It was funny: Yale swam at Hull House specifically because there wasn’t a scene there; the only friend he ever saw at the pool was Asher, who’d probably chosen it for similar reasons. The place was dank and completely unsexy. And then Charlie started showing up.
Yale and Charlie were both wet that day from swimming, and Yale was glad the flush coming over his body might be excused as post-workout blood flow. He learned later that Charlie hated to swim, had been choking down chlorine just so he could run into Yale on the pool deck. They were already friends, but there was something different—even in the most innocent ways—about the intimacy of the locker room. (Later, when people asked how they got together, they hated to admit it, to recite what might be the beginning of a porno flick.) They went from drinks back to Charlie’s place, and Martin quickly became a distant memory, except for the few times he’d pop up to storm past Yale at bars. But Yale had always, because of Martin’s size, felt smaller next to Charlie than he might have. Charlie had five inches on him—five inches and five years and five IQ points, was Yale’s joke—but it might as well have been two feet.
Asher asked Terrence if he had any questions, and Terrence finally shook his head, initialed the papers. He signed on the last page with a tremendous flourish, elbow in the air.
Asher said to Fiona, “We need you to be sure.”
“I am!”
“Anything that goes wrong,” he said, “anyone who challenges this, I’ll be there to set them straight. Okay? But listen, you have to consider what could happen if the family shows up.”
“We’ll deal with that if and when,” she said.
“Right.” Asher was being careful, speaking slowly. “But the ‘we’ might not include Terrence, if he’s unconscious.”
Yale refilled Terrence’s wine glass. He wished Asher would stop talking. What Terrence feared most, Yale knew, was the variety of sickness that would make him a vegetable or—worse, to Terrence—make him walk around town in a fugue state. Everyone knew how Julian’s friend Dustin Gianopoulos, near the end, had walked into Unabridged Books in the middle of the day with diarrhea running out of his shorts and down his legs, how he’d stood there buying a stack of magazines, manic and oblivious. And how, because it was the fall of ’82 and no one had seen this yet, the story had gone around that he was coked out. Yale and Charlie, along with everyone else, had laughed about it until they heard, two weeks later, that Dustin had died of pneumonia.
Fiona said, “I’m an absolute veteran, Asher.” She signed both copies of the document, then pulled the papers up near her mouth like she was going to kiss them, leave a lipstick mark.
“Don’t,” Asher said.
“Kidding! Yeesh.” She laughed, tucked the pen behind her ear.
Asher asked if Yale and Charlie would sign as witnesses; yes, of course.
“Have you two thought about it?” he asked when they’d finished. He’d been badgering them about signing stuff for ages, but they hadn’t yet pulled the trigger when the test came out and made it less urgent.
“We really should,” Yale said. “Next time, okay?”
Terrence had fallen quiet. Fiona had opened another bottle of wine, and Yale had lost track of how many they’d already finished, but he was sure Fiona had drunk more than anyone. Her spoon slid from her fingers and crashed into her empty bowl. She laughed, and so did everyone but Yale.
He asked how she was getting home, and she pointed a finger at him, squinted.
She said, “Pixie dust.”
* * *
—
By December, Charlie was busier than ever, and he was drinking more coffee than Yale thought was healthy. He’d gotten roped into the planning committee for the pre-Christmas fundraiser that would benefit the new AIDS hotline at Howard Brown, and he was doing all the publicity for the event. They were organizing a silent auction and a raffle upstairs at Ann Sather on Belmont, the restaurant a step up from the pass-the-bucket lectures in someone’s apartment. Yale looked forward to it, really. He enjoyed Christmas, which he hadn’t celebrated until he took up with Charlie, and he looked forward to seeing everyone.
One night Yale and Charlie were out at a Vietnamese place in Uptown, huddled in sweaters in the back, and Yale said, “Why don’t you have Richard do a photo essay on the party? For the paper? Like, artsy and journalistic, not just normal party shots. Someone’s hand on a glass, that kind of thing.”
Charlie set his chopsticks in his rice noodles and looked up at Yale. “Oh my God,” he said. “Yes.” Yale felt relieved, as if he’d just evened the score, made up for something. Charlie bit his lip, a code: Wait till we get home.
When they did get home, though, Charlie was tired and wanted to crash. He’d had a fever before Thanksgiving, one that hit him hard at first and seemed to be sticking around in milder form. A year ago they’d have both worried this spelled doom. The fact that a fever could just be a fever now, a cough could just be a cough, a rash could just be a rash—it was a gift the test had given them. This was where Asher was wrong; knowledge was, in some cases, bliss. Yale brought Charlie herbal tea in bed, told him he should take the next day off.
Charlie said, “God, no. If they ever do a whole issue without me, they’ll get ideas.”
* * *
—
Late the next afternoon, Cecily Pearce called to request that Yale meet her for coffee at Clarke’s, a neon-laden place that always gave Yale a headache. There was something so agitated in her voice that, on his way there, Yale developed a paranoid theory: Cecily had blacked out some of that night in Door County nearly a month ago, and it had only this morning come back to her that she’d offered Yale cocaine, put her hand on his leg. Maybe she’d remembered that part but not the rest, not the confirmation of Yale’s sexuality, the fact that he’d dropped her off at her room.
When he arrived, five minutes early, Cecily was already waiting, had already ordered him a to-go cup. She said, “I’m not in a sitting mood.” Yale had been glad to get out of the cold, but she was buttoning her coat, heading out the door. He followed her onto the sidewalk and managed to steer them back toward campus before Cecily could turn toward the chill of the lake. She didn’t complain. Her gloves matched her hat and scarf: all a soft cream that made her look fragile.
She said, “We have a bit of an issue. Have you heard more from our friend Nora?”
“Not a word.”
“Okay. Just as well. I’m honestly hoping this whole thing disappears.” She stopped and looked blankly through a store window at some headless mannequins. “There’s a donor, a trustee actually, by the name of Chuck Donovan. Class of ’52. This is someone who gives ten thousand a year to the annual fund, but there’s a bequest in place for two million. Not our biggest donor of all time, but we need him. We can’t throw people like this away.”