“Should it be a roast beef?” I’d asked.
George had smiled at me, shrugged. “Could be, if that’s what you’d like.”
I said, “I just cannot wait to be the guy sitting in front of the fireplace with the Christmas tree over his shoulder and all the lights glittering away and the only present I have ever wanted is right here, where I can do with him exactly as I please.” And I’d leaned over the single sofa cushion between us and moved for his neck.
He let me kiss his neck but it was a favor. I could sense him looking at the wall, waiting for me to finish.
I withdrew, but maintained my smile and said, “Yeah, it’ll be so amazing. I can’t wait.” And I slid back to my former position, slowly, as if my body had merely stretched briefly and returned.
“Augusten, listen,” George began.
That was all he had to say for me to understand; there always was a new and terrible medical complication. A treatment-resilient itis or oma or osis.
So I was truly stunned when he said, “No, not that. It has nothing to do with my health.”
I was blank.
How sorry for me his face became as the seconds emptied from the room, drained away from us forever.
But how could it have nothing to do with his health?
There was nothing besides his health.
The best and only everything that I had ever known depended solely and completely on the health of his every living cell.
When he told me what it was, I burst out laughing. It was from relief, more than anything else.
“Well, gee, Auggiedoggie, I never meant to upset you so much.” He began to chuckle, tentatively at first, like a child at a fancy restaurant who watches the adults take a bite of food first, before venturing forward with his own fork.
Then he was laughing right along with me.
George and I would not be spending Christmas together after all. Actually, that had never been the plan. Because he always spent Christmas with his family.
My laughter trailed off and I asked, “But what about when you guys used to have Christmas?”
And George said, “He would never come. Sometimes he would move into a hotel room in case my family decided to stop over and see the apartment.”
“You hid him away in a hotel room, like he was a dirty magazine you could stick under the mattress? And he let you live?”
“No, Augusten, it wasn’t like that. My parents are great people but, you know, they don’t need to know everything about me. They wouldn’t be happy, and why upset them unnecessarily?”
I felt grateful, just then. Because I actually hated him at that moment and this hatred made me feel free. But the feeling was a vapor and it dispersed almost immediately.
I was facing the tree, which was reflected back into the room once again by the windows, now black with night.
The two candles on the dining-room table were lit, the flames so smooth they hardly quivered.
I didn’t know what to say.
I just watched him, standing with his back to the tree he had decorated. He had placed each ornament with such exacting precision, ever the investment banker.
No, that’s not it, I thought.
He had placed each ornament with excruciating care. Because it was the one and the only thing he could make perfect.
He would turn his back on this tree and leave this home—leave me, leave us; this family he built himself. He would leave us behind on Christmas Day so that he could be by himself with the family that he came with.
It was Christmas Eve and he was leaving for his parents’ house. We stood beside the front door. He was in his black wool coat, the one he wore over his suits to the office. His face was strained and he looked so tired. I could see that he felt both powerless and guilty.
I faced him and took one lapel in each fist, raised them up tall. I adjusted his scarf at the nape, making sure it covered any naked skin.
His black leather gloves were already on his hands, which were hanging straight down at his sides. His overall stiffness was endearing, childlike.
He had known about Christmas all along but had not been able to tell me because I was so excited.
He chose what had seemed to him to be the most humane course of action. He allowed me to have my perfect New York City Christmas for as long as he possibly could.
And I had our first Christmas so fully imagined that it had begun to feel more like a memory than a fantasy.
I knew how the table would be set and I could even see how the slices of roast beef would fold onto the plates.
I knew that he would have a second piece of pie.
And that we would then sit on the floor in front of the fire.
His glittering, beautiful tree would stand in the corner and throw its light and sparkle all over our backs.
And as I looked at his face lit by the fire, I would start to feel myself falling backward into the person I used to be, before I was disfigured by my own appalling dread.
George would glance at me and he would freeze. I would see the wires in his eyes begin to glow as he realized that I was suddenly, finally, truly right there beside him. And not still a few steps ahead, in the inevitable future.
He would begin to tremble very slightly.
And my eyes would travel to his neck, and down the length of it.
His whole body would shudder.
And he would close his eyes and feel my hands on him, long before they ever reached his skin.
Much later, we would have a snack. We would eat it wordlessly, standing side-by-side in the wedge of light that you are given when the refrigerator door is opened in the middle of the night.
As we stood by the front door, I carefully adjusted a lock of George’s hair and looked into his eyes and without saying one word—by only feeling it, by truly meaning it—I thanked him for giving me exactly the Christmas I had dreamed of.
Because day after day as I imagined it, I always forgot one little detail: our virus.
In my mind, on our first Christmas as a family, it was always just the two of us.
And as far as my eyes could see in any direction, there was only more, and more, and more.
Slowly, I leaned toward him, then against, then into.
“Merry Christmas,” I said, my voice soft, deep; vertical, not horizontal.
My mouth was pressed against his ear. I felt the tiny hairs on his earlobe scratch at my lips.
My chest was pressed against his; my heart directly over his.
And then. I lifted my arms off of him entirely, withdrew my hands from his shoulders.
I pulled away from him, slow, slow, to see his face.
And he was standing perfectly still in his long black coat.
But his head was back, neck arched.
And his eyes were closed.
And his mouth was open so that he could breathe.
And I could see so clearly that he was in both ecstasy and astonishment at once.
His eyelashes twitched.
And he blinked.
And suddenly happiness was inside his eyes.
Unmistakable.
Like a single word printed on a clean white page.
And because there was so much to say that would never be said; because his eyes flashed with tears and because he knew that I was suddenly, finally and truly right there beside him, his voice cracked as he spoke.
“I was hoping it was you.”
I never chose a life with George. There had never been a choice to make.
He had been there all along, woven into the fabric of my future.
Destiny.
I would have laughed in your face.
I did not leave cookies out for Santa Claus.
And I did not believe in destiny.
But.
When Santa is suddenly standing right in front of you, soot from your chimney staining his fine red suit and he is flushed and breathing hard and smells like frost and sweat and smoke and his jacket is linted with coarse
reindeer hairs and there is reindeer shit on his boots and his eyes twinkle with preposterous joy, you simply cannot say, “I don’t believe in you,” and turn your back on him.
Because he will grip you by the shoulders and wrench you around and he will bring his bristly mouth to yours and blow
stars
down your throat
until
you are so full
of
light.
Silent Night
POSSIBLY BECAUSE I hadn’t had a drink in ten years, I no longer peed in the kitchen sink, blew my nose on my T-shirt, or wet the bed. I was now fully domesticated with a family that included one Dennis, two French bulldogs, a station wagon, and a septic tank. I’d even had my first colonoscopy. It just doesn’t get more grown-up than that.
So, was it possible that I hadn’t done anything for Christmas since just before George died?
That was ten years ago.
One decade.
This was not “a healing interim”; it was pathologically morbid.
It was perhaps time for some jolly.
Dennis and I had spent two years building our home in western Massachusetts—plaster walls, beadboard ceilings, and paint imported from Holland. Even the inside of each closet had layers of crown molding that had been cut by hand. As my brother so aptly put it, “It’s a house suitable for queers.”
My older brother and I built our houses at the same time on the same street, just two doors apart. Ours was the gay house, with oiled soapstone counters and a wild-flower garden lit by a copper gas lantern barely bright enough to help you see the keyhole on the door; his was a hetero cement-clad monolith with an active steam pipe over the front door and xenon vapor gas discharge exterior floodlights that illuminated his wooded backyard like an Ikea parking lot.
With each imported-from-Cincinnati brass push-button light switch plate we installed, I felt six Phillips-head screw revolutions farther away from every bad thing that had ever happened to me. Tentatively, I began pretending I was entering the “After” stage of my life—the part with brocade window treatments and shiny German faucets. Where the worst thing that could happen was getting into a discussion with another shopper at Whole Foods over the last container of edamame.
Even my taste in furniture buffered me from catastrophe—I liked old things. Chairs and tables with nicks and stains and dents. I liked seeing where the split leg of the dresser had been so carefully glued back together. And I loved the table beside the sofa; if you put a glass of water on it, the glass would gradually slide onto the floor. Otherwise, you didn’t really see that it was lopsided. I figured, if this crap can survive all those other families for so many years, surely it can survive one of me for just this life.
A major benefit of building a house with Dennis is that he made a lot of the choices, and they were very fine choices. In fact, everything I loved about the house had been his idea. It occurred to me that if some Suburban-careening dot-com bitch chatting away on her cell phone happened to plow into him on the Merritt Parkway, sending our little Audi somersaulting into Vermont, I would find a certain measure of comfort in this house, which contained so much of him. This ran counter to my experience with George, whose mother had cleaned and emptied the apartment within hours of his body reaching room temperature.
Dennis and I had been together for six years. And nothing horrible had happened. It was the longest I had ever gone in my life without needing an emergency room, a law enforcement official, or a funeral home. A Christmas tree would be the bow on the package. More than anything else, it was a symbolic way of saying, “Disaster? I am no longer your bitch.”
The more I thought about it the more I felt I was almost owed a real and proper Christmas.
Dennis, however, was less than enthusiastic about the whole idea. A tree would shed needles and make a mess. Besides, we didn’t own any ornaments or lights, not even a tree stand. “And a fresh tree is going to need watering. Are you going to be the one making sure it has fresh water every day?”
“It’s not a pet, it’s just a dead tree,” I cried.
But there was something else. His name was Jesus.
Dennis was an atheist. He didn’t believed in God, so the idea of celebrating the birth of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior felt entirely absurd, like throwing a bar mitzvah for the Easter Bunny.
Now, I was about as far from being Christian as a person could be while still living outside the walls of a supermax prison. I didn’t believe in God, either. But wasn’t that all the more reason to saw down a living tree and truss it with environmentally unfriendly lights? Shit, we could even make it an olive tree.
“Look,” I said, “I just want a little tree. With some pretty lights. And a few sparkly balls. We don’t even have to have a star on top if that’s too Jesus of Nazareth for you.”
He knew I could talk him into almost anything. “I don’t want to celebrate the big Christian holiday,” he mumbled, frowning.
“I’m not suggesting we set up a nativity scene on the mantel and then go bomb an abortion clinic. I just want a little tree. That’s all.”
And when he smiled just a little, I added, “Come on, it will be fun.”
The smile was still there but his eyes flashed with caution.
I had used that exact phrase—it will be fun—about going boating on the Connecticut River with my brother early in the summer. Dennis had never learned to swim and hated the water, but he figured it would be okay “for an hour or so,” and reluctantly agreed.
The grim, fatiguing seven-hour boat ride was not merely a memory for him, but a ropy psychic scar.
Finally, I just told him, “I have always loved Christmas. Even when I was in my twenties and trying to be very cool and anti-Christmas, secretly, I still loved it. And I know that’s kind of idiotic, but there you go. I mean, I buy all of it: the cheesy music, the gaudy lights, and the spray snow, especially the spray snow. So the thing is, I have loved Christmas my entire life, and yet? Every single one has really been kind of hideous. Or maybe hideous isn’t the word. Maybe it’s more like, cataclysmic. It’s like I have a genuine Christmas curse or something. All I want is just one good, normal, happy holiday. A little one.”
His eyes had softened and he walked over to the counter and grabbed the car keys. “Ready to go get our first Christmas tree?”
The smell of fresh balsam was overwhelming as we stepped out of the car. Atkins Market, a former roadside apple stand that got ambitious and now peddled lobster tails and clever mustard, had a parking lot full of fresh-cut trees.
Ropes of soft white bulbs lit the area and the ground was thick with needles and sawed-off lower branches. It was this makeshift cocoon of bare-bulb lighting along with the tree carnage and balsam-stained air that made me realize, this was like the animal-friendly equivalent of a whaling vessel.
Standing beneath that halo of light, I suddenly felt observed. I imagined Greenpeace activists hiding in the darkness of the surrounding orchard, waiting to pummel us with sticks and frozen Granny Smith apples.
But Dennis knew certain veal recipes by heart; he experienced no ethical confusion over the tree bodies and immediately located the one perfect tree.
Everybody else had overlooked it or they would surely have taken it. There was only a week until Christmas and I had thought we’d be lucky to find one that didn’t look like a wood chipper got to it first. Instead, we got a tree so beautiful, you’d swear it came from a box. The apron was exactly symmetrical, as though it had been formed by a meticulously calibrated robotic extrusion nozzle and not the random, seemingly drunken hand of Mother Nature herself. That crazy old bitch gave us the California redwoods; true. But right along with it she whipped up some naked mole rat.
We hoisted the tree onto the roof of the car and secured it on the ski rack with bungee cords. “Let’s head over to Target and pick up some decorations,” Dennis said.
But when I saw this tableau—the Audi wagon, the fake-looking real
tree, the snow blanketing the landscape, smoke from Atkins bakery ovens curling into the air in soft, sweet plumes—I thought, This is ridiculously perfect.
Simultaneously I felt actual g-forces inside my chest as I was ejected from my life, suddenly on the outside looking in; an observer. Though many things could be said about my life over the years, ridiculously perfect would never have been among them.
I simply could not trust any kind of perfection, not even the ridiculous variety.
After cleaning up the 498,000 individual needles that had scattered everywhere when we dragged the tree inside, I made a display of fetching a pitcher and giving the tree some water. To prove that I could.
Crouched on the floor, trying to angle the pitcher under its wide lower branches and getting my hand smothered with sticky sap and my eyes stabbed with needles, I realized, This fucker really is like a pet, only a super-dumb one. All it could do was need attention and remain upright while looking pretty. Though, hadn’t I dated many guys who had even less to offer?
After this, I went upstairs to the bedroom and my laptop. I was in terrible withdrawal, having been offline for hours. Surely, there’d been an earthquake or a major molestation; perhaps even the announcement of an unsuccessful conjoined twin surgery. Essentially, I just needed a good bedtime story.
Dennis came up to bed sometime later.
I woke up on my right side, facing away from the wall of windows. I thought: It’s bright. I’ve overslept. And I had, it was nearly eight thirty. The dogs were nestled deep into the down comforter. Bentley, who was normally awake at first light, excited about his morning walk, merely glanced at me as I climbed from the bed and walked to the next room.
Dennis was sitting at his desk. He was working and appeared to have been awake for hours. “Oh, hi there,” he said. “I didn’t hear you wake up.”
“Just now. Did you not sleep? Why are you already up?”
You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Page 11