by Ann Beattie
For once, the answer is as clear to me as a fissure in a crystal ball. No, I am not. I am not, under any circumstances, leaving. And I tell him so.
As we come near our house, Jason asks another question. “What does ‘cosmos’ mean?” he says.
Inside, I read to him from the dictionary. I do this because I have no idea why the flower is named what it’s named, and also because I don’t want to guess wrong one more time—if not forever, at least for the rest of the day.
“Cosmos” is Greek, meaning “the universe.” I read: “the universe as a manifestation of order; any orderly whole developed from complex parts; any—” I stop, and paraphrase: “Bright flowers. ‘Showy flowers’ is how it’s actually put.”
Today, with the world so whited out, it is difficult to conjure up the flowers’ bright pinks and electric lavenders, but as soon as I stop trying, another image appears: Carl’s parents…what could it have been like, to fall out of the sky over Anchorage, Alaska, into endless drifts of snow? For a few seconds there must have been such color in the air: the engine sparking; detritus blown like confetti, far and wide; a free fall of bright winter clothes.
Jason, at the sink, may or may not have taken in my recitation from the dictionary. After turning on the water, he’s preoccupied, totally involved in the moment: here is the chance, again, to be the good boy, the vigilant boy, who carefully washes his hands. I stand behind him and put my own dirty hands under the water. Down the sink the dirt goes, his hands turning cleaner and cleaner, even the grit embedded under his fingernails eventually washing away, so that his hands become, again, unblemished little boy’s hands; my clasping them, as I quickly move my thumb back and forth, is done only out of habit.
SECOND QUESTION
There we were, in the transfusion room at the end of the corridor at Bishopgate Hospital: Friday morning, the patients being dripped with blood or intravenous medicine so they could go home for the weekend. It was February, and the snow outside had turned the gritty gray of dirty plaster. Ned and I stood at the window, flanking a card table filled with desserts: doughnuts, cakes, pies, brownies, cookies. Some plastic forks and knives were piled in stacks, others dropped pick-up-sticks style between the paper plates. Ned surveyed the table and took a doughnut. In his chair, Richard was sleeping, chin dropped, breathing through his mouth. Half an hour into the transfusion, he always fell asleep. He was one of the few who did. A tall, redheaded man, probably in his mid-fifties, was hearing from a nurse about the hair loss he could expect. “Just remember, honey, Tina Turner wears a wig,” she said.
Outside, bigger snowflakes fell, like wadded-up tissues heading for the trash. Which was what I had turned away from when I went to the window: the sight of a nurse holding a tissue for a young woman to blow her nose into. The woman was vomiting, with her nose running at the same time, but she refused to relinquish the aluminum bowl clamped under her thumbs. “Into the tissue, honey,” the nurse was still saying, not at all distracted by her posturing colleague’s excellent imitation of Tina Turner. I’d stopped listening, too, but I’d stuck on the phrase “Gonna break every rule.”
Richard was dying of AIDS. Ned, his ex-lover and longtime business associate, found that instead of reading scripts, typing letters, and making phone calls, his new job description was to place organically grown vegetables in yin/yang positions inside a special steamer, below which we boiled Poland Spring water. A few months earlier, in that period before Richard’s AZT had to be discontinued so that he could enter an experimental outpatient-treatment program at Bishopgate, Ned had always slept late. He couldn’t call the West Coast before two in the afternoon, anyway—or maybe an hour earlier, if he had the unlisted number of an actor or of a director’s car phone. All of the people Richard and Ned did business with worked longer hours than nine-to-fivers, and it was a standing joke among us that I was never busy—I had no real job, and when I did work I was paid much more than was reasonable. Ned joked with me a lot, an edge in his voice, because he was a little jealous of the sudden presence of a third person in Richard’s apartment. Richard and I had met in New York when we were seated in adjacent chairs at a cheapo haircutter’s on Eighth Avenue. He thought I was an actress in an Off Broadway play he’d seen the night before. I was not, but I’d seen the play. As we talked, we discovered that we often ate at the same restaurants in Chelsea. His face was familiar to me, as well. Then began years of our being neighbors—a concept more important to New Yorkers than to people living in a small town. The day we met, Richard took me home with him so I could shower.
That year, my landlord on West Twenty-seventh Street remained unconcerned that hot water rarely made it up to my top-floor apartment. After I met Richard it became a habit with me to put on my sweatsuit and jog to his apartment, three blocks east and one block over. Richard’s own landlord, who lived in the other second-floor apartment, could never do enough for him, because Richard had introduced him to some movie stars and invited him to so many screenings. He would sizzle with fury over the abuse I had to endure, working himself up to what Richard (who made café filtre for the three of us) swore was a caffeine-induced sexual high, after which he’d race around doing building maintenance. Now, in the too-bright transfusion room, it was hard for me to believe that only a few months ago I’d been sitting in Richard’s dining alcove, with the cluster of phones that rested on top of Variety landslides and formed the centerpiece of the long tavern table, sipping freshly ground Jamaica Blue Mountain as my white-gloved hands curved around the pleasant heat of a neon-colored coffee mug. The gloves allowed the lotion to sink in as long as possible. I make my living as a hand model. Every night, I rub on a mixture of Dal Raccolta olive oil with a dash of Kiehl’s moisturizer and the liquid from two vitamin E capsules. It was Richard who gave me the nickname “Rac,” for “Raccoon.” My white, pulled-on paws protect me from scratches, broken nails, chapped skin. Forget the M.B.A.: as everyone knows, real money is made in strange ways in New York.
I turned away from the snowstorm. On a TV angled from a wall bracket above us, an orange-faced Phil Donahue glowed. He shifted from belligerence to incredulity as a man who repossessed cars explained his life philosophy. Hattie, the nicest nurse on the floor, stood beside me briefly, considering the array of pastry on our table as if it were a half-played chess game. Finally, she picked up one of the plastic knives, cut a brownie in half, and walked away without raising her eyes to look at the snow.
Taking the shuttle to Boston every weekend had finally convinced me that I was never going to develop any fondness for Beantown. To be fair about it, I didn’t have much chance to see Boston as a place where anyone might be happy. Ned and I walked the path between the apartment (rented by the month) and the hospital. Once or twice I took a cab to the natural-food store, and one night, as irresponsible as the babysitters of every mother’s nightmare, we had gone to a bar and then to the movies, while Richard slept a drug-induced sleep, with the starfish night-light Hattie had brought him from her honeymoon in Bermuda shining on the bedside table. In the bar, Ned had asked me what I’d do if time could stop: Richard wouldn’t get any better and he wouldn’t get any worse, and the days we’d gone through—with the crises, the circumlocutions, the gallows humor, the perplexity, the sudden, all-too-clear medical knowledge—would simply persist. Winter, also, would persist: intermittent snow, strong winds, the harsh late-afternoon sun we couldn’t stand without the filter of a curtain. I was never a speculative person, but Ned thrived on speculation. In fact, he had studied poetry at Stanford, years ago, where he had written a series of “What If” poems. Richard, visiting California, answering questions onstage after one of the movies he’d produced had been screened, had suddenly found himself challenged by a student whose questions were complex and rhetorical. In the following fifteen years, they had been lovers, enemies, and finally best friends, associated in work. They had gone from Stanford to New York, New York to London, then from Hampstead Heath back to West Twenty-eighth Street, with si
de trips to gamble in Aruba and to ski in Aspen at Christmas.
“You’re breaking the rules,” I said. “No what-ifs.”
“What if we went outside and flowers were blooming, and there were a car—a convertible—and we drove to Plum Island,” he went on. “Moon on the water. Big Dipper in the sky. Think about it. Visualize it and your negative energy will be replaced by helpful, healing energy.”
“Is there such a place as Plum Island or did you make it up?”
“It’s famous. Banana Beach is there. Bands play at night in the Prune Pavilion.”
“There is a Plum Island,” the man next to me said. “It’s up by Newburyport. It’s full of poison ivy in the summer, so you’ve got to be careful. I once got poison ivy in my lungs from some asshole who was burning the stuff with his leaves. Two weeks in the hospital, and me with a thousand-dollar deductible.”
Ned and I looked at the man.
“Buy you a round,” he said. “I just saved a bundle. The hotel I’m staying at gives you a rate equal to the temperature when you check in. It’s a come-on. I’ve got a queen-size bed, an honor bar, and one of those showers you can adjust so it feels like needles shooting into you, all for sixteen dollars. I could live there cheaper than heating my house.”
“Where you from?” Ned asked.
“Hope Valley, Rhode Island,” the man said, his arm shooting in front of me to shake Ned’s hand. “Harvey Milgrim,” he said, nodding at my face. “Captain, United States Army Reserve.”
“Harvey,” Ned said, “I don’t think you have any use for guys like me. I’m homosexual.”
The man looked at me. I was surprised, too; it wasn’t like Ned to talk about this with strangers. Circumstance had thrown me together with Ned; fate precipitated our unlikely bonding. Neither of us could think of life without Richard. Richard opened up to very few people, but when he did he made it a point to be indispensable.
“He’s kidding,” I said. It seemed the easiest thing to say.
“Dangerous joke,” Harvey Milgrim said.
“He’s depressed because I’m leaving him,” I said.
“Well, now, I wouldn’t rush into a thing like that,” Harvey said. “I’m Bud on draft. What are you two?”
The bartender walked over the minute the conversation shifted to alcohol.
“Stoli straight up,” Ned said.
“Vodka tonic,” I said.
“Switch me to Jim Beam,” Harvey said. He rolled his hand with the quick motion of someone shaking dice. “Couple of rocks on the side.”
“Harvey,” Ned said, “my world’s coming apart. My ex-lover is also my boss, and his white-blood-cell count is sinking too low for him to stay alive. The program he’s in at Bishopgate is his last chance. He’s a Friday-afternoon vampire. They pump blood into him so he has enough energy to take part in an experimental study and keep his outpatient status, but do you know how helpful that is? Imagine he’s driving the Indy. He’s in the lead. He screeches in for gas, and what does the pit crew do but blow him a kiss? The other cars are still out there, whipping past. He starts to yell, because they’re supposed to fill the car with gas, but the guys are nuts or something. They just blow air kisses.”
Harvey looked at Ned’s hand, the fingers fanned open, deep Vs of space between them. Then Ned slowly curled them in, kissing his fingernails as they came to rest on his bottom lip.
The bartender put the drinks down, one-two-three. He scooped a few ice cubes into a glass and put the glass beside Harvey’s shot glass of bourbon. Harvey frowned, looking from glass to glass without saying anything. Then he threw down the shot of bourbon and picked up the other glass, lifted one ice cube out, and slowly sucked it. He did not look at us or speak to us again.
—
The night after Ned and I snuck off to the bar, Richard started to hyperventilate. In a minute his pajamas were soaked, his teeth chattering. It was morning, 4 a.m. He was holding on to the door frame, his feet in close, his body curved away, like someone windsurfing. Ned woke up groggily from his sleeping bag on the floor at the foot of Richard’s bed. I was on the foldout sofa in the living room, again awakened by the slightest sound. Before I’d fallen asleep, I’d gone into the kitchen to get a drink of water, and a mouse had run under the refrigerator. It startled me, but then tears sprang to my eyes because if Richard knew there were mice—mice polluting the environment he was trying to purify with air ionizers, and humidifiers that misted the room with mineral water—he’d make us move. The idea of gathering up the piles of holistic-health books, the pamphlets on meditation, the countless jars of vitamins and chelated minerals and organically grown grains, the eye of God that hung over the stove, the passages he’d made Ned transcribe from Bernie Siegel and tape to the refrigerator—we’d already moved twice, neither time for any good reason. Something couldn’t just scurry in and make us pack it all up again, could it? And where was there left to go anymore? He was too sick to be in a hotel, and I knew there was no other apartment anywhere near the hospital. We would have to persuade him that the mouse existed only in his head. We’d tell him he was hallucinating; we’d talk him out of it, in the same way we patiently tried to soothe him by explaining that the terror he was experiencing was only a nightmare. He was not in a plane that had crashed in the jungle; he was tangled in sheets, not weighed down with concrete.
When I got to the bedroom, Ned was trying to pry Richard’s fingers off the door frame. He was having no luck, and looked at me with an expression that had become familiar: fear, with an undercurrent of intense fatigue.
Richard’s robe dangled from his bony shoulders. He was so wet that I thought at first he might have blundered into the shower. He looked in my direction but didn’t register my presence. Then he sagged against Ned, who began to walk him slowly in the direction of the bed.
“It’s cold,” Richard said. “Why isn’t there any heat?”
“We keep the thermostat at eighty,” Ned said wearily. “You just need to get under the covers.”
“Is that Hattie over there?”
“It’s me,” I said. “Ned is trying to get you into the bed.”
“Rac,” Richard said vaguely. He said to Ned, “Is that my bed?”
“That’s your bed,” Ned said. “You’ll be warm if you get into bed, Richard.”
I came up beside Richard and patted his back, and walked around and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to coax him forward. Ned was right: it was dizzyingly hot in the apartment. I got up and turned back the covers, smoothing the contour sheet. Ned kept Richard’s hand, but turned to face him as he took one step backward, closer to the bed. The two of us pantomimed our pleasure at the bed’s desirability. Richard began to walk toward it, licking his lips.
“I’ll get you some water,” I said.
“Water,” Richard said. “I thought we were on a ship. I thought the bathroom was an inside cabin with no window. I can’t be where there’s no way to see the sky.”
Ned was punching depth back into Richard’s pillows. Then he made a fist and punched the center of the bed. “All aboard the S.S. Fucking A,” he said.
It got a fake laugh out of me as I turned into the kitchen, but Richard only began to whisper urgently about the claustrophobia he’d experienced in the bathroom. Finally he did get back in his bed and immediately fell asleep. Half an hour later, still well before dawn, Ned repeated Richard’s whisperings to me as if they were his own. Though Ned and I were very different people, our ability to imagine Richard’s suffering united us. We were sitting in wooden chairs we’d pulled away from the dining-room table to put by the window so Ned could smoke. His cigarette smoke curled out the window.
“Ever been to Mardi Gras?” he said.
“New Orleans,” I said, “but never Mardi Gras.”
“They use strings of beads for barter,” he said. “People stand up on the balconies in the French Quarter—women as well as men, sometimes—and they holler down for people in the crowd to flash ’em: you give them a
thrill, they toss down their beads. The more you show, the more you win. Then you can walk around with all your necklaces and everybody will know you’re real foxy. Real cool. You do a bump-and-grind, you can get the good ole boys—the men, that is—and the transvestites all whistling together and throwing down the long necklaces. The real long ones are the ones everybody wants. They’re like having a five-carat-diamond ring.” He opened the window another few inches so he could stub out his cigarette. One-fingered, he flicked it to the ground. Then he lowered the window, not quite pushing it shut. This wasn’t one of Ned’s wild stories; I was sure what he’d just told me was true. Sometimes I thought Ned told me certain stories to titillate me, or perhaps to put me down in some way: to remind me that I was straight and he was gay.
“You know what I did one time?” I said suddenly, deciding to see if I could shock him for once. “When I was having that affair with Harry? One night we were in his apartment—his wife was off in Israel—and he was cooking dinner, and I was going through her jewelry box. There was a pearl necklace in there. I couldn’t figure out how to open the clasp, but finally I realized I could just drop it over my head carefully. When Harry hollered for me, I had all my clothes off and was lying on the rug, in the dark, with my arms at my side. Finally he came after me. He put on the light and saw me, and then he started laughing and sort of dove onto me, and the pearl necklace broke. He raised up and said, ‘What have I done?’ and I said, ‘Harry, it’s your wife’s necklace.’ He didn’t even know she had it. She must not have worn it. So he started cursing, crawling around to pick up the pearls, and I thought, No, if he has it restrung at least I’m going to make sure it won’t be the same length.”
Ned and I turned our heads to see Richard, his robe neatly knotted in front, kneesocks pulled on, his hair slicked back.
“What are you two talking about?” he said.
