There was this to be said for the sedatives: They helped you adjust to death better. It was difficult to pick up and move anywhere, let alone from life to death, without the necessary psychic equipment. That was why, I realized, persons in messy, unhappy situations had trouble getting out: Their strength ebbed; they simultaneously aged and regressed; they had no sedatives. They didn't know who they were, though they suspected they were the browning, on-sale hamburger of the parallel universe. Frightened of their own toes, they needed the bravery of sedatives. Which could make them look generously upon the skinny scrap of their life and deem it good, ensuring a calmer death. It was, after all, easier to leave something you truly, serenely loved than something you really and frantically didn't quite. A good dying was a matter of the right attitude. A healthy death, like anything — job promotions or looking younger — was simply a matter of "feeling good about yourself." Which is where the sedatives came in. Sedate as a mint, a woman could place a happy hand on the shoulder of death and rasp out, "Waddya say, buddy, wanna dance?"
Also, you could get chores done.
You could get groceries bought.
You could do laundry and fold.
Gerard's Dido and Aeneas was a rock version of the Purcell opera. I had never seen it. He didn't want me going to the rehearsals. He said he wanted to present the whole perfect show to me, at the end, like a gift. Sometimes I thought he might be falling in love with Dido, his leading lady, whose real name was Susan Fitzbaum.
"Have fun in Tunis," I'd say as he disappeared off to rehearsals. I liked to say Tunis. It sounded obscene, like a rarely glimpsed body part.
"Carthage, Benna. Carthage. Nice place to visit."
"Though you, of course, prefer Italy."
"For history? For laying down roots? Absolutely. Have you seen my keys?"
"Ha! The day you lay down roots…" But I couldn't think of how to finish it. "That'll be the day you lay down roots," I said.
"Why, my dear, do you think they called it Rome?" He grinned. I handed him his keys. They were under an Opera News I'd been using to thwack flies.
"Thank you for the keys," he smiled, and then he was off, down the stairs, a post-modern blur of battered leather jacket, sloppily shouldered canvas bag, and pantcuffs misironed into Mobius strips.
during rehearsal breaks he would phone. "Where do you want to sleep tonight, your place or mine?"
"Mine," I said.
Surely he wasn't in love with Susan Fitzbaum. Surely she wasn't in love with him.
eleanor and iaround this time founded The Quit-Calling-Me-Shirley School of Comedy. It entailed the two of us meeting downtown for drinks and making despairing pronouncements about life and love which always began, "But surely…" It entailed what Eleanor called, "The Great White Whine": whiney white people getting together over white wine and whining.
"Our sex life is disappearing," I would say. "Gerard goes to the bathroom and I call it 'Shaking Hands with the Unemployed.' Men hit thirty, I swear, and they want to make love twice a year, like seals."
"We've got three more years of sexual peak," says Eleanor crossing her eyes and pretending to strangle herself. "When's the last time you guys made love?" She tried looking nonchalant. I did my best. I sang, " 'January, February, June, or July,'" but the waitress came over to take our orders and gave us hostile looks. We liked to try to make her feel guilty by leaving large tips.
"I'm feeling pre-menstrual," said Eleanor. "I was coerced into writing grant proposals all day. I've decided that I hate all short people, rich people, government officials, poets, and homosexuals."
"Don't forget gypsies," I said.
"Gypsies!" she shrieked. "I despise gypsies!" She drank chablis in a way that was part glee, part terror. It was always quick. "Can you tell I'm trying to be happy?" she said.
Eleanor was part of a local grant-funded actor-poets group which did dramatic and often beautiful readings of poems written by famous dead people. My favorites were Eleanor's Romeo soliloquies, though she did a wonderful "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I was a crummy dancer with no discipline and a scorn for all forms of dance-exercise who went from one aerobics job to the next, trying to convince students I loved it. ("Living, acting, occurring in the presence of oxygen!" I would explain with concocted exuberance. At least I didn't say things like "Tighten the bun to intensify the stretch!" or "Come on, girls, bods up.") I had just left a job in a health club and had been hired at Fitchville's Community School of the Arts to teach a class of senior citizens. Geriatric aerobics.
"Don't you feel that way about dancing?" Eleanor asked. "I mean, I'd love to try to write and read something of mine, but why bother. I finally came to that realization last summer reading Hart Crane in an inner tube in the middle of the lake. Now there's a poet."
"There's a poet who could have used an inner tube. Don't be so hard on yourself." Eleanor was smart, over-thirty, over-weight, and had never had a serious boyfriend. She was the daughter of a doctor who still sent her money. She took our mutual mediocrity harder than I did. "You shouldn't let yourself be made so miserable," I attempted.
"I don't have those pills," said Eleanor. "Where do you get those pills?"
"I think what you do do in the community is absolutely joyous. You make people happy."
"Thank you, Miss Hallmark Hall of Obscurity."
"Sorry," I said.
"You know what poetry is about?" said Eleanor. "The impossibility of sexual love. Poets finally don't even want genitals, their own or anyone else's. A poet wants metaphors, patterns, some ersatz physics of love. For a poet, to love is to have no lover. And to live" — she raised her wine glass and failed to suppress a smile—"is to have no liver."
basically, i realized, I was living in that awful stage of life from the age of twenty-six to thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight. Nonetheless you tried things out:
"Love is the cultural exchange program of futility and eroticism," I said. And Eleanor would say, "Oh, how cynical can you get," meaning not nearly cynical enough. I had made it sound dreadful but somehow fair, like a sleepaway camp. "Being in love with Gerard is like sleeping in the middle of the freeway," I tried. "Thatta girl," said Eleanor. "Much better."
on the community school's application form, where it had asked "Are you married?" (this was optional information), I had written an emphatic "No" and next to it, where it asked "To whom?" I'd written "A guy named Gerard." My class of senior citizens somehow found out about it and once classes got under way, they smiled, shook their heads, and teased me. "A good-humored girl like you," was the retrograde gist, "and no husband!"
Classes were held at night on the third floor of the arts school, which was a big Victorian house on the edge of downtown. The dance studio was creaky and the mirrors were nightmares, like aluminum foil slapped on walls. I did what I could. "Tuck, lift, flex, repeat. Tuck, lift, flex, now knee-slap lunge." I had ten women in their sixties and a man named Barney who was seventy-three. "That's it, Barney," I would shout. "Pick it up now," though I didn't usually mean the tempo: Barney had a hearing aid which kept clacking to the floor mid-routine. After class he would linger and try to chat — apologize for the hearing aid or tell me loud stories about his sister Zenia, who was all of eighty-one and mobile, apparently, as a bug. "So you and your sister, you're pretty close?" I asked once, putting away the cassettes.