Read Online Cat's Pajamas by James Morrow - Free Book Online Page B

outward from ground zero, suggesting at first an apocalyptic plum pudding, then an immense Santiago pilgrim’s hat. The blast front flattens concrete buildings, tears palm trees out by the roots, and draws a tidal wave from the Pacific. Now the filmmakers give us a half-dozen shots of the inevitable mushroom cloud. I gaze into the roiling crimson mass, reading the entrails of human ingenuity.
    â€œYou’re free of cancer” and “You’re the lover I’ve been looking for my whole life” are surely two of the most uplifting sentences a person will ever hear, and it so happened that both declarations came my way during the same week. An optimist at heart, I took each affirmation at face value, so naturally I was distressed when the speakers in question began backpedaling.
    No sooner had Dr. Joshua Pryce told me that the latest lab report indicated no malignant cells in my body, not one, than he hastened to add, “Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re rid of it forever.”
    â€œYou think it will come back?” I asked.
    â€œHard to say.”
    â€œCould you hazard a guess?”
    Dr. Pryce drew a silk handkerchief from his bleached lab coat and removed his bifocals. “Let me emphasize the positive.” In a fit of absentmindedness, the oncologist repocketed his glasses. “For the moment you’re definitely cured. But cancer has a will of its own.”
    In the case of the man who called me his ideal lover—Stuart Randolph, the semi-retired NYU film historian with whom I’ve shared a bohemian loft overlooking Washington Square for the past eighteen years—I logically expected that his subsequent remarks would concern the institution of marriage. But instead Stuart followed his declaration by arguing that there were two kinds of commitment in the world: the contrived commitment entailed in the matrimonial contract, and the genuine commitment that flowed from the sort of “perfect rapport and flawless communication” that characterized our relationship.
    â€œIf we enjoyed perfect rapport and flawless communication, we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” I said. “I want to get married, Stu.”
    â€œReally?” He frowned as if confronting a particularly egregious instance of postmodern film criticism. Stuart’s an auteurist, not a deconstructionist.
    â€œReally.”
    â€œYou truly want to become my fourth wife?”
    â€œAs much as I want you to become my fifth husband.”
    â€œWhy, dear?” he said. “Do you think we’re living in sin? Senior citizens can’t live in sin.”
    â€œImitation of Life is a lousy movie, but I like it anyway,” I said. “Marriage is a bourgeois convention, but I like it anyway.”
    â€œShould the cancer ever return, dearest Angela, you’ll be glad you’ve got a committed lover by your side, as opposed to some sap who happens technically to be your husband.”
    Stuart was not normally capable of bringing romance and reason into such perfect alignment, but he’d just done so, and I had to admire his achievement.
    â€œI cannot argue with your logic,” I told him. And I couldn’t. All during my treatments, Stuart had been an absolute prince, driving me to the hospital a hundred times, holding my head as I threw up, praising the doctors when they did their jobs properly, yelling at them when they got haughty. “Checkmate.”
    â€œLove and marriage,” he said. “They go together like a horse and aluminum siding.”
    Have no fear, reader. This is not a story about what I endured at the hands of Western medicine once its avatars learned I’d developed leukemia. It’s not about radiation treatments, chemotherapy, violent nausea, suicidal depression, paralyzing fear, or nurses poking dozens of holes in my body. My subject, rather, is the last performance ever given by an old colleague of mine, the biggest