Authors: Renee Manfredi
Jack smoothed Hector’s hair back, looked into his eyes as he pushed himself into Hector’s body, tight and narrow and snug all around. He moved slowly. Hector closed his eyes; his mouth drawn thin and hands splayed against the brick wall to steady himself. “Oh,” Jack said. “You are so gorgeous.”
He’d felt strangely calm when he thought he might be infected. There was a little part of him that was curious, that wanted to experience the disease without actually having it. When his sister got pregnant she tried to describe to him how it was. “It’s like this creature inside me is part me and part not,” Susan said. “What I think about most, though, is how rooted I feel, how closely linked I feel to Mom and Grandmother, and all the way back. It’s like this continuation.”
That’s exactly what Jack had felt when he imagined he might be infected, the lineage of all those he’d ever loved and his lovers’ loved ones, through this virus, a kind of terrible, merciless child who gestated over and over.
“You are so beautiful.” He kissed Hector’s neck, licked the sweat at his collarbone and thought of how he could get through the next day, and the one after that, without seeing him. He rested his head on Hector’s shoulder, inhaled the scent of clean laundry. Jack imagined Hector’s mother washing this shirt for her son even as Hector sweated through her good intentions. It made Jack sad for a moment, thinking of this boy’s innocent mother looking after her son in this way. Or perhaps Hector had a
girlfriend. Jack shuddered. He kissed the cool bone of Hector’s nose, traced the elegant arches of his silky eyebrows.
Hector straightened his clothes. He pulled out two cigarettes and handed one to Jack. “Maybe you could give me some cab fare,” Hector said. “Maybe a little extra, too, since I got fired last week.”
Jack nodded, pulled out fifty dollars from his wallet and folded it into Hector’s hand. So, that was it. Jack knew this kind: not a prostitute, not a cruiser, but an opportunist, one who was no doubt propositioned at some point by a queer like him and learned to take advantage of it. “Let me ask you, Hector, did you like that?”
Hector shrugged. “Sure, I like. Whatever. I like you.” He smiled.
Jack stopped himself from asking when he could see him again, if he lived at home with his mother, or with a woman.
“I gotta go, man,” Hector said. “You be good.”
“Right back at you.” Jack flashed him his best Robert Mitchum grin, the one that had charmed men on both coasts.
Jack finished the cigarette and started home but thought better of it. It would be best to have a window of time before returning to Stuart.
He passed dark storefronts and a few college bars with unbearably loud music and shrill female laughter. A single malt Scotch would be nice, but he wasn’t about to go in one of these places replete with fat, cheesy-thighed college women and their breeder boyfriends.
Normally, he wasn’t this misanthropic. The baby discussion with Jane and Leila had put him in a strange mood. He was surprised, then shocked, at his own paternal longings. It was specific to Stuart, he understood now. It made sense. Stuart as a parent to his child made sense.
He walked another block. A bar at the end of the street looked promising; it was dark and relatively quiet. He peeked in the open door. Just a dozen or so people staring up at a television. A few couples here and there in booths. Two thirtyish men playing pool. He went in, ordered a double Scotch, neat, and stared up at
ESPN
. He drank quickly, let the alcohol smooth down the rough edges in his head, the snags his thoughts kept catching on: the beauty of Hector, his love for Stuart. It was because he loved Stuart so much that he had fucked Hector. All other men were pathways to Stuart—how could he ever explain that to anyone? That other men were a way to reclaim what he gave of himself so completely to Stuart. It
was, he thought, precisely because his love for Stuart was so constant and abiding that Jack strayed. Or maybe it was just greed, pure and simple. Because Stuart had everything Jack needed, giving into temptation was, if not wrong, then wasteful, like going into a grocery store and heaping a cart with things he wouldn’t use. But who didn’t need this comfort? Who didn’t want to believe there was plenty of everything in the world?
A
nna awoke before her alarm, set for six, and got up to make coffee. In the month since her birthday she hadn’t slept well or long enough. It was easier to stop fighting it, to simply get up and start her day at whatever hour she opened her eyes.
It was four-thirty now, well before even the summer dawn, plenty of time to get in a few hours of practice. The orchestra rehearsal was tomorrow, with the first performance of the summer in two weeks. Anna still hadn’t mastered the Rachmaninoff, the elusive fifth, which seemed as chaotic to her as any music ever written: the piece simply refused to be herded, the notes like small animals darting in and out of the corner of her brain, sliding down her arms into her hands before screeching off again, whippet-like eighth notes skittering away in wild terror.
Just short of an hour, she put her cello down and wandered to the window. Mike’s car was outside, a good sign since, this early, it probably meant he’d parked it there last night. Anna assumed he’d been coming home at decent hours, since Anna hadn’t had any late night calls from Greta in a week or so. She skimmed the newspaper, washed the dishes from the night before, glanced over some student quizzes on bacterial infections, and mopped the kitchen floor. At eight o’clock, when she finally picked up her cello again, the phone rang.
“It’s me,” Greta said.
“How’s tricks? What’s the news of the hour?” Anna looked at the
purple fingerprints on the sheet music, a casualty of the Wright’s stain used for medical slides that never seemed to completely wash off. She checked her cello to make sure none of it had marred the wood. Anna prized this cello, a gift from Hugh when she started playing again, right around the time she turned forty. It was Austrian, and its tone was lovely and somber and full, the golden whole notes of a lake loon.
“Are you terribly busy?” Greta said.
“I’m just sitting here about to spread my legs for Sergei, the sullen S.O.B.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Rachmaninoff. I’m about to start practicing.”
“Oh. Okay, then. I’ll let you get back to it.”
“No, wait. I’m also desperate for distraction. What’s up?”
“Mike needs to go into the office for a few hours, and I need to get to my rehearsal. My car is in the shop again.”
Greta’s group, the No-Tones, was opening the Boston symphony’s summer season. Anna couldn’t remember when the first performance was. “Can I borrow your car?”
“Sure. If you have it back by two.” Anna had selected one of her students to oversee the AIDS patients’ extra group time, and she had an appointment with the student and Nick Mosites later in the day. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll drive you into the city, then come pick you up later. I have to be at the hospital for a meeting anyway.”
“Are you sure?” Greta asked.
Anna said that she was.
Greta’s rehearsals were in Cambridge, in an old warehouse near Harvard Square. There were probably twenty or thirty children, Anna guessed, ranging from ages six to ten. She sat in one of the folding chairs—might as well stay for part of the rehearsal—with the parents off to the side, some of whom were wearing earplugs. When the music started she understood why: the bass was turned all the way up so the children could feel the vibrations. This was for rehearsal only; during the actual performance, Greta told her, the bass would be equalized and the children would rely on counting instead of the rhythm.
“Okay, parents,” Greta called across the room. “This is the first dress
rehearsal, so I hope by now everyone has purchased a costume for his or her child. Also, for those in the Beethoven sequence, don’t forget to tease out the gray wigs. Think big. Think bird’s nest. Think half-crazy genius.” Greta held up a picture of Beethoven, his hair going every which way. “This is the look we want.” Greta turned back to the children who were filing in. The older ones were in costumes of giant foam-rubber ears, their faces painted black and surrounded by Spanish moss to represent the opening of the auditory canal and the cilia within. The little kids were dressed as ears of corn.
The music was in a 2/2 time signature and turned up so loud Anna’s eardrums ached.
The ears of corn swayed in a line at the front like a field with wind rippling through it, albeit a kind of rap wind, Anna thought. The children in front sang loud, with a pitch that Greta taught them to feel first in their diaphragms before sending the vibrations up to recreate the sounds in their throats. Anna was amazed. The harmonics were remarkable given no child had any idea what the next child was singing.
The kids in front sang: “We are corn. We can hear. We listen to the kernels around our ears.”
The older kids, the human ears, stood behind the ears of corn and sang in counterpoint to the child in front. This was the part that was especially difficult, Greta had told Anna. The human ear singers couldn’t lip-read to determine where, lyrically, the ears of corn were. The vibrations the human ears felt had to be mostly ignored, since they indicated the main melody line, not the harmony they were singing. But Greta had, miraculously, managed to pull it off. The whole production, Anna understood, was about faith, each child believing the vibratory sounds he made would harmonize with the whole.
A girl representing the wind—long diaphanous streamers tied to a gauzy gown—scampered around the stage and pretended to whisper to the ears of corn. The human ears bent toward the vegetable ones then began to dance and sing, this time without music. The story line here was something about how silence was the way of animals and plants, and the manner by which wisdom was channeled from heaven to earth. The creatures who used language heard only dumb mumbling.
The finale showcased three Beethovens who entered from stage left,
one with a viola and two with violins. The trio played the first movement of Beethoven’s fifth. Eyes straight ahead, without sheet music, and without any mistakes that Anna could hear. The performance ended with the wind coming back and announcing: “Magic is the child of Faith.”
“Okay,” Greta said, and signed, clapping along the whole row of children to show her appreciation. “Very, very good. Beethovens, perfect. Let’s do it one more time through.”
Anna caught Greta as she was rewinding the cassette tape. “I’ll be back to pick you up before five.”
Greta nodded. “Nifty, huh?” she cocked her head toward the children and grinned.
“I can’t tell you how wonderful it is.”
Anna still had over two hours before her meeting at the hospital. Insomnia always accelerated her pace; she moved faster through the world, did things in less time than when she was fully rested. She drank a cup of coffee, then went into an enormous bookstore and wandered aimlessly through the aisles for an hour before landing in Travel/Adventure. A book of essays written by women who hunted big game caught her eye. The cover depicted a middle-aged woman beside a dead bison, holding up the animal’s head as though she expected it to smile. Anna skimmed through it, put it back, then picked it up again and tucked the book under her arm. There was another about a woman who had hunted antelope in Africa. She would buy this one, too. She had never in her life been interested in hunting, very rarely even ate meat, so why she was buying these two books—three, now, as she spotted an autobiography of a woman deer hunter—or why she was picking up a flyer attached to a shelf about a women’s hunting group, was a mystery to her. Something about watching Greta’s children had taken her outside of herself. Those pitch-perfect Beethovens, especially.
Anna had been at her peak, musically, at twenty-three, but hadn’t known it at the time. Her playing was the best it would ever be, though her technique sharpened and became more sophisticated over the years. She’d played Rachmaninoff occasionally as a young woman, along with Saint-Saëns, who used to be one of her favorites but whose music she hadn’t touched in thirty years. Something to do with emotional complexity; nuances
of tone and pitch had been more accessible when she was young, though that seemed counterintuitive. She’d have imagined that the somber weight of, say, late Beethoven or the measured sorrow of Bach’s cello suites would become more familiar over time.
She remembered playing Saint-Saëns one late afternoon in her junior year in college, ditching her biology class in a sudden fit of melancholy. She stood by her window, watched the slant of October light shimmer over the quad. Back then, she could stand on any note and let herself sink down to the bottom.
She walked out to her car. What if she really was the kind of woman who wanted to hunt lions in Africa? A woman of independence and ferocity, not worrying about social conventions or niceties, oblivious to personal and professional failures, focused on the thrill and danger of dusk falling on the Serengeti. A version of herself she often longed for but couldn’t be: the Anna who loved humanity and read books about safaris and knew how to field-dress a moose. Maybe a boyfriend for her elderly years, quiet days and drives up-country on weekends. The Anna of even emotion and even-temper, of peaceful sleeps and hearty appetite.
I am not Prince Hamlet and have never been
—stray lines of corrupted poetry from long-ago college literature classes, swirling around her head.
I am not a pair of claws scuttling along the bottom of the ocean
.
Anna spotted her student, Amy, and Nick Mosites sitting in the corner of the hospital cafeteria.
According to the criteria Nick had given Anna—a student with a good working knowledge of basic immunology, compassionate, bright—Amy had seemed the obvious choice. But here in the hospital with the smells of sickness and Betadine and formaldehyde, Anna’s nose went into panicked overdrive and she second-guessed herself. Amy was young, but that wasn’t it. It was that she was too eager to help. The compassion necessary for facilitating an AIDS support group probably had nothing to do with embracing alternative lifestyles or empathizing with another’s suffering, and everything to do with seeing how things like support groups didn’t matter a damn in the long run, then proceeding anyway.