Just one word, my name.
But with that one word he told me that he was sorry and that he did love me and that he wished for something else, something lighter for me. A life that weighed much less.
And I looked up at him and I loved him in return, for not fully understanding, maybe, but not judging me, either.
“I’ve never been so fucking scared in my life,” I said then. “I always thought I could quit drinking whenever I wanted. Or that I was somehow too smart. Or too something. Whatever, alcohol wouldn’t ruin me. It couldn’t. But man, if you had only heard that voice and seen the size of her. You know? She was big. Shirley was huge. And still, she got taken down.”
Matt reached across the table and brushed the back of his hand against my cheek, and his eyes became smooth, glassy, and warm.
“She scared the shit out of me. And I don’t know if it’s going to do any good, I really don’t. But I do know that I wasn’t scared before. Maybe that’s good? To be scared?”
“Jesus. Well, maybe. Yeah, I guess it’s good to be scared. But shit, this was some kind of Christmas you had for yourself. Although I guess, at least you weren’t just sitting in your nest alone, piss-drunk. Maybe hanging with these homeless people really is a kind of progress.”
“You ever see that Streetcar Named Desire?”
“Of course I’ve seen A Streetcar Named Desire. You’re the only one of the gays who hasn’t.”
“Yeah, well I watched it. And it made me think, maybe one of my problems is, I never depend upon the kindness of strangers. I would rather bleed to death on the street than depend on a stranger. But maybe that is a huge fucking mistake. Maybe I need to be more like Blanche. But I didn’t get why they lock her up at the end. Just for being kind of a slut?”
“You are some kind of fucked up,” he muttered under his breath.
“Short,” I mumbled without moving my lips.
“Go to hell,” he said.
“I need a drink,” I told him.
“Hopeless alcoholic.”
“Correction,” I said, raising my finger high into the air. “Hopeful alcoholic. And that may seem like a small difference to you, but all I have ever needed in life was a maybe.”
“Hopeful, then,” he said, brightly.
I nodded as the waitress finally approached. “Hopeful.”
The Best and Only
Everything
IT WAS OUR first Christmas as a family. Me, George, and our tiny new virus, AIDS.
The virus was just a few months old. And we were like typical new parents—up and down all night to pace the floors, in with the thermometer, out with the thermometer, wondering, “What are we going to be dealing with five years from now?” I certainly wouldn’t have imagined diapers.
In retrospect, I’m not altogether certain it’s accurate to say we. Because the virus wasn’t mine, it belonged to George. And he wasn’t the one pacing the floors all night and sticking a thermometer in his mouth every five minutes.
That was me.
George was actually quite calm and logical. He was being treated by the best doctor and taking the best drugs.
His attitude was, “Let’s enjoy the moment.”
My attitude was, I cannot fucking believe you stuck your bare hands in his bloody mouth. There was a box of gloves on the table beside his hospital bed. You, yourself, made sure of it. And why were you the one removing the gauze from his mouth instead of a nurse? None of it makes sense.
Of course, we’d had this conversation before. Many times. It had become our pair of faded jeans, our sweater with too many fur balls on it. It was comfortable, if ugly.
“Augusten, I have told you again and again, I was crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just very upset and he needed that dressing out of his mouth immediately and I didn’t think. Listen, it doesn’t matter—we can’t ever go back and change that moment.”
True. But we could get drunk and forget we’d ever had this conversation. That way, when we had it again in a week, it would be all new to me.
Still, I had to try and be grateful for the little things. It was, after all, this very virus that had brought us together, transformed us from “secret lovers” into “official couple.”
George’s previous boyfriend had entered into an affair with a lawn-care professional. George didn’t have a lawn.
Their relationship had been unraveling for a long time and he was feeling stagnant. George had been thinking of leaving the boyfriend when the lawn-care professional turned out to be HIV-positive, passing the virus to George’s boyfriend.
The boyfriend did not handle this news well. He figured, Well, that’s it then. I guess I’ll just go ahead and die now.
George said, “You have to fight this. We have to.”
The boyfriend replied, “Where do the whales go when they die?”
That’s when I met him.
At eight minutes after five on February 14, 1989, I reached the landing that overlooked the Winter Garden atrium. I approached the wide, grand staircase leading down. Step by step, mistake by mistake, choice by choice, everything that I had ever done, every right instead of left, had been designed to get me here.
In time, I would come to believe that all along, without my ever knowing, every single time I wondered, Why? the answer had been to carry me down these steps on this day so that I could reach the one moment upon which all the remaining moments of my life would be based.
But at the time, I only thought that I was walking down some stairs to meet a guy.
I didn’t even know his name. A date couldn’t have been more blind.
The Rizzoli bookstore within the Winter Garden had been his idea. He would be waiting right in front of the store.
Of course at this time of day the offices would be emptying. And the Winter Garden would be filled with people. Many of them standing around, waiting for somebody at one of the restaurants or bars. Bankers, brokers, lawyers, CFOs, VPs—all of them would be buzzing throughout the space. I didn’t know how, exactly, I was supposed to find this one very specific though featureless man.
But there he was, right where he said he’d be. The Winter Garden atrium was a swarm of people; he was the only man I saw.
He was dressed in a charcoal suit with chalk pinstripes. His back was turned to me because he was looking in the window of the bookstore. He didn’t appear to be a man waiting for anyone.
But this was the man. There was something about the specific tilt of his head. Or perhaps it was how he squared his shoulders. I only knew that the instant I saw him, I recognized that he had been inevitable. I headed directly for him.
As I approached his broad back and noted the exquisite drape of the suit I realized, I don’t even know his name. I can’t just tap this guy on the shoulder and say, “Are you by any chance waiting for—”
He surprised me by suddenly turning around to face me. He was smiling and he had a bad haircut. The first words George said to me were these: “I was hoping that was you.”
And I realized that he had not been looking in the window of the bookstore, but at my reflection, at me, as I walked toward him.
We spent a little over two hours together that first day we met. Less time than most people spend test-driving a car before buying it. Over drinks he made a toast in Greek, “To pepromenon phugein adunaton.”
It’s impossible to escape from what is destined.
It had been only a couple of hours. But I knew.
I may not have known the facts of him; I couldn’t have told you his favorite color, his birthday, or how he liked his coffee. I couldn’t have said if he was a Republican or a Democrat or whether he was allergic to cats; but I knew the him of him.
I also knew that one didn’t have a second date with this man and then a third, each time getting to know him a little bit better or seeing another “side” of him.
George was vertical, not horizontal. All of him was right there from the first moment. He didn’t have “sides”; he h
ad fathoms. If you didn’t know him after one date, you couldn’t know him. In this way, he was a treasure perfectly hidden right before my eyes. He was the wreck of the Sussex in my backyard swimming pool.
I could only be truly crazy if I walked away from such a find.
I struggled in my apartment that night, his phone number in my hand. I knew that if I called him, that would be it—my life would change. I had never felt such an irrational thing about a person I’d only just met. But I knew it was true.
My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines.
And attraction is our most ancient drive, it is why we are. Attraction is the very point of gravity; timespace itself bends to allow it. It is attraction in its pure form that holds the galaxy together.
Attraction is our glue.
I knew this: there was only one of him in the world.
One hour with him was denser than all the years spent with everybody else I had ever known.
My instincts were not mistaken.
My instincts had been with me as I crawled from the swamp; my brain only showed up later. It was my instinct I would trust. Even if it defied logic.
Especially if it defied common sense. I wanted nothing to do with common.
But extremely rare and precious specialty items often carry an extraordinary price. I knew this, too.
It was reckless and insane to feel this way about a person I didn’t even know. My mind was hurling itself against the walls of my skull in protest. But beneath my sternum that night, I felt a kind of wisdom. I very nearly heard advice: Acceptance, when it comes, arrives in waves: Listen with your chest. You will feel a pendulum swing within you, favoring one direction or another. And that is your answer. The answer is always inside your chest. The right choice weighs more. That’s how you know. It causes you to lean in its direction.
I thought, I don’t know who he is, but I know he is mine.
George picked up before the first ring was out. “I knew you’d call,” he said, his voice low, not quite a whisper but a hush.
The hush in his voice. I knew it all right then: the boyfriend, ten feet away. George, sitting by the phone hoping I would call. Hearing the phone and knowing it was me. Hearing my voice and knowing he’d been right. Realizing he was hearing my voice because he had been discovered, he had been seen. This fact sinking in. This fact sinking all the way in.
Casually, I said, “I liked seeing you.”
With the exaggerated singsong inflection of a cartoon character, he said, “I don’t know what it is . . . but it’s mine!”
I almost laughed and then I almost sobbed.
Neither of us was expecting what eventually happened. It was very much like a car accident in this respect. You can go over it a thousand times to prove it shouldn’t have happened, but it did and it changed everything.
It was certainly not my idea of a romantic situation. But I had loved George approximately twelve minutes after we met. It had not been possible for me to walk away from him. And once I met the boyfriend and saw how loyally and carefully George cared for him, I loved George even more.
I pictured myself in the boyfriend’s position, except with a cold. And George bringing me a tuna melt he’d made beneath the broiler, on top of a piece of aluminum foil. Instead of a suction wand.
I did feel filthy, being the secret lover. Invited into the home as a new friend. But the boyfriend didn’t seem threatened in the slightest. In fact, he seemed relieved to have George occupied and stop nagging him to fight this thing. Often the boyfriend would say, “You two boys go out to a movie. I just want to rest.” And I would think, Would you please just die so we don’t have to go out into the cold? And then I would try and “unthink” the thought by saying in my mind, That was just a very dark joke. My way of trying to hold it together. I didn’t mean it. Although in truth, I kind of did. By this point, George and I were a couple, in all but name.
Only as the boyfriend was nearing death and whispered to me, “You want him? You can have him,” did I realize he’d known all along.
I disgusted myself. I stood and watched that man’s chest rise with his very last breath and never deflate. And then I left the hospital with his boyfriend. Oh yes, I did.
For the next year, George was in mourning. Pictures of the boyfriend were installed on all surfaces of the apartment and the same somber, funereal George Michael and Enya CDs were played endlessly on the stereo. It seemed there was nothing I could do to reach him. Each morning when I woke up in what was now our bed, the first thing I saw was the photograph of George and his boyfriend beside me on the bedside table.
The boyfriend himself, in ash form, was in an urn atop the mantel.
After a year, when George still refused to let me in, I left him.
And it was only a few months later that a brand-new George drove downtown to my apartment in Battery Park City and rang me from a payphone. The dead boyfriend was no longer right there between us. Something else was.
George had tested positive for HIV. It was the same strain that had killed the boyfriend. And according to George, they had never had unprotected sex. And in the last years, no sex at all.
That meant, the day I walked into the boyfriend’s hospital room after work and saw George with his bare hands inside his boyfriend’s mouth, removing packing gauze from the recent wisdom tooth extraction, was indeed the day he had become infected.
As soon as I walked in I had grasped the magnitude of the scene before me. I shouted at him, “What are you doing?” and I pulled him by the arm over to the sink—he still hadn’t taken off his suit jacket—where I forced his hands under the faucet at full strength.
After he managed to wash away all the blood, he held up his dripping clean hands to inspect them. George was a nail biter. And the evidence was right there before us: cuts on his thumbs, tears in the flesh beneath the nail of his index and middle fingers. Cuticles ripped. Open wounds. All I could say was, “Jesus Christ.”
After six, seven, then eight months with no news, I had come to believe that in a moment of madness, we had experienced a very close call.
Now, as I listened to him describe how the doctor revealed he had seroconverted, I sat in the passenger seat and stared at the dashboard without blinking. A dead weight had formed inside my chest and though I didn’t know it then, this weight would never leave me.
I had wanted only George. And because I knew he felt the same and because I could see a terrible window, I waited. And when George was grieving and had no room for me, I crushed everything inside of me that was huge and filled with joy into a tiny, dense point and I waited some more.
But George would not return to me. His eyes would look everywhere except at mine. I had lost him and so I left.
And I began to let him go. Hour by hour. Days into months. It was a physical sensation, like letting out the string of a kite. Except that the string was coming from my center.
He had parked the Honda behind the American Express building. It was there that George finally spoke all the words I had ever wanted him to say.
He said them all at once. “I love you. I am in love with you. You mean more to me than anything or anyone ever has and I am so sorry that I hurt you and pushed you away.
“I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Not hiding, not sneaking, and not waiting. I want everything and I want it only with you.”
And because I had waited and waited and waited to hear him speak the words that I could see on his face and in his eyes; that his arms and neck and back and hands never withheld; and which was implicit in our relentless, insatiable, appetite for each other. Because of this, I turned to look at him.
And I saw that those words had always been inadequate; they were clichés.
They could not begin to name the trembling, almost orchestral longing, the magnitude, the need—all of it, utterly hopeless and complete.
I closed my eye
s and wondered why I had ever made it about the words at all. Words like that were spoken every day; few people got to see what I saw right in front of me.
I opened my eyes and what I said was, “Okay.”
And we didn’t even stop by my apartment. We raced up the West Side Highway to his. We were traveling at the speed of an ambulance, as if this was the very definition of an emergency.
By the time we reached the end of the hallway and his door, we were desperate, clumsy, half-naked animals. Inside, we slammed the door shut with our bodies and dropped to the rug.
At midnight we showered. And we emerged from the steam a normal couple.
I noticed a new set of coffee mugs still on the counter, and when I went into the bedroom to throw on a T-shirt and shorts, I saw that the photograph of George with the boyfriend was gone. In the same frame was a photograph of me.
I had given it to him the year before and not seen it again until that moment.
Almost immediately, George introduced me to friends I’d never known he had. He displayed an easy, affectionate possessiveness; a hand on my shoulder, guiding; two hands suddenly around my waist, pulling me backward, reeling me in. The sex, rather, ceased. It was replaced with astonishing thoughtfulness.
What troubled me most was the way he now called me honey. As if this would be an acceptable term of endearment under even the most ideal circumstances. But we had come together as a couple beneath a mushroom cloud of infidelity, death, and now terminal disease.
Honey was the guy standing up in the metal rowboat, trying to keep his balance with his arms outstretched before him as he pleads with his wife and young daughter to join him out on the lake. Behind him, black clouds roil and grind; lightning flashes inside of them, thunder cracks the air. C’mon guys, it’ll be great, I promise!
There was something packaged to us now. I simply could not believe a word of this new relationship. I didn’t trust it. Whatever we had together, no matter how far from perfect it was, it had been forged from something real and it existed in a state between the wonderful and the terrible.
You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Page 9