You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas (13 page)

“Now, if you think I would make prank phone calls to a maternity ward, you just don’t know me at all. I have doctor friends, and all it would take is one case of good French wine and any one of them would walk up to maternity and tell one of the mothers that she had better prepare herself, she was going to have a Harlequin baby.

“And finally, I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with some bums, the ones that hang out at the movie theater around the corner from me. The place with the skanky red carpeting?”

Matt choked on the ice cube he’d been knocking around in his mouth. He crunched down on it and killed the choke. “Are you fucking kidding me? You spent your holiday with homeless people on the street?”

“Yeah,” I said feeling very bright-eyed. “With one in particular, Shirley.”

“You didn’t fuck her, I hope. Christ, Burr, tell me it wasn’t some homeless chick that got you to play for the other team.”

“No, I didn’t fuck her, asshole. We talked.”

“You talked. What? For two days?”

“Actually, I think it was three. But I only remember one. Part of one, really. And mostly, just a few hours of the one. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What matters is, it was inspiring. Or wait, maybe that’s not the right word.”

He was watching me. If I levitated or if smoke began to vent through my ears, it wouldn’t have surprised him.

“Okay, she didn’t
inspire
me. She showed me something more surprising, more astonishing, and more, just
more beautiful
than I know how to explain. It’s like, she could have been huge—Beverly Sills or ... I don’t know their names—but she was
The Met,
she was
Carnegie Hall
; Matt, she made the windows shake in their frames.”

He was watching me with his eyebrows raised and a sort of,
And when are you going to start making sense?
expression on his face.

“I know this sounds weird, but here’s my point—all of it was wasted. She had—
has
—this epic talent and she’s a homeless alcoholic. She’s not some big opera singer at the Met. She’s a bum lady. With this secret voice. Almost like a prisoner with a ten-carat diamond who can only wear it inside her cell and prance around alone.

“And you know the first thing that came into my mind when she was done singing for me? I thought, if I had been born with a talent that large I never would have started drinking. Almost like having such a huge gift would insulate you or protect you. Because it would feel like you had this destiny. So you didn’t have to worry. I wouldn’t drink because I had too much talent to drink. And then I kind of looked at Shirley sitting there on that bench and I knew,
Oh yes I would
. And something in me just fucking clicked.”

Matt placed his elbows on the table and leaned forward.
“Augusten,”
he said.

Just one word, my name.

But with that one word he told me that he was sorry and that he did love me and that he wished for something else, something lighter for me. A life that weighed much less.

And I looked up at him and I loved him in return, for not fully understanding, maybe, but not judging me, either.

“I’ve never been so fucking scared in my life,” I said then. “I always thought I could quit drinking whenever I wanted. Or that I was somehow too smart. Or too something.
Whatever,
alcohol wouldn’t ruin me. It couldn’t. But man, if you had only heard that voice and seen the
size
of her. You know? She was big. Shirley was huge. And still, she got taken down.”

Matt reached across the table and brushed the back of his hand against my cheek, and his eyes became smooth, glassy, and warm.

“She scared the shit out of me. And I don’t know if it’s going to do any good, I really don’t. But I do know that I wasn’t scared
before
. Maybe that’s good? To be scared?”

“Jesus. Well, maybe. Yeah, I guess it’s good to be scared. But shit, this was some kind of Christmas you had for yourself. Although I guess, at least you weren’t just sitting in your nest alone, piss-drunk. Maybe hanging with these homeless people really is a kind of progress.”

“You ever see that
Streetcar Named Desire
?”

“Of course I’ve seen
A Streetcar Named Desire
. You’re the only one of the gays who hasn’t.”

“Yeah, well I watched it. And it made me think, maybe one of my problems is, I
never
depend upon the kindness of strangers. I would rather bleed to death on the street than depend on a stranger. But maybe that is a huge fucking mistake. Maybe I need to be more like Blanche. But I didn’t get why they lock her up at the end. Just for being kind of a slut?”

“You are some kind of fucked up,” he muttered under his breath.

“Short,”
I mumbled without moving my lips.

“Go to hell,” he said.

“I need a drink,” I told him.

“Hopeless alcoholic.”

“Correction,” I said, raising my finger high into the air. “Hope
ful
alcoholic. And that may seem like a small difference to you, but all I have ever needed in life was a
maybe
.”

“Hopeful, then,” he said, brightly.

I nodded as the waitress finally approached. “Hopeful.”

I
T WAS OUR
first Christmas as a family. Me, George, and our tiny new virus, AIDS.

The virus was just a few months old. And we were like typical new parents—up and down all night to pace the floors,
in
with the thermometer,
out
with the thermometer, wondering, “What are we going to be dealing with five years from now?” I certainly wouldn’t have imagined
diapers.

In retrospect, I’m not altogether certain it’s accurate to say
we.
Because the virus wasn’t mine, it belonged to George. And he wasn’t the one pacing the floors all night and sticking a thermometer in his mouth every five minutes.

That was me.

George was actually quite calm and logical. He was being treated by the best doctor and taking the best drugs.

His attitude was, “Let’s enjoy the moment.”

My attitude was,
I cannot fucking believe you stuck your bare hands in his bloody mouth. There was a box of gloves on the table beside his hospital bed. You, yourself, made sure of it. And why were you the one removing the gauze from his mouth instead of a nurse? None of it makes sense.

Of course, we’d had this conversation before. Many times. It had become our pair of faded jeans, our sweater with too many fur balls on it. It was comfortable, if ugly.

“Augusten, I have told you again and again, I was crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just very upset and he needed that dressing out of his mouth immediately and I didn’t think. Listen, it doesn’t matter—we can’t ever go back and change that moment.”

True. But we could get drunk and forget we’d ever had this conversation. That way, when we had it again in a week, it would be all new to me.

Still, I had to try and be grateful for the little things. It was, after all, this very virus that had brought us together, transformed us from “secret lovers” into “official couple.”

George’s previous boyfriend had entered into an affair with a lawn-care professional. George didn’t have a lawn.

Their relationship had been unraveling for a long time and he was feeling stagnant. George had been thinking of leaving the boyfriend when the lawn-care professional turned out to be HIV-positive, passing the virus to George’s boyfriend.

The boyfriend did not handle this news well. He figured,
Well, that’s it then. I guess I’ll just go ahead and die now
.

George said, “You have to
fight
this.
We
have to.”

The boyfriend replied, “Where do the whales go when they die?”

That’s when I met him.

At eight minutes after five on February 14, 1989, I reached the landing that overlooked the Winter Garden atrium. I approached the wide, grand staircase leading down. Step by step, mistake by mistake, choice by choice, everything that I had ever done, every right instead of left, had been designed to get me here.

In time, I would come to believe that all along, without my ever knowing, every single time I wondered,
Why?
the answer had been to carry me down
these steps
on
this day
so that I could reach the one moment upon which all the remaining moments of my life would be based.

But at the time, I only thought that I was walking down some stairs to meet a guy.

I didn’t even know his name. A date couldn’t have been more blind.

The Rizzoli bookstore within the Winter Garden had been his idea. He would be waiting right in front of the store.

Of course at this time of day the offices would be emptying. And the Winter Garden would be filled with people. Many of them standing around, waiting for somebody at one of the restaurants or bars. Bankers, brokers, lawyers, CFOs, VPs—all of them would be buzzing throughout the space. I didn’t know how, exactly, I was supposed to find this one very specific though featureless man.

But there he was, right where he said he’d be. The Winter Garden atrium was a swarm of people; he was the only man I saw.

He was dressed in a charcoal suit with chalk pinstripes. His back was turned to me because he was looking in the window of the bookstore. He didn’t appear to be a man waiting for anyone.

But this was the man. There was something about the specific tilt of his head. Or perhaps it was how he squared his shoulders. I only knew that the instant I saw him, I recognized that he had been
inevitable
. I headed directly for him.

As I approached his broad back and noted the exquisite drape of the suit I realized,
I don’t even know his name. I can’t just tap this guy on the shoulder and say, “Are you by any chance waiting for—”

He surprised me by suddenly turning around to face me. He was smiling and he had a bad haircut. The first words George said to me were these: “I was hoping that was you.”

And I realized that he had not been looking in the window of the bookstore, but at my reflection, at me, as I walked toward him.

We spent a little over two hours together that first day we met. Less time than most people spend test-driving a car before buying it. Over drinks he made a toast in Greek,
“To pepromenon phugein adunaton.”

It’s impossible to escape from what is destined
.

It had been only a couple of hours. But I knew.

I may not have known the
facts
of him; I couldn’t have told you his favorite color, his birthday, or how he liked his coffee. I couldn’t have said if he was a Republican or a Democrat or whether he was allergic to cats; but I knew the
him
of him.

I also knew that one didn’t have a second date with this man and then a third, each time getting to know him a little bit better or seeing another “side” of him.

George was
vertical,
not horizontal. All of him was right there from the first moment. He didn’t have “sides”; he had fathoms. If you didn’t know him after one date, you
couldn’t
know him. In this way, he was a treasure perfectly hidden right before my eyes. He was the wreck of the
Sussex
in my backyard swimming pool.

I could only be truly crazy if I walked away from such a find.

I struggled in my apartment that night, his phone number in my hand. I knew that if I called him, that would be it—my life would change. I had never felt such an irrational thing about a person I’d only just met. But I knew it was true.

My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines.

And
attraction
is our most ancient drive, it
is
why we
are.
Attraction is the very point of gravity; timespace itself bends to allow it. It is attraction in its pure form that holds the galaxy together.

Attraction is our glue.