Lucky Us (19 page)

What could I do in this kind of place? I only knew how to sit tight and shut up. I kept to myself as much as I could, but people didn't leave me alone just because I wanted it. I was tested over and over by other inmates, with an audience for every test. Men who had been in the
place longer offered to be my protectors—more than one came forward to advise me—and it was easy to guess wrong about which ally to pick. My instincts about people went only so far in this place. I had to think about what I was doing all the time. I had less time to read, less unguarded time in my own head.

After a few years like that, I was a hardened version of myself. My face got bony around the jawline and my eyes looked dead, although on the inside I was often quite sentimental and childish. I hadn't wanted anyone from my old life to contact me here, but now I wrote letters. They were intelligent letters, I hadn't turned into a goon. I wrote to Joel, my old college friend, that being in prison was like being the Burrower in Kafka's story, a creature with fresh sources of paranoia at every turn. What did Joel think about the design for the World Trade Center, did the twin towers change the scale of everything? I asked him to write and tell me how they looked.

The topic I really wanted to know about was Steve, my ex-friend, the undercover cop who had sent me to this prison, but I didn't want to indulge myself in this curiosity. Maureen was the only person with any connection to this scene that I could even ask. In Maureen's second letter she said that she had no information about Steve because neither she nor anybody she knew would have
anything to do with him and if it were up to her, all [this word was blacked out by the warden's office] and informers would have their [word blacked out] cut off and stuffed in their [words blacked out]. Even in censored form, this was much uglier and more violent than what I had been thinking.

I wanted Steve to come to a bad end, that was all. However hardened I was by now, I was not a man who had a really vicious imagination. I wanted Steve to be fired from the police for something stupid like repeated drunkenness, to be two-timed and mocked and ditched by whatever woman he was with, to grow fat and discouraged and spinelessly depressed, to know himself as a spectacle of shame and cowardice before the world. I wished him failure, not torture.

So I didn't write to Maureen after that. When I came out of prison, I worked for a while for my brother Rich, who had a limo rental business, and I got involved with a woman named Rita who was kind of bad news. When I wasn't with her, I read.

Rita wanted me to have more money. She was a silly woman but being in bed with her was amazing to me and for a while I was in thrall. On a day when I was struck with great loneliness I went to see the man who had been my mentor in prison and who lived in the Bronx now. I
didn't even like him all that much but he was the closest thing I had to a confidant. One morning after Rita and I had a fight, she called my parole board to tell them I was consorting with a former inmate, and they arrested me for breaking parole. I had to go back in for another year.

After I came out the second time, my aunt Angie let me live with her. My parole officer found me a job as a porter in an office building. I would read all day and then go mop the floors at night. I had nothing to do with women or with dating. I was done with that. My aunt was nice to me. She fed me great dinners and played poker with me at night, and every now and then got me to go to Mass with her. I got fatter on her food, and I wouldn't answer when she said I shouldn't be so discouraged and depressed. You could have been more, she said. You still could be.

Gabe was never home, no matter how many friendly messages I left on his machine. I called the camera store and a man told me he wasn't in that day, did I want to speak to someone else? I called the next day and a woman said, “Oh, no, he's not
here
. He's on vacation. I think maybe he went to Switzerland.”

“Where?” I said.

Gabe never went anywhere—he spent his vacations at home reading. He hadn't told me he was going on any trips. And Switzerland was an expensive country, way over budget for him. So where was he really?

“He totally needed a rest,” the woman said. “We all do, you know.”

I thought that Gabe's friend Ed could tell me where he was, but the woman said Ed was gone too.

I
HAD BEEN
so happy making those phone calls. “Maybe you'd like to go out for a drink,” I was going to say when he called back. He would say yes in his usual measured way, but he would be quite pleased, quite glad.

Not so, apparently. Why was I always sure he was there for the asking? The whole four years I spent with Gabe, I thought of my young and adorable self as a lavish bit of bounty I was gifting him with. I don't know that Gabe ever saw it that way, but the idea of this had been quite a pleasant thing for me to live with. My diagnosis wiped that out—that feeling of being a flouncy little blessing to him. Things sat differently between us, once I was a princess without a fortune. Then it made me squirm to be on view in my fallen state. Then I behaved as badly as any displaced royal.

F
OR A WEEK
I phoned his apartment, though by the fourth day I stopped leaving any messages. Where was Gabe really? Who was he with? I was still not feeling
great, and the disappointment was hard on me. I had been thinking about our wedding.

I had been thinking that if we had the ceremony at Saint Agnes, then maybe Fiona and Ira would let us have the reception in their loft. We'd get some nice caterer who did delicious and playful food—carved vegetable landscapes, portraits of us in lobster salad. But how would everyone get from the church in midtown to the loft in Brooklyn? Could we hire a fleet of limos? How much would a bus cost? A bus could be fun.

Dream on, I thought to myself. I would not have said I was the sort of woman who planned imaginary weddings, spun forth those puffballs of girlish longing. I would have said I was not stupid in that particular way. Anyone would have said that about me.

W
HEN
I
FIRST
went outside again, after six long days of being sick in bed, I was glad to be on the street, away from the smell of turpentine, away from Jason. The morning sky had a white, early brightness and the air hadn't turned steamy yet. I felt light on my feet and free, stepping neatly along the sidewalk, looking into all the store windows, and I thought that my night on the roof had given me this freedom, just a little of it. I walked across Avenue A with the floaty sensation of being hollow
and weightless from not having eaten much for days, and thinking, whose body is this? My body, I thought, but as if it were a skulking child I wanted to be nice to, as if I were claiming it only to be kind. This flimsy bone-cage was making its way down the street with me in it, but I sort of saw
through
us both.

I
DID TRY
to think,
whose body,
the next day when I was waiting in the doctor's office, clenched and scared. This was a clearer idea to me than it sounds, and it let me summon my better style for the not-so-pleasant conference I had to have with the doctor. I didn't have prayer so I had to rely on what incantations I had in me.

When I brought home my bags of pill bottles from the pharmacy, Jason was in the kitchen making himself some tea. I opened the white paper sacks in front of him and said, “Look what I have.”

He didn't look at any of it.

“I'm going to love taking these, right?”

“Sure,” he said. “They're fabulous and groovy.”

I dumped two caplets into my hand and held them out. “Want some?”

“Thank you, no. Not me.”

“Get me water,” I said. “Would you, please?”

But he shook his head. So I poured out my own glass
from the pitcher in the fridge, and I held it up for a toast. I said, “From now on,” and I scarfed down my first handful of pills.

W
HAT THE DRUGS
did—aside from (a) trying to slow down the HIV and (b) killing the bacteria I'd ingested with those tasty slices of raw fish—was to make me hazy and sour and shaky in ways I wasn't used to. Not yet I wasn't. Jason said that was why he wasn't going near any of this stuff until he had to. “You feel worse, don't you?” he said. “Everybody says that.”

“Maybe,” I said. “So what?”

Jason objected to my leaving the bottles out on the counter, he said they made the place look like a hospital. We squabbled about whether I was ever any help at all with the housework. He went out at night without me. We weren't doing very much in bed anymore either. You didn't have to be very bright to know it was time for me to get out of there.

So where to? I couldn't stay at Dawn's because she had two roommates already, although she offered me the couch very kindly. Fiona and Ira were the ones with the most room.

“No problem,” Fiona said. “We'll find a little dusty corner for your cot, a little puddle of gruel for your supper.”

“Don't go to any trouble,” I said.

I put my clothes in suitcases—they were summer clothes, light and thin—and I packed in boxes the chrome reading lamp and the coffee machine and the toaster oven Gabe had made me take back. Jason helped me get all of it into a taxi. “You'll be fine, right?” he said.

“And you?”

“Oh,” he said. “Me? Sure.”

“Be careful about everything,” I said. “You're not careful.”

He gave me a dirty look. He didn't want that bit of advice, not from me.

“Bye,” he said. “Safe trip.”

W
HEN
I
GOT
to Fiona and Ira's, their loft was blazing with morning sunlight; they had just polyure-thaned their floor and it glowed with a benevolent sheen. “Take off your jacket and stay awhile,” Ira said.

When we dragged my belongings in from the elevator, they were a makeshift little pile in that open field of a room. You could fit a hundred people easily in this loft, I thought, you could invite everyone you knew to a wedding and put a band in the corner, right where the table is now, if you really wanted.

I
T WAS THE
end of August, everyone was coming back to the city from wherever they'd gone. Where was Gabe and why wasn't he calling me? When I spoke to my mother on the phone, she asked the same questions. It gave me no pleasure to answer them.

“I thought you were settling down,” she said peevishly. She felt gypped, I could tell, and she'd had her fill of gyps. “I
liked
Gabe,” she said. Better than those delinquent darlings you fell for in high school, she meant. This was not my first wedding-that-never-was, although she had no way to know that.

I had come surprisingly close the first time; I almost did run off with Chris, my high school boyfriend. Married at seventeen, ha. It was an idea he had. What a fervent, experimental boy he was.

Through most of high school, I was in a better situation than my friends, because I had Chris, who was so beautifully affectionate. I had him for two years. We were always driving around in his car, high as kites. We would buy everything in the 7-Eleven that began with the letter
C
or we'd see how far we could travel in one direction before a certain tune came on the radio. Once we were going to drive to Virginia to get married. Chris said, “Time to push the envelope.” I was giddy with pride. When I wanted to marry Gabe later, I wanted to get the feeling
again of being the girl on that side of things, startled and chosen, raised above her single sisters.

Like my other wedding, it was delayed by a medical crisis. We needed drugs for our nuptial journey; we needed speed to drive that far and we needed something special to be on for the service. Romance had to be honored. We could not quite decide what the ceremonial substance should be, and we were starting to argue when we stopped at one dealer's, where a girl customer was very upset and crazy, flailing around and frightened, and we had to talk her down. It took hours. Chris was very good at that.

If Chris was how I got infected, I don't blame Chris.

Years after we were together in any way, after we had moved to different coasts, Chris was killed in a motor-cycle accident. His bike ran into the divider on a highway outside Portland, Oregon, at four in the morning. He was wearing a helmet, but it didn't matter. My mother, who never exactly liked him, could not tell me the news without her voice breaking. I was fresh from that phone call the night I first met Jason.

For a long while after Chris died, I used to talk to him in my head. I had incidents I saved for him, with all the details phrased for his delectation. I had gossip I knew he would be tickled to hear. Madonna's interest in the
Cabala and Monica Lewinsky's blue dress would have been a real hoot to Chris. The week I first got my diagnosis, I heard myself thinking, Oh, Mr. C., do you hear what they say? Worse and worse, Chris.

The night that I didn't get married to Chris, we were in no hurry while we talked to the girl at the dealer's who was having such a bad time. She said, “I have to take off all my clothes, they're rubbing my skin raw,” and we kept saying, “You look so beautiful in your clothes.” We were secretly happy all through this. That feeling that we had, of being so rich we could linger for this pink-eyed mess of a girl, the feeling of delaying the great thing we were about to do, of pausing before the big leap: I remember that with great pleasure.

Maybe it was the best part. The brightness of our future throbbing in the back of our minds while we combed the girl's hair and dabbed ice on her face—what could have felt better than that? Chris never took off his leather jacket the whole time, and we were indoors for hours, just about to hit the road any minute.

In the dealer's living room, Chris sang to the girl and played his torso like a bongo drum; he sang, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Twist and Shout,” not peaceful tunes. I sang with him, very loud, because it made the girl sit up straight and stop rocking herself back and forth. It was a
long night. We ate bag after bag of Fritos and drank the dealer's cheap beer. We were tired and spent, after hours of this, and when she fell asleep we got up and walked stiffly to the car and bickered a little about who was awake enough to drive home. We hadn't exactly forgotten why we started out but the project had lost its urgency.