Lucky Us (20 page)

Neither of us was that surprised at this outcome. Before I went back inside my mother's house, we sat in the car, sharing one last joint, and Chris said, “Oh, well, easy come, easy go,” which made sense to me and seemed like a useful thought. It was a sweet thing to remember later (sweet, not bitter), after the light of him was gone, after that accident on the highway in Oregon.

F
IONA DID SERVE
me gruel, or oatmeal anyway, the fancy long-cooking steel-cut kind, because there was still a lot of food I had trouble keeping down. It depressed us all when I ate my porridge for supper, my waif's meal. “It's divine,” I would say, but not trippingly enough.

When I bought antibacterial detergent to wash the dishes with, Ira said, “Hey, I know I can't get it from your dinner plate, don't worry.”

“This is for me,” I said. “It's me that can't get near any germs.”

“Oh,” he said. “I didn't know that.”

I had not lived before with anyone who was completely outside my illness, and it made me nervous as a houseguest. Bruce was a help, when he came by. “Hey, lean machine,” he would say. “Kate Moss wants to know your diet secrets.” He was more relaxed around my situation than the others; being a gay man had made him worldly in that way.

One night when he came over I was trying on a polo shirt of Fiona's that she wanted to give me, a neon-orange-and-navy item. “Bright colors look worse on me now,” I said.

“That is contrary to every mother's theory,” Bruce said. He had three sisters.

“Please,” Fiona said. “After my mother got divorced, she started wearing
red
all the time because she believed it made her look younger. I was totally embarrassed.”

“Nothing worse than an embarrassed daughter,” Bruce said.

“Am I the only one here with undivorced parents?” Ira said. “I am, right?”

I thought of my mother in her worst year, dulled and hazy and overtranquilized, hanging around the house in her sweatpants. I'd make her toast for breakfast and she'd still be sitting over the plate picking at the crumbs when
I came home from school. I was eleven. She was always asking me, “Are you all right?” in this fluttery voice I hated. No wonder I always wanted to keep bad news away from her.

“Does your mother still carry a torch?” Fiona said. “Mine does.”

“One person always does,” Bruce said. “With mine, it was my father.”

I was thinking of a torchlight parade of zealots. Was I in line, singing a torch song for Gabe, longing for us to once again be the actual couple? In the nights at Fiona and Ira's loft, when I thought of Gabe in Switzerland or wherever he was, my tears on the sofa pillows were tedious even to me, but they were real tears.

“It made my father sour, to think he was the one who lost,” Bruce said. “And mean. He didn't even care so much about my mother, he just didn't do well with the whole loser concept.”

“He did lose,” Ira said.

“But it's so crazy to think you're never going to do anything but win,” I said. “The odds on it are very slim, aren't they? What a high-risk way to live.”

There was a little silence after I said this, an unspoken murmur of dismayed surprise. Where did she get this
one? they must have been thinking. I had to know then how wide the gap was between us, how far away I was from them on just this point.

“My father left a dead squirrel in my mother's car, for spite,” Bruce said.

“People get pathetic,” Ira said.

“This is a terrible conversation to have,” Fiona said, “in front of a fairly recent bride. We are different from them, right?”

“I am,” Bruce said.

I was thinking then of my father, his hangdog guilty look during his monthly visits. He would wait in the doorway for me with his shoulders hunched, his hands in his pockets. Fuckhead, I used to think, don't ask me to feel sorry for you.

Perhaps this same sentence could now be said to me.

E
VERYONE BELIEVED
I'
D
had the flu, when I went back to work after two weeks out, and I made an effort to show that I was fine now, fine, fine. I needed this job for the insurance, if nothing else. The coverage was not going to be enough, as time went on, but I wasn't in a hurry to deal with any of that.

When money is on your mind, like a gleaming mirage in a waterless desert, an art gallery is an odd place to be.
I'd look at a piece that was one of my favorites—white paper folded and cut and constructed into a fragile arch—and I'd think, ten thousand dollars for that? It's just paper. The very thing any philistine oaf says. And
I
could really use that money, I'd think, the exact fact any robber is sure of, waving his gun.
I
need it
more
. My cells, my blood, got to feed those starving children.

At the end of the day, when I was walking the long blocks from the westernmost reach of Chelsea to the subway, or when I was standing up on the F train to Brooklyn, I'd feel a money panic rising in me. I had a girly job as a peon receptionist with bad pay. Where was I going to get what I needed?

My mother used to have money—she once bought a hundred-year-old Chinese rug for our hallway—but that was before the divorce. When I was twelve, she went out to work as a legal secretary and she still had the same job now in the same office, getting by but never saving anything. And my father had his second family to feed—I had six-year-old twin stepbrothers I'd never met—on whatever profits his idiotic paper bag and envelope business made. I had no intention of asking either parent for money; I hadn't seen my father in person since my high school graduation, and I didn't think either of them had big reserves to tap into if I ever did ask.

All of this made me think of Gabe (everything made me think of him now) and how tidily he handled his own modest household, his sensible belongings. Two can live as cheap as one—the jolly and resourceful couple, picnicking on bologna and crackers—two against the storm. It was much easier to think about everything with Gabe in it.

Fiona heard me leaving a message on Gabe's phone machine one night and she said, “Maybe you should give it a rest.” This only made me remember that I couldn't stay with Fiona and Ira forever, although Fiona wasn't being unkind.

In the second week, Bruce asked if I'd thought about apartments up in Inwood, where there were still some cheap ones, or Jackson Heights, which was not as far out in Queens as it seemed. I had stopped paying for my studio, or I might have tried to live there illegally, although there was nothing in it but a sink to wash in. On the sofa at Fiona's, I'd lie awake not knowing where to
go
and thinking that I needed advice from Gabe, about what to do if he didn't want to see me.

I was glad I had Saint Agnes to work in over vacation; I didn't want two weeks of open time hanging heavy on my hands. On the last evening before the break, Clorinda phoned me at the store. “I have bad news, but don't get too upset,” she said. “I think it has a silver lining.”

City building inspectors had paid a little visit to the church that morning—no warning, no nothing—and they'd taken one good look at the roof and shut the place down at once. “Pleading had no effect on these gentlemen,” Clorinda said. “Then I had to call the board members to tell them, and I went into such a wailing tirade that I think one couple is finally going to make a really decent
donation for the roof. We could be legal again by midwinter.”

“Where will they
eat
till then, our people?” I said.

Clorinda had already put up signs directing people to the hot lunches at Holy Apostles on Ninth Avenue. She was sending our leftover food to the Apostles' kitchen, sneaking it out of the padlocked building. My last labor for Saint Agnes that summer was loading giant cans of crushed tomatoes and crates of oranges onto a panel truck, at a very desolate hour of the night.

T
HE FIRST FEW
days I spent at home reading were no different from many vacations past, but they felt worse. Elisa's absence was in the house. And all the kidding at the store about my trips to Morocco and Bali and the Alps had made me discontented in ways that I wasn't used to.

I wanted to go where money had nothing to do with anything. I hated the way it had been wielding its clumsy power all over my world. In the end, because my apartment felt like an underventilated closet and the parks made me remember that it was the last stretch of high summer somewhere, I rented a car and drove two and a half hours north to the Catskills, where Ed and Howard used to go hiking. They had liked those hikes.

I stayed in a hotel on the main street of Phoenicia, a town whose sun-faded drugstore and back-stocked souvenir shop looked like places in my childhood. The noble profile of a mountain, its slopes dappled in the summer light, loomed at the end of the street. I took my first hike right that afternoon, a few hours up and down Mount Tremper. I remembered the hot and dusty hikes in Tucson, but this trail went over a mossy brook and was shaded and green. The damp, piney smell was very beautiful and I tried to train myself to keep noticing it. I got lost once but mostly I followed the path along the mountain ledge, pleased with myself. Why hadn't I thought of this before?

In a clearing I surprised two deer, who thudded away from me with dramatic swiftness, tails up. Why had I thought my life was over? When I came out at the trail-head, into the glare of the late-day sky, I felt somewhat
restored,
like a nineteenth-century traveler.

The hotel made me think of being on the road when I was young. The bed with its chenille spread made me think of the times in Tucson when I'd taken Sandy to my room. There was a bar downstairs that got tourists at night—city people, like me—but by day it had only the regulars, guys who hadn't been sober for twenty years. I liked that bar.

I took hikes every day for a week, even in rain. I was feeling seasoned, muscles no longer stiff, tree identification book in my pocket, when I wandered freely off the trail. I took a turn past a pile of shale and saw a very large snake slither out of it, brownish with black chevrons on his body. His head was turned away from me, but he stuck out his tongue to taste the air. Snakes look innocent until they do that. I was about six feet away, steeling myself to walk on—I was not, after all, something he'd want to eat—but I saw his black tail, with five horned segments on it, one rattle for each time he'd shed his skin.

He was too real, that snake. I had the city person's instinct to hold my ground, even when he moved. But his ripple made me remember that a reptile can't be stared down and that I'd have to limp to the car alone and try to drive if he struck. I turned around and walked back on the trail the way I'd gone in.

I came out of the woods with the dry residue of horror in my mouth. Nothing had hurt me, the snake had been absorbed in his own snake interests, few people die of bites anyway. And what kind of innocent dope was I, to be so shocked at a glimpse of danger lurking under the rocks?

The next day when I went out to hike—I did go out—I was wary and I was also quite suddenly lonely. I bore the wariness by reminding myself that I was going to die
one day, no matter what, probably without the help of any snake—I do know that, better than most people. I had more trouble with the loneliness. If anything bit me, it was my own lookout. No one even knew where I was exactly. There was nothing very new in any of this, but it now seemed like a bad idea, a piece of wrong thinking I was stuck with, and on the last hikes, I didn't much like being alone, the way I usually did.

W
HEN
I
CAME
back to the city after those two weeks away, message followed message on my phone machine.
How's everything? Hey, give me a call,
Elisa's voice said. Then it tried again.
Just wanted to come over sometime to get some clothes, if that's okay with you.
Day after day it asked for me.
I guess you're away still, climbing Mount Matterhorn or wherever it is, with some girl named Heidi and two goats. I suppose I have to wait till your triumphant return from greener pastures
. I thought she sounded jeering in the last message.

I got a runaround when I tried to call her back at the gallery, the one place I could reach her. First a giggly young woman told me Elisa was out, then an older woman said she was not at her desk, then a man told me she had already been given my message. “You can try again if you
want,
” he said.

I
T WAS THE
first week in September, and as soon as I went back to work, the camera store was mobbed with people overtaken by a sudden eagerness to spend money. There was a new saleskid (as Ed called him) who was no good at all—he complained about the air-conditioning (“I have a problem with noise”) and he didn't know a thing about cameras and he kept telling all the peskiest customers that the man with the ponytail was the one to ask, the old guy. They tired me out, these customers. I was just going for my evening break while it was still light enough to read outside, when the phone at my counter rang, and I started back.

“Never mind,” Charelle said. “It's for Jeremy.”

The new kid, who had a close-trimmed haircut and wore what Ed told me was a Prada jacket, strolled toward the phone, so I left. In the warm, fading light, I fell asleep on the park bench with my book not even opened.

When I came back from my break, I kept thinking I heard the phone ring every time anyone's beeper went off.

“Nervous?” the new kid said. He was a pain already. “Hey,” he said. “By the way. My mom says hello.”

I got it then. He was Maureen's kid. He was here now, he said, instead of back in college because he really had
not liked any of his courses very much and the other students were an exceedingly lame group. “It was such a tacky school,” he said.