Lucky Us (14 page)

Oh, he did turn around, and I saw a regular human
face, Jason in his familiar flesh-and-blood, and I was so horrified at what I had just thought that I screamed at the sight of him. As if he were dead, instead of just huddled in the cold. “It's me,” he said.

I said, “You are such a dickhead creep”—nothing very deep, for that moment—but it was enough to let me leave. I got off the roof.

I
HAVE TO
believe that I would never, not really, have done anything like push him. But there was a blind second when it was possible, and I have nothing but wild gratitude, gushing relief, for what didn't happen. I spent the rest of that night on the musty sofa in the living room, curled up like a snail and sweating thanks.

What was left of my time with Jason—we had a few more weeks—was dismal rather than ugly. He didn't hit me again. We didn't get as carried away as we could have, we made an effort at holding back. We were always saying (we got franker in the last phase) that we might have done so much worse to each other.

All that final congratulation came to seem like a joke later. No harm done, my foot. We had our eye on the wrong dangers entirely. We did use condoms, oh, every so often, but I don't think it occurred to us to worry about
that
.

I would like to forget about that night on the roof, but I also like to think it scared me to good effect. I behaved better after, showed a little decent restraint. There were places I didn't ever want to go again. I came down from there somewhat improved.

A proper scare could do that. Jason himself (I noticed right away) was much changed since when we first knew each other. For him, the diagnosis did it. It hit him hard and stunned him and toned him down. It shook off some of the evil bluster.

I
SAW THIS
right from the afternoon when I dragged him into Starbucks with me. Jason was less cool, in all senses of the term—there was less glowering and more bantering. He treated the virus like an annoying relative who had to be mocked. “Don't I look robust today?” he would say to me. “Strapping and vigorous,” I'd say. “You too,” he'd say. “Blooming like a rose.” Actually we did look very good. We always had.

Perhaps if I had joined one of the zillions of support groups that Gabe was always badgering me about, I might have been less excited about knowing Jason. I seemed to have some sentiment attached to the notion that Jason and I were in this together, as if the virus were our baby. I'd think back to the old days and remember
occasions of especially
thorough
sex and ponder which night one of us gave it to the other, the way people try to guess when their kid was conceived.

When Gabe knew for sure that I was seeing Jason, and he got so livid and outraged and disgusted, I couldn't stand, all of a sudden, to hear Jason reviled. Jason the wry and the brave. “You don't know a thing,” I said to Gabe.

I had my nerve, didn't I, getting angry at Gabe when I was the one fooling around. The Monday after Gabe and I had our big blowup, when he came back from one of his broody walks, I thought,
Get a grip, Elisa. Don't lose Gabe
. So I did what I could to keep my mouth shut, for a change. I made tremendous efforts to hold my tongue. I asked Gabe whether it was raining out and when he wanted to eat dinner and I didn't try to talk about anything else.

We moved around the house being dull and polite to each other. It wasn't the sort of thing I was good at, but I did my best. I made Gabe tell me whether the city should keep its sales tax and why NutraSweet was bad for you. He went along with this; he did have opinions and maybe they distracted him. In between I kept the TV on. For a week it was on all the time until we fell asleep, and sometimes then too.
America's Funniest Home Videos. Late Night with Letterman. Politically Incorrect. Barney and
Friends
.

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.

I
S 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.

J
ASON 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.

I
N 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.

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.

N
O 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.