“What’s that grin about?” she asked. “Did you sign up someone big?”
“If only,” he replied. He felt light-headed, full of helium. “It’s strange being here. In a foreign country.”
“You live in Chelsea. That’s its own foreign country. Homostonia.”
“At least the natives are friendlier.”
“Fewer assaults from eight-year-old girls?”
“For instance.”
Ted peeked at what Ann was reading: the restaurant listings. “Going out for dinner?”
“Thinking about it,” she said. “By the way, someone asked for you. John someone.”
“John.” Ted wondered aloud. It was poor form to forget a contact. He tried to remember the people he’d met thus far, flipped through the business cards he’d received. “John,” Ted said again, trying out the name on different faces he knew. He paced the booth, as if it were a cage.
“Bald. Muscular.”
He cycled to the John he knew the best.
“No way. What’s he doing here? It’s been six years.”
“I kind of suspected that it might have been that John,” Ann said. “Want to hunker down in avoidance mode?”
Ted polished fingerprints off the plastic Crixevir model. It was the size of a newborn. People couldn’t help but shake it or stroke its shiny surface. How many people in the world were, at this moment, swallowing this pill? Was John on Crixevir? Could he feel it in his bloodstream, like electric sparks, like hope? Was his body fat peeling away from his face and buttocks and redepositing itself on his abdomen?
“Well,” Ted said, “if it happens, it happens.”
“Ken and Jill have invited us out to drinks,” Ann said.
“Ken?”
“From Glaxo Wellcome.”
“Oh, right.”
“And Jill from—”
“I know,” Ted said.
When Ann said, Ken and Jill have invited us, she meant, Ken and Jill invited me, and you are free to accompany me. He had an attenuated relationship with the other drug reps. Ann was the public face of the Crixevir team, with her broad, brassy personality that people, particularly gay men, loved in small, controlled doses. She went to short-lived SoHo clubs in abandoned storefronts. Ted was an afterthought, an appendage. He’d watched Ann, in her business pantsuit, dance in high heels with men that wouldn’t have given him the time of day. “But that’s why we make a killer team,” Ann had said. “I lure them with my boobs and bullshit, and then you nail them with sincerity. You actually believe what you say about Crixevir.”
“Tell them I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s some stuff I need to do.”
“Stuff,” Ann said. She fanned brochures across the table. “You know, for a gay guy, you’re kind of a downer.”
“Tell me about it,” he replied.
Ted made the walk of shame from Dev’s room to his own. Shirt untucked, hair at odd angles. The hotel staff didn’t notice; their invisibility was a paid-for privilege. An unfamiliar satisfaction settled onto Ted’s chest: he remembered Dev’s heft pressing against him, how solid he felt, like a dam. When Dev left the bed, the sheets ballooned, and a chill swept in the vacated space. “Did you know,” Dev said, rooting on the floor for his underwear, “that you smile in your sleep?” Ted touched the corners of his mouth, as if double-checking. Dev had an outpost of hair on the small of his back, right above his buttocks. “A curious thing,” Dev said. He went to shower, and Ted retrieved his clothes: boxers beside the bed; pants collapsed at the foot, socks scrunched up inside the legs; shirt balled up near the window.
By the time Dev emerged from the bathroom, drying his hair, a towel cinched around his waist, Ted had dressed. Dev squirted sweet-smelling coconut oil into his hands and slicked back his hair, taming the unruly curls beneath his fingers. Dev approached Ted, arms raised as if for an embrace, but instead smeared the excess oil onto Ted’s face.
Ted could smell it now as he entered his own room. Could he keep this experience for himself? Not as a story, but as something vital. A moment that brought continuous pleasure. While he’d lived with John, he’d lived in the future, always wondering what was going to happen. After John, he lived in the past, remembering what life with John had been like. The present eluded him, evanescent as the scent of coconuts wafting by.
As he showered, he rubbed the tender spot along his collarbone, where Dev had scored his skin with stubble. It felt like a sunburn. As he was about to go downstairs, Ann knocked on their adjoining door. But it wasn’t really Ann; it was a hideous replica of her in a hotel robe. She had the pallor of bread; she sweat and shivered simultaneously, hair plastered against her skull.
“What happened to you?” Ted asked.
“To me?” she said. “What happened to you?”
“I was out.”
“I hope you at least sealed the deal,” she said. “I’ve been vomiting my brains out.”
“I guess I’m breaking down the booth alone?”
“Stupid Ken. Wanted ‘the real India.’ He got us food off a street cart. He’s twice as bad off.” Ann burped, and the sourness spilled into the room. “I asked room service for Pepto-Bismol, but they couldn’t understand me. Do you have anything?”
“I think I’ve got a dose or two of Cipro.”
“Cipro? Shit, you play rough, don’t you?” She slipped the whole bottle into her pocket. “Details later,” she said, “when they won’t make me barf.”
Details, then:
Dev rapped the side of the Avartis booth, saying, “You know, it’s generally considered rude to leave in the middle of a person’s presentation.” Ted apologized, and Dev said, “It’s quite all right.” Free for dinner? Yes.
At dinner, Ted started his pitch: “Avartis is looking for key opinion leaders to represent us,” and Dev sighed. Must you?
Second tack: “This summer, we’re convening an informational session at Lake Como. In Italy. We can arrange a speaking engagement—”
Dev interrupted. “Will you go? To Lake Como, that is,” and Ted replied, “I wish I could—” and Dev said, “Then, no.”
“You can’t hope to sway me,” Dev continued, “especially since Triacept is so effective. Which you would have known if you’d stayed for my entire presentation.”
Ted countered: “But what if the WTO rules against Triacept?” and Dev said, “They won’t.” Ted pressed: “But what if they do?” And Dev said, “If they do, I will be too busy with dying patients to come to Lake Como.”
Other doctors and drug reps mingled seamlessly. They laughed at one another’s jokes, threw their heads back without disturbing their cocktails.
“I see I’ve upset you,” Dev said.
Ted insisted, “No.”
Dev continued, “You’re not the first to approach me. The other reps. So full of bonhomie. I turned them down too, but they smile through their rejection. I can see you take it personally.”
Ted said, “I don’t,” and Dev said, “You do.”
“I’m not Avartis,” Ted said.
“But you are Crixevir,” Dev replied.
These, of course, weren’t the details that Ann wanted. So instead:
Dev asked Ted to come to his room after dinner. Further conversation, maybe a nightcap, a more personal excoriation of Avartis. Dev closed the door and latched the privacy lock. “Make yourself comfortable,” he said. From Dev’s window, sickly yellow letters floated in midair: Shangri-la. Adventurers for centuries had searched for Shangri-la, and all Ted had to do was walk across the street.
“How do you find India?” Dev asked. He hung his jacket, the metal hangers clinking like chimes. He unbuttoned his shirt, unearthing a black morass of hair above the curve of his undershirt.