You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas (17 page)

I faced him and took one lapel in each fist, raised them up tall. I adjusted his scarf at the nape, making sure it covered any naked skin.

His black leather gloves were already on his hands, which were hanging straight down at his sides. His overall stiffness was endearing, childlike.

He had known about Christmas all along but had not been able to tell me because I was so excited.

He chose what had seemed to him to be the most humane course of action. He allowed me to have my perfect New York City Christmas for as long as he possibly could.

And I had our first Christmas so fully imagined that it had begun to feel more like a memory than a fantasy.

I knew how the table would be set and I could even see how the slices of roast beef would fold onto the plates.

I knew that he would have a second piece of pie.

And that we would then sit on the floor in front of the fire.

His glittering, beautiful tree would stand in the corner and throw its light and sparkle all over our backs.

And as I looked at his face lit by the fire, I would start to feel myself falling backward into the person I used to be, before I was disfigured by my own appalling dread.

George would glance at me and he would freeze. I would see the wires in his eyes begin to glow as he realized that I was suddenly, finally, truly right there beside him. And not still a few steps ahead, in the inevitable future.

He would begin to tremble very slightly.

And my eyes would travel to his neck, and down the length of it.

His whole body would shudder.

And he would close his eyes and feel my hands on him, long before they ever reached his skin.

Much later, we would have a snack. We would eat it wordlessly, standing side-by-side in the wedge of light that you are given when the refrigerator door is opened in the middle of the night.

As we stood by the front door, I carefully adjusted a lock of George’s hair and looked into his eyes and without saying one word—by only feeling it, by truly meaning it—I thanked him for giving me exactly the Christmas I had dreamed of.

Because day after day as I imagined it, I always forgot one little detail: our virus.

In my mind, on our first Christmas as a family, it was always just the
two
of us.

And as far as my eyes could see in any direction, there was only more, and more, and more.

Slowly, I leaned toward him, then against, then into.

“Merry Christmas,”
I said, my voice soft, deep;
vertical, not horizontal.

My mouth was pressed against his ear. I felt the tiny hairs on his earlobe scratch at my lips.

My chest was pressed against his; my heart directly over his.

And then. I lifted my arms off of him entirely, withdrew my hands from his shoulders.

I pulled away from him, slow, slow, to see his face.

And he was standing perfectly still in his long black coat.

But his head was back, neck arched.

And his eyes were closed.

And his mouth was open so that he could breathe.

And I could see so clearly that he was in both ecstasy and astonishment at once.

His eyelashes twitched.

And he blinked.

And suddenly
happiness
was inside his eyes.

Unmistakable.

Like a single word printed on a clean white page.

And because there was so much to say that would never be said; because his eyes flashed with tears and because he knew that I was suddenly, finally and truly right there beside him, his voice cracked as he spoke.

“I was hoping it was you.”

I never chose a life with George.
There had never been a choice to make.

He had been there all along, woven into the fabric of my future.

Destiny.

I would have laughed in your face.

I did not leave cookies out for Santa Claus.

And I did not believe in destiny.

But.

When Santa is suddenly standing right in front of you, soot from
your
chimney staining his fine red suit and he is flushed and breathing hard and smells like frost and sweat and smoke and his jacket is linted with coarse reindeer hairs and there is reindeer shit on his boots and his eyes twinkle with preposterous joy, you simply cannot say,
“I don’t believe in you,”
and turn your back on him.

Because he will grip you by the shoulders and wrench you around and he will bring his bristly mouth to yours and blow

stars
      down your throat
                                 until
                                         you are so full
                                                                 of
                                                                    light.

P
OSSIBLY BECAUSE I
hadn’t had a drink in ten years, I no longer peed in the kitchen sink, blew my nose on my T-shirt, or wet the bed. I was now fully domesticated with a family that included one Dennis, two French bulldogs, a station wagon, and a septic tank. I’d even had my first colonoscopy. It just doesn’t get more grown-up than that.

So, was it possible that I hadn’t done
anything
for Christmas since
just before George died?

That was ten years ago.

One decade.

This was not “a healing interim”; it was pathologically morbid.

It was perhaps time for some jolly.

Dennis and I had spent two years building our home in western Massachusetts—plaster walls, beadboard ceilings, and paint imported from Holland. Even the inside of each closet had layers of crown molding that had been cut by hand. As my brother so aptly put it, “It’s a house suitable for queers.”

My older brother and I built our houses at the same time on the same street, just two doors apart. Ours was the gay house, with oiled soapstone counters and a wild-flower garden lit by a copper gas lantern barely bright enough to help you see the keyhole on the door; his was a hetero cement-clad monolith with an active steam pipe over the front door and xenon vapor gas discharge exterior floodlights that illuminated his wooded backyard like an Ikea parking lot.

With each imported-from-Cincinnati brass push-button light switch plate we installed, I felt six Phillips-head screw revolutions farther away from every bad thing that had ever happened to me. Tentatively, I began pretending I was entering the “After” stage of my life—the part with brocade window treatments and shiny German faucets. Where the worst thing that could happen was getting into a
discussion
with another shopper at Whole Foods over the last container of edamame.

Even my taste in furniture buffered me from catastrophe—I liked old things. Chairs and tables with nicks and stains and dents. I liked seeing where the split leg of the dresser had been so carefully glued back together. And I loved the table beside the sofa; if you put a glass of water on it, the glass would gradually slide onto the floor. Otherwise, you didn’t really see that it was lopsided. I figured, if this crap can survive all those other families for so many years, surely it can survive one of me for just this life.

A major benefit of building a house with Dennis is that he made a lot of the choices, and they were very fine choices. In fact, everything I loved about the house had been his idea. It occurred to me that if some Suburban-careening dot-com bitch chatting away on her cell phone happened to plow into him on the Merritt Parkway, sending our little Audi somersaulting into Vermont, I would find a certain measure of comfort in this house, which contained so much of him. This ran counter to my experience with George, whose mother had cleaned and emptied the apartment within hours of his body reaching room temperature.

Dennis and I had been together for six years. And nothing horrible had happened. It was the longest I had ever gone in my life without needing an emergency room, a law enforcement official, or a funeral home. A Christmas tree would be the bow on the package. More than anything else, it was a symbolic way of saying,
“Disaster? I am no longer your bitch.”

The more I thought about it the more I felt I was almost
owed
a real and proper Christmas.

Dennis, however, was less than enthusiastic about the whole idea. A tree would shed needles and make a mess. Besides, we didn’t own any ornaments or lights, not even a tree stand. “And a fresh tree is going to need watering. Are you going to be the one making sure it has fresh water every day?”

“It’s not a pet, it’s just a dead tree,” I cried.

But there was something else. His name was Jesus.

Dennis was an atheist. He didn’t believed in God, so the idea of celebrating the birth of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior felt entirely absurd, like throwing a
bar mitzvah
for the Easter Bunny.

Now, I was about as far from being
Christian
as a person could be while still living outside the walls of a supermax prison. I didn’t believe in God, either. But wasn’t that all the more reason to saw down a living tree and truss it with environmentally unfriendly lights? Shit, we could even make it an olive tree.