by Sam Lansky
Stuff for the apartment, like a candle that reeked luxuriously of musky sandalwood, or an enormous cylindrical dish made of hammered steel to set on the dining room table, stuff he would buy wandering listlessly through a department store after work. These things were typically stark and expensive, which was their style, mostly metallic and grayscale, crisp lines and sharp edges. There was no color there—not even the accent wall Sam had imagined painting when they had first moved in, some cheerful pop of color—except the deep chestnut of the salvaged wood coffee table and the green stem of the white orchid that sat on the console in the foyer. Every few weeks it would die and they would have to buy a new one. “Aren’t these supposed to live for, like, a long time?” Sam asked Charles, but he just shrugged. “Lack of light,” he said.
Occasionally Sam would buy something sweet, like when he was walking past a little boutique on Lex and saw that they had blown-glass cups for tea candles in a lovely marbled silver, each with a different letter of the alphabet on its front, so he bought one with an S and another with a C and set them on each of their nightstands. When Charles got home that night, dropping his briefcase on the floor with a heavy thud and peeling off his jacket—a black leather Valentino bomber with a matelassé texture, like diamonds—he pointed at them. “Did you buy those?” he asked.
Sam nodded.
“Those are really cute,” Charles said, and his eyes crinkled at the corner and his face turned tender, and for a few moments all was right within Sam.
But Sam only had so much space to adorn with expensive things, and so more often than not, he would buy something for himself. There were just so many beautiful things a person could buy. Many, many pairs of loafers, always worn sockless, and breezy tailored dress shirts and cashmere sweaters in every conceivable color and style and coats, so many coats—God, the coats! A brisk cream tailored Bottega Veneta trench coat, and a black Saint Laurent motorcycle jacket with woolen cable-knit front panels and sleek leather sleeves, and a slate-gray checkered Gucci bomber with sporty ribbed cuffs, and a wool herringbone Brunello Cucinelli topcoat that Charles bought Sam for Christmas; Sam had tried it on at Bergdorf’s and then looked at the price tag, side-eyeing Charles—“Trop cher,” Sam said, and Charles had nodded—but he had remembered and gone back and bought it for Sam.
It wasn’t like Sam worked in fashion, or even had particularly good taste. He joked to Brett that he should start a fashion blog called Expensive Shit That Doesn’t Look That Dope On Me. “Do you think I’m becoming vain and materialistic?” Sam asked Brett once.
“No,” Brett said cheerfully. “You’ve always been this way. You can just finally afford it.”
Somehow buying things always felt like the next right thing to do. It was such an uncomplicated solution.
His coup de grâce was a Fendi shearling coat with panels of flaky black leather, tan felt and tufts of black sherpa at the collar. I will be my best self in this Fendi shearling coat, Sam said to his reflection, looking at his shape from every angle, considering how its stiff construction gave his squishy body—he had been gaining weight again—the illusion of structure. If I buy this Fendi shearling coat, I will be the kind of person who deserves this Fendi shearling coat. And so he bought the coat, and wore it exactly twice before spring came.
After all, you couldn’t wear a coat like that—not in New York. It was not a coat for trudging avenue after avenue to the subway through mountainous piles of gray snow strewn with garbage, when another flurry of sleet could blow through at any moment. That was the winter that went on forever, months of rain and snow and hail. It wasn’t just the dark cold of years past; Sam had been through enough New York winters to know that the sun would come out eventually. This one was different. The him that had existed before that winter felt irretrievable.
On the holiday they’d taken in Morocco a few months before spring came, it was unseasonably cold—the coldest winter they’d had in a decade, the concierge said. As they roamed the narrow alleyways of Marrakesh by night, Sam liked the way their silhouettes looked as they walked in unison, their feet slapping on the ground at just the same moment—two tall broad men in the same shoes and pants and shirts and coats, where in the shadows they appeared only in duplicate.
The trill of a cash register and the jagged sound of receipt tape printing. An empty bowl on the table. This was what he remembered. The way things looked—and not just the way things looked, but what the way things looked said about him. He had never loved things that much until they were the best available substitute for love. How did that happen?
Sam returned to his body. He put his hand on his heart. He breathed in and out. He went deeper.
Deeper, into a more distant memory. He was sitting in the bay window of Eleanor’s house in the Hamptons again, and it was a few weeks after he and Charles had met, and they were packing up to go back up to the city, and something had struck him. He knew this place, knew it well. He had been here before—not just in his memory, but recently, in ceremony—but he had closed it down before he had reached the memory’s critical juncture. He had been so bitter that the moment was gone, so afraid of what was lurking just under the surface. But he wasn’t afraid anymore, and instead of nostalgic regret, he felt an affectionate curiosity for his younger self.
He was right there on the verge of something. It was so close. He could taste it, metallic, like blood in his mouth.
He sighed and gave into it.
But what if you have HIV? There was the thought, the first thing, clear and sharp as a diamond. They had been packing up their things in the bedroom to drive back to the city when the thought had cut through Sam, so abruptly that he had to sit down on the bed, as shocking as if it was a new question that he had never considered, instead of something that he had asked himself so many times before. But this time he had a more compelling reason to be anxious: two weeks before Sam had met Charles, he’d slept with a guy in the neighborhood he’d met online; Sam didn’t realize until after he had finished that the condom had broken. Sam didn’t say anything to the man, didn’t ask him if he had been recently tested or if he knew his status; just hurried home, eager to wash the experience from his body.
A few days after that, Sam had gotten a sore throat. He had meant to go get tested, had thought it was something he should do, and then he’d met Charles and in the whirlwind of those first few weeks, he hadn’t given it another thought; it hadn’t come up. Until now, in this moment, when the whole thing rattled through him like thunder.
“Are you all right?” Charles said, looking over at him. Sam nodded. Charles came over and sat down on the bed next to him, rubbing Sam’s shoulders gently. The ugliness of this knowledge spread through him.
“I’m just stressed about the workweek,” Sam said. “Sunday scaries.”
Charles looked out the window and in the golden hour, the light caught him just right. He was too perfect to keep. And now Sam, with a growing sense of panic, was sure he would lose him.
“I know,” Charles said breezily. “I love it out here. I never want to leave.”
But they had to leave. And in the car on the ride back to the city, Sam was silent in the front seat while Charles played the music loud, singing along to songs they loved, looking over at Sam, frowning a little when he saw that Sam wasn’t singing along, too.
But Sam couldn’t. Suddenly it was all he could think about. He knew that he needed to go get tested, but the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that he was positive. He could feel it in his body; feel it in his bloodstream; he was sick, he knew it. He knew that he would test positive and when he did, he was sure that Charles would leave him. Sam had never met anyone so paranoid about getting sick; in fact, that they hadn’t had a sexual health conversation at all was shocking considering how conscientious Charles was, but he had just assumed that Sam was healthy, and to be fair, Sam had made the same assumption, at least up until now. They
had only been seeing each other for a few weeks, and even though Sam was already in love with him, he also feared that there wasn’t enough foundation there for them to weather such a major upheaval.
But he couldn’t bring himself to do it, and so he let this, the knowledge that he was positive and that it was a secret he was keeping from Charles, torture him endlessly. Most of the time he buried it somewhere deep, hours passing by without the thought popping back into his consciousness, but certain repetitive moments came to be connected with the thought. When he reached for the shampoo in the shower each morning, it would spring back into his head, and he would think to himself, Not yet. You’ll get tested when you’re ready. When he walked the six blocks uptown to Charles’s apartment, he would stand on the corner beneath his building, finishing his cigarette, and he would think about it, the fact that he was sick and that it was only a matter of time before he had to face this, living as an HIV-positive man, the fact that Charles would probably leave him—Sam was sure that he would—and then he would be alone once again, having to disclose his status to every new partner he met, forever feeling the twinge of loss over Charles, the man he had let slip away.
Sam thought perhaps he would write about it someday, years from now, a book or an essay about how he’d lost this great love. Charles was a risk analyst; Sam would call it Risk. Sometimes he wondered whether there was an alternate ending to this story, one in which he got on medication and got his viral load down to undetectable and they continued being together, but Sam figured this was probably unlikely, given Charles’s hypochondriacal tendencies. There was never any part of Sam that doubted that he was positive, just how long until he had to face it. He would extinguish his cigarette, nod to the doorman and take the elevator upstairs, where he would try to bury the thought for a little while longer.
And of course when they were hooking up, the thought rose to its highest intensity, an almost audible buzzing in the back of Sam’s head that contaminated those moments of pleasure. Sam knew enough to know that it was difficult to transmit the virus through oral sex, which was all Charles really seemed interested in anyway, and Sam was fastidious about keeping any of his bodily fluids away from him, but still, the paranoia nagged at him—oh God, what if he gave it to Charles? How would Sam live with himself?
The first time Charles came down with a cold, Sam had wept on the street outside in sheer terror. At home, Sam read and reread the findings of studies about HIV transmission, which provided some temporary relief, the idea that transmission through oral sex was exceedingly rare, but still he couldn’t be sure; the only way to relieve this anxiety, he knew, would be to get tested, but he was so certain that he would test positive, and then Charles would leave him. So he tried, desperately, to force it even deeper into himself, to quiet the noise, to promise himself he would do it soon, when he was ready. Just not yet.
He talked himself down, convinced himself that if he had managed to avoid contracting HIV when he was a teenager, before he’d gotten sober, when he was shooting up and having unprotected sex with strangers and waking up with no memory of what he’d done the night before, the odds of getting it now were low. What kind of God would spare him then, when he was at the highest risk, only to let him get infected now after just one mistake?
But he could feel it in his body. He knew he had it.
The fear devoured him from the inside out. He lost a few pounds. Was he getting sicker? Was the disease already ravaging his body? A show they were watching together featured a storyline where a character had tested positive for HIV. He told Charles he didn’t like it anymore. “The writing’s gotten bad,” he said. At dinners and parties and events with his friends, he would forget about it for a few hours, and then all the thoughts would rush back again in a hot wave, like a fever.
He could not tell Charles. He could not tell anyone. This was his and his alone.
It was sick, Sam knew, all of it—the fact that he was so clearly ill but refused to seek treatment; and worse still, the fact that he was putting the person he loved most at risk. The shame bloomed inside him like a vine. What kind of person would do such terrible things? What kind of person could be so selfish?
And yet somehow he managed to keep compartmentalizing it, to enjoy the majority of the best experiences they had together, to lock it away for periods of time. As many moments as it contaminated, it also made Sam all the more grateful for the best times, those instances of pure lovestruck joy; when Charles looked at him with such tenderness he thought his heart might rupture; when he awoke before Charles and nestled his head in the hollow of Charles’s chest, feeling his heart beat—feeling as close to him as Sam had ever felt to anyone. Even if he was a liar, he still loved him—that love was never a lie.
Finally, after months of this, he told Kat over dinner while he was home for the holidays. He knew that she wouldn’t judge him, but more than that, he knew that she wouldn’t immediately dismiss it, like so many other people might; the easiest way to defuse a conversation as charged as this one was to say, “Of course you don’t have HIV,” which is exactly what Sam would say to any friend who told him they were afraid of that. The odds always felt implausible unless it was happening to him, in which case the worst-case scenario was always the likeliest one.
Kat listened patiently as Sam recounted his tale of punishing anxiety. “Why do you think you have it?” she asked softly. He told her. She considered it. “You might,” she said, and Sam blushed. “But hopefully not. And if you do, you’ll get through it.”
“Do you think I’ve already given it to Charles?” he said.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Would you still be my friend?” he asked.
“God, Sam, it’s not a death sentence anymore,” she said.
“If I have it and Charles leaves me and I give up my entire life and move out of New York and change my name and decide to live in some small town where nobody knows me and all the terrible selfish things I’ve done, will you still be my friend then?” Sam asked.
“Always,” she said.
But saying it out loud didn’t take the power out of it, as he had hoped it might. Instead it made it stronger, like a thing that lived inside him that had its own heartbeat, like a parasite he was carrying. And a few weeks later, he cracked.
He had woken up early from a dream, or a premonition, where he was alone in a hospital bed, sick with some mysterious illness. It was winter and his bedroom was cold, the stark morning light illuminating the dust in the air. Sam ran a bath and stepped into it, letting the water turn almost cold. He knew that he was ready.
There was an urgent care clinic on Eighty-Sixth Street. He walked there and told the nurse that he needed an HIV test.
“Do you have reason to believe you were recently exposed to the virus?” she asked.
“Not recently,” he said weakly. “A while ago.”
“We’ll do a rapid HIV test now, and then we’ll take some blood and send it out to the lab for a full sexual health screening,” she said.
She returned, pricked his finger and pressed it to the test, leaving an ominously bloody fingerprint on the white adhesive. Sam knew this was it. It was all over. He had to face the consequences for what he’d done. He could not wait any longer. He just prayed that he hadn’t already infected Charles. Charles, this man whom he loved so much—his anchor, his missing piece, his person. He knew he had the disease, and that much he could tolerate. He had made peace with it.
But if he had gotten Charles sick, he would kill himself. The thought was not hysterical—it was calm and rational. He could not go on knowing that he had done that to him. For a few seconds, he allowed himself to consider when and how he would do it. A drug overdose, probably. He would make sure Charles knew how sorry he was. A tragic conclusion to this great love story, but he had never really believed he’d have a happy ending, anyway.
The nurse looked at
the test. “It’s negative,” she said. And so it was.
Sam walked home in stunned silence. He wasn’t relieved. He was incredulous at his mind’s ability to convince him of something that hadn’t been true. Was he crazy? He had to be.
He didn’t tell Charles about any of it—he wouldn’t have known what to say, or how to explain it. But in the days that followed, he thought deeply about how he had let this spiral so madly out of control, to the point where his conviction that he’d had it was almost incapacitating. He talked to Brett, but found that his certainty, which had been such a genuine source of torment at the time, was almost comical in the retelling. It took on a morosely funny bent, this tale of great anguish over what turned out to be nothing; there was no way to convey how truly harrowing the experience had been when the punchline was so obvious.
“Please!” Brett said. “I spiral like that every time I have sex. Are you even gay if you don’t obsess constantly about your sexual health?”
“I’m serious, Brett,” he said. “I was so sure. I felt sick.”
“I know this girl,” Brett said, “who would get tested all the time, even if she wasn’t sleeping with anyone. She would go to different doctors asking them to run her blood because she was so convinced that she had it and the tests just weren’t picking it up somehow.” He considered it. “A true ally.”
“But what if I had given it to Charles?”
“You couldn’t have,” Brett said. “Because you don’t have it.”
“But what if I did?”
“But you don’t!”
Sam rubbed his eyes. “Doesn’t it feel like as millennial gays who came into our sexual agency at the tail end of the AIDS epidemic but before treatment was as effective as it is now, we are forever cursed on some level to always see HIV as the biggest of the big bads even though it’s actually become highly treatable, yet we’ll never truly be able to enjoy sex without anxiety because we got it so beaten into us that pleasure invariably leads to sickness and there’s an inextricable link between sex and death?”