All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [101]
And then he tells me he has bad news.
He has been diagnosed with cancer, and the doctors have given him two rounds of chemotherapy. He won’t be able to go back to the university, not this year. “I had hoped,” he writes, “to at least reach sixty-five before finding myself in this situation.”
He is now fifty-nine, and I am almost the age he was when we first met, when he was such a sexy, assured older man. But still so young.
I call him in Paris, and when a woman answers I try to come up with the polite way in French to say good afternoon and ask to speak to the Professor. He comes to the phone and first I forget and say hello in Spanish and then Italian and he realizes it’s me. “Laura,” he says, the rolling Italian way, the way he first pronounced it after we met, over breakfast at a pensione on Ischia, on our way together already to go see the view of the sea from the highest point on the island. “It’s so nice to hear your voice,” he says, always so sweet, sounding so close.
I stumble over my words, I’m so sorry, and I can’t say anything for what seems a long time, from Mexico to France, but I want to pull myself together because I don’t want him to think that I’m so upset, as if that would makes things worse.
“È così,” he says. It’s like that.
I try to cheerfully tell him a little bit about Mexico and the election, how wonderful that everyone is so excited. We talk about his son, who is thinking about coming to San Francisco, and he asks if I will help him, and I say of course, anything, but a nineteen-year-old who is nearly as handsome and charming as his father won’t need any help at all. He laughs.
I ask about his trip to India. It was beautiful, incredible, he says, from north to south, and a good thing that he traveled when he did. If he had known, he never would have gone, never would have experienced the place he dreamed about for so long. When he returned home, he had a pain in his stomach. I don’t want to ask, but he offers that it is liver cancer, not an easy kind, but he is feeling okay for now. He has many friends who visit and care for him and keep him company, and he is full of hope. I ask if he is still with the same woman, and he says, “The same beautiful woman, meno male,” a good thing, so I know she is nearby, listening, and I’m so glad she is there for him.
He asks if I have any romances, and I say nothing right now. Niente.
“I can’t believe that,” he says.
“We’ll see,” I say. “Someone always turns up.”
I tell him I send him a big, big hug and kiss and say I hope that all this will be nothing, a small, forgettable episode in la bella vita. As I say it, I believe it to be true.
“Grazie, bella,” he says. He asks if maybe I have plans to come to Europe sometime soon. I say I don’t know, but of course I always love to come to Europe, and we say “Ciao, ciao, ciao,” many times, the way the Italians say good-bye, reluctant to hang up.
I climb the stairs to the terrace, hear the ranchero music playing from next door, then a child’s laugh and a rooster’s crow, and sit with the warm rays of sunshine drying my face. I spend a long time like that, trying to breathe evenly. Church bells ring, and dogs bark in response.
In a little while, I will go see about booking a ticket to Paris, to visit an old friend, a love, a piece of my heart. But for now I am just going to sit in the sun.
By late fall, the plants in my house have grown, delicate periwinkle vines dripping down the atrium, lavender and jasmine blooming, cactus and aloe plants growing into Dr. Seussian proportions. My parents have decided to visit for my mom’s eightieth birthday.
This wasn’t an easy decision; since she’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, it’s been more difficult for my mother to travel comfortably. It dismays her not to have new adventures to recount to her friends; it makes her feel less like herself, though her friends know she has a lifetime of being quietly daring. I tell Mom and Dad it’s easier to get to Mexico than it was when we came in 1971; instead of taking