The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  Yale didn’t write back, but he didn’t throw the letter away either. Six months ago he might have burned it. Now he smoothed it flat and put it under the pewter bowl on the dresser, the one he kept his change in.

  He picked up Roscoe and carried him to the window and stood looking down at the river, at the tour boat gliding by, impossibly slow. Soon enough it had passed.

  2015

  Richard said, “The best one for dancing was Paradise. I’m sure that’s long gone as well.”

  Fiona said, “Brace yourself: It’s a Walmart now.”

  “No.” He turned from his studio sink, hands dripping. Serge, from the reclining chair in the corner, listened with amusement. Cecily sat with Fiona at the big wooden table. She wore a beige turtleneck sweater today, one that in its solid plainness made her look protected—from the chaos of the city, the poison darts of family.

  “It’s like they were trying to be symbolic,” Fiona said. “At least it’s not a GOP headquarters or something. Richard, listen, there’s a Starbucks at Belmont and Clark. It’s—it’s not as sterile as I’m making it sound. But it’s not the same. Every winter they have this soup walk. You go from restaurant to restaurant, and you get soup. Everyone’s out there: gay guys, straight couples, babies in strollers. And soup. It’s beautiful. You wouldn’t want it to be the same. Because the vibe before, it came from an outsider place, and there was—you know, there was desperation all around. Even before AIDS.”

  “So it’s grown up,” Richard said.

  “No more Boystown!” Serge laughed. “Man’s town!” No one else appreciated it.

  Richard said, “Do you ever think it’s just a fleeting moment?”

  No, she didn’t. Not really. It was hard to imagine going back, losing ground.

  He said, “Because I do. I’m sure I’d roll my eyes at the gentrification, but listen, honey, I’m old and I’ve seen a lot of shit, and I’m telling you, let’s enjoy it while it lasts. Because this isn’t Mother May I. You’re not always advancing. I know it feels that way right now, but it’s fragile. You might look back in fifty years and say, That was the last good time.”

  Fiona pulled her sleeves over her hands. It was so tempting to think of the fires of her twenties as being the great historical struggle of her life, all past tense. Even her work at the store, her lobbying and fundraising, always felt like aftermath. People were still dying, just more slowly, with a bit more dignity. Well, in Chicago, at least. She considered it one of her great moral failings that, deep down, she didn’t care on quite the same visceral level about the ongoing AIDS crisis in Africa. It didn’t stop her from donating money to those charities, but it bothered her that she didn’t feel it in her core, didn’t cry herself to sleep over it. A million people in the world had died of AIDS in the past year, and she hadn’t cried about it once. A million people! She spent a long time asking herself if she was racist, or if it was about the width of the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe it was because it wasn’t happening primarily to the gay community there, wasn’t only killing beautiful young men who reminded her of Nico and his friends. Of course all altruism was in some way selfish. And maybe, too, she only had room in her heart, in this lifetime, for one big cause, the arc of one disaster. Claire, it seemed, had certainly grown up feeling it—that her mother’s greatest love was always focused on something just over the horizon of the past.

  Cecily said, “That’s the difference between optimism and naievty. No one in this room is naive. Naive people haven’t been through real trials yet, so they think it could never happen to them. Optimists have been through it already, and we keep getting up each day because we believe we can keep it from happening again. Or we trick ourselves into thinking it.”

  Richard said, “All belief is a trick.”

  Serge said, “No one in France is an optimist.”

  Richard’s studio was L-shaped, with screens and cameras and lights at one end, desks and computers and mess at the other, and in the middle—where they all were now—a seating area, a kitchenette. The place had been decimated by the move to the museum, and loose power cords and packing peanuts littered the floor. Fiona had not come here to see the videos. She’d made it clear—this wasn’t the right time.

  It was two o’clock on Sunday. Tomorrow was supposed to be Richard’s vernissage, but everything was still up in the air. There was a manhunt for one of the terror suspects under way near the Belgian border. As soon as they’d gotten to the studio, they’d locked the door behind them. The radio on the counter played the BBC news too softly to hear, and Serge kept updating them from his Twitter feed, but there wasn’t much to report. Richard was waiting on the call from the Pompidou, the decision on whether it would open at all tomorrow, let alone proceed with the festivities. Even if things were a go, the party would be sparsely attended. The Pompidou wasn’t far from the Bataclan Music Hall, which was still a “scene of carnage,” according to the news, although the only photos Fiona could bear to look at were of flower heaps, teddy bears. Some of the most important guests would have been coming from out of town, and lord knew what would happen to their flights, their trains.

  Late last night, Damian had called to say that Claire had emailed him at his university address. Just five sentences to say she was fine and he shouldn’t worry. He spelled Claire’s email address for her—an address she wasn’t supposed to use, of course—and he read her the email twice through. No apology, but no anger, no stiffness either. How different from the two tense conversations she’d had with Fiona.

  Well, Claire’s issues were largely with her, not with Damian. The child psychologist had explained it, years ago: They lash out at the parent they live with, the safe one. And it came out during therapy that Claire understood far more than they’d hoped about Fiona’s affair. “She believes,” the psychologist had said, “that you were looking for another family, a better family.”

  Fiona stuck the piece of paper with Claire’s email address into her bedside drawer. She had already memorized it.

  * * *

  —

  Richard’s phone finally rang, and he retreated down to his desk to pace and talk. When he returned, he shook his head. “Not the Pompidou,” he said. “At this point, if they call, I’m going to say no. I want to wait a week. Next Monday, don’t you think? They can let the public in whenever the hell they want, but if we’re doing the vernissage at all, we’re doing it right. But listen, good news. Fiona, I told you there was a surprise for you. It was going to happen tomorrow night, but—you know.”

  Fiona braced herself. Richard sometimes had strange ideas of what other people would enjoy, and if he was about to present her with a video of Nico, she wouldn’t be able to handle it.

  “That was the call,” he said. “Go wait by the door, okay? Two minutes. You’ll see.”

  “Just me?”

  “Just you.”

  She gave him a skeptical look but walked out into the hall and then into the little entryway, where she could see through the glass door and onto the street. Her stomach didn’t feel good. Her head didn’t feel good.

  A dark-haired man in a blue coat passed, looking at his phone, and then backed up and faced the door fully. He grinned at her.

  He was around her age, with strange cheekbones, a face that was somehow wrong, skewed, scrambled.

  Then the features rearranged themselves, and rearranged themselves again, and instead of unlatching the door, letting him in, Fiona took a step backward, because she was looking at a ghost.

  This man could not be, but was, Julian Ames.

  And because he was still grinning at her—because what else was she supposed to do?—she finally stumbled forward and figured out the lock and tried to push the door before realizing she needed to pull, needed to flatten her body against the wall to make room.

  He clasped her arms, brought his face close to hers.

  He said, “Well, loo
k at you!”

  1988, 1989

  Charlie had an infected eyelid. This was what Asher told him, and then he said, “I’m not going to update you on every little thing, but I thought I’d tell you, and then I thought I’d ask how often you want a report. Basically, the doctors are saying this definitely counts now as rapid progression.”

  Asher’s Chevette was heading down Lake Shore Drive, and they both had to shout over the engine roar. Yale had grown skittish about public transportation, about the germs on the handrails, the spittle in people’s coughs. He’d do it occasionally, but he was tired today and the AZT made his legs weak, and so he didn’t feel bad taking Asher up on the ride home from support group. Besides which it was the first spring day when you could drive with the window down, and the lake looked like a glassy cliff, like if you walked to the horizon you could jump off the edge of the world.

  Yale said, “Mostly people have been filling me in on the drugs. Like I’m supposed to take some perverse pleasure in this.”

  Asher turned on the radio, but it was just ads. He said, “I want to throttle him. He could be doing so much good with that money.”

  About a year ago, thanks to the sudden proliferation of 1-900 numbers and the companies willing to spend a lot of money advertising them, Charlie’s paper had become, for the first time, quite lucrative—more lucrative than Yale had ever imagined a gay newspaper could be. On top of this, he’d sold off the travel agency—just cashed out, intending to spend his remaining time in luxury, if not in comfort. And then he had apparently spent all the money on coke. It surprised Yale, at least in the sense that Charlie had been, in the past, a highly selective drug user—and it also didn’t surprise him at all. But meanwhile the paper was falling apart, or at least the staff was. Rafael had defected to Out and Out, Dwight was dead, and Gloria was still there but wasn’t speaking to Charlie. There were new people, but from what Yale had heard, they hated Charlie, and Charlie hated them, and it was, in general, a horror show.

  One of the stranger results of Charlie’s coke habit was that, following a long pause after that first letter, he’d taken to writing Yale manic eight-page missives about once a month. Yale suspected he wasn’t the only one receiving these letters, but he was presumably the only one for whom Charlie made obsessive lists with titles like “Dreams I’ve Had About You” and “Here Are All the Books You Left.” Some of them were darkly funny. “Ways I’ll Kill Myself If the Republicans Win This Fall” included an entry on letting leeches suck all his blood and then having someone serve those leeches at the inaugural ball.

  Charlie never proposed meeting. After that first, needy letter, he never asked for anything at all. Yale had become a figure in a writing exercise, a static memory for Charlie to bounce feelings off of. He never apologized, either, not in so many words. There were just the lists, and then, in jagged print that carved at the page, meticulous accounts of his days: what he ate, his weight, his digestive issues, the plots of movies he’d seen. He was keeping strictly vegetarian, and Dr. Vincent implored him to eat more protein. Teresa had gotten herself an apartment not far from Charlie’s, and Martin seemed a permanent appendage, although Charlie spared Yale any details about their sex life, including whether they even had one. Sometimes the letters weren’t about Charlie at all. Once, for no discernible reason, there were five pages about Wanda Lust, a drag queen who’d died before Yale even moved to the city.

  Yale tended to wait a few days before opening a letter. He’d sit, finally, on Saturday morning with coffee, consider the thickness of the envelope, and finally slide a finger under the flap. He’d never written back. Not out of spite or stubbornness so much as the fact that he couldn’t imagine where to begin.

  The letters had softened him on Charlie, at least a bit. Had made him seem less the villain and more the pathetic sap Yale had always known he really was.

  Over the past two years, he’d seen Charlie from a distance a number of times. He imagined Charlie had seen him from a distance too, on days when Yale was too distracted to notice. He imagined that Charlie caught his breath, turned, made some excuse to leave the party, the bar, the meeting—the same way Yale always did.

  Yale tried to picture an infected eyelid. Puffy, he assumed. Red. It made his own eyes water.

  They turned off the Drive and at least the engine was quieter now.

  Asher said, “I think he’s scared. I—Okay, I’m just going to say this. He wants to see you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “No, he told me. Several times. I’m supposed to tell you that he wants to see you.”

  Yale had meant to knock the side of his head into the window, but since the window was down, his head flopped out into the rushing air.

  “Think about it. I’m just planting a seed.”

  “If he wants to apologize, that’s one thing. I’ll—I’d consider giving him some closure. But I’m not swooping in to hold his hand.”

  “I know.”

  Asher had one of those “GAY $” stamps and a pad of red ink in his center ashtray, and Yale wondered if he was still stamping all his money. He picked up the stamp, ran his thumb along the letters. Leave it to Asher to keep this stuff in the car so he could engage in civil protest the instant he got his change at the McDonald’s drive-thru.

  Yale would at least have things to talk about with Charlie, information with which to fill the void. The fact that he’d never written back meant he had endless fuel. Charlie might not know yet about Fiona’s college acceptance; she only got the notice last week. People had surely told him Yale was working in fundraising at DePaul, but they might not have conveyed the dreariness of the job, the way everything was about money; no art, no beauty. He’d sweated his way through the insurance interview, said no to the AIDS question. Dr. Cheng had submitted the first claim for AZT five months ago, and it was still under review. The insurance company wanted the names of every doctor who’d treated him in the past ten years, and Yale was worried they’d do to him what they did to Katsu—find some minor illness from years back or the one dermatologist he’d forgotten to list, and then claim misrepresentation. The insurers had a year to review it all, while Yale paid thousands of dollars out of pocket, hoping he’d eventually get reimbursed. But at least he had the job, a desk to cling to.

  He could tell Charlie that Bill had delayed Nora’s show till the fall of ’90 at the earliest, and that although Yale was in great shape, thanks for asking, he was afraid he’d never see it happen. He could tell him Nora had passed away last winter; that he’d hoped so much he could at least send her photos of the show, even if they couldn’t roll her into the Brigg as they’d dreamed. Of course Charlie might not even remember who Nora was.

  He could say that his lymph nodes had been swollen last summer, but they were fine again, and his T cells were fantastic, and he was drinking vitamin shakes and doing visualizations. He could tell him Roscoe had gone to live with Cecily and her son after Dr. Cheng had told him he could not, under any circumstances, keep the cat and its litter box in his apartment. He could say he’d left the Marina Towers finally, was living in a sublet in Lincoln Park, that the paint was peeling but the place had its own washing machine.

  Asher said, “Can I get you to the DAGMAR meeting next weekend?” Yale was never clear on DAGMAR’s mission, in part because the R kept changing—Dykes and Gay Men Against Reagan, or the Right, or Republicans, or Repression. Every time you asked it was something different.

  Yale said, “It’s Rutabagas now, right?”

  He pressed Asher’s stamp onto his left palm; the slightest trace of red ink came off.

  “You’ll feel better,” Asher said. “Everyone I know who isn’t political, it’s just because they haven’t tapped into their anger. And once you do, it’ll feel right. Listen, direct action—direct action is the third best feeling in the world.”

  “What’s the second?”

  “Peeling o
ff a wet swimsuit.”

  “Huh.”

  Yale actually wanted to say yes, but the way he felt around Asher was unsustainable. It wasn’t good for the nervous system. Besides which, what he’d seen of direct action protests involved lying down in the street, pepper spray, getting handcuffed and locked in a paddy wagon—where, in summer, they’d close the doors and turn the heat up. He hadn’t even been able to fight off other boys in his seventh-grade locker room. How was he supposed to hold his own, in front of Asher Glass, against third-generation Chicago cops? He said he’d think about it. He had a lot going on at work, he said.

  The one place he did see Asher regularly was at support group. Asher would consistently show up half an hour late, loosening his tie. If Yale had managed to keep an open seat next to him—usually by leaving his coat on it casually for a while, and then removing the coat as if he’d just suddenly remembered it was there—Asher would take it, squeeze the back of Yale’s neck as he sat down. Otherwise he’d stand outside the circle, refusing the therapist’s offer to grab him one of the chairs that was still folded against the wall. When Asher talked, it was to make a speech—not to share anything about himself, about his own diagnosis or its aftermath. He’d never acquiesced to the test, but last year his weight had suddenly dropped, his stomach had revolted, and his doctor had insisted on checking his T cells. His count was below one hundred. About once per meeting, he’d go off about the cost of AZT. As if they were the ones responsible, as if they could do anything about it. He’d start yelling that it was the most expensive prescription drug in history. “You think that’s a coincidence? You think that isn’t pure hatred? Ten thousand dollars a year! Ten thousand fucking dollars!” He was never one to break down in tears, never one to sob over lost friends or mortality or survivor guilt.

  After the meetings, Asher would tell Yale he ought to get together with someone in the group. After a brief fling with Ross, the redhead from Marina Towers—they’d mostly had dinners together because Ross, who got tested the first weekday of every third month, was terrified of anything more than kissing—Yale had been completely celibate. “That Jeremy, with the chin,” Asher said once, when they went for coffee after. “He’s got no baggage, he’s your age, he has amazing arms. I’m judging from the forearms, but I’m extrapolating. You’re both positive, he lives a block from you, and he’s financially independent. I’m not saying you move in together, I’m saying you exchange some bodily fluids and feel good about it.”