Story for performance #183
webcast from Sydney at 08:05PM, 20 Dec 05

He is sleeping well
Source: Martin Chulov and Abraham Rabinovich, ‘Sharon stroke bolsters image’, The Australian online, 20/12/05.
Writer/s: Alexandra Keller

It is the haziest, hottest, most humid day of the year. After several barely tolerable days in the high 80s, summer has hit New York with all three H’s blazing, so much so that all anyone can do is pant and sweat in other equally appropriate clichés. ‘Hot enough for ya?’ ‘How ‘bout that heat?’ ‘Hoo-ee, sure is hot out.’ Nobody minds. The entire city has no spare energy to do better.

David and I walk into the Suds Café laundrette to discover the only place hotter than our apartment. The wind from the dryers hits us with hurricane force, and I shut my eyes. David laughs gleefully, which he does when faced with a hopeless, but not fatal, situation.

‘We are the two biggest idiots in the world for doing laundry in weather like this.’ He whoops it up like he’s auditioning for Oklahoma! The place is empty except for the proprietress, who’s folding drop-off, seemingly impervious to conditions in her establishment. She seems more perturbed by David’s cackling than the temperature.

‘David,’ I’m whining, too hot not to. ‘Get us some ice coffee.’

‘What’ll you do for me?’ David is only mock stingy, but in the heat the mock seems to have melted, or desiccated, or melted then desiccated.

‘Your laundry. I’ll do your laundry if you just run next door to Dalton’s and get me a nice big iced hazelnut with cream.’

‘Why don’t you get me an ice coffee and I’ll do the wash?’ This is a terrible idea.

‘Two reasons, pidge.’ Pidge, short for pigeon, an animal that, for reasons we don’t know, flocks to David in droves the minute he’s in the open air. It’s an animal of which he’s irrationally frightened. ‘One, you can’t do laundry without an instruction manual. Two, that very cute guy you met right before Sound Factory closed is working there today.’

David jumps up and streaks out. Ten seconds later he’s back.

‘Did you really think I was that hard up?’ David falls out laughing, slumped, silently shaking over his huge duffel bag, which is full of more dirty socks than I’ve ever had in my life. David says it’s because when he packs to go somewhere, he always brings one sock and one book, regardless of whatever else he might need. I guessed the book was for boredom, but couldn’t figure about the sock. I was wrong about the book.

‘It’s for bugs,’ he once explained to me while he was packing to go on one of his weekends away with all the other single gay men he knew. Surprisingly few considering how many single lesbians I knew. ‘The book is to squash them. It’s hardback, it’s heavy, it’s quick.’ He stuffed the Bug Book under his actual book, Bastard Out of Carolina, which I was making him take with him.

‘And it’s relatively humane,’ he added, ‘for murder.’ He took the sock and tucked it between both books.

‘So what’s the sock for?’ I asked.

‘To wipe off the book. I might just have to read it.’

David and I sleep together all the time. We’re both insomniacs and just sleep better if someone’s in bed with us. So we get around the wackiness of the random pickup by alternating bedrooms. David says it’s cosmic revenge for me trying to pick him up one night.

My Gaydar was busted that night, and, I believe, in addition to that strange mechanical malfunction, I was both a little too drunk, and might have been coming down with a cold. Bad combo. Also, for whatever reason I was out with some straight friends from work, one of whom I didn’t particularly like, and she was making eyes at David. So I think I wanted to school her, maybe remind her that just because I’m a lesbian it doesn’t mean I can’t pick up men if I want to—as an exercise. David turned me down politely. He didn’t say, ‘No thanks, I’m flattered, but I’m gay.’ He said, ‘No thanks, I’m flattered, but you’re a lesbian.’

How could I not love him?

We moved in together suspiciously quickly. Part of it was that we really liked each other. Most of it was that David somehow sniffed out an amazing rent controlled sublet that had square footage perilously close to the apartment on Friends. Real estate pornography. Even if we’d hated each other we’d have done it.

David comes back into the laundrette with coffee. I remember the day he came home from work early, sat down next to me as I was writing, and told me he’d been diagnosed. He didn’t cry, I did. I wept like a baby until my eyes were dry. David held me, rocking me slowly, whispering in my ear that it would be all right. I turned to him and kissed him full on the mouth. It wasn’t a romantic kiss. It wasn’t even an out-of-my-head-erotically-registering-grief kiss. It was a kiss that meant to say to David that being positive didn’t mean he wouldn’t be kissed again, even if it were just his lesbian roommate and best friend for the last eight months. And somewhere in that kiss I must have given him something to cry with. He didn’t make a noise, he just fixed his eyes on me and the tears rolled and rolled and didn’t stop until long after the sun went down and my hands, hopeless to dry them, were soaked. We went silently to bed, skipping dinner and the brushing of teeth, and I wrapped myself around him, a useless barrier to ward off something that was already inside him.

David hands me my coffee. ‘How are your lacy unspeakables?’ he asks me.

‘Unmentionables,’ I correct him.

‘Well, shut up then.’ He smiles, laying back on a bench with his head on my lap. We watch the clothes go round like a TV show. Tonight we’ll both have insomnia. But here, in the hottest place and time, he is sleeping well.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Alexandra Keller.