saw Nico, he’d been unconscious, with foam—some kind of awful white foam—oozing suddenly from his mouth and nostrils. Terrence had screamed into the hallway for the nurses, had run into a cleaning cart and hurt his knee, and the fucking nurses were more concerned about whether or not Terrence had shed blood than about what was happening to Nico. And here on the slide was Nico’s full, beautiful face, and it was too much. Yale dashed up the rest of the stairs.
He worried the bedrooms would be full of guys who’d been taking poppers, but the first one, at least, was empty. He closed the door and sat on the bed. It was dark out now, the sparse streetlights of Belden just barely illuminating the walls and floor. Richard must have redone at least this one room after the mysterious wife moved out. Two black leather chairs flanked the wide bed. There was a small shelf of art books. Yale put his glass on the floor and lay back to stare at the ceiling and do the slow-breathing trick Charlie had taught him.
All fall, he’d been memorizing the list of the gallery’s regular donors. Tuning out the downstairs noise, he did what he often did at home when he couldn’t sleep: He named donors starting with A, then ones starting with B. A fair number overlapped with the Art Institute donors he’d worked with for the past three years, but there were hundreds of new names—Northwestern alumni, North Shore types—that he needed to recognize on the spot.
Recently he’d found the lists disconcerting—had felt a dull gray uneasiness around them. He remembered being eight and asking his father who else in the neighborhood was Jewish (“Are the Rothmans Jewish? Are the Andersens?”) and his father rubbing his chin, saying, “Let’s not do that, buddy. Historically, bad things happen when we make lists of Jews.” It wasn’t till years later that Yale realized this was a hang-up unique to his father, to his brand of self-hatred. But Yale had been young and impressionable, and maybe that’s why the reciting of names chafed.
Or no, maybe it was this: Lately he’d had two parallel mental lists going—the donor list and the sick list. The people who might donate art or money, and the friends who might get sick; the big donors, the ones whose names you’d never forget, and the friends he’d already lost. But they weren’t close friends, the lost ones, until tonight. They’d been acquaintances, friends of friends like Nico’s old roommate Jonathan, a couple of gallery owners, one bartender, the bookstore guy. There were, what, six? Six people he knew of, people he’d say hi to at a bar, people whose middle names he couldn’t tell you, and maybe not even their last names. He’d been to three memorials. But now, a new list: one close friend.
Yale and Charlie had gone to an informational meeting last year with a speaker from San Francisco. He’d said, “I know guys who’ve lost no one. Groups that haven’t been touched. But I also know people who’ve lost twenty friends. Entire apartment buildings devastated.” And Yale, stupidly, desperately, had thought maybe he’d fall into that first category. It didn’t help that, through Charlie, he knew practically everyone in Boystown. It didn’t help that his friends were all overachievers—and that they seemed to be overachieving in this terrible new way as well.
It was Yale’s saving grace, and Charlie’s, that they’d met when they had, fallen in love so quickly. They’d been together since February of ’81 and—to the bemusement of nearly everyone—exclusive since fall of the same year. Nineteen eighty-one wasn’t too soon to get infected, not by a long shot, but then this wasn’t San Francisco, it wasn’t New York. Things, thank God, moved slower here.
How had Yale forgotten he hated rum? It always made him moody, dehydrated, hot. His stomach a mess.
He found a closet-size bathroom off this room and sat on the cool toilet, head between his knees.
On his list of people who might get sick, who weren’t careful enough, who might even already be sick: Well, Julian, for sure. Richard. Asher Glass. Teddy—for Christ’s sake, Teddy Naples, who claimed that once he managed to avoid checking out of the Man’s World bathhouse for fifty-two hours, just napped (through the sounds of sex and pumping music) in the private rooms various older men had rented for their liaisons, subsisting on Snickers bars from the vending machine.