by Joan Silber
At work the next day the whole store had seen him or heard about his being on TV. When Gabe told me that night, he was smiling his goofy, satisfied smile and talking in a way that made his Adam’s apple stick out. Who would’ve thought that thirty seconds of not hiding his light under a bushel would be so sweet to him?
I tried not to rain on his parade. I spoke glowingly of his committee, although I actively disliked some of them. I let him tie up the phone for hours, and I designed a very professional-looking flyer to be handed out in the protests. And it happened that Gabe, despite being so busy, was unusually lusty during this time. He was more athletic than he had been, more sudden in his desires and more surprising. Determination heated him.
Oh, it was a good cause, saving that church. And for all my flippancy about it, I hated thinking of the chapel’s mosaics smashed. But it was not the cause I would have imagined for Gabe, a man who always spoke harshly against any clinging to the past. Let it go was what he said for a range of cases—when I asked him about anything from years before, when I analyzed my own behavior, when I apologized after a fight. Gabe was the one who wanted bygones to be bygones.
Gabe and his committee managed to get a court injunction against the wreckers—Gabe did a jig when he heard this, he looked like a drunken uncle at a family party—and the case got turned over to the mayor’s office. On the day of the final decision, I went from my job straight to city hall. By the time I got there, a crowd was making a lot of noise outside, and I thought, uh oh, poor Gabe, I feel so bad for him. But they weren’t booing, they were bellowing in triumph, it turned out, and Gabe, who had testified, was walking around in a frenzy of amazement, his sports jacket flapping in the wind. The newsmen could hardly get him to stay still. When he saw me, he hugged me hard enough to stop my breath.
At the victory party that night, people of all ages walked around getting sloshed and saying sappy things to each other and kissing Gabe. One seventy-year-old woman in a very expensive lime-sherbet-colored suit kept telling me over and over what a heck of a fellow my husband was. “Never in a million years,” Gabe said, “did I think we’d save that sucker.” We made our way home at four in the morning. I hadn’t been up that late since my club days. Just before we fell into bed, Gabe thanked me for being such a wonderful support to him.
I was confused by all of it. To see Gabe like that, foolishly joyous and prone to the same vanities as anyone, threw me for a loop. Was this what he had wanted all along, just this? The balm of praise, a taste of things going his way? I looked at him, after he’d fallen asleep, and I thought: Now he’s going to crash. I know it.
HE WOKE UP in a wonderful mood, and randy as a goat. In the evening he talked about going to service at the church on Sunday. The place was Episcopal, which didn’t happen to be his religion or mine either. Gabe was raised Catholic and I grew up as a secular Jew.
On Sunday I dressed myself in a nice sheath dress which was probably too short, and Gabe was in his dark suit that made him look like a sheriff. When we were on the street, walking toward the church, its stone facade really did look majestic, and I was proud of Gabe. Through the service, I kept looking at the mosaics (which were lovely and delicate and a little stiffly silly) and listening to the minister, who talked at the end about “the famous Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky,” and how, just when he was lined up before the firing squad, in the agony of a despair we can only imagine, a reprieve came at the last minute. The church of Saint Agnes had had just such an agony and just such a reprieve.
Gabe could not resist whispering to me that the whole execution had been the czar’s joke, but the sermon was actually about the rewards of zeal and effort—very uplifting—and the minister thanked the committee for their vigor and most especially Gabriel Catanzaro and a few others. Gabe was pleased, I could tell. Watching his quick, small smile, I got the idea that we could get married in this church. We could, if I got him soon, while he was flushed with victory and heady with achievement. He was right now at the moment of bloom, the brief instant after the closed bud and before the browned petals. I thought of him the way men used to think of dewy virgins.
After the service, we both shook hands with the minister, who gave Gabe a bear hug (who knew Episcopalians got so carried away?). Other people from the committee were there, and we all went to lunch with the minister. I was not used to seeing Gabe with groups of people his own age, and once we had explained ourselves to a few of them who thought I was his daughter, there was a flood of remarks about how pretty I was, and I stood around stroking Gabe’s shoulder and hanging on his arm.
I thought that when we got home he would be full of desire, which he was, and after we had spent time in bed I would mention marriage in Saint Agnes. In fact the whole day had spun me around, and spun Gabe too, and our sex was different, deeper and more willful. We were greedy and frank; we swam in a lake of bright determination. When we came out of it, I forgot that we had not really had a discussion, and I made a reference to our marrying—I said something like, “If we did the wedding thing in winter, I bet the rev would wear a different getup”—and Gabe didn’t say a thing. He sighed and stared into the middle distance.
In the next few days, however, I heard him say, “In winter that church could be really cold, if we had a lot of older guests like Aunt Angie, it’s like a barn.” When he said one other thing—a little joke about whether our pizza place catered wedding banquets—I took it up. I said, “What do you think, March or April?” It was then October. Gabe looked slyly happy, I thought.
That was how he was the next few months, slyly happy. I was the one who ran around like a maniac, getting all excited, telling my friends every little bit of progress, generally acting like the giddy girl I still sort of was. Gabe was wary and twinkling, I would say. When anyone congratulated him, he looked amused at himself.
My friend Dawn said to him, “You were never married before, huh?” It was always a big surprise to people, the things Gabe hadn’t been. “Why not?” Dawn was nosy.
Gabe said, “Things didn’t develop,” which I thought covered anything else anyone might have asked him.
I was the one who’d almost gotten married before, in high school, to a boyfriend who died a few years later. On our list of reckless, charged-up things to do, running off to another state to get married was definitely an item. We used to talk about it when we were high, bait each other with the idea, and once, we were about to get in the car and go, but we got distracted and lost our steam. Maybe I wouldn’t have done it, when push came to shove. We did stupider things, however.
My mother remembered Chris, my high school boy-friend, all too well—a grungy kid who once nodded out at her dinner table—and this helped make Gabe look better to her. For most of my teenagehood, it was just my mother and me in the house together (my father was in Chicago, leading what he hoped was a more interesting life) and I was too much for her—I kept doing whatever I wanted and I made her feel helpless and outmaneuvered and ignored. It probably disappointed her now that I was pledging myself to a man Gabe’s age, with an unimpressive job, but she’d met Gabe on her one visit to New York from Cleveland, and all his careful courtesies did get to her. She flirted with him. They got along. She thought I could do a lot worse.
Aunt Angie was very glad that Gabe and I were getting married, and she naturally crowed about how there was some juice left in those old apples after all. I looked forward to her talking smut at the wedding reception. I looked forward to everything. I was in that frame of mind where everything ahead looked good to me, better than I could begin to imagine.
Gabe was so pleased, he was kind of a nuisance. He who had never minded how much time I spent in the studio became sulky if we didn’t have meals together. When we were together, he talked more—I hadn’t quite seen him run away with a topic the way he did now. He tried my patience. When I listened to his speculations about, say, the coming elections, I thought: he isn’t always that smart. Once I did say, “I think I’ve created a mon
ster,” meaning he used to be so quiet. I was sorry afterward. But Gabe was so contented he wasn’t even touchy.
My mother said that when she was engaged, she lost twelve pounds from sheer delirium. That was her phrase for it. My mother had been divorced for fifteen years, and neither of us saw my father much anymore, but her memories seemed to be unblighted by later ironies. “I was thin as a snake,” she said. “I was very gorgeous, but I fainted during the blood test.”
“Right,” my friend Dawn said, when I told her this. “They used to test everybody’s blood for syphilis. No more. Now they have to do HIV tests, I think.”
“Shit,” I said. “I totally forgot about that.”
We were having this conversation in a restaurant after we had been shopping for Dawn’s dress. I’d talked her into getting a spunky little chartreuse number, silk shantung with black trim. Now we were getting bombed on margaritas and eating a plate of oysters. Dawn wanted us to tear right over to a medical testing office after lunch—uptown there was one with No Appointment Necessary; she seemed to think we could make this part of our girls’ afternoon out. Very modern, first we vamp around dressing rooms in our underwear, then we get our antibodies checked. I wasn’t really so lighthearted about it, but I knew that Gabe wasn’t going to like the idea of this test one bit, and I thought that if I went first, I’d pave the way.
NOBODY WANTED US laughing in that office. A receptionist gave us a flyer with some gentle wording describing the chilling possibilities, and I was asked if I wanted to speak to a counselor before deciding to be tested. I was sober now. The office was thronged with people—we had to stand, although two guys in their fifties tried to give us their seats—and everyone was blanched and tense. What am I doing here? I thought. I had the sense then to be terrified. Of the people in the room a certain number were not going to be crowing with relief a week or so from now when they read their results. And here I was, with my shopping bags and my chatty friend and my lips puffy from margarita salt. I had come here in the wrong way, like a person who wears shorts into a tabernacle.
And I made a kind of bleating noise when I read the pamphlet, with its simple sentences explaining the two tests needed for positive diagnosis. The first was the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, the ELISA test; to see my own name used like that made me start to laugh, in a gasping and silly way. It was too startling, too fateful. Dawn said, “Do I take it personally that there’s a dish detergent with my name? I do not. Get a grip.”
I was trying to get a grip and to carry myself decently; I was thinking of Gabe and how he would be (was soon going to be) under these circumstances. I was trying to copy his easy steadiness when the nurse stood with her clipboard and called my name and I had to follow her into the deeper white recesses of the office.
The drawing of blood was quite unspectacular in itself. The nurse, with her latex gloves, looked down at the crease in my arm as if it were something hard to read that she was puzzling over. She took her time aiming, and then there was a sudden jab, a tiny bloom of pain, and I saw the bright blood rising in the syringe. A little pipette ran from it straight into a vial.
The sight of it made me sweat. It was always alarming to see that deep, vivid color, escaped from the skin, and I felt shocked and also rebuked. I remembered that no matter what the particulars of my day, my own intricate and interesting schedule, at the end I was a bag of blood. I also remembered that I had been as stupid as the next person as far as unsafe practices went, and just because I knew I’d gotten away with them didn’t mean I had. I got shakier and queasier by the second, tallying up all this. The nurse pulled out the needle and gave me a gauze strip to dab at the drop of blood on my skin. I was afraid I was going to throw up, but instead, like my mother, I fainted.
I knew that I was fainting—I didn’t black out suddenly—and I slid down and hit the carpeted floor with enough of a roll so that I didn’t konk my head. They had me lying on a cot by the time Dawn came in to get me. “This must happen all the time,” I said to the nurse.
“Not really,” she said.
Dawn said, “You know these brides. She’s a bride.”
WHEN I TOLD Gabe about my passing out in the clinic, he made me stay home the next day and lie around watching TV, although I felt fine. When Dawn told all our friends about my fainting episode, Fiona said, “You don’t need any tests to get a marriage license. What were you girls thinking?” What indeed. Gabe was deeply relieved that no one was going to test him.
Gabe believed that I had fainted because I was pregnant. There was sort of a possibility of this. I was freaked at the idea, but under the freakedness was a secret exhilaration, and perhaps a belief that I was getting signs, strange nuptial presents, that I had better take notice of. I knew that if I was pregnant, I was lucky to have Gabe. Gabe thought we shouldn’t talk about it until we knew, but I heard him supposing what bigger apartments in Brooklyn rented for, and I went and looked over my health insurance policy.
I wasn’t pregnant, as it turned out. I got my period before I even had to go buy one of those kits to make my pee turn color. I was tired of getting all my bodily fluids analyzed anyway. I was probably glad—more glad than not—to have my old childless goof-around life back, but I thought it was too bad that Gabe was let down. I had liked his dreamy, nervous looks that week.
All of this took my attention away from my HIV test, but I didn’t forget to go back for the results. You had to go in to talk to someone; they wouldn’t just give you a piece of paper that said, negative or positive, here’s your future. Gabe went with me to the office this time. I could tell by the way he stared ahead that the posters and the pamphlets were a bit much for him. Semen, blood, mother’s milk, vaginal secretions. I felt generationally superior, glad to be educating him. After this we were going for lunch at a favorite sushi bar, something else he didn’t like before he knew me.
I was quite hungry by the time I got called in to see the counselor. She was an overweight, pretty woman in her thirties. When she saw me, she stood up from her desk and shook my hand. She held it for a second and then she asked me how I had felt about having this test, and I thought, no, oh, no. She said that whenever she had to tell people now that they were positive, as she had to tell me, she thought of how much easier it was to say this now than it used to be. It was important that I realize that.
She was being kind, but I couldn’t hear her because of the buzzing current in my veins. I wondered whether the clinic had a policy about breaking the news this way, with an upbeat undertone. I thought: Gabe was right.
Water came up in my eyes right away, but everything else stopped. I couldn’t hear and I wasn’t seeing. I had all I could do to keep my heart beating. I was taking in the idea of my test result, as if it were a stone I had to swallow, get down fast or choke. I sat there, with this rock in my gullet, making a great effort to get used to its sharp weight. The counselor seemed to be surprised and unhappy at how calm I was. I was not saying much.
I did ask about a referral to another doctor. I had some sense of having to take care of all this, of having to take over out of some duty to that bimbo who had gotten herself infected in the first place. The counselor had a lot more things to tell me. I understood that she knew I wasn’t listening but that we had to remain sitting together for a while, as if we were waiting for a drug to take effect.
The counselor wanted me to know that I had a lot of choices. I wanted to tell her that I had had my choices already and the bets were closed. You were not supposed to think of the virus that way. HIV was not a punishment, and it didn’t matter whether needles or boyfriends had anything to do with it.
But it did matter. For one thing, I probably had less time to be without symptoms if I’d had this thing since high school. And it was a punishment—a real beating, not deserved, but caused all the same, a barbed link in the iron chain of cause and effect.
I was imagining Gabe in prison, a thin-necked smartassed boy, full of regret, not that he’d sold marijuana (wh
ich he still smoked now and then) but that he’d gotten caught. I had been caught.
I was fidgeting with my skirt, a raucous little print of black and fuchsia polka dots. The gaudy cuteness of it made me think again of how hard I had worked to get Gabe over to a different view of things. I was hoping that there would be some satisfaction for him in having been right all along. I did hope this, without bitterness.
I HAD TO go into another room to get a whole stack of pamphlets to take away, and then I had to go out of those inner offices and talk to Gabe, who was sitting in an ugly molded plastic chair, looking awkward and sweet. Oh, my groom, I thought, and I couldn’t stand the thought. What wedding had I already given us, what fluster of white blood cells. He might be fine. Probably was fine. When he saw me, he looked up fast.
I wanted to say, Guess what? You’re not going to believe this, because I thought that he of all people was going to be able to believe it right away. I thought he was ready, if anyone was. And it comforted me at that moment to think of his readiness. I think I had some idea that it showed how fated our being together was, although you would think I had had enough of fate just then.
2
Gabe
When I was in prison, nobody went around asking anyone else: what are you in for? Curiosity like that only suggested there was a convincing reason for some guy’s conviction. What for? The answer was nobody’s business and beside the point, although everyone did know about everyone else anyway. While I was waiting in the medical lab for Elisa, I read a pamphlet that insisted on this approach to how anyone got infected with HIV: don’t ask, how could it matter, what’s the difference.