Bodies jostled on Michael’s right as somebody forced his way up to the bar. Michael was pushed against Lucian. He was knocked against the man and imagined he felt bones covered with clothes and virus. He knew that wasn’t so, knew touch was only touch and his terror groundless, but the terror excited him and left him as breathless as the first time he deliberately touched another guy, when he was too frightened to feel anything sexual.
“S-s-s-sorry,” Michael stammered and pushed against the body on the other side of him to give the man room.
“No problem,” said Lucian, his voice deep and whispery, without looking at Michael.
But he had spoken to him and Michael wanted to keep him speaking, so he said the only thought he found in his head, “Would you like to dance?”
Lucian turned a calm smile on Michael. “Thanks. But I’m not much of a dancer these days.”
“Then will you fuck me?”
Calm and smile broke. “What?”
“Fuck me. I want you to fuck me,” Michael pleaded.
Lucian shot frightened looks around the bar. “You know who I am? You mocking me, asshole?”
Breathless and grinning, Michael leaned in closer. “I want you to fuck me, Lucian. I want you to shoot inside me with everything you’ve got!”
“You little psycho!” He pushed Michael away with both hands. “Get away from me you drunk little creep!”
“But I want you to fuck me! Please fuck me!”
“Who put you up to this? Whose sick joke is this?”
And Michael finally realized what he’d been saying. He was horrified. Then he burst out laughing, letting himself know it was only a joke, a disgusting failed joke that now had him laughing hysterically as he backed away from the man. There were people dancing around him, and Michael began to lift his elbows and stamp his feet even as he continued laughing.
The man glared at him, appalled and confused, and turned to the bar, folding his arms across his chest. The man with the anemic mustache hurried over to see what was wrong with his friend.
Michael stopped laughing and slipped between dancers. He moved deeper into the crowd, wanting to lose himself in them, needing to hide from the man he had insulted for being sick. It had been a vile, heartless joke. He couldn’t understand why he had said such a thing, except he was drunk.
There was a small clearing in the dancing crowd. Michael began to dance, hoping to lose himself in that. He felt foolish dancing alone, so he tried to dance with some of the bodies sawing and swaying around him. Nobody looked at Michael. He tried to dance with the two boys in jockey shorts swaying on the bright stage. Their eyes were wide open but they kept their gazes locked above the crowd, like they were dancing alone in their own private rooms without even a mirror for company. Michael closed his eyes and danced in the dark room of his own head. He wanted it to be like running cross-country in high school, when he could disappear inside himself for miles on end, without thought or feeling, just a soothing dreamless sleep carried along by the beat of his track shoes.
He was rocking his hips, moving them in a way he never moved them except when he was dancing or fucking.
“Oh, but I love being fucked by you,” Clarence said again and again.
“You shouldn’t have anything to worry about,” he said later. “I only did it to you once or twice and never without a rubber, right?”
And later still: “I’m not asking you to have sex or even kiss me. Won’t you just let me hold you for a few minutes?”
Michael opened his eyes, but nothing outside seemed as real to him as what he was thinking.
Won’t you just let me hold you?
It felt dreamed or imagined, only it came to him with live emotions attached, not just remembered but reborn emotions, feelings that seemed to have been perfectly preserved while frozen in forgetting. Just outside his remembering seemed to stand a mass of forgotten incidents and moments, but all Michael experienced now were the emotions: fear and guilt and more fear. Of Clarence.
He had been too frightened to share his bed, too terrified to touch him. He had hated being in the same room with the illness.
Michael was barely dancing now, just shifting his knees and absently flipping his hands to the music. He did not want to remember this yet. He would remember it later, when there would be a sober calm where he could look at it straight and defend himself against what he’d felt and how he’d behaved. He danced harder, trying to shake away the memory his dancing had shaken loose.
“Watch it, prick!”
He had lost the beat of the music. He moved more wildly, trying to catch up with it again. He spun around and his flying hand hit something.
“You dumb shit!”
Hands pushed him away. An elbow hit his jaw. The crowd suddenly capsized and Michael was on the floor.
He deserved to be on the floor. He wanted to be stepped on and kicked. He had not loved Clarence sick. He had been too selfish and afraid to love a dying man. He looked around and saw a forest of writhing legs. It was like he was inside Clarence’s movie. He had remembered the movie without remembering his fear of the man who made it. It was like he’d been drunk his entire life, to have behaved the way he had and then forgotten it.
He threw himself flat on his back and waited to be trampled into the floor. When nothing happened, when the bodies towering overhead stepped around him, Michael began to bang his head against the floor, wanting to knock himself out.
“Kid? Get up from there, kid.”
A bald head with a handlebar mustache plunged toward him, and Michael felt his shoulders being lifted. He was rising up like Clarence’s camera and he expected flashes of lightning up there, where he would float like a spirit over the bobbing crowd. But he didn’t float and there was no lightning, only a handlebar mustache, a bald head as smoothly angular as an apple, and a set of darkly kind eyes.
“You okay, kid? Helluva place to take a nap.”
“I’m fine. No nap. Fine.”
“Let me walk you out of this stampede.”
The man’s concern was such a surprise Michael almost hugged him. But he remembered he had no right to hug or touch anyone. He pulled his arm out of the man’s gentle grasp. “Don’t touch me. I’m scum. I’m shit.”
“You’re shitfaced, you mean. Somebody’s had tee many toonies. Here, let me get you over to some friends.”
Again Michael jerked his arm from the man. “I don’t have any friends. I don’t deserve any. Go on with your dancing. I’m fine. Just fine.”
The man looked back at another man with a similar mustache who had continued dancing while he watched them. “Okay,” said the bald man. “If you say so.” He patted Michael’s shoulder and set him walking toward the nearest wall.
Michael stepped stiffly through the crowd, straining not to touch anyone. The man’s kindness pained him. The man hadn’t understood. If he understood he would have let Michael lay there and kicked him. Michael looked for Lucian, wanting Lucian to kick him, hurt him, do something to him to punish Michael for what he had done to Lucian and Clarence and everyone else. All he saw in the enormous room were dancing men, an army of friends who would never turn away from each other in sickness or fear. He did not deserve to be among them.
He hurried along the wall and past the bar, then down the stairs and through the lobby. He stepped out of The World into a silence so sudden and deep it was like stepping out of time. But then there was cool air, stark buildings, and the huge strange thoughts again, and Michael ached to step out of the world and time for real.
8
MEMORY IS IMPERFECT KNOWLEDGE. People often remember only what is safe to remember or, when they need to punish themselves, what hurts them most.
It began as a cough Clarence developed sometime between shooting his movie and editing it. A dry, insistent cough, he blamed it on the shouting he had done during the shoot—Clarence was unaccustomed to shouting. Michael blamed it on too many cigarettes and tried to scold Clarence into cutting back on his
smoking—his scolding was more a rite of intimacy than an expression of real worry. Clarence was too immersed in the movie to pay much attention to either Michael or the cough.
He edited for fourteen and sixteen hours at a stretch, coming home every night from the cramped, windowless editing room near Times Square goofy with fatigue. He obsessed over specifics, how shots didn’t cut together, how certain scenes dragged, how his only hope was cutting more rapidly and cheating with the soundtrack. Despite his griping and the way he ground his teeth in his sleep, he clearly loved the work and enjoyed his suffering. He was both intoxicated and hung over with the movie. Michael grew tired of hearing about it, and a little jealous, as if Clarence were going on and on about an impossible infatuation with another guy. He tried to ignore Clarence’s movie to devote himself to his last semester at school.
When Clarence finished, he screened the final cut for the boy-producer, the producer’s post-punk girlfriend, and Jack and Michael. The event he had worked toward for the past six months took place in a grim screening room with folding chairs, a linoleum floor with missing tiles, and film canisters stacked in the corners. Afterward, the producer was quite proud of his movie and strutted around the room like a bantam rooster while he talked about his vision, his talent, his future as a filmmaker. He thanked Clarence for helping to bring his vision to the screen before he and his girlfriend hurried off to get to a party at Nell’s. Clarence only exchanged weary, knowing smiles with Louise, the assistant editor. She alone understood what they had been through, but they said goodbye to each other as casually as two construction workers after a bad day.
Clarence remained distant even when he was alone with those closest to him. Jack complimented him on technical details and didn’t have a single word of criticism for the film, a sure sign he hadn’t liked it. Michael had been disappointed it looked like any other horror film and that none of his suggestions for the script had been used, but all he said was, “It’s a real movie,” an assessment promptly seconded by Jack. Yet Clarence didn’t seem to care what either of them thought. He was numb to the movie now that it was done, relieved the work was over, and stoically amused by all the fuss that had preceded this confusingly empty moment. He insisted he wasn’t depressed, only exhausted, and said he wanted to go to sleep for the next two months.
Only when he had time for it did Clarence get sick. The cough became a cold or some kind of flu; Clarence joked that it was his body’s way of insisting he take a vacation. He spent most of the day in bed or on the sofa, taking long naps and listening to classical music. Michael enjoyed the domestic routine of babying the invalid a little, bringing him glasses of orange juice and cups of soup, picking up flowers and treats for Clarence on his way back from classes. Final exams were coming up and Michael did most of his studying at home. It was wonderful having Clarence around the apartment again after he’d been gone for so long.
After two weeks of this, Michael was awakened one night by Clarence talking in his sleep. It was not the usual nonsense questions that, once answered, would be followed by a reassured mumble and sound sleep, but a furious, absurd monologue about lost footage in Danville and a shot he had forgotten to include so that everything was out of sync. The bed around him was soaking wet and his body was like an oven. Michael tried waking him, but couldn’t. He telephoned Jack, who sleepily told him it must be the fever breaking and he should let Clarence sleep. When Michael got back to bed, Clarence was still talking, his words now hammered apart by a chattering of teeth. The telephone rang. It was Ben. Jack had called him after thinking about what Michael said; Ben was better informed about the dangers here than Jack. Ben calmly asked Michael questions about Clarence’s condition, then told Michael not to worry but they should get Clarence to a hospital tonight. He was to dress Clarence in warm clothes and have him ready when Ben came over in a cab. They could get him to a hospital sooner than an ambulance would.
There was no room for self-consciousness or thought that night. The crisis made thought impossible. Ben was at his best in a crisis, giving orders to the cab driver, demanding assistance at the hospital. Michael did everything Ben told him to do. They spent that night and most of the morning in the waiting room at St. Luke’s Hospital. Jack arrived and he and Ben told Michael to go home and get some sleep, but Michael wouldn’t leave. He feared a doctor would appear any moment to tell them Clarence was dead. Death was easy to imagine in the abstract space and bright white light of the hospital—he remembered Clarence hating the ugliness of fluorescent light. Jack brought the morning newspaper with him, shared it with Ben, and asked Michael if he wanted the crossword puzzle. Michael shook his head, confused they could think about anything else, surprised they could read the news and even comment on things to each other. Danny arrived, clean and shaved and looking like daylight. He sat with Michael while Ben and Jack went out to get some breakfast, held Michael’s hand, told him not to worry, then left for a cattle call downtown when Ben and Jack returned.
When a doctor did appear, a woman with an Indian accent, she took them into a tiny office and told them it was pneumocystic carinii pneumonia. Which meant AIDS, which was what Ben and Jack had been fearing. It had only been a vague possibility to Michael, another name for Clarence’s possible death. AIDS had been a regular presence the past four years, a condition considered and talked about as constantly as politics, almost as abstract as politics. But when Michael heard the word attached to Clarence, when it sank in, it seemed less frightening than death, more specific and concrete. It made Clarence’s condition more public, tragic, and important for Michael, and somehow easier to bear. Ben and Jack took their own turbulent feelings of shock and helplessness and focused them on Michael, treating him with tender respect as someone tragic and important.
There was nothing they could do once they had the terrible news. Clarence was in intensive care and they weren’t allowed to see him. They would be notified of his progress, the doctor informed them. Michael went home with Ben, where Ben tried to distract them by playing Danny’s records of Broadway musicals. The silliest, sappiest songs would start Ben crying. The sight of Ben’s tears helped Michael to find his own.
Michael spent two nights at Ben and Danny’s, then stayed with Peter and Livy, who had more room. He didn’t want to be alone and the others respected that. While time stood still, he was unable to do anything except watch television and look through magazines, forgetting then remembering the cause for his sadness. All of them ran out of ways to talk about Clarence, but nobody could talk about other things for longer than ten or fifteen minutes before thoughts of Clarence crowded back in, ending conversation. Finally, they could at least visit Clarence.
He was barely there during the first visits, a pair of glassy eyes looking up from a large livid face on a stone-white pillow, a dry flaking mouth that sometimes worked itself into a polite smile. After a few days he gained a little personality, made jokes about the “food”—an IV bottle suspended over the bed—and said the last week had been the worst acid trip he had ever experienced. “Who gave me that bad acid?” he joked, several times each visit, forgetting he had already said it. Then, quite suddenly, his alertness and good humor would vanish, as quickly as the skin of steam on a cup of tea, and he lay there looking confused and miserable.
In the second week he became Clarence again, or a reasonable facsimile, reporting his goofiest dreams or longings for fantastic meals while he grinned at his own foolishness, describing the dress and quirks of the patients and nurses who populated his world with a kindly appreciation of such human cartoons. Now and then, a new crankiness would break out, a resentful remark or bitter sneer, but it quickly passed and he went back to being himself, or rather the self his friends were accustomed to. Danny brought him a coloring book and crayons, just as a joke, but they were the gifts Clarence seemed to enjoy most. He never read the novels Jack brought him or looked at Ben’s skin magazines. Michael felt the situation was too important for gifts or words. He sat beside the bed each v
isit, held Clarence’s hand, and let the others do the talking.
Compared to what Michael experienced later, this was a pure and simple time, fear and the anticipation of grief housed by a hospital, made real by it yet contained by the daily visits.
He was ecstatic when Clarence was allowed to come home; he looked forward to taking care of him. It was the end of May and school was over—he had missed final exams, but that became trivial in the face of this—and Michael could devote himself completely to Clarence. Talking with Ben and reading everything he could find about AIDS, Michael had decided Clarence would be one of those cases whose remission lasted for years. He might die, of course, one day. Michael knew that, but in the way most people know they too will die, eventually. He fed Clarence, monitored his medication, and indulged him, doing everything he could that first month to get Clarence over this last hill into good health. Clarence remained in a quiet limbo of naps, fatigue, and restlessness. He seemed removed from Michael’s efforts, amused and touched by them. The one time he tried to talk about death, Michael wouldn’t hear of it. He scolded Clarence for thinking about it. He wouldn’t even let Clarence talk about his past life, talk that suggested his life was almost over. Michael told him to concentrate instead on his next movie, the strange project Jack encouraged him to make called Murder in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Marcel Proust investigated the murder of a duchess, doing most of the work in the confines of his cork-lined room and coming up with nothing more conclusive than that Time did it. Jack even wrote a few pages of script to give Clarence something to storyboard. The point of the story was beyond Michael, but he was pleased it made Clarence think in the future tense.
They tried to have sex, just hands and kissing, but Clarence’s body couldn’t respond and Michael felt bad, as if he were taking advantage of an invalid. Clarence tossed and turned in his bed at night, and they agreed it would be better if Michael slept in the bed in the spare room.
In Memory of Angel Clare Page 14