MacArthur Park by Judith Freeman

Author:Judith Freeman [Freeman, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

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THE WAITER brought our food. Jolene began eating, slowly cutting her steak into small pieces and chewing carefully.

I can eat okay, I still have an appetite, she said. It’s afterward that’s the problem. The digestion. Everything was so badly damaged by the radiation, and then the surgery later didn’t quite go as planned. My intestinal tract…She let her voice trail off.

I’m just so sorry, I said, about…the cancer.

It was a hard word for me to say, and as I spoke it I felt how terrible it sounded. A frightening, difficult word. I wished I could have put it another way. It always sounded like a death sentence falling out of my mouth to even utter that word. But it also felt foolish to avoid it.

Ah yes, the cancer. What a bitch. I think all the stress I went through with Lucien contributed to my becoming ill. But how could you know, she added, why anyone gets sick? She said she hated it when people tried to blame you for getting cancer. That was the killer.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask her what kind of cancer she had—colon, stomach, liver? What difference did it make anyway? I felt she really didn’t want to talk about it right then. So instead I asked about where she was living, exactly what part of Silver Lake, and we talked about that for a while as we ate. How the neighborhood had changed from what she remembered. The obscenely high rents in L.A. had shocked her, she said. Not even Paris seemed that expensive, though it was probably worse.

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