Like a Love Story

by Abdi Nazemian

  “Maybe you’ll design something for me someday,” she says brightly.

  “Maybe . . . ,” I say. “It’s just . . . I don’t think you’d wear anything I design.”

  “It would be like a commission,” she says, annoyed I’m not playing along. “You would have to design something that fits the client. In this case, me.”

  “Yeah, but the thing is, I have a style. A look.”

  My mom sighs. I exhaust her. “You know, even some of the biggest designers do custom orders. What if Jackie O. called you tomorrow? Would you tell her she has to dress just like you, or would you make her something classic and beautiful?”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” I say. “Can I answer that question when Jackie O. actually calls?”

  My mom shrugs and smiles. “Sweetie,” she says, as she sits on my bed. Uh-oh—when she begins a sentence with Sweetie, something is up. “You do understand why I don’t tell people what Stephen has.”

  “It’s so stupid,” I say. “I’m sure they all know. He’s been on the news protesting. Twice.”

  “They’ve never met him,” she says. “They don’t know what he looks like.”

  “There are pictures of him all over the living room!” I argue.

  Then we both just look at each other with the kind of sadness that makes me want to bury myself somewhere, because we both know that the Stephen in the picture frames and the Stephen on the news look nothing like each other.

  “It’s just . . . it’s just easier this way,” she says. “And he does have cancer. Kaposi’s sarcoma is cancer.”

  “I know that,” I say. “It’s just . . . if no one dies of AIDS, then how will the shame ever go away?”

  “But so many people die of AIDS,” she says. “Rock Hudson died of AIDS!”

  “And he was outed because of it,” I say. “Not exactly a poster child for gay pride.”

  “Stephen is sick,” she says. “I don’t understand why we have to politicize it.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess maybe because he politicizes it. Can’t we just, like, follow his lead?”

  She nods. She knows what I’m trying to say. She knows how wrong it is that one disease could be more socially acceptable than another.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I say.

  “It’s not what I’m thinking,” she says, conflict etched all over her face. “It’s what others think.”

  “Why do we care what others think?” I’m pacing the room now.

  “Sweetie, come sit next to me.” She pats the bed, like that’ll convince me to calm down.

  “I know what other people think. That they deserve it. That he deserves it.”

  “No,” she says. “Not at all. Nobody deserves this, and nobody I would call a friend would say that.”

  “What then?” I ask, staring her down. “I just don’t get it, Mom.”

  “It’s not a disease that you get at random. It’s a disease you get because of a behavior . . .”

  “Oh my God, Mom, stop! He’s your brother!”

  “And I love him. I worshipped him when we were kids. Don’t you think I know how magnetic he is? Don’t you think I emulated him when I was young just like you do now? Don’t you think I understand why Mommie Dearest is funny? I’m his sister. I’ve let him be like a parent to you. I haven’t seen my own mother for over a year in solidarity with him, because I hate the way she treats him. It’s just not always so simple, Judy. I’m not saying he did this to himself, or that he deserves it, or that anyone does. I am saying that the reason people might prefer to say someone died of cancer or pneumonia is because certain things are private. I’m saying there are discussions I would rather have with him, with you, but not with women who wouldn’t understand. That doesn’t lessen my love for him, and he knows it.” She catches her breath. I think she may not have breathed for that whole monologue.

  “Well, I’d like to make people understand.”

  “Fine,” she says. “That’s your choice, and I’m not stopping you.”

  “You know, not everything is a choice, right? Like maybe he didn’t choose to be gay, and maybe I can’t just choose to be thin.”

  “I’ll give you the first one,” she says.

  How generous of her.

  “And think of the things he did choose to do,” I continue fervently. “He could’ve been some fancy lawyer, right? He chose to help refugees and asylum seekers. You always say yourself how noble that was.”

  “It was,” she says.

  “And now he chooses to be an activist. He’s always choosing to change the world. What have you chosen?” This last question was cruel, and I know it. Stop when you have the moral high ground, Judy.

  “I chose to work hard, marry a good man, and raise you right,” she says, defensive. Then she takes a breath. “I’d say my brother and I both did some pretty good things.”

  I hate when she does this. It’s always when I say something totally bitchy that she’s at her nicest, like she wants to shine a light on my awfulness.

  “Sweetie,” she begins again. Uh-oh. “I know we are very different women, and I’m generally okay with that, especially since I was once not completely unlike you, so there’s hope we’ll grow closer. . . .”

  Oh God, please don’t let me turn out like her.

  “Mom, where is this going?”

  “I just want us to be close, especially because . . .” She trails off. “Your uncle, he may not be around much longer.” I feel the tears coming, but I’ve just done my makeup, and it looks good. I try to squeeze them back. “And I want to be here for you. And I want you to be here for me.”

  She’s done it. She’s succeeded in making me cry, and in making me sit next to her on the bed. She grips my hand in hers. She seems to glance with disgust at my nail polish. Half the nails are black, and the other half are yellow. “I just don’t get it,” she says.

  “It’s a look,” I say. “And I wanted to bring together the black and yellow of the outfit.”

  “No,” she says. “Not your nails, which are strange, I must admit. I just don’t get how somebody so vibrant could . . .”

  “Mom . . .” I’m too sad to say anything else. She’s crying too.

  She wipes the tears from her eyes and looks at me again, assessing me. “You put a lot of effort into an outfit for Sunday movie night,” she comments.

  “Not really,” I say.

  “Last week, you went in sweatpants and that leather vest I hate.”

  “Last week, I felt run down,” I say.

  She glances at me with interest. “I know you better than the back of my hand, you know. Of course, I won’t look at the back of my hand ’cause it looks so old. Hands are the first to go.” She places her hand on my cheek. “Whoever he is, just don’t come on too strong. You can be a little intense. And if you invited him to your uncle’s, don’t let Art scare him off either.”

  I want to say that maybe this guy likes intense, that maybe this guy likes girls that come on strong, but I say nothing. Because I will not confirm that there is a guy. That will lead to follow-up questions, and I’m not going there. “It’s just another movie night,” I say.

  Mercifully, my dad peeks his head into the room just then. “Well, this is sweet,” he says. “My girls are having a moment.” He’s still in his racquetball outfit. We all have our Sunday routines. “What are we talking about?”

  “Oh, girl talk,” my mom says, with a wink my way, as if we’re suddenly coconspirators or something. But the thing is, she’s kind of made me feel like we are. And I wonder, who would Reza feel more comfortable with? My parents and their safe world of pastel, racquetball, and self-help, or Uncle Stephen and Art’s world where we laugh about child abuse and do Mae West impersonations?

  I want my parents to leave the room so I can call Reza and cancel my invitation. The whole thing was a terrible idea. They do leave eventually. But by that point, the woman who answers the phone at Reza’s house tells me he’s already gone. “
He just left with his friend,” she says.

  “Oh,” I say. “Weird—he’s meeting me.”

  “Oooooh,” she says, with way too much interest. “That’s nice. Are you a friend of his?”

  “Um, yeah,” I say, “I’m Judy.”

  “Oh, of course, he’s mentioned you,” she says. “This is his mother, Mina. I’d love to meet you soon.”

  I smile a little. He’s mentioned you to his mother, Judy. That’s a good sign. A really good sign.

  “Is he, um, bringing a friend with him?” I ask.

  “They said they were both meeting you,” she says. “He left with the hedge fund man’s son. He had left his bag here last time. What is his name again? It’s very long.”

  “Oh, Art,” I say. “Bartholomew. Okay. Well, I’ll see them soon and, um, nice to chat with you.”

  I hang up the phone. It’s a little weird that Art picked Reza up, and a little weird that he had left a bag there to begin with. But I don’t let myself get too in my head. I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation, or given Art, some unreasonable but hilarious explanation. I fix my makeup again, getting ready for showtime.

  #54 Garland, Judy

  The gay movement as we know it might not exist without Judy Garland. Some say that the queens who started the Stonewall riots, fighting back against decades of police brutality, homophobia, and oppression, did so in part because they were mourning Judy’s death. Perhaps we identified with her for generations because, like us, she was brutalized and victimized by the system and because, like us, she somehow created so much beauty out of it all. And perhaps once she was gone, we were ready to stop being victims ourselves.

  By age sixteen, Judy was one of MGM’s most valuable stars. She was Dorothy, after all. The studio gave her pills to wake up, to lose weight, to go onstage. But the thing about Judy is that no matter how much artifice they imposed on her, and no matter how many pills they gave her, her raw authenticity still shone through. That’s why she was able to give the greatest performance ever put on film in A Star Is Born. She lost the Oscar for that movie, and not just to anyone . . . to Grace Kelly! To a woman who was born so perfect and privileged that she was allowed to keep her name in an era when the studio system pretty much gave everyone a new identity.

  The day our Judy was born, my sister and her husband couldn’t agree on what to name her. My sister favored the name Ernestine, after our mother, and her husband wanted to name her Carol, after his mother. I held newborn Judy in my arms as they argued. For a moment, it seemed one of those names would be the first name and the other would be the middle name, but they couldn’t agree on which would go first. And then . . . I whispered the name Judy, because when I gazed into my baby niece’s eyes, I could tell that she had an authenticity that would shine through any expectation the world imposed on her. I saw in her a force of nature that would never accept limitations. And I hoped, no, I knew, that someday, she would be a great friend to this friend of Dorothy.

  Reza

  I don’t know why I do it. Abbas already gives me an allowance, something my mother could never do when she was raising us alone and paying for everything from the sporadic money she made from interior-design clients. Back then, I never desired much that money could buy anyway. My mother bought my clothes. My mother bought my notebooks for school. My sister bought records when we could afford them, and we would listen to those along with a few old cassettes my mother brought with her from Iran. Consumption was not yet in my vocabulary. But now I want things. I think about things. Well, I think about one thing. Madonna. I think of Madonna constantly. I cannot explain it. I love her music, but there’s something deeper, like she is saying all the things that I want to be saying. It is out of desire for her that I sneak into Abbas’s bedroom when he showers on Saturday.

  We are alone in the apartment. Saadi is practicing lacrosse. My mother is at the hairdresser, living a life of leisure she is quickly growing accustomed to. And me, I’m about to become a thief. In Iran, they would likely cut my hand off for this, but then again, they would also have cut my hand off for masturbating more than I brush my teeth, and for what I think about when I masturbate, and for the time I used the toothbrush as a tool to help me masturbate, thinking about Art.

  Abbas sings Billy Joel in the shower. My father only sang when he was drunk, and his voice always had a threatening edge to it, even when he was singing a love song. I remember Art saying how easy it is to steal from his father. I enter the room. I wonder where Abbas keeps his money. It’s not on any tabletop that I can see, or in a drawer. Then I find his pants, hanging from a chair. A wallet in the right pocket weighs them down. I creep closer. The shower is still on. He is still singing. I think about what I want to buy, and I reach my hand in. The first thing I see inside the wallet is his driver’s license, with a much younger photo of him, back when he had hair. Then, in the pouch, I find bills. Three hundred sixty dollars in different denominations. I wonder how much would make him notice. I decide fifty dollars is a good number, take it, and run out. Art was right. It’s easy. So is spending it.

  I’m staring at my new purchases as I get ready for Judy’s movie night. Two posters of Madonna now hang on my wall. In one, she’s in a wedding dress, the words “Boy Toy” on her belt. In the other, she has her arm raised suggestively, a cross dangles from her neck, and her cutoff shirt reads “HEALTHY” in block letters. I decided on this one because that’s what I want to be. Healthy. Forever. There’s one more purchase, and I am wearing it. It’s a T-shirt with a decal of Madonna’s face on it. I love it.

  A knock on the door startles me as I assess my new look and the posters I just hung on the wall. My mother enters. “Wow,” she says. “Did you go shopping?”

  “It is, uh, just . . . I’m not used to having an allowance, so I used it.” I feel myself trying to sound relaxed and failing.

  My mother gets very close to the HEALTHY poster. “Why does she have to show her armpit?” she asks. “A bit vulgar, no?”

  “I like it,” I say.

  She looks at me with a smile, then runs a hand through my hair. “My first crush was Alain Delon. He was a French actor. Gorgeous. I would rip his photos from magazines my aunt brought back from France and put them on my wall.” She smiles again, lost in memory. “I just hope the woman you marry will not be showing her armpits and her belly button all the time. You will discover all this soon enough, but there are women you have fun with and women you marry. Madonna is a woman you have fun with.”

  What I want to say is . . . and there are women you want to be.

  The doorbell rings. “Who is that?”

  “Oh, right, that’s why I came in,” she says. “The doorman called and said your photographer friend is here.”

  “Is he studying with Saadi?” I ask.

  “I don’t think so. The doorman said he was here to see you.”

  My heart. It seems to be bouncing inside my body, hitting the edges of me in different locations, until it sinks into my stomach and stays there. I don’t move.

  “I can answer it,” my mom says. And she’s gone. To open the door. For Art. Who is here to see . . . me?

  I can hear them from within my room, saying their obligatory hellos, and my mother giving Art a kiss on each cheek. Last time, it was a handshake. “Reza is in his room,” she says.

  I hear the stomping of his platform shoes getting closer and closer. I close my eyes and tell myself not to act as scared as I feel.

  “Hey” is all he says when he comes in. His camera is, as always, dangling from his thin neck.

  I say, “Hey.”

  And then he sees the posters, and my shirt, and he says, “Whoa.”

  “What?” I ask, wondering if we will only speak in one-word sentences.

  He lifts his camera to his eye, adjusts the focus, and snaps a photo of my posters.

  “Have you joined the fan club yet?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “You should,” he says. “You get
a magazine in the mail. And you get dibs on concert tickets and stuff like that.”

  “Cool,” I say, still trying desperately to sound normal.

  “Since we’re both headed to movie night, I figured I’d swing by and get my backpack. Then we can go together.”

  “Oh, of course,” I say, and I pull the book bag from my closet and hand it to him.

  He unzips it and peeks inside. He pulls out the notecards and breathes a sigh of relief, then puts them back in. “Thanks for taking care of it,” he says. “There was actually something really important in here.”

  “Oh,” I say, maintaining what I hope is a very innocent expression. “What?”

  “Just, um, study cards,” he says. “But you know, they’re the only ones, so if I lose them, I fail.”

  “At what subject?” I ask.

  “Life,” he replies with a crooked smile.

  I look down. I realize the number of sins I have committed since moving to New York is mounting. I snooped in his bag. I stole from my stepfather. And now I lied to Art. Though of course, I have lied to him before. I pretended it was a coincidence I was outside the protest, which was a ridiculous charade. I was drawn to it because I had heard him discuss it. I had to be there. I try to convince myself that the city made me steal and lie and snoop, but I know that’s not true. And I don’t feel bad either. What I feel right now is not guilt; it’s disappointment that I read only a few of those notecards. I should have read them all before he surprised me like this. Well, all except the ones about AIDS. I want to know more, but I’m still too scared.

  “So should we head?” he asks. “Stephen might pick some three-hour movie, so we don’t wanna be late.”

  We say goodbye to my mom, who is watching the giant television with Abbas, wrapped in a cashmere blanket. She looks so relaxed, like she has aged backward. I wonder what she would be like if she had married a man like Abbas to begin with.