Page 23 of The Cabin
She told me our flat is a top-floor corner spot, with the most romantic view of the Eiffel Tower you can ask for. I paid extra to have it stocked with hand-picked red wine and champagne, stuffed to embarrassment with profusions of roses and bouquets of wildflowers, to have the fridge filled with cheese and strawberries and blueberries and yogurt and charcuterie meat and baguettes in the breadbox. Candles everywhere—I send a text when we’re leaving the airport, and the agent will send someone to light the candles. We have a car service, available to us twenty-four seven for the duration of our stay. I’ve scheduled a personal shopper for Nadia, and took out a credit card with an eye-watering credit limit.
I’ve also got essentially a bucket of high-dose painkiller narcotics, not just the good stuff but the best stuff. I sampled them a few days ago, when I first got them, and whoa. Seriously whoa. I have to be careful, judicious. Mainly at night, so I can sleep, or only during the day if it’s too much to bear.
I’ve gone all out for this trip. I cashed out a bunch of investments to pay for it, and did some financial jujitsu with the rest, moving them to less risky, more stable portfolios, and all solely in Nadia’s name. I’ve done a lot, the past couple months. My final book is done. The arrangements have all been made.
The entire reason I booked this trip in the first place is because I met with my oncologist, Dr. Jerry Lowell, not that long ago.
“All we can really do at this point, Adrian,” he’d told me, “is try to make you as comfortable as we can. We can keep doing chemo if you want, it’ll push things out a few more weeks, maybe a few more months at most. But…in the end, there’s really nothing else we can do.”
“Say I stop all chemo, all treatments,” I’d said. “How long?”
“Two, maybe three months. Three and a half on the outside.”
I’d nodded. “I had a feeling.” My eyes had burned, and Dr. Jerry had the decency to find something on his computer to do while I fought for composure. “So, how do we make me comfortable? Meaning, I want to be able to enjoy the time I have left with my wife as much as possible.”
He’d nodded, and explained my options to me.
So now, here we are. Paris. The trip of a lifetime. Of course, we’ve been here before. London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Berlin, Perth, Dublin, Reykjavik, lots of places. Signing tours, film publicity tours, that kind of thing. But they had always been for work. We always took a few extra days around the event to see the sights and play tourist, but we’ve never taken a major vacation like this without there being some kind of work event connected to it.
This is…not goodbye. Not yet. This is…I don’t know what the hell it is. Time with my wife, my best friend. An epic send-off. Memories to hold on to as I near the end.
I push my morbid thoughts aside as we slide through Paris traffic. I’m holding her hand, watching her more than the sights. She’s radiant, lovelier than ever. She had her hair trimmed, three inches off the bottom. Got a manicure, a pedicure, the works. Her eyes soak up the sights.
I’m going to make this the best month of her life. Take all the drugs to kill the pain and fight the nausea. Pretend it’s a stomach bug that won’t quite go away. There’ll be time, later.
I know she should have more time to adjust, but…selfishly, I can’t give her that. I want this time for us.
Us without
The Big C
between us, hanging like a bloody carcass, dripping effluvia all over our joy.
No. This trip is about us.The first two weeks have been magical. We spent it walking, shopping, sitting in cafes sipping espresso and eating flaky, delicate pastries.
We attended Mass in Notre Dame at midnight. The nave was bigger than belief, the vaulted ceiling dark with age. A beautiful young woman in a blue gown sang an aria in Latin, sang it with such holy, reverent beauty that we both wept.
One day we strolled across the Pont des Arts bridge with hundreds of padlocks on it—there was signage posted in English and French prohibiting further locks, because the weight of them was beginning to compromise the integrity of the bridge, but we stood there at the apex of that romantic bridge at sunset, watching the water flow underneath like a ribbon of silk blowing in a silent wind. The locks caught the light, reflected and refracted, and each one represented a love story. We examined some of the locks and pretended we could determine the details of the lives of the people who’d put them there.
