Lucky Us (23 page)

“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.

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.

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.

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
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 2001 by Joan Silber. All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment is given to the copyright holder for permission to reprint an excerpt from Mark Epstein's
Thoughts Without a Thinker
, ©1995 by Mark Epstein, M.D. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-769-2

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