So Much Pretty (9 page)

I haven’t worn scrubs, haven’t seen gloves, in years. The purposelessness of my own attire offends me
.

My job has become one much more involved with speaking than anything else. My hands are useless and require no washing. Most of what I do is review the things other people do, and refine them, developing simple 30-second messages. I stand in front of a roomful of people and show a PowerPoint I have shown 300 times before as if I am delightedly looking at it for the first time. I have five diagrams that will fit the bill regardless of the topic. Flow charts with block arrows called “chevrons” can be used to describe any process. I spend my entire day manipulating people into doing something I think is wrong. I
convince
them of the profitability of doing something wrong
.

And I am sick of the way everyone talks. Lower-end businesspeople use images like “I’m trying to shepherd along this process” or they make reference to herding cats, circling wagons, taking conversations “off-line” or putting ideas in the “parking lot” to be addressed later. Or possibly making sure everyone shares the “sandbox” or contrawise, “stay in their own swim lane” (can you believe these? There are more)
.

Buzzwords are another story. “Leverage” as a verb is universally accepted in business. It is only used incorrectly: “Let’s leverage this capability in another functional area.” These are the little things that are driving me crazy. Very rarely do I engage in small talk about my life or feelings. People can tell if you are making things up. I do not discuss politics unless I can judge the person’s ideology with a 99 percent degree of accuracy. I’ve made mistakes before and they have been very costly
.

I can tell you things are far far worse than news stories and investigative pieces in the alternative press (which sucks as a source frankly and you should get yourself a subscription to the
Wall Street Journal).
I’m not just talking about ethical issues involving testing and pricing, or pushing psychiatric medication on whole populations, or the suicidal side effects of the products in which I am strategically involved and for which I am morally culpable. In fact I can’t even tell you what I’m talking about until I get the fuck out of here
.

The difference, Gene, between now and then is that then I thought I could make something happen. That I could do this for just a little while in order to do other more important things. And I did think we could change things or at least
escape
—build within the wreckage. (Beneath the Paving Stones, the Beach!) Now I know I can’t make anything happen. And I don’t care if it all comes down tomorrow. Let it come down, honestly
.

I am coming to visit soon and will try to stay as long as I can which may only be a couple of days. If you have any ideas as to what I could possibly do instead of this please let me know. I’m serious, man, I need some suggestions. And not that I should just “drop out” and move in with you which is preposterous (though lately I think about it at least twice a day). I mean real ideas. You know what I mean. I’ll see you soon. Say hi to LoudClaire and the terrible three and a half—I can’t believe she’s starting to read
.

I love you, I love you. Constant
.

Gene

HAEDEN, NY, DECEMBER
1996

“W
HY IS DADDY
crying? Claire! Why is Daddy crying?”

“C’mere, pumpkin sauce. Dad got a sad letter from Connie.”

“But is Connie sad?”

Claire swept Alice’s tangled blond-white hair away from her head, and the girl slumped down into the soft paisley couch to lean against her. “A little bit,” Claire said. “But he’s going to be okay.” She reached a long arm out to Gene.

He shook his head and came to sit with them, tears on his face. He let his head fall back and looked up at the ceiling. “We should really be living in community,” he said. “You’re fucking right. You’re right, you’re right. God, Claire. We all should be together. This was crazy. Crazy stupid. They should be living here with us. I should have tried harder to talk him out of it. I should have told him all about this shit.”

Claire just held his hand.

Alice climbed over her mother to sit on his lap and brushed the tears from his cheeks with her little hands. He put his arms around her. She was tiny. Three and a half, long-limbed and round-cheeked. So pale the skin on her face sometimes looked translucent. She gazed intently at him. Her light blue eyes were shiny, pupils round and slightly dilated. Her brow was furrowed and she looked worried, but something else about her was studying the whole situation, and he could see it: her worry and her thought, her intensity in trying to put everything together. Her smallness made this both funny and oddly powerful. She was figuring it out, taking it on to help them.

“Wait,” Alice said gravely. “Where
is
community?”

Gene and Claire looked at each other and laughed. Gene was still crying a little.

“It’s when people live
together
and help each other out, you little question bug,” Claire said, smiling at her.

“Do we have to help Connie out because he’s sad?” Alice asked, looking relieved that they could do something.

“Yes, of
course
we help Connie and anyone else who is feeling bad. We stick
together. All
people stick together,” Claire told her. “It’s brave to help out, and it feels really good.”

Alice was getting restless. She stood up on Gene’s knees, and he held her hands. “Daddy’s feeling bad, so I have to climb him.” She put one foot on his chest and leaned back, rappelling off him while he held her hands. She was intent and grave about the task, watching Gene’s face for signs that it was making him feel better. He shook his head in disbelief. And then he and Claire started to laugh hard. Alice put her other foot on his chest and began to walk up so she could stand on his shoulders.

“You’re going to climb all the way up Gene while he’s crying
and
laughing?” Claire asked. Gene thought maybe she had inadvertently suggested Alice climb by saying “brave” and “feels good.” The girl loved to climb, and they always called her “brave” or “fearless” or said “good job” when she was doing it.

“Gene likes to climb,” Alice explained, shrugging. She put her feet on his shoulders, her skinny legs on either side of his head. He held her hands out to the side but then let go. He could feel that she was very well balanced, the arches of her little feet curved and strong, the heels resting just above his shoulder blades. And it did feel nice—like a massage. Her weight was just right.

Claire was looking at him, and though she was laughing at Alice, he saw that she was upset about Con. Disappointed. Pissed. “He’s unhinged,” she said quietly. “It’s him. You couldn’t have changed it.” She looked deeply into his eyes, the way she did, keeping him company that way, better than a kiss, and pulled her knees up to her chest. She was no longer the skinny
girl he’d known from the East Village; she was rounder now, a big-breasted, softer-featured woman, someone who had nursed a baby and had been high on the joy of caring for that baby. But her face and her eyes still expressed a knowledge that set her apart. Gene knew she had no sympathy for Con. The letter clearly disgusted her. He could see her weighing Constant’s life against her own back at the clinic. Fourteen-hour days, crowded waiting rooms, funding cuts, staffing problems because people like Con found the work too boring or taxing, were unwilling to deal with the attendant features of poverty, illness, abuse. Gene knew that as far as she was concerned, Con might as well have sent them a letter saying he was sad he had only one Mercedes.

“Honestly,” Gene said to her with Alice still standing on him, “he’s just caught. He’s been caught.”

Claire

EAST VILLAGE, 1992

M
ICHELLE WAVED AT
Claire and Gene from the front window of Downtown Beirut as Gene locked up their bike. She smiled and headed in, and Gene followed with his messenger bag.

“It’s the breeders!” Michelle said as they pushed their way through.

“Sorry sorry sorry,” Claire said. “I hope you haven’t been waiting.” She carried a bag from the thrift store connected to the shelter at St. Mark’s. She was wearing pointy black knee-high boots and had just had her hair bleached the same color as Gene’s and cut into an asymmetrical bob. She was wearing a black shirt with the Ramones smiling across her breasts.

Con leaned out from a crush three people deep to hand Michelle her drink. “I hate that you guys always want to come here,” he said before ducking back to the bar. “I fucking hate the name of this place. I mean, Christ.”

Someone had put Iggy Pop on the jukebox. Claire watched Con lip-synch the words, “I am the passenger. I ride and I ride,” while he waited for the next drink. He was still wearing his blue oxford shirt from work but had left the tie and jacket somewhere.

Finally, he came to stand with them and kissed Claire on the cheek, passed a beer over to Gene. Claire knew their “surprise” had shaken him and Micky. They were more than nervous about the home-birth idea and conflicted about living with a baby. But when Gene and Claire moved, it would still be a bargain for Con and Michelle to live there, still keep them where they wanted to be—away from their asshole colleagues on the Upper East Side. Even so, they joked about how crack
hadn’t driven them out of the neighborhood, but the “miracle of human life” just might.

“Drink those now,” Gene said, “and we’ll buy a couple of forties to take over to ABC No Rio.”

Con nodded in agreement, then said, “Lovely outfit, Doctor,” to Claire.

“Thank you, darling,” she said, and laughed. “You look very sharp yourself.” Claire had felt elated since the third month she was pregnant. Everyone looked more beautiful to her, she loved riding her bike more than ever, and she found herself singing out loud when she didn’t realize it, like in the checkout line at the grocery store. She turned to Michelle, opened her bag, and pulled out a red and black dress, holding it up against herself to show the diagonal hem that cut across her legs. “Two bucks!” she exclaimed.

“Nice,” said Michelle, but her eyes weren’t smiling.

“How was work?” Claire asked her.

Michelle yawned and nodded slowly, covering her mouth. “Cytomegalovirus,” she said, and looked blankly over the crowd. She put her arm around Claire’s waist and rested her head on her friend’s shoulder. “Kaposi’s sarcoma.”

“It’s bad,” Con agreed. “I feel like at least seventy-five percent of my day used to revolve around opportunistic infections. I do not miss that.”

His last words made Gene visibly tense.

“I feel so sad for this man I saw today,” Michelle said. “He had his sister with him. Twenty-seven years old. He’s going blind, CD4 below 140, boyfriend died this past winter. He should be out here drinking with us. His sister’s sitting with him all day, reading him kids’ stories.” She drank the rest of her beer quickly, her arm still around Claire’s waist.

Claire could see that Michelle was somewhere beyond angry, frustrated, exhausted. She had seen this on Con’s face in the months before he gave notice at Beth Israel. It seemed that for
Michelle, too, everything had fallen away but the facts at hand. No tradition, no protocol, no gender, no oppression, no class, no status, no hierarchy guiding desire. No acquiescence. No will to power. Nothing but the stripped-down sense of possibility and fellow feeling in an animal looking after another animal. The psyche offered up.
This is what a healer should be
, she thought, proud of her friends. Michelle was going off to do the right thing. Con, she was sure, would come back to his senses.

“Did you guys eat?” Gene asked. He pulled two thin and knobby carrots from the messenger bag. Constant and Michelle shook their heads. “We ate at home, and then Claire had to stop at Katz’s, and then she made us stop again for some seaweed salad.”

“Jesus, girlie,” said Michelle, “are you
trying
to make yourself puke?”

Claire smiled. Claire did not puke. Or cry. And her eating habits had nothing to do with pregnancy. She was always hungry.

Con set his empty glass on the bar, and they headed out into the warm night toward ABC No Rio to watch the Motivators play. The place was on a part of Rivington where they normally wouldn’t go, but they went because Gene’s friends from the community garden would be there, and because he was in love with the idea of a DIY community center. ABC No Rio proved his point about something. Proved that even when the artists moved out and the crackheads and junkies moved in, regular people still got together and got things done.

His theory made sense as they walked along, but it fell apart once they arrived and it became obvious to anyone who looked at them that they were the only “regular people” from the neighborhood there.

The opening band started with no introduction, causing the crowd closest to the stage to start jumping straight up and down, slamming, smashing into one another. Kids with their shirts off and overdressed kids in leather, a beautiful variety of bleach jobs
and shaved skulls, teased and dyed and flowing locks, safety pins and pierced skin, studded wrists and necks and waists, torn shirts emblazoned with missiles and mushroom clouds and swastikas and American flags all slashed through with a red X. Or blotted out with a circle A. Bodies, beautiful in exposed disarray, danced and fell together, screamed along, wrestled and rolled one another, then helped each other up, held hands and shouted and jumped as one animal. The crowd and the band were in love. Pumped up, elated, singing along unintelligibly through the industrial din. Claire smiled at the sight of it. There was coercion and there was play and it was not a fine line that divided them. She knew why they were there. There was a power in the place and in the music that they were in danger of losing, were losing every second. The joy at the heart of anarchy. The feeling that you were born to win. She looked at her tired friends, then pressed closer to Gene to tell him that she loved him. Close enough to get the faint smell of earth and sweat from his skin.