If he didn’t have Charlie, he didn’t have Teresa. And he didn’t have their friends, who’d all been Charlie’s friends first. He was fairly sure he didn’t have Charlie. Apparently, Charlie had Julian instead. And who knew what else Charlie had been up to.
He picked up his overnight bag and stuck in a bottle of scotch from the cupboard. He kissed Teresa—missing her face, grazing her ear—and he said, “I’m so sorry.” He said, “I didn’t do this to him.”
“I know,” she said.
* * *
—
And then he was out on the street with no idea which way to walk. He wandered to Little Jim’s and sat there staring at the bottles behind the bar and drank vodka tonics because they were on special. He might have been pounding them down, if he’d felt like moving his arms, which he didn’t. Despite his heart rate, despite the unhelpful primal signals telling him to scramble up a tree for safety. Porn was showing on the big TV: A guy watched, tentatively, from behind a shower wall as two other men went at it. The camera kept panning back to the voyeur’s face. He was never going to join in. It wasn’t that kind of movie. Yale felt nothing, watching. Or, nothing besides what he already felt: nausea, paralysis. He’d torn a little plastic straw to shreds.
No one bothered him. Surely they could tell something was wrong.
It wasn’t the cheating that bothered him most. He articulated this, mentally, down into his glass, thought it at the melting ice cubes. And it wasn’t only the disease, the exposure, although that was most of it. But the thing screwing itself into his heart right now was that he’d let himself be so cowed by Charlie’s demands. He’d been walking on eggshells for this man, and meanwhile Charlie, behind Yale’s back, had just been throwing the eggs straight at the wall. He felt, more than anything else, stupid.
By the time he walked out the door it was late, past dinner, although the clinic would still be open. But why do that to himself right now? He should wait three months. No, three months minus—today was the sixteenth. Three months from New Year’s. So, the end of March? He couldn’t manage the math. The antibodies might show up faster, but that wasn’t exactly reassuring. He’d be walking into either a meaningless negative and more purgatory, or a death sentence. He thought about going to the gallery, sleeping on his office floor. But the security guard would freak out. He thought of Terrence, who was home from the hospital. Someone ought to be at Terrence’s anyway. He could be the person at Terrence’s, the person taking care of Terrence.
He walked to Melrose and buzzed. Then he felt awful at the thought of Terrence having to get up to answer. They weren’t best friends or anything. He’d been closer to Nico. He had no right to Terrence’s energy reserves. He was about to walk away when Terrence said hello. He said, “You can come up, Yale, but I’ll be honest. It smells like shit.”
It did. Terrence’s face had hollowed, his skin was shiny and taut, but in the hospital he’d grown a patchy beard, and he hadn’t shaved it since. How had his body found the energy to produce hair? Why was it growing a beard instead of T cells?
Roscoe, Nico’s old gray cat, rubbed against Yale’s leg. “Does he need food?” Yale asked.
“No,” Terrence said, “but you’re welcome to clean his litter.” He wasn’t joking. “I’m not supposed to do it without rubber gloves, and I ran out. Not supposed to have him here at all, really.” The box in the kitchen was disgusting. Yale knelt on the kitchen floor and got to work, with Roscoe head-butting his thigh. Doing this felt right. Yale could spend the rest of the night scooping out dung and islands of dried piss, and it would feel like he was in exactly the correct place. “You know his doctor doesn’t want you here,” he whispered to Roscoe. “And he’s allergic to you too.”
Once he was on Terrence’s couch, a glass of his own scotch in his hand, he found that he couldn’t tell him anything true. He couldn’t say, “Charlie’s sick,” and he couldn’t say, “Charlie cheated on me.” It was humiliating, and the first part wasn’t his news to tell. He couldn’t go spreading word that Charlie, who had advocated safe sex in Out Loud before anyone else, was a hypocrite.