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, look 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.