“I don’t feel like making small talk with my cousins.”
She looked upset. “If there’s anyone in the world that you’d want to see, even if you didn’t think they wanted to see you. Is there anyone at all?”
“Christ, Fiona, you’re making me feel really friendless right now. Unless your magic wand can bring back the dead, no. You’re as bad as the chaplain.”
The chaplain wouldn’t stop checking if Yale wanted anything, wanted to chat. “No,” Yale said every time, at least when he had air to talk, “and I’m Jewish.” Yale had once caught him composing himself before he walked into the room, making his face as sad and pious as he could, pouting down at the Bible in his hands. Not long after that, he saw Dr. Cheng do the exact opposite. Yale was in the hallway waiting to be wheeled down for his bronchoscopy; Dr. Cheng had stood outside a patient’s door reading through his notes, looking deflated. It wasn’t an expression Yale had ever seen on him before. It occurred to Yale for the first time that Dr. Cheng was only around his own age. And then he lowered the notes, drew himself erect, took a breath Yale could hear from yards away, and transformed himself into the Dr. Cheng Yale knew. Then he knocked on the door.
Fiona gave up on her questions and scooted closer so she could stroke the skin between Yale’s eyebrows. He couldn’t stand to be touched anywhere else anymore, but that one spot worked. He closed his eyes.
He said, “When I was a kid, I used to shut my eyes in the car when we were ten minutes from home. And then I tried to feel it, feel that last corner that was the driveway. I tried not to count the turns, just sense when we were home. And I usually could.”
Fiona said, “I did the exact same thing.”
“And when I couldn’t breathe, I was doing it too, but with—you know, with the end of things. And I know I’ll wind up doing it again. I’ll lie here with my eyes closed, and it feels like, Okay, this is it. This must be it. Only it’s not.”
“Sometimes it was like that with the car too,” Fiona said. “Didn’t you ever have that? It would feel like you were done, and you’d open your eyes, and it was just a red light.”
“Yes. Yeah, it’s like that.”
He was glad she didn’t tell him he was being morbid.
“That glow of the red light,” she said. “Do you remember how magical the glow of a red light at night was? As a kid? Just being outside after dark.”
He remembered.
He thought he might cry then, thought his body might wrack itself with dry tears, but Fiona stopped stroking his forehead and when he opened his eyes he saw that she was already crying herself, and it stopped him. He said, “I’m okay. It’s okay.”
But she was shaking her head fast and he saw, turning, how tightly she gripped the bar of his bed. Her face had gone pale even as her cheeks had gone red.
He said, “Fiona. What.”
“My back hurts.”
“Your back?”
“I think—”
“Hey. Hey, it’s okay.”
She gasped in air as if she’d been holding her breath, which maybe she had. “The thing is, it keeps spasming like two minutes apart. But it’s in the back.”
“That sounds like contractions, Feef.”
“It’s probably just those false ones, those Brixton whatevers. But I keep thinking maybe I should like—no, don’t do that!” Yale had pressed his call button. “Why’d you do that?”
“Maybe don’t have your baby on the AIDS ward.”
“I’m not having—it’s not due for four weeks.”
“And I wasn’t supposed to die till I was eighty.”
Debbie was already in the doorway. “Not me this time,” Yale said.
Fiona said, “I’m okay.”
“You don’t look okay,” Debbie said.
“Is there—there’s a maternity ward here, right? Or do I have to go around to the ER?”
“Heavens! Well yes, we do provide that service. One-stop shopping. Let’s get you a wheelchair.”
“They’re not even that bad,” Fiona said. “I mean, I’m basing that on the movies, people screaming and whatever, but they’re not that strong. It’s just, they’re coming pretty fast.”
Debbie said, “Here’s what we’re doing. I’m calling up to maternity, I’m getting you an escort up there, no ER for you, and Yale is sitting very tight and I’m staying right with him all night. Maybe you come back a lot skinnier, maybe you come back a couple ounces bigger. Okay?”
And Fiona, who appeared to be holding her breath again, squeezed Yale’s hand and nodded. “But they’ll—can you keep me filled in? If I’m there a while, I want to know what’s happening. I still have power of attorney, right? Even if I’m up there?”
“We can call you,” Debbie said, “and you would not believe how fast I can make an orderly run.” She was already beckoning someone in from the hallway, already picking up Yale’s phone to call Labor and Delivery.
* * *
—
When Yale woke from night sweats, Debbie was still there. Fiona was resting, she said, and they were trying to delay the labor. Her husband was on his way from Canada, where he’d been speaking at a conference. She’d let Yale know as soon as she heard anything. Meanwhile, she’d get his sheets changed.
His heart felt bad. He could feel it working so hard, a fist trying to break through a wall. Which was exactly what Dr. Cheng said would happen. “The thing about you having multiple concurrent pathogens,” he’d said, “is we’re going to treat them all, but the treatments won’t necessarily get along. And it’s a lot of medicine, a lot of IVs, a lot of fluids. The risk is that we’re going to stress your heart out, more than it’s already stressed.” The almost inevitable result, in short, would be congestive heart failure—the same thing Nora had died of. How had she seemed so serene through all of it?
* * *
—
In the morning, everything was much worse. Debbie was gone and Bernard had taken her place. Bernard changed the catheter bag, and Yale tried to ask about Fiona, but all he got out was her name.
“She’s calling the nurse’s station every ten minutes, I swear to God,” Bernard said. “She wanted to know when you woke up. No baby yet.”
Dr. Cheng came by. He said, “You’re gaining weight, which is, for once, not a great thing. We’ve got some fluid collecting in your abdomen now. Which means the kidneys and liver aren’t doing too well.”
Yale’s fingers tingled from low blood-oxygen, and he wasn’t sure he could feel his toes. His heart was climbing a mountain with every beat.
In second grade, Mrs. Henry had been hospitalized with pneumonia and the substitute, a man who mostly told them stories about his time in the Peace Corps, had attempted to explain what was wrong with Mrs. Henry. “Take the deepest breath you can,” he said, “and don’t let it out.” They did, and then he said, “Now take another breath on top of that. Don’t let that one out either.” They tried. Some of the kids gave up and let it all go with a wet raspberry noise, fell off their chairs laughing, but Yale, who always did as he was told, managed to keep going. “Now take another breath on top of that one. That third breath is what pneumonia feels like.”
There was something comforting in the midst of all this about knowing he’d been warned so early. That sitting there with his healthy, strong little body, he’d felt, for one second of his seven-year-old life, how things would end.
Dr. Cheng said, “I want you to just nod or shake your head. If I can’t understand you, we’ll go to Fiona, alright? I want to know if I have your okay to take you off the pentam and the amphoterrible. That means we’d be officially starting hospice. And I want you on morphine.”
It was one of the things Yale appreciated about Dr. Cheng, that he just went ahead and called it amphoterrible.
Yale used all the strength he could to make it as clear as possible whe
n he nodded yes.
* * *
—
He woke up after God knew how long to see a very tall young man hovering over the bed. He couldn’t quite focus; the face was cloudy. The morphine was a rug, a warm, numbing rug that was on him and in him.
“Hey, it’s Kurt,” the man said. “Cecily’s son.”
Yale tried to breathe in to say something, but he coughed out far more air than he’d taken in, and each cough was a morphine-dulled boot against his ribs.
Debbie was here. It must be night again. Now that he thought about it, he’d known Debbie was here. He’d felt her beside him for a while now. She knew about the spot between his eyes.
“Hey, I’m sorry. I don’t need you to talk. My mom wanted me to check how you were, and I—” Yale could see, foggily, Kurt glancing to Debbie for permission. He unzipped the duffel bag he carried. “I brought Roscoe.”
A blur of gray. Yale had held Roscoe on his lap every time he went to Cecily’s for dinner, and each time, Roscoe settled in as if he knew exactly who Yale was.
“Mom’s back from California on Friday.” Yale had no idea how far away Friday was.
Kurt hovered near the bed, but he didn’t put Roscoe on it. He surely hadn’t been prepared for the number of tubes, the number of machines. He might have imagined Yale propped up with pillows, reading a book.
“I know he appreciates it, honey,” Debbie said. “Here, let me bring him close for a second.”
She took Roscoe, who didn’t object, and she raised Yale’s hand and put it down in the thick fur. Yale was aware, as he moved his fingers as much as he could, that this was the last time he’d ever touch animal fur, the last time, in fact, he’d touch much of anything besides his own bed and people’s hands.
Kurt said, “But I’d better get going.”
The poor kid. Yale wanted to tell him it was okay, that he wouldn’t blame him if he ran for his life.
When he was gone, Yale managed to make an F sound with his lips, and Debbie understood.
“She’s in labor,” she said. “She’s going to have a beautiful, healthy baby. I’ll let you know as soon as we get the news.”
* * *
—
He was aware that he was dreaming, but it felt like a dream that would never end.
Fiona, alone on the street. Only sometimes he was Fiona, looking down at the stroller she pushed, a stroller that was empty at first and then held twins and then again was empty. After a while there was no stroller. And sometimes he was looking at Fiona, following behind her, above, reaching out to touch her hair.
Fiona alone on Broadway, walking south. A hot, thick summer night, windows lit around her, but the streets were empty. The windows were empty, the parking lots. Broadway and Roscoe. Broadway and Aldine. Broadway and Melrose. Broadway and Belmont.
Airplanes crossed the sky, and far away there was traffic, but here there was no one. Fiona shouldered her way through clots of cold air. She felt the wind on her neck, and she said, “They’re breathing on me. They’re all around.” She caught a glimmer of a teenage boy sitting on a bus stop bench, writing in a journal with a blue fountain pen. She turned and he was gone, and she said “Oh, he was only—” and Yale—because he was there now, was somehow behind her—tried to say that no, she was wrong, this boy had died all the way back in the ’60s, he died in Vietnam, and there were other, older ghosts here too. But Yale could make no noise because he wasn’t really there.
Fiona was on School Street now, a street Yale didn’t really know, but he’d always liked its name. Streets that carried their histories with them: He was fond of those. Was there still a school on School Street? Well, sure. There it was, abandoned and mossy. It stretched for blocks and blocks and blocks, and Fiona looked down at the stroller, at baby Nico. Because yes, it was Nico, she’d given birth to her brother and he only had to start again. He was swaddled in his orange scarf. He wore a crown of paper clips. She said, “He’s not old enough for school yet.” She said, “You have to wait until the year 2000.”
But wasn’t it close? They were back on Broadway now, and the year 2000 was very close. That was why everything was ending. New Year’s Eve was the deadline. The dead line. The last gay man would die that day.
What about baby Nico? “We’ll smuggle him through,” Fiona said to no one, “like Baby Moses. But he’ll have to play baseball.”
Broadway and Briar. Broadway and Gladys Avenue. Poor Gladys, lost in the wrong part of town. A statue of President Gladys.
Fiona pulled fliers off the telephone poles, loaded them into the empty stroller. It was her job to clean the streets. She stripped posters from windows, signs from stores, menus from restaurant entrances. She walked into an empty bar and sniffed the half-filled pint glasses still on the counter.
And although she was still alone, Yale could talk to her now. He said, “What are they going to do with it all?”
When she looked at him, he saw that the real answer was that she would live here forever, alone, that she would clean the streets forever. But she said, “They’re turning it into the zoo,” and he knew this was true as well.
She sat down in the middle of the empty road, because no cars would ever come this way. She said, “What animal gets your old apartment? You’re allowed to choose.”
And because he felt very, very hot now, so hot, like he’d been knitted into a thousand blankets, and because the heat was filling his lungs even as something inside him was cold, was turning, in fact, to ice, Yale chose polar bears.
2015
They were greeted at the entry to the Galerie de Photographies by a man with a tray of champagne glasses. Fiona plucked one like a flower, but Julian passed. He smiled at Fiona. “Twenty-four years and eight months sober.” They were early; only two dozen people in there and half were lugging huge cameras and lighting equipment, snapping eager photos of the earliest guests.
Serge had posted himself near the entrance, and Fiona double-kissed him, but she didn’t see Richard.
She held her breath and followed Julian, making sure Claire was still behind her, although Claire was going straight to the wall, straight to the giant mouth photo there’d been so much talk of. It was a man’s mouth, stubble below the bottom lip. Black and white, the lips just slightly parted. It should have been trite, something from a high school photography show, but it was one of the most arresting and strangely sexual things Fiona had ever seen. A sense of movement, as if the mouth were about to open wider, about to say something. How was it that you could tell the mouth was opening and not closing?
She hadn’t thought about it in years, but she remembered, suddenly and in quite a lot of detail, the opening of Nora’s collection at the Brigg, the first real opening she’d ever been to. She tended to think more often of the times she took Claire to see its permanent installation in what was by then the enormous and world-class Brigg Museum. She’d tell her about Soutine and Foujita; she’d show her Ranko Novak’s work and say, “She loved him her whole life. Such a long time.” And she’d think maybe it was only possible to love someone that long if he was gone. Could you love a living, flawed human that many years? She’d tell her about Yale getting the art, making the show happen, keeping Ranko’s work in the collection, and she’d say, “That’s where you got your middle name! Yale was right downstairs when you were born, helping wish you into the world! And when you came here from heaven, you left the door open so he could go out.” It hadn’t seemed such a terrible thing to say, but she could see now, yes, how a child would have misunderstood, heard the guilt in Fiona’s voice and taken on its mantle. What had she been thinking? Maybe she hadn’t been thinking of Claire at all; maybe it was a fairy tale she’d needed to tell herself.
Fiona spotted Corinne and Fernand in the center of the room, holding court. Their picture was being taken.
Claire was still at the mouth; Fiona would give her space. Sh
e was increasingly reassured that Claire wouldn’t flee the gallery.
This work was much more postmodern, much more multimedia—Fiona wished she had the vocabulary for it—than anything she’d seen from Richard before. A large photo showed a Polaroid sitting on a stack of papers. The Polaroid, in turn, was of a man in a chair, his face in his hands. It looked like the ’80s or early ’90s—something about his white T-shirt, his Docksiders—but Fiona didn’t recognize him. Next to it hung a photo of an apartment building’s facade, three of the windows painted over with red X’s. According to the sign, Richard had taken the photo in 1982 but added the X’s just this year. She supposed that the show’s title, Strata, was about this layering of old and new.
She found the updated Julian series—the 2015 Julian smiling mischievously. But no face in a Richard Campo photo ever showed just a single emotion. He also looked embarrassed, and also triumphant.
She almost collided with Jake Austen. He said, “There’s my girl!”
She patted his chest. “I am not your girl, Jake. But it’s good to see you.”
It was, really. She’d had the feeling for the past ten minutes that she didn’t know what the hell year it was—the year of Nora’s show, the year Julian vanished, the year she first took Claire to the Brigg, the year Claire was born—and here was a living, breathing reminder that it was 2015.
He said, “Check it out! From the movie.” He pointed across the gallery to where that actor stood, the one someone on the street had called Dermott McDermott.
But no one was looking at him; everyone was looking at Richard, who had just entered the room. Slim gray slacks, a coral shirt open at the neck, his cheeks glowing with attention. Her famous friend. How bizarre life was.
* * *
—
By the time Fiona made her way around the sectional wall, Jake was off toasting with some loud young Brits, and Julian had circled back.
The Great Believers Page 49