Lucky Us (2 page)

The cruddy plainness of our living room was suddenly very dear to me. I was so comfortable and so pleased with Gabe at that moment, and the glazed feeling from being tired and overfed made me sentimental. I was thinking how we would get married, if we ever did it. We would do it better. I said this to Gabe.

“I don't know,” he said.

Even at Fiona's wedding, there had been a moment when everyone was moved. When the priest gave his homily and he talked about the sacredness of their troth and how much these two had just promised each other, Fiona's face was flushed a brilliant pink. The whole assemblage pretended it believed in simple joy. Boys with nose rings and shaved heads, old women with pearls dipping into their hilly necks were getting misty-eyed. All that faith and longing unraveled us.

“You don't know what?” I said to Gabe.

“Nothing,” he said. It was sometimes hard to argue with Gabe.

“Nothing what?” I said. I didn't get anywhere.

W
HEN
I
KEPT
bringing this up in the days after, he acted put upon and ill used, and he had a point. Of the two of us, he had already proven himself the more loyal. I had had some flirtations and a one-night fling in the
very beginning, and when we quarreled I was always the one threatening to leave. To my knowledge, Gabe had not fooled around at all—and, old as he was, there were opportunities—and he was always doing things like bringing me home a raspberry tart from my favorite bakery or surprising me with a book on an artist I'd said I liked, and those art books weren't cheap. In the mornings, I stayed in bed later than he did. I had stopped working at the camera store after I finished school, and was now an underpaid receptionist at a gallery in Chelsea that didn't open until ten, and from under the covers I could hear him tiptoeing around the kitchen, moving as noiselessly as he could. A few times I came in and saw him drinking his coffee with headphones on, listening to the news that way so he didn't wake me. And what did I do for him? Plenty, and always with great fanfare, but nothing that deeply courteous. I was nice, but I wasn't steady or devoted.

So we didn't need to marry so that I could get him pinned down; he was as pinned as I could ask for. No, it was for something else that I had developed this bee in my bonnet. The sheer optimism of Fiona's wedding had gotten to me, the nerve of all that blithe insistence that things could go well. And all those spring bouquets and fragrant boughs brought in to support the argument.
Couldn't we also just lodge ourselves blindly on the side of good fortune and high expectations? Why did we always have to know better?

Gabe winced at all this. He tied himself in knots trying to explain his views without insulting me. He said he hated lies and had always done his best to live without them—he sounded like a boy arguing for nonconformity in junior high. But I knew what he meant. Who doesn't? Nasty, brutish, and short; best not to have been born at all. Most people say those things, in one way or another, but they don't really believe their own lot will follow this pattern, not exactly. Gabe did believe it, and much of what I thought of as his dignity of bearing had to do with his treading lightly through the ashes of this world.

So I let it go, my complaining. In truth, I didn't really care that much and was already starting to forget what I'd had in mind. If I wanted a child (which I didn't yet) we could argue later. I had time.

Gabe was a little huffy after our arguments, and he spent more time away from the apartment. He cut back on his reading and went for longer walks around the city. I tried to get him to talk when he came back. He would drop his sullenness if I got him going on his favorite buildings. From all his strolling and reading, he was more conversant with New York architecture than any of the
blowhards who took us touring in art school. He knew a lot about churches—a Renaissance copy stuck in the middle of office buildings, a Greek Revival Quaker meeting house in a quiet square, an onion-domed Russian chapel off Fifth Avenue. There were more churches than I had noticed, secrets of high-mindedness sandwiched in the grid.

One Sunday, when I got back from the studio, Gabe told me that Saint Agnes—a very pretty brownstone hulk with gorgeous mosaics inside—was going to be knocked down for an office tower. I said something like, “Those assholes.” I wasn't very startled by that sort of news. But Gabe had already been to a meeting of outraged citizens. He was apparently quite vocal at the meeting, by his own account. Certainly he knew more about the history of the site than anyone. Probably he calmed everybody down.

For the next few months, Gabe went to meetings. He didn't really believe that the church (on a high-priced street, with a tiny congregation) had much of a chance, but he came back reciting details of zoning statutes and the history of landmarks preservation. For Gabe, he was very worked up.

One evening, when he was addressing a group outside the church, a TV news crew came to tape the protest, and that night Gabe was on the eleven o'clock news. He
looked good, lean and sharp-nosed, and he was very patient with the reporter's dodo questions. I watched him on the screen, while I was lying in bed with him, and I was about to initiate a private celebration of his big moment when the phone rang. It was the first of many phone calls, that night and all the next day, of people congratulating Gabe.

Aunt Angie called twice, and Ira and Fiona called, and several people who were on the protest committee, and also Ed from the camera store, and a guy he'd gone to high school with. Gabe took the phone each time with an awkward chuckle. I had never seen him so pleased with himself or so at a loss for how to behave. By the end of the day he was gushing—to anyone, to me—about how you had to know how to get the networks on your side. His hair had come out of his ponytail, his shirttails hung loose, he was striding around the house.

At work the next day the whole store had seen him or heard about his being on TV. When Gabe told me that night, he was smiling his goofy, satisfied smile and talking in a way that made his Adam's apple stick out. Who would've thought that thirty seconds of not hiding his light under a bushel would be so sweet to him?

I tried not to rain on his parade. I spoke glowingly of his committee, although I actively disliked some of them.
I let him tie up the phone for hours, and I designed a very professional-looking flyer to be handed out in the protests. And it happened that Gabe, despite being so busy, was unusually lusty during this time. He was more athletic than he had been, more sudden in his desires and more surprising. Determination heated him.

Oh, it was a good cause, saving that church. And for all my flippancy about it, I hated thinking of the chapel's mosaics smashed. But it was not the cause I would have imagined for Gabe, a man who always spoke harshly against any clinging to the past.
Let it go
was what he said for a range of cases—when I asked him about anything from years before, when I analyzed my own behavior, when I apologized after a fight. Gabe was the one who wanted bygones to be bygones.

Gabe and his committee managed to get a court injunction against the wreckers—Gabe did a jig when he heard this, he looked like a drunken uncle at a family party—and the case got turned over to the mayor's office. On the day of the final decision, I went from my job straight to city hall. By the time I got there, a crowd was making a lot of noise outside, and I thought, uh oh, poor Gabe, I feel so bad for him. But they weren't booing, they were bellowing in triumph, it turned out, and Gabe, who had testified, was walking around in a frenzy of amazement,
his sports jacket flapping in the wind. The newsmen could hardly get him to stay still. When he saw me, he hugged me hard enough to stop my breath.

At the victory party that night, people of all ages walked around getting sloshed and saying sappy things to each other and kissing Gabe. One seventy-year-old woman in a very expensive lime-sherbet-colored suit kept telling me over and over what a heck of a fellow my husband was. “Never in a million years,” Gabe said, “did I think we'd save that sucker.” We made our way home at four in the morning. I hadn't been up that late since my club days. Just before we fell into bed, Gabe thanked me for being such a wonderful support to him.

I was confused by all of it. To see Gabe like that, foolishly joyous and prone to the same vanities as anyone, threw me for a loop. Was this what he had wanted all along, just this? The balm of praise, a taste of things going his way? I looked at him, after he'd fallen asleep, and I thought: Now he's going to crash. I know it.

H
E WOKE UP
in a wonderful mood, and randy as a goat. In the evening he talked about going to service at the church on Sunday. The place was Episcopal, which didn't happen to be his religion or mine either. Gabe was raised Catholic and I grew up as a secular Jew.

On Sunday I dressed myself in a nice sheath dress which was probably too short, and Gabe was in his dark suit that made him look like a sheriff. When we were on the street, walking toward the church, its stone facade really did look majestic, and I was proud of Gabe. Through the service, I kept looking at the mosaics (which were lovely and delicate and a little stiffly silly) and listening to the minister, who talked at the end about “the famous Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky,” and how, just when he was lined up before the firing squad, in the agony of a despair we can only imagine, a reprieve came at the last minute. The church of Saint Agnes had had just such an agony and just such a reprieve.

Gabe could not resist whispering to me that the whole execution had been the czar's joke, but the sermon was actually about the rewards of zeal and effort—very uplifting—and the minister thanked the committee for their vigor and most especially Gabriel Catanzaro and a few others. Gabe was pleased, I could tell. Watching his quick, small smile, I got the idea that we could get married in this church. We could, if I got him soon, while he was flushed with victory and heady with achievement. He was right now at the moment of bloom, the brief instant after the closed bud and before the browned petals. I thought of him the way men used to think of dewy
virgins.

After the service, we both shook hands with the minister, who gave Gabe a bear hug (who knew Episcopalians got so carried away?). Other people from the committee were there, and we all went to lunch with the minister. I was not used to seeing Gabe with groups of people his own age, and once we had explained ourselves to a few of them who thought I was his daughter, there was a flood of remarks about how pretty I was, and I stood around stroking Gabe's shoulder and hanging on his arm.

I thought that when we got home he would be full of desire, which he was, and after we had spent time in bed I would mention marriage in Saint Agnes. In fact the whole day had spun me around, and spun Gabe too, and our sex was different, deeper and more willful. We were greedy and frank; we swam in a lake of bright determination. When we came out of it, I forgot that we had not really had a discussion, and I made a reference to our marrying—I said something like, “If we did the wedding thing in winter, I bet the rev would wear a different getup”—and Gabe didn't say a thing. He sighed and stared into the middle distance.

In the next few days, however, I heard him say, “In
winter that church could be really cold, if we had a lot of older guests like Aunt Angie, it's like a barn.” When he said one other thing—a little joke about whether our pizza place catered wedding banquets—I took it up. I said, “What do you think, March or April?” It was then October. Gabe looked slyly happy, I thought.

That was how he was the next few months, slyly happy. I was the one who ran around like a maniac, getting all excited, telling my friends every little bit of progress, generally acting like the giddy girl I still sort of was. Gabe was wary and twinkling, I would say. When anyone congratulated him, he looked amused at himself.

My friend Dawn said to him, “You were never married before, huh?” It was always a big surprise to people, the things Gabe hadn't been. “Why not?” Dawn was nosy.

Gabe said, “Things didn't develop,” which I thought covered anything else anyone might have asked him.

I was the one who'd almost gotten married before, in high school, to a boyfriend who died a few years later. On our list of reckless, charged-up things to do, running off to another state to get married was definitely an item. We used to talk about it when we were high, bait each other with the idea, and once, we were about to get in the car and go, but we got distracted and lost our steam. Maybe
I wouldn't have done it, when push came to shove. We did stupider things, however.

My mother remembered Chris, my high school boy-friend, all too well—a grungy kid who once nodded out at her dinner table—and this helped make Gabe look better to her. For most of my teenagehood, it was just my mother and me in the house together (my father was in Chicago, leading what he hoped was a more interesting life) and I was too much for her—I kept doing whatever I wanted and I made her feel helpless and outmaneuvered and ignored. It probably disappointed her now that I was pledging myself to a man Gabe's age, with an unimpressive job, but she'd met Gabe on her one visit to New York from Cleveland, and all his careful courtesies did get to her. She flirted with him. They got along. She thought I could do a lot worse.

Aunt Angie was very glad that Gabe and I were getting married, and she naturally crowed about how there was some juice left in those old apples after all. I looked forward to her talking smut at the wedding reception. I looked forward to everything. I was in that frame of mind where everything ahead looked good to me, better than I could begin to imagine.

Gabe was so pleased, he was kind of a nuisance. He who had never minded how much time I spent in the studio
became sulky if we didn't have meals together. When we were together, he talked more—I hadn't quite seen him run away with a topic the way he did now. He tried my patience. When I listened to his speculations about, say, the coming elections, I thought: he isn't always
that
smart. Once I did say, “I think I've created a monster,” meaning he used to be so quiet. I was sorry afterward. But Gabe was so contented he wasn't even touchy.