Lloyd
E
va greets me with a mug of hot cocoa. Its warmth feels good in my cold hands, even better down my throat. She sits beside me on her living room couch and watches me drink. “Happy New Year, Lloyd,” she says.
Thank God for her. I tell her about the experience with Jeff, and she listens, present and attentive. Unlike Jeff, she’s listening to me—not running her own agenda and issues in her head, just waiting for her chance to speak.
“Until that point, it had all been going so well,” I tell her. “But now it just feels like it did before. This game of pulling closer, then pulling back. I don’t want to play that game anymore with him.”
“I imagine it must make you terribly weary.”
I nod. “Jeff can be impossible at times.”
“Well, it must be a little hard for him to understand,” Eva offers.
I scoff. “Understand what? The guest house?”
She smiles. “Do you think, Lloyd, that maybe, just maybe, he was hoping you were going to move back to Boston?”
I take another sip of cocoa. I guess I’d already wondered that myself. I just shake my head. “I gave him no reason to think so,” I say defensively. And I hate feeling defensive.
Eva’s eyes well up. She’s a very empathetic person. That’s why I love her, and why I think you will, too. “That poor boy,” she says. “Oh, of
course,
I can understand how he’s feeling. If that’s what he’d been hoping for, and then here you are, moving in with
me
instead...” She looks as if the tears will come any second. “That poor, poor boy.”
I let out a long sigh. “I wouldn’t spend too much time feeling sorry for Jeff, Eva. I can assure you his mind is
not
on our guest house at the moment.”
“No matter what he’s doing to forget,” Eva says, “I’m sure somewhere he’s hurting inside, and I feel badly about that.”
Eva’s a good woman. Kind, compassionate, wise. She reminds me of Javitz, actually. Always there with a ready ear, solid insight, and unconditional support.
Let me give you an example. I knew Eva was somebody I wanted in my life—that I could enter into a partnership with—when I watched her with one of the guys she takes care of as a volunteer for an AIDS service agency. The miracle cures haven’t worked for this guy. Alex has about four T cells and weighs about ninety pounds—a stark reminder that the plague isn’t over—but so far he’s managed to still live on his own and make his own life. Except that he needs help getting groceries and things like that, for which Eva is only too glad to volunteer. I watched her with him, and she was
perfect:
warm, interested, nurturing, but never condescending. She fixed his meals, kidded with him about his hair, gently massaged lotion into his feet until he drifted off to sleep. “I admit I dote on him,” she told me. “When I look at Alex, I don’t see a wasted, dying man. I see the man he was and still is: handsome, witty, talented. If he wasn’t gay, I just might well fall in love with him, virus and all.”
Eva Horner is fifty years old. She’s a widow, still grieving her husband. In her youth, I imagine, she was very pretty. Even now she’s got large brown doe eyes, strawberry blond hair, and a scattering of freckles across her cheeks that belie her half-century of life. Yet she seems to do her best to conceal her attractiveness, pulling her hair back severely in a bun, keeping her large breasts shrouded in loose, heavy sweaters or smocks. Those oversized mammaries are an anomaly: everything else about her is tiny, petite, delicate. She stands just four feet ten, with hands as small and delicate as a girl’s. She smiles easily but shyly, always with a hint of embarrassment, as if she didn’t feel she deserved to be having such a good time.
I know that I make her smile. Until meeting me, she was as adrift as I was: unsure of her next move, still trapped in her own prison of grief. Her volunteer work was a bold leap back into the world for her, a move from which I took inspiration. She doesn’t have to work: she admits that she came from money, and then her husband left her fairly well off on top of that. She lives in opulent splendor—three bedrooms upstairs, a downstairs den, a parlor and full pantry—but it was a jail cell for her nonetheless. Before I met her, I’d never known anyone in New York who had an apartment bigger than my closet in Provincetown. But her wealth never bought her happiness or a respite from her grief.
“It’s only by living that you can really live,” she said to me one night—a simple, almost banal statement, but one that made me look over at her in wonder. We’ve had many such moments like that, moments of insight that have startled me and encouraged me back on my road to wellness. “It’s only through connection with another person that one understands why we’re here,” she said another time, a truth that might have been uttered by Javitz himself.
She’s struggled with finding connection all her life. Her mother died when she was very young, and she was raised by a series of nannies. She craved the love of her distant but adoring father, a diplomat in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations who was forever flying around the world. Often months would go by before Eva would see him again. “He never failed to bring me home a beautiful doll from Japan or a dress from France,” she said. “How happy I would be to see him. As a little girl, I’d climb into his bed and stay there with him all night. The nannies always thought it wasn’t proper, but I was just so glad to see him, and he me.” His portrait hangs in her living room, a somber, gray-haired man I have a hard time imagining showing any warmth. “That’s how I picture Daddy when I think of him now,” she said. “In oils. I saw that portrait more often in my childhood than I ever saw the real man.”
Her greatest disappointment in life, she’s told me, is that she and Steven never had any children. “I guess in the old days they would have called me barren,” she said. But ultimately she thinks it was probably for the best, given the truth she discovered about the man she had married.
“You know, Eva,” I say, setting down my mug of cocoa, “I felt bad leaving you to go to the bar tonight when I realized you’d be alone. You told me you were having a gathering, that there would be other people, everybody doing past-life regressions. But it was just you and me.”
She looks a little uncomfortable. “Well, I had thought Jeff might come with you, and your other friend—Henry, isn’t it? And the friends I invited all canceled at the last minute.”
“Oh.” I’m not quite sure what to make of that. Eva’s spoken of other friends but rarely gives any names. The only people she seems to spend time with are Alex, her AIDS buddy, and her late husband’s lawyer, Tyrone, who, Eva blushingly has admitted, is in love with her.
“Don’t worry about me, Lloyd,” she says suddenly. “I’m good all by myself. Okay, so at midnight I had a little cry, remembering Steven, but it was good for me. I haven’t cried in a while. It actually felt good.”
I smile. “Javitz wanted so much to see the year 2000. I remember him saying when he was a kid he’d figured out how old he’d be in 2000 and thought fifty-two seemed so
old.
”
“To a kid, it would seem old. Not to me.” She sighs. “It’s
young.
Javitz should have seen 2000. So should have Steven.”
We both sit in silence for a moment. “I want to tell Jeff about Steven, Eva,” I tell her. “Do I have your permission?”
She reaches over and takes my hand. “Of
course.
It might make a difference for him, knowing that Steven was gay, and that he died of AIDS—”
Suddenly, she begins to cry. That happens with her. She’ll be going along fine, and then all at once,
whammo!
Something kicks in and she remembers Steven and she starts to cry. I understand. It’s sometimes like that for me with Javitz. I reach over and pull her close to me. Her tiny hands grip my shirt and hold on tight, like a frightened child clinging to her mother. I pat the back of her head.
“It’s so silly,” she says, breathing hard. “It’s been almost five years since Steven died. And here I still am, breaking down at the slightest mention—”
“It’s okay to cry. It’s not good to put your grief in a box.” I take her by the shoulders and bring her up so I can look down into her eyes. “That’s what’s so wrong with everything today. Because so many people got well so quickly, suddenly we’re not supposed to show our grief anymore. We’re not supposed to cry out and curse and agonize over the hundreds of thousands who weren’t so lucky. It’s like we’re just supposed to stop talking about it. Like it was all a bad dream and it’s over now.” I laugh scornfully. “Well, fuck that. We haven’t finished crying yet.”
My little speech seems to impress her. I have that effect on her. She’s always saying so, giving me credit for inspiring her and motivating her. But she’s done the same for me. It’s been Eva over the past few months who’s gotten me talking about my grief, who’s allowed me the space to share my stories about Javitz. Jeff sure as hell won’t do that.
She takes both my hands in hers and looks me steadily in the eyes. “Tell me how he died again, Lloyd. Tell me the story.”
The story. It feels good to tell it.
I let out a long breath and look out the window. There are more lights on in the city than usual, people still awake and celebrating the coming of the new millennium. Yes, I’ll tell her the story. She takes power from hearing it. I take power from telling it.
“It was the night of the hurricane,” I begin, the way I always begin. “I remember our neighbors buying plywood to nail across their large picture window that faced out onto the bay. People were staking trees and stockpiling water. Javitz had been declining for weeks and hadn’t spoken in three days. That afternoon he began breathing heavily, laboriously. The active dying had begun.”
I settle back into the couch. Eva sits close to me so that our shoulders are touching.
“As the evening went on, he seemed to grow increasingly agitated, as unsettled as the sky outside. When the first winds hit, he began making a low whine in his throat, and his hands were clenching and unclenching into bony fists. He was in a hospital bed by then, so it was difficult to comfort him. In his own bed, I could crawl in beside him and take him in my arms. But now there were those horrible aluminum guardrails separating us. I slid one down and managed to get in as close as I could. Outside, the wind slammed against the house. The shutters that I thought had been nailed down securely came loose and slapped madly against the windows. I worried the glass might break. We lost power. I lit candles and told Javitz not to be afraid.”
I can’t continue. Eva squeezes my hands. “I’m right here,” she whispers.
I find my voice. “We had morphine. I knew I could put a few drops in his mouth and that it would calm him, but I also knew it would hasten his death. I told him what I was doing. We’d had so many talks over the years, I knew he’d want me to. I gave him the morphine and then sat down beside him again.
“And he did calm down. He was looking at me. All of a sudden, I remembered something he’d once said. ‘Be with me at the end and tell me about the wind.’ See, Javitz loved the wind. It was so perfect that he should die during a hurricane. So I took his hand and described the wind, how fierce it was, how powerful, and I told him that he was like that wind, just as strong, and that all he needed to do was become one with the wind and he’d be free.”
My throat tightens but I continue. “I told him that I loved him, and he mouthed the words back to me. He hadn’t been able to communicate in days, but he died saying those words. At that moment, I saw the life just disappear in his eyes, like a light switch turned off. I sat there staring at him, his lips still wrapped around his final words, his eyes still open. And suddenly there was such a wind outside, so tremendous that I thought the roof would come off. Tables fell over and a vase in the living room flew from the mantel and shattered against the floor. I thought the house was collapsing inwards, but it was only Javitz, finally released from this world.” I pause, smiling. “Leave it to him to go out with a bang.”
Eva’s crying softly. So am I. “How I wish I had known him,” she says. “Thank you for sharing that story with me. It means so much every time I hear it.”
You need to understand how important it is to tell it. For three years I’d kept that story bottled inside. Jeff couldn’t bear it, and neither could other friends. But it felt
good
to speak it. It felt
empowering
to remember it. Javitz would
want
me to remember it, and to tell it often. And with
passion,
with him as the star. I smile. Javitz always loved being the star.
And it took Eva, a woman he had never known, to become his most eager fan.
She seemed to sense, right from the start, my need to talk about Javitz, and she’s continued to encourage me to do so. Even when I might not be thinking about him at the moment, she’ll bring up his name, ask me to tell her something about Javitz. It’s been the way to my heart. In the past three months, Eva’s become the closest person to me on earth.
We met cute, as they say in the movies. At a seminar on psychic healing at New York’s Open Center, I tripped over her purse and sent a row of metal chairs clanging down like dominoes. Horrified that everyone turned to glare, including the speaker, I sat down beside Eva with my cheeks burning. She offered me a Tic Tac, and a friendship was born.