If I thought I'd gotten a good feeling by now for the twists and turns of chemo, I was wrong. This evening I left the house with Harriet at 5:30 for dinner at the home of our old friends Doug and Nancy, in time to attend a public lecture a short drive away. By 7:00 I was lying in their bed, alone in the house.

As we sat down to eat, Nancy raised a toast: how delightful it was to be together, she said, and to see me looking so well. "And," I thought, clinking my glass of wine, "how misleading." At that point I was, clinically, a man without immunity. The day before Nurse Jill had shown me my latest lab results on the screen of her examining room computer, happily stubbing her finger at the column where my white blood cell count was nearing zero—proof positive that my chemo was right on schedule, working like a charm. "The numbers should shoot back up in about a week," she said, "Just keep taking your antibiotics, stay away from crowds and call if you get a cold."

Harriet had expressed some concern about my going to the lecture. If I was determined to go, I should at least wear one of those surgical masks you see on people in the evening news when there's an outbreak of flu in Asia. We could leave a little early and buy one at a drugstore on the way. I was against it—too humiliating. Those ribbed bulbs of sky blue plastic made you look like you were sucking on a small armadillo. Besides, the mask didn't specify which side the danger was on. What if people thought I was wearing it to protect them from me! I didn't want to stick out as the sickest person in the room. "I'd rather die of infection than embarrassment," I joked. That did it. I'd just made the perfect case for not going at all.

"Here's a plan," said Nancy, "You drive home and skip the lecture, it's only an hour anyway. We'll take Harriet with us and come back to your place and hang out." A perfect solution to keep the evening rolling! I could even buy some ice cream for dessert on the way back.

Our car was blocking theirs in the driveway. With a surge of energy I drained the last of my wine, jumped up from the table, rushed to the door and nearly collapsed with a case of chemo legs. They sat me down at the table, eyeing me with that mixed look of tenderness and terror I was getting used to seeing on Harriet every time a new side-effect cropped up. I was sure the condition was temporary, but there was no time to prove it. If they were going to get to the lecture on time, they needed to leave right away. To reassure them I'd be okay, I let Doug and Nancy lead me upstairs, put me in their bed with the TV on and promised to stay there until they got back. A few minutes later I heard them drive off as I lay there mummified in a quilt, staring at an episode of "Demolition Derby" on the cable.

Ten minutes later, Doug and Nancy's teenage son showed up with his girlfriend. Seeing his parents' bedroom wide open and blaring with the sound of bashing trucks, they wandered in and froze at the threshold. Matthew had known me all his life and seen me plenty, but never flat on my back in his parents' bed. This early in my chemo, I didn't even know if they had told him I was sick. Making some excuse that I might have had a little too much to drink but was now feeling fine, I got up, wished them a pleasant evening, and drove home. I forgot the ice cream.

I entered our house through the back door, relieved to see we had left it unlocked. I'd forgotten my house keys and wasn't eager to add to an already eventful evening by breaking through the living room window from the porch.

I stood in the kitchen, soothed by its silence, grateful at last to have an hour to myself. In a way, I had told Matthew the truth. I did have too much to drink at dinner. In fact, I shouldn't have been drinking it all. On my way to his parents' house I had swallowed an Ativan and an extra dose of Oxycodone, not for pain, but, off-label, in the hope of easing the mounting anxiety I seemed to carry with me everywhere and before everyone I met, that, at any moment, I might be asked to leave. It made absolutely no sense to feel unwelcome at Doug and Nancy's table, or uncertain of their kindness and love, but there it was, since my childhood, that deep deposit of distrust, beyond the reach of common sense and nearly forty years of friendship.

Someone had left a light on in the back of the kitchen and I could just make out the shapes of two hats hanging side by side on pegs near the door. Both had arrived at the house within the last few days.

The first, a soft, dark leather cap, belonged to a dapper neighbor of ours in his mid-sixties named Eric. I didn't know him well; we communicated mostly by friendly smiles if our paths crossed at all, but I would often see him talking contentedly with his partner, Richard, as they strolled down to the pond at the bottom of our street. Eric had died unexpectedly of a heart attack the day I had been diagnosed with cancer. My first chance to offer Dick my condolences was on the day he came to call, weeks later, with this hat of Eric's as a gift.

The second hat, a Basque beret, had come a day earlier by mail from our friend Alice on Cape Cod and had belonged to her husband Max. Max had died of Parkinson's Disease when Andrew was still a child and, now that I was in need of a hat, she wanted me to have it. I had met Max only once, late in the evening on a visit to their house when Alice and I were getting acquainted. It was toward the end of Max's life and, as I recall, he sat in a wheelchair, warmed by a shawl and the nearby light of an antique table lamp. By then, except for an occasional, slurred word, he'd lost the power of speech. Still, through his eyes, his charm and a sweet, almost boyish delight in our company filled the room. Alice told me the beret came from his years as a screenwriter and filmmaker, when the two of them had been a radiant young couple chasing adventures in California, Paris, and New York.

I never liked hats, but sooner or later, if only to keep from looking too sick or ghastly, I was going to need them, so I tried them on. Max's beret was a bit snug; his head had been smaller than mine; Eric's cap fit just right. To my surprise, though, alone in the dark and quiet of the house, as I lowered them to my head, they felt like a caress; a laying on of warm, well-wishing hands. For that moment, if only through sheer exhaustion, I felt chemo had given me the ability to touch not just the surface of things, but their spirit.