His favorite song, not yet written. His favorite movie, not yet made.
* * *
—
The depth of an oil brushstroke. Chagall’s blue windows. Picasso’s blue man and his guitar.
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “I’m going to write down everything I say to you, so you can read it again later.”
* * *
—
The sound of an old door creaking open. The sound of garlic cooking. The sound of typing. The sound of commercials from the next room, when you were in the kitchen getting a drink. The sound of someone else finishing a shower.
* * *
—
All of them growing old together on the Yacht for Old Queers that Asher always joked about. Right off the Belmont Rocks, he said, with binoculars for everyone.
* * *
—
Art Nouveau streetlights. Elevators with gates.
* * *
—
Fiona having kids. Being a surrogate uncle, buying the kids sweaters and gum and books. Taking them to the museum. Saying, “Your Uncle Nico was a good artist, and maybe you will be too.” If it was a girl, letting her paint his nails. If it was a boy, taking him to ball games. You could take a girl to ball games too.
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “You’re young and you’re strong, and you’re going to take excellent care of yourself.”
* * *
—
Good, thick, Turkish coffee. Sanka with too much cream after a long dinner. Sad, weak office coffee.
* * *
—
The year 2000. The last party of 1999.
* * *
—
Red wine. Beer. Vodka tonics on a summer day.
* * *
—
Christmas, which he’d just really started to love.
* * *
—
Getting to Australia someday. Sweden. Japan.
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “I know the last thing you feel like right now is having more blood drawn, but we’re going to get your T-cell count today. Since we know this is a brand-new infection, I expect your count to be very strong. So we’ll have some good news on top of the bad. We’ll do the draw right here.”
* * *
—
Arthritis. Gray hair. Bushy eyebrows, like his father’s. Dentures, canes, prostate issues.
* * *
—
His twenty-fifth high school reunion. He might really have gone, despite everything.
* * *
—
A dog he could walk by the lake.
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “You might not feel like talking at first, but I’m writing down the info for the Test Positive Aware Network support group. It’s on the bottom of the first page here.”
* * *
—
The brutal wind on the El platform. Fifty people huddled under the heating lamp. Pigeons crowding at their feet.
* * *
—
Owning a house. Painting the door, so he could tell his friends to look for the purple door.
* * *
—
The foods that hadn’t yet made their way to America. The things he hadn’t tasted that everyone would be crazy for in ten years.
* * *
—
The way Chicago looked from an airplane window, flying in from the east. The only time you could really see the city’s face.
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “We have no idea what advances are down the road. In my opinion it’s a waiting game. Because better medicine is out there. Some flower in the Amazon, who knows. It could be tomorrow, it could be next year. There’s no reason not to believe that at some point there will be survivors.”
* * *
—
The cement beach up by Bryn Mawr, the psychedelic foot someone had painted there.
* * *
—
The next Harvey Milk. The first gay senator, the first gay governor, the first woman president, the last bigoted congressman.
* * *
—
Dancing till the floor was an optional landing place. Dancing elbows out, dancing with arms up, dancing in a pool of sweat.
* * *
—
All the books he hadn’t started.
* * *
—
The man at Wax Trax! Records with the beautiful eyelashes. The man who sat every Saturday at Nookies, reading the Economist and eating eggs, his ears always strangely red. The ways his own life might have intersected with theirs, given enough time, enough energy, a better universe.
* * *
—
The love of his life. Wasn’t there supposed to be a love of his life?
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “Our counselor is here today, and I’m going to have Gretchen walk you down the hall and wait with you till he’s available.”
* * *
—
His body, his own stupid, slow, hairy body, its ridiculous desires, its aversions, its fears. The way his left knee cracked in the cold.
* * *
—
The sun, the moon, the sky, the stars.
* * *
—
The end of every story.
* * *
—
Oak trees.
* * *
—
Music.
* * *
—
Breath.
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “Whoa, there, let’s lie down. Let’s get you lying down.”
2015
Serge said the phone signals were jammed all over the city. Which was possibly why Fiona hadn’t heard from Claire, and likely why she hadn’t heard from Cecily, who’d been gone all afternoon.
Fiona had become, throughout the day, simultaneously more and less panicked. Less, because many names of the dead had been released, and Claire’s and Nicolette’s were not among them. More, because she still hadn’t heard anything. Less, again, when she realized the problem with the phones. More, every time she stopped to think about it.
At six o’clock, Cecily finally buzzed up from the street. “He’s with me,” she said.
It was hard to tell how much, if at all, Cecily and Kurt had reconciled in that time. The fact that he came with her certainly meant something. But they wore matching looks of concern, and the vibe Fiona got was more of two people assisting each other through crisis than of some touching mother-son reunion. They sat a couple of feet apart on the couch. Fiona knew this must be painful for Cecily—but she couldn’t imagine being the one, as a mother, who’d broken off contact, the one who’d given up. Well, no; she mustn’t confuse it with what her own parents had done to Nico. Cecily had been protecting herself after Kurt stole from her and lied to her, again and again. She hadn’t rejected a helpless teenager. Still.
Kurt said, “I left her three messages.” The woman whose apartment shared a kitchen with Claire’s, he said, would have found a way to get him word if something bad had happened, if Claire had never come home. “I’m worried, but I don’t have a reason to be worried. And there’s no way she was out that late.”
Fiona didn’t mean to shout, but it came out too loud: “Can’t you just go over there?”
“That’s not our—we have an arrangement. Not a legal arrangement, but if I ever showed up when it wasn’t my day, she’d split. She’s made that crystal clear.”
Cecily said, “But in an emergency situation—”
“No,” Kurt said.
/>
A siren blasted right outside the window. It was short—police warning someone to move out of an intersection maybe. Nevertheless, all three of them jolted, and Fiona’s heart started beating like a hamster’s.
“Give me the address,” she said. “I’ll say someone at the bar gave it to me, and if that doesn’t work I’ll say I tricked you. I broke into your apartment and got it off an envelope.” It wouldn’t be far from the truth. “No, wait, I’ll say the detective found it.”
Cecily put a hand on Kurt’s knee. “Wouldn’t that be for the best?” she said. “Then you’d know they were safe.”
He seemed to relax, rather than bristle, under Cecily’s touch.
If nothing good came of this for Fiona, at least maybe she’d have been responsible for the Pearce family reconciliation. Maybe Cecily could send her weekly updates on Nicolette, as she got to watch her grow up, as Fiona sat home alone in Chicago.
Fiona handed him her phone. “Just type it into my GPS,” she said. “As far as she knows, I haven’t seen you in years.”
Kurt sighed and took the phone.
As soon as she had it back, Fiona grabbed her purse. She said, “If you want to wait here, you can.” Kurt squeezed Fiona’s shoulder with his giant hand.
Saint-Denis was a zoo of blocked-off streets. The cab driver had asked three times if she was sure she wanted to head up there.
“I wait to make sure you get in,” he said. “You here long? I wait to drive you back too.”
She told him she’d be three minutes. She hoped she’d be coming out to tell him he could leave, to give him an extra tip.
A young man was heading in the door right ahead of her, so instead of messing with the jumble of buzzers and names, she followed him into the narrow hallway. The place was labyrinthine, but she finally found number eight. A red plastic bucket and green plastic shovel outside the door.
She knocked with her uninjured left hand, which felt wrong, unlucky.
When Claire opened the door, she left the chain in place.
She said, “What the fuck.”
“Honey, just—”
“No, this is not okay.”
“I had no other way to reach you.”
“This is not okay.”
Her hair was pulled up sloppily on top of her head. She looked as if she hadn’t slept.
“You’re safe?”
“Obviously.”
“I’m alright, too, in case you were concerned.”
“Listen, it’s her nap time.” Claire’s voice softened slightly. “This, just—I can’t deal with this right now.”
“I understand.”
“I’m not sure you do.”
“Can you give me your number, at least? So I don’t have to stalk you at work?”
“I have your number.”
“Listen, what’s the harm?”
“This is the harm.”
“Okay.” Fiona put her hands up in surrender. “You’re alive, your daughter’s alive, that’s all I needed. I’ll leave now.”
Claire let out a loud, angry sigh that Fiona couldn’t begin to decipher.
Fiona wanted to storm off, but the whole point of coming to Paris—she and her shrink, together, had been clear on this point—was to put herself out there. To keep her arms open even when Claire closed hers. To be the parent, not the child. She said, “Call anytime. I love you, sweetie.”
Claire shut the door without saying anything, without even waving.
1986
That September, Katsu Tatami fell on the street. Someone took him to the ER at Masonic, where he was sent up to the AIDS unit. Teddy reported that Katsu was wishing aloud to die before he was stable enough to be dumped back into County. But he got stable, and back he went. County discharged him almost immediately, and when he was unable to breathe the next day, they told him they no longer had an available bed. He waited two weeks, not quite bad enough to go back to the Masonic ER, until finally, too late to do much good, County readmitted him.
Yale knew he had to visit eventually. Partly because it was the right thing to do, and partly because in the worst-case scenario, he’d end up at County himself, and he needed to see it, needed to get it over with.
One night, he pulled on Julian’s dental floss and the last of the string came out, just long enough to use. He tried not to take it as a bad sign, but it felt like one. He decided to visit Katsu the next morning, before it was too late.
* * *
—
He’d been a finalist for a job at Saint Louis University, and he was still in the running for a regular development job at DePaul, here in the city, but he was still unemployed. Dr. Cheng had told him to take the first job that offered insurance. “The bigger the company the better,” Dr. Cheng said, “so you’ll get lost in the shuffle.” Meanwhile he was on COBRA, which would quickly drain his savings. He could afford it till January, barely, and then he’d have to choose between insurance and food.
In the meantime Dr. Cheng would keep the tests off Yale’s record. As far as he was concerned, Yale had only come to see him for a sore throat. When he applied for new insurance, Yale would just be asked about a history of AIDS—not about the virus. “You will not be lying when you say no,” Dr. Cheng said. “And then a month after you’re approved, you come in for the test again. Officially.” But it was risky, and if it was ever discovered—if the government seized test results, anonymous as Dr. Cheng claimed he’d kept them; or if Yale was in an accident, had blood drawn at the hospital, etcetera—he could be denied coverage forever. He’d wind up like Katsu, praying one of the beds at County would be open when he needed it.
Yale called Asher, hoping he’d say something reassuring, but what Asher said was “Get a job fast.”
Complicating matters was the fact that he could no longer get a letter of recommendation from Bill Lindsey. And it didn’t look great that Yale had worked at Northwestern less than a year.
Right after his own positive test, Yale had sent a note to Roman through campus mail, and then he’d addressed a letter to Bill at the office:
I have specific reason to believe that if you haven’t done so already, you might consider getting tested for HTLV-III, the virus known to cause AIDS. I hope you’ll advise your wife to take this test as well; please be assured that I have not contacted her and will not do so.
He’d thought for days about Dolly Lindsey, ways to reach out to her. He’d debated it with Asher, with Teddy, with Fiona. They all surprised him by shaking their heads in the same skeptical way, saying, “I don’t think you really can.” Teddy had thrown some Kant at him, made a particularly compelling argument. In August he heard from Cecily that Dolly had left Bill. “I’ve seen her around town,” Cecily said. “Shopping and stuff. Really, Yale, I don’t think they were even sleeping together, do you?” But he’d never heard back from Bill, with the exception of a note written in Bill’s spidery script, attached to a stack of semipersonal mail the gallery had forwarded him: It’s grand to hear you’ve landed on your feet! Yale had indicated no such thing. He heard from Donna the docent that Bill was no longer talking about retirement.
* * *
—
His visit to County would be short; Katsu was doped up, and Yale wanted to get the hell out of there. The beds were all in one huge room, separated only by hanging sheets, so that the sounds and smells of thirty different stages of death surrounded you. How anyone could sleep in that place, how anyone could harbor a single hope, Yale couldn’t fathom.
Katsu said to him—slurred, really—“My armpits hurt. Why do my armpits hurt so bad?”
Yale had brought him a milkshake, and he left it on his tray for when he felt up to it. He knew from Teddy that Katsu kept his Walkman under his pillow so it wouldn’t get stolen, but no one would steal a milkshake, would they? Certainly not the nurse who’d avoided even looking
at Katsu when she changed his IV bag.
Yale wanted to get Asher in there to raise hell, but what could he possibly accomplish? Yale had signed his own power of attorney over to Asher last month, confident that Asher would at least know how to yell at the right people.
Katsu said, “Can you make them turn the lights off?” But the lights were huge and fluorescent and covered the whole area, and Yale already knew they never turned them off, even at night. He folded two Kleenexes together and put them over Katsu’s eyes, a makeshift sleeping mask.
* * *
—
When he got home, the strangest thing: a letter addressed to him in Charlie’s print. Charlie’s odd way of making E’s, three floating rungs with no vertical support. Light blue paper, dark blue pen.
He’d heard, it said. It said that Teddy and Asher and Fiona, all three, had assured him he wasn’t directly responsible, but that he wanted to hear it from Yale. It was terrible, Charlie wrote, to assign blame to people rather than to the virus itself or to the power structures that let it thrive, but he couldn’t help it, and he wanted to know. Even though he was, at the very least, indirectly responsible. He wanted absolution, Yale gathered. It wasn’t something Yale was ready to grant.
The Great Believers Page 41