Sticky Kisses

by Greg Johnson

  Relieved, everyone laughed. Pace had joined them, too; with a grim smile he held out the leftover envelopes.

  He said, “Don’t everybody lunge for these at once.”

  They laughed again, and for a while they chatted excitedly about Ricky and Mitch and the “scene” that had taken place. Abby learned that Ricky had a housecleaning business, and that Mitch had been one of his clients for several years; not long ago, Ricky had quit. It was Connie, of course, who alone in their group knew why, and he told them breathlessly that he’d run into Ricky at the Metro late one night—Ricky was not above doing a little hustling, Connie added—and Ricky had told him that he’d opened a drawer of Mitch’s nightstand, just looking innocently for a Kleenex (“Yeah, right,” said a slender, fair-haired man who stood next to Connie, and who’d been introduced to Abby as “Edwin”) and inside the drawer, guess what Ricky had found? Here, of course, Connie paused for dramatic effect, glancing over his shoulder as if he feared being overheard.

  “It was a pile of magazines,” he said. “Kiddie porn, believe it or not—yes, a big messy stack of magazines, right there in the nightstand of our virtuous, nonviolent Mitch!”

  Connie took a deep breath, his eyes damp with excitement.

  “Then, fueled by moral indignation, heroic Ricky started ransacking the house and evidently found a few dozen videos with titles like Hot Tots and Little Weenies—I’m not kidding, you guys!—and even some mailings from NAMBLA, too, that suggested Mitch is a card-carrying member. Ricky claimed that later he phoned Mitch and confronted him. He said Mitch started bawling and swearing he’d throw everything out, he knew he needed help and was going to get it, he was begging Ricky please not to call the police, please don’t ruin my reputation—that whole routine. And Ricky didn’t. He just quit cleaning at Mitch’s, that’s all. But obviously if he told me about it, he’s told other people, and after tonight it’s bound to get around to Mitch’s patients, or their parents…”

  That’s right, Connie told Abby after a suitable pause: many of Mitch’s dental patients were children. He was renowned, in fact, for how well he worked with them, allayed their fears, made them laugh.

  So there they stood, Abby and Thom and Connie, with two or three other close friends of Pace’s, and finally the subject had been closed when Pace said, in his deep booming voice, “Oh the hell with it, what can you do? Mitch is a close friend, and he’ll stay a close friend. As for Ricky, he doesn’t clean houses worth a shit—I hired him once and never asked him back. But I guess he needed to do that, for his own conscience or whatever. The hell with it—he’s a friend of mine, too.”

  Shaking his head, Connie said in marveling voice, “Pace, you’re so wonderfully tolerant.”

  “That’s why he has so many friends,” Thom said, smiling.

  “That, and his fabulous parties!” Edwin said, giving Pace a friendly poke in the ribs.

  “You bastard,” Pace told Edwin, cheerfully. “Why haven’t you gotten another drink?”

  But Edwin had to leave, and the others took that as permission to say their goodbyes as well. At the door, Thom said to Pace, “Really, don’t worry. This time next week, no one will even be talking about it.”

  “Hell, let ‘em talk!” Pace said, smiling. “I don’t give a good goddamn.”

  At the door, they discovered the wet snow had turned to rain, so Pace loaned them an umbrella and, huddling close together, they jogged out to the car. Abby’s head was swirling, as though filled even now with that image of wild coiling snowflakes she’d seen from Pace’s upstairs room; but she felt strangely calm. A dreamlike aura had descended, cloaking these past few hours. Had she really met an impossibly handsome, black-clad stranger, whose warm breath had mingled with the thrilling cold of expensive champagne to give her an intoxicated sense, however short-lived, of a wild new life, a wild new self, as unpredictable and exciting as those torrents of snow that had blown against the ceiling? Now as she and her brother drove through the drizzling familiar streets of Ansley Park, enveloped in a companionable silence, she doubted it, and felt she could forget what had happened as easily as she would shrug off any dream. Yes, she was forgetting already.

  As they pulled into Thorn’s complex she saw that her brother was shaking his head. “I still can’t believe it,” he said. “Poor Pace.”

  Abby blinked, then glanced over. “Believe what?” she said.

  Chapter 4

  During the week before Christmas, an unbroken string of drizzly, cold days, Thom navigated traffic-clogged Peachtree Street each morning with Abby, Connie, and Warren, on their way to visit Carter in Crawford Long Hospital.

  After a brief period during which he’d seemed to improve with a new drug “cocktail” that had brought his T-cell count into triple digits, he’d gotten worse just as abruptly, suffering a fainting spell one evening during a mild workout at the gym. Later that night, he’d blacked out while having dinner with some friends at the Colonnade (someone made the inevitable joke: “Maybe it was the food”) and the next morning his doctor had him in the hospital undergoing a battery of tests that were still inconclusive. Other problems followed: violent headaches, incessant vomiting and diarrhea, intermittent fevers that reached such dangerous levels his doctor firmly refused Carter’s repeated pleas that he wanted to go home and spend his “last days” with a bit of dignity.

  These were not his last days, she told him.

  Dr. Mcllhaney was a petite, serious-minded woman highly admired in the local gay community; she’d been known as an “AIDS doctor” long before it was fashionable. Yet she had a stubborn, authoritarian streak that reminded Thom uncomfortably of the nuns from school. Thom had been in the room that day, an awkward bystander, listening as the doctor spoke to Carter in a tone that closed off any argument. There were more tests to do, she said, and he should remember that he’d suffered bouts of grave illness before and had pulled through. These were not his last days, she repeated.

  Thom understood that she’d been hurt by Carter’s request. Her tone had changed slightly; there was an edge of little-girl’s plaintiveness in her voice that pulled at Thorn’s heart. Yet during endless conversations since that day it became clear that no one believed her, this time—not Thom or Connie or Warren, Carter’s closest friends, and certainly not Carter himself, who had kept his moist fevered eyes fixed on the muted TV screen during his doctor’s pep talk.

  That had been Sunday; now it was Wednesday morning and little had changed. When Thom stopped for a light at Tenth Street, Connie’s voice—atypically somber and irony-free—complained from the backseat.

  “I hate to say this, but these daily visits are getting to me. I don’t know how long I can keep it up.”

  Thom glanced into the rear-view mirror, just in time to see Warren reach across and give Connie a hug.

  “You shouldn’t feel obligated,” Thom said. “You could visit on alternate days, or you could just call him. I don’t think Carter’s keeping track of the visits.”

  “That’s right,” Warren said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, honey.”

  Thom glanced sideways at Abby, and they exchanged a brief smile. Just the night before, he’d told her the long, tangled history of Connie and Warren, who had dated for several months until Warren, Connie said, became too “clingy” and Connie broke it off in favor of a Platonic friendship. They’d lived together now for six years in Connie’s large, expensively furnished condominium off Pharr Road, and everyone knew that Warren was still madly in love with Connie. Outsiders meeting them for the first time usually assumed they were lovers. They shopped, cooked, took semiannual vacations; they spent holidays, including Christmas, with each other instead of with their families.

  Thom thought Connie was lucky to have sweet, baby-faced Warren, with his shining mop of light-brown hair (“an altar boy’s haircut,” Connie once observed) and his damp, deep-brown eyes Thom could not help silently comparing to the worshipful eyes of his own uncritical admirers, Mitzi and Chloe. Sometimes
Connie did treat Warren shabbily, canceling long-standing plans in deference to one of Connie’s gorgeous, temporary boyfriends; or, after a few glasses of wine, making a cutting remark when other people were present, embarrassing Warren and, Thom knew, hurting him deeply. They had one of those strange, intense loves that often develop between two gay men: less than a marriage but more than a friendship, a unique relation crafted slowly through years of wily bargaining and crazy need, funded by shared experience and mutual knowledge and an awareness on each man’s part that the other knew him thoroughly and still loved him, and you thought long and hard before tossing that away.

  Warren reached across and patted Connie’s hand. “Carter knows how sensitive you are. He wouldn’t mind if you skipped a day.”

  Connie looked unconvinced. “But we’ve been going every morning, this same little group. We’re like the four musketeers or something. If you guys keep going and I stop, it’ll look like I don’t care. I do care, but seeing Carter like that makes me depressed for the rest of the day.”

  Abby smiled back at Connie. “I think Warren’s right,” she said. “Tomorrow, why don’t you and I both stay home? Thom and Warren can go. Would that make you feel better?”

  Connie said, “Oh, sweetheart, thank you. Maybe we can go to lunch or something, just the two of us.” He nodded, clearly relieved. “I’ll take you to the Peasant Uptown, where all the ladies who lunch go. I need to pop into Saks anyway.”

  The others laughed, even Warren, though Connie had not intended to be funny.

  “What’s so amusing about Saks?” he demanded.

  As they turned into the hospital parking lot, Thom began steeling himself for the sight of Carter’s gaunt, near-skeletal face and arms, the glaze of deadened hopelessness in his eyes. These past few days, everyone but Dr. Mcllhaney seemed aware that Carter had given up; the whole story was in his eyes, for anyone to read.

  Those first couple of days, upon entering the impersonal, bustling corridors of Crawford Long, one of them would make the obligatory remark about hating hospitals, and the others would agree, and they’d giggle uncomfortably during the elevator ride and the long march down to Carter’s room. In this way they had immunized themselves, or tried to, against the inevitably depressing hospital aura of brisk white-clad industry overlaying the pulsing silence of animal decay and human sorrow leaking from the rooms they hurried past. Today, jammed in an elevator with two orderlies, a patient in a wheelchair, and a corpulent nun in an old-fashioned habit of black veil and white wimple, all four of them stayed silent. By rote, they veered to the left when the doors shuddered open. The west corridor of Carter’s floor was the so-called “AIDS wing” where, Thom and the others had informed Abby, they’d visited—and lost—other friends in recent years. It might have been Thorn’s imagination, but it seemed to him now that their pace had slowed, as though they were avoiding the inevitable moment of entering the room and donning their masks of fake cheerfulness for Carter.

  “Do you think he’ll be asleep?” Connie whispered outside the half-open door. “Maybe we shouldn’t have come this early.”

  Thom glanced at his watch: five past eleven.

  “Really, you don’t have to go in,” Warren said, putting one hand to his hip in mild exasperation. “Why don’t you go downstairs and wait in the coffee shop?”

  Connie shook his head. “Nope,” he said, “I’ve made it this far. I’m not going to be a pussy about it.”

  “It’s a little late for that resolution,” Thom said, annoyed. “Come on, then.”

  As they entered, Thom was surprised to see that Carter was sitting up. His head was turned vaguely in the direction of the TV screen where Sally Jessy Raphael was interviewing a weeping, overweight woman.

  “I know this is hard,” Sally was saying.

  Thom grabbed the remote and pressed the mute button.

  “Hey, Carter,” Thom said, as the others shuffled in behind him. “You’re looking better this morning.”

  Why did he tell such extravagant lies? Carter looked exactly the same: exhausted, spiritless, a bag of sticks in his hospital-issue nightgown. Thom had offered to bring pajamas, but Carter said the gown was more comfortable.

  “Hey, guys,” Carter said, his voice croaky from disuse. Slowly, he licked his lips. He reached a shaky hand toward the night table, grasped a plastic cup, and brought it to his mouth. But it was empty. Thom sprang forward, took the water pitcher, slowly filled the cup. It was always a relief to do something, at such times. Carter’s hand was still trembling, so Thom helped him hold the cup while he took a few sips.

  “Thanks,” Carter whispered. A drop of water meandered down the side of his whisker-stubbled jaw. During the weekend Thom had asked if he wanted a shave, but Carter declined. His skin hurt, he said.

  Now Connie bolted forward, energetic as a windup doll. For all his bellyaching, Thom often thought Connie was better than any of them at navigating these awkward visits.

  “Hi, sweetie,” he said, planting a kiss on Carter’s forehead. “What’s in that pitcher—vodka? We should have brought olives and hors d’oeuvres. For that matter, we should have brought dancing boys!”

  Carter smiled, vaguely. “Hey, Connie,” he said.

  Now Warren came forward and greeted him, followed by Abby, and for several minutes they chatted about general, safe topics, carefully avoiding direct questions to Carter, who clearly lacked the energy to say more than a few words. Thorn’s heart had become a sore lump in his chest. He, too, would be depressed for the rest of the day, but unlike Connie he had a busy schedule to distract him: half a dozen phone calls to return, a client who wanted to see some houses in Peachtree Hills, an inspection for one of his contracted listings at four o’clock. During the ride over, his pager had buzzed twice at his side, but he hadn’t bothered to check the numbers. The callers could wait.

  In recent years, it seemed to Thom that his life came more and more to be ruled by the telephone. (He was the only agent in his office who did not yet have a cell phone; he needed his drives around town as a breather from the pressures of clients, lawyers, other agents. The pager was bad enough.) Over the phone, he’d learned that he was HIV-positive: he’d been in the process of switching health insurance, and a doctor in California had called him. During a closing, he’d gotten the news that Roy had died: he’d been summoned by the lawyer’s secretary to take an “urgent” call and had heard the dreaded words alone, in an empty conference room. Almost all his boyfriends, during his four or five years of frenetic dating after Roy’s death, had broken up with him that way, too cowardly or too indifferent to tell him in person. There was one exception: Edward, the man who had infected him, had taken him to dinner at the Food Studio and abruptly ended the relationship as they shared a chocolate torte. (Months later, in a Christmas card to his lawyer-friend Andrew in San Francisco, he’d called this the night of the “chocolate tort.”) At the time, Thom hadn’t known Edward was positive, much less that he’d infected Thom, and because Edward had been the most glamorous of Thorn’s boyfriends, and the one, excepting Roy, he’d loved the most, he’d been grateful that Edward at least had told him in person.

  It embarrassed Thom now to remember that, on the verge of tears, he’d thanked Edward for the “courtesy” of breaking the news so gently, and in person. Startled, Edward had simply said, “You’re welcome.”

  Thom hadn’t told him that Steven, the twenty-something blond stockbroker with rippling abs Thom had dated the year before Edward, had left the bad news on Thorn’s answering machine.

  Standing here with his sister and several of his closest friends, one of whom was dying, he saw that era of semi-desperate searching as remote, even vaguely comical. If he hadn’t come away from those years with HIV infection, it might now seem merely amusing, an antic period that in retrospect was clearly his way of dealing with Roy’s death. Maybe there had been a kind of death wish there, after all, since with a couple of the boyfriends he hadn’t been “safe,” whatever that term r
eally meant. One time a condom had broken, and although his boyfriend Trent (a two-month fling he’d had after Steven, but before Edward) could have withdrawn in time, he did not; an hour later, the heat of their wild intimacy worn off, he’d apologized profusely and sworn to Thom that he was negative, that he’d just been tested the previous month, specifically because he’d decided to sleep with Thom. Perhaps Trent, who at twenty was the youngest man Thom had dated in a long while, had glimpsed the skeptical light in Thorn’s eyes, for Trent’s own eyes had filled with tears, and his protestations had grown even more intense. But later, when Thorn’s frenzy of dating was over and he’d gotten his bad news from that California doctor, he’d dutifully called each man. All claimed to be negative, all got tested again, and all phoned Thom back and told him, to his great relief, that they were still negative.

  All except for Edward. Their final conversation, too, had taken place over the phone and had upset Thom deeply. Edward’s voice, his tone, were almost unrecognizable, as though Thom were speaking to a different person. Dour and resentful, even a bit sarcastic: “You might want to get tested, Thom dear, I’ve gotten a bit of bad news. I’m positive for the dreaded plague, isn’t that fun?” No sympathy for Thorn’s bewilderment, though Edward had claimed he was negative—and monogamous—when they were together.

  “Come on, Miss Innocent,” he’d added, that day on the phone, “I can hardly believe—”

  Shocked, Thom had simply hung up. They never spoke again.

  Thom hadn’t told Abby any of this. Except for Chip, the guy he’d been dating casually, and irregularly, for the past few months and from whom he expected a “dear John” phone call (or answering machine message?) any day now, Thom hadn’t said much to Abby about the men he’d known, partly because she had seemed uncomfortable when Thom mentioned her own recent boyfriend. Was it Gary, or Graham?—he’d already forgotten the name. Thom supposed they ought to be discussing such things, but for now it seemed easier to avoid them. He and Abby were still trying to relearn each other, he reasoned, after their four-year estrangement; they picked their way slowly and carefully, shadowed by the unspoken but powerful awareness of their mother, hundreds of miles away but hovering invisibly over their every conversation, their every reference to the past or the future.