Precious Blood(13)

She picked at her lobster and thought that the food and the room and the bottle of sweet wine were all very nice, but not the important things. She had had a wonderful day. She had seen everyone she wanted to see. She had talked it all over with the only people who could possibly understand. She had been treated so well, so kindly, it had made her a little dizzy. Even Peg Morrissey had been nice to her, and niceness hadn’t been Peg’s thing back in high school. Peg had taken down all her old yearbooks, the three they were all in together and the two that followed—because Tom, of course, had graduated a year after the rest of them—and they had spent an hour looking at the pictures. That was just the kind of thing Cheryl had come North hoping to do.

Cheryl got out a cigarette and lit up. Then she poured wine into the wineglass that had come up with the room service tray and struck a pose in front of the mirror that rested against the opposite wall, trying to look like a sophisticated lady. It didn’t work. She’d felt more sophisticated drinking the wine out of the water glasses from the bathroom, the way they had when the two of them had drunk it together, after she first got the room. It was really wonderful wine, from Italy, as sweet and thick as syrup, and it had been bought for her specially at a fancy liquor store on Compton Street on their way here. They’d made the taxi stop and wait at the curb while they ran in to get it. Then, once they were here, there’d been a lot of fumbling in the bathroom with glasses and corks, out of her sight. The little cork-lined tray meant to hold complimentary soap and perfume became a wine server, with two glasses half full of heavy red liquid flanking the recorked bottle. The scene had enchanted her, and the wine had enchanted her just as much. It reminded her of the Communion   wine she’d had once in a newfangled church in Baltimore, where people received under both species.

She put the wine down without drinking it, took some more lobster, then put her fork down and went back to smoking. She had been running around all day and she felt very bad, really awful. Her joints ached and her head was heavy. Her bones felt stuffed full of needles. If she hadn’t stopped taking painkillers, she would have used two or three to put herself to sleep.

Maybe, she thought, I’ll take a whole lot of them at the end of the week, on my last night here. In the meantime, she could ask her friends to get her to a doctor for a new prescription or get a prescription some other way. Then she could lie in bed for the next six days, knowing that everything was wonderful and nothing was going to get worse. There had been times in her life when that was all she’d wanted: just to know that nothing was going to get worse.

She picked up the wineglass in one hand and the ashtray (with the cigarette in it) in the other, and lay back on the pillows. Pain, pain, pain, she thought. If I drink enough, I won’t have any pain. She wrapped her mouth around the rim of the glass so she wouldn’t spill and took a long gulp of wine. It went down her throat feeling hot and spread its heat against the cancer dome of her belly.

It was good she’d had that first year in Maryland and that day in Black Rock Park and this day here. Nobody should have to die without having had some real joy in their lives. Nobody should have to die without ever knowing a moment’s ease. Her own mother had died after a life like that. Cheryl had always thought it was cruelly unfair.

She put the wine and the ashtray on the night table. It was one of the minor problems caused by her illness that it made her need to use the bathroom a lot. She swung her legs off the side of the bed and headed for the bathroom door.

Funny, she thought. I must have been smoking too much today. Everything tastes like cigarettes.

She turned on the bathroom light and went in. She looked at herself in the glass and thought: I wish I’d had one really pretty dress. Just one.

That was when the cramps hit her.





PART ONE


Wednesday in Holy Week to Holy Thursday

Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord.

—Cor. 11:27





ONE


[1]


“THE PROBLEM,” DONNA MORADANYAN was saying, “was that he’d read these magazines that said women were supposed to have orgasms, and if they didn’t have orgasms they got very angry, only it was some kind of secret anger so you couldn’t always tell, so when I wouldn’t have an orgasm, even if I didn’t have one because I didn’t want one—”

“Oh,” Bennis Hannaford said. “I know. He’d work at you for hours.”

“Exactly, and when I’d say, for God’s sake, I’m not women, I’m me, he’d turn around and go—”