Me Times Three

by Alex Witchel

  Susie Schein read my piece on Idina and liked it, though of course she had some notes. I worked on it, flashing back to Dr. D’Amico. It had been so easy! And fun! He had been remarkably good-natured and relaxed, I thought. There seemed to be a lot of those people in the world. People who didn’t work seven days a week. People who met for a first date and hadn’t booked the honeymoon by dessert. Even back in New York, at the New Year’s functions on my Paul schedule, I had a better-than-okay time, talking to guys about any old thing without trying to foresee their genetic possibilities. For the first time in a long time, a new year really felt like one to me.

  That Monday morning passed almost in slow motion, the way it often can after a vacation. But right after lunch came a sudden barrage. Mark Lewis’s agent called to arrange the long-awaited drinks meeting; a publicist tried cheerily to convince me that each of her three clients was perfect for us; the requisite freelance writer, broke after the holidays, sniffed around for his paycheck. By the time the phone rang a fourth time, I dropped the hello and simply said, “Yes?”

  “Well, happy new year to you, too,” I heard Paul say.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I demanded.

  “I was seeing Marie.”

  “For ten days? I must have called fifty times.”

  “Sorry, Sandy. It was an action-packed vacation.”

  “I’ll bet it was,” I said, leaning over to close my door so that I could light a cigarette. “As a matter of fact,” I said smugly, “I had some action of my own.”

  “Oh?” His voice grew faint.

  “I went to Acapulco.”

  “Really.”

  “Really. All right, what’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You sound deeply bizarre, and I want to know why.”

  “Well, Sandra, that’s actually the reason I’m calling.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  There was silence and a breath.

  “So …” He paused again, and then, in a rush, he said, “I have AIDS.”

  My head jerked, as if I’d been hit. “What?” It came out as a whisper.

  “I have AIDS,” he repeated, this time more clearly.

  “Do you mean you’re HIV-positive?” I asked, gripping my desk.

  “No, it’s past HIV-positive. It’s full-blown AIDS.”

  “But, I thought you’d been tested and you were fine.”

  “Well …” His voice trailed off, then came back strong. “I didn’t get tested when I said I did. I chickened out. I decided I didn’t want to know.”

  “You lied to me!” I shouted. Now, there was a sentence I could hang on to.

  “Yeah, I guess I did.” He sounded tired yet buoyed, somehow, by that strange surge of energy people get in an emergency. “I just didn’t want to know,” he said.

  “Right.” I felt myself grow cold, trying to get logical. “Tell me what happened, how you found out.”

  “Well,” he said, “it was a good indication something was wrong when I passed out at the dinner table on Christmas Eve and Marie had me rushed to the hospital. They did all the blood tests I’d been trying to avoid, but at least it took them until two days after Christmas to tell me the results.”

  “How is Marie taking it?”

  “She’s been amazing, actually,” he said admiringly. “She’s strong as a horse. She says I’m going to beat it and that we’ll work together as a family.”

  “And your dad?”

  “Well, he doesn’t know yet.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Marie’s going to wait until there’s a better time to tell him.”

  “Romano, does he really not know you’re gay?”

  “I think, Sandy, that this might have happened because of the drugs,” he said. He sounded as if he were choking.

  I lit another cigarette and said nothing.

  “Look, who knows how this happened?” he sighed. “Yes, I had a lot of unprotected sex, but I did a lot of drugs, too. I used needles, and it could have happened that way.”

  “Oh, God,” I said suddenly. “What about Sally?”

  “She knows, and she’s being wonderful. She explained to her parents about the drugs and how that was a phase of my life that ended a long time ago.”

  I stared at the wall, trying to steady myself. I focused in hard, on the detail of the paint, but when I saw that it looked like skin I turned away.

  “Is she at risk?” I finally asked.

  “She took the test, and she’s negative.”

  “Did you tell your boss?”

  “Yeah, I had to. He’s being great.”

  “Paul?” My voice cracked.

  “Don’t, Sandra, please,” he said thickly. “Everything will be fine. There are medical breakthroughs every day, and I have this terrific doctor at Cedars-Sinai who everyone goes to. It will all be fine.”

  “I want to see you,” I said.

  “Give me some time,” he answered. “I don’t think I’m up to you yet.”

  I half smiled. “I often feel that way myself.”

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I have a meeting.”

  “Paul,” I began, but he cut me off. “Gotta go,” he said, and the phone clicked.

  This is truly not happening, I thought as I stood and mechanically started stashing papers in different piles. I switched off my computer and grabbed my bag and walked to the elevators. Another editor looked quizzically in my direction, but I turned my back on her and gulped air and jabbed the elevator button. Let them fire me. I would go to California and stay there.

  At that point, AIDS was a death sentence. There was no cure, no agreed-upon treatment, and everyone was convinced that the only way you got it (unless you were hemophiliac) was by doing something wrong. That meant promiscuous gay sex or drug use. Very few women had it then, and very few kids. When Paul and I were still at Yale, in 1982, a directing student showed us a purple bruise on his hip; it had just appeared and he was losing weight and none of the doctors at the health service could figure out what was wrong. Six months later he was dead.

  By 1988 everyone knew that the purple bruise was Kaposi’s sarcoma, everyone knew that when an obituary said a single man died of pneumonia he had really died of AIDS, and everyone knew that there was no cure. No one talked about managing the illness and living with it. Some people still thought it could be spread by mosquitoes.

  Once outside, I gulped the freezing air and walked up Madison Avenue, past the shops, past the dwindling throngs of bargain hunters still looking for post-Christmas sales. The acrid smoke of overheated chestnuts burned the back of my throat, and I crossed over to Fifth and reversed direction, walking downtown. I wasn’t sure where to go or what to do. Who could I call? Who could help me?

  I stood on a corner, waiting for the light to change, and caught the eye of a German shepherd on a leash beside me. We looked at each other for a long moment before he jumped up and licked my face, making a crying sound. His owner pulled him away.

  I kept moving, feeling the dog’s saliva dry on my jaw, and for a while I followed the back that was directly ahead of me, a man in a black coat. I used him as a guide, to keep me upright, on the sidewalk, moving forward. When I got to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I walked up the steps and through the door. It was dark inside, a comforting darkness, and I walked into the warmth of the sanctuary, where people in front of me dipped their fingers in holy water and crossed themselves and moved silently down the rows.

  I walked down the center aisle. No one looked up; people were either lost in thought or lost in prayer. One woman clutched a blue tissue in her fist. I slid down a row and sat on the bench, drawing my coat close. I looked up, up at the majesty of the building, the awesome beauty that man could make to offer God, and I listened as the organ played and the chords struck the room around me. I bent my head as if to weep, and prayed.

  10

  It was one of life’s little ironies, I thought, that I would be meeting Mark Lewis—who w
as ten minutes late and counting—at the same table at Café 43 where Carla Jones and I had, months ago, attempted female bonding. I would have asked the waiter to move me, but no other table was free.

  I studied the Cruvinet list. They had the same Edna Valley Chardonnay Carla had ordered—she probably knew it because Bucky had learned it in his wine course. It was funny, I thought idly, fooling with the corners of my starched napkin, how so few people ever have an independent thought. Someone you know tells you something he knows and then you walk around saying it as if you knew it all along. Bucky, I realized too late, didn’t have an original thought in his head. The wine was what someone else drank. The vacation was where a buddy had been. The restaurant of choice was a place the boss loved. Why had I never understood that before?

  “Um, hi. Sandra Berlin?”

  I started. “Yes,” I said, rising. “Mark Lewis?”

  “Yes. Hello.”

  He sat down and put his hand to his tie. “Do you mind?” he asked, beginning to loosen it. His face was flushed, and he was short of breath, as if he had run an obstacle course to get here.

  “No, that’s fine, of course not,” I said.

  He pulled the tie off and stuffed it into his jacket pocket.

  “I guess we’ve sort of met before,” I said, smiling. “Sorry about that.”

  He smiled, too. “No problem,” he said. “Um, I don’t like those kinds of parties, either.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I answered, handing him the Cruvinet list. He lowered his eyes and studied it.

  I studied him. Mark Lewis was of medium height, in his mid-thirties, with thinning hair and enormous slate-blue eyes that dominated his face and seemed surprised, somehow. He was preppy-dressed, with a navy blazer, khakis, and a striped shirt, open now at the neck. He looked like the kindly, somewhat absentminded faculty adviser to a boys’-school newspaper. Smart and in charge, but young and hip enough to get the joke. I guess he looked the same as at the party, though he was tan now. I probably couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup, since his only identifiable feature was starting his sentences with “Um.” For a writer known for his definitive opinions, that was a curious habit. Maybe he wasn’t such a tough guy off the page.

  The waiter arrived to take the order, and Mark looked at me. “I’ll have the Edna Valley Chardonnay,” I said authoritatively.

  He turned back to the list. “I’m not familiar with the Havens Merlot,” he said. “Is it good?”

  The waiter sparked to life. “Terrific!” he exclaimed, and pointed out one or two others, and Mark asked questions and they had the kind of conversation Bucky used to have about this one tasting like berries or that one being famous for its smoky undertones. Mark leaned back in his chair and listened intently, cocking his head and running his index finger back and forth over his lips as if someone were imparting the secrets of the universe and he was pondering what to do with them. Which spurred the waiter to even greater heights, until finally I said, “Forget the Edna Valley. I’ll try the Havens.”

  Mark looked startled. He seemed to have forgotten I was there.

  “I think I’ll have the Rutherford Hill Merlot,” he said, and I gasped. He looked at me. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, fine, it’s fine,” I answered. Bucky loved Rutherford Hill Merlot. It never occurred to me that anyone else in the world even knew about it, much less drank it. “I like it a lot.”

  “Well, then we can trade tastes,” he said amiably, and we smiled at each other, and I felt something give in my stomach, in that place under my ribs where I had been feeling punched all this time. Whatever it was had released, and I breathed freely, at last. He wasn’t scary at all. I was beginning to understand why people had agents.

  When the waiter left, Mark looked at me full in the face, and seemed not to be in motion for the first time since he arrived. His expression was expectant, almost optimistic, as if he were convinced that I would tell him the most enchanting story and he couldn’t wait to hear it. I stared. I didn’t know what I could possibly say to satisfy that expression, no matter how nice he seemed. Also, he was such an incredible writer with such an impressive vocabulary—“um”s aside—that surely everything I said would be grammatically incorrect and instantly alert him to the fact that I should be nowhere near his copy.

  So much for breathing freely. I froze. I looked down, I looked up. I started to swallow, thought it sounded too noisy, stopped, and figured I was going to choke. Then I felt light-headed and thought I might have a full-scale panic attack right there at the table. All within about ten seconds. This was really Miss Belladonna’s fault. If she had met him, why hadn’t she called him herself? Because she would never let herself be refused, that’s why. That was Susie’s job. And Susie knew better than anyone that I was only a glorified assistant with a fancy title and no power. She should have had this meeting, even if it meant forgoing the opportunity to torture me once Mark decided to pass on Jolie! and make his extra money elsewhere. Well, you know what? Fuck her. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

  I took a deep, stabilizing breath and dug my fingernails into my palms. “Tell me what you’d like to write for us,” I said, hoping I sounded briskly professional.

  “I’m not sure,” he parried. “Tell me what you have in mind.”

  Where was that wine? My jaw seemed wired shut.

  “Well, we’ve heard you’re from Chicago, and we thought you might want to write about that, give sort of an insider’s view into your hometown.”

  Should I have said “sort of”? That wasn’t terribly precise. And was it “view into” or “view of”?

  But he was already shaking his head. “I know what you want,” he said, “but as I think my agent told you, I’m going through a divorce, and my wife, who’s also from Chicago, is threatening to move back there with our son, and both our families are there, and it’s not a good time for me to be writing about it now just for fun.”

  I was torn between the relief of knowing he should have said “for me to write about it now” and the surprise of learning he had a son.

  “How old is he?” I asked.

  “Almost two,” he said. I must have looked shocked, because he flushed and added hurriedly, “I know, it’s the old story, really. My ex-wife thought a baby would help the marriage, but obviously, it didn’t turn out that way.”

  “I guess not.” I wasn’t sure how to respond. I certainly couldn’t lay claim to an old story any more original. I remembered that Peter Darby had told him about my broken engagement.

  The shared realization of being felled by such desperately ordinary circumstances sent us both into an extended silence in which the mood palpably dipped. Glasses in hand, we were, I sensed, in imminent danger of sliding into a bar scene straight out of a Eugene O’Neill play. Any second now, someone would say “pipe dream” and all would be lost.

  But something caught Mark’s eye, and he sat straight up. “Do you recognize the man who just came in?” he asked. I followed his gaze and saw Irving Aronburg, a big-deal gallery owner who was always being photographed for gossip columns with Hollywood stars who were buying his artists’ work.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Do you know him?”

  “Since I was twelve years old,” he answered. “My father’s a lawyer who did a lot of work for him when Aronburg was just starting out, and I used to hang around his gallery whenever I came to New York. He was never particularly nice to me—he thought I was a strange kid, because I cared so much about painting—and here it is all these years later and I’m writing about most of his shows.”

  I suddenly remembered reading about this somewhere. “Didn’t you just have a big fight with him?” I asked.

  Mark nodded. “He banned me from the gallery during Francis Sydney’s first show because he said I would never be able to appreciate the work—I was too intellectual to respond to it viscerally.”

  “So what happened?”

  His grin was devilish. “I went to the opening a
nyway. It was packed. Irving had so many models there, and so many of his garment-district friends trying to pick them up, that I walked in wearing a hat and a different pair of glasses and passed literally in front of him without being recognized. Then I wrote a column about it for Art and Our Times. He went insane.”

  “I guess you didn’t like the work.”

  The devilish grin had gotten even wider. “I loved it,” he said, laughing now. “That was the best part. Sydney was terrific. And once he read my piece and heard the story about Irving banning me, he threw a fit and threatened to switch galleries.”

  What a troublemaker he was. And fearless. I admired that. Everyone I knew, certainly at the magazine, was dying to be liked, a commodity I’d come to consider overrated, because what it ends up meaning is that you’re never allowed to say no. But what was inviting about Mark Lewis was that he wasn’t desperate for approval but he wasn’t a snob either. I could tell that if he hadn’t genuinely admired the work he would have said so, but the fact that he was able to dupe Irving Aronburg and boost the career of a new artist was even better. He might love art, but he loved a good story too.

  “Mark?” Irving Aronburg was standing at the table. He was about seventy, bald and round and wearing large black-framed glasses that someone must have told him made a striking statement, when in fact they made him look like a very fat bug. Like so many men of his generation, he had managed to parlay his lack of polish into a tough-guy business stance, fancying himself a frontiersman of sorts—from Brooklyn.

  Mark had stood and was shaking Aronburg’s hand. “Irving, nice to see you,” he said, turning toward me. “Sandra Berlin, Irving Aronburg.”

  I stood as well, and he scoped me, head to toe. It was one leer away from vaudeville.

  “Well, Mark, I see that life is treating you well,” Aronburg said, as if delivering a proclamation. He had apparently decided to let bygones be bygones and was quite pleased with himself for confronting the enemy head-on. “How are the folks?”