Pink Slip

by Rita Ciresi

  I started the engine.

  “You might want to take down that autoshade before you start to drive,” Dodie suggested, “unless you really want to get arrested.”

  The mere thought of being dragged into the station—booked for trespassing and possession and perhaps losing my job if Boorman ever ordered an updated background check—made my stomach turn. I thrust my hands against the handle, jacked the car door open, and left a stupendous puddle of yellow and green vomit on the gravel.

  Riding side by side in the hot Toyota—my mouth still coated with vomit, and our bodies coated with nervous sweat—I noticed what had been disguised in the fresh salt air on the beach: My cousin and I smelled like low tide beneath the Q Bridge. As we drove through a tiny town outside Shore Line, church bells were pealing. It was Sunday morning, and even in the Hamptons, some people on earth still went to church. Back home our mothers already had been to mass and knelt side by side at the altar, their mouths open to receive the host. They were probably sitting down to Sunday dinner while we were on the beach blowing weed, my autoshade an open invitation to the law to come mug us and fingerprint us and park us in front of a black phone on an otherwise bare table so we could make our one phone call to someone in the law-abiding world. Dodie wouldn’t have hesitated a moment before he dialed 800’s number. But who would I have called had I gotten arrested?

  The church bells continued to ring as inside myself I repeated like a mantra the name of the man I suddenly knew I was about to lose: Eben, Eben, Eben.

  Chapter Thirteen

  That’s Your Real Name

  Back at home—where I was surprised to find no messages on my answering machine—I finally faced the enormous question: how to deal with Strauss? To buy time I unplugged the phone on Sunday evening. After a sweaty, restless night of half-sleep, I called in sick to work on Monday morning, then made an appointment at a public health clinic in Tarrytown for that afternoon—the earliest they could get me in, the receptionist claimed, even though I told her it was an emergency, a real emergency.

  When the long, throaty chirp of the phone pierced the silence of my apartment at 10:00 A.M., I dropped my rosary beads. I’d been doing rounds of Hail Marys, just to calm myself down. I had promised God I would read the Bible from cover to cover, from In the beginning or Let there be light or whatever that first chapter said, all the way up to the headless horsemen and all that wild Jungian stuff in Revelation—if only He would save Dodie and me, and if only there was a way to hide my exposure to that disease from Strauss.

  My voice cracked like an adolescent boy’s when I picked up the receiver and said hello.

  “Where have you been?” Strauss asked—quietly, to protect against secretaries with big ears. “I called you—several times—last night.”

  “I unplugged the phone. I went to bed early. I’m not feeling well.”

  “I figured as much this morning, when I saw you hadn’t logged in.”

  “I see you have your ways of checking up on me.”

  “I was worried,” he said, in a tone that suggested he had spent the weekend stewing about our relationship, while I had been boozing and masturbating and smoking dope and discovering I might have a fatal disease associated with boy hookers and heroin addicts. “I almost came over last night, but I didn’t want to risk your wrath.”

  Because my voice broke again when I told him I felt under the weather, Strauss asked me if I had a cold. This was as good an excuse as any. To add further validity to my sickbed claims, I recklessly added, “I have cramps too.” The moment I said it I hoped he didn’t remember I just had my period two weeks before.

  But he did. “I thought you—”

  “It’s irregular,” I told him.

  “You should see a doctor about that.”

  “I’m going this afternoon.”

  I heard the creak of his desk chair. “I’ve told Peg I need to talk to her this afternoon.”

  “Strauss, don’t. Please. I thought we were going to do it together.”

  “Oh. Is that what you decided?”

  “Yes,” I said quickly, and he seemed relieved, almost cheerful after that.

  “Can I see you tonight?” he asked.

  “Actually, I was thinking about retreating into a hut—”

  “Just to talk,” Strauss said. When his voice lowered and he said, “I give good back rubs,” I heard Dodie warning, Don’t undervalue it, and I began to realize the worth of everything I was on the verge of losing.

  “How was your weekend?” I asked, to change the subject.

  Strauss said it was fine. He said birthdays always were emotional for his father. He said his nephew walloped him at Uncle Wiggly (sending him several times back to the Cluck-Cluck Chicken House), the twins got carsick and threw up twice—that was two times each, four times all together—his sister was a nervous wreck, his brother-in-law was his usual pompous self, his mother made too much food, the front room smelled of lemon floor wax, the Yankees won one, lost one, and he sneaked into my office very early, before anyone arrived, and left a little something on my desk.

  “Lisar.”

  “What.”

  “I’ve missed you.”

  “I missed you too.”

  “My parents are eager to meet you.”

  “You told them?”

  “I took the liberty.”

  I just knew it, there are diamonds on the horizon—

  “Congratulations,” he added. “You didn’t even have to be there to win them over. Within half an hour of my getting home, you were already lovingly referred to as—I hope you don’t blister at the epithet—Ibby’s girl.”

  When I got off the phone—promising to call him back later that night—I fingered the blue glass beads of my rosary (a gift from Auntie Beppina on my Confirmation) one last time before I put them away in their plastic pouch. Then I stashed the rosary in my top drawer, underneath the tie I swiped from Strauss and right beside the brown vial of tiny white sleeping pills I knew I was going to get addicted to in the upcoming weeks. I slathered cold cream on my face, which looked crisped in the mirror. The tight sunburn on my cheeks and shoulders—a dead giveaway that I had spent time on the beach—now could be added to all the other things I’d never be able to hide from Strauss.

  I had to come up with something good. A really credible story. Knowing I didn’t have the guts to level with him, I tried to think of ways I could avoid sleeping with Strauss until my test came back clean. I figured a good case of imaginary flu—on top of the period and the cramps—ought to keep him at bay for four or five days at most, long enough to get the results back from the lab. After all those years of trying to weasel my way out of the humiliation of high-school gym, I had become skilled at feigning illness. By affecting some scratchiness in the throat and not washing my face and hair, I knew I could look and sound like the worst of patients.

  But what if he showed up at my apartment feeling amorous? Not that he would ever force me. A man like him would never force me. But what if he just wanted to make me feel good? What if he knew—as he probably did, since he trained as premed—that a really sharp orgasm could send even the worst of cramps on their merry way? What if he said, Just relax and let me take care of you. You know I like to take care of you.…

  I told myself: If I already had it, then Strauss probably already had it. If I didn’t have it, then Strauss couldn’t get it, unless he was screwing someone else behind my back, which he would never do—any more than I would do to him. It hit me, like a dodgeball thrown right into my tummy during recess, that therein was proof I loved him. I wanted to be faithful to him. I wanted him to be faithful to me. And if we were faithful to each other, we could just go on sleeping with each other without anything changing for better or worse, so why should I risk telling him?

  As an old proverb put it: The fish that keeps its mouth shut can’t get caught. I told myself I’d get the test and then clam up.

  At the clinic, the patient-registration sheet asked
me to identify myself On the first dotted line I wrote the same altered name I had the presence of mind to give the receptionist on the phone: Elisa Dodici.

  Why are you here? the patient-information chart asked.

  Confidential, I wrote.

  Only in the examination room, sitting on the crinkling wax-paper liner that covered the table, did I tell the nurse—a woman with too-white hair and pink lips—that I needed a test for AIDS. She pursed her lips and said she would get the equipment. When she returned, she did not speak to me while she scrubbed and then suited up in her rubber gloves. I didn’t look at her when she hiked the cuff of my white shirt higher, swabbed my inner arm with a yellow sterilization compound, and stabbed the needle into my vein. I made the mistake of looking at the vial of blackish—red blood after she capped it and placed it in the holder by the sink, and my head went lighter than air. The small package from which she took the vial was marked ELISA.

  “I think I’m going to faint,” I told the nurse, who was scrubbing her hands again. She turned toward me and commanded, “Lie back. Lie back right now on the table.”

  I obeyed. She exited the room, closing the door behind her. I stared at the stippled tiles on the ceiling—thinking, How could this be happening to me? Me, to whom the dentist always said, “Looking good—not a single cavity” and to whom the gynecologist always chirped, “Your cervix is pink and healthy”? Then there came a frightening knock on the door—strictly pro forma, because it was not followed by the polite question, “May I come in?” The doctor charged in, holding my chart. He had on the ominous white coat that had scared me ever since I was five and had to get my shots to enter elementary school. I was relieved to see that he was close to Strauss’s age—not old and bald like the doctors who had brusquely examined me as a child. But any hopes I harbored that he would be more understanding were shot to hell when he addressed me as young lady.

  “Hello, young lady.” He closed the door, drew up a stool, and scooted over to me, all the while looking at my chart. “Elisa,” he said. “That’s your real name?”

  I nodded and knew he didn’t believe me.

  “I’m Dr. O’Brien. How long have you had these fainting spells?”

  “I don’t have fainting spells.”

  “The nurse said you almost passed out.”

  “I haven’t fainted in years. I saw the blood. I got scared.”

  Admitting to fear seemed like the most intimate thing I could confess—that is, until Dr. O’Brien started his questions. He had a whole list of them on his clipboard, and at first he ran through the same ones Dodie asked, about the diarrhea and the night sweats and the lumps.

  “I don’t have any symptoms,” I said.

  Dr. O’Brien cleared his throat. He wanted to know why I was getting the test. “Have you had sexual contact with someone who has the disease?”

  I shook my head, making the wax-paper liner on the table crinkle.

  “Intercourse with a known homosexual?”

  I shook my head. More crinkling.

  “Known bisexual?”

  “Maybe in college. I’m not certain.”

  “Strictly vaginal sex?”

  “Say what?”

  “Was there anal penetration?”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Just answer the question.”

  “I’ve never done that,” I said. “That scares me—”

  “Sex with a known drug user?”

  “Listen,” I said. I tried to explain. I told him I had a friend—a male friend—who had the virus. With him I’d shared a razor and silverware and a toothbrush. Once I’d bandaged his finger after he got cut slicing a Spanish onion—

  At that point the doctor interrupted. “Unless you had an open sore when you changed his bandage, what you’re describing doesn’t sound life-threatening to me. There are only two ways this friend could have transmitted it to you: sexual contact or intravenous drug use.”

  “All right. We shared a needle.”

  “How many times?”

  “Just once.”

  “Did anyone else share it?”

  “Just us,” I said.

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t know. Nineteen-eighty. Eighty-one? It might have been in eighty-two.”

  “Are you sexually active now?”

  Why did I feel like a slut when I said yes?

  “Multiple partners?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “But at other times, yes? And is there a partner now?”

  To hear Strauss described as a partner made me bristle, and I suddenly saw why Dodie always had despised the term, because it reduced the other person to merely his sexual function. Boyfriend also was stupid and adolescent and demeaning. There just were no acceptable names for lovers outside of the marriage bond.

  “There’s somebody,” I said. “But I don’t want to tell him any of this.”

  The wheels on his stool creaked as Dr. O’Brien moved back slightly from the table. “That’s your decision.”

  “I mean, if I test positive, of course I’ll have to tell him. How long do I have to wait for the results?”

  “You’re not off the hook with this test. It isn’t foolproof. There are false negatives and even some positives. If this one is negative, you’ll have to have another in six months.”

  “Six months!” I thought, I can’t pretend to have my period for six months. I can’t even have the flu for that long, and Strauss knows I’ve already had mono, so now I’m up the creek. I started to sit up, felt lightheaded, and lay back down again. “You don’t get it; this is a serious relationship. I can’t tell him. I mean, I love him. Can’t you tell me what the chances are that I have it?”

  He looked annoyed. “If it was just that one needle—and a Band-Aid—the chances are slim you have it. Your other behavior, it seems to me, has put you at greater risk.”

  “What other behavior?”

  “You’ve talked of multiple partners. Some of whose sexual activity you don’t seem entirely sure of. And they in turn have been with others whose activity you have no way of monitoring.”

  I turned my head and watched as he scribbled something on the clipboard. Just as I suspected, he wore a wedding band on his left hand.

  “How many sexual partners—total—have you had?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t keep track. I mean, after five it seemed like there wasn’t any reason to count, and after ten there didn’t seem any reason to stop, because I’d never get myself back again, and God, what’s with this interrogation? You’re not my conscience. I have my own conscience.”

  “For your own good and the good of others, then, I hope you’ll listen to it.” He stood up. “The current Board of Health recommendation is that you notify everyone you’ve been with for the past five years—”

  “Five years!” I said, thinking of Davey and Brian and the impotent professor and all the others on my dance card, a long list that seemed to go on and on, like le donne di Don Giovanni and made me realize that when it came to promiscuity, I could give Dodie a real run for the money. “But that’s only if I test positive, right?”

  “That’s up to you.” His voice was irritated. “If you can’t or won’t call them, you can write down their names, and someone from the Board will notify them to have a test. It’s done confidentially. No one can trace it back to you.”

  He went into the drawer beside the sink and took out a card, preprinted with the Board of Health number, which I was supposed to call in seventy-two hours for my results and with any other information I might want to share with the counselor who was on the other end of the line. He held the card over me like a threat. “Sit up now, please. But keep your head down.”

  He gave me a spiel about condoms. About monogamous relationships. About the percentage of false negatives and positives. The nurse brought some juice. I paid by cash at the desk and slunk out the front door. On the way home I stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought a pack of Trojans and a
Little Debbie crumb cake. To this I added a last-minute impulse purchase—a Big Joe to Go cup of hazelnut coffee. I sat out in the parking lot trying to nurse my cares away with this comfort food. By the time I got back it was five-thirty, and the way the light waned in my living-room window reminded me that fall and winter were coming. I thought of pumpkins and turkeys and tinsel, and how the great chain of sexual connections suddenly seemed like a string of Christmas lights—one dysfunctional bulb could cause the entire series to go dark within an instant.

  I stored the Trojans beneath my bed.

  Just like my mother, I always kept a coffee cup full of dull yellow pencils and a light-green steno pad by the phone, although I rarely had to write down any messages. I took up the steno pad and a pencil and sat down on my couch to record the names of my sexual partners. Then I tossed the steno pad aside, got out a college-ruled legal pad, and started to cover the page with names. I also listed the few addresses I had or remembered, most of which amounted to nothing more specific than the boroughs of New York. I saw I had done more men from Brooklyn than from Manhattan, and more men from Manhattan than the Bronx. I saw I had never had anything more than oral sex with anyone from Staten Island. I saw I had never slept with a doctor, or a lawyer, or a priest, or an Asian, or—post—high school, at least—any man with less than a high-school diploma. I saw I had a bad pattern of getting involved with ugly Eastern European men, who drank too much and growled Leee-za, Leee-za as they pumped away at me, and who always looked clinically depressed when they were finished, as if the physical exertion of fucking me had brought them to the point where they needed to jump over a cliff I saw I had tried on men the way some women tried on clothes in a department store—carelessly leaving them draped on hooks or rumpled on the dressing-room floor until the saleswoman could rescue them and put them back onto the hanger.

  Right before the end of the list—which I hoped was comprehensive, because the thought of even one more name was utterly staggering-I thought how strange it would be to send this sheet of paper to my mother, unsigned, so she would open it and say, “Madonna, the weird things you get in the mail these days—do you suppose this is part of one of those wacky chain letters?”