Free The Last Beach Bungalow by Jennie Nash Page A

with what I had lost—my innocence, my faith, the frivolous lightness of being. I had been cancer-free for five years now. That was a joyous landmark, devoutly to be wished, and while I could revel in a good story or in the blessing of being able to witness my daughter growing into such a fine young woman, the fact of the matter was that cancer had made me feel mortal, and it’s hard to be optimistic when you feel so damn mortal. It’s hard to believe in God, it’s hard to feel excited about a new house, it’s hard to let your husband love you.
    In the beginning, I was grateful and smug, because most of the women in my support group said their husbands were too repulsed to touch them and they were convinced that no one ever would again, except out of pity. Rick, however, never flinched in the face of the wounds I sustained when I lost a breast. He cleaned those wounds, cared for them, then kissed them in a seamless progression of love and desire. But as the years passed and the mammograms came back clean, it began to be more difficult—the whole messy business of love and life.
    It’s hard to say why this is so, but the further away we got from the event itself, the more tenuous my grip on survival became. I felt more and more mortal as time went by. I felt more and more the risk there was in loving other mortals, in making alliances, in staking a place on this fragile earth. At these times I couldn’t stand my husband’s touch. My right breast was completely numb because it was completely fake. I appeared balanced and whole and I mostly felt balanced and whole—except when he touched me. He’d put his lips on my left, live, nipple, and all I could feel was the nonresponse of the one on the right. He’d move to the right one and all I could feel was his sense of duty, like a soldier following the protocol he knew to be right. I wanted to yell, “It doesn’t work!” but I never did. Was it possible he actually enjoyed it?
    As our fourteenth anniversary approached—which was a year and a half ago—guilt overwhelmed me. Rick didn’t deserve a wife who had been sick, and he didn’t deserve a wife who had grown so cold. I wanted to do something to show him how grateful I was for his compassion and constancy, and what I did was this: I had my fake breast tattooed. The idea came to me when I overheard a conversation where a mother was expressing her outrage that her daughter had gone to a place called Art & Soul. The girl had just waltzed in and gotten a shamrock tattooed on her ankle because her boyfriend was an Irishman. I was taken with that concept—of outrageous spontaneity, of permanent adornment for an audience of just one. I was certain Rick would be taken with it, too.
    Not long after the thought first came to me, I was in line at the grocery store behind a small, fit woman with an elaborate dragon tattooed on her shoulder blade. The tail snaked down her arm and the body covered most of the rounded knob of her shoulder. She was wearing a white spaghetti-strap tank, and I could clearly see the whole beast—its tail, its wings, its scales.
    “That’s beautiful,” I ventured, pointing.
    She turned her head, and registered no surprise that a slightly heavy, apricot-haired mother wearing plain black flip-flops, a denim skirt that hit below her knees, and an expression of extreme exhaustion, was interested in her tattoo.
    “It’s Cold Drake Dragon from Lord of the Rings ,” she said. “Erika Stanley did it at Art and Soul. I had to wait six months to get an appointment with her.”
    “Art and Soul,” I repeated. “I’ve heard of it.”
    The next day, I drove half an hour on the freeway to the studio on Robertson Boulevard. I was stunned to find that it was more like an art gallery than a sleazy bar. The walls were white and the space was open. There were large, colorful posters on the wall of various tattoos, framed award certificates and row upon row of black binders filled with tattoo