IT WAS OUR first Christmas as a family. Me, George, and our tiny new virus, AIDS.
The virus was just a few months old. And we were like typical new parents—up and down all night to pace the floors, in with the thermometer, out with the thermometer, wondering, “What are we going to be dealing with five years from now?” I certainly wouldn’t have imagined diapers.
In retrospect, I’m not altogether certain it’s accurate to say we. Because the virus wasn’t mine, it belonged to George. And he wasn’t the one pacing the floors all night and sticking a thermometer in his mouth every five minutes.
That was me.
George was actually quite calm and logical. He was being treated by the best doctor and taking the best drugs.
His attitude was, “Let’s enjoy the moment.”
My attitude was, I cannot fucking believe you stuck your bare hands in his bloody mouth. There was a box of gloves on the table beside his hospital bed. You, yourself, made sure of it. And why were you the one removing the gauze from his mouth instead of a nurse? None of it makes sense.
Of course, we’d had this conversation before. Many times. It had become our pair of faded jeans, our sweater with too many fur balls on it. It was comfortable, if ugly.
“Augusten, I have told you again and again, I was crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just very upset and he needed that dressing out of his mouth immediately and I didn’t think. Listen, it doesn’t matter—we can’t ever go back and change that moment.”
True. But we could get drunk and forget we’d ever had this conversation. That way, when we had it again in a week, it would be all new to me.
Still, I had to try and be grateful for the little things. It was, after all, this very virus that had brought us together, transformed us from “secret lovers” into “official couple.”
George’s previous boyfriend had entered into an affair with a lawn-care professional. George didn’t have a lawn.
Their relationship had been unraveling for a long time and he was feeling stagnant. George had been thinking of leaving the boyfriend when the lawn-care professional turned out to be HIV-positive, passing the virus to George’s boyfriend.
The boyfriend did not handle this news well. He figured, Well, that’s it then. I guess I’ll just go ahead and die now.
George said, “You have to fight this. We have to.”
The boyfriend replied, “Where do the whales go when they die?”
That’s when I met him.
At eight minutes after five on February 14, 1989, I reached the landing that overlooked the Winter Garden atrium. I approached the wide, grand staircase leading down. Step by step, mistake by mistake, choice by choice, everything that I had ever done, every right instead of left, had been designed to get me here.
In time, I would come to believe that all along, without my ever knowing, every single time I wondered, Why? the answer had been to carry me down these steps on this day so that I could reach the one moment upon which all the remaining moments of my life would be based.
But at the time, I only thought that I was walking down some stairs to meet a guy.
I didn’t even know his name. A date couldn’t have been more blind.
The Rizzoli bookstore within the Winter Garden had been his idea. He would be waiting right in front of the store.
Of course at this time of day the offices would be emptying. And the Winter Garden would be filled with people. Many of them standing around, waiting for somebody at one of the restaurants or bars. Bankers, brokers, lawyers, CFOs, VPs—all of them would be buzzing throughout the space. I didn’t know how, exactly, I was supposed to find this one very specific though featureless man.
But there he was, right where he said he’d be. The Winter Garden atrium was a swarm of people; he was the only man I saw.
He was dressed in a charcoal suit with chalk pinstripes. His back was turned to me because he was looking in the window of the bookstore. He didn’t appear to be a man waiting for anyone.
But this was the man. There was something about the specific tilt of his head. Or perhaps it was how he squared his shoulders. I only knew that the instant I saw him, I recognized that he had been inevitable. I headed directly for him.
As I approached his broad back and noted the exquisite drape of the suit I realized, I don’t even know his name. I can’t just tap this guy on the shoulder and say, “Are you by any chance waiting for—”
He surprised me by suddenly turning around to face me. He was smiling and he had a bad haircut. The first words George said to me were these: “I was hoping that was you.”
And I realized that he had not been looking in the window of the bookstore, but at my reflection, at me, as I walked toward him.
We spent a little over two hours together that first day we met. Less time than most people spend test-driving a car before buying it. Over drinks he made a toast in Greek, “To pepromenon phugein adunaton.”
It’s impossible to escape from what is destined.
It had been only a couple of hours. But I knew.
I may not have known the facts of him; I couldn’t have told you his favorite color, his birthday, or how he liked his coffee. I couldn’t have said if he was a Republican or a Democrat or whether he was allergic to cats; but I knew the him of him.
I also knew that one didn’t have a second date with this man and then a third, each time getting to know him a little bit better or seeing another “side” of him.
George was vertical, not horizontal. All of him was right there from the first moment. He didn’t have “sides”; he had fathoms. If you didn’t know him after one date, you couldn’t know him. In this way, he was a treasure perfectly hidden right before my eyes. He was the wreck of the Sussex in my backyard swimming pool.
I could only be truly crazy if I walked away from such a find.
I struggled in my apartment that night, his phone number in my hand. I knew that if I called him, that would be it—my life would change. I had never felt such an irrational thing about a person I’d only just met. But I knew it was true.
My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines.
And attraction is our most ancient drive, it is why we are. Attraction is the very point of gravity; timespace itself bends to allow it. It is attraction in its pure form that holds the galaxy together.
Attraction is our glue.
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!
There was something packaged to us now. I simply could not believe a word of this new relationship. I didn’t trust it. Whatever we had together, no matter how far from perfect it was, it had been forged from something real and it existed in a state between the wonderful and the terrible.
There had never been anything ideal about us except for the depth of our feelings and our instincts that we could believe in them. Now I was going through the motions of being one-half of an exceedingly happy couple. All the words I ever wanted to hear were there. I just didn’t see them on his face anymore.
Sitting together in the parked car down in Battery Park City had been the proposal as well as the honeymoon.
And yet, there were benefits. We no longer had to confine the whole of our relationship to my living room sofa between the hours of noon and one in the afternoon. We did not have to choose between talking and feasting on that couch. And a handjob under the table at Mesa Grill would no longer have to suffice. I did not stand now at the window of my Battery Park City apartment and stare out at the World Trade towers and the West Side Highway wondering what he was doing at that very moment. I would never again drink a bottle of vodka while listening to Julia Fordham’s “Porcelain” over and over, her voice like a light house in the inky blackness.
I had exactly what I asked for.
Oh, it may have taken an excruciating length of time and somebody may have died along the way. But didn’t they always say nothing worth having comes easy?
I stood in the bathroom, which the dead boyfriend had designed, and I gazed at my own reflection in his mirror.
It was difficult to believe there hadn’t been a physical change. A manifestation. I opened my mouth, stuck out my tongue and searched for signs that a cancer had come to take away the part of me that asks for things.
But I was only asking for a lighter sentence. I knew that the price for getting exactly what I asked for would be, eventually, losing it. I had won my lottery. But the tax would be unfathomably high.
Fall in Manhattan. Suddenly, smart woven coats in burnt umber, rust, ruddy brown, and a melancholy shade of green appear on the fashionable young ladies.
Athletic guys standing in line at the movie theater on Broadway and Eighteenth defiantly remain in shorts, refusing to grant the chill in the air the recognition it demands.
Brisk, blustery winds send fallen leaves, plastic coffee lids, and scraps of paper skittering along the sidewalks and then up into the air where they spiral at great heights.
This would be the first holiday season I had ever spent in New York as part of a couple. And for two or three weeks that October, I felt like perhaps the refreshing change of seasons had somehow had a clarifying effect on my mind. In no way did I believe things were suddenly right. But I had accepted George’s illness in a way that I hadn’t been sure I could.
Now his pills and frequent appointments with the doctor for blood work and minor alterations in his course of treatment all seemed nearly ordinary. As though he had a minor diabetes. Serious, but quite able to live a normal and vigorous life. George’s stoic, onward-Christian-soldiers approach to his disease must have somehow demagnetized my banging iron pots of panic and terror. I was no longer waking up in the morning and being nearly knocked flat again by the horrible wave of reality.
Since the beginning of our new life, every day had begun with an overwhelming, crushing sense of doom. “This can’t be real,” I would moan in the bathroom, from a place so low in my throat it seemed more a growl from my chest.
Then walking into the kitchen I was confronted with, Oh yes it can!
A new plastic pillbox, twenty-eight individual compartments.
The schedule imprinted on each lid—BREAKFAST, LUNCH, SNACK, DINNER—did not normalize the drugs; rather it had the opposite effect. It reminded me of what, exactly, I had given up to be with George. Never again can you have a normal breakfast—eggs, sunny-side up—when you have had this for breakfast. Once you are changed, so you remain.
But with the fall, so much of this sweltering negativity, this fever dream of relentless dread, seemed to be subsiding. Releasing me.
For the first time in months I went out for a walk, not an errand. Not to the doctor’s office or to pick up prescriptions, I wasn’t running around trying to find some insanely high-dose of vitamin C because Linus Pauling thought there might be something to it. I was just out.
I walked east along Thirteenth Street so that I would pass the Quad Cinema. I had always felt the Quad could show infomercials and ads for Korean and Lithuanian feminine hygiene products and I would stand in line to get inside, all because of their popcorn.
The Quad simply refused to allow that stick of butter to be pried from its fingers.
This was more comforting than one might think, in a time of tremendous insecurity. I had always gone to the Quad instead of to a therapist. Therapists, I felt, were like poodles: there were simply too many for them all to be good.
I walked down to Balducci’s market to look at the tiny ears of corn, the exotic cheeses, and the pies. People were already shopping for Thanksgiving, still almost two weeks away. I saw an older gay man heft a pumpkin out of his cart at the checkout with the faintest look of satisfaction on his lips. He would be making a pie, I was certain of it, and no cans would be harmed in its creation.
I imagined him going into work the next morning with nutmeg still under his fingernails. He would casually run his thumb under his nose, pretending to scratch an itch. And there in the meeting he would get to inhale just a little bit more of his pie’s soul.
I saw couples. Men together, women. I saw an old-fashioned man and woman walking with their arms linked, an English pram with a swaddled baby inside leading their way. I imagined they would be spending Thanksgiving with one set of parents. Whoever had the better set. After dinner it would only be four o’clock in the afternoon—too early to claim a mattress and curl up on top of it. Instead, everyone would sink into the sofa, drape themselves over the arms of overstuffed chairs like big cats—and there would be one or two of those, as well. The baby would be passed from chest to chest and each person would get a turn.
We would probably have Thanksgiving alone, but I could certainly think of worse things, having experienced many of them more than once. We could spend the night before in the kitchen making pies. Or just one pie. If I could actually lose myself in the act of making a pie with my boyfriend, I thought, I just might be able to do this.
To my surprise, Thanksgiving would not be just the two of us. It would be just the one of me.
George was going to his family’s house in New Jersey. I had met George’s two brothers but not his sister or his parents and it was obvious that George had not told them that he was no longer a grieving widower but a glowing newlywed. So to speak.
Actually, I didn’t feel terrible about it. It wasn’t like Thanksgiving with my boyfriend was being taken away from me. I’d never had Thanksgiving as an adult, so the loss was theoretical and abstract. It was a Monopoly-board loss.
What did make me feel terrible was the fuss he made before he left. George insisted on a festive Thanksgiving atmosphere in the apartment, even one cobbled together with deep orange candles and a tacky paper turkey on the glass dining table. He bought a pie. He pulled a roast chicken from its metallic-lined paper sack and pronounced, “Tah-dah! It’s fresh roasted close enough.”
That was the moment I felt most acutely that I was living a pretend life and not a true one.
George was putting on a little play so that I wouldn’t be alone and depressed; just alone. It was like he was doing a magic trick, his right hand holding the cards out for me to choose, the left behind his back, fiddling with the trickery of a false deck. Redirection, is what they call it, and the only reason to do it is to fool a person into believing something they know can’t be true.
When he left the next morning, I stood at the window overlooking Perry Street. As I watched him cross, it dawned on me that it was not lonely I felt, but empty.
I drank too much when I was alone. And the more I drank in general, the more often I just wanted to be alone. George had expected me to stay in the apartment while he was gone, but after less than an hour I felt I was performing on a stage and there was no audience. I was playing the role of the guy who is totally cool to be left alone on a holiday. So I walked home.
I had let go of my Battery Park City apartment and chosen a studio in the East Village. George had gone with me to look at it. It was unspoken yet understood that I would not give up my own apartment altogether, though I can’t say I am sure why that was the case. And for this purpose, the apartment was perfect. It was a small, square box, less than three hundred square feet. A place to store clothes and take a nap.
As soon as I entered, something slid into place within me. In my hand was a bag containing a liter of vodka. I would drink Absolut and tonics with a splash of Rose’s lime juice. That had been our drink, chosen by George on our very first date. He had also chosen our first song: “Manhattan Skyline,” Julia Fordham.
I did put Julia Fordham on the stereo. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t.
My mistake was in underestimating the emotional force of a song you have already heard a thousand times. When I heard the song that night, I heard it with the ears I used to have. And I felt what I used to feel—that almost sickening blend of excitement and longing, mysteriously interwoven by not a little bit of bottom-of-the-stomach dread.
All came back to me: the powerful ache of needing to see him, be with him, even just on a street corner near his apartment that cost me eight dollars to reach by cab. And later, how hard I had tried to find the thing I could say that would unlock him from his grief and bring him back to me.
Over and over, I replayed the day of the boyfriend’s wake. How back at the apartment George had been utterly leveled. Gone from his eyes was everything I had always seen in them, even when he sneezed. The apartment was filled with people—the boyfriend’s mother, whom he hadn’t seen for years. A brother. Others, strangers. Friends. And me. I sat on the sofa feeling fraudulent, like I did not belong.
Late in the day, George passed through the room and Madonna was singing “Cherish” on the stereo. And when she sang the words “Of always having you here in my life,” George looked directly at me, mouthing the words, smiling a weary, heroic little smile, and winking.
That one exchange had been all I needed to fortify me through the year that lay ahead, a year in which George and I had sex only when I relentlessly groped beneath the covers after he had fallen asleep, when his body would respond before his mind could stop it.
His body, I knew, still did love me.
It was difficult to believe there had once been a time when I was not allowed to call him at the office because he would ejaculate in his slacks just hearing my voice.
George returned from his Thanksgiving and called me from the apartment in the afternoon. I let the machine pick up. He sounded playful and completely nonchalant but that was an act. George would have thought only one thing upon walking into that apartment and finding me gone: Uh-oh.
He would have thought about the period when I was gone entirely, just before he came to me with the Diagnosis. It had been, he told me, almost beyond his ability to endure.
George had been surprised by my ability to leave him. He had not seen that in me.
I waited until evening to call him and say I was busy with work and couldn’t see him.
I worked as an advertising copywriter and though it was a consuming job, I was better at it than people knew. I had learned that my first idea was always my best; it was the one the clients bought, even if I came up with a dozen more later. Knowing this, I always trusted that first instinct. So I was able to do in an hour what another writer would agonize over for a week. In this way, I maintained a schedule that suited me. But I could always use it as an excuse. And I frequently did.
But I was back the next day as if I had never been gone, not even for a night. When I walked in the door he said, “Oh good, can you hand me the box from the top of the front closet?”
He was at the dining-room table writing checks. I had arrived at the perfect moment. I handed him the box and stuck my tongue out at the top of his head. And because his head did not then turn around with knowledge of what I had done, I felt a terrible regret and stood for a moment looking at his head, wishing I could take back the gesture, suddenly feeling only tender toward him, feeling he was precious and that any time spent away from him was an extravagant waste.
There we were: less than a week before Christmas.
New Yorkers are notoriously blasé about the holiday, though their very city is most famously dressed for the occasion. With every tree along Park Avenue not merely strung with lights but encased in them; strands of bulbs wrapped around and around and around each branch, every twig, right to the very tips. The unique anatomy of every tree, celebrated with light—the knotty elbow of a particular branch, a gleeful V that opens up with reaching fingers.
When I first moved to the city, the only Christmas present I ever needed was to hire a cab to drive me up and down the length of Park Avenue. With a bottle of cognac secreted in my coat pocket and the window all the way down, I pressed my face into the breeze like a dog. I closed my eyes for the longest moment, and when I opened them again I saw exactly what I had seen before. Block after block after block of dazzling. This was naked, full-frontal splendor.
Then there was the tree at Rockefeller Center. Dwarfed by the cluster of buildings that surround it, on the day the tree is lit, it instantly surpasses every one of them in magnitude. Almost more thrilling than the tree itself was the fact that so many people made a pilgrimage just to see it. A colorful winter sea of people, all of them exhaling elegant puffs of white smoke, like hopeful engines.
My love for Christmas had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus. It was the lights. It was the fact that grown people really did believe in Christmas miracles; longed for them even. New Yorkers, nonetheless.
So when George out of the blue pressed his body tight up against my shoulder as we walked along Hudson Street, then reached down with both of his hands and found my one, taking my fingers between his own and squeezing my hand from all directions at once with precisely the force needed to say Mine, I was automatically euphoric. Ten fingers can overpower more than just one hand; ten fingers doing precisely the right thing, at the moment you least expect it, can make you forgive everything.
He had seen the tree stand up ahead and thought, Why not get a tree tonight? Disbelief was kicked right out by an eager, mindless, yes, yes, yes excitement. I wasn’t going to ask why. The gift-horse law was instantly enacted.
We carried the tree home together. That was the word that he used, home. “Let’s get this home, stick it up, and then watch a movie.” Usually, he said, “the apartment” or “my apartment.” Sometimes he even called it “Perry Street.” He had never called it our home before. And while he hadn’t said our, I’d heard it.
Halfway down the block he said, “Hold on,” and let the peak of the tree drop to the sidewalk.
I continued holding the trunk. “Are you okay?”
He nodded, then leaned forward and placed his hands just above his knees, bent his legs. He took a deep breath, then another.
I held mine.
He straightened and smiled tightly at me. “It’s nothing,” he said. He didn’t even say it. He mouthed the words, just like he had the day of the wake: “... of always having you here by my side.”
We continued walking toward the building but I was no longer aware of walking or carrying a tree. Suddenly, there was only a clock. It had appeared instantly, from nothing. And the red secondhand had begun to travel the dial in halting, unstoppable clicks.
And I knew: even if we are able to make us really, really good—there will be a limit.
There will be a day.
There will be an hour.
There will be a wake.
I thought George might lie down after we got upstairs but he didn’t. Instead, we began extracting boxes from the cleverest storage spaces imaginable. A tree stand seemed to have been plucked from the space between two books. I could not imagine how he had devised such devious methods of hiding so great a volume of holiday paraphernalia.
“Steph did it,” he said. “He loved what he called finding space.”
I closed my eyes and let out a breath. That was exactly the feeling. I wanted to be finding space.
There was a magnificent optimism locked in the center of the phrase; the implication that there was space that did exist and could be found. The only question was, How clever are you? It was a phrase that nearly made me weep in relief. I steadied myself.
“Do you need this?” I asked, holding out a never-opened box of tinsel.
He was standing on a chair, level with the top of the tree and hanging the first strand of lights. He paused, arms outstretched, the string of bulbs bowing at the center. He looked hard at the box, wrinkled his forehead.
I smiled, seeing his eyes so busy in their search.
George had the most beautiful eyes. They were brown and therefore retained much of their information. You could not read them instantly like blue eyes. You had to keep looking, you had to study. Like searching for familiar forms in a darkened room. And there were sparks of mischief firing along the thin gold wires that streaked the iris. They were loyal eyes. Deeper, there was warmth, almost a glow. Just the crumbs from a fire, smoldering on. I loved most when his eyelashes twitched and he blinked, and suddenly happiness was there inside his eyes. Unmistakable. Like a single word printed on a clean white page. I used to love seeing that word in his eyes.
George finally recognized the box of tinsel I was holding. He said, “Oh no, I don’t need that,” and returned his attention to the tree.
We were going to spend Christmas alone together at home. We’d even talked about what to make for dinner.
“Should it be a roast beef?” I’d asked.
George had smiled at me, shrugged. “Could be, if that’s what you’d like.”
I said, “I just cannot wait to be the guy sitting in front of the fireplace with the Christmas tree over his shoulder and all the lights glittering away and the only present I have ever wanted is right here, where I can do with him exactly as I please.” And I’d leaned over the single sofa cushion between us and moved for his neck.
He let me kiss his neck but it was a favor. I could sense him looking at the wall, waiting for me to finish.
I withdrew, but maintained my smile and said, “Yeah, it’ll be so amazing. I can’t wait.” And I slid back to my former position, slowly, as if my body had merely stretched briefly and returned.
“Augusten, listen,” George began.
That was all he had to say for me to understand; there always was a new and terrible medical complication. A treatment-resilient itis or oma or osis.
So I was truly stunned when he said, “No, not that. It has nothing to do with my health.”
I was blank.
How sorry for me his face became as the seconds emptied from the room, drained away from us forever.
But how could it have nothing to do with his health?
There was nothing besides his health.
The best and only everything that I had ever known depended solely and completely on the health of his every living cell.
When he told me what it was, I burst out laughing. It was from relief, more than anything else.
“Well, gee, Auggiedoggie, I never meant to upset you so much.” He began to chuckle, tentatively at first, like a child at a fancy restaurant who watches the adults take a bite of food first, before venturing forward with his own fork.
Then he was laughing right along with me.
George and I would not be spending Christmas together after all. Actually, that had never been the plan. Because he always spent Christmas with his family.
My laughter trailed off and I asked, “But what about when you guys used to have Christmas?”
And George said, “He would never come. Sometimes he would move into a hotel room in case my family decided to stop over and see the apartment.”
“You hid him away in a hotel room, like he was a dirty magazine you could stick under the mattress? And he let you live?”
“No, Augusten, it wasn’t like that. My parents are great people but, you know, they don’t need to know everything about me. They wouldn’t be happy, and why upset them unnecessarily?”
I felt grateful, just then. Because I actually hated him at that moment and this hatred made me feel free. But the feeling was a vapor and it dispersed almost immediately.
I was facing the tree, which was reflected back into the room once again by the windows, now black with night.
The two candles on the dining-room table were lit, the flames so smooth they hardly quivered.
I didn’t know what to say.
I just watched him, standing with his back to the tree he had decorated. He had placed each ornament with such exacting precision, ever the investment banker.
No, that’s not it, I thought.
He had placed each ornament with excruciating care. Because it was the one and the only thing he could make perfect.
He would turn his back on this tree and leave this home—leave me, leave us; this family he built himself. He would leave us behind on Christmas Day so that he could be by himself with the family that he came with.
It was Christmas Eve and he was leaving for his parents’ house. We stood beside the front door. He was in his black wool coat, the one he wore over his suits to the office. His face was strained and he looked so tired. I could see that he felt both powerless and guilty.
I faced him and took one lapel in each fist, raised them up tall. I adjusted his scarf at the nape, making sure it covered any naked skin.
His black leather gloves were already on his hands, which were hanging straight down at his sides. His overall stiffness was endearing, childlike.
He had known about Christmas all along but had not been able to tell me because I was so excited.
He chose what had seemed to him to be the most humane course of action. He allowed me to have my perfect New York City Christmas for as long as he possibly could.
And I had our first Christmas so fully imagined that it had begun to feel more like a memory than a fantasy.
I knew how the table would be set and I could even see how the slices of roast beef would fold onto the plates.
I knew that he would have a second piece of pie.
And that we would then sit on the floor in front of the fire.
His glittering, beautiful tree would stand in the corner and throw its light and sparkle all over our backs.
And as I looked at his face lit by the fire, I would start to feel myself falling backward into the person I used to be, before I was disfigured by my own appalling dread.
George would glance at me and he would freeze. I would see the wires in his eyes begin to glow as he realized that I was suddenly, finally, truly right there beside him. And not still a few steps ahead, in the inevitable future.
He would begin to tremble very slightly.
And my eyes would travel to his neck, and down the length of it.
His whole body would shudder.
And he would close his eyes and feel my hands on him, long before they ever reached his skin.
Much later, we would have a snack. We would eat it wordlessly, standing side-by-side in the wedge of light that you are given when the refrigerator door is opened in the middle of the night.
As we stood by the front door, I carefully adjusted a lock of George’s hair and looked into his eyes and without saying one word—by only feeling it, by truly meaning it—I thanked him for giving me exactly the Christmas I had dreamed of.
Because day after day as I imagined it, I always forgot one little detail: our virus.
In my mind, on our first Christmas as a family, it was always just the two of us.
And as far as my eyes could see in any direction, there was only more, and more, and more.
Slowly, I leaned toward him, then against, then into.
“Merry Christmas,” I said, my voice soft, deep; vertical, not horizontal.
My mouth was pressed against his ear. I felt the tiny hairs on his earlobe scratch at my lips.
My chest was pressed against his; my heart directly over his.
And then. I lifted my arms off of him entirely, withdrew my hands from his shoulders.
I pulled away from him, slow, slow, to see his face.
And he was standing perfectly still in his long black coat.
But his head was back, neck arched.
And his eyes were closed.
And his mouth was open so that he could breathe.
And I could see so clearly that he was in both ecstasy and astonishment at once.
His eyelashes twitched.
And he blinked.
And suddenly happiness was inside his eyes.
Unmistakable.
Like a single word printed on a clean white page.
And because there was so much to say that would never be said; because his eyes flashed with tears and because he knew that I was suddenly, finally and truly right there beside him, his voice cracked as he spoke.
“I was hoping it was you.”
I never chose a life with George. There had never been a choice to make.
He had been there all along, woven into the fabric of my future.
Destiny.
I would have laughed in your face.
I did not leave cookies out for Santa Claus.
And I did not believe in destiny.
But.
When Santa is suddenly standing right in front of you, soot from your chimney staining his fine red suit and he is flushed and breathing hard and smells like frost and sweat and smoke and his jacket is linted with coarse reindeer hairs and there is reindeer shit on his boots and his eyes twinkle with preposterous joy, you simply cannot say, “I don’t believe in you,” and turn your back on him.
Because he will grip you by the shoulders and wrench you around and he will bring his bristly mouth to yours and blow
stars
down your throat
until
you are so full
of
light.