You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas (14 page)

I knew this: there was only one of him in the world.

One hour with him was denser than all the years spent with everybody else I had ever known.

My instincts were not mistaken.

My instincts had been with me as I crawled from the swamp; my brain only showed up later. It was my instinct I would trust. Even if it defied logic.

Especially if it defied common sense. I wanted nothing to do with common.

But extremely rare and precious specialty items often carry an extraordinary price. I knew this, too.

It was reckless and insane to feel this way about a person I didn’t even know. My mind was hurling itself against the walls of my skull in protest. But beneath my sternum that night, I felt a kind of wisdom. I very nearly heard advice:
Acceptance, when it comes, arrives in waves: Listen with your chest. You will feel a pendulum swing within you, favoring one direction or another. And that is your answer. The answer is always inside your chest. The right choice weighs more. That’s how you know. It causes you to lean in its direction.

I thought,
I don’t know who he is, but I know he is mine.

George picked up before the first ring was out. “I knew you’d call,” he said, his voice low, not quite a whisper but a hush.

The hush in his voice. I knew it all right then: the boyfriend, ten feet away. George, sitting by the phone hoping I would call. Hearing the phone and knowing it was me. Hearing my voice and knowing he’d been right. Realizing he was hearing my voice
because
he had been
discovered, he had been seen.
This fact sinking in. This fact sinking all the way in.

Casually, I said, “I liked seeing you.”

With the exaggerated singsong inflection of a cartoon character, he said, “I
don’t
know what it is . . .
but
it’s mine!”

I almost laughed and then I almost sobbed.

Neither of us was expecting what eventually happened. It was very much like a car accident in this respect. You can go over it a thousand times to prove it shouldn’t have happened, but it did and it changed everything.

It was certainly not my idea of a romantic situation. But I had loved George approximately twelve minutes after we met. It had not been possible for me to walk away from him. And once I met the boyfriend and saw how loyally and carefully George cared for him, I loved George even more.

I pictured myself in the boyfriend’s position, except with a cold. And George bringing me a tuna melt he’d made beneath the broiler, on top of a piece of aluminum foil. Instead of a suction wand.

I did feel filthy, being the secret lover. Invited into the home as a new friend. But the boyfriend didn’t seem threatened in the slightest. In fact, he seemed relieved to have George occupied and stop nagging him to
fight this thing.
Often the boyfriend would say, “You two boys go out to a movie. I just want to rest.” And I would think,
Would you please just die so we don’t have to go out into the cold?
And then I would try and “unthink” the thought by saying in my mind,
That was just a very dark joke. My way of trying to hold it together. I didn’t mean it.
Although in truth, I kind of did. By this point, George and I were a couple, in all but name.

Only as the boyfriend was nearing death and whispered to me, “You want him? You can
have
him,” did I realize he’d known all along.

I disgusted myself. I stood and watched that man’s chest rise with his very last breath and never deflate. And then I left the hospital with his boyfriend. Oh yes, I did.

For the next year, George was in mourning. Pictures of the boyfriend were installed on all surfaces of the apartment and the same somber, funereal George Michael and Enya CDs were played endlessly on the stereo. It seemed there was nothing I could do to reach him. Each morning when I woke up in what was now our bed, the first thing I saw was the photograph of George and his boyfriend beside me on the bedside table.

The boyfriend himself, in ash form, was in an urn atop the mantel.

After a year, when George still refused to let me in, I left him.

And it was only a few months later that a brand-new George drove downtown to my apartment in Battery Park City and rang me from a payphone. The dead boyfriend was no longer
right there
between us. Something else was.

George had tested positive for HIV. It was the same strain that had killed the boyfriend. And according to George, they had never had unprotected sex. And in the last years, no sex at all.

That meant, the day I walked into the boyfriend’s hospital room after work and saw George with his bare hands inside his boyfriend’s mouth, removing packing gauze from the recent wisdom tooth extraction, was indeed the day he had become infected.

As soon as I walked in I had grasped the magnitude of the scene before me. I shouted at him, “
What
are you doing?” and I pulled him by the arm over to the sink—he still hadn’t taken off his suit jacket—where I forced his hands under the faucet at full strength.

After he managed to wash away all the blood, he held up his dripping clean hands to inspect them. George was a nail biter. And the evidence was right there before us: cuts on his thumbs, tears in the flesh beneath the nail of his index and middle fingers. Cuticles ripped. Open wounds. All I could say was,
“Jesus Christ.”

After six, seven, then eight months with no news, I had come to believe that in a moment of madness, we had experienced a very close call.

Now, as I listened to him describe how the doctor revealed he had seroconverted, I sat in the passenger seat and stared at the dashboard without blinking. A dead weight had formed inside my chest and though I didn’t know it then, this weight would never leave me.

I had wanted only George. And because I knew he felt the same and because I could see a terrible window, I waited. And when George was grieving and had no room for me, I crushed everything inside of me that was huge and filled with joy into a tiny, dense point and I waited some more.

But George would not return to me. His eyes would look everywhere except at mine. I had lost him and so I left.

And I began to let him go. Hour by hour. Days into months. It was a physical sensation, like letting out the string of a kite. Except that the string was coming from my center.

He had parked the Honda behind the American Express building. It was there that George finally spoke all the words I had ever wanted him to say.

He said them all at once. “I love you. I am
in love
with you. You mean more to me than anything or anyone ever has and I am so sorry that I hurt you and pushed you away.

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Not hiding, not sneaking, and not waiting. I want everything and I want it only with you.”

And because I had waited and waited and waited to hear him speak the words that I could
see
on his face and in his eyes; that his arms and neck and back and hands never withheld; and which was implicit in our relentless, insatiable, appetite for each other. Because of this, I turned to look at him.

And I saw that those words had always been inadequate; they were clichés.

They could not
begin
to name the trembling, almost orchestral longing, the magnitude, the need—all of it, utterly hopeless and complete.

I closed my eyes and wondered why I had ever made it about the words at all. Words like that were spoken every day; few people got to see what I saw right in front of me.

I opened my eyes and what I said was,
“Okay.”

And we didn’t even stop by my apartment. We raced up the West Side Highway to his. We were traveling at the speed of an ambulance, as if this was the very definition of an emergency.

By the time we reached the end of the hallway and his door, we were desperate, clumsy, half-naked animals. Inside, we slammed the door shut with our bodies and dropped to the rug.

At midnight we showered. And we emerged from the steam a normal couple.

I noticed a new set of coffee mugs still on the counter, and when I went into the bedroom to throw on a T-shirt and shorts, I saw that the photograph of George with the boyfriend was gone. In the same frame was a photograph of me.

I had given it to him the year before and not seen it again until that moment.

Almost immediately, George introduced me to friends I’d never known he had. He displayed an easy, affectionate possessiveness; a hand on my shoulder, guiding; two hands suddenly around my waist, pulling me backward, reeling me in. The sex, rather, ceased. It was replaced with astonishing thoughtfulness.

What troubled me most was the way he now called me
honey.
As if this would be an acceptable term of endearment under even the most ideal circumstances. But we had come together as a couple beneath a mushroom cloud of infidelity, death, and now terminal disease.

Honey
was the guy standing up in the metal rowboat, trying to keep his balance with his arms outstretched before him as he pleads with his wife and young daughter to join him out on the lake. Behind him, black clouds roil and grind; lightning flashes inside of them, thunder cracks the air.
C’mon guys, it’ll be great, I promise!