“Well, one out of three,” Raphael said. “The great bands had all broken up by the time I got there. And the ocean at San Francisco is about the temperature of your refrigerator.”
“Even in the summer?”
“Especially in the summer.”
“So what have you been doing all these years?”
Raphael thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Never mind. I like your version better.”
“I thought then maybe I could do all that, someday.”
“Maybe you will.”
“You were in love,” Nick said, and the longing in his voice penetrated the denseness of Raphael’s heart.
Around them the first, early-fallen apples were decaying into the moist dark earth. Surrounded by their faint, cloying scent, Raphael felt, as if it were under his hand, the flat hardness of Nick’s chest. In another time and place Raphael would have taken Nick’s hand in his own, he would have covered Nick’s mouth with his own and they would make love right here in the apple orchard of his childhood backyard. He was the city boy; he was the man with experience; it was his place to make the move. Except that he was the man with HIV.
How to explain this to Nick? Strictly speaking Raphael had no need to explain, so long as he was careful, and yet it was there—a third person; no, a phantom, lying here with the two of them.
Through the apple trees came Tice Flaherty’s thin voice, quavering a little—he was eighty if he was a day—singing with Rose Ella, high and thin above the ukulele’s hollow plink:
Sometimes I live in the country
Sometimes I live in the town
Sometimes I have a great notion
To jump into the river and drown.
And then Nick was kneeling above Raphael, straddling him and taking his head between his hands—his horn-hardened hands scraped Raphael’s cheeks—and kissing him, an awkward brush of his lips, and Raphael felt Nick hard against him and he opened his mouth and took Nick’s tongue between his lips and they kissed in the orchard with the incandescent stars falling down, the stars under which they’d grown up, under which they had lived, under which they would die falling to earth.
And so they make love. This horn-hard, rope-muscled farmer (plower of fields, sower of seed) and this gym-toned city boy, lover of books. Their hands are everywhere at once until finally Raphael (man of experience, man of books, city man) says, “Slow, baby, slower, slow,” and Nick has known enough of the scarcity of love to understand what he means and so there is the astoundingly erotic pain of flirtation and restraint. They spend unmeasured time on details (the sharp line of Nick’s sun-reddened neck is visible even in this near-dark; the strawberry birthmark that rides above Raphael’s waist), but slower as they go, however they hold back the moment arrives when their bare chests show pale in the tree-filtered dark. Their shirts are open to the summer air, humid and soft about its edges (no California nights like this, which enforces desire on bodies caught in its embrace).
This is what Raphael wants to do, it is what he once did again and again with his dead lover. For two years and more grief has banked his desire, ash over coals, but now it has burst into flame and he is nothing in front of this wanting, larger and harder than anything he has known—before it he is nothing. He would take Nick in his mouth and love who he is in the here and now until he comes, blood without iron or color, tasting of life that he would carry in his mouth to plant his lips over Nick’s.
This is what he would do and more, but Raphael forces himself to think of such things, there is too much to remember: he is the carrier, the potential disburser of disease and he must be gentle, this is what he wants but in the end he must yield to the facts of things, he must be satisfied with less, always with less, but it must be enough.
He accepts what he is given. He would be tempting fate to ask questions of a gift so perfect.
Nick was the farmer—he was the man with a bandanna. After they cleaned themselves up Raphael lay back and gave himself up to joy, laughed out loud at the thought of that many-pointed star of his childhood still turning, still pricking in his heart.
Nick knelt over him and again took Raphael’s head in his hands. Raphael opened his lips as if to kiss, but Nick was only looking—in the dark Raphael felt his straight-on look. “You don’t have to worry, from what we did,” Raphael said.
“I wasn’t worrying. I’d do it again, right now, even if I did have to worry.”
“You can’t think that way.”
“It’s not thinking I’m talking about.”
“Then you can’t feel that way,” Raphael said, and set about explaining: This is what it’s OK to do. This is what it’s OK to do, maybe. This is what—
Nick laid his hand over Raphael’s mouth. “So you’re telling me you’re dying.”
“We’re all dying, if it comes to that,” Raphael said. A phrase from some writer—Whitman?—welled from memory, from some lesson taught by Miss Camilla, who—he remembered this now—had loved Whitman so very much. “Life is the little that is left over from dying,” Raphael said.
Their hands were clasped, Nick was clutching and un-clutching Raphael’s hand until he clutched it so tight Raphael sat up and pulled it free. “Easy, boy,” Raphael said. “Listen to a certified San Francisco diva.” He threw out his arms. “La morte e nulla,” he sang, sotto voce and off-key, but Nick was up and gone like a startled deer, across the yard and into the dusk.
Raphael thought first to leap up and call to him. Then he lay back, looking up through the orchard’s tangling black branches. Nick’s warmth lingered still on Raphael’s skin—his skin still shuddering, electric, exalted from desire—this was enough for the here and now, the only place he wanted to be. Raphael closed his eyes against the stars.
To remove himself to the previous summer, to the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, where he has taken refuge from the heat and the crowds of the Jardins de Luxembourg. The church is cool and dark, a relief after the diesel fumes and grime and grit of Europe in a hot, dry summer. Raphael has taken this journey to reward himself, no, to comfort himself, after his old lover’s death, after learning that he himself is infected. He bundled his airline bonus miles into a package and paid for an upgrade into a first-class seat, and now he is here among the polite, indifferent French, who pass through polyglot hordes of tourists as if they aren’t there, as if they are wraiths.
He himself is not a wraith, not yet, but the thought has dogged him in a way that later in this trip he will manage to lose, and that he will keep more or less at bay for the next year or so, until his blood counts drop and his hair loses its luster and his cheekbones emerge and he cannot avoid the knowledge that something is wrong. But here in France, amid the Germans and Japanese and Italians (not so many Americans; the dollar is weak and the only Americans he sees are honeymooners or exchange students or those like himself, on necessary pilgrimages), here in Paris his mortality dogs him. He has seen his death in the face of his lover, in the faces of his friends, and soon enough he will see it in his own.
Long ago he left behind the Catholicism of his childhood, he sets foot in churches only in foreign countries, but he is in a foreign country now and in a church, and when he enters any church he lights a candle. He has convinced himself that he is leaving this trail of candles not in homage to the patrons of these particular churches (Geneviève, Etienne du Mont, Eustache, Sulpice—saints that have no place in the American canon, and for all he knows no interest in the affairs of American gay men), but because of the gesture: In memory of his dead lover, in memory of his brother Clark, in memory of those gone before, a leaving of light and beauty for those who follow into these vast and cool spaces; memento mori for himself, with the hope that someone will do the same for him when he is gone.
And so past Delacroix’s Jacob struggling with his angel, forward to the apse where Raphael takes a candle, passing over the smaller, cheaper tapers for the longest, tallest, most potent ten-franc version. As always he says a prayer—“makes a wish
” is how he thinks of it. And as always he remembers from childhood that one is never permitted (by whom? he wonders) to wish for oneself, that this is the surest way to jinx a wish. One must always wish for something for someone else. So he wishes for . . .
But wishes for himself crowd his heart (for a miracle, for a cure; barring that, a death with my San Francisco friends at hand, for a speedy death, a painless death unlike those I have witnessed), and it is awhile before he can set these wishes aside—the image comes to mind of the pâtisseries that earlier today he purchased and that the cheerful pâtissière wrapped in a small neat packet tied with a ribbon. These wishes for himself he boxes up and sets aside, to wish finally for—“World peace,” he whispers aloud. Such a stupid and naive thought, but these are go-for-broke days and why not? Is one so very much more impossible to imagine than the other—a miracle cure, a quick and painless death among friends, world peace?
So he lights the taper and goes about fixing it in place. The candles have small holes bored in their bases, he faces racks of dangerous-looking spikes. All he has to do is jam the candle onto the spike of his choice.
But the wax breaks at the candle’s bottom and the candle refuses to stay fixed. He tries again, the wax breaks again, the candle clatters to the stone-paved floor, sharp and sacrilegiously loud. Such is the fate of unbelievers. In America he would return the candle with its blackened wick to the rack and pick a new one, but he would never be doing this in America, where insurance companies have eliminated candles from churches, where he never sets foot in a church anyway.
Three elderly French women are standing behind him now, their two-franc candles lit and poised to be mounted. The immense pregnant globe of the world that fills the church’s apse swells before him, splashed by the digitalis blue of glass-stained light and crowned by the Virgin crushing beneath her delicate heel the snake, an enormous conger eel of evil, and here Raphael stands before her unable to accomplish this simple act. Caught between the widows behind, the Virgin before, he suddenly sees his gesture as the height and sum of futility, and he is overcome with anger, bitterness, grief at this useless question: had he and his lover been allowed love—had they had the courage to seize love—might his lover still be alive? Might Raphael himself be whole, clean, free?
He stumbles to the nearest straw-bottomed chair, where he sits with his shoulders heaving hot, choking sobs that echo in the apse, his grief made more unbearable by the sympathetic stares of the elderly women. After some time they fix their candles in place and withdraw (in America they would have scattered instantly, or sat and offered Kleenex, but these widows are accustomed to displays of grief in churches, this is why people come to churches, this is why there are churches) and he is left alone. Furtively he wipes his eyes. He picks up his ten-franc candle with its broken stub of a base and takes it to the votive shrine. He heats its base in the flames of the widows’ candles, then jams it onto a spike, where it holds its place.
Lying in the apple orchard of his childhood home, the image of the Virgin of Saint-Sulpice fixed in mind, Raphael tells himself this:
You see: This is where you are. As a young man you were a vessel of desire—the dreams you had, the men you wanted! Across a lifetime you would have transformed yourself into a vessel of memory. You began life filled with what you hoped to be; with time and luck you would have crossed that river, earned a place where you were filled with what you had been.
And this is the fact of things: You have all but crossed that river, you are nearing the other side, you are not much desire and mostly memory, and facing at every moment the terror of the here and now. “You will see worse,” the prediction rises through time and memory from Willy, his red-haired German hitchhiker; if not his first love, at least his first lust. Willy—where is he now, Willy of the blackened eye, enamored of cowboys? Alive, dying, dead?
At the thought Raphael was seized by fear so vast and sudden it caught his breath. He saw himself as if in a mirror—a little paunchy at the waist, a little thinning at the crown, a librarian; cataloguer of acts, repository of memory, a man whose forays into an indifferent world fell a little short, came a little late, and still, as surely as if he had fought Contras in Nicaragua, crack dealers in the Tenderloin, chained himself to bureaucrats’ doors, they’d brought him to this: him alone, facing his death. Here in the orchard of his memory’s backyard, Raphael spread-eagled his arms to clutch at the weedy earth but it fell away beneath him all the same, and he was left alone, with nothing but himself and the impossible thought of the world without him. Surely this demanded the greatest leap of faith—to conceive of the starry universe without his living, breathing self.
In liquid notes a whippoorwill began numbering his ancestors, one, two-three; four, five-six; lost count, began again, lost count, began again. With the whippoorwill’s permission the night sounds rose up from the ravine, a high-pitched chorus of peepers underscored by the bullfrog’s contrabass. Raphael raised himself to his elbows to look over the creekbed. A long, drawn-out cackle—a solitary rain crow flapped across the last dull light from the west. In the cooling night more fireflies ventured forth, their winking lights spreading up the slope from the ravine, and it was as if a great wave of life were rising to fill the valley, to catch them up in its embrace.
Raphael was brushing leaves from his jeans when he heard a scrabbling in the wisteria. “Nick?”
“Sorry. I can be a lot of things to a lot of people, but I can’t be Nick for nobody.” It was Catherine. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes, slid one out, tapped it against her wrist. “Promise you won’t breathe a word to Joe Ray. He’d have a fit if he knew I was smoking.”
“The pot calling the kettle black, if you ask me.”
“Isn’t that how it usually works?” Catherine lit her cigarette and inhaled deeply. “I like having a secret vice. It gives me something I can call mine.”
“Have several. I have nothing against secret vices. I’m a Californian, or hadn’t you heard?”
Catherine smoked in silence for a minute. “Raphael. I’m sorry about your friend.” She held up her hand. “You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted to say I know what he meant to you, and I’m sorry I didn’t say that when he died. I know it’s been a long time—”
“You might say that.”
“—but better late than never. Or so I like to think.”
Raphael squatted to the earth, picked up a twig to dig at the dirt.
“You shouldn’t let us get away with it, you know,” she said. “I don’t see why you just don’t break out and let the shit hit the fan. But who am I to talk.” She laughed, short and harsh. “You owe it to yourself.”
“I owe it to him, is who I owe it to.” Raphael dug a little hole in the ground, covered it back, dug it again. “So how did you figure out he was my boyfriend?”
“How does anybody ever figure out what’s going on in the world? You open your ears and listen to what people aren’t talking about. I’m coming to believe the only things you can be sure do happen are the things people don’t talk about. Is that so different in California?”
“Yeah. A little, anyway. If only because it’s so goddamn big. Nobody cares what anybody else does.”
“Oh, brave new world.” Catherine crossed her arms and stared up through the apple trees. “Besides, I haven’t lived with Joe Ray for twenty years without learning to recognize pain when I see it.”
“So why do you stick with him?”
She inhaled a long drag. “The pleasures of petty vice,” she said, letting the smoke filter from her lips in a slow, luxurious cloud. “You think about it, and when you’ve figured it out you let me know.”
“Can you imagine how it would hurt Rose Ella, if I let the shit hit the fan?” Raphael asked. “That’s what I worry about. And if I talked to her I’d have to talk to Tom Hardin, and I can’t imagine that. It’s just not within the realm of what can be imagined.”
Catherine sighed. “You think Rose Ella couldn’t handl
e that? Honey, that’s what keeps her alive. That’s what keeps her strong. You tell her what’s really going on—that means you need her. And when somebody needs you like that, you don’t have a choice—you’ve got to be strong for them. And in being strong for somebody else you find out you’re being strong for yourself. A man sees that kind of strength as weighing him down, holding him back. For a woman it’s who she is.”
“And that’s why you stay with Joe Ray.”
She took the twig from Raphael and crouched to the earth, where she dug a little hole and buried her cigarette butt. “I think your heart fills up with pain until either you drown in all that or you let it break, like a dam, you know, and there’s some kind of freedom in that breaking. You let it all flow out, to water whatever living thing is in the way, carrying some part of you along with it wherever it goes. And you think it’s all gone, you’re dried up, there’s nothing left and you think you can give up, you want more than anything to give up, and then you find out for better and for worse that the heart’s like a river. There’s always more coming.” She stood, tucked her cigarettes into her waistband, smoothed her slacks with a pat so they showed no sign of the pack beneath, smoothed over the earth with her shoe. “That is what I think.” She pulled out a package of mints and popped one in her mouth, then held them out as if to forestall his speaking. “Have a mint. You want to head back up there together? That will set Joe Ray wondering.”
By the time they reached the patio the last of the hospital staff had left, along with some of the brothers and sisters and grandchildren. Out in the yard the remaining grandsons and Dwight Flaherty had switched from poker to buck pitch. They’d pulled a flat-topped cooler beside Michael’s chair so he could lay out his cards where only he could see them—he couldn’t hold his cards in a regular fan. The monks sat on the patio, their chairs circled around Tom Hardin and Rose Ella, Tice Flaherty and Miss Camilla. Joe Ray was asleep, his head rolling back on the splayed slats of an Adirondack.
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