Lucky Us (21 page)

I welcomed him to the wonderful world of Eagle Eyes Camera. “Hope it's been going well,” I said.

“Well, it's not hard, that's for sure,” he said. “It's a job with no content, if you know what I mean. Maybe you don't. I don't know how you did it all these years.”

“Is that a question?” I said. He sort of laughed.

“Everybody says you're the man here,” he said. I hated that the most, his little compliment.

W
HEN
I
GOT
home to my apartment, there was another message from Elisa.
I don't know why I'm bothering if you never call me back.
Where did she expect me to try to call her? After a long day, it didn't cheer me at all.

And I had my cheerless meal, liverwurst on rye in front of the TV news. I was eating a stale Mallomar when the phone rang. It was a sudden, thrilling ring, once and then twice and then again; here it was, here it was, here it was, after all.

The caller wasn't Elisa. She was a woman who had a lot of trouble pronouncing Catanzaro and who wanted me to give money to the Police Athletic League. I told her
I wasn't home. Afterward it bothered me that I had been so jubilant hearing the phone ring. I didn't want to be that eager for the sound of Elisa's voice.

W
HEN
I
WAS
in prison, I told everyone not to visit me there. But I had longings, it was never true that I didn't. I thought at times about summoning one of the women I had been with—they would have come, they weren't timid or weak women. Even Maureen might have come, although we had not been together for several years. The prison was just a few hours away from the city. The sight of her would have been quite a miracle to me. But I hated the thought of her going through a metal detector—this was before everyone endured them at airports—and the one at our prison was notorious for being absurdly sensitive. A woman had to remove any jewelry from her ears and wrist and neck, and she might have to go into a rest room to take off her bra if the under-wiring set off the alarm. Maureen could not have been admitted wearing jeans or a miniskirt, unsuitable attire, and I was not sure she even had other clothes. The guards would have gone through her purse and taken away any food—a box of raisins, a pack of chewing gum—no matter how innocent.

But I had longings nonetheless. At night or at unguarded moments during the day, I would think about the concept of
being kissed
and it would seem too radical and lavish to have once been common in my life. Later, when I got out, people sometimes wanted to ask about how “frustrated” I must have been, but it was not sheer release I missed (that I could effect myself, with sad efficiency) but the pressure of a body in my arms, eager for me. The gift of that.

And when I was first with a woman, after I got out—it was someone named Catherine, a mild and handsome woman—I thought, as we stood kissing for a long time and then as we made our way to the bed, that I had not really remembered any of this right. For all the time spent imagining nothing but, I never had more than a phantom trace of
what it was like.

S
O NOW
I played the tape of Elisa's messages over five times in a row (who was there to stop me?). She seemed to be mocking the way I never took a vacation. Whatever she was saying ceased to mean much by the third time around. I was interested in the sound of her talking, the breathy immediacy of it. It startled me each time with the surprise of the possible. It reminded me
that there was an actual specific person, an Elisa, who had spoken into the tape.

A
ND THEN AT
work the next day, Ed called me to the phone. “It's me,” Elisa said. “At long last. Can you believe it?”

“How are you?” I said.

“Oh!” she said. “I've been better.”

“What happened? Are you okay?”

“I'm staying with Fiona and Ira, do you have the number there? In Brooklyn. You remember that loft, don't you?”

I was glad of this, very glad. At least she wasn't living with what's-his-name. But perhaps that was how she had been better, in the happy days with him.

“Winter is coming, you know,” Elisa said. “So if it's all right with you, I want to come by to get some clothes. Maybe later on. What do you think? How late are you working?”

“Later on now, you mean?” I said. “Tonight?”

I
MADE
J
EREMY
take my last customer, a truly aggravating man who kept asking questions about service warranties. I had been thinking of nothing but Elisa for
two hours and I could not bear this person slowing me down.

“Jeremy,” I said. “Want a chance to make yourself useful here?” He looked at me in confusion and simmering protest, but he obeyed, and I got out of there.

Gabe looked good. A little wary around the eyes. He hugged me in a civil and polite way.

“Is that a new shirt?” I said. “It's nice.”

I had been back to this building a few times since I'd moved out, but when I'd walked in from the street to-night, the hallway felt very stagy and fateful, and the decades-old paint job—brown woodwork, pale yellow plaster—was so drab that I could hardly stand its poignancy. Gabe looked like himself.

“I buy new stuff sometimes,” he said.

“Did you get it in Switzerland?”

“Where?”

“I knew you didn't go to Switzerland.”

“Not me,” he said. “Who told you that? I didn't go far. How are Fiona and Ira?”

“They tiff with each other. But they're nice to me.”

“Will you stay there awhile? It's a big place, right?”

“I won't stay long.” I felt like a certain kind of actress in French films, hysterical but composed.

Gabe wanted to pour me a glass of wine but I asked for water instead. I asked him how the lunches were going in the soup kitchen.

“They closed us down,” he said. “But Clorinda thinks she has some couple with deep pockets who'll bail us out.”

“The proverbial rich patrons,” I said.

“Sometimes I wish I were rich,” he said.

“Oh, please. You? You don't want that really.”

“I might have been rich, which is funny to think of,” he said. “Sometimes I do think about it.”

“Rich how?”

“I could have traveled, I could have seen a lot more of the world.”

I didn't say
it's not too late
or
you've done just fine
. Fake cheer was not what I wanted to give him.

“You don't even care about money!” I said. “What are you talking about?”

And then I put my hand on his knee. He was sitting next to me on the couch, so it was an easy maneuver. Under the leg of his black gabardine pants I felt his kneecap and the muscle of his thigh, and I thought, oh, this is easy. It's not hard at all. What took me so long?

I looked at him then, my Gabe of Gabes, but he wasn't looking back. He went on talking about something at work—a too-hip salesman who was condescending to him—and he gave no sign that my hand on him was anything he wanted to notice. If anything, he looked embarrassed.

I didn't move my hand and I stayed in that foolish position. So I had fucked up everything, after all. All was lost. How could it be? It could be, it was; only someone as thickheaded as I was wouldn't have known.

Gabe, who had hardly ever been anything but kind to me, wouldn't look me in the eye now. All was lost. I took my hand away from Gabe's knee.

What did that mean,
all was lost?
What a flabby, melodramatic phrasing that was. I was as bad as all those mewling divorced mothers I'd scoffed at. I had never gone in for wistful plaints, but now I could see the temptation. That beckoning pool of sadness, with its refreshing glint of indignation. I had to draw myself up. I had to get through this better than that.

“Do you want to go eat?” he said. “Did you have supper?”

“Supper?” I said. “No. Let's go, let's go right now.”

W
E WENT AROUND
the corner to this restyled diner where we always used to go before. I was glad that he had wanted to spend this much more time with me and I was gladdened by the place too, with its red vinyl cushions and its chrome-trimmed banquettes.

“How's your painting?” he said.

“It's a mess,” I said. “I don't really like doing it anymore. It's no good—I have to start over. It's going to take me too long to be even halfway decent.”

“You have to keep at it.”

“Is that so?” I said. He was a fine one to talk about keeping at things.

“You still have your studio?”

“No,” I said.

“It was a nice studio,” he said. “You always liked it.”

“I let it go. I was never there.”

I couldn't eat until eight o'clock because of my meds, and I didn't explain this to Gabe until after I'd ordered some meat loaf that I played with for twenty minutes and then ate a slice of when it was cold. “My stomach has to be empty while some of the magic bullets are working,” I said.

“I didn't know,” he said. “What are you taking?”

I said the names (Crixivan, Zerit, Epivir), and he nodded solemnly. These things he had once read about were now the intimate occupants of my bloodstream. He was a little startled, I think.

“I would've waited to order food,” he said. “You didn't tell me.”

“Never mind,” I said. “I'm fine.”

If I didn't want his pity before, I certainly didn't want it now. Actually, I did. But I was trying to be careful of all that in myself, the oozy helplessness, the big-eyed soppy bid for special treatment. Who wanted to be like that?

“I lost thirteen pounds,” I said. “You didn't notice?”

“You look fine,” he said.

“I'm too skinny.”

“You look fine.”

This wasn't the best compliment I'd ever gotten. I didn't look so fine either.

Gabe was not even looking at me. It probably didn't really make much difference to him what my weight was anymore. Why should it? But the surprise of this took my breath away. I was sitting at a table with Gabe, having one more meal among the thousands I'd eaten in his company, and he was way out of my reach. No one could
blame him, but I wasn't used to any of this yet. The time ahead was more than I wanted to think about.

“Is that someone you know?” Gabe said.

A woman with a round face and a great bobbed haircut was walking toward me. It was Wendy, the intern from work. “I can't believe you're in this dive,” she said. “I love this place. God, you look so much better than you did. Is that meat loaf? You can keep that kind of food down now?”

“No,” I said. “Better not come too close.”

“She looked god-awful a month ago,” Wendy said to Gabe. “Well, you probably know. She was like Vampyra, wasn't she?”

“But now I'm stunning,” I said.

“I've never seen anyone look worse from flu. Force her to eat her mashed potatoes,” Wendy said to Gabe. “Stand over her with a whip until she finishes.”

“We don't have that kind of relationship,” I said.

“Is this your father?” Wendy said. “I'm Wendy, I'm so glad to meet you.”

Gabe said, “I'm Elisa's friend.” How velvety he sounded next to Wendy.

“Are those my people?” she said. “I think they are. I can't stay now.” She took off then, to the front of the diner, none too soon.

I felt like a ghoul after she left, a gray-skinned grotesque with belladonna eyes. What a creepy joke for me to have thought I was going to lure back my old sweetheart.

“She's made me hate my potatoes,” I said.

On the wall across from me was a framed photograph of a black-and-white cow in a barn. The cow was looking straight at the room with dopey, soft eyes—a born sucker, whose brother had been ground for my supper. The long lashes made her look conceited and pleased with herself, an accidental effect, but that was why she was comic. And I never wanted to be in this restaurant again. Every object in the place was barbed. Every bit of hearty decor was sarcastic. Poor cow.

Just then I felt his hand on my knee. It was Gabe, his hand. I remembered every bit of old joy in my life and thought about how I was about to get that back. His face, however, did not seem to tell me much one way or the other. I looked skinny and he was pitying me. What was I going to do with that?

“Well,” he said.

Now he was caressing my knee. It was definitely a caress, with motion and fondling in it.

“See, it's good I called you,” I said.

I became instantly giddy, from the shock of gladness. I
thought, this is what Gabe must have felt like, when he first got out of prison, when he walked through those sets of gates and the world was still there.

There was no chance of my eating anymore food after this, and we went home as soon as we got the check.

I
N THE LIVING
room, when I was kissing Gabe (I had forgotten his way of kissing, the rhythm and tact in it), I was as blindly happy as anyone could be, delighted and eager and celebratory. I was thinking that I did have some luck, didn't I?—to make good on my chances before they ran out.

The apartment was quite dark, with just one light that had been left on in the kitchen. It was barely nine o'clock but it felt very late. The dimness in the rooms was like the tender dark of the country at night, empty and full of faint, pulsating noise. Every shadowy piece of furniture in the place was waiting.

We stood and leaned against a wall, necking, as if we were a young, dating couple, going through each step, testing. How long we were going to just kiss? When he put his hand under my shirt, I made a sound between a sigh and a laugh. I was a little bit like the ugly maiden aunt, cloyingly grateful for what's left to her. Just a little bit.