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“Who shines your eyes, Sam?”

“What? Oh, yeah. I haven’t been getting much sleep. Judy? Honey? Here are the Messengers come to see you.”

The woman waved at them to sit. Messenger waited while Sam chased the dogs from the chairs. Judith Glazer chatted amiably on the telephone, her skin as jaundiced as her blond hair. Sam had disappeared.

Messenger had the impression she was performing for them, dragging the call out till someone else rang up so she might demonstrate the complexities of the new phone. She prattled about third parties, alluding to people Messenger had never heard of, would never meet. Her speech was for Sam too, he thought, off and busy somewhere in the house, her voice raised theatrically, its octaves just beyond her vision. She spoke with all the authority of her doom, arranging with only a minimum of consultation all the car pools of ordinary life. She spoke not as if she were not going to die before the winter was out, but as if she was never going to die.

Sam returned with the glass cylinder from a blender. It was filled with some sort of pinkish malted. He poured out the thick pink liquid for his wife and set the cylinder down on a community newspaper. Messenger noticed that the yellow hold button was lighted. “If we’re interrupting—” he said.

Judith shook her head, her strawberry mustache like a third lip. “Sit still,” she said. “Talk to Sam. Comfort Sam.”

Sam smiled. “People have been wonderful,” he said. “Judy’s lining up next week’s dinners.”

“Next week’s dinners?” Paula said.

“They bring casseroles, roasts, full-course meals. Bunny Fletcher’s coming over later to barbecue steaks for us.”

“What a way to go,” Messenger said comfortingly.

“It’s a picnic,” Sam said.

“We heard about it when we were still in Vermont,” Paula said. “Bill Richards told us.”

“What else did the provost say?”

Paula shook her hands helplessly, lowered her voice. “He told us about the prognosis. I’m sorry, Sam.”

Sam shrugged. “Bill’s been super. He stayed with me in Judy’s room during the exploratory. Adrian was there, too.” He looked down at his fingernails. “When the surgeon told me what they’d found, Adrian held my hand. How do you like that? He just took my hand and held it. When we got to the restaurant the chancellor was already there, waiting for us. Bill must have phoned him, or Adrian. Anyway, there he was, waiting for us. He still had jet lag. He and Bunny had just flown in from London that day.”

“Who picked up the check,” Messenger asked deliberately, “dean, provost, or chancellor?”

Sam laughed. “Life goes on,” he said.

“What’s going on?” Judith said, her phone call ended. “Why am I missing all the fun?”

“ ’Cause you’ve got cancer,” Messenger said, stripped of diplomatic status and settling for bad taste in this house of bad taste where Consumer Reports lay on the surfaces of the furniture like coffeetable books. Sam’s meanness was famous. Even Judith, who came from money, an heiress who would never now collect her birthright, whose great expectations had been shut down by the doctors and who, though her wealthy, highborn, Episcopal parent be struck dead that afternoon or catch the lightning in his hair, would never live through probate, joined in this joke on Sam. Who brooked no criticism of him, whose trigger-happy anger was always at his disposal, always in his defense, as much a species of big brother to him as wife, permitting no slight to her slight Jew and going along not so much dutifully as obediently with all Sam’s bargains and schemes, all his duty-free, marked-down, consumer-reported tchotchkes and appliances, his Sam Goody records and bulk film, his examination copies and suits by Seconds — and Sam a clotheshorse — and international flights by mysterious charter clubs and groceries from a co-op some assistant professors and grad students had founded, his order actually smuggled into their kitchen by some eligible TA. Why she even enjoyed his fabled economies, the fabled part anyway, encouraging them, Messenger supposed, as a harmless outlet for an anti-Semitism she had been unwilling entirely to surrender, writing them off as a cute trait of her clever Yid, much, he hoped—oh, how he hoped, his sense of propriety in the balance now — as she accepted the hold buttons on her telephone and the command performance dinners and her jaundiced skin the color of Valium, and her cancer.

“I never,” she said, “objected to your bad taste, Cornell. It only matters that you love me.” And she waited for his declaration.

“Of course I love you,” Messenger said, the heat on.

“All right,” Judith said, swallowing malted, refilling her glass from the cylinder, extending the glass. “Drink,” she said, “it’s delicious. There’s no medicine in it. It’s only a strawberry malt. I take it to fatten me up for when I start my chemotherapy on Thursday. Will you drink from my glass?”

“I’m already fattened up,” Messenger said.

“Maybe the Messengers would like to hear our news,” Sam said, suggested.

“They may hear our news when they have broken malted with us. They may hear our news when they have sipped from the glass touched by my pancreatically cancered lips.”

“Sure, Judith. Gimme,” Messenger said.

“Here,” she said.

He downed all the malted. “Gee, Judy,” he said, “there’s nothing left for you.”

“The news, of course, is that I’m dying. Well, that’s my news. People are so embarrassed by other people’s deaths that I’ve drawn up a sort of list— ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Judith Glazer’s Death But Were Afraid to Ask.’

“First. The girls know. I told them as soon as I learned the results of the operation. Milly doesn’t accept it yet, I think. I mean she doesn’t believe it will happen. That’s unusual, because of the two she’s the more mature, though she’s younger than Mary. We told the two of them together. Mary’s the one who cried. Now she wets the bed and goes around stinking of urine. Well, I understand rage. It’s always been one of my subjects. But she’s twelve years old and almost six feet tall and she won’t change her underwear and goes about soiled and—”

“Look,” Messenger said.

“Oh, you’re just like Milly, aren’t you? Isn’t he just like Milly, Sam? He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t accept things.”

“I accept things.”

“No,” Judith Glazer said, “if you don’t want to know you can’t accept things. Oh. You’re embarrassed. For all your tough talk, you’re embarrassed, gun-shy. There’s hope for you. Shyness is a kind of love, too. Like chugalugging from the cancer cup.”

“Come on, Judith,” Messenger said, “cut it out.”

“Standing up to me is. It’s all right. If I bring you these messages from the deathbed it’s not because I want to rub your nose in things you aren’t up to, but because I love you, too, Cornell. I never loved Paula. Paula, I’m sorry but it’s true. Perhaps I will now, I can’t be sure. I shall certainly have to try. You, for your part, Paula, you shall have to try, too.”

“I’ll try,” Paula said.

“Do. Please do,” the woman said, and went on. “Have I told you about the girls? My medication’s wearing off, my pain confuses me. Where was I? Oh, yes, the girls.”

“If you’re tired, sweetheart,” Sam said.

“I have cancer, not fatigue. Try not, please, to be humiliated by me. You never were before. All those years I was crazy. Stand by me now. These are the facts, pet, this is the way I wet my bed. Humor your horrible wife.” She had been lying on the sofa. Now she sat up, her housecoat parted and her nightgown hiked. Messenger saw her bald, prepped groin and looked away. “I shall make a family man of him yet. I’ve barely more than five months, but we’re well begun. Oh, yes, we make furious love.”