Lucky Us (7 page)

He said, “Negative,” in a flat, sobered voice. I hugged him, and he flashed a small, bright smile. He must have been deeply relieved, but he was something else too, saddened that we were on different sides of this. Anyway he never would have gloated in front of me, not Gabe.

I was the one who got gleeful as it hit me that I really hadn't—not at all, not me—given the virus to him. I danced around him, I clapped and cheered like a maniac. Gabe didn't know what to do. I told him he was going to live to be ninety, one of those old farts hanging around on the corner telling filthy jokes to his cronies and looking very sage.

Gabe said, “Maybe.” He was already getting modest about his health.

I wanted us to go out to celebrate, I really did. Gabe said this was too weird, he couldn't do it. I had not been able to eat much all week and now I was ravenously hungry. “We're supposed to celebrate while we can,” I said. I
had gotten advice along these lines from friends about every two minutes.

In the end we just ordered Chinese takeout. But with the pan-fried leek dumplings, our first course, I opened up a bottle of very decent Sancerre that we had been saving.

“Not bad,” he said.

I held up my glass and made a toast to his negativity.

“Right,” he said.

“Oh, drink,” I said. I leaned over and kissed his neck. He got jollier. He stroked my arm, and then he kidded around with his chopsticks, lifting my shirt.

I was wearing a black lace bra. I hadn't, after all, changed my style of underwear since getting the bad news. I was pleased to see it myself.

He let down my shirt and used his chopsticks to feed me a dumpling, which fell on my shoe instead. We thought this was hilarious.

“Feeding the floor again,” I said, something my mother used to say. I didn't mind being verbally moronic. I understood that there was misery and there was this, and this was not impossible. I could have flashes of this.

Gabe was trying to offer me another dumpling, which this time landed in my lap, and he got to do a little raunchy
clowning over its retrieval with the chopsticks. His cheeks were flushed—wine did that to him—and he looked younger.
Be healthy,
I thought, but of course he was, without any invocations from me. How solid he looked, the squared shoulders and the muscled angles of his arms. He was wolfing down chow fun with remarkable speed and noise, a sight that made me so glad that I had to slip a noodle down his sock.

I
WALKED AROUND
the streets for several days grinning to myself over Gabe's being fine. Talk about feeling several things at once. At work everyone noticed that I was less testy.

Gabe bought a shelfful of vitamins and herbal supplements that he fed me every morning. He was constantly trying to get me to eat more, although there was no reason for me to be fatter at present. In the evenings when he didn't work late, he came home and constructed elaborate meals. Figs with prosciutto, gnocchi with cream sauce, eggplant stuffed with smoked mozzarella. He wanted to tend me. I was going to turn into a tub from humoring him. Some of my short skirts were already getting tighter in the waist.

I couldn't have felt more married than I did over those meals, stuffing myself on rosemary chicken and sopping
up the sauce with a hunk of bread. I thought that we were like a couple under siege, brave citizens feasting in a cellar while bombs went off overhead. I suppose I thought of our sex life that way too; we had to always be listening for the enemy, and so our interludes were tense and limited, but also tender and comradely.

Aunt Angie, who had groused a lot about the wedding being postponed, often phoned in the evening and wanted to hear what we'd had for dinner. “He likes the pasta with sausage and broccoli rabe,” she said. “That's the way to get to him.” Like my mother, she was convinced that the dawdler over marrying was Gabe. She also believed I did all the cooking, no matter what we told her. “Just to offer some free advice,” she said, “get him to eat bitter greens so he'll piss a lot. A man his age needs that to keep him limber, and I know you know what I mean.”

For a week Gabe could not take a pee without one of us remarking on the amazing limberness of his dick, which was going to wear us both to a frazzle, down to nubs and shreds of ourselves. Any more pissing and neither of us was going to be ambulatory; we got a lot of mileage out of this one, true or not.

I
N
M
ARCH MY
friend Dawn wore the dress that she'd bought for my wedding to her boyfriend's mother's birthday dinner. She said she couldn't save it up any longer and she would need something different anyway by whatever season we got around to deciding to get married.

“Maybe in another ten years,” I said, just to hear Dawn yelp. In fact, I was thinking that maybe Gabe and I
could
do it, not right this minute but soon. Everything I'd read had assured me of my right to carry on as if I were a regular person.

Gabe was still quiet around me. Our sex had become the sex of very old, cautious people who were afraid of injuring each other's vital tissues. Sometimes it reminded me too of some of the sex I had had in high school, which had of course been more wild and strenuous but had had the same sneaky feeling of stolen moments.

Gabe said a number of things that made a difference during this time (he said I should always remember that I was loved) but mostly he didn't talk much. He was being vigilant, watching me to see how I was bearing up. It made me nervous but I appreciated it.

Often we sat in front the TV, letting the sound track talk instead of us. One night we were watching the late-night news in bed; we were drowsy and barely listening.
A reporter was blathering on about the stock market, and Gabe said, “I hope my pension fund isn't run by idiots.”

“What fund?”

“From the store,” Gabe said. “You know. For retirement. It adds up over the years, even though they don't put in that much.”

I said, “When can you get it?”

“At sixty-five. I could go live in Mexico on it, I suppose, if it's still cheap to live there.”

“Right,” I said. “I like warm places.”

He took my hand. He had been planning his future without me, but I let this go. Where did he think I'd be in another sixteen years? “Mexico is a good idea,” I said.

“Compound interest is kind of amazing,” Gabe said. He knew quite a lot about it, as it turned out. I had to hear about year-end capital balances and cost of living adjustments.

He looked flat to me at that moment, like someone I couldn't get in focus. It wasn't his fault that he lived in another kind of time from me, but I felt that we were now on different schedules.

A
ND THEN THERE
was the episode with the onion. It was an ordinary kitchen event. I was slicing a red onion for the salad (Gabe was cooking the main course, as usual)
when the onion slid and I hit my thumb instead. I was using the one good knife in the house, a heavy steel chef's knife, and I yelped to see how much red blood flowed out of my thumb. I was dripping gore onto the cutting board.

“What'd you do?” Gabe said. He took my hand to look at it, and he didn't draw back or falter. His face looked a little pinched but he was game.

Nobody gets infected this way—only if Gabe had an open cut was there even the smallest technical chance—but I didn't like his holding my gushing thumb. I yelled, “Stop it,” and I pulled my hand away, which really made blood get all over. Our wall was spattered with red.

Gabe put his hands up and backed away, the stance that meant
don't bother me, I'm an innocent man
. He was angry. I wrapped myself with a paper towel and I went to the bathroom to get a Band-Aid.

When I came back, I made a solution of Clorox to wash down the wall and the cutting board. It was too hard, I thought, to have to worry about myself and Gabe too. For a very brief second, I really was sorry he didn't have this same virus. And it shocked me to think it, what was I turning into? I hadn't thought I would be like this.

I kept thinking I could have handled this better than Elisa was doing. She was so young, she didn't know how to take bad news. No one does, of course, but I would have been better at it.

Why, for instance, was she still refusing to see a doctor, no matter how I reasoned and nagged? She was distracted by the wrong things and too revved up, too wired. From everything I had read so far (I was reading as much as I could and there was more and more), she was going to have to keep her wits about her and not fly off any handles.

There was the whole question of hope, for instance. I
had read articles that made my heart beat with happiness, tales of people who'd been at death's door and were now dancing around, happily medicated on triple and quadruple combinations of antiviral drugs. One magazine listed six different drugs that were now in trials and would be on the market soon, probably before Elisa needed them. The same magazine had an obituary section that seemed to be a regular column. Four AIDS activists, with bright and bustling resumes, had died that month; one of them was younger than Elisa. The subhead could've read: don't flinch, dear reader.

Elisa was too jumpy to read a magazine like this and her information was pretty thin. She was running on blind nerve at the moment. I was afraid she was going to make a mess of things.

S
HE DID KEEP
getting on the subway and going to her studio to paint, which I thought was a good thing. She had been working on these cityscapes, big stripes and jolts of hot color. I asked if she was going to keep working at these or if she had a different sense now of what she wanted to do. She was annoyed by the question. “You want me to do dancing blood cells?” she said. “That kind of AIDS art?”

“People have done stuff that's very beautiful,” I said.
“It can be subtle. Some of it's raging and in-your-face and some of it's oblique. There's a range.”

“I don't have to do anything I don't want to do,” she said.

“Do what you want,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. “I will.”

I wanted, of course, art to do for her what religion might have, if she'd had a religion. I wanted her to see her situation in a more bearable, even a more exalted way. But I wasn't a painter and I didn't know that much. I had only the favorite phrase,
aesthetic distance,
so calming and sibilant, which didn't mean all that much to Elisa.

A surprising number of people with HIV had written about illness as a “gift,” an unchosen source of insight, but Elisa did not find this notion very interesting. I was the one always trying to make a silk purse out of our particular sow's ear. This task fell to me.

It was my joke to say to Elisa that condoms made me young again, a trip back to high school—the crackling packet and the haste to get it open, the ringed cylinder of pale film unrolled with boyish eagerness. I took the relentless presence of latex in stride, but I was sorry for us and sorry for the reminder each time that this wisp of rubber, thin as tracing paper, was my
protection
.

What shields, what fences, what locked doors. For oral
sex, I was supposed to cut a condom open and spread it across Elisa, and sometimes we used Saran Wrap, which felt glassy and foolish against my tongue. The taste of my own Elisa, sealed behind plastic, forever kept from me. From
me
.

And sometimes I thought, I'm old, what does it matter? I can die soon, I've done most of what I'm ever going to do. I don't have to be in fear for my life, the way a young person would be. What life? Sometimes I was not afraid at all.

I
TRIED TO
keep watch over how she took care of herself. I fed her vitamin E, garlic extract, Coenzyme Q10, and an evil-tasting tonic made from Asian roots, and I watched her body for changes. She looked the same as she had since I'd met her—downy skin, bright eyes, shiny hair. In the morning when I kissed her good-bye I would cup her chin and stroke her neck, and after a while she knew I was checking for swollen glands.

“Are you a boyfriend or a fucking nurse?” she said.

I read the advice for serodiscordant couples. What a graceful phrase, that—as if unmatched serostatus were a musical problem. (The advice was no help: talk, be open, expect stress; yeah yeah.) I tried to get Elisa to use that word,
serodiscordant,
but I never heard her say it.

E
LISA DIDN'T WANT
me to see whatever she was painting now. She had been quite an eager displayer of her work in the old days. Once, in our first months together, she showed me a whole box of drawings and “art projects” saved from third grade through her last year of art school. You could see how verisimilitude had gotten her going—she had been thrilled that she could draw a dog that looked recognizably like a hypothetical spotted hound. Once she was in her teen years she had begun to think of abstraction as a purer, higher mode. There was a painting, done when she was sixteen, of lines scratched on red and blue shapes, with a quote from Kandinsky scrawled on the bottom, “Still later I understood that the external grows from the internal or is stillborn.” In the past few years, the paintings again used recognizable figures—streets, buildings—but blurred and heated up. The blurring and heating looked confident, but the more “effective” the paintings were, the less confident she was about them, because they weren't hers yet. And what could she do with all that now? One thing was clear—she didn't need me to ask.

I
DID FINALLY
get her to go to a doctor. Her insurance company sent her to some young, brisk guy with a shaved head and a bow tie. He was too jovial for my taste.
I went with her to the office, and she didn't faint this time. When the needle went in, she shut her eyes. I thought she might be praying. I looked at the blood going into the ampoule and I thought,
please, give her more time
.