Read Online Lucky Us by Joan Silber - Free Book Online Page A

get it?”
    â€œAt sixty-five. I could go live in Mexico on it, I suppose, if it’s still cheap to live there.”
    â€œRight,” I said. “I like warm places.”
    He took my hand. He had been planning his future without me, but I let this go. Where did he think I’d be in another sixteen years? “Mexico is a good idea,” I said.
    â€œCompound interest is kind of amazing,” Gabe said. He knew quite a lot about it, as it turned out. I had to hear about year-end capital balances and cost of living adjustments.
    He looked flat to me at that moment, like someone I couldn’t get in focus. It wasn’t his fault that he lived in another kind of time from me, but I felt that we were now on different schedules.
    A ND THEN THERE was the episode with the onion. It was an ordinary kitchen event. I was slicing a red onion for the salad (Gabe was cooking the main course, as usual)when the onion slid and I hit my thumb instead. I was using the one good knife in the house, a heavy steel chef’s knife, and I yelped to see how much red blood flowed out of my thumb. I was dripping gore onto the cutting board.
    â€œWhat’d you do?” Gabe said. He took my hand to look at it, and he didn’t draw back or falter. His face looked a little pinched but he was game.
    Nobody gets infected this way—only if Gabe had an open cut was there even the smallest technical chance—but I didn’t like his holding my gushing thumb. I yelled, “Stop it,” and I pulled my hand away, which really made blood get all over. Our wall was spattered with red.
    Gabe put his hands up and backed away, the stance that meant
don’t bother me, I’m an innocent man
. He was angry. I wrapped myself with a paper towel and I went to the bathroom to get a Band-Aid.
    When I came back, I made a solution of Clorox to wash down the wall and the cutting board. It was too hard, I thought, to have to worry about myself and Gabe too. For a very brief second, I really was sorry he didn’t have this same virus. And it shocked me to think it, what was I turning into? I hadn’t thought I would be like this.

4

Gabe
    I kept thinking I could have handled this better than Elisa was doing. She was so young, she didn’t know how to take bad news. No one does, of course, but I would have been better at it.
    Why, for instance, was she still refusing to see a doctor, no matter how I reasoned and nagged? She was distracted by the wrong things and too revved up, too wired. From everything I had read so far (I was reading as much as I could and there was more and more), she was going to have to keep her wits about her and not fly off any handles.
    There was the whole question of hope, for instance. Ihad read articles that made my heart beat with happiness, tales of people who’d been at death’s door and were now dancing around, happily medicated on triple and quadruple combinations of antiviral drugs. One magazine listed six different drugs that were now in trials and would be on the market soon, probably before Elisa needed them. The same magazine had an obituary section that seemed to be a regular column. Four AIDS activists, with bright and bustling resumes, had died that month; one of them was younger than Elisa. The subhead could’ve read: don’t flinch, dear reader.
    Elisa was too jumpy to read a magazine like this and her information was pretty thin. She was running on blind nerve at the moment. I was afraid she was going to make a mess of things.
    S HE DID KEEP getting on the subway and going to her studio to paint, which I thought was a good thing. She had been working on these cityscapes, big stripes and jolts of hot color. I asked if she was going to keep working at these or if she had a different sense now of what she wanted to do. She was annoyed by the question. “You want me to do dancing blood cells?” she said. “That kind of AIDS art?”
    â€œPeople