The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  She said, “I’ll be here at least that long, to see his show. I’d like for you to come home with me, but—” she put up a hand to stop Claire’s wide-eyed protest “—if that’s not an option, I’d like to stay a while. Maybe I can help with the baby. Will you give me your number at least?”

  “She’s not a baby. She’s three.”

  “I’d love to help, sweetie.”

  Claire would not give Fiona her number, but Fiona could come by again in two days, they agreed, and they’d take things from there.

  The woman behind the bar called to Claire, pointed at her watch, and Fiona wondered if this wasn’t prearranged: Call me back after six minutes unless I give you the signal.

  Claire said, “I don’t mind you being here, but we’re fine.”

  “I know you’re fine. I can tell. You were always going to be fine.”

  Part of her actually meant it.

  1986

  Yale kept wishing Julian would leave the apartment, but Julian didn’t want to risk being seen. He wanted to hide here till Sunday, when his flight would leave for Puerto Rico. He had a high school friend out there to stay with—and after that he wasn’t sure, except that it would be somewhere warm. “Maybe Jamaica,” he said, and Yale said, “Julian, they kill people like us in Jamaica.” And Julian, disturbingly, had shrugged.

  Julian spent most of his time locked in the master bedroom, or else working out in the Marina City gym in exercise clothes he’d dug out of Allen Sharp’s dresser. As far as Yale could tell, he was staying clean—but then he didn’t know what went on during the day. At 6:30 each evening, Julian would appear in the living room to turn on Wheel of Fortune, which Yale wondered if he even enjoyed; he never made any effort to guess the answer. When the winner went shopping in the little showcase after each round, Julian would wonder aloud if the person would choose the Dalmatian statue. That was the extent of his engagement.

  * * *

  —

  After work on Tuesday, Yale saw Asher Glass at the Hull House pool. Asher was already toweling off when Yale got there. Yale jumped in and talked to him from the water. He felt scrawny next to Asher, pale, and the water was a good cover. Asher had heard that Yale was living down in River North. Yale said, “In the corncob towers. I keep trying to think of a good cornhole pun, but I’ve got nothing.”

  Asher didn’t laugh, just looked at him with concern. He said, “If you need legal help getting what’s yours out of your old place—or anything financial—I’m just saying, this is what I do, and I’d be glad to help.”

  The water clung to Asher’s shoulders and chest hair in perfect spheres.

  “It means a lot that you’d say that.”

  He hadn’t thought much about the things he’d left behind at Charlie’s. He’d been wearing Allen Sharp’s sweaters for several days now, and Allen Sharp’s very soft bathrobe, and he had all the music and furniture and dishes he needed, for now. But the fact that Asher would help him instead of helping Charlie—it made his skin warm in the cold water. After Asher left, he sank to the bottom of the pool and looked up at the streaks of pale blue light.

  * * *

  —

  Fiona called Yale at the office on Wednesday to say Roscoe was ready to be picked up. Yale didn’t ask about the money, and Fiona didn’t mention it either; he paid the 360 dollars. He brought Roscoe home in the cardboard carrier they gave him.

  Yale hadn’t mentioned the cat episode to Julian—because it was upsetting, and because he didn’t trust himself to tell the story without also telling the story of getting tested—so when Yale opened the box, when Roscoe took a tentative step out, Julian stared bewildered from the couch. Yale said, “Remember this guy?”

  It took only a second of blank confusion before Julian was down on the floor, clutching Roscoe like a long-lost security blanket. “Where did he come from?” he said, and—mercifully—didn’t give Yale time to answer. “Hey, buddy, you’re living in the penthouse now! Is he gonna stay? Can he stay?”

  “If he doesn’t have another social engagement.”

  He worried, the way Julian was holding that cat, that now Julian would never leave either. But Julian’s ticket was purchased, and he seemed antsier every day. Yale went back out and bought Roscoe a litter box and some food and a dish and a cat bed. Halfway out of the store, he turned and went back to buy him a toy, a purple ball with a feathery tail.

  * * *

  —

  On Thursday, a Foujita expert came in—he’d flown from Paris—to meet with Bill. Yale wanted to listen outside the door. He wanted to spend the rest of his life building Nora’s Paris out of sugar cubes, brick by brick. He wanted a one-way ticket to 1920. He thought about Nora’s idea of time travel. What a horrible kind of travel, that took you only forward into the terrifying future, constantly farther from whatever had once made you happy. Only maybe that wasn’t what she’d meant. Maybe she meant the older you got, the more decades you had at your disposal to revisit with your eyes closed. He couldn’t imagine ever wanting to revisit this year. Well: In eleven days he’d have his results. And maybe then he’d long for this purgatory, the time when he could sit at his desk clinging to some small splinter of hope.

  * * *

  —

  When Yale got home that night, Julian was at the table reading the TV Guide, even though he was nowhere near the TV. It was an old one, from the last time the Sharps were here. Roscoe was on his lap.

  Julian said, “This is funny. They pretended to interview Kermit and Miss Piggy.”

  “Yeah, I saw that.”

  “He insists they’re not married, and she thinks they are.”

  “Hilarious. You doing okay?”

  “I’ll be out of your hair in two days.”

  Yale sat down. If Julian really was leaving, Yale could ask him. He ought to, before he left. He said, “I want to say again that I forgive you for what happened with Charlie. I should be poisoning the coffee, but I’m just not mad at you. But you have to tell me something. I need to know whether that was really the only time.”

  Julian flipped the magazine over, open, as if he didn’t want to lose his place. He held Roscoe up to his chest. A shield. “Okay. So . . . yeah, pretty much.”

  “Pretty much?”

  “He blew me once. About a year ago. But in terms of—if that’s what you’re asking, then yeah, only once.”

  “He blew you about a year ago.” Yale was trying to do mental math, trying to remember what had been going on in their lives last winter. Charlie’s paper was struggling. The test hadn’t come around yet. He wasn’t surprised, but then why was his heart pounding?

  “But listen, Yale—like, if you really want to know this stuff?” Yale nodded. “He was definitely getting around.”

  Yale controlled his breath. He said, “I need you to be more specific.”

  “What would happen—he kept it so bottled up. I mean, you know how I feel about monogamy. He’s this pillar of the community, or whatever, and then every six months or so he’d snap. I’m not saying it was constant, but—you know how if you haven’t eaten all day, your body takes over and eats a whole cake? I just know there was a lot of, like, dark corner sex. Train station bathrooms, the forest preserve, that kind of stuff. He used rubbers. At least he said so.”

  Roscoe came in and out of focus. Julian’s face came in and out of focus. Train station bathrooms were where guys from the suburbs went, furtive men with wives and kids, the “commuter gays” Charlie used to rant about. People who could match his guilt, his self-loathing. Yale didn’t believe for an instant that Charlie had used rubbers. What Charlie was doing was suicide. You don’t use condoms for suicide. He said, with the last of the breath that had already escaped him, “Fuck.”

  “For what it’s worth, I think he stayed away from, like, our community. He wasn’t picking up guys at Paradise or anything.”

/>   Yale wondered if Charlie had been protecting his reputation, Yale’s feelings, or both. He couldn’t have thought those guys from the suburbs would be safer.

  “You gotta understand,” Julian said, “this was why I didn’t feel so terrible about it. I mean, I did, but it wasn’t like I was breaking something unbroken, you know? And I wasn’t sure if you guys had more of an understanding than you let on. I guess not.”

  “How do you even know all this?” Yale wanted to ask who else might have known, but he wasn’t sure he could handle the answer. Terrence had really seemed to believe he’d witnessed an isolated incident. But if Julian knew, surely Teddy did. He wondered about Asher, Richard, Charlie’s staff.

  “I mean, he always sort of confided in me. One time I saw him at Montrose Street Beach, like full-on knocking on some guy’s Audi window. After that he’d tell me things. He wasn’t bragging or anything, just unloading. He wasn’t happy about it. Like, why does anyone do that stuff? Either you’re having a blast, or you do it because you hate yourself, and I don’t think he was having fun.”

  Yale felt a lot of things clicking into place, pieces he hadn’t known were scattered around the recesses of his brain. He said, “And you didn’t tell me. You knew, and you didn’t tell me.” If Fiona was right, if no one really liked Charlie, why had they all protected him for so long?

  “I just—I wouldn’t want people talking about every mistake I made. That’s the sex police, you know? I’m not the sex police. Hey, I’m really sorry, okay? I’m really, really sorry. You’re not—you’re not infected, are you?” Julian’s eyes filled with something like panic, as if the thought had only just occurred to him.

  Yale said, because it was true in the loosest sense, “I tested negative.” As of May. Well. He’d been negative, and lord knew how long Charlie had been exposing him to stuff. He stood up, made Julian stand up, hugged him. If Julian really was leaving on Sunday, he didn’t want their friendship ending in a fight. He could be angry later, on his own. He could draw targets on the wall, pictures of everyone who’d betrayed him, and he could throw darts at their faces. But he could also hold Julian tight for a second. It felt good. He said, “Sex police would be a great Halloween costume.”

  * * *

  —

  He was awake till three. The odds of Charlie becoming infected after only one encounter, and then Yale becoming infected after only a few encounters with Charlie, would be minuscule. But now his statistical padding had disappeared. He knew that the virus didn’t care about fairness, about probability—but that didn’t make him any safer.

  Yale wondered suddenly if Charlie had even gotten tested at all, back in the spring. They’d been counseled together but their blood had been drawn separately, and they’d been called back separately for their results. Nothing was beyond Yale’s imagination now, no level of deceit. Charlie might have been too chickenshit to go through with it, might have convinced himself he was okay until he was presented with the undeniable fact that someone he’d slept with was indeed infected.

  * * *

  —

  When Yale got to work on Friday, still half asleep, he had a note to “call Alfred Cheng.” It took him a moment to recognize this as Dr. Cheng, the Dr. Cheng who wasn’t supposed to phone for another ten days. His throat flipped inside out. He wanted to call back instantly just as much as he wanted to wait a hundred years, but he couldn’t imagine phoning from the office. And he couldn’t call from the apartment either. Julian had planned to stay in all day watching soap operas and playing with Roscoe. It was probably nothing—an issue with the bill, a follow-up question. It was far too soon for the results, and what bad news could there be besides the results? Maybe something else had come up in the blood work. Cholesterol. Flat-out cancer.

  In the late morning, Teddy called to ask if Yale had seen Julian. “I haven’t,” he said, “but I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “Why would he not be fine?” Teddy said. “I only asked if you’d seen him.”

  Yale wanted Teddy to figure it out, to realize Julian would rather spend time with him than suffocate under Teddy’s watch. He wanted to ask if he’d known Charlie had been out whoring around like a teenage drug addict.

  At noon, exactly noon, he walked over to the concert hall without his coat. There were pay phones in the lobby. His hands shook too much to be efficient with his quarter, too much to flip carefully through the address book he’d shoved in his pocket. He cursed himself as he dialed for waiting till lunchtime; the whole office was probably out. Someone played the trumpet somewhere—fast, agitated music, which didn’t help.

  But the receptionist answered, and a minute later Dr. Cheng was on the phone. “Well,” he said, “I lied!”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I lied, about not calling you for the ELISA test. You’re negative.”

  “Oh.” Yale floated somewhere between the floor and the ceiling. “How—how negative?”

  Dr. Cheng laughed. “Very negative. There’s no such thing as a false negative. This is definitive.”

  He might die right here, in the lobby.

  “You seemed so nervous; I didn’t want to give you another restless week for no reason. Now listen, you can’t tell anyone I did this, because then—”

  “I get it. I get it.”

  “And when we test you again, in three months, I’m absolutely not calling you early. No joke. This is a one-time thing.”

  Yale wondered if that was true, or if the scene would repeat, with another vow that it was the last time.

  “Now, official disclaimer, this means there are no antibodies now. You said the last time you were intimate with your partner—”

  “Ex-partner. December. So I’m really not clear till March, right? Can I come back in March?”

  “Sure. I’d normally say three months, but we can do March. And I’m going to caution you to use protection in every situation until then, even with an uninfected, monogamous partner. But—the odds of the antibodies showing up that late are slim. If I were you, I’d rest easy. Celebrate, okay? Responsibly.”

  “And you’re sure? I mean, your coding system, and everything.”

  “I’m sure. Listen, I think it would still be a good idea to come in for counseling. I know I dealt with a lot of guilt myself when I tested negative.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  How did he feel? He kept his hand on the receiver after he hung up, as if the phone could feed him the proper emotion. There was elation, certainly—and a sober sense of having dodged, once again, a bullet that was still flying straight at his friends—but in what proportion? Mostly he felt sheer adrenaline.

  Two students came into the lobby with violin cases. Yale bummed a second quarter from one and called Fiona. She wasn’t home but she had an answering machine.

  He said, “Just calling because I’m in such a negative mood. Feeling really, really negative over here.” She would hear his grin. “Just awash in negativity. Thought you’d want to know.”

  * * *

  —

  Back in the office, Roman was leaning with his whole upper body on a three-hole punch. Yale said, “Let’s turn some music on.” His New Order cassette was still in the tape deck. He sat at his desk, beating time with his ballpoint pen. Roman stared with what seemed like genuine alarm, but then when the chorus began he joined in, hitting his table like a bongo drum. When the chorus came back a third time, they both sang along.

  * * *

  —

  Yale stayed late at the office so he wouldn’t have to spend time around Julian. He couldn’t bear it, couldn’t stand to look him in the eyes knowing Julian was sick and he was healthy. He’d done it before—hadn’t he been fine with Nico, with Terrence? But this was different.

  When he got off the El that night, instead of going back to the apartment he went down Hubbard Street where there were a couple of g
ay bars and an unmarked bathhouse. He had no plans to enter the bathhouse and wasn’t sure about the bars either—it was just nice to walk there. To know there were other groups of friends in other parts of the city having their own crises and affairs and redemptions. To be outside, feeling healthy. He stood across the street from Oasis and watched people coming and going. How lovely not to recognize anyone. How lovely not to know which of these men were dying.

  Around the LaSalle corner came a group with all the noise and buzz of a night in full swing, and for a second Yale wished he could join, blend in and follow them—until he realized that in front of them all was Charlie. Charlie, who never usually came down here. Gesturing broadly, mid-debate. In his “FRANKIE SAY RELAX” shirt, jacket open. Yale stood there, an additional lamppost, not breathing much.

  As the group turned toward the door, Yale saw another guy—no one he recognized, at least not from this distance—whisper something into Charlie’s ear, then turn back and look straight at Yale. But Charlie never turned.

  Yale’s feet stuck to the ground quite a while. The emotions he’d have felt if this had happened yesterday were mitigated by the fact that he wasn’t infected. It hit him now that he’d outlive Charlie, that he’d be the one looking back on this in fifty years, telling Charlie’s story to someone just as Nora had told Ranko’s to him. With less longing, granted. He couldn’t imagine he’d see this as the great lost romance of his life. He wanted to be invisible so he could follow Charlie into the bar, see if he was drowning himself in beer. Instead he walked home, straight into the wind, and by the time he got there his skin was numb.

  * * *