With or Without You (23 page)

INSPIRATION:
Matisse’s
Le bonheur de vivre
(
The Joy of Life
)

PALETTE:
Background = sapphire
Lead bars = topaz
Shadows = ruby

An explosion of color in wide, unpolished strokes. The trapezoid lead bars have rounded edges, hugging one another tightly. The background matches the vibrant blue of Wisconsin’s state flag.

Once—
once
—I tried to control the Boing.

In my defense, I was twelve and hadn’t really come to understand the full scope of Davis’s obsessions. How powerful they were at the start. Or how quickly they gave up the ghost.

After being dragged to Boy Scouts and stamp collecting
and soccer lessons—none of which lasted more than a week—I announced to Davis that I was going to teach him how to paint.

“What for?” he asked. “How will that help us fit in?”

That’s what it was always about. Fitting in.

“Think of it as something to do until we find a new club to join,” I said.

I still can’t believe he said yes.

So we spent the next few weeks doing rudimentary lessons—how to draw basic shapes, how to visualize the final product in your mind’s eye. One day, we caught a bus to the UW Arboretum. I brought THE CLAW and a window shaped like a cross that I got from an old church. We set up in a marsh near Lake Wingra and I started work on a landscape in the style of Gauguin. Davis just wanted to watch me paint. After about ten minutes, he started making little grunts and shaking his head.

Finally, I said, “What?”

He pointed to the bottom of the window. “What’s that?”

“It’s grass.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, looking out into my field of vision with exaggerated effort. “Yeah, I don’t see any red grass out there. What the hell? You’re always doing things like this. Painting with colors that you don’t really see.”

“It’s called artistic interpretation.”

We’d had some variation of this conversation at least twice a year since we met. I would try to explain … well, art. It never ended well.

He plopped down in the grass next to me, sitting cross-legged with a look of feigned exasperation on his face. “Yeah, yeah, you’ve said that. Why can’t you just let colors mean what they mean?”

I laid down my brush and folded my arms, ready for battle. “Oh. Well, what do colors mean?”

“Well, like, red. Red should mean love. But when you paint hearts or other lovey stuff, you paint them purple and blue and white and … It’s just weird.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, “well, isn’t red also the color of danger? Isn’t that the color of a stop sign? There it means to pay attention. Am I supposed to love a stop sign?”

Davis looked lost.

“There’s no universal meaning attached to color. When you try to tie color to a single meaning, you’re limiting what you can say. That doesn’t mean you can’t use a color to represent a feeling or an idea. But you need to keep your mind open to all possibilities. That’s how you make art.”

For a moment, Davis’s eyes flared with appetite. I’d finally found the right words and he got it. I’d witnessed the birth of a Boing, one I could get excited about too. I was so worked up, I ignored the fact that I knew the ultimate fate of each and every Davis Boing. This was going to be different. I knew it.

The lessons continued. Davis stopped watching me and began experimenting on his own. He started with small picture frames as his canvas. Mainly, he played with color and light,
getting the feel of it all. He even went to the store and got his own set of paints and brushes. When I sensed he was getting anxious to actually paint a picture, I found two small windows and we took THE CLAW to the State Capitol down in the center of Madison.

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon with no one around. The Capitol building looks very much like the Capitol in Washington, DC, shaped like an upright, oblong pill. Near the information desk on the first floor is a huge Wisconsin state flag. The flag’s crest is fairly simple: a miner, a sailor, a stack of lead bars, a badger … But Davis freaked when he saw it.

“No way can I do that.”

I began contorting THE CLAW so it would hold both windows, aiming them directly at the flag. “Don’t worry about painting the whole thing. Pick a part of it. The badger. The bars of lead. Use your imagination. It doesn’t have to be a perfect representation.”

Once THE CLAW was in place, we each began mixing colors. I started right in, focusing on the cornucopia in the lower left of the crest. Davis stood there for a long time, just staring up as if hoping for divine inspiration. Then he poked at some silvery paint and began dabbing in the shape of a trapezoid. We painted for about an hour. A Cubist cornucopia filled my window while Davis had managed a very realistic replica of the stack of lead bars.

“See?” I said, elbowing him. “That’s amazing for your first
painting.” But as we wiped our brushes clean, he frowned and shook his head.

“It’s not as good as yours.”

His tone might as well have been a dirge, signaling the premature death of another Boing.
Not this time
, I remember thinking.
Give me 40,000 volts, stat.

Clear!

“I’ve been doing this longer. If you stick with it, each one will get better.” I tried to sound supportive, but desperation colored my voice. The patient was fading fast. Silently, I pleaded:
Don’t give up, don’t give up.
“You should see my first paintings. Not half as good as yours.”

But that was the last time we went painting together. A few days later, I suggested we take THE CLAW out so I could teach him about negative volume. Davis flipped the page of the manga he was reading and yawned. “That’s okay. I don’t think painting’s for me.”

Of everything I’d seen Davis take up and drop—Boy Scouts, drama club, stamp collecting, band, choir—his dismissal of painting felt personal. Like he wasn’t just dismissing painting but our friendship. Or maybe because I thought—I hoped—it would give him the discipline to follow through on something. Anything. I know now that it was arrogant to think I could teach that to Davis. At the time, I just wanted him to know what painting had taught me.

Every work of art—painting, novel, song—anything you
work really hard to achieve comes with a point of no return attached. A moment of evaluation: Is this worth continuing?

You’re forced to think things through. You enter into a relationship with each new painting. It’s intimate and intense. Giving up is like breaking up.

When I start a painting, I put a lot of thought into deciding if it will be worth the journey. But that’s a painting. Something I’m totally at ease with. Bigger things, like relationships with other people?

I crash and burn.

Storm clouds darken the sky. Another front moves in, sending winds that bend the trees and toss whitecaps across the surface of Lake Mendota. My legs throb as I pump my bike’s pedals, determined to outrace the imminent downpour.

I make it to the RYC seconds ahead of the thunderclap that summons rain so thick it makes everything outside gray. Inside, Davis shoots pool with Will. He swaggers around with his cue, holding it over his shoulder like a caveman wielding a club.

“Will, I need to talk to Davis.”

Davis singes me with a glare, obviously still angry about last night. Will looks to Davis, who nods, giving him permission to leave. Davis turns back to the game and shakes his head. “What the hell happened to you last night?”

“Did you sleep with that guy?” I demand, a little louder than necessary.

Davis laughs. “Nah. We went back to his place, messed around a bit—”

“Messed around?”

He rolls his eyes. “Just a lot of grab-ass. Anyway, he got totally wasted and passed out before we could get to the good stuff. S’okay, I didn’t want to fuck him anyway.”

I lean in so our noses nearly touch. “Was he HIV positive?”

I’ve caught him off guard. Davis’s eyes narrow and he takes a step back. He knows I know. He brushes it off with a head toss, then turns back to the pool table and lines up a shot. “I don’t know. It never came up. Probably not. That’s not how I wanna get the gift anyway. I wanna wait.”

The gift.

Click, click
. The six ball caroms off the side and lands in the corner pocket. The cue ball spirals back toward Davis, who’s waiting, ready, with his cue.

My skin crawls, growing cold. “Davis, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Davis grins.
Click, click, click.
The nine ball stops just shy of its pocket. Davis rotates to set up his next shot. “Look, Cicada’s pretty pissed about that stunt you pulled last night but I think I can talk him down from it. You can still be a Chaser.”

I snatch the cue ball and shove it into the nearest
pocket. He sets his cue on the table slowly and puts his hands on his hips. I stare him down. “No, I can’t. I’ve seen what HIV can do to someone. You can’t go through with this.”

Our raised voices earn sideways glances from people across the room. Davis grabs my elbow and ushers me into a side hall. He’s smiling but his eyes are hard and distant, like he’s trapped between remembering who I am and who he is.

“The final initiation,” he says in a low, seductive murmur, “is gonna be awesome. We’re getting together with a bunch of guys who’ve been living with the gift for years. Sable’s going to tell them everything we’ve done to earn our right to be called Chasers. And then they’re each going to pick one of us to pass the gift on to.” He stops, throws a conspiratorial look over his shoulder, then smiles. “Except me. Cicada said he would take care of me personally.”

This isn’t my Davis. The color has gone from his face and his eyes are filled with dreams we never talked about. The journey we started together when we were nine—toward belonging—is apparently something he’s willing to continue alone. Acceptance, his voice tells me, is finally within his grasp.

He gently pulls me down and we sit cross-legged on the floor. It’s like we’re back in my bedroom, chewing down
egg foo yung and finding our lives in fortune cookies. It could be that. It’s not.

“Everything you think you know about HIV is wrong,” he assures me with a pat on my knee. “You know how Cicada told us that the heteros want us to think that it’s not natural to sleep with any guys we want? Well, this is the same thing. They want us to think HIV is this horrible stigma, that only ‘bad’ people get it. But it’s not. It’s a badge of honor. That’s why it affected the gay community first. It’s like … a mark from nature, something to make us special. They called us queer to ridicule us. Well, we took that word back and used it with pride. They tried to make us feel shame about getting AIDS. Well, we’re taking that back too. We own that. You can’t be ashamed of something that makes you belong.”

I can pick out each of Sable’s half truths, the ones clogging Davis’s logic. “Davis, it’s a killer. There is no cure.”

He scoffs with a smile that reminds me too much of his new mentor. “More hetero propaganda. HIV doesn’t have to be a death sentence. Not these days. There are medications you can take and you can live a normal life. So you take a few pills every day. Small price to pay to be somebody.

“Once you get the gift, it’s a sign of power. The fear is gone. You have nothing to worry about anymore. You’re finally in control of your own destiny.”

Every time I’ve lost Davis, when he’s become so consumed by his own thoughts and misery that he loses touch with the world, I’ve always been able to get him back. I’ve been able to get him to realize that he’s not alone. Sometimes it took jokes, sometimes it took yelling. But I always won. Right now, I don’t feel like I’ll ever win again.

“Davis,” I whisper, because my throat is too dry to do otherwise, “I want you to drop out of Chasers. I want you to tell Sable that you’re finished and move out of the RYC. If Malaika knew what Sable was doing—”

“Don’t say a word!” I can’t tell if Davis is afraid of Sable being exposed or afraid of what Malaika would think of him.

“I won’t,” I say, secretly knowing that if that’s what it takes to stop this, I’m ready to do just that. “She doesn’t have to know about Sable, the Darkroom, or anything. Just move out of here and … and …” I punt. “Move in with my family. I don’t know how I’ll get my parents to agree to it but they will. Then …” I have no idea how I’ll explain any of this to Erik. “We’ll figure the rest out.”

He studies my face. After nine years of friendship, he can read my every look, and this one says:
I’m not messing around.
I wait for him to back down, to respect everything we’ve been through and admit I’m right. But his expression
is one I can’t read anymore and he says, “Not gonna happen.”

I think of Mr. Benton and the nights Erik spent with him, waiting for his fever to break. I wonder: If Davis keeps this up, who will be there for him, waiting for his fever to break? He’s about to stand when I catch his arm. “Davis, I can’t let you do this. If you don’t drop out of Chasers …” He’s past the point where telling Malaika would mean anything. Fortunately, I can hit harder than that. “I’m going to the police with what I know about the Darkroom.”

Davis freezes. “You’d never do that.”