“Hey, I’m sorry. I don’t need you to talk. My mom wanted me to check how you were, and I—” Yale could see, foggily, Kurt glancing to Debbie for permission. He unzipped the duffel bag he carried. “I brought Roscoe.”
A blur of gray. Yale had held Roscoe on his lap every time he went to Cecily’s for dinner, and each time, Roscoe settled in as if he knew exactly who Yale was.
“Mom’s back from California on Friday.” Yale had no idea how far away Friday was.
Kurt hovered near the bed, but he didn’t put Roscoe on it. He surely hadn’t been prepared for the number of tubes, the number of machines. He might have imagined Yale propped up with pillows, reading a book.
“I know he appreciates it, honey,” Debbie said. “Here, let me bring him close for a second.”
She took Roscoe, who didn’t object, and she raised Yale’s hand and put it down in the thick fur. Yale was aware, as he moved his fingers as much as he could, that this was the last time he’d ever touch animal fur, the last time, in fact, he’d touch much of anything besides his own bed and people’s hands.
Kurt said, “But I’d better get going.”
The poor kid. Yale wanted to tell him it was okay, that he wouldn’t blame him if he ran for his life.
When he was gone, Yale managed to make an F sound with his lips, and Debbie understood.
“She’s in labor,” she said. “She’s going to have a beautiful, healthy baby. I’ll let you know as soon as we get the news.”
* * *
—
He was aware that he was dreaming, but it felt like a dream that would never end.
Fiona, alone on the street. Only sometimes he was Fiona, looking down at the stroller she pushed, a stroller that was empty at first and then held twins and then again was empty. After a while there was no stroller. And sometimes he was looking at Fiona, following behind her, above, reaching out to touch her hair.
Fiona alone on Broadway, walking south. A hot, thick summer night, windows lit around her, but the streets were empty. The windows were empty, the parking lots. Broadway and Roscoe. Broadway and Aldine. Broadway and Melrose. Broadway and Belmont.
Airplanes crossed the sky, and far away there was traffic, but here there was no one. Fiona shouldered her way through clots of cold air. She felt the wind on her neck, and she said, “They’re breathing on me. They’re all around.” She caught a glimmer of a teenage boy sitting on a bus stop bench, writing in a journal with a blue fountain pen. She turned and he was gone, and she said “Oh, he was only—” and Yale—because he was there now, was somehow behind her—tried to say that no, she was wrong, this boy had died all the way back in the ’60s, he died in Vietnam, and there were other, older ghosts here too. But Yale could make no noise because he wasn’t really there.
Fiona was on School Street now, a street Yale didn’t really know, but he’d always liked its name. Streets that carried their histories with them: He was fond of those. Was there still a school on School Street? Well, sure. There it was, abandoned and mossy. It stretched for blocks and blocks and blocks, and Fiona looked down at the stroller, at baby Nico. Because yes, it was Nico, she’d given birth to her brother and he only had to start again. He was swaddled in his orange scarf. He wore a crown of paper clips. She said, “He’s not old enough for school yet.” She said, “You have to wait until the year 2000.”
But wasn’t it close? They were back on Broadway now, and the year 2000 was very close. That was why everything was ending. New Year’s Eve was the deadline. The dead line. The last gay man would die that day.
What about baby Nico? “We’ll smuggle him through,” Fiona said to no one, “like Baby Moses. But he’ll have to play baseball.”
Broadway and Briar. Broadway and Gladys Avenue. Poor Gladys, lost in the wrong part of town. A statue of President Gladys.
Fiona pulled fliers off the telephone poles, loaded them into the empty stroller. It was her job to clean the streets. She stripped posters from windows, signs from stores, menus from restaurant entrances. She walked into an empty bar and sniffed the half-filled pint glasses still on the counter.
And although she was still alone, Yale could talk to her now. He said, “What are they going to do with it all?”
When she looked at him, he saw that the real answer was that she would live here forever, alone, that she would clean the streets forever. But she said, “They’re turning it into the zoo,” and he knew this was true as well.
She sat down in the middle of the empty road, because no cars would ever come this way. She said, “What animal gets your old apartment? You’re allowed to choose.”
And because he felt very, very hot now, so hot, like he’d been knitted into a thousand blankets, and because the heat was filling his lungs even as something inside him was cold, was turning, in fact, to ice, Yale chose polar bears.
2015
They were greeted at the entry to the Galerie de Photographies by a man with a tray of champagne glasses. Fiona plucked one like a flower, but Julian passed. He smiled at Fiona. “Twenty-four years and eight months sober.” They were early; only two dozen people in there and half were lugging huge cameras and lighting equipment, snapping eager photos of the earliest guests.
Serge had posted himself near the entrance, and Fiona double-kissed him, but she didn’t see Richard.
She held her breath and followed Julian, making sure Claire was still behind her, although Claire was going straight to the wall, straight to the giant mouth photo there’d been so much talk of. It was a man’s mouth, stubble below the bottom lip. Black and white, the lips just slightly parted. It should have been trite, something from a high school photography show, but it was one of the most arresting and strangely sexual things Fiona had ever seen. A sense of movement, as if the mouth were about to open wider, about to say something. How was it that you could tell the mouth was opening and not closing?
She hadn’t thought about it in years, but she remembered, suddenly and in quite a lot of detail, the opening of Nora’s collection at the Brigg, the first real opening she’d ever been to. She tended to think more often of the times she took Claire to see its permanent installation in what was by then the enormous and world-class Brigg Museum. She’d tell her about Soutine and Foujita; she’d show her Ranko Novak’s work and say, “She loved him her whole life. Such a long time.” And she’d think maybe it was only possible to love someone that long if he was gone. Could you love a living, flawed human that many years? She’d tell her about Yale getting the art, making the show happen, keeping Ranko’s work in the collection, and she’d say, “That’s where you got your middle name! Yale was right downstairs when you were born, helping wish you into the world! And when you came here from heaven, you left the door open so he could go out.” It hadn’t seemed such a terrible thing to say, but she could see now, yes, how a child would have misunderstood, heard the guilt in Fiona’s voice and taken on its mantle. What had she been thinking? Maybe she hadn’t been thinking of Claire at all; maybe it was a fairy tale she’d needed to tell herself.