He gave me a curious look, then went back to the Times crossword. I went up to my room and got out of my wet clothes and under the shower. I stood there a long time, willing myself to feel nothing but the hot spray on my neck and shoulders. By the time I turned off the taps and stepped out of the tub, the little room looked like a Turkish bath.
The mirror over the sink was steamed up. I left it that way. I had a pretty good idea how old and tired I looked, and I didn’t feel the need to see for myself.
I got dressed and tried to find something to watch on television. I settled for the news on CNN but it didn’t matter what I was watching because I couldn’t pay any attention to it.
After a while I turned it off. I’d had the overhead light on, and I turned that off, too, and sat looking out the window at the rain.
I met Jim Faber at the Hunan Lion on Ninth Avenue. I got there at six-thirty, having walked the several blocks with an umbrella for protection. It didn’t blow inside out, either. The rain was still coming down hard, but the wind had eased up considerably.
Jim was already there, and as soon as I sat down the waiter came over with menus. There was already a pot of tea on the table, and two cups.
I opened the menu and nothing looked very appealing. “You may be eating for two tonight,” I said. “I haven’t got much of an appetite.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, nothing.” He gave me a look. He is my AA sponsor and my friend, and we’ve had a standing Sunday night dinner date for a few years now, so it’s not surprising that he can tell when I’m being evasive. “Well, I had a call yesterday,” I said. “From Jan.”
“Oh?”
“She wanted me to come down to her place.”
“Isn’t that interesting.”
“Not in the way you’re thinking. She had something she wanted to tell me. I went down there this afternoon, and she told me.”
“And?”
I said the words in a rush, not wanting to give them a chance to get stuck in my throat. “She’s dying. She’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she’s got less than a year to live.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I guess it hit me pretty hard.”
“I guess it would,” he said, and then the waiter turned up with pad and pencil at the ready. “Listen,” Jim said, “why don’t I just go ahead and order? Bring us one order of the cold noodles, an order of the spicy shrimp with broccoli, and General Tzo’s famous chicken.” He squinted at the menu. “Except he seems to be known as General Tsung at this particular establishment. Another menu, another spelling. I suppose it’s all the same general. God knows it’s always the same chicken.”
“Is good dish,” the waiter said.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine. And we’ll have brown rice with that, if you have it.”
“On’y white rice.”
“Then we’ll have white rice.” He handed back the menu and refilled our teacups. To me he said, “If you and I lived in China, would we be going out every Sunday night for General Schwarzkopf’s chicken? Somehow I doubt it. Matt, that’s horrible news, just awful. It’s an absolute certainty? There’s nothing at all they can try?”
“Evidently not. According to her the diagnosis is a death sentence. Worse than a death sentence, because you can’t delay it by filing appeals. It’s like frontier justice in the Old West. They pronounce sentence in the afternoon and hang you at sunrise.”
“What a hell of a thing. How old is Jan, do you happen to know?”
“Forty-three, forty-four. Something like that.”
“That’s not very old.”
A little older than Elaine, a little younger than I. I said, “I guess it’s as old as she’s going to get to be.”
“What a hell of a thing.”
“Afterward I went back to my room and sat by the window and watched it rain. I wanted a drink.”
“Now there’s a surprise.”
“I never entertained the idea of having one. I knew it wasn’t something I wanted to do. But the physical desire was as strong as I can remember it. Every cell in my body cried out for alcohol.”
“Who wouldn’t want a drink under the circumstances? Isn’t that what it’s for? Isn’t that why they put the stuff in bottles? But wantin’ ain’t drinkin’. And it’s a good thing, or there wouldn’t be but one AA meeting a week in New York, and you could hold it in a phone booth.”
If you could find a booth to hold it in, I thought. They didn’t have them anymore. But why was I thinking about phone booths?
“Nothing easier than staying sober when you don’t feel like drinking,” he went on. “But what amazes me is the way we manage to stay sober even when we do feel like drinking. And that’s what strengthens us, too. That’s where the growth comes from.”
Oh, right. I’d been thinking about phone booths earlier in the day, standing on the corner of Fifty-fifth and Eleventh and looking at the phone Holtzmann was using when he died. Where would Superman change his clothes, now that the city was out of phone booths?
“I don’t think I’ve ever gone through a difficult time without getting something out of it,” Jim was saying. “ ‘I must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ I forget who said that.”
“Samuel Beckett.”
“Really? Well, it’s the whole program in, what, ten words? ‘I must stay sober, I can’t stay sober, I’ll stay sober.’ ”
“That’s eleven words.”
“Is it? ‘I must stay sober, I can’t stay sober, I’ll stay sober.’ All right, it’s eleven words. I stand corrected. Ah, cold noodles with sesame sauce, and not a moment too soon. Here, help yourself to some of these. I can’t eat the whole thing.”
“They’ll just sit on my plate.”
“So? Everything’s got to be someplace.”
When the waiter had cleared away our dirty dishes, Jim said I’d done pretty well for a man with no appetite. It was the chopsticks, I explained. You wanted to look like you knew what you were doing.
I said, “I still feel empty. Eating didn’t change that.”
“Have you cried for her?”
“I never cry. You know the last time I wept? The first time I spoke up at a meeting and admitted I was an alcoholic.”
“I remember.”
“It’s not that I make an effort to hold back the tears. I’d be perfectly willing to cry. But it’s evidently the way I am. I’m not about to rip off my shirt and go beat a drum in the woods with Iron Mike and the boys.”
“I think you mean Iron John.”
“Do I?”
“I think so. Iron Mike’s the fellow who coaches the Chicago Bears, and I don’t figure he’s much of a drummer.”
“Strictly a bass player, huh?”
“That would be my guess.”
I drank some tea. I said, “I hate the thought of losing her.”
He didn’t say anything.
I said, “When Jan and I broke up, when we finally called it quits and I got my stuff from her place and gave her back her key, I remember telling you how much it saddened me to see the relationship end. Do you remember what you said to me?”
“I hope it was profound.”
“You told me that relationships don’t end, they just take a different form.”
“I said that?”
“Yes, and I found the words very comforting. For the next few days I was running them through my mind like a mantra. ‘Relationships don’t end, they just take a different form.’ It helped me keep from feeling that I’d lost something, that something valuable had been taken from me.”
“It’s funny,” he said, “because not only don’t I remember the conversation, but I can’t even recall ever having had the thought. But I’m glad it was a comfort.”
“It was,” I said, “but after a couple of days I thought about it, and I decided it was a cold comfort. Because this particular relationship had changed its form, all right. It had changed from two people who spent half their nights together and spoke at least once a day to two people who made a particular point of staying out of each other’s way. The new form the relationship had taken was one of nonexistence.”