You Can Say You Knew Me When (11 page)

Stop him. Tell him.

I can’t tell him now, not right here in the middle of sex.

Tell him now, before you give him AIDS!

Rick didn’t have AIDS.

You don’t know that.

Woody won’t get HIV from oral sex.

Are you certain? Really certain?

But that would mean I have AIDS, too—

The amazing sensation of being deep down Woody’s throat, my thighs tickled by his hot breath, my body held in place by the weight of him. He was servicing me and dominating me all at once. I don’t know that I’d ever felt so physically close to him and so mentally far away at the same time.

The physical won out. I didn’t stop him to confess. I squashed the conversation inside my skull: It was based on guilt, not medical information. The odds were against this being dangerous:
I did not get HIV from a couple of seconds of aerated semen on my tongue. It’s only unsafe for Woody if I have HIV, and I don’t have HIV!
I repeated this like a mantra, not sure where rationality ended and wishful thinking began—a familiar, unwelcome confusion that I could trace back to the late eighties, when penetration was new to me and AIDS truly was capital-letter deadly. This panicky mind-chatter went back to every time I’d read reports of a study claiming the virus might in fact be transmitted by oral sex; to every article claiming a new, more virulent strain of HIV had been discovered; to every time someone I knew seroconverted. I shut out the studies; I focused on all the anecdotal evidence to the contrary. I slammed the lid down on the cauldron and just breathed the humid mist of the moment. I gave in to Woody’s effort.

He lifted me farther back on the bed and then undressed. His long, lean torso—broad bony shoulders, broad flat chest, a slanting ridge of muscle highlighting his lower abdomen. Skin the color of parchment. His cock rigid without either of us touching it. I watched a crystal bead glistening at the tip drop to the floor, a filament stretching and vanishing. I would be on my hands and knees tomorrow, looking for the spot that sacred drop had blessed. He sucked me some more and I watched the elongated slope of his lower back, his ass raising up like a cat’s hoping to be scratched, more of that golden skin, gleaming exquisitely. And when he planted a knee on either side of my ribs and lifted himself up, and dropped back down onto my lap, and guided me up inside of him, I let it happen. I fucked him, as he clearly wanted it, the way we always did this.
Bareback.
I looked up and met his eyes and I told myself,
It’s going to be okay,
and then thrust up until he groaned and we found the rhythm.

I said to him out loud, “I’m yours.”

He matched the intensity of my gaze and held it and nodded his head, telling me:
Yes
.

He called the next day from work. I was sitting at my desk in my underwear, checking my e-mail, a mug of coffee cooling at my side, two dead cigarettes already in the ashtray. A tiny thump of a hangover persisted through the caffeine, less from the Merlot than from the lingering feeling that I’d not only fucked Woody the night before, I’d
screwed
him.

“I had an idea,” he said.

“As long as it’s not about therapy,” I said, “I’m game.”

“Have you done an Internet search for Danny Ficchino?”

That I hadn’t wasn’t surprising. I’d been a slow starter in the wired world, the last of all my friends to get an e-mail account. I was trekking to the library to do research when everyone else was swearing by search engines. This wasn’t the smartest attitude for a radio producer to take. True, I often found sources on library databases that didn’t quickly appear when using the ’net. But when I finally got screamed at by an executive producer for taking too long to put together a list of possible interviewees for a deadline-driven project, I learned that I needed to pick up the pace.

At home, I was still using a modem to connect. Woody had a T1 line at work, which was about a zillion times faster. “I’ll do it for you,” he was saying. “I’ll try PeopleSearch.”

“Search, people! Search!” I commanded, listening to his keyboard clacking.

In an instant, he had results: nothing under
Dan
or
Daniel
or
Danny Ficchino
, but almost thirty variations of
Dean Foster
. He forwarded the page to me, and when we got off the phone I looked it over.

Some of the names were clearly wrong—
Roderick Dean Foster, Dean Smith-Foster
—and I eliminated those immediately. Any listing with a middle name or initial—
Dean Thomas Foster, Dean M. Foster
—I cut as well; I figured since
Dean Foster
was an alias, it was unlikely that Danny would have made up a middle name. That left about eighteen to consider. Of those, five were in California, including three in Los Angeles and a couple in towns not far from San Francisco. I stared at the screen, at all the possible Deans. I debated whether or not to make phone calls first or send each one an e-mail. Both choices seemed presumptuous, invasive—somewhere between junk mail and stalking. I could mention my professional credentials, the possibility of a public-radio story, but how would I back that up? I couldn’t even convince Brady that this was anything but personal.

All but two of the entries had street addresses. That seemed best: I’d send a letter, a good old-fashioned winds-up-in-your-mailbox letter. Time wasn’t pressing; in the interest of not scaring him off, I could wait.

I jammed some of Anton’s pot into my pipe and spent the afternoon composing letters:

…which decomposed as the morning progressed and I got more and more stoned…

…until at last I was typing out the true, fucked-up heart of the matter:

I didn’t print any of these out. I didn’t send anything. I couldn’t. Not yet.

Anton was sliding the knife set across the glass counter, the blades gleaming, the handles buffed and creamy, the velvet brushed clean. “A thing of beauty,” he marveled, as if he had no idea how these shining objects had wound up in his shop.

I liked witnessing this side of Anton, the proud tradesman emerging from beneath the pot-addled painter and the paranoid drug dealer. I plopped down sixty bucks, more than I’d ever given him at once—for knives, that is—and said, “Better than new.”

As I turned to leave, Anton said, “Hold on.” He disappeared into the back room, returning with a newspaper clipping in hand. “The lady painter. Ray Gladwell. I knew the name was familiar.” He handed me the clipping, a review from a gallery show, dated about a year previous. There she was: a short, curvy woman with cropped, salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a dark turtleneck sweater and an ornate, metal necklace. Her smile told you she’d be the easiest person in the world to talk to.

“We were both in a show at the Berkeley Gallery, in ’68 or ’69,” Anton said.

The article reviewed a show of abstract landscapes at a gallery near Union Square.
A transformer of reality into dream, Ray Gladwell is a tireless career artist, one of the last of the California-landscape generation receiving much deserved recognition.
Sixty-five and finally getting her due—no wonder she was smiling (though she could just as easily have bitterness scarred across her face). The text said she lived on the Peninsula, south of the city. Assuming she hadn’t died in the past year, she was still alive, this woman who’d been my father’s—what? Lover? Girlfriend?
Old lady
? What would they have called it in 1960?

“Do you remember her at all?” I asked Anton.

“I remember thinking she painted like a man.”

I pulled from my father’s San Francisco box the break-up letter Ray had written to him, the one I’d first skimmed in New Jersey. I hadn’t noticed before how fragile the paper felt. The creases where it had been folded were splitting and frayed.

She had signed it “Ray Gladwell,” as if there could be any other Ray in his life. Her handwriting was curvaceous, penmanship-perfect; she was a lady of the 1950s, schooled to handwrite notes with soothing legibility. How, then, did she wind up as a self-reliant adulteress, running around without explanation, sneaking past her husband, all in the name of freedom?

I wondered, too, about the threat she’d referred to. Here, at last, was a hint of Teddy as I knew him—bark worse than bite, but what a bark! That baritone voice, hard and resonant as steel as it conjured the fear of punishment, the force gathered up under his skin just barely held in check. He’d never raised a hand to me, but he scared me many a time. Ray had felt this, too, forty years ago, though she must have been a match for him: alluring, always in motion, calling the shots.
You are a fine young man.
Such a withering, patronizing thing to say to a lover! She’d broken his heart because it was good for him.

In a desk drawer crammed with unsorted photographs, I found a picture of my father that I’d snapped at the barbecue celebrating AJ’s birth. Dad stands in the backyard in his silly apron, wielding spatula and tongs, smiling toward me. The last good moment between us. Not a hint of the fateful argument to follow.

I placed the gallery clipping on the desk, next to this photo. Teddy and Ray. His aged face next to hers. Long before my mother, my father had crossed paths with this woman, had followed that winning smile into an illicit affair. Somehow, they’d found places where they could be alone—his apartment, a motel room, perhaps a locked bedroom at a party. They’d seen each other naked. They’d whispered into each other’s ears. They’d ignited something tender, and then, soon enough, it ceased.