Quarantine

by Rahul Mehta

  Body. Antwon was standing still again, staring into the audience. “She also left me her life’s savings—seventeen thousand dollars—which I added to some money I’d saved over the years. I used it all for a down payment on an apartment in Chinatown off Grand Street. Now I live down the street from my ex-wife, whom I married before I became a full-time fudge-packer and she became a full-time donut-banger, though we should have known, even then, that that was the way it was going to go. Not that I regret it. What’s to regret? Fudge and donuts? It’s not such a bad combination. Back then, she aborted our child. Now I babysit the daughter she adopted with her partner.”

  A middle-aged man and woman stood up angrily and angled their way toward the exit. Others followed.

  “Mouth!” a rogue audience member shouted, not the girl on the side of the stage who had been designated to say mouth. Then she said mouth, too, echoing the audience member. But Antwon didn’t stop speaking. Maybe he was confused. Or maybe he was deliberately ignoring the orders he’d been given.

  “My mother was my only family, the only family I know of. Now I am alone.”

  Mouth, the designated student said more emphatically this time, and Antwon stopped.

  Body. Antwon hustled toward the back of the stage, then threw himself against the back wall, repeatedly, violently, as though he were trying to put back in place a dislocated shoulder. He fell to the floor and thrashed around. I wondered if he hurt himself.

  He was still wearing the Band-Aid I had smoothed on his chin.

  We’d closed his eyes. We’d shut his mouth.

  The audience was bored or, worse, hostile. They were beginning to snicker at him.

  They didn’t understand.

  We’d been counting down numbers all along, and I looked over at the student holding the cards and noticed we were down to one. I called it out and then less than a minute later, zero. I watched the card fall to the floor and slide a little toward An-twon.

  The bass from the neighbors’ stereo reached up through the floor and shook me awake. I squinted at the clock: four a.m. I got out of bed and stumbled toward the bathroom. I could hear the shower from the hallway. When I entered the bathroom, I could see it was on full blast. Antwon was next to it, lying flat on the bathroom floor. He had dragged his pillows and blanket with him.

  “How can you live like this?” He had to shout to be heard over the noise.

  The shower helped muffle the techno, but only a little.

  I said, “I have to pee.”

  “Who’s stopping you?”

  I stepped over him, lifted the toilet seat, hooked my thumb in the waistband of my pajamas, tugged them down. I hadn’t switched on the bathroom light; the only light was from the hallway. As I was pissing, I looked to see if Antwon was watching, but I couldn’t tell in the shadows. I briefly imagined myself swiveling my hips. I pictured the stream of piss hitting his face, his chest. Would he have been insulted? Or turned on? Which would I have preferred?

  On my way out, as I was stepping over him, I stopped for a moment, lingering. My legs straddled his body. My knees bent ever so slightly. I started to lower myself onto him. Then I stopped, straightened, took a step to leave. As I did this, did I feel his hand briefly grasp the cuff of my pajama? Did I hear—through the thump of the techno, through the crash of the shower—a murmur, a whisper? Squirrel. Stay.

  The next morning was another beautiful day, so we decided to leave for the airport early and to stop at a park for a picnic. Antwon had a new laptop computer, and he was afraid to put it in the trunk because he said it would get too hot, and he was afraid to leave it in the backseat because he said someone would steal it, so we took turns carrying it as we hiked through the woods to the picnic spot. When it was my turn, I complained loudly about how heavy it was, though it was fairly light, which everyone, of course, knew.

  After we found our spot and settled down, Antwon asked if we wanted to see a funny photo of him. He pulled out an expired passport stowed in the front compartment of his laptop case, where he also stored his current passport. The passport must have been almost thirty years old. Antwon’s name was listed as “Clarence.” He said he’d changed it when he moved to New York.

  “Why do you keep this?” Don asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  I didn’t recognize Antwon in the photo. He looked stoned. Defiant. His neck was thick, his jaw squared, his head tilted backward. He was gap-toothed, his hair in an enormous Afro.

  He is sexy, I thought, looking at the photo. I thought it again later that night in bed with Don, and two nights later in bed alone in my own apartment, and many nights after that.

  Don napped in the sun, and Antwon told me stories about dodging the draft, fucking his way across Europe and the Middle East, living in a kibbutz in Israel, which apparently was a popular thing to do at the time, even if you weren’t Jewish. I’d never done any of those things or been to any of those places.

  “My dad dodged the draft, too,” I said. “But he was only successful for so long. It finally came down to a lottery, and if he got picked he probably would have gone back to India instead of serving, and I’d be living there now instead of here.”

  Antwon told me his ex-wife was Martina—a friend of Don’s, a performance artist who sometimes went by “Martin” and whom I had met many times, but I never knew she’d been married to Antwon. He said she didn’t tell him about the abortion until much later, until it was over. He said, “Not that it would have changed anything.”

  He told me when he first moved to New York he shared a studio apartment with a cast member of the original production of A Chorus Line, when it was still off-Broadway, long before anyone knew or even dreamed what it would become. He said he’d been asked to do some of the choreography, but had said no. He said if he had said yes, maybe he’d be rich now. Or maybe the show would have flopped. Who knew?

  I was impressed by the life Antwon had led, the life he continued to lead. Impressed in the same way I’d been at the reading he curated, watching as the downtown luminaries swirled around him. Impressed in the same way Don must have been when he first took a class with Antwon, so many years ago, when he first saw Antwon perform. I tried to think of stories to tell Antwon, stories about my own life that might impress him, but nothing compared.

  When it was time for us to leave, Don insisted there was a shortcut back to the car, and he led us down a different path that turned into a field that became a swamp.

  “These are my new sneakers,” I whined, as the mud gulped at my shoes. “This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”

  Antwon laughed. “I sincerely hope this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, and that ever will.”

  4.

  The following fall, in a memoir-writing class in grad school, I tried to write about it: about me and Don and Antwon. When I met with my professor, a famous memoirist, to discuss my draft, I noticed she referred to all my characters as just that, as characters, not as real people, even though I was presumably writing about myself and people in my life. She would say to me “the narrator,” not “you,” as though this character just happened to have the same name as I did.

  She said, “When your narrator says, There are things only a lover knows, he should give examples.”

  She said, “The piece seems to be tiptoeing around race. It’s not clear enough to the reader that Antwon is black.”

  “Race is incidental,” I said.

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “It’s a big part of what your piece is about.”

  “It’s about desire,” I said.

  She said, “It’s about control.”

  She said, “Your readers will want to know why the narrator never confronts Don about whether or not he had sex with Antwon in exchange for money, why he never demands to know definitively. It seems ridiculous that your narrator doesn’t ask. Your narrator owes it to your readers to explain his rationale. If he doesn’t, your readers will think he’s holding
back.”

  She said, “They won’t like him. They won’t like you.”

  After leaving her office, I walked to a nearby café, which was closing in another month because a Starbucks had opened down the street. No one was sad about this; the coffee was terrible. But I was happy to be there. It had big couches and, since everyone had already switched to Starbucks, it was empty. I wanted to be alone.

  I wondered about the memoirist’s question. Why hadn’t I cornered Don? Why hadn’t I insisted he tell me everything?

  Around the time Don and I first moved in together and I discovered Antwon’s story, Mayor Giuliani had mounted an effort to “clean up the city,” as he called it. He started using antiquated zoning laws, which hadn’t been enforced in decades, to shut down strip bars and sex clubs. To many of us, it seemed like he was particularly targeting establishments with a queer clientele.

  Two of our closest friends, Priscilla and Charlene—lovers and PhD students at Columbia—joined a group called SexPanic! They did things like stand outside the mayor’s office, holding signs, chanting, “We’re here! We’re queer! We fuck strangers on the pier! Get used to it!” Priscilla occasionally worked as a stripper at the Blue Angel. She said we wouldn’t believe the types she met there. She once got paid four hundred bucks for shitting on a plate in a room in the St. Marks Hotel, while her client masturbated. Her dissertation was somehow connected to all this, but I wasn’t sure how.

  In a few years, Priscilla and Charlene would move to Wisconsin, leaving behind SexPanic! and the Blue Angel. They would settle into more or less quiet academic lives. But at the time, their lives seemed to me messy with passion. I admired them, in a way, and wanted to believe what they believed, though I couldn’t quite articulate what that was. Something about living fully and dangerously. Something about sexual freedom. It seemed to me to be the same thing that Antwon, years later, would describe at the Falls, when he talked about the urge to jump, about wanting to feel that feeling of floating or flying or falling, about wanting to feel free.

  If I had asked Don directly what had happened between him and Antwon, he would have told me, I have no doubt. But I didn’t want to ask. Not that I didn’t want to know. I did want to know. But I didn’t want to want to know. I didn’t want to need to know.

  The memoir-writing class had forced me to see this more clearly. It had also gotten me to think about something else: about the process of how writers transform the experiences of their lives. I remembered my own reading of my story, “The Night Jagdish Learned to Drive,” my cousin’s comment afterward, the lie I’d told him.

  The next weekend, when I visited Don, I dug out the anthology of gay erotica with Antwon’s story, no longer on my bookshelf, but now in Don’s closet in a cardboard box with a broken VCR and an old thesaurus. I hadn’t read Antwon’s story in years. Even now, it was difficult. I remembered the first time, lying on the floor in the one-bedroom in Crown Heights, I had to keep stopping, putting the book down. The boy in the story winces as he is fucked for the first time ever. That is the word the narrator uses: “winces.” The boy is described “baring his teeth,” and afterward, “crying quietly.”

  Reading the story again now, I told myself: Don wasn’t trying to be coy or deceptive when he said it wasn’t him. It wasn’t him. It isn’t him. It isn’t any of us.

  Even when it is.

  5.

  A few months later, I ran into Antwon, almost literally, on Second Avenue in the East Village. He smelled like cologne. He was holding a red rose.

  “Thank you,” I said, and reached for it.

  “It’s for me,” he said. He didn’t say who gave it to him. “Today I’m half a century old.”

  “Wow. Are you celebrating?”

  “I’m on my way to meet some friends at John’s.”

  “That’s Don’s favorite restaurant.”

  “Mine, too,” he said.

  “A coincidence,” I said, understanding that perhaps it wasn’t.

  Antwon rolled the stem of the rose between his fingers, and then held the blossom to his nose, breathing in deeply, half-shutting his eyes. He seemed to be considering something for a moment. He started to speak, then stopped.

  After a few seconds, he said, “What are you doing here?”

  “In New York? It was an impromptu trip. The day before, we had gone to the grocery store and we’d noticed that tomatoes were on sale. There was a sign above the display that read: In Celebration of Black History Month—Tomatoes are a key ingredient in African-American cooking. There was something so sad about that sign. I thought, This is the way we celebrate black history? Tomatoes on sale? We had to get out of there.”

  “You have good timing,” Antwon said. He pulled a card from his coat pocket and handed it to me. I looked at it. On the front was an image of Antwon in a Mohawk (which he wasn’t sporting now) and blindfolded by a pair of black lace stockings. On the back were details for his show at The Kitchen. The only time I’d seen Antwon perform were those nights when he visited us upstate. “Tomorrow and Sunday are the last two days,” he said. “Please come.”

  “I will,” I said.

  Later, while walking to the movie theater where I was meeting Don and some of our friends, I caught myself absentmindedly chewing on the corner of his postcard, a nervous habit from when I was a kid.

  Two days later, Don and I and our friend, with whom we were staying, were eating bagels in the kitchen. It was a bright morning, and the sun streamed into the room through a dirty window that opened out onto a fire escape. We were all quietly reading our separate sections of the Times when Don said excitedly, “Look,” and pointed out a review of Antwon’s performance. He read it out loud. It was glowing, an unequivocal rave. “Unsentimental,” Don read. “Achingly honest. The choreographer masterfully leads the performers, and by extension the audience, into complicated emotional terrain. The result is both terrifying and seductive.”

  We had all planned to attend that night. “It’s a good thing we already have reservations,” our friend said. “It’s sure to be sold out now.”

  I got up to fetch some orange juice and noticed, stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnet, the postcard of Antwon with the Mohawk, the one he gave me when I ran into him on the street. My bite marks perforated the corner.

  When I sat back down, Don was still looking at the paper, rereading the article. His eyes were wide, his mouth smiling broadly.

  That evening, I was sitting in the living room when Don came into the room and said it was time to go to the performance. I was wearing track pants and a sloppy T-shirt, and I was splayed out on the couch, clutching the remote control, my eyes fixed on the TV.

  “I’m not going.”

  “Why?” Don asked.

  I looked away from the screen. Don was standing there in a tailored dress shirt and designer jeans he had bought at Century 21 during an earlier trip. His brow was furrowed. He was holding his wool peacoat in his hands.

  There were so many things I could have said.

  “I’m feeling sick.”

  Don looked at me a moment. I could tell he was considering calling my bluff, forcing me to explain why I didn’t want to go. But then he seemed to decide against it. He kissed me on the forehead, gently, as though I were really sick. “Feel better.”

  After Don and our friend left, I considered leaving, too. I could have walked down the block, seen a movie, eaten sushi, bought a chocolate croissant at my favorite patisserie. After all, it was one of my precious few nights in the city—a night to collect acorns. Instead, I got sucked into the television, idly flipping through channels, eventually settling on a marathon of reruns of Friends, a show I’d hated when it first started airing back when I still lived here, hated in part for being such a patently false version of a life in New York. But now that it was in syndication, now that I no longer lived here, I found it comforting, even sweet. I fell asleep before Don returned.

  In the car the next day, barely out of New York, barrelin
g down the highway past the bland New Jersey suburbs—an endless parade of Targets and Borders and Bon-Tons—I asked Don about the performance. I was driving. Don took a moment. He lowered the volume on the radio, turned his whole body toward me, lifted his hands (Don, ever the dancer, talked with his whole body). He took a deep breath. The way he did this, I could tell he was ready to launch into an animated description of some section he loved, some particular bit of movement that reminded him of why he himself had become a dancer in the first place. But then he exhaled and said, “You know, it wasn’t so great.” I glanced at him. “Really?” He smiled. “I’m sorry to say it: Antwon is overrated.” Don faced front, turned up the radio, and sank back into his seat.

  That morning we’d heard on the weather forecast about a blizzard that was expected to develop that evening. The report warned it was going to paralyze the whole region. The first few flakes were just beginning to fall. They hit the windshield—heavy and wet—and the wipers wiped them away. I gripped the wheel and, hoping to beat the worst of it, gently pressed my foot on the accelerator.

  Nine

  A Better Life

  When, by the end of the summer of 1990, the summer they graduated from high school, Sylvie had not only not lost the ten pounds the modeling agency had wanted her to lose, but she had, instead, gained fifteen pounds, she was told she shouldn’t bother coming to New York, the agency couldn’t represent her, they couldn’t find her work. She was told this over the phone by a woman she had met in New York in the spring, an “ugly” woman, Sylvie now said, whom no one could ever find pretty, so who was she to judge?

  Sanj saw Sylvie that Sunday night, two nights after she’d received the news, and just three days before he himself was leaving for the University of Southern California—as far from West Virginia as he could manage. Sanj reminded Sylvie that the local community college had rolling, open admission.