Lucky Us

by Joan Silber

  On one of his meandering shopping trips before breakfast, he came back with a box of condoms. When he set it on the night table next to his books, he said, “Maybe they’ll give us a discount if we stock up by the case.” I took this for what it was, an elegant gesture. No one had better manners than Gabe.

  On Mondays the gallery where I worked was closed, and I stayed home in the apartment and napped all day. I was alone in bed, sunk in the envelope of sheets. I had a dream of a beach, of lying on the sand with someone who was probably my high school boyfriend. We were making love and had to stop when people walked by; we kept pausing and starting again. I awoke still in the heat of the dream, and before it faded my hand was between my legs. This was making me quite happy, until I woke up further and remembered that all the moistures of my body were not simple anymore, that my leaking female self was slick with danger. I had always been pretty blithe about myself sexually, ready to unveil my vital parts to anyone I lusted for without much modest forethought. Now it made me weep to touch myself.

  WHEN I WAS calling people on the phone to tell them the news, I had many cheery technical conversations. Everybody in the whole goddamned world that I spoke to that week told me how amazing and miraculous the antiviral drugs were now, not like the old days. People who couldn’t spell ibuprofen were all of sudden full of information about how protease inhibitors in combination therapies made T-cell counts go up and viral loads go down. Sometimes. Maybe. They didn’t work on everyone. No one knew how long they worked for. Over time they could have a lot of toxic side effects. But people were full of uplifting advice and merry stories of people who weren’t dead yet.

  Even Fiona, my least sentimental friend, tried to convince me that I was lucky it was now and not five years ago. “Please be hopeful,” she said. I was, actually. I was in anguish and hopeful too, like a person who has taken an up and a down both at once, a thing I sometimes did in my recreational drug days. The hope and the mortal dread hit me at alternating times, and I was never exactly straight now.

  I HAD NOT told my mother yet—I was planning to wait as long as possible on that one. She was going to fall into a few dozen pieces when she heard, and this wasn’t the best time for me to have to hold her up until she pulled herself together (a thing she’d do eventually). My mother is better than a lot of mothers—she was never mean or cutting like some, or flaky and childish like some others—but my father’s stupid behavior and the high stress of coping with me took most of the wind out of her sails. A high school friend once said my mother was wet (meaning limp and transparently incompetent) and I got angry but I laughed because I knew it was true.

  And when she called me now, she still babbled on happily about the wedding. She was getting more excited by the day. For me, the wedding had vanished since the diagnosis. It seemed out of the question, wildly inappropriate. All that fluffy sweetness: not for us.

  When Gabe tried to bring up the subject, I waved him away (“Not now,” I said, or, “Do I have to deal with that too?”). With my mother, I resorted to inventing material obstacles—the church might not be ready, its ceiling had developed big cracks where the rain came in, we could wait till summer. It was true about the church’s ceiling, but services went on every Sunday under a sheet of plastic tacked across the beams. This was New York.

  “You have to have it there?” my mother said. She had never liked the idea of our picking a church instead of a synagogue, although she had been a good sport about it.

  “Yes,” I said. “We have to have it there.”

  “You cover any room with flowers and it’ll look very beautiful and festive, you know.”

  She seemed silly, my mother, but it wasn’t her fault.

  “Is it Gabe?” she said. “Gabe is the one who likes that church?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I see,” my mother said. “I’m sorry, sweetie. They get cold feet but it doesn’t mean anything.”

  My father had gotten cold feet in a meaningful way fifteen years into their marriage, but I let her sound wise if she wanted to. She was all wrong about Gabe. Gabe was very set on the marriage. Once he was stuck on something, he didn’t get off it. If anything, he was more resolute now, as far as I could tell. It hurt his feelings when I wouldn’t talk about getting married anymore.

  I couldn’t picture myself in some Reddi-wip swirl of a dress, eagerly asking the world to wish me well. The wedding concept—the whole frilled, teary spectacle of high emotion—had gotten very nauseating to my way of thinking. Too much wallowing, too much carrying on.

  “Doll-face,” my mother said. “Be patient. Just because things are hard now doesn’t mean they won’t get better.” I could see her at the maple dinette table as she said this, with her frazzled, half-dyed hair and her brave red lip gloss.

  “Spare me the proverbs,” I said.

  “Excuse me for living,” my mother said. (We both regressed in this conversation.) Anything she said had a little irony in it, because of her not knowing.

  I WAS RESTLESS all the time and I didn’t like it when there was no one around to talk to. At work, in the white, track-lit space of the gallery, I made phone calls to Gabe when there was nothing to do. “Just checking in,” I’d say. I called him a few times a day. He’d say, “What’s up, girl?” and tell me some stupid joke one of the other salesmen had told him. I’ve never really liked stupid jokes, and I laughed anyway. But the strain of these conversations started to wear on him—he was not really a phone person—and once he lost a sale he was in the middle of because someone thought I was an urgent call.

  “I have a job,” Gabe said. “Remember?”

  “Oh, that,” I said.

  “If money grew on trees, I wouldn’t work,” he said. “Unfortunately it’s something we’re going to need.”

  I hadn’t been to see a doctor yet. I was taking one thing at a time. The insurance I had from work was one of those mean-spirited HMOs, minimal and stingy, and whenever I got around to starting on any regimen of drugs, it was going to cost a fucking fortune and insurance wasn’t going to cover all of it. My own secret hope was that I might become a very successful painter before my medical expenses started to escalate. I wasn’t ready to think clearly yet.

  OVER DINNER THAT first week, I said that a wedding was going to cost too much money. “It’s a one-time expense,” Gabe said.

  “The whole thing is too much to deal with,” I said. This wasn’t my usual tone, this whiny overwhelmed tone.

  “We could just go to City Hall,” Gabe said. “There’s no reason this has to be an elaborate production.”

  “I hate City Hall.”

  “When were you there?” Gabe said. “You were never even there.”

  “I don’t want to be some bride standing in a long line in a smelly hallway,” I said.

  “A lot of people like City Hall,” Gabe said.

  “Nobody likes it,” I said. “They’re not there because they like it.”

  Gabe shook his head. “Forget it,” he said. “I never mentioned it, okay?”

  “ARE YOU CRAZY?” my friend Fiona said. “You’re going to pick fights with Gabe now? What if he walks out? Where will you be then?”

  “Use your brain,” Dawn said. “That’s all she’s saying.”

  Usually Dawn was the one who encouraged me to be mouthy and difficult. In the days when I was with Jason, she was always telling me not to put up with his shit. Now I had become someone who couldn’t afford to offend her protector.

  They meant well, my friends. None of us had much experience with anything like this. The people we’d known with AIDS—Fiona’s cousin Alan, who was dead, and our friend Bruce’s friend Luis, who’d gone back to live with his parents—were all men. Sometimes now when I saw gay men on the street, I wanted to say, I’m in on this too.

  It scared me when I got my period. I knew the blood, which was not just blood but shed tissue and mucus, was not likely to get into anyone else’s bloodstream, but it showed red and lethal, and wha
t was I supposed to do with my used and polluted tampons? I had to call a hot line to find out how to dispose of them. The woman was crisp and cheerful, I was embarrassed.

  ON A FRIDAY Gabe went to the lab after work to get his test results. He went without me; I wasn’t very keen on stepping inside that office again. When he came back to the apartment, I couldn’t guess from his face which way it had gone. He was holding his mouth tight and his eyes weren’t readable. “Well, what?” I said.

  He said, “Negative,” in a flat, sobered voice. I hugged him, and he flashed a small, bright smile. He must have been deeply relieved, but he was something else too, saddened that we were on different sides of this. Anyway he never would have gloated in front of me, not Gabe.

  I was the one who got gleeful as it hit me that I really hadn’t—not at all, not me—given the virus to him. I danced around him, I clapped and cheered like a maniac. Gabe didn’t know what to do. I told him he was going to live to be ninety, one of those old farts hanging around on the corner telling filthy jokes to his cronies and looking very sage.

  Gabe said, “Maybe.” He was already getting modest about his health.

  I wanted us to go out to celebrate, I really did. Gabe said this was too weird, he couldn’t do it. I had not been able to eat much all week and now I was ravenously hungry. “We’re supposed to celebrate while we can,” I said. I had gotten advice along these lines from friends about every two minutes.

  In the end we just ordered Chinese takeout. But with the pan-fried leek dumplings, our first course, I opened up a bottle of very decent Sancerre that we had been saving.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  I held up my glass and made a toast to his negativity.

  “Right,” he said.

  “Oh, drink,” I said. I leaned over and kissed his neck. He got jollier. He stroked my arm, and then he kidded around with his chopsticks, lifting my shirt.

  I was wearing a black lace bra. I hadn’t, after all, changed my style of underwear since getting the bad news. I was pleased to see it myself.

  He let down my shirt and used his chopsticks to feed me a dumpling, which fell on my shoe instead. We thought this was hilarious.

  “Feeding the floor again,” I said, something my mother used to say. I didn’t mind being verbally moronic. I understood that there was misery and there was this, and this was not impossible. I could have flashes of this.

  Gabe was trying to offer me another dumpling, which this time landed in my lap, and he got to do a little raunchy clowning over its retrieval with the chopsticks. His cheeks were flushed—wine did that to him—and he looked younger. Be healthy, I thought, but of course he was, without any invocations from me. How solid he looked, the squared shoulders and the muscled angles of his arms. He was wolfing down chow fun with remarkable speed and noise, a sight that made me so glad that I had to slip a noodle down his sock.

  I WALKED AROUND the streets for several days grinning to myself over Gabe’s being fine. Talk about feeling several things at once. At work everyone noticed that I was less testy.

  Gabe bought a shelfful of vitamins and herbal supplements that he fed me every morning. He was constantly trying to get me to eat more, although there was no reason for me to be fatter at present. In the evenings when he didn’t work late, he came home and constructed elaborate meals. Figs with prosciutto, gnocchi with cream sauce, eggplant stuffed with smoked mozzarella. He wanted to tend me. I was going to turn into a tub from humoring him. Some of my short skirts were already getting tighter in the waist.

  I couldn’t have felt more married than I did over those meals, stuffing myself on rosemary chicken and sopping up the sauce with a hunk of bread. I thought that we were like a couple under siege, brave citizens feasting in a cellar while bombs went off overhead. I suppose I thought of our sex life that way too; we had to always be listening for the enemy, and so our interludes were tense and limited, but also tender and comradely.

  Aunt Angie, who had groused a lot about the wedding being postponed, often phoned in the evening and wanted to hear what we’d had for dinner. “He likes the pasta with sausage and broccoli rabe,” she said. “That’s the way to get to him.” Like my mother, she was convinced that the dawdler over marrying was Gabe. She also believed I did all the cooking, no matter what we told her. “Just to offer some free advice,” she said, “get him to eat bitter greens so he’ll piss a lot. A man his age needs that to keep him limber, and I know you know what I mean.”

  For a week Gabe could not take a pee without one of us remarking on the amazing limberness of his dick, which was going to wear us both to a frazzle, down to nubs and shreds of ourselves. Any more pissing and neither of us was going to be ambulatory; we got a lot of mileage out of this one, true or not.

  IN MARCH MY friend Dawn wore the dress that she’d bought for my wedding to her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday dinner. She said she couldn’t save it up any longer and she would need something different anyway by whatever season we got around to deciding to get married.

  “Maybe in another ten years,” I said, just to hear Dawn yelp. In fact, I was thinking that maybe Gabe and I could do it, not right this minute but soon. Everything I’d read had assured me of my right to carry on as if I were a regular person.

  Gabe was still quiet around me. Our sex had become the sex of very old, cautious people who were afraid of injuring each other’s vital tissues. Sometimes it reminded me too of some of the sex I had had in high school, which had of course been more wild and strenuous but had had the same sneaky feeling of stolen moments.

  Gabe said a number of things that made a difference during this time (he said I should always remember that I was loved) but mostly he didn’t talk much. He was being vigilant, watching me to see how I was bearing up. It made me nervous but I appreciated it.

  Often we sat in front the TV, letting the sound track talk instead of us. One night we were watching the late-night news in bed; we were drowsy and barely listening. A reporter was blathering on about the stock market, and Gabe said, “I hope my pension fund isn’t run by idiots.”

  “What fund?”

  “From the store,” Gabe said. “You know. For retirement. It adds up over the years, even though they don’t put in that much.”

  I said, “When can you get it?”

  “At sixty-five. I could go live in Mexico on it, I suppose, if it’s still cheap to live there.”

  “Right,” I said. “I like warm places.”

  He took my hand. He had been planning his future without me, but I let this go. Where did he think I’d be in another sixteen years? “Mexico is a good idea,” I said.

  “Compound interest is kind of amazing,” Gabe said. He knew quite a lot about it, as it turned out. I had to hear about year-end capital balances and cost of living adjustments.

  He looked flat to me at that moment, like someone I couldn’t get in focus. It wasn’t his fault that he lived in another kind of time from me, but I felt that we were now on different schedules.

  AND THEN THERE was the episode with the onion. It was an ordinary kitchen event. I was slicing a red onion for the salad (Gabe was cooking the main course, as usual) when the onion slid and I hit my thumb instead. I was using the one good knife in the house, a heavy steel chef’s knife, and I yelped to see how much red blood flowed out of my thumb. I was dripping gore onto the cutting board.

  “What’d you do?” Gabe said. He took my hand to look at it, and he didn’t draw back or falter. His face looked a little pinched but he was game.

  Nobody gets infected this way—only if Gabe had an open cut was there even the smallest technical chance—but I didn’t like his holding my gushing thumb. I yelled, “Stop it,” and I pulled my hand away, which really made blood get all over. Our wall was spattered with red.

  Gabe put his hands up and backed away, the stance that meant don’t bother me, I’m an innocent man. He was angry. I wrapped myself with a paper towel and I went to the bathroom to get a Band-Aid.


  When I came back, I made a solution of Clorox to wash down the wall and the cutting board. It was too hard, I thought, to have to worry about myself and Gabe too. For a very brief second, I really was sorry he didn’t have this same virus. And it shocked me to think it, what was I turning into? I hadn’t thought I would be like this.

  4

  Gabe

  I kept thinking I could have handled this better than Elisa was doing. She was so young, she didn’t know how to take bad news. No one does, of course, but I would have been better at it.

  Why, for instance, was she still refusing to see a doctor, no matter how I reasoned and nagged? She was distracted by the wrong things and too revved up, too wired. From everything I had read so far (I was reading as much as I could and there was more and more), she was going to have to keep her wits about her and not fly off any handles.

  There was the whole question of hope, for instance. I had read articles that made my heart beat with happiness, tales of people who’d been at death’s door and were now dancing around, happily medicated on triple and quadruple combinations of antiviral drugs. One magazine listed six different drugs that were now in trials and would be on the market soon, probably before Elisa needed them. The same magazine had an obituary section that seemed to be a regular column. Four AIDS activists, with bright and bustling resumes, had died that month; one of them was younger than Elisa. The subhead could’ve read: don’t flinch, dear reader.

  Elisa was too jumpy to read a magazine like this and her information was pretty thin. She was running on blind nerve at the moment. I was afraid she was going to make a mess of things.

  SHE DID KEEP getting on the subway and going to her studio to paint, which I thought was a good thing. She had been working on these cityscapes, big stripes and jolts of hot color. I asked if she was going to keep working at these or if she had a different sense now of what she wanted to do. She was annoyed by the question. “You want me to do dancing blood cells?” she said. “That kind of AIDS art?”