They only had time to look at each other in bemusement before she came back with local strawberry wine, cough-syrup red, the bottle itself somehow already sticky when she pressed it into Yale’s hands.
“Or you can take it back to your family,” she said, and Yale thanked her, assured her that they did indeed enjoy wine, that they’d put it to good use.
Yale was heading to his own room, but Roman beckoned him from two doors down. “You don’t want to know what’s on CBS?”
Yale did, and furthermore he didn’t want to find out alone if it was something like Russia declaring war. He carried the wine into Roman’s room. He said, “What’s going to be worse, the news or the wine?”
There was a basket on top of the bureau with a corkscrew and napkins and plastic cups. Yale poured them each a glass—hard to gauge with cups this shape how much wine it was—and they clicked a toast. Yale expected a mouthful of syrup, but this stuff had an untamed acidity under the sweetness, so that it was both far too sweet and not sweet enough.
He took a seat on the end of Roman’s bed. Roman’s suitcase, down on the floor, spilled black clothes like lava.
Roman had gone to the TV to turn it on—it was just a couple of feet from the end of the bed, perched on the bureau—but now he was blocking the set. Yale had nothing to look at but his back and his ass.
“Oh,” Roman said. “Oh, wow.”
“What?”
“The, ah, the space shuttle. It blew up.”
“Shit. Move over.”
Roman sat beside him, cross-legged. He took his glasses off and put them back on.
Dan Rather was explaining, in the studio, that something went wrong one minute and twelve seconds after liftoff. Live at Cape Canaveral, a man at an outdoor desk tried to explain what had happened, talked about the big pieces of the craft that had fallen into the ocean. They showed the shuttle taking off this morning, and things went well for long enough that Yale was almost hopeful nothing would happen after all. And then it burst into a ball of smoke, two spiraling plumes.
“My God, they had that teacher on there,” Yale said.
“What?”
“You know, there was that contest for a teacher to go to space. The woman. Oh God.”
Roman said, “Huh. Yeah, I don’t really watch the news.”
Yale wouldn’t have been as aware of it all himself if Kurt Pearce hadn’t been talking about it the other day—how now we were going to go back and forth to space all the time, how Kurt planned to live on the moon by the time he was twenty.
Roman’s left knee was touching Yale’s right knee, or at least the cloth of his black jeans was brushing Yale’s khakis. Yale wondered if it was intentional, wondered if he would hurt Roman’s feelings by shifting away.
Yale said, “Well it was a really big deal. Fuck.”
“Do they have other space shuttles?” Roman said.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, do they have a fleet of these things, or is there just the one?”
“There’s—” It seemed like an easy question, but Yale found he wasn’t sure of the answer. “There’s one at a time, right? This was the current one.”
Yale found himself gulping the wine. It was only afternoon but it felt later. Roman’s curtains were all drawn, the blinds down behind them.
Roman flopped back on the bed, legs still crossed, knee still pressing toward Yale, and balanced the wine on his belly with the aid of a finger hooked onto the cup’s rim.
Yale took time to think out the whole thought, in words: He was not going to sleep with Roman. Not now, and not ever. Not now, because he might have been infected. Not ever, because he was supposed to be this guy’s mentor. He wasn’t sure what rules existed about grad student–professor relationships at Northwestern, but he imagined they did exist, and he imagined he’d be held to the same standards. Not ever, because he wasn’t interested in helping some confused virgin work out his sexuality. Not ever, because Roman, despite his pending PhD, wasn’t the brightest bulb, and that kind of thing mattered to Yale.
“It’s hubris,” Roman said. “That’s what it is. Like, you listen to Nora’s life—that was so recent. She’s taking ocean liners over there, you know? And now we think we can just run buses back and forth to space.”
Yale wanted to ask if the astronauts could have staved off disaster by fearing it would happen, but that would have been unkind. This was so horribly sad. Everything was so horribly sad. He said, “You know what’s worse than something bad happening, is when something was supposed to be really good, when everyone expected it to be wonderful, and then instead it’s bad. Why is that so much worse?”
The newscaster was saying that Reagan had cancelled the State of the Union address that was scheduled for tonight but would surely address the disaster. Yale missed Charlie suddenly, desperately. He wanted Charlie there to shout at the TV that what Reagan would “surely address” wasn’t always so logical. A handful of dead astronauts and Reagan weeps with the nation. Thirteen thousand dead gay men and Reagan’s too busy.
When the news went to commercial, Yale took the opportunity to rise from the bed, lower the volume a bit, refill his glass, sit back down farther from Roman.
Then the TV showed the schoolchildren who’d gathered to watch the launch. It showed the ground crew handing the teacher an apple. It was hard to look away, and harder to look. The wine was affecting him more than he’d have thought. Well, the beer plus the wine. And the darkness of the room, and the horrible plumes of smoke.
Roman said, “When I think about death, I start questioning everything.”
Yale did not want to talk about death. He said, “Sometimes questioning is good.”
“I keep thinking about Ranko. How romantic. I mean, he’s literally shut away in a castle. And she’s out there waiting for him.”
“It sounded awful, to be honest.”
“Don’t you envy what Nora had, though? There was so much disaster, but it was like she belonged to something, you know?”
Yale was careful. “I mean, you can—you can find that in Chicago. That belonging.”
“Maybe that’s my problem. I’m stuck in Evanston looking at paintings.”
“I didn’t come to the city till I was twenty-six,” Yale said.
He had the sudden inspiration that he should hook Roman up with Teddy. Teddy was healthy, after all, and he’d consider Roman a fun project. A puppy to train.
“Listen, you need to come down to, you know, to Lakeview. You’d have a lot more in common with people down there than in Evanston. Good bars, fun people. A little more laid-back.”