stuck the envelope on top of the refrigerator, found a serrated knife for the bread. Asher had a New York accent, and the way he pronounced certain words—coffee, for instance—made Yale want to mouth them in his wake.
Charlie poured a gin and tonic for Asher without asking. “You really pulled the plug,” he said. “No going back?” The Howard Brown clinic, where they both were on the board, had finally, after much debate, decided that next month it would start offering the HTLV-III test, the one doctors had been giving since the spring. Asher had quit, vocally. According to Charlie, he’d stabbed a ballpoint pen into the table as he made a point, and the thing had burst, so that when Asher finally stormed out of the board meeting it was with blue hands.
Yale had harbored a crush, an occasionally overwhelming one, on Asher for years. It was quite specific: It would flare up mostly when Asher was angry about something, when his voice grew stentorian. (The most ridiculous of Yale’s first loves was Clarence Darrow, as portrayed in Inherit the Wind, which he’d read in tenth grade. He’d avoided speaking in class for two whole weeks, terrified his cheeks would redden if he tried to discuss the play.) Funny, because when Charlie got similarly agitated, Yale wanted to stuff his own ears with cotton. And his attraction would flare up when Asher’s dark hair got shaggy, which it was right now, making him look like a young, unkempt Marlon Brando. Stockier and clumsier, but still.
Asher ran his law practice out of his own apartment on Aldine, and what had started out as housing equality work had quickly turned into wills and insurance battles. He was a daytime friend, not someone to hit the bars with at night. His love life, in fact, was a mystery, and Yale could never figure out if Asher would approach sex with the same intensity with which he approached his work, or if, having spent all his passion on the day’s battles, he’d rather just call an escort once a week. He’d been talking a lot lately about the difference between activism and advocacy, and Yale couldn’t remember which Asher was in favor of, or if he wanted everyone to do both. He had shoulders like barrels, and his eyelashes were long and dark, and Yale required a valiant effort not to stare at his lips when he talked.
Asher’s voice had already started to boom, loud enough that Yale worried Terrence might hear if someone had let him in downstairs and he was already out in the hallway. “Look. We all have a death sentence. Right? You and me, we don’t know what that is. It’s a day, it’s fifty years. You wanna narrow the range? You wanna freak yourself out? That’s all the test gives you. I mean, show me the line for the miracle cure and I’ll take the damn test, I’ll make everyone else take it too. Meanwhile, what? You want to end up in a government database?”
Charlie said, “You know where I stand.”
“I do, and listen.” Asher’s hands were flying, gin spilling down the side of his glass. Yale leaned back against the sink, watched those hands like a fireworks show. “If your priority is safe sex, the test isn’t helping. Half these guys get a false sense of security, the other half know they’re dying. They’re depressed, they get drunk, and what the hell do you think they do? They don’t run out to the rubber store.”
Charlie was still laughing over “rubber store,” riffing about Helmet Hut and Trojans R Us, when Terrence and Fiona buzzed up. In the time it took them to get upstairs, Asher cleared his throat and deftly turned his ranting to the opinion that there was no decent Chinese food in Chicago. Yale argued that you just had to go to Chinatown and be willing to eat chicken feet.
Terrence and Fiona walked in, arm in arm.
Terrence handed Charlie a bottle of wine and said, in his whitest voice, “The wife and I got stuck in the worst traffic, driving in from Sheboygan. Thank God we’re fixing up that infrastructure with the trickle-down and whatnot, God bless the USA.”
They seemed to be doing well, both of Nico’s bereaved, but what could you tell from the outside? Fiona’s blonde curls always lent her a vibrancy, an alertness, that compensated for any fatigue. And Terrence—he looked thin, but you’d never know he was sick if it weren’t