The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [23]
“I just hope they have options for her,” Ginger says, knowing Eddie knows what she’s talking about. “Andrea says even before they left, Paisley was pretty wiped out.”
“You or I would be wiped out, too. Doctors aren’t gentle anymore. Nobody comes in and tells you not to worry. Now it’s all about being straight with patients. Now it’s, ‘Well, it’s just as we thought. The big C. The poisoned apple. The angel of death.’ ”
“Eddie, don’t.” But she asked for it. He can’t stand being serious at times like these. The worse the situation, the more outrageous his jokes. She struggles between wanting to take his hand and tell him it’s all right—which, of course, it isn’t—and shouting at him to shut up. She gentles her tone. “Let’s just hope we hear some good news.”
“And what would that be? She’s fried, isn’t she? Pancreatic cancer? Also in the liver? Come on.”
“Okay! Enough! Stop it, Eddie. I’m serious. Stop.”
Traffic moves, and he steps on the gas so hard that the car lurches forward, forcing him to brake.
“Marie Coleman thinks she’s going to be in one of those clinical trials,” Ginger says. “There are all kinds of new treatments these days.”
“Well, let’s hope so.” He inches along toward the hotel, only a hundred yards away.
“Of all people, why did this happen to her?”
“Why am I a computer guy?” Eddie asks. “Why was I standing on the street when the window fell out of the building? Why did the bus run over me? Because it was my turn in the barrel, that’s why.” His voice is strangled.
With a whoosh, the cars surge forward.
Under the hotel’s marquee, they are delivered into the hands of parking attendants and bellmen in formal, maroon-colored uniforms, offering services for which they will pay extraordinary rates. Next to the registration desk, a huge silver coffeepot dominates a highly polished mahogany table, set with real china cups and saucers, apparently to provide a pick-me-up for the long line of guests waiting to check in. But the pot is empty. “First class,” Eddie whispers. “It’s prettier, and it costs more, but it doesn’t mean they don’t treat you like shit.”
“Shhh.”
Just then a sour-faced bellman seizes the small overnight cases they intended to carry themselves and sets the bags on a movable cart, practically daring them to refuse the service. Eddie clutches his computer case to his chest and impales Ginger with a wide-eyed stare and a Groucho Marx lift of his eyebrows.
In their room at last, the bellman sets down the bags and holds out his hand for a tip, without the least show of embarrassment. Looking down at the bills Eddie gives him, he nods but doesn’t say thank you. “First class means never having to be grateful,” Eddie murmurs when he goes.
“You didn’t have to be so generous.”
“And have him come back and slit our throats in the night?”
On either side of their bed, on the heavy cherrywood night tables, a small square of chocolate, wrapped in gold foil, sits on a tiny porcelain saucer. “Ah,” says Eddie. “Feed them chocolate and expect them to pant and blow.”
But Ginger can tell he’s already losing interest in his attack on first-class service. Even as he speaks he’s easing Ginger down onto the silky bedspread of their plush, king-size, first-class bed and running his hand up her thigh. Desire twists in her belly the way it did when she was twenty. Two hours later, they’re still lying on the bed, naked now, Ginger partially wrapped in a silky sheet with an obscenely high thread count, Eddie propped up on one elbow beside her, tracing circles with an index finger around her flattened-out right nipple.
“Is this foreplay?” she asks. “Or postcoital play? Or just idleness in the face of exhaustion?”
“The latter, I think.” After having oral sex on the fully made bed the moment the bellhop left, they had pulled back the covers to enjoy what Eddie terms “regular” sex, then napped briefly, then