Lucky Us
Page 1
Lucky Us
A NOVEL BY
Joan Silber
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
For my friend Ann Jones
The point was driven home for me for the first time when I was traveling in Asia in 1978 on a trip to a forest monastery in northeastern Thailand. . . . We were ushered into an audience with Achaan Chaa. A severe-looking man with a kindly twinkle in his eyes, he sat patiently waiting for us to articulate the question that had brought us to him from such a distance. Finally, we made an attempt: “What are you really talking about? What do you mean by ‘eradicating craving’?” Achaan Chaa looked down and smiled faintly. He picked up the glass of drinking water to his left. Holding it up to us, he spoke in the chirpy Lao dialect that was his native tongue: “You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should rap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.” Achaan Chaa was not just talking about the glass, of course, nor was he speaking merely of the phenomenal world, the forest monastery, the body, or the inevitability of death. He was also speaking to each of us about the self. This self that you take to be so real, he was saying, is already broken.
—Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker
Contents
PART I
1 Elisa | 2 Gabe | 3 Elisa | 4 Gabe | 5 Elisa: A List
PART II
6 Elisa | 7 Gabe | 8 Elisa | 9 Gabe | 10 Gabe | 11 Elisa | 12 Gabe: A List | 13 Elisa | 14 Gabe | 15 Elisa | 16 Gabe | 17 Elisa
PART III
18 Gabe and Elisa
Acknowledgments
Also by Joan Silber
PART I
1
Elisa
My boyfriend was in prison, twenty-odd years ago. He never hid this, but in our first years of living together, I heard him mention it only a few times. He was a direct person, for the most part, so if he was keeping his mouth shut on this one, that was it: he wasn’t telling. Not everything has to be dug up all the time, in my opinion. He got busted for selling marijuana and he was lucky; it was before the laws got stricter and he did less than a year. I saw one snapshot of him from before, when he was a cute guy trying to look like James Dean, a squinting bad-boy. No other picture showed him like that, and he didn’t look anything like that later. He worked in a camera store for a long time before I knew him, and that was where we met. He could have been something different, if he had wanted, especially once he had me.
I hadn’t been born yet when he was serving time. Sometimes in our early days he liked to introduce me, slyly, as his little friend here. Naturally I called him the old man. It was nice to be the great stroke of luck in somebody’s life, although that interpretation was mostly mine, not his. Gabe was glad but not dazzled, as far as I could see.
He was easy to live with, which I wouldn’t have expected in someone who’d nested by himself for most of his life. He was domestic—that is, he liked to do things at home—but he wasn’t rigid in his routines. He would listen to almost any kind of music I tuned in or put on the stereo—he greeted it with amused attention, he nodded in spots he liked. He was a good cook and he updated his repertoire for my benefit, went from spaghetti with meatballs (not that I minded that) to risotto and Pad Thai.
He looked pretty good. A little chewed up around the edges, a little thick in the middle and grizzled in the chest and pubic hair. But he’d never gone bald and he wore his streaky hair in a ponytail, which made him look like an old boxing coach or an aging jazz musician, neither of which he was. He wasn’t anything. He was a guy who knew about cameras, and who read all the time. He read about four hours a day, and he read more than that before we lived together.
We met in the camera store. It was a big place, near Wall Street, and I got a job there part-time when I was studying painting at the School of Visual Arts. Unlike Gabe, I actually cared about photography, and I spent the first few days just drooling over all the equipment, set lusciously behind the glass counter. I was thrilled when anybody asked to see one of the really snazzy models, with all the bells and whistles. My listing of its virtues was so awed that I scared people away, which was unfortunate, since we were paid on commission.
I was told to watch Gabe, who knew how to be casual and quietly informative in a way that got people used to the idea that this camera was about to be theirs. Gabe himself was not comfortable with theories about his salesmanship, although he had worked in the place the longest of anyone. “Be yourself,” he said to me. “You’ll be fine. Do it your way.”
He joked around with the other guys, but mostly he kept to himself. For his lunch break he usually went in the back and ate a sandwich while he read. He was reading Kafka’s The Castle for the third time, and enjoying it more and more, he told me. In good weather he sat in City Hall Park. I had just come out of a really messy relationship and I was tired of going to clubs where all these fucked-up people hung out, and his self-containment seemed glamorous to me. So I was the one who came on to him.
I did it pretty bluntly. I said something like, hey, want to have a drink after work? I was not shy with men generally, and Gabe’s age made me particularly confident with him. “Now?” he said. “Tonight?” He was confused. We went to one of the darkest, smokiest bars I’d ever been to, and I talked a blue streak about anything I could think of, and I put my hand on his knee. I was quite smug, it seemed to me later.
We got along fine right away but neither of us believed it would last. It turned out to be, truly, like living in another season, being with someone like him. When I was with my friends before, we all talked about how depressed we were; we had fits of being hysterically miserable, we played at being done in and bottomed out. Our unhappiness was real, but we had no idea really. A brighter day tomorrow was a definite likelihood, if we could hold out till then. Gabe was in another stage. Most of what kept me going couldn’t be said to him. A lot of his life was behind him already. He was chipper but hopeless; that’s how I described him. He had almost no joy in thinking of how things would turn out. A friend who was involved with Buddhism thought Gabe was very advanced in his thinking. Perhaps that was right, or half right. I couldn’t tell exactly, from my corner on this.
I used to try to tell him everything about my past, such as it was. What I did in high school, how I lost my virginity, why I got mixed up with the lunatic I went out with before him. I wanted to be known, through these things. Gabe listened—he was interested—but he didn’t come up with comparable incidents. He had lived in the same apartment for more than twenty years—two rooms in a former tenement on a nice Village block—and you would think he had spent every night all alone in it, from his conversation. This was not the case. There was a woman named Yvonne, whom he dated for years, and there was another person, Judy, who moved to San Francisco. And probably others, although I don’t think he’d been driven by appetite since he was a young man.
When we first started sleeping together, I noticed how patient he was. He was ardent—I don’t mean he wasn’t—but he was always watchful and careful of me. I did what I could to take him out of himself, I tried my boldest and subtlest maneuvers on him. “Oh, my girl,” he would say. “Jesus, what’s this?” He was happy, maybe even wildly happy, but he was never different from the Gabe I knew.
We always kept a certain amount of our lives separate. I saw people without him, and I did my painting in a studio in Brooklyn, two subway lines away in Greenpoint. At home, he read in one room while I was in another, and I didn’t interrupt
him or make him talk about what he was reading. On weekends he liked to take walks all over the city by himself. He was something of an expert on its history.
Sometimes, of course, we were together for social occasions—parties that my friends gave, for instance. Gabe was quiet but people got used to him over time. He had small conversations with the other guys about politics or cars or whatever. And sometimes he even danced. This was a great thing and took a large quantity of beer to bring about. He danced in a fluid, gently wicked way, as if it were no trouble at all, although he looked a little surprised. People stopped asking why I was with him.
The only person who loved to raise that question was his aunt, whom we often visited in Queens. She was a candid creature, Aunt Angie. “So tell me the truth, Elisa,” she would say to me. “Any lead left in that pencil? He needs a crutch to hold it up or what?” Gabe always told her the fountain was not running dry, never fear, and there was a lot of cackling back and forth. Angie would wink at me, and I would nestle against Gabe to back up his story, which was mostly true.
THE MAN I was with before Gabe liked to have shouting fights in public. I got into it, I could shout as loud as he did. I was with him for a year and at the end he was threatening and hitting (mostly with an open palm, but a few times with his fist) and one night I thought I was going to shove him off the roof. I was standing behind him, thinking how easy it would be, and I got scared enough to think this is ridiculous, and I ran downstairs instead. We had a few more rounds left before it was done, but that was the beginning of my getting out.
I thought of that year as one long freak event I got stuck in, which was probably how Gabe thought about prison. Although Gabe once said, in his few words on the subject, that those months were bad but not that bad—it was a minimum security place, no picnic but not grisly. “Don’t get an exaggerated idea,” Gabe said.
“What was it that you wanted to do before then?” I said.
“Make money,” he said.
Gabe always dressed carefully—he was careful about everything—but his tastes were pretty elemental, and nothing in his apartment would lead anyone to think he was materialistic. He had a stereo from about 1975, and he had a couch that looked like a graduate student’s castoff. “What were you going to do with this money?” I said.
“Walk around like a big shot,” he said.
“That’s all?” I said.
“Travel,” he said. “Buy books.”
GABE WAS SURPRISED our first night together when I made him use a condom. He didn’t ask questions or object, but for a moment I caught him off guard; it took him a little while to get back on track. Later on, when we’d been together awhile, we stopped being perfectly cautious.
My friend Fiona used to walk around the streets in a Tshirt with a photo from a fifties movie of a woman screaming in horror—NO! the caption said, Not Without a Condom! When Fiona was talking about getting married, some of us dared her to wear that shirt to the wedding. Actually she wore a dress from the twenties, white crepe with bugle beads, a slinky column that looked beautiful on her. I helped her pick it out.
Fiona had known her husband for a shorter time than I’d known Gabe. This made several people ask if Gabe and I were thinking about getting married. Often they asked this when we were both present. Gabe was too gallant to say anything pointed, but he looked as if he wanted to bolt out of the room. We murmured that we liked things the way they were. Once Gabe said that it was because he didn’t have a church and there was no sanctifying body to legitimize our union. “And not the state either,” I said. We were in accord about this, irritated together.
AND WE DIDN’T even like Fiona’s wedding. We were itchy through the service, which was a church ceremony with some parts left out, and the reception was in a banquet hall in New Jersey, where the relatives danced to brassy show tunes and songs made famous by Neil Diamond. Gabe politely refused to do the miserlou or the hokeypokey and I didn’t blame him. Some of the friends went out to the parking lot to smoke a joint, and Fiona and Ira, the groom, snuck out to join us. I think I was embarrassed for them, trapped in this gimcrack family takeover, but they didn’t mind, they laughed about it happily enough. They got stoned and went back and cut their cake.
I was so glad to get home with Gabe afterward. We drank about a gallon of seltzer and we watched a spy movie on TV. It was bliss. “I’m sorry I made you go,” I said, during the station break.
“It wasn’t torture,” Gabe said. “It was fine.”
The cruddy plainness of our living room was suddenly very dear to me. I was so comfortable and so pleased with Gabe at that moment, and the glazed feeling from being tired and overfed made me sentimental. I was thinking how we would get married, if we ever did it. We would do it better. I said this to Gabe.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Even at Fiona’s wedding, there had been a moment when everyone was moved. When the priest gave his homily and he talked about the sacredness of their troth and how much these two had just promised each other, Fiona’s face was flushed a brilliant pink. The whole assemblage pretended it believed in simple joy. Boys with nose rings and shaved heads, old women with pearls dipping into their hilly necks were getting misty-eyed. All that faith and longing unraveled us.
“You don’t know what?” I said to Gabe.
“Nothing,” he said. It was sometimes hard to argue with Gabe.
“Nothing what?” I said. I didn’t get anywhere.
WHEN I KEPT bringing this up in the days after, he acted put upon and ill used, and he had a point. Of the two of us, he had already proven himself the more loyal. I had had some flirtations and a one-night fling in the very beginning, and when we quarreled I was always the one threatening to leave. To my knowledge, Gabe had not fooled around at all—and, old as he was, there were opportunities—and he was always doing things like bringing me home a raspberry tart from my favorite bakery or surprising me with a book on an artist I’d said I liked, and those art books weren’t cheap. In the mornings, I stayed in bed later than he did. I had stopped working at the camera store after I finished school, and was now an underpaid receptionist at a gallery in Chelsea that didn’t open until ten, and from under the covers I could hear him tiptoeing around the kitchen, moving as noiselessly as he could. A few times I came in and saw him drinking his coffee with headphones on, listening to the news that way so he didn’t wake me. And what did I do for him? Plenty, and always with great fanfare, but nothing that deeply courteous. I was nice, but I wasn’t steady or devoted.
So we didn’t need to marry so that I could get him pinned down; he was as pinned as I could ask for. No, it was for something else that I had developed this bee in my bonnet. The sheer optimism of Fiona’s wedding had gotten to me, the nerve of all that blithe insistence that things could go well. And all those spring bouquets and fragrant boughs brought in to support the argument. Couldn’t we also just lodge ourselves blindly on the side of good fortune and high expectations? Why did we always have to know better?
Gabe winced at all this. He tied himself in knots trying to explain his views without insulting me. He said he hated lies and had always done his best to live without them—he sounded like a boy arguing for nonconformity in junior high. But I knew what he meant. Who doesn’t? Nasty, brutish, and short; best not to have been born at all. Most people say those things, in one way or another, but they don’t really believe their own lot will follow this pattern, not exactly. Gabe did believe it, and much of what I thought of as his dignity of bearing had to do with his treading lightly through the ashes of this world.
So I let it go, my complaining. In truth, I didn’t really care that much and was already starting to forget what I’d had in mind. If I wanted a child (which I didn’t yet) we could argue later. I had time.
Gabe was a little huffy after our arguments, and he spent more time away from the apartment. He cut back on his reading and went for longer walks around the city. I tried to get him to talk when he came back. He w
ould drop his sullenness if I got him going on his favorite buildings. From all his strolling and reading, he was more conversant with New York architecture than any of the blowhards who took us touring in art school. He knew a lot about churches—a Renaissance copy stuck in the middle of office buildings, a Greek Revival Quaker meeting house in a quiet square, an onion-domed Russian chapel off Fifth Avenue. There were more churches than I had noticed, secrets of high-mindedness sandwiched in the grid.
One Sunday, when I got back from the studio, Gabe told me that Saint Agnes—a very pretty brownstone hulk with gorgeous mosaics inside—was going to be knocked down for an office tower. I said something like, “Those assholes.” I wasn’t very startled by that sort of news. But Gabe had already been to a meeting of outraged citizens. He was apparently quite vocal at the meeting, by his own account. Certainly he knew more about the history of the site than anyone. Probably he calmed everybody down.
For the next few months, Gabe went to meetings. He didn’t really believe that the church (on a high-priced street, with a tiny congregation) had much of a chance, but he came back reciting details of zoning statutes and the history of landmarks preservation. For Gabe, he was very worked up.
One evening, when he was addressing a group outside the church, a TV news crew came to tape the protest, and that night Gabe was on the eleven o’clock news. He looked good, lean and sharp-nosed, and he was very patient with the reporter’s dodo questions. I watched him on the screen, while I was lying in bed with him, and I was about to initiate a private celebration of his big moment when the phone rang. It was the first of many phone calls, that night and all the next day, of people congratulating Gabe.
Aunt Angie called twice, and Ira and Fiona called, and several people who were on the protest committee, and also Ed from the camera store, and a guy he’d gone to high school with. Gabe took the phone each time with an awkward chuckle. I had never seen him so pleased with himself or so at a loss for how to behave. By the end of the day he was gushing—to anyone, to me—about how you had to know how to get the networks on your side. His hair had come out of his ponytail, his shirttails hung loose, he was striding around the house.