Greg shakes his head. He sees fear in Alex’s eyes, he sees uncertainty. And after what happened to Alex’s son all those years ago, Greg realizes saying that word is a big deal. Son. He feels honored. This makes his eyes burn, and he swallows hard. “Then you should know me better.”
Alex gets up. “Should I call Freddie? Should I talk to her instead?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“What you should do is stop looking at me like I’m a fucking porcelain doll. It’s insulting.”
“Insulting?” Alex sighs. “I don’t think many others would be insulted.”
“Isn’t that why I got to this point in the company? Because I’m me. I work my ass off, sick or not.” He touches his chest. “I’ve got to keep moving.” He inhales. “I can’t stand this.”
“This is beyond work, Greg. You can’t even see that, can you?”
“No, what I see is that my travel has been cut down to almost nothing, that you’re giving all the good stuff to Franklin and Jean. What the hell do either of them know?”
“Greg.”
“I hate Franklin. He doesn’t win anyone over. Smug little wimp.”
“Greg, this is your life.”
“Is it?” He thinks of the double-M name for his disease. He thinks of his bad plasma cells, his defective bone marrow. He lets Alex’s word life roll around in his head. Life. What is a life? Is this really his life? Has he used up most of the good times already? The effortless way he and Freddie would hold hands walking around downtown after dinner, Addie skipping in front of them. A Sunday where the three of them would climb into bed in the afternoon and watch a movie. A spring day where he’d soap up the Mercedes in the driveway and spray it off. All that traveling for work—the excitement of wheeling his bag behind him in the airport, the old clients who remembered him, the new ones he had to impress. He loved crashing at some hotel later those nights, ordering room service and spreading out in the middle of the bed, calling Freddie and Addie and saying I love you, I love you. God, this whole thing has been love: with Freddie. With Addie. And life, too. He loves his life.
He hates himself for not being better at this. He always figured if, God forbid, he got some disease, he’d be valiant and humble. Not this prickly thing who spits in the face of a wonderful wife, a caring boss, an excellent doctor. “Well, I want a life where I’m not sick.”
He feels his limbs go weak, feels light-headed. He was never dainty like this. He forces himself to stand, and he walks to the window, keeping his back to Alex. “I can’t be sick,” he says. “Alex, I can’t be sick.”
His throat aches, and a familiar feeling comes over him from when he was a boy, a sadness so deep he feels like it will never go away—the sadness when his grandmother died, the pain when he fell out of a tree and broke his collarbone. He feels like a little kid again. Scared. He starts to weep. He doesn’t want to leave Freddie, Addie. He imagines Freddie will let Addie sleep in their bed at night, rubbing her back while she cries.
He doesn’t want them to cry for him.
He doesn’t want them to eat their dinners alone at the small kitchen table. He wants to be with them every part of the way—he wants to see Freddie get a book published, he wants to see Addie go to school dances. He wants to help her with an economics paper when she’s in college someday, even if she calls him at two in the morning. He wants her to get married to a guy he can teach to play golf; he wants them to have children whom he and Freddie can invite over for sleepovers and cook waffles the next day. He has thought about all of this. He wants to be in this office until he’s seventy. He wants to keep seeing the next season. He squeezes his eyes shut, but the tears come anyway.
He feels Alex’s hand on his shoulder, and his head slumps forward like a resting marionette. There are pigeons on the roof of the building below them, and the guys are on their suspended platform squeegeeing the windows across the street. He sees a plane creep by in the empty blue sky, and he lifts his head and wipes his eyes with the side of his hand.
“People get better all the time. Every day, someone in a hospital is fixing something. Thousands of people go in sick and come out cured. Every day that’s happening,” Alex says. His voice is a low whisper, and Greg loves this man for saying this. He wishes Freddie would say this—that she wouldn’t look so uncertain. He wishes the doctor would say, “We’re going for a cure. Nothing less.”