THREE:
Decisions, Decisions

David and I sit on the couch in the room where my husband died. In the two weeks David and I have been seeing each other, we’ve progressed from hand-holding to tentative hugs to long embraces. I press back against the upholstered arm as David caresses my crossed legs. My body is so lonely his touch feels like sex. I ask if he’s had a vasectomy. Eric had. 

*

Two years ago I walked beside Eric’s wheelchair as a nurse pushed him along a hospital corridor at midnight. I hadn’t known that outpatients fill the daytime MRI appointments. Inpatients like Eric get the odd hours. 

The overhead lights were bright, streaking the floor with shiny patches. We passed the CT scan room, which I recognized from the day before. 

The MRI machine was housed in a huge trailer parked against the backside of the hospital. We stopped at a cluster of chairs in an alcove. The hospital hummed like a sleeping beast. The blackness behind the double glass doors made a mirror. I pivoted the wheelchair to turn Eric away from his reflection.

Yesterday’s scans had shown tumors in Eric’s bones and liver. Now the MRI would check his brain. The biopsy wasn’t back yet, and one doctor had suggested this could be lymphoma, something treatable. But her shrug undercut that possibility.

We knew this was ocular melanoma. The tumor in Eric’s left eye had been radiated three years before. At fifty, he had been relatively young and the tumor small; there was only a ten-percent chance of the cancer returning.

 Yet here Eric was in a wheelchair, me seated in yellow plastic. I was too hammered by the sudden reality of Eric’s condition to feel anything other than dread. Exhaustion was for people with possibilities.

“You know you can’t die,” I said leaning towards Eric. “Remember, we hate all our friends.” He lifted his face and there was a trace of his wild smile that had first enchanted me decades before. 

*

Now David leans towards me until our lips meet. 

Finally, the real thing, after so many nights of aching for exactly this, my first post-death, not-Eric kiss.  

I shudder. 

David doesn’t kiss the way Eric did. His lips are tentative. We lean back and look at each other. “Wow,” David says. “I kissed you.” 

He looks old. There are lines around his eyes and mouth, and he smells different tonight. I wonder if his clothes are from a different closet in his house. I hesitate, then pull him into a deeper kiss, reaching for the magic I’ve imagined. As scared as I am, I want this so much more than I don’t. I press my mouth on his until he answers with a reassuring firmness. Our tongues meet and our hands wrap around each other’s shoulders. My pulse is so insistent in my ears I wonder if he can hear it. I pull back.

We go to the kitchen for dinner and I step up close to David, lean into his chest. He’s the biggest man I’ve ever been with and I want to feel his bulk. Eric had been a tiny bit shorter than me, which mattered more after he died. All my fantasies drew whomever would be next as large, large enough to scare off sadness and the creepy male attention that’s hovered around my body’s hunger. That David is respectful and sweet, as well as tall and broad, feels like a jackpot. 

When we sit down to eat, David takes the seat at the head of the table. Eric’s place. A hard knot of grief falls through my chest and lands in my stomach. I take my place on his right.

“I think we should wait until my divorce is final before we have sex,” David says.

“Are you serious?” I say. “Because I have no intention of waiting that long.” But I’m confused by the low tremble in my body, like the quiver that lasted through the weeks when Eric was dying. How exactly does sex work with a different man? How will we get our clothes off?  

My body and mind take turns taking over and my body wins. I stand up and squeeze between the table and David to sit on his lap, facing him with my legs straddled across his. I put my hands around his neck and cradle the back of his head. 

Now my mind takes charge. “I realize I’m giving you conflicting messages,” I say, “but I think I may need more space.” 

He looks at me and blinks, our faces inches from each other. I feel him get hard. 

“Okay, like, you mean after tonight.”

“I think so.”

“How often can I call you in a day?” 

“Twenty times,” I say. I kiss him and then pull back and look at him. “Okay, maybe only six times. Twenty could be creepy.” I kiss him again, then pull his face to my breast. His hair is surprisingly soft. I want to hold on to him forever, but I need to know he’ll back off if I ask him to.

*

The MRI two years before hadn’t found cancer in Eric’s brain, but the biopsy confirmed the ocular melanoma. The afternoon Eric came home from the hospital we lay on our bed with our arms wrapped around each other. Our thirty years together were in that embrace, the familiar comfort. We cried. The boundaries between our bodies were confusing. If the tumor in Eric’s eye had unleashed cells that would kill him, would they kill me too? Did it make any difference which one of us died? If one of us was gone, we were gone. 

“We’ve been so lucky,” Eric said. “So lucky to have all these years together. And now it’s going to be over.” We’d been told if the cancer reappeared there was no effective treatment. Eric would be dead in months. 

“We’re the luckiest unlucky people in the world.” I said and Eric nodded. Then I had to ask because I couldn’t imagine it. “What will happen to me when you’re gone?” 

Eric pulled back and looked at me with a shadowed smile. “You’ll heal for a year or two and then some man will scoop you up.”

*

David calls me three times the next day, each time a quick hello and check-in. By the third call, it feels like an interruption. Without him next to me, my body is quiet and I’m even more confused. Work is particularly busy and I’m exhausted. In the two weeks since our first date, David and I have talked and emailed every day, and seen each other whenever we’re both free. The excitement of meeting such a nice man, mixed with anxiety about the vulnerability I’m walking into, leaves me so agitated I’m hardly sleeping. It feels like grief—insomnia, a fluttery stomach, difficulty focusing outside the fog of thinking about David. Maybe I don’t have time to have a boyfriend. My body certainly wants someone in my life again. Or at least in my bed. But maybe I can’t handle an actual someone, another person who needs time and attention. 

My phone rings again while I’m driving home from work. David. Annoyed, I tell him I’ll call when I get home.

“You called me four times today,” I say when he picks up my call. 

“You told me six times was the limit,” David says. “In fact, at one point you told me twenty.”

“I was confused last night. I’m not sure about this. I need to be left alone for a few days.” I lean back against my kitchen wall, then slide down until I’m sitting on the floor. 

David is quiet for a moment, then says, “All I can do is ask for one hundred percent of what I want and negotiate the difference.” I knew this—a few days before, he’d talked about this idea as a way to navigate tricky parts of relationships.

“What’s a hundred percent of what you want?”

“To see you on Sunday, like we’d planned.”

My stomach clenches. “I don’t know.”

“Then I won’t be in touch with you. I’ll leave it to you to be in touch with me.”

“I need to get used to this.” 

“Used to what?”

“You don’t kiss like Eric.” 

“Ah,” he says.

*

I email David each morning after our call, but he doesn’t email back. By Friday, three days later, I’m worried I’ve hurt him, hurt my chance to be with someone again, someone who just days ago felt like a jackpot. My hands shake as I dial his number. He picks up on the first ring, his voice happy.

“Hello!”