Blue Angel by Francine Prose

at work. Mercury must be in retrograde, or something. This girl came in and said she was getting bad vibes from the ghosts of Elijah Euston’s dead daughters.”
    â€œWhat were you supposed to do about that?”
    â€œValium,” Sherrie says.
    It actually cheers Swenson up to hear that clean-cut Euston kids are scamming to get drugs. “Probably one of my students.”
    â€œFreshman. Theater major,” says Sherrie. “And then this disgusting thing happened. Some creep, this new guy in admissions, comes over with an application from some high school kid. The good news is the kid’s got astronomical SAT scores. The bad news is he’s got testicular cancer. They want me to call Burlington and ask about his chances. They don’t want to waste a place in next year’s class if the kid’s not going to make it.”
    â€œIs that how he put it?” Swenson asks.
    â€œNo,” Sherrie says. “That would have been illegal. But that’s what he meant. I wasn’t going to call Burlington. Or let them turn the poor kid down. So an hour later I call admissions and tell them that the guys at the medical school promised the kid would be fine. I’m feeling like a hero. And then it hits me that they could admit the guy and I could spend the next four years with a very sick kid on my hands.”
    Swenson certainly hopes not. He doesn’t want to spend the next four years discussing testicular cancer. Listening to Sherrie’s stories about the clinic has begun to feel like hearing someone’s hypochondriacal symptoms. It’s not Sherrie’s fault that whatever she sees in her office has started sounding like something Swenson’s fated to get.
    The fact (which he would never say, and rarely admits to himself) is that he’s not very interested in what happens at the clinic. He married Sherrie under false pretenses—pretending to be enthralled by what she’d chosen to do with her life. But he had been fascinated, and not just for romantic reasons. A few days after he woke up on the emergency room floor with Sherrie’s cool hand encircling his wrist, he’d started writing a story about a doctor so infatuated with a jazz singer that he ruins his career to satisfy her unquenchable thirst for love disguised as a ravening hunger for morphine and diet pills. As the story grew into his first novel, Blue Angel, it developed its own needs—a craving for medical information. So he went back to St. Vincent’s and found Sherrie waiting for him. They fell in love so quickly, it seemed like research for the story of a man whose passion for a woman leaves him no viable option but to wreck his life. Except that Sherrie saved his. Everything changed when he met her.
    That summer, they saw The Blue Angel at the Bleecker, and as Swenson watched the professor degraded into a slobbering clown for the amusement of the nightclub singer, Lola Lola, played by Marlene Dietrich with her smoky voice and the thighs that grabbed and held your attention, he knew where his book was going. The film gave him the name of the nightclub where his singer worked—and the title for his novel. For the first time, he felt that he was onto something larger than revenge on a doctor so starstruck by Sarah Vaughn that he’d ignored Swenson’s ear infection. He understood that this period in his life—being in love instead of wanting to be in love, writing instead of wanting to write—had been arranged by magic, that a mantle of grace had settled on him and could as suddenly be whisked away. But not suddenly, as it turned out. Slowly. Thread by thread.
    Sherrie says, “Arlene told me the most insane story at work today. These cousins of hers took their daughter to some amusement park near Lake George. They went to buy cotton candy and let go of the kid’s hand and looked down…the kid disappeared. So they ran to park security, and the guards said,