I Loved You More (51 page)

10:30 that night. I lay the three yellow antidepressant pills in a pile on the kitchen counter alongside the one green Klonopin and the white trazodone. All my searching for an answer, for meaning to it all, has come down to this. Life and death in a pile of pills.

I stare at those three little yellow pills for a long long time. I won't let myself think about it. What will happen if this antidepressant doesn't work.

The glass with the yellow balloons, I fill it up with tap water. I hold the pills in my hand. That moment.

AN HOUR LATER
maybe, I'm sitting on the couch in front of the fire, a blanket over me, my head resting on a pillow. I don't need the TV or music. In those moments, just the fire and being alive is all that matters. The phone rings and it's Ruth.

“I just wanted you to know,” Ruth says, “that it was only today in Dr. Roth's office that I realized something.”

Ruth clears her throat. She's crying but so I can't hear.

“That whole time we were together,” Ruth says, “there was a part of me that thought – the depression, the anxiety – that you were just making it all up.”

It's at that moment, or soon after, I drop the phone and fall asleep. A deep sleep I don't wake up from 'til ten hours later.

      
Book Three

Hank & Ruth

      
19.

The spiderweb

LOOK AT HIM. BEN GRUNEWALD SPRAWLED OUT ON HIS
couch, in front of the fireplace, sleeping like a baby. When he wakes, it will be a new world.

The AIDS cocktail. It doesn't feel like it, but the AIDS cocktail, with some adjustments, is working. Men are starting to live and not just die.

Plus now Ben has an antidepressant that works.

Well,
works
isn't quite the right word, and we'll talk about that later, but now, I mean just look at him. At least he's sleeping. And a couple years down the line, Viagra will come along. There's so much hope in a hard-on.

All he'll need to do is take his meds, eat right, exercise, and keep a good attitude. A good attitude. Like the famous guy who, when he was told he had cancer, locked himself up in a room, watched a shitload of funny movies and laughed so hard he cured himself.

Or Shirley MacLaine when she won the Academy Award. How she made such a rousing speech: if you really and truly want something with all your heart and soul you can make it come true.

And Shirley was absolutely right. You want proof, it's right there on your TV. She's the bitch on the stage holding the golden statue.

A good attitude. That's the secret. With a good attitude there's nothing that can stop you. Fucking people can be so stupid. Still I'd give my left nut that it were true.

That this story would have a happy ending.

DECEMBER 24, 1999.
Hank Christian is flying into Portland, Oregon. It's Hank's forty-first birthday. Hank and Jesus Christ. Maybe that's how Jesus got his middle initial.

Jesus Hank Christ.

SO MUCH HAS
happened in the last four months I don't know where to start. I'm teaching my class again. Alone. And so far the class is full. I run out of energy all the time but
arbeit macht frei
. I'm taking a yoga class twice a week. Hot Yoga. Sometimes I think I'm going to melt in there. My viral load is way down and I have 148 T-cells. Sleeping eight hours. I'm back up to 176 pounds. The way the weight's coming back on my body, though, is totally fucked. I still have no ass, and my legs and arms are skinny, which leaves my belly. The AIDS belly.

Oh, and I'm developing a pendulous left tit. Somehow the AIDS meds fuck with your DNA and so you start developing breasts. Or rather one breast. The doctors don't call my left tit pendulous, though. They don't even mention the area or that the area is under my left nipple. They just call it the fatty tissue deposit.

The day I went in to have my fatty tissue deposit checked out, it was at the same hospital where I was treated for AIDS. A sprawling piece of architecture that looks like an old yellow brick university campus that huge space-age sculptures of steel and glass have suddenly erupted out of.

When I finally found the clinic, the word above the desk was
Mammography
.

I've been to a lot of clinics at this hospital. The otologist who checked out my tinnitus. The optometrist who checked out my CMV. The specialist who checked out my positive test for tuberculosis. The neuropathic doctor. The gastroenterologist for the colonoscopy. The dietician. And a shitload more ologists I can't even tell you. All the clinics had spacious waiting areas,
with big windows, plenty of natural light. I never had to wait longer than twenty minutes.

This clinic,
Mammography
, the clinic that deals almost exclusively with women was the worst. Well, not the worst.
Mental Health
was the worst.

In the
Mammography
waiting room it wasn't pretty. Fifty women were jammed into a small room. No windows. Crying children. All the women looked stressed-out, hollow-eyed, and going through it.

Maybe it was just the day, but sitting in the
Mammography
waiting room, it was so clear to me that women really are treated different.

The woman I sat next to, middle aged with dyed-black hair, designer labels, and Gucci glasses, brought her own magazines to read.
Vogue, Wallpaper
. Her Chanel No. 5 could not conceal her fear.

My appointment was at one o'clock and at three-thirty they still hadn't called my name. I hadn't brought my sardines. I asked the nurse for something to eat and she gave me a saltine cracker.

Finally, in a small square bright room with two doctors, men, I took my shirt off. One was an older guy, five or six comb-over strands, thick glasses. Full of language I couldn't understand. The younger doctor had thick black hair. I remember the hair because of the bright room and the white.

Without warning, no local anesthesia, no Valium, nothing. The black-haired doctor stuck a long needle two or three inches just under my nipple. The pain was so sharp and instant I couldn't speak. When the doctor pulled on the syringe, it felt like my heart was coming out through the needle. That's when I started cussing.

Then I sat in that white room alone for over an hour with the door closed, holding my tit, fucking staring at a fucking bright white fucking wall wondering if I was the one fucking man
in the world with fucking breast cancer, when finally a nurse came in with the test results on her clip board.

“Benign tumor,” she said, “Mr. Greenblatt. Good news.”

That's the only time a doctor or a nurse ever called what was under my pendulous left breast anything but a fatty tissue deposit. A benign tumor.
Of a kind and beneficial disposition
.

I wish to God that had been Hank's kind of tumor.

AT FOUR IN
the afternoon, Christmas Eve, there's a knock on my kitchen door. Four o'clock December in Portland is already dark. Of course it's raining. It's been a downpour all day and it's not going to let up. Thank God it's not freezing. When I hear the knock, I flutter. Everything about me flutters – my hands, my fingers, the breath in my chest. I take a deep breath, run into the bathroom and look in the mirror, check what's left of my hair, look myself in my eyes and mark the moment.
Hank Christian is knocking on my kitchen door
. I suck in my belly.

The light on the porch is out. When I turned that light on at 3:30 it was working. I flip the fucking switch on and off but nothing. The doorknob smells of Windex. I've been cleaning house all week. I swing the door open and the rain is loud, big drips falling from the gutter. A gust of wind blows the rain in. The smell of rain and wet cedar boards and earth, the compost heap. Just then the porch light flashes on and I blink and blink and raise my hand to block out the bright, then the light goes out again. Hank in his black rain gear is a mass of shiny wet inside the black rainy night. I go to speak, but suddenly Hank's hand pokes out of the darkness and into the overhead fluorescence of the kitchen right at me. It is the hand of Tarkovsky's
Andrei Rublev
and appears as if out of another dimension. I look and look and look at the hand, then grab it, Hank's hand, and I pull him in as if Hank out there was drowning in dark water.
The Maroni
. Both Hank and I laugh a little the way I've hauled him in. When I catch a look from Hank's eyes, I quick pull my hand out of Hank's, and my hand falls down against my leg, fluttering.

There's a way my body is in shock to see my beloved friend right in front of me. All that the eleven-and-a-half years have done to him.

Hank's in shock, too. Both of us just stand and stare. The door still open, the wind banging the door against the wall, rain blowing in. We get the whole big
gestalt
of each other, no details really. My eyes go right to Hank's black eyes. We say some shit like
hey buddy
or
how's it going man
. In no time at all we're front to front in a big embrace, no bicycle in between us like the last time. At first it's proper bear hug, man to man, back slapping, no crotch. But the embrace doesn't stop. Our bodies get closer and pretty soon we're a full on frontal. New red potatoes in a shovelful of earth. After a while we both have to admit it. We are the one holding the other one up. Those kind of tears that just roll out your eyes one endless stream without any sobbing sounds. For me that's how it is. Hank is sobbing big sobs, his belly bouncing against mine.

“Fucking Gruney, man,” Hank says. “I never cried once through the whole cancer thing. Now just look at me.”

Hank pulls away, his hands holding on tight to my shoulders. He pushes out and raises up his chest, pulls his chin down – that bit of cleft, pulls his shoulders down, too, flexes his biceps. Fucking Hank Christian, man. Hasn't changed a bit. That's when I see his right eye, how the old right eye is gone, and the new glass eye has replaced it. Still real tears, not glass tears coming out that eye. Under that eye, something deep under the skin that's yellow and dark blue. The scar that makes a dent there. His neck is thicker, his face rounder. Still the efficient line of Roman nose. Hank's sweet smiling lips. Rain dripping from his black baseball cap. I can't see his hair because of the hoodie and the ballcap. I can tell it's clipped short but I can't tell the color. Not yet. Just for Men, how the light when it shines through his hair makes his hair look purple.

What I see Hank see. Where I've lived the last twelve years. The overhead bright fluorescence of the kitchen light. The
square wooden table in the middle of the kitchen and the four unmatched wooden chairs. The wooden tabletop, scratched and stressed with circles where I've set down pots that were too hot. Globs of candle wax I've tried to scrape off. A big blue candle scented with lavender in the middle of the table. Three votive candles in red glass. The yellowish refrigerator and matching yellowish stove. The cupboards that look like real wood with a fucked-up fancy design but are made out of particle board. On the counter, my new set of glasses with red and yellow balloons I just washed. Four new big white plates I bought after Ruth left. The ugly linoleum on the floor with yellowish squares with some kind of blue triangle in them. Above the sink, a painting Ephraim did of tipis in the snow. Then there's the smell. The Windex and lemony ammonia smell from mopping the floor.

I close the door. Turn the overhead light off. I light the big blue candle, and then three votives in the red glass.

“It's like a church in here,” Hank says.

“There are some hooks on the wall behind you,” I say, “where you can hang up your things.”

Just beyond the candlelight, Hank is black in the shadows, taking off his coat, his sweatshirt, hanging up his ballcap. The candlelight on Hank's face. The night in Pennsylvania with Olga when Hank danced to Billie Holiday's “April in Paris.”

“What about my boots,” he asks. “They're soaking wet.”

“You're standing in the mud room,” I say. “Just leave them there.”

I'm standing between the stove and the table. Fluttering, my hands. I don't know what to do with them.

“It's just like on East Fifth Street in here,” Hank says, “only a little bigger.”

Strange to hear Hank's voice in the rooms of my house. I put my fingers around the top on the wood of the chair and look around, at the voice of him in there. My hand flutters up and covers my pendulous tit.

“I've got a big old couch in front of the fireplace,” I say. “That's where you'll be sleeping.”

“You need some food?” I say, “I've got chicken soup.”

“No thanks, Gruney,” Hank says. “I'll be hungry later, though. We'll go out and get a burger.”

Hank doesn't know I don't go out. I mean not like going out used to be. And that I can't eat hamburgers. When he asked if I could pick him up at the airport I told him my driver's license had expired.

“We could go to our old hangout on Columbus Circle,” Hank says. “Silvio would be so happy to see us.”

“Silvio's dead,” I say.