There had never been anything ideal about us except for the depth of our feelings and our instincts that we could believe in them. Now I was going through the motions of being one-half of an exceedingly happy couple. All the words I ever wanted to hear were there. I just didn’t see them on his face anymore.
Sitting together in the parked car down in Battery Park City had been the proposal as well as the honeymoon.
And yet, there were benefits. We no longer had to confine the whole of our relationship to my living room sofa between the hours of noon and one in the afternoon. We did not have to choose between talking and feasting on that couch. And a handjob under the table at Mesa Grill would no longer have to suffice. I did not stand now at the window of my Battery Park City apartment and stare out at the World Trade towers and the West Side Highway wondering what he was doing at that very moment. I would never again drink a bottle of vodka while listening to Julia Fordham’s “Porcelain” over and over, her voice like a light house in the inky blackness.
I had exactly what I asked for.
Oh, it may have taken an excruciating length of time and somebody may have died along the way. But didn’t they always say nothing worth having comes easy?
I stood in the bathroom, which the dead boyfriend had designed, and I gazed at my own reflection in his mirror.
It was difficult to believe there hadn’t been a physical change. A manifestation. I opened my mouth, stuck out my tongue and searched for signs that a cancer had come to take away the part of me that asks for things.
But I was only asking for a lighter sentence. I knew that the price for getting exactly what I asked for would be, eventually, losing it. I had won my lottery. But the tax would be unfathomably high.
Fall in Manhattan. Suddenly, smart woven coats in burnt umber, rust, ruddy brown, and a melancholy shade of green appear on the fashionable young ladies.
Athletic guys standing in line at the movie theater on Broadway and Eighteenth defiantly remain in shorts, refusing to grant the chill in the air the recognition it demands.
Brisk, blustery winds send fallen leaves, plastic coffee lids, and scraps of paper skittering along the sidewalks and then up into the air where they spiral at great heights.
This would be the first holiday season I had ever spent in New York as part of a couple. And for two or three weeks that October, I felt like perhaps the refreshing change of seasons had somehow had a clarifying effect on my mind. In no way did I believe things were suddenly right. But I had accepted George’s illness in a way that I hadn’t been sure I could.
Now his pills and frequent appointments with the doctor for blood work and minor alterations in his course of treatment all seemed nearly ordinary. As though he had a minor diabetes. Serious, but quite able to live a normal and vigorous life. George’s stoic, onward-Christian-soldiers approach to his disease must have somehow demagnetized my banging iron pots of panic and terror. I was no longer waking up in the morning and being nearly knocked flat again by the horrible wave of reality.
Since the beginning of our new life, every day had begun with an overwhelming, crushing sense of doom. “This can’t be real,” I would moan in the bathroom, from a place so low in my throat it seemed more a growl from my chest.
Then walking into the kitchen I was confronted with, Oh yes it can!
A new plastic pillbox, twenty-eight individual compartments.
The schedule imprinted on each lid—BREAKFAST, LUNCH, SNACK, DINNER—did not normalize the drugs; rather it had the opposite effect. It reminded me of what, exactly, I had given up to be with George. Never again can you have a normal breakfast—eggs, sunny-side up—when you have had this for breakfast. Once you are changed, so you remain.
But with the fall, so much of this sweltering negativity, this fever dream of relentless dread, seemed to be subsiding. Releasing me.
For the first time in months I went out for a walk, not an errand. Not to the doctor’s office or to pick up prescriptions, I wasn’t running around trying to find some insanely high-dose of vitamin C because Linus Pauling thought there might be something to it. I was just out.
I walked east along Thirteenth Street so that I would pass the Quad Cinema. I had always felt the Quad could show infomercials and ads for Korean and Lithuanian feminine hygiene products and I would stand in line to get inside, all because of their popcorn.
The Quad simply refused to allow that stick of butter to be pried from its fingers.
This was more comforting than one might think, in a time of tremendous insecurity. I had always gone to the Quad instead of to a therapist. Therapists, I felt, were like poodles: there were simply too many for them all to be good.
I walked down to Balducci’s market to look at the tiny ears of corn, the exotic cheeses, and the pies. People were already shopping for Thanksgiving, still almost two weeks away. I saw an older gay man heft a pumpkin out of his cart at the checkout with the faintest look of satisfaction on his lips. He would be making a pie, I was certain of it, and no cans would be harmed in its creation.
I imagined him going into work the next morning with nutmeg still under his fingernails. He would casually run his thumb under his nose, pretending to scratch an itch. And there in the meeting he would get to inhale just a little bit more of his pie’s soul.
I saw couples. Men together, women. I saw an old-fashioned man and woman walking with their arms linked, an English pram with a swaddled baby inside leading their way. I imagined they would be spending Thanksgiving with one set of parents. Whoever had the better set. After dinner it would only be four o’clock in the afternoon—too early to claim a mattress and curl up on top of it. Instead, everyone would sink into the sofa, drape themselves over the arms of overstuffed chairs like big cats—and there would be one or two of those, as well. The baby would be passed from chest to chest and each person would get a turn.
We would probably have Thanksgiving alone, but I could certainly think of worse things, having experienced many of them more than once. We could spend the night before in the kitchen making pies. Or just one pie. If I could actually lose myself in the act of making a pie with my boyfriend, I thought, I just might be able to do this.
To my surprise, Thanksgiving would not be just the two of us. It would be just the one of me.
George was going to his family’s house in New Jersey. I had met George’s two brothers but not his sister or his parents and it was obvious that George had not told them that he was no longer a grieving widower but a glowing newlywed. So to speak.
Actually, I didn’t feel terrible about it. It wasn’t like Thanksgiving with my boyfriend was being taken away from me. I’d never had Thanksgiving as an adult, so the loss was theoretical and abstract. It was a Monopoly-board loss.
What did make me feel terrible was the fuss he made before he left. George insisted on a festive Thanksgiving atmosphere in the apartment, even one cobbled together with deep orange candles and a tacky paper turkey on the glass dining table. He bought a pie. He pulled a roast chicken from its metallic-lined paper sack and pronounced, “Tah-dah! It’s fresh roasted close enough.”
That was the moment I felt most acutely that I was living a pretend life and not a true one.
George was putting on a little play so that I wouldn’t be alone and depressed; just alone. It was like he was doing a magic trick, his right hand holding the cards out for me to choose, the left behind his back, fiddling with the trickery of a false deck. Redirection, is what they call it, and the only reason to do it is to fool a person into believing something they know can’t be true.
When he left the next morning, I stood at the window overlooking Perry Street. As I watched him cross, it dawned on me that it was not lonely I felt, but empty.
I drank too much when I was alone. And the more I drank in general, the more often I just wanted to be alone. George had expected me to stay in the apartment while he was gone, but after less than an hour I felt I was performing on a stage and there was no audience
. I was playing the role of the guy who is totally cool to be left alone on a holiday. So I walked home.
I had let go of my Battery Park City apartment and chosen a studio in the East Village. George had gone with me to look at it. It was unspoken yet understood that I would not give up my own apartment altogether, though I can’t say I am sure why that was the case. And for this purpose, the apartment was perfect. It was a small, square box, less than three hundred square feet. A place to store clothes and take a nap.
As soon as I entered, something slid into place within me. In my hand was a bag containing a liter of vodka. I would drink Absolut and tonics with a splash of Rose’s lime juice. That had been our drink, chosen by George on our very first date. He had also chosen our first song: “Manhattan Skyline,” Julia Fordham.
I did put Julia Fordham on the stereo. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t.
My mistake was in underestimating the emotional force of a song you have already heard a thousand times. When I heard the song that night, I heard it with the ears I used to have. And I felt what I used to feel—that almost sickening blend of excitement and longing, mysteriously interwoven by not a little bit of bottom-of-the-stomach dread.
All came back to me: the powerful ache of needing to see him, be with him, even just on a street corner near his apartment that cost me eight dollars to reach by cab. And later, how hard I had tried to find the thing I could say that would unlock him from his grief and bring him back to me.
Over and over, I replayed the day of the boyfriend’s wake. How back at the apartment George had been utterly leveled. Gone from his eyes was everything I had always seen in them, even when he sneezed. The apartment was filled with people—the boyfriend’s mother, whom he hadn’t seen for years. A brother. Others, strangers. Friends. And me. I sat on the sofa feeling fraudulent, like I did not belong.
Late in the day, George passed through the room and Madonna was singing “Cherish” on the stereo. And when she sang the words “Of always having you here in my life,” George looked directly at me, mouthing the words, smiling a weary, heroic little smile, and winking.
That one exchange had been all I needed to fortify me through the year that lay ahead, a year in which George and I had sex only when I relentlessly groped beneath the covers after he had fallen asleep, when his body would respond before his mind could stop it.
His body, I knew, still did love me.
It was difficult to believe there had once been a time when I was not allowed to call him at the office because he would ejaculate in his slacks just hearing my voice.
George returned from his Thanksgiving and called me from the apartment in the afternoon. I let the machine pick up. He sounded playful and completely nonchalant but that was an act. George would have thought only one thing upon walking into that apartment and finding me gone: Uh-oh.
He would have thought about the period when I was gone entirely, just before he came to me with the Diagnosis. It had been, he told me, almost beyond his ability to endure.
George had been surprised by my ability to leave him. He had not seen that in me.
I waited until evening to call him and say I was busy with work and couldn’t see him.
I worked as an advertising copywriter and though it was a consuming job, I was better at it than people knew. I had learned that my first idea was always my best; it was the one the clients bought, even if I came up with a dozen more later. Knowing this, I always trusted that first instinct. So I was able to do in an hour what another writer would agonize over for a week. In this way, I maintained a schedule that suited me. But I could always use it as an excuse. And I frequently did.
But I was back the next day as if I had never been gone, not even for a night. When I walked in the door he said, “Oh good, can you hand me the box from the top of the front closet?”
He was at the dining-room table writing checks. I had arrived at the perfect moment. I handed him the box and stuck my tongue out at the top of his head. And because his head did not then turn around with knowledge of what I had done, I felt a terrible regret and stood for a moment looking at his head, wishing I could take back the gesture, suddenly feeling only tender toward him, feeling he was precious and that any time spent away from him was an extravagant waste.
There we were: less than a week before Christmas.
New Yorkers are notoriously blasé about the holiday, though their very city is most famously dressed for the occasion. With every tree along Park Avenue not merely strung with lights but encased in them; strands of bulbs wrapped around and around and around each branch, every twig, right to the very tips. The unique anatomy of every tree, celebrated with light—the knotty elbow of a particular branch, a gleeful V that opens up with reaching fingers.
When I first moved to the city, the only Christmas present I ever needed was to hire a cab to drive me up and down the length of Park Avenue. With a bottle of cognac secreted in my coat pocket and the window all the way down, I pressed my face into the breeze like a dog. I closed my eyes for the longest moment, and when I opened them again I saw exactly what I had seen before. Block after block after block of dazzling. This was naked, full-frontal splendor.
Then there was the tree at Rockefeller Center. Dwarfed by the cluster of buildings that surround it, on the day the tree is lit, it instantly surpasses every one of them in magnitude. Almost more thrilling than the tree itself was the fact that so many people made a pilgrimage just to see it. A colorful winter sea of people, all of them exhaling elegant puffs of white smoke, like hopeful engines.
My love for Christmas had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus. It was the lights. It was the fact that grown people really did believe in Christmas miracles; longed for them even. New Yorkers, nonetheless.
So when George out of the blue pressed his body tight up against my shoulder as we walked along Hudson Street, then reached down with both of his hands and found my one, taking my fingers between his own and squeezing my hand from all directions at once with precisely the force needed to say Mine, I was automatically euphoric. Ten fingers can overpower more than just one hand; ten fingers doing precisely the right thing, at the moment you least expect it, can make you forgive everything.
He had seen the tree stand up ahead and thought, Why not get a tree tonight? Disbelief was kicked right out by an eager, mindless, yes, yes, yes excitement. I wasn’t going to ask why. The gift-horse law was instantly enacted.
We carried the tree home together. That was the word that he used, home. “Let’s get this home, stick it up, and then watch a movie.” Usually, he said, “the apartment” or “my apartment.” Sometimes he even called it “Perry Street.” He had never called it our home before. And while he hadn’t said our, I’d heard it.
Halfway down the block he said, “Hold on,” and let the peak of the tree drop to the sidewalk.
I continued holding the trunk. “Are you okay?”
He nodded, then leaned forward and placed his hands just above his knees, bent his legs. He took a deep breath, then another.
I held mine.
He straightened and smiled tightly at me. “It’s nothing,” he said. He didn’t even say it. He mouthed the words, just like he had the day of the wake: “... of always having you here by my side.”
We continued walking toward the building but I was no longer aware of walking or carrying a tree. Suddenly, there was only a clock. It had appeared instantly, from nothing. And the red secondhand had begun to travel the dial in halting, unstoppable clicks.
And I knew: even if we are able to make us really, really good—there will be a limit.
There will be a day.
There will be an hour.
There will be a wake.
I thought George might lie down after we got upstairs but he didn’t. Instead, we began extracting boxes from the cleverest storage spaces imaginable. A tree stand seemed to have been plucked from the space between two books. I could not imagine how he had devised such devious methods of hiding
so great a volume of holiday paraphernalia.
“Steph did it,” he said. “He loved what he called finding space.”
I closed my eyes and let out a breath. That was exactly the feeling. I wanted to be finding space.
There was a magnificent optimism locked in the center of the phrase; the implication that there was space that did exist and could be found. The only question was, How clever are you? It was a phrase that nearly made me weep in relief. I steadied myself.
“Do you need this?” I asked, holding out a never-opened box of tinsel.
He was standing on a chair, level with the top of the tree and hanging the first strand of lights. He paused, arms outstretched, the string of bulbs bowing at the center. He looked hard at the box, wrinkled his forehead.
I smiled, seeing his eyes so busy in their search.
George had the most beautiful eyes. They were brown and therefore retained much of their information. You could not read them instantly like blue eyes. You had to keep looking, you had to study. Like searching for familiar forms in a darkened room. And there were sparks of mischief firing along the thin gold wires that streaked the iris. They were loyal eyes. Deeper, there was warmth, almost a glow. Just the crumbs from a fire, smoldering on. I loved most when his eyelashes twitched and he blinked, and suddenly happiness was there inside his eyes. Unmistakable. Like a single word printed on a clean white page. I used to love seeing that word in his eyes.
George finally recognized the box of tinsel I was holding. He said, “Oh no, I don’t need that,” and returned his attention to the tree.
We were going to spend Christmas alone together at home. We’d even talked about what to make for dinner.
You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Page 10