Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? (4 page)

Michael

I
couldn’t sleep. Just the
thought
of Lily needing a biopsy turned my world upside down. And she was right, of course. I am chicken.

Growing up, I did everything to prove I was a red-blooded American male. I played every sport, was on every varsity team and screwed every girl who’d let me. But my heart was never into it—women, that is, not sports. I was into baseball so obsessively, I could recite the batting average of every Yankee since the team was formed. I used to spend hours in a batting cage. I’d bat until I had to ice my shoulder when I got home.

I may have been macho on the outside, but inside I was chicken. The thought of admitting I was attracted to men terrified me. But the feeling was there, like a spider on the wall in the corner. Every once in a while, I’d shine a flashlight beam on that spider. Examine it. Then I’d turn off the flashlight, too afraid of whatever else was lurking there.

After I accepted, to myself, that I was gay, I was terrified of being outed.

And after I was finally outed, there was a new fear—AIDS. And it was Lily who made me shine the flashlight on that fear.

“Come on,” she said. She was standing in my apartment, circa 1989—back when I had an ugly black leather sofa that I used to stick to if I wore shorts when I sat on it, and LeRoy Neiman prints on my walls—tapping her foot in that impatient way of hers. The big ’80s hair was still big, though not near the heights it was when I’d first met her. Her pale blue eyes were cold—she wasn’t in the mood for my bullshit.

“Look, Lily, I’m not going. AIDS is a fucking death sentence, and if I have it, I don’t want to know.”

I plopped down on my leather couch and averted my eyes.

“Look, I left Tara with David, and I drove all the way here. We’re going.” She came closer to me and stood over the couch.

“Fuck off, Lily. I’m not going.”

When she saw how adamant I was, she sat down on the coffee table, her knees touching mine, and looked me in the eyes. “Why? Tell me why, Michael.”

My voice cracked. “We’ve been to four funerals in the last year. Four. Guys in their prime. Guys who looked like me—healthy, in great shape—who ended up walking cadavers before they ever made it into the casket. I can’t remember everyone I’ve slept with since I was sixteen. Can you?”

She nodded. “Actually, I can. But it doesn’t mean I know everyone that they were with. Look…I’m going to be right there to hold your hand, Michael. But you have a moral responsibility to get tested. You could be out there infecting people. And if you’re negative, don’t you want to know that, too?”

“No. God,” I snapped at her and stood up. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you fucking get it?”

“Get what?”

“You’re off playing house with Professor Perfect there. I’m here trying to live my life as a gay man in a straight man’s world. And I’m watching men I love—friends, lovers—getting picked off like this is some cosmic game of Russian roulette. There’s no cure. There’s no hope. So why bother, Lily? I don’t want to know.”

“Because if you’re sick, you could be making other people sick. Sooner or later, the dance has to stop, Michael. You can’t be out there screwing around and not caring about the consequences. What about the people who love you?”

“Sure. If I’ve got AIDS, are you really going to take me—” I inhaled and swallowed hard.

“Take you where?”

“Fuck it. Forget it.”

“No. Where?”

“Into your home? Let me sleep on your sheets and eat on your plates? Do you know that when Sammy went home to say goodbye to his family back in Ohio that they made him eat with plastic cutlery? They were afraid to mingle his stuff with theirs in the damn dishwasher. How’s that for saying goodbye?”

She looked down at the wedding ring on her hand and then stood up and hugged me. “If you’re sick, Michael, yes, I will take you into my home. You can sleep on my sheets and eat on my plates, and you can use my silverware and kiss my baby.”

It felt enormous, this thing she’d said, there between us. I started to cry and held onto her. I hadn’t been able to cry at a single funeral. I was too worried about whether I had the plague. Too self-involved. I can’t have AIDS, I told myself. But I was terrified. Now I cried and let it all out—the fear and the grief.

“Are you getting snot in my hair?”

“Maybe if you didn’t tease it so high I wouldn’t.”

She squeezed me harder. “Come on.”

“All right. I’ll go. I’ll get tested.”

We took a cab to a clinic near Christopher Street. The floors were a filthy gray-white, and the place smelled like rubbing alcohol. The plastic chairs in the waiting room were filled with gay men. Some of them already looked sick, and I suppose they were there hoping against hope that the lost weight, the lesions of Karposi’s sarcoma wasn’t HIV, wasn’t AIDS.

The nurse gave me a number. We were identified by number only—the shame and stigma was so great then, not to mention the danger of losing health insurance. I’d have to return in two weeks for my results—they wouldn’t give them to you over the telephone for fear you’d blow your brains out or jump out a window if you were positive. Both those options crossed my mind whenever I thought about maybe being positive.

They were the longest two weeks of my life. I couldn’t write. I sat at my computer and stared at the screen, the cursor mocking me, taunting me with its blinking.
Queer. Queer. Queer. Sick. Sick. Sick.

Lily was the one to take me back for my results. During that two-week period, I didn’t sleep with anyone. I was too afraid. Too afraid of dying.

We returned to the clinic. More dying men. Lily, of course, was dressed in high heels that clicked along the linoleum when they called my number. She held my hand tightly, both of our palms sweaty. I think I was numb. I barely remember it, as if the whole thing was a dream that happened, almost underwater, like an old Esther Williams’s musical.

We were escorted into a private room. “Your test came back negative for HIV.” The nurse said it quickly, not prolonging my agony.

I started crying. Lily started crying—actually, she gasped first and then her hand flew to her mouth and she cried silently with relief.

The nurse had compassionate eyes, warm and brown, and absolutely white hair. I guessed she was around sixty. I can’t imagine that she had, back in nursing school, pictured one day working in a gay men’s clinic.

“It’s okay.” She patted my hand. “People cry either way.”

Lily and I left the clinic and when we got outside to the sidewalk, we grabbed each other and jumped up and down.

“Let’s go get drunk,” I said. “I feel like celebrating.” It was as if someone had just handed me my entire life in a box with a ribbon on it.

What I’ve Learned
by Lily Waters

This last birthday was a Big One. I wish I could get away with saying it was thirty. I told most acquaintances it was thirty-five. But it was actually
that
Big One. I break out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.

What do I have to show for forty years on the planet?

For starters, I have credit card debt so deep I need a shovel to get through the bills each month. A house with a leaky roof. A dog that doesn’t come when I call it or sit when I tell it to. (The dog will, however, climb up on the kitchen table to eat out of my son’s cereal bowl in the morning.)

I have a closet full of size sixes I no longer fit in, and too many gray hairs to pluck—I’d be bald. I have a hint of crow’s-feet, and I spend more on one jar of my anti-wrinkle cream than I used to spend on groceries for an entire month back when I was a struggling reporter.

I have a minivan with nearly 100,000 miles on it, and my kids think I am the least-cool mother on the planet. Me! I was the rebel in high school. I was the girl everyone wanted to hang out with. Now, instead of wearing cute tops, braless, I wear enough underwire to set off the security alarm at the airport.

So would I go back in time and be twenty again?

Not on your life. If I did go back in time, I’d have to give up all this wisdom I’ve accumulated.

I’ve learned you really can count your best friends on one hand. They’re the ones you can call to nurse you through a broken heart at 2:00 a.m. By forty, you’ve more than likely held hands with them as you’ve collectively lost parents or watched a marriage circle the drain, or agonized over children heading down the wrong path, or a boss who seemed determined to make life a living hell. They’ve seen you with the flu and bad haircuts. You’ve attended funerals together and weddings. And second weddings. And even a few third weddings. They’ve learned to love you despite all your flaws because that’s what friendship means once you’ve aged a little bit.

I’ve learned that growing up means letting go. Suddenly it doesn’t seem worth it to carry that grudge against the woman who stole your boyfriend—she can have him! It also means letting go of the dream that somehow your parents will change and undo all the harm and pain they caused you when you were growing up. You must either accept them or feel forever bound and torn apart by the past.

I’ve learned that no matter how hard I try, I will never be the perfect mother, the perfect friend or the perfect lover. In turn, I’ve learned to stop demanding perfection from others.

I’ve learned a lot of other little things, too. Like eating yogurt one day past its expiration date won’t kill me, tanning just gives me wrinkles and freckles, and pizza can indeed be a breakfast food when I’m in a rush to get my kids to school on time. I’ve learned that lipstick is as indispensable as my eyelash curler, and that I really don’t need to use conditioner in my hair.

But most of all, I’ve learned that the reason I’m here is simply to love and be loved in return. All the rest of life…the ups and downs, the checks that bounce and the raise that doesn’t cover the cost of living, the messy teen’s room and the Magic Marker stain on the carpet, the Kool-Aid spilled on the couch and the bottle of $100-an-ounce perfume your son used to bathe the dog…none of it matters. Not in the face of love.

Sure, love-is-all-you-need sounds like an old Beatles tune. But it really does make life worth living. That’s what I’ve learned. And I wouldn’t trade my wisdom for turning back the clock.

Lily

“Y
ou do realize there’s a wire—a
wire
—protruding from my right breast, don’t you?” I looked up at Michael and then stared down at this thing—this thin wire, looking like the stuff the orthodontist once threaded through my braces—that was now threaded
into
my breast and sticking out about eight inches.

“Very weird-looking. Does it hurt?”

“Oddly enough, no.”

“And the reason for turning your breast into something that would set off the metal detectors at JFK is?”

“It pinpoints the lump exactly and guides the surgeon right to it.”

In the time since my mammogram, I’d gone to a breast surgeon who decided to remove the lump instead of just doing a needle biopsy. So now I was waiting for them to come and put me to sleep. When I woke up, I would either have cancer—or not.

“Promise me you won’t let them chop my breast off.”

“Dr. Costas told you that won’t happen.”

“Uh-huh. Look, I like him and everything, but I’ve read plenty of horror stories about doctors taking out the wrong kidney or chopping off the wrong leg.”

“Lily, Dr. Costas is one of the best surgeons on the East Coast.”

“I know. But maybe he’s a closet alcoholic.”

“It’s eight o’clock in the morning. Even you won’t drink a martini this early.”

“He could still be drunk from last night.”

“Does he seem drunk?”

“No.”

A very pretty nurse with short blond hair and a colorful blue and purple smock walked past. Michael caught her eye—easy for him to do since most women are rendered speechless by his good looks. “Excuse me…”

“Yes, sir?”

“Do you have a Valium or something you can give my friend? She’s working herself into a frenzy.”

“I don’t want a Valium,” I snapped at him. “I want to wake up with both my breasts!”

The nurse approached my gurney, which was in a little curtained alcove. “Would you like something to calm you down? You’ll be going into surgery in about a half hour.”

“Well…maybe. A martini?”

She laughed, revealing two deep dimples in her cheeks. She glanced at Michael and then down at me. “Um…no martini, but I can give you something to make you sleepy.”

“She’ll take it,” Michael said insistently.

The nurse disappeared and returned with a syringe. I already had an I.V. She uncapped the needle and inserted it into the I.V. line. Within a minute, I was seeing double.

Michael thanked the nurse and then stroked my forehead. “We’ve been through a lot together.”

“Don’t go getting all mushy on me,” I whispered sleepily.

“I’m not. I’m stating a fact.”

“Yeah. Remember that boyfriend I had who stole my underwear?”

He laughed. “Remember the time I tried to add highlights to my hair? The Duran Duran look?”

“Not pretty. Only a best friend would stand by you after that.”

I shut my eyes for a second and felt myself drifting off. Michael’s hand on my forehead connected me to reality even as I floated toward dreamland.

“Push!” Michael screamed at me from somewhere in my memories. I glared at him. He had a cool compress on my head and kept trying to stroke my forehead to relax me.

“Stop fucking touching me!”

“Push, Lily.”

It had been seven years since I gave birth to Tara, and now Noah was being born in the middle of a snowstorm while my poor husband, David, was stranded in Manhattan, with no trains operating out to the ’burbs.

“Come on, Lily,” Michael pleaded with me. “Push!”

“How many fucking kids have
you
pushed out?” The pain was searing, starting in my back, and I felt like I was literally splitting in two.

“Breathe!”

The doctor between my legs said, “Concentrate, Lily.”

I glared at her, too. “I can’t.” Suddenly, this wave of exhaustion took over the pain, and I collapsed back against the pillows. I could hear the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor and a steady
beep-beep
of machines. I had my relaxation tape on. Fuck Lamaze. I mean, I love a little Wyndham Hill and jazz as much as the next person, but piano music and a pan flute aren’t going to transport me to my fucking happy place.

Dr. Gorman looked at Michael. “She needs to push with each contraction now. The baby’s head is right here. I see a head of black hair.”

Michael leaned up close to me, his voice in my ear. “You can do this, Lily. You’ve done everything you’ve ever put your mind to, gotten every job you wanted, every assignment. You can get this baby out of you. Find your inner bitch and push.”

“Get—the—fuck—away—from—me!” I grunted as another contraction came. They were in waves now overtaking me time and again until I felt like I was drowning in pain. But his pep talk made me lean up on my elbows a bit and push.

“Atta girl!”

“Don’t ‘atta girl’ me!”

Another contraction. Michael pulled on my left thigh and a nurse on my right.

“I’m not a wishbone,” I shrieked.

“Quiet, Lily,” Dr. Gorman snapped. “Concentrate.”

So I did. I thought of how desperately I wanted to hold this baby. I was tired of practically needing a forklift to climb out of bed. Tired of not being able to see my feet or tie my sneakers. I wanted a baby to snuggle.

“A few more pushes,” Dr. Gorman said excitedly.

“Come on, Lily,” Michael urged.

And then with a burst of energy from Lord knows where—maybe the thought of getting to have my favorite martinis again and fit into my old jeans—the baby’s head popped out, then a shoulder and…Dr.Gorman plopped him on my chest.

“It’s a boy!”

I started crying. Michael started crying. I counted ten fingers. I counted ten toes. He was covered in sticky whiteness and had blood on his face, but he was here. My angel, Noah.

Michael stroked my forehead. “I knew you could do it.”

“I guess I did, too. What was I supposed to do, leave him halfway in and halfway out?” I laughed.

He kissed my forehead. “You made a life.”

Michael cut the cord, and the baby was taken to the nursery. I was exhausted. The doctor gave me a shot of Demerol for the pain—I’d had a pretty major episiotomy. In a few minutes, drowsiness took over. Michael stroked my forehead and pushed my hair, which was matted to my cheeks from the sweat and pushing of labor, off my face. I felt his fingers, connecting me to reality, even as I floated away to dream of Noah.

After I came to, maybe three hours later, my surgeon appeared looking grim-faced. Apparently, he hadn’t liked what he’d sliced from my breast. I wanted to accuse him of being drunk on the job, but I didn’t. I just shut my eyes when he was done talking to me and pretended I was still out of it from the anesthesia. I didn’t want to talk to Michael. I didn’t want to talk to Ellie, who had taken a half day from her job as a graphic artist and come to the hospital to sit with Michael and wait. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. So I shut my eyes and tried to go someplace serene.

Despite what the radiologist at the women’s center said, she was full of shit. Three weeks later, I could safely say it
wasn’t
the not knowing that was the worst of it. It was the knowing. I had cancer. Suddenly I had an oncologist named Dr. Morris. And my column was completely wrecked. I went from writing about kneading dough in a mammogram to writing about mortality.

I still tried to be funny. With the doctors and nurses. With the guy who had come to suck the last pint of blood I had out of my arm for tests and more tests. With the insurance company even. I made them all laugh to show them that I wasn’t afraid.

But, of course, I was.

They just didn’t have to know that.

No one did.

A week or so after my surgery I had to go for an oncology consult. Dr.Morris wanted to discuss the lymph node biopsies, the whole thing. I knew I had cancer. Just not how bad. But Dr. Morris told me. I knew it wasn’t good, just from the way his large mitt of a hand enveloped mine. I noticed his gold wedding band was scratched and worn. I noticed the hair on his hands was pale blond mixed with gray. His watch was a Bulova, and it had the date in a little square where the three should have been and a burgundy alligator-skin wristband. I observed all this as he patted the top of my hand and then settled his to rest on mine. Dr. Morris seemed like the kind of guy who only holds hands when he has bad news. It was a dead giveaway.

“Look, Doc, we must stop meeting this way.” A clock on his bookshelf went
tick, tick, tick
in the silence as he looked at me.

“Lily…” his blue-gray eyes watered just enough for me to notice. Then he cleared his throat. “It’s an aggressive cancer.”

My breath still left me, and I had to remind myself to inhale. Breathe, Lily, breathe. I felt like I had a case of the bed spins, my world twirling around me, confirming what I sensed. What I’d dreamed about at night since the surgery. Monsters and serial killers chasing me. Just like the cancer. Finding me no matter where I hid. I think I knew it even as they were scanning my body, and the faint hum of hospital machinery whispered around me, but I still blinked and stared at him. I still stopped breathing.

“Fuck.” I exhaled unevenly. “What the hell am I going to tell my kids?” I heard the catch of self-pity in my voice and looked out the window at the expanse of parking lot behind the hospital.

“You’ve made every one of my nurses laugh today. You’ve made Dr. Costas laugh. He told me how special you are…. You’ve got to keep a positive attitude.”

“Easy for you to say, Doc. You don’t have the Big C. And no offense, but you have no hair—and I am rather fond of mine and it’s all going to go bye-bye.”

He patted the top of his head. “Bald can be beautiful.”

“Look at me. Do I look like the kind of woman who has cancer? I look perfectly healthy. I feel like…like I’m sleepwalking.” I paused. I had been telling myself that it would be all right. That it would be “good cancer”—whatever that is—less aggressive.

“This really…is inconvenient.”

He gave me a half smile. “I don’t guess there’s ever a convenient time to get cancer.”

“Well, I’ll look in my calendar and pencil it in when I’m really old and decrepit. This just—God, it sucks.”

“I wrestle with that in this job every day. People ask me how I can deal with cancer day in and day out. But honestly, it’s patients like you that make it bearable. You have a fighter’s attitude. But I don’t pretend to understand God’s plan.”

“How bad is it? How aggressive?”

“It’s in your lymph nodes. We have to schedule a body scan to see if it’s spread anywhere else. The lumpectomy got the cancer—but the edges weren’t well-defined. We biopsied lymph nodes under your armpit…um…it’s pretty bad. I have this report and we’re going to go over all of it. I don’t like my patients kept in the dark. I’d rather you know what you’re looking at so you can fight.”

“So we’re gearing up for a battle?”

“No. I won’t lie to you. It’s a war. But I’m up for it if you are.”

“This really means bye-bye hair.”

He nodded.

“I could go for a platinum wig. Or hot pink.”

“Hot pink would be flattering.”

“Am I going to die?”

“No predictions. I don’t believe in breaking things down into statistics. Wouldn’t you rather be the one who defies the statistics?”

“Sure. But the losing-hair thing sucks.”

“You don’t have to shave your legs then. Have to look at the bright side.”

“When I’m boyfriendless I never shave them much anyway. But I see where you’re going with that.”

We talked some more, talked about chemo and radiation. But mostly it was more hand-holding. More consoling. More jokes.

I left his office and went and sat in my van and tried to cry. The c-word. Aggressive.

But I was too stunned to cry.

When I got to my sleepy little town up the Hudson River from Manhattan, I smelled a first snow—super early that year—in the air and found my senses alive in ways only those who are sick can understand. I drove home from the train station and stood in front of my Cape Cod house, shingled in white with royal blue shutters, looking at the huge jack-’o-lantern with a candle inside reflecting an orange glow out onto the street.

Michael, of course, was in the kitchen when I walked in, cooking. He’s the reason Tara and Noah eat anything of nutritional value. I had tried to cook scrambled eggs for Noah the day before and had burned them terribly. They were brown and yellow with this sort of brown-black skin clinging to the top of them. Noah had looked at me with his baleful brown eyes and asked, “What’s wrong with my eggs, Mom?”

“They’re suntanned. Eat them. Trust me, they’re better that way.” He was not convinced.

I pulled off my boots, silently thanking God for Michael. The sounds of opera echoed through the house. Michael was playing a Boccelli CD as he prepared, from the looks of the pans when I went in the kitchen, enough food to feed all the citizens of New York City and still have doggie bags left over. But that’s Michael. Always big, big, big. He cooks the way his heart is, generous and full. He wants to stuff you with his love. The fact that he never gains an ounce totally makes me despise him, but he is my best friend, so I allow him this one small failing.

“What’s for supper?” I asked, taking off my black peacoat and my new favorite scarf, an Hermés that Michael had bought me. He had been beyond supportive since the surgery, and I think the scarf was in anticipation for what was next. Music filled the kitchen. Boccelli’s a man Michael and I both agree on.

“Mom!” Noah’s face lit up as I entered my least favorite room in the house. “Uncle Michael’s teaching me to make…what is it again?”

“Pâte brisée, for starters, and linguine with white clam sauce à la Angelo.”

“Sounds heavenly,” I murmured. “Where’s Tara?”

“Where else?” Noah said, sitting on the counter so he could see what Michael was simmering in the saucepan.

“Justin’s?”

Noah rolled his eyes as he did every time Tara swooned over a phone call from her new—actually, first—boyfriend. “Mom’s a genius,” Noah giggled.

“And don’t you forget it, Champ.” I smiled, pinching his cheek.