How much had she even talked to Richard in the past two years? Not at all, really. She’d emailed to ask if she could come. Before that . . . well, it felt like they’d talked, but that was just a product of seeing his name pop up so often in the world, and of their being such old friends.
Julian stood above her, helpless, running his thumb across his chin. She stared at his face, the ways it had changed. Beyond the normal transformations of age, he had what she recognized as some facial wasting from AZT, and—she was certain—cheek implants to counter the fat loss. Not great ones either. A couple of her volunteers at the store had similar cheeks. And his face had broadened—the steroids, presumably—so that he looked blocky, carved. Still handsome but profoundly different. As if he’d been reconstituted from a police sketch.
He said, “I work in accounting for Universal. We’re shooting right on Richard’s street. Not that I get to be on set. They only flew me in three days ago and I’m in a sad little office.”
She said, “Where—usually—” but she didn’t have words for the rest of what should have been an easy question.
“I’m in L.A. I looked for you on Facebook, you know. A bunch of times!”
“Oh.”
“Hey. I’m sorry.”
She wasn’t sure why he’d said it, but she worried he’d read her mind: Why, she was thinking, should it be Julian Ames, of all people, to show up, a ghost at the door? Why not Nico or Terrence or Yale? Why not Teddy Naples, who’d evaded the virus only to die in ’99 of a heart attack in front of his class? Why not Charlie Keene, for that matter, who was an asshole, but did so much good? She’d loved Julian. She had. But why him?
She made herself smile, because she hadn’t smiled yet.
“I really did try to find you,” he said. “I should have asked Richard.” His voice was the same. Julian’s voice.
“You did ask, remember? Last year, in L.A. And I said I’d get you her email. I forgot, of course.”
She said, “It’s okay.”
Richard said, “I feel like a lout.”
They decided what everyone needed was sandwiches, and Serge was dispatched to buy them. By the time he came back with five plastic-wrapped baguettes of ham and cheese in a paper bag, they were all sitting around the table, and Richard had adroitly defused the awkwardness with a story about the time Yale Tishman had thrown a birthday party for his roommate at Masonic, a man he’d just met who’d had no one in town to visit him. Yale had told them all to bring little presents, and Fiona, to be funny, had bought a Playgirl on the way, only to learn on arrival that the guy was straight. A gruff IV drug user from downstate. “He was not amused,” Richard said.
Fiona still felt detached, floaty, confused. She kept looking at her own hands. If these were the same hands she’d had all along, then it wasn’t impossible that Julian Ames was sitting here across from her, opening his sandwich, asking if Richard had any napkins.
There were events she’d believed herself, for years, to be the sole custodian of—when all along, those parties, those conversations, those jokes had stayed alive in him as well.
Julian said, “Leaving is one of my great regrets in life, Fiona. I want you to know. I thought I was running off to spare everyone, and really I was abandoning them. I’d never imagined they could go before I did. Not in a million years. And I know, from Richard—I know you took care of Yale in particular. It should have been me. I should have been there for him.”
“Cecily was there too.” Fiona’s voice croaked out as if she hadn’t talked in a week. “It was me and Cecily in the hospital. We did shifts.”
Cecily said, “It was mostly you.”
“But he died alone.” It was the cruelest thing Fiona could have said, not just to Julian but to Richard and Cecily too. And to herself. “He died completely alone.”
Julian set his sandwich down and looked at her until she looked back. “Richard told me,” he said. “I know, and I know it wasn’t your fault. Anyone could have died alone. You know, the middle of the night, if—”
“It wasn’t the middle of the night.”
Cecily put a cool hand to the back of Fiona’s neck.
Serge mouthed something to Richard, and Richard mouthed back “New York.” Serge must have been asking where Richard was when Yale died. Richard’s career had been blowing up.
Fiona, to change the subject, managed to ask Julian to recount his last three decades.
“If you’re asking how I’m still alive,” Julian said, “I have no idea.” But he did, really. He’d gone to Puerto Rico in ’86, and he’d stayed a year, mooching off an old friend, selling T-shirts on the beach and getting stoned. “I was so sure I was ready to die,” he said. “And then when I heard about AZT, it was like—like if you were trying to drown, but someone threw you a rope, and you couldn’t stop yourself from grabbing it.” The problem was that Julian had no insurance, and the drug cost more than half of what he’d made a year back in Chicago. So he went home to Valdosta, Georgia, where his mother, who’d thought she’d never see him again, was happy to let him live in his childhood bedroom, happy to spend his father’s life insurance and remortgage her house for her youngest child. “She was a saint,” he said. “A southern gentlewoman. She was built for church and afternoon tea, but it turns out she was also built for crisis.” For a while she made him keep working—he got a job with a local film production company—because she was so certain he’d survive, and that when he was cured, he wouldn’t want a gap on his résumé. (Fiona remembered Julian’s sweet optimism before his diagnosis, the way he was always sure the disease would be cured, sure he was just about to become famous. He must have gotten it from his mother all along.) He grew sicker and sicker despite her care, developed resistance to the AZT. “I had about half a T cell left,” he said. “I weighed a hundred and eight pounds.”
Richard said, “And that’s when I saw you.” Fiona knew Richard had run into Julian in New York sometime in the early nineties, that Julian had come up there with a friend to see one or two good shows before he died. He was in a wheelchair. This was when Richard had taken that last photo of him, the third photo of the triptych. Richard had called her afterward, and then she’d called Teddy to marvel over the fact that Julian had lasted that long.
“Right. And after that I was in the hospital for a solid year. That New York trip was a bad idea, in retrospect.”
Serge said, “And then what?” He was the only one who’d finished his sandwich.
“Then it was ’96! Suddenly the good drugs came out! There’s a few months I don’t even remember, I was so out of it, and when the fog lifted, I was home again. I could lift my arms and I could eat food. Next thing you know, I’m jogging. I mean, really it took a while, but that’s what it felt like.