Lucky Us

by Joan Silber

  I didn’t say, I thought you were gay. I necked with him a little while longer and then we went back to his apartment. His roommates (two guys, a girl, and a cat) greeted me pleasantly and certainly without any signs of shock that I was female. We went to his room and had slow and straightforward sex, and I said something dopey like bodies are great, aren’t they? “How true,” he said. “How well put.”

  We used a condom. He had a supply stacked in a wineglass on his bed table. Only one condom—he was a gentle and leisurely lover but not an endlessly hungry one. Afterward he lay in bed holding hands with me.

  I’m always going to sleep with bi men from now on, I thought, always. But it was a thing I phrased to show off to myself; really I wanted him to want only me. “You did well,” Bruce said the next day. “There’s no one nicer than Lionel. Is he nice or what?” Bruce believed I probably had had a wonderfully consoling effect on Lionel after his desertion by Dale. Dale was a boy; I asked.

  All the same, I felt much clearer about everything and I “broke up” with Philip Luckenthorn (most stubborn and tormented of men).

  I liked to tell Fiona that if you slept with a gay man at least there was no argument about safe sex. Oh, but later I was plagued with worry. What if a small speck of semen had catapulted out of the rubber seal? What if there had been a pinpoint leak, a fatal percentage of defect? I was ashamed of my dread, which seemed cowardly and disloyal—that careful boy, how had he ever wished me any harm? Bruce lost track of him after a while, but we thought he’d gotten back with Dale.

  6. Jason, especially in our early days together, had more erotic tricks than any man I’d been with. Tricks is what they were—as cunning as dance steps and not invented on the spot. I liked these, who wouldn’t have? I had not really understood, before then, how far I could go in what I felt. I did not ever tell him he was my teacher. But he had me doing things I hadn’t done and I might have done more. There was some luck for me in his not wanting more.

  He could be quite charming in those crucial moments when he interrupted himself to put on the condom—grumpy in a boyish, cute way. He was a better sport than anyone would have guessed. Except when he wasn’t. “Don’t nag,” he said to me. “For Christ’s sake. Not now.” So I didn’t.

  7. I was not the great love of Jason’s life. I knew that, he didn’t have to tell me, although he did tell me. When he lived in Chicago he had a job on a trade journal that was meant to be read by strippers and exotic dancers. Mostly it made its money selling the women page space to advertise themselves. Jason was the entire art department.

  The strippers would come in with their photos, and the editor, Jason’s friend Megan, would help them write up their bios. For Jason, the office was an amazing place to hang out. The women would stroll in, wearing their leather shorts and their tiny T-shirts, their streetwear. They expected Jason, the only man in the office, to eye them and to chat them up, which he did, he said, the ones who weren’t too stupid or too drugged out.

  A dancer named Suzi sort of intrigued him, a skinny girl with a big bust who claimed that she had once been in the corps de ballet of a troupe in another city, Santa Fe or South Bend, the story fluctuated. She was unsmiling, with a small, hoarse voice. In bed she had a kind of hunger he had not seen before; she was like a person in a dream, with a beautiful surety to her moves. She made his head spin.

  But what could they talk about? She knew quite a lot about muscles, exercise, nutrition. She liked to talk about where her body was strained and what it needed. This in spite of the fact that she smoked Newport Lights and ate packs of barbecue potato chips first thing in the morning, washed down with ice-cold Pepsi. “Breakfast of champions,” Jason said every time. Sometimes he picked her up after work, catching the last few minutes of her act, a simple bump-and-grind in a G-string, on a catwalk lit with reddish light above the rows of half-empty tables. It seemed highly professional in a dingy way, like a jingle made out of your heart’s desire. She would wink at him when she saw him, a signal that this was just a goof to her. Her nipples had glitter brushed on them over a coat of vaseline, her pubic hair was shaved; she was like a geisha, she once told him. She wasn’t stupid or unread.

  But it was not easy waiting around for her after three in the morning when he had to work the next day. She was perfectly willing to make dates to do something normal, a restaurant dinner or a movie, but she broke them or didn’t show up at all. Then without notice she would appear at his office and they’d end up at his apartment all through the afternoon. “You’re getting so crazy,” he said to her. “I need different clothes,” she said. “I need to look different. I hate my job, I want to get another job.” She borrowed five hundred dollars and disappeared without a trace. Three months later she was waiting for him outside his building at dusk.

  When he told me this, he said, “What a story, right? It goes on and on.” It was the only time I ever heard Jason rueful.

  She left him to go work in a club in San Francisco. There was a message on his phone machine, “Guess where I am? The city of hills. I’ll let you know how it is.” She called him at seven in the morning to tell him to come out to join her there. Before he could get his plane tickets bought, the phone number she’d given him went out of service and she stopped calling.

  He went back with his old girlfriend Megan, the editor of the strippers’ newsletter, but Suzi phoned him at work collect from London. More than once in the year I lived with Jason, I woke up in the middle of the night and found him pacing around the kitchen, talking on the phone, taking deep drags from his cigarette and saying, well, honey, don’t do it then if it makes you feel so down. Listen to me for a minute, will you.

  PART II

  6

  Elisa

  It was a cool, bright day in late March and I was in a good frame of mind for a change, on my way to my studio in Brooklyn, when I saw a really handsome man—one of those lithe, big-shouldered guys—walking along near my subway station, and when he turned his face I realized it was Jason, my old boyfriend. I had not spoken to him for a long time, although I should have. I should have phoned him after I got the test back.

  “Eeeelisa,” he said. “What a surprise.”

  “Hey!” I said, very chirpy and friendly. “How are you?”

  “Do you mean how do I feel?”

  “Sure.”

  “I feel fine,” he said. “And yourself?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m glad. Really.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s nice to hear. You look great.”

  “I’m not fine though,” he said. “If you know what I mean.”

  I sighed when he said this, I made a ridiculous breathy whimpering noise. “Yeah, well,” Jason said. “It sucks, doesn’t it?”

  I had trouble speaking, which had not happened to me before. I was used to other people’s horror when I told them my news, and my instinct was always to keep talking while they regrouped. What I was afraid of now—what stopped my mouth—was that Jason was going to shout at me in rage. A lot of people had asked who gave it to you? which I had learned to think of as an offensive and naive question, but I wouldn’t have blamed Jason if he had shouted at me. He was a shouter, as I well knew.

  Instead he put his hand on my shoulder, which almost made me jump. “Did you just find out now or did you know before?” I asked.

  He said he’d only gotten tested when he heard about me, and I suppose I believed him. It could have gone either way, our infection. There was no telling which was the crucial bend in the road. People can be infected and without symptoms for more than ten years; I’d heard this long before Gabe, the retrovirus scholar, told me.

  I noticed Jason’s hair was longer, and then I saw that I was checking him out to see if he looked sick. Probably I had that pained, pitying squint I hated in other people. He looked as normal as he ever did.

  It’s not so easy for a man to get it from a woman. His penis has to have abrasions or cuts or sores on it. That tender surface has
to be roughened and broken. Just thinking this made me remember fucking Jason. You’d think the memory would be blighted for me, but actually all the clinical images were only making it more vivid, more strongly flavored in recollection. Also I hadn’t had skin-to-skin sex in a while and I missed it. I had truly liked Jason quite a lot in bed. Although I wasn’t a baby when I met him, I learned things from Jason. I’d probably stayed with him much longer than I should have because of that.

  We had the hope-has-arrived conversation—we were both big enthusiasts of these drug cocktails neither of us was on yet. “What luck,” Jason said. He actually winked at me. His diagnosis seemed to be making him jaunty.

  “You want to go have coffee?” I said. I hadn’t expected to say this at all. He took my elbow, and we strolled across the street to the coffee bar, comrades-in-arms.

  We were crossing against the light. “Live dangerously,” Jason said, as a little red Honda whipped around the corner and he danced us out of its way. “Really, I’m very careful,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe what a cautious boy I’ve become.”

  When we sat down at the coffee counter, I forgot how to talk to him.

  “Raspberry mocha latte,” I read. “Is that a disgusting idea or what?”

  “How’s Dawn? How’s Fiona?” Jason said.

  “Fiona’s married to Ira now,” I said. “His parents bought them a big loft in Brooklyn.”

  “I thought you were getting married.”

  “I might be.”

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  “Nobody’s buying me any goddamn lofts though,” I said. “Fiona has an easy life.” I thought that about everyone now.

  Our iced cappuccinos were set down in front of us. “Look at this,” Jason said. He was pointing to the straws, whose paper wrappers had been peeled but left on at the tips. “Even our drinks are wearing condoms.”

  I flicked my bit of paper off, making a big flamboyant gesture out of it. I put my finger in the cup and scooped up some foam, which I tasted off my fingertip. There wasn’t any way to approach that coffee that wasn’t sexy.

  “Good, isn’t it?” Jason said.

  “I’m drinking mine bareback,” I said, and sipped straight from the cup.

  “Latex is our friend,” Jason said. “Believe it. For a while I was dating a woman who could put a condom on me with her mouth.”

  All of Starbucks liked that one. I could hear a pause across the room while they waited for details.

  “The guy behind you wants her phone number.”

  “Never mind,” Jason said. “That was for your ears alone.”

  People still flirted with me, at work and sometimes in bars, but I felt slightly fraudulent, a body with a soured immune system masquerading as regular babe flesh. Flirting with Jason was a more enjoyable exercise.

  “Want a bite?” Jason said, holding out the muffin he’d ordered.

  “Everything you say sounds dirty right now,” I said. I nibbled at the edge.

  “The word muffin always sounded dirty to me anyway,” Jason said. “I could never believe there were girls with that nickname.”

  “They’ll throw you out of this place soon,” I said.

  Jason pretended to hide himself in the sleeve of his jacket. What lighthearted young things we were.

  HE WALKED ME back to the subway station on the corner. “My studio’s really nice now,” I said. “I cleaned it up. I had new electric lines put in.”

  Jason asked how my paintings were coming. “Crappy,” I said, and I asked about his.

  “I’m doing new stuff,” he said. “You should come by sometime to see.”

  “Different how?” I said.

  I should have known this would get him started. I had to hear quite a long description. He wasn’t a bad painter, although I thought he pleased himself too fast. When we lived together, he used to paint in his underpants in summer, and I’d see him parading in front of his canvas, the triumphant stroller.

  “Are you in a hurry?” Jason said. “You want to come now to see the work?”

  “Now?” I said.

  My heart was lurching, as if I had just taken a very speedy drug. It was not a good idea to walk into that apartment again. To see his etchings, as it were. I had not cheated on Gabe, not since the first few months anyway, and I had, if anything, more reason than ever to hold on to him now (as Dawn and Fiona were always pointing out). And I didn’t want to look back on my engagement (I still thought of myself as about to be married) as a time when I had lied to Gabe.

  Jason said, “Just for a second. You don’t have to linger for days or anything.”

  Anyone can do something just for a second. It didn’t have to be a big deal to pay a quick studio visit.

  “You know what happens when you take too long to decide something?” Jason said. Cajoling was not his usual style at all. “It’ll stress your system.”

  “God, anything but that,” I said. I could just look at the art and leave, couldn’t I? “Oh, why not?” I said, even though I knew the answer to that question.

  JASON’S NEIGHBORHOOD—my old neighborhood, Avenue A—had continued its race toward improvement in the years since I’d lived there. Bright-faced restaurants had taken over where desolate ancient storefronts had been. Le petit this, Il giardino di that. Korean, Japanese. This made Jason seem more prosperous and fortunate too, and perhaps he was, since he lived off freelance work as a graphic designer, which he was good at. Oh, it was weird, walking through the door of his building again.

  He had moved things around in his apartment, knocked down a dividing wall. It was still a mess but an open mess now, with his unmade bed between the kitchen and the paintings. “It looks good, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “It looks bigger,” I said.

  “It was a lot of work. Tell me it looks stunning.”

  “I’m speechless.”

  “It is easier to work in.” I had pangs when he said this, since I hadn’t been getting much painting done myself. I had never thought of Jason as a good example before.

  “You want something to drink?” he said.

  I laughed when he brought out a plastic water pitcher with a purifying filter—no nasty microbes for him. It looked so hygienic in that setting.

  “Give me a break,” he said. “I’m fighting the good fight.”

  Every single pull-up-your-socks pamphlet I’d read was full of battlefield metaphors—the body as a landscape of swarming minuscule violence, like the war of the ants in Walden. In fact the paintings Jason wanted to show me were of battles.

  They were drawn as cartoons—like old G.I. Joe comics—but the combatants were naked and had a lot of lurid gore around their vital parts. The scenes were full of stage bravery, heroes brandishing swords and whips. They had a mocking, boyish fervor and reminded me of other people’s work. The art of AIDS that was relentlessly angry and couldn’t stay away from irony: better painters than Jason had gotten beauty out of this. My own problem was that I wasn’t that kind of painter.

  I didn’t hate the paintings. They were okay. I told Jason I really liked them.

  He said, “I thought you would.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “You have paint in your hair,” he said. “I just noticed.”

  “What color?”

  “Cobalt blue. It’s right above your ear. God, it’s so bright. No, the other ear.”

  It was an old trick. I hadn’t painted in days and my hair was freshly shampooed.

  “You’re the one,” I said. “You can’t go out in the street now with the stuff that’s in your hair.” I ran my hands over his head, getting down to the scalp. He had nice thick brown hair. “Oh, big glob of paint here, big hideous clump of paint here.”

  “No way,” he said. “Not possible.”

  He had his eyes closed. I was the one who made the first move, more or less. I had my hands behind his neck and I stepped closer and drew him to me. I moved in for the clinch, simple as that, and I thought, what the fuc
k am I doing, am I crazy? I didn’t have to do it. I knew I was being the great jerk of all time, but I wanted to do the wrong thing.

  I FELT CRAZY, the whole afternoon. While we were taking off each other’s clothes, I heard myself say, “Oh,” as if I had just read a fact that astonished me. Our sex was like the sex we used to have after a fight, intense and reckless and hallucinated. Jason’s body seemed sweetly young to me after Gabe’s (oh, Gabe) and his weight on me was a different weight. I was lost (that was why I was doing this, to get lost), but not so delirious I couldn’t keep track; I knew Jason’s signals, we knew each other. Everything was vivid and a little monstrous. Sometimes we spoke, as if we were waving to each other from under water. Once when I made a stricken noise, he asked if he should be gentler, but in fact any sharpness, of his teeth or his grip, seemed right to me.

  I think we were amazed. Everything we did we had done before, but we were running now on something like a joined spirit of defiance, and it took us further. I saw his face, the lower lip slack with arousal and the eyes half opening to check on me. It did something to me, to get that gaze from Jason.

  He had a bedside shelf of condoms, lubricating gel, a box of latex gloves—far more extensive than anything in my house—and he gestured to them and said, “They can be fun, you know,” but I said, “Do we have to?” and we decided fast that we could risk reinfection (against all the advice of all the pamphlets) and skip the latex, just this once, just for a change. That in itself was startling, the smooth immediacy of his skin. Right there against my tongue—it was almost too present, too much. Jason made a particular sound when he was coming—a hoarse, low groan, very male and very moving to me.

  As the day went on, all the play between us got more ornate and lengthy and choreographed. In the moments when we paused—we each got up a few times to pee and later we shared a sandwich with the plate on his belly—we sounded vastly amused and proud of ourselves. “I’m in a trance,” I said. “I’m gone.”