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1 Lily M y phone rang, and I reached a hand out into the blackness and fumbled for the receiver.My best friend’s voice spoke, singsong. “Is this the decrepit old hag?”I groaned and looked at the clock on my nightstand. “Payback’s a bitch, Michael. Just remember that.”“Happy birthday, ancient troll.”“It’s five-thirty in the morning.”“But you know the tradition.”Ever since Michael and I discovered, nearly twenty years ago, that our birthdays fell a week apart, the tradition has been to be the first person to wish the other a happy birthday. Somehow, with Michael’s latent gay frat-boy sensibility, this has disintegrated into phone calls at 5:00 a.m. and relentless teasing and Over The Hill black balloons. Rather than maintaining my dignity, of course, I have gone birthday for birthday with him, each of us escalating the idiocy. By the time we’re ninety, I am sure he will be hiding my false teeth, and I will be sending buff male strip-o-grams—like the “cops” who yank their tear-away pants
2 Michael T he CIA has nothing on Lily. Nothing. Come our birthday week, she can fuck with my mind in ways psychological torturers wish they could come up with. Drop her into enemy territory and the opposition will be begging for surrender.So the night before my fortieth birthday, she actually pulled off a surprise party. In order to do this, she enlisted the help of the departmental chair of the English department of Hudson University, Martin Robeson. Until the moment when ol’ Marty yelled “Surprise!” I hadn’t even known he had a sense of humor.That Friday morning, I heard him in his office yelling, “Damn, damn, damn!” at the top of his lungs.I poked my head into his office, “What’s up, Martin?”In a performance worthy of Shakespeare, he passed his hand across his brow. “I have a potential professor for the opening next fall flying in from Scotland, and damn that Helen also has me scheduled to meet with the dean for dinner.”He eyed me slightly desperately. “I don’t suppose you could…”“
3 When Did I Become My Mother? by Lily WatersEvery woman has the moment when she becomes her mother. The time comes in an instant of shock and awe. Real shock and awe—not the Donald Rumsfeld variety.My daughter, Tara, has never missed an opportunity in the years since she turned twelve to point out to me that I ceased to be cool the moment I had to buy my first box of Nice ’n Easy to cover my gray. For four years now, she has pointed out I no longer wear cool clothes, listen to cool music or have the cool lingo down. Only cool’s not cool anymore anyway. It’s hot.I have refused to believe her, of course. I am cool. Hot. Whatever. I still like rock and roll blasting from my stereo. All right, no self-respecting cool person would drive a minivan with juice stains on the seats and a plethora of baseball gear in the back, including cleats with mud still clinging to them, but I still roll down all the windows and sing at the top of my lungs. I like to drive fast down the hills of my hometown
4 Lily M onday morning The Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” played inside my head because the list of why I don’t like the first day of the workweek would, if I rattled off the reasons, last longer than the song. After Bob Geldolf finished his cross between a warble and a wail, I would still be going on.For starters, my whole life seems to run on its own watch, which is perpetually twenty minutes slower than everyone else’s watch. This means that I can’t seem to get myself and my two kids, Tara and Noah, out the door in a way in which it would be possible for them to arrive at school on time, unless we managed to somehow score a lift on the space shuttle.Both my children have inherited my organizationally challenged genetic defect. So, inevitably, when I get the three of us in our minivan—which frankly I can’t believe I drive—one of them will have forgotten something. Whatever this something is will not be the same something from day to day. Monday it might be the lunchbox on the
5 Michael O nly my sainted Sicilian mother could have given me a name like Michael Angelo. Nothing like stacking the cards against a kid in grade school. Actually, forget grade school, try meeting a guy in a gay bar, sticking out your hand and saying, “I’m Michael Angelo.” I’ve heard them all. “And I’m Picasso.” “And I’m the Virgin Mary.” “And I’m the Pope.” “And I’m the Sistine Chapel.” I’ve sometimes slept with a guy two, three times, and he’ll turn to me afterwards and say, “So what’s your real name?”Gay, with a moniker like mine, a mother who still believes I only need to meet the right woman, and a father who won’t speak to me because apparently my being gay is a reflection on his manhood. Add to that people hate me because I’m beautiful. And vain. Well, it’s all a burden. And to top it off, there’s Lily. My best friend and confidant. And the woman who makes me supremely glad I’m gay—because there is no way I could ever live with her.Every once in a while, Noah will ask, “How did
6 Curveball An excerpt from a novel by Michael Angelo“You’re a fucking homo, aren’t you?” The venom in Charlie’s voice sounded murderous. “A fucking queer.” His face was pale, and his normally lively green eyes looked dark.Sam tried to laugh it off. “No…no. I’m not gay. What are you crazy?” His heart pounded, and he felt his mouth go dry as sandpaper. He looked around for someplace in their tiny dorm room to escape. Like the closet. And the irony of that was pathetic.“Then what’s this, Sam? What the hell is this?”Sam took a step backward. From the moment he walked in the room after class and saw Charlie at his desk, Sam knew what Charlie had found. There in his spiral notebook was a page of doodles from the night before, when from too much caffeine and not enough sleep cramming for midterms, he had absentmindedly written out Charlie’s name in the center of a heart with an arrow drawn through it.“It’s nothing. I don’t know. I was delirious. I’ve been up for two days straight with this o
7 Lily T he machine whirred and moved, sounding like a cross between R2D2 and an X-ray. My right breast was stretched and pulled in ways I couldn’t have imagined a half hour before. In my mind, I wasn’t really thinking about the fact that I was having a mammogram, I was thinking of all the funny ways I could describe just what it is that mammogram machine does to your breasts.It kneads them like dough in a bread maker.It flattens them like…what? Like the machine was a gigantic spatula, squashing my breasts which were like so much hamburger. It paws them like that sloppy drunk and inexperienced one-night stand from freshman year of college.“Uncomfortable?” The technician looked at me with concern. “Just let me know if it gets unbearable.”“Uncomfortable? Why no…I love being flattened like this. It’s some sort of kinky turn-on.”She laughed. “I know. It’s a pretty weird experience.”“Are you kidding? This is the most action my breasts have gotten in four months.”Which was true. Thanks to Mi
8 Michael I couldn’t sleep. Just the thought of Lily needing a biopsy turned my world upside down. And she was right, of course. I am chicken.Growing up, I did everything to prove I was a red-blooded American male. I played every sport, was on every varsity team and screwed every girl who’d let me. But my heart was never into it—women, that is, not sports. I was into baseball so obsessively, I could recite the batting average of every Yankee since the team was formed. I used to spend hours in a batting cage. I’d bat until I had to ice my shoulder when I got home.I may have been macho on the outside, but inside I was chicken. The thought of admitting I was attracted to men terrified me. But the feeling was there, like a spider on the wall in the corner. Every once in a while, I’d shine a flashlight beam on that spider. Examine it. Then I’d turn off the flashlight, too afraid of whatever else was lurking there.After I accepted, to myself, that I was gay, I was terrified of being outed.An
9 What I’ve Learned by Lily WatersThis last birthday was a Big One. I wish I could get away with saying it was thirty. I told most acquaintances it was thirty-five. But it was actually that Big One. I break out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.What do I have to show for forty years on the planet?For starters, I have credit card debt so deep I need a shovel to get through the bills each month. A house with a leaky roof. A dog that doesn’t come when I call it or sit when I tell it to. (The dog will, however, climb up on the kitchen table to eat out of my son’s cereal bowl in the morning.)I have a closet full of size sixes I no longer fit in, and too many gray hairs to pluck—I’d be bald. I have a hint of crow’s-feet, and I spend more on one jar of my anti-wrinkle cream than I used to spend on groceries for an entire month back when I was a struggling reporter.I have a minivan with nearly 100,000 miles on it, and my kids think I am the least-cool mother on the planet. Me! I was the r
10 Lily “Y ou do realize there’s a wire—a wire—protruding from my right breast, don’t you?” I looked up at Michael and then stared down at this thing—this thin wire, looking like the stuff the orthodontist once threaded through my braces—that was now threaded into my breast and sticking out about eight inches.“Very weird-looking. Does it hurt?”“Oddly enough, no.”“And the reason for turning your breast into something that would set off the metal detectors at JFK is?”“It pinpoints the lump exactly and guides the surgeon right to it.”In the time since my mammogram, I’d gone to a breast surgeon who decided to remove the lump instead of just doing a needle biopsy. So now I was waiting for them to come and put me to sleep. When I woke up, I would either have cancer—or not.“Promise me you won’t let them chop my breast off.”“Dr. Costas told you that won’t happen.”“Uh-huh. Look, I like him and everything, but I’ve read plenty of horror stories about doctors taking out the wrong kidney or choppi
11 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, ign
12 Curveball An excerpt from a novel by Michael AngeloSam opened his locker and a giant black dildo fell out. Not that he’d seen too many dildos, but this one was enormous, and it was wrinkled and lifelike. A giant black cock.When the dildo fell, Sam felt eyes boring into him from behind. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t acknowledge the thing. A burning filled his eyes, tears he willed away. This is just locker room horseshit. I will not let them see me cry. I won’t.But the tears were there. Sam had never felt so alone his entire life. Charlie, who had been a constant since the first day of orientation freshman year, had stopped speaking to him. Charlie slept at his girlfriend’s dorm room every night and wouldn’t look at Sam in class. Let alone the locker room.And now, the dildo.He could hear them snickering. But not a good kind of laughter. He heard the menace in it. Worse, he could feel a heat in the room. They may have been laughing, but they hated him. Like a flash of lightning str
13 Lily J ustin is Tara’s first love, and she is over-the-moon crazy about him. She comes home from their dates and tells me all the details—what he said, what he wore, that he held her hand or kissed her good-night. Tara and I have always been close, but now that she is fifteen, I am also subjected to her withering glares and her mercurial displays of temper. I was certain she would feel my getting cancer was a giant inconvenience to her social schedule.Michael said he would tell Noah. I just felt emotionally beat-up, and agreed. But I had to tell Tara.She didn’t hear my knock on her bedroom door the first three times, so I poked my head in. The music was deafening, but I smiled as I suffered through it. At least I could make out the lyrics, and thank God she doesn’t like rap. Whatever happened to Debbie Harry and Blondie? To the Rolling Stones? I know what happened to the Stones. They got wrinkled. Poster boys for what drugs, alcohol and groupies can do to your youthful complexion. F
14 Michael L ily is not a pretty picture when she is throwing up. I suppose no one is, but she is especially hideous, and I know she won’t mind me saying so.I held a pot under her head and pulled back her hair because she couldn’t make it into the bathroom. Vomit came out her nose. So much for the antiemetics.“I can’t do this,” she moaned. “I cannot do another six months of this. It’s fucking hell.”“I can tell you holding this pot isn’t thrilling me either, Sugarcakes.”“Fuck you.”In truth, I wanted her mad at me. Angry people don’t give up. Depressed people, pessimistic people, the people who always see the damn glass as half-empty—they give up. Angry people fight. They do not go quietly into this good night.“After all we’ve been through,” I said. “We come to this. Me holding your barf bag.”I heard her laugh, though her face was bent away from me and I couldn’t see her smile. Laughing was good. Laughing people get well. I’d read Norman Cousins’s book. Laughter really was a kind of medi
15 Sisters by Lily WatersI used to go to parties, in my vain and glorious twenties, and look around the room and see each woman as competition. Each woman was shorter or thinner, fatter or had bad hair—compared to me. Or they were taller and more glamorous. Maybe they dressed cheaply or wore their makeup wrong. Their eyeliner wasn’t drawn on quite right. Or they threw themselves at men and made fools of themselves. Whatever their faults, I spotted them. Whatever mine were, I obsessed over them. I was the center of my own universe. I saw all of us women in some sort of competition for men. If I walked into a room dressed sexy and felt all eyes upon me, I won. If I walked in overdressed or underdressed, or with my perm frizzed out, I lost. Maybe I am too young. I missed the bra-burning women’s rights era. Other women weren’t my sisters. They were the enemy.Now I go to parties and feel the irony. The perm is gone. So is my hair. I’m bald. Even my eyebrows are gone. So there’s no comparing
16 Lily C hemotherapy is chemical warfare. You hope the chemicals, the same poisons that make your hair fall out and make you vomit and feel so tired even your eyelashes hurt, win. You hope your body loses.In the beginning, Michael came with me to each session and held my hand as they started my I.V., and we watched the steady drip snake its way into my arm. However, after a couple of sessions, I decided I was a big enough girl to be dropped off.“I’ll call you on your cell when you can pick me up.”“You sure you’re okay alone?”“Yeah.”The cancer center where I get my treatment lines up lounge chairs in rooms. They want you to be comfortable for your chemical warfare. Our doctors tell us to bring personal CD players and music to relax to or music that will help us fight. They are into imagery. They tell us to picture Pac-Man gangs eating the bad cells, or little soldiers going to war. I found the whole idea preposterous, as if having a video game in my body would help me beat cancer. But
17 Michael I t’s hard to know exactly when Lily started giving up. I think it was piece by piece, day by day. Sometimes, Noah would wrap his arms around her, and she would breathe in that heavenly child scent and for moments or hours, she would fight. I could see it in her eyes. Other days, throwing up on a towel because she couldn’t reach the toilet, the indignity of being too weak and too tired to even wipe her nose when she cried, I saw the light go out. But she was changed after her third chemotherapy treatment. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I think it was simply the resignation.Resignation has a weary connotation, and in Lily’s case, that simply wasn’t so. Or maybe she was weary at first, but in its place grew grace. She had a quality about her that I could not define. She was no saint, but Catholic that I am, I think in terms of grace. Lily was filled with serenity and dignity, and motherhood stopped being about cleaning up dirty dishes and driving the carpool every morning
18 Curveball An excerpt from a novel by Michael AngeloSam stirred. He wondered if he was seeing things. A light was on in the locker room and someone was standing over him.He tried to think back to what had happened, but in actuality, all he could think of was his pain. Breathing hurt, his face hurt, and he felt like he was going to puke from swallowing blood. He rolled onto his side and retched.His eyes were nearly swollen shut, and he was trying to tell his limbs to move, to tell his arms to cover his face, to defend himself from this figure standing over him. He wondered if it was Charlie, back to finish the job. Back to kill him.The figure bent down, and he heard the voice of his coach, Carl Ditford. Coach Carl.“Hey there, Sam.”Sam couldn’t speak. He tried to open his mouth, but found he couldn’t.“Son…” Coach Carl said, his voice soft, much quieter than during practice session when his Texas twang barked across the field. “Seems you had a bit of a disagreement with the boys.”“Mmm.”
19 Lily W hile it wasn’t “time yet,” I discussed with Dr. Morris how, if it got really bad, I wanted to die at home. I had become a walking medical dictionary. Ductal, in situ, carcinoma…invasive, stage four, the words could spill out of me at will. I told Dr. Morris that I would let him know when I’d had enough treatment—or he would. When and if fighting became pointless, I would have hospice care at home. I was planning ahead, which was never my strong suit. But spontaneous and cancer didn’t seem to be two words that sat well together. So next I visited two lawyers.The first lawyer was my family attorney, Harry Conklin, a sweetheart of a guy who’d known me since my father died and we had to settle the estate. Harry always wore bow ties to the office. He possessed quite a collection, including a light-up one for Christmas, one with orange pumpkins for Halloween and a red, white and blue one for the Fourth of July. Good lawyer jokes abound—you know the ones about how they’re all sharks
20 Michael M y whole life has been a baseball analogy. When life gets me down, I say it’s bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded. I still have one more at bat. Sometimes life throws you a knuckleball. Sometimes a fastball.In my life, the Big Pitcher Upstairs usually throws me a curveball, kind of low. So it was when I met George.I have never been monogamous. I’ve had periods of my life where I was a total whore. It was the lifestyle of the time. It was Studio 54. Even when I settled down, when AIDS came along and killed half my friends, I just never went looking for a soul mate. Maybe Lily’s right. What we have is so close to perfect, except for the sex part, that we both got kind of lazy about finding someone.Maybe it’s that, for most gay men, the whole settle down and get married thing didn’t even start to be a blip on our radar until gay men could safely come out of the closet—the 1990s, maybe. And “safe” is relative. I live in New York. Forget some other places where I think h
21 Unholy House by Lily WatersI lived in a godless house.On Sunday, while my playmates leaned scraped knees on church kneelers, wriggling and sliding on shiny wooden pews under the annoyed gazes of their mothers, I learned how to pull a dollar bill from under a shot glass without spilling a drop. The next day, I brought a shot glass and a dollar in for Show and Tell, much to the chagrin of my second-grade teacher. I learned from her shocked gaze and the awed stares of my classmates that visiting bars in the less fashionable neighborhoods of New York City on Sundays was considered unholy.When I hear my girlfriends recount their childhoods, they complain about distant fathers and overbearing mothers. Lisa tells me about the year she nearly made the Olympic swim team—only to have her accomplishments overshadowed by her brother’s Hail Mary pass in the final game of the season, which lifted his team to the state championships—and exalted him to a football scholarship. Her father went to eve
22 Lily H ow can you possibly cram a lifetime of lessons, everything you want your kids to know, into months, days or even a couple of years?Justin, Tara’s boyfriend, is pretty much everything you’d want in your daughter’s first boyfriend. He is polite. He shakes Michael’s hand when he comes over. He gives me a hug now, as we’ve all grown closer. He wears a single little earring, a tiny gold hoop that if my high school boyfriend wore, my father would have beaten him up on the front lawn. Of course, no one ever said my dad was a very good parent, so I think the earring is just fine. A nose ring might have given me a jolt, but Justin is an A student, bound for college, and he wants to be a physical therapist and specialize in sports medicine. His dream job would be to work for the New York Yankees. Michael would let Tara marry him. Tomorrow. If Justin eventually gets a job with the New York Yankees, Michael will kick in a sizable dowry.When I first lost my hair, Justin even got a supersh
23 Michael O ut of the clear blue sky, some guy named Pete called Lily for a date. He contacted her voice mail at the paper. She was still managing to eke out her column every week, and Joe would assign her some features during weeks she felt good. Chemo was over, and she was doing radiation.I’m Noah’s baseball coach, and spring training had started. He was in the shower, and I was boiling water for some pasta. She came home from the office—one of her face-time days with Joe—and said, “I have a date tonight.” She said it as if she were shocked.“A date?”She nodded. “With a guy who apparently doesn’t mind dating a woman with a crew cut.” Her hair had started growing in just the tiniest bit. Her eyebrows were still drawn on.“You’re beautiful even without hair. Don’t you remember when Demi Moore did it for G.I. Jane?”“Michael, you know, I’m not insecure about my appearance. But Demi Moore I’m not.”“It’s a look.”“Yeah. It’s a cancer look.”“Well, obviously, whoever this guy is, he’s a man of
24 Curveball An excerpt from a novel by Michael AngeloSam spent his life perfecting his batting stance. He learned to stare down the pitcher, to bend his knees, to raise his bat, ready. To have every nerve and muscle on alert, waiting for whatever pitch was sent his way, in life or in the ballgame. He lived and breathed baseball, the smell of a leather glove, the sound of the ball smacking against the bat, the sight of its high arc as it shot out of the park.Sam knew that since baseball’s beginnings, sportswriters have used the game as a metaphor for life. Men who couldn’t talk to their fathers about anything important, about anything emotional, men who could do little more than punch their dad in the arm, and mumble a few gruff words, found in baseball a way to communicate.Sam and his father used baseball to talk before Sam went off to college. They would play catch in the backyard. On the face of it, catch is such a simple game. Sam loved the rhythm. He threw the ball to his father.
25 Lily P ete told me I looked beautiful. He brought me a bunch of lilies of the valley—apparently the day we met I had mentioned something about how beautiful I thought they were. That having cancer makes you want to be around your favorite things and makes you want to not waste a second with the things you hate, including the people who bring you down.We picked up where we left off, and by the end of the appetizer course, I knew I would make love with him. He made me dizzy, that’s how crazy I was about him.After dinner, we stood in the parking lot near our respective cars.“You look great with hair, you know.” I smiled.“You’ve got some coming in, too.”“Pete…something about you…” I leaned in close to him and we kissed.“Will you think I’m pushing it if I ask you back to my place for coffee?”I shook my head.I followed him to his apartment, which was two towns over—about a fifteen-minute ride. It was a duplex, a small house divided into an upstairs apartment and a downstairs apartment. Hi
26 Michael P ete was good for Lily. And he and I worried together while she was gone. Lily’s oncologist was furious because the trip could literally threaten Lily’s life. But arguing with her was futile. I let her go, helped out with picking Noah up from school and spent more time with George.“I could get used to this.” He smiled at me Saturday night, as I sat at the end of the bar waiting for him to finish in the kitchen. His manager was going to close that night. Then we drove to my place and parked on the street.“I rented Philadelphia Story,” I told him as we walked to my apartment. The air was typical New York spring, couldn’t decide whether to be cold and miserable or warm…so it was a cross between the two, warm, with chilly breezes.In my apartment, I poured two glasses of merlot and set up the VCR. George looked at the photos on my desk and on the bookshelves. He did that every time he came over. I wondered if it was a nervous habit.“When can I meet Lily’s kids?” he asked.“Soon,”
27 A Daughter’s Turn by Tara WatersMy mother asked me to write her column today. Kind of like a school project.My mom has cancer. When I tell people that, they look at me like they feel really sorry for me. When they find out my father lives in London and I never see him, and my favorite uncle, Michael, is gay, they think I have three heads. Add a pesky kid brother and you have a teenager’s nightmare.But I decided to write about my family for this column because family isn’t about having everything picture-perfect. I’m not even sure I would want everything perfect. Why? Well, my mom has shown me that having cancer isn’t the end of the world, and you can have cancer and still take care of your family. Being sick can give you courage.My uncle Michael has shown me that you don’t have to be related to someone for them to be family. He gets on my nerves, but he is more of a father to me than my real father. Which leads me to my next point. Anybody can have a baby. Just because you’re a pare
28 Lily T his is a list of questions I have for the Big Man Upstairs when I die. I’ve been compiling them ever since I got sick. I have a notepad, and as I think of a question, I write it down. I don’t know why, since I can’t take the notepad to heaven—or wherever it is we go. Still I have them. For some reason, they help me.1. Do they wear high heels in heaven? I’ve spent my life height-challenged, and I don’t relish being the shortest angel in heaven. Are all angels the same height?2. Why do bad things happen to good people? It’s the unanswerable one here on earth. Finally, I want a straight answer.3. Why is there cancer? What about poisonous snakes and cockroaches and really gross stuff? Why are some men evil? I mean like sociopathically evil? Were they born without a soul?4. Why is a baboon’s ass that funny red, and why is there that one ape with the funny nose, that big schnoz? I mean, some of the things in nature…kind of weird. Did you make them that way on purpose? Does a baboon
29 Michael O pening day.What is it about baseball that makes grown men rhapsodize?It’s no secret I adore the game. Maybe because it was a way of communicating with a distant father, a product of the 1950s, a man watching control slip away from him in the turmoil of the ’60s and ’70s. Amid the familiar rhythm of playing catch, we didn’t have to speak. We could just be: father and son.Maybe the reason is the boys of summer. The idea that grown men can make a living doing what little boys love to do. They can put on their uniforms and jog out onto freshly mowed grass, baselines painted white, punch their gloves and throw the ball. They can live a fantasy for the rest of us working stiffs who have to grab the subway to work or jostle along the crowded streets, stuffed into shirts and ties. They passed up wingtips for cleats. Briefcases for gloves. Papers and legal briefs, or jackhammers and nails, for dust kicked up on the pitcher’s mound.Perhaps it’s the ritual of the game I love. Watchin
30 Goodbye by Lily WatersThis is my last column. I’m taking a leave of absence, and I’m not sure if I’ll be back. My hair is back, after chemo, and it’s curly—without a perm! But I’m afraid cancer is in my lungs and there’s also a suspicious spot on my brain. So it’s time to take a break from the column. Or, more specifically, from my editor Joe, who is an ornery type of the old school of journalism, but who taught me an awful lot in my years here.I wanted to also say a few things before I go. For one thing, having cancer does not make you brave. It doesn’t. It makes you sick. I know it’s terribly romantic to sort of picture me lying in bed like the dying Camille, looking ethereal and beautiful, my new-grown hair splayed out. But dying is really an ugly business, and I would greatly prefer not to be doing it.Another thing. David Letterman once asked Warren Zevon, the great rock and roller, when he was dying of cancer, what he knew. The ever sarcastic rocker said something about taking
31 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 t
32 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
33 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, b
34 Michael Y ou don’t realize how much of a hurricane someone is, until they leave. Maybe you picture their leaving, sort of like arriving at the eye of a storm, but until they are really gone, you don’t really know the full devastation.In the weeks after Lily died, me, Pete, George, Joe, Noah, Tara, Ellie—even my parents—were the walking wounded. My department chair, Martin, the guy who’d helped Lily with her surprise party for me, was, in the end, an even better guy than I could have imagined. He hurriedly put together a family leave for me and fast-tracked a sabbatical for the following semester.Joe had taken to dropping by—a lot. As if the paper just wasn’t fun anymore without her to argue with. He would sit in a chair in the living room, watching CNN. Noah would come in and Joe would help him with his homework. But mostly, we all seemed to flounder. It all reminded me of a day in Central Park a long time ago. One of those days you think nothing of at the time, but then later, you
35 Lily I saw them all.At my funeral.The funny thing is, all along I don’t think I ever really pictured going to heaven. I pictured that I would be one of those ghosts rattling around my home, because I wouldn’t be able to cut the cosmic umbilical cord. I thought my aching for them all would be so great I could never move on. And I assumed I wouldn’t want them to move on. Not really. I mean, yes, in some bullshit-piousness sort of way, I might have mouthed it. But I didn’t mean it. If they all moved on, then they would forget me.But time has no meaning here. And I’m able to visit them, mostly at night, or when they conjure me. When Michael’s internal conversations with me get really loud in his head, next thing I know, I’m next to his desk, looking at him with his head in his hands. I know he’s wondering what to do.It’s not easy to help them. I whisper mostly. I urge them in ways they think is their own mind, but it’s not. It’s angels. Or whatever we are. I don’t have wings. And I don’
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