“My cousin Howard,” Javitz grates, pulling me back to him. “Is he dead?”
“I never knew you had a cousin Howard,” I say.
He nods, but just closes his eyes. I look over at Lloyd, whose eyes are liquid in the light. He reaches down and takes Javitz's hand. Suddenly I'm overcome with a horrible sense of finality, that this is it, the beginning of the end. For all of us. I feel terribly weak, as if my knees will buckle.
“IâI'm going out to call Chanel and Melissa,” I say. “Maybe they shouldâmaybe they might want to come by and see him.”
Lloyd nods.
At the end of the corridor there's a phone. I blink back the horrible brightness and press Chanel's number. When she answers, I start to cry.
“Jeff, what's the matter?” she asks.
I'm not thinking right. “Katie Haaglund's dead,” I tell her.
And I start to cry harder, as hard as Katie did, all those years ago. Poor little girl. Made no sense, not then, not now. Here today, gone tomorrow. Where did she go? What happened to the girl?
I know. â
The radiator.
It's the only answer that makes any sense at all.
Provincetown, April 1995
“Why didn't you tell us any of this before?” I'm asking Javitz. Lloyd is sitting next to me, right by my side.
“Darling, there was nothing to tell.”
Lloyd stands, impatient. “What do you mean, ânothing to tell'? This
fatigueâ”
“And the loss of vision,” I add. “Javitz, why didn't you tell us before that you were having trouble seeing?”
He reaches across the table for his cigarettes, then thinks better of it. “I've made an appointment for next week at the clinic here,” he says. “We'll just take it one step at a time.” He looks back and forth between us. “All of us. We'll
all
take it one step at a time.”
Lloyd kneels beside him suddenly. “I'm sorry I haven't been around.”
Javitz caresses Lloyd's cheek. “Oh, but you have, darling. You never leave me. I've missed you, but I got over that. I knew you were never really far away.”
They embrace. “I'm not going away from you again,” Lloyd promises huskily.
I catch his eye. He can't promise me the same thing. When he came back, he found Javitz and me sitting here. I'd finally gotten Javitz to talk about the fatigue, and then he mentioned that he'd been steadily losing his vision. He'd be in the grocery store and he couldn't see to the end of the aisle. He scraped his car against the side of a house on one of the east end's narrow lanes.
Lloyd sat down beside me, listened to it all. His eyes came alive in a way I haven't seen them in a long time. As if this was what he'd been searching for all alongâor running away from. Either way, there was no avoiding it now.
“Maybe you should get back on an antiviral,” Lloyd says.
“There's something else coming out,” I offer. “Tommy told me about it. Something called a proâ?” I can't remember the name.
Javitz nods. “They're called protease inhibitors. They're not widely available yet, and when they are, they're going to be outrageously expensive. You have to take them with an antiviral. The idea is that the protease will inhibit the replication of the virus, and then the antiviral will have an easier job attacking what's left.”
“That's good news,” Lloyd says.
Javitz shrugs. “Maybe. So was AZT ten years ago.” He stands. “We'll just take it one step at a time.”
“But you'll ask the doctor about them? These protease things?” I say.
He looks at me. “Darling, I'm going to die, and I'm going to die of AIDS. Maybe not right now, maybe not tomorrow. But I am going to die. It's sooner now, rather than later. And yes, I am going to let you take care of me.” We hold each other's gaze for several seconds. Then he looks over at Lloyd. “And you, too.”
Nobody says a word. He walks to the stairs. “I'm going up for a nap,” he tells us. “Will you still be here when I get up, Lloyd?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Good.” Javitz smiles, then heads upstairs.
“Cat,” Lloyd says.
I don't answer.
“Cat, we need to find some balance with each other. If Javitz gets sickâ”
“If Javitz gets sick,” I repeat, “we'll
have
balance. But right now, I don't feel very balanced, and I don't think I want to, either.”
He's silent.
“I'm going for a walk,” I tell him.
“Jeff.” He comes to me, looks me square in the eyes. “I love you.”
I turn away. Damn, why is it even now I can't stay angry at him? “I know you do, Lloyd,” I say, pulling on my coat. “Listen, I won't be gone long.”
Outside the sun is starting to set. The town glows with a reddish gold sheen. I head back to the beach, where the wind now swirls in mighty gusts. The waves are fiercer now as the tide comes in. This is why I moved here. These waves.
“Not yet,” I whisper to the waves. “He can't die yet.”
Then when? Next year? The year after that? It's sooner now, rather than later. After all those years, in and out of the hospital, back and forthâeven long-term survivors die eventually.
Life without Javitz. I cannot bear to imagine. It is impossible. He has always been there, longer than any of the others. His move here was supposed to give him a new lease on life, a new beginning. Now he's going to die. He's going to
die,
and it's sooner now, rather than the ambiguous, comforting “later” that it's always been before. He's going to die, just as Lloyd has left me, and our happy family will forever be gone, and I'll be alone.
You're angry with me because you're afraid I'm not going to take care of you anymore.
“Not yet,” I repeat. “Please, not yet.”
I'm walking along the narrow strip of sand, moving in and out as the tide comes in, each time a little more aggressive than the last, each time claiming a little more of the shore. I find myself in the same spot where I'd met the painter earlier. His easel still stands there, forlorn and empty. I approach it, and follow with my eyes the windswept footprints that lead up to a small gray, barnacled cottage.
I see the painter inside, under the soft orange glow of a table lamp, eating his dinner. His long hair is slicked down now, as if from a shower, the bald top of his head shining under the glow of a single unshaded gold bulb.
“Hello?” I call, knocking gently on his screen door.
He squints. “Oh, hello. It's you, my portrait model. Come in.”
I step inside hesitantly. The cottage smells of paint and turpentine. Dozens of canvases are stacked against the walls. An old black stove slumps to my left; in front of me the painter sits at a rusted linoleum table. “I don't mean to interrupt you, but as I thought about it, I really felt I should give you something for the painting.”
He grunts at the idea. On the plate in front of him are the remains of a baked trout, its head and eye all that are left on the long, prickly skeleton. I think it odd that he's eating trout and not lobster or clams or any of the seafood native to Provincetown. A half-filled bottle of red wine sits beside an empty glass. He wipes his mouth with a paper napkin and shakes his head, “No, no. I gave that to you. I've long since stopped taking payment for my art.”
“Well, then I thought maybe I could interview you. Do an article about you for the local paper.”
“Whatever for?”
I'm not sure. “Maybe I just wanted to talk to you some more,” I admit.
He pours himself some wine, then holds up the bottle to me. “No thank you,” I say. He gestures for me to sit down.
“Is this about your lover?” he asks.
“Well, yes, partly. IâI guess I just wanted to hear more about Chesterâ
your
loverâand what you said about the wind and the waves and the gulls.”
He sighs. “I'm not sure there's more to say. It's just part of the cycle of life. An ingenious cycle, really. Chester, he believed that he'd come back as a seagull. I think that's crap, if you ask me. But still, when those seagulls cry out there, I feel Chester's talking to me.”
“So it's just you making yourself feel better.”
“Perhaps. And what'd be so bad about that?” He takes a long sip of his wine. “But it's more than that. When Chester died, up in that Boston hospital, a lightning storm struck just at the moment I saw the light go out in his eyes. Some folks say it was just a coincidence. But I'll tell you. After living on this same beach for nearly thirty years, watching the seasons come and the seasons go, watching the gulls eat the sand crabs and the cats eat the gulls, there's only one thing I don't believe in anymore. And that's coincidence.”
“My lover says the same thing,” I tell him. “That there's no such thing as coincidence. That it's all part of something, something bigger, something connected.”
The painter smiles at me gently. “He's dying, isn't he, your lover?”
I pause. I think about it. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, he is. It's sooner now, rather than later.”
He nods his head. “That's what I thought.”
“I want to believe that he won't leave me. That's what scares me. That he'll leave me, and I'll be alone.”
“Sometimes you will be. Other timesâ” He shrugs. “You just come out here and watch the waves.”
He stands with some difficulty, bends down to hunt through an old wicker box. He finds a small book, its cover, cracked and faded, depicting a cottage among tall grass and sand dunes. “This is the book I told you about earlier. Take it. It's yours.”
“Oh, I'll return itâ”
“No, keep it. I know it all by heart anyway.”
I thank him for the book and his words. I stand, reluctant to leave, yet again. I turn back to him. “You know, I want to say that I'll go back now, and I'll feel better, that I'll believe, that everything will be okay. But I'm not sure I can.”
“Don't expect you to. We can only be in one place in life, and that's the place we're supposed to be. You'll get to where you need to go.”
We bid each other good night. The sun has disappeared now. The darkness is rich and thick, a deep chilly violet. As I walk back out onto the beach, I realize I still don't know his name, or he mine. I turn, ready to ask him, but see that his light is already out and his cottage is in darkness. It's a curious sensation I feel: as if he was never really there at all. “People seem to come and go so fast here,” I whisper, Dorothy in Oz. But I hold his book in my hands. That's proof of his existence. I imagine he rises pretty early in the mornings to paint. I won't disturb him again.
I wander along the beach all the way to the pier, and decide to walk out along its length and enjoy the coolness of the night. There's light here, a milky, hazy light from the lampposts above. Several tourists mingle about, pointing up at the monument, over at the lighthouse on Long Point. I look down at the book: The
Outermost House.
There's a bookmark in one page, and I open to it. “Whatever comes to pass in our human world,” I read, listening to the waves crash ceaselessly against the pier, “there is no shadow of us cast upon the rising of the sun, no pause in the flowing of the winds or halt in the long rhythms of the breakers hastening ashore. On the outer beach of the Cape, the dunes still stand in their barrier wall, seemingly much the same, but to the remembering eye somewhat reshaped by wind and wave.”
Someone calls my name. I'm startled out of my reading. “Jeff?”
Even as I turn, I know who it is.
“Eduardoâisn't that your friend Jeff?”
It's Eduardo's father, and Eduardo is with him. They're walking down from the end of the wharf, where Eduardo's father keeps his boat. Eduardo wears cut-off denim shorts and a big blousy white shirt. Seeing himâand the way the wind catches under his shirt, billowing it up from his lithe brown bodyâstops my breath in my lungs for a second. But I manage to smile and wave.
“Hello, Jeff,” his father greets me, shaking my hand heartily. His grip is as strong as I remember, his hands as big. “Back for another season?”
“Actually, I don't know. I've been here for the last month, staying with a friend.” I turn to Eduardo. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Eduardo says.
“You didn't do your paper-in-the-hat trick again this year?” his father laughs.
“No,” I say, smiling. “Not this year.”
Eduardo seems uncomfortable that we've stumbled onto each other. Clearly he has not told his father about our problems. I wonder if he's brought Tommy home to meet his parents.
“Well,” his father says, “you ought to come out for dinner some night. Eduardo's just up from Boston, and he's already bored.”
“When do classes end?” I ask.
Eduardo nods. “In a couple of weeks. Then my internship starts.”
“Oh,” I say. “That's right. At a newspaper. Which one?”
He hedges, then tells me the name of a gay newspaper in Boston.
I grin. And he can't suppress one of his own.
Eduardo's father moves off, talking with a couple of other fishermen at the wharf. Eduardo looks awkwardly from his feet up to the star-dotted sky. “So how are you?” he asks.
“Not great,” I tell him. “I'm a little worried about Javitz.” I decide not to say anything about Lloyd.
Eduardo's eyes dart to mine. “Is Javitz ... ?”
“He's been suffering from a lot of fatigue, and some eyesight problems.”