Lucky Us (6 page)

And all that emphasis on
feeling
. I couldn't watch TV, not the talk shows and not even the family comedies or the eleven o'clock news. The screen was full of people with distorted expressions, emotions bursting out of them. I thought it was all just petty bullshit run amok, tiny passing matters drawn large.

P
RISON TOOK A
lot of my vanity from me, which is unusual for a young man. In the camera store, where I ended up staying for so long, I used to notice that I was different in this respect from the guys I worked with. I'd see them preening around, pushing for their places in the
sun, and I'd feel like an old fart, compared to them.

And then I
was
an old fart. It seemed to happen in a matter of weeks—I knew that couldn't be so—as if I'd gone from being young to being middle-aged without passing through anything in between. All of a sudden at the store I was surrounded by these rollicking young creatures who were the sales staff. I'd see the girls cracking each other up over some customer's foolish outfit, I'd see the boys doing chin-ups on the stockroom door frames.

They were so wrapped up in themselves, in the usual ways. There was one girl—very lively, very pretty—who was always spitting mad or strung out over her boyfriend, and I'd watch her with fond amazement. “Never mind,” I'd tell her. “You think you'll even remember this bozo's name a year from now?”

“Bozo who?” she'd say. She had a friendly personality, when she didn't have a hangover. I had to explain a lot of the equipment to her; she had no patience but she was very smart. She hovered around me, using me like an uncle who knew the ropes.
You'll be fine,
I said to her about everything, and it seemed patently true. She was so brisk and leggy in her miniskirts, so electric and willful. When we went out for a drink after work, I thought, nothing is
going to stand in her way, and I was sorry that she seemed about to ask for my advice on getting her rotten boyfriend back. When Elisa put her hand on my knee, a thrill of surprise went through my whole body. Oh, ho, what's this? I thought. What's this? I was caught off guard, knocked out by good news, for once.

Oh, fuck
was what I said to Gabe, softly, when I came over to him in the waiting room. This was a stupid way to put it, but I seemed to need this style. The light went out of Gabe's face. We got our coats and made for the door. Everyone in the room stopped moving to look at us.

People around us in the elevator were upset by me, a wet-eyed person saying
fuck, fuck, fuck
. Gabe kept rubbing my back. The one thing I wanted to do was go home. I wouldn't talk until we were there. I felt unsafe on the street—noises jolted me and the rush of strangers coming at me was more than I could stand. It was my
body, of course, that I was afraid of, and I was still in it when we got home.

I
N THOSE FIRST
few weeks, Gabe looked like a sunken old man. He walked around with a distracted shuffle; from the back you would've thought he was maybe seventy-five. In the morning he'd go to the store and forget what he meant to buy. He'd come back with canned biscuit dough and fruit cocktail, things we never ate. At night he'd get into bed early, by nine or nine-thirty, and he'd lie on his back in his underwear listening to the radio.

I was the opposite—I couldn't stay still and I couldn't shut up. I talked in long sobbing outbursts and I argued with myself out loud about what I had to do. I kicked the stereo and broke it, I threw thick expensive art books down the hall. Everything I saw was an affront to me.

I woke Gabe in the morning talking. I seemed to always have more to say. He'd put his arms around me and I'd keep talking into his shoulder. When he got up from the bed to go to the bathroom, I complained he wasn't paying attention. I was hard on him. I made my own grief vulgar. What did I care, it didn't matter.

I wasn't going to tell my friends but then I was on the phone with one after another, telling them. Some of them
were wonderful and some weren't, but afterward I was sorry I had told anyone. I should have waited (I said this to Gabe), but I was in a hurry. Not a minute to spare. At night I dreamed I was on fire and had only just noticed; I was running into a lake but the lake was on fire.

Gabe acted as if we had all the time in the world. Every day he was more slowed down. He would tell me to “hold on” or “cool it” or “take a break here.” He shook his head at me and sighed.

One morning I woke up at dawn, feeling weepy and sorry for myself. I thought about whether this was the last room I was going to live in, and the idea made me shake under the covers.
This can't go on,
I thought, meaning the horror, and then (Gabe was sleeping next to me with his hand tucked under his head) it did lift, for a second, and I had a glimpse of what it would be like to get used to this.

T
HERE WAS NO
question of our having sex those first days. I was too jacked up to pause long enough to fuck and Gabe was doddering around half gone. We gripped each other's hands or we held each other for minutes at a time, which I liked, and we would kiss lightly, like preteens on a date. If Gabe was fearful around my body (as he well might have been), he did a good job
of not showing it. In the meantime we waited for his test results.

On one of his meandering shopping trips before breakfast, he came back with a box of condoms. When he set it on the night table next to his books, he said, “Maybe they'll give us a discount if we stock up by the case.” I took this for what it was, an elegant gesture. No one had better manners than Gabe.

On Mondays the gallery where I worked was closed, and I stayed home in the apartment and napped all day. I was alone in bed, sunk in the envelope of sheets. I had a dream of a beach, of lying on the sand with someone who was probably my high school boyfriend. We were making love and had to stop when people walked by; we kept pausing and starting again. I awoke still in the heat of the dream, and before it faded my hand was between my legs. This was making me quite happy, until I woke up further and remembered that all the moistures of my body were not simple anymore, that my leaking female self was slick with danger. I had always been pretty blithe about myself sexually, ready to unveil my vital parts to anyone I lusted for without much modest forethought. Now it made me weep to touch myself.

W
HEN
I
WAS
calling people on the phone to tell them the news, I had many cheery technical conversations. Everybody in the whole goddamned world that I spoke to that week told me how amazing and miraculous the antiviral drugs were now, not like the old days. People who couldn't spell ibuprofen were all of sudden full of information about how protease inhibitors in combination therapies made T-cell counts go up and viral loads go down. Sometimes. Maybe. They didn't work on everyone. No one knew how long they worked for. Over time they could have a lot of toxic side effects. But people were full of uplifting advice and merry stories of people who weren't dead yet.

Even Fiona, my least sentimental friend, tried to convince me that I was lucky it was now and not five years ago. “Please be hopeful,” she said. I was, actually. I was in anguish and hopeful too, like a person who has taken an up and a down both at once, a thing I sometimes did in my recreational drug days. The hope and the mortal dread hit me at alternating times, and I was never exactly straight now.

I
HAD NOT
told my mother yet—I was planning to wait as long as possible on that one. She was going to fall into a few dozen pieces when she heard, and this
wasn't the best time for me to have to hold her up until she pulled herself together (a thing she'd do eventually). My mother is better than a lot of mothers—she was never mean or cutting like some, or flaky and childish like some others—but my father's stupid behavior and the high stress of coping with me took most of the wind out of her sails. A high school friend once said my mother was
wet
(meaning limp and transparently incompetent) and I got angry but I laughed because I knew it was true.

And when she called me now, she still babbled on happily about the wedding. She was getting more excited by the day. For me, the wedding had vanished since the diagnosis. It seemed out of the question, wildly inappropriate. All that fluffy sweetness: not for us.

When Gabe tried to bring up the subject, I waved him away (“Not
now,
” I said, or, “Do I have to deal with
that
too?”). With my mother, I resorted to inventing material obstacles—the church might not be ready, its ceiling had developed big cracks where the rain came in, we could wait till summer. It was true about the church's ceiling, but services went on every Sunday under a sheet of plastic tacked across the beams. This was New York.

“You have to have it there?” my mother said. She had never liked the idea of our picking a church instead of a synagogue, although she had been a good sport about it.

“Yes,” I said. “We have to have it there.”

“You cover any room with flowers and it'll look very beautiful and festive, you know.”

She seemed silly, my mother, but it wasn't her fault.

“Is it Gabe?” she said. “Gabe is the one who likes that church?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I see,” my mother said. “I'm sorry, sweetie. They get cold feet but it doesn't mean anything.”

My father had gotten cold feet in a meaningful way fifteen years into their marriage, but I let her sound wise if she wanted to. She was all wrong about Gabe. Gabe was very set on the marriage. Once he was stuck on something, he didn't get off it. If anything, he was more resolute now, as far as I could tell. It hurt his feelings when I wouldn't talk about getting married anymore.

I couldn't picture myself in some Reddi-wip swirl of a dress, eagerly asking the world to wish me well. The wedding concept—the whole frilled, teary spectacle of high emotion—had gotten very nauseating to my way of thinking. Too much wallowing, too much carrying on.

“Doll-face,” my mother said. “Be patient. Just because things are hard now doesn't mean they won't get better.” I could see her at the maple dinette table as she said this, with her frazzled, half-dyed hair and her brave red lip gloss.

“Spare me the proverbs,” I said.

“Excuse me for living,” my mother said. (We both regressed in this conversation.) Anything she said had a little irony in it, because of her not knowing.

I
WAS RESTLESS
all the time and I didn't like it when there was no one around to talk to. At work, in the white, track-lit space of the gallery, I made phone calls to Gabe when there was nothing to do. “Just checking in,” I'd say. I called him a few times a day. He'd say, “What's up, girl?” and tell me some stupid joke one of the other salesmen had told him. I've never really liked stupid jokes, and I laughed anyway. But the strain of these conversations started to wear on him—he was not really a phone person—and once he lost a sale he was in the middle of because someone thought I was an urgent call.

“I have a job,” Gabe said. “Remember?”

“Oh, that,” I said.

“If money grew on trees, I wouldn't work,” he said. “Unfortunately it's something we're going to need.”

I hadn't been to see a doctor yet. I was taking one thing at a time. The insurance I had from work was one of those mean-spirited HMOs, minimal and stingy, and whenever I got around to starting on any regimen of drugs, it was going to cost a fucking fortune and insurance
wasn't going to cover all of it. My own secret hope was that I might become a very successful painter before my medical expenses started to escalate. I wasn't ready to think clearly yet.

O
VER DINNER THAT
first week, I said that a wedding was going to cost too much money. “It's a one-time expense,” Gabe said.

“The whole thing is too much to deal with,” I said. This wasn't my usual tone, this whiny overwhelmed tone.

“We could just go to City Hall,” Gabe said. “There's no reason this has to be an elaborate production.”

“I hate City Hall.”

“When were you there?” Gabe said. “You were never even there.”

“I don't
want
to be some bride standing in a long line in a smelly hallway,” I said.

“A lot of people like City Hall,” Gabe said.

“Nobody likes it,” I said. “They're not there because they like it.”

Gabe shook his head. “Forget it,” he said. “I never mentioned it, okay?”

“A
RE YOU CRAZY
?” my friend Fiona said. “You're going to pick fights with Gabe
now
? What if he walks out? Where will you be then?”

“Use your brain,” Dawn said. “That's all she's saying.”

Usually Dawn was the one who encouraged me to be mouthy and difficult. In the days when I was with Jason, she was always telling me not to put up with his shit. Now I had become someone who couldn't afford to offend her protector.

They meant well, my friends. None of us had much experience with anything like this. The people we'd known with AIDS—Fiona's cousin Alan, who was dead, and our friend Bruce's friend Luis, who'd gone back to live with his parents—were all men. Sometimes now when I saw gay men on the street, I wanted to say,
I'm in on this too
.

It scared me when I got my period. I knew the blood, which was not just blood but shed tissue and mucus, was not likely to get into anyone else's bloodstream, but it showed red and lethal, and what was I supposed to do with my used and polluted tampons? I had to call a hot line to find out how to dispose of them. The woman was crisp and cheerful, I was embarrassed.

O
N A
F
RIDAY
Gabe went to the lab after work to get his test results. He went without me; I wasn't very keen on stepping inside that office again. When he came back to the apartment, I couldn't guess from his face which way it had gone. He was holding his mouth tight and his eyes weren't readable. “Well, what?” I said.