“I have an idea,” Freddy exclaimed. “Let’s go to Venice!” Instead, he began chemotherapy. At first the chemo sessions seemed to help, and after a few coma-like days of lethargy, he appeared almost sprightly as he gamboled around the brownstone. Each time Clay rejoiced in the improvement, even though it was also the reason they were spiraling into a pit of financial ruin. For many months of Freddy’s sickness, they didn’t speak frankly about the danger. Clay was just trying to keep his friend going day by day. Freddy’s insurance, however, was refusing to cover most of the specialist bills. Out of network. Exceeding lifetime coverage caps. Finally, Clay had no other choice but to ask Freddy outright if there was any secret, emergency van der Haar fund that he could access.
“Gitsy warned me that one day you’d come demanding money,” Freddy joked as he lay on the ripped couch in the basement. Then he stopped joking. There was no money, no secret stash, no forgotten van der Haar trust. There was only a mountain chain of debt, peaks and summits adding up to millions of dollars in total. “I’m so sorry,” Freddy said gravely. “You shouldn’t waste your youth locked up here with me. I’m not your problem. Put a can of gasoline by the door when you leave and know that I love you.” Clay knew that Freddy wasn’t joking, not about the love or about the gasoline. But Clay wouldn’t walk away. He’d done that once already when someone he loved was sick, and he’d barely survived the guilt of it. This time, through the searing worst of it, he’d be the good son and stay.
A week after the revelation about his finances, Freddy contracted pneumonia. His spleen was also infected, and he went into the hospital for three nights. Clay didn’t bother imagining the costs accrued in that visit. He was starting to adopt his friend’s put-it-on-the-life-tab mentality. When you’re buried to your waist, does it matter if you sink to your chest? Freddy came out of the hospital with a new condition: edema. His legs were waterlogged, each calf bloated to the size of a neck. Special socks would be needed—as would a wheelchair and converting the downstairs parlor into Freddy’s new master bedroom. The stay at the hospital had terrified Freddy. He swore he saw white ghosts walking around his bed at night (“You mean nurses?”), and he couldn’t get the howls of the other patients out of his head. He would do anything, sign any paper, never to spend another night in that place again. Clay hated hospitals too, so it wasn’t difficult when Freddy made him pledge not to leave him in one.
Not long after that, Freddy went on oxygen. It further confined his movements to the tether of the long tube screwed to the tank. Clay suggested throwing a fund-raiser for his medical expenses. “You’re one of the last New York art pioneers. I’m sure your friends can scare up a few billionaire bankers to come to a cocktail party in your honor. We need the money. Badly.” Freddy refused. “I don’t want people to see me,” he said, motioning to his oxygen tube and swollen legs, “like this.” But the real reason wasn’t vanity. The only thing worse than death to Freddy was shame, and after seventy-three years of being a New Yaak van der Haar, he couldn’t bear the public exposure of his condition as a beggar. He’d go with the gasoline option instead.
Clay had maxed out his own credit cards to pay some of the medical expenses. He accrued umpteen fines by defaulting on his college loans. Four banks had turned him down for a personal loan before the final, dodgiest branch extended him twenty thousand at an interest rate that would only appeal to suicide bombers. A chunk of that was eaten up merely by transportation to and from doctor visits. Freddy, with his wheelchair and oxygen tank, was too cumbersome to fit into a taxi; Uber drivers often threatened to go straight to an emergency room when they heard Freddy’s hysterical gasping and moaning. The solution fell to renting a party van with a chauffeur. A party van cost a fortune, and its interiors were often decked out in blinking rainbow lights. But since the van’s primary customer base was drunk teenagers, Freddy wasn’t deemed that objectionable. In New York, all obstacles can be overcome with cash. The loan quickly evaporated, and Clay decided he had only one remaining option.
His father was managing the security for a new office complex in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Riverdale was far more affluent than Clay’s childhood neighborhood, but it still carried some of the borough’s brash rhythms and street style. It didn’t feel so bad to be back in the Bronx, even on a scorching summer day where people packed under store awnings as if they were rush-hour subway cars. The new office complex was constructed entirely of black glass and was built in the shape of three smooth onyx stones touching at their tips. The development must have cost hundreds of millions, but Clay bet that not a single person living around it—or even working for it—could tell you who owned it. There were no occupants yet inside the glossy buildings, but Clay’s father was in charge of providing the impression of top-tier protection. The security uniforms, from ankle to neck, were a bark brown. From a distance, they faded into the color of the glass, causing an optical ripple effect when the guards circled the building.
Clay’s father stepped out of an emergency side door. Although he was the manager of the security detail, his uniform was the same bark brown, nearly the shade of his skin, and he had walkie-talkies clipped at each hip the way a western sheriff might have pistols. In the nearly three years since Clay had laid eyes on his father, he had lost all of his hair and had gained a substantial amount of weight. All these years, Clay presumed he’d broken free of his upbringing by taking the internship at the Peggy Guggenheim. Standing in front of his father, taking in the crisp, brown uniform and the camouflaged sweat stains, he realized that his enviable museum job was simply another version of security guard.
“Look at you,” his father said, offering his hand in the position of an arm wrestler. Clay clasped it, and his father bumped gently into his chest in an abbreviated hug. “You’re looking older than I last saw you. Maybe a little thicker too from all that pasta!”
“I’m sorry it’s been so long. I got back, oh maybe a month ago,” Clay lied. “I didn’t want to visit until I got settled so I could tell you where I was.”
His father could have taken issue with that slight, but he simply nodded in resignation. His son was an adult now. They chatted for a while, standing directly under the sun in the sweltering heat, as if inviting Clay into the air-conditioned building would have been a breach of protocol. His father had never been a tyrant, but Clay couldn’t help feeling that this chat in the pounding heat was a test of his endurance. His father spoke leisurely, filling him in on his cousins and aunts—who got married, who’d been laid off. After fifteen minutes, Clay introduced his reason for the visit.
“I was wondering . . . Mom’s life insurance.”
“Yeah?” his father asked with a squint. Beads of sweat rolled down his neck.
“I know she had a policy from the dental association. And I know the money went to you, but she said I should pay off my college loans with some of it. I was thinking, now that I’m back . . .”
His father adjusted his walkie-talkies. He kicked at his own shadow on the concrete. His mouth was moving under his sagging cheeks as if he were chewing gum, although Clay knew gum would be against the rules. The developers wouldn’t want gum wads mucking up the smooth black pavement.
“There is some money,” his father said. “And, yes, your mother would have wanted it to go to your education. How much do you owe Fordham University?” His father always recited the school’s full name. It was never just Fordham.
“One hundred and thirteen thousand dollars.” The truth was that he owed one hundred and twelve thousand two hundred and eighty-one dollars for his four years at the Jesuit liberal arts college. But Clay’s portion of his mom’s life insurance money wasn’t going to touch his student debt. Clay was going to spend it on keeping Freddy alive.
His father needed a belt. At the mention of money, he pulled at his waistline. “Okay,” he answered. “You give me your address, I’ll mail you a check. How’s that?” To Clay’s relief, his father didn’t look annoyed or doubtful.
&
nbsp; Clay wrote down the address on Jefferson Avenue. His father took the piece of paper, studied it, and folded it up in his shirt pocket. “You go out to visit your mom at the cemetery?”
“Not yet,” Clay said, staring down at his own tarry shadow on the concrete, jamming his heel into the back of his own skull. “But I plan to go. I promise.”
Not long after the check arrived, Freddy’s oncologist recommended a more vigorous and experimental form of chemo. Early studies indicated that it had a higher success rate with patients living with (“or dying with,” as Freddy corrected) HIV. Freddy’s GP was on the fence. “It can get risky to switch. Different chemicals, different reactions, different results. You may turn a different color. You may go into remission. You may turn inside out.” But the oncologist wagged this delicious carrot: “You might also feel a whole lot better.” It was nearly impossible to argue against feeling better—even if it was experimental, even if it was more expensive. “I’d love to feel better,” Freddy agreed. “Even one day of feeling better. I just pray I don’t lose my hair.”
If the earlier chemo had rendered him a listing vessel, this new-and-improved variety flipped him over and sunk him deep. The pain was excruciating, and the cleanup was comparable. Freddy went screaming into unconsciousness, and woke up periodically to scream some more. He vomited so profusely that the parlor was littered with buckets. The diarrhea was worse than the vomiting because it couldn’t be directed or contained. Adult diapers only helped so much.
Ironically, Freddy did not lose his hair. It grew a lustrous gray, perhaps conditioned by the night sweats and stomach bile. After two weeks, the pain ebbed enough that Freddy no longer screamed at all hours. A temporary calm returned to Jefferson Avenue. Clay called the oncologist. “Excellent,” the doctor said. “We’ll let him get his strength back and schedule the next chemo session for three weeks.”
The second session yielded the same horrific results, only this time Clay finally hired outside help. Nurses came and went like thunderstorms. Most of them quit because the patient was “uncooperative.” One nurse claimed Freddy had bitten him on the hand. Another marched out after proclaiming, “This man needs to be in a hospital!” Thankfully, nurses populated New York like aspiring actors: there could always be a fresh face from an agency waiting at the front door in the morning with only a scant idea of the horror movie underway inside.
One afternoon, as they were pulling up to Jefferson Avenue after an appointment with Freddy’s GP, Clay saw the silhouette of a plump, older black man on the sidewalk, a few feet from the open gate to the brownstone. “Stay here a second,” he told Freddy and the nurse, who were both crammed in the back of the party van. Clay climbed out and hurried toward his father.
His dad wasn’t wearing his bark-brown uniform even though it was a Thursday. Clay feared he had taken the day off for this visit. His dad held a piece of paper emblazoned with the logo of the bank where Clay had taken out his college loans. Clay had directed the bank to route all correspondence to his new Brooklyn address, but statements must have continued being sent to the Guillory household.
Clay knew what was coming, and yet in the eight white sidewalk tabs it took to reach his father he failed to formulate any justifiable defense.
“What is this?” his father shouted as he shook the paper in his grip. “Says here, you deferred on your loan. Says here you haven’t repaid so much as a dime of it. Where’s the money I gave you from Mom’s life insurance?” His father was enraged, his voice louder and sharper than Clay had ever heard it. “Where is it? What did you spend it on?” Spit flew from his lips. He was visibly quaking. It frightened Clay to see his father yelling out on the sidewalk. Clay glanced around at the renovated homes, either in case a neighbor got the wrong idea and called the police or in case there might actually be need to call the police should his father rush toward Freddy in the van.
“Dad, please.” He reached for the letter, but it was whisked away. “I needed the money. I will pay my loans back. What difference does it—”
“I gave you that money for your college tuition. Not for you to spend on anything you feel like.” He glared over Clay’s shoulder. “Who is that?”
Clay spun around. The nurse had not heeded his order to remain in the van. She’d opened the back door, exposing the frail old white man wrapped in a lavender throw and haloed by blinking colored lights. “What are you doing with that man? Did you pick him up from the hospital?” Clay’s father smiled angrily. “You spending your mother’s money on some rich white guy, van der something?” His father must have searched the brownstone’s front-door mailbox. “What the fuck are you doing, Clay?”
“I’m helping him. He’s sick,” Clay managed. “I was taking him to the doctor.”
“Oh, helping!” His father nodded vigorously. “What a good guy you are! Helping. Your mother could have used some help. I could’ve used some help.” He raised his palm and spread his fingers wide. “Five! That’s how many times you visited your mother in the hospital. I counted. Five! And she counted too. I was there every day for months. You managed to drop by five times to see your mother when she was dying. And now you’re using her money on this old, screwed-up—” Clay wished his father would sputter a derogatory word, freeing Clay to hate him for uttering it—hating him for something would have helped him a great deal right now. But his father didn’t use any of those derogatory words. Instead he simply clenched his hand. “I’m through with you,” he yelled to his son. “Don’t come back. Not even when you realize your mistake.” He tossed the loan statement at Clay’s feet and strode off, down the buckled sidewalk, until he was lost among the tattooed legs and toddler-weighted shoulders of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
When Clay walked back to the van, Freddy whispered through his cracked lips, “Who was that awful man?”
“That was my father.” Clay reached into the back seat to slip his arm around Freddy’s hanger-sharp shoulders. Long, soft fingers crested his scalp, Freddy’s fingers. Their tips pressed against the indentation where Clay’s skull met his spine. He froze, and Freddy’s fingers remained there, exerting a tender pressure. They stayed like that for a minute in the darkness of the van, and it took all of Clay’s strength to snap awake and pick up this frail body and carry it into the house.
Sometimes, late at night, Clay hallucinated that it wasn’t a man he was trying to save but a piece of New York. If Freddy died, a vital chapter of the city would disappear with him, never to return, all of those righteous sins and transgressions, all of those young gay men in thousands of black-and-white photographs, all of his raw beauty, up in smoke. Freddy was the last bridge, and once he fell, that secret city inside him would be lost for good. Clay knew this much: there was no memory in New York; there was only the living. But in the end, it didn’t matter who or what he thought he was saving. After four rounds of the new-and-improved treatment, Freddy couldn’t take it anymore.
He would die soon. Every single hospice nurse claimed that Freddy would live only for a few more hours, a few more days. And yet summer ticked on, each month hotter than the last. The weeds wilted in the back garden. Flies died on the windowsills. And gasping, wheezing Freddy, whose every inhale sounded like the brawl of the century, continued to exist. It was very hard to kill a cockroach.
The new-and-improved chemo hadn’t been the worst part of Freddy’s illness. They had finally reached the worst part, the waiting for the abusively tardy angel of death to arrive. In his lucid moments, Freddy pleaded with the nurses: “More morphine, kill me with it, please.” And the nurses would let out an exhausted groan as if to say, Believe me, I’m trying. One nurse told Clay in the kitchen, “I’ve given him the highest dosage I can. It’s enough to kill a horse. Most hospice patients die from morphine, but I can only OD him within an acceptable margin of error!” The death that Freddy needed was apparently beyond that acceptable margin of error.
August and September crawled by, and all Clay could do was sit at his bedside and hold his hand.
“Please put a pillow over, stop breathing . . .” Freddy’s eyes would hound him from the pillow, his lips as dry as sand dunes. “Please. Clay. I don’t. Want to.” His fingertips pattered against the back of Clay’s hand like light, insistent rain. Clay would squeeze his hand and bring a cold washcloth for his forehead.
On the first chilly day of fall, Clay let the new nurse in. They made small talk in the kitchen as he poured her a cup of coffee. Then she went to work, trying to find a pulse on Freddy, changing his IV, adding his morning dose of morphine to the drip. Freddy’s muscles went slack like cut rubber bands. Clay sat in the chair by the bed while the nurse with the husky Haitian accent went upstairs to use the bathroom.
Clay rushed to the drawer and removed the needle. He’d pilfered it from the bag of a hospice nurse a week ago, the one who was too busy quitting to notice the theft. Clay had spent two years doing everything he could to keep Freddy alive. But now the only favor he could do for his best friend was to help him reach an end. Clay sat in the chair, leaned over the bed, and whispered in Freddy’s ear.
“Make a fist for me,” he said. “One last gesture, and that’s it, I promise. Try to squeeze my thumb.” Freddy managed to curl his palm around Clay’s thumb. A single vein rose on the long, gray arm.
Clay pulled the cap off the needle. He hoped this amount of morphine, plus the horse dose already running through him, would be enough. He didn’t dare google the question on his phone in case the police ever checked.
A Beautiful Crime Page 25
