Bleeder (6 page)

“Fine. But I’m buying you an electric razor.”

Ana relinquishes the Band-Aid, which I secure over the cut; then I slip back into bed where Ana nuzzles against me.

“It’s nice to not be lonely anymore,” she whispers into the night as we fall asleep.

Another weekend as I drive to see Ana, my truck’s odometer measures the real distance of our love. I crack my window and the breeze chills me while the wind drones out the Stone Roses album straining from my tiny dashboard speakers. The asphalt clips underneath my tires, and the city lights dance neon rainbows as I streak through winter twilight.

When I arrive, Ana’s dorm is quiet. The thrall and hum of young scholars has been replaced by the hollow echo of a few pattering steps and the distant sound of faceless voices.

I call Ana’s name down the hallway toward her room. She soon answers back.

“It’s so quiet here,” I tell her when she greets me.

“They’ve all left for some party. My roommate, also, has left for the night. We’ll be all alone.”

I smile. Ana smiles back.

We go to a movie; then we return to her silent dorm, slinking down the vacant hallway in the giddy embrace of young lovers. Ana playfully kicks open her door and flips on a lamp in the corner that casts her room in a romantic glow. She stands by her bedside, rubs her hand across its coverlet.

“What should we do now?” she asks. My skin prickles. My heart flutters.

“What should we do?” I repeat, playing the game Ana has begun. And yet, my mind is nettled by HIV. But I suppress it.

She pulls me to her, pushes her warm hands underneath my shirt and sweater, and strokes my chest. She lures me to her bed, where I begin fumbling with her blouse. And when she climbs on top of me, her long hair catches in my mouth, and I lift my hand to hook her dangling strands behind her ear; then I breathe into her ear and kiss her neck. She sighs with pleasure, her hands struggle with my jeans’ zipper.

“Wait,” I say.

“We have waited.”

She moves lower. Then, she is breathing on me. I can’t look at her, so I stare at the ceiling, studying leak stains that spread out like continental maps. I swell. Ana stops and pulls herself to my lips where we heave and grope and grind our hips together, the thin fabric between us our only restraint.

“I have condoms underneath my bed,” Ana whispers into my ear.

My mind tugs at me, but when Ana unrolls a condom along me, I let her. We become two bodies, one movement, and we press our desire as far as it will go.

When the moment ends, Ana fills a glass of water at her sink, drinks deeply, and then offers it to me. I swallow, pause for a breath of air, and finish it off. It is cool and tastes like nothing, but is everything. Ana rests the glass on her floor and returns to bed where I slip an arm around her.

In the corner, the lamp burns, dimly, moodily. Ana rises up to kiss me, and she then shifts to fit in the slip of space between my arm and my heart. Her eyes close, open, close, and then close.

I’m thinking of how to tell her about my HIV . . . but I am asleep.

Later, I awaken and get up to turn out the lamp and refill the water glass. I sip while standing over Ana and watching her sleep in the gray moonlight. Curled onto her side, the sheet tucked to her neck, and with strands of her blonde hair splayed out onto the pillow, she breathes in such gentle and easy peace. I take a few more sips before slipping back into her arms.

When morning comes, we drive into the country. Despite it being cold, it is a lovely day: the sun is out, the sky is clear, and a car ride seems fun. We
don’t speak of last night, but I can’t loosen it from my mind. I’m restless and need to confess. Yet I don’t know what to say, for HIV does not enter our conversation.

She leans against me and tells me she is happy.

“Are you happy to be with me again?” she asks.

“I am.”

We drive into winter. The trees are bare and the meadows we pass are humped with the heaviness of rolled hay, and the geese file over us as we pass the withered barnlots of a past life. Ana stretches out her tender hand, and I grip it as I steer to nowhere in particular.

Ana visits me in Wilmington. She has told me to be waiting, so I wait, realizing that I have to tell her. It has gone too far.

Ana knocks at my door. I inhale deeply and then I let her in.

“Oh, it’s been too long,” she says, placing her bag at the foot of my bed. She then draws me on top of her and my bed. “I’ve missed you.” And we’re at each others’ clothes, manipulating clasps, navigating fabric.

“Wait. We have to talk.”

Ana freezes. “Talk?” Her face looks troubled.

“It’s not what you think.”

“How do you know what I think?”

“I can see it in your eyes. This isn’t a breakup talk. This is harder to say.”

I lie down beside her, stare at my ceiling—a wilderness of white.

“Well, what is it?” Ana trifles her fingers along a dangling sweater string, coils it tightly around her index joint. “You have to tell me now.”

“You know I have hemophilia?” She nods yes. “Well, when I was a little boy, something happened to me.”

“Is this about your operations?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, I just wanted you to know that your scars don’t bother me.”

“It’s not that. It’s about some blood I received through a transfusion.”

Ana pauses, her mind sifting for meaning. “Oh, no,” she exhales. “Oh, no,” she repeats. Her eyes water. “You?” she asks softly. She wipes away a tear. “You?”

“Yes, me.”

She buries her face into my chest while her body shakes against my heart. My arms enwrap her, my face looks skyward, and I cry, too. I flashback to those nights with Ana: our naked bodies, the bitter scent of passion.

“How long have you known?” she asks after a long and labored lull.

“They told me when I turned eighteen. After I graduated high school.”

Ana sobers. She dabs her tears with a Kleenex drawn from my bedside dispenser. “Were we . . . ?”

“Safe?”

“Were we?”

“Yes. We were safe. We always used condoms.”

Ana straightens herself in my bed, leans against the headboard, and looks out the window. She wipes a pale hand across her wet eyes. I gaze past her.

“So, we’ve been safe? Just tell me that what we do is safe. Just tell me that.”

“Yes, Ana. It is safe.”

She draws herself to me, stares at me with red eyes. She straddles me and yanks off her shirt, revealing the tiny birthmark above her navel. Then she pushes her shirt up to her stomach and frees her pink panties where I can feel the press of her wetness on me.

“What are you doing?” I ask as she unclasps my belt.

“Well . . . I can’t be in a relationship without sex. Not now. Not with you.”

“Are you sure?”

She kisses me. “Yes. I’m sure.”

We say nothing, but lock hands and squeeze one another and reach for protection when we are ready. And later, when I trace my finger along the curve of Ana’s arm, which rests outside the sheets, she breathes quiet in the afternoon while my own mind labors over the burden of HIV.

Outside, a steady rain drizzles on the coastal pines, wetting the rusted needles that litter the winter courtyard. The constant patter of rain reverberates off the roof, the window, the sidewalk. There is nothing but this sound, stillness and quiet.

The next weekend when I visit Ana, we have sex and sleep and have more sex, only breaking apart to eat, to shower, or to shift ourselves after sex. We press our bodies together to assure we are real. Ana explains how HIV has brought us closer, how it has given everything urgent clarity.

“Now I love you even more,” she declares.

April. Having spent Easter with our families and now, the holiday ended, we say goodbye before heading back to school. Wrapped around one another on her parents’ couch, Ana and I press together and then catch our breath while the television flickers blue light over our skin.

“I’m going to miss you,” Ana says, turning to face me. “I can’t wait until summer. Then we’ll see each other every day.” She hugs me tightly and rubs her bare ankle along my calf and settles her face to my quiet heart. I hold her loosely and trace the notches of her spine. “I feel your heart beating,” she says. “It’s really fast.”

“We did just have sex.”

“I know, but it’s really loud and fast.”

She continues to listen, and then I feel a tear against me.

“You okay baby? What’s wrong?”

Ana wipes her eyes. “I worry about you. What if you get sick? What are we to do then?”

Ana’s question hangs in the dark gulf between us. “What if . . . ,” I say, trailing off.

She breaks my hold of her so our noses touch, and I can see the sorrow her eyes veil.

“It’s not like it’ll happen right away. It takes time.”

“But what if you start? What if you get your first infection?”

“Then I’ll deal with it. I can’t live constantly imagining how I might die.”

“I know that, but what about us?” Ana plays our fingers together and makes a steeple of them. “If you get sick, you have to promise me something.”

“Promise you?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t promise till I know what it is.”

“Just promise, okay. For me.” She places her palm on my face. A tear
slides the short line of her nose. “Promise me that if you start getting sick that you’ll marry me. You will marry me won’t you?”

“Is that what you want, Ana? To marry someone who will likely leave you a young widow?”

“No, I don’t want that to happen. But if it does, I want to have something of yours to carry on. I want to have your name. Promise me that. Say it for me.”

“Okay. I promise that if I get sick I’ll marry you.”

She throws her arms around me and cries into my chest. “I love you so much,” she says. “I love you so much, I love you so much,” she repeats as an unending chant.

When Ana quiets, we remain gripped to one another in silence. The television bounces light through the room and gives us laughter where there is none. Then we fall into a light sleep and let it renew our troubled hearts as much as it can.

When I awaken, I have no sense of the time, but can feel that it’s late, so I nudge Ana.

“I have to go. It’s getting late.”

“No,” she says sleepily. “Not yet. Just a few more minutes.” She curls herself into a ball next to me, tightens her arms around me. I lie against her and watch as her mother’s cat grooms itself underneath the hazy lamp light. The cat methodically licks a paw and swipes it across an ear, repeating this movement several times before settling its head against the carpet.

“Ana . . . Ana, I have to go. It’s a long drive to Wilmington.”

“I know.” She rises and drapes a coverlet over her while I dress. “I’ll show you out.”

Over the threshold of her open door, we hug goodnight while a moth flutters near our kissing faces and then disappears inside her house.

“See you in a few weekends?” she asks.

“Yes, two weeks.”

“That seems like forever right now.”

“It’ll pass and soon we’ll have the whole summer together.”

“Yes. That’s something to look forward to.”

I wave one last time from my truck’s cab and Ana waves back, wiping
her tears with her other hand. Then the night tents around me. The brilliant stars scatter themselves across a dark canvas while the faint scent of dogwood drifts through my cab and is then gone. And when I think of Ana and of marriage, fear envelops me.
Would we be happy? Would I?
My stomach twists with the thought of such a sad matrimony.

SANDWICH INTERLUDE

S
UMMER 1991
. A
NA AND
I
SPRAWL ONTO ONE OF OUR PARENTS’
couches every evening and, when we are alone, we shed our clothes and press our desire until we are shaking with pleasure. Then we settle into familiar spoons and twirl fingers in the dark.

“Oh, I’m going to hate when summer ends,” she says. “It’s so great having you here every day. It’s spoiling me.”

“Me, too.”

We kiss and kiss and Ana slips her hand to my hips to see if I’m ready again.

During the day, however, I work at a sub shop. I earn minimum wage and am congratulated on my hard work and dependability by my manager. And while the job gives me money for gas, dinner dates, movies, and CDs—after work, my legs ache, my ankles swell like oranges, and my knee joints crackle like puffed rice. Tonight, I can hardly walk, so I lumber to the refrigerator for my factor. I take it out, treat, and fall asleep, exhausted and hurting, only waking when Ana calls to come over.