I left a message with Shaniqua, asking her to let Bastiaan know that I’d see him at home later, and made a quick escape from the hospital without even stopping to take my coat, running westward in a daze and somehow ending up seated on a bench near Central Park Lake. It was cold and I could tell that people were staring at me, thinking I was crazy to be dressed for summer on such a cold day, but I couldn’t go back yet. There had only been time for me to utter his name in astonishment, and for him to whisper mine in reply, before I found myself running from the room and charging along the corridor, certain that if I didn’t get outside into the fresh air quickly I would pass out. It had been fourteen years since he realized that our friendship was based on a simple deceit on my part, and this was to be the cruel circumstances of our reunion. In New York City. In a hospital room. Where my oldest friend was dying of AIDS.
I remembered now how careless he had been from the start with his sexual health. It was true that things had been very different in the 1960s and ’70s than they were by 1987, but it seemed to me that Julian had been particularly cavalier throughout his youth, as if he believed himself to be invincible. How he had never gotten a girl pregnant was a mystery to me but then, I realized, perhaps he had and I had simply never found out. He could have a gang of children for all I knew. Still, I had never even imagined that he would one day contract a disease that would not only threaten his life but bring it to a premature end. Not that I could condemn him, of course, without facing up to my own hypocrisy. After all, I had been so promiscuous as a younger man that I was lucky never to have come down with something myself. Had I been twenty years younger and in my sexual prime when the AIDS crisis was beginning, I had little doubt that I would have been putting myself in harm’s way with the number of hazardous situations in which I found myself with strangers. How had we reached this point, I wondered? We were middle-aged, both of us, but we had been cheerful teenagers once, who had gone on to waste so much of our lives. I had squandered my twenties in a cowardly attempt to present a deceitful facade to the world and now Julian had thrown away what might have been another forty years of life through his own carelessness.
Staring into the water now, I could feel tears forming behind my eyes and remembered how Bastiaan had told us over dinner how Patient 741 didn’t want his family to know what he was going through because of the extra stigma that would come with the disease in Ireland. So Alice, I realized, who had adored her older brother, knew nothing of his illness.
A woman came over to ask whether I was all right, an unusual occurrence in New York, where weeping strangers are usually left to fend for themselves, but I had no ability to converse and simply stood up and walked away. I wasn’t sure where I was going but my feet somehow led me back toward 96th Street, back to Mount Sinai Hospital, and when I exited the elevator on the seventh floor, I felt grateful for small mercies when I saw that Shaniqua was not at her desk, giving me the freedom to return to Room 703 without having to answer any questions.
This time, I didn’t hesitate or knock but walked straight in, closing the door behind me. The curtains were still open, just as I had left them, and Julian’s head was turned away from me to catch whatever view he could see from where he was lying. He moved a little in the bed to see who had entered the room and when he saw me an expression crossed his face that combined anxiety, shame and relief. I took a chair and sat next to him, my back to the window, saying nothing for a long time as I looked down at the floor, hoping that he would speak first.
“I wondered whether you’d come back,” he whispered eventually, his voice croaky from lack of use. “I figured you would. You never could stay away from me for long.”
“That was a long time ago now,” I replied.
“I hope I haven’t lost any of my appeal,” he said, and the half-smile on his face forced a small laugh from my mouth.
“I’m sorry I ran off like that,” I told him. “It was a shock, that’s all. To see you again after so many years. And here, of all places. I should have stayed.”
“Well, you have a history of disappearing without a word, don’t you?”
I nodded. Of course, this was a subject that would inevitably come up but I wasn’t ready for it, not yet.
“I needed some fresh air,” I told him. “I went for a walk.”
“On 96th Street?” he asked. “To where?”
“I went over to Central Park. You don’t mind that I’ve come back?”
“Why would I?” he asked, shrugging as best as he could, and as his lips parted I could see how his teeth, which had once been spectacularly white, had grown yellow and uneven. There was at least one missing from the lower set and his gums were a whitish shade of pink. “The truth is, I was as shocked to see you as you were to see me. I was glad of a little time to process it. Only I can’t make a break for it as easily as you can.”
“Oh, Julian,” I said, giving in to my emotions now as I buried my face in my hands to stop him from seeing the grief on my face. “What happened to you? How did you end up here?”
“What can I tell you?” he said calmly. “You always knew what I was like. I fucked around. I made a career of it. Stuck it in one too many places, I suppose, and my degenerate ways eventually caught up with me.”
“I thought I was the degenerate.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
I had thought of him many times over the last decade and a half, sometimes with love and sometimes with anger, but the truth was that since I had met Bastiaan he had started to fade from my memory, a thing that I had never previously imagined could happen. I had grown to realize that although I had once loved him—and I had loved him—it was nothing like the love I had experienced with Bastiaan. I had allowed a crush to become an obsession. I’d been infatuated with the idea of his friendship, with the awareness of his beauty, and by his unique ability to transfix all those around him. But Julian had never loved me in return. He may have liked me, he may have cared about me like a brother, but he had never loved me romantically.
“So you live in New York?” he said finally, breaking the silence.
“Yes,” I said. “For about seven years now.”
“I never would have imagined you here. For some reason, I always thought of you living in some sleepy English village. A schoolteacher or something.”
“You thought of me then? Over the years?”
“Of course I did. I could hardly have forgotten you. Are you a doctor, is that it? That’s quite a life change.”
“No, nothing like that,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m just a volunteer. Although my boyfriend is. He works here at Mount Sinai. When we first met, his specialty was communicable diseases and I suppose he was the right man in the right place at the right time because once this thing broke, his services were in demand. But of course we know a lot of gay people here in the city and it started to affect me when we lost friends. I developed an interest in what was going on, in what I could do to help. And I found out that a lot of victims have been abandoned by their families because they’re so ashamed of what’s happened to them. That’s where I come in.”
“You’ve become a do-gooder,” he said. “Strange, considering how selfish you always were.”