A minute later, there he was, interrupting Serge’s tour of the view. He’d combed what remained of his hair wetly to his scalp, and he wore a pressed shirt that was too large, as if he’d recently shrunk. He cried, “Fiona Marcus in the flesh!” and grabbed her arms to air-kiss both cheeks, and although she hadn’t used that surname in decades, she didn’t correct him. It was a gift, this name of her youth handed back to her by someone she associated with a time when she’d been optimistic and unencumbered. Granted, she associated him with the next years, too, the ones with Nico gone, with Nico’s friends, who’d become her only friends, dying one by one and two by two and, if you looked away for a second, in great horrible clumps. But still, still, it was a time she missed, a place she’d fly back to in a heartbeat.
“Now the trick, my dear, is to keep you awake the rest of the day. No sleep whatsoever. Caffeine, but only if you drink it regularly. And no wine, not a drop, till you’re rehydrated.”
“He’s an expert,” Serge said. “Before I met Richard I hadn’t crossed the Atlantic.”
“And now how many times?” Richard asked. “Twenty?”
“Alors, beaucoup de temps,” Fiona said, speaking French for no reason at all, and then became certain that she’d just said “a lot of weather.” She felt dizzy and stupid and like she really should lie down, against Richard’s advice. She said, “You mentioned coffee.”
And soon they were sprawled across Richard’s gray furniture. She wanted to pry open the clamshell packaging on her converter and charge her phone, call the detective even if it was still seven minutes too soon, but she forced herself to sit still and tell them how grateful she was for the place to stay, the warm welcome. It felt good, in fact, to rest for a moment, to be Fiona Marcus again, twenty years old again, doted on by Richard Campo again. It filled her up.
Serge had made her a latte, right there in the kitchen with a machine that belonged in a cockpit, and now she sipped at the thick foam. He said, “You tell me everything about this guy when he was young, yeah? I need some scandals!”
At that, Richard went to a low shelf by the windows and pulled out a photo album he’d apparently lugged all the way to Paris and into the new century. He sat between Fiona and Serge on the long couch, started flipping through. How strange to see Richard Campo’s work in snapshot form, yellowed Polaroids and Kodak prints. He’d been doing more serious work back then, too, but those photos weren’t the ones preserved in cheap cellophane slots.
Richard said, “Nico’s here somewhere,” and then he must have found a picture, because he handed the album to Serge, tapping a page. “Oh, was I in love with him.”
“You were in love with everyone,” Fiona said.
“I was. All those boys. They were younger, and so open, not like my generation. I envied them. They came out at eighteen, twenty. They hadn’t wasted their lives.”
“You’ve hardly wasted yours,” Fiona said.
He handed her the open album. “I was always making up for lost time.”
There was Nico, curly brown hair and long teeth, his face tan and freckled, looking just past the camera and laughing. Some joke, crystallized forever. She had a copy of this photo, but an enlarged and cropped one. This version bore an orange date stamp: 6/6/82. It would be three years until he got sick. And this version showed not just Nico but the two men on either side of him. One was Julian Ames. Beautiful Julian Ames. The other she didn’t know or remember, but as she studied his face she saw above the man’s left eyebrow a small, oblong purple spot. “Christ,” she said, but Richard was busy explaining to Serge the way Chicago had been in the early eighties, the smallness of Boystown and the way it still hovered then, somewhere between gay ghetto and gay mecca. How there was no place like it, not in San Francisco, not in New York. She tried to wipe the spot away, in case it was on the cellophane, but it didn’t move. She stared at these sick men who didn’t know they were sick, the spot that was still, that summer, only a rash. She handed the album back and Richard continued his narration. Fiona pretended to peer into his lap as he turned the pages, but really she let the jet lag overtake her vision, let the pictures blur. It was too much.
“This was Asher Glass,” Richard said. “Big activist, a dynamo. The most beautiful voice, a big loud lawyer voice. The shoulders on him! Built like a brick shithouse, is what we used to say. I don’t think you can translate that into French. I have no idea who this one is. Cute, though. This one’s Hiram something, who owned a record store on Belmont. Belmont would be, like, I don’t know. What’s the equivalent?”
Serge laughed. “All of Paris?”
“No, dear, like some street in Le Marais. We weren’t that provincial. This was Dustin Gianopoulos. Teddy Naples. A pocket twink, as you can see. Never stopped moving. This one, I don’t remember either. He looks like a manatee.”
“I don’t know this word,” Serge said.
“A lumpy walrus,” Fiona offered, without looking at the picture.
“This was Terrence, Nico’s boyfriend. Yale Tishman and Charlie Keene. That’s a saga there. Look how sweet they are. This one’s Rafael Peña. Remember him?” This was directed at Fiona, obviously, and she roused herself to nod.
She said, ostensibly to Serge but really to Richard, in a harsh voice she didn’t expect, “They’re all dead.”
“That’s not true!” Richard said. “Not all of them. Maybe half. Exaggeration never did any good.”
“This is the American habit,” Serge said to Richard. “You exaggerate.”
“Don’t listen to her. They’re not all dead.”
Fiona said, “I need a sharp knife.” Her poor timing didn’t register until both men started laughing, and she realized she hadn’t said anything yet about the converter, the clamshell packaging. She explained, and Serge left the room to return with a massive pair of shears. He made quick work of the plastic, and soon her phone was charging happily.
Richard said, “Two things I haven’t told you. One’s just a minor nuisance, and one is nothing at all.”
“Not nothing at all,” Serge said. “A very big deal.”
“But it shouldn’t affect you. I didn’t mention, when you wrote, that the next few weeks are a bit of a circus for me. I have a show going up.”
“At the Centre Pompidou,” Serge added. “A big fucking deal.”
“But it’s all done, all my work, until, you know, the day before. I have a number of interviews, though, and some of them will be kind enough to meet me here. So just ignore, ignore, ignore.”
“But you come to the vernissage! If you’re still here,” Serge said.