“No, no, I’ll come alone. You probably just have a bad case of flu. It’s the season.”
But Fred really did look frail and diminished when he opened the door, a little defeated old man. He was in a ratty old bathrobe over baggy boxer shorts and a torn T-shirt marked “Colorado State,” where he’d studied and wrestled a century ago. “Don’t touch me!” Fred warned. “Don’t kiss me. I may be contagious. Disinfect your hands when you leave here. You really should be wearing a mask.”
“I’ll do no such thing, let me hug you.”
“Guy, I’m not fooling around, stay away.”
But Guy did hug him and felt how skinny he was under the robe, his ribs as articulated as a washboard or a xylophone. He smelled bad, like dirt and old sweat.
Guy worked hard at being cheerful; it was December, and Fred was trembling slightly like an expensive dog, though the apartment was toasty and smelled like sandalwood for some reason, maybe joss sticks burned before the idol.
Once the food was twirled and warmed in the microwave, Guy watched Fred eat, or rather dabble his fork in the sticky contents of his plate.
“Don’t use so much salt,” Guy said.
“Fuck it! I’ll be dead long before a salt buildup in my arteries. Nothing has any taste.”
Guy was staring at the quarter-sized brown spot on Fred’s thigh where his robe had fallen open. Fred intercepted his glance and said, “Pretty bad, huh?”
Guy knew from his mother that you couldn’t discuss mortality simply, nobly, honestly with the dying or the mourners, that the visitor was obliged to be cheerful. He also knew that Fred worshipped him so much he’d believe anything Guy would say. “You’ll outlive us all,” Guy promised. “You’re an ox.”
“I feel more like a calf being led to slaughter.”
Guy could see the doomed look on Fred’s face, like the pallid, resigned look of a drowning friend only a few meters out to sea but caught in an inescapable undertow. Fred had already given up. “What are my kids going to say? ‘Daddy, we told you so.’ What did I have the face-lift and the tummy tuck for? The mortician?”
“Stop, Fred, you’ll feel fine in a week.”
“Really?”
“Really. Trust me. A week.”
“Carbolic acid,” Fred said. “Wash all the exposed surfaces of your skin with carbolic acid.”
“Shut up,” Guy said playfully, and then he courageously embraced the sick man again. “I’ll be back again tomorrow.”
“You will? When?”
“We’ll see.” Then he added spitefully, “You have a heavy schedule tomorrow?”
“I’ve got nothing planned but worry. I don’t even feel up to putting together this new movie deal.” He thought about it and said, “I should do the first AIDS movie — something very romantic, with two hot young macho studs dying.”
“How hot would they be,” Guy asked, “if they both had AIDS?”
“The lead would have to lose thirty pounds for the last three minutes. We’d cast a famous straight father of nine. Makeup would cover him with black spots — an Oscar, he’d get an Oscar for kissing a man. Boffo box office!”
Fred seemed cheered up by his new product. It was a way of mastering the disease. It was a way of turning tragedy to farce for profit.
It was a depressing winter and spring. Fred kept succumbing to one disease or another. One day he couldn’t write and he sat bemused in front of a few doodles. That turned out to be a parasite in the brain, toxoplasmosis, but they’d just discovered a way of routing it. Then he succumbed to PCP, the gay pneumonia, and he was put on a ventilator and an antibiotic drip. He lost sensation in his feet except for occasional stabbing pains: neuropathy. Guy was learning a new vocabulary. Fred would get better and would go on long walks with Guy, though he was a skeleton in baggy clothes. Everything his eyes landed on he wanted to buy. Soon the spare bedroom was full of ostrich eggs nesting on branching coral supports, storage ottomans, a signed first edition of Huckleberry Finn, a huge poster for the Italian version of Gone with the Wind, lots of bad paintings in gold frames. Everything went on his American Express card and Guy got a call from a hysterical Ceil; the kids had told her after a visit with Fred that Daddy was laying up treasures like a pharaoh furnishing his tomb. Guy, who wondered how she’d found his number, mumbled that he couldn’t intervene. He didn’t even know Fred that well. She started sobbing; “I don’t care if he’s gay. Gay, schmay. It’s the children’s inheritance I’m worried about.”
“Aren’t they already grown up and married, with children of their own?”
“You bastard, trying to rob my children, you filthy French harlot and … husband-stealer.”
Guy just hung up and shrugged. He didn’t pick up the ringing phone. It was sure to be the seal, the phoque. Two days later he received a letter in the mail poorly spelled and hastily written, calling him a Jezebel switching his little homo butt before the dazed eyes of a pathetic, dying old man. She knew all about the house on Fire Island and their drug-fueled orgies where gullible Fred had been deliberately infected with a fatal disease. She knew all about vicious fag home-breakers and gold diggers.
Guy just slapped the letter in front of Fred, who read it silently, intently, then looked up at Guy with a saturnine scowl. “The bitch will stop at nothing. We’ve got to transfer the ownership of the Pines house to you. I’ve heard stories of the family seconds after a death clearing out an apartment and changing the locks. The vultures! You can bet your bottom dollar Ceil will contest the will. We’ve got to put it in your name now and make it foolproof. I’ve heard of wills where if someone who’s getting a bequest contests the will, he gets nothing. That’s what I want.”
“In France you can’t disinherit your own children. Napoleonic law.”
“Well, lah-di-fuckin’-dah, it’s my money and I’ll leave it like I want to, to the great love of my life.”
As Guy walked home through the snow he felt bad he’d only put out that one time for Fred. If he’d only known Fred was going to die so soon, he’d have been less tight-assed about it. Coached by Pierre-Georges, Guy had been playing a deep game for long-term stakes, but there was going to be only the short term, as it turned out. Oh, well, he thought, maybe the great loves are always unreciprocated; did Beatrice put out for Dante, Eloisa for Abelard? Didn’t Abelard castrate himself or something extreme? If love worked out, it was just dull and normal — Guy had done Fred a favor by rejecting him, and Guy had avoided the disease.
Andrés was commuting out to Rutgers on a bus three days a week; he was in the last year of coursework for his Ph.D. The bus was cheaper than the train. He’d rented a studio nearby on Weehawken Street where he spent two or three days a week, just a room next door to a taxidermist storeroom: Everything smelled of naphthalene. He was away from home almost too much, though at first Guy had welcomed the time alone. What was he doing in his studio? Taking tricks there? Why did he need a studio?
And then Guy paid a surprise visit to him one day on the pretense that he was in the neighborhood and wanted to take him to lunch at a new restaurant on Greenwich Street. The room was very bleak, just a chair and a desk and a floor lamp. And everywhere prints by Dalí, or at least very faithful copies — horrible robot women and crucified Christs seen from a strange axonometric perspective, and vaporous, mounted Don Quixotes, melting watches and forks. All with pretentious, far-fetched surrealist names and big Dalí signatures.
“These must be worth a fortune,” Guy said. “Are they real?”
“They’re part of my research for my Ph.D.,” Andrés said, not looking Guy in the eye.
“Not every art history student can afford originals by his topic,” Guy said.