A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You Read Online Free PDF Page A

carbohydrates; everyone who is not confined by an IV drip or a restricted diet eats there. Mai sips herbal tea all through chemo, but Ellie goes down and back a few times, for a currant scone, for a cappuccino, fora mango smoothie. She is happy to spend three dollars on a muffin, grateful that she lives in a country where no one thinks there’s anything wrong or untoward in the AM A-approved pursuit of profit at the expense of people’s grief and health.
    Ellie prepares a little picnic on the seat next to Charley. Coffee the way he likes it, two different kinds of biscotti, a fist-size apple fritter, two elephant ears sprinkling sugar everywhere, and enough napkins to make this all bearable to Charley, who is two steps short of compulsive. Ellie presents him with the food-covered seat.
    “This is great,” says Charley. “Treats. Honey, look how she takes care of me. Yes, folks,
that’s
a wife.”
    This is supposed to be funny, because Ellie is a lesbian and therefore unlikely to be anyone’s wife. If Ellie lived with another woman, neither Ellie nor Charley nor Mai would think of Ellie as a wife. Ellie is pretty sure that her days of looking for a spouse are over; Mai thinks so too, and used to imagine that when Charley died, at a suitable but not horribly advanced age, of a swift-moving but not painful disease, she and Ellie would retire to her parents’ house in Oslo, or buy the little yellow house on Pearl Street in Provincetown that they walked past on spring break twenty-one years ago. Now it seems possible that Ellie will sit on a porch slugging back brandy with some other old lady, and that Charley will grow old with someone who has two breasts and a full head of hair.
    Ellie gives Charley a napkin, and he kisses her hand,which smells of coffee and antibacterial soap and of Ellie, a scent for which he has no particular name. Mai has always smelled like clove; since November she smells like seaweed, and Charley, like a pregnant woman, has lost his taste for sushi, for lobster, and for salt.
    They sit for two hours. Women in scarves, women in floppy denim hats, women in good wigs, even enviable wigs, and women in wigs so bad they would look better in sombreros; weary, frightened husbands; girls with tons of silky, curly, bouncing hair, whom Mai, Charley, and Ellie all take to be the daughters and friends of the patients. There are a few teenagers, the sweetest signs of their youth distorted, creamy, luminous skin swollen and ashy from chemo, nothing left of their immortal shields, so that even the women who shuffle along on their skinless feet, even the old women whose aged ears hang off their heads like tree fungus, even they cannot bear to look at the children with cancer.
    Mai’s favorite nurse, Ginger, an old vaudevillian’s idea of a nurse, busty and long-legged in the only tight white uniform Mai’s seen, showgirl perfect except for her snub-toed rubber-soled shoes, leads them to Corner C of Room T4, the best chemo room as far as Mai and Ellie are concerned. Charley kisses Mai at the door, as if this were the dressing room or a gynecological exam, as if everyone knows that he would stay if he could but the rules forbid it.
    Ellie is disgusted, but Mai is fine. Relieved. Sitting agitates Charley, and for the same reason that she wouldrather do the laundry than wait for him to volunteer, and for the same reason that she does not complain when he turns on the light at five a.m. to iron his shirt by their bedside before going to his office at seven, she does not mind his leaving. He is who he is. It is what it is. She says these things to herself a hundred times a day under normal circumstances. Now she says them two hundred times a day. When Mai repeats these things to Ellie, Ellie stares at her and says, “I hope that makes you feel better.” Ellie is an endless fixer and shaper and mender; she is as sure that life’s events can be reworked and new endings attached as Mai is that they cannot and that any