“I was. All those boys. They were younger, and so open, not like my generation. I envied them. They came out at eighteen, twenty. They hadn’t wasted their lives.”
“You’ve hardly wasted yours,” Fiona said.
He handed her the open album. “I was always making up for lost time.”
There was Nico, curly brown hair and long teeth, his face tan and freckled, looking just past the camera and laughing. Some joke, crystallized forever. She had a copy of this photo, but an enlarged and cropped one. This version bore an orange date stamp: 6/6/82. It would be three years until he got sick. And this version showed not just Nico but the two men on either side of him. One was Julian Ames. Beautiful Julian Ames. The other she didn’t know or remember, but as she studied his face she saw above the man’s left eyebrow a small, oblong purple spot. “Christ,” she said, but Richard was busy explaining to Serge the way Chicago had been in the early eighties, the smallness of Boystown and the way it still hovered then, somewhere between gay ghetto and gay mecca. How there was no place like it, not in San Francisco, not in New York. She tried to wipe the spot away, in case it was on the cellophane, but it didn’t move. She stared at these sick men who didn’t know they were sick, the spot that was still, that summer, only a rash. She handed the album back and Richard continued his narration. Fiona pretended to peer into his lap as he turned the pages, but really she let the jet lag overtake her vision, let the pictures blur. It was too much.
“This was Asher Glass,” Richard said. “Big activist, a dynamo. The most beautiful voice, a big loud lawyer voice. The shoulders on him! Built like a brick shithouse, is what we used to say. I don’t think you can translate that into French. I have no idea who this one is. Cute, though. This one’s Hiram something, who owned a record store on Belmont. Belmont would be, like, I don’t know. What’s the equivalent?”
Serge laughed. “All of Paris?”
“No, dear, like some street in Le Marais. We weren’t that provincial. This was Dustin Gianopoulos. Teddy Naples. A pocket twink, as you can see. Never stopped moving. This one, I don’t remember either. He looks like a manatee.”
“I don’t know this word,” Serge said.
“A lumpy walrus,” Fiona offered, without looking at the picture.
“This was Terrence, Nico’s boyfriend. Yale Tishman and Charlie Keene. That’s a saga there. Look how sweet they are. This one’s Rafael Peña. Remember him?” This was directed at Fiona, obviously, and she roused herself to nod.
She said, ostensibly to Serge but really to Richard, in a harsh voice she didn’t expect, “They’re all dead.”
“That’s not true!” Richard said. “Not all of them. Maybe half. Exaggeration never did any good.”
“This is the American habit,” Serge said to Richard. “You exaggerate.”
“Don’t listen to her. They’re not all dead.”
Fiona said, “I need a sharp knife.” Her poor timing didn’t register until both men started laughing, and she realized she hadn’t said anything yet about the converter, the clamshell packaging. She explained, and Serge left the room to return with a massive pair of shears. He made quick work of the plastic, and soon her phone was charging happily.
Richard said, “Two things I haven’t told you. One’s just a minor nuisance, and one is nothing at all.”
“Not nothing at all,” Serge said. “A very big deal.”
“But it shouldn’t affect you. I didn’t mention, when you wrote, that the next few weeks are a bit of a circus for me. I have a show going up.”
“At the Centre Pompidou,” Serge added. “A big fucking deal.”
“But it’s all done, all my work, until, you know, the day before. I have a number of interviews, though, and some of them will be kind enough to meet me here. So just ignore, ignore, ignore.”
“But you come to the vernissage! If you’re still here,” Serge said.
“The preview,” Richard explained. “For the press and the VIPs. They wanted to do two nights, but I told them I’m old.”
“The sixteenth,” Serge said. More than a week from now. Fiona hadn’t thought that far ahead. “And a big party in two nights!”
“I’ll—sure,” she said, in what she hoped was a vague way.
“The other thing is the nuisance. They’re shooting some kind of film on this street. An American one, romantic