by Tim Murphy
Still looking down, she shook her head. “It all sucks,” she said. She traced patterns on her jeans with her finger, not wanting to look at Hector.
He got up and went into the kitchen, came back with a glass for her. “Drink with me,” he said, pouring her tequila.
Issy laughed. “That shit’ll fuck me up!”
“Not so much this far along.” Hector handed her the glass.
“Don’t we get limes and salt?”
He laughed. “You wanna go downstairs and buy limes?”
“No!”
“Then just drink.”
Issy knocked back her first gulp. The tequila burned and bloomed in her stomach, filling her with a liquid sunny warmth. She seldom drank; it wasn’t good for her liver. “My God, that feels so good,” she commented.
Hector smiled bitterly. “I know.”
As they drank, on opposite ends of the couch, they idly watched the TV program—an inane plot in which the girl played by Shannen Doherty witnesses a robbery at her favorite diner and then has flashbacks about it.
“Haha, she’s having night sweats!” Hector laughed. “Pobre blanca!”
“Yeah, she saw a robbery in Beverly Hills!” Issy cried. “How’s she ever gonna recover?”
The more Issy drank, the more she felt convinced she was throwing off earthly chains. She and Hector could’ve been kids growing up on the island together, running on beaches. It all could’ve worked out so differently! Maybe what they were living through wasn’t really happening; maybe they were waking up from a bad dream. The more she drank, the more she admitted to herself that she’d been in love with Hector for three years, that he played the starring role in fantasies she barely allowed herself. Then suddenly she was saying, “Oh, Hector, oh, Hector,” over and over again. Then she was in his arms on the couch, tasting his tequila lips.
Hector broke out laughing. “You’re crazy, Issy!”
“I know.” She laughed, her hands gobbling up every part of his body. “You’ve been so good to me, Hector. I really love you.”
“I love you, too, Issy. But I don’t—”
“I know. I don’t care. Can you just hold me? I haven’t had that in so long.”
“Of course, Issy.” She felt his hands in her hair.
Then it started happening. He’s humoring me, it’s a pity fuck, a little voice in Issy’s head told her. But she couldn’t be bothered with that. She felt the all-consuming gratitude of someone who sets misgivings aside and gives over completely to a fantasy coming true. She looked at him. He stared up at her, lying on his back, frightened and awed.
“Just let me show you,” she said. And indeed she had to show him. But when she undid his pants and saw that he was semihard, she felt a quiet wave of triumph that allayed some of her feelings of being pathetic. She slid down, fellated him, took pride in his moans, in his hands on her head. When she felt he was not far from coming, she pushed down her own jeans, her wet panties.
“We need a condom,” she said.
But Hector pulled her closer. “You’re not going to give it to me,” he said.
She felt a new rush of gratitude and tenderness toward him. Four years now, she’d lived with the feeling of wearing a sandwich board that said DAMAGED GOODS. TOXIC VAGINA. She often felt certain people on the street could read this information in her eyes, and she could see repulsion or pity in return. She knew it was difficult for a woman to infect a man. Usually, though, that didn’t quell her feelings of self-quarantine. It wasn’t an easy thing to explain to a man, and the few occasions she’d had sex since her diagnosis—occasions of which she wasn’t proud, coming as they did after a desperate, lonely bar visit—she’d felt ashamed that she hadn’t told the men, even though she’d insisted on a condom. It was a holy relief to be with someone who understood the disease, who knew about her and didn’t reject her.
Issy lowered herself onto Hector. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed. She’d barely remembered what that felt like. It brought back the feelings of that night in the back of the car outside the club. How strange that she’d met Hector that night, and now—
She looked at him. He was staring at her, his eyes large with bewilderment.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Does it feel good?”
“It feels good,” he said. “It’s just—” His eyes welled and his voice broke. “It’s just I don’t understand anything. I feel like it’s all happening around me and there’s really nothing I can do about it.”
Issy drew in her breath. Her desire simmered for a moment and she clearly saw Hector’s confusion. “Let’s stop then,” she said, bracing herself on the couch to rise.
“No, no.” He pulled her back down. “Stay there.” He pulled her head down toward his, held their foreheads together, his hands behind her neck. “Stay like that.”
Issy moved up and down on Hector, her feelings a queasy jumble. She was using him, for one thing. She’d been pushy about it. Yet it felt so good, like scratching an itch, deeper and deeper. She felt like, as she moved, she was trying to work something out—something that, as she got closer and closer to it, felt like anger. Rage. She’d been so fearful and ashamed and shut down for three years. What she was feeling now was rage at her family, at her neighborhood, at the whole entire city. She’d been royally fucked over! She didn’t deserve this! And there was Hector. How dare he not love her the way he loved Ricky! And yet, also, there was Hector, his mouth wide open, breathing hard, his eyes squinched shut, with Ricky back at the hospital. She wanted to blot him out to the point where he was merely an object, a dildo, in this moment, but she couldn’t remove herself from his grief. It was all making for a very complicated fuck for Issy, and to mute her own intensity, she refocused on Hector.
“Does that feel good?” she asked him. “Like that?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “Yeah, definitely.”
Issy worked it like that, focusing on Hector’s face, until she felt the contractions and jerks that told her he was moving toward coming. Hector tried to pull away but Issy insisted he stay. He came inside her, noisily and hotly—he looked like a deranged eight-year-old, she thought amusedly as she watched his face—then she put the focus back on herself and made herself come, gouging her fingers into Hector’s neck. She felt hugely relieved when she was finished, like she’d thrown off years of misery and frustration. She slid off him and collapsed alongside him on the couch. The full force of her drunkenness hit her now, and the room began spinning. She focused on the feeling of his hairy stomach against her back, his hairy legs on hers, his breath on the back of her neck. He threw an arm around her, and she drew him closer. The room spun and spun, making her close her eyes to it. She spun uneasily into blackness and passed out.
When she woke, she found herself alone on the couch. Sunlight streamed in through a window and she heard traffic outside. She’d barely lifted her head before the wild spinning began again. She was still very drunk—she could feel it. She managed to stand up, spying the empty tequila bottle. The last thirty minutes before she passed out came rushing back to her. She gasped, covered her mouth with her hand. She pulled up her panties and jeans, buttoned her shirt, and walked toward the bedroom. Hector had moved there at some point and fallen asleep in a fetal position in his T-shirt and jeans. His body heaved up and down. Issy knew she should take a shower and leave, but she could barely stand up straight, the room was spinning so fast. She climbed up onto the bed and lay down on her side next to Hector, who sensed her body and rocked away from it.
FOURTEEN
Vancouver
(1996)
Champagne glass in hand, Hector turned away from his conversation—he’d been talking with a local activist about where in Davie Village to have dinner later that night—when a nervous treble voice behind his back broke the cocktail din in the small reception room. He was shoulder to shoulder with Chris, whose trembling hand hel
d a coupe of sparkling water, a thin ring of sweat staining his collar, his face a chalky color with another sweat film over his upper lip.
“You okay?” Hector murmured to him.
“I’m scared I need a toilet,” Chris murmured back. “Fucking, fucking, fucking meds, they are so vile.”
Hector briefly massaged Chris’s neck. “You gotta hold it, honey, you know she’s coming in soon. You can’t shit all over the queen.”
Chris allowed a grin. “That’s how we’ll remember this crowning moment.” Then he switched into a cheesy British accent. “When I shat myself before the queen!”
“Please, she’d probably help clean you up. You think you’d be the first soiled queen Liz Taylor’s seen in the past ten years?”
The treble voice belonged to an amfAR functionary, a handsome PR reptile with a long Italian last name Hector could never remember. “She is about five minutes away with Kessler’s deputy JoAnn Barbour accompanying her,” he announced to the room.
“Kessler’s not coming in with her?” The question had been asked by Maira Goode, to Chris’s left, the sole woman in their breakaway group. A five-foot-four pear whose high-school-lacrosse thighs anchored her into the floor when she spoke before a group, and whose dark curly hair was always disciplined back into a knot, Maira had never in her life uttered anything more charged than a mere incontestable fact, which was how she’d managed to disengage herself from the movement without leaving bitterness and recrimination in her wake. Even Hector, so much more loved than Chris, hadn’t fully escaped that fate, perhaps because people hadn’t expected such treason from him. When their group reported back to the movement, Maira led, Hector followed, and Chris stayed home.
“Kessler’s in front of another group,” said the amfAR functionary.
“Pharma?” Chris muttered under his breath to Hector.
Barbour, a fiftysomething ash blonde in a taupe rayon pantsuit, the conference lanyard around her neck, entered just in time to hear the conversation. “Believe me, Liz wasn’t happy about it, either,” she deadpanned.
That cracked up the room. Even Maira snorted out a laugh. To Hector, the moment felt good, a nanosecond bit of irreverence amid all the pomp, the relentless schedule of the conference, the fact that everyone was slowly realizing that, after more than a decade of meeting like this every other summer since Atlanta in 1985, this was likely the one everyone would look back on as the turning point. Hector couldn’t get past a shadow that fell between himself and the data; surely someone had to have missed something—surely it wouldn’t pan out. And yet he’d told himself a hundred times that, well, there was the data and there were the results, happening to his friends these past six months before his very eyes. There was Chris, ready to shit himself, but still with computer printouts showing numbers that meant he probably was going to live to see the twenty-first century. There it was, all around Hector. He’d thought that 1992, Ricky’s death, had been the most surreal year of his life, but maybe he was wrong. It looked like that title now belonged to 1996.
“So I would say just go on and talk among yourselves for the moment,” the functionary said.
The small, crowded room settled back into murmuring chatter. Hector crossed glances with JoAnn; she smiled and came over.
“So you get to be the queen’s plus one,” he joked.
She gestured at her pantsuit. “I’m sure I’m not up to her standards of glamour.”
“Like Kessler is? Come on, neither of you are exactly Rock Hudson circa 1960.”
“True, that,” JoAnn demurred, glancing down at the floor. Briefly, Hector considered the inner life of a single, childless FDA deputy commissioner. He pictured her reading briefs while microwaving a frozen dinner and pouring a too-large glass of wine at the kitchen counter of a Bethesda condo after getting home from work at ten P.M.
She looked back up, eyed him. “You guys should feel really proud,” she said, sotto voce. “Really, really proud.”
Hector shrugged; now it was his turn to feel awkward.
“You called us out when you needed to,” she added. “Every step of the way. On AZT plus ddC. On the d4T data.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Don’t talk about it like it’s the past tense, you know.” He tried to keep humor in his voice. “It’s not over.”
“I’m not saying that.” Her voice was still low, careful. “I’m just saying—” She paused. “You guys know this one is special.”
She briefly put him at a loss for words. “Yes, it’s special,” he finally averred.
But she caught something in his eyes. “What?” she asked him. “Hector.” And here she surprised him by reaching for his hand. “You have to acknowledge this. I know it’s been really, really ugly at times. But this is definitive.”
“I know.” He jumped on her words, startled by the speed in his own voice. “I’m just saying now’s not the time to relax.”
“No,” JoAnn insisted. “Now is the time to relax a minute. We can un-relax when we get back to New York and D.C. But you should relax a little now and enjoy this.” She craned her neck, hearing the clack of heels in the hallway outside. She peered out the door and ducked back in, grabbed Hector’s arm. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, it’s her,” she muttered, gesturing for the whole room to push back along the far wall, near the table with the champagne.
“Are you relaxed right now?” Hector asked her, grinning.
“I’m freaking out a little!” She clutched his arm, pulling them back in baby steps toward the wall.
The amfAR functionary turned to the entire room and pantomimed a giant Shush! as though he were quieting an orchestra. Then he ducked out of the room, returning seconds later with two other officials and her. The queen. Who’d just stood before three thousand people and the international press and denounced Canada’s prime minister for abandoning a national AIDS program. She struck Hector as a giant ebony nimbus of hair and eyebrows set atop a Lilliputian frame. He was fixated on her eyes. He couldn’t believe he was in the same small, crowded room with those eyes. He applauded with the rest of the room, exchanging giddy glances with Chris and Maira.
“Well, hello!” she trilled over the applause. “Hello and thank you and congratulations.” The functionary shouldered his way from the back through the crowd with a flute of sparkling water for her, which she reached out and accepted without acknowledging him. She scanned the back reaches of the crowd. “Where is my new FDA friend?”
Hector nudged JoAnn. “Go!” he whispered. “She’s summoning you.”
JoAnn made her way to the front of the room and, her face the color of a pomegranate seed, stood shifting alongside the queen, who looked her up and down with cinematic precision, then, after a perfect beat, said, “You look very fetching in a pantsuit, Dr. Kessler.”
The room erupted in laughter. It was a perfect diss to Kessler, who for one reason or other hadn’t been able to accompany the queen on the plaudits she wished to bestow upon a small, select group of activists and researchers.
“Now, I don’t mean to make this long day even longer for you,” continued the queen, whose diction—luxuriously articulated, almost slurry, full of delicious, refined cadences and hints of various medications—rolled over Hector’s ears like a thick nectar. “But I asked for the chance to meet some of the individuals I’ve not yet met through amfAR who’ve been so instrumental”—indeed, she played that word like an instrument, cresting elegantly toward the syllable ment before tumbling back down—“in . . .”
She trailed off, as though at a loss for how to finish. “In . . .” She looked at the faces before her, raised a heavily jeweled hand as though to say, Help me.
Panic flashed across JoAnn’s face. “Well,” she said, “in helping bring about the amazing data that we’re seeing here in Vancouver. And celebrating.”
The queen’s hand fell, relieved. “Exactly. I couldn’t h
ave said that better myself.” Pause. “And I didn’t.” Again, she made the room explode in laughter.
“Ahh,” she continued, smiling, her head bobbing slightly as she grasped for new thoughts. “What I know is that many of you here in this room today—and I mean not just the federal people and the drug companies, but the young people from New York, from the Drug—” She paused, then sounded frustrated with herself. “Well, you know, the Drug group—”
“From the Drug Movement Coalition,” JoAnn supplied.
“That’s who I meant,” the queen said. “The Drug Movement Coalition. I mean”—her voice rose emotionally—“I mean these five or six people—where are you, anyway? Step out.”
Hector, Chris, and Maira weakly raised their hands, accepted applause from the room. Chris, Hector noticed, had gone a shade whiter.
“These people kept the rest of you on your toes the entire way, and they were not even in Washington!” Her eyes were wide with wonder, admiration. “These people were not even doctors yet they were the ones telling us, ‘No, no, stop! Stop testing the drugs one by one; you’re killing their power. You have to put the drugs together for them to work. It’s as simple as that.’”
The room was uncomfortably silent. This was the problem with the queen, many said, as beloved as she was. Sometimes the queen spoke beyond the limits of her knowledge and got the science a little bit off. Certainly, here, she was overreaching, Hector knew—everyone knew. Their group hadn’t been the first to know or to insist that new drugs had to be tested in combination rather than one at a time; they’d just played a huge role promoting that information to other activists and to patients, then proposing to the feds a trial that allowed for different combinations without being too burdened with qualifying criteria, so that as many patients as possible could participate. And they’d also demanded more safety data on certain drugs before they were released. (In that regard, they were only half successful.)