by Joan Silber
WHEN I CAME back to the city after those two weeks away, message followed message on my phone machine. How’s everything? Hey, give me a call, Elisa’s voice said. Then it tried again. Just wanted to come over sometime to get some clothes, if that’s okay with you. Day after day it asked for me. I guess you’re away still, climbing Mount Matterhorn or wherever it is, with some girl named Heidi and two goats. I suppose I have to wait till your triumphant return from greener pastures. I thought she sounded jeering in the last message.
I got a runaround when I tried to call her back at the gallery, the one place I could reach her. First a giggly young woman told me Elisa was out, then an older woman said she was not at her desk, then a man told me she had already been given my message. “You can try again if you want,” he said.
IT WAS THE first week in September, and as soon as I went back to work, the camera store was mobbed with people overtaken by a sudden eagerness to spend money. There was a new saleskid (as Ed called him) who was no good at all—he complained about the air-conditioning (“I have a problem with noise”) and he didn’t know a thing about cameras and he kept telling all the peskiest customers that the man with the ponytail was the one to ask, the old guy. They tired me out, these customers. I was just going for my evening break while it was still light enough to read outside, when the phone at my counter rang, and I started back.
“Never mind,” Charelle said. “It’s for Jeremy.”
The new kid, who had a close-trimmed haircut and wore what Ed told me was a Prada jacket, strolled toward the phone, so I left. In the warm, fading light, I fell asleep on the park bench with my book not even opened.
When I came back from my break, I kept thinking I heard the phone ring every time anyone’s beeper went off.
“Nervous?” the new kid said. He was a pain already. “Hey,” he said. “By the way. My mom says hello.”
I got it then. He was Maureen’s kid. He was here now, he said, instead of back in college because he really had not liked any of his courses very much and the other students were an exceedingly lame group. “It was such a tacky school,” he said.
I welcomed him to the wonderful world of Eagle Eyes Camera. “Hope it’s been going well,” I said.
“Well, it’s not hard, that’s for sure,” he said. “It’s a job with no content, if you know what I mean. Maybe you don’t. I don’t know how you did it all these years.”
“Is that a question?” I said. He sort of laughed.
“Everybody says you’re the man here,” he said. I hated that the most, his little compliment.
WHEN I GOT home to my apartment, there was another message from Elisa. I don’t know why I’m bothering if you never call me back. Where did she expect me to try to call her? After a long day, it didn’t cheer me at all.
And I had my cheerless meal, liverwurst on rye in front of the TV news. I was eating a stale Mallomar when the phone rang. It was a sudden, thrilling ring, once and then twice and then again; here it was, here it was, here it was, after all.
The caller wasn’t Elisa. She was a woman who had a lot of trouble pronouncing Catanzaro and who wanted me to give money to the Police Athletic League. I told her I wasn’t home. Afterward it bothered me that I had been so jubilant hearing the phone ring. I didn’t want to be that eager for the sound of Elisa’s voice.
WHEN I WAS in prison, I told everyone not to visit me there. But I had longings, it was never true that I didn’t. I thought at times about summoning one of the women I had been with—they would have come, they weren’t timid or weak women. Even Maureen might have come, although we had not been together for several years. The prison was just a few hours away from the city. The sight of her would have been quite a miracle to me. But I hated the thought of her going through a metal detector—this was before everyone endured them at airports—and the one at our prison was notorious for being absurdly sensitive. A woman had to remove any jewelry from her ears and wrist and neck, and she might have to go into a rest room to take off her bra if the under-wiring set off the alarm. Maureen could not have been admitted wearing jeans or a miniskirt, unsuitable attire, and I was not sure she even had other clothes. The guards would have gone through her purse and taken away any food—a box of raisins, a pack of chewing gum—no matter how innocent.
But I had longings nonetheless. At night or at unguarded moments during the day, I would think about the concept of being kissed and it would seem too radical and lavish to have once been common in my life. Later, when I got out, people sometimes wanted to ask about how “frustrated” I must have been, but it was not sheer release I missed (that I could effect myself, with sad efficiency) but the pressure of a body in my arms, eager for me. The gift of that.
And when I was first with a woman, after I got out—it was someone named Catherine, a mild and handsome woman—I thought, as we stood kissing for a long time and then as we made our way to the bed, that I had not really remembered any of this right. For all the time spent imagining nothing but, I never had more than a phantom trace of what it was like.
SO NOW I played the tape of Elisa’s messages over five times in a row (who was there to stop me?). She seemed to be mocking the way I never took a vacation. Whatever she was saying ceased to mean much by the third time around. I was interested in the sound of her talking, the breathy immediacy of it. It startled me each time with the surprise of the possible. It reminded me that there was an actual specific person, an Elisa, who had spoken into the tape.
AND THEN AT work the next day, Ed called me to the phone. “It’s me,” Elisa said. “At long last. Can you believe it?”
“How are you?” I said.
“Oh!” she said. “I’ve been better.”
“What happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m staying with Fiona and Ira, do you have the number there? In Brooklyn. You remember that loft, don’t you?”
I was glad of this, very glad. At least she wasn’t living with what’s-his-name. But perhaps that was how she had been better, in the happy days with him.
“Winter is coming, you know,” Elisa said. “So if it’s all right with you, I want to come by to get some clothes. Maybe later on. What do you think? How late are you working?”
“Later on now, you mean?” I said. “Tonight?”
I MADE JEREMY take my last customer, a truly aggravating man who kept asking questions about service warranties. I had been thinking of nothing but Elisa for two hours and I could not bear this person slowing me down.
“Jeremy,” I said. “Want a chance to make yourself useful here?” He looked at me in confusion and simmering protest, but he obeyed, and I got out of there.
15
Elisa
Gabe looked good. A little wary around the eyes. He hugged me in a civil and polite way.
“Is that a new shirt?” I said. “It’s nice.”
I had been back to this building a few times since I’d moved out, but when I’d walked in from the street to-night, the hallway felt very stagy and fateful, and the decades-old paint job—brown woodwork, pale yellow plaster—was so drab that I could hardly stand its poignancy. Gabe looked like himself.
“I buy new stuff sometimes,” he said.
“Did you get it in Switzerland?”
“Where?”
“I knew you didn’t go to Switzerland.”
“Not me,” he said. “Who told you that? I didn’t go far. How are Fiona and Ira?”
“They tiff with each other. But they’re nice to me.”
“Will you stay there awhile? It’s a big place, right?”
“I won’t stay long.” I felt like a certain kind of actress in French films, hysterical but composed.
Gabe wanted to pour me a glass of wine but I asked for water instead. I asked him how the lunches were going in the soup kitchen.
“They closed us down,” he said. “But Clorinda thinks she has some couple with deep pockets who’ll bail us out.”
“The proverbial rich patrons,” I sai
d.
“Sometimes I wish I were rich,” he said.
“Oh, please. You? You don’t want that really.”
“I might have been rich, which is funny to think of,” he said. “Sometimes I do think about it.”
“Rich how?”
“I could have traveled, I could have seen a lot more of the world.”
I didn’t say it’s not too late or you’ve done just fine. Fake cheer was not what I wanted to give him.
“You don’t even care about money!” I said. “What are you talking about?”
And then I put my hand on his knee. He was sitting next to me on the couch, so it was an easy maneuver. Under the leg of his black gabardine pants I felt his kneecap and the muscle of his thigh, and I thought, oh, this is easy. It’s not hard at all. What took me so long?
I looked at him then, my Gabe of Gabes, but he wasn’t looking back. He went on talking about something at work—a too-hip salesman who was condescending to him—and he gave no sign that my hand on him was anything he wanted to notice. If anything, he looked embarrassed.
I didn’t move my hand and I stayed in that foolish position. So I had fucked up everything, after all. All was lost. How could it be? It could be, it was; only someone as thickheaded as I was wouldn’t have known.
Gabe, who had hardly ever been anything but kind to me, wouldn’t look me in the eye now. All was lost. I took my hand away from Gabe’s knee.
What did that mean, all was lost? What a flabby, melodramatic phrasing that was. I was as bad as all those mewling divorced mothers I’d scoffed at. I had never gone in for wistful plaints, but now I could see the temptation. That beckoning pool of sadness, with its refreshing glint of indignation. I had to draw myself up. I had to get through this better than that.
“Do you want to go eat?” he said. “Did you have supper?”
“Supper?” I said. “No. Let’s go, let’s go right now.”
WE WENT AROUND the corner to this restyled diner where we always used to go before. I was glad that he had wanted to spend this much more time with me and I was gladdened by the place too, with its red vinyl cushions and its chrome-trimmed banquettes.
“How’s your painting?” he said.
“It’s a mess,” I said. “I don’t really like doing it anymore. It’s no good—I have to start over. It’s going to take me too long to be even halfway decent.”
“You have to keep at it.”
“Is that so?” I said. He was a fine one to talk about keeping at things.
“You still have your studio?”
“No,” I said.
“It was a nice studio,” he said. “You always liked it.”
“I let it go. I was never there.”
I couldn’t eat until eight o’clock because of my meds, and I didn’t explain this to Gabe until after I’d ordered some meat loaf that I played with for twenty minutes and then ate a slice of when it was cold. “My stomach has to be empty while some of the magic bullets are working,” I said.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “What are you taking?”
I said the names (Crixivan, Zerit, Epivir), and he nodded solemnly. These things he had once read about were now the intimate occupants of my bloodstream. He was a little startled, I think.
“I would’ve waited to order food,” he said. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Never mind,” I said. “I’m fine.”
If I didn’t want his pity before, I certainly didn’t want it now. Actually, I did. But I was trying to be careful of all that in myself, the oozy helplessness, the big-eyed soppy bid for special treatment. Who wanted to be like that?
“I lost thirteen pounds,” I said. “You didn’t notice?”
“You look fine,” he said.
“I’m too skinny.”
“You look fine.”
This wasn’t the best compliment I’d ever gotten. I didn’t look so fine either.
Gabe was not even looking at me. It probably didn’t really make much difference to him what my weight was anymore. Why should it? But the surprise of this took my breath away. I was sitting at a table with Gabe, having one more meal among the thousands I’d eaten in his company, and he was way out of my reach. No one could blame him, but I wasn’t used to any of this yet. The time ahead was more than I wanted to think about.
“Is that someone you know?” Gabe said.
A woman with a round face and a great bobbed haircut was walking toward me. It was Wendy, the intern from work. “I can’t believe you’re in this dive,” she said. “I love this place. God, you look so much better than you did. Is that meat loaf? You can keep that kind of food down now?”
“No,” I said. “Better not come too close.”
“She looked god-awful a month ago,” Wendy said to Gabe. “Well, you probably know. She was like Vampyra, wasn’t she?”
“But now I’m stunning,” I said.
“I’ve never seen anyone look worse from flu. Force her to eat her mashed potatoes,” Wendy said to Gabe. “Stand over her with a whip until she finishes.”
“We don’t have that kind of relationship,” I said.
“Is this your father?” Wendy said. “I’m Wendy, I’m so glad to meet you.”
Gabe said, “I’m Elisa’s friend.” How velvety he sounded next to Wendy.
“Are those my people?” she said. “I think they are. I can’t stay now.” She took off then, to the front of the diner, none too soon.
I felt like a ghoul after she left, a gray-skinned grotesque with belladonna eyes. What a creepy joke for me to have thought I was going to lure back my old sweetheart.
“She’s made me hate my potatoes,” I said.
On the wall across from me was a framed photograph of a black-and-white cow in a barn. The cow was looking straight at the room with dopey, soft eyes—a born sucker, whose brother had been ground for my supper. The long lashes made her look conceited and pleased with herself, an accidental effect, but that was why she was comic. And I never wanted to be in this restaurant again. Every object in the place was barbed. Every bit of hearty decor was sarcastic. Poor cow.
Just then I felt his hand on my knee. It was Gabe, his hand. I remembered every bit of old joy in my life and thought about how I was about to get that back. His face, however, did not seem to tell me much one way or the other. I looked skinny and he was pitying me. What was I going to do with that?
“Well,” he said.
Now he was caressing my knee. It was definitely a caress, with motion and fondling in it.
“See, it’s good I called you,” I said.
I became instantly giddy, from the shock of gladness. I thought, this is what Gabe must have felt like, when he first got out of prison, when he walked through those sets of gates and the world was still there.
There was no chance of my eating anymore food after this, and we went home as soon as we got the check.
IN THE LIVING room, when I was kissing Gabe (I had forgotten his way of kissing, the rhythm and tact in it), I was as blindly happy as anyone could be, delighted and eager and celebratory. I was thinking that I did have some luck, didn’t I?—to make good on my chances before they ran out.
The apartment was quite dark, with just one light that had been left on in the kitchen. It was barely nine o’clock but it felt very late. The dimness in the rooms was like the tender dark of the country at night, empty and full of faint, pulsating noise. Every shadowy piece of furniture in the place was waiting.
We stood and leaned against a wall, necking, as if we were a young, dating couple, going through each step, testing. How long we were going to just kiss? When he put his hand under my shirt, I made a sound between a sigh and a laugh. I was a little bit like the ugly maiden aunt, cloyingly grateful for what’s left to her. Just a little bit.
16
Gabe
Once we began it seemed unthinkable that we might not have ended up in bed. What else could we have had in mind? Anything else would have been a bitter waste, a cryi
ng shame. Elisa, who must have thought ahead herself, wore a black-lace bra, black satin panties; they were an honor, I thought, to me. Her legs were thinner, her waist small. Pretty. She was always pretty.
We were both naked when I realized there were no condoms in the house. I opened the drawer of the night table and there were no such things in it. I had thrown the last one out, I remembered, when the foil packet seemed too pathetic shifting around with the Kleenex and the ballpoint pens.
“Guess what?” I said to Elisa.
“Fuck,” she said. “Gabe. Are you sure?”
I was sitting up in bed by this time, a desperately ardent lover with a fading erection. All the solemnity and splendor of our being together again was suffering a foolish turn.
“There’s a drugstore every two blocks,” Elisa said. “They sell them in delis. They sell them at newsstands.”
“Imagine people lining up nude at the newsstand,” I said. “Making a quick buy, not bothering to collect their change, and running home fast.”
Elisa was giving my shoulder a sequence of love bites. “What are we going to do here?” she said.
There was plenty we could do, we both knew that. We could perform any number of tender flourishes on each other, get as far as we needed to go. Whole books had been written on just this subject. “You know,” I said.
I led us at first. This method had its beauties—its part-by-part progression, its dancerly inventions. My attention to Elisa was carefully detailed, although I got the better share, since I was the undangerous one. We went on for a long time, stopping and starting. Carried away and swept back; for all of Elisa’s daring and cleverness, I was too wrought up or too melancholy to come, despite everything she did, despite love and more love. Too old maybe. I did think that.
We rested awhile. Elisa had her arm across her face. “Are you tired?” I said.