For a moment I saw us from a distance, sitting on opposite sides of a table with the palms of one in the palms of the other, a supplicant seeking guidance from a soothsayer. I saw the teacups, white, crazed like eggs too long boiled. The faintest shadow of pattern—vines perhaps, or perhaps simply woven lines—was visible around their brims, and I thought, this is what The Garden is. Not a physical maze but a mental one. A skein of warped perception, lines of history tangled up and rendered indistinguishable. But every once in a while something slips free, and almost always it’s something beautiful. Something, at any rate, so filled with the promise of meaning it acquires beauty, like a rusty key hatched from a ceramic egg. Sometimes it’s easier to believe in a metaphor than the truth, and if that’s true then I believed in buried treasure: three teacups, one filled with water, another holding its own broken handle, the third empty, as perfectly synced with the lives they represented as a high-noon shadow.
I picked up the water-filled cup.
“Yours?”
Claudia nodded.
I pointed to the empty one. “Then that must be Ellis’s.”
Claudia nodded again.
For the first time I noticed there wasn’t a ring on her finger, and I wasn’t surprised so much as I was…sad, I guess. For Claudia. I wanted my question to be larger than what was in front of us, so I said, “What happened to
your
family?”
Claudia saw where my eyes were aimed and pulled her hands from mine. She smiled as she shook her head, her solicitations of five minutes before replaced by sudden if tender withdrawal.
“I won’t be a representative of my past,” she reproached me, “let alone for the race,” but her voice was gentle. “Not for my father, and not for you either.” One of her ringless hands took her teacup from me and drank the water in it, and she made a face. “Acid rain,” she giggled. But then she looked at the three cups for a long time and her face went soft. “Drugs,” she said finally. “It’s a black thing. I’m sure you understand. Enough stories for one day,” she went on in a firmer voice. She stacked the three cups together, Ellis’s holding Parker’s holding its handle, Claudia’s on top of them. Then she looked up at me, and it was as if the water from her cup had welled into her eyes. “I can’t go home like this. Can I sleep here for a while? Please?”
I put her in my bedroom, on my sheetless bed. She asked me for a T-shirt to sleep in and in the time it took me to pull one of Trucker’s Stephen Sprouse wannabes from a drawer Claudia had slid her dress down her body, where it lay at her feet looking for all the world like a rolled-up condom. She stood within its ring of safety in surprisingly chaste broad-bottomed white panties and strapless bra, idly scratching one of her wrists.
“What you looking at, boy?”
I blushed and stammered, “Y-you left your shoes in the garden.”
Claudia just smirked as she pulled the T-shirt over her neck. Her arms writhed under the shirt and I wondered if she were too stoned to find the sleeves, but then her bra fell to the floor and her hands poked out the sleeveholes. She scratched her wrist again, looked down at it, frowned. Then she lay down on the bare mattress and languorously rolled on to her stomach. “You’re my hero,” is what I think she said, but the pillow muffled her words.
She rolled on her back then. Her eyes were sealed, her right hand scratched her left, her mouth was a thin slit between lipstick-mottled lips. She reached for a sheet but it was still drying in the back room, and her hands pulled warm air up over her body.
“Claudia—”
“Sshh.”
But I couldn’t help myself. I knelt down beside the bed and put my hand on her stomach. “Are you going to keep him?”
“No.” Claudia smiled without opening her eyes. “I’m going to let him fly away.” She was scratching her stomach through the fabric of the T-shirt, and the toenails of her right foot made a rasping noise as she dragged them up and down her left ankle. “Jamie,” she whispered.
I practically laid my ear against her mouth. Again the smells, smoke and booze and mint. “Claudia?”
“Oh Jamie,” Claudia breathed. “We fucked up. We fucked up big time. We were playing with HIV.”
There was a soft smile on her face and she was scratching her belly, but as I watched the smile relaxed, her hands stilled. Her lips pouted open and a thin steady wheeze passed through her lips.
“Claudia?”
If she wasn’t sleeping she was a good actress. Her face softened until it was as round and open as an infant’s, her tongue just visible between parted lips. I crept out of the room and down the hallway and into the stairwell, her last words beating in my ears. What did she mean, playing with HIV? And all of that scratching? What was
that
about?
When I got to the shop I veered toward the garden, thinking I’d retrieve Claudia’s magazine and read Knute’s article. But on my way to the back of the building I passed Nellydean’s office, and I detoured into the small room.
The phone book was still spread to the page I’d left it open to not quite a month before. I reached to close it but my hands had ideas of their own. As it turned out he was listed under the same name he’d given the magazine, Lingon, K., but nothing resembling that name appeared on the buzzer panel of the white glazed-brick building that took up the whole block of First Avenue between 61st and 62nd, and I had to sit there for three hours waiting for him to come out. As it turned out he wasn’t home: he came walking up the sidewalk, the setting sun casting one faint shadow behind him, a street lamp casting another thicker one before him, a pair of spectral towers that collapsed in on him until just the man stood in front of me, solitary and brightly lit. Not that I noticed any of this: I was too busy scratching the red welts that had sprung up on my arms and ankles, hands and feet and neck. I scratched with gleeful abandon—gleeful, because the constellating rash enabled me to realize Claudia had said
itch
ivy, not
H
IV.
“Jamie.”
I was immersed in scratching, but his voice didn’t startle me. It was almost as if I’d been expecting it.
I looked up at him. “How did you know about that name?”
Knute smiled down at me. “I think this is yours.” His free hand—his right hand carried a white plastic bag through which I could read the labels on a tin of steel-cut oats and a bottle of Beaujolais—reached into his front pocket. What came out first was a silver chain; what followed, swaying back and forth like a hypnotist’s pendulum, was my mother’s key, and as I looked at it my mind filled with an image of mer-Knute, clothed as he was now—and as he was when we first met, in pale khakis and white buttondown shirt open at the throat—swimming down to retrieve the key from a murky river bottom populated by spare tires and unlaced boots, pickled gangsters in cement overshoes. Oh, I had it for him. I had it for him
bad
.
“How did you—”
“From Ellen, Nelly, Endie—”
“Nellydean.”
“That’s her.” Knute slipped the chain, warm from his pocket but still cool against my skin, over my head. “That’s a nasty rash. Itch ivy?”
I smiled, wanly.
“We should put something on it.”
I could smell the paint before Knute opened his door. The periwinkle walls of the foyer still glistened, and in the living room all the furniture had been pushed against one wall. The empty side was carpeted in newspapers, and I scanned them for good headlines but Knute only read the
Times
: “Amid Rising Prices, the Quest for Affordable—and Comfy!—Manhattan Living.”
“Pardon the mess,” Knute said, and he disappeared down the hall. By the time he came back I’d found the candles—the ones I lost the day I lost the key around my neck. They lay on the paper-wrapped mantle, four white tapers, their thick wax bodies broken in several places but their wicks still intact, so that when I picked one up its segmented length curved like the stacked boxes on the shop’s mezzanine.
I heard Knute’s feet on the paper behind me, the sound of liquid in a bottle being vigorously shaken. The candle flopped back and forth in my fingers, and I felt Knute’s wet hand on my neck, rubbing something cool and unguent over my itch ivy rash.
“That pier queen? The one who sold your wallet to the magazine?” I was startled at how close his voice sounded: his lips practically tickled my ear. “He found them.”
One of Knute’s hands was still rubbing the back of my neck; the other traced the curve of my ear lightly, almost surreptitiously, and I stood there while he kneaded a curl of my hair in his fingers as though spinning it into thread. Or a dread—a tiny dreadlock as thin as pencil lead. His fingers pulled slightly, as if testing the strength of what he’d made.
“I’ve always loved hair like this.”
“Curly? Or short? You had everything,” I said before he could answer. “The candles, the key, my wallet, my shoes—
everything
.”
Knute’s voice sounded confused. “You put your shoes and wallet in the bag before you jumped in the river. Don’t you remember?”
Still facing away from him, I flopped the candle in my hand. “Were you planning on keeping these?”
“They were broken—”
“They were
mine
.” When I turned, Knute’s wet hand caught the chain around my neck and pulled it tight. “What do you mean, Endean gave the key to you?”
Knute kept his finger on the chain, kept the chain pulled tight against the back of my neck. “She told me she took it off you when you were sleeping on the, on the fountain,” he said, as if just now sensing something fishy in her story. “For safe-keeping?”
“Why did you make up those
lies
about me?”
Knute let the key fall against my chest. “You wouldn’t talk to me, I had nothing to go on. I had to think of something.”
“But you wrote them
down
. You published them in a
magazine
.”
“I had one of my friends pretend to be you.”
“
What?
”
“For the fact checkers. They don’t just print anything, you know. There are safeguards. But I gave them my friend’s number, they talked to him as if he were you.”
“But—but why? Why work so hard? Why not just say there was no story, I wouldn’t talk, I was so boring nobody’d want to read about me.”
“Because that’s not true.”
“But the key, the candles—”
But Knute was still speaking over me. He said, “Because,” over and over until I stopped talking, and then he said, “I wanted to see you again.”
There was a beat, and then another, and then Knute stepped back and gestured nervously at the pile of furniture. “Look, why don’t we—” He whipped the plastic from a swivelly modern chair with industrial-strength upholstery, beet purple. “Here, sit, please.” He waved a hand at the half-painted walls, a gray dawn encroaching on midnight blue. “I was about to open a bottle of wine. It’s just Beaujolais but—”
“I didn’t come over for a glass of
wine
.”
“Then why did you come?”
“What?”
“Why’d you come over?”
“What,” I said again, but Knute didn’t repeat his question a third time. “But, but…you wrote those
lies
about me.”
“Then why not go to the magazine? It published them. Look, Jamie—”
“You must not call me that! Only my mother called me that.” But even as I protested I heard the word in Nellydean’s voice, and then, again, in Claudia’s.
Knute smiled, and in his wry grimace I could see he knew much more about me than what he’d written, or what I’d read.
“James,” he said. “I’m at that age when men fall in love with their younger selves.”
“Did you rehearse that bullshit in a mirror?”
Knute raised his hands, guilty as charged. “What I’m trying to say is that choices that once seemed mutable have become fixed. Options are limited. I look back at certain times in my life and I think, what if I’d done
that
instead. What if someone had done
that
for me.” He shrugged. “When I was eighteen, I used to meet this girl on the dunes behind Long Beach. She was kind of brilliant and kind of crazy and she was a lot more savvy in matters of the heart than I was, or am for that matter. Do you know what she did?”
“I dunno. Did she
marry
you?”
“Uh, no.” Knute’s smile was brief, pained, as if he almost wished she had. “She told me I was gay. And I…”
“You what?”
“I want to do that for you.”
I suddenly remembered: I’d never told him.
“Knute,” I said, softening at this weirdly chivalric gesture. “I already know. I
am
gay.”
Knute shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just…I mean…I guess I wanted to tell you that you can be who you are. For my generation, being gay
was
our identity. We ran to New York or San Francisco, Ptown or Silver Lake, and more or less pretended everything in between didn’t exist. But your generation is different. You have to find a way to live in the middle of the country, as well as at the edges. Okay, I’m working this metaphor a little hard. I guess what I’m trying to say is that people your age have to figure out how to incorporate a gay identity into the rest of their lives. I mean, it’s better in some ways. You have more choices. More freedom. But that makes it harder too. Everything’s so goddamned nebulous with you kids. Post-identity, post-gay, post-AIDS.” Knute shook his head, snorting. “I mean, Jesus Christ, every time I woke up sweating in the 1980s I was sure I was seroconverting, but your generation—”
I must have made a face because Knute stopped, waved his words away. “I’m getting off track. Talking to myself as much as you. What I’m trying to say is, I wanted to save you, James.”
“From…being gay?”
Another snort, another shake of his head. “No. From New York.”
Knute’s face had a look of pleading, as if what he was saying was tremendously important—so important that I had to look out a window. But all I saw was a broken checkerboard of tarred roofs and blanched blue sky.
Behind me, Knute was still talking. “I know how crazy this sounds. I know. But it’s not real. It doesn’t exist.”
“What doesn’t exist?”
“That,” Knute said, and pointed out the window. “The promises in all of that. They’re not real. They don’t ever come true. People come here thinking New York will help them realize their dreams. But it doesn’t. It only helps them realize
its
dream. We—my generation—we had to learn that the hard way, and I guess I didn’t want you to have to go through the same thing. At least not on your own.”