Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? (15 page)

Michael

I
t seems like love is all about labels: gay or straight? Married or just shacking up? I had no label for Lily’s and my friendship. I had no label for how I felt about George. I just called both of them love. George didn’t see it that way.

We had just finished a dinner we cooked together at my place. Two steaks, broiled to medium-rare, delicious red potatoes in an herbed butter, asparagus steamed with orange juice. A bottle of Australian Shiraz. Chocolate éclairs. Then I told him.

At first, he just gripped the arm of the couch. Then he stood and paced. “How can you expect me to accept that, Michael?” His eyes welled up.

I stood up, too. Facing him. “Look, George, before you and I ever met there was Lily and these kids. And if, God forbid, Lily doesn’t beat this thing, then there are still those two kids.”

“Why you?”

“Why not me? George, you’ve barely gotten to know them. They could be part of your life, too…our life.”

“But I have no interest in playing Daddy. I have a restaurant to run. I barely have time to see you as it is, and if this came to pass, Michael, you’d be split in half. Half for me, half for them. Oh…and the half for your job, and the half for the Yankees. The half for your mother. There’s not enough halves to go around.”

“You make it sound like I’m a stock commodity. Shares traded on Wall Street. Well, I’m not. I’m me, George. Complicated, maybe, but life is complicated.”

“Not this complicated.”

“George, this is a formality, and chances are this will never come to pass because Lily is not going to die.”

His voice trembled as he whispered, “You need to stop lying to yourself, Michael. Anyone can take one look at her and know it’s only a matter of time. She wouldn’t have suggested this if she didn’t know deep down inside, herself, that she wasn’t going to make it. She knows, Michael, and I’ll say it because you won’t. She’s
dying!
”

Without even thinking, I slapped him. Me, throwing a fit like a diva. I don’t pull stunts like this in relationships—not, mind you, that I was ever very serious with anyone before George. But I slapped him.

He stood there, stunned, his face careening from one emotion to the next: shock, horror, anger and finally, a flood of tears.

“George, don’t…” I moved toward him, my arms outstretched. “I’m so sorry…”

“No,
you
don’t,” he screamed, grabbed his coat and rushed from my apartment, not looking back. I didn’t know whether to follow him or wait for him to cool down, so I watched him leave, my insides a jumble. The door slammed like a final exclamation point. A slam of “You blew it, Michael.”

I sat down on my couch and dialed the telephone. I called his answering machine, feeling myself get teary at the sound of his voice, “This is George, leave a message and have a peaceful day.” God, I loved his voice. “George, I’m under a lot of stress, and I just lost my head, man. I’m sorry. I can’t imagine losing you, and I’m hoping we can work through this.” I hung up.

I don’t know if I ever thought of myself as a happily ever after guy. Even if I could legally marry a man, I had never thought about marrying any of the guys I’d been with. I had trouble, with my attention span, getting past breakfast. Until I met George.

It wasn’t his looks, or even the sex. It was the other stuff. Watching movies together, cooking together, going to a ball game or just hanging out. The fact that we could fall into a silence that was as comfortable as my Yankee jacket. And I had stopped thinking about when we might grow bored of each other. I had started thinking in terms of, if not forever, then a long, long time. Why had I slapped him?

Was it because George had told me what no one else has the courage to say? Had I not seen the way the shadow was overtaking her?

George saw the shadow. He saw it hulking and looming, waiting. Sitting in my apartment, I felt cold. I wrapped my arms around myself. The shadow was rubbing its hands together, knowing, knowing time was on its side. Time was on the side of cancer. Time could wait out her energy and strength. It could wait out her resolve and her fight. It could wait out her spirit. Time and this shadow called death. They were best of friends. Coconspirators in the death trade.

I hadn’t seen the shadow. I saw life. I saw her smile and heard her laughter. I argued with her over who was the better actress: Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Fontaine. She always chose Joan and so we argued. We all know it’s Stanwyck. We popped popcorn. We watched movies. We went to soccer games. We went to Yankee games. I watched the sunlight over Yankee Stadium play on her face, dappling it in light, as the boys of summer ran the bases. I saw the light, not the shadow. I refused to see the shadow, as if not seeing might make it so.

George had seen the flicker of defeat. George had seen she had already lost. I saw her ruin scrambled eggs in the morning and heard her reading
The Hobbit
to Noah. I listened to her voice and heard her bravery, while George heard the weakness.

I turned off the lamp in the living room and sat in the dark. I didn’t want the shadow of death to see me cry. I didn’t want it to know I felt the cold. I prayed in the dark for a long time. I prayed for a miracle. I prayed for courage. I prayed I knew what I was doing with Noah and Tara. I prayed George would forgive me. I prayed to understand why there is the valley of the shadow of death. We walk this life in a dream, never realizing the valley is there. It’s always far off, in the distance. We don’t accept it. We turn our eyes from it. But it’s there. It’s quiet and still. It has time on its side.

Lily

I
don’t know if Michael was ever in love before George. I know he was really close to Damon, years ago. Damon was a beautiful columnist from the paper with coffee-colored skin and a physique to match Michael’s. Physically, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find two more beautiful men within a hundred-mile radius of Manhattan. Both of them inspired the usual comments from my female friends, “What a waste. The pair of them.” Back then, I routinely tried matchmaking. And Michael and Damon elicited sighs from my potential fixer-uppers. I liked Damon a lot, too. He was funny and used to mock Michael’s vanity as much as I did. He read eclectic authors and loved talking books. Michael would cook us all dinner and we’d stay up late debating politics and one-upping each other with stories of bad dates and the familiar “my family is more insane than yours.”

Then Damon was diagnosed HIV-positive, and Michael said he couldn’t handle it. We had buried eight friends already at that point. Not just acquaintances.
Friends.
They were people we loved. We watched families shut out gay lovers from funerals. Our friend Tom was evicted from the apartment he shared with his lover and his lover’s family wouldn’t even give him his own clothes. Damon looked healthy, but that was when HIV was a death sentence. I know Michael really hurt Damon. I don’t think he meant to abandon him. He was
always
a commitment-phobe. But Michael never dwelled on how he hurt others. He was Michael. Center of his own handsome universe. Love wasn’t part of his vocabulary, except with me. Sort of that “Love ya, you big idiot,” kind of love, where I half expected him to punch me in the arm when he said it. But when he and George split up, I had never, not in twenty years, seen him such a mess.

“I don’t fucking get how selfish he’s being….” Michael leaned over his wineglass, his eyes squeezed shut. Tissues were sprawled, crumbled on my bed.

“Maybe he just needs time—”

“Time? To accept that I am suddenly going to be a father? I don’t think all the time in the fucking world is going to fix that, Lily. And why? Am I different because I am involved with Noah and Tara? I always have been. Why does a little thing like formalizing it make it different? Am I different? Do I look different to you? Do I?”

He sat on my bed, cross-legged, wine bottle on my nightstand. He was now two glasses into bottle number two. Noah and Tara were in their rooms, Noah asleep, Tara on the phone.

“It’s a lot for him to grasp. But really, Michael, I’m sure he loves you.”

“Don’t use that word.”

“Why not?”

“Just don’t.”

“Why? He does. And I know you love him, too. Did you remind him of that?”

He shrugged, then tossed back his glass of wine. He was looking at a killer hangover tomorrow. Then again, that’s how I always felt lately. No matter how I tried to get comfortable, I ached, as if I had the worst flu on record. Yet I never hated cancer for what it did to me. How crazy is that? I hated it for what it did to the people around me. If I hadn’t so desperately needed Michael to be guardian of the kids, George and he would be happily together.

“Come on, you stubborn ass, put your head down,” I coaxed. “This will all work out. I know it. I know you and George are meant to be together.”

“I hate him.”

“You don’t.” I patted the pillow next to mine. “Come on. You look terrible. Let’s watch an old movie, and I’ll make some popcorn.”

“You’ll burn it.”

“I’ll try not to.”

Michael at last put his head down. I’d been watching him drink and listening to him talk for over two hours. He took the remote—he is a total remote hog, like all men—and clicked over to the old movie channel.

“
Rebecca
! Oh my God, it’s just starting. Go make popcorn.”

I was tired, but I forced myself out of bed and down to the kitchen. I burned the first bag of microwave popcorn by turning the bag wrong-side down. The second bag had that terrible burned-popcorn smell, but the top two-thirds of the popcorn in the bag was yellow and unburned. So I put the good popcorn in a bowl, picked out a few brown ones and went back upstairs. Michael was snoring heavily. His face was unlined. I shook my head. He must have struck a bargain with the devil to look that good for this long. I glimpsed my face in my dresser mirror. My eyebrows had returned, but one of my other medicines now made me puffy. I wasn’t winning any beauty pageants.

I covered Michael with a quilt and went down the hallway and picked up the phone in my study. I called George’s restaurant and asked for him. I’ve been a meddler all my life.

“Hello?”

“George, it’s Lily,” I whispered.

He was silent. So I plunged ahead. “Michael doesn’t know I’m calling. He’s so miserable without you, George. Please reconsider. Please. I know it’s all so new—
we’re
all so new—but please think about it.”

“Lily, I like you. I like the children, but…I can’t talk. I have a restaurant to run. You see? I am so busy. He is so busy. If he’s a father, that’s just less time I have for me. Us. I don’t know if I can handle that. I’m very set in my ways.” He was quiet. I could hear the bustle of the restaurant in the background.

“You know, don’t you?”

“Know what?”

“What he won’t face. That he really will be a single father.”

“I see it. I see you.”

I thought what George was essentially saying would hurt me, but I was somehow relieved that someone, anyone, was looking at me with truth. I was dying. “He loves you, George,” I offered.

George didn’t respond. “I have to go, Lily.”

“He does.”

“Goodbye.”

He hung up the phone, and I listened to dead air for a while. Then I hung up. Michael needed George. George, I knew, needed him. Somehow, they just fit. I would just have to make them realize it.

Michael

L
ily had a long list of do’s and don’ts for her funeral. She wanted me to give the eulogy. She wanted Pete to sit with me and the kids. She wanted my mother in the second row with Joe. She wanted martinis served after at a party at her house. Also she liked these little canapés I make. She also made me promise to play Bruce Springsteen. No hymns. No open casket—she preferred cremation. Then she wanted her urn to sit on the fireplace next to a picture of her. If that creeped us out too much, she asked me to scatter her ashes in the shoe department of Macy’s. I told her the fireplace sounded like a better option. She also said she wanted us to have lots of pictures of her looking gorgeous around. From back when we first met. Our vacation at Club Med. Pictures of her and the kids when they were small.

She wanted to institute a No Crying rule at her funeral, but I didn’t imagine it was enforceable. I assumed we had tons of time.

We didn’t.

I thought death gave out warning signs, but sometimes, death doesn’t. It enters in silence and leaves just as quietly.

This is the eulogy I gave:

There wasn’t a dry eye in the memorial chapel. Noah put on a brave face. I tried to. I was amazed at how full the place was. The entire staff of the paper. Her neighbors. Soccer moms. The Little League team. Even the guy where she bought her bagels.

Then two extraordinary things happened. Though given this was Lily we’re talking about, maybe not so amazing.

First, George walked through the door of the chapel. He pulled me aside later at the house, apologized and told me we’d weather parenthood together, figure it out as we went along. He set about putting out the canapés and making martinis and doing what she wanted. Everyone listened to her. They were afraid not to.

Second, my father showed up as I was giving the eulogy.

I was dumbfounded. I mean, not only that he had shown up, but that he had gotten so damn old in the last twenty years. I saw pictures at my mother’s, but he had, the stubborn old bastard, managed to avoid seeing me in the flesh all these years. If I went to a wedding, he didn’t. And vice versa. I felt like I was seeing a ghost of him. This big, burly man I had once been so intimidated around was kind of a shell of his old self.

And he was crying. I mean big messy tears.

After I shook hands with the guests and got the kids settled with Pete into the limousine for the ride back to the house, I told them to go without me. I’d be right along. And I went over to my father, who was lingering in the back of the chapel looking out of sorts.

“Long time, no see,” I said, kind of coldly.

“You could say that.”

“What the hell are you doing here, Dad?”

“Your mother told me you became a father.”

“Well…not exactly, Dad.”

He waved his hand as if to stave off tears. I noticed his other hand had a letter in it. “No, no, I know that. But you’ve done an amazing thing taking on these kids.”

I kept staring at his left hand. “What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

I recognized Lily’s handwriting on the outside of the envelope.

“What are you doing with a letter from Lily, Dad?”

“Oh…I can’t tell you. She made me promise. You know she used to come visit me from time to time. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that either, but if she saw your mother, she made a point of coming into the den…. Eh…anyway, you better go, son.”

I looked at him, still not really understanding what the hell he was doing there. And then, without warning, he grabbed me and pulled me to him and started crying into my shoulder.

“I’m so, so sorry.”

I stiffened, but then the weight of everything sort of made me collapse and I softened into this hug.

I have no idea what the letter said. But I just figured it was like Lily to have the last word.

There was a lone limo waiting for me outside, and I settled into the backseat. Martinis. Canapés. Was she out of her mind at the end? Who would feel like having a party?

But when I got to the house, people were laughing. Drinking. Eating. Crying. But most of all, making noise. They were celebrating her life the way she wanted them to.

Lily lived a noisy life. A messy life. An organizationally-challenged one.

And as I looked around, it dawned on me she knew exactly what she was doing when she handed me her funeral plans.

I just wish she had given me a detailed plan for the rest of our lives. Because for
that,
I hadn’t a clue as to what to do.