All of my married friends keep photographs of their weddings on their mantelpieces. This includes my new boyfriend, Larry.

It is a fake mantelpiece. According to certain firelaws, there is not now nor has there ever been a fireplace in the apartment, which was built in the 1970’s. The architect added the mantel in order to give the living room a more sophisticated style and a false sense of security. Larry keeps his entertainment system in the fireplace nook, which is just right for it. When the VCR overheats, we stick our feet out from where we are sitting on the couch and warm them up. It’s a dual purpose system.

Larry and I have cancer. I am in my twenties and I have leukemia. Larry is in his late forties and has something a little more complicated. I have had leukemia since I was a child. I was in remission for a while but the disease came back. This is the third time.

Larry and I met around the time that I placed an ad in the newspaper. It said, ‘SWF, 26 yo, leukemic, looking for similarly cancerous. Who knows how long I’ll live—let’s live it up.’ It felt like a lot of words for a personal ad but everything about it seemed integral. So I left it that length. A lot of strange men and women answered the ad. Larry did not. Instead, we had the same general practitioner, Doctor Gary Patt. Our weekly appointments and chemotherapy happened side by side, mine first. Every week when I walked into the waiting room fifteen minutes early for my appointment, he and his wife were arriving as well. She looked younger than I was, shaggy blond hair, rock T-shirts, bangles, cowboy boots, bra straps peaking out. The difference between us scandalized and fascinated me. I started talking to them in the waiting room and found out a lot.

Here is a list of what I learned:

Larry’s wife is named Lucy.

Larry used to be a rock and roll writer for Rolling Stone magazine.

Larry ran away from home to follow the Rolling Stones on their 1975 Tour of the Americas concert series.

The Tour of the Americas show included a giant inflatable stage phallus.

His mother was not happy.

Larry and Lucy had a whippet dog but Larry never liked it.

Whippets are very fragile; it died.

Larry and Lucy lived on the Upper East Side together.

Lucy went to Vassar for college.

After a while, Lucy stopped coming to appointments with Larry, but he still got there fifteen minutes early. I liked Larry on his own. He was very clever. Once he told me a joke about an octopus that tried to fuck a bagpipe. I guess you had to be there.

“Where’s Lucy?” I finally asked him.

“It’s like Bill Wyman said, ‘All the fun has gone out of it.’”

“You can’t always get what you want.” Was all I could think of to say.

“I think she’s going to leave me.”

“Maybe she’s too young to understand.” I fired back at him.

“Maybe I’m too old.”

The next week, I cut out my ad, which was still running in the paper and on www.craigslist.com, and brought it to my appointment. I handed it to Larry on my way out of the doctor and his way in. Then I waited.

Larry showed the ad to Lucy, who thought it was a great idea. The rest is history.

Sometimes I wonder what the hell we are doing in this railroad apartment in Brooklyn. There are no real rooms: just one big corridor with funny half-walls, cake decoration trim, and a few windows. If I felt more motivated, I might put a set of French doors between the bedroom and the living room, but it is just a month-to-month rental so what is the point.

One night, Larry and I sit across from one another at the dinner table. All around us glow these tiny votive candles that we bought at the Flea Market. Our kitchen looks like a church.

Larry has cooked a steak for dinner, which he has mostly eaten. We are drinking Argentinean wine from his best friend’s vineyard. Larry recently switched his pain medicine to an opiate cocktail which means he can drink alcohol again. This is worth celebrating. He stays at the table. I lie down on the floor.

“Jeanie?” He says, his voice wavy with wine and candlelight.

“What?” I feel like I’m lying at the bottom of a very beautiful well.

“Can I ask you something?”

I say sure because when a man has cancer and he wants to ask you a question, you answer it.

“Have you ever been to Salt Lake City?”

I have not of course. Utah is too far west for my taste. “I saw the movie, SLC Punk?”
Larry nods. His hair is totally silver from the chemotherapy. He looks kind of beautiful.

“The Salt Lake City Mormons have a huge geneological library. Any time anyone wants to do family research, it’s the place to go.” The burning wicks make a faint hissing sound in the pause. “Mormons care about the human soul and where it goes. They live for it, they do everything in life for the sake of eternity. So when people who aren’t Mormons die, the Mormons try to get ahold of their names and other such information about them—especially Jewish names—Mormons love Jews—and each Mormon takes on a name.”

I sit up, “Like putting on a hat.”

“They take the name on and symbolically baptize themselves as that person. So the Mormonism transfers over to the other soul they’re carrying—the Jewish guy gets converted to Mormonism after he’s dead. And this supposedly saves his soul for all of eternity.”

I am listening now, with a morbid fascination.

“I’m listening with a Mormon fascination.” I say from the floor.

“Ha.” And he foists the last piece of steak onto my plate.

By now I have gotten up from the floor. I sit down across the table from Larry. The candles make shapes against his skin. I never liked guessing the shapes of clouds, but shadows from fire? That is an endeavor that I could really entertain.

Larry reaches across the table and takes my hand.

“You’re very beautiful, Jeanie.” His fingers must have sandpaper tips. His hands must be made of ice. If his hands are made of ice, then mine are made of fire. In his hands, my hands feel like hands again.

He has never done this before. Larry and I are companions but we do not necessarily have a romantic life. Or rather, our life is as romantic as possible, but we have never had sex.

We make love standing up against the mantelpiece. We knock over Larry and Lucy’s wedding picture by mistake and we do not stop to pick it up until after we are finished. If I had any pictures of my ex-boyfriend, Dave, I would put one on the mantelpiece too. We broke up eight months ago. He met an opera singer from Boston and decided that it was an easier, more positive relationship for him to be in. I would tell you her name except that she is famous. You can probably guess who it is if you think about it long enough.

Afterwards, Larry and I slide way under the covers, like a tent. Most of the candles have gone out. We do not want to sleep but we have doctor’s appointments in the morning.

A cancer is simply an overdevelopment of cells, cells that proliferate too frequently and too fast. People with cancer, we are too alive: we have too much growth; we develop too quickly. We get punished for this progress, this evolution.

In the morning, we are destroyed. Our blood tests spike completely off the charts from the alcohol. We receive separate and stern reprimands from Doctor Patt. Then Larry goes in for chemo.

Larry sits quietly on the subway ride home from Doctor Patt’s. He is usually so jovial that it embarrasses me. I can never forget that there are other people all around us, watching us, whereas he feels completely at home talking as loudly as possible. It is one o’clock pm and there are very few people riding the 6 train. A toddler sneezes and walks the length of the car towards us, her mother trailing behind. Normally, Larry would make a ‘Knights In Satan’s Service’ face at the child or at least a barn animal sound. But not today. There is a lady with grey hair and a Chanel suit sitting across from us. It must be knock-off: real Chanel never rides the rails.

I cannot imagine how we must appear to the other straphangers—strap-hangers, that is—which I thought was “straff-anjers” when I first saw it because I am extremely literate and I always want words to be more complicated than they actually are. I wear a white cashmere cap sort of like a hat for a baby on my head and Larry is all puffy. God, we must look like homeless people. I am Greek. I used to have this long black hair that hung down almost to my waist. I used to be kind of beautiful.

“Jeanie?” Larry says finally. He wraps his arm around my shoulders, “Can I ask you a question?”

I say of course.

“I was wondering if you would baptize my soul onto your body.”

“Like right now?”

“After I die, I mean. I sure as hell can’t control what they do to my body and I can’t stop some Mormon from trying to save this Jewish soul. All I can do is beat them to it.”

“What—“ I start to protest.

“I don’t care how you do it, when you do it, whether you tell anyone. Just do it. Will you?”

“So you don’t want to be saved?”

Larry tugs on my earlobe, “I’ve already been saved. I don’t need some fanatic to mess that up for me.”

I stare at the floor. So what, Larry and I are going to become One? Finally I nod Yes.

The irony is that Larry is definitely going to outlive me: the chemospots on his hands will fade and even though he will have to lose his hair to grow it back again, it will grow back. He and Lucy will reconcile at a The Cure tribute band concert and they will get another dog on the Upper East Side, maybe a labrador this time. What Larry and I have together is a vacation from the truth.

We transfer to another train, a plasticene panther with its posh whirring and smooth stealth curves. A Chasidic Jew with his face like a bear leans against the doors where the sign says not to do so, his sole act of rebellion. He satisfiedly draws his hand under his shawl and withdraws a chrome cell phone. He texts. Larry slumps.

We walk the blocks from the train station, through the glass littered streets. The rushing of the traffic grows fainter as we pass the crumbling eggshell cardboard siding on the corner building. The sun glints in blinding sheets as we approach the underpass.

“Hold your breath.” I say to Larry and we duck under the bridge, entering the permanent midnight of its shade. A passing car above tosses a bucketful of water onto the sidewalk. The splash reverberates against the mock abalone tiling around us. We stumble into the light on the other side of the bridge and take deep breaths as though emerging from a deep sea dive. Water trickles noisily into the gutter grating. Across the street, paint peels equally passionately off of the shaving cream ad on the side of the building, approximately thirty years old, and the graffiti mural, approximately three months old. The bricks emerge; the messages fade.

Across the street, a couple of kids in oversize flannels staple posters to the telephone pole. In the distance, the park looks sooty.

By the now the chemicals have flushed Larry’s bloodstream. He sways. I get my keys out of my purse and we unlock the front door. We run into Mrs. Gregorsky, our little old lady landlord, on the stair. I struggle a hello, forever trying to ingratiate us, losing ground with both my gestures and my awkward niceties. She twitters something. Then she disappears beyond her blue door into her apartment.

We limp into our home and I get Larry down on the couch. I give him the green plastic basin in case he gets nauseous. Then I change into one of his newer T-shirts, “Death Cab For Cutie.” Larry lights a joint, which is the one thing about him that I do not like. Nevertheless, I disappear with him into the ambient haze.

Thoughts of David blossom like inkspots in my brain: where he is right now; what he might be doing; his new girlfriend who somewhat resembles how I used to look, who may well be a better version of me; their inside jokes and what jokes of ours he has recycled to become theirs. A flood of images, real and imagined: David and _____ having sex; David and ____ at the beach; David and _____ taking the trip we planned but never took. Try as I might, I cannot look away because my eyes are already closed.

They say that trauma affects peoples’ brains like this, changes the very blueprint of the mind. The trauma victim relives the experience every time he or she remembers it. In this way, the trauma stays fresh, a private snuff film playing over and over in the head. Thus the victim cannot file the episode away into memory, subconscious, oblivion.

I wonder if Larry is thinking about Lucy, whose only problem was that she couldn’t bear the hard part.

I open my eyes and see Larry. He smiles at me through the tangle of smoke. I look over at the mantlepiece and Larry’s wedding photo. Then I try for just one moment not to live anything but what I am living now.