Lucky Us (17 page)

“The roof of Saint Agnes is falling down,” I said. “They need donors to fund it, if you happen to feel like getting rid of some bucks tax free.”

I knew as soon as I said it that Maureen would not like this request, however lightly worded. People with money didn't want to be hit up for it all the time, and maybe I wouldn't either. I had asked her out of secret spite against her and secret hysteria about the roof.

When she didn't answer, I said, “Never mind. It's okay.”

“You wouldn't believe what tuition is now. You could probably live for years on what Jeremy's tuition is for one semester.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Of all the conversations I'd ever had with Maureen, how many had been about money? Surely not all. But part of what she had found alluring about me (when we were the same age as her son) was my sexy deftness in acquiring piles of cash. Once we went out to buy her some long red suede coat she wanted—hundreds of dollars, more than our rent—and when we came back she naturally wanted to put it on over her nude body (she had a lovely, slender body), so that its luxury was part of our foreplay. Our sex—that day especially, but other days and nights too—had the heat of money in it.

Well, I wasn't like that now, whatever else you could say. I didn't have pangs over this, not this, but I thought that Maureen did, on my behalf.

“We feed a hundred fifty people every day in the church.” I said that because I thought it was the kind of sentence that would keep her from feeling sorry for me. When you make any mention of your charitable deeds people envy you, or say they do.

“I should do something like that,” Maureen said. “I don't know if I could.”

“Sure you could,” I said. “I'm just worried the Buildings Department's going to shut us down once they realize what the roof is like.”

Maureen went silent, from impatience at hearing about this roof crap. It made the end of our conversation awkward again, and I got off the phone feeling freshly terrible.

I
N OUR EARLY
days together, I used to try to tell Elisa what the difference was between the blues and self-pity. I would play some album for her—she tolerated women singers better, so I'd try Big Mama Thornton or Etta James or even Nina Simone—and I would say, “Listen, they're not wallowing, they think everybody else's life is just as fucked. It is not news. They expect to stand it.”

“Hey, “ Elisa would say, “my favorite music is based on self-pity. Kurt Cobain, for instance.”

My two chats with Maureen made me feel grievously
disappointed
at how my life had turned out, an emotion I thought was creepy and unmanly. Nobody wants to be anywhere near a lachrymose old man who thinks all the big chances have passed him by.
I
didn't want to be inside a person like that.

In the hours when I was ladling out food at Saint Agnes, I was fine (you'd have to be a true asshole to start pitying yourself there) but in the store, when we were short on customers in the middle of those long summer days, I'd stand around ruing my lot and missing Elisa.

Ed was about to leave for his vacation and he was full of debate about whether it was really a good idea for him to go to Provincetown. He might meet a guy there—if not there, where?—but did he want to meet a guy? He thought he did. “Where are you going?” Ed said. “Are you going anywhere this year?”

“Bali,” I said. “Saint Moritz. Tangiers.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
word had spread in the store that I was going to spend a month in Tangiers. “Not exactly,” I said.

Charelle thought the very idea was a riot. “Smoke that kef, Gabe. Go lie on the beach in a thong bikini.” She could not contain her hilarity, and she was not a mean girl.

Meanwhile, the dead times at the store got longer. I'd stand around the counter in the late afternoon, wiping down the glass just to have something to do, idle and underused in a way that seemed (even to me) dreary at my age.

In the weeks after I left Gabe, it tore my heart out to talk to him on the phone. I said many fond things to him—I do miss you, take care of yourself, who knows what will happen—and I meant them, but I wasn't about to make good on them. I was out of range then, on a different frequency. I was in Jason's house.

What a little household we were. Jason had not expected me to land on him in the way that I had, but he seemed entertained by the whole thing and glad, in a shrugging way. More glad than not. We weren't, by a long shot, two people in love, but roommates with a shared hobby.

My friends did not get it at all. They saw me with Jason quite often—we were out and about all the time and dragged each other to gallery openings across town and new bars in the neighborhood—and I'd see Fiona or Dawn eyeing us with dismay. Jason baited them. “Hello, my pretties,” he'd say. “Remember me? I guess you do.”

My mother was quite confused about what had happened. Where was the wedding?
Where
was I living now? “You are too prickly,” she said. “Just because Gabe got cold feet is no reason to take a powder. No reason at all.”

I did my best not to explain. I said Gabe was a fine person but that I was happier now with someone of my own age and outlook, someone less morose and doomful and more, well, casual. “More what?” my mother said. “I don't get it.”

A
BOUT THIS CASUALNESS
. It meant a range of things. No condoms ever (at times I thought that alone was worth the move, imprudent though it was) and not too many questions asked or answered between us. We already knew each other anyway, and we were not really curious or fascinated.

“Tell me one thing about him that's so great,” Dawn said. I smiled. “Besides that.”

“I like his attitude.”

All that obnoxious confidence—Dawn had no idea how soothing it was to be around it.

“Soothing?” Dawn said. “What planet are you on, girl?”

I did know better than anyone (how could I not?) that I was playing with fire. Every time we made love I was taking new viruses into my system; for several days out of every month I stood a real chance of getting pregnant; and I was living with a man who had in former times belted me in the mouth more than once.

On the other hand, everything seemed to be fine. In our bratty way we got along. What talking we did was offhand and noninflammatory. Crude though our coping methods were, we were perfectly amiable.

The city had cleared out for the summer, and Saturdays at the gallery were wonderfully quiet; I had moments when I actually felt I was in a petite palace of art, glassed over and hushed. We were showing some stuff I liked, and not all the people who turned up were pretentious creeps.

Sometimes on my days off Jason and I would sunbathe on the roof. Tar beach. We'd stretch out a blanket, strip down to our bathing suits, and lie around reading art magazines and drinking cans of beer that turned warm in about five minutes. One time the Li twins from the fifth
floor came up and ran around splashing bottles of soda on each other, but mostly we had it to ourselves. Some of the tenants were raising tomatoes in cans of dirt, and there was a garden effect from one pot of geraniums. It was nice.

The other thing Jason liked to do was go hear music. He picked some really rot-gut clubs to be fond of, pits that were scuzzy even for our neighborhood, and noise that was too dense and thick to be ear friendly. What is it with men that they always have to get you to hear their music? Gabe too, with his ancient mossy albums of dead junkie geniuses at the Village Gate.

All the same, I went out to clubs with Jason when he wanted to go. I'd go sit in those cellars of screaming sound, with their felt-paneled walls strung with chili-pepper Christmas lights, and I'd dream to the thudding roar of the amps, like a girl musing over a waterfall.

Sometimes the band was good enough for me to hear it. The lead guitar would do something really tricky and interesting, and the whole room would be pulsing with attention, in some kind of sonic suspense while the tune ranted on. I got happy then, and I thought, Jason knows a thing or two, doesn't he?

Jason liked to wander off and leave me sitting at the bar while he talked to people. Other men came and talked to
me, which I liked. They were not hitting on me (most of them knew I was with Jason) so much as paying a kind of tribute—to my worthy looks, to the worthy presence of their own desire. They would come over and speak into my ear and touch my knee and jokingly ask me when I was going to ditch this jerk and run off with them. How could I not like this? I liked it.

Being with Gabe had kept me away from some of that. So I was quite thrilled with myself on those evenings out, all teeth and lipstick and maroon-streaked hair. One night Jason said, “Legendary fox,” and I was inordinately tickled. I was susceptible like that. On that night we did a little Ecstasy before going out, which may have explained Jason's burst of good nature, and we stayed until the place closed. In the end I got a little dazed and strange from drinking cheap white wine on top of everything, and Jason said we needed to eat.

He had a favorite place, Tokyo Apocalypse, which was very nice at this hour. It was the world's only messy Japanese restaurant, cluttered up with the owner's terrible expressionist paintings on the walls, real embarrassments of color. Jason said, “I need my blast of sashimi before I go to bed.”

“Gabe wouldn't let me eat the stuff,” I said.

“Get the eel, you like it,” Jason said.

The silvery slices went down easy and tasted delicious, dark and sharp. “It's so fresh it's crawling on my tongue,” I said.

“You always like that,” Jason said.

I was sleepy once I had eaten, groggy and contented. On the streets afterward, walking in the cooled-down air and leaning all over Jason, who was whistling to himself, I thought, if these are the last nights of our last summer like this, I don't want to know.

T
HE NEXT DAY
I woke up with a feverish ache all over and so nauseated I could hardly see. I said
no
out loud when I made my way to the bathroom to throw up. I was very angry. Then I sat in the armchair in the bedroom shivering in my nightgown. Every time I started to feel better, I'd do something rash like take a sip of water and my digestive juices would rise up against it.

After the fourth time I puked, I started to cry. “It's your fucking fault,” I said to Jason.

“Everything is perfectly clean and fresh in that place,” he said.

“I don't want to be sick!” I said. “I don't
want
any dead-fish bacteria eating me up. They're never going to
leave,
I can't fight them off.”

“I feel fine,” Jason said. “Don't be scared.”

“Excuse me?”

“If it were something dangerous, I would be sick too.”

“Everything is dangerous!” I said. “Don't you know that? Our immune systems are suppressed, that
means
something.”

“Take a nap,” Jason said. “Could you do that, please?”

I
DID SLEEP
and sleep, crying in between naps. I slept and I puked and I cried, a mess of leakage and useless repentance. By afternoon I had bouts of diarrhea too, as if everything in me had to flow out as something ugly-smelling and unstoppable.

Tuesday morning I was better. Not throwing up anymore, no more cramps, definitely stronger. I woke up at six, feeling sunny. The bright new day after a terrible storm. To purge the toxins is a good thing, I thought. Anyone can get a little food poisoning. You feel like hell and then you're fine.

“I panicked,” I said to Jason.

“Silly girl,” he said.

When I got up and roamed around the kitchen, I was wobbly on my feet. I took it slow.

“Maybe you shouldn't go to work,” Jason said. He was still in bed himself.

“I want to go. I do.”

“Well, then,” Jason said.

He stood me up in the shower, and he let cool water run over me and then icy, icy water and then warm. He did know how to do this. He toweled me off and he stroked rubbing alcohol down the length of my spine. While I got myself dressed, he made me a cup of very strong tea and some dry toast.

“Think you'll be okay?” he said. He was sitting at the table in his underwear, reading a magazine that was three months old.

“Oh, I can do it,” I said. “It's not like it's a hard job or anything.”

“You need more lipstick,” he said.

I
WAS NOT
exactly okay at work. I was shaky still, and my phone voice probably sounded like a very old sheep. The usual smells of the office got to me: the toner in the Xerox machine, the new latex paint on a display wall, the summer intern's Shalimar.

But I was all right. I stayed in my cubicle as much as I could and I sat at my computer running off rejection letters to artists who had sent us slides. I knew some of these people, and I didn't enjoy being a wet blanket to their ambition, but it comforted me a little about not getting to the studio myself. I envied Jason, who had spells of time
between his freelance jobs and was probably home painting at this moment. Jason was getting somewhere, in his way.

In my studio I had been working, when I worked, on some cityscapes that Fiona said looked like the stains on a bathtub. They were okay, but I wasn't going to be a really good painter for a long time. Jason could get by on these bold gestures, but anything I did needed to be more thought through. I knew that.

At lunch I was careful to have a mere raspberry yogurt, which I ate very slowly. In the middle of the day I found myself in the ladies' room puking my guts out anyway. “Oh, no,” I said out loud.

The vomiting left me limp and sweaty with tears in my eyes. It was hard to know when I was done, and I stood with my head bowed in the stall, waiting. When I came out, wiping my chin with a piece of toilet paper, Wendy, the intern, was standing at the sink, combing down her bangs. She was a dopey, self-assured girl.