know all this?” Yale wanted to ask who else might have known, but he wasn’t sure he could handle the answer. Terrence had really seemed to believe he’d witnessed an isolated incident. But if Julian knew, surely Teddy did. He wondered about Asher, Richard, Charlie’s staff.
“I mean, he always sort of confided in me. One time I saw him at Montrose Street Beach, like full-on knocking on some guy’s Audi window. After that he’d tell me things. He wasn’t bragging or anything, just unloading. He wasn’t happy about it. Like, why does anyone do that stuff? Either you’re having a blast, or you do it because you hate yourself, and I don’t think he was having fun.”
Yale felt a lot of things clicking into place, pieces he hadn’t known were scattered around the recesses of his brain. He said, “And you didn’t tell me. You knew, and you didn’t tell me.” If Fiona was right, if no one really liked Charlie, why had they all protected him for so long?
“I just—I wouldn’t want people talking about every mistake I made. That’s the sex police, you know? I’m not the sex police. Hey, I’m really sorry, okay? I’m really, really sorry. You’re not—you’re not infected, are you?” Julian’s eyes filled with something like panic, as if the thought had only just occurred to him.
Yale said, because it was true in the loosest sense, “I tested negative.” As of May. Well. He’d been negative, and lord knew how long Charlie had been exposing him to stuff. He stood up, made Julian stand up, hugged him. If Julian really was leaving on Sunday, he didn’t want their friendship ending in a fight. He could be angry later, on his own. He could draw targets on the wall, pictures of everyone who’d betrayed him, and he could throw darts at their faces. But he could also hold Julian tight for a second. It felt good. He said, “Sex police would be a great Halloween costume.”
* * *
—
He was awake till three. The odds of Charlie becoming infected after only one encounter, and then Yale becoming infected after only a few encounters with Charlie, would be minuscule. But now his statistical padding had disappeared. He knew that the virus didn’t care about fairness, about probability—but that didn’t make him any safer.
Yale wondered suddenly if Charlie had even gotten tested at all, back in the spring. They’d been counseled together but their blood had been drawn separately, and they’d been called back separately for their results. Nothing was beyond Yale’s imagination now, no level of deceit. Charlie might have been too chickenshit to go through with it, might have convinced himself he was okay until he was presented with the undeniable fact that someone he’d slept with was indeed infected.
* * *
—
When Yale got to work on Friday, still half asleep, he had a note to “call Alfred Cheng.” It took him a moment to recognize this as Dr. Cheng, the Dr. Cheng who wasn’t supposed to phone for another ten days. His throat flipped inside out. He wanted to call back instantly just as much as he wanted to wait a hundred years, but he couldn’t imagine phoning from the office. And he couldn’t call from the apartment either. Julian had planned to stay in all day watching soap operas and playing with Roscoe. It was probably nothing—an issue with the bill, a follow-up question. It was far too soon for the results, and what bad news could there be besides the results? Maybe something else had come up in the blood work. Cholesterol. Flat-out cancer.
In the late morning, Teddy called to ask if Yale had seen Julian. “I haven’t,” he said, “but I’m sure he’s fine.”
“Why would he not be fine?” Teddy said. “I only asked if you’d seen him.”
Yale wanted Teddy to figure it out, to realize Julian would rather spend time with him than suffocate under Teddy’s watch. He wanted to ask if he’d known Charlie had been out whoring around like a teenage drug addict.
At noon, exactly noon, he walked over to the concert hall without his coat. There were pay phones in the lobby. His hands shook too much to be efficient with his quarter, too much to flip carefully through the address book he’d shoved in his pocket. He cursed himself as he dialed for waiting till lunchtime; the whole office was probably out. Someone played the trumpet somewhere—fast, agitated music, which didn’t help.