Richard had been so quiet for so long that Fiona kept wondering if he’d fallen asleep. He stretched his arms overhead and said, “Serge, that’s enough.”
“I’m going out there.” Serge grabbed his helmet from the counter. “Hollande can fuck his curfew.”
Fiona expected Richard to stop him, expected Serge to stop himself, but Serge was out the door. Richard’s phone rang again, but he ignored it.
“I didn’t mean to offend him,” she said. “I’m not naive, you know that.”
He said, “It’s always a matter, isn’t it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it’s always only temporary.”
1986
Roman had a scar on the meat of his left arm from his smallpox vaccine: an indented circle made of a thousand tiny dots. Yale could put his thumb there. He could put his tongue there.
* * *
—
Roman would come over drunk. It seemed to take some alcohol to get him to show up without all the baggage of twenty-seven years of Mormonism. Roman would call at 8 p.m. on a Saturday and say he’d be over “in a while,” but he wouldn’t come till after midnight. And during that time, Yale would blast music, start drinking himself. Because he didn’t want to go out and miss Roman, but it was pathetic to sit there on the couch watching reruns and waiting.
* * *
—
Roman had silver fillings in his molars, and he always needed to blow his nose after he came.
* * *
—
Roman would show up like rain, once every couple of weeks, and he’d stay till four in the morning, leaving before the city woke up. Every time, as he put his shoes on, he’d say, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” And Yale would think, but not say, that they were both lost in the woods. Only Roman thought Yale knew the way out.
* * *
—
Roman liked to do it spooning on their sides, his chest against Yale’s back. He’d drench both of them with sweat. He would groan, shaking, into Yale’s hair. The first few times he was too fast, too spastic. Then he relaxed, learned to slow down, started to seem like he actually enjoyed it and it wasn’t a thing to race through in shame. Now he’d even stick around and talk afterward.
* * *
—
Roman said, “No offense, and it’s—I mean it’s a good thing, but your dick is like a fucking pepper grinder. I mean, I’ve never seen—like, I don’t really—” and Yale said, “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna try to fuck you.” Yale asked Roman if he’d thought about going to the Pride parade, which was ten days away. They were starting to sober up; it was three in the morning. “Just being counted matters,” Yale said, and heard how he sounded like Charlie. “Last year we had thirty-five thousand.”
Roman rolled toward Yale and grinned, his eyes molelike without his glasses. “You’re saying size matters to you.”
“I’m saying we want to top that.”
Roman laughed, ran a finger up Yale’s groin.
“It’d be good for you. There’s something about seeing some drag queen doing a pole dance in a flatbed right there in the street that makes it easier to go back to work the next day and not worry about being a little faggy.” Not that Yale went to work anymore. “And also—” but Roman sank his teeth into the top of Yale’s ear, moved his hand up his side. “Also, it’s educational.”
“You’re educational.”
* * *
—
Yale hadn’t heard from Roman since that night, and meanwhile he’d decided he might not even go to the parade himself. He bought a ticket for the Cubs-Mets game, which wouldn’t start till 3:30 but at least gave him a fairly solid excuse, one he used when Asher called the day before the parade and asked if Yale could lend a hand on the AIDS Foundation of Chicago float. “Actually,” Asher said, “it’s not your hands we want. It’s your cute face. We’re wearing clothes, no Speedos involved. Unless you want to, of course. Who am I to stop you?” Yale would have done just about anything else for Asher, but he couldn’t be in a parade, couldn’t roll down the street past everyone he knew, couldn’t run into Charlie in the staging area.
Ross—the redhead who’d been flirting with Yale in the Marina City gym for the past month—said if Yale wanted to hang out, some friends would be watching from a fire escape at Wellington and Clark, with mojitos. Yale didn’t want to lead Ross on, but the setup was appealing. When he first moved to the city he’d been in love with all the fire escapes, kept feeling Audrey Hepburn might appear there with her guitar, her hair wrapped in a towel, that she might sing him “Moon River” and grab his hand and pull him across town.
He had a mental list of reasons not to go: He wanted to see Sandberg face off against Gooden. He didn’t want to stand there getting turned on by beautiful shirtless men just to come home and jerk off sadly in the bathroom. He didn’t feel like worrying about how he looked, scanning the crowd constantly for friends and former friends. He did not want to watch the Out Loud float go by. Plus, he worried every year that this would be the time someone would set off a bomb, open fire on the crowd. He’d watched on the news last night as a thousand KKK supporters filled a park in a black neighborhood on the southwest side. Yesterday it was racial slurs they were shouting, but they’d announced their plan to rally again in Lincoln Park before the parade, in the free-speech area. It couldn’t end well.
* * *
—
Over the past four months he’d contacted every place he could think of, even the aquarium and the planetarium, small places in Michigan, remote university galleries where he had no contacts. His CV was strong, but no one seemed to be hiring for more than grant writing. He’d been replaced at the Brigg, had gone in for the last time in early April.
Cecily still had her job. The gallery was in good shape. The lawsuit was off and Chuck Donovan had moved on to other ego battles. Yale called Bill once in a while to check in and learned that the restorations on the Modiglianis and the Hébuterne painting were going to take much longer than anyone had thought. Bill was beginning to doubt the show could go up next year. Yale himself had deleted the section of tape where Nora had talked about painting on Ranko’s behalf. “One small step,” he said to Roman, “in my journey to becoming Richard Nixon.”
The Sharps had come to town for a week in April, and Yale had kept out of their way as best he could. He hid Roscoe over at Asher’s place, where Roscoe got noticeably fatter. Allen, just because he’d called Yale up that one time, felt personally responsible for Yale quitting, despite everything Yale had told them both. They doubled down on their insistence that he stay there. They’d be in Barcelona for the summer anyway.