by Joan Silber
When Jason called me at work, I told him, “I’m having a crisis.”
“Oh, don’t have one of those,” he said.
“I think I’m going to have to hibernate,” I said. “It seems like I have to do some serious staying at home, not go out of the house to see anyone anymore. Even people I really like.” I didn’t like to say too much at work.
“Is that a fact?” he said. “Really now? Are you absolutely sure?”
And then he hung up. The click made me sigh and whimper, to my own shame. Only Jason could do that, leave me holding a dead phone and moaning, no matter what I’d just said.
But I didn’t call him back, then or later. I was sticking it out with Gabe, that was my plan. I stayed home every minute I wasn’t working; I watched enough TV to make a normal person comatose. I made a point of showing Gabe I wasn’t going anywhere.
What did Gabe think? When I said, “I’m so sorry,” in a whispery voice, and put my hand on his knee, he said, “Fine,” and got up and walked away.
When I got histrionic and said, “Well, do you want me to leave then?” he shook his head. “Nope?” I said. “Does that mean nope?”
The more I talked, the more I was like some bubbly morning-show host, prattling away to keep the audience tuned to the channel. Why did I think things could be fixed up between us, made whole again? Was this a dopey young girlish-giggly notion on my part?
There were two TV sets in the house, mine and his old one, and after a while I just stayed with the cruddy black-and-white in the bedroom, eating my meals in front of it. As if I were sick. Which I was not. I complained to my friends that it was dreary at my house, Gabe was so dreary. Fiona said, “Excuse me, what did you expect?” Dawn told me to be patient, for Christ’s sake.
On Sunday, I went out to get the paper and it was a ravishingly beautiful day, warm and balmy, a visitation of rare May sweetness in our smudged city. The air felt soft, and the sky was a true cerulean, a blue with no other tint to it, cloudless and pure. I thought I would walk a few extra blocks from our apartment on Sullivan Street and bring back some brioches from the really good bakery. But the lines in the bakery were long, and I didn’t want to wait, so I meandered along Bleecker Street, looking into the windows of closed restaurants and Italian pastry shops. I was walking east, and I just kept walking. I thought that Gabe, the majestic walker, would understand, although he was waiting at home to read the Times, which I carried with me, hugging its Sunday bulk to my chest like a schoolbook.
Once I had decided it was okay not to come back right away, I was in no hurry to return. I was filled with energy, and everything—fathers talking to peevish toddlers, old women walking frowsy little dogs, teenagers zipping by on skateboards—charmed me.
I crossed LaGuardia and Broadway and the Bowery and Second Avenue, going east, but not as far as Jason’s neighborhood. I had been gone close to half an hour and I thought I should phone Gabe to tell him I’d be back soon. The first phone I tried on the street had the coin slot jammed and the next one had no dial tone no matter how much money I fed it. What was I going to say to Gabe anyway? He was leaving for work in another hour and wouldn’t have enough time to read the paper when I went back.
I didn’t want to go inside that dark apartment either. I bought a bouquet of deep blue irises at the greenmarket, because the shade was so amazing, and then I walked the three blocks over to Jason’s building. I knew, as I waited for him to answer the downstairs bell, that he might be (why not?) in bed with someone else (I’m kind of busy at the moment, he would say), and in that case I would go home at once—bring the irises to Gabe and start back at point A. As it was, Jason laughed through the intercom when he heard my name, and then he hit the buzzer to let me in. It was a long, raspy noise that went right through me.
IS THERE A reason that a person has to do a fucked-up thing over and over? Enchantment may be one reason. I was flooded with delight to see Jason again, to get to clasp him unto me in a nice lusty hug. Here I was in his apartment as if I had never for a second left it.
I knew better than to do what I was doing. As Jason and I took off our clothes, right there in the kitchen, I thought of what I was going to say to Fiona and Dawn. I wasn’t thinking, I could say, but I was thinking at full power, all circuits running. I couldn’t help myself, I could say, which Dawn would simply snort at. I refused to worry, I could say. Wasn’t that something they should praise me for?
Oh, I was thrilled with my own stubbornness. Jason and I stayed in bed for hours, waking and sleeping and being erotic show-offs. Jason seemed highly pleased—and amused too—that I had come wandering back. I got up once to put the irises in water and when I woke up after that, it was dark outside.
I did worry, of course. At selected moments I thought of Gabe at home waiting, Gabe at the store infuriated. What did I think I was doing? This question made me want to sleep more. When I woke up again, Jason said we should eat.
When I got up, I mumbled in a small voice and I minced around, trailing Jason. I was timid. He ignored this—that was Jason’s great gift, to ignore things—and he took me to the sushi place he liked around the corner. I had to say it was risky for people like us to eat raw fish, but Jason just said, “Really? Fuck that shit.” So I got the sashimi, which was stunning—glistening sheets of tuna and eel and mackerel—and I chewed it with jolts of wasabi, in bliss and fear.
JASON ASSUMED I would go home after dinner. It was my idea to stay the night with him. “You sure?” he said.
“I want to.”
“Fine,” he said. “Mi casa, su casa. But don’t blame me afterwards.”
“Who’s blaming people?” I said.
In the apartment we sat around reading various sections of the newspaper I never brought Gabe. Jason had an old Nirvana album on the stereo, echoes of high school. “If you want to go home, it’s okay,” Jason said.
He wasn’t the most enthusiastic host. This did not make me waver in the slightest. I settled back in my chair and played footsie with Jason under the kitchen table. If he thought I was worrying about Gabe or about anything, it was too fucking late.
IN THE MIDDLE of the night I woke up, thick-headed from the sake and the beer, and I knew I had cooked my own goose and there was no uncooking it. I was so homesick for Gabe I wanted to bang my head against the windowpane. I lay next to Jason (whose fault this wasn’t), and I went over and over what I had just done, and I couldn’t stop being appalled.
9
Gabe
When I was in my twenties, thousands of people were reading The Joy of Sex. The title was a claim, sex is joy, an assertion no one needs underlined anymore. The question now is: at what price?
I thought of all this while I was waiting, in vain and in rage, for Elisa to come back. I didn’t want to imagine her with this other person (whose name I avoided thinking) but she was doing everything she could to force this imagining. The bed, the bare skin, the cries of rapture. In the scald of jealousy, in my torment, I wanted to ask her: hasn’t sex done enough damage in your life already?
When Elisa came back, I was so furious I couldn’t look at her. “What time is it?” I said. “You don’t even know what time it is, do you?” I yelled things at her, but they were not the things I meant—they were old attacks and ragged bits of meanness. Elisa was pale and underslept and maybe contrite. She skulked to the other room and tried to tell me that I didn’t care anyway. “What’s it to you?” she said. “You don’t even care that I’m here.”
I was too pissed off to stop talking, and I was too wild to make sense. “You are so stupid,” I said, several times over. “Why are you so stupid?” I did think this was the mystery.
“None of your business,” she said.
I was making myself hoarse. I never told her to leave—I didn’t want her to leave—but Elisa stood at the dresser gathering up her cosmetics and putting them into a vinyl case. The blue-glitter nail polish, the hairstyling gel: they reminded me how young she was. I began to see her
leaving as a stylized gesture, willful and showy. And optimistic, in a messed-up way. She was dancing herself out the door.
“Oh, bye,” I said, not pleasantly, when she was standing in the entryway with her tote bag. “Go. Go now, Elisa. Don’t hang around discussing it.” By then I believed I had always known this would happen, had never seriously thought otherwise.
I LEANED HARD on this idea in the weeks to come. I insisted on my lack of surprise. Elisa left in early May and until June I went around in a glaze of insistence. I didn’t pretend I wasn’t suffering, but I treated it as a habit I had always had. My anguish and my sorrow, my burning exasperation: I walked around with them like a deafening noise I was ignoring. I was always a little startled that other people didn’t hear it.
I knew where Elisa was. She called me on the phone from the other person’s apartment, although I never spoke to him and I made some effort not to use or hear his name. I agreed that she could come back to get her clothes when I was away at work. I shouted at her a few times. I said, “Just don’t speak any more bullshit, please,” and “I take it you’re satisfied now,” and “You were always like this, weren’t you?” Once I stopped shouting, she was sweetly friendly and newly awkward in our phone conversations. I especially hated her being kind to me.
NO MORE CHANCE of being infected, no more risk to me; didn’t I feel my days were lightened? I did not have to remind myself that in many ways it was a relief having Elisa gone. My time was my own, and my house was not full of lies. I liked the long and regular hours of my own company, my own bare freedom. It was easier right away than I would have thought.
What I didn’t like was being around other people. Any comfort or advice irked me quite a lot, and any talk on other topics was idle and distracting. The few times I went out after work, with Ed or with a group, I was eager to come back home again pronto.
At home I would sit listening to a few favorite albums, some Coltrane and late Beethoven and Big Joe Turner. Elisa had in fact disliked most of these. I probably should have taken more time to play certain passages over for her. She might have liked Dexter Gordon, I thought now. In the meantime Joe Turner sang about how blue the chains of love had made him feel. If Elisa happened to walk in the door while this was playing, she would hear me singing under it, in the low grunting voice that always amused her. If she came in without calling first, I might say to her, Oh, look who’s here, as if she’d just gone out to shop. Where’s my newspaper? I could say, gently. She would be glad that I was not angry and we could get ourselves to the bedroom in no time; no time at all.
Time after time I got up from the sofa, stirred by these musings, quickened and brightened and nourished too. It was for these thoughts I had come home, to be alone with them. I felt better for them, I couldn’t help it. They were a delicious vice of solitude, like smoking opium or talking to a pet. Every so often I caught myself, pining for this person who was absent on purpose, no matter how richly ardent she acted in my daydreams, and I felt foolish and lame and way, way off the right track.
I really did not want to be humiliated by hope. I waited for it to leave me, and I did my best to fight it off. Elisa herself helped me in this, in those phone calls when she humored me.
EVERYONE AT THE store thought I should be furious with Elisa, which I suppose I was, and that I should not hesitate too long before locating some other woman to solace me in bed. Charelle said, “Lots of very suitable ladies out there,” and Ed suggested that I not let the equipment go to rust.
This advice sounded ridiculous to me and made me wince. Certainly the last thing I had an appetite for was anything new. I had my long walks, my nights of reading, and the news at breakfast without headphones. My inclinations at the moment were toward stillness and order; my old habits were serving me. And I did not see any problem in being someone who did without. That was how I saw my future as well. I thought there was a lot to be said for renunciation, only no one said it anymore. I wanted, after all, an honest life.
At night I would prepare eccentric meals of a sort that Elisa had never liked—herring on toast, salami omelettes—and then I would take up my book. I was working my way through the reports of Shackleton’s expedition to the Antartic in 1914–16, which Ed had recommended. He said the matter-of-fact accounts of polar ice and near starvation had been distracting and soothing to read during his worst times. I couldn’t read novels or stories but I had my interest in facts still.
On my days off I walked around in the sweet early summer sunshine, a regular person taking a regular walk outside. No one could have told from my stride that I was a man in bitter grief, and I took a natural pleasure in the buildings I passed. I went by the church of Saint Agnes, which looked as jewel-pretty as ever. During my first week without Elisa, they had called me—that is, a woman from the committee had—to help with fund-raising, but I couldn’t picture myself having much success shaking down money from rich people, which was what they really needed. Better to let one of their own do that, one of the women in pastel suits whom Elisa had tittered over.
Things did look shoddy when I stepped inside the church. The ceiling, with its gorgeous Byzantine dome, was half covered by tarpaulins, and somebody had done a really hideous job of plastering over a fissure in one of the lower walls. I was sorry for my church, although I had not gone there in a long time and had only been to one service and wasn’t an adherent of its particular faith. But I was so suddenly outraged and sad about the bad plaster that I understood that I had walked in hungry, like any supplicant. What did I want? Something, badly, that had to do with elevation from my own pettiness and suffering. I wanted to find a space to hover above that, I wanted to be at a distance where I could enjoy seeing the dots of my own feelings become as small as ants.
The sight of the building’s wounds made me want to come back to it. Perhaps if it had looked too spruce, I might not have had the impulse. I thought I would come back the next Sunday for the early service.
But I didn’t come back. I forgot, or I didn’t want to enough. I fell all at once into a very cranky phase, for me. At work I was weary and unhelpful with customers, one of those salesmen who can’t imagine why you’re bothering him. I was short-tempered with Ed (he didn’t have to leave his coffee cup right on the shelf with the digital cameras) and humorless with Charelle when she wanted to goof with me about some customer’s nose job.
And I began to phone Elisa at the gallery where she worked. “I was wondering,” I would say, “whether you’re ever going to come get that toaster oven you left behind. It’s taking up room.” Or I’d say, “Just calling to let you know how much you still owe on the electric bill from last month.” After behaving so well, I lowered myself to sullen pettiness. I was full of proof of how badly she had acted and I couldn’t keep it to myself. “Okay, okay,” Elisa would say. “Is that it? Are you done?”
And sometimes I pleaded with her to come back. In the middle of my refusal to provide board for her abandoned toaster, I would point out that she might, after all, want to come back to live here. She might. I would say this in a low, subdued voice, as the confession that it was. “Oh,” Elisa would say. “It could happen. I don’t know. It’s hard to say.” And we would be lost in phone space, dangling from our lines, nowhere to go but someplace worse. I didn’t like it.
I MADE MYSELF unbearable to my friends too. I called Ed one night and I said, “Have you ever split up with someone and then gotten back with them?”
“No,” Ed said. “But it happens all the time. People are reunited, and it feels so good. They wrote a song about it.”
“It seems very close to happening,” I told him. “Not yet but sometime.”
“Could be,” Ed said.
Since Ed’s lover was gone as in dead and gone, I was aware that my complaints were weightless, next to that, and were maybe not something he wanted to hear. This did not stop me. “She’s very young,” I said. “She gets stubborn but she can change her mind fast too.”
“That’s
youth,” Ed said.
“One time she insisted that we needed to get a car, to go to the country on weekends. She read all the ads in the papers, she bought Buy-Lines, she even called dealers to find out about leases. Then all of a sudden she had a revelation about its not being practical and she never mentioned it again.”
“Leases are bad. Howard leased a Honda Civic,” Ed said. “I had a hard time getting out of the contract after he died. I had to get a copy of the death certificate.”
I made a sympathetic noise, but I went on. Nothing deflected me. “If she was a person who never changed her mind, I wouldn’t be expecting any improvements in the situation.”
“When did she leave?”
“Early May. Going on seven weeks.”
“She can change. She’s changeable,” he said. He was nice to me.
BUT THE THIRD time I called him, I could hear him turn silent when I got far along into my moaning and groaning and retelling yet another significant detail I had remembered about Elisa. He wanted the Gabe he’d always known to return. Who was this embarrassing mess of a poor bastard? I did appreciate the joke of that, me the straight friend turning out too much florid emotion for Ed to take. It didn’t keep me from phoning him either. It was too late to stop any of it.
I DIDN’T LIKE being lovelorn; it didn’t suit me. All that howling at the moon; I couldn’t bear to hear it either. And it robbed me of my old peace. When I took my walks, everything I looked at on the street brought me back to my anguish. Kissing couples, miserable old men, sick people in wheelchairs: either they stung me with envy or they pulled me down with sorrow.
I tried to get myself out of this, out of the solipsistic monotony of heartbreak, by focusing very closely on the buildings I walked by. I would try to look at the ornamentation on a pediment or count the columns in a row as a way to get out of my inner ranting. I’d fix on these details of cast iron or stone that were, at least, bits of matter that I had no longings for and no despair in. It was my way of meditating.