Loonglow

by Helen Eisenbach

  “Great,” Louey muttered.

  “You didn’t want me to know?”

  “Nothing to know, Mother. I haven’t changed.” She cradled an old shirt, now sadly outgrown. “Anyway, he’s not Jewish.”

  “You couldn’t find a nice Jewish boy—or girl?” It was the first time her mother had referred to her being gay since Louey had told her years ago.

  Louey laughed and hugged her mother, who patted her daughter’s head. “Not for lack of trying, Ma.”

  “These days you have to be careful with boys, you know.”

  “I know, Ma.”

  “It’s just not a good idea, Louey, with all the diseases going around.”

  “Next thing I know, you’re going to be telling me you’d rather I was involved with a woman.”

  “Would that be so terrible?”

  Louey’s mouth dropped. Her mother: one of a kind.

  By the end of the weekend, Louey had been treated to as much familial harmony as she could bear. She’d lost count of the number of times she’d been asked when she was going to get married and the number of newly divorced third cousins to whom she’d been introduced. The number of people who remembered what she did for a living, on the other hand, she could count on the fingers of one hand.

  Slipping out, she took a walk until she found herself outside city limits, where on a whim she caught a bus to the town gay bar. Unlike New York bars, this one was fully mixed, male and female. She hadn’t been in a gay bar anywhere for what seemed like years.

  The tall woman behind the bar raised her eyebrows when she saw Louey. After filling a middle-aged man’s mug, she came over. “What can I get you?” Her husky voice was the sweetest sound Louey had heard all weekend.

  “What have you got?” teased Louey.

  “Oh, I don’t know …” A slow smile spread over the woman’s features. “For you?”

  In a little while most of the customers had left. Louey helped the bartender clear the empty glasses away and put chairs up on the tables. Then the tall woman turned to Louey with a grin.

  Well! Louey thought. What was a girl to do?

  When Louey got home to New York, she learned that in her absence several famous people had died of AIDS. She got into the shower, letting the water soothe her, filled with foreboding at the thought of how many of her friends she would not see grow to middle age. It was only a matter of time before someone she knew would get it, she realized. The future was laid out suddenly before her one young man would fall, then another, and another, just as each one hit the prime of life. No wonder she never pushed dread too far from her mind.

  At night she dreamed her friends were in the hospital, filling bed after bed. Tony, too frail ever to dance again, lay dressed in white, surrounded by strange people whose faces were obscured by masks. “They refuse to help me with my makeup,” he complained, relaxing in her embrace like a child grateful for its mother’s love. She dreamed she was walking around in heaven with people she hadn’t realized had died, who showed her all the sights as if she’d arrived at a resort, a fabulous new club. Night after night she woke up in a sweat, afraid to go to sleep for fear of whom she’d find in heaven next.

  One night she woke to find Clay’s arms around her as the now-familiar tears streamed from her eyes. His solid form ought to have comforted her, his body healthy as a young man’s should be. Yet he seemed so far away, surreal. Kevin had just been the first to die, she thought; the rest would follow. Clay held her tightly: everyone would follow.

  “Is it Kevin?” Clay asked in the morning. It seemed ridiculous to tell him she was suddenly afraid of everyone she loved dying. The rest of the world had learned to live with death. Becoming paralyzed by it amounted to a sort of insanity.

  What did it mean to love someone? she wondered. Had it been a fluke that she’d loved Mia? Did she still love her? Did she love Clay, or was she merely responding to his love for her? Clay’s hands tried to soothe away her sorrow. Grief brought her emotions so close to the surface, every sensation felt like pain.

  One day she realized what was happening. How could she not have seen it? It was as if she were twelve years old again—yet now, instead of not being able to start crying, she couldn’t stop.

  For half her life, Louey had waited for catastrophe: she’d wake to find her home and family gone, she’d suddenly be penniless, abandoned. Her mother called her to a room and told her her father was dead.

  As she’d grown older, some of her fear had begun to fade. Then Kevin died—and now this monstrous, inhuman disease would destroy her friends. All at once, the foundation she thought she’d established started crumbling. It was as if her father had died yesterday, only yesterday. How had she managed to put off thinking about it for so long?

  How many young men would wake up to discover purple blotches on their bodies—boys who just the day before had leapt out of their beds and gone about delighting everyone who knew them? How many people would fear them, condemning them to death as if it were a punishment they deserved? How many of her friends would die, she wondered, get it and just die?

  Clay told her she’d be less afraid in time. Yet all she saw was everyone she loved lined up to fall into open graves, toppling, body after body. Some nights she wished she’d never have to wake to face it.

  Clay had thought love was something he knew nearly everything about, yet each day with Louey taught him something new. Sex he had thought he knew, too, yet his passion for her increased daily, when he would have expected it to fade. How could two such different people care for one another? Would she tire of him? As she dipped unfathomably toward despair, her body grew more precious, something he lived to coax joy from.

  She seemed to be losing what he’d sensed in her for a long time—her resistance to the idea of him, to the notion of him as part of her future. Some days she even seemed to welcome what she felt for him. Their relationship went against everything she believed, he knew. Yet love was so rare. Surely she wouldn’t turn her back on it because of the unexpected circumstances in which she’d found it? You love me, he wanted to shake her—was that so fucking terrible to admit?

  It had to mean something, what they had: they loved each other. Yet as she grew more comfortable, a strange uncertainty began to gnaw at him, some odd, growing unease. At unexpected moments, his happiness would be pierced with flashes of self-doubt—but why?

  One evening, to his horror, he heard himself ask her to marry him. She looked at him with astonishment and another emotion he couldn’t identify. He threw himself from her apartment into the noisy comfort of the streets, trying to understand what had come over him. Marriage, for Christ’s sake, he didn’t even believe in marriage. It was regressing to some precognizant state even to suggest it: the ultimate slap in the face to a gay woman.

  After a long walk he came back and rephrased the question: Did she want to live with him?

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Was he imagining the uneasy expression in her eyes? “No rush,” he said.

  “There are some things I have to tell you.”

  “I only need to know one thing.” He cleared his throat. “Your future mailing address for tasteless postcards.”

  “What brought all this on?”

  “Thing is,” he began, “I guess I need to know what your intentions are.” He tried to laugh. “I’m so conventional.” She studied his face grimly. “Louey, I can’t seem to stand just taking each day as it comes—is that unfair of me? Sometimes I don’t have any idea what you’re going to do next, if you want to—” He couldn’t say it. “I have to know what you really feel for me. Is that—”

  She swallowed. “It’s not unfair.”

  He should be happy she was considering living with him, he told himself. He was happy. Yet a queasy panic filled him, as if the ground were suddenly crumbling under his feet.

  “I’m not the only one due for some thinking,” Louey pointed out. “You should take time yourself to figure out what you really want from
me.”

  He wanted her to move in with him, that was what he wanted. Nothing could make me happier than being bound to you forever, he longed to tell her: bound. So why was part of him suddenly terrified that she might agree? What was he afraid of—what possible thing could either of them be risking—when they’d been through so much already?

  She moved around the room, cleaning up without looking at him. Clay felt as if he’d jarred the serenity of their life together, broaching some scandal that pitted them against each other, rendered them strangers. He gathered some of his things, looking around the apartment with a sense that something unfathomable was happening. Slipping away: the phrase echoed in his head. He didn’t know what it could be, but he was losing something irretrievable. Giving her a kiss, he left, closing the door behind him. The soft click echoed in his ears as if it were the discharge of a pistol.

  Louey awoke to a discovery: she loved him. Could that be possible? She lay in bed, studying the ceiling as the words reverberated through her head. It was true; she loved him. It astonished her. Who would have thought her simple pleasure in his company could unexpectedly turn into something deeper? A feeling of calm seeped through her. How had something like this happened without her even noticing? Typical, she thought, when life outside convention gave her such delight, her sly emotions tricked her into this collaboration.

  She picked up the phone, hanging up before she’d made the connection. What would she have said: I love you, isn’t that a riot? He would hardly have been amused. She shook herself, sighing, and got up to go to work.

  In the middle of the afternoon the thought came into her head: never to make love with a woman again. She stared at lines of text in front of her, unable to focus. How could she bear it? Never to kiss a woman. How could she give that up forever? You’re the one who feels sorry for anyone who isn’t gay, she told herself, remember? She hadn’t realized what she would be giving up if she stayed with Clay. If she told him about sleeping with the woman back home, he would probably leave her. How could she love him?

  But she did love him. It was ridiculous, but she did. Jesus: was she actually contemplating moving in with a man? It was too alien a notion to consider seriously. What was it she had with him; could it be anything like what she’d had with Mia? She didn’t want anything like that with a man. Her own mother, with all her wishes for an easy life, would not expect that of her. But Clay wasn’t “a man”: he was just Clay. What was so terrible about loving him?

  To keep his mind off the future, Clay dredged up his old manuscript. It was both better than he’d remembered and more fundamentally flawed than he’d expected. How on earth could he write a book if he couldn’t even think of how to end it? What was love, anyway? What made him feel so lost thinking about it? He was just unaccustomed to being alone, he told himself; Louey was such a basic component of his life he couldn’t function properly without her.

  The faceless uncertainty continued to gnaw at him. What could he be so worried about? She would either say yes or no, and if no, that didn’t mean she was going to walk out of his life forever. And if she said yes? Wasn’t that what he’d dreamt of—proof she loved him so much she was willing to do something absolutely out of character?

  He didn’t want her to be out of character, that was the problem. As he thought of her compromising, he envisioned Louey changing, trapped, like so many people dimmed by the details of ordinary life. Would she become less and less the woman he loved, the more she changed for him? How fair was it to ask her?

  He wanted to live with her, couldn’t imagine not being with her. Yet what if years went by and one day she awoke and realized she’d betrayed all she was, all she cared about? Would she blame him, then, for what he’d done to her? Would she grow to despise herself—and him?

  It made no sense, thought Louey. If she refused to love someone simply because he was a man, how was that any different from the world denying her the right to love a woman? What was the big deal, living with him, anyway? She wouldn’t lose her life; it wouldn’t change what she felt about anything. Being with one person always meant giving up what you might have with anyone else. Everyone in relationships made the same concession. And if she found that she couldn’t be happy with him—because he wasn’t a woman, for whatever reason—she’d stop seeing him. No relationship was guaranteed to be permanent; she’d known few that were. What she had with Clay was bound to change eventually. She was gay, for Christ’s sake. Then why live with him? she wondered.

  On the other hand, since she loved him, why not?

  By the end of the week Clay had hardly slept a night, stalking the city for hours like a homeless man. One night, when he lay down, something in him gave. Never again could he let anything, any one person, put him in this state. Life could never rise and fall on circumstances he could not control; that way lay madness.

  The night before he was to meet Louey, he came home to find a message from her on his machine: she would meet him at a certain restaurant at eight (she would be the one with teeth). He turned the machine off, running a hand through his hair. Instinctively he moved to fix himself a drink. She sounded cheerful, which meant the news was good, or so he had to hope. Catching sight of his face in the hall mirror on the way to depositing his jacket, he lifted his glass in a toast.

  “Here’s to your future, baby,” he said. Soon enough he’d hear the verdict, good or bad. It shouldn’t really matter what it was.

  Why was it he felt like crying?

  After thirty-five minutes, the maître d’ came over to Clay to say Miss Mercer had called to tell him she was going to be late. He had been surprised at the butterflies that overtook him as he sat waiting; why he should be so anxious he couldn’t imagine. Reason told him that she was late due to something minor, yet he couldn’t help feeling a purely irrational sense of foreboding. What if she didn’t come at all? What if she had realized she was making the biggest mistake of her life? Why hadn’t he been satisfied to leave things as they were—marriage, for God’s sake, where had that idea come from? It was all this misery that had overtaken her recently; it had made him want to pledge himself to her, to glue her to him.

  This was craziness. She would be here. He was insane to worry—he wouldn’t ruin her just by living with her, she was sleeping with him as it was, for Christ’s sake, and she hadn’t been contaminated with normality, had she?

  The waiters and other customers looked at him with alternating pity and curiosity, as if he were dolled up for a blind date who was obviously jilting him. After an hour, the gnawing in his stomach got the better of him and he called her apartment. The phone rang and rang. He called his machine to see if she’d left him a message, but there was no word. He went back to his table, determined to renew his vigil, but his trip to the phone had somehow killed his desire to stay, and he paid the check, leaving a message with the waiter in case Louey came after he’d gone. The last thing he was going to do was sit and wait as if eagerly anticipating bad news.

  He had to do something. She’d been murdered on the street, on the subway; she’d been kidnapped, pushed under a train. He would never forgive himself if something had happened to her. With a growing sense of dread, Clay made his way to her apartment.

  Louey had been zipping up her dress when a knock came on her door. Silly boy, she thought, opening it with a flourish.

  “May I come in?”

  Louey took a step back. Mia stood in her doorway, her hair in disarray around her face.

  “I know I should have called,” Mia was saying. Louey moved back and they were both inside before she knew how it had happened. The room seemed tiny, cramped. “You probably would have hung up on me.”

  “I can’t talk to you,” Louey blurted.

  Mia stared. Louey felt the outline of her body wavering, as if she were dissolving into tiny particles. How could Mia be here? Mia said something about the party (Party? Louey thought), then on the street, why wouldn’t Louey talk to her? There seemed to be an echo. “… do I hav
e to do?” said Mia, do? voice faltering, just tell me what I have to do.

  Louey groped for a nearby chair, sinking into it. “You stopped,” she stuttered. “Everything just stopped.”

  “You know I never stopped loving you.” Had Mia really said that? It seemed cruelly surreal. “Does this mean all a person has to do is make one mistake … someone you love …” (Louey’s head was throbbing) “… another chance?” Louey covered her face.

  “Are you all right?” Mia knelt, a hand on Louey’s knee, the other reaching to her cheek. Louey wrenched herself away, head spinning, bolted to the bathroom, splashing water on her face, the small room closing in on her, face in the mirror wild-eyed, unfamiliar. How could Mia be here, now?

  The sight that greeted Louey on returning to the living room nearly made her stagger, reaching for the wall. Mia was crumpled on the floor, collapsed, face in her hands: Mia was crying. Never had she seen Mia like this, defeated; it was wrenching. Louey stumbled for the phone, leaving a message, her eyes frozen on the sight of Mia: Mia helpless and distraught was the only possibility she’d never considered, the only problem she was powerless to solve. Kneeling, she put her arms on Mia’s shoulders. “Don’t. Please, Mia.”

  “I waited,” Mia said, “until I had the nerve.” Her voice pierced right through Louey. “Till I was sure he was gone.”

  “He?”

  “Yes”—suddenly defiant—“I saw you with him, but then for a while he didn’t come, so then I …” Waited to make sure, Mia was saying; some strange roaring built in Louey’s ears. “… courage to face you.” Mia, building courage?

  “So does this mean once someone hurts you,” Mia said again, “they never get another chance?” Her voice seemed far away; surely it was someone other than Mia who’d been watching her apartment until Clay was really gone? “… what it took to force myself to knock.” Louey swallowed: forced herself? “I never knew what I was doing,” Mia cried out. “Don’t you realize that? You always thought I had all the answers—Christ, I didn’t have a clue. What the fuck has someone like me got to offer?”