Index Cards

I took out books on the statistics. There are whole books, just on the statistics. Survival rates. If you’re actually better off with all those new…organic treatments, I think they’re called. I do the research, because Thomas won’t. He hates when I call him Thomas. He likes to just be called Tommy. I told him I won’t be involved with a Tommy, and he says he doesn’t care. He won’t read the books on the statistics. I make little index cards summarizing the information on them, but he won’t read those either. Still, I have to do something. I have to be proactive. His wife doesn’t do much of anything. She just cries. Not that I blame her. I’ve done my fair share of crying over the past few weeks. I just think at some point you have to stop crying and figure out what you’re going to do, you know? I read. I’m what you might call well-read. It’s one of the benefits of a college education. You learn to take in massive amounts of literature and then develop ideas about them so that you can read an 800-page book on cancer after the married man you’ve been seeing for six years develops it and wants to pretend he hasn’t or that he’ll be fine if he just doesn’t think about it or that he isn’t going to…So, I read…a lot. You know, studies are showing that people don’t read anymore. There are some studies that say they do, but those are all bullshit if you actually look at what the people doing the studies ask the subjects. Nobody tells the truth to somebody in an official position like that. Lawyers, accountants, doctors—we lie to all of them, because we fear what they’re going to tell us. So we think we can come up with a lie and that’ll somehow change the truth. Thomas told his doctor that his cough had only been around for a few days. He’d had that cough for months, and he’d been smoking for years. And what he told the doctor didn’t change the truth. But he didn’t want to hear anything about it from me. My wife nags me enough, he said. So I let him alone, but I still did my reading. He doesn’t read. Won’t read. When we first started seeing each other, I begged him to open his mind more. To expand his line of thought. But he refused. He said take him or leave him, not that somebody else already hadn’t. Thomas can be frustrating like that. A very all or nothing sort of man. At first I thought we never went anywhere because he didn’t want to get caught with me, but then I realized he just didn’t like going anywhere, which was incredibly depressing. I tried dragging him to the opera, jazz clubs, gallery openings, book signings—I come from a very different world than him, so there wasn’t any danger of his friends or his wife’s friends seeing us. But he wasn’t having any of it. He used to say, ‘You like me, because I’m a mutt. So why you trying to make me something else? You don’t want to like me anymore?’ Maybe he had a point. I get asked out every once in awhile by some…type or other. Usually professors. I’m a research assistant and I love my job, but it doesn’t expose me to many different types of people. My family, where I come from, we’re all simple. They’re all simple. Simple, good people. When you tango with academics, you’re asking for trouble. That’s been my experience anyway. So the only person I tangoed with was Thomas. And now… (Pause.) He asked me the other day if I had a favorite poem. He said he needed something someone could read at his… And I got hysterical, which is very unlike me. I said, ‘Don’t talk like that. I’m not picking out any poems for your wife to read at your fucking funeral, Tommy!’ He smiled and I realized I’d called him Tommy. I walked over to the trash compactor and shoved all the index cards in and turned it on. You really can’t change people, you know? They don’t read. They don’t listen. They don’t leave their wives and their children. They don’t seek happiness or passion. They just live and bounce around and eventually they die. That’s how Thomas is. So I put those cards in the compactor as is to say, to hell with it. As if to say, Fine Tommy, we’ll just keep doing things your way for now.