Julian nodded, without taking his face off Yale. “Yale, where are you staying? Are you alright?”
“I have no idea. I mean, I’m fine. I was kind of gonna sit here till four.”
“Oh, Yale. Come with us, then. Is that why you asked me the other day? I’m a dolt.”
Yale said, “You’re not. And I shouldn’t. I can’t.” Not if Julian would be there. He couldn’t wake up sober in the morning and eat eggs with Julian. He couldn’t take care of Julian vomiting in the night.
Richard said, “My friend owns a little hotel on Belmont. It’s in a beautiful old house. We’ll walk you there, okay?”
It seemed as good an option as any.
* * *
—
Richard hugged the hotel’s owner, an older guy in a bolo tie and aviators, and gave him a fifty-dollar bill and asked him to take good care of Yale. As the owner showed Yale the elaborate key system (one for the front door, one for the upstairs hall, one for the room), Richard and Julian took off.
In the morning, there was coffee and powdered doughnuts. There was a little dog that lived downstairs—a fluffy white thing named Miss Marple—and a TV that broadcast two channels. Yale came back the next night with his bag and his box, and reserved his room for the rest of the week. It would deplete his checking account, but if he had to dip into savings, he would. What the hell was he saving for, exactly?
* * *
—
On Friday Yale went to the Laundromat, and there was Teddy, pulling his clothes from the dryer, peeling apart his staticky shirts. He said hello—coldly, Yale thought—and went back to his folding. But as Yale was starting the washer, Teddy came up and stood there, arms full of clothes. Of course Teddy couldn’t just hold clothes; he bounced them in his arms like a baby.
“Listen,” he said, “There’s something I need to say.”
“Okay?”
“After you left the church on Sunday, Asher and I went in there and found Charlie in a pretty awful state. So let me just start by saying I know what’s going on, I know he’s sick.”
“Alright.” Teddy didn’t say anything, so Yale looked around, saw no one was listening, whispered. “Well, no, he’s not sick, he just has the virus. Do you know how he got the virus?”
“No, and I don’t want to. That’s where judgment and blame come in, and I want no part of it. I mean, what, we’re gonna make an infection tree? A flowchart? Come on. Everyone got it from someone. We all got it from Reagan, right? We’re gonna blame someone, let’s be productive and blame the ignorance and neglect of Ronald Fucking Reagan. Let’s blame Jesse Helms. How about the Pope? Here’s what I know. I know your lover of—what, five years?—is scared shitless, and you decide the appropriate response is to walk out and leave him alone with his terrified mother, and then to yell at him at the fucking funeral of your friend.”
Yale said, “Wait. Wait. He kicked me out.” Although that wasn’t precisely true, was it? How had it even happened?
“Yeah, he’ll be acting irrationally for a while. Come on.”
He wanted to ask if Asher was mad at him, too, if every gay man in Chicago had heard Charlie’s side of the story, if Yale’s name was being mentioned around town in the same breath as Helms and the Pope.
“Teddy, he doesn’t want me there. And he’s the one who should be crawling to me.”
“The sick don’t do the crawling.”
“Is that a philosophical tenet?” Yale tried to lower his voice; the woman at the counter was staring now.
“Sure.”
“So you’re out there tending the ill? Walking the streets and giving out morphine shots? You’re running the clean-needle exchange?”
“As a matter of fact.” Oh, God. Yale had stepped right into it. “As a matter of fact, Julian just moved in. I’m taking care of Julian.”
Teddy and Julian hadn’t been an item, a real item, in a year or two, but there had always been that possibility, a thread left hanging.
“When?”
“Two days ago. Richard called me Wednesday morning. He said you were out cruising together when you found him.”
“Jesus. I was not cruising, I was homeless.”
“Anyway, he’s at my place now, and one of the things I’m realizing is how much I love him, how much I always have. When you’re going to lose someone, it puts things in a new light.”
“You’re back together?”
“Well, not physically. Not yet, but it could happen. The point is,