Me Times Three

by Alex Witchel

  I mean, really. Paul, it turned out, was as much a liar as Bucky. Only his lies couldn’t hurt Sally the way Bucky’s hurt me, because Sally knew what she was dealing with. Unlike me, when Paul had named me Three Wishes, Sally had opened her eyes and seen what was in front of her—and she had chosen to love him anyway. My eyes had been perennially closed. Until Carla Jones came upon me with a crowbar.

  But Paul had also lied to me, I realized, sitting there, blowing smoke toward the front lawn, expecting to see a face appear from behind the drawn curtains. I felt thrown now but, truth be told, not all that much. I knew who Paul was, pedigree aside. This scenario actually made perfect sense to me. I remembered our trip to Buccellati. Would a rich person ever have done that?

  “It’s just hopes and dreams, that’s all, about who Paul wants to be,” Sally said firmly. She ran a hand through her hair, and I could see that the terrible tension she had been carrying was gone. “He does love you, Sandy,” she said. “That part is true. I know, because I feel it from him. Without a doubt.”

  “It’s mutual,” I said. “I just can’t believe I’ve known him for so long and he didn’t tell me. That he wouldn’t trust me to accept him for who he is.”

  She smiled gently. “That’s not who he wanted to be,” she said. “Paul always had an idea of how his life should go, and if something didn’t fit, he just pretended it was gone. That’s all.”

  And he had the nerve to call me Three Wishes. He was the original Cinderella, pushing his luck to the last stroke of midnight, and even though he had the sense to flee before whichever Prince saw the truth, he just refused to see it, even back home with the mice and the pumpkins. I remembered how he danced at the opening-night parties at Yale, flinging me around the floor as if he were trying to win a race, pushing and pulling and willing the music to last. When it stopped, he simply picked up and went elsewhere. There was never a morning after with Paul; it was always the morning before.

  I watched Sally fiddle with her key ring, her eyes downcast. I realized then that, truth aside, it had been to Sally’s advantage to keep Marie believing I was competition. The story would be better that way. When Marie’s friends from church discovered that her son was dying from AIDS, he could be the victim of intravenous drugs, nothing else, with an extra girlfriend from back east to prove it.

  The closeness I had felt to Sally, seeing Paul’s house with her, was tempered now. So much was happening between us that it far surpassed “I like you, you like me.” We were not friends, Sally and I. The only thing we had in common was Paul. And it seemed that all either one of us could look forward to now was more of these conversations—either stilted and painful, or all in a rush—in which I would wish I could be talking to him, instead, and so would she.

  She started the car. “He’s waiting, we’d better go,” Sally said, her calm, official tone reinstated. “Also,” she added, “just so you’re aware, it’s my birthday soon, and I heard Paul on the phone with a friend of ours who has a van, and he wants to surprise me by going shopping and getting me a gift. He wants to do it tomorrow, while you’re here.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I won’t let on that I know what you’re doing when you leave. But, Sandy”—she looked over at me—“the reason for the van is that you’re going to have to take him in a wheelchair.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and looked out the window. Paul’s illness was the first time in my life I had faced a situation where being smart didn’t help, being responsible didn’t help, even being nice didn’t help. There was nothing I could do to stop it or to fix it. What about all those books about people who have incredible wills to live? People who surmount any obstacle and survive just to stay with the ones they love? Maybe Paul wasn’t trying hard enough.

  I dropped that notion the minute I entered the apartment. Even after Sally’s careful preparation, I was completely taken aback. Paul was sitting up on the couch, dressed in a white pressed shirt and black pants. He was skeletal, and his skin had turned a mottled grayish-green. But it was the force of his anger that stunned me. He had seen all the same movies I had but discovered that his will to live meant nothing. Rage shot from his eyes, smacking me from across the room. All that seemed left of his face was his suddenly gigantic yellow teeth, which his lips barely covered. He seethed now like a grotesque monster in a fairy tale. The spell that had been cast on him could never be reversed.

  Anything I had planned to say evaporated. For once, my mouth failed me. “Hey,” I tried cheerily, and he glared, silent. He kept his eyes on me as Sally eased him into a reclining position. “That was so good that you were able to sit up for Sandy,” she said, as if he were a two-year-old. “Wasn’t that good, Sandy?”

  I didn’t answer, but went instead to the coffee table next to the couch and sat on it, close to him, near his head. “Hey,” I said again, softly, and this time he cried, throwing his arm over his face for protection. But there was no violence or fury in his sobs, no throbbing or shaking. They were silent. He had been defeated.

  I started telling him all about the potato pancakes and the smoked salmon, and my new awful roommate with the white face and white hair, and how Susie Schein was as terrible as always, and anything else that came into my head, while Sally sat in an easy chair across the room. There were piles of books all over, all about coping with illness or pain, about how to say goodbye. Most had bookmarks in them. Sally saw me scanning them. “We read aloud sometimes,” she explained. “It helps.”

  Finally, Paul lowered his arm and looked into my eyes. “I have to go to bed,” he said, and I got out of the way while Sally helped him stand. The walk to the bedroom took longer than it had last time, and I followed behind, watching how his feet barely left the ground, how he hung on to her.

  The bedroom was a shambles; countless medicine bottles overflowing the night tables or lying on the light blue carpet, which was dotted with shit stains. Once he was perched on the edge of the bed, Paul motioned Sally away. “I must go shopping tomorrow,” he whispered to me, taking tenuous hold of my wrist with two fingertips, as if I were the one who was sick and he didn’t want to get too close. But he was adamant that I understand the importance of his mission. “It’s going to be Sally’s birthday. And I might not be here.”

  “I understand,” I assured him. “I’ll come with you.”

  And just as it seemed he would lose his balance, Sally reappeared and moved him back against a pile of pillows, then scooped up his legs and brought them around. When his feet touched the covers, he winced and cursed, and she apologized, again and again.

  I walked out into the hallway as she began to undress him. “I’m going to bed, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I called out, heading for the guest room.

  “Don’t you want dinner?” Sally called after me. No, I insisted, I was just too tired. I needed to be alone now, to think about everything she had told me, and what it meant. I closed the door behind me and reached into my bag for the two squashed tuna fish sandwiches I had taken from my mother’s care package. I much preferred this solitary meal to the awkward marathon of small talk that would inevitably follow the greater revelations of the day.

  And there had been so many. I sat on the pink carpet, leaning my head back against the flowered bedspread. First off, Paul had lied to me. So why wasn’t I angry? From the beginning, he and I had intuited the nasty little secret we shared: We both wanted to belong—and didn’t. So why shouldn’t he lie? I lied to him every time I lied to myself, about my perfect life shimmering on the Green Hills horizon.

  His anger now stunned me, though. The depth of it. I had always thought that when people were dying they tended toward the reflective, the philosophical. But that was usually in the movies, I supposed now, someone propped up against the pillows, looking pale yet radiant.

  I rubbed the knots in my neck. I wished the caregiver support group had been more helpful. I had gone twice, the honorable Bebe Stewart presiding. She was certainly an unlikely sight, standing i
n a room full of metal chairs and dirty linoleum. She was tall and thin, and teased clouds of gray hair framed her milk-white face, flawless even in fluorescent light. She wore a baby-lotion-pink Chanel suit with matching slingbacks, and a load of Bulgari jewelry sat, perfectly balanced, around her neckline. If this woman didn’t have the answers to life, no one did.

  “For any newcomers,” she had said in a voice that was unexpectedly kind, “this is a group that gathers twice a week and is meant to give support to all of us who are living with people who are living with AIDS or HIV. We spend so much of our time ministering to the needs of others that we sometimes forget that our own batteries need to be recharged, too. We have to take good care of ourselves, remember, or else the person who is relying on us will be let down.”

  An older woman raised her hand. “My son has AIDS,” she said. “And I can’t get him to eat. I can’t get him to take his medicine. I can’t even get him to see the doctor. He doesn’t listen to me. And he’s shopping all the time. He’s having trouble sleeping, so he’s spent every day for a week at Macy’s, looking at mattresses. I’m telling you, Mrs. Stewart, there’s nothing wrong with the mattress he has. And we can’t afford a new one.” She started to cry. “I just don’t know what to do.”

  I thought now of Paul sending himself flowers. Five hundred dollars’ worth.

  Bebe Stewart had an answer. “One of the things that’s so hard for us to understand when we’re living with this disease every day is the idea of denial,” she said. “It may seem incredible to you that your son won’t take his medicine or see his doctor, but to him, it’s perfectly logical. If you put yourself in his place, you can see how scared he is, how powerless he feels. Denial sometimes is nothing more for an ill person than a vacation. It’s a way of saying, ‘No, I’m not sick. This is not happening to me.’ ”

  More people spoke, people for whom life was dreadful, filled with the sordid sights and rotten smells I knew Sally had to endure each day. By the end of the second session, I felt ashamed for even thinking that I needed support. For what? Existential despair? I didn’t belong there with those people pushed to strength’s end. My suffering was borne at a clean distance, at the end of a phone line, within the confines of a long weekend. I felt ashamed that I had come at all.

  I felt ashamed now, because even though I was here, sitting on the rug right down the hall from the friend I loved, there was nothing I could do that would ease his pain, increase his appetite, reduce his despair. I had no experience of living without hope. It had always seemed to me that if you worked harder and behaved better, there was a chance you could turn things around.

  It was dark out now. The low sounds of a television traveled down the hall. I climbed underneath the flowered bedspread and fell asleep.

  The following morning, Paul lay on the couch and I sat in front of him with a plate of potato pancakes. He inhaled deeply, a look of pure pleasure on his face. He took a bite and seemed in ecstasy. My spirits soared. “I knew these would make you happy,” I exulted, and he nodded, but his chewing slowed and he held the food in his mouth awhile until, finally, he turned his head and spit it out.

  “Too hard to chew?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me see.”

  He looked surprised. “I want to see what it looks like,” I said. “Sally told me you had a lesion on the roof of your mouth, and I knew no matter how bad it was, you were thrilled it wasn’t on your face.” He smiled and leaned his head back, opening his mouth as if he were at the dentist. The lesion looked like a huge scab. Then he reached down and tugged at his pant leg: Silently, he lifted it and showed me another sore, on his shin.

  “Potato pancakes for breakfast?” Sally’s cheery voice bounced off the kitchen tiles as she came in with the papers and fresh orange juice.

  “Yes, they’re great, have some,” I called. She and I ate a few, and then she got up to make Paul’s milk shake.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, following her. “Just show me how.”

  I put everything in the blender—sneaking in more nutrition powder than Sally had measured—and poured some of the mixture into a shot glass. Paul drank it in small sips until it was finished.

  “Great!” I enthused. “How about another?”

  He looked up at me, spent, with a pleading expression, but he didn’t speak.

  “Maybe later,” I said, feeling ashamed. There must be no greater affront to a sick, weak person than a healthy person’s pushy vitality.

  Paul and Sally’s friend Phil arrived, as scheduled, and there were loud explanations of going out for a drive as Sally busied herself cleaning up the kitchen. “See you all later,” she called.

  Once the three of us were in Phil’s van, Paul seemed infused with energy. “This is a total surprise, and no one is allowed to tell her,” he ordered.

  Phil nodded. He was a slight, blond guy, who Sally had said was part of Paul’s AA group. “Where to?” he asked Paul.

  “Saks,” Paul said authoritatively.

  “What are you thinking of buying?” I asked.

  “Antique jewelry,” Paul said.

  “They have that at Saks?”

  He nodded. “A great selection.”

  When we arrived at the Beverly Hills store, Phil got out of the van, set up the wheelchair, and moved Paul into it seemingly without effort, covering his lap with a blanket. “It’s air-conditioned pretty good in there, buddy,” he explained.

  Paul nodded and said, “I think only Sandra should come in with me. We won’t be long.”

  Phil looked surprised, but he agreed. “I’ll be here,” he said, climbing back into the van.

  I wheeled Paul toward the entrance. “What was that about?” I asked.

  “He’s in my AA group, and I don’t want him to know how much money I have. He works for a housepainter.”

  “Okay.” I concentrated on maneuvering the chair, stopping once to fix Paul’s blanket, which had slipped. I looked at him, sitting up, expectant, the old shopping gleam in his eye. He caught me looking, and we grinned. I pushed him forward and stopped in the doorway, framed between the shimmering California heat and the blast of refrigerated air. And in that instant I realized—too late—that this was his prized theater moment in reverse; the anticipation of magic had gone perilously wrong somehow, the lights had come up on disaster. Every person in the store stopped, a tableau set against gleaming marble and shining glass cases. Each turned to stare at the shrunken green man in the wheelchair at what seemed exactly the same moment. I couldn’t see Paul’s face then, only the golden faces before us, shining with lipstick and glossy hair. In that split second it was as if a secret alarm had gone off, and now the only thing anyone could do was agilely shift their aerobicized bodies clear of the disease rolling willfully into their midst.

  Almost as quickly as it had stopped, the chatter began again. I pushed the chair forward, and every head turned away, and we were alone, cast adrift among the Gucci bags.

  “Do you know where the jewelry is?” I asked Paul, but he shook his head. And when I asked a saleswoman, she answered without looking at either me or at Paul. I followed the woman’s directions, wheeling Paul to a counter that said ESTATE JEWELRY, and we looked through the glass together. “See anything you like?” I asked, but he was indecisive. He wanted to see the pieces up close. But the counter was deserted, and I couldn’t find anyone to help us. Paul knew exactly what was going on. A few months ago, these same people would have taken one look at his handsome, chiseled face and fought one another for the chance to help him.

  I left him there, and finally, three counters away, in costume jewelry, I noticed a saleswoman, her back turned to me, who was busily opening and closing drawers.

  “Excuse me,” I said, walking up to her. “Excuse me,” I repeated loudly, in my most forbidding New York tone of terror.

  “Oh, yes?” Her voice cracked as she turned, showing me a forced smile.

  “I need some help with the estate jewelry.”


  “I’m afraid that’s not my department,” she said, walking out from behind the counter in an attempt to flee.

  “Can you make it your department?” I asked curtly.

  “Well, now, it’s not that easy. I don’t have the key,” she answered.

  “Who has it?”

  “The woman who’s on break.” She was literally walking backward.

  “Okay, fine,” I said, smiling a dangerous smile. “Here’s what’s going to happen now. You may not realize it, but you see my friend there, in the chair? Well, did you know that he’s a Calvin Klein model? Yes, you recognize him now, I can tell you do. So either you find the woman on break and get the key, or he is going to get up and model a rackful of clothing for your clientele.”

  Her eyes were wide with horror, and I felt a strange rush of elation. I had finally found something I could do, even if it was only terrorizing this idiot saleswoman whose love handles were ruining the line of her knit Adolfo suit. Bebe Stewart would be thoroughly appalled—on all counts.

  “Now,” I said loudly. She stood, motionless.

  I lowered my voice. “He has the same right to be in this store as any other customer. And unless you want to be named in a major discrimination suit”—I glared at her name tag—“Sherrie, I suggest you find the key.”

  That did it. She began walking backward again, as if I might mow her down with a rifle if she turned her back. She had covered a few feet when, with astonishing peripheral vision, she spotted another saleswoman. “Grace! Grace!” she implored, and the woman came over. Before they had a moment for any private conference, I walked forward.