‘Yes, but—’
‘I did well, and I invested well,’ Ollie said, beginning to walk and tapping his cane in his own personal code: tap, tap-tap, tap, tap-tap-tap. ‘I am one of the infamous One Percent so reviled by the liberal young. Not by a lot, mind you, but by enough to have lived comfortably here for the last three years while continuing to serve as my younger brother’s safety net. I no longer have to perform that service for his daughter, thank God; Martha actually seems to be earning a living for herself. Which is a relief. I’ve made a will, all proper and correct, and in it I’ve done the proper thing. The family thing. Since I have no wife or children myself, that means leaving everything to Tom. Except this. This is for you. You’ve been a good friend to me, so please. Take it.’
Dave considered, decided he could give it back when his friend’s death premonition passed, and took the watch. He clicked it open and admired the crystal face. Twenty-two past six – right on time, as far as he could tell. The second hand moved briskly in its own little circle just above the scrolled 6.
‘Cleaned several times, but repaired only once,’ Ollie said, resuming his slow ambulation. ‘In nineteen twenty-three, according to Grampy, after my father dropped it down the well on the old farm in Hemingford Home. Can you imagine that? Over a hundred and twenty years old, and only repaired once. How many human beings on earth can claim that? A dozen? Maybe only six? You have two sons and a daughter, am I right?’
‘You are,’ Dave said. His friend had grown increasingly frail over the last year, and his hair was nothing but a few baby-fine wisps on his liver-spotted skull, but his mind was ticking along a little better than Olga’s. Or my own, he admitted to himself.
‘The watch isn’t in my will, but it should go in yours. I’m sure you love all your children equally, you’re that kind of guy, but liking is different, isn’t it? Leave it to the one you like the best.’
That would be Peter, Dave thought, and smiled.
Either returning the smile or catching the thought behind it, Ollie’s lips parted over his remaining teeth and he nodded. ‘Let’s sit down. I’m bushed. It doesn’t take much, these days.’
They sat on one of the benches, and Dave tried to hand the watch back. Ollie pushed his hands out in an exaggerated repelling gesture that was comical enough to make Dave laugh, although he recognized this as a serious matter. Certainly more serious than a few missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.
The smell of the flowers was strong, heavenly. When Dave Calhoun thought of death – not so far off now – the prospect he regretted most was the loss of the sensory world and all its ordinary luxuries. The sight of a woman’s cleavage in a boatneck top. The sound of Cozy Cole going bullshit on the drums in ‘Topsy, Part Two.’ The taste of lemon pie with a cloud of meringue on top. The smell of flowers he could not name, although his wife would have known them all.
‘Ollie, you may be going to die this week, God knows everyone in this place has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, but there’s no way you can know for sure. I don’t know if you had a dream, or a black cat crossed your path, or something else, but premonitions are bullshit.’
‘I didn’t just have a premonition,’ Ollie said, ‘I saw one. I saw Mister Yummy. I’ve seen him several times in the last two weeks. Always closer. Pretty soon I’ll have a room visit, and that will be that. I don’t mind. In fact, I’m looking forward to it. Life’s a great thing, but if you live long enough, it wears out before it runs out.’
‘Mister Yummy,’ Calhoun said. ‘Who the hell is Mister Yummy?’
‘It’s not really him,’ Ollie said, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘I know that. It’s a representation of him. A summation of a time and place, if you like. Although there was a real Mister Yummy once. That’s what my friends and I called him that night in Highpockets. I never knew his real name.’
‘I’m not following.’
‘Listen, you know I’m gay, right?’
Dave smiled. ‘Well, I think your dating days were over before I met you, but I had a pretty good idea, yes.’
‘Was it the ascot?’
It’s the way you walk, Dave thought. Even with a cane. The way you run your fingers through what remains of your hair and then glance in the mirror. The way you roll your eyes at the women on that Real Housewives show. Even the still-life drawings in your room, which form a kind of timeline of your decline. Once you must have been so good, but now your hands shake. You’re right – it wears out before it runs out.
‘Among other things,’ Dave said.
‘Have you ever heard someone say they were too old for one of America’s military adventures? Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan?’
‘Sure. Although what they usually say is they were too young.’
‘AIDS was a war.’ Ollie was looking down at his gnarled hands, from which the talent was departing. ‘And I wasn’t too old for all of it, because no one is when the war’s on one’s native soil, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I guess that’s true enough.’
‘I was born in nineteen thirty. When AIDS was first observed and clinically described in the United States, I was fifty-two. I was living in New York, and working freelance for several advertising firms. My friends and I still used to go around to the clubs in the Village once in a while. Not the Stonewall – a hellhole run by the Mafia – but some of the others. One night I was standing outside Peter Pepper’s on Christopher Street, sharing a jay with a friend, and a bunch of young men went in. Good-looking guys in tight bellbottom pants and the shirts they all seemed to wear back then, the kind with the wide shoulders and narrow waists. Suede boots with stacked heels.’
‘Yummy boys,’ Dave ventured.
‘I guess, but not the yummy boy. And my best friend – his name was Noah Freemont, died just last year, I went to the funeral – turned to me and said, “They don’t even see us anymore, do they?” I agreed. They saw you if you had enough money, but we were too … dignified for that, you might say. Paying for it was demeaning, although some of us did, from time to time. Yet in the late fifties, when I first came to New York …’
He shrugged and looked off into the distance.
‘When you first came to New York?’ Dave prompted.
‘I’m thinking about how to say this. In the late fifties, when women were still sighing over Rock Hudson and Liberace, when homosexuality was the love that dared not speak its name instead of the one that never shuts up, my sex drive was at its absolute peak. In that way – there are others, I’m sure, many others – gay men and straight men are the same. I read somewhere that when they are in the presence of an attractive other, men think about sex every twenty seconds or so. But when a man’s in his teens and twenties, he thinks about sex constantly, whether he’s in the presence of an attractive other or not.’
‘You get hard when the wind blows,’ Dave said.
He was thinking of his first job, as a pump jockey, and of a pretty redhead he’d happened to see sliding out of the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s truck. Her skirt had rucked up, revealing her plain white cotton panties for a single second, two at most. Yet he had played that moment over and over in his mind while masturbating, and although he had only been sixteen at the time, the memory was still fresh and clear. He doubted if that would have been the case if he’d been fifty. By then he’d seen plenty of women’s underwear.
‘Some of the conservative columnists called AIDS the gay plague, and with ill-concealed satisfaction. It was a plague, but by nineteen eighty-six or so, the gay community had a pretty good fix on it. We understood the two most basic preventive measures – no unprotected sex and no sharing of needles. But young men think they’re immortal, and as my grandma used to say when she was in her cups, a stiff dick has no conscience. It’s especially true when the owner of that dick is drunk, high, and in the throes of sexual attraction.’