The New Yorker Stories (67 page)

“He’s kidding,” I said. It seemed the easiest thing to say.

“Dangerous joke,” Harvey Milgrim said.

“He’s depressed because I’m leaving him,” I said.

“Well, now, I wouldn’t rush into a thing like that,” Harvey said. “I’m Bud on draft. What are you two?”

The bartender walked over the minute the conversation shifted to alcohol.

“Stoli straight up,” Ned said.

“Vodka tonic,” I said.

“Switch me to Jim Beam,” Harvey said. He rolled his hand with the quick motion of someone shaking dice. “Couple of rocks on the side.”

“Harvey,” Ned said, “my world’s coming apart. My ex-lover is also my boss, and his white-blood-cell count is sinking too low for him to stay alive. The program he’s in at Bishopgate is his last chance. He’s a Friday-afternoon vampire. They pump blood into him so he has enough energy to take part in an experimental study and keep his outpatient status, but do you know how helpful that is? Imagine he’s driving the Indy. He’s in the lead. He screeches in for gas, and what does the pit crew do but blow him a kiss? The other cars are still out there, whipping past. He starts to yell, because they’re supposed to fill the car with gas, but the guys are nuts or something. They just blow air kisses.”

Harvey looked at Ned’s hand, the fingers fanned open, deep Vs of space between them. Then Ned slowly curled them in, kissing his fingernails as they came to rest on his bottom lip.

The bartender put the drinks down, one-two-three. He scooped a few ice cubes into a glass and put the glass beside Harvey’s shot glass of bourbon. Harvey frowned, looking from glass to glass without saying anything. Then he threw down the shot of bourbon and picked up the other glass, lifted one ice cube out, and slowly sucked it. He did not look at us or speak to us again.

The night after Ned and I snuck off to the bar, Richard started to hyperventilate. In a minute his pajamas were soaked, his teeth chattering. It was morning, 4 a.m. He was holding on to the door frame, his feet in close, his body curved away, like someone windsurfing. Ned woke up groggily from his sleeping bag on the floor at the foot of Richard’s bed. I was on the foldout sofa in the living room, again awakened by the slightest sound. Before I’d fallen asleep, I’d gone into the kitchen to get a drink of water, and a mouse had run under the refrigerator. It startled me, but then tears sprang to my eyes because if Richard knew there were mice—mice polluting the environment he was trying to purify with air ionizers, and humidifiers that misted the room with mineral water—he’d make us move. The idea of gathering up the piles of holistic-health books, the pamphlets on meditation, the countless jars of vitamins and chelated minerals and organically grown grains, the eye of God that hung over the stove, the passages he’d made Ned transcribe from Bernie Siegel and tape to the refrigerator—we’d already moved twice, neither time for any good reason. Something couldn’t just scurry in and make us pack it all up again, could it? And where was there left to go anymore? He was too sick to be in a hotel, and I knew there was no other apartment anywhere near the hospital. We would have to persuade him that the mouse existed only in his head. We’d tell him he was hallucinating; we’d talk him out of it, in the same way we patiently tried to soothe him by explaining that the terror he was experiencing was only a nightmare. He was not in a plane that had crashed in the jungle; he was tangled in sheets, not weighed down with concrete.

When I got to the bedroom, Ned was trying to pry Richard’s fingers off the door frame. He was having no luck, and looked at me with an expression that had become familiar: fear, with an undercurrent of intense fatigue.

Richard’s robe dangled from his bony shoulders. He was so wet that I thought at first he might have blundered into the shower. He looked in my direction but didn’t register my presence. Then he sagged against Ned, who began to walk him slowly in the direction of the bed.

“It’s cold,” Richard said. “Why isn’t there any heat?”

“We keep the thermostat at eighty,” Ned said wearily. “You just need to get under the covers.”

“Is that Hattie over there?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Ned is trying to get you into the bed.”

“Rac,” Richard said vaguely. He said to Ned, “Is that my bed?”

“That’s your bed,” Ned said. “You’ll be warm if you get into bed, Richard.”

I came up beside Richard and patted his back, and walked around and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to coax him forward. Ned was right: it was dizzyingly hot in the apartment. I got up and turned back the covers, smoothing the contour sheet. Ned kept Richard’s hand, but turned to face him as he took one step backward, closer to the bed. The two of us pantomimed our pleasure at the bed’s desirability. Richard began to walk toward it, licking his lips.

“I’ll get you some water,” I said.

“Water,” Richard said. “I thought we were on a ship. I thought the bathroom was an inside cabin with no window. I can’t be where there’s no way to see the sky.”

Ned was punching depth back into Richard’s pillows. Then he made a fist and punched the center of the bed. “All aboard the S.S.
Fucking A
,” he said.

It got a fake laugh out of me as I turned into the kitchen, but Richard only began to whisper urgently about the claustrophobia he’d experienced in the bathroom. Finally he did get back in his bed and immediately fell asleep. Half an hour later, still well before dawn, Ned repeated Richard’s whisperings to me as if they were his own. Though Ned and I were very different people, our ability to imagine Richard’s suffering united us. We were sitting in wooden chairs we’d pulled away from the dining-room table to put by the window so Ned could smoke. His cigarette smoke curled out the window.

“Ever been to Mardi Gras?” he said.

“New Orleans,” I said, “but never Mardi Gras.”

“They use strings of beads for barter,” he said. “People stand up on the balconies in the French Quarter—women as well as men, sometimes—and they holler down for people in the crowd to flash ’em: you give them a thrill, they toss down their beads. The more you show, the more you win. Then you can walk around with all your necklaces and everybody will know you’re real foxy.
Real
cool. You do a bump-and-grind, you can get the good ole boys—the men, that is—and the transvestites all whistling together and throwing down the long necklaces. The real long ones are the ones everybody wants. They’re like having a five-carat-diamond ring.” He opened the window another few inches so he could stub out his cigarette. One-fingered, he flicked it to the ground. Then he lowered the window, not quite pushing it shut. This wasn’t one of Ned’s wild stories; I was sure what he’d just told me was true. Sometimes I thought Ned told me certain stories to titillate me, or perhaps to put me down in some way: to remind me that I was straight and he was gay.

“You know what I did one time?” I said suddenly, deciding to see if I could shock him for once. “When I was having that affair with Harry? One night we were in his apartment—his wife was off in Israel—and he was cooking dinner, and I was going through her jewelry box. There was a pearl necklace in there. I couldn’t figure out how to open the clasp, but finally I realized I could just drop it over my head carefully. When Harry hollered for me, I had all my clothes off and was lying on the rug, in the dark, with my arms at my side. Finally he came after me. He put on the light and saw me, and then he started laughing and sort of dove onto me, and the pearl necklace broke. He raised up and said, ‘What have I done?’ and I said, ‘Harry, it’s your wife’s necklace.’ He didn’t even know she had it. She must not have worn it. So he started cursing, crawling around to pick up the pearls, and I thought, No, if he has it restrung at least I’m going to make sure it won’t be the same length.”

Ned and I turned our heads to see Richard, his robe neatly knotted in front, kneesocks pulled on, his hair slicked back.

“What are you two talking about?” he said.

“Hey, Richard,” Ned said, not managing to disguise his surprise.

“I don’t smell cigarette smoke, do I?” Richard said.

“It’s coming from below,” I said, closing the window.

“We weren’t talking about you,” Ned said. His voice was both kind and wary.

“I didn’t say you were,” Richard said. He looked at me. “May I be included?”

“I was telling him about Harry,” I said. “The story about the pearls.” More and more, it seemed, we were relying on stories.

“I never liked him,” Richard said. He waved a hand toward Ned. “Open that a crack, will you? It’s too hot in here.”

“You already know the story,” I said to Richard, anxious to include him. “You tell Ned the punch line.”

Richard looked at Ned. “She ate them,” he said. “When he wasn’t looking she ate as many as she could.”

“I didn’t want them to fit anymore if she tried to put them over her head,” I said. “I wanted her to know something had happened.”

Richard shook his head, but fondly: a little gesture he gave to indicate that I was interchangeable with some gifted, troublesome child he never had.

“One time, when I was on vacation with Sander, I picked up a trick in Puerto Rico,” Ned said. “We were going at it at this big estate where the guy’s employer lived, and suddenly the guy, the employer, hears something and starts up the stairs. So I ran into the closet—”

“He played football in college,” Richard said.

I smiled, but I had already heard this story. Ned had told it at a party one night long ago, when he was drunk. It was one of the stories he liked best, because he appeared a little wild in it and a little cagey, and because somebody got his comeuppance. His stories were not all that different from those stories boys had often confided in me back in my college days—stories about dates and sexual conquests, told with ellipses to spare my delicate feelings.

“So I grabbed whatever was hanging behind me—just grabbed down a wad of clothes—and as the guy comes into the room, I throw open the door and spring,” Ned was saying. “Buck naked, I start out running, and here’s my bad luck: I slam right into him and knock him out. Like it’s a cartoon or something. I know he’s out cold, but I’m too terrified to think straight, so I keep on running. Turns out what I’ve grabbed is a white pleated shirt and a thing like a—what do you call those jackets the Japanese wear? Comes halfway down my thighs, thank God.”

“These are the things he thanks God for,” Richard said to me.

Ned got up, growing more animated. “It’s
all
like a cartoon. There’s a dog in the yard that sets out after me, but the thing is on a
chain
. He reaches the end of the chain and just rises up in the air, baring his teeth, but he can’t go anywhere. So I stand right there, inches in front of the dog, and put on the shirt and tie the jacket around me, and then I stroll over to the gate and slip the latch, and about a quarter of a mile later I’m outside some hotel. I go in and go to the men’s room to clean up, and that’s the first time I realize I’ve got a broken nose.”

Although I had heard the story before, this was the first mention of Ned’s broken nose. For a few seconds he seemed to lose steam, as if he himself were tired of the story, but then he started up again, revitalized.

“And here’s the rest of my good luck: I come out and the guy on the desk is a fag. I tell him I’ve run into a problem and will he please call my boyfriend at the hotel where we’re staying, because I don’t even have a coin to use the pay phone. So he looks up the number of the hotel, and he dials it and hands me the phone. They connect me with Sander, who is sound asleep, but he snaps to right away, screaming, ‘Another night on the town with a prettyboy? Suddenly the bars close and Ned realizes his wallet’s back at the hotel? And do you think I’m going to come get you, just because you and some pickup don’t have money to pay the bill’?”

Eyes wide, Ned turned first to me, then to Richard, playing to a full house. “While he was ranting, I had time to think. I said, ‘Wait a minute, Sander. You mean they didn’t get anything? You mean I left my wallet at the hotel?’ ” Ned sank into his chair. “Can you believe it? I’d actually left my fuckin’ wallet in our room, so all I had to do was pretend to Sander that I’d gotten mugged—sons of bitches made me strip and ran off with my pants. Then I told him that the guy at the hotel gave me the kimono to put on.” He clicked his fingers. “That’s what they’re called: ‘kimonos.’ ”

“He didn’t ask why a kimono?” Richard said wearily. He ran his hand over the stubble of his beard. His feet were tucked beside him on the sofa.

“Sure. And I tell him it’s because there’s a Japanese restaurant in the hotel, and if you want to wear kimonos and sit on the floor Japanese style, they let you. And the bellboy thought they’d never miss a kimono.”

“He believed you?” Richard said.

“Sander? He grew up in L.A. and spent the rest of his life in New York. He knew you had to believe everything. He drives me back to the hotel saying how great it is that the scum that jumped me didn’t get any money. The sun’s coming up, and we’re riding along in the rental car, and he’s holding my hand.” Ned locked his thumbs together. “Sander and I are like
that
again.”

In the silence, the room seemed to shrink around us. Sander died in 1985.

“I’m starting to feel cold,” Richard said. “It comes up my body like somebody’s rubbing ice up my spine.”

I got up and sat beside him, half hugging him, half massaging his back.

“There’s that damn baby again,” Richard said. “If that’s their first baby, I’ll bet they never have another one.”

Ned and I exchanged looks. The only sound, except for an intermittent hiss of steam from the radiator, was the humming of the refrigerator.

“What happened to your paws, Rac?” Richard said to me.

I looked at my hands, thumbs pressing into the muscles below his shoulders. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I’d forgotten to put on the lotion and the gloves before going to sleep. I was also reflexively doing something I’d trained myself not to do years ago. My insurance contract said I couldn’t use my hands that way: no cutting with a knife, no washing dishes, no making the bed, no polishing the furniture. But I kept pressing my thumbs in Richard’s back, rubbing them back and forth. Even after Ned dropped the heavy blanket over Richard’s trembling shoulders, I kept pressing some resistance to his hopeless dilemma deep into the bony ladder of Richard’s spine.