Above The Thunder (12 page)

“Your temperature is a hundred and two.”

“It is?”

Mosites wouldn’t meet Jack’s eyes. “I want to take a white count. Fortunately for us, I have a friend who is gifted at reading differentials. White blood cells, that is. We won’t have to send it off to a lab. I’ll draw your blood, and then Anna can take a peek. Her lab is just a few blocks from me. Shouldn’t be any trouble to ask her. Okay?”

Jack looked away when the needle went in. He felt his heartbeat thrumming against his eardrum.

“All done. Come into my office when you’re dressed.”

On the other side of the door, Jack could hear Mosites on the phone. “Anna, it’s Nick. Is this your cell number?” He paused. “Are you anywhere in my vicinity?” Another pause. “Right. Right, I know. But I need to ask a favor. I have a patient in my office and I need a CBC and an HIV test. Probably should do a mono spot, too.”

Everything went black before Jack’s eyes when he bent to tie his shoes. He sat. Waited for his vision to clear. Stood, shaky and weak-kneed, and walked into Nick’s office.

“Have a seat, Jack. Anna will be here in just a few minutes. She was nearby when I talked to her.”

“You’re bothering the poor woman for my little allergic reaction and fever?” He tried for levity, angled around to get back to the breezy, casual side of Mosites, but it didn’t work.

“Try to relax,” Nick said.

Jack took a deep breath. Nick’s office was cool and shadowy, the blinds drawn against the late sun. Jack sat on the leather sofa beside an antique sexton. The room smelled of lemon oil and buttery pastries, old books and humid soil from the English ivies hanging at the windows. Mosites looked at him with his great black eyes, beautiful soft eyes that seemed to caress everything they fell on.

“You don’t think this is just a skin allergy, do you?” Jack asked.

“Jack, I’m not going to do a duck and cover here. I’m concerned. This looks to me like a systemic bacterial infection. Probably staph.”

Jack sat back in his chair, let out his breath. Thank God! Just a stupid
skin infection. He probably needed to be more vigilant about changing out of his exercise clothes after a workout, use some real soap instead of that goat’s milk organic crap he couldn’t resist buying at the health food store. “Thank God,” Jack said. “From the look on your face I was beginning to think I was about to die.”

Mosites’s look didn’t change. “When was the last time you had an HIV test?”

“About a year ago, I guess. I was negative.”

“And since that time, have you or Stuart engaged in any high-risk behavior?”

Adrenaline flooded through him. His vision started to tunnel. Not this. Anything but this. “What are you implying?”

“That I think this looks like an immune-deficiency-related problem. A staph bacterium doesn’t rage this out of control except in rare cases. The elderly, those with compromised immune systems.” He picked up Jack’s chart. “Also, are you aware you’ve lost fifteen pounds since you were in here six months ago?”

“Are you saying you think I’m positive?”

“What I’m seeing is not inconsistent with HIV patients. I’d like to test you for the virus. Anna can check your status when she does your white count.”

“No,” Jack said.

“Pardon?”

“No. I don’t want an AIDS test. There’s no reason to think I’m at risk.”

“Okay. You might be sure of that from your end, but are you a hundred per cent sure about Stuart?”

“Stuart would never cheat on me.”

“I can’t insist, but you should do the right thing and get tested,” Mosites said.

Jack nodded, his eyes filling. Anyway, it was too late. The seed of possibility had been planted. If he didn’t learn his status now, every little head cold or sniffle would have a question mark after it.

By the time Mosites came back with his results, Jack had worked himself into a state where he no longer cared. He had prepared himself for the worst—or thought he had until Mosites came back in after an eternity
with the news on his face. He sat down next to Jack on the sofa, took him in his arms. Mosites started in about his T-cell count and viral loads, about protease inhibitors and AZT cocktails.

“Don’t. Don’t talk to me yet.” He buried his face in the snowy shoulder of Mosites’s lab coat, breathed in the clean smell of laundry soap and aftershave. He wanted his father here, but not as a son wanted a father, exactly. He didn’t want to be anyone’s son at the moment, anyone’s lover or boyfriend or brother. What he wanted was the tenderness distilled out of all these relationships, the pure unconditional love of a father, a child, a priest.

“The new drugs are good, Jack. More and more this disease is becoming a chronic, long-term illness the way diabetes is. You need to take care of yourself, and there’s no reason not to hope you can’t live fifteen or more years with this.”

He drove around for hours after leaving Mosites’s office, drove by Hector’s corner—he was there, but Jack didn’t stop—pounded three shots of tequila and two vodka tonics at two different bars, then drove down to the Charles River. It was dark now, getting late, the city lights silvered on the water. How was he going to tell Stuart? And what about Hector? Maybe it was possible that the test was wrong. Maybe a bacterial infection could look a lot like AIDS. And testing positive didn’t mean it would become full-blown.

He lit a cigarette, shivered. He didn’t want to be awake. He wanted to be anywhere but inside his own skin. He toed the dirt beneath his feet. It was soft from a recent rain, smelled sharply of algae and brine. He put his hand down, pulled away clumps of dirt. It was pliable as potter’s clay. He dug deeper, as though looking for something, felt the panic he’d been wrestling with the past few weeks rise up again, this time with the force of certainty behind it: some part of him had known, of course. He sank to the ground, cleared away the dirt with the heel of his hand, scraped deeper down with a nearby beer bottle. He lay down in the space he made, out of the way of the dog walkers and runners. A calmness washed over him. He worked his hand down into the coolness of the clayey mud, starfished his fingers wide apart until he felt the wetness between them. If he could remake himself he would. Start anew and keep goodness intact. In a little while he would rise and go home to Stuart, would confess his indiscretions
in San Francisco. He would leave off the sin of Hector for now. It would only be more for Stuart to deal with. It was highly improbable—or impossible?—that Hector had given it to him since he had never penetrated Jack’s body. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want to dissolve the mystery. Finding out who and when and how would only make it more unbearable. Mysteries and miracles, miracles and destinations, weren’t that far apart, in his view. The stricken and the blessed both followed the same path, faith the common point of origin. In the end, there was no difference between Bethlehem and the bathhouses.

Now he had practical things to consider, like how to live through one day at a time—that horrible maxim of the sick and afflicted everywhere. He didn’t want to wake up each day and take an inventory of his health, work his way past this terrible fact each morning, and God forbid, be grateful for feeling good and getting through another day. It would be too much like waiting, like waiting for the virus to quicken in him until it carried him off in pieces. He’d seen friends die, they all had. Suffering was one thing, but subtraction was another. Every day something was taken away. Dignity, of course, was first. Memory, sometimes. Thinking back to those who had died from this plague, Jack couldn’t think of a single person whose death wasn’t met with thankfulness and utter relief. Not that the dead one’s suffering was over, but the suffering of those who had cared for him had finally ended.

When Stuart got in from school Jack wasn’t home yet. All the Robert Mitchum tapes were out and scattered around the living room, magazines and the remains of at least two meals on the coffee table. He’d eaten, which must mean he was feeling better. Stuart had been so worried these past few weeks. Jack was completely worn-out looking, edgy and irritable. It had been months since they’d made love, even longer since Jack slept through the night. Jack thought he didn’t know, thought he didn’t hear him get out of bed and leave the house, but Stuart was aware of every second ticking by, every moment Jack wasn’t beside him.

Jack was cheating, he was sure of it. With whom, he didn’t know, and he couldn’t have said if it was one time with one person or a hundred with fifty different people. He hadn’t yet made up his mind what to do. Confront him, ignore it and hope it went away, or leave Jack altogether, which was what he was considering after last night. As much as the thought of
being without Jack made him feel hopeless and lost, he couldn’t stand the alternative, either, which was loving someone as much as he loved Jack and having his heart break over and over. Jack’s behavior at the party last night had tipped the scales toward exodus.

Stuart had gone to the backyard to look for Jack and saw him sitting on the chaise with the boyish-looking man who was Craig’s ex-partner. Stuart watched long enough to see them hand a bottle of booze back and forth, and to see the man pawing at Jack. He had felt so sick then, his stomach turning to hot needles. Later, he couldn’t stop shaking with grief and fury. It was getting too painful to be with him. Infidelity aside, Jack’s moods and flippancy, excesses and bluster were corrosive. Jack had the energy and spirit of two men.

After finding Jack with Gary, Stuart talked to his friend Pamela on the phone about what was going on. Pamela offered him her place if and when he decided to leave Jack. Stuart felt hives popping up just thinking about packing his things.

He took the dirty plates to the kitchen, then cleaned up Jack’s sick bay area: a used handkerchief, a half-completed grocery list, doodles on the note pad by the phone, a heap of pistachio nut shells and a sour-smelling sweatshirt. He took the nutshells and handkerchief and notepaper with Jack’s handwriting into the bedroom. The doodles were all of trains and ladders—or maybe they were supposed to be railroad tracks.

Hidden behind the blankets in the spare bedroom’s closet was Stuart’s special coat. On the outside, it was just an ordinary trench coat, but on the lining he had sewn various mementos of Jack over the years. Race numbers from marathons; a square of denim from an old pair of Levi’s Jack wore a lot when they’d first started dating; bits of hay from a farm in Idaho they stopped at while driving across the country. Jack had first told him he loved him at that farm, and everything Jack touched that day, from the foil his sandwich was wrapped in to the guitar pick he’d found on the street then snipped in the center with fingernail clippers to form a heart, was sewn into this coat. It would seem fetishistic to some, Stuart knew, and Jack himself would make fun of it, but whatever else happened, Stuart would always have these traces of Jack.

Near the hem, he glued the notepaper with Jack’s doodles and grocery list, right up against the maple leaves and acorns from their trip to Maine
last year. They’d stayed in a bed and breakfast on the coast, spent long mornings in bed and afternoons walking on the beach, evenings around the enormous fireplace in the nearby ski lodge.

Maybe they should travel together, go back to that quaint B&B to try to reconnect. How could he give up Jack? At the shoulder were the liner notes to Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work,” the first CD they bought together, and beside it, ticket stubs from
The Magic Flute
around which he pasted the pistachio shells that had been heaped in Jack’s soup bowl earlier this afternoon.

Stuart refolded the coat and took it back to its hiding place. He’d start an appetizer plate. Foccacia with herbed chèvre and Greek olives. It was seven o’clock. Where the hell was Jack? Stuart expected him hours ago. Things were going to be fine, Stuart told himself. Jack’s rash was just an extreme reaction to that medicine. Nothing to be overly concerned about; the doctor told him as much. He decanted a bottle of port, poured half a glass, and before he realized what he was doing, he’d opened a bottle of sixty-dollar champagne they’d been saving for two years. He set the table with candles and their best china and loaded up Dave Brubeck and Lightnin’ Hopkins on the CD changer. Was Stuart celebrating? It looked like celebration. It was a sign, he decided, an omen that Jack was all right.

By the time Jack walked in at, Stuart was drunk, the candles burned down to stubs, and the food cold and congealing on the plates. Jack just stood in the doorway, looked at Stuart from there as though waiting to be invited in. He was filthy, covered in mud, unsteady and droopy-eyed.

Brubeck was playing “Take Five” for the third time. He stared at Jack, tried to make sense of the mud, the sticks in his hair. “Is it raining?”

Jack shook his head.

Stuart got up, walked closer to him, but Jack didn’t move. “What’s wrong with you? Why do you look like that?” Stuart asked.

Jack opened his mouth as if to speak. He met Stuart’s eyes then looked down.

“Did you see the doctor today?”

Jack nodded. “Darling,” he started.

What was coming next, he wasn’t ready to hear. “Stop,” Stuart said. “Don’t speak. I want five minutes.” He sank back down into the sofa.

“Stuart—”

“Shut up, Jack. These are the last few minutes before my life changes forever. And they’re mine.” How could this be? Though even as he formed the question he knew.

“I’m standing in the doorway, Stuart.”

“I see that.”

“I’m waiting for you to ask me in.”

“Why?”

“Because if you tell me not to come any farther, I’ll disappear from your life forever. I understand if you hate me. I’m an evil man. I’ve lied to you. I’ve betrayed you. I’m the worst kind of evil.”

Stuart didn’t respond.

A few minutes went by. Jack said again, “I am standing in the doorway.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“I want you to tell me which way to go.”

He looked up. “Tell me first. Do I need to be tested?”

“Yes.”

“How could you do this?” Stuart turned off the stereo, began to clear the table. Ordinary things, one ordinary thing at a time. Two forks, two plates. Dishwater and sponge. He turned on the tap and added soap. Scraped the dishes into the trash.