Lawnboy (11 page)

Then Woodworth turned and noticed me. He knew that Todd and I were gym buddies, banding together during softball class, deliberately, flamboyantly missing the fly balls that dropped in our direction.

“Hey, Sarshik,” he said. “Here’s your friend, he’s bleeding. Why don’t you come over here and take care of your friend?”

I looked at him as if to say
What friend?
then left Todd to his own devices as I hurtled down the steps to the locker room.

***

Two mornings later I went to Todd’s funeral mass. I dropped William off at work, then drove around Coral Gables looking for the church. I found it after a few minutes, a large Catholic church with ocher brick walls and a round rosette window—St. Michael the Archangel. I sat in the back row, near the baptismal font, in my single white shirt and ill-fitting suit (an old thing I’d borrowed from William’s closet), and stared down at the initials etched into the soft wood of the pew. Ten rows ahead were his cousins, dozens of them, all bused in from Allentown, Pennsylvania; his former neighbors; his most recent friends, two of whom appeared to be models or porn stars; and his parents, Francis and Dot, who seemed alternately composed and quietly devastated. It was hard to imagine that they’d ever been cruel to Todd, but they’d been awful, literally locking him out of the house upon learning he’d had sex with Lloyd Scarborough, the marching-band director. Still, they’d welcomed him back home when he’d come down with his first symptom, a case of CMV retinitis, realizing that he had no other choice but to stay put, that he wasn’t going to run away, or frighten or surprise them anymore.

But it was foolish to expect anything but surprise from Todd. Even in death, he still managed to unsettle. Before mass, standing outside with his cousin Ricky (who’d allowed me to bum a cigarette, something I did from time to time), I’d learned that before moving to San Francisco, where he’d butched himself up and started sleeping with porn stars, Todd had been an accomplished composer of liturgical music, something he’d hidden from almost everybody, including his parents. He’d taken it quite seriously, taking pride in his designation as the youngest composer ever in the catalog of UIA Library, his publisher. Now the choir was performing some of Todd’s music for the service. The cantor intoned his setting of my favorite psalm, one of those I still knew by heart, Psalm 42—
Like a deer that longs for running streams
—and then we all repeated it, its antiphon rising, lifting us up, moving and unnerving everyone in the congregation.

Outside the church, Todd’s other cousins, three of whom had been linebackers for Penn State, hefted the shining casket down the steps. The sun went in. People milled about, jabbering. It was hard not to feel cheated somehow, though it was a nice mass, a nice sermon. There were only veiled, uncomfortable references to AIDS, the priest assuring us that God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom, was blessing Todd, seating him at his right hand. I tried not to be miffed. The palm fronds glistened in the heat. Karen Kenley, a mutual friend of Todd’s and mine, spotted me in the throng. To my dread, she made her way toward me.

“What have you been up to?” she asked.

I visored my eyes. Already she’d aged. She might have been five or ten years older than I was with her brittle blonde perm, her pitted skin. She waited for me to answer.

I hadn’t anticipated the question. Since I’d been with William I’d more or less isolated myself from everyone I’d known. I couldn’t possibly tell her the truth, that I’d been staying at home, immersed in a relationship that I worried about more and more with each passing day.

“I took some time off from school,” I said. “But I’m going back someday.”

Her face betrayed surprise and relief. “I thought you’d have been in grad school by now. You seemed so brilliant. You were always throwing off the curve on tests.”

Her words barbed and shamed, though I doubted she’d wanted to hurt me. One thing you could say about Karen was that she was kind. She might not have been smart or attractive or ambitious, but she was kind, and no one would take that away from her. I turned the question around. “So what about you?”

She was hostessing at a Perkins Pancake House in Naranja, on the seedy deadbeat strip to the Keys—most of which had been torn open by Hurricane Andrew. Already she’d divorced and married a second time, but the current marriage—to a guy twenty years her senior, a former real estate salesman for General Development—wasn’t working. She was thinking of moving back in with her mother, if only to put some money in the bank. She was twenty years old. I couldn’t have imagined a life so different from my own.

“And I have a baby!” she cried.

She reached into her wallet and passed me a cellophane-wrapped picture of a baby, a little girl with blonde hair, blue eyes, and white shirt patterned with golden pachyderms.

“Her name’s Lola. Seventeen months old. Don’t you think that’s the coolest name?”

“Wow.” I wanted to feel what I was supposed to feel. She so much wanted my approval, even though I could barely muster it, with Todd on my mind. What was she doing with a baby when she could barely take care of herself?

“Let’s get together sometime,” she said. Awkwardly, as if on impulse, she hugged me.

“We should,” I answered. I felt her gripping me closer, her tears hot on the cloth of my shirt.

She laughed, sniffed, pretended she wasn’t crying. “Remember when the three of us went to the drive-in, and the tire blew out, and we had to walk six miles to the Texaco?”

I nodded. I’d had such a horrendous time that night, bickering with Todd, walking with him in a pair of thrift-store shoes that were one size too small, that I’d all but suppressed it. But maybe I’d had a bad attitude. Was my recollection any truer than hers?

“So give me a call, please? How’s Jane, by the way?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her.”

“You haven’t? That surprises me. You two used to be like this.” And she crossed two fingers together, holding them up for me to see.

“People drift apart.”

She nodded. “I never liked her,” she said, admitting to something I’d always suspected. She rubbed her arm as if chilly. “She always made me feel fat, stupid. Maybe I’m jealous of her.”

I grabbed her tightly by the hand and shook it, in full measure of my support. “That’s Jane. Well, we won’t ask her along this time. How’s that?”

“Good,” she said, laughing now.

I walked away from her. The cars, headlights on, inched down the road toward the cemetery. Driving home, I knew that we’d never get together. I was in another life. I’d never see her again.

Three weeks after Todd’s funeral, on a night marked by the arrival of a cold front, with violent bursts of lightning, and eerie passages of calm, I locked myself in the bathroom and pressed a damp washcloth to my face. My stomach lining popped and burned. There was no question: I knew that I was infected, and that it was only a matter of time before I came down with it—the night sweats and fevers, the rashes and gum disease, the odd tingling and numbness that would prevent me from walking.

I crawled back into bed and sidled up to William, deliberately waking him.

“Do you ever worry?” I asked him.

He opened one eye. “What now.”

“Don’t you ever worry about AIDS?”

He breathed deeply, patiently through his nostrils. “We’ve been safe,” he said blandly. “What’s there to worry about?”

But we hadn’t been safe, even though we tried to be. There had been that time or two when just before he’d rolled on the rubber, he’d pressed his dick inside me, just an inch or two deep, just for the thrill of it, just to test something. Wasn’t that a part of it, the thrill, the daring? Wasn’t that the thing that drove people to let down their guard, to stare down death in the face, or to finally stop fighting, because it took all of your resources to keep it at bay? I thought of the first time we were together, the hot afternoon on which I’d fucked him, the smell of cut grass in the air, only to find a rusty, bloody bloom on the top sheet after he’d left for the bathroom. I looked at the spot, thinking, we’re never going back from here, we’re linked together now—William and Evan, blood brothers—brutalized and comforted at once.

“We never talk about it,” I said. “Don’t you think we should at least talk about it sometime?”

“What’s there to talk about?” A grimace passed over his face. He twisted his hands together, once, not even knowing he was doing it.

I sat up. I tried my best to sound rational, nonchalant. “Maybe we should both get tested.”

He shook his head from side to side, emphatic. “No way. I’m over that idea.”

“Why not? We’ll just get it over with and we won’t have this dreadful thing looming over us.”

His face looked empty, bleak. “It’s always looming over us.”

He stood. I followed him into the bathroom, watching him pour baking soda into a juice glass. Carefully, he filled it with tap water, stirred it with his finger, then sipped it as if it were champagne.

I sat on the closed toilet seat. If I were sick, if my time were really limited, I wanted to be doing things. I wanted to be living like Todd did, having experiences, fucking, becoming somebody new, changing my name, somewhere on the opposite side of the country.

“Do you think you’re positive?” I asked.

He swallowed, testing the condition of his throat. “I feel fine, if that means anything.” His face looked brighter, calmer all of a sudden. “How about you?”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s good. That’s all we need to know.”

I followed him back to the bedroom. Outside, the sky lightened notch by notch. I expected him to be resentful, silent. Instead, he turned to me and held me tight, breathing slowly, at regular intervals, until he was fast asleep, as if he’d convinced himself the world was nothing but a restful, safe place.

I found it in our mailbox, without postage, in a used, brown envelope once addressed to my parents. A ghastly photograph of Ed McMahon peered down from the upper left corner. As it had been deposited after 2:30, the last time I’d checked the box, I assumed that my mother had delivered it herself.

I read the letter twice more before I tore it in half, then pieced it back together with strapping tape.
Goddamn,
I thought. They were locking me out. I really had no place to go.

***

William’s solution to my seething rage was to take me out to a party. He received the invitation from Cleve Stern, a sound engineer from Channel 7, one of the few employees he was officially “out” to, so I assumed there’d be people like us there. William wouldn’t tell me anything specific about the party, except that it would be taking place in a loft in an industrial area of Little Havana, and that I shouldn’t worry too much about what I was going to wear.

“What kind of party? Who’s going to be there?”

“You’ll see,” he said, nudging me onward. “Hurry up, get moving. It starts in forty-five minutes.”

I felt a dread coupled with a low-key anticipation. We hadn’t had much of a social life. All these months it had been just him and me, and I’d been feeling the pressure of that, the sense that we needed to open ourselves out. It made me wonder why he’d waited until now to do this, when we were practically crawling around on our hands and knees. But any change was potentially refreshing, especially from someone who was so dependent upon routine.

It took us a good fifteen minutes to find a parking space. The neighborhood wasn’t great. I looked up to the sky above the warehouses and high-tension wires, lines of pink and red light creeping across its map. I thought, this is the Florida that no one sees in postcards, the Florida that’s always there behind the palms, the bronzed bodies, the swept, glittering surfaces.

Inside, the loft we were met by a line of men in a graffiti-scarred hall. The music was loud beyond imagining. I recognized the song, a remix of “Rude Thing,” by some alternative band that Todd had introduced me to.