By summer, my eyebrows had vanished. The hair on my head? Forget it. Every time I blew my nose I threw out a tissue of mucus, blood, and hair. At least it was easier to pretend I had cancer.
My wife Illiana tried to talk me out of the beach. She said she didn’t like the idea of a public beach, and besides, the sun would be bad for my skin.
“That’s why God invented sunscreen,” I said, and handed her SPF 50. She rubbed it into my back with one knuckle.
Under the contract I signed, sunbathing was strictly forbidden. Then again, the contract didn’t mention how I’d bloat, or the liver-colored spots that would cover every inch of me. I didn’t put sunscreen on my face. I wanted to walk into the lab the next day with a Rudolph nose, like, “well, fuck you guys, I guess.”
Illiana and I staked out a spot right in front of beach traffic so we could watch the bathing suits. I think by then we knew it wasn’t working. At first she treated the changes like a surprise, tonguing every new bump and groove. “It’s like I’m cheating on you with a teenager,” she said, giggling in the afterglow.
Lately, she closed her lips when we kissed. She couldn’t understand why I still went to work during chemo. “Doesn’t Richard have any heart?” she said.
Richard had plenty of heart, but he also had a bottom line. The day he sat me down and explained the financial origins of my severance package, I resolved that Illiana would never find out I’d been laid-off.
We spent five hours at the beach, and went in the water once together. Underwater I had the strength to lift her up and spin her. For a few minutes I got to be Charles Rittenberg again, the upcoming investment banker, the one who socialite Illiana Petrovich went home with, even if she laughed when he told the cab driver, “to Brooklyn.”
Then the tide came in. She dragged me back to shore. I wheezed at the edge of the surf, and she watched men emerge from the sea, shaking off their hair.
“Oh great,” she said, “more hunks.”
