The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

She said, “Gosh, I don’t know. I imagine this place will go fast.”

  If everything worked out with Nora’s donation—and when would he know that? In a month? A year?—he’d feel, at least, secure in his job. He’d be ready. And if the house was still on the market when that happened, he’d take it as a sign.

  He walked her back to Halsted, and the agent asked if he knew that the theater on the corner used to be a horse stable. Yes, he did. They stood together looking at the walled-in archway that must have been built to let carriages through. The agent said, “Imagine that.”

  * * *

  —

  The night of the Howard Brown fundraiser was so windy and brittle that Yale and Charlie joked about taking a taxi the quarter mile to Ann Sather. The fact that this was a Swedish restaurant, that the food would be meatballs and mashed potatoes, had seemed silly when the planning began in August, but now sounded perfect. He’d had a glass of scotch at home to warm him up for the walk, and it buzzed nicely through his hands, his feet.

  Yale had been in a heightened state lately, waiting to hear back again from Nora, jumping every time his office phone rang for fear it would be Cecily. And now, on the street with Charlie, with nothing to worry about till Monday, that nervous energy had turned to pure elation. He was thrilled to walk beside a handsome man in a black wool dress coat, thrilled to give a dollar to a punk kid on a sidewalk blanket.

  Every day that week, Bill Lindsey had dropped into Yale’s office with more news from some Pascin or Metzinger expert who’d told him, off the record, what the works Bill described might be worth. “Not that I care about the money,” Bill said, “but the farther over two million this estimate gets, the better I feel.”

  Bill was a “paper and pencil man” to begin with—he said it the same way Yale’s uncle used to say “legs and tits man”—and he was more excited about the drawings than Yale was, but he was also particularly drawn to the painting of the bedroom, which was supposedly the work of Jeanne Hébuterne. Hébuterne, Modigliani’s common-law wife, had been an artist herself, although after her early death her family hadn’t allowed her work to be exhibited. Authentication would be particularly difficult, but perhaps its existence might bolster the claims on the Modiglianis. Yale loved the bedroom himself, the crooked walls and shadows.

  Ranko Novak and Sergey Mukhankin were unknowns, but with a little digging, Yale found that a Mukhankin drawing not unlike the one in Nora’s possession—both were charcoals of nudes—had done decently at Sotheby’s in ’79. Bill was taken with that piece, anyway.

  The Novak works, the ones Nora was so adamant that they display, were the only disappointments. Five of the pieces—two small, rough paintings and three sketches—were his. Curiosities, but not valuable. Yale didn’t mind the painting of a man in an argyle vest, the way the lines of the argyle extended beyond the bounds of his clothing, the dark depth of his eyes, but Bill hated it, and he hated the other painting, of a sad little girl, and he hated the sketches, which were all of cows. “Don’t promise her this stuff’s going on the wall,” he said. Yale cringed and Bill said, “Well, maybe she’ll, ah, pass away first. She’ll never know. But look, minus these cows, the collection holds together. I’m a happy man. There’s balance, there’s contrast, there’s a story, and it’s just the right size. You know, it’s a show. Someone is handing us a show.” He’d clapped Yale on the back like Yale had drawn the stuff himself.

  And so although the cold air had bored its way into every pore of his body, Yale was floating.

  The restaurant, already festively Swedish with its folk art walls, was now a Scandinavian wonderland, festooned with Christmas lights and greenery. They headed up the stairs, fashionably late—Charlie, despite his planning role, had nothing to do with setup—and so they barely had their coats off before a dozen people ran to see them. Or, rather, to see Charlie. Not that they didn’t want to see Yale, not that he wasn’t their friend. But everyone had urgent and hilarious things to tell Charlie. Teddy’s friend Katsu Tatami, a counselor at Howard Brown, came bounding across the room like a gazelle. Katsu, despite being Japanese, had ended up with hazel eyes. He said, “We got like two hundred people up here! We’re gonna run out of raffle tickets!” Katsu fetched them both beers, because Charlie wasn’t going to make it to the bar without being stopped twenty times.

  It was the regular crowd mostly. Which was comforting but always a bit disappointing: It would be nice, one day, to see people who hadn’t been at the last fundraiser, and the one before that. To see an alderman, a straight doctor or two.

  The silent auction wrapped the edges of the room—donated wine baskets and concert tickets and a free hotel night downtown courtesy of Charlie’s travel agency—but the room was so crowded Yale couldn’t make his way around to see everything.

  He spotted Fiona and Julian in deep debate, Fiona talking with her hands. Bird hands, he’d told her once, and she’d fluttered her fingers up to his face, flapped them on his cheeks. He thought he should maybe rescue her; Fiona, as intense as she was herself, found Julian exhausting. “He’s like a mouthful of Pop Rocks,” she said once. “And I like Pop Rocks! I do! They’re sweet, and he’s sweet. I’m not being mean. But you don’t want a whole mouthful.”

  Richard took photographs, as Yale had suggested: candid shots of people eating and laughing and talking. His camera was such a permanent appendage that no one much noticed—the key, Richard said, to getting great photos.

  Teddy came up to congratulate Charlie on the event before turning to Yale and asking if Evanston was even colder than the city today. “You’re so far up the lake!” he said. He kept rotating the pint of beer in his hand. His face looked fine, his nose looked fine. A scar right at the bridge to match the one on his upper lip. Then he said, “Have you seen Terrence?” Actually he whispered it. Yale scanned the room for Terrence’s lanky frame, his wire-rimmed glasses. “It’s not good,” Teddy said. And then Yale saw him, and Charlie must have, too, because he gave a low gasp and turned immediately back. Yale had thought the idea was that Terrence would look bleak, maybe have lost some weight since they’d seen him at Thanksgiving. What was that, two weeks ago? But Terrence was propped against the wall like a scarecrow, his head completely shaved, his cheeks sunken in. If it weren’t for the glasses, Yale might not have placed him. His skin, once warm and rich, was the color of a walnut shell. He looked barely able to lift his head.

  “Bloody hell,” Charlie whispered.

  “I mean, he’s sick,” Teddy said. “He was always sick, but now he’s sick. Like, his T cells are fucked. The Rubicon is crossed. He should be in the hospital. I don’t know why he’s here.”

  Charlie said, “He was fine! Two weeks ago he was fine!”

  Yale said, “Two weeks ago he looked fine.”

  Charlie said, “And now he looks like Gandhi. Oh my God. Oh my God.” Yale thought Charlie would go over to him, but he didn’t yet. He headed for the bar with his empty glass.

  The beer was good. He should remember to eat. He needed to talk to Terrence, needed to see how Terrence was doing, but he wasn’t ready to cross the room to where Terrence now sat by the wall in a chair, Julian and some old guy flanking him. He wasn’t sure he could keep a steady expression on his face, didn’t know how not to look horrified. And so he headed back to the bar, where he bumped up behind a woman in a purple dress. She turned and said, “Yale!” and he breathed beer into his windpipe. It was Cecily Pearce. An inch taller than him thanks to her heels, blue eye shadow she’d never have worn at work. “I’m delighted to see you! I should have known!”

  He wasn’t sure what she meant, exactly, and so he said, “My partner was on the planning committee.”

  “Oh, is he here? I came with friends, but they’re making out with each other in the coats, so I know no one.”

  Having met both sober Cecily and drunk Cecily, he was fairly sure this was the latter. Or at least the buzzed version
. Maybe there was a happy medium, an ideal Cecily Pearce who would neither threaten him about bequests nor molest him.

  Charlie was across the room, talking to people Yale didn’t know. But just then, Julian came up and put his arm around Yale’s waist, his chin on Yale’s shoulder.

  Cecily said, too brightly, “Hi! I’m Cecily, from Northwestern! It’s great to meet you finally!” She squeezed Julian’s hand and said, “You must be so proud!” Whether she meant proud of Yale or proud of the party, he didn’t know.

  Yale could feel Julian’s chin press into him when he answered, his stubble move against Yale’s neck. Julian said, “I am very proud. Yes. Indeed. Proud.”

  And because Yale could see this turning bad quickly—could imagine Cecily, on her way out of the party, telling them what a cute couple they made, with Charlie in earshot—he said, “Julian just likes to lean. Charlie Keene is my partner. He’s around here somewhere. He has a beard.”

  Julian said, “I hate his beard, I’ve told him. Why hide such a pretty face?”

  Cecily found this hilarious, or at least pretended to. She laughed with the desperate air of someone who didn’t want the conversation to turn uninteresting lest you leave her alone with no one to talk to. Yale spotted Gloria, Charlie’s reporter with all the earrings, and waved her over. “Gloria went to Northwestern,” he said, and the two women started talking, and within a minute Yale and Julian were making their escape.

  “Bathroom,” Julian whispered right behind Yale’s ear, and it didn’t sound like such a bad idea. There was a lot of beer in his bladder.

  The bathroom was empty. Julian, instead of heading into one of the two stalls, splashed water on his face and then stood there as if he expected to chat. He twisted his forelock. When Julian went bald someday, he’d have to find something else to do with his hands.

  Yale said, “That woman is not exactly my boss, but she’s not not my boss.”

  “She didn’t seem so bad.” Part of Julian’s beauty was the way he looked at you. If you stared at the ground, you’d find that Julian had ducked down and was catching your eye from below, as if to pull you back up again. He would rub his fingers along his own ear and blush at you, and that was oddly beautiful as well.

  Yale headed into a stall. No urinals here, thankfully.

  Julian’s voice: “Have you ever seen a snake dancer?”

  “A charmer? With a basket?”

  “No. Usually they’re women, like belly dancers, but they let a python crawl all over them when they’re dancing. Anyway, Club Baths is bringing in a guy, like this bodybuilder guy, who does snake dancing.”

  Yale laughed as he zipped his fly. “What could possibly go wrong?”

  “You’re no fun!”

  “Sorry. That’s probably the safest thing going on there.” Yale came out and washed his hands. Julian looked in the mirror.

  “You wouldn’t mind if they all closed.”

  “Honestly, Julian—yeah, I think it might be for the best. For a while. I don’t blame them for everything the way some people do, but they sure as hell haven’t helped. And it’s not about shame or regression or anything else. It’s just, like, if there were a salmonella outbreak at a restaurant, you wouldn’t keep eating there, right?”

  Julian shook his head. He didn’t seem inclined to leave the bathroom. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’ve heard more condom propaganda there than anywhere else. You’re just parroting Charlie.”

  “Charlie’s right about some stuff.”

  “But Yale. After they cure this thing, there won’t be any place left to go.”

  Yale felt a hundred years older than Julian right then—Julian, who was, in fact, examining the pores of his forehead in the mirror—but instead of saying what he thought, which was that there was never going to be any cure, he said, “When they cure it, we’ll open new ones. And they’ll be even better, right?”

  Julian turned and gave him a sad, beautiful smile. “Can you imagine the party? When they cure it?”

  “Yeah.”

  And Julian didn’t look away. It was a small bathroom and they were only two feet apart, and the longer they stood there, the more Yale felt as if he and Julian had entered into physical contact, chest to chest, thigh to thigh. The fact that they hadn’t, that the room smelled like urine, was irrelevant. It was probably just lingering guilt over the whole ridiculous nonexistent Teddy issue, but then again neither of them had moved in a long time, and really it was something else. It was an invitation on Julian’s part. He’d made casual invitations in the past—whom did Julian not invite?—but there was something alarmingly sincere in the unbroken line between their eyes. This was the look, Yale realized with a jolt, of someone desperately in love.

  Julian said, “Yale.”

  Yale glanced at the door, certain Charlie would burst through, would save him from having to think. But there was no one there, and when he looked back, Julian had taken a step forward, had shrunk the small distance between them by half. Julian’s eyes were wet, his lips parted.

  Yale said, “We have to get back out there.”

  It hit him, as he reentered the party, Julian behind him, that perhaps Charlie had been onto something after all. And he never would have said “Julian’s in love with you,” because that would’ve made it worse. What mortal wouldn’t fall for that, at least a little bit? To know that someone was longing for you was the world’s strongest aphrodisiac. And so Charlie made it instead about Yale, about not trusting him. There was a lot that suddenly made sense. In the twenty feet between the bathroom door and the bar, his world had shifted on its axis.

  He had just enough time to refill his drink and take his place by Charlie’s side before the speeches started. Cecily appeared at his elbow, and this was perfect. He could put in time next to her, clap with her, toast with her, without having to chat, without risking a follow-up conversation about Nora’s son and the angry donor. Someone talked about the history of Howard Brown, and then someone came up to talk about the hotline. Yale tried not to yawn. He looked for Terrence, to see how he was holding up, but he wasn’t in the chair by the wall anymore. Nico must have taken him home.

  No.

  No, Nico had not taken him home.

  And so now, in the middle of some tedious talk about fundraising goals, Yale was suddenly, finally, drunkenly, sobbing.

  Wasn’t this why he’d gone upstairs the night of the memorial in the first place? To keep from crying?

  Everything would’ve been better if he’d let it out that night. He wouldn’t be a wreck right now, he’d never have scared Charlie like that, they wouldn’t have fought, he’d have gotten to go to Nico’s to pick out some old records or whatever.

  Charlie didn’t notice his crying, and Yale tried to back away before he did, before the whole night got messed up. Cecily saw him, though, as he turned, and Fiona saw him, too, so by the time he was at the top of the stairs, they were both with him, each grabbing an arm. “Come outside,” Fiona said. “Come outside.”

  Out on the sidewalk, Cecily handed him the napkin she’d been holding around her drink. He used it on his nose, flowing even more embarrassingly than his eyes. “You’ll both freeze,” he said.

  Cecily said, “I grew up in Buffalo.”

  Fiona sat on the curb and pulled Yale with her. She held his hands and said, “Let’s breathe.” He did, matching his breath to hers. She wore enormous silver hoop earrings that grazed her shoulders. Nico was always telling her she’d get her earrings caught on something one day, a stop sign or a passing businessman. Yale wanted to remind her of this, but instead he lost it even more. Nico had been such a good big brother; his voice always changed around Fiona, got deeper, surer. Yale dug his face into her clavicle. He tried to slurp the snot and tears back in, but he was drenching her.

  Cecily said, “Here.” Somehow she had a fresh glass of wa
ter for him, with ice cubes.

  Yale sipped it, and he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been holding things in.”

  “It’s fine,” Cecily said. And Fiona said, “It’s fine.”

  And because Yale was a bit drunk and spewing things in every direction already, he said to Fiona: “I never got to go to his apartment. I didn’t get—everyone left.”

  “And it was all my fault,” Fiona said. “I keep thinking about that. I’m so sorry, Yale.”

  Cecily said, “Is this what you’re upset about?”

  “No, Cecily, I’m upset because I’m thirty-one and all my friends are fucking dying.”

  He regretted it an instant later, but then it wasn’t any worse than bawling like a child, and it wasn’t any worse than having cocaine in your purse on a work trip, was it?

  Fiona ran her fingers through Yale’s curls and didn’t say anything. Cecily, to her credit, didn’t say anything more, and Yale pulled himself together. He stood.

  “Do you want to just go for a walk?” Fiona asked.

  “No, it’s freezing.” And Charlie would wonder where he was.

  They headed back to the door, and Fiona slipped in first. Yale touched Cecily’s arm and said, “I never meant to make trouble for you. I didn’t.” God, he was drunk. Sober enough to hear his words, sober enough that he’d remember them in the morning, but drunk enough to say things he hadn’t planned to. He sent a message to his future self, his morning self: You didn’t tell her about the art. You didn’t say anything bad.

  On the stairs she said, “Listen, Yale, I like you. I do. I want to be your friend.”

  Yale couldn’t see himself as friends with Cecily, out on the town or whatever she was picturing, but still he was flattered. Nearly as flattered as he’d been by Julian in the bathroom, to be honest. When was the last time someone had made friends with him, rather than him-and-Charlie?

  He said, “You’re a good person.” God, alcohol made him a sap. Why did it make some people so mean? It only made him love everyone.