by Joan Silber
“Not me,” she said.
The sweet perkiness with which she said this pierced my heart—not me—and before I knew it, I slipped inside her. Why not? What did it matter? She said, “Oh, honey. What?” I felt that jolt of surprise I had known as a teenager, that amazement that sex existed. We moved together—unearthly and fevered—and then Elisa said, “I can’t,” and she shifted away from me. When I fell out of her, wetly and clumsily, I was still hard, but oddly contented.
“It’s okay,” I said.
We lay without speaking for a while. I had a wave of something like fear, a small horror, over the thing I had just done. I was as dumb as any jerk whose stupidity I might marvel at. But I didn’t care either. What did it matter, what did anything matter?
And then we went back to touching each other, more directly and effectively this time. When we were truly done, both of us, we lay alongside each other, rapturous and brokenhearted.
ELISA WAS CRADLED against me. I had my hand on her rib cage, under her breasts.
I saw then, as we were both falling asleep, what it would be like for us from now on. We would be happy, but in a ruined way, in an abandoned way. In this abandon, we would be freer, loosened from our smaller-minded attachments, and some things would be easier. Some.
17
Elisa
In the night I woke up and didn’t know where I was. I had been dreaming that I was in a strange city where I was late for an appointment and kept getting lost. But I was in my old bed and Gabe was next to me, breathing on in loud and rasping innocence. His head a dark shape on the pillow. And I thought of him resisting me, in the restaurant. What made him come around in the end? What tipped him toward me finally? I kept my-self up asking this. I wanted to know so I could keep doing it.
At breakfast the next day, we were a little self-conscious with each other. Gabe asked, “What can I get you?” as if I were a new guest. I asked for two slices of dry toast, the primmest of breakfasts.
He had to fix them in the broiler because he had made me take back the toaster oven. “Jesus Christ,” he said, when he burnt his fingers trying to pluck the toast off the grill.
I kissed his fingers, a silly and submissively romantic thing to do, not quite like us really. And yet. Wasn’t this the meal for drama, for devotional gestures? Gabe, being Gabe, seemed slightly embarrassed. “Oh,” he said. He was stroking the top of my head.
Were we going to have sex again now? I kissed the fabric of his pants over the zipper. I stayed there a minute, my mouth closed and dreamy. “We don’t have time, do we?” I said.
“Probably not,” he said. “I’m supposed to be at work. Insane though that seems at the moment.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Work. And I have to go home for the rest of my meds.”
We didn’t move, both thinking.
I remembered there weren’t any condoms in the house. This did get me to my feet, and I pulled my skirt down and straightened my cotton sweater. I bustled around, carrying the dishes from the table to the sink. I put the butter and milk in the refrigerator. The little homemaker, that was me.
“I want to come back here to live,” I said. I was always the blunter one.
“Come tonight,” Gabe said.
It knocked me out to hear him say that. I said, “I have things still in boxes at Fiona’s.”
“How many boxes, do you think?” Gabe said.
“They’ll fit in one cab.”
“Pack fast.”
I was proud of us, that we were making this part simple. In our buoyancy now, in our great fullness of feeling, we were in the mood to make things easy for our ragged selves. The sick girl and the old man, them. A happy ending made us quick and clear.
PART III
18
Gabe
You can have good luck as well as bad. I thought of this sentence as if it were a complicated new truth, a beautiful and irrefutable fact. It hit me most keenly when Elisa was sleeping in the bed next to me. I could not keep from crowing over what I had: look at what I had.
Everything looked better to me, the glass cabinets of Eagle Eye Camera, the intricate equipment on those gleaming shelves, the raucous and crowded streets of my city.
At work, Ed said, “My boy, you look twenty years younger.”
“That’s not so young,” I said.
“You look fifty years younger,” Charelle said.
“Any more sex and you’ll disappear totally,” Ed said.
Jeremy said, “You have a girlfriend? That’s wild.”
ON THE OTHER hand, I quarreled with Elisa almost as soon as she moved back in. One night I came home to find that she had left the refrigerator door open all day. The kitchen floor was puddled with water, the freezer was full of soggy food packets. I was outraged, and I was resistant to any adorable insouciance she tried on me.
Through the first few months, I had fits of being offended like that. A stubbornness came over me when she did anything I disliked. I couldn’t see why I had to put up with anything after all I had borne already. I pointed this out repeatedly.
And yet. We really did very well, I thought. Every day at work I would think that I was going home to Elisa and I would feel that I had what I wanted in this life, of the things I could have. If Ed was nearby, I talked incessantly about what I had cooked the night before, I repeated what Elisa had said about some TV show, I told entertaining stories about my own grouchiness.
IN A MOVIE theater one night, I got very annoyed with Elisa when I discovered she had forgotten to bring her meds with her. People were hissing at me to shut up. We were watching a long, late movie and there were pills she was supposed to take at nine. “It can wait,” she said.
I ran out and took a cab home and showed up back in the theater a half hour later with the pills. God knows what the ushers thought, letting in this panting guy waving his ticket stub. Little did they know—the cavalry officer fresh from the fort, bringing needed supplies. When had I ever done that before? I was just as glad to miss some of the film, and it was a good film. I’d been useless for most of my life.
ONCE I DREAMED that Elisa and I went to Prague, to look at Kafka’s house. We were roaming through streets of gray Baroque buildings, and then I lost her when we turned a corner. I walked all over the city looking for her. She turned up behind me, laughing, but then she disappeared again. Where did she go? I decided just to give up, I knew I’d never see her again. But I couldn’t find my ticket to get back to New York—I spent the rest of the dream looking in my suitcase for it. It was the mildest of the dreams I had about Elisa dying.
IN THE MORNINGS, I liked to watch Elisa get dressed, putting on these stylish little outfits she wore to work in the gallery—cropped linen pants and tiny snug shirts—and I would think, this isn’t her real life, this gallery crap. She didn’t think so either, but it was almost all she did when we weren’t together.
What was she waiting for? I wanted her to get back to her painting. More and more I came to think that this was important. Elisa wasn’t really a very good painter, as far as I could tell about these things, but there was something going on in most of those paintings—some flash of an underworld brought to the surface. She was going to have to use what she knew, which she was nowhere near doing now. From the derivative messes of these canvases, she could (I thought) move on to truer inventions, if she really worked at it, but this would take her a long time. She was the sort of artist who might at forty do something very fine.
In her forties Elisa would be stringy and lean and handsome. She would be calmer but she would still be blunt and mouthy. I did not think that we would ever have children. I had read about women with HIV who chose to get pregnant—there was a decent chance of the child being uninfected, especially if the mother took AZT or nevirapine—but I didn’t see that for us.
At fifty, if Elisa did well in her art, developed her habits and had the luck to sell paintings for real money, we might go somewhere to live more quietly. I was thinking of the co
untryside, Vermont or the northern Catskills, but the seashore was not impossible. I knew that Elisa liked the ocean. Maybe, with my pension and her painting income, we could afford to have a house somewhere in Mexico or even Greece, if Greece was still cheap by then.
Elisa was not going to want to be quiet, even as an older person. Maybe rural retirement was not my best idea. By then I would be in my seventies. But Elisa would sulk if taken too far away from the hard angles of her city, too distant from the dirt and the shimmer.
Perhaps this would be our culminating quarrel, me with my heart set on some A-frame in the mountains, Elisa in a furor at ever letting go of her urban usual. We would each complain bitterly about our sacrifices over the years—my days and nights of watching over her volatile body, her decades of being tied to this sober old phantom. But anything we could say, however bitter, would have been said many times over by then.
Her friends would come visit if we took to the mountains. Fiona would be long divorced, with at least one kid, and Dawn would be a fading beauty with a sweet-natured husband. They would not be girls anymore either; they would be solider or bonier, with lower voices and deeper bosoms, laughing at entirely different things. If they came to visit, they would grouse about their jobs; they would speak with envy about someone like Patsy Futterman, of all people, having a museum show; they would air their views about the girl that Fiona’s kid was living with—was she a flake or was she kind of interesting and really good for him? They would sit outside drinking glasses of wine and squeal in praise of every plant in our garden. I gloried in thinking of my Elisa among them, stretched out on some striped lawn chair in our yard, old as I was now. That old. I kept this notion in me.
AND WHAT ABOUT the wedding? After Elisa was back in the apartment, we didn’t say too much about it. We sort of let it go. Did the whole world have to be involved in our private arrangements? Couldn’t we just go on as we were? Many people did ask if we’d reset the date. Elisa’s mother, Aunt Angie, Fiona and Ira, Dawn, Ed, not to mention Charelle—they all asked. They were bursting with curiosity. Maybe later, we said.
WE DID HAVE other things to talk about. Elisa’s insurance balked at paying for a private doctor, and she had to go to a clinic instead, no matter how much she liked Dr. Bowtie. I went with her for the first visit. The clinic was in a hospital built like a maze and we came off the elevator and walked straight into the AIDS ward.
Wrong pavilion. How to get out?
A bald, emaciated man in pajamas was walking, with great difficulty, down the hallway. He gave us the rictus of a smile as we went by. A man pushing himself forward in a wheelchair lifted one arm to wave to us.
“They’re certainly friendly,” Elisa said.
“Are you here for the wedding?” the man said.
He couldn’t have said that, I thought. But when we passed the visitors’ lounge, vases of flowers blazed all over it—yellow chrysanthemums on the coffee table, sprays of white orchids on the TV set, garish coral-pink gladioli set on the floor. “You know what they are?” Elisa said. “They’re bouquets from the patients’ rooms.” A cluster of men in bathrobes and hospital wraps sat on the couches.
A nurse was pinning an orchid into the single long braid of a woman who had to be the bride. She had a face like a Siamese cat, chiseled to the point of strangeness. Her arm had a needle taped to it and a line attached to an IV pole with its printed plastic bag half full of clear liquid.
The groom waited in the corner, dapper in his suit, a still-handsome guy with a roguish goatee. “Here at last!” he said to me. “Can’t begin without the chaplain.”
“I’m not the chaplain,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, man,” he said.
“The guy’s probably on his way,” Elisa said.
“Hey,” the groom said, “stay for the wedding. You be the guests. We need guests.”
“You do?” Elisa said. “Thank you. That is so nice.”
I didn’t want to be at this stranger’s ceremony. But Elisa did, she wasn’t leaving. “What a treat,” she said.
When the hospital chaplain finally turned up (I didn’t want to think where he’d been), both of us thought he was a drip. He had a weak smile and kept patting down his hair. But once he began the service, in a rumbling voice, there was too much feeling in the room. The bravery of the couple, throwing their party in this ward they might never leave, the ashen congregation gazing on them fondly, the valiant sexiness of the bride’s cleavage showing above her embroidered smock, the groom’s stiff gait when he walked to her. It was too much.
Right then I decided that Elisa and I were never going to do anything this sweet. A violent antipathy to all sentiment rose up in me, just as I was looking at Elisa, very fresh and girly in her flowered overalls, and at this couple putting rings on each other’s fingers, and water welled up in my eyes. Everyone in the lounge was dripping salt tears. The couple had been saying, in soft and astonishing voices, as long as we both shall live. My nose ran, I was not pleased with myself.
Elisa, who was more advanced in this than I was, sniffled and then stopped. She looked at me then, as if she had just remembered something the whole room had forgotten. She looked quite stern and quite calm. She murmured, “It’s okay,” which meant nothing at all but was said out of pity for me. For me.
When she said, “It’s okay,” a second time, she sounded as if she were quieting a first grader, as if I were fussing over something very small. Something she was past noticing. She was way past me just then.
Then the groom kissed the bride and there were cheers and applause. I lined up with the others to kiss the new wife on the cheek—she sat down for this and we all had to be careful of her IV line—and I shook the groom’s hand. He hugged Elisa lavishly. He said he was lucky to have found us for guests.
Elisa
I felt sorry that I hadn’t known more gay men in my life—oh, there were Bruce and Lionel and plenty of others—but I hadn’t seen at close hand any of the ones who outlasted their lovers, who nursed their men and mourned them and then went on to the rest of their lives. There was Ed, Gabe’s friend, but according to Gabe he didn’t talk much about himself. I wanted to know how they managed, these widowed guys, so I could think of how Gabe was going to manage.
Gabe was, of course, a person who was good at being alone. He had years of practice in doing without—a skill he had always been too ready to depend on, I thought.
I undid some of that good work at renunciation. And the more trouble I was in, the more kindness and tending and nursing I needed, the more he would forget his old skills. He would know me better than anyone would decently want to, be forced into the crudest of intimacies, be too desperately needed. He would be so busy sticking by me, in my nakedness and rawness and liquefaction, that he would not have time to read or be by himself. And he would do so well at this! He would. Where would it leave him?
Undone. No longer at home in his own house. He could become the man with the white ponytail at the checkout counter in the supermarket, talking to strangers about the high price of rolls of paper towels, holding forth about the latest bone-headed thing the mayor was doing. He could become someone to avoid on the street.
But women have always liked Gabe. A woman will rescue him. Someone with her wits about her will not believe her luck when she hears that he is single and will have the sense to be kind to him.
That’s what a gay man would do, hook up with someone again, in time. Gabe will not know that this is what he wants until desire surprises him and he remembers its link to one form of happiness.
Gabe
After Elisa and I left the wedding in the Visitors Lounge, it took us a while to find our way to the wing of the hospital where the clinic was. We seemed to go through one hallway and turn down another and come out always in the wrong place. When we got there at last, we were very late for Elisa’s appointment.
“In school they never taught you to read a clock, with the big hand and the little hand?�
� the receptionist said.
We had to wait for two hours to see anybody. We gave some of the cake we had brought with us from the wedding to a restless four-year-old who was there with his mother. While he was getting white butter-cream icing all over the sofa, Elisa decided she had to feed me the other piece of cake, straight from the palm of her hand to my mouth. She was very sexy about it, and two teenagers in the waiting room hooted in approval. Anyone passing by would have thought it was an unusually jolly clinic.
Elisa
I had the idea, when I first met Gabe, that most of his life was already behind him, since I was young and didn’t have much imagination about anything not under my nose. Anyone that cool-headed had to be mostly done with things—that was probably what I thought.
I didn’t know how events were going to fan out like an unfolded map and how thick this part of his life was going to be. I didn’t foresee any of that. Neither did he, of course. He must have thought that he’d played out most of his hand (and not as well as he would have hoped), although something quite different was happening all along.
I am especially grateful to Myra Goldberg and Chuck Wachtel for their generosity and patience, and I would like to thank Andrea Barrett, Charles Baxter, Kathleen Hill, and Joan K. Peters for all their help with this book. Special thanks to Sharon Captan for her friendship. I am indebted to my agent, Geri Thoma, for her loyalty and integrity, and to my editor, Shannon Ravenel, for her wise suggestions. I wish I could thank Peter Maase, who is missed by all who knew him.
A SHANNON RAVENEL BOOK
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing