Yale said, his mouth full, “Gloria, I never see many photos from the dyke bars. Could you do more coverage there?”
“We don’t like to pose as much as you guys!” she said, and when Charlie threw his hands up in exasperation, she laughed at herself.
Charlie said, “I tell you what. We’ll do a new quarter-pager for my agency, and we’ll have two women for the photo. Walking along sharing a suitcase, something like that.”
Gloria nodded, appeased. To Yale she said, “He’s hard to stay mad at, you know.”
“Story of my life.”
* * *
—
Yale managed to get back to the bedroom, finish packing. He laid out Nico’s blue Top-Siders to wear for luck. He swept the M&Ms into his hand, put them in his blazer pocket for tomorrow.
He dialed Fiona from the phone by the bed. Mostly he wanted to check in, see if she was eating, if she’d made it home safely. He worried about her. She had no family left, not really. She was close to Terrence, but when Terrence died too—he could picture a million terrible endings to her story, drugs and alleys and botched abortions and violent men.
And he would ask about this great-aunt, thank her for making the connection. On a selfish level, he also wanted to lead the conversation around to last night—to why Fiona would have said that about him and Teddy. But he could imagine how it played out. She was drunk, confused, devastated. Not malicious. He forgave her. And if she’d answer the phone, he’d say so. But she never picked up.
He was doing a crossword in bed when Charlie came in, the living room empty at last. Charlie looked at the suitcase and didn’t say anything. He went into the bathroom for a long time, and when he came out he said, flatly, “You’re leaving me.”
Yale sat up, put his pencil down.
“Good God, Charlie.”
“What am I supposed to think?”
“That I’m gone for one night. For work. Why the hell would I leave you?”
Charlie rubbed his head, watched his own foot toe the suitcase. “Because of how awful I was.”
Yale said, “Come to bed.” Charlie did, unfolding himself on top of the covers. “You never used to freak out like this.”
When they first got together, it was casual for a few months. Yale was still new to Chicago, and Charlie took perverse joy in shocking Yale with the options available to him in the city, the things he hadn’t seen in Ann Arbor. He brought him to The Unicorn—the first time Yale had ever been in a bathhouse. He’d had fun laughing at Yale’s squeamishness, the way he folded his arms over his stomach, his questions about whether this was legal. They just ended up making out with each other in a corner, in the dim red light, then leaving for the privacy of Charlie’s place. Another time, Charlie took him to the Bistro and pointed out the men on the dance floor that Yale should, one day, be sure to “snog.” Charlie used to overdo his Briticisms, knowing Yale loved it. “I feel like I’m part of some news report,” Yale had said that night. “You know how every report on, like, Who Are the Gays? has that stock disco footage in the background? We’ve stepped into stock gay footage.” And Charlie said, “Well, you’re messing it up by standing still and looking frightened.” Yale remembered “Funkytown” ending and Charlie saying, “Watch!” The glitter cannons at the corners of the dance floor shot off, and the shirtless men who’d already looked like fitness models suddenly shone with blue and pink and green glitter. It stuck to their sweat, defined their shoulders. “That one,” Charlie said, pointing at a luminescent dancer. “Give that man your number now.”
Even as Yale had wanted nothing right then but to be alone with Charlie, he’d taken huge delight in the idea of the Bistro. There had been one real gay bar in Ann Arbor, but nothing like this, not a gay disco, not a space where everyone was so happy. The place in Ann Arbor had been filthy, with a sad jukebox and windows full of dying geraniums meant to obstruct the view from the street. There’d always been a skulking vibe, a sense that any happiness was somehow stolen. Here the music blasted and there were three bars and a pair of neon lips and multiple mirror balls. The excess of the place felt exultant. There wasn’t as much on Halsted, five years back—bars were just starting to pop up; people were just starting to move there; and Boystown (no one had even called it that yet) was just starting to coalesce—and so this place, way down by the river, was where Yale first fell in love with the city.
At the Bistro, Yale felt entitled to joy. Even if he was just watching from the wall, drink in hand. This, the Bistro announced, was a town where good things would happen. Chicago would unfurl its map to him one promising street, one intoxicating space, at a time. It would weave him into its grid, pour beer in his mouth and music in his ears. It would keep him.
The relationship grew serious that fall—drunk, Yale whispered into Charlie’s ear that he was in love, and Charlie whispered back, “I need you to mean that,” and things progressed from there—and for about a year, Charlie worried aloud that Yale hadn’t experienced the city’s freedoms, hadn’t been with enough men, and that one day he’d wake up and decide he needed to live some more. Charlie would say, “You’re going to look back on this and wonder why you wasted your youth.” Yale was twenty-six then, and Charlie somehow imagined their age gap to be practically generational even though he only had five years on Yale. But Charlie had started alarmingly young, in London. Yale was still figuring himself out sophomore year at Michigan.
Eventually things settled. Yale was suited to relationships, to the point that Teddy thought it was great fun to call him a lesbian, to ask how life on the commune was going. He’d stayed with each of his first two lovers for a year. He hated drama—hated not only the endings of things but the bumpy beginnings as well, the self-doubt, the nervousness. He was tired of meeting guys in bars, would rather lick a sidewalk than look for action in some parking lot by the beach. He enjoyed having standing plans with someone. He liked going to the movies and actually watching the movie. He liked grocery shopping. For two years, things were easy.
And then, after the virus hit Chicago—slow-motion tsunamis from both coasts—Charlie suddenly, inexplicably, worried all the time, not about AIDS itself but about Yale leaving him for someone else. Last May, before he realized how deep the insecurity had grown, Yale had said yes to a weekend pilgrimage with Julian and Teddy up to the Hotel Madison—a trip Charlie couldn’t join because he wouldn’t leave the paper, even for three days. They explored the city and danced in the hotel’s bars and Yale spent most of Saturday night listening to the Cubs on the radio, but when they got back, Charlie questioned him for an hour about where everyone had slept and how much they’d drunk, about every single thing Julian had done—and then he barely spoke to Yale for a week. He claimed to understand now that nothing happened up there, but the idea of Yale with Julian or Teddy or both of them had taken his imagination hostage. It was more often Julian that Charlie worried about, in fact. Julian was the flirt, the one who’d offer you a bite of cake off his own fork. The Teddy thing was odd, specific to last night.
Yale rolled toward Charlie and decided to apply Bill Lindsey’s advice on talking to Cecily Pearce. He phrased it as a question: “Do you think it’s possible that all the sickness and funerals and everything—they’ve made us feel less secure? Because this is new for you. And I’ve never given you reason to worry.”
Charlie spoke to the window. “I’m going to say something terrible, Yale. And I don’t want you to judge me.” And then he didn’t say anything at all.
“Okay.”
“The thing is, the most selfish part of me is happy about this disease. Because I know until they cure it, you won’t leave me.”
“That’s fucked up, Charlie.”
“I know.”
“No, that’s really fucked up, Charlie. I can’t believe you said that out loud.” He could feel a vein pulse in his throat. He might get in Charlie’s face and scream.
But Charlie was shaking.
“I know.”
“Come here.” He rolled Charlie toward him like a log. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I’m not looking for anyone else.” Yale kissed his forehead, and he kissed his eyes and chin. “We’re all under a lot of stress.”
“That’s generous.”
“You get afraid of one thing, and suddenly you’re afraid of everything.”
2015
Fiona realized, as her cab approached the center of the city, that it was too early. She’d imagined delays and traffic, but here they were at 7:22 a.m., and she’d told Richard nine o’clock. She had the cabbie pull over and show her, on her fold-out map, where she was—she didn’t want to wear out her phone battery till she was sure her charger would work with the converter she’d bought at O’Hare—and then she got out and started walking definitively down the broad sidewalk, even though she wasn’t sure it was the right way at all.
At the corner, she checked the map again (her face buried in it, suitcase next to her, like the world’s most muggable tourist), and it looked like three miles. Walking, she could keep her eyes peeled in a way she couldn’t from a cab. Better use of her time than sitting on her ass at Richard’s, waiting for business hours so she could call the private investigator back. (A private investigator! How was this her life?) She had booked the first flight she could afford, and the urgency of the packing and dog-sitting arrangements made the whole thing feel like a race, but what was one more hour? The video was two years old. Still, walking felt like a delay. She should be getting there and doing something.
If she saw the Seine, she’d feel better. She just needed to follow it west. Fiona remembered both islands from her high school trip; they’d stopped at Notre Dame, on the bigger island, where some classmate had read grisly suicide statistics out of a guidebook.
She passed a father carrying a little boy on his shoulders. The boy held a Buzz Lightyear, zoomed it in front of his father’s glasses.
It was a stroke of fate that she’d be staying right in the middle of the river, because hadn’t the video shown Claire on a bridge? It had been impossible to tell which one—the video was grainy and didn’t reveal much background—but after looking at photos online, Fiona had eliminated a few. It was one with padlocks all over the chain link, but apparently most bridges had that now.
She passed bouquinistes opening up their green stands of paperbacks and antique pornography. She stopped at each bridge to see if it looked like Claire’s bridge, to see if Claire had been magically frozen to the spot. It was a gorgeous day, she’d failed to notice. And my God, she was in Paris. Paris! But she couldn’t summon much awe. Her daughter may or may not have still been involved with the Hosanna Collective, and was probably still under Kurt Pearce’s thumb. Her daughter may or may not have been the mother of the little girl in the video, the girl with blonde curls like Fiona’s. All of those things felt more foreign to her than the simple fact of Paris. Paris was just a city. Anyone’s path might lead here. But who ever thought their baby would get mixed up in a cult? Who imagined this was how they’d experience Paris—searching it for someone who didn’t want to be found?
It was quite possibly a hopeless quest. When had her attempts to reach Claire not backfired?
She’d been thinking lately about a time when Claire was seven, when they’d all been in Florida at the beach—she and Damian still married, just barely—and Fiona had announced that it was time to go, that Claire had already been given extra time to finish her sandcastle. Claire had started to cry, and instead of leaving her alone, instead of letting her have her way, Fiona decided to hug her. Claire pushed her away and ran to the water, throwing herself into the surf with her sundress on. “Let her cry it out,” Damian had said, but twenty yards down the sand Claire had picked herself up and walked into the ocean, thigh deep, waist deep. “She’s not going to stop,” Fiona said, and Damian laughed and said, “She’s Virginia Woolfing herself.” But she really was, and Fiona was up and running, knowing better than to call to Claire, knowing that at the sound of her voice Claire might throw herself under the waves. By the time she reached her, grabbed Claire from behind, the water was up to her own chest; Claire’s feet hadn’t touched sand in a long time. That was just one day. Claire had done similar and worse on a thousand others. But the incident had taken on greater meaning lately: the first time Claire had flung herself off the continent.
Fiona crossed to Île Saint-Louis and passed an ice-cream shop, the smell of the waffle cones reminding her that she was starving, and she passed shops selling bright leather purses and wine and Venetian masks. Here, finally, was Richard’s building, three stone stories above a shoe shop. “Campo/Thibault,” it said beside one of the five black buzzers. It was 8:45 now—close enough, good enough. She rang, and a minute later it wasn’t Richard who came down but a thin young man in a motorcycle jacket. He said, “You’ve arrived! I’m Serge, partner of Richard.” Ree-sharr. “I take you up, okay? You get settled. Richard is having a shower, then he joins us.”
Serge plucked up her suitcase as if it were empty, and she followed him up the dark stairs.
The apartment was chic and sparse, but the light fixtures and windows and the wrought iron railings outside the glass doors looked wonderfully ancient, and the details on the walls—the relief pattern of vines, and even the light switch panels—had been softened by endless layers of paint. Fiona remembered Richard’s place in Lincoln Park, the treacly peaches and pinks. This was its opposite: bright monochromatic paintings over gray furniture straight out of an architecture magazine. Serge showed her where she’d be staying—a book-lined room with a white bed and a single plant—and then brought her to the kitchen and poured her an orange juice. She heard Richard’s shower end, and Serge called that Fiona was here. Richard called back something she couldn’t understand, and it took her a moment to realize he’d answered in French.
A minute later, there he was, interrupting Serge’s tour of the view. He’d combed what remained of his hair wetly to his scalp, and he wore a pressed shirt that was too large, as if he’d recently shrunk. He cried, “Fiona Marcus in the flesh!” and grabbed her arms to air-kiss both cheeks, and although she hadn’t used that surname in decades, she didn’t correct him. It was a gift, this name of her youth handed back to her by someone she associated with a time when she’d been optimistic and unencumbered. Granted, she associated him with the next years, too, the ones with Nico gone, with Nico’s friends, who’d become her only friends, dying one by one and two by two and, if you looked away for a second, in great horrible clumps. But still, still, it was a time she missed, a place she’d fly back to in a heartbeat.
“Now the trick, my dear, is to keep you awake the rest of the day. No sleep whatsoever. Caffeine, but only if you drink it regularly. And no wine, not a drop, till you’re rehydrated.”
“He’s an expert,” Serge said. “Before I met Richard I hadn’t crossed the Atlantic.”
“And now how many times?” Richard asked. “Twenty?”
“Alors, beaucoup de temps,” Fiona said, speaking French for no reason at all, and then became certain that she’d just said “a lot of weather.” She felt dizzy and stupid and like she really should lie down, against Richard’s advice. She said, “You mentioned coffee.”
And soon they were sprawled across Richard’s gray furniture. She wanted to pry open the clamshell packaging on her converter and charge her phone, call the detective even if it was still seven minutes too soon, but she forced herself to sit still and tell them how grateful she was for the place to stay, the warm welcome. It felt good, in fact, to rest for a moment, to be Fiona Marcus again, twenty years old again, doted on by Richard Campo again. It filled her up.
Serge had made her a latte, right there in the kitchen with a machine that belonged in a cockpit, and now she sipped at the thick foam. He said, “You tell me everything about this guy when he
was young, yeah? I need some scandals!”
At that, Richard went to a low shelf by the windows and pulled out a photo album he’d apparently lugged all the way to Paris and into the new century. He sat between Fiona and Serge on the long couch, started flipping through. How strange to see Richard Campo’s work in snapshot form, yellowed Polaroids and Kodak prints. He’d been doing more serious work back then, too, but those photos weren’t the ones preserved in cheap cellophane slots.
Richard said, “Nico’s here somewhere,” and then he must have found a picture, because he handed the album to Serge, tapping a page. “Oh, was I in love with him.”
“You were in love with everyone,” Fiona said.
“I was. All those boys. They were younger, and so open, not like my generation. I envied them. They came out at eighteen, twenty. They hadn’t wasted their lives.”
“You’ve hardly wasted yours,” Fiona said.
He handed her the open album. “I was always making up for lost time.”
There was Nico, curly brown hair and long teeth, his face tan and freckled, looking just past the camera and laughing. Some joke, crystallized forever. She had a copy of this photo, but an enlarged and cropped one. This version bore an orange date stamp: 6/6/82. It would be three years until he got sick. And this version showed not just Nico but the two men on either side of him. One was Julian Ames. Beautiful Julian Ames. The other she didn’t know or remember, but as she studied his face she saw above the man’s left eyebrow a small, oblong purple spot. “Christ,” she said, but Richard was busy explaining to Serge the way Chicago had been in the early eighties, the smallness of Boystown and the way it still hovered then, somewhere between gay ghetto and gay mecca. How there was no place like it, not in San Francisco, not in New York. She tried to wipe the spot away, in case it was on the cellophane, but it didn’t move. She stared at these sick men who didn’t know they were sick, the spot that was still, that summer, only a rash. She handed the album back and Richard continued his narration. Fiona pretended to peer into his lap as he turned the pages, but really she let the jet lag overtake her vision, let the pictures blur. It was too much.
The Great Believers Page 5