by Joan Silber
I didn’t speak about Elisa very much at work, except to Ed. Ed was the other quiet one at the store. On weekends he liked to go hiking upstate. Ed, who had lost his lover Howard to AIDS, was one source of my original reading material on Elisa’s situation.
Today he only wanted to make cracks about some guy in an Armani trenchcoat. Did I know what those things cost?
“It looks too big on him,” I said. But it turned out I had the wrong guy. What did I know? “My raincoat is just as hip,” I said.
“That’s so endearing that you think that,” Ed said.
“If you had a humongous amount of money, like if you won the lottery,” Charelle from the video department said to me, “you’d just look at the check and not know how to spend it. Wouldn’t you?”
“I resent this view of me as some kind of old monastic,” I said. I opened my sports jacket to model it for them.
“Look at the man’s moves,” Ed said. “Poetry in motion.”
“Elisa says that to me every night,” I said.
Charelle guffawed and patted me on the shoulder, the lewd old dude. When she went off to check a camcorder for a customer, I said to Ed, “Elisa’s acting antsy these days. Very jumpy and hyper. Also she doesn’t stay asleep at night. What do you think that means, the not sleeping?”
“Let her be,” Ed said. “Don’t crowd her.”
I’d never crowded anyone in my life. It irked me that Ed would suggest any such thing, and I kept away from him for the rest of the afternoon.
BUT WHEN I went home that night, I was careful not to crowd Elisa. She was lying on the floor when I came in, listening to a very loud salsa version of “Hot Hot Hot.” She waved at me, on the beat, when I came in. “Hola, chica,” I said, although I really wanted to watch the news.
After dinner I got interested in a program on the ecology of the Alps. “People are always killing themselves climbing those mountains,” Elisa said. “Why do they do it?”
“For the view,” I said. “They like to work hard to see things from a sublime and inhuman distance. Really.”
“You sound like Bruce.” Bruce, her old friend, had become a fairly serious Buddhist, a follower of the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan-lineage teachers. I liked Bruce. I pointed out to Elisa that Tibet was called the Roof of the World.
“I hate heights,” Elisa said. She was being shallow on purpose. In our early days she had sometimes been like that. I don’t know why she liked that defense, it wasn’t really her.
“YOU’VE LET YOUR pasta get cold,” I said.
“This is so good, Gabe,” she said, holding up a congealed forkful. “You outdid yourself on this one.”
“I’m glad.”
“Also the salad is terrific. You make the best salad, you do.”
On TV I watched the deep blue expanse of night sky and the moon spilling its light over the snowy cap of the Jungfrau, and when we finished eating I went into the bedroom to read. I didn’t want to hear Elisa being pert and jittery anymore.
I meant to start reading a novel, but I got caught up in one of the AIDS magazines littering the bedroom. There was a feature about a man who had directed his last film from his sickbed and another about a mother who said, “I tell my kids, be glad for each day and don’t let the shit-heads get you down.” All that uplifting bravery soothed me. I did not feel encouraged—the filmmaker in the article was already dead—but I did feel enlarged and reminded of what was important. Wasn’t the one bonus of this (even Elisa said so) that it freed you not to care about what didn’t matter?
The magazine was also filled with ads from pharmaceutical companies—colorful drawings of the virus with speeding arrows to show how its replication might be blocked. The chattiness of the ads (“put some freedom in your HIV medication schedule”) made me think of how many thousands of people were taking this stuff every day. It was crazy that Elisa was not on any of these drugs yet, and I had let her be crazy, in her own fluffy and evasive way.
Elisa was calling me from the living room. “You have to see this,” she yelled.
I went out to look. Homer Simpson was making a fool of himself again. “I thought the mountains were on,” I said.
“They’ve been replaced.”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing the Alps someday,” I said.
“So far you’re not going anywhere. That I can see.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” she said. “Go back and read.”
“You asked me to watch.”
“Forget it,” she said. “You think anything I watch on TV is too dumb.”
“I like The Simpsons. I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I don’t ask you to read Thus Spake Zarathustra,” I said. “I don’t make intellectual demands on you.”
“You don’t think I’m equal to it?”
“You tell me,” I said.
Elisa looked surprised, and there was an unpleasant pause.
“It’s so useless, what you read,” she said. It was going to be one of those conversations. “Nobody reads that crap anymore. Nietzsche and Kafka, for Christ’s sake. It’s from another era entirely.”
“I don’t think you have the equipment to know,” I said, and we went on for some time in this unfruitful and unstoppable mode. I didn’t know how we had gotten there.
I WENT TO work without seeing Elisa in the morning. I was sorry I’d said those scorning things to her, and by the afternoon I was sorrier. What had happened? I wanted to be rational and steady, and instead I was a carping, superior creep, a character who’d sneaked in from a pettier world.
One thing seemed clear to me: we couldn’t just hammer and jeer at each other through the years of her getting sick; we couldn’t slip into whatever muddy neurosis came the most easily to us. We had to make some sort of pact between us not to do that.
It was one of my early days at the store, and when I got off work at five, I took the subway to Elisa’s gallery, and as I walked through the streets, I felt lighter for what I was about to say. As a rule, Elisa was not hard to make up with—her nature was much more forgiving than mine. I was the one who nursed grudges. Elisa could turn sunny again in a minute.
Whole gloomy blocks in the West Twenties near the river had hulking buildings that were being transformed, floor by floor, into sparkling gallery spaces, and Elisa—or someone of her age, her way of dressing—was exactly the sort of person you would expect to see sitting at a desk here, pressing a button that opened a huge glass door. A workman took me in an old, fusty elevator up to her floor, and then I was in a room of dazzling industrial whiteness, where even the sprinkler pipes on the ceiling were clean and vibrant. I heard Elisa’s laughter from the office in the back, and I walked past the display—huge vitrines over what seemed to be bleeding quilts—to the back rooms, which were open cubicles. “Hi, it’s me,” I said. She was sitting on top of her desk, giggling away with some tall guy with a metal stud under his lip, who was saying, “And then they called that a slide registry.”
“Gabe?” she said. She looked astonished to see me. And the way she recovered herself alarmed me. Her face had been young and giddy before and now she looked toothy and scared. I didn’t like this smile.
The guy said, “Hi, I’m Jason,” and we shook hands. If this was the Jason Elisa had once lived with, he didn’t look the way I expected. I had pictured someone rat faced and punkish and young; this guy was almost a man. He was perfectly friendly—he asked me if it was raining out and if I’d seen the big orange cat in the hallway—and then he left, with Elisa waving at him.
“God,” Elisa said. “He just wants to hustle me because he thinks I have some pull with the gallery. It’s pathetic, I feel sorry for him.”
“Do you?”
“As if anybody would listen to me anyway,” she said. “How much clout could I have? Really.”
I stopped being jealous for a minute—these painters, I thought, they’re worse than actors—but I knew, no matter how she patted my
knee and kissed my forehead, that she didn’t want me there in the gallery. I waited anyway, sitting on a chair in the corner while she typed on the computer and made a phone call. Did I want a magazine? Did I mind if she wasn’t going to be done for a while? I waited and she tolerated me.
On the way home together on the subway, I could see there was nothing to feel lighter about. “So artists bother you a lot at work?” I said.
“What?” she said.
She was sitting down and I stood over her; she had her lipstick drawn outside the lines of her mouth, in that clownish style some women wear, and she seemed pleased with herself. People were packed around on us on all sides. “They come in whenever they feel like it and try to talk you up for favors?” I said. “Ex-boyfriends come and hang out?”
She stared up at me, under her smeary lashes. “Gabe,” she said. “Don’t worry. You always worry.”
This made me furious. Who was she talking to? “Never mind then,” I said. “Go ahead and do what you want. Entertain whoever you fucking please.”
“What?” she said.
“You think I’m stupid. Why do you think that?”
“Stop it,” she said. “You’re working yourself up over nothing. I don’t want us to fight.”
I remembered that I had not wanted this either. “People talk to you in the camera store all the time,” Elisa said. “Women talk to you. I don’t get upset.”
“I’m not upset,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “I hate it when we have arguments with no point to them. It’s horrible.”
She put her hand on my elbow. When I reached down to stroke her hair, she said, “I’m so tired,” and tears came into her eyes. “I don’t want to fight,” she said.
“No,” I said. She leaned her head against me. “It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll be okay.” I wanted to comfort her, I did.
IT SEEMED UNLIKELY that Elisa would just out and out lie to me. She was not afraid of me personally, and she had too much attitude to be furtive or shirking. I leaned very hard on this idea, which was only an idea.
On Sunday, when I worked from noon to five, we had planned to go to my aunt Angie’s for dinner. Elisa wasn’t back from her studio when I got home. By seven, when we were supposed to leave, she still hadn’t shown up, and her studio had no phone in it. I telephoned Angie to say we’d be late, and she said, “She can paint the Mona Lisa tomorrow. You know what the manicotti’s going to taste like?”
Elisa did turn up a little before eight, looking flustered and talking about how I must be hungry, she was really sorry, we could call Lucky Noodle for takeout.
“Did you forget?” I said.
“What?” she said.
When I told her, Elisa put her hand over her mouth and made a sharp whimpering noise. She said, “Oh!”
“‘Oh’ what?” I said.
She shook her head and didn’t speak. She didn’t try to gab her way of this, and that in itself worried me.
“Get your coat,” I said. “Now.”
When we got to Angie’s apartment, Angie said, “What, you had to go to somewhere more important first?”
“It’s my fault,” Elisa said. “I got confused about the day.”
“Don’t be confused, sweetheart,” Angie said. “Get your head out of your you-know-what.” I had forgotten how my aunt looked when she was pissed off. Her eyebrows got hawkish.
We made our way into the dining room, a humbled and dispirited couple. Elisa was still in her painting clothes, and although the stains were stiff and dried, Angie made her put a towel over the chair before she sat down.
“You know why you’re forgetting things,” Angie said to her. “Those paints are poisoning your brain. Who’s the one who went nuts, the painter from Spain?”
“El Greco?” Elisa said. “That was from lead. It’s not in paint anymore. But I could be losing it like that. I think I am.” She crossed her eyes and let her tongue hang out.
Elisa never kidded around broadly like this, so she was not great at it. “Don’t do that with your eyes, they could get stuck,” Angie said.
“It’s her brain I’m worried about,” I said.
“She just has to remember what’s what,” Angie said.
“She can’t remember how to tie her shoes,” I said.
“What are you picking on her for?” Angie said.
“A poor cross-eyed maiden,” Elisa said. “Be kind to the disabled.”
I might have continued to pick on her, on and on with no end in sight, but I really was very hungry by this time, and the smell of the food made me ravenous. The manicotti Angie had worried over was still delicious, the dark tang of the tomato and the lush grainy softness of the ricotta.
Elisa was eating more than I’d seen her eat in weeks. After the pasta we had roast chicken with rosemary and sautéed escarole with garlic and a salad of oranges and fennel. “Oh,” Elisa said, “my short-term memory is so bad, I can’t remember if I ate everything, I’m having seconds to make sure.”
“We’ll fatten you up, doll,” Angie said.
“What if we just stayed here and never stopped eating?” Elisa said. “What if something let us blissfully stuff ourselves forever?”
It was a thought. For a little while I was happy too, chewing over all those bright, familiar tastes. I got pulled into a kind of dumb contentment. The inky, tannic wine that Angie always bought warmed and mellowed me, and I forgot myself.
When we left, Angie said, “Come on time next time but come again, darlings,” and I was sorry to leave. I didn’t want to go home to us.
“YOU MUST THINK I’m the fool of the world,” I said, once we were by ourselves in the taxi.
Elisa said, “It’s gone on much longer than I thought it would.”
“What?” I said.
“Jason’s not a bad person,” she said, in case I hadn’t believed what I pretty much knew. And for the rest of the ride, through the empty streets of Gravesend and Borough Park and Red Hook, we were like creatures thrown into a pit. Neither of us said a word.
When the cab stopped at our house, the driver put the overhead light on, and I saw Elisa’s face. She gave me a lopsided half smile, a crooked, helpless look. This is so awkward for her, I thought, and it made me furious.
She looked the way Steve, my subcontractor, had looked in certain moments at my trial. When Elisa and I walked into the apartment again, it was full of signs of us—my newspapers on the floor, Elisa’s clothing thrown over the chairs and the sofa, old Diet Coke cans in front of the TV. I had been thinking already about being without Elisa, and all this made me see that we had a long time ahead of us, more arguing and truth-telling and confusion. I was sorry we had ever begun, sorry I had been won over by her dizzy, selfish sweetness.
Elisa was watching to see what I would do and I was waiting for her to apologize and to swear off Jason. I knew, the whole time both of us were washing and getting undressed, that no apology was coming, and when she got into bed, sighing to herself, I said, “Go to sleep,” in a grim and booming voice.
In the morning I woke up feeling indignant and humiliated. On the kitchen table were all the bottles of vitamins I had tried to make her take and the Chinese root tonic that had cost thirty-nine dollars: oh, look how good I had been. I felt martyred, a role that gave me the creeps actually.
Elisa stayed in bed till late (it was Monday, when neither of us worked). When she got up, we argued about who had forgotten to buy a carton of milk, and this set us off. I didn’t want more fighting, but there I was, bellowing and hectoring. “What do you think you’re doing?” I said. “Just tell me that. I’m listening. Go ahead.”
“How should I know?” Elisa said. She was, by turns, defiant and meek and coolly frank. Part of her thought there was something young and vigorous about carrying on with Jason. “That’s how I am,” she said. Not blithely, but almost. I was the spoilsport—me and my root tonic and my thirty-year-old copies of Kierkegaard.
Elisa did cry, in one spot.
She said she had ruined her whole life by fucking things up with me, she knew it, and I held her, as if we were weathering together a disaster from outside. But then she said one more thing about Jason—“he’s different from what you think”—and I brayed at her in outrage. What did she think I had to hear? And we were off again, wearing each other out. By the end of the day I felt as if I’d been walking through a hail of rocks.
I KNEW THAT I’d fought before like this, with some of the different women I’d been with, and each time I’d thought that none of it—the spewing forth and the dredging up and the mean little speeches—was like me at all. Ah, no, not me. But now I really was too old for this.
At twilight, when I went out for a walk by myself, I moved through the crowded streets and felt better at once. I was still angry with Elisa and I was heartsore from fighting, but part of me did not believe any of it much mattered.
I couldn’t have said this to Elisa in a way that would have made sense to her. She was on a different system. She was burning up and blazing away—I could see the glow on her, the secret flush. I wasn’t pressing her anymore to stop seeing Jason because I was afraid she was going to lie to me. “Okay, all right,” she would say. “Okay, babe.” When I walked out of the house, I went all the way up Fifth Avenue to Central Park, so I didn’t have to go back just then and see her face.
8
Elisa
The night I first met Jason, five years ago, I was in a club with friends, and I was too sad to be there. I’d just gotten a phone call from my mother, with news about my old boyfriend Chris, the worst news. My face was still raw from crying; I shouldn’t have been out. My idea (I’d thought this before leaving the house) was that rock’n’roll was as good an answer to death as anything, but the crappy band that was playing that night was not supporting this belief.
Jason didn’t like the band either. That was our first conversation, a shared contempt for this bozo group with no funk to them. I got livelier, talking to Jason. The thought of fucking him made me temporarily lose some of my sorrow, which had been so fresh and sharp.