With Tanya, we were just lovers. I was in an open relationship with someone at the time who had a lover in Berlin, a lover in Seattle and a few other lovers that I didn’t know about and didn’t want to even if I said I did. Tanya had been floating around the Internet. I didn’t pay her much attention. When we saw each other for the first time it was in a crowd. We ended up suddenly face-to-face, like we were put there on purpose by one of those funky African spirits. Neither of us had easy chemistry with people. We felt lucky. There was nothing to blur your eyes to or hold your nose against. All of her was fine. She was from New Orleans, white, fleshy, with the whole deal accent and stories about moonshine and four wheelers, full sleeve tattoo on the left arm. She was also a Mom and a nurse.
We started fucking every now and then when the kid wasn’t around. I’d go to her house. Maybe we would have dinner. Usually not. She liked to be fucked really hard, said that was unusual for her. Only liked it with me that way so far. We really went places. She used the word love when it came to how I fucked her. “I love the way you fuck me”, she’d say, moan, and my mind would linger on the word “love” with a clinical eye for detail, circling around the word like a diver near a caged shark –curiosity, desire and fear tempered with the arrogance of a manufactured safety.
I went away to New York for a few months to be with my girlfriend. I saw from some Facebook postings that Tanya was in the hospital. I called her, something I rarely did unless it was to set up a date. She told me that her intestine did this weird thing. It kind of turned inside out and almost exploded. Something that usually only happens to kids. It was a weirdly lucky thing to happen to her, because they discovered that part of her colon was cancerous. The whole fluky event basically saved her life.
“I told them, while you’re in there, go ahead and fix my hernia, why don’t you. They were like, really? There’s a certain power you have in the hospital when you are a nurse. I was climbing the wall with pain. Literally. I was in a fetal position, but up against the wall screaming and I said, fuck this morphine shit. Bring me Dillaudid! NOW!”
When I got back to town it was three weeks after her surgery. I came over and we fucked. She had a big fresh scar over her belly. What had gone on under it was a really big story, but with me, it was just some red marks in a line that had a certain Museum of Contemporary Art power to evoke awe and the incomprehensible. At first I was gentle, then she asked me, not so much gentle actually, please.
When the doctors suggested she go on a round of chemotherapy it was unexpected. It was her decision. She decided to go ahead and do it because of the kid. Not take any chances. The next time I came over I brought Kale and turkey burgers and cooked them in her kitchen. An alarm went off and she took her chemo pills, big pale orange things that she choked down with water, then we went in her room and fucked. Her cunt tasted like chemicals but that was all that was different. She had a whole life that was different now I guess, but with us, it stayed the same. We were just lovers. A month ago she sent me a text. She had met someone and it wasn’t going to work anymore, this meeting up and stuff.
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