LITMIR.BIZ

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Peter didn’t want to see Doctor Cohen. The doctor couldn’t do much for him right now, and he always had bad news. Martin insisted. Peter temporized. Martin glowered. Peter made excuses. Martin threatened to call Cohen himself. Finally, Peter made an appointment the last week in September.

      Cohen’s waiting room—white and chrome and smoked glass and shadowless, lit by hidden fluorescent tubes—could hold six patients if three of them shared the sofa shaped like a heap of accumulating snow. Martin sat in a nubby white chair next to Peter. He had never before seen Peter fully dressed. Peter wore black jeans and a cashmere sweater of royal blue. The clothes did little to conceal the angularity that sickness had visited on his body. His colorless complexion didn’t help. And his thick black locks hung loose over his eyes, ears, and neck. He resembled a hippie somebody’d gussied up for a visit to a rich aunt. But no emaciation, no ungainliness, no lack of grooming could destroy the exquisite shape of his head.

      Two young men Peter’s age came in. They wore white sweatshirts, white denims, white sneakers. Clean-cut, wholesome, all-American. They sat next to each other on the sofa without speaking, glanced at Martin, ogled Peter, riffled through the magazines, twiddled.

      “Mr. Christopher?” a woman’s voice said.

      The room was smaller after Peter had gone. Martin watched the two young men. He was sure they were lovers. Peter had told him that Cohen specialized in AIDS and related diseases. When the eyes of one of the men skimmed over Martin, he realized with a shock that they probably assumed he was Peter’s lover.

      Were gay men always better looking than straight men? No, they worked harder to make themselves attractive, and they spent more money on clothes and grooming. These two smelled just right, faintly musky, faintly sweet, a scent so unobtrusive that it hovered at the edge of awareness. The dark one had a Caesar haircut, combed forward, so that a wavelet of hair cast a shadow on his upper forehead. The blond’s hair was barely long enough to lie down. Both were slim and muscular, skin faintly tanned and clear. Their matching sweatshirts and jeans were athletic in cut but snowy clean. Martin could imagine them perfecting their biceps and pecs before walls of mirrors at a trendy gym. He couldn’t visualize them roughhousing in the mud with a football the way he had at their age. Might bruise or break something. Such solicitousness about their bodies somehow detracted from their handsomeness, made them seem not quite real, like fashion models. They lacked the innocence, the unawareness of self that young people shared with young animals. They knew how to show themselves off to the greatest advantage. That knowledge aged them.

      Martin got to his feet and wandered toward the hall door. He browsed without interest through an offering of leaflets in a wall rack—the principles of safe sex, a listing of the symptoms of AIDS, information on the HTLV-III antibody test, and ways of fighting anal warts—all his, free for the asking.

      Peter reappeared, flushed.

      Martin turned. “What did he say?”

      Peter moved past him and hurried down the hall to the men’s room. Martin followed. He heard Peter inside a stall. More diarrhea.

      The traffic on Connecticut Avenue made the drive home all creeps and stops.

      “Tired?” Martin said.

      Peter nodded, leaned his head on the backrest, and closed his eyes.

      “Are you hurting?”

      Peter shook his head.

      “Hungry?”

      Peter shook his head again without opening his eyes.

      Martin let him be.

      Back in the apartment, Martin put fresh sheets on Peter’s bed while Peter soaked in a hot bath, then helped Peter into clean pajamas. He waited for Peter to tell him what Cohen had said. Peter was silent. Resigned, he told Peter he’d be back in the evening and left to teach his afternoon class.

      

      Peter listened to the last echo of Martin’s footsteps dwindle to nothing. He wanted to call Martin back. The silence of the apartment was marred only by the drone of the refrigerator, the hiss and hum of an occasional car on Porter Street, and the murmur of a television from the floor below.

      Peter wept. He had steeled himself against regret. He had cultivated his cynicism and refused to look back or care about anything or anyone. Except the bastard who had infected him. No way to figure out which one it had been. There’d been too many. Half of them were dead now, anyway.

      And yet, if he were honest with himself, he knew it wasn’t hatred that made him cry. It was regret. Despite his smugness, despite all his defenses, despite the shell he had worked so hard to develop, he ached.

      Sally had disappeared. Maybe she was dead by now. Billy. He’d hit Billy. He’d never see Billy again.

      And Johnny, who never meant anything to him. Tall, blond, tan, and solid, more boy than man, with a silly grin. A good one-night stand. It had been in November only a month after Peter recovered from his first attack of pneumocystis. Johnny played the piano in The Back Door after the regular pianist left. A modern dissonant piece he’d written. Peter leaned across the keys, kissed him. “Can we go to your place?” “No. My mom. Yours?” “No.” Peter took him to a hotel. “You believe in safe sex?” “Any reason I should?” “No regrets,” they had laughed the following morning. Five months later, Johnny was admitted to the Hospice of Saint Anthony and died there.

      Peter had known the risks. Johnny hadn’t. Peter never told him. Peter never told anybody. Peter didn’t care. If Johnny were alive, he’d go to him, tell him the truth. Maybe Johnny would forgive him and still this ache. Nothing could change it now. Johnny was dead, as Peter soon would be. Peter could have spared Johnny, but Peter hadn’t cared.

      But, as far as Peter knew, Johnny’s mother wasn’t dead. She could forgive him, for herself and for Johnny, too. She probably lived in one of those Victorian houses in old Alexandria. She’d meet him at the door. She’d be tall and handsome and sad and wise, her hair gray at the temples, parted in the middle, pulled away from her face and caught at the back. She’d be wearing an understated long-waisted frock with a full skirt. He could hear her contralto voice saying, “So glad to meet you, Peter.” They’d sit in the drawing room in front of a bay window looking out on a brick patio and seamless lawn. There’d be a fire in the fireplace. She’d serve him tea in a cup as fragile as a baby bird, so thin that he’d have to be careful not to crush it in his fingers. She’d wait, hands folded in her lap, head tilted, and listen to his story. He’d tell her the truth. Her eyes would shine. Maybe a tear would escape down her cheek. “Thank you for your honesty,” she’d say. Maybe she’d even take him in her arms.

      He had to find her. She could free him. He saw her stately figure, the tasteful drawing room, the patio, the fireplace. Around the edges of the image boomed the ashen surf. In his chest he felt the suffocation of pneumocystis. Terror of Kaposi’s sarcoma flashed through his belly like quicksilver. The picture of his skeleton pressing against rotting skin blocked out Johnny’s mother. Peter was dying. The end wouldn’t come today or tomorrow, but as he listened to his body, he knew.

      Shit, shit, shit. What was the use? He could pretend to himself that his predicament was touching, poignant, even gripping. He could conjure a scene with a wise and beautiful Mrs. Logan in a setting from Renoir. He was seeing his life as if from the audience. There was no audience. He was not Camille or Violetta or Mimì. He was head-to-head with death. No one was watching, brought to tears by the sadness of his plight. No one but himself. The heart-rending images wouldn’t work anymore. Death was real and gritty and in-your-face. And there wasn’t much time left.

      When he pushed away the fantasies, what was left? Nothing but the steady trickle of his life, the leaking of precious time, the need to remember and try to repair the damage. To forgive and be forgiven. Never mind the fake Mrs. Logan. He had to find the real one. To do what he could to make up for Johnny’s death.

      Now it was Peter’s turn. Cohen had as much as said so. He had told Peter that if he wanted to delay the next attack of the pneumonia, now overdue, he had to do everything

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