Lucky Us

by Joan Silber

  “People have done stuff that’s very beautiful,” I said. “It can be subtle. Some of it’s raging and in-your-face and some of it’s oblique. There’s a range.”

  “I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do,” she said.

  “Do what you want,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I will.”

  I wanted, of course, art to do for her what religion might have, if she’d had a religion. I wanted her to see her situation in a more bearable, even a more exalted way. But I wasn’t a painter and I didn’t know that much. I had only the favorite phrase, aesthetic distance, so calming and sibilant, which didn’t mean all that much to Elisa.

  A surprising number of people with HIV had written about illness as a “gift,” an unchosen source of insight, but Elisa did not find this notion very interesting. I was the one always trying to make a silk purse out of our particular sow’s ear. This task fell to me.

  It was my joke to say to Elisa that condoms made me young again, a trip back to high school—the crackling packet and the haste to get it open, the ringed cylinder of pale film unrolled with boyish eagerness. I took the relentless presence of latex in stride, but I was sorry for us and sorry for the reminder each time that this wisp of rubber, thin as tracing paper, was my protection.

  What shields, what fences, what locked doors. For oral sex, I was supposed to cut a condom open and spread it across Elisa, and sometimes we used Saran Wrap, which felt glassy and foolish against my tongue. The taste of my own Elisa, sealed behind plastic, forever kept from me. From me.

  And sometimes I thought, I’m old, what does it matter? I can die soon, I’ve done most of what I’m ever going to do. I don’t have to be in fear for my life, the way a young person would be. What life? Sometimes I was not afraid at all.

  I TRIED TO keep watch over how she took care of herself. I fed her vitamin E, garlic extract, Coenzyme Q10, and an evil-tasting tonic made from Asian roots, and I watched her body for changes. She looked the same as she had since I’d met her—downy skin, bright eyes, shiny hair. In the morning when I kissed her good-bye I would cup her chin and stroke her neck, and after a while she knew I was checking for swollen glands.

  “Are you a boyfriend or a fucking nurse?” she said.

  I read the advice for serodiscordant couples. What a graceful phrase, that—as if unmatched serostatus were a musical problem. (The advice was no help: talk, be open, expect stress; yeah yeah.) I tried to get Elisa to use that word, serodiscordant, but I never heard her say it.

  ELISA DIDN’T WANT me to see whatever she was painting now. She had been quite an eager displayer of her work in the old days. Once, in our first months together, she showed me a whole box of drawings and “art projects” saved from third grade through her last year of art school. You could see how verisimilitude had gotten her going—she had been thrilled that she could draw a dog that looked recognizably like a hypothetical spotted hound. Once she was in her teen years she had begun to think of abstraction as a purer, higher mode. There was a painting, done when she was sixteen, of lines scratched on red and blue shapes, with a quote from Kandinsky scrawled on the bottom, “Still later I understood that the external grows from the internal or is stillborn.” In the past few years, the paintings again used recognizable figures—streets, buildings—but blurred and heated up. The blurring and heating looked confident, but the more “effective” the paintings were, the less confident she was about them, because they weren’t hers yet. And what could she do with all that now? One thing was clear—she didn’t need me to ask.

  I DID FINALLY get her to go to a doctor. Her insurance company sent her to some young, brisk guy with a shaved head and a bow tie. He was too jovial for my taste. I went with her to the office, and she didn’t faint this time. When the needle went in, she shut her eyes. I thought she might be praying. I looked at the blood going into the ampoule and I thought, please, give her more time.

  And when we went back the next week, Dr. Bowtie was even more cheery. Elisa’s CD4-cell count was 720, not that far below normal, and her viral load was 5,300, not a big deal. Elisa didn’t say a thing. I think part of her had hoped they would find out the whole thing was just a big mistake. She looked disappointed. “I’m very pleased,” the doctor kept saying.

  I asked a few direct questions, since Elisa, who was so gabby as a rule, wasn’t piping up. What drugs was he going to put her on? Maybe none. It was up to Elisa. Some doctors still said hit-early-and-hit-hard but with someone like Elisa, who’d probably been infected for a few years, his own philosopy was to wait until there were symptoms, or until the counts started moving in the wrong direction. What did Elisa think? The drugs were no picnic to take and once you were on them you really shouldn’t go off or you’d become resistant. Elisa?

  “That’s it, right?” Elisa said. “Are we done?”

  She was out of her seat while he was still explaining.

  FOR A MONTH I had comforted myself by thinking about how powerful the medication would be, and I took it hard that she wasn’t getting anything. Didn’t she want to think about it more? “That’s the last thing I want,” she said.

  This was not a passing mood, it turned out. You could not mention the words viral, immune, or positive in front of Elisa without her saying, “Will you stop this right now, please?”

  How could I stop? I was pretty obsessed with the subject. At night or on my lunch hour I worked my way through books with titles like Viral Sex or HIV Infection: The Facts You Need to Know; I got very devoted to a magazine called POZ; I read doctors’ accounts of their time in clinics; I read guides to spiritual uplift. Hardest of all were the AIDS memoirs, a genre that had risen in the eighties and peaked in the mid-nineties, just before the new drugs; these books were often very beautiful but I could only get through them by constantly noting the ways the people depicted were different from Elisa and how many years ago anyone had died. Elisa herself asked why I had to read this crap. The answer was that I couldn’t stay away. I would start some mystery novel and find myself instead sneaking looks at the latest copy of Treatment Issues.

  “What did you read before?” Elisa said.

  Our bookshelves were lined with what I’d read before, but they were like hobbies from my boyhood, trivia I didn’t have time for now. For her part, Elisa wanted to read Vogue and watch the X-Files and reruns of Law and Order. She had poked around a little in my piles of data at first, but no more.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I’d like to be a regular person in my spare time. Get this out of my sight, please.”

  It is hard to get anything out of anyone’s sight in a two-room apartment, and I didn’t think she meant this literally. But she did. I’d look for hours for the book I was reading and discover she had put this month’s ARTnews over it to hide its ugly face.

  “Denial is sort of out of style these days,” I said.

  “Who’s denying anything? Didn’t I go tell the whole world?” Elisa said. “I just don’t want this literature staring at me all the time.”

  “You could be a little better informed,” I said. “You don’t want to be ignorant when you have to make decisions.”

  “Gabe,” she said, “it’s my goddamned disease.”

  I HAD NEVER before felt like Elisa’s parent. People thought we had that kind of relationship (her friend Dawn liked to call me Daddy-o) but we didn’t. I wasn’t someone who liked scolding or hovering over somebody else. I thought people should be left to their own devices. I had always liked that phrase.

  Certainly no one had ever accused me of trying to take over. On the contrary. Judy, whom I once lived with, later blamed me for “letting her” do a number of misguided and ill-advised things while we were together.

  But what kind of man wouldn’t watch over Elisa now? What did she think I was?

  I SUPPOSE THERE had been times before when I was paternal. And she liked it. Once in January she came home from her studio angry and tearful because the place was so dra
fty and cold that she couldn’t concentrate and she was sniveling and getting sick all the time. I went to the place and looked it over and I rewired the electricity so that she could set up an electric heater without burning out all the lines. The studio was quite cozy when I was done, if you didn’t move too far from the heater.

  Elisa was all tickled and dimpling and pleased. She sat in this ratty paint-smeared vinyl armchair and she looked up at me, after I turned on the heater for the first time, and she said, “You’ve made it so nice, it’s very nice here.”

  I said, “No big deal,” which was true. I could feel her gazing at my back, as I bent down to adjust the dials, and I was proud of myself, I was. Sometimes with Elisa then, it was so easy to do the right thing.

  5

  Elisa: A List

  If one more person asked me, how did it happen?

  1. I was in the tenth grade and I had a crush on Dennis Kotke. But it was Keith Mickleton who liked me. He wasn’t bad either, a smart boy with a tattoo of a dragon on his ankle and a butch-waxed thatch for a haircut. All the same I wanted Dennis. Keith had been eyeing me for a while; I was so young that the heat of anybody’s gaze made me wildly pleased with myself. “Hey, girl,” he said. He came to get me at home after supper and we walked along the suburban streets, with their hilly lawns and leafy smells, to the housing development past the highway. Everybody knew how to break into the model houses after dark. We walked arm in arm—I could hear his breathing, and when we sat on the steps of one of the houses, there was a catch in his throat, like a nervous hiccup. He said, “That’s a nice jacket,” while he was caressing my shoulder. This was sweeter than some of the other boys I had necked with.

  He was a good kisser, for a boy that age, an intelligent kisser. When his hands moved over me, I thought, oh, my. I had done most of these things before, but barely, so that each succeeding placement of his hands was a different audacity of feeling. And I had the fever on me, the high sickness of desire. I felt it as a glory of helplessness.

  He carded the lock on the door of the model house with his laminated library card and we went into the living room. He led me to the brown plaid sofa, barely visible in the dark. “Our house,” I said.

  “Our mansion,” he said.

  He was as nice as anyone I knew. “Oh, you,” he said, with his eyes closed. When he entered me, I didn’t bleed, but it was all a kind of bleeding, a pointed wound, a cut to the quick. In the midst of my delirium—I was pretty glad about what was happening—I got homesick for Dennis, where was Dennis? The sadness of missing him hit me sharply (not that we’d ever done much), but I liked the sadness, I liked being cut by everything at once. It seemed suitable to the intensity of what was going on. But I might have been nicer to Keith. Afterward he worried that we hadn’t used a condom.

  “Don’t worry now,” I said. “What’s the point of that?”

  2. I was more seasoned by the time I knew Chris. He had a car, a beat-up Chevy Nova, which served as our bedroom. We’d play the radio loud and fool around a little while he was driving down the highway, and then we’d pull over to the side of the road. Often we were silly and stoned as well as hotly eager to have sex. A small obstruction—a stubborn bra hook, pants legs that wouldn’t roll easily down the knees—struck us as more hilarious than we could stand. “Stop laughing,” Chris would say, holding his breath. “Stop it right now.”

  Naturally, condoms were often funny to us; putting a latex sack on an engorged organ is inherently funny. In time lust always outran the instinct for comedy—we wanted each other pretty fiercely—and then we made love like serious lovers, solemn and beyond the ridiculous. After the exalted finale, it often surprised me to see the condom again, that shred of disagreeable rubber on what had seemed so distinctly naked.

  One night—it was autumn and I remember the car was cool and dank—Chris looked down and said, “Science has failed us.”

  He had to take the thing off to show me what he meant. He held it up, glistening and ripped.

  “We were too much for it,” I said. I had a small thrill of panic. One friend had had an abortion, and it had been expensive and awful but okay. Interesting even.

  “Want to save it?” Chris said. “Want to put it in your scrapbook?”

  “We’re sending it back to LifeStyles for a refund,” I said. “We’re suing them and getting rich.”

  “I want an airline ticket around the world,” Chris said. “I want a car that doesn’t have a transmission that’s shot. I want a new leather jacket.”

  “Lucky us,” I said. “We’ve hit the jackpot.”

  3. In my second year with Chris he was druggier. Sometimes I did stuff with him and sometimes I didn’t. He was a great proselytizer for different sensations, but he didn’t pressure me, aside from giving out toothsome descriptions. Some drugs made him horny and urgent, some made him speedy and strange; heroin made him languorous and distant and only mildly sexual. I couldn’t help it, I was always trying to get him to want me when he thought he didn’t. How unsubtle I must have been, preening and tossing myself around, larding my conversation with coy and bawdy references, touching his arm or his back.

  When I had him on the linoleum floor of the laundry room in our friend’s parents’ basement, he smiled at me with his eyes closed. I was proud of myself for his erection, but it was an unreliable miracle, and I had to keep coaxing it back. I was patient and stubborn, I wouldn’t let him be. I brought him back, with glee and triumph, only to have him soften and slip away from me again. From my mouth! From all my artful and generous attention! I was deeply insulted, I was near weeping. When he had a sudden resurgence of unmistakable desire for me, I was so grateful that I moved up the carpet and lowered myself over him at once, to get the best of him while I could, and I didn’t even think about whether we were using any protection.

  4. I was kind of fascinated by the needles. It was such a professional way to do drugs, an open sacrifice to absolute expedience. The boys—it was always boys—were intent as musicians, methodically melting down the powder in a spoon, binding their arms with some girl’s pantyhose, drawing the liquid up through cotton into the syringe. And I saw their faces, their scientific gazes, as they watched their own arms and waited, the curl of pleasure in the slow stretch of their lips. Boys I had known since kindergarten.

  It felt different than I had expected. I tried it first before we went to a concert, out of a long-growing eagerness and a belief (through the music, which Dennis Kotke cranked up on the stereo in his basement) that this was the one true life, the blaring phantom life of extremity. I was sitting in a scuffed rocking chair in a cellar with pine-paneled walls. I held out my arm, like a victim, and Andrew Brunovacci said something to make me laugh, so we had to wait a second. Then Chris slid the needle in cleanly and what felt like pure excitement lit up my whole body. The traveling route of this sensation was not calming (as I had expected) but galvanizing, like a surge of the best possible news. When I tried to tell everyone how good it was, I smirked and laughed to myself.

  As it turned out, I was more stoned than the rest of them, and on the car ride over (somebody’s girlfriend drove), Chris kept dripping cold club soda on my neck to keep me alert. When we all walked into the faded-velvet lobby of the concert hall, I knew how I must have looked, wet haired and glazed, but I was past minding. Chris and I sat in the dark, holding hands, with the amps turned up so loud there was no music in the noise. Chris mouthed the words, “You okay?” and I got tears in my eyes over the niceness of his asking. Junk made me soggy. I cried when the band did a slow tune about the love that burns you out forever, I wept quietly and easily and without shame. “Hey, what?” Chris said.

  I didn’t mind sadness any more than I minded being nauseated or itchy. I was having a fine time. I was thoroughly and proudly astonished at myself. I skidded on the marble stairs walking out of the concert hall, and I viewed the bruises on my leg with tender interest.

  I had been exhilarated all the way through, so puffed
up (even at the outset) at what I was doing that I didn’t think to notice whether Chris used a fresh needle or not.

  5. I was lonely when I first came to New York. I met people in my classes in art school and I hung out with them right away, but I didn’t really take to them. I lived in a tiny double room at the Y, where the school housed some of us. I hadn’t met Fiona or Dawn yet. I was dating a guy who didn’t seem to want to sleep with me. We would see a movie together and at the end of the night he embraced me as if I were a relative. Philip Luckenthorn, his name was.

  He did refer to me as his girlfriend. I had consultations with my new friend Bruce about whether Philip was gay. Bruce, who had been getting it on with boys since junior high, guessed no, for some reason. “So if you like him,” Bruce said, “grab it.” Did I like him? I learned a lot from Philip about art—he was smart and much better educated than I was—but he was rigidly cynical in a way I already considered young.

  Any hints I dropped (“if you stayed over, my roommate could stay with her friend”) met with a shrug from him or a sheepish shaking of the head. Pressing him further, I thought, would only lead to an outright shudder. My adolescence seemed like an insane dream.

  So I was happy when Bruce took me to a party full of familiarly libidinous youth, drunk on potluck punch. Patsy Futterman was telling some long story about eating frogs’ legs and where was the clitoris on a frog, and two friends of Bruce’s were talking happily about which paintings in the Met had given them hard-ons. “It’s a nice crowd,” I said.

  Bruce’s friend Lionel interviewed me closely about how people dressed in Cleveland versus New York. “In the Midwest people are fatter,” I said. “As a rule.” He was a sparkling talker himself, with genial brown eyes.

  In the kitchen we were washing out some used paper cups when he stood behind me and leaned against my back in a friendly way. Then he bent around and kissed me full on the mouth. It was all a great surprise—this cute boy with his tongue darting around in my mouth, artful and subtle.