Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

— And I never thought about AIDS, not once, not as something which could apply to me. I was lucky, wasn’t I? I couldn’t die. Sex had always meant pleasing myself, and later, much too much later, babies. It didn’t mean death. It couldn’t mean death. I never realised the two were related.

We couldn’t go back to our apartment, of course, but nor could we go to Benjamin’s place which he shared with a crotchety Bulgarian sculptor who exhibited his work to all Benjy’s visitors. So we ended up in a dark little room that Benjamin found, in a hotel straight out of the nineteenth century, with stairs, and no telephones in the rooms, and no security in reception, no lounge, but we didn’t need a lounge, no room service, but we serviced ourselves, no air-conditioning, but we didn’t notice. A view of pigeons and fire-escapes. (Benjamin was not very rich just then; he hadn’t found a dealer to replace Isaac; so perhaps it was the money as much as the romance that took us to the Arlington.) In any case it was ours, it was perfect, and the first time we fucked was unforgettable.

We fucked, and laughed, and smoked, and talked, and fucked again, for hours. His impatience was glorious, glorious. As soon as we had turned the key in the lock — a mortice key! a rusty little lock — and shut the door again behind us, his hands were pushing up under my blouse, he was kissing my breasts, he was holding my arms, his voice was shaking as he said my name, he had pulled my pants down over my feet and was down on his knees on the threadbare carpet, moaning as he breathed in the smell of my sex, as his mouth pushed up between my thighs and his tongue found the hard little tongue at my centre; I begged him to stop, I was falling, dying, we had to lie down, we tore our clothes off, saying nothing, clumsy, furious, clasped each other on the bed at last, naked at last, nothing could stop us — I groaned as I felt his heavy penis nudging against me like a dog, I pulled him inside me, I had to be filled. He came in seconds, roaring, helpless, and lay for a few minutes stunned in my arms. Then we both started laughing. ‘Your turn next. I want to have you four times today.’ Actually I think it was only three, but it was like being young, I was young again.

It was boiling hot. We had stripped the bed. We lay together, smoking, naked. I always smoked for births and deaths; this felt like the births of the rest of my life. The sunset light on our flanks was red. His cock was big; he was a big young man; his balls were beautiful, heavy, hard; his hands were big, but extremely gentle, as if they had known and touched me for ever. The window was open, and life flowed in. It was so different from where we usually met, with everything covered, carpeted, masked, disinfected, hushed, restricted, dead. No one opens windows in New York, but we flung them wide, though the air is lethal, it was air from the sky, not a filtering system, and in the quiet moments when we lay and smoked a lifetime of fragments of remembered sound floated up above the traffic’s dull roar, laughter, screams, doors banging, a dog, church bells escaped from long-ago Europe, the horns of taxis blaring for someone — and rich smells of frying onions and liver, everything cheap and anarchic and young, his hot young skin against my hot skin, and what did it matter if his were younger?

Behind the hotel was a long strip of wasteland, a makeshift garden, raggedly green. Very faintly, we heard those noises too, green noises from another world, the thwacks and screams of a game of baseball, children shouting, an icecream van, then louder, clearer, a baby crying. Benjamin and I made love again.

— I thought, I could leave Christopher. When Isaac has died. When Chris is over it.

I stopped pursuing Chris for sex. If I wasn’t so happy, I’d have been more cunning. I had all the sex I wanted, now. I was nice to him, though. I was kind to him. I knew he had found no way through to Isaac, and he would only accept that once Isaac was dead. The suspended possibility was horribly painful, even though Isaac could communicate with no one, only drips and drugs got through to him. He could signal only by blinking his eyes: there would be no more rallies, no more presents. But he wasn’t dead. Chris suffered it. I was sorry for him, doubly sorry.

And yet, he bored me, he irritated me, he slept in my bed, a weight of gloom, wordlessly asking me for something. I longed for everything to be over. We were in the twenty-first century now; I was ready for it, I was glowing with life, but the past hung dying round my neck.

I failed to conceal my happiness.

One day I came in from an afternoon of visiting Isaac and fucking Benjamin and found Chris sobbing on the bed. A horrible sound, strangled, despairing, head down on the pillow, deaf to the world. The video screen was a forgotten snowstorm reminding me of something bad, something heartbreaking from the past. Either he hadn’t heard me come in or he didn’t care. His shoulders heaved. Perhaps he wanted me to find him, wanted me to love and comfort him. My stomach contracted with dread.

I couldn’t do it. I felt like a stranger. I was no longer the woman he was waiting for. He was waiting for me, but I had moved on. In some terrible way I didn’t care, though another part of me was shocked, frightened. But my capacity for pity was dulled by joy; all afternoon I had been so happy.

The same old truth about long marriages; it all reduces to a struggle for power. I had lived with Chris for twenty-six years, I’d been happy with him, I’d suffered with him, and now it seemed we had come to an end I was glad that he, and not I, was weeping. After twenty-six years there was bound to be weeping.

— I pretended, of course, because he frightened me. I pretended that he was crying for Isaac. ‘Poor darling,’ I said, the solicitous nurse, I sat on the bed, I stroked his hair, I looked away but I stroked his hair. ‘It’ll soon be over. This week, maybe. The doctor reckons the end of the week. You could come with me if it would make you feel better.’ (I was safe saying that; it made him feel worse; he never visited without feeling worse.)

But the sobbing went on. He didn’t play. ‘Alex,’ he sobbed. ‘Alex, Alex.’ Not sobbing for Isaac, sobbing for me. The devastating smell of another body that he had somehow sensed on me.

It was twenty minutes before he stopped. I walked about doing unnecessary things with exaggerated concentration, speaking calmly and gently, as if to a child, always of Isaac, never of us. When he managed to stop, he said nothing. Because we said nothing, both of us knew. It was as clear as accusation and confession.

But still I knew I could not walk out. Not possible, with Isaac dying.

And so things moved towards their end. So we moved towards our end.

And five years later I don’t understand: why was the choice so clear to me? Why was I so sure I could be happy with Benjy? Why did I think that leaving would be easy, that everything would go according to plan?

I think I could no longer imagine Christopher. We lived side by side, but I never saw him, I stopped myself feeling what he felt because that was difficult, painful. Now the same thing has happened with Benjamin.

In my mind Chris became an old man, an invalid, someone who suffered, and would suffer from me, but who would have to accept what I did to him.

I didn’t realise how much he loved me. I didn’t see that he was half-crazy. I didn’t know he would kill for me.

What have I done, what have I done?

Lucia doesn’t realise who she’s working for. She thinks her master is old and frail. Her soups get thinner, her coffee weaker. She talks a lot about my heart and frets if the windows are left open at night because of ‘unhealthy airs’ from the canal; she tells me I’ll prendere un raffredore, as if I would expire at a breath of wind. If I walk in the sun it’s just as bad — ‘Wear your hat,’ she shouts from the door, ‘the sun is cruel to grandfathers.’