Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel

by David Rakoff

  Especially when you were impersonating Mrs. Zolteck from Talmud Torah

  when we were at camp.

  Josh, we have become the best of friends and I’m so happy now I’m your sister,

  But when we go out together let’s try not to get blisters…”

  Nathan’s mind wandered as Mindy meandered.

  The effort he’d squandered, if this was the standard,

  Seemed hours badly wasted, until he recalled

  That, time notwithstanding, he’d nothing at all.

  He’d pored over Bartlett’s for couplets to filch

  He’d stayed up ’til three and still came up with zilch

  Except for instructions he’d underscored twice

  Just two words in length, and those words were, “Be Nice!”

  Too often, he’d noticed, emotions betray us

  And reason departs once we’re up on the dais.

  He’d witnessed uncomfortable moments where others

  Had lost their way quickly, where sisters and brothers

  Had gotten too prickly and peppered their babbling

  With stories of benders or lesbian dabbling,

  Or spot-on impressions of mothers-in-law,

  Which, true, Nathan thought, always garnered guffaws

  But the price seemed too high with the laughs seldom cloaking

  Hostility masquerading as joking.

  No, he’d swallow his rage and bank all his fire

  He knew that in his case the bar was set higher.

  He’d have to be careful and hide what his heart meant

  (Disingenuous malice was Susan’s department).

  They’d be hungry for blood even though they had supped,

  Folks were just waiting for him to erupt

  In tears or some other unsightly reaction,

  And Nathan would not give them that satisfaction.

  Though Susan’s a slattern, and Josh was a lout

  At least Nathan knew what he’d not talk about:

  I won’t wish them divorce, that they wither and sicken,

  Or tonight that they choke on their salmon (or chicken).

  I’ll stay mum on that time when the cottage lost power

  In that storm on the Cape, and they left for an hour

  And they thought it was just the cleverest ruse

  To pretend it took that long to switch out the fuse.

  Or that time you advised me, with so much insistence,

  That I should be granting poor Susan more distance.

  That the worst I could do was to hamper and crowd her,

  That if she felt stifled she’d just take a powder.

  That a plant needs its space just as much as its water

  And above all, not give her the ring that I’d bought her.

  Which in retrospect only elicits a “Gosh!

  I hardly deserved a friend like you, Josh.”

  No, I won’t air that laundry, or make myself foolish

  To satisfy appetites venal and ghoulish.

  I will not be the blot on this hellish affair.

  And with that Nathan pushed out, and rose from his chair.

  And just by the tapping of knife against crystal,

  All eyes turned his way, like he’d fired off a pistol.

  “Joshua, Susan, dear family and friends,

  A few words, if you will, before everything ends

  And you skip out of here to begin your new life

  As happily married husband and wife.

  You’ve promised to honor, to love and obey,

  We’ve sipped our champagne and been cleansed with sorbet

  All in endorsement of your Hers and His-dom.

  So, let me add my two cents’ worth of wisdom.

  Herewith, as a coda to this evening historical

  I just thought I’d tell you this tale allegorical.

  I was wracking my brains sitting here at this table

  Until I remembered this suitable fable.

  Each reptilian hero, each animal squeal

  Serves a purpose, you see, because they reveal

  A truth about life, even as they distort us

  So here is ‘The Tale of the Scorpion and Tortoise.’

  The scorpion was hamstrung, his tail all aquiver.

  Just how would he manage to get ’cross the river?

  ‘The water’s so deep,’ he observed with a sigh,

  Which pricked at the ears of the tortoise nearby.

  ‘Well, why don’t you swim?’ asked the slow-moving fellow.

  ‘Unless you’re afraid. Is that it, you are yellow?’

  ‘That’s rude,’ said the scorpion, ‘and I’m not afraid

  So much as unable. It’s not how I’m made.’

  ‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean to be glib when

  I said that, I figured you were an amphibian.

  The error was one of misclassification

  I mistakenly figured you for a crustacean.’

  ‘No offense taken,’ the scorpion replied.

  ‘But how ’bout you help me to reach the far side?

  You swim like a dream, and you have what I lack.

  What say you take me across on your back?’

  ‘I’m really not sure that’s the best thing to do,’

  Said the tortoise, ‘Now that I see that it’s you.

  You’re the scorpion and—how can I say this?—just … well…

  I don’t know I feel safe with you riding my shell.

  You’ve a less-than-ideal reputation preceding.

  There’s talk of your victims, all poisoned and bleeding,

  That fact by itself should be reason sufficient.

  I mean, what do you take me for, mentally deficient?’

  ‘I hear what you’re saying, but what would that prove?

  We’d both drown so tell me, how would that behoove

  Me, to basically die at my very own hand

  When all I desire is to be on dry land?’

  The tortoise considered the scorpion’s defense.

  When he gave it some thought, it made perfect sense.

  The niggling voice in his mind he ignored

  And he swam to the bank and called out ‘Climb aboard.’

  The tortoise was wrong to ignore all his doubts

  Because in the end, friends, our true selves will out.

  For, just a few moments from when they set sail

  The scorpion lashed out with his venomous tail.

  The tortoise, too late, understood that he’d blundered

  When he felt his flesh stabbed and his carapace sundered.

  As he fought for his life, he said, ‘Please tell me why

  You have done this, for now we will surely both die!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ cried the scorpion. ‘You never should trust

  A creature like me, because poison I must.

  I’d claim some remorse or at least some compunction

  But I just can’t help it. My form is my function.

  You thought I’d behave like my cousin the crab

  But unlike him, it is but my nature to stab.’

  The tortoise expired with one final quiver

  And then both of them sank, swallowed up by the river.”

  Nathan paused, cleared his throat, took a sip of his drink.

  He needed these extra few seconds to think.

  The room had grown frosty, the tension was growing,

  Folks wondered precisely where Nathan was going.

  The prospects of skirting fiasco seemed dim

  But what he said next surprised even him.

  “So what can we learn from their watery ends?

  Is there some lesson on how to be friends?

  I think what it means is that central to living

  A life that is good is a life that’s forgiving.

  We’re creatures of contact, regardless of whether

  to kiss or to wound, we still must come together.

  Like in Annie
Hall, we endure twists and torsions

  For food we don’t like, and in such tiny portions!

  But, like hating a food but still asking for more

  It beats staying dry but so lonely on shore.

  So we make ourselves open, while knowing full well

  It’s essentially saying, ‘Please, come pierce my shell.’

  So … please, let’s all raise up our glasses of wine

  And I’ll finish this toast with these words that aren’t mine:

  Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

  By each let this be heard,

  Some do it with a bitter look,

  Some with a flattering word,

  The coward does it with a kiss,

  The brave man with a sword!”

  Where first it seemed that Nathan had his old resentments cleanly hurdled,

  The air now held the mildest scent of something sweet gone meanly curdled.

  The thorough ambiguity held guests in states of mild confusion

  No one raised their eyes, lest a met glance be taken for collusion.

  Silence doesn’t paint the depth of quiet in that room

  There was no clinking stemware toasting to the bride or groom.

  You could have heard a petal as it landed on the floor.

  And in that quiet Nathan turned and walked right out the door.

  The urinal’s wall was The King and His Court,

  A work done in porcelain, precisely the sort

  Of tableau of gentility at Le Petit Trianon,

  A cast of nobility, designed for the peeing on.

  Nate turned his gaze as he hosed down the scene,

  It seemed an especially brutish and mean

  Treatment of all the baroque figures in it

  (Such unlucky placement, poor girl at her spinet).

  He needed this pit stop before he took off

  To go catch his train, when he heard a slight cough.

  There, twisting a swan’s head in gold for hot water

  Was Lou, who had bankrolled this day for his daughter.

  Lou had scared Nathan for all of the years

  He was with Susan, and now the sum of his fears

  Was here, now the chickens had come home to land.

  “The man of the hour, with his schvantz in his hand.”

  Nathan started to say that he knew how he blew it

  And how he was sorry, but Lou beat him to it;

  Lou, who was blunt—some said boorish—and rich.

  But a mensch deep at heart, said, “My Suzy’s a bitch.

  You’d think that today I’d be proud, that I’d kvell,

  But I followed you out here just so I could tell

  You: she told her friends she would be able to get

  You to come give a toast. It’s a monstrous bet,

  Made all the more awful that her Day of Joy

  Was still incomplete, and abusing a boy

  In a trick was the thing that she wanted above

  All else. It’s the mark of a girl who can’t love.

  Ach, Nathan, this day is a stroke of bad luck.

  You, cast in this play, and then played for a schmuck.

  But think of it this way, she’ll wake up tomorrow

  And still be unhappy. And that is my sorrow.”

  Lou turned off the swan’s head, once more checked his tie,

  Held his arm out and said, “This is good-bye.”

  He shook Nathan’s hand and then made for the door

  Where he paused and he turned to say just one thing more.

  “That toast, if you give it again (but you won’t),

  Remember, Nate: turtles swim, tortoises don’t.”

  A permeable world where each friend is a trick,

  Can feel like it’s crumbling when just one gets sick.

  Add one more for two, and that queasy sensation

  Can feel like a threat to one’s very foundation.

  Three seems like carelessness, a surfeit of strife

  Exposing one to comment on the Platform of Life

  (Yes, dear Lady Bracknell, invoked with remorse

  But humor was Cliff’s one remaining recourse);

  For if “sick” becomes “die” and then “three,” “every friend,”

  It’s the hurricane’s eye of a world at an end,

  A Vale of Tears reached ’cross a sad Bridge of Sighs,

  Cliff and his cohort were dropping like flies:

  Victor, a handsome star of the ballet

  Whose turnout, they said, could turn anyone gay

  Coughed once, and then he expired like Camille—

  Not quite, but the true facts seemed just as surreal—

  And what could one say about poor lovely Marty?

  Whose fever spiked high at his own dinner party

  Between the clear soup and the rabbit terrine

  By eleven that night, he was in quarantine.

  Marco was the anchor of Bay Area News Day.

  Fevered on Friday and dead the next Tuesday.

  Gorgeous and baritone, gifted with words

  And felled by an illness that struck only birds.

  Before all they’d had to look out for was crabs

  But now nothing helped, there were no pills, no labs

  Nothing to slow down, never mind getting rid

  Of this crazy-fast killer they’d weakly named GRID.

  A grid: Cliff could see it stretched out, made of wire,

  And spanning a canyon of brimstone and fire.

  Suddenly, all of them caught unawares

  Were one by one falling away through its squares

  Rampant infections called opportunistic

  Worked at a pace both absurd and sadistic.

  The plum-colored smudge, a sloe slowly blooming,

  Seemed barely worth noticing; small, unassuming,

  As if trying to belie all the terrible harm it

  Could do, it stayed hidden, just under his armpit.

  But soon it branched out, making siblings and cousins

  His lesions were legion, from just one to dozens.

  Despite all his nursing, the tears and the dramas

  Of friends, when he woke up to find his pajamas

  As wet through with sweat as if dunked in the sea

  He still briefly asked, What is happening to me?

  He’d loved Touch of Evil, when la Dietrich tells

  The fortune of corpulent, vile Orson Welles:

  “Your future’s all used up.” So funny and grim.

  But now that the same could be spoken of him

  It was sadness that gripped him, far more than the fear

  That, if facing the truth, he had maybe a year.

  When poetic phrases like “eyes, look your last”

  Become true, all you want is to stay, to hold fast.

  A new, fierce attachment to all of this world

  Now pierced him, it stabbed like a deity-hurled

  Lightning bolt lancing him, sent from above,

  Left him giddy and tearful. It felt like young love.

  He’d thought of himself as uniquely proficient

  At seeing, but now that sense felt insufficient.

  He wanted to grab, to possess, to devour

  To eat with his eyes, how he needed that power.

  Not much of a joiner, he’d always been leery

  Of groups, although now, he was simply too weary

  From all of the death, plus his symptoms now besting

  Him. He so admired those heroes protesting

  The drugmakers, government—all who’d forsaken

  The thousands—the murderous silence of Reagan,

  Or William F. Buckley, that fucker at whose

  Suggestion that people with AIDS get tattoos;

  (The New Haven lockjaw, the glib erudition,

  When truly, the man’s craven moral perdition

  Made Clifford so angry he thought he might vomit

  Or fly east, find B
uckley’s address, and then bomb it).

  But, just like a child whose big gun is a stick,

  Cliff was now harmless, he’d gotten too sick

  To take any action beyond rudimentary

  Routines that had shrunk to the most elementary:

  Which pill to take now, and where is your sweater?

  Did the Imodium make you feel better?

  Study your shit to make sure you’d not bled,

  Make sure the Kleenex is next to the bed.

  “Make sure,” “be prepared,” plan out every endeavor

  Like a scout on the stupidest camping trip ever.

  The facts were now harder, reality colder

  His parasol no match for that falling boulder.

  And so the concern with the trivial issues:

  Slippers nearby and the proximate tissues

  He thought of those two things in life that don’t vary

  (Well, thought only glancingly; more was too scary)

  Inevitable, why even bother to test it,

  He’d paid all his taxes, so that left … you guessed it.

  Suppose one were trying to gently assert

  One’s position; an East Eighty-third Street address doesn’t hurt.

  Nor does a cottage on Georgica Pond,

  Or three (Jewish … shah!) kids who are natural blonds.

  Susan had banished all unsightly elements

  Her latest career would brook no such impediment

  To being the personal, shining reflection

  Of breeding and privilege, class and connection.

  Finally, to match Mayflower Realty, Inc.’s tone

  Her business cards now showed her first name as Sloan.

  Josh was a force of the courts—law and squash—

  The family was blessed and seemed wholly awash

  In the kind of good fortune one doesn’t dare dream,

  Near-parodically copious, bursting the seams

  Of the sky; heaven-sent, like the biblical gift of the manna,