About an hour into my visit we were interrupted by her oncologist, a youthful and classically handsome brown man, like a movie star cast as the hero doctor, and I was touched to see how she flirted with him (and how he, subtly, good-naturedly, flirted back) before I was asked to step out of the room. A private room. (You won’t believe what this is costing, she told me, but I couldn’t bear the idea of lying here all day with some roommate watching TV or gabbing on the phone. I can’t stand it even for a few minutes in the lounge. And I, in turn, told her about being in the hospital overnight for minor surgery the year before, and how I’d had to listen for hours to the woman in the next bed phoning updates on her condition to an endless series of people, including her hairdresser, and, weirdly enough, one apparently bewildered person to whom she had to explain how it was that they even knew each other.)

After her doctor had finished his consultation we picked up where we’d left off. Then, all at once, she fell back, exhausted. It was that sudden, as though she’d been shot. She no longer had the energy to talk, but she asked me to stay a bit longer. A nurse came to take blood and my friend snapped at her, I no longer remember what, ostensibly, for. (I don’t like that one was all she said later.) The nurse, the picture of professional poise, winked at me as she went out. They are trained to forgive, in cancer care.

I’m so glad you came, my friend said when I kissed her goodbye.

I told her I’d come again, the next day.

What are you doing tonight? Anything?

I told her I was going to hear my ex give a talk.

Oh, him, she said. And she rolled her eyes.

I asked if she’d read the article on which the talk was based and she said that she had.

Nice to see he’s still his old ball-of-fun self, she said.

—