The Men from the Boys (16 page)

“That's direct semen-blood contact. I have a
right
to worry.”

“Yes,” he says, but he's not compassionate, not at all. “You have a right.”

There's a knock at the door. Our anger pulls back, not wanting to face public disclosure. It's Ernie. “David?” he sings. “You home?”

Javitz gets up and opens the door. Ernie bounds in, full of energy, despite the dreary day and his dearth of T cells. “Hi, girls. Want to come watch drag-queen softball with me? They're going to play even if it rains! Can you imagine sequins in the mud?”

“No thanks,” I say. “I've got plans.” I do. I plan to call Eduardo.

“Let me put on my shoes,” Javitz says.

“David, I checked on that application for you—”

Javitz shoots him a look. I notice it. Ernie looks apologetic, as if he'd just spilled the beans about something.

“What application?” I ask, trying to sound indifferent as I pick up the phone.

Javitz looks down at the floor. “Well, I wanted to tell you and Lloyd together, but didn't get a chance this weekend.”

I wait, my finger poised over the first digit in Eduardo's number.

“After next semester, I'm going on disability.”

“What?” I ask, hanging up the phone. “Just like that?”

“It's not a rash decision. I've given it a lot of thought.”

I look over at Ernie. Yes, and I know who you gave it thought with. Not with us, your supposed very best friends in the whole world, but with
him.
Because he's got it, and we don't. Because of one stupid little micro-organism that's chewing its way through Ernie's cells, and not ours. I let out a long sigh and return to the phone. “Guess we can talk about this later,” I say. Poor Ernie looks like an embarrassed newlywed watching his wife and her mother argue for the first time, not quite a stranger but not really part of the family either.

Ah, family. It's like Bisquick. No matter how you bake it, it always comes out the same.

Boston, February 1995

I'm pissed that we're here, because I wanted to write today. I've started a piece, something that feels fresh and alive and makes no sense at all, which gives me a rush, a big old hard-on. Don't ask me to explain what it's about: I don't know. It just started flowing the other morning, making my fingertips itch and my heart push blood past my ears. It was the morning after Javitz told us he was moving to Provincetown for good, in fact—a morning after a particularly restless night. I haven't shared it with anyone yet. I have to wait a week or so and see if I still like it. It often works out that I don't.

“Over here,” Lloyd is saying. We've come to a psychic fair at the mall in Cambridge. Lloyd and his straight friend Naomi, a nurse at the hospital, have been to see one of the psychics here before. “Her name is Magda,” Lloyd said. “She's
amazing.
Please come, Cat. We can ask her about the apartment, what we should do.” Lloyd and Naomi are into this sort of thing. After all, they go to the same meditation group—along with Drake—and chant around a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh.

We make a hardy little band off to see the wizards. Javitz is here, pretending to be open-minded about this sort of thing. Naomi had jumped at the chance to see Magda again. I called Tommy and begged him to come. “For my sanity,” I pleaded. “Everybody else is going to be acting wavy gravy.” He consented.

Magda sits at a small cardboard table surrounded by tarot card readers and astrologers. The fair is a fundraiser for the pediatric AIDS ward at Mass General. (“Of course it's for the
babies,”
Javitz snarled.) I catch a buzz of fortunetelling as we walk through the rows of tables. High-school girls with big blond hair ask about their boyfriends. Wiry old hippies with receding hairlines and ponytails ask whether O.J. will be found guilty. Magda is taking a break when we come upon her, eating her lunch, an egg salad sandwich and a pear. She's a fat dyed redhead with a small blue tattoo of a star on her chin. She recognizes Lloyd and Naomi, grins up at them. “My friends,” she says grandly.

“Hello, Magda,” Lloyd says, reverentially.

“Hello, mind doctor,” she says. “And you, healing woman.” She wipes her mouth with a red paper napkin and puts away her lunch. “Who are your followers?”

“This is my lover, Jeff O'Brien,” Lloyd says. I smile. “And these are our friends, David Javitz and Tommy Lundquist.”

She puts out her palms to us, fingers pointing down, like a carnival Buddha. “Welcome. I feel your energy, and it is good. Who will start?”

“We thought Javitz would,” Lloyd says. “He's planning to make a significant change.”

She gestures at the chair beside her. He sits, appraising her, eyebrows taking over his face. “I'm planning a move—”

“Tell me no more,” she cuts him off. He reaches into his back pocket and withdraws his wallet, handing her a ten. “Not yet,” she scolds, her eyes closed. “Money disturbs my energy.”

That's the point where I roll my eyes and gesture to Tommy. We head down to the food court, where I get a fat-free raspberry frozen yogurt from Ben & Jerry's and Tommy a chocolate honey-dipped cruller from Dunkin' Donuts. He's been quiet all day, much as he had been at Lloyd's birthday party.

“So what's going on with you?” I ask him.

“Oh, stuff.” He puts away the donut in just three bites.

The frozen yogurt has a bitter aftertaste, so I toss it into the trash bin. “Like what kind of stuff?”

“We're organizing a letter-writing campaign to Clinton,” he says. “Asking him to come out against Amendment 2 in Colorado.”

“I thought you'd given up on Clinton,” I say.

“Yeah, well ...” He looks around as if he's considering another donut. “Got to do something to keep the masses organized and active. AIDS sure doesn't excite them anymore.”

Tommy has always been involved in some queer cause or another. Has been ever since I met him, at an ACT UP demo in front of the State House, back when I was still with Javitz. Tommy's always been fiercely passionate about queer politics. He was one of the founders of the Queer Nation chapter here. The first meeting was held at his house. Javitz and I went, and Tommy caused a stir by asking any straight supporters to leave. “Queer Nation hates straights,” he announced, and he got booed.

He's not so fierce these days. “What's the matter?” I ask him, touching his sad cheeks. “I thought you said you were dating a new guy.”

He looks at me as if I'm being stupid, as if I don't get it. And maybe I don't. But I thought that's what Tommy's always wanted: a boyfriend. He hasn't had all that many.

“Come with me to Chanel's after this psychic silliness is over,” he says. “We can talk then.”

I shrug. “All right.” Somehow him calling this silliness bothers me. I can say it, because Lloyd's my lover. But Tommy can't. Lloyd believes in this, and I don't like people mocking him. Only I can do that.

Tommy decides a cinnamon cruller was calling him after all. He wanders off to buy it, while I sit here amid the potted plants, breathing the sweet stale air of the mall. I marvel at all the mini-dramas that pass in front of my eyes. A father scolding his son for being mean to another boy. A woman flirting with a man who seems not to care. A girl momentarily lost, terror in her wide blue eyes. Then her mother finds her, takes her hand, and the child trots alongside her like an obedient puppy. How I envy the pink flush of relief that spreads across her baby-fat cheeks.

“Let's go back,” I say to Tommy. “I think I want a reading of my own.” He just gives me a look.

We head back to the fair. “Ah, here they are,” Magda says as Tommy and I return to her table.

“How'd it go?” I ask.

Javitz seems stunned. Lloyd and Naomi are beaming. “Incredible,” Lloyd says. “She told Javitz some
amazing
things.”

“She told
me
I was about to meet a man,” Naomi grins. “And he
won't
be gay.”

I laugh. “And what about you, Lloyd? What did she say about us and the apartment?”

He looks at Magda, then back at me. “I'll tell you later,” he says, and I feel my stomach drop.

“Which of you boys wants to go next?” Magda asks.

“Count me out,” Tommy laughs.

I look at Lloyd. “I'll go,” I say.

I sit down. She passes her hands in front of my face, creasing her forehead. “You are a weaver,” she says at last. “Do you sew?”

“No,” I tell her.

She looks puzzled. She closes her eyes and waves her hands in front of me again. “Yes,” she says at last. “You are weaving together a large piece of fabric that you will hang on your wall.”

“I'm
a journalist,”
I tell her.

“No,” she insists. “You're a weaver.”

“What about my home?” I ask her suddenly, gripped by a force that takes me by surprise. I lean forward in my chair. “What about my home and my family?”

She opens her eyes and looks at me. “Let the images come. Don't rush it.”

I sit back in my chair.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “I don't see anything.”

“Nothing?”

She shakes her head. “I'm sorry. I guess I'm tired. Come back after lunch. I won't charge you.”

“Guess you all tired her out,” I say as we head outside.

Javitz walks as if in a daze. “She said I was moving to the water, to regain a sense of time and place,” he says, lighting a cigarette as soon as we're outside. The air is cool but vibrant, a sunny day in the middle of this dreadful winter. “She said I was going to a place where I would find my soul, and in so doing, rediscover my life. Death, she said, would not dare approach me in such a place.”

“Isn't that
amazing?”
Lloyd gushes.

Naomi closes her eyes and shivers.

“What's amazing?” I ask. “You
told
her you were moving. She only said what you wanted to hear.”

“Maybe I wanted to hear that I was making a mistake,” Javitz says. “That way I'd stay put, and not take the leap.”

“Well, I guess this just confirms it then,” I laugh, trying to sound light, but the nasty edge creeps through. “You're leaping.”

“Yes,” Javitz says. “Yes, I am.”

“I'm so proud of you,” Naomi coos.

“I'm hungry,” Lloyd says. “Let's have lunch. Where should we go?”

“I told Chanel I'd meet her,” Tommy says. “Jeff, are you ... ?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I'm going with Tommy. We'll be at Chanel's if you want to come by later.”

They barely hear me. The three of them cluster by Lloyd's car deciding on a place to eat. Lloyd and Naomi are vegetarians, of course, so every place Javitz suggests is nixed by them.

“What about Denny's?” he asks. “They've got a nice salad bar and I can get veal parmigiana.”

“Veal?”
Lloyd scolds. “Don't you know that's the worst you can eat?”

Naomi makes a sad face. “A calf. A baby cow.”

“Look,” Javitz says, arm on hip. “Why don't the two of you just head over to that field across the street and
graze
for a while?” They all laugh.

I don't. Instead I'm thinking about my poor old aunt Agatha, whom my father and I found dead on her living-room couch when I was ten and she was ninety-six. She'd been dead for a week—at least. Her apartment smelled like the shed out in back of my grandparents' house, where they kept plums and pears and apples. Some of the fruit would start to rot, way down in the barrels, and when you opened that shed door, it was the sweetest, most loathsome smell you ever could imagine. That's how it smelled the day Dad forced open Aunt Agatha's door, and told me to wait in the hall. But what kid ever minded his father when the corpse of a dead aunt beckoned from another room? She was tipped to her side on the couch, her mouth and eyes open and the television on. What had she been watching when she died? Bob Barker was on the tube when we came- in that day, calling for the next contestant to come on down.

Aunt Agatha died alone. She had no children. Even her sister's children were dead, leaving only grandnieces and -nephews like my father to come in and check on her every once in a while. I try to imagine what that must have been like, day in and day out. Sitting there alone, never quite sure what day of the week it was because it no longer mattered. During the day, she had Art Linkletter and Dinah Shore and Bob Barker for company, but at night she was left only with the ticking of the clock and the clanking of the radiator.

“Not the way it's supposed to be,” my mother had clucked, shedding no tears over the coffin of this ancient lady she barely knew. “You're supposed to have
family
around you when you're old.”

That used to be the fear parents had for their homosexual children. “But who will you have to grow old with?” they'd cry, wringing their hands. But we took back that myth: “We create new families,” Chanel wrote, “new families to replace the ones taken from us.” Sure we do. But that doesn't mean we still won't end up like Aunt Agatha, or those old plums in my grandparents' shed: shut up alone, old fruits left to rot.

Provincetown, July 1994

I can make the ride from Provincetown to Boston in two hours. Sometimes less, depending on traffic. It's at least twice that to my parents' house in Connecticut, and getting into my car this morning I predict all of five.

“That's only because you'll dawdle,” Javitz tells me.