Yale started to say, I can’t believe he’s doing this again, I can’t believe you’re listening to him, I can’t believe he thinks I’d do that to him, and we just got tested this spring.
But he sat on the floor and put his head between his knees.
She was trying to tell him something different, something about Charlie, and Yale couldn’t work out the pieces. But yes, oh God, he understood. Needles shot through his arms and legs and abdomen, pinned him to the moment. A dead bug on a foam square.
He could hear Charlie in the bedroom, walking. Moving things. Yale squeezed his ears with his knees. Teresa had crouched in front of him. She put her hand on his shoe. Nico’s shoe.
She said, “Yale, can you hear me?”
Yale was shocked to find that he wasn’t crying, even though Teresa was. Why was he not crying? He whispered: “Teresa, what did he do?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “He won’t tell me. Listen, Yale, even if he has this—these—antibodies, that just means he’s been exposed. It doesn’t mean he has the virus.”
“That’s not true. He knows damn well that’s not true. Did he tell you that?” His compulsion to whisper might have come from practice—not discussing someone’s disease when the guy was within earshot. Or maybe he wanted to deny Charlie his reaction. He could have screamed, couldn’t he? He could have broken down the bedroom door and held him, or punched him, instead of sitting here thinking about his own body, his own health, his own heart.
He might vomit. He wanted to vomit.
If Charlie were out here, saying all this himself, he could think about Charlie, about what this meant for him. But all he had was a closed door and this message, this messenger.
What the hell had happened? He looked at the ceiling, which was still, improbably, just a plain white ceiling.
He said, “When did he call you? When did you come?”
“He got the results yesterday. I flew in this morning.”
Today was the sixteenth. So Charlie would have gotten tested what, the very beginning of the month? The very end of December?
And Yale was on his feet, hurtling toward the bedroom. “Charlie, did you fucking sleep with Julian? With Julian? What the hell did you do, Charlie? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He kicked the door, and he kicked it again.
It hurt his foot, but not enough.
Those were the dominoes that had fallen: Julian, and then Charlie. And maybe Yale.
Charlie going pale at lunch. Charlie at the pay phone. Charlie walking around the city on New Year’s Eve while Yale visited the hospital alone.
When Yale took too much of his inhaler, his hands would buzz and tingle. They did this now, and they were hot.
Teresa pulled him back by the waist, and he heard sobbing through the locked door. She said, “We need to get you out of here, Yale. You don’t have to get tested right now. We can just go to a—a pub. A friend’s flat.”
Julian skipping out on Thanksgiving. Charlie not wanting to see Hamlet. Charlie grilling Yale (What did Julian say? What did Julian do?) every time he mentioned seeing him.
He wheeled on her. “It would do me zero good to get tested right now. Do you understand?” He was shouting, so Charlie would hear. “It takes three months to be sure. You have to wait three months from the last time you were exposed.”
“But you might feel better,” she said weakly.
When was the last time they’d had sex? There was the blowjob on Saturday, but when was the last time Charlie had so much as removed his own pants, let Yale unbuckle his belt? God, not since New Year’s. Yale had to give him that much credit. He’d pushed him away again and again. But before that, yes. Christmas, etcetera. And Lord knew when he’d slept with Julian, how many times, over how many weeks or years.
He shouted, close enough to the door that he could feel his own breath bounce back and hit him in the face. “How long were you doing this, Charlie? Is this why you were so paranoid? Because you were looking in the goddamned mirror?”
“Honey, stop,” Teresa said. He shouldn’t have said any of this in front of her, but he didn’t care.
“You at least could’ve let Teddy fuck you!” Yale shouted. “He’s not sick!”
Something crashed into the door. Teresa said, “Yale, stop.” And he had to listen to her. Her son was dying. Charlie was dying. He sank to the floor again and put his head between his knees again. He thought about getting up again and kicking furniture, but no, he was going to stay here and breathe.
This wasn’t about Yale, at least not yet.
When they got tested together in the spring, Yale had imagined that if they were infected, they’d hold each other and sob and then they’d go out for a good meal and make jokes about fattening up, and they’d order the most expensive bottle of wine, and it would be a terrible night, but they’d be heading into this together. Dr. Vincent had counseled them, together, before their tests. “Let’s discuss what a positive diagnosis would mean for you,” he’d said, and he’d explained that these things went better if you thought through your reaction, your options, ahead of time and with a clear mind. He said, “Who would you turn to for support?” They’d pointed to each other. Charlie had said, “And we have a tight circle of friends. And my mother.” Yale felt all those people falling away right now like dust. If he didn’t have Charlie, he didn’t have Teresa. And he didn’t have their friends, who’d all been Charlie’s friends first. He was fairly sure he didn’t have Charlie. Apparently, Charlie had Julian instead. And who knew what else Charlie had been up to.
He picked up his overnight bag and stuck in a bottle of scotch from the cupboard. He kissed Teresa—missing her face, grazing her ear—and he said, “I’m so sorry.” He said, “I didn’t do this to him.”
“I know,” she said.
* * *
—
And then he was out on the street with no idea which way to walk. He wandered to Little Jim’s and sat there staring at the bottles behind the bar and drank vodka tonics because they were on special. He might have been pounding them down, if he’d felt like moving his arms, which he didn’t. Despite his heart rate, despite the unhelpful primal signals telling him to scramble up a tree for safety. Porn was showing on the big TV: A guy watched, tentatively, from behind a shower wall as two other men went at it. The camera kept panning back to the voyeur’s face. He was never going to join in. It wasn’t that kind of movie. Yale felt nothing, watching. Or, nothing besides what he already felt: nausea, paralysis. He’d torn a little plastic straw to shreds.
No one bothered him. Surely they could tell something was wrong.