The slides: Nico in running shorts, a number pinned to his chest. Nico and Terrence leaning against a tree, both giving the finger. Nico in profile with his orange scarf and black coat, a cigarette between his lips. Suddenly, there was Yale himself, tucked in the crook of Charlie’s arm, Nico on the other side: the year-end party last December for Charlie’s paper. Nico had been the graphic designer for Out Loud Chicago, and he had a regular comic strip there, and he’d just started designing theater sets too. Self-taught, entirely. This was supposed to have been the prologue of his life. A new slide: Nico laughing at Julian and Teddy, the Halloween they had dressed as Sonny and Cher. Nico opening a present. Nico holding a bowl of chocolate ice cream. Nico up close, teeth shining. The last time Yale saw Nico, he’d been unconscious, with foam—some kind of awful white foam—oozing suddenly from his mouth and nostrils. Terrence had screamed into the hallway for the nurses, had run into a cleaning cart and hurt his knee, and the fucking nurses were more concerned about whether or not Terrence had shed blood than about what was happening to Nico. And here on the slide was Nico’s full, beautiful face, and it was too much. Yale dashed up the rest of the stairs.
He worried the bedrooms would be full of guys who’d been taking poppers, but the first one, at least, was empty. He closed the door and sat on the bed. It was dark out now, the sparse streetlights of Belden just barely illuminating the walls and floor. Richard must have redone at least this one room after the mysterious wife moved out. Two black leather chairs flanked the wide bed. There was a small shelf of art books. Yale put his glass on the floor and lay back to stare at the ceiling and do the slow-breathing trick Charlie had taught him.
All fall, he’d been memorizing the list of the gallery’s regular donors. Tuning out the downstairs noise, he did what he often did at home when he couldn’t sleep: He named donors starting with A, then ones starting with B. A fair number overlapped with the Art Institute donors he’d worked with for the past three years, but there were hundreds of new names—Northwestern alumni, North Shore types—that he needed to recognize on the spot.
Recently he’d found the lists disconcerting—had felt a dull gray uneasiness around them. He remembered being eight and asking his father who else in the neighborhood was Jewish (“Are the Rothmans Jewish? Are the Andersens?”) and his father rubbing his chin, saying, “Let’s not do that, buddy. Historically, bad things happen when we make lists of Jews.” It wasn’t till years later that Yale realized this was a hang-up unique to his father, to his brand of self-hatred. But Yale had been young and impressionable, and maybe that’s why the reciting of names chafed.
Or no, maybe it was this: Lately he’d had two parallel mental lists going—the donor list and the sick list. The people who might donate art or money, and the friends who might get sick; the big donors, the ones whose names you’d never forget, and the friends he’d already lost. But they weren’t close friends, the lost ones, until tonight. They’d been acquaintances, friends of friends like Nico’s old roommate Jonathan, a couple of gallery owners, one bartender, the bookstore guy. There were, what, six? Six people he knew of, people he’d say hi to at a bar, people whose middle names he couldn’t tell you, and maybe not even their last names. He’d been to three memorials. But now, a new list: one close friend.
Yale and Charlie had gone to an informational meeting last year with a speaker from San Francisco. He’d said, “I know guys who’ve lost no one. Groups that haven’t been touched. But I also know people who’ve lost twenty friends. Entire apartment buildings devastated.” And Yale, stupidly, desperately, had thought maybe he’d fall into that first category. It didn’t help that, through Charlie, he knew practically everyone in Boystown. It didn’t help that his friends were all overachievers—and that they seemed to be overachieving in this terrible new way as well.
It was Yale’s saving grace, and Charlie’s, that they’d met when they had, fallen in love so quickly. They’d been together since February of ’81 and—to the bemusement of nearly everyone—exclusive since fall of the same year. Nineteen eighty-one wasn’t too soon to get infected, not by a long shot, but then this wasn’t San Francisco, it wasn’t New York. Things, thank God, moved slower here.
How had Yale forgotten he hated rum? It always made him moody, dehydrated, hot. His stomach a mess.
He found a closet-size bathroom off this room and sat on the cool toilet, head between his knees.
On his list of people who might get sick, who weren’t careful enough, who might even already be sick: Well, Julian, for sure. Richard. Asher Glass. Teddy—for Christ’s sake, Teddy Naples, who claimed that once he managed to avoid checking out of the Man’s World bathhouse for fifty-two hours, just napped (through the sounds of sex and pumping music) in the private rooms various older men had rented for their liaisons, subsisting on Snickers bars from the vending machine.
Teddy opposed the test, worried names could get matched with test results and used by the government, used like those lists of Jews. At least this was what he said. Maybe he was just terrified, like everyone. Teddy was earning his PhD in philosophy at Loyola, and he tended to come up with elaborate philosophical covers for terribly average feelings. Teddy and Julian would occasionally have a “thing” on, but mostly Teddy just floated between Kierkegaard and bars and clubs. Yale always suspected that Teddy had at least seven distinct groups of friends and didn’t rank this one very highly. Witness his leaving the party. Maybe the slides were too much for him, as they’d been for Yale; maybe he’d stepped out to walk around the block, but Yale doubted it. Teddy had other places to be, better parties to attend.
And then there was the list of acquaintances already sick, hiding the lesions on their arms but not their faces, coughing horribly, growing thin, waiting to get worse—or lying in the hospital, or flown home to die near their parents, to be written up in their local papers as having died of pneumonia. Just a few right now, but there was room on that list. Far too much room.
When Yale finally moved again, it was to cup water from the sink, splash it over his face. He looked frightful in the mirror: rings under his eyes, skin gone pale olive. His heart felt funny, but then his heart always felt funny.
The slide show must be over, and if he could look down on the crowd he’d be able to spot Charlie. They could make their escape. They could get a cab, even, and he could lean on the window. When they got home, Charlie would rub his neck, insist on making him tea. He’d feel fine.
He opened the door to the hall and heard a collective silence, as if they were all holding their breath, listening to someone make a speech. Only he couldn’t quite hear the speech. He looked down, but there was no one in the living room. They’d moved somewhere.
He came downstairs slowly, not wanting to be startled. A sudden noise would make him vomit.
But down in the living room was just the whir of the record, spinning past the last song, the needle arm retired to the side. Beer bottles and Cuba libre glasses, still half full, covered the tables and couch arms. The trays of canapés had been left on the dining table. Yale thought of a raid, some kind of police raid, but this was a private residence, and they were all adults, and nothing much illegal had happened. Probably someone had some pot, but come on.