David Lipsky
Garden
In the year after they graduated from college, all
of Leonard's friends, to one degree or another, began to be stuck
by premonitions of mortality. They had all been raised on ceremony,
to expect life to be a passage of doorways: grammar school to
a good high school, high school to a good college, college to
a good job. Now there were no more doorways, just a wide room,
an empty, dim room, with at the end one black doorway leading
nowhere at all. It was against this doorway that Leonard's friends,
all year long, seemed to be stumbling. While Leonard, a graduate
student, studied English at Georgetown, closing books and then
mounting them on his bookcase as if in a display of difficult
prey bagged, his friends collapsed. Michael, his hallmate in college,
called late one night. He was having a heart attack. He was dying.
Leonard lay on his futon, the phone against his cheek, imagining
long wires stretching to Los Angeles, Michael's heart attack scurrying
across darkened wheat fields to Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Pennsylvania Avenue, here. "Can you feel your heart?"
he asked.
"Of course I can feel it," his friend said.
"I feel it in my ears, my shoulders, my muscles. It's all
I can feel. I don't know what to do."
"Count the number of beats," Leonard said,
and was surprised to hear, in his voice, the instructions he'd
received from his Chaucer professor for telling the difference
between strophe and anapestic meter. "I'll give you a minute
on my watch, you count the number of beats. Okay?" Leonard
held up his wrist so the streetlight could illuminate the dial.
"Go."
Michael's count was eighty-five; nowhere near, Leonard
knew, a heart attack. Michael was nervous, home in California
without a job. Leonard told him to call a doctor in the morning.
But other calls came, too--his friends seemed to
think Leonard was stable, back in the hallway with more doors
to open, and thus capable of giving unhysterical advice. But Leonard
found that even among his fellow graduate students, life-threatening
diseases were also rampant. One friend worried about brain tumors,
another about the pattern of moles on her arm. At Columbia, a
friend from high school checked himself into Payne Whitney for
a night, and stayed a month. Leonard, beginning work on a long
paper in March and coming down with the worst cold he'd had since
the fourth grade, decided two things: That he would flee Georgetown,
and that he had AIDS.
He handled the first problem directly. He called
Michael in Los Angeles. Michael would be moving to New York in
May, to start work at the magazine owned by a friend of his father's.
Leonard would be leaving Georgetown the following month. Would
Michael mind finding an apartment for both of them?
The second problem attacked Leonard in two ways.
He tried to decide how he'd gotten the disease and came up with
a woman he'd met playing tennis one summer, a tall, beautiful
Asian who was uncertain of herself in the way tall pretty women
sometimes are, as if their beauty and height are stilts they're
afraid the first mean person will topple them from. She was twenty-eight,
and Leonard, twenty, had slept with her, feeling it a sort of
victory. He'd felt handsome that summer for the first time in
his life. That this woman (twenty-eight! Asian! from Harvard!
in investment banking!) would sleep with him so casually seemed
a welcome from the adult world, which he had then imagined as
glamorous and powerful. The woman had complained of a previous
lover, a ballet dancer who had been cruel to her. To Leonard,
in March, "cruel" now seemed a euphemism for sodomy,
and this woman, who had been so welcoming, now seemed to have
welcomed him to something else, to the area behind that black
door in the empty room. Each morning, he woke and checked his
arms for dots, for suspicious marks. He began wearing sweatshirts to avoid this morning
performance, and found himself sweating in his sleep. Nightsweats
were a symptom. In the shower, avoiding the sight of his unfurled
skin, Leonard found himself praying.
This was the second dimension Leonard's sense of
the disease took: he believed that if he prayed, if he behaved
rightly, he would be spared. The disease was a way of keeping
him in line, keeping him from feeling too happy or satisfied with
himself. In the fall, as his postgraduate friends, pursuing jobs
in Manhattan, had spats, fell apart, checked in with neurologists,
heart specialists, sleep therapists, Leonard had found himself
enjoying Georgetown, loving it in a way he never had in college.
The smoky smell that hung in the streets--from fireplaces that
actually worked--the candy colored row houses, all the same height,
the swish-swish of trees overhead, these things had made Leonard
feel adult, and thrilled with life. He'd left the girl he'd dated
in school and had taken up with another girl, an undergraduate
in a class a friend of his was teaching. When the ex-girlfriend
called, tentatively proposing reconciliation, Leonard had felt
safe on a high, happy perch, looking down on avoided misery. AIDS
was his punishment for happiness. He broke up with the undergraduate
and reconciled with the original girl. He began to keep Kosher,
which struck him as a small sacrifice. And he began to limit his conversation to assertions
of whether things were good or better--to be negative was to risk
extermination.
This had caused problems. He couldn't say no to people.
When Michael called and proposed he pay rent for April also, since
the apartment (a first floor tenement on West 20th Street, with
a garden) was for his use, too, Leonard argued vehemently. Michael
said, "I can't believe we're arguing. I'm here in this apartment
because you needed a place to come back to. I'm not even asking
you to pay the full rent, though I could just as easily have stayed
in California."
"You told me you were going crazy in California,"
Leonard reminded him. "You called me on the phone and told
me you were having a heart attack."
Leonard could feel Michael registering this. It was
taboo to talk about that evening; for a moment, Leonard feared
his friend would hang up. "In any event," Michael said,
with a nasty click in his voice, "I'm here in this apartment,
which is rented in both our names, because you asked me to be.
And I'm not paying the first month's rent alone."
They fought for an hour, coming to no special conclusion,
and when Leonard got off the phone he panicked. What had he been
thinking? Was it worth five hundred dollars to die? He carefully
rolled back the sleeve of his shirt to look at his forearm. The
red dots, which had seemed to be gone that morning, now were pulsing
as brightly and happily as ever. In the morning he sneezed, twice,
he coughed, his pee seemed frothier than usual, in the shower
he dared examine both arms and felt about to cry, the dots were
there, when he looked. He prayed. And then, when he got out of
the shower, he called New York, leaving a message on Michael's
answering machine. "Sorry about last night and anything I
may have said. I was tense about leaving Georgetown. Of course
I'll pay my half of the rent. See you Friday." And then,
hanging up, he'd felt terrible.
Next was Alexa, his old girlfriend. She was looking
forward to his return to the city. She called and asked if he
wouldn't mind helping paint her apartment. What could Leonard
say?
It was the first of May and scorching in the early
Washington summer, the day Leonard left Georgetown. On the Amtrak
next to him was a tidily dressed businessman with many magazines.
Leonard asked to borrow Sports Illustrated. His seat-mate gave it to him with an edgy expression,
the look of a man clearly pained by the idea of someone else getting
something for nothing. Leonard read. He felt he was unlikely to
be ambushed here by medical information, and he hoped the bland
scores and sports photographs would calm him down. But the sports
information and his AIDS thoughts were in a race in his head,
and in the end AIDS outpaced Sports Illustrated, tackled it to
the ground and jumped up and down on top of it, trumpeting victory.
Leonard returned the magazine. His seat-mate took it, then tore
it in half. For the rest of the trip, each time this man finished
a magazine, he would look at Leonard and tear it first into halves,
then into quarters, dropping the remains on the carpet under his
feet. At Penn Station Leonard hailed a taxi, got in, and gave
directions. His driver swiveled in his seat. "Relax,"
he said, "you've found a driver who's white and speaks English.
You've hit the jackpot." In their apartment, Michael was
sitting in the living room, taking his own blood pressure.
"Shh," he said, pumping the bulb. When
he was finished, he showed Leonard the kitchen, the closets, the
bedroom. Then he took him out to the garden. It was lovely. There
were two chairs and a barrel table. Dark clouds moved across an
even darker sky. There were birds and herbs, and even the many
weeds were handsome and fresh-smelling. A cool breeze came up,
drying the sweat on Leonard's forehead. He pictured himself here
in summer, in winter. "Is it all ours?" he asked.
Michael nodded, pulling out one of the chairs. "There's
a priest on the second floor who keeps wanting to plant things.
Apparently, the last tenant let him keep his own flower bed."
"Should we let him?" Leonard asked.
"Of course not," Michael said, sitting
down. His upper arm was still red from where the blood pressure
apparatus had been wrapped around it. He had the Californian's
matter-of-fact cruelty, which to Leonard seemed to come from learning
to view human accidents not as catastrophes, but as inconveniences
which tied up the freeway. "We probably pay five times the
rent he does. If he wants a garden, let him find another apartment.
He certainly can't use ours."
_____
Waking, on the living room floor, in Michael's sleeping
bag--Michael had taken the bedroom; this was only fair, he'd explained,
since he'd found the apartment--Leonard realized he could not
go on. He had thought that he could not face the AIDS exam. Now,
though, he grabbed for the White Pages, and called the number
for Department of Health HIV Information. A recorded voice came
on and told him to wait, first in English, then in Spanish. Then
radio music came on, exactly as though this were a department
store he'd called, or some other cheery place. The first song
was "Tonight's the Night." The second was "Dust
in the Wind." Leonard slammed the phone down. Were they kidding?
This morning he didn't think he could face the shower, the menacing,
unexplored territory of his own skin. He pulled on shorts, a shirt,
and ran out the door.
In the hallway, a man in a priest's outfit was getting
his mail. Leonard's back stiffened. All spring long he had been
especially nice to clergymen. It didn't even matter what denomination--if
Leonard behaved correctly, they were bound to put in a good word
for him with the agency for which they worked. He tried to slip
past, but the man looked up and said, "Ahh, you must be Leonard.
I'm Father Halliday." Father Halliday was in his sixties,
bald, with rapidly blinking eyes and ears folded up intricately
against his skull like bats wings. He inclined his head and spoke
in a confiding, slightly effeminate voice: "Now, Michael
told me to bring this up with you, he said you were the gardener.
I'm a gardener, too, and as he may have mentioned, I have the
most beautiful zinnias and begonias which I could plant in your
garden, to give it a little color. What do you say?"
"I'd love to talk about it right now, but I'm
late, I'm very sorry." Leonard kept moving. He didn't dare
check his arms. And on Eighth Avenue, he didn't dare look at the
little cluster of newspaper machines comparing headlines under
a lamppost. In Georgetown, he had measured his moral progress
by the number of Washington Post articles dealing with AIDS. The
better he acted, the less likely there was to be one. On the subway,
a swaying woman told a rambling story about her abusive, jailbird
husband, as preamble to asking for money. Other riders--competitors?
critics?--heckled her, for delivery and believability. Leonard
gave a dollar. It was a moral toll charge. Alexa was waiting in
her apartment on Perry Street. They kissed. Alexa was a tall,
slim girl with arching eyebrows. She--solo in Leonard's acquaintance--had
gone through the year unscathed by disease. She'd been unscathed
by anything. She'd started the summer working for one magazine
and, finding it boring, had switched in mid-winter to another.
Disliking the Upper East Side, she'd moved down here. She was
the sort of person who scented out what she wanted and then zeroed
unswervingly in after it, like a hunting dog. She had zeroed in
on Leonard at Georgetown. Now, she was zeroing in on giving her
apartment a new coat of white.
As they painted--a sharp smell, rollers spraying
up paint against their forearms and faces--Leonard couldn't help
examining Alexa's arms and legs for dots and other tell-tale markings.
That she could work so aggressively, with no hint at all of the
terrible battle that might even then be raging within her (plucky
white blood cells versus hordes of invading virus), made Alexa
seem innocently brave. They painted in silence, one or the other
of them occasionally journeying into the kitchen to change the
radio station. Alexa seemed
irritated. After two hours, she said, testily, "Leonard,
I wish you wouldn't keep staring at me that way."
"What way?" he asked.
"Like you wish I were someone else." Alexa
swung around to face him. The ends of her hair were flecked with
Glidden Spread Satin, and there was a fine dusting of white spots
over her cheekbones, like freckles. Her eyes were narrowed, and
her nostrils were dilating and shrinking, as they did when she
scented outrage. "What do you want me to say, Leonard? I'm
sorry I asked you to paint my apartment! I'm sorry I'm not your
little freshman friend at Georgetown!"
Leonard said, timorously, "She was a junior."
He felt that if he stuck to the facts, he would stay blameless.
Alexa advanced, stepping over paint cans and the
aluminum foil roller tray. She put her hands on her hips. "And
how you could sleep with one of your students I could never understand,
either."
She was one of my friend's students, Leonard wanted
to say. But with Alexa so close, so close that he could smell
her--anger, sweat, and (vaguely) perfume, and paint--he was dazzled
by the planes of exposed skin now revealed to him: collarbone,
earlobes, jawline, there was so much territory to cover! Alexa's
face contracted and expanded in disbelief. "See! You're doing
it right now!"
What she couldn't understand was that he was checking
his behavior by her condition. "Let's not talk about this
right now."
"Why not? We have to talk about this. How can
we ever stay together if we can't even talk to each other?"
And Leonard understood; Alexa had zeroed in on marriage. The CD
ended. Alexa, in her excess of anger, whirled into the kitchen,
as if her stereo, too, had failed her. Leonard dropped his roller
and walked out of the apartment.
His stomach was jumping all over the place. He began
to walk uptown, towards his apartment. The presence of so many
people on the street made Leonard feel less special, and thus
less afraid. Taking a deep breath, he looked at his arms. They
were covered with splotches. White, the hair matted. It was paint.
But it was how the disease would look. Leonard took another deep
breath. He tried to remember how he'd felt in Georgetown, in the
fall, with the other girl, the wood smells, his own ease. It seemed
a paradise he'd been ejected from. Acquired Immune Deficiency
Syndrome. It was iambic pentameter. Recognizing this calmed him
down, some.
He would have to become cruel. That, he saw, was
the solution. God, perhaps, required that you be loving and nice,
but the world required cruelty and indifference. Leonard thought
of the racist cab driver, the man on the Amtrak, the passengers
on the subway, even Michael and Alexa. They were all at home making
demands, acting
selfishly, withholding things. If you were not cruel, Leonard
decided, people would get anything out of you they wanted. You
were a door with no locks, waiting to be ransacked. And this information,
itself, seemed another doorway through which Leonard was passing.
At Twentieth Street he turned. Father Halliday was
waiting on the sidewalk, in front of their building. As Leonard
approached, he took a breath, and his eyes seemed to visibly consider
strategies, and Leonard, panicking, head down, cut him off by
saying, "Yes, yes, yes: please use our garden."
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