I went by myself. I was going only for the night. I walked from my hotel to the theater and showed my ID to a guard who then led me to the crowded greenroom. I met the hosts of the event and a few people who worked for them. I was introduced to Tom Hanks’s editor, Tom Hanks’s agent, his publicist, his assistant, Tom Hanks himself. He was tall and slim, happily at ease, answering questions, signing books. Everyone was laughing at his jokes because his jokes were funny. The people around him arranged themselves into different configurations so that the assistant could take their pictures, each one handing over his or her cell phone. Audience questions arrived on index cards, were read aloud and sorted through. The ones Tom Hanks approved of were handed to me. I would ask them at the end of the event, depending on how much time we had. The greenroom crowd was then escorted to their seats, and we were ushered to the dark place behind the curtain—Tom Hanks, his assistant, and I. The assistant was a tiny woman wearing a fitted black-velvet evening coat embroidered with saucer-size peonies. “Such a beautiful coat,” I said to her. We’d been introduced when I arrived but I didn’t remember her name.

The experience of waiting backstage before an event is always the same. I can never quite hear what the person making the introduction is saying, and for a moment I wouldn’t be able to tell you the name of the theater or even the city I was in. There’s usually a guy working the light board and the mics who talks to me for a minute, though tonight the guy talking was Tom Hanks. He wanted to know whether I liked owning a bookstore. He was thinking about opening one himself. Could we talk about it sometime? Of course we could. We were about to go on. “I don’t have any questions,” I whispered in the darkness. “I find these things go better if you just wing it.” Then the two of us stepped out into the blinding light.

As soon as the roaring thunder of approval eased, he pointed at me and said, “She doesn’t have any questions.”
,br> When the event was over and more pictures had been taken and everyone had said how much they’d enjoyed absolutely everything, Tom Hanks and his assistant and I found ourselves alone again, standing at the end of a long cement hallway by a stage door, saying good night and goodbye. A car was coming to pick them up.

“Come on, Sooki,” he said, his voice gone grand. “Let’s go back to the hotel. I need to find a Belvedere martini.”

I hoped he would ask me to join them. I’d spent two hours on a stage talking to Tom Hanks, and now I wanted to talk to Sooki. Sooki of the magnificent coat. She had said almost nothing and yet my eye kept going to her, the way one’s eye goes to the flash of iridescence on a hummingbird’s throat. I thought about how extraordinarily famous you would have to be to have someone like that working as your assistant.

Neither of them asked me out for drinks.

Most of the writers and artists I know were made for sheltering in place. The world asks us to engage, and for the most part we can, but given the choice we’d rather stay home. I know how to structure my time. I can write an entire novel without showing a page of it to anyone. I can motivate myself without a deadline or a contract. I was happy, even thrilled, to stop traveling. I had spent my professional life looking at my calendar, counting down the days I had left at home. Now every engagement I had scheduled in 2020 was canceled. With each day, I felt some piece of scaffolding fall away. I no longer needed the protection. I was an introvert again. Sooki had come to our house thinking she’d be staying with someone who was gone half the time and busy the other half of the time. And there I was, going nowhere. It was just the three of us now, Sooki and Karl and me.

Sooki and I stood together in the kitchen, one of us washing the vegetables, the other one chopping, making it up as we went along. I wrote and she painted and then we made dinner. But our truest means of communication arrived in the form of old yoga DVDs. There was no more walking to a class in the dark of morning—everything was closed—and so I asked her if she wanted to exercise with me. I did kundalini yoga in the morning, a practice that was built around a great deal of rapid breathing, and then I went on to other things.

But once we had finished that first short practice, she turned to me, blooming. “This is what I need,” she said, excited. “This is what’s been missing.”

This story—which begins and begins—starts again here. Of course we would exercise together; it was good for both of us. Kundalini is nothing if not an exercise in breath, and as it turned out, breath was what Sooki was craving. More breath. Almost from the moment we finished that first practice, she identified it as part of her recovery, the thing she needed to stay alive.

I had never found a way of asking what having cancer had been like for her, or what it meant to so vigorously refuse the hand you were dealt. With every passing day I seemed less able to say, Do you want to talk about this? Am I the person you’re talking to, or are you talking to someone else downstairs late at night? I was starting to understand that what she needed might have been color rather than conversation, breath rather than words.

My continuous and varied relationship with exercise was an inheritance from my father. He was not one to miss a workout and neither was I. I’d practiced kundalini devotedly for years and then drifted, picking up other things, and while I’d stuck with the short class, I had amassed no end of DVDs. Now Sooki and I sorted through them like old baseball cards. We did a different hour-long class every morning, identifying our favorites, ordering more DVDs. All that breathing and twisting and flexing fed her, and the calm voice of the instructor seemed to be speaking directly to her. “This one is good for your liver.” “This will help all your internal organs.” “You are beautiful. You are powerful. You decide.” We laughed at the simple optimism but we also caught ourselves listening.

Every morning before breakfast, we waved our hands in the air. We danced. We did up dog and down dog in endless repetition. And then one night, for reasons I cannot imagine, we decided to do it all again before we went to sleep. And that was that. Yoga and meditation for an hour in the morning was augmented with yoga and meditation for an hour at night. Surely we would take off the Wednesday mornings when she had to be at the hospital at seven o’clock. Never. She was going to be stuck in a chair all day, which was why it was necessary to do it again at night when she got home. We laughed at ourselves, at the practice, at the voice that told us we were flowers, we were leopards, but we didn’t stop. I thought some nights my back would snap. I wanted to go to bed and read. But my sixty-four-year-old houseguest with recurrent pancreatic cancer asked for absolutely nothing but this. How was I going to say I was tired when she was never tired? She lit up with all that breath.

Or maybe it was the company. We had finally found a completely comfortable way of being together. I saw my mother and sister. I went to sleep with my husband. Most days I went to work at Parnassus for several hours, filling boxes. The bookstore was closed to the public, but we were still shipping orders. Yoga was Sooki’s necessary social hour, and what I got in return was time with Sooki. There were so many other people who would have done anything to be with her—her mother and husband, her daughter and son and grandchildren, her sisters and all of her friends. How thrilled they would have been to have even a few of the hours she wasted with us. These precious days I’ll spend with you, I sang in my head.
,br> Pay attention, I told myself. Pay attention every minute.