Paul rests his elbows on the guardrail of the Millennium Bridge. Below them, the Thames swirls in loops of brown and gray. A tour boat disappears beneath their feet.
“You’re acting like I don’t have a right to be worried,” Paul says. “But I think I have a right to be worried. I mean,” he lowers his voice here, “he fucked me without a condom, Mark.”
Mark instinctively reaches out to rub Paul’s back, but stops himself short of actually touching him; he doesn’t want to convey conflicting messages, particularly given what he’s brought him here to say. Behind him, two tourists snap a series of photos, and Mark wonders if he’s in them—if the back of his head features prominently in shots of the British Parliament.
Paul continues, “I could have AIDS.”
“You don’t have AIDS.”
“It would be HIV, I guess. But still, it’s a possibility.”
“It would only be a possibility if Alcott were positive, which he’s not.”
Paul scrapes a marred spot along the metal railing.
“Do you know that?” he asks. “Have you asked him?”
Mark’s patience burns low, and he considers chastising Paul for his ignorance. Again, though, he exercises restraint. The last thing he wants is for Paul to run and tell their mutual friends that Mark put him in harm’s way—that he threatened Paul with disease—before leaving him. Better to hedge his bets, Mark thinks. Better to suffer through a little more empathy so as to save some face in what will inevitably be a face-decimating few months.
“I haven’t,” he says. “But I can if it’ll make you feel better.”
“No, don’t. Oh, God, please don’t. I’d never get over the humiliation.” Paul sighs. “I’m such a hypochondriac.”
“It’s endearing.”
Mark looks left. Sun reflects off the Shard in broken slivers of light. For once, London’s skies are cloudless.
Paul says, “No, it’s neurotic. Do you know that after I kissed my first guy I went and got tested?”
Mark can’t fathom how many times he’s heard this story. He masks his annoyance by reminding himself that this is the last time he’ll ever have to suffer through it.
“I vaguely remember you mentioning that,” he says.
“I was sixteen, and I went to Boystown with this kid from my soccer team. Scott Reardon. Anyway, Scott got so drunk on the frozen slushies at Sidetrack that he puked in his mom’s Accord, and I spent the whole night in the corner of some bar with a thirty-two-year-old French Canadian.”
“That’s right. It’s all coming back to me.”
“Every day for the next week I called the AIDS hotline. The one that the CDC runs. You know what I’m talking about?”
“I do.”
“Anyway, I’d tell whatever poor son of a bitch picked up that I had this friend who made out with a guy, and who was worried that he might get sick. And then they’d give me this whole runaround about how low the chances are of getting HIV like that, and how it would require that both guys had, like, bleeding open sores in their mouths.” Paul rips off a shred of fingernail with his teeth and flicks it into the Thames. “Still, though, they’d never actually say it was impossible. I’d try to get them to say that it was. I’d ask the question in, like, twenty different ways. Still, they’d stick to their line: there have been no reported cases, and the likelihood is very, very low. Which, I mean, obviously wasn’t good enough for me; I still stayed up at night wondering how I was going to tell my mom and dad that I was gay and that I had AIDS in the same conversation.”
Silently, Mark tallies what details are left; he maps out how many plot turns he must endure before Paul’s story reaches its merciful end.
“So I got tested. After two months of total misery, I told my mom that I had to go back to Chicago for some research paper, and I went to a free clinic in Boystown, a block away from the bar where I made out with the French Canadian. The woman who took my blood was this hippie earth mother named Kat. While we waited for the results—it was one of those ten-minute things—she sat me down in her office and gave me little packets of lube and talked to me about wearing condoms during oral sex, which, I mean, can you even imagine?” He adds: “I actually went back to see her every time I was home from college. Two weeks ago she added me on LinkedIn.”
Mark nods. He says: “I think we should end things, Paul.”
Below him, another boat passes. He glances down at the tops of a hundred heads.
Paul’s silent. He stares at Mark wide-eyed, his shoulders bunched up around his ears.
Mark recalls all the words he practiced reciting the night before, the delicate balance of his reasoning and rhetoric.
“I care about you,” he says. “Deeply. Very deeply, incidentally. But we’re two different people. We’ve grown into two different people.”
Of all the canned phrases he’s prepared, this is the one in which he believes the most. They have changed, they have grown—or Mark has, at any rate. Indeed, what’s surprised him the most over the past three days is how swiftly his categorization of Paul has changed. Alcott’s presence has reminded Mark of how intoxicating new lust is, and has cast his fraternal love for Paul in a dull, bloodless light. If anything, Paul has become a barrier: he’s the guy who Mark regrettably asked to dinner, and with whom he’s thus obliged to dine, even though the only person he’s actually interested in talking to is the waiter who winks at him every time he refills his water glass.
“But I…”
Paul’s voice cracks, and Mark’s muscles tense: Paul mustn’t cry. That’s a fate that Mark was actively trying to avoid by bringing him here, to the Millennium Bridge, one of the busiest pedestrian walkways in the city. He’d hoped that the scrutiny of strangers would keep Paul in line. Besides, he figured that monumental events should take place at monumental locations. And for Paul, this afternoon is sure to become a monumental event.
“But what about Friday night?”
Paul is pleading now, and Mark wants nothing more than to shake his shoulders, to tell him to stop. He wants to tell him that the most important thing now is to show a bit of dignity, for Paul to think of his future self looking back on this moment without shrinking from shame.
“We both know that you did that for me,” Mark says, coolly. “You were trying to make me happy and prove yourself.”
“Fuck you for saying that. I wanted to do it.” Paul’s choking back tears. He speaks as though he’s been in a terrible car accident, emerging from a state of shock. “And even if what you’re saying is true, why isn’t that enough? Why isn’t wanting to make you happy enough?”
“Because that’s not how things work.”