“Enough about me. Tell me what you’re up to.”
“Well, okay. After college I enrolled in med school. It really wasn’t the right fit for me. It was too much pressure, so I moved back here and started catering.” This was not the story of her life that she wanted to tell her former teacher. Before she could take it back, she heard herself saying, “I have been writing a bit.”
His face flushed with life. “Tell me more.”
“I’ve been writing these stories, they aren’t magic—” She had to swallow theor anythingthat threatened to follow. “When I meet someone who wants to fall in love, an image or lesson comes to me, something concrete yet abstract, and I write it down for them. Then they meet someone. Or did. I led a few good people to bad ends, so I stopped writing. I didn’t want to be involved in anyone’s heartbreak.”
Mr. Thomas nodded throughout her ineloquent speech. Then, at “meet someone,” his expression changed as he realized this was exactly what had happened at the diner with Joe. “Do you think,” he whispered, “is it too greedy to ask if you could write another one for me?”
Before Alice could fumble through an awkward explanation of how she couldn’t support infidelity, he said, “It’s for Joe, actually. You see, I’ve got cancer. Pancreatic. It’s why I had to stop teaching.” Alice did her best to keep her composure as he told her the bare facts of his situation.
“Mr. Thomas,” Alice began, relieved when he interrupted her, because she wasn’t sure what to say next.
“It’s Hank,” he said. “I never liked being called Mr. Thomas—the school insisted. But I digress.” Mr. Thomas had always been full of digressions. Half of what Alice had learned from him, the many books she’d read at his recommendation, was the product of his digressing and his complex mind.
Mr. Thomas—Hank—explained that he had been diagnosed a year ago. There’d been signs, issues with back pain and nausea. When the doctor told him, he was strangely calm on account of an innate knowing. What he hadn’t expected, what caused his calm to descend into panic, was the timeline the doctor gave him.
“I wish there was something I could do.” Alice meant that she wished she could write a story that could stop cancer like it could start love.
“Alice, don’t you see? You are the only person who can help me. The doctors are worthless at this point, and I’m not about to die with dignity. I’m going to hold out until the very last indignant breath, but Joe, he refuses to accept that my time is ending. And this will be so much harder on him if he doesn’t prepare himself.”
Alice fidgeted, picking at her fingernails as Hank continued.
“Joe is the kind of person who needs someone. Don’t get me wrong, our love isn’t about need, but he won’t be happy alone. He has too much love to keep it all to himself. I’m afraid he’ll never let himself love again. And he needs to. I want him to. If he’d let me, I’d pick his next partner. He won’t, so maybe you can. I want him to find someone deserving of his love.”
That familiar itchiness overtook Alice’s body, this time from seeing too much desire in someone. His love was rawer than his cancer. To Alice it seemed just as dangerous.
“I’ve never written a story like that before.”
“Only one way to start.”
“I’m really not writing anymore. It’s too risky.” She proceeded to explain all the ways her stories had gone wrong. She would never be able to forgive herself if she brought someone violent into Joe’s life.
Hank clicked his tongue as he considered her words. It was a sound he used to make in class, one that had always made her feel like her adolescent interpretations ofTo Kill a MockingbirdandA Yellow Raft in Blue Waterwere not just insightful but essential.
“Look, forget the story.” He waved it off like it was in the past. “What would you say to dinner? Joe would kill me if he knew I ran into you and didn’t invite you over to meet him.”
“Sure,” Alice said. “Dinner I can do.”
28
The Vanity Room
Alice lifted the ring of the brass lion knocker and waited nervously for Hank to answer the door. Although he’d said to forget about the story he’d asked her to write, it was all she could think about, how she could do him this small favor before he died, if she might be able to help him in a way no one else could.
“Well, well, well, you must be the notorious Alice Meadows,” said the man who opened the door. Joe, obviously. He was tall and thin, with warm brown skin and a head so bald it shone. His chin was hidden by a neatly trimmed beard with a white patch shaped like a heart. When he caught Alice staring, he rubbed his palm against the spot.
“Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. I wear mine on my face.” Joe invited Alice inside. “Hank’s just setting up the porch. I hope you don’t mind eating al fresco.”
Alice stepped into the living room of the renovated Craftsman. From the low-profile couch to the midcentury banquette and the built-in bookshelves, every piece of furniture was a statement. The scuffed wood floors were overlaid with Persian rugs, the walls covered to their last inch in paintings. It was the kind of house where you could be yourself. Alice had never considered a house in this way before, not even the one she’d grown up in. She wondered what the house would feel like in a month or a year when Hank was gone, if the ease would be replaced by something else.
As they walked toward the kitchen, Joe narrated the paintings in the hall. “This was from my Cubist phase.” He pointed to the elongated face fashioned from shapes Alice didn’t have names for. “And that—” he motioned toward a pastoral scene “—that’s when I thought I was a landscape artist.”
Alice peered into the dining room, where the walls were covered in portraits. A child seated on a swing, laughing at the sky. Overlapping heads facing away from the viewer with different haircuts. A composite of feet that somehow all clearly belonged to the same person. The largest painting on the far wall was a portrait rendered entirely in shades of blue: a sky background, a teal chair, cobalt pants, cornflower skin with cerulean and indigo wrinkles etched into it. Despite the lined skin, the veiny backs of hands, Hank looked boyish, with perfect posture and a robust chest that made Alice realize just how emaciated he had become.
“Hank calls this the vanity room,” Joe said in a tone that revealed that all the portraits were of her old teacher. Joe frowned at the blue portrait, the only one where Hank’s face was identifiable. “If I’d known he was going to get sick, I never would have chosen blue.”
Alice almost asked him why he didn’t just take the portrait down. That would be its own kind of death. It was easier to avoid the room, especially when avoiding it had the undeniable advantage of dining al fresco.
