Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? (13 page)

“He’s gay.”

“Now
that’s
a newsflash. Is he really?”

“The sarcasm again. I hate it!” He leaned forward and propped his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands. “This is not fair. You’re hitting me with too much at once.”

“What’s not fair is that I won’t be around to watch Tara graduate from high school or to dance at Noah’s wedding. What’s not fair, you self-centered bastard, is I have so little faith in you that I can’t imagine them coming to live with you and Lizzie. That’s what’s not fair. They didn’t even get a birth announcement when their half brother was born. They didn’t even know Lizzie was pregnant. But then again, they’re not thirty-seventh in line for the throne.”

“That’s not fair, and you know it.”

“Cut the crap with the fair angle, David. Life isn’t fair. Death isn’t fair. It’s not a level playing field.”

Our salads arrived, along with my second drink. We immediately ordered another round.

“Fine. You know, it might be okay for Tara, I mean she’ll be off to college in a couple of years anyway. But do you really think I can stand by and watch my son be raised by a faggot?”

My fork was raised. His hand was on the table. I could have reached over and impaled him.

“Better than a deadbeat, David.”

“So what are these papers?”

“You waive your parental rights. The child support stops now. End of story. When they’re each eighteen, if they’re so inclined, they can look you up. You can keep in touch, if you want. But Michael becomes their legal guardian.” I pressed the papers down onto the crisp white tablecloth. They lay halfway between the two of us, in no-man’s-land.

“What would people think, Lily? A man giving up his children? It’s just not done.”

“And so you’d have them come here to live with you and Lizzie and baby royal?”

“No. They can stay in America with Michael. But I don’t want to sign any formal papers.”

“I can’t risk that you’ll have a fit of guilt after I die and change your mind. You have to sign them.”

“Let me have the papers, and I’ll think it over. Have my attorney look at them. You’re asking me to say I don’t love my own children. That they’re not mine.”

“I’m not.” I felt tears and rubbed at my eyes, smearing my pathetic little lashes. “I’m asking you to love them enough to know they don’t have a place in your world anymore, but they do have a place with Michael.”

I pushed the papers across the table, closer to him. They were thick and folded in thirds.

“Sign them, David. If you really do love them, sign them.”

He looked at me across the table. “I can’t. I may not be a perfect father, but I am their father, and I can’t sign away that right.”

My next martini arrived. I wished to be held by Pete. I wanted to talk to Michael. I sipped and thought of my next move. Tara’s and my plane left the next day. This was my only chance. He looked so sincere. I was asking him to do the unthinkable. But I pushed that down.

I remembered the night he came to the hospital after Noah was born. “I need to tell you that when you come home from the hospital, I won’t be there.” He confessed that the snowstorm he was stranded in had just given him another night with Lizzie. It had been going on the entire time I was pregnant.
No, crying won’t change things. I’m not in love with you anymore. No, the baby doesn’t change anything. No. No. No.
I remembered this as I brought out my final weapon. My last chance.

“Does Lizzie know we slept together in New York? After you two were married?”

“You wouldn’t, Lily. You wouldn’t.” His voice registered horror.

He had flown to Manhattan five years ago to do a guest lecture and asked me to meet him. He was just in town for a night before he headed on to Denver to visit with a colleague. I brought along Tara’s latest report card and some recent snapshots. I was between boyfriends, and part of me never got over not saying goodbye. That he had left without closure—whatever that was. Lawyers had handled it all, and I never felt like I had properly shut the door on the man I once loved, even if I came to understand that I loved an image. A smart deceiver masquerading as a husband.

We drank wine. Lots of it. And before I knew it, we were having a nightcap in his room. When he leaned over to kiss me, to say he was sorry for the hurt he’d caused, and I felt the lips of my children’s father on my neck, I had a night of insanity. We’d made love, but for me it was a goodbye fuck. A last time to put it all to rest. It wasn’t that I forgot the hurt and anger and rage, it was just that, for a night, I felt that slip away and in its place came a bittersweet farewell. After he fell asleep, I looked at him in the half dark. The bathroom light was on, casting half his face in light, half in shadow. That was David. Half a creature of decency, the man I fell in love with, half a man consumed by his own need to be adored. I didn’t adore him enough. I was too caustic, too sarcastic, too much a writer with a fresh mouth and a ready one-liner. I kissed him on the cheek and said goodbye on my terms and never looked back. It took me a month to tell Michael I had done something so stupid.

Now, here in London, the night that perhaps for him had been a bittersweet goodbye as well was going to cost him his children.

“Lily…that night was just—I don’t know, a way of ending what was between us in the right way. I felt bad about what I had done. In the hospital…while you were pregnant. I didn’t intend for us to be together that night.” Panic edged his voice.

“Does she know?” I asked evenly.

He leaned back, staring at me in disbelief as the waiter cleared our salads and brought our dinner. He made no move to touch his steak. His face, his strong, broad cheekbones, were deathly pale. Like me without my layer of makeup.

“They’re my children, too. This is blackmail, Lily. You can’t do this. Not this way. Let me think about it.”

I looked at the papers on the table between us. “Sign them.”

“No.”

“Fine.” I pulled my cell phone from my purse.

“What does that mean? You don’t have the balls to call Lizzie. You don’t.”

“I don’t have the time to wait for you to sign them. I don’t have time to waste, David. Time is what I do not have, and you’re asking me for time. Now I’m
telling
you I will do whatever it takes to make sure my children are cared for after I am gone. Lizzie will not raise them. Lizzie and her uppercrust family will have nothing to do with Noah and Tara. Yesterday with Tara was a failure. You saw that. She and Lizzie can’t even share a meal together. I will not waste five minutes hesitating. I will call her. I don’t have a choice.”

“This is evil, Lily. What you’re doing is evil.”

I shrugged. “Sometimes evil is born of necessity.”

I ate my soup in silence. He didn’t touch his food. After a while, he lifted the papers and began reading them. I bent my head over my soup, occasionally glancing at him. He rubbed his eyes with his right hand. Tears. I calmly ate my soup, forcing myself to think of Christmas. No card. No presents. Noah’s fifth birthday. When the child support check came that month there was an extra twenty-five dollars and a note in the memo portion of the check, in David’s handwriting, “Happy Birthday Noah.” Tears could not move me. Not today. I didn’t have time.

His steak lay untouched as he stood. “I can’t. I have to go see Noah. If I lose Lizzie, I lose her. But I don’t think I will.”

I had a sinking feeling. He was so certain he wouldn’t lose her just as my real self told me I couldn’t call Child Bride. Our night together to say goodbye would remain our secret. Maybe it was because I once loved him. I was defeated.

“How long do you have?”

“Months, maybe. Maybe a year.”

“Will Michael keep in touch with me?”

“That’s up to you. You call. He’ll talk to you. You can call the kids.”

“That night meant something to me. I do have regrets, Lily. I loved you very much at one time.”

I looked down at my plate. “Me, too. You’re part of my children.”

“What do I owe you for dinner?”

“Nothing.”

“Just my children, right?” He stood and threw his napkin down.

“No. Just take the papers and think about it,” I whispered. “I won’t call her. I think you know me better than I thought you did.”

“The Lily I knew wouldn’t hurt Lizzie. She was really young when I met her. I shouldn’t have gotten involved with her. And I didn’t tell her I was married. It’s me you’re mad at.”

He leaned down and kissed me familiarly on the cheek, stood, turned and left, never looking back, his pace quickening as he got to the door of the restaurant. He stepped out and was gone into the grayish London night.

Michael

P
ete was good for Lily. And he and I worried together while she was gone. Lily’s oncologist was furious because the trip could literally threaten Lily’s life. But arguing with her was futile. I let her go, helped out with picking Noah up from school and spent more time with George.

“I could get used to this.” He smiled at me Saturday night, as I sat at the end of the bar waiting for him to finish in the kitchen. His manager was going to close that night. Then we drove to my place and parked on the street.

“I rented
Philadelphia Story
,” I told him as we walked to my apartment. The air was typical New York spring, couldn’t decide whether to be cold and miserable or warm…so it was a cross between the two, warm, with chilly breezes.

In my apartment, I poured two glasses of merlot and set up the VCR. George looked at the photos on my desk and on the bookshelves. He did that every time he came over. I wondered if it was a nervous habit.

“When can I meet Lily’s kids?” he asked.

“Soon,” I said. “I thought maybe we could all try to go to a Yankee game.”

“Sounds great,” he said, but he looked away.

“What?” I sat down on the couch.

“I don’t feel like I really belong. You have this family life, sort of. It’s strange, don’t you think?”

I didn’t think so. Maybe I used to, but I stopped trying to classify love.

“No,” I said flatly.

“I don’t mean it in a bad way.”

“Yes, you do. Like what is a queer doing with a straight woman and a pair of kids?”

“No…I guess I just wonder where I fit in.”

“Same place you have since I met you. You said yourself when we started that you’re married to your job.”

He paced nervously back and forth. We both knew we were about to have our first fight. That’s a test, isn’t it? The first fight, the first make-up session, the first time one of you cheats or does something low. The first time you meet each other’s parents. That would be rich. My mother would shriek, and my father wouldn’t come out of the basement.

“I’m not. I am in a way, but I have time for you. I make time for you.”

“Look, let’s not make this a big deal. I have a hard enough time being in a relationship without a lot of strings and whining attached.”

“I’m not whining,” he whined.

“You are.”

“Maybe I’d better go home. I’m tired from work. I shouldn’t have said anything.” He put on his jacket again. His face was pale. It made me want to hold him.

“Look, George, I’ve known Lily since we were in our twenties. I’m not running out on her or those kids now, just because I happened to have fallen in love.”

As soon as I said it, you could have heard a pin drop in my apartment. I had blurted it out. Had I meant it? I felt feverish suddenly, like my face was flushed. Never, never, never give the other person in a new relationship the upper hand. What the fuck had I just done? Could I take it back? Did I want to? I slugged back my glass of merlot and poured another.

“I love you, too,” he said and looked at the ground. Even playing field. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Well…” I smiled. I shook my head, well…What do you say now? I stretched and got up from the couch.

I pulled him in my arms and kissed the top of his head. Next thing I knew we were in the bedroom. He was such a vulnerable lover. Maybe that was why I felt my stomach lurch each time we had sex.

He fell asleep before I did. I loved him. What do you know? It was like trying a new pair of five hundred dollar loafers on for size. Five hundred dollar loafers are a hell of a commitment. You have to try them on, walk around, see how they fit. But they do fit. They feel comfortable right away. But are they practical? George and I were completely impractical right now. And I loved him.

I slipped out of bed and went into the living room. I hadn’t heard from Lily. I looked at my watch. It would be 8:30 in the morning in London. I called the St.Regis and they patched me through to her room.

“Hello-o-o-o?” Her voice was dry and groggy.

“Lily? It’s Michael. What’s going on?”

“I can’t talk. Tara spent the day with him yesterday, and it didn’t go well. I’ll tell you more when I come home.”

“What did he say about the kids?”

“We had dinner alone. He’s such a fucking coward. When he saw me in my scarf…out of breath…he started welling up. Said it was too hard to see me this way. Like this is about
him
after all this goddamn time. And he didn’t sign. He wants to come see Noah first. Seems he’d be willing to let Tara stay in New York, but…Noah’s a different story. He’s such a Spawn.”

“I love George.”

“What?”

“I love him. I told him tonight.”

“Oh my God!” she squealed.

We shifted gears instantly. Real friendship is like the tides. It ebbs and flows, it fills the little trenches we build in our hearts. It finds our holes and fills them, then it seeps down deep. It washes up starfish and shells and magical things that we get excited about, like pieces of sea glass. And it washes up seaweed and man-o’-war and ugly things we’d rather have stay in the sea. It cleanses, and it goes on forever.

“I know,” I whispered. “I feel like a kid. I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt this way.”

“It’s about time you grew up.”

“We had a fight tonight.”

“About what?”

“About the kids. You. He wonders where he fits in.”

“I can’t blame him.”

“I don’t have an answer for him, though. It’s like I have two halves of myself. The you half and the him half. Only it’s not fifty-fifty. He gets less of me. But that’s just how it is.”

“Michael, if I didn’t have cancer, and I didn’t have Peter, it would be me with this problem, not you. It’s figuring out how to carve up a life and share it. You’ll work it out.”

“That Pete’s a good guy. He called twice to check on the kids.”

“He is a great guy. Listen, I don’t want to talk right now. I want Tara to sleep in. Then we’re going to go on a double-decker bus. We’re leaving this afternoon. Wish me a safe flight.”

“Pete will see you at the airport.”

I hung up the phone and thought about Lily and Spawn. What he didn’t realize, what he couldn’t know, is that when it came to their kids,
her
kids, she would kill. If she had to drown him and sink him in the Thames with weights on his ankles, she would. I almost felt bad for the guy. Sooner or later, he’d sign. But my sympathy was fleeting. Very fleeting.

I stood up and looked out the window. Ellie was with Noah. The view from my apartment was lousy. Mostly I could see the street below. There’s a bar down on the corner so even at three-thirty in the morning, it was sort of busy. There was a night Michael and a day Michael, a drive Noah to school Michael and a lover Michael. A Michael for my lover and one for Lily. I just hoped my head and heart were big enough for both of me.