Like a Love Story

by Abdi Nazemian

  “I hope you like it,” Judy says. “And obviously, if you don’t, then you don’t have to wear it.” We are in her room now, and she sits at her sewing machine, a pint of cookies-and-cream ice cream by her side.

  “I’m sure I’ll like it,” I say.

  “Don’t do your polite Persian thing with me, okay? I want you to feel free to be rude with me. To be yourself.”

  “But I am not rude,” I say.

  “Right, of course,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s like sometimes I think that deep down, everyone is an asshole, and nice people are just hiding their true selves. Does that make me horrible?”

  I shrug and spoon a bite of ice cream into my mouth.

  “Maybe it just makes me a New Yorker,” she says. “Honestly, whoever decided children should be raised in this city is the horrible one.”

  If only she knew what being raised in Tehran was like.

  “Obviously I’m happy about it, though. Nobody raised in Peoria would design this fabulous shirt for you.”

  Now I take a spoon of ice cream and feed it to her. She accepts it as she continues to sew. “This is the life,” she says. “When I’m a famous designer, I’m going to make sure I have a gorgeous man feeding me ice cream while I work. He’ll have one of those ice cream trucks, but instead of some dumb jingle, it’ll play ‘I Love Rocky Road’ by Weird Al on a loop.”

  I look around her room, at the posters on her wall. David Bowie in pants that look inflated. Debbie Harry in a gold leotard. Pages ripped from fashion magazines and taped to the walls with abandon. Models I don’t recognize, wearing dresses with zippers down the sides, men’s shirts way too big for them with belts cinched around them, gowns with sequins on them, clothes so shiny that some of them look like they were made for another planet.

  She looks over at me and smiles. “You okay?”

  I look away. She asks me this question a lot, and I never like it. We don’t ask this question in my family. We know that the answer will always be yes, but that the truth will always be no, so what’s the point in asking the question? “Of course,” I say. Does she ask me this all the time because she senses that something is not okay, or does she ask this question because this is what Americans do?

  “I’m sorry about my mom,” she says. “I hope she didn’t upset you.”

  “Not at all,” I say. I mean it, too. I have much more monumental things to be upset about than the assumption that I know a lot about tea, which is true anyway.

  “Okay,” she says. “She’s just not that culturally sensitive, I know, but she means well, which I guess is worth something.”

  “I like her,” I say. “And I like your father too.”

  “Cool,” she says, her head down, assessing her work. After a few more seconds, she pulls the fabric out of the machine and reveals it to me. “Ta-da,” she says.

  I could see pieces of the shirt as she was working on it, but I was not prepared for the explosion of colors, deep orange and royal blue and gold. The sleeves are blue, and there is the illusion of an orange vest laid atop the shirt. On the back are two thick stripes, outlined in gold, and inside the gold stripes are tiny figures of plants and goats and flowers. The level of detail is so intricate that I find myself studying the shirt like a piece of art. “Wow,” I say.

  “Does wow mean you like it?” she asks. “Or does wow mean it’s too much and you would never wear it and you think I’m a freak for making it for you?”

  “No, it’s just . . .” I search for the right words. “It belongs on David Bowie, not on me. I am not worthy of it.”

  “At least try it on before saying that.”

  She hands me the shirt. The fabric is softer than I imagined. It feels luxurious. It’s not until I’m holding it in my hand that I realize the colors are reminiscent of ancient Persian clothing, and that the tiny figures running down those stripes look like miniatures. It hits me how much time and care Judy has put into this one shirt, for me. I am not unworthy of the shirt. I’m unworthy of her.

  “Is it . . . Persian?” I ask her.

  She smiles. “I didn’t want it to be too obvious,” she says. “I went down a total rabbit hole of research at the library about Persian style. Oh my God, Reza, honestly, it’s beyond. The robes. The shawls. The vibrant colors and the vests and the level of detail. I mean, you guys come from the epicenter of everything gorgeous.”

  “Wow,” I say.

  “I wanted it to be a surprise.” She claps her hands together. “Come on, try it on. I want to see how it fits.”

  I unbutton the black cardigan I’m wearing. The fish pin Judy and I bought together is on it. We have worn those pins every day since we bought them on Saint Mark’s Place. When I place the cardigan down on Judy’s bed, the eyeball of the fish seems to be staring at me, judging me. Then I put my hands at the base of my favorite T-shirt and pull it off. When I lay it down on the bed, Madonna’s eyes seem to be judging me as well. I love Madonna so much, but I know she would hate me. All she tells me to do is express myself, and here I am hiding. I don’t like having my shirt off. I hate how thin I am, and I hate the thick hairs growing on my chest, and I hate the birthmark on the bottom of my back. It’s the first time I have taken my shirt off in front of Judy. Even when she took my measurements, I kept a T-shirt on. I can feel her looking at me, then looking away, then looking back at me. Is she thinking I look better with clothes on? I think about Art taking his shirt off in front of me, of how beautiful he was.

  I put my arm through the left sleeve first, and then the right. As I reach for the buttons, I realize they are gold. I was so focused on the colors and pattern that I did not even notice this detail. When I’m done, I look at myself in her mirror. I look like a new person, like a person who has a strong sense of self, like a person confident enough to stand out. The person in the mirror is who I want to be.

  “You look like a rock star,” she says. “Do you like it?”

  “I do,” I say. “Very much.”

  She claps her hands together again, her excitement bursting out of her. She stands in front of me and takes my hands in hers. Her hands are so soft, and her nails are smooth and lacquered with her purple nail polish. She whispers, “I think you inspire me.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Maybe you’ll be the Marlene Dietrich to my Josef von Sternberg. I’ll surround you in beauty. I’ll design, and you’ll be my muse.”

  “Maybe . . . ,” I say. She gets closer to me and I suddenly feel panicked. I know I’m supposed to kiss her. I’ve seen this in movies. She’s everything I want to want, and I hate that I don’t want her. I want magic powers that will turn her into Art. I want to kiss Art’s lips, smell his scent, see his bare chest again. I close my eyes and press my lips gently against hers.

  She pulls her lips away from mine after a few seconds. “I’m excited to meet your family.”

  “Me too,” I say. “Of course, you’ve already met Saadi.”

  “Is he nicer at home than he is at school?” she asks skeptically.

  “No,” I say.

  She laughs, and the sound of it lifts me up. I love the life in her, the passion and the vision. I imagine this is what Madonna was like, back when she was our age. Bold and confident. Madonna would hate me, but she would love Judy.

  Judy looks down at the pint of ice cream, melting into a soup. She picks it up and feeds me a spoon. “Finish it, please,” she says. “I don’t need it now that I’m done.”

  “Maybe we can add some tahini dressing to it,” I suggest. “Tahini ice cream soup.”

  “Stop,” she says playfully. “You’re driving my taste buds crazy.”

  I slurp the ice cream like soup, which makes her smile. But there’s something melancholy in her gaze now, and taking her lead once again, I whisper, “Hey, you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I guess I’m a little nervous. Like what if they don’t like me? What if they think I’m some unsophisticated American girl?”

  “What?�
�� I say. “Who would think that?”

  “I would think that,” she says, revealing an insecurity I hadn’t known was there. “I do think that.”

  “Judy,” I say softly. “You don’t think that. I know you don’t. You are . . . beautiful, and so cool, and so good.”

  The capitalized words from Mrs. Bowman’s book cover seem to float above me and Judy like clouds, the word GOOD above Judy’s head, and the word BAD above mine. Maybe I do know who I am. Maybe I have found myself, as Americans like to say. I am BAD. I lie with every kiss. I lie with every touch and every gaze.

  “Thanks for saying that,” Judy says.

  “I’m not just saying it. I mean it.” I wish she understood how much I mean it, that despite all my lies to her, the most important truth is that I think she’s incredible, like sunshine in a dark world. And I wish she knew that her ability to even utter all these doubts out loud means she thinks highly enough of herself to respect the emotions inside her. I would never let my doubts leave the prison of my brain.

  She takes my hand. “Hey,” she says. “Thanks for checking in.”

  I have checked into her life, like a hotel room. I only wish that I could truly inhabit this room, untouched by my desires.

  Art

  We’re standing outside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, one of Andy Warhol’s favorite places in the city, and it’s as opulent, ornate, and glamorous as Warhol himself. It’s also a place of judgment and repression, and because of that, it makes no sense to me that Warhol loved it. It mystifies me that only two years ago, a memorial mass was held for him here, that its pews were filled not with gay haters and pro-lifers, but with Yoko Ono, Grace Jones, and Halston, with the freaks and goddesses from his Factory. Maybe this was Warhol’s personal fuck-you to the church, his way of telling them that he was so big and so powerful that his circus could invade their halls at will. Stephen was there for Warhol’s mass, not inside, but outside. He saw them all walk in, the fabulous people in their downtown twist on Sunday church couture. He thinks that despite his queerness and his celebration of those cast aside, what Andy wanted more than anything was acceptance by the God he still worshipped.

  “Shall we go become one with God?” Stephen asks. Next to him are five activists, including many I recognize from the meetings and two I recognize from the New York Stock Exchange protest.

  “Remember not to make a scene today,” a woman in a gray coat and jeans says. She has curly red hair and glasses. She’s not a member of ACT UP; she’s a part of another organization called WHAM!, Women’s Health Action and Mobilization, which is joining forces with ACT UP for this. “Today is just a chance to scope out the place, come up with ideas.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” a voice I recognize calls out from behind me. I turn around to see Jimmy, wearing the same black fur coat he wore the last time I saw him, inside the Korean deli, that awful night I thought Reza and I were going to fall in love and live happily ever after. I hate that night and want to forget everything about it except for Jimmy and his fabulous coat. I love that he’s wearing it to church.

  Jimmy kisses everyone on the cheek, saving me for last. By the time he gets to me, everyone else has begun to enter the church. Jimmy locks his arm in mine. “Art, mon amour,” he says with a conspiratorial wink. “You just get more handsome, while the rest of us degenerate into one giant lesion.”

  “You look like Mahogany,” I say.

  “I look like Mahogany with an eating disorder and jaundice,” he says. “Darling, do you remember that photo you took of me and Walt in the deli?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Could you . . .” His voice quivers. He takes a breath of crisp winter air. I can feel the shallowness of his breath, his lungs working overtime to do their job. “I think it was the last photo of the two of us together while he was still . . .” He takes another big breath in, but this time, he doesn’t finish the sentence.

  I know the end, of course. Walt is dead. Died almost two months ago, just weeks after I saw them. And I should’ve given him a copy of that photo as soon as I found out. I’m sure he would’ve appreciated it. But the thing is that I never developed that roll of film. I knew it would remind me of Reza, and I didn’t want to see any of those photos.

  “I’m on it,” I say, putting my hand on his shoulder.

  We are almost at the entrance of the church when Jimmy whispers to me, “Do you believe in God?”

  I pause for a moment. I don’t know what the right answer is. If I say yes, I’m lying. If I say no, I’m telling a dying man who just lost the love of his life that there is nothing left for him but dust. “I don’t know,” I finally say.

  “I didn’t think I did,” Jimmy says. “But since getting sick, I’ve started to wonder, or to hope . . .” Another breath, and then he says, “Hey, do you know that Walt died the day after Bette Davis? Honestly, that queen was such a fan that he had to follow Jezebel to the afterlife. You didn’t see me croaking when Joan died, did you?”

  I laugh, grateful that he lightened the mood. But I feel his pain. His body is wasting away. His lover is gone. And he doesn’t even have a copy of the final photo taken of them because the kid who took it is too self-involved to develop the roll.

  “Welcome,” a woman says when we reach the entrance. She holds her hand out to us, first to me, and then to Jimmy. She fixes her gaze on him as she shakes his hand, inspecting him. “I hope you enjoy today’s mass,” she says.

  As we move away from her, I tell Jimmy, “I hate that she stared at you like that.”

  “Honey,” he says, “white ladies were staring scornfully at my queer black ass long before I had AIDS. I’m used to it.”

  “Is it awful that I think this place is absolutely gorgeous?” Stephen asks, approaching me.

  “Good Lord,” Jimmy says. “Next you’ll be telling us that you find Reagan gorgeous too.”

  “Not in the least,” Stephen says. “But I could have my way with Cardinal O’Connor.” Seeing the shock on our faces, he quickly says. “It was a joke. Jesus Christ, I’m not that desperate.”

  I realize that both Stephen and Jimmy just took the Lord’s name in vain without thinking much of it, and it makes me think about how adeptly religion has seeped into every part of our language. Even those of us who want to shake the shackles of religion off us are tied to it somehow. I look up and take the vastness in. The cathedral is majestic and so imposing, like the church wants to remind you of its power through its architecture. Near the entrance is a gift shop. Candles are for sale, and Bibles, and postcards, and pens, all there to raise funds for the church, the money going toward reaching more people with their message of intolerance. It feels completely absurd to me. I know that ACT UP meetings have a merchandise table too, but that’s because we have no money and no funding. The church has countless cathedrals just like this one, real estate everywhere, and they still want people to give them more.

  We make our way to pews in the back of the church. I sit in between Stephen and Jimmy, but pretty soon, we are standing as Cardinal O’Connor enters in his ornate robe, looking like an extra from a Cecil B. DeMille movie. I look over at Stephen, Jimmy, and the rest of the activists as O’Connor enters, and daggers shoot from their eyes, all pointed straight at this man. This awful man, who was brought to New York to bring conservatism back to the Catholic Church by a Vatican that wants to push back against some of the reforms the church has taken on recently. Cardinal O’Connor made it his business to take our condoms away, so we can all die.

  As the choir sings a song, Stephen whispers to the group, “So the idea being batted around is that we all lie down in the aisle when he does the homily.”

  A woman in front of us shushes him. I close my eyes for most of the ceremony. It’s not my first time in church, and most of the memories it brings to mind are bad ones. But this time, something about the choir moves me. The sound of all those voices harmonizing together is undeniably beautiful, and the acoustics of the space make it sound
like the voices are surrounding me. If angels do exist, I suppose this is what they’d sound like. And the voices remind me of the choir in “Like a Prayer,” and I think that if it weren’t for all the bullshit rules of Catholicism, then there would be no Madonna, because what is she if not a rebellion against all of this? I guess I need to be grateful for that. I hear her song playing in my head, and I imagine Reza’s face when he listened to it for the first time. I could feel it washing over him. I could feel him come alive, forming into something new in front of my eyes, and then he pulled away from me. I keep my eyes closed until the choir stops, and I imagine myself kissing Reza’s lips, his eyelids, his nose, his chest, his thighs. I imagine everything that would disgust the church and the Cardinal, all set to their holy music. I guess that’s the thing. I don’t want to burn this place to the ground. What I want is to make them see that I AM HOLY. These thoughts of me and Reza, they are holy. Well, except for that part about him being my best friend’s boyfriend now. That’s a sinful detail.

  “The Lord be with you,” O’Connor says.

  “And with your spirit,” the room responds. All except our row. We’re not playing this game. We’re not going to do his call-and-response and eat his tasteless wafer. We’re here on a mission, to get ideas about how to invade this space and open people’s eyes to the church’s complicity in our deaths. The mass is long and boring. In his homily, O’Connor makes multiple references to protecting “the unborn,” and I can feel the WHAM! woman’s blood boiling. It’s amazing how gung ho he is about saving the lives of fetuses, but then he turns a blind eye to all the actual humans DYING right in front of him.