge door open, hot splash of butter hit the skillet. I looked down at myself in the now-cool water. My hips, bluish skin, the slip of my belly, cheating legs.

I stood, dizzy, and put a hand on the wall, grabbing a discarded towel and wrapping it around my waist. I wiped the mirror above the sink and saw myself surrounded by the fog like a tacky school photo, misty with me in the middle, my stupid face wet with steam. My skin was tight, mouth expressionless and familiar—the bottom lip so full it suggested pouting, the upper one thin enough to contradict it and give me some sternness I’d once been grateful for, but now just made me look old. And predatory. I opened the cabinet to punish myself: mini o.b. tampons, a little glass bowl of rings for her belly button, which I’d noticed in the bath had a small silver object in it. And endless ChapSticks and round tubs of lip gloss, which surprised me. She didn’t seem the type.

Someone my daughter’s age. It was a good thing I don’t believe in God, because otherwise I’d be high on the list for smiting. Charles and I used to gossip about the trolls who drank the youth of students and then either abandoned stunned wives or traded entire lives of actual thinking and living for epic sessions of couples therapy. I always thought counseling was talking that happened at the expense of living, that if you had to discuss your relationship all the time, you probably weren’t busy or happy enough having it. Hence, Charles and I never went to couples therapy, although I guess I didn’t really get to keep gloating about that now.

And as for the gossiping, it was really just me. I gossiped while Charles furrowed his face and cleared his throat occasionally to demonstrate that he hadn’t died of boredom or judgmental-ness.

I peered out into Leah’s hallway, steeling myself against additional innocence: beige plastic bins everywhere, likely for everything from toiletries to paperclips. There were socks strewn about, cheap throw rugs, pillows on a futon. A futon! Until this, I hadn’t had sex on a futon in fifteen years. When I said so, Leah joked that maybe this was my version of buying a new car and fucking my secretary, which would be funnier if it weren’t so obvious.

“Where’s my convertible, then?” I asked, trying to flirt. “And where’s my secretary?”

“You’re an academic,” she replied, tartly. “You have too much irony and too little money for a real mid-life crisis. And I’m your secretary.”

I felt defensive then, because I wasn’t the type to force my TAs to do secretarial tasks. I didn’t even have a TA; I taught poetry to twelve students. But if I had one. And I had plenty of money, too, although there was no reason my students would suspect that. I didn’t come to class dripping with jewels, in spite of Charles’s wealth. We exuded quiet evidence of the care that comes with expensive food, exercise, potions for the skin, good medicine. My clothes also probably cost more than their simplicity suggested, but none of that was recognizable to young eyes.

I wondered if Charles had it in him to punish me with money. I doubted it somehow. He’d always been generous about sharing everything, and in any case, he preferred moral judgment and remaining blameless himself. He’d be kind about cash, whether by continuing to allow me access to our shared bank accounts or in alimony payments, if we ever actually formalized the utter ruin of our lives. Especially since I was sick. Maybe he wouldn’t punish me at all, would just let me have this. Our marriage wasn’t in crisis, I don’t think—I just got sick and wanted to burn the world down. Still want to burn the world down. Or the parts of it that are trapping me, anyway.

I stood in the hallway. A line of photos on canvas: Leah and somebody, probably her mother, an anemic-looking blonde. What did her mother think of her lovely, boyish girl? I pushed the question from my mind. Here were Leah and another girl in sunglasses, the other girl in a small bikini, Leah in some kind of short wetsuit, a giant body of water behind them. Next, Leah holding a baby I assumed was someone else’s. I knew nothing about her family or life and hoped not to learn much.

How little could I hear and say, and still keep her close and naked? Or was she keeping me? She’d driven the day. Who even was I? I stood staring at a nail hole in Leah’s wall, just under the bottom edge of the canvas print of her and the baby; she’d probably tried to hide it with that photo but hung it just slightly too high. I itched to fix it.

And in that moment, it came to me: I would tell no one about my surgery. Just like I’d say nothing about Leah, obviously. I wouldn’t tell the department that I might be dying, would teach my way through the entire thing while averting my eyes. If I needed additional treatment, chemotherapy, radiation, poison they would have to pump into whatever was left of me after, I’d cross the question of whether to admit any of that later. I felt ecstatic relief. If I didn’t tell anyone, then maybe none of this would have happened.

I just had to get to and through the surgery, and then it would be Thanksgiving. Alexi would be home. We would eat pies and strip my drains and then hopefully by the following week, I would prop myself up and teach. Fake my way through until it was true that I was fine. I felt, for the first time since the diagnosis, like I would be alive someday, on the other side of this.

Of course, if that was true, what the hell was I doing in a towel in my student’s hallway?

“Sam?” Leah peered her head into the hallway, hair in small, wet lines that looked drawn onto her face. “Hey. So. Your sandwich awaits you.”

I thought, if I told no one that I was sick, then when it was over, it would be over and gone. Although—what was the line in that Heather McHugh poem about the hurricane, or was it a tornado? Anyway, the line happens after the storm:

It was over for maybe minutes.

Then it was never over.

Maybe this would be like that, never over, even once it ended.

“Coming,” I told Leah. I walked down the hallway, absurdly still in a towel, then doubled back to the bathroom and put my clothes on. I thought, while I was at not telling anyone about my illness, I also wouldn’t leave Charles. There was no reason to get divorced unless someone wanted to remarry, right? Although—I guess he would, actually.

Because that’s what men do, I thought, they remarry.

Maybe Leah and I should get married in white dresses, Leah with nothing under hers—no bra, no tank top, no underpants. We’d hold hands down an aisle and kiss in front of an audience of horrified relatives: Charles and his parents; Alexi, home from college; my mother, Sophia, slack-jawed; and who else? Oh my God. My older brother Hank and his wife, Sarah, and how about the students from my poetry seminar this semester? I’d assign them to write occasional poems and then appear myself, clutching a Sappho collection. I’d still be bandaged in my strapless gown, wound drains hanging like balloons from a car: Just married! Two drains on each side, blood collecting in their plastic bulbs. Someone would have to “strip” the drains and measure their fluid. Maybe I’d be able to do it myself. Would Charles still be willing, after this? Or I could twist Leah’s imagination for the rest of her life by asking her to do it: Hello, sexy fling, would you mind measuring the gore pouring from my wounds?

I had a sickening jolt of considering what the others in my class might think at Leah’s and my imaginary wedding. Or if they saw me now. What I myself might think of this if I saw me now—in other words, if my mind were still intact.

There were twelve graduate students in my workshop, all talented, one genuinely on her way to being a writer. I’d always prided myself on knowing who the stars were long before it was obvious to the world. It wasn’t always the ones whose writing was the most polished or gleaming, or even those—to my dismay when I was young—who worked the hardest or read the most. Once, it was a girl who consistently wore pants that rode below her pelvic bone. Every time she stood up, she flashed the entire class a band of waxed skin and I wondered, where do my responsibilities begin and end? Why had her mother not taught her to wear underpants? Or had she, and this was a rebellion? Was it obliviousness?

There was a quality about my best writers that was difficult to define—enormous talent and curiosity, yes, but also willingness. Maybe that makes me sound like a narcissist who, in addition to seducing my student in spite of having a loyal, diligent husband of nineteen years, also tries to turn young writers into other Samanthas. (Some wanted that, in fact—read Temporary Conditions when they were young and then showed up in this nowhere land of a university town to find me because they think my work helped form—or could help form—theirs).

But I’ve never wanted students who wrote my work. I’ve hardly even wanted to write it myself.

What I mean by “willing” is that they had to be able to discover what kinds of poems they could actually make, which required a willingness to recognize and acknowledge when they hadn’t figured out yet what they were capable of doing. Most people lack various components of this ability: some can’t tell in anyone’s work what’s successful and what isn’t. Others are blind only to their own work’s strengths and failures. Some can tell what’s wrong but haven’t learned to fix it. Not to mention the next requirement, which is to be open to making those poems you can make well, all while keeping enough variety and experimentation not to become an imitator of your own work—a problem I consider “being Jack Nicholson,” even though more than one student has pointed out to me that being Jack Nicholson would be awesome.

“But you know what I mean,” I say when that happens. “He just plays himself over and over.”

And they stare like a group of surprised deer, anxious to flee but unsure in which direction.

In the kitchenette, Leah stood at the counter, pouring orange juice into glasses embossed with cows. She was still naked, her stomach flat and stacked with muscles. I wondered if she ran, jumped, crunched. She pushed a round blue plate across the counter toward me.

“Don’t say I never wined and dined you,” she said. “Here, I’ll even get you a napkin.” She grinned at me, and I thought she was signaling that she was both too young to be believed and also wisely aware of how young she was or maybe seemed to me. I remember when I was young, having the constant irritated sense that I knew how little I knew. I reminded myself not to be a wise old woman now—why couldn’t I just revert to my younger self with Leah so we could enjoy each other?

She bent to open a drawer and pulled out a paper towel, so unselfconscious that I wondered what it felt like to be her. Maybe weightless. Her small, un-jeopardized breasts appeared immortal. She was still smiling, assembling this meal for me. Leah was a good person, composed of all the qualities I lacked. She was easily, fully human. And her poems, like her papers, were always oddly off the mark, but this made the fallible beauty in them somehow more compelling. And she was starkly unpretentious, a rarity in the workshop.

I looked down at the food, desperately flat on the plate. Leah was watching me. She came around to where I stood and stood behind me, put her hands on my hips, and slid them up and down like she was measuring something. I lifted the sandwich off the plate and took a bite. The cheddar was chalky and under-melted, the bread thick with congealed butter. I tried to avoid chewing, swallowed the doughy glob, and coughed out, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Can I get you something to drink now? I mean, to go with the sandwich?”

I felt like flinging all caution to the wind, and anyway, how was I going to get this sandwich down? I said, “Whiskey.”

“Oh, um, I have beer—is that okay?” Now she sounded shy, defeated. She hadn’t had the thing I’d asked for.

“Of course,” I said, even though I hate beer. It makes me feel like someone has pumped me full of air and hops and wheat or barley or whatever it’s made of. Plus, the smell. Like the woods at night, burning dirt.

She handed me a beer in a bottle, yellow as a urine sample.

“Aren’t you having one?” I asked, buying time, wondering where I could hide both the beer and the sandwich, collecting unwanted treasures from Leah.

“I don’t drink,” she said. “Bad history.”

I didn’t ask, didn’t want to know, just took a long, thirsty sip of the beer. It tasted better than I remembered beer tasting, although I thought suddenly that this was one of those beach beers, and she was supposed to have stuffed a slice of lime into its neck, right?

“I’ll be right back,” she told me, as if we were buddies on a field trip. Then she went to get dressed and I quickly wrapped the tragic sandwich in the paper towel and buried it in Leah’s beige trashcan, under melted candles, an empty bottle of cucumber lotion, and containers that had once contained pre-washed baby kale. I poured the bright beer down her sink.

My phone came alive then, buzzing in the back pocket of my jeans: Alexi. Her name ignited the new combination of fear and longing I felt every time I thought of my family. I hadn’t told her yet. We hadn’t told her yet. And now would I compound the announcement of my mortality with the one of my infidelity? “Your childhood was good—you’re welcome. But now that you’re nineteen, I have cancer and I’m sleeping with one of my students, who is barely older than you are, and dreaming of leaving your father for the first time in nineteen years of either being happy or deadening my fantasy life.”

Because I need more actual life for a minute, in case I die either of cancer or of some unpredictable disaster or complication during surgery three weeks from now.

Hard to imagine a way to put that euphemistically. I didn’t pick up.