VENASQUE

1 4 3 R V E N A S Q U E M A R Y S T E W A R T H A M M O N D He’d build a fire, and bring me strong, dark, bitter co√ee every morning with lots of milk, warmed, little sugar, just the way I like it, and we’d sit opposite each other clutching our mugs in a little loaned stone house in a little stone village perché in Provence, in December, in the year 1991. We probably said a few words. Words of endearment. But we were each in a place the other couldn’t reach, and the winter landscape outside matched, which is why we didn’t want to look at it, had no room to take it in because it was already inside us. What possessed us? How could we forget Provence was on the same latitude as Nova Scotia? He had brought a 1,007-page book with him, Robert Massie’s Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War, to be exact, although that’s less important than the number of pages. It would be about here, after a few words, a few swallows of co√ee, when he would begin to read. I had brought a blank notebook, but was frightened of what I’d find there. I would begin to cry, silently. Or, maybe it was the other way around; I’d begin to cry, and then he’d pick up his book. It doesn’t matter. He was not shutting me out; he was abandoning himself. He is a man who needs 1 4 4 Y certainty the way the rest of us need food, or sleep, and he no longer had a perfect wife; he had a wife who had just been treated for cancer, who most certainly was going to live, but might not. He also learned, the day before we flew to France, the way lovers do in Disease of the Week movies, to frolic in lavender and sunbeams, when facing death, that he might not have a job when we got back. And he was fifty-five years old. That was possibly scarier than having a wife with cancer. Excuse me, a wife who’s ‘‘gotten over’’ cancer. It is advisable when dealing with this disease to think of it as being something like first cousin, seventeen times removed, from a flu bug, because language, after all is said and everything possible done, is the only hot oil left to pour down on the marauding cells of any second wave trying to climb the ramparts. The second attempt to invade has been known to succeed. We, being everyone, don’t talk about that. That is the value of language. On the other hand, language is quite handy for getting cancer o√ the table when there are other issues like: being jobless in America in 1991 at the age of fifty-five. Which you can’t treat at Christmastime sitting in Provence. Actually, unemployment is a condition that can be treated with language, but the odds of it being a cure 1 4 5 R rank with the odds that fruits and vegetables will cure cancer. Take spin, for example: Spin is extremely useful once you’ve decided on a treatment of choice for staying alive financially, or corporeally. After that it is probably better to look straight ahead, turn neither to your right nor your left, neither to positive nor negative. Everyone who survives treatment is said to have survived cancer. The word ‘‘recovering’’ would be closer to reality, but instead we have the hocus pocus expression ‘‘cancer survivor.’’ I am ‘‘a cancer survivor.’’ Hello. My name is Mary Stewart, no hyphen, and I am a ‘‘cancer survivor.’’ (Notice. I use quotations marks. Spin doctors do not.) This is the opposite of an AA meeting. This is a lie. Or not a lie. This is medicaleaze. The truth is the only way you know you’ve survived cancer is when you die of something else, meaning you never know. So he was pissed. At me. Of course, it’s dumb. But understandable. At the...