Page 148 - In Five Years

Chapter Twenty-Six

I go down to Bella’s and make her tens of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—
the only thing, really, I know how to “cook.” The gallery girls come by. We
order from Buvette, and Bella’s favorite waiter brings it himself, along with a

bottle of Sancerre. And then the results of the surgery come back. The doctors
were right: stage three.
It’s in the lymph system, but not the surrounding organs. Good news, bad

news. Bella starts chemo and impossibly, insanely, we continue wedding
planning for two months from now: December in New York. I call the wedding
planner, the same one a young woman at my firm used. He wrote a book on

weddings: How to Wed: Style, Food, and Tradition by Nathaniel Trent. She buys
me the book, and I flip through it at work, grateful for the environment, this
animal firm where I work, that does not require or ask me to ooh and ahh over

peonies.
We choose a venue. A loft downtown that is, as Nathaniel tells me, the “best

raw space in Manhattan.” What he doesn’t say: Every nice hotel is booked, this
is the best we’re going to get. Some couple called their wedding off and we got
lucky.
The loft will mean more decisions—everything has to be brought in—but all

of the available hotels are bland or too corporate, and we agree to follow
Nathaniel’s lead and end up with something that splits the difference.

At first, the chemo goes well. Bella is a champion. “I feel great,” she tells me
on her way home from the hospital after her second session. “No nausea,
nothing.”
I’ve read, of course, that the beginning is a lie. That there is an air of

suspension. Before the chemicals reach your tissues, dig in, and start really