Jeff was propped up against the pillows with a medical journal in his hands, watching Johnny Carson announce the night's first guest: “. . . her new novel is The Love Machine. Please welcome the beautiful Jacqueline Susann!”
He looked to Linda, his eyes drawn to her naked breasts. “Hey,” he said. “Does this mean I'm going to get lucky?” “
Jeff,” she said in a louder voice, more like panic.
He was out of the bed and in front of her in no time, his hands on her arms, looking directly into her eyes. “What, Linda? What is it?”
She swallowed once, twice. “A lump,” she tried to say, but her voice didn't come out.
“What!” Jeff insisted. “Damn it, Linda, you're scaring the hell out of me.”
Something about his panic calmed her. She focused on the sameness all around her: the medical journal abandoned on the bed; Port-noy's Complaint on her own nightstand, bookmarked to the page she'd been reading; the Tonight Show audience laughing on the TV. “
A lump,” she said more surely. “I think I felt a lump. I'm sure it's nothing, but—”
“Oh, shit,” Jeff said, turning away from her, running his hand through his dark hair.
“It's probably nothing,” Linda assured him. “I was just startled. It's probably nothing.”
On the television, the Tonight Show band played a few short notes.
“Shit,” Jeff said. “Okay. Okay. We'll call Albert. Shit, what's his number?”
“It's nearly midnight,” Linda said.
Jeff looked at her as if she'd just insulted him. Suddenly self-conscious, she turned to the bathroom, retrieved her pajama top, pulled it over her head.
In the moment she was turned away from Jeff, he bolted out the bedroom door, down the stairs to the phone in the kitchen. She heard pages flipping, Jeff looking for his colleague's home number, then his voice: “Albert, listen, Linda's got a . . .”
In the long pause that followed, Linda crept down the stairs, peeked around the corner. Jeff sat on the kitchen floor, in the dim light that filtered down from upstairs. He had the phone receiver to his ear, but his head was tucked down to his knees.
He looked up, focusing on the cabinets across from him. He heaved a big breath. “A lump,” he whispered. Then after another moment, “Yes.”
“Jeff,” Linda said.
He stiffened. He'd heard her, but he didn't look her way. He listened into the receiver for another moment and, still without looking at her, handed it over. His hand, she thought, looked like her father's: broad and muscular, and unsteady.
She was chilled all of a sudden.
She took the receiver, answered Albert's questions. The lump was in her left breast. At about three o'clock. Yes, near her armpit. The size of a small pea. Not as hard as a marble, but harder than chewed bubble gum. She listened to Albert for a few minutes, then handed the receiver toward Jeff. “He says there's nothing to do tonight,” she said. “
He says to call his office in the morning and he'll get Ellie to work me in.”
As Linda headed back upstairs she tried to block out the sound of Jeff's voice pleading with Albert, then growing angry. “I could drive Linda over right now, we could be there in ten minutes.” And she knew Albert was telling him what he'd just told her, that they would almost certainly have to do a biopsy, that that would take a few days to arrange.
She turned off the television in the bedroom, turned off the lights, climbed under the covers, laid her head flat on the pillow. She stared up at the ceiling, trying not to think, trying to get warm.
From downstairs, Jeff's voice, still badgering Albert. “Okay, seven o'clock, if that's the best you can do. We'll be at your office at seven a.m.”
She heard the receiver click onto the cradle. The house was silent for a long moment before she heard the refrigerator door sucking open, ice clinking in a glass. A bottle twisting open. Liquid splashing out. Jeff's scotch.
She was still lying there, awake, when Jeff came upstairs finally. She closed her eyes, able to bear the darkness with him there, and pretended to sleep.
He eased onto the bed and under the covers, but he stayed at the very edge of the mattress, as if he was afraid to get too near her in case she was contagious. She lay awake all night, listening to the sounds of him lying awake, too. She had not felt so alone since before she'd met him, since before he'd first spoken to her at a fall mixer her freshman year at college. She'd been wearing her favorite sweater, a forest-green cashmere cardigan she claimed she liked to wear without a blouse underneath because she loved the soft wool against her skin, although the truth was that a blouse ruined the drape of the sweater, the way the thin green wool accentuated her breasts.