“No, they’re not,” I said.
“You know the funny thing is I’ve fucked about a thousand women over the last forty years,” he said. “And not once in all that time did I ever get any kind of disease. Nothing. Not even when I was in the Navy when, you know, most guys were fifty percent penicillin by the time they got discharged. So I guess it was inevitable that when I finally caught something it was gonna be something big. You people have a lot to answer for.”
I bit my lip. This was another familiar trope: a heterosexual patient lashing out at homosexuals for what he saw as their responsibility for the spread of both the virus and the disease that sprang from it, and I knew from experience that there was no point arguing with any of them. They couldn’t see beyond their own suffering. And why, I supposed, should they?
“What did you do in the theater?” I asked him, eager to change the subject.
“I was a choreographer,” he said with a shrug. “I know, I know. The one straight choreographer in New York City, right? But it’s the truth. I worked with all the greats. Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, Bob Fosse. Bob came in to see me a few weeks ago, actually; he was the only one who did. That was kind of him. Most of the others haven’t bothered. All those pretty young dancers. They’d do anything for a part in the chorus line and I was happy to oblige. Not that I ever did any of that casting-couch crap. I didn’t have to. You wouldn’t think it to look at me now but I was a good-looking guy in my day. The girls, they all came running. I had my pick of them. But where are they now? They’re afraid to come near me. Maybe they think I’m dead too. My sons have done a better job of killing me off than AIDS has done so far. At least they were quick about it.”
“I don’t go to the theater much,” I said.
“Then you’re a philistine. I bet you go to the movies, though, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Quite a lot.”
“You got a boyfriend?”
I nodded. I didn’t mention that my boyfriend was the Head of Communicable Diseases at the hospital, had probably met him dozens of times and was the doctor in charge of his treatment. Bastiaan had made it clear to me from the start that I should reveal nothing about our personal relationship to the patients.
“You fuck around on him?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Never.”
“Sure you do.”
“I really don’t.”
“What kind of fag doesn’t fuck around? It’s the 1980s, for Christ’s sake.”
“I told you,” I said. “I’m not a fag.”
“So you keep saying,” he replied, waving this distinction away. “If you don’t fuck around, then my advice is for you to stay that way and hope that he doesn’t fuck around on you either. Then you’ll probably both be safe. But if you’re not doing it, then he probably is. There’s no chance the only two monogamous fags in New York City found each other.”
“He’s not like that,” I insisted.
“Everyone’s like that. Some are just better at hiding it than others.”
He started to cough and instinctively I reared back in my seat, reaching for the mask that was hanging around my neck and placed it across my face. “You little shit,” he said, looking across at me contemptuously when he’d recovered his breath.
“I’m sorry,” I said, taking it off and feeling my face redden a little in shame.
“I’m kidding. I’d do the same if I was you. Actually, I wouldn’t even be here if I was you. Why are you here anyway? Why do you do this? You don’t know me; why do you want to come inside this room?”
“I wanted to do something to help,” I said.
“Maybe you want to watch someone die. You get your kicks from that, is that it?”
“No,” I said. “That’s not it.”
“Have you ever seen anyone die?”
I thought about it. I’d seen several people die, of course: the priest who’d fallen out of the confession box on Pearse Street; my first fiancée, Mary-Margaret Muffet; and Ignac’s father, of course, on that terrible night in Amsterdam before we’d decided to leave Holland for good. But I’d never seen anyone die of AIDS. Not yet anyway.
“No,” I said.
“Well, stick around for the show, buddy, because I don’t have much time left. None of us do. The way I see it, this is the beginning of the end of the world. And it’s you people who my people have to thank for it.”
Three Types of Lies
The restaurant was located on 23rd Street, near the Flatiron Building, and from where we were seated I could see couples making their way through Madison Square Park, where, only a few weeks earlier, an old woman had spat in my face when Bastiaan, in a spontaneous moment, had put his arm around my shoulder and kissed my cheek.
“Fuck you,” the woman, who was old enough to remember the Great Depression, had snarled at us, and there was so much invective in her voice that the other people walking nearby had turned around and stared. “Fucking AIDS carriers.”
I would have happily avoided the area for a while, but Bastiaan’s friend Alex, one of the doctors who worked under him at Mount Sinai, had made the booking not knowing what had taken place there.
I tried to put the memory from my mind now as Alex’s wife Courteney, a journalist, drowned her sorrows, having been passed over for promotion earlier that day. The dinner had been intended as a celebration—both she and Alex had been certain that the job would be hers—but it had turned instead into something of a wake.
“I think I should quit,” she said, looking downcast as she swept her fork ineffectively through her food, taking only the occasional bite. “Do something useful with my life. Become a brain surgeon or a garbage collector. My whole career has been building toward becoming lead White House correspondent and for what? I’ve put so much time into getting to know all the people there. And instead that bastard gives the job to some guy who hasn’t even been at the paper for a year and probably couldn’t name the Secretary of Agriculture without looking it up. It’s just fucked up is what it is.”
“I couldn’t name the Secretary of Agriculture,” said Alex.
“Yes, but you don’t need to name him,” she said. “You’re not a political reporter. And it’s Richard Lyng,” she added under her breath, as I knew she would.
“Did you talk to him about it?” I asked.
“Of course I did. Well, it was less of a conversation and more of an argument. Voices raised, name-calling, the whole nine yards. And I may have thrown something.”
“What?”
“A plant. At the wall. Which just gave him the ammunition to say that he didn’t think I had the right temperament for such a responsible position.”