Complicating matters was the fact that he could no longer get a letter of recommendation from Bill Lindsey. And it didn’t look great that Yale had worked at Northwestern less than a year.
Right after his own positive test, Yale had sent a note to Roman through campus mail, and then he’d addressed a letter to Bill at the office:
I have specific reason to believe that if you haven’t done so already, you might consider getting tested for HTLV-III, the virus known to cause AIDS. I hope you’ll advise your wife to take this test as well; please be assured that I have not contacted her and will not do so.
He’d thought for days about Dolly Lindsey, ways to reach out to her. He’d debated it with Asher, with Teddy, with Fiona. They all surprised him by shaking their heads in the same skeptical way, saying, “I don’t think you really can.” Teddy had thrown some Kant at him, made a particularly compelling argument. In August he heard from Cecily that Dolly had left Bill. “I’ve seen her around town,” Cecily said. “Shopping and stuff. Really, Yale, I don’t think they were even sleeping together, do you?” But he’d never heard back from Bill, with the exception of a note written in Bill’s spidery script, attached to a stack of semipersonal mail the gallery had forwarded him: It’s grand to hear you’ve landed on your feet! Yale had indicated no such thing. He heard from Donna the docent that Bill was no longer talking about retirement.
* * *
—
His visit to County would be short; Katsu was doped up, and Yale wanted to get the hell out of there. The beds were all in one huge room, separated only by hanging sheets, so that the sounds and smells of thirty different stages of death surrounded you. How anyone could sleep in that place, how anyone could harbor a single hope, Yale couldn’t fathom.
Katsu said to him—slurred, really—“My armpits hurt. Why do my armpits hurt so bad?”
Yale had brought him a milkshake, and he left it on his tray for when he felt up to it. He knew from Teddy that Katsu kept his Walkman under his pillow so it wouldn’t get stolen, but no one would steal a milkshake, would they? Certainly not the nurse who’d avoided even looking at Katsu when she changed his IV bag.
Yale wanted to get Asher in there to raise hell, but what could he possibly accomplish? Yale had signed his own power of attorney over to Asher last month, confident that Asher would at least know how to yell at the right people.
Katsu said, “Can you make them turn the lights off?” But the lights were huge and fluorescent and covered the whole area, and Yale already knew they never turned them off, even at night. He folded two Kleenexes together and put them over Katsu’s eyes, a makeshift sleeping mask.
* * *
—
When he got home, the strangest thing: a letter addressed to him in Charlie’s print. Charlie’s odd way of making E’s, three floating rungs with no vertical support. Light blue paper, dark blue pen.
He’d heard, it said. It said that Teddy and Asher and Fiona, all three, had assured him he wasn’t directly responsible, but that he wanted to hear it from Yale. It was terrible, Charlie wrote, to assign blame to people rather than to the virus itself or to the power structures that let it thrive, but he couldn’t help it, and he wanted to know. Even though he was, at the very least, indirectly responsible. He wanted absolution, Yale gathered. It wasn’t something Yale was ready to grant.
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.