Yale mentioned to Dwight, the copy editor, that he was about to head up to Door County again, and Dwight, who’d grown up vacationing there, had all sorts of advice for him, most of it seasonally inappropriate. Dwight was a tedious person, but Yale hadn’t caught a typo in Out Loud all year. Dwight also told him about the German POWs who’d been sent to the peninsula during World War II to pick cherries, and how many of them had stayed and married local girls. Yale logged this away as fodder for the ride up.
Down at Charlie’s end of the table, though, something was wrong. Charlie had his head in his hands, and he’d gone white, and he was saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rafael was saying. “I thought you’d know before I would.”
Yale said, “What?” and Charlie shook his head urgently. It was something to be dropped. Something to talk about at home. Meanwhile, no one at Yale’s end seemed to have heard whatever was said. They dutifully found conversations to cover the awkward silence. Dwight asked to taste Gloria’s tomato soup. But then Charlie was up from the table, heading out the door to the pay phone without his coat. Through the window Yale could see him dialing, listening, hanging up, retrieving his quarter, dialing again. Four times.
When he came back, he didn’t sit down but reached across the table to Yale. He handed him his credit card and whispered: “Take care of everyone, okay?” And then he turned and walked out.
The people sitting at what had been Charlie’s end of the table didn’t seem shocked, just chagrined, as if they’d made a horrible mistake. Yale squeezed his way off the bench past Gloria and went to fill Charlie’s vacant chair. He said, quietly, “What just happened?”
The two men on either side—Rafael and a new guy—both started to talk and then stopped. Rafael finally said, “It’s Julian Ames.”
“Oh. Fuck.” Yale felt faint, felt himself go as pale as Charlie had. “No,” he said. “Fuck.”
But they weren’t contradicting him, weren’t saying, “No, we only meant he broke his leg. We only meant someone beat him up.” He looked at them, and they looked at their plates.
Yale’s breath wasn’t coming on its own.
And, terribly, half his horror was selfish. Had he actually considered going up to Julian’s apartment? He hadn’t actually done it, had he? He hadn’t gone up there and then blocked it out, and here he sat in denial? He really hadn’t. He’d had vivid dreams about it since, but he hadn’t done it.
No, more important: Julian, beautiful Julian. Julian, who kept talking about the cure. Yale wondered if this was in fact what Julian had been trying to tell him in the bathroom. A confession of illness mistaken for a confession of love. He said to Rafael, “You heard this firsthand?”
“He, um. It was his birthday present to himself, to get tested. That’s kind of all I know. Not from Julian, from Teddy Naples.”
Julian’s birthday was December 2. The Howard Brown fundraiser had been—it had still been Hanukkah, hadn’t it? The thirteenth. So no, he wouldn’t have had the results by then. Unless he already wasn’t feeling well. Unless that was the reason he’d finally done it.
The new guy said, “I mean, if it’s just the virus, he could have a long time. Years!”
Rafael said, “What I heard was they called him on Christmas Eve. He woke up because the phone was ringing, and he thought it was his mom calling for Christmas. And it was the nurse, saying to come in for his results.”
The whole table was listening now, satisfying their own curiosity. No one seemed personally upset, just concerned for Yale. Either they didn’t know Julian well, or Yale and Charlie were the last to hear.
Yale reached for Charlie’s half-full glass of water and watched his own hand shake. He should call Julian, but that was clearly what Charlie had tried. He should chase after Charlie, figure out where he was going—but Yale was the one with the credit card, and people still had food in front of them. Rafael said, “Let’s take this down the street. Let’s get you a beer.”
* * *
—
Charlie wasn’t at the apartment when Yale got home two hours later. He felt disappointed, to an extent that surprised him. He’d wanted to talk it over, to lie there on the bed together staring at the walls and swearing and rehashing any details they’d picked up. But there was more to it: By holding Charlie, Yale could begin to atone for ever thinking of starting up with Julian. The tighter he held Charlie, the more he could take it back.
At nine o’clock, Yale headed to Masonic alone with some magazines and a paper party hat for Terrence. He hadn’t been up to the new AIDS unit yet, and he took the wrong elevator, had to wind his way through the pulmonology ward, but then there it was. Christmas lights and streamers on the nurses’ station. A nurse who looked like Nell Carter asked Yale if he wanted sparkling cider. Sure, he said, and she poured it into a little Dixie cup. “He’s got a new roommate in there today,” she said. “Angry guy, but he’s out cold now. Terrence is awake.”
Yale tried to peek at this new roommate as he walked in, tried to see if it was anyone he knew—but it was dark on that side of the curtain, and all he could see was the bottom of someone’s chin, stubble and purple lesions on a hollowed jawline.
Terrence was eating a chocolate pudding with a plastic spoon—a cannula in his nose for oxygen, an IV taped to his wristbone. He looked even thinner than he had at the fundraiser, but better too. Happier, at least. “Hey,” Terrence said. “You want to eat this for me?” His voice was rough, strained.
“I’m tempted,” Yale said, sitting down, “but those artificial flavors are for your health and recovery.”
Yale asked if Charlie had been in. Terrence said no, just Fiona. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. We just got our signals crossed.” He said, “Hey, don’t talk, okay? I’ll talk. This place is nice. Seriously, you got a TV lounge out there? This is Club Med.”
“Club Dead.”
“No, no talking. I made your veggie chili on Christmas. It turned out okay, but I’m no expert.”
Terrence said, “You know the hardest thing about having AIDS?”
It had quickly become an old joke, but Yale still laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “telling your parents you’re Haitian.”
“No.” Terrence cracked a wide grin. “It’s actually the dying part.” He started laughing, and then he started coughing. But it was okay, it was okay.
Yale remembered, so vividly: Terrence carrying Fiona down the hall of the suburban hospital where Nico’s parents had insisted on moving him, carrying her like a baby as she sobbed on his neck. She had stubbornly refused to go into Nico’s room without Terrence, and all the social worker had managed to broker was an hourly changing of the guard: Mr. and Mrs. Marcus, to whom Fiona wasn’t speaking, would spend an hour at his bedside while Terrence and Fiona sat in the ICU waiting area, and then Terrence and Fiona would get half an hour while the Marcuses went down to the cafeteria. Yale and Charlie and Julian and Teddy and Asher and a rotation of Nico’s other friends filled in the gaps. Yale was the one there with Fiona and Terrence—the three of them were stepping off the elevator—when the terrible nurse with the spiky hair came toward them, told Fiona she should go in there now, that this was the time. “Can I bring Terrence?” she said, and the nurse looked put out and said she could maybe get the social worker out of his meeting, and Fiona said, “I’m not going in without him.”
Fiona sat down then on the bench, and Yale didn’t know whether to look at her or to look at Terrence, who was shaking, his hands on the windowsill, or if maybe he should just leave—if this was the point at which he didn’t deserve to be here anymore. And after thirty seconds, Fiona stood up and said, “I’m so sorry, Terrence,” and ran down to Nico’s room.
Yale strode over to the nurses’ station, said, “Yeah, let’s get the social worker here. This is not okay. This is not okay.”
But while
they were waiting for him, Fiona came back out, looking both twelve and a hundred, but not twenty-one. She was convulsing, sobbing so hard that she made no noise. Behind her, Mrs. Marcus started wailing. The doctor came out of the room and toward Terrence, and Yale prepared to catch him as he fell. But Terrence, once the doctor had confirmed what they knew he would, did not collapse.
He said to the doctor, in a voice like hollow stone, “I’ll be back in two hours. You’re going to clean him up, right? And they’ll have their time. And I will be back in two hours.” His knee was still hurt from running into the cleaning cart that morning, but he scooped Fiona up like she weighed nothing and walked straight out of the hospital. Yale stayed back to call Charlie and everyone else from the nursing station phone. He found out later that Terrence had carried Fiona around the outside of the hospital for twenty full minutes until she was ready to come back in and call for a ride. That someone, concerned that a black man was carrying a sobbing white woman around the parking lot, called the police, and an officer showed up and trailed them slowly, until Fiona shouted that she was fine, that it wasn’t illegal for a person to carry another person, was it?
And now it was Terrence in the bed, and at least this was a much better place, but did it matter in the end? And soon it would be Julian.
Terrence’s eyes had closed, and Yale sat there a long time, relaying gossip. Yale sang him “Auld Lang Syne,” croaky and off-key, till Terrence whapped him with the back of his IV-free hand to make him stop. The whole time, Yale thought Charlie might show up. But he didn’t.
Terrence opened his eyes. “Is it midnight yet?”
“It’s 10:40. But we could watch the ball drop in New York. Can you hold out twenty minutes?” He got the little TV in the corner working, showing a Times Square that Terrence would never visit again.
Terrence watched the ball, and then he said, quietly, “I made it. 1986, man.” He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Yale didn’t feel he should go yet—or maybe he didn’t want to—and so he sat there a few more minutes. The door opened and Yale thought it might be Charlie, but it was just a nurse, checking that everything was alright.
Yale squeezed Terrence’s thin hand as hard as he dared. He said, “You can’t die of a fucking sinus infection.”
* * *
—
Charlie wasn’t at home, either.
Yale left a long message on Julian’s answering machine, shamefully relieved that he hadn’t picked up. “I want you to let us know what we can do,” he said. “Some people—I mean, Nico and Terrence had each other, you know? And if you don’t have anyone—which isn’t what I mean—you have all of us.”
He wondered how Teddy was doing. Teddy and Julian had been on and off for years, and he must be terrified, on top of devastated. Yet Teddy, despite all his time in the bathhouses, all his time in the back rooms of clubs doing things that made Yale squeamish to imagine, seemed perfectly healthy so far. (He could hear Charlie and Asher both, chastising him for that line of thought. From Charlie: It’s not about the numbers, it’s about the condoms. From Asher: If we had more bathhouses, we’d have less illness. You know why? We’d have less shame.)
Once, Teddy had drunkenly whispered to Yale, like it was the best secret: “You know why I don’t have it? You can’t get it if you always top.” And Yale had tried to give him data, had said that was like girls who thought you couldn’t get pregnant in summer. That you couldn’t apply rules to a virus this random. Yale said, “Look, you ever get soap up in there? Things go both ways.” If Teddy didn’t already know, deep down, that he had it, he had to know now. They were human dominoes. How could Teddy not know he was the next domino in line?
* * *
—
It wasn’t till two in the morning that Charlie walked in the door. Yale had been sleeping in sweatpants on the couch, by the lights of the small Christmas tree. Charlie’s face was pinched, and he moved like a broken puppet. Yale asked, as gently as he could, where he’d been, and Charlie said, “Walking.” He sat on the couch, and Yale sat up and put his head on Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie’s body gave off cold like an open refrigerator. Yale took the blanket he’d been using and covered Charlie with it too. Charlie said, “It was just the final straw. Not that it’s final. That’s the thing. It’s a straw, and it broke me, but I know there’ll be more.”
And Yale understood, because that was how he’d felt the night of the fundraiser. He put his hand to Charlie’s face, and Charlie shuddered. “Sorry,” Yale said. “I wasn’t—I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“What, are you okay?”
“Of course not. But this seems to be hitting you harder than most.”
Charlie snorted. “Most.”
It was easier to talk to Charlie when they were both looking at the Christmas tree than when they were looking at each other. Yale breathed deeply and said, “I want to reassure you. I’ve said this before, and I shouldn’t have to say it, but I know for some reason it was always a concern for you. And you need to know that Julian and I never touched each other.”
Charlie jerked away and looked at Yale wild-eyed.
“I’m sorry, I thought maybe—I thought that might have been on your mind.”
Charlie stood, throwing the blanket off like it was covered with spiders. He said, “Bloody fucking hell, Yale.”
“Okay, I shouldn’t have brought it up. Come back. Come here. Come here.”
Charlie did, and he cried for a while into Yale’s chest hair, and then he fell asleep there.
2015
Arnaud had asked her not to call till 10 a.m., so Fiona called at 10:01. He didn’t answer and so she tried again, and then she killed time by showering. At 10:26, he answered.
He said, “You got some rest?”
“Tell me,” she said.
“I have photos, if you’d like to see.”
“Was it them?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Was there—did they have—was it just them?”
“Two adults. Listen, I can describe these forever or you can look for yourself.”
They agreed to meet at noon at a place in Saint-Germain called Sushi House—not really Fiona’s idea of Paris, but at least she pronounced it easily for the taxi that took her there. And when they sat down and she made herself look at the menu, kept herself from diving across the table to rip open Arnaud’s messenger bag, she could also understand the food being described: sake nigiri, ikura, miso.
Arnaud told her he’d waited in his car till eleven, and at last Kurt and Claire had come walking past his window, hand in hand.
Arnaud held his phone out over the table. “You ready?” he said.
She didn’t understand at first. She’d been expecting him to pull out a stack of glossy 8 × 10s. But the photos were on his phone; of course they were.
The first was just of Kurt, a close-up.
“It’s him,” she said. She waited to be overwhelmed with rage at the sight of his face, but instead she felt just the buzz of recognition, the click of encountering an old friend—which, after all, he was. Fiona couldn’t ever see him without also seeing the kid he’d been, the smart, nervous boy who would rattle off facts about German submarines and spy planes.
The phone was still in Arnaud’s hand, and so she said, “Okay, I’m ready. Next?”
But the next photo showed both Kurt and a tall woman with thick black hair. They were hand in hand, and the woman held a plastic shopping bag. It was not Claire.
She yanked the phone from him, scrolled to the next photo and the next. They were taken in rapid succession, so it looked like a flip-book as the two figures moved down the sidewalk.
“No,” she said. “Fuck.” She was angry at Arnaud, which made no sense. “No.” She felt trapped in the booth, suffocated under the yellow lights and quiet music.
“It’s not
her?”
“How does that even remotely look like her?”
“She could have dyed her hair.”
“What, she dyed herself a different nose too? She dyed herself taller?”
“Okay,” he said, “calm down. It’s good, yes? This means she’s not with him anymore.”
She smacked the phone facedown next to the soy sauce, grabbed her purse.
“Where are you going? Order some food, okay? So, we have some more steps to take. We need to plan those out. Here. Drink water.”
She put the glass to her forehead instead of drinking from it, and when the waitress came by Arnaud ordered for her.
“Let me see again,” she said, and Arnaud unlocked his phone, handed it back.
Kurt’s hair was pulled into a bun, his face shaved. He looked maybe half Hosanna. Hard to tell with the woman. Long hair parted down the middle. Fiona couldn’t see, washed out as this woman was by the streetlights, if she had makeup on. She wore a coat, but her legs were cut off by Arnaud’s camera. Fiona studied each shot again, as if clues would be lurking in the background.
Arnaud said, “Does the group have—do you say polygamy?” He pronounced it like a French word.
“Yes. I mean, yes, that’s the word. But they don’t, actually. Thank God.” Was she really thankful? It meant Claire didn’t live in that apartment. That she might not even be in Paris. But wait, no, the video. The video was in Paris, and Kurt was in Paris. So Claire had been in Paris, at least. “If Claire left him,” she said, “she probably left France too. She’s—how does immigration even work? You can’t just stay somewhere, right? If you’re not a citizen?”
Arnaud shrugged. “Plenty of people stay illegally.”
What if, the very day Fiona got here, Claire had decided to show up at her door in Chicago? What if she’d knocked, went away, came back, figured Fiona had moved? What if she’d come by the store, asked around, was told that Fiona was out of the country? Fiona should call a neighbor. She should have left a note for Claire, clearly marked and taped to the front door. But no, she was being ridiculous. Why would Claire choose that exact moment to come home? Fiona hadn’t felt this urgency a month ago; it was only the video that had made everything seem so immediate. She hadn’t left town since Claire went missing, but she’d been gone all day plenty of times, and some nights, when she stayed over at a date’s house or, once, crashed at a downtown hotel for a wedding. And the world hadn’t fallen apart any further than it already had.
The Great Believers Page 16
