The Men from the Boys (26 page)

“I don't want to be fifty and prowling around rest stops,” Eduardo said once when driving past the rest stop on our way to Boston.

“Don't be judgmental,” I cautioned him.

“Okay. I accept your premise that sex is good, that we queers can define how we practice it without the rules set up by society.” He leaned across the front seat to kiss my ear. “But I don't want to be an old queen jerking off alone in my bedroom to thoughts of little boys.”

That image hangs around me like a pesky fly, and I actually swat at it a few times, until I realize it really is a fly, or some sort of insect anyway, roused by the unexpected warmth. I must have disturbed its nest as I trudged through the weeds.

Off to my right two men are fucking. I make my way to them cautiously. If they spot someone approaching, they sometimes break, bounding off like deer into the woods. These two don't. In fact, the one being fucked, bent over with his hands on his knees, gestures for me to join them. I decide not to. All at once I'm tired, aware of how my day is just slipping away, aware that tomorrow the gray skies could return, that more snow could still fall. Spring has a way of teasing you, and I'm not in the mood suddenly to be teased.

I hear the fucker come behind me: I imagine he has not pulled out, that no condom blocks the way of his infected sperm. Right now, as the sun beats warm upon my face, thousands of tiny microscopic viruses eagerly swim up the ass of the man who gestured to me. I do not linger long on the thought. “If a man asks me to fuck him up the ass without a condom,” Javitz had said last summer, “I will.” I was shocked then, disillusioned even.

I'm not anymore.

Pravincetown, August 1994

“How could you do that?” Chanel rails at me. “He's just a kid!”

“It just happened,” I explain. “I don't feel good about it.”

I look over at Javitz, who's sitting across from me at the kitchen table. He says nothing. He just lights up a cigarette, breaking the rule about smoking in the house. Already the day drips with humidity. I'm shirtless. My back sticks to the chair.

“Things like that just don't
happen,”
Chanel insists, scolding me as if I've personally offended her. Maybe I have. There was a guy who used to work with us at the newspaper. I didn't know him well. Teddy was his name. He was Chanel's best gay male friend before me. He's dead now.

She stands up. I wish she'd keep her voice down. Eduardo's still asleep. When I got up, after a night of dreams between sticky, sweaty sheets, I'd found her here, sitting across the table from Javitz. She and Wendy had had a fight, a major one, after they left the birthday party last night. Chanel had come here, refusing to share a bed at the guest house with her lover.

“She's completely selfish,” Chanel had been protesting when I stumbled out to the table.

“Who?” I asked.

“Wendy.” Chanel's eyes were bleary, from lack of sleep and—possibly, could it be?—from crying. I'd never known Chanel to cry, didn't think her the type. “She's a fucking selfish bitch.”

“Whoa,” I said, sitting down.

“She wants a baby,” she explained to me, as she must have already explained to Javitz. Of course, I already knew that, but pretended not to.

“But you don't,” I said.

“I'm not ruling out anything,” Chanel said. “But she said she has to know
now.
Like today. Says she's waited long enough. If I don't decide, she's leaving me.”

Javitz gave one of his long, long sighs. Chanel had come to him when the relationship was new, for his approval. He'd met Wendy, liked her, and that was that. Now, he was presiding over the end as well.

“Darling,” he said to Chanel, “don't make any rash decisions just because she's being rash. And that includes saying no as much as it includes saying yes.”

“She wants an answer,” Chanel said.

“She also wants you,” Javitz told her.

“I'm going to tell her no. I can play this game too.”

I reached across the table and put my hand on hers. “Chanel, you can't just walk away from this. It's been four years. You've invested a lot in this relationship. Stick around for the dividends.”

Javitz flipped me an eye. “Well put,” he offered.

“Thank you,” I said.

But inside, all I could think of was the boy in my bed, the boy I'd betrayed.

“He trusted you!” Chanel says now, pacing the room. “Hell, he
loved
you. I could see it in his eyes. How could you do it?”

“Give me a fucking break,” I plead, standing up now myself. “I'm not the first one to have unsafe sex. It happens.”

“Yeah. And people die because of it!”

“All right, stop,” Javitz says finally, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Stop it, both of you. Calm down.” He looks up at Chanel, then at me. “Back to your places.”

We retake our seats.

“What you did wasn't smart,” Javitz says to me. Then to Chanel: “What he did wasn't wrong.”

“What do you mean, it wasn't
wrong?”
She's pissed, whether at me or at Wendy or both I don't know. But she's pissed, and that's getting me pissed as well.

“It wasn't wrong. There was no malice involved. Can we remember for a moment that we are human? That we all make choices, and that we sometimes do things we might regret?” Javitz looks as I imagine he must look in his classroom, after he delivers a long soliloquy on the rights of man and is asked by a student if any of that will be on the final exam. He's tired of teaching us. Are we forever to be apprentices?

“All I know is,” Chanel says, “he fucked that boy—”

“I'm not a boy.”

It's Eduardo. Oh, shit. He stands there in the doorway of the bedroom and I imagine he must hate me as much as I hate myself. Not because I came inside him: he was good about that, saying it was an accident, we'd talk about it later. No, if anything, Eduardo would hate me for revealing what had occurred, for speaking without him here, treating him exactly as the child to which Chanel referred. More than anything else, that is what Eduardo resents.

He approaches the table.
“Two
people had sex last night. Two people fucked. Get it right.”

I watch him in silence. I might even go so far as to say in awe. He commands the room, this tall, thin boy-man, this angry, tight-jawed twenty-two-year-old whose hair stands like a daisy field on his head, whose skin bears the wrinkles of sleep. He is the picture of dignity. I need say no words in his defense.

“He did not fuck me,” he tells the table. “I
let
him fuck me.” He looks down at me. “I let him
make love
to me.”

“That's right,” I say, and my voice, already small, cracks just a bit.

Chanel simmers in her chair. “But aren't you afraid, Eduardo? I mean, Jeff—”

“—isn't exactly a virgin,” Eduardo finishes. He sits down. “Any coffee?” he asks. Javitz pours him a cup. “Believe me,” he says after he's had a sip, “I'm
well
aware of Jeff's sexual history.”

“I'm sorry, Eduardo. Sorry about talking about this without you.”

He makes a wry face. “If I'm to be a part of this little group, I guess I have to accept a certain amount of loss of privacy.”

“We do tend to operate a bit like the
Oprah
show,” Javitz concedes. “Discussing unsafe sexual behavior and the dissolution of relationships around the breakfast table.”

“It's pretty weird, huh?” I say.

Chanel reaches over and places her hand on top of Eduardo's. “It's just our way. Nothing leaves the room.”

Eduardo laughs. “Oh, go ahead and tell the world. I don't care.”

“Are you all right?” Javitz asks.

He shrugs. “I don't know. What does ‘all right' mean?”

“Ah. That is the question,” Javitz says. He turns to Chanel. “The problem is, my dear, no one knows what
anything
is anymore.”

“I've got to get back to Wendy and give her my decision,” Chanel says, standing up. “This is too much right now.”

“Can we talk later?” I ask.

She shrugs. “I don't know where I'll be later.” She kisses Javitz, who cautions her to go slow. She turns to Eduardo. “Take care,” she says, as if she'll never see him again, as if he'll be dead by tonight. She doesn't say a word to me.

“I'm going to take a shower,” Eduardo says. He looks at me. I can't tell what he's feeling.

When I hear the water, I turn to Javitz and tell him it
was
wrong.

“Define
wrong,”
he says.

“Oh, shut up!” I've had it. I spin on him. “Shut up, please! You know what wrong means! We can't redefine
that!
Sure, he let me fuck him. Sure, he shares part of the responsibility in this. Forget even that I'm older, more experienced. Forget that I've seen people die, that I've lived through all this with you, and he hasn't. Forget all that. I was still wrong in what I did!”

“Why?”

He's so preternaturally calm it almost scares me, as if there's something he knows that I don't that he's going to spring at me, like a snake in a jar. But I persist.

“It's just wrong,” I say, and I remember my terror, not long ago, when the man at the dick dock shot his load on my newly shaven chest. I remember Javitz's bitterness when I told him that story. I didn't comprehend it then, even less now. I sit down hard on the couch, banging my shin against the coffee table. “Fuck,” I say, and think for a moment I'm going to cry.

“There's an article in this issue of the Collective's newsletter,” Javitz says. “It discusses the theory that HIV is merely a cofactor in causing AIDS. That there has to be some other causal agent as well, that the routes of transmission as we have known them for the last decade are simply not enough to explain every case of AIDS.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know all that. And some people say HIV has nothing to do with AIDS at all, that you can buttfuck to your heart's content and it's perfectly safe. And they're all as loony as the loons on Golden Pond.”

He smiles. “Perhaps.” He comes to me, sits beside me on the couch. He is not angry now, not bitter. “The point is, we just don't know enough to draw any conclusions about anything. There are certain precautions we should take—using condoms is one of them—but we've got to stop blaming ourselves for everything we do. We are human, after all. We are not saints.”

I look him straight in the face. “You laughed at me when I was scared about being infected through a nick on my chest. But you're right, Javitz. We
don't
know enough about
anything.
Maybe sucking isn't safe. Maybe all those guys who are infected who think they got it through buttfucking really got it from sucking dick, through little tiny tears left by their toothbrushes on their gums. I mean, come
on
—how can we know for sure where the virus entered?”

“The odds are—”

“Fuck the odds. You just said it. Buttfucking without condoms cannot explain every case of AIDS. Neither can blood transfusions or needles. If even
one
guy got it through sucking dick—whether there's one or none or sixteen cofactors—if
be
got it, so could any of us.” I look at Javitz and silence him before he can come back at me. “What if you're getting head—not even giving it, but getting it—and the guy sticks his tongue up your piss slit so hard it hurts? You know there's a tear there. There's got to be. And if the guy giving you head has got HIV in his saliva—and all the cofactors that are needed—well what then?”

“You get AIDS, I guess.”

“Don't patronize me.”

“I'm not. But saliva has not been shown to transmit HIV.”

“Well, cum up the butt has. You can't have it both ways, Javitz. If we don't know nothin', we don't know nothin'. Maybe your big sloppy kisses have indeed infected us all.”

I touch a sore point there. Once, a fellow activist, someone who was supposedly enlightened about safe-sex dogma, had recoiled from Javitz's lips. It had stung him. “Anyone who won't kiss me is no friend of mine,” he'd insisted.

Javitz stares at me long and hard. “If a man asks me to fuck him without a condom, I will,” he says quietly.

I feel something twist inside me. “You'd tell him you had AIDS, wouldn't you?”

“Why?” He smiles malevolently. “What did you say to Eduardo before you stuck your dick up his ass? Isn't the canon ‘We should assume everyone is infected'?”

I'm stunned. “You're saying it's his responsibility, and not yours.”

“That's exactly what I'm saying.”

“So we've come to this now,” I say. I want to get out of there, I want to go away from Javitz, not think of him in this way.

“Yes,” he says, lighting a cigarette and not caring if he puffs up the room. “We've come to this.”

Boston, March 1995

I'm clipping a recipe for tuna soufflé from the newspaper. Javitz is here. We've spent the day together, just lying around, drinking coffee, eating graham crackers, reading the Sunday
Globe,
talking about whether Dole will be the Republican nominee next year and if we can support Clinton again.

“We don't have much of a choice, do we?” I venture.

“Darling, we
always
have choices.”

We're waiting for Lloyd to get back from his spiritual retreat. He's late, and Javitz hasn't seen him in two weeks.