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

have done stuff that’s very beautiful,” I said.“It can be subtle. Some of it’s raging and in-your-face and some of it’s oblique. There’s a range.”
    â€œI don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do,” she said.
    â€œDo what you want,” I said.
    â€œThank you,” she said. “I will.”
    I wanted, of course, art to do for her what religion might have, if she’d had a religion. I wanted her to see her situation in a more bearable, even a more exalted way. But I wasn’t a painter and I didn’t know that much. I had only the favorite phrase,
aesthetic distance,
so calming and sibilant, which didn’t mean all that much to Elisa.
    A surprising number of people with HIV had written about illness as a “gift,” an unchosen source of insight, but Elisa did not find this notion very interesting. I was the one always trying to make a silk purse out of our particular sow’s ear. This task fell to me.
    It was my joke to say to Elisa that condoms made me young again, a trip back to high school—the crackling packet and the haste to get it open, the ringed cylinder of pale film unrolled with boyish eagerness. I took the relentless presence of latex in stride, but I was sorry for us and sorry for the reminder each time that this wisp of rubber, thin as tracing paper, was my
protection
.
    What shields, what fences, what locked doors. For oralsex, I was supposed to cut a condom open and spread it across Elisa, and sometimes we used Saran Wrap, which felt glassy and foolish against my tongue. The taste of my own Elisa, sealed behind plastic, forever kept from me. From
me
.
    And sometimes I thought, I’m old, what does it matter? I can die soon, I’ve done most of what I’m ever going to do. I don’t have to be in fear for my life, the way a young person would be. What life? Sometimes I was not afraid at all.
    I TRIED TO keep watch over how she took care of herself. I fed her vitamin E, garlic extract, Coenzyme Q10, and an evil-tasting tonic made from Asian roots, and I watched her body for changes. She looked the same as she had since I’d met her—downy skin, bright eyes, shiny hair. In the morning when I kissed her good-bye I would cup her chin and stroke her neck, and after a while she knew I was checking for swollen glands.
    â€œAre you a boyfriend or a fucking nurse?” she said.
    I read the advice for serodiscordant couples. What a graceful phrase, that—as if unmatched serostatus were a musical problem. (The advice was no help: talk, be open, expect stress; yeah yeah.) I tried to get Elisa to use that word,
serodiscordant,
but I never heard her say it.
    E LISA DIDN’T WANT me to see whatever she was painting now. She had been quite an eager displayer of her work in the old days. Once, in our first months together, she showed me a whole box of drawings and “art projects” saved from third grade through her last year of art school. You could see how verisimilitude had gotten her going—she had been thrilled that she could draw a dog that looked recognizably like a hypothetical spotted hound. Once she was in her teen years she had begun to think of abstraction as a purer, higher mode. There was a painting, done when she was sixteen, of lines scratched on red and blue shapes, with a quote from Kandinsky scrawled on the bottom, “Still later I understood that the external grows from the internal or is stillborn.” In the past few years, the paintings again used recognizable figures—streets, buildings—but blurred and heated up. The blurring and heating looked confident, but the more “effective” the paintings were, the less confident she was about them, because they weren’t hers yet. And what could she do with all that now? One thing was clear—she didn’t need me to ask.
    I DID FINALLY get her to go to a doctor. Her insurance company sent her to some