Like a Love Story

by Abdi Nazemian

  “Then we have nothing to worry about, Reza. We take the tests. They come back negative. And then we can do whatever we want. We could, you know, explore . . .” He trails off.

  “Is the test 100 percent?” I ask.

  “Reza, stop, just stop.”

  “I don’t believe anything is 100 percent,” I say, my voice shaky. “The test may be wrong. Condoms could break. You heard Stephen. Even he said they can break. And even if neither of us has done anything with another man, maybe we got it some other way. Ryan White got it, and he was . . .”

  “He was a hemophiliac,” Art says. “He had gallons of other people’s blood injected into his body. Have you had gallons of blood injected inside you?”

  “No, of course not,” I say. “But the test is a blood test. What if the test itself gives you AIDS? What if they use an infected needle?”

  “Reza, I’m trying to find a solution here,” he says, frustrated.

  “A solution?” I ask, defensive. “Why, am I that big a problem?”

  A wave of anger passes through him. His nostrils flare. His brow sweats. Then he takes a few deep breaths. “Just work with me. Please. You are not going to be positive, and trust me, if you are, the CDC will want to study you. You’ve never done anything that could put you at risk.” He takes my hand again, squeezes it a little too hard. “If we’re really boyfriends, then I want to, you know, do all the things that boyfriends are supposed to do.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say finally. “I’m scared.”

  “I would never hurt you, Reza,” he says softly. “I promise.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t want to hurt me,” I say. “But you might. Someday. I don’t want to hurt you, and I feel like I’m hurting you right now. I don’t want to hurt my mother, but I know I’m hurting her.”

  “Reza, it’s okay,” he says.

  “Nothing is okay,” I say. “I want to skip to our next life sometimes, Art. Maybe in our next life there will be no AIDS and no homophobia.” I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Art. I am so happy with you, but . . .”

  “But?” he says, aggravated. Then I watch as he brushes off his annoyance and smiles. He puts his arms on my back, moving them slowly lower until they reach my ass. “This is the only butt that matters in our relationship. No other buts, okay?”

  I laugh. I grab his ass stiffly, trying to be as coolly seductive as he is, feeling awkward and foolish instead. “Except for this butt,” I say.

  I melt into his arms. I want him so bad. I want him to ravish me. I let him put a hand down my pants, feeling the smoothness of my skin in his palms. He laughs.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask, blushing. “Is it me? I sound silly trying to be sexy, don’t I?”

  “You don’t need to try to be sexy,” he says with sweet sincerity. “You are sexy.” He takes a breath, then laughs again. “It’s just . . . Is there anything gayer than the two of us holding each other in the costume room?” he asks.

  I laugh too, but there’s sorrow behind the laughter.

  “Hey, can I tell you a secret?” He holds my gaze with intensity.

  “Of course,” I say. “You can tell me all your secrets.”

  He turns his head toward my ear, then whispers, “I’m more patient than I seem. I’ll wait for you. And in the meantime, I will eat your liver.”

  Art

  I’m so in love with Reza, I feel like I’m bursting with it. But I haven’t been able to say it to him yet. Maybe I’m afraid it’ll scare him off. Or maybe I’m afraid that saying it out loud will break the spell. That’s what it feels like. Like we’re under a magic spell.

  I live to make him laugh. If I could bottle those moments of laughter, I would turn them into a cologne and spritz myself with it every day, or I would turn them into bath suds and soak myself in his essence. But all this love only makes me want to fight harder, because if love is this beautiful, then anyone standing in the way of it is even more evil than I thought. All those homophobes in government, all those pharmaceutical companies profiting from our illness, all those parents kicking their children out of their homes, all those high school bullies tormenting the gay kid. My own parents, who won’t say Reza’s name, or allow him into their home, or even look me in the eye anymore—someone should make a horror movie about them, but it would probably be too scary. People want their villains to look like Freddy Krueger and Jason. They don’t see killers in pearls and tailored suits.

  My anger isn’t reserved for them, though. I have stores of it saved up for others. For Mrs. Starr, who wouldn’t let me create an ACT UP affinity group. For Darryl Lorde and all the assholes at school, who sneeze and cough words like “faggot” and “pansy” into their hands when Reza and I walk by.

  And for Judy, who hasn’t spoken to me since December, who avoids my gaze just like my parents, and who has quickly replaced me with a group of boring girlfriends. Annabel de la Roche is her best friend now. They do everything together. Judy always hated girls like Annabel, with her blow-dried hair and her sleek gray-or-beige clothes and her simple makeup. Classic. Effortless. Boring. Not to mention Annabel dated none other than Darryl Lorde freshman year. Now Judy and this beige lover of homophobes are best friends? I know I wronged Judy, but months have passed. I called and left messages. I dropped notes in her locker. I admitted what I did was wrong. I told her I loved her. I even gave her a first-edition copy of Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece and inscribed a note telling her that she was my missing piece.

  And nothing from her. Not a word. Not even an acknowledgment. Silence. So yeah, I’m angry with her too. I’m pissed off that she won’t forgive me. Aren’t friends supposed to forgive each other? I’m pissed off that because of her, I’m not invited to Sunday movie nights anymore. That I don’t get to share my first love with my best friend, because, well, because he was her first love too. But still . . .

  Sometimes, I even get pissed off at Reza. Probably too often. I didn’t know before this how frustrating love is, how crazy it can make you. Like now, we just got out of the movies. We went to see Longtime Companion, me and Reza and Stephen and Jimmy, and we cried and cried through the movie. It’s about a group of gay men and their one straight female friend, and it’s about the first years of AIDS, and about death and friendship. I can’t believe this movie about fags dying was made. I cried because the movie was so beautiful, and because the story was so poignant, and because the character Mary-Louise Parker played reminded me of Judy and I miss her. But also I cried just because this movie exists now, and if this one was made, then maybe more will be made. Maybe gay stories will be told.

  Then Reza asks, “Do you think the people who need to see this movie will see it? I hope it is not just a gay movie.”

  “What does that even mean?” I burst out. “JUST a gay movie?”

  Reza stumbles over his words. “I meant, I don’t know, that . . .”

  “This is a gay film,” I say. “And I want things labeled as gay. Books and movies and all that. Don’t we deserve our own stories?”

  I can feel Reza tense a little. He can’t handle this side of me. Stephen puts a palm on my shoulder.

  “You could argue,” Jimmy says, intervening to restore peace, “that it is a story about friendship, about life and death. That those themes are universal.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “About GAY friendship. About GAY life. And GAY death. Don’t you want black films to be called black films, Jimmy?”

  “I do,” Jimmy says. “But what’s a black film, anyway? Is The Color Purple a black film when it was directed by a straight white man? I loved that shit and Oprah was robbed, but the whole film is viewed through the lens of a white person. Perspective matters.”

  I think back to photographing Jimmy for my project, of posing him like Diana Ross as Billie Holiday, per his request. Of setting up the lighting to frame his face in an otherworldly glow and finding the perfect angle. Did I capture the true him? Could I? Then I remember what Stephen told me once. That photographs say
more about the photographer than they do about the subject. And if that’s true, I hate that. Because I don’t just want to photograph myself.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Reza. “I’m just angry that the straightness is implicit in everything, that there are so few queer stories. I’m not angry at you.”

  Reza nods. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “I see what you’re saying.”

  Stephen smiles. “Isn’t the world more interesting when not everyone thinks like us?” he asks, clearly directing his question to me.

  “Said the ACT UP activist who storms the offices of people who disagree with him,” I snap back. What’s wrong with me? I just apologized to Reza, and now I’m picking a fight with Stephen.

  “Art, there’s a difference between denying sick people access to life-saving drugs and expressing an opinion about how to define-queer film,” Stephen says tiredly. “Pick your battles.”

  Jimmy asks Reza a question about Iranian cinema, and the two of them walk ahead of us, leaving me alone with Stephen. I feel like an idiot. “What are you and Judy watching tonight?” I ask, changing the subject.

  It’s Sunday afternoon, and I know Judy will go to her uncle’s tonight, that they will continue a tradition I was once a part of.

  “I don’t know,” Stephen says, uncomfortable. He doesn’t talk about Judy to me.

  “Okay,” I say. “Well, tell her that I still miss her.”

  “I have,” Stephen says. “She will come around, you know. I just don’t know when. And I hope it’s before . . .” He takes a breath. “Let’s talk about something else. How are you and Reza doing? Did my sex tutorial help?”

  I shake my head. “He’s too scared to do anything but kiss. And even that scares him sometimes. He bit his lip and he wouldn’t kiss me until it healed. Which was, like, three days. I couldn’t kiss him for three days. It was like torture.”

  “His paranoia is normal,” Stephen says. “A lot of guys are scared. And remember that he just came out. He hasn’t had all the time you’ve had to accept all this.”

  “But isn’t he supposed to wanna rip my clothes off? Isn’t he supposed to, you know, find me irresistible?”

  “Oh, Art,” Stephen says, smiling. “I’m sure he does find you irresistible.”

  “If his fear lets him resist me, then obviously I’m resistible,” I grumble.

  I look ahead at Reza walking with Jimmy, arm in arm. He’s supposed to be mine, and yet he won’t give himself to me. Not fully.

  “Sometimes I wonder whether I would choose to be from your generation or mine,” Stephen says thoughtfully. “I’d be alive if I were your age.”

  “Stephen, you’re alive,” I say forcefully. “You’re here walking with me.”

  “You know what I mean,” he says. “But if I were your age, I would never have had all those years of freedom without fear. I can’t imagine falling in love with José and not being able to be intimate with him, to make our bodies one. I wouldn’t trade those moments for anything, not even for more years.”

  “Thanks for rubbing it in,” I say ruefully.

  “Sorry,” Stephen says with a shrug.

  “You think Reza will ever be ready?” I ask.

  “I do,” Stephen says. “But I don’t know when.”

  To recap: He thinks Judy will forgive me, but he doesn’t know when. He thinks Reza will sleep with me, but he doesn’t know when. And despite telling Reza I’m more patient than I seem, I’m as impatient as a human being gets. I look at Stephen and say, “I’m sorry I got all pissy earlier. I’m not a good person like you, but . . .”

  “Art,” he says, “you’re a great person.”

  Reza and Jimmy have stopped and are waiting for us to catch up. When we do, Jimmy says he’s tired and needs a nap before Judy arrives. We say our goodbyes, and then it’s just me and Reza. We walk for a bit. Sunday nights are hard. The absence of Judy cuts deeper on Sunday nights. I want to put all this energy I have somewhere.

  “Hey,” I say to Reza. “How would you feel about coming to the darkroom with me?”

  “Really?” he asks.

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “I just, I always thought, that it was . . . private, or you know, a sacred space for you.” God, he’s cute, stammering away like that about sacred spaces when he’s my sacred space.

  “Follow me,” I say. “There’s no place I wouldn’t let you into.” I hope he caught the not-so-subtle hint there.

  I lead him to the darkroom I use, which is on the ground floor of an Upper West Side office building. I pay a fee per month, the best money I’ve every stolen from my criminal of a father. For that fee, I get access to trays and tongs and chemicals, but that makes it sound so technical. It’s magic. You walk in with nothing, and you leave with an image.

  Reza seems fascinated by it all, by the red lights, by the strong scent of the chemicals, and by the black-and-white photos I have hanging from clothespins above my workstation: Old Hollywood–style shots of Stephen and other activists. Jimmy with a gardenia in his hair. Those homophobe bankers at the New York Stock Exchange. And then I see Reza’s eye catch an image that’s almost covered up by another. It’s the photo I took of him at that first protest, the one he pretended not to be at. He’s part of a crowd, but it’s unmistakably him. He stares at the photo and smiles.

  “It seems sad now,” he says.

  “What?” I ask.

  “That I lied to you about being at that protest,” he says.

  “You’ve come a long way, baby,” I say.

  “I also lied to you about your book bag,” he says, cringing a little. “When you left it at my house. I opened it. I read those notecards. I smelled your underwear.”

  “You did NOT,” I say, giddy.

  “I did. I’m awful.” The blush on his cheeks is accentuated by the darkroom lights.

  “You’re all kinds of awful,” I say, impishly. “Now can we please be awful together?”

  He turns his attention back to that image of himself as if there’s an answer to a riddle buried inside it. Then he turns to me and says, “You are so talented.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so,” he says.

  “I see things,” I say. “I mean, I know that sounds crazy. But it’s like, I don’t snap a photo unless I see its energy. I know they’re all black-and-white, but they have colors to me. Auras. And if they don’t, I don’t take them. And if the aura doesn’t survive when I print the picture, then I throw it out. And I want . . . I want them to mean something. I want to contribute something. To capture all this, so that a hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now, people will remember it all and know that we existed. That we lived.”

  “How did you start?” he asks.

  “I always liked taking pictures,” I say. “My mom had a camera, and she said when I was a kid and she was always taking photos of me, I would take the camera from her and take photos of her. She has an album somewhere at home of Polaroids I took when I was, like, five years old.” My heart aches a little bit thinking about those Polaroids of my mother with her Farrah Fawcett hair and her chic palazzo pants and fringe dresses, of my father with a fuller head of hair and a thick mustache. My parents, through the lens of five-year-old me, were always shot from below, making them imposing and fabulous. When did that all change? When did I realize the divide between them and me was too big to cross? When did they go from being my favorite subjects to the villains in my story?

  “Then Stephen gave me my camera the year I started high school, as a birthday gift, and it all took off from there. I became obsessed.” I remember those early days with my camera, learning everything about lenses and apertures and focus. Practicing on Judy and Stephen. Making them pose for me. Their exasperation when they had to sit too long as I figured out how to get the focus just right, not too sharp, not too hazy. God, I miss Judy. “I guess that’s it. Sometimes, I worry that I prefer life through a lens to life, you know. In a lens, I can . . . structure things. Fra
me them the way I want them to be framed. It’s safe.”

  His eyes pierce through me. “I don’t think there’s anything safe about it,” he says. “Your pictures are not safe. Everything about you, Art, is so . . .”

  “Risky?”

  “Bold,” he says. “Brazen.”

  I think of my mom saying my photographs were “nice.” She doesn’t get me. But Reza does. He sees me.

  “Brazen,” I repeat. “I want to be brazen with you.”

  He laughs, then looks down at the floor, like he wants to escape this moment.

  “Hey, you want me to teach you how to print a photo?” I ask.

  He nods, and the lesson begins. As we print a portrait of a female activist in a cowboy hat, staring the camera down like John Wayne, I lead Reza’s hands toward the tongs and show him how to gently place the paper in the different baths.

  “Careful not to touch the chemicals,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Safety is crucial in a darkroom. You should always wear closed shoes.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “If you do touch anything, always wash your hands right away. And be very careful not to get any in your mouth or eyes,” I say.

  “What happens if you do?” he asks.

  Our photo is in the final bath. I leave it in there and turn him around to face me. “Nothing will happen,” I say. “I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”

  I lick his lips. He always smiles when I do this, and I’ll keep doing it until it stops making him smile. I pull him into me, crushing his body into mine. I kiss him, run my hands up his shirt, feel his smooth skin.

  “Reza.” I look into his eyes. I soak in the sound of his name. “Reza,” I say again.

  “Art,” he says, tenderly.

  “Say it again,” I request.

  “Art,” he says. The sound of my name in his accent makes me feel like a new person, like he’s invented a better version of me. It almost brings tears to my eyes.