Charlie said, “Out and Out doesn’t have the same problem because they can’t sell ads to save their life.”
Yale grabbed pretzels from the bag on the table, and Rafael nodded meekly. He’d been appointed Editor in Chief after those three staffers left, but he hadn’t learned to shout Charlie down yet, and he’d have to. Funny, because Rafael was hardly shy. He was known for coming right up and biting your face if he was drunk enough. He’d started out as the nightlife reviewer—he was young and cute, with spiked-up hair, and he’d worked as a dancer—but he turned out to be an excellent editor, and despite his deference to Charlie, despite the diminished staff, the paper was better than ever. Hipper too.
Yale said, his mouth full, “Gloria, I never see many photos from the dyke bars. Could you do more coverage there?”
“We don’t like to pose as much as you guys!” she said, and when Charlie threw his hands up in exasperation, she laughed at herself.
Charlie said, “I tell you what. We’ll do a new quarter-pager for my agency, and we’ll have two women for the photo. Walking along sharing a suitcase, something like that.”
Gloria nodded, appeased. To Yale she said, “He’s hard to stay mad at, you know.”
“Story of my life.”
* * *
—
Yale managed to get back to the bedroom, finish packing. He laid out Nico’s blue Top-Siders to wear for luck. He swept the M&Ms into his hand, put them in his blazer pocket for tomorrow.
He dialed Fiona from the phone by the bed. Mostly he wanted to check in, see if she was eating, if she’d made it home safely. He worried about her. She had no family left, not really. She was close to Terrence, but when Terrence died too—he could picture a million terrible endings to her story, drugs and alleys and botched abortions and violent men.
And he would ask about this great-aunt, thank her for making the connection. On a selfish level, he also wanted to lead the conversation around to last night—to why Fiona would have said that about him and Teddy. But he could imagine how it played out. She was drunk, confused, devastated. Not malicious. He forgave her. And if she’d answer the phone, he’d say so. But she never picked up.
He was doing a crossword in bed when Charlie came in, the living room empty at last. Charlie looked at the suitcase and didn’t say anything. He went into the bathroom for a long time, and when he came out he said, flatly, “You’re leaving me.”
Yale sat up, put his pencil down.
“Good God, Charlie.”
“What am I supposed to think?”
“That I’m gone for one night. For work. Why the hell would I leave you?”
Charlie rubbed his head, watched his own foot toe the suitcase. “Because of how awful I was.”
Yale said, “Come to bed.” Charlie did, unfolding himself on top of the covers. “You never used to freak out like this.”
When they first got together, it was casual for a few months. Yale was still new to Chicago, and Charlie took perverse joy in shocking Yale with the options available to him in the city, the things he hadn’t seen in Ann Arbor. He brought him to The Unicorn—the first time Yale had ever been in a bathhouse. He’d had fun laughing at Yale’s squeamishness, the way he folded his arms over his stomach, his questions about whether this was legal. They just ended up making out with each other in a corner, in the dim red light, then leaving for the privacy of Charlie’s place. Another time, Charlie took him to the Bistro and pointed out the men on the dance floor that Yale should, one day, be sure to “snog.” Charlie used to overdo his Briticisms, knowing Yale loved it. “I feel like I’m part of some news report,” Yale had said that night. “You know how every report on, like, Who Are the Gays? has that stock disco footage in the background? We’ve stepped into stock gay footage.” And Charlie said, “Well, you’re messing it up by standing still and looking frightened.” Yale remembered “Funkytown” ending and Charlie saying, “Watch!” The glitter cannons at the corners of the dance floor shot off, and the shirtless men who’d already looked like fitness models suddenly shone with blue and pink and green glitter. It stuck to their sweat, defined their shoulders. “That one,” Charlie said, pointing at a luminescent dancer. “Give that man your number now.”
Even as Yale had wanted nothing right then but to be alone with Charlie, he’d taken huge delight in the idea of the Bistro. There had been one real gay bar in Ann Arbor, but nothing like this, not a gay disco, not a space where everyone was so happy. The place in Ann Arbor had been filthy, with a sad jukebox and windows full of dying geraniums meant to obstruct the view from the street. There’d always been a skulking vibe, a sense that any happiness was somehow stolen. Here the music blasted and there were three bars and a pair of neon lips and multiple mirror balls. The excess of the place felt exultant. There wasn’t as much on Halsted, five years back—bars were just starting to pop up; people were just starting to move there; and Boystown (no one had even called it that yet) was just starting to coalesce—and so this place, way down by the river, was where Yale first fell in love with the city.
At the Bistro, Yale felt entitled to joy. Even if he was just watching from the wall, drink in hand. This, the Bistro announced, was a town where good things would happen. Chicago would unfurl its map to him one promising street, one intoxicating space, at a time. It would weave him into its grid, pour beer in his mouth and music in his ears. It would keep him.
The relationship grew serious that fall—drunk, Yale whispered into Charlie’s ear that he was in love, and Charlie whispered back, “I need you to mean that,” and things progressed from there—and for about a year, Charlie worried aloud that Yale hadn’t experienced the city’s freedoms, hadn’t been with enough men, and that one day he’d wake up and decide he needed to live some more. Charlie would say, “You’re going to look back on this and wonder why you wasted your youth.” Yale was twenty-six then, and Charlie somehow imagined their age gap to be practically generational even though he only had five years on Yale. But Charlie had started alarmingly young, in London. Yale was still figuring himself out sophomore year at Michigan.
Eventually things settled. Yale was suited to relationships, to the point that Teddy thought it was great fun to call him a lesbian, to ask how life on the commune was going. He’d stayed with each of his first two lovers for a year. He hated drama—hated not only the endings of things but the bumpy beginnings as well, the self-doubt, the nervousness. He was tired of meeting guys in bars, would rather lick a sidewalk than look for action in some parking lot by the beach. He enjoyed having standing plans with someone. He liked going to the movies and actually watching the movie. He liked grocery shopping. For two years, things were easy.
And then, after the virus hit Chicago—slow-motion tsunamis from both coasts—Charlie suddenly, inexplicably, worried all the time, not about AIDS itself but about Yale leaving him for someone else. Last May, before he realized how deep the insecurity had grown, Yale had said yes to a weekend pilgrimage with Julian and Teddy up to the Hotel Madison—a trip Charlie couldn’t join because he wouldn’t leave the paper, even for three days. They explored the city and danced in the hotel’s bars and Yale spent most of Saturday night listening to the Cubs on the radio, but when they got back, Charlie questioned him for an hour about where everyone had slept and how much they’d drunk, about every single thing Julian had done—and then he barely spoke to Yale for a week. He claimed to understand now that nothing happened up there, but the idea of Yale with Julian or Teddy or both of them had taken his imagination hostage. It was more often Julian that Charlie worried about, in fact. Julian was the flirt, the one who’d offer you a bite of cake off his own fork. The Teddy thing was odd, specific to last night.