The Interestings A Novel

SIXTEEN





If you had told me, in 1986, after I was first diagnosed, that I would still be alive in 2002, I would have asked you what you were smoking,” Robert Takahashi told the dark gold banquet room. This was met with polite laughter and a slightly ominous, liquid cough from somewhere among the tables. “Then again,” he said, “if you had told me, in 1986, that one day two towers in our city would be brought down by hijacked airliners, I would have said the same thing.” Earlier that night, in Jonah’s loft, when Robert was practicing this speech, Jonah had interrupted to say he didn’t see the relevance of the terrorism line; including it seemed knee-jerk, he said, but Robert insisted it was required. “But as I well know, sixteen years after my diagnosis,” Robert went on now, “with access to protease inhibitors and good care, HIV remains a serious disease but is no longer necessarily a death sentence. I’m grateful to Lambda Legal for providing me with a great place to work over all these years that I’ve remained surprisingly alive—the terrifying years, the tremendously sad years, and now this new era that I guess we could call the anxious years. I myself happen to be anxious but hopeful. And very much alive.”

There was applause, then more coffee was poured, and the gelatinous roofs of unloved desserts were listlessly poked at, along with the obligatory three raspberries, then another speech was given by a French virologist, and the final speech of the night was delivered by a diminutive activist nun, who shook her fist as she leaned up toward the too-high microphone. Jonah and Robert, in their good dark suits, sat at the head table. Domenica’s had been a savings and loan at the turn of the twentieth century, and now its soaring ceilings and paneled walls lent themselves well to fund-raising evenings such as this one. It was late February, and many of the winter benefits in the city had been canceled; no one had the heart or the concentration to go through with them. But the organizer of this benefit had said something about how if we weren’t going to give in to AIDS, we also weren’t going to give in to terrorists.

That logic didn’t exactly track, but enough time had passed so that some of the generalized shakiness had gone away. Instead of feeling frightened all the time that another building would come down, or that a dirty bomb would go off in Times Square, you could also feel a little defiant, and that was the mood here tonight. Many aging men in this room had danced closely together as young men or boys in the 1980s at places like Limelight or the Saint, or Crisco Disco. Then their numbers had been thinned, and of the ones still alive, quite a few had ended up here tonight, in business dress, holding on.

Robert Takahashi was not, apparently, dying after all, at least not with certainty. He’d held on long enough for protease inhibitors to become standard protocol, and suddenly, astonishingly, if you were lucky enough to tolerate the side effects of the drugs, you might live for a very long time. No one they knew had ever thought this change would occur in their lifetimes; they’d imagined the death pileup continuing on into infinity. Still, it did often lead to death. People went unprotected, ignorant, passed it on; and in many places the drugs often weren’t affordable, or weren’t available at all, and so the world was still dying and AIDS was still a reason why, but in some quarters there was hope. Death was often held off, pushed back. President Reagan had left the scene long ago, and now he was an elderly, confused man who probably no longer remembered how he’d once behaved—or maybe he only remembered certain glittering, particular pieces of his long presidency: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Tonight, having been the recipient of the Eugene Scharfstein Award for Political Activism Within the Legal Profession, Robert stayed on at the glossy bar of Domenica’s after the ceremony and dinner had ended. Other, younger men were also still hanging around, but the new generation barely looked over at Robert and Jonah, thinking they were stylish men from another generation, which at just past forty they nearly were. Both of them had had a lot to drink; Robert wasn’t supposed to do that, but tonight was a special occasion. He was fairly drunk when he tugged on Jonah’s ice-blue tie and said, “You look so good in a suit. I always tell you that.”

“Thank you.”

“You should dress like this every day for work. You’d get your way in all the meetings. Everyone would want to do you.”

“No one dresses up at my job, as you know.”

“I didn’t know that. You hardly talk about your job.”

“You hardly ask.”

In all their years together, Robert had only been to visit Jonah at Gage Systems once, and that was when the robotics firm was still at its old location. Robert had never seen Jonah’s sun-filled cubicle with the drafting table and the corkboard on which he’d pinned a photo of himself and Robert, and another photo of the world’s largest Lego sculpture, and one of his mother singing on a river barge with Peter, Paul and Mary about a million years ago. But to be fair, Jonah thought, he’d only been to Robert’s office once, too. It was just the way they were. On the nights they were together, one of them was usually preoccupied with something that didn’t include the other. Even stripped down to boxers for bed, Robert was often on his BlackBerry, tapping away, and Jonah was at the table looking over designs. Half the week Robert slept in his own apartment nearby on Spring Street.

“Well, you look good,” Robert said now at the bar, and he leaned forward and kissed Jonah quickly. Jonah’s recoil was imperceptible, he hoped; Robert smelled like whiskey concentrate, and even under the best circumstances Jonah Bay was not completely natural when it came to being physically demonstrative. But Robert let go of the tie and sat back on the stool, his expression readjusting itself. “Jonah,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

“We struck a bargain back in the beginning, don’t you think?”

Jonah felt himself tense down his arms and the long sides of his calves. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he finally said.

“You couldn’t handle too much with me. And that was okay. Because truly, I couldn’t give you all that much then. I had this diagnosis. I was going to die. And we had to watch what we did, of course. And what we do. Which has been fine, really.”

“Except?”

“Except now, as you know,” said Robert, in deep discomfort but forcing himself to keep going, “it seems I am not necessarily going to die of this. And honestly, Jonah, as time has gone by I’ve been thinking that I want something more complete.”

“Complete? What the hell does that mean?”

“Oh, you know—love. Sex. The full package. Someone who throws himself into me, physically and mentally.”

“And where are you going to find this package, Robert? This throwing-himself-in package.”

Robert looked down into his drink, the default place to look during a breakup, which this was so hideously and amazingly turning out to be. “I found him,” he said.

“You found him.” A sour statement.

“Yes.” Robert looked up and bravely held Jonah’s gaze. “At the board meeting three months ago. He’s in research at Columbia. He’s positive.”

Not thinking, Jonah said, “He’s positive he’s in research?”

“He’s HIV positive. Like me. We started talking. We fell into this, Jonah. It wasn’t supposed to happen, I recognize that. But we found ourselves sort of . . . free. It felt amazing. I don’t think there’s been too much freedom in our relationship, yours and mine.”

“Oh, freedom, that’s the coveted thing? The holy grail. F*cking without protection?”

“It’s not just that,” said Robert. “He knows what it means to live with this.”

“And me? I have lived with you all these years.”

“No, not with me. You never even wanted me to move in. Look, I am this year’s winner of the Eugene Scharfstein Award, and I think I deserve a moment of big honesty here. You always wanted to keep yourself separate, Jonah. That was your doing, not mine, and I went along with it because what else could I do?”

Each time he said Jonah’s name, it got worse, as if Robert were a kindly, distant person speaking to someone who was doomed. After all this time, Robert was the survivor, while Jonah occupied a land between the ill and the well, a torturous purgatory in which he’d be forced to remain. “All right,” said Jonah, gathering himself. “So what is it you want now?”

“I think I should go,” Robert said.

“Go? What does that mean? Go to this guy? This ‘researcher’?” He tried to give the word a sarcastic edge, but sarcasm just seemed immature now.

“Yes.”

Robert took Jonah’s hand, but his own hand was so cold from the drink that it felt as far from reassuring as possible. Jonah would remember the press of fingertips of a man who had already left him, who was already thinking of his researcher and the night ahead and what would follow, now that he could live and be loved. Now that he was free. Robert Takahashi said, “It’s been a very nice run. We weren’t lonely. But now maybe we should see where the wind will carry us, so to speak.”

• • •

The streets of lower Manhattan actually resembled a wind tunnel that night. Jonah’s tie flipped over his shoulder and he stuck his hands into his coat pockets, feeling the contours of an old, fossilized tissue inside one and the linty coins and swan song subway tokens with their cut-out pentagram centers in the other. Jonah couldn’t go home yet. Instead he found himself at Ash and Ethan’s doorstep not too far away on Charles Street, ringing the bell, which gave a resonant sound from deep inside the house. A security camera purred and angled down on Jonah’s face, then a female voice with a Jamaican accent spoke to him from an intercom. “Yes, who is it please?” This was Rose, the nanny.

“Hi, Rose,” he said as lightly as he could. “Are Ash and Ethan around? It’s Jonah Bay.”

“Oh wait, turn a little; yes, I can see your face now. They’re away, Jonah; they flew to the ranch in Colorado. But they’ll be back tomorrow. Ethan has meetings. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“No,” he said. “It’s okay. Just tell them I was here.”

“Wait a moment, all right?”

“All right.” Jonah stayed on the step, not sure why he was being asked to wait, but very soon Rose opened the heavy door and asked him to come in. In the front hallway, a pale and tranquil space where the light seemed to come from a hidden source, the nanny handed Jonah a cordless telephone. Then she showed him into a sitting room that he hadn’t ever been in before, and, still partly drunk and anguished, he sat on a plum velvet settee below a large painting of a vanilla ice cream cone.

“Robert left me,” he said to Ash on the phone with a suppressed cry.

“He left you?” she said. “Are you sure? It’s not just a fight?”

“We didn’t fight. He’s got someone else.”

“I’m shocked, Jonah.”

“A ‘researcher.’ Apparently I’m too withholding.”

“That’s not true,” said Ash. “You’re a very loving person. I don’t know what he’s talking about.” But of course she did know, and was just being polite. “When I come home,” she said, “I’m all yours. But spend the night at our house tonight, okay? Rose and Emanuel will set you up. I wish we were there, but we flew the cast of Hecuba out here for rehearsals, and Ethan came too. You can have breakfast with Larkin and Mo in the morning; would that be okay? You can check on them for me. I hate to be away from Mo. He doesn’t do well with change in his routine.”

So Jonah spent the night in the second-floor guest room, which in his view was almost as grand as the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House. He distantly remembered that his mother had taken pictures with a Polaroid the night she’d spent there, back when Jimmy Carter was president. (Rosalynn Carter had loved “The Wind Will Carry Us,” and had cried a little when Susannah sang it after dinner.) In the morning the sunlight spread across the bed where Jonah slept, and someone knocked on the door. He sat up and said, “Come in.” Ash and Ethan’s children walked into the room, and Jonah was startled to see how much they’d changed since he’d seen them last a few months earlier. Larkin was beautiful, poised, heading toward adolescence. Mo, poor kid, appeared uncertain and not exactly right even just standing doing nothing. The way he held himself was disconcerting. He stared at Jonah searchingly.

“Hey, you guys,” Jonah said, sitting up and suddenly feeling self-conscious. He was never able to sleep with a shirt on, so he was bare-chested now. His hair, still long, had begun to go gray, and he worried that he appeared to these children like a menacing, effeminate gypsy. But Jonah always felt that something was wrong with him, no matter how many people exclaimed over his face or his long body or his designs for devices to aid disabled people or his “gentleness,” a word that often, irritatingly, got used to describe this held-back, polite man.

“Mom and Dad said you were here, Jonah,” said Larkin. “They said you should stay and have breakfast with us if you can. Emanuel is making waffles that Mom says are to die for.”

“I don’t want to die,” Mo said with a quivering mouth. “You know that, Larkin.”

“I was kidding, Mo,” his sister said, putting an arm on his shoulder. “Remember? It’s a joke.” Then, over her brother’s head, she said, “He is the most literal person any of us has ever met. That’s the way people on the spectrum can be.”

After getting dressed, Jonah followed the sound of the children’s voices, which led him one flight up to a well-stocked playroom. Larkin stood at an easel, painting a skillful landscape that was apparently based on the view from her bedroom on the ranch in Colorado. Mo lay on his stomach on the carpet like a much younger boy. So many Lego pieces were scattered around him that it appeared as if there’d been a volcanic explosion and all the flung bits had cooled and hardened. Jonah stood in awe, just looking; long ago he’d loved Lego too, and what all those little pieces could do. In a sense, he’d gone to MIT because of Lego, and now he worked for Gage Systems because of his early interest in what interlocked and what did not.

“What are you making?” he asked.

“A garbage claw,” said the boy, not looking up.

“How does it work?” Jonah asked, and he crouched down and let Mo Figman give him a demonstration of the uses of his invention. Right away he saw that Mo possessed a visceral understanding of mechanics that went deep and wide. Jonah questioned him about the functionality of the garbage claw, and asked him a series of problem-solving questions relating to use, form, durability, aesthetics. Mo shocked him with his cool skill, yet he was grim about it all, too. Lego was what he loved, but he behaved like a worker, like one of the child laborers who had inspired what had now become Ethan’s cause.

At the breakfast table a little later, Jonah was tended to like the Figmans’ third child, instead of like a man who’d been broken up with by another man only eight hours earlier. Jonah sat with the children in the sunny kitchen, looking out onto a garden that featured a wall threaded so heavily with vines it appeared like the underside of a tapestry. He ached to have lived here, to have had parents like Ash and Ethan and not like his mother, who’d been well-intentioned but unable to save him from being ripped off and diminished. Up on the farm in Dovecote, Vermont, Susannah Bay still lived with her husband, Rick, and taught guitar and prayed, and was revered in that enclosed world, famous and beloved within the membrane of the Unification Church. She assured Jonah that she liked her life there very much, and that she had no regrets about slipping from this larger world into that smaller one. In her daily life she was admired for her talent, which was so much more than he could say for himself.

“Are you okay?” Larkin suddenly asked him. Jonah was surprised, and he wasn’t sure how to reply.

“Why wouldn’t he be okay?” Mo asked. “He doesn’t have anything wrong with him.”

“Again, you’re being really literal,” Larkin said. “Remember, Mo, we talked about that?”

“I’m okay,” Jonah said. “But if you’re picking up something, it’s just that I feel kind of sad right now.”

“Sad? Why is that?” said Mo, almost barking out the words with impatience.

“Well, you’ve met Robert, right?”

“The Japan man,” said Mo. “That’s what I always call him.”

“Oh, you do? Oh. Well, he doesn’t want to be my partner anymore. So that was hard for me. He told me last night, which is how I wound up here.” The conversation was starting to take a peculiar turn; why was he discussing his love life and his breakup with two children? Also, the words felt imperfect; he hadn’t exactly ever been anyone’s partner.

Larkin looked at her brother, fixing her gaze on him in a specific way that she had clearly done before. “Mo,” she said. “Did you hear what Jonah said about being sad?”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the appropriate response right now?”

Mo looked around desperately, like someone searching the classroom walls for an answer on a test. “I don’t know,” he said, his head dropping slightly.

“Oh, it’s really okay,” said Jonah, putting a hand on Mo’s shoulder, which was all wood, like the back of a chair.

“You do know,” said Larkin softly. Her brother looked at her, waiting it out, waiting to remember, and suddenly he found the answer.

“I’m sorry,” Mo said.

“Say it to Jonah.”

“I’m sorry.” Ethan’s son said it in a voice that strained for expression, though Jonah didn’t have to strain to find any feeling to meet it.