Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? (5 page)

Michael looked over his shoulder at me, and of course, without my saying a word, he read it on my face.

“Noah, honey,” Michael said, “we’re just going to let this absorb some of the garlic flavor. Why don’t you go play on your computer, and I’ll call you when it’s time to set the table.”

“Okay.”

Michael lifted my little boy, with his lopsided grin and missing two front teeth, down from the counter, and sent him off to his room with a kiss on the top of his head.

“Well?” Michael turned to me, his black eyes filled with worry.

“It’s not good, Michael. It was in the lymph nodes.”

“You’re too young. How is this possible?”

“It just is, Michael,” I snapped. “So though I know you had high hopes for setting me up with your sexy stud of an accountant, I would say unless he digs bald chicks, all bets are off.”

“Don’t even talk like that, Lily. I hate when you do that.”

“I
can
talk like that. I’m the one with cancer.”

“Lily…”

I saw him swallow hard and look away. “The rule, Michael!”

“Oh, fuck your No Crying rule. Who institutes something as stupid as that? Just fuck it, Lily. I’m allowed to cry.” He exhaled loudly and turned his head. In profile, he was even more good-looking, which I have come to believe over the nearly twenty years I’ve known him should be against all laws of genetics. His nose was perfectly straight and regal. There was strength and beauty in his cheekbones and jawline, in his olive complexion and black curly hair. His neck was strong, like a Greek marble bust.

He faced me again. “Sorry. I was having a moment. God, Lily,” he wrapped his arms around me, and I leaned my head against his chest. I fit so perfectly, as if the hollow there was made for me. More often than not, I suppose I shared that hollow with his latest lover, but they always left and I was always here. For now. I snuggled in closer. His black sweater smelled of Aramis.

“Hello chemo. Goodbye hair.”

I heard him sniffling.

“Are you blowing your nose in my ear?”

“You need some new one-liners. Honestly, you can be…the most impossible bitch. It’s a good thing I adore you.”

“I’m the only one who can put up with you during Yankees season. And now you’ve corrupted my son.”

“Taken him to the dark side.”

“Baseball is so boring.”

“Blasphemer!” He pulled back in mock horror.

I smiled. “I love you, Michael.”

“I love you, Lily.”

“Now we really have to tell the kids. I don’t think I can hide a bald head, and you know I am the biggest baby in the world about throwing up.”

“I’m well aware…. Are you going to tell Satan’s Spawn?”

“No.”

“One of the kids might tell him.”

“He hasn’t called either of them in going on five months.”

“Such an asshole. All right then. And by the way, just because you have cancer doesn’t mean you get out of clean-up duty.”

“I wouldn’t mind, but do you have to use every pan in the kitchen? Every one?”

“You won’t be complaining when you taste.” He held a spoon of clam sauce to my mouth.

“You are a culinary genius.”

“More flattery. It’ll get you everything.”

“A cure? Can I have that?” I smiled weakly.

“I’ll talk to the Big Man and see what I can do.”

Michael attended Mass every Sunday, a fact that confused me. Some of his dates found it endearing. I didn’t understand how he could be a gay Catholic, technically condemned by the very Church whose faith sustained him. I just didn’t understand, though being sick had taught me in a short amount of time to stop questioning faith. Mine was fragile. My faith. Barely there, it was like the last breaths of a dying person, just a whisper of air, a hint of life. With Michael, faith was like greedily gulping in the wind at the seaside, filling his lungs with its healing.

We sat down for dinner, just the three of us. Michael said grace. “Heavenly Father, grant us a miracle. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”

“What kind of miracle do you want?” Noah asked with simple innocence.

Michael looked at me. I shook my head.

“We’re praying your mother doesn’t burn your breakfast tomorrow. But that may be too much to ask.”

Noah nodded, looking at me the way little boys do when they adore their mothers.

I stared up at the ceiling and said my own silent prayer.
Big Man, breakfast I can handle. A battle with cancer, I’m not so sure.

Michael

I
’ve been single since the 1980s. Since the age of AIDS.

Lily and I used to attend funerals like they were dates. It seemed, for a time, that we had one funeral a week. It’s so hard to convey to anyone not living in Manhattan or San Francisco or Los Angeles at that time what it was like. Lily worked for a newspaper and freelanced at magazines. I wrote for some magazines and taught. We were around some of New York’s best creative people—graphic designers and writers, playwrights and poets. We were in our twenties and believed we were invincible, that we were having the time of our lives. Only for some of us, it was borrowed time.

One by one, people started dropping. Friends who were beautiful young men not a month before when we saw them had Karposi’s, their faces covered with the purplish lesions that marked them the way leprosy used to mark its victims. They grew sicker and sicker, some of them going insane before the end, often alone, just skeletons, disowned by family, ignored by neighbors—or worse, vilified.

A lover of mine, one I buried in 1987, once asked me when I knew I was gay. It was a rare moment when we weren’t fighting or drunk or breaking each other’s hearts with our cheating and lies. We were lying in my king-size bed, staring at the ceiling after smoking a joint, and he asked me, “When did you know?”

I shrugged.

“Come on, Michael. You always shut me out every time I try to get to know you.”

“I didn’t shut you out ten minutes ago.” I grinned, then, as always, aware that my looks offered me a sanctuary. A grin. A seduction. Hiding always came so easily to me.

“Come on. When did you know?”

I thought about it in my pot-fogged mind. “Part of me wants to say I always knew. I was born knowing. But I guess it was in junior high when everyone was paying dollars—whole dollars!—to look at a magazine of Swedish porno that my friend Greg’s father brought back from one of his trips overseas. Mr. Morgan was a pilot. It was hardcore stuff, and Greg found it in the bottom of his father’s sock drawer. Blond women with enormous tits screwing two guys at once, a lot of times black men. Some kind of Swedish obsession. All my buddies were going ga-ga over the blonde, and I was going crazy over these pictures of cocks the size of loaves of French bread.”

“That was a good clue,” he laughed. And then, like the two high idiots we were, we laughed ourselves silly for fifteen minutes until we couldn’t even remember what we were laughing at anymore.

He was dead eleven months later. Not that it stopped me. I never thought anything would stop me. Not the AIDS crisis. Not my own HIV scare—I’m negative, though, thank God. Not lovers settling down into couplehood. I eventually got tested, but I was still running from myself. And then Noah was born.

Noah Michael Waters (middle name after yours truly) was born at five o’clock in the morning the night of a massive blizzard. Lily’s ex, David, who was not yet an ex, was stranded in a Manhattan snowstorm (and please, what bullshit that turned out to be) with no trains leaving the city. I had gone to keep Lily company before the storm hit and ended up sleeping on Lily’s couch. If the new baby decided to make a grand entrance, I didn’t want to worry that I couldn’t get to her.

Just before midnight, Lily came downstairs and poked me.

“Michael?” she whispered. “My water broke.”

The next fifteen minutes played like an
I Love Lucy
episode. I panicked. I jumped off the couch and started putting on my Reeboks with no socks—which was fucking frigid in the snow. I was running around looking for my coat, looking for Lily’s coat, running into the bathroom to brush my teeth, screaming, “Be calm, Lily. Be calm!”

Lily just laughed. “We have a little time yet, Michael. But with the snow we better get going.” She called up her next-door neighbor, a sweet older lady named Marjorie, to come and stay with Tara.

“Breathe…breathe…” I urged Lily. “You can do this naturally.”

“Fuck that. I want my epidural as soon as we get there.”

I kept watching Lily, expecting the baby to drop down between her legs at any moment.

“Michael, I am not going to be seen with you dripping toothpaste down your chin. Go wash. I’ll wait.”

Marjorie arrived, her hair in plastic rollers held in place with bobby pins, and a thick bathrobe on. She hugged Lily for good luck. Before we left, we went upstairs to kiss Tara goodbye. She was eight and cute then, not the petulant teen she is now. “Bring me home a sister,” she murmured sleepily. I warmed up Lily’s “mom van,” which I had mercilessly teased her about when she got it. She’d sold out, gone suburban on me. She moved out of the city when she married Spawn, only then we didn’t call him that.

I drove slowly, trying to see through the swirls of snow dancing in my headlights. Next to me, Lily kept breathing. I was a pinch hitter. I hadn’t gone through Lamaze. I just knew, when David got stranded in the city, that I might be “it,” and she had given me a crash course in the fact that she would soon be screaming, hitting me and otherwise behaving in decidedly insane fashion while she, in turn, tried to push this baby out of her.

“Breathe,” I said, my eyes squinting in the poor visibility.

“I am,” she shouted back and slugged me in the arm.

“I mean
me.
I’m talking to myself. You’re making me nervous.”

“Fuck you, Michael. Just get me to the hospital.
I want my epidural!
”

We pulled into the parking lot of St. Mary’s hospital, and I got her a wheelchair and pushed her up to maternity. Everyone assumed I was the father, and she and I laughed each time the mistake was made. At the same time, she didn’t call David to tell him she’d gone into labor. I think she knew…maybe she was afraid at that perfect moment, delivering this new baby, that another woman would answer the phone in his hotel room and ruin it for her.

I held her hand. I breathed with her. I watched the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor. I gave her ice chips, even as she screamed at me.

“I don’t want fucking ice chips! I want a ginger ale. A Coke. A frigging martini. Something. Please. Just a sip.”

I gave the nurse a pleading look, but she shook her head and spoke as one soothes a child.

“Now Lily, you’ve had one child already. You know you can’t have anything to drink. Just ice chips.”

As soon as the nurse left to check on another patient, Lily’s lips quivered, and she whimpered, “Michael, just one sip. Go find a soda. I just want one sip.”

“I can’t, Lily, honey. You heard her.”

“What the fuck does she know?” she screamed and punched me in the arm again. I decided giving birth was like having multiple personalities.

Hours later, in a mirror the nurses set up for us, I watched Noah’s head crown. I was amazed at how a woman’s body could
do
that. Stretch to let this new life emerge, covered in blood and white stuff Lily assured me was normal. He was whole and perfect.

When he cried, I cried. Lily cried. I cut the cord, terrified and amazed at separating this new life from his mother with a snip. The doctor placed him on his mother’s breast, and Noah immediately searched for her nipple, found it, and started making sucking noises. I put my finger next to his little fist, and he grabbed it. I counted five little perfect fingers. Then he stopped sucking, turned his face and stared at me as I said, “Hello, Noah.” I convinced myself he knew my voice from all the talks Lily and I had during her pregnancy about how David was growing distant. She was certain he was having an affair. And I had been there for her, listening and talking. My voice.

Lily sniffled and laughed and cried at the same time. “He knows you, Michael.”

They took Noah from us and put him on a scale to weigh him and do tests and clean him up. And I was aware that everything had changed. I had witnessed this life, and I felt responsible for the little guy. I was there when he took his first breath. I was part of something…someone who was now going to grow up and become a person. A man who might become president or, better yet, a starter for the Yankees. And I wanted to be part of creating that.

Ordinarily, I would have gone home that night, changed and cruised the bars. I had safe sex since finding out I was HIV negative, but though I had sworn to change my ways, I hadn’t. I mean, yeah, I wore a condom, but I still didn’t allow myself to stand still for very long. I was always running. Running from what? The past, I guess. Everyone but Lily, who knew so much about me that running from her would have been futile.

But instead of going back to my apartment, after Noah was born, I slept on the couch in Lily’s birthing room, and while she slept, I held him and whispered, “Whatever happens between your mom and dad, Noah Michael, I will be here for you. I’ll never abandon you. I’ll never judge you. Whoever you become, whoever you are in that soul of yours, I’ll accept. I may have a problem if you don’t like baseball, but we can work around that.”

David left Lily six weeks later, for good. No looking back. She had gone to the grocery store and by the time she made it back home, his bags were packed. The fact that I had been an usher in their wedding made me not want to believe what she had been telling me throughout the pregnancy. I told her what
I
wanted to hear—what I thought
she
wanted to hear—not the truth, which was that any guy who had as many excuses for not making it home from the city as he did was surely fucking someone on the couch in his office.

Lily was a mess. If it hadn’t been for me and the kids—especially this new little infant all baby-smelling (they really do smell perfect)—I think she would have curled up and quit. But Lily is a fighter. Lord
knows
she is a fighter.

His girlfriend-on-the-side, the Child Bride as we call her, was an exchange student from London, and he moved there to marry her as soon as the divorce was final. Noah, in some ways, was mine. David never looked to the past, and I never wanted him to. Lily was better off without him. And instead of Noah’s real father, it was me who witnessed all the miracles. The first tooth, the first step, the first day of school. And wrapped up in this package of childhood was a gift. A gift of my own mortality.

Where some men might see their son and think they are immortal, for they are now passing on their genes, I saw so clearly how I would one day die. Noah was the future, and from the moment he grasped my pinky in his little fist, I wanted to pass along all my knowledge of the batting averages for the entire Yankees lineup since 1972, the secrets of a perfect soufflé, the stance when you’re at bat, my record collection that I refused to part with—including The Village People and Etta James and Beverly Sills. I wanted him to learn it was okay for a boy to like opera and baseball. I wanted to read
David Copperfield
aloud to him. I wanted to take him to the Metropolitan and show him Chagall and Degas, and my favorite, Goya. I wanted to save him from Lily’s deadly cooking. I wanted to live on, through Noah.

After all the death I had seen. All the funerals, all the bed sores and Karposi’s scabs. All the dementia and pneumonia that was so much a part of the AIDS crisis before the cocktails that keep them all alive now, I was ready for a gift of life. So Noah was a gift of my mortality, of seeing I would some day be gone and knowing I wanted to leave my mark, and also a gift of life and innocence in an age lacking those very things. He was my boy then and now. He changed me forever.

I thought Lily and I had shared the toughest stuff there was. The good stuff, too. We had danced on tabletops in the Palladium, and we had taken a cruise together to the Bahamas. And we had survived her marriage. I mean, for a lot of friends, marriage is the death knell. They drift apart. But we didn’t. Secretly, I think David always had one foot in, one foot out; he never committed with his whole heart to her. So I was convenient. I got to absorb some of her intensity, her passion, her excitement. He got to remain a little distant.

Divorce always sucks—but I can’t imagine being postpartum hormonal and facing it. But we got through that. We got through my attending my grandmother’s funeral—my father hasn’t spoken to me since I came out in college. But cancer? I mean, cancer is always something that happens to someone
else’s
family. Oh, you know, this guy I work with, his sister’s brother-in-law has a brain tumor. It’s never up close and personal. Only now it wasn’t someone else. It was Lily.