The End of Men

by Karen Rinaldi

  “She’s remarkable, our Jessie,” Paul said wistfully, more to himself than to Beth. “The thing that makes all this so hard”—Paul swept his hand across his body—“is knowing I won’t be around to watch her grow up. It’s where I lose my faith in God.” Paul pressed his lips together in an unsuccessful effort to stem his tears.

  PAUL HAD ALWAYS been devoutly Catholic. When he and Beth were first dating, it was important to him that Beth attend Sunday morning Mass with him every week. Beth had no truck with religion, having grown up in an atheist household, but she made the effort to accompany Paul to church as a way to get to know him better. She admired his devotion and found beauty in the liturgical ritual. Paul’s submission to the tenets of Catholicism seemed to contradict his fierce intellect, and yet it was this very conundrum that made her feel that she could trust him. He seemed at home in mind and spirit.

  But the sermons and prayers of Sunday Mass left her cold. Worse, the politics of the Church seemed supremely misogynist to her. She couldn’t imagine how any woman could wrap her head around such blatant patriarchal bullshit.

  “Would you ever convert to Catholicism?” Paul asked her over brunch one Sunday after church.

  “No, Paul, I couldn’t. It would be hypocritical. In fact, I’m not even sure that I’m comfortable attending Mass with you anymore. It feels like a lie,” Beth told him.

  “I respect that. But I don’t know how we can be together if God isn’t central to your life.”

  “Well, that’s something you need to think hard about because I don’t see it changing,” Beth replied. “I don’t see why love between two people on earth needs something more to connect them. Love is mystery enough for me.” Paul grabbed her hand in solidarity and the subject never came up again between them.

  Paul had planned on becoming a Jesuit priest until, at the age of twenty-two, he had changed his mind and gotten his MBA instead. By the time he was twenty-eight, he had made a killing as an investment banker. However, he’d always struggled to understand his conflicting desires and never quite made peace with any of his choices. When he met Beth, he’d believed that she was his salvation. His struggle with her lack of faith ultimately dissolved in the bond they’d created together. What Beth couldn’t know at the beginning was how she was the first and only woman Paul had ever fallen for. Paul’s love for Beth transcended the limitations that entrapped him in life and faith.

  From the start, Beth was drawn to Paul’s easy sense of humor, which lacked any meanness whatsoever. She’d never met a man who laughed so easily, who didn’t sulk and wasn’t jealous. This scored high points for Beth. In May of that year, on Beth’s twenty-eighth birthday, Paul threw her a once-in-a-lifetime party. Since they’d known each other for only a few months, Paul had Isabel help plan the party and invite guests. He’d rented a hundred-foot schooner to sail around Manhattan. A three-star chef prepared dinner, served by a waitstaff. The unseasonably warm night, illuminated by a full moon and cloudless sky, seemed ordained to capture Beth’s heart, as if Paul had made a pact with Mother Nature herself to bestow magic on the evening. By coincidence, Tony Bennett was giving a performance on one of the Hudson River piers. The boat set anchor for an hour to listen from the water. At the end of the evening, as they left the marina and walked along the river, Paul gave Beth a strand of black Mikimoto pearls. When he proposed a month later, Beth didn’t hesitate for a moment.

  People often mistook the couple for brother and sister. More fraternal than romantic, the strangers’ assumptions weren’t entirely off the mark. They never could get the sex right. While Beth tried to address what the problems might be, Paul insisted that his strict Catholic upbringing had created inhibitions. Once they were married, he’d promised, his resistance would lift.

  For all of Beth’s worldliness, she chose to believe Paul. When someone asked her if she could name the most important reason why she married her husband, Beth replied quick and sure: “Trust. I trust him.”

  Less than a year later, Beth’s concept of trust had been thrashed to bits when she found out that Paul had contracted HIV by having unprotected sex with countless men before and during their marriage. Beth felt betrayed by Paul’s infidelity, but she was furious at the risk Paul had taken with her life and their unborn daughter’s. Worse, the way Beth learned the truth further crushed her belief that Paul’s concerns ever extended beyond reinforcing the lie he lived.

  Paul had donated blood for his father, who was about to undergo surgery due to cancer. In spite of Paul’s O positive blood type, which meant he was a universal donor, he was reluctant to donate the blood. When Beth questioned him about it, he replied, “I can’t stand the sight of blood.”

  “Really? Your father has cancer, Paul, get over it and give up the blood,” she commanded.

  Three weeks later, Beth received a phone call from the hospital saying they urgently needed to speak with Mr. Marchand.

  Beth picked up on the tension in the caller’s voice. “Can you please tell me if there is a problem? This is his wife.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, we can’t do that. It’s a private matter. Please have him call the hospital as soon as possible. It’s urgent.” The doctor’s voice held tight. Clearly something was very wrong.

  Beth first thought, My God, Paul has leukemia. Further complicating her chain of morose projections, her period was two weeks late and she suspected that she might be pregnant, the result of an unusually successful evening of sex with Paul a month earlier. They’d met for drinks after work and then polished off a bottle of Cristal with dinner. Later that night in bed, Beth successfully coaxed Paul into hours of lovemaking.

  Beth called Paul out of a meeting to tell him about the phone call from the doctor. Terse and distracted, he told her, “I’m very busy today, Beth. Please don’t interrupt any more meetings with this nonsense.”

  “Paul, the doctor said it was urgent,” she said. “How can you say it’s nonsense?” Beth’s voice turned shrill in concern and confusion.

  “I’ll call him tomorrow.”

  When Paul got home that night, she screamed at him. “For Christ’s sake, how can you not want to know why the doctor is calling you with urgent news? News he can’t even tell your wife! What is wrong with you?” She hated herself for flipping out, but she sensed that something terrible was happening to them.

  Paul stood squarely in front of her as if to physically block her. The veins across his forehead pumped to the surface, looking like they could burst from the strain. “I couldn’t get the doctor on the phone, but I left him a message. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.”

  Paul seemed far from fine, and Beth couldn’t understand why he was acting so strangely.

  He softened then and pulled her toward him. “Listen, sweetheart, let’s just crawl into bed and make love.”

  Furious about his refusal to take the phone call seriously, the last thing Beth wanted to do was have sex with him. “Paul, not now. I’m really not up for it.”

  “How can you turn your husband down? I’m trying to make this work.” Paul held her hands in his and pulled her, slowly, into the bedroom.

  From some archaic sense of marital duty she didn’t even know she had, Beth climbed into bed with Paul that evening and reluctantly allowed him to have sex with her. She lay there, motionless, biting into the flesh of her palm, as he mindlessly thrust away. When she broke through the skin of her hand with her teeth she didn’t feel a thing. Paul didn’t notice the blood.

  The next morning, Paul awoke as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Beth questioned the urgency she’d felt and wondered if she had exaggerated what had transpired the day before. They had a quick breakfast together before Paul left for the office. As he closed the door behind him, Beth called out, “Paul, please speak with the doctor today. Put my mind at ease.”

  That evening, Beth came home from work to find Paul sitting on the couch listening to Wagner full blast on the stereo. Paul had never arrived home from work before Beth.
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br />   “Wow—what’re you doing home?” she asked, genuinely surprised and momentarily delighted. Paul’s vacant stare shifted her delight to darkness. Something was very, very wrong. Her pulse spiked.

  Paul turned his head to follow her as she walked over to the stereo and turned the volume down. He stood up from the couch looking like a stranger to her, as if another being had inhabited her husband’s body.

  “Paul?”

  “I spoke to the doctor.” He paused.

  “And . . . ?” Beth couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “I have it.”

  Beth looked at him with impatience. “You have what?”

  “I’m HIV positive.”

  Beth’s nonsensical response was to laugh as if it were a sick joke, although she knew with dead certainty that it was not. Her knees gave out and she fell onto the rug, which somehow lacked substantiality—was it floating? she wondered—beneath her feet. Breathing heavily, Beth felt as if she would faint. It took a few minutes for her to feel gravity again.

  “No, Paul. How can that be possible?”

  “I don’t know,” he told her as he stood eerily still, not offering any insight as to how his life had just been cut short.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” Beth said, her voice tremulous with shock. “You must know something.”

  But Paul stood his ground, recalcitrant, unapologetic. Beth crawled to the couch, and climbed onto it like a two-year-old would, uncertain again if gravity would keep her grounded. She vibrated with adrenaline.

  “Now what, Paul? What do we do now?”

  Beth’s comprehension of the world shifted violently that evening. Nothing would ever look the way it had before the moment Paul uttered the fatal words, “HIV positive.” She heard them over and over and over again in her mind, trying to trace her way back to the moment when she should have known that her husband was a ticking time bomb.

  The week that followed felt like a dream as Beth tried to understand how he might have contracted the virus. He lied at first when she asked if he was gay, saying, “Beth, come on. I have a hard enough time having sex with women. Do you think I’d be able to perform with men?” He sounded convincing, so Beth believed him. She still trusted him.

  Paul speculated that Beth’s boyfriend before Paul, who had a sexually promiscuous and multi-gendered past, was responsible for the virus in their midst. Of course, this theory assumed that Beth was positive as well.

  ONE TORTURED WEEK later, Beth’s results came back. She had tested negative for HIV and positive for pregnancy. It was early morning when they got the call.

  “Paul, please. Just tell me the truth,” Beth said, trying to breathe steadily.

  “I don’t know the truth,” Paul said.

  “You know some things. Like: How many men? Is there a man you love?” She needed some facts. Truth, what was that?

  “No! I love only you, Beth.”

  Paul sounded resolute, which made Beth angrier. He moved away from the confrontation, ducking into the kitchen under the pretense of pouring another cup of coffee. She followed him.

  “That’s fucking bullshit! You used me to cover your shame. Just fucking tell me what’s going on, Paul—at least grant me that respect!”

  Finally he turned to face her. “Men, Beth?” he said through clenched teeth, hands working into fists. “There have always been men. In high school, in college, at work, when I travel.”

  “And you didn’t—don’t—practice safe sex? How could you be so stupid?”

  “I hated myself. Hate . . .” Paul’s voice tempered to a defeated whisper. “Maybe I should just kill myself now and get it over with.”

  Beth glanced at the knives in the wooden block on the counter as a plausible threat and moved to place herself between them and Paul. He turned away from her but stood, unmoving, for a few uncomfortable minutes. She was afraid of Paul at this moment. If he was capable of such a dangerous lie, what else could he do? When a life comes miserably tumbling down, what morphs a thought of action into a fatal reaction?

  When Paul walked away and out the front door, Beth tried to muster the strength to go after him but could only stand in dazed relief.

  FOR WEEKS BETH wandered around in a haze and didn’t tell anyone the news of Paul’s health status. If she just kept it to herself, she unreasonably reasoned, it couldn’t be real, it wouldn’t be true. And indeed, it wasn’t until she told the story to Isabel, a few weeks later, that it all came rushing at her as her new reality.

  Beth and Paul continued to live together for a few months after the two phone calls that had altered their lives irrevocably, during which time Paul seemed to have found an insatiable sex drive. Before the news of his HIV status, he had to be seduced into sex. Not so now. He became desperate to sleep with his wife though she adamantly refused him.

  Beth lived in mortal fear for her health and the health of the baby she was carrying. Paul’s desire for sex disgusted her and filled her with contempt. She could barely look at him anymore and cringed whenever he tried to touch her. She wanted to kick him out of their apartment, but for the first time in her life, she found herself crippled by terror. He continued to threaten suicide, and Beth found herself caught between being fearful that he would act on his threat or, worse, that they all—Beth, Paul, and their unborn child—would become a New York horror story.

  Paul moved out in August after several entreaties from Beth. She’d been spending nights at Isabel’s to give Paul space, or at least that’s what she told him. Only once he was out of her daily life could Beth express the rage she felt toward him. In the months that followed, Beth refused to speak with him except to remind him that she thought him a coward. Pregnant with Jessie, Beth felt murderously protective. Paul never let up on his entreaties to try to make Beth understand. He swore that he hadn’t tried to infect her during that last night they’d made love. He didn’t even know of his status yet, he argued. He claimed he was trying to convince himself that all was fine. But in Beth’s mind it didn’t matter. His denial overwrote his instinct to protect her and that freaked her out more than anything. Why else would he have postponed talking with the doctor if he hadn’t known at least on some level?

  There was no way to know what was in Paul’s heart and mind; surely he believed the story he told himself, and Beth found a small part of her wanting to believe him as well. Maybe she had to. What would it mean to admit to herself the possibility of Paul’s coldhearted ability to blatantly disregard the welfare of his wife and baby to the extent of infecting them with a deadly virus? What kind of love allowed for that? None that Beth had ever wanted to know.

  Over the course of years, Beth had slowly allowed Paul back into her life with the realization that love can confound with messiness and even cruelty. Once she accepted Paul’s dread about who he was, she began to sow the seeds of forgiveness. In that way, they became a kind of family.

  PAUL, BETH, AND Jessie spent two nights in Portofino before flying back to New York. On the final evening, Beth made an excuse for staying back at the hotel so that Paul and Jessie could have a date for dinner at the waterfront restaurant where Jessie had met her new friend.

  They returned hours later, still laughing about how Paul had mangled the little Italian that he knew while insisting on speaking to the waiters in their language. Beth’s heart ached watching Paul and Jessie together. Their daily lives had little to do with each other. Still, when they did see each other, Jessie brought out a childlike sense of play in him, a quality often displayed in his life before his HIV status, but now only revealed when he spent time with his daughter. They loved each other, that was certain.

  Time stood still for the three of them in that ancient Italian town, and Beth was caught in an emotional whorl that her sensible self bucked with every last ounce of energy. She couldn’t wait to get back home, to get back to work and to the routine home life with Jessie that anchored her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Maggie

  MAGGIE
COULDN’T GET Blue Eyes out of her head.

  She had seen him only one day over the summer: sitting alone on a park bench across from RHM, scooping up the remains of a Wendy’s Frosty from the yellow-and-red cup. He wore khaki shorts, a white oxford button-down, and lime-green converse high-tops. She thought she detected a whiff of amber as she walked past him. Maggie caught his cool blues for a moment and smiled flirtatiously. Nervous that he would think she was coming on to him—okay, she really did find him inexplicably attractive—she quickly crossed to the other side of the park with unnecessary determination considering her destination of the local bodega for a coffee. Maggie opted instead for a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar. Seeing Blue Eyes made her suddenly feel famished.

  Talk to the man for goodness’ sake, Maggie encouraged herself. What do you have to lose?

  Frozen treat in hand, Maggie walked back across the park toward Blue Eyes, resolved to say hello and at least open up the opportunity for conversation. Distracted, she had torn open the wrapper of her dark-chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick, but had forgotten to take a lick. The temperature had been hovering around 90 degrees all week and the ice cream bar couldn’t hack it. Before she reached the park bench, the entire bar slid off the stick and onto her sleeveless white silk chemise. Maggie stood in disbelief for a few seconds, looking down at the blob of ice cream and chocolate on the ground in front of her. When she looked up, Blue Eyes was walking toward her. “Oh, nuts” was all she could say, a phrase that always made Lily laugh when Maggie said it.

  “Tough break,” Blue Eyes said as he sauntered past her. His voice, octaves higher than she expected, caused Maggie to jump at the sound of it. Maggie avoided his eyes, focusing instead on the orange-capped pen clipped inside his shirt pocket.

  Mortified, Maggie headed straight back to the office, hoping she wouldn’t bump into anyone she knew along the way. No luck she would go unnoticed—Beth and Isabel happened to be walking back from lunch at the same moment.