The Fall of the Virgin Bed

“I’m having surgery on Friday. I have a mass in my chest. They need to biopsy it.” He finally returned my calls. After months of not speaking, he had been coming up in my mind over and over again. I had been calling him and texting him with no response. He left a voicemail while I was teaching right before Memorial Day Weekend. This was how I found out.

I had left a mean message on his voicemail on Valentine’s day, after he wouldn’t pick up the phone. I said, “We were never friends—friends return calls!” I was so mad that I wanted his heart to explode in his chest. Actually, the last time we were together, I was afraid he was going to have a heart attack on top of me. Freaked me out. I put my hand on his chest, felt his shortness of breath.

He made a joke as he was telling me they didn’t know what it was. “I kept wondering, why am I so tired after fuckin’ you?” I was stunned, but it all made sense. I had felt he was sick. I felt hung over the day after we were together, an energetic, empathetic symptom I had dismissed.

“Do you want to rendezvous before Friday?” I was afraid there’d be complications with the surgery, that he’d be out of commission for good, that I may never see him again.

“My place or yours?” He asked.

“You’re the one having surgery—whatever’s best for you.” I was trying to be accommodating.

“I’ll come over after traffic dies down around eight,” he said before he hung up.

I had never had sex in my new bed. It was my virgin bed. I had kept it that way for nine months. We had even had sex on the floor because I didn’t want to have sex in my bed unless it was my boyfriend who spent the night and went to breakfast with me the next morning. He had made the comment, “What, the bed is just for special people?”

But tonight was special. He played the cancer card.

He said he needed people to make him laugh, to stay strong. But when he came in and hugged me, there was no usual little pat of distance, we just sort of sunk into each other, like we were sinking into the news. Usually when we made love, there was a potpourri of porn talk. But things were different that night. At one point, my denial and defenses crumbled and I started crying. He said, "What's wrong?"

I covered it with, “I’m doing my tantric breathing.” He always made jokes about my tantric breath during sex.

But as we continued, I said, “Don’t leave me.” As if fucking me and fighting for his life were actually intertwined.

There is a comfort when we fight. Neither of us is getting too close for comfort. When he says something particularly mean or hurtful, I can rationalize he’s an asshole and be mad at him all over again.

But when there is silence, I worry. It is the silence that scares me.