He was rinsing his plate when the door opened. Teresa said, “I thought you’d have left.”
“I can. I should.”
She put her purse on the counter and walked toward him as if she planned to hug him, but she didn’t. Her face looked terrible, dry and deeply creased. Her chin, her jowls, had dropped. Her eyelids were swollen. She said, “Yale, are you alright? Have you been tested yet?”
“It would be pointless.”
“You’d feel better. Charlie would feel better.”
“Charlie’s feelings aren’t my concern.”
She looked pained. “I don’t see why you boys have to fight. You love each other.” Yale wondered if that was true. Teresa picked up his hand in her own, stroked the back of it. She said, “If you’d come home, I could take care of both of you. I’ve been cooking, you know. And not just soggy British food! Did I tell you I took an Italian cooking class this fall? I have a wonderful meatball recipe now, only Charlie won’t eat beef.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m going to be fine.”
“He made a mistake. It was the first thing he said when he called. He said he’d made a mistake, and he couldn’t fix it.”
“That is true. He cannot fix it.”
“Yale, I’m worried if he’s upset he’ll get sick faster. He’ll wear himself out worrying.”
Yale marveled at this turn of logic, the idea that he was now the one making Charlie sick. He could sit here and explain things about AIDS that would make Teresa’s head spin, or he could say that Charlie hadn’t uttered a word of apology, but what good would it do? He told her he was meeting Charlie at the funeral, and this seemed to appease her. She said, “Be gentle with him, won’t you?”
So that he wouldn’t be seen walking down Halsted with the box, Yale turned east and took the long way around—a route that took him past the house he’d toured. He should have kept walking, but he stopped to look. A masochistic gesture. Because even if he wasn’t sick, even if he got some enormous raise and could afford the house all on his own, he’d never buy a place down the street from Charlie. Even if Charlie were gone, he couldn’t live so close to where they’d been happy together, couldn’t walk past their old apartment on his way to the El.
But did he truly believe Charlie would ever be gone? It was still a hypothetical in his mind, like a tornado hitting the city. Did he believe, as foolishly as Julian used to, that someone was about to announce a cure? He didn’t think that was it. It was all just a rock that hadn’t sunk yet, that was still hitting the surface of the pond.
The “For Sale” sign was still there, the phone number glowing in the late sun, runic writing that no longer held meaning. In the window of the place next door, a cat slept. Someone played the piano.
* * *
—
Yale dodged the people congregating in the church lobby and ducked down a back hallway to find a place for his box. He put it behind a beanbag chair in what must have been a youth group room, a place where the kids had painted the walls with daisies and frogs and Beatles lyrics.
Then he straightened his suit, damped his hair down in the bathroom, found Fiona, and helped her with the flowers she was carrying. He gave her the necklace from Nora, said she mustn’t ever wear it around her cousin Debra, and Fiona held up her curls so Yale could fumble with the clasp behind her neck. “I’ve never done this before,” he said, and Fiona, for some reason, found that hilarious. He helped straighten the chairs in the sanctuary. Yale appreciated the chairs: less ass-numbing than pews, less likely to dredge up negative childhood memories.
By the time Charlie arrived, the front of the place had filled. Charlie was trailed by some of his staffers—Gloria, Dwight, Rafael, Ingrid. They must have changed at the office, then walked here together. They’d be walking back together too, while Yale wandered off alone. Yale caught Charlie’s eye, and a minute later Charlie was there beside him, smelling like aftershave.
The minister spoke about community and friendship and “the family you choose,” tremendously aware of his audience, obviously practiced in this sort of thing. How many of these funerals had he personally overseen? Fiona got up and told a story about the day Nico introduced her to Terrence. “He warned me that Terrence had a sense of humor,” she said. “And so I was terrified. I kept waiting for him to put a whoopee cushion on my chair or something. But he didn’t crack a single joke. At the end of lunch he looked at me and he said, ‘You’ve taken care of your brother your whole life, and I—’” Her voice had run into a wall. She tried again but no sound came out. She said, “It would’ve been easier if he’d said something funny.” They all laughed, just to add their voices to the room, to get her through this. “He said, ‘You’ve taken care of your brother all your life, and I want you to know I’ve got it from here.’ And he did. He didn’t know what he was signing on for, but he was with Nico to the absolute end. And now he’s taking care of him again.” She barely got it out. A girlfriend walked her down from the lectern, rubbing her back.
One of Terrence’s teaching colleagues read a poem Yale couldn’t focus on. The minister led everyone in a meditation. Asher, who was a classically trained baritone, sang the “Pie Jesu” from Webber’s new requiem—a song Yale had only heard a soprano recording of, but that worked just as well for Asher, for the cello Yale had always imagined living in Asher’s throat. Yale, no more Catholic than Asher was, reveled now in the sound of Latin, those pure, liturgical vowels, the crunch of Q’s and C’s. The song wasn’t just a lamentation; it was a wringing out. Yale was a wet washcloth, and someone was squeezing everything out of him over a sink.
He didn’t look at Charlie. He could hear him breathing, hear him blowing his nose. At Nico’s vigil, they’d held hands.
He did look back at the rows behind him. Seven teenagers sat together, without parents. Yale imagined they were students who’d somehow gotten word. Behind them sat Teddy and Richard. Teddy drummed his left hand on the chair back. Some of Terrence’s family sat in the rear. Or at least he assumed they were family. A tall young man who looked remarkably like Terrence, three young black women. No one who looked the right age to be Terrence’s parents, but one woman old enough to be his grandmother.
When it was over, Yale and Charlie walked out together, and they each hugged Fiona.
Yale spotted Julian across the church lobby. He hadn’t seen him in the sanctuary, but here he was now by the coatrack, eyes wide and glassy. He’d lost weight. Yale didn’t imagine it was the virus; the odds of Julian getting sick precisely when he learned he had the thing were low.
He realized Charlie was staring, too, and for an instant Yale and Charlie were aligned again, communicating telepathically.