The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  He hadn’t been to his own doctor, she learned later, just to the ER, where they’d given him calamine lotion and a leaflet.

  A month later, he and Terrence were shopping, and Terrence asked how much cash he had, and Nico spent a long minute staring at the ten dollar bill in one hand, the five dollar bill in the other hand, unable to add them together. And six weeks after that, he was gone.

  She looked at the pigeon that had landed on the balcony rail. She was not ready to look at Richard’s videos, but maybe she could work her way there by looking through Richard’s photo albums. She closed the balcony, poured a glass of milk, took a few deep breaths.

  There were probably twenty albums on the shelf, a fact Fiona hadn’t absorbed that first day. Rows of black leather, brown leather, colored canvas. Boxes full of slides, as well, but she wouldn’t mess with those.

  When she pulled a thick red album off the shelf, though, a paper slipped out and landed on the floor. Fiona attempted to clutch the album closed before anything else fell, but she dropped the whole thing, and now there were papers everywhere. Cream-colored sheets folded in half, small cards, a lavender page with a grainy photo of a man. They were funeral bulletins and prayer cards. She got on her knees and started stacking them up. This wasn’t a photo album at all, she saw when she opened it to an old clipping from Out Loud Chicago, an obituary of someone who’d danced with the Alvin Ailey Theater.

  Jesus.

  She opened the album at the beginning, and tried to slide the papers back into the empty spots. A man named Oscar, no one she remembered, had died in 1984. A clipping about Katsu Tatami from 1986. Here was the bulletin for Terrence Robinson, Nico’s Terrence. How odd—she must have put this bulletin together herself, but she didn’t remember it. Jonathan Bird. Dwight Sumner. There were so many of them, so impossibly many.

  In her current life, it happened at least once a week that someone would wander into the store and then, when they discovered its mission, say something like “Oh, I remember that time!” Fiona had learned to check her temper, to push her toes into the floor so her face didn’t change. “I knew someone whose cousin had it!” they’d continue. “Did you ever see Philadelphia?” And they’d shake their heads in dismay.

  And how could she answer? They meant well, all of them. How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out?

  Here, in her hand, a stack of ghosts.

  She looked through Terrence’s bulletin. They’d read a Psalm, apparently, although the book and verse numbers didn’t mean anything to her now. Asher Glass had sung. She remembered that.

  Asher would speak at ACT UP meetings with a voice like a politician from a black-and-white movie. He’d break into city council with his bloody handprint banner. He and his friend chained themselves to Governor Thompson’s fence one summer, got arrested for the millionth time. Asher was still around, Fiona knew, living in New York. She’d seen him in a documentary a while back, a “three decades of AIDS” thing. He looked as healthy as anyone, was so muscular you couldn’t believe he had the same virus she’d seen carve men into skeletons. His hair had grayed and he had jowls, and surely he was dealing with early osteoporosis or the other landmines of being HIV positive over age fifty, but in that movie he’d looked ready to jump through the screen into Fiona’s living room to help her lift boxes.

  It wasn’t true, what she’d said. They weren’t all dead. Not all of them.

  On October 13 she’d held her own quiet memorial, alone in her house, for Nico. Candles and music and too much wine. Thirty years. How could it possibly have been thirty years? But that was just the start of the worst time, when the entire city she’d known was turning into lesions and echoing coughs and the ropy fossils of limbs. And although it made no sense at all, she’d never fully been able to shake the ridiculous, narcissistic feeling that the whole epidemic was somehow her fault. If she hadn’t mothered Nico (she’d recently whined this at her therapist), if she hadn’t taken care of him in those early years, brought him his allergy medicine on the El, let him see that she was doing alright—wouldn’t he have gone home sooner or later? Vowed to date girls? He’d have been miserable, but it wouldn’t have lasted long. A couple more unpleasant years at home, like every other gay man on the planet. And maybe he wouldn’t have been exposed. He wouldn’t have died.

  She had so much guilt about so many of them—the ones she wished she’d talked into getting tested sooner, the ones she might have gone back in time to keep from going out on a particular night (“Let’s agree that we know this is illogical,” her shrink said), the ones she might have done more for when they got sick. The night that, for no reason, she’d told Charlie Keene that Yale was with Teddy. Why on earth had she done that? It was an honest, drunken mistake, but everyone knew what Freud said about mistakes.

  She felt, sometimes, like some horrible Hindu god, turning all she touched to ash.

  The painkillers were making her swimmy.

  She could stay here, with this paper graveyard. And who knew what other landmines Richard’s shelf contained?

  Or.

  Right now, maybe a ten-minute walk away, there was footage of Nico she could look at. Nico alive. She was terrified; it would be so much stranger than a still photo. Was there sound? When was the last time she’d heard Nico’s voice? When he was alive, she figured. If anyone had ever taped him—well, that would have been Richard. These would be the tapes.

  She had to do it.

  * * *

  —

  Serge had told her the corner for the studio, but she hadn’t paid attention to the street number—and it wasn’t like Richard had a sign out front. Fiona looked at the doorways, the storefronts, as if she could figure it out by squinting. Nothing looked right.

  Was she glad? She found herself at least partly relieved.

  And then she spotted Serge’s motorbike parked on the broad sidewalk, propped against the wall of a building.

  She steeled herself and said, “Okay, then.”

  She felt her phone before she heard it.

  “Yes?” She was shouting, and she didn’t care. She plugged her other ear.

  “Hey, calm down,” Arnaud said.

  “I’m calm. What.”

  “Can you get to Le Marais? I think we have a couple hours.”

  She spun around to look for a cab. If nothing else, this timing was a sign, wasn’t it? She wasn’t meant to go in there and dwell on the past. She was here for Claire, not Nico. She left Richard’s studio behind like it was on fire.

  1986

  Yale nearly forgot to go into work the next day. He’d somehow believed that it was Saturday, that after he went to the grocery store and the GNC for Terrence, after he packed up and tiptoed out of the apartment, all he had on his agenda was finding a place to stay tonight, maybe buying a clean shirt. But at ten o’clock, walking down Halsted with a headache, he saw a guy in a necktie and realized it was Friday.

  At least it gave him somewhere to be. He already had his overnight bag, so he just got on the El, his clothes wrinkled from Terrence’s couch. As the doors closed, someone came running at them, as if he’d fit through the inch of space left. He stood there, desolate, as the train pulled away. A thin man with dark hair. Yale thought for a moment that it was Julian—but that wasn’t his chin, and Julian wouldn’t be up yet at ten in the morning. Yale wondered what he’d do if and when he ran into Julian. Would he hit him in the face, or embrace him? It wasn’t Julian he was mad at, somehow. It was only Charlie. Halfway to Evanston, he decided that if he saw Julian, he’d probably just cry on him.

  Roman was already in Yale’s office, collating and labeling the copies he’d made in Door County at t
he library. The entire contents of the shoebox.

  Two messages from Bill Lindsey on his desk: one saying the Sharps were coming after lunch to see the pieces, the other reading, “Campo said yes—thank you!” It took Yale a few slow seconds to remember that he’d given Richard Campo’s number to Bill in the car yesterday morning, suggesting he could shoot the 8 × 10 photos they needed to send to New York, that maybe he’d do it on the cheap.

  Yale went into the restroom to shave and brush his teeth. He hadn’t done it at Terrence’s, because Terrence was curled on the bathroom floor by the time he woke up, and again, or maybe still, when he got back from his errands. Terrence had promised he’d be fine, that Asher was coming by later. Yale sprinkled water on his shirt now to iron out the wrinkles by hand.

  Maybe the test was wrong. Wasn’t it possible to mix up the files? There were no names on any tests, just—what, numbers? Codes? So the code could be off. Which still left him with the fact that Charlie was a louse and he himself was a fool, but all that would seem like nothing if the results could somehow be undone. And the test was so new. Teddy was always saying he didn’t believe everyone with the virus would get the full-blown disease. It was part of some larger conspiracy theory Yale couldn’t remember the details of. Something about there being no longitudinal studies. Christ, was this the bargaining stage of grief? But he hadn’t even moved on from anger yet! He looked at his face in the mirror, crumpled like a child’s. Portrait of a sucker.

  Back at his desk, he stared at papers he couldn’t read. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before in Sturgeon Bay, not counting his liquid dinner last night. He should have bought himself a banana when he’d picked up Terrence’s groceries. If he was infected, the best thing he could do was gorge, get fat while he still could. Eat six burgers tonight. Maybe by dinner he’d magically have an appetite.

  But where was he even going to eat dinner? Some miserable restaurant. And then what? He couldn’t put Terrence out again. And he couldn’t go anywhere they would ask questions. He thought of Richard’s house, that big guest room, but the thought of that house made his stomach clench. Once upon a time, he might have stayed at Nico’s. Maybe his apartment was still empty, unrented, but where was the key? There were old friends from the Art Institute, some who didn’t even know Charlie, but no one he could impose on.

  He felt ill. Feverish, dizzy, an ache in his joints. He’d reminded himself when he woke up this morning that he would probably convince himself he was sick. Knowing this didn’t help much.

  At noon, he slowly dialed his own number. He imagined Charlie had gone in to work—Charlie would work through a tornado—but he thought maybe Teresa would pick up, could give him more answers.

  Really, no, it wasn’t that. He wanted to cry at her, wanted her to tell him everything would be okay. If Teresa picked up, he’d send Roman out of the office. But she didn’t. And they didn’t have an answering machine, because Charlie was convinced that the day they got one it would be filled with panicked messages from his staffers.

  He called Out Loud Chicago and, in a voice he hoped didn’t sound like his own but wasn’t odd enough to attract Roman’s attention from across the room, asked if the publisher happened to be in today. “No,” said a young person Yale couldn’t identify, “Mr. Keene is out on personal business.” He tried the travel agency, too, and was told that Charlie would be in on Tuesday.

  It was a tremendous relief when one o’clock hit. He had something to do now, a script to recite. When he got to Bill’s office, the Sharps weren’t there but Richard already was. Yale hadn’t heard him come in. Had he been asleep? He felt like maybe he had. Richard wore all black, except for the yellow sweater he’d knotted around his shoulders, and he moved like a cat around the room, crouching low to adjust the lights he’d brought. He had the Foujita green-dress watercolor laid out on Bill’s table.

  “The man of the hour!” he said, and blew a kiss at Yale before turning back to his lights.

  Yale managed to say, “Thanks for doing this.” He tried to remember if he’d seen Richard since the night of the memorial. Yes, several times. At the fundraiser, for instance. Still, Richard seemed to have walked straight out of Yale’s nightmares. The man had done nothing wrong. He’d thrown a great party. He’d made a beautiful slide show.

  Richard didn’t talk as he worked, didn’t require Yale’s conversation, and soon the Sharps were in the doorway, grinning like parents about to meet their adopted child.

  Bill made introductions—Esmé, Allen, Richard Campo, Allen, Esmé—and shut the door behind them all. He said, “Truly, this is the most extraordinary find of my career, and I can say right now that I’ll retire happy. We could get this up next fall, is what I’m hoping. Well, maybe that’s a bit optimistic. But a spectacular show.”

  Bill showed them the Foujita, still on the table.

  “That’s her,” Yale said. “That’s Nora.”

  “She’s lovely!” Esmé leaned over the paper, entranced.

  Bill opened the cover of the giant portfolio he’d moved the smaller pieces to, and Esmé held her husband’s arm. Richard looked, too, from behind. Yale said to him, quietly, “It’s Nico and Fiona’s great-aunt.” The portfolio was open to one of the blue-crayon Modiglianis, not that it looked much like anyone at all.

  Richard laughed, delighted. “Spectacular genes in that family.”

  Maybe he could ask Richard, after all, for a bed tonight. A different bed. Would that be so terrible?

  Allen said, “I don’t want to wake up and find I’ve invested in restoring some frauds.”

  “Well,” Yale said, “we could hold off till authentication comes through.” His voice was made of tin. “But we have strong corroboration for provenance, and we’d love to get restoration started to prevent further damage.”

  A painting was a thing to which you could prevent further damage. You could restore it, protect it, hang it on a wall.

  Bill looked at Yale expectantly. There was something else he was supposed to say, but he was blank. Bill cleared his throat and said, “One option is, we could wait for the first authentication to come through. Let’s say the Pascin people verify his work, for instance.” He flipped to the nude Pascin sketch. “Wouldn’t that reassure us about the rest as well?”

  Allen bobbled his head side to side. Noncommittal.

  Bill said, “Well, go get Roman! Go get the copies!”

  And so Yale did, and as Richard continued working at Bill’s desk, the rest of them gathered around the chair where Roman deposited the stack of papers. Yale half listened as Roman read them a letter Nora had written home about Soutine and his wretched table manners.

  Bill, meanwhile, had come up behind Richard, who was putting white gloves back on, ready to pull one of Ranko Novak’s cows out of the portfolio.

  Bill whispered: “Not those.”

  It wasn’t as if there were some Ranko Novak expert out there to mail the photos to.

  Bill said, “The artist was not overburdened with skill.”

  The cow sketches weren’t bad, but the three were nearly identical, and there was something too neat and too simple about them, like images from a “how to draw animals” book for kids. Still, Yale didn’t fully understand Bill’s contempt. Well, no one ever got to be a gallery director through egalitarianism.

  Richard shrugged, turned carefully to the first Metzinger sketch.

  Allen looked agitated, scratched behind his ear. He said, “Look, what I’m thinking of, I’m thinking of those fake heads they found in the river.” The summer before last, someone had dredged a canal in Italy hoping to find the carved heads Modigliani had allegedly thrown there in his youth after a harsh critique from friends. They found three heads and rushed to display them, but a few weeks later some university students came forward to say they had carved the pieces themselves and tossed them into the river as a prank.

 
Bill took the letter Roman had been reading from, put it back on the stack, kept his hand there. “It’s true everyone’s hackles are up. There’s a high bar to clear, for Modigliani in particular. But listen, we’re tremendously confident. The point is, authentication could take ages. And why not get things moving?”

  Out of nowhere, Yale was frozen by the memory of Charlie and Julian driving down to a protest in Springfield that summer. Charlie said there were other people in Julian’s car, but Yale hadn’t seen that himself. They’d said they were staying with some National Gay Task Force people. They’d said they didn’t get arrested at the protest but that Julian got a speeding ticket.

  Yale looked over at Esmé, who was watching Richard work, standing back so she wouldn’t make a shadow on the art. He could see from her face, the way she leaned over the Metzinger sketches as if she wanted to dive in, that she was sold on the whole thing: the story, the collection, the exhibit.

  Esmé said, “How did she go from art student to model? I’m only asking because—weren’t the models, you know, ladies of the night?”

  Yale said, “We’ll be going back up to Wisconsin, getting the whole narrative.”

  And yes, that was where he could go, not tonight, but soon. He could stay up there. He could drag it out. He could leave this city, keep driving north, put a great, frozen expanse between himself and Charlie.

  Bill said, “What do you think? This is the Lerner-Sharp Collection.”

  Allen drew a deep breath. He said, “We trust your instincts, both of you.”

  Yale doubted anyone should follow him anywhere, since he was, himself, the world’s biggest fool. But he nodded. “You won’t regret it,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Back in Yale’s own office, Roman stared at him expectantly, a border collie awaiting command. Yale said, “It’s been a long week. I’ll see you Monday.”