“I’m not?”
“No. You have more imagination than that.”
Teddy couldn’t tell if she was joking, but her body language, normally open and friendly, had turned stiff and uncaring. “More imagination? What are you saying?”
“Oh, come off it. I’m not racist. I’ve dated black men before. I had a black boyfriend at university,” she said.
“‘Some of your best friends are black’?”
“I said come off it! It’s just so cliché, my friend. The white boy arrives in New York to be fucked by a big black man? I thought that you had grander aspirations than that.”
They had been crass with each other before, but not like this. Normally, they spoke in deliberate innuendo, the kind easily established and maintained by bar buddies that painted everyone as the generally promiscuous type, but this bore an air of archness more pointed than their typical talk. “Séverine, this isn’t just some fetish. At least I don’t think it is. It’s just what I find attractive. What I think I find attractive.”
“What you think you find attractive? Stop thinking so much. Go out and actually do something.”
Though Séverine’s treatment of him had been harsh—downright cold, even—there was truth in it: if he held this idea inside himself and didn’t act on it, he was turning his fantasy into a fetish.
Despite realizing, in light of Séverine’s remarks, how earnest his intentions were, he could not decide how to go about acting on them. That encounter with Ken, however insubstantial it may have been, still smarted. For him, every encounter felt insubstantial and crushing at the same time. If the topic of race, now soured by Séverine’s reaction, also entered into the picture, Teddy feared that he would commit some horrible faux pas and ruin everything.
He continued, working at the store and accompanying Séverine on her adventures but, now more than ever, willfully resisting any thoughts of further encounters. He felt old and washed-up. Worse, he felt that he had missed the narrow window in which sexual exploration was acceptable. All this time, he should have been seeing his early time in New York as if it were college—a time for intent study of the sexual landscape, when he would learn the skills necessary to find men, date them confidently, pleasure them, and, when necessary, exchange one for another until he had landed the right man, as a professor landed tenure. Instead, he had squandered whatever sentimental education had been offered to him, so the only real choice was to embrace his ignorance. Denying himself sexually felt like denying any further development of his personality, as if he were trapping his mind in the foolish pen of youth while the rest of his body moved forward and announced a level of wisdom and experience that he simply did not have.
*
It was so terrifying at the time that it puzzles him how people forget about it now. Since he was so solitary during those days, he experienced it as if he were watching a horror movie. The constant fights between sensationalist headlines and angry protestors, the thinning but passionate-voiced ACT-UP members thronging his neighborhood, Reagan’s maddening evasion. His trips to gay bars of any kind had diminished more and more over time, but that didn’t stop him from imagining, at the beginning of things, that he, too, had somehow been infected. When he thought of his aborted tryst with Ken, he thought not only of the virus but also of how pathetic it was that this was the sole sexual encounter that could have put him at risk. When he was able to calm himself down, he felt horrible in knowing that he was healthy. He could feel a second closet being built around him: he knew that, however strong his lust could be, his fear would always be stronger. There were only so many lesions, only so many men ghostly in their premature age that he could take before he saw his celibacy as a dear treasure.
Jance, the kind-eyed, able-fingered hairdresser from the corner barbershop: gone. Nico, the waiter at the Waverly Restaurant who had served him countless plates of runny-on-purpose eggs and snappable bacon: gone. Mike, the sinewy, crew-cut ex-army guy who always dipped a five into the tip jar after getting his BLT: gone, but in stages, walking down the street weaker and weaker until he no longer appeared.
Then it hit closer to Teddy than he had anticipated. He had been seeing less of Séverine since her upsetting critique of him, but they hung out sometimes, though not at her place. They met at Caffè Reggio or for a movie at the Film Forum, went for cocktails at the Chelsea Hotel or a wine dinner at The River Café. One night, she showed up at the Waverly. Her eyes were glassy with tears.
“Are you OK?” Teddy asked, suddenly as caring and affectionate with her as he had been in the past. He had never seen her distressed.
“You were the wise one! You knew! How did you know?” She huffed into a handkerchief, something that she never carried and had once called disgusting.
Teddy knew immediately what the subject was but didn’t know whom she was mourning. Then it hit him: it was Séverine herself. It was the oft-overlooked group, the straight people who were ignored so that his kind could be demonized instead.
“Séverine! No—not you?”
She flicked her head up and, unexpectedly, rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on, Teddy—don’t be insane. I don’t have it. It’s Edouard! He has it.” Her face crumbled again, as if someone had drawn a tragedy mask over it, and she hunched over again.
At first, he didn’t even remember, but then he realized: Edouard was the quiet/boring Frenchman with whom Séverine had tried to set him up. Teddy felt especially sympathetic because he had become boring, too: he worked his job in the store and spent his days in delis or cafés, went on occasional theater outings—during which he sat in his seat and pouted about his bad luck with love—while someone like Edouard probably had fulfilling sexual and romantic conquests and was repaid unjustly.
“I’m so sorry, Sev,” Teddy said, leaning over the table and stroking her hair. He had seen many pairs of people in similar positions these past several months.
“It’s just not fair,” she said, raising her head again. “Why can’t this just be a city of love?”