One day Ginny texts: “Here’s a new card for our collection: Thanks so much for coming to visit and fucking my husband. I needed a divorce to keep my mind off cancer.”
The visitor in question is one of her close friends from college who has come to help take care of her during chemo. A new level of casserole bitch. She catches them in the living room one night when she gets up to get a glass of water. Ginny goes into lawyer-warrior mode. She makes them sign affidavits before they even get up from the fold-out sofa.
I have no idea what to say. I spend days scowling at every man I see. For the first time in all of this, I can’t sleep. John sees the silver lining: “I’m really looking better and better, aren’t I?”
I text Ginny: “You are fully entitled to slap the next person who tells you that God only gives us what we can handle.”
The day after the divorce finalizes she writes: “I’ve decided I’m going to take out a personal ad on craigslist.” We’ve been bemoaning our post-treatment bodies. “One-boobed, mentally unstable, newly divorced, borderline obese freight train with cankles, two kids, a silver-fox butch hairdo, and vaginal dryness ISO hot-bodied twentysomething with a large trust fund and larger hands who likes long walks on the beach, intelligent discussion, and uncomfortable sex.”
I think of a match immediately: Montaigne. His middle-aged craigslist ad (not that he was on the market—his wife glimmers into view from time to time): Straight-ish White Aristocrat/Thinker with persistent kidney stones and gout, robust bowels and waning sexual appetite, impressive book collection in welcoming medieval tower, and a passion for the Ancients and spicy food, ISO moderation in everything, long walks in unsettled woods, and intimacy with fear. Bandits, skeletons, and Death welcome. Politicians and doctors need not respond.
The man dreaded medical inventions as much as Ginny and I do: “To be subject to both kidney stones and abstention from the pleasure of eating oysters: that is two evils in one,” he wrote. “The illness pinches us on one side; the remedy on the other.”
The illness, the remedy. We are such fragile creatures, although we feel far more like oysters until we are dying—those rough husks.
Like Montaigne, Ginny has always lived not far from the coast—for her: the low country down in South Carolina. On one visit, she takes me out shell collecting with our kids and I can hardly believe the bounty: The lettered olive, she teaches me, looks like a rolled bill—smooth and heavy in your palm, rarely found intact. There is angel wing, moon snail, sand dollar, and slipper. The fighting conch is a beauty—midsized and spiky, and the unrolled lip at the edge is as inviting a castle as I’ve ever seen.