Pneumonia on Demand

I am finding my way through a surprise attack of pneumonia, which is an appropriate time to tell you of a woman in my life, or more romantically the woman in the rest of my life.

Her name is Karen Marie, to whom I was introduced last September. I was hoping for companionship at the time and my parameter was exacting: she had to be fun.

If she was fun, I knew that meant she was smart, and if she was smart, the odds were good that she would be engaged in the world.

It turns out she was fun – impish, in fact – smart and engaged in the world in most interesting and compelling ways. Now we are engaged together in the world and our newest plan is to be married in Paris next April, but that plan is only two days old and may be changed at any time.

What does not change, between me and her, is an old and fabulous feeling brought about by longing and satisfaction existing side by side. Love at this level of excitement is like the two lines on a heart monitor, the upper line spiked with specific events and the lower line running along with a quiet, but quite strong, pulse. In November, around Thanksgiving, I felt the longing line ignite, and start to glow, and I knew what it meant.

The upper line is the satisfaction line. In this line, there will be an event, a moment, with Karen – a laugh, a touch, a glance, a kiss - that flings me in a spike of pure satisfaction clear to the other side of the universe. Over there, as I am recovering my bearings, regaining my breath, I see the longing line arriving, curving around to meet me, telling me that, of Karen, there will never be enough.

It was perfectly reasonable, then, for Karen to be sitting on the edge of my tub Thursday night. It was the second evening of Karen’s special pneumonia treatment for a man she loves. She drew me a hot bubble bath, settled me into it, and brought me a small but icy cold vodka martini. I lay back in the suds and closed my eyes and we talked of events of the day. I talked about pneumonia. I had never had it before, and its onset surprised me. It began as a cold and I would still think it was a cold, with constant coughing, if Karen hadn’t made me go to the doctor.

“Pneumonia,” I reported to her by phone.

“See?!” she said, vindicated and a laugh escaping. Just a total imp. “I could just come over there and smack you.”

Instead she came over and took care of me, which now, at tubside, inspired her to pick up the bar of soap and say, “Now I’ll just bathe you. You need bathing.”

The soap in her hand ran up my arm, underneath, softly gliding in precise equilibrium with my skin, over my shoulder, behind my neck, turning me slightly in my weightlessness, suspended as I was between earth and space, cruising in comfort at the speed of light, switching my martini from right to left as I felt her gliding to the other side, cradling my neck in her hand. Heaven.

“I am going to write a pamphlet for men,” I purred: “ ‘Pneumonia on Demand.’ ”

We laughed and laughed. But then each man has to write his own. I will eventually forget the details of having pneumonia. But I will always have the pamphlet, and my love for Karen, who inspired it.