Lucky Us (3 page)

My mother said that when she was engaged, she lost twelve pounds from sheer delirium. That was her phrase for it. My mother had been divorced for fifteen years, and neither of us saw my father much anymore, but her memories seemed to be unblighted by later ironies. “I was thin as a snake,” she said. “I was very gorgeous, but I fainted during the blood test.”

“Right,” my friend Dawn said, when I told her this. “They used to test everybody's blood for syphilis. No more. Now they have to do HIV tests, I think.”

“Shit,” I said. “I totally forgot about that.”

We were having this conversation in a restaurant after we had been shopping for Dawn's dress. I'd talked her into getting a spunky little chartreuse number, silk shantung with black trim. Now we were getting bombed on margaritas and eating a plate of oysters. Dawn wanted us to tear right over to a medical testing office after lunch—
uptown there was one with No Appointment Necessary; she seemed to think we could make this part of our girls' afternoon out. Very modern, first we vamp around dressing rooms in our underwear, then we get our antibodies checked. I wasn't really so lighthearted about it, but I knew that Gabe wasn't going to like the idea of this test one bit, and I thought that if I went first, I'd pave the way.

N
OBODY WANTED US
laughing in that office. A receptionist gave us a flyer with some gentle wording describing the chilling possibilities, and I was asked if I wanted to speak to a counselor before deciding to be tested. I was sober now. The office was thronged with people—we had to stand, although two guys in their fifties tried to give us their seats—and everyone was blanched and tense. What am I doing here? I thought. I had the sense then to be terrified. Of the people in the room a certain number were not going to be crowing with relief a week or so from now when they read their results. And here I was, with my shopping bags and my chatty friend and my lips puffy from margarita salt. I had come here in the wrong way, like a person who wears shorts into a tabernacle.

And I made a kind of bleating noise when I read the pamphlet, with its simple sentences explaining the two
tests needed for positive diagnosis. The first was the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, the ELISA test; to see my own name used like that made me start to laugh, in a gasping and silly way. It was too startling, too fateful. Dawn said, “Do I take it personally that there's a dish detergent with my name? I do not. Get a grip.”

I was trying to get a grip and to carry myself decently; I was thinking of Gabe and how he would be (was soon going to be) under these circumstances. I was trying to copy his easy steadiness when the nurse stood with her clipboard and called my name and I had to follow her into the deeper white recesses of the office.

The drawing of blood was quite unspectacular in itself. The nurse, with her latex gloves, looked down at the crease in my arm as if it were something hard to read that she was puzzling over. She took her time aiming, and then there was a sudden jab, a tiny bloom of pain, and I saw the bright blood rising in the syringe. A little pipette ran from it straight into a vial.

The sight of it made me sweat. It was always alarming to see that deep, vivid color, escaped from the skin, and I felt shocked and also rebuked. I remembered that no matter what the particulars of my day, my own intricate and interesting schedule, at the end I was a bag of blood. I also remembered that I had been as stupid as the next
person as far as unsafe practices went, and just because I knew I'd gotten away with them didn't mean I had. I got shakier and queasier by the second, tallying up all this. The nurse pulled out the needle and gave me a gauze strip to dab at the drop of blood on my skin. I was afraid I was going to throw up, but instead, like my mother, I fainted.

I knew that I was fainting—I didn't black out suddenly—and I slid down and hit the carpeted floor with enough of a roll so that I didn't konk my head. They had me lying on a cot by the time Dawn came in to get me. “This must happen all the time,” I said to the nurse.

“Not really,” she said.

Dawn said, “You know these brides. She's a bride.”

W
HEN
I
TOLD
Gabe about my passing out in the clinic, he made me stay home the next day and lie around watching TV, although I felt fine. When Dawn told all our friends about my fainting episode, Fiona said, “You don't need any tests to get a marriage license. What were you girls thinking?” What indeed. Gabe was deeply relieved that no one was going to test him.

Gabe believed that I had fainted because I was pregnant. There was sort of a possibility of this. I was freaked at the idea, but under the freakedness was a secret exhilaration,
and perhaps a belief that I was getting signs, strange nuptial presents, that I had better take notice of. I knew that if I was pregnant, I was lucky to have Gabe. Gabe thought we shouldn't talk about it until we knew, but I heard him supposing what bigger apartments in Brooklyn rented for, and I went and looked over my health insurance policy.

I wasn't pregnant, as it turned out. I got my period before I even had to go buy one of those kits to make my pee turn color. I was tired of getting all my bodily fluids analyzed anyway. I was probably glad—more glad than not—to have my old childless goof-around life back, but I thought it was too bad that Gabe was let down. I had liked his dreamy, nervous looks that week.

All of this took my attention away from my HIV test, but I didn't forget to go back for the results. You had to go in to talk to someone; they wouldn't just give you a piece of paper that said, negative or positive, here's your future. Gabe went with me to the office this time. I could tell by the way he stared ahead that the posters and the pamphlets were a bit much for him. Semen, blood, mother's milk, vaginal secretions. I felt generationally superior, glad to be educating him. After this we were going for lunch at a favorite sushi bar, something else he didn't like before he knew me.

I was quite hungry by the time I got called in to see the counselor. She was an overweight, pretty woman in her thirties. When she saw me, she stood up from her desk and shook my hand. She held it for a second and then she asked me how I had felt about having this test, and I thought,
no, oh, no
. She said that whenever she had to tell people now that they were positive, as she had to tell me, she thought of how much easier it was to say this now than it used to be. It was important that I realize that.

She was being kind, but I couldn't hear her because of the buzzing current in my veins. I wondered whether the clinic had a policy about breaking the news this way, with an upbeat undertone. I thought:
Gabe was right
.

Water came up in my eyes right away, but everything else stopped. I couldn't hear and I wasn't seeing. I had all I could do to keep my heart beating. I was taking in the idea of my test result, as if it were a stone I had to swallow, get down fast or choke. I sat there, with this rock in my gullet, making a great effort to get used to its sharp weight. The counselor seemed to be surprised and unhappy at how calm I was. I was not saying much.

I did ask about a referral to another doctor. I had some sense of having to take care of all this, of having to take over out of some duty to that bimbo who had gotten herself infected in the first place. The counselor had a lot
more things to tell me. I understood that she knew I wasn't listening but that we had to remain sitting together for a while, as if we were waiting for a drug to take effect.

The counselor wanted me to know that I had a lot of choices. I wanted to tell her that I had had my choices already and the bets were closed. You were not supposed to think of the virus that way. HIV was not a punishment, and it didn't matter whether needles or boyfriends had anything to do with it.

But it did matter. For one thing, I probably had less time to be without symptoms if I'd had this thing since high school. And it
was
a punishment—a real beating, not deserved, but
caused
all the same, a barbed link in the iron chain of cause and effect.

I was imagining Gabe in prison, a thin-necked smartassed boy, full of regret, not that he'd sold marijuana (which he still smoked now and then) but that he'd gotten caught. I had been caught.

I was fidgeting with my skirt, a raucous little print of black and fuchsia polka dots. The gaudy cuteness of it made me think again of how hard I had worked to get Gabe over to a different view of things. I was hoping that there would be some satisfaction for him in having been right all along. I did hope this, without bitterness.

I
HAD TO
go into another room to get a whole stack of pamphlets to take away, and then I had to go out of those inner offices and talk to Gabe, who was sitting in an ugly molded plastic chair, looking awkward and sweet. Oh, my groom, I thought, and I couldn't stand the thought. What wedding had I already given us, what fluster of white blood cells. He might be fine. Probably was fine. When he saw me, he looked up fast.

I wanted to say,
Guess what? You're not going to believe this
, because I thought that he of all people was going to be able to believe it right away. I thought he was ready, if anyone was. And it comforted me at that moment to think of his readiness. I think I had some idea that it showed how fated our being together was, although you would think I had had enough of fate just then.

When I was in prison, nobody went around asking anyone else: what are you in for? Curiosity like that only suggested there was a convincing reason for some guy's conviction.
What for?
The answer was nobody's business and beside the point, although everyone did know about everyone else anyway. While I was waiting in the medical lab for Elisa, I read a pamphlet that insisted on this approach to how anyone got infected with HIV: don't ask, how could it matter, what's the difference.

In the medical office, there were posters showing people of all ages and races, arm in arm, looking straight ahead, valiant in the face of their diagnosis. Everything in
that office was pleading with you to carry off this moment in your life with style, without too much pissing or moaning. I found the posters sort of moving, actually.

Don't ask, how could it matter. When I was in prison, I didn't write home to complain. There were guys who didn't know the names for
visor
or
cellophane
, who got mad if you said something was
oblong
or
vicarious
. I didn't fill in any blanks for them. I shut up as much as I could the whole time. I had conversations that were brief. I kidded around when I could see how to do it, but I didn't overreach.

I read Camus's
The Stranger
, Alan Watts's
Way of Zen
, Richard Brautigan's
Trout Fishing in America
, Alexandre Dumas's
Count of Monte Cristo
, Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged
, and an incredible number of Mickey Spillane and James Bond novels. My brain was like an imprint of a page. I read most of the books several times over.

I tried not to be in a state of horror since I was getting out in eight months. I would say to myself,
don't be a sore loser
. This was something my father had said to my brothers and me, to scorn us before we whined. I wanted to carry myself well through these months, and I worried that I wasn't doing that really. I walked around with my head ducked down, I had a frozen, desolate look. It was the best I could do.

M
Y FAMILY HAD
always thought of me as a steady and dull person. My brothers were the two jitterbugs in the family—party guys, never in deep trouble but sometimes in bar fights or car accidents. I had been urged not to follow their example but no one really meant this, everyone liked them. My brothers called me the Deep One, which was not exactly a compliment. My mother, who liked nothing better than to have forty people talking all at once in her kitchen, called me Gloomy Gus.

The first year I was a student at Brooklyn College, I lived at home. My parents tried not to bother me, but I wanted out. I had sold dope in an informal way before; that is, I'd bought enough at one time to split with a few friends, and now I simply started buying in more bulk. Every campus has guys like this, except that Brooklyn didn't really have a campus. I hung out at the deli so friends could find me, and other people found me too, not all of them students.

There I was at my table, drinking red cream soda by the quart, and thinking what a cagey dude I was getting to be. I was very big on intrigue. I'd leave bags for people in the men's room, hand someone his jacket with a stash in the pocket. Nothing explains why I didn't get popped by some alert narc right then.

I was going to get a big apartment with my friend Joel,
but instead I moved in with a woman named Maureen. Maureen was vivid all the time; she got angry in about a second and her path was strewn with her own blown fuses. All my efforts to be silky only exasperated Maureen. She didn't understand patience, and she thought I was a coward.

I had to settle arguments for her. She'd call one of my customers a dickless overfed brat (different social elements commingled at our school) and I'd have to convince him he was above caring. In my neighborhood I had stayed out of fights by treating rash statements lightly. Who cares, big deal, so what, yeah yeah: sometimes I could make my disdain catching, a shared anthem. Two guys not sweating the small stuff together.

Maureen hated that. She thought I was without principle and too fond of the cheap purity of not taking sides. I was doing business out of her living room, and Maureen would try to rattle me by walking into a professional conversation with her shirt off or talking on the phone at top volume. I handled it as well as I could. I'd introduce her politely in her underwear, or I'd lean in very close to the customer so we could hear each other speak.