AUDIOBOOK
About
When NPR commentator Marion Winik met Tony Heubach at Mardi Gras in 1983, there was "a spark of recognition between us. . . . something with a trajectory outside my field of vision." In this candid and deeply felt memoir, she traces that trajectory: a straight woman and a gay man falling in love, marrying, raising two beautiful sons; their against-the-odds happiness eventually crumbling under the pressure of AIDS; and the harrowing, heartbreaking final moments of their life together. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
"Gritty, funny, moving, horrific, outrageous-and, above all, fearlessly honest.... ultimately a joyous story." -Newsday
Decidedly unfaint-hearted... Marion Winik is resilient, hardy, unfazable; this self-described suburban wannabe is a frontier woman in disguise." -The New York Times Book Review
"A true story stripped of fine writing or cheap analysis.... I won't be the only reader who can't put it down." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Beautiful ... intense and intimate." -Washington Post Book World TONY SLEEPING
Tony has never looked more beautiful than he does right now, sleeping, his features sculpted and glowing by the light of the candles. They are the Mexican kind, in tall glasses, two white and two blue as he requested, arranged in a semicircle around our wedding photograph: my gauzy veil, his spiky hair, our wide, giddy smiles. Under the edge of the picture's vermilion frame, he has slipped another photo, a dreamy-looking sepiatone postcard of a woman dancing that someone gave him on his birthday in the hospital last month; she seems only half there, as if she had turned the corner into another dimension.
On the lower shelf of the night table, there are two goblets of red wine, still full, along with Tony's rimless eyeglasses, which I just took off for him. The table is one of a pair he bought at an estate sale, then stripped and painted and drizzled with wavy lines of pink and white paint-a typical Tony home improvement project in that it took almost a year and he ran out of paint before he finished all the boomerang-shaped decks. Its twin stands on the other side of the bed, a firm and lovely king-size model that we acquired when I was pregnant with Vince and damned if I would go through another pregnancy on that old futon of ours. Flanked by these tables, the bed has always reminded me of the Starship Enterprise, about to take off for the final frontier.
I have been watching Tony sleep for almost twelve years, on and off, since the early days when I was so keyed up and hungry that at night I lay wide-eyed beside him, gazing at him, examining him, drinking and eating him with my eyes. In the morning, I would wake up first, make coffee, come back to bed to look some more. I filled sketchbooks with drawings of him sleeping. The dark lashes against the cheek, the long arm thrown out against the pillow, the fingers curled slightly toward the palm. Years later, I took a series of photographs of him napping with Hayes; in the first, a few days after Hayes's birth, they are sleeping on the lambskin baby spread together and there is that arm again, the baby no longer than the distance from wrist to elbow.
When you think how much of a person's beauty is in their eyes, it is astonishing how beautiful they can be with them closed in sleep, perhaps as when you suddenly notice how talented the members of a chorus line are once the stars of the show have left the stage. Finally, you can look at something else. His hair, for instance, cut the way I like it best, long in front, short at the sides and back. We call it the don't-ever-change do because he alternates between this and more extreme cuts, and whenever he returns to this look, my mother and her friends at the club say, Don't ever change. It is beautiful hair, thick and shiny, a sandy forelock jutting forward and slanting down almost into his eyes. He's been complaining of its falling out and changing texture from the medicatio
"Gritty, funny, moving, horrific, outrageous-and, above all, fearlessly honest.... ultimately a joyous story." -Newsday
Decidedly unfaint-hearted... Marion Winik is resilient, hardy, unfazable; this self-described suburban wannabe is a frontier woman in disguise." -The New York Times Book Review
"A true story stripped of fine writing or cheap analysis.... I won't be the only reader who can't put it down." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Beautiful ... intense and intimate." -Washington Post Book World TONY SLEEPING
Tony has never looked more beautiful than he does right now, sleeping, his features sculpted and glowing by the light of the candles. They are the Mexican kind, in tall glasses, two white and two blue as he requested, arranged in a semicircle around our wedding photograph: my gauzy veil, his spiky hair, our wide, giddy smiles. Under the edge of the picture's vermilion frame, he has slipped another photo, a dreamy-looking sepiatone postcard of a woman dancing that someone gave him on his birthday in the hospital last month; she seems only half there, as if she had turned the corner into another dimension.
On the lower shelf of the night table, there are two goblets of red wine, still full, along with Tony's rimless eyeglasses, which I just took off for him. The table is one of a pair he bought at an estate sale, then stripped and painted and drizzled with wavy lines of pink and white paint-a typical Tony home improvement project in that it took almost a year and he ran out of paint before he finished all the boomerang-shaped decks. Its twin stands on the other side of the bed, a firm and lovely king-size model that we acquired when I was pregnant with Vince and damned if I would go through another pregnancy on that old futon of ours. Flanked by these tables, the bed has always reminded me of the Starship Enterprise, about to take off for the final frontier.
I have been watching Tony sleep for almost twelve years, on and off, since the early days when I was so keyed up and hungry that at night I lay wide-eyed beside him, gazing at him, examining him, drinking and eating him with my eyes. In the morning, I would wake up first, make coffee, come back to bed to look some more. I filled sketchbooks with drawings of him sleeping. The dark lashes against the cheek, the long arm thrown out against the pillow, the fingers curled slightly toward the palm. Years later, I took a series of photographs of him napping with Hayes; in the first, a few days after Hayes's birth, they are sleeping on the lambskin baby spread together and there is that arm again, the baby no longer than the distance from wrist to elbow.
When you think how much of a person's beauty is in their eyes, it is astonishing how beautiful they can be with them closed in sleep, perhaps as when you suddenly notice how talented the members of a chorus line are once the stars of the show have left the stage. Finally, you can look at something else. His hair, for instance, cut the way I like it best, long in front, short at the sides and back. We call it the don't-ever-change do because he alternates between this and more extreme cuts, and whenever he returns to this look, my mother and her friends at the club say, Don't ever change. It is beautiful hair, thick and shiny, a sandy forelock jutting forward and slanting down almost into his eyes. He's been complaining of its falling out and changing texture from the medicatio