The Human Condition

"Did you get the 23rd off?" I asked sleepily.

My law partner was finally tying the knot and it was Joe's and my job to make sure he got there on time. Not an easy task when you knew his nickname was Late Again Murphy.

We were still in bed. I knew I should make an issue out of it, but it was so warm and nice and quiet. It had been a long time since Joe and I had had this much lazy time together. Our jobs, our friends and family seemed to eat up the days. Not mind you, that I'd have traded any of it. Still, to be able to lie in this bed with my lover was heaven.

"Yeah, I traded with Mark, but it means I'm going to have to work the next two weekends."

"Next weekend? Your Mom wanted us to come over and help her get out the porch furniture."

"You're a big guy," Joe grinned. "I'm sure you can handle it by yourself."

"Terrific," I stretched. "No wonder she likes me best."

"In your dreams."

We snuggled silently for a few minutes longer. I moved closer to him and my hand slid down, inadvertently I swear, to Joe's cock. It twitched.

"Oh," I groaned. "Do not even think about it."

"Then quit trying to wake him up!"

"You're a hound you know it?" I moved my hand back up to a safer place on his chest."

"And you love it."

We kissed, but we both knew there wasn't time even if we could have gotten the equipment working again, which was unlikely. We weren't 22 anymore.

"Hey Mike," Joe sat up. "Did you get a hold of the painters?"

"They'll be here next week, which should work out okay because the furniture is supposed to be delivered on the 16th."

"Of which month?" Joe said sarcastically.

We'd had experience with furniture deliveries before. The house we lived in was great, a modern multilevel with lots of light and space. But the previous owners decorating was for shit. I mean it would have been fine if you were a Colombian drug lord, but it didn't fit our lifestyle.

As first time home owners, we had blithely thought that all of the mistakes could easily be fixed. That had been five years ago and our innocence was long gone.

"The carpet is already at the warehouse, they're just waiting for the painters."

"God I hope they got it right this time," Joe laughed and I grinned back.

I knew he was remembering the day we'd both come home from a very hard day at our jobs only to find wall to wall purple plush carpeting installed in the living room instead of the beige Berber we'd actually chosen.

I'm not talking mauve or even violet here. I mean vibrant, pulsating, right in your face, purple. The guys at the carpet shop were aghast when I called and told them to rip it up and get it out of our house. They said it was a special order and they couldn't return it. I said I had the receipt to prove they blew it and I didn't give a damn what they did with it, but it wasn't going to stay in my living room.

You know, it wasn't too long after that, that a big dinosaur named Barney made his debut on TV. Coincidence? Maybe...

"I went over and checked. It's the right stuff."

"Well that's something at least," Joe stood and walked over to closet. "The Reynolds' invited us on their boat for the Fourth."

"Ugh!"

"I know, he's the most boring human being on earth, but he's my boss."

He pawed through the closet then turned to me. "Have you seen my Cubs jacket?"

"No."

"Damn, I think I left it at the cleaners."

"You'll live."

"But it's my lucky jacket."

"Joe," I laughed. "The Cubs don't need luck, they need a fucking miracle."

"Hey!" He turned and pounced on me. "Those are my boys you're slamming. And besides," he kissed my nose, "it's only June, they still have a chance."

"If every other team quits, maybe," I convulsed with laughter as he started to tickle me.

"Holy shit," Joe had caught site of the clock. "Look at the time!" He slapped my ass and bounded off the bed. "Come on we've got to hustle."

"Now he's worried," I stayed where I was.

"Okay, I'll shave first," Joe glared at me. "But in 15 minutes I want to see your ass in the shower."

"You always want to see my ass," I yelled at his back as he left the room.

He flipped me the bird without turning around. I snuggled deeper under the covers.

God, I wondered, how had I gotten here? Worrying about jackets and painters, and a mother-in-law who bossed me around like I was her own kid.

Twelve years ago, I would have laughed my ass off if someone had suggested it. No, I remembered, that wasn't true. There was a time when someone had talked to me about it and I hadn't laughed at all...

August 21, 1988

I looked around the apartment I had just moved into. Well, I sighed, at least there was plenty of space and the price was right.

It was the second floor of an old carriage house that was nestled in the back yard of a large Victorian. I had gotten it, amazingly enough, through my advisor, Dr. Cline. He'd heard me bitching one day to a friend about my impending homelessness and had stopped his journey to whatever meeting he was on his way to and gave me the address of a friend who had a place that might work for me.

After I picked my jaw off the floor--I'd never thought the guy even liked me--I thanked him profusely and scurried my ass to the nearest pay phone. There I made an appointment with my prospective landlady for the next day.

Joe and I had kept our bargain to be more open and include each other in our daily lives, but I had remained adamant on refusing to live with him in that apartment. It was no longer about mine or his privacy you understand, I just wasn't going to live anywhere where I couldn't pay my fair share. I was only half kidding when I told him it made me feel cheap.

He reluctantly agreed and I was careful to exclude him from any of my further forays into the housing market. He really did love the frat house and I would have felt guilty about robbing him of his last year there to room with me. So I didn't tell him about my hot lead until after I'd signed the lease. But by that time, I had quite a story to tell.

Her name was Lucy Cummings Galway and she had always lived in the house on Oak Street. She'd been born there in fact, and fully had every intention of dying there though not soon, unless those ham-handed medics killed her with all the medicine they were always trying to get her to take.

She told me this at the door. I was to learn that Lucy usually said everything that came into her head as soon as it got there. She said it was one of the perks of old age but I thought she'd been doing it a lot longer than she'd been in AARP.

I never could figure out how old she was, anywhere from 50 to 80 was my guess. She wasn't about to tell. She didn't believe in ages and said that knowing how old a person was limited your ability to judge them on their own merits.

She was tiny, barely five feet tall in her sneakers, and she dressed in pants and sweater sets ala Katherine Hepburn. She had that kind of voice too, clear and harsh and classy. She had an ageless beauty, and she knew it, though she did nothing to capitalize on it. It was that deep, under the skin, beauty that only happens with the right alignment of bones. She could look down her nose at someone like nobody's business; but she saved it for phonies and those with money, but not much else.

She took me into the parlor and sat me down on a horsehair sofa then chose the only comfortable chair in the room for herself. After giving me a cup of tea, in china so thin I was afraid I'd crush it, she gave me a long stare.

"You're the gay boy Richard sent over to keep me company."

My tea splashed over the edge of my cup and on to my leg. Lucy calmly handed me a napkin and went on while I mopped up.

"He thinks you'll be quieter because you're a swish." She shook her head in exasperation. "He's a fool, but he means well."

I stared at her. I mean, how was I supposed to reply to that?

"Come on." She stood abruptly. "If you're still interested in seeing the apartment that is."

Then she turned and stalked off without bothering to look to see if I was following. I had to hurry to catch up. We passed a wall of family portraits and stopped.

"My mother." She pointed at a delicate beauty in white lace. "Gorgeous, but the most complete ninny. Only read Vogue."

She pointed again to a stern man. "My father." She raised her eyebrows. "Now he was brilliant. He was the Dean at the law school, did you know that?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Yes, he was academically superb but an utter asshole when it came to dealing with people."

I choked back my laughter but she noticed. There wasn't much, I was to find out later, that Lucy missed.

"Go ahead and laugh, he was a ridiculous figure."

"Oh no, I..."

Lucy ignored my stuttering protests. She waved a hand at the wall.

"The rest of these are my brothers and sisters. There were nine of us you know. Most of them are dead or moved away now, thank God."

She saw the shock on my face and gave me a wicked grin. "We were never what you'd call close."

She turned back to the wall and stroked a picture of a young man with laughing eyes. "Except for Brian, my youngest brother. I was the baby and he was one up from me. We were a team, he and I, always different from the rest of them."

"He's handsome." I finally managed to say something.

Lucy laughed and looked sideways at me. "Yes he was," she tilted her head. "He'd have liked you too. He was your kind, you know. A pouf, as our dear father used to say."

"He's dead I take it?" I had decided that bluntness was the course to take with this remarkable woman. From the look of approval on her face it appeared I was right.

"He died young. They say only the good die young. That was certainly the case with Brian. The only consolation I have is that it means that I shall live a long, long time."

This time I did laugh out loud and she grinned back at me, pleased. Then, in a quick birdlike gesture I was to get to know very well, she sprinted down the hall.

"Come on," she called back to me. "I haven't got all day."

We climbed the stairs on the outside of the carriage house and Lucy produced a key and unlocked the door. I stepped inside.

It was really only one huge room and it was filthy with dust and cobwebs, but it had possibilities. There was a kitchen area along one wall with a window over the sink that overlooked the big house and the tangled garden between. A bathroom of incredible antiquity occupied one corner and there was a light switch that I assumed worked the unfortunate choice of chandelier in the middle of the room. A couple of outlets completed the modern amenities.

I barely noticed. The thing that caught my attention was the wall overlooking the alley. It was all windows. Not sliding doors or some big bland picture window but small panes with leading in between. They were old and wavy and even now with so much dirt on them you couldn't see out, the light was incredible. The rest of the walls were plaster with exposed brick on one and the floors were plank. I knew right away I'd found the place I wanted to live in.

"Nobody's lived here for 10 years," Lucy said by way of apology for the dirt. "Not since that girl writer whom I thought might become the next Katherine Ann Porter."

She wrinkled her nose in disgust and it wasn't over the state of the apartment. "I was mistaken."

"How much?" I said hoarsely.

I had to have this place, but I knew all too well how much it would go for with a little elbow grease and a new coat of paint for the cabinets.

"Two hundred."

"What?" I thought I was hearing things.

"Too much? Okay then one fifty, but not a penny less and you have

to mow the lawn."

"Ms Galway..."

"Call me Lucy since we're going to be neighbors."

"Okay Lucy, I feel I have to tell you that you can get a lot more for this place if you fix it up. God, even if you don't, it's worth three times your first offer."

"Oh I know that," She waived a hand dismissively. "You think I need the money? I'm sorry to disappoint you dear, but I don't. I hadn't thought of this place in years until Richard called me about you. Even then I only agreed to see you because he thought he was doing me a favor. To be truthful, I never had any intention of offering you the apartment. I was going to see you, let you down gently and call Richard and tell him to mind his own damn business."

"But you have offered me the apartment. Why?"

She shrugged and tilted her head up to meet my eyes. "I like your face. You have, knowing eyes. And I need a new lawn man, the last one sucked."

So, as I told Joe later that evening, I signed a one year lease and we celebrated with Irish whiskey and Japanese seaweed crackers. I couldn't however, let her get away with giving me such cheap rent. We haggled and eventually reached an agreement that seemed to please Lucy as well as me. And I would clean up the garden, as well as mow the lawn.

"Jesus, Mike," Joe laughed as I finished my story. "How're you going to be a lawyer if you can't even screw one old lady out of a little rent money?"

"Fuck you," I said with no rancor.

"In your dreams."

"You wish."

It was amazing how far we'd come in a few weeks. Things I'd never have believed I'd say to Joe rolled off my tongue as if I'd never held them back.

"Wait 'til you meet her," I returned to the topic of Lucy. "You'll go nuts over her."

"Sounds like it. Too bad it's going to have to wait."

I nodded. This was Joe's last night in town. Tomorrow he was heading back to Chicago to take a job as an orderly at Cook County Memorial. He had gotten the AIDS research job he'd coveted our freshman year, and for the last two summers he'd stayed in Ann Arbor to work as a lab rat. But funding had dried up as it has a way of doing, so he was going home for the last summer before he graduated.

I would be leaving by the end of the week too. I could have stayed; my job at the law firm was always there. But I could save more money working in Pennsylvania and sponging off my parents, so I was heading in the opposite direction from Joe to do my yearly stint as a slave at Hershey Park. It would be almost three months until we'd see each other again and I don't think either of us were very happy about it.

But the time passed as it has a habit of doing and now I was standing in my brand new apartment and wondering what the fuck I had gotten myself into.

Lucy had been busy that summer. She'd had the place cleaned and she'd put in a new apartment sized stove and refrigerator. She'd even gotten somebody to slap a coat of paint on the cupboards.

A friend who was graduating had willed me his beat up furniture. Now I had a couch, table and chairs and a bedroom set plus some other little goodies like knifes and spoons and a bent up set of pots and pans that looked like their surface had been scored by a fork and left little gray flakes of Teflon in everything you cooked.

My mom had made up most of the rest in one horrendous shopping trip to the Big K that she insisted I take with her. We bought sheets and towels and a cute little plastic plaque that said Bless This Apartment and made me want to throw up every time I looked at it.

My grandma had given me her extra set of dishes, which she said she was going to throw away if I didn't take them. That statement tells a lot about the way they looked. And my Aunt Livia, or Aunt Livid as the family called her behind her back because of her nasty personality, had amazed me with a silk flower arrangement.

Seeing my pleasure, she'd promptly told me she got it because it was the sort of thing my kind seemed to like. That bitch had earned her nickname.

Now all my new toys were piled up in the middle of the room waiting for me to find them a home. The place was shaping up nicely. Except for one problem and it was a lulu.

The place was hot. I don't mean warm. I don't mean uncomfortable. I mean hot; Amazon rain forest hot. I expected kudzu to sprout through the floorboards and start creeping up my legs at any moment.

In my obsession with the damn windows, you might have thought I'd notice their purely decorative purpose. Not one of the little puppies was made to open. Instead, they radiated heat, magnifying the 80 degree weather outside to a bone melting 98 inside.

There was no cross ventilation to help alleviate this either. The only windows that opened in the whole place were the one over the kitchen sink and the tiny one in the bathroom and they were both on the same wall. There was some kind of a hatch in the ceiling that had probably opened to let out the heat, but a new roof had put that out of commission.

I stood there with sweat dripping off my fingertips and considered my future. Ann Arbor may have been in Michigan, a northern state, but it was in the southern end and the heat of summer could and often did last well into October.

If I bought some fans, okay, a lot of fans, I could probably manage to sleep there as long as the weather cooperated and the nights cooled off. But how was I going to actually live and work inside this blast furnace?

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a stampede charging up the stairs. I deduced that Joe had arrived. Seconds later he flung the door open.

"Dude! Hey it's great to see you... Holy shit!" He stepped back involuntarily as a wall of heat attacked him. "Damn! Open the windows quick, it's fucking hot in here!"

"It is open," I pointed glumly to the lone window over the sink. It wasn't even double-hung; it cranked out from the bottom and the opening stuck at about six inches.

Joe took a deep breath and stepped into the room. He stared at the wall of light. "What about these? Oh man, they don't open."

It had taken him 30 seconds to see what I had just become aware of. Maybe I should have brought him with me when I first looked at the place.

"Well, you'll get used to it," he said helpfully. "What's the temperature anyway?"

"98 degrees," I answered hopelessly.

"Hmmm, feels hotter."

"That makes me feel better."

"You know," he said looking around again. "It's not too bad a place, if it wasn't for the danger of heat prostration and all."

"You're not very funny."

"Sorry, I thought I was."

We were both silent for a while. Joe walked back over to the door.

"Wish I could stay, but I just dropped in to say hi."

"Yeah right, coward."

"No really, I've got to meet some of the guys. You're welcome to come."

I shook my head. The only place I was planning on going was a store with a sale on fans. I almost wished now that I hadn't been so honorable in my dealings with Lucy. With a little less rent, I might have squeezed my budget enough to afford a small air conditioner. I wouldn't have been able to get a big one but even a little one would be better than nothing.

"Hey Mike."

I'd forgotten Joe was still there. Funny, he'd been the one person I was most looking forward to seeing and I hadn't even said hi yet.

"It'll all work out buddy," he continued softly. Then he grinned. "Just drink Gator Aid, lots and lots of Gator Aid."

I'd have flipped him the bird, but I was too hot to make the effort.

"Later," he ducked out the door.

I eventually forced myself to move and half heartedly tackled a couple of the boxes, but halfway through the third one I was soaked and my eyes were going blind from the sweat that was running off my forehead.

I gave up and took a cold shower. That helped for just about as long as took to get redressed. I had to get out of that apartment.

The mall was always cool and it was for that fact almost as much as the necessity for fans that I decided to make it my destination. I was just getting into my car when Lucy came out of the house and beckoned me over.

"I've made up a spare room for you for the night," she said with no preamble.