“three decades of AIDS” thing. He looked as healthy as anyone, was so muscular you couldn’t believe he had the same virus she’d seen carve men into skeletons. His hair had grayed and he had jowls, and surely he was dealing with early osteoporosis or the other landmines of being HIV positive over age fifty, but in that movie he’d looked ready to jump through the screen into Fiona’s living room to help her lift boxes.
It wasn’t true, what she’d said. They weren’t all dead. Not all of them.
On October 13 she’d held her own quiet memorial, alone in her house, for Nico. Candles and music and too much wine. Thirty years. How could it possibly have been thirty years? But that was just the start of the worst time, when the entire city she’d known was turning into lesions and echoing coughs and the ropy fossils of limbs. And although it made no sense at all, she’d never fully been able to shake the ridiculous, narcissistic feeling that the whole epidemic was somehow her fault. If she hadn’t mothered Nico (she’d recently whined this at her therapist), if she hadn’t taken care of him in those early years, brought him his allergy medicine on the El, let him see that she was doing alright—wouldn’t he have gone home sooner or later? Vowed to date girls? He’d have been miserable, but it wouldn’t have lasted long. A couple more unpleasant years at home, like every other gay man on the planet. And maybe he wouldn’t have been exposed. He wouldn’t have died.
She had so much guilt about so many of them—the ones she wished she’d talked into getting tested sooner, the ones she might have gone back in time to keep from going out on a particular night (“Let’s agree that we know this is illogical,” her shrink said), the ones she might have done more for when they got sick. The night that, for no reason, she’d told Charlie Keene that Yale was with Teddy. Why on earth had she done that? It was an honest, drunken mistake, but everyone knew what Freud said about mistakes.
She felt, sometimes, like some horrible Hindu god, turning all she touched to ash.
The painkillers were making her swimmy.
She could stay here, with this paper graveyard. And who knew what other landmines Richard’s shelf contained?
Or.
Right now, maybe a ten-minute walk away, there was footage of Nico she could look at. Nico alive. She was terrified; it would be so much stranger than a still photo. Was there sound? When was the last time she’d heard Nico’s voice? When he was alive, she figured. If anyone had ever taped him—well, that would have been Richard. These would be the tapes.
She had to do it.
* * *
—
Serge had told her the corner for the studio, but she hadn’t paid attention to the street number—and it wasn’t like Richard had a sign out front. Fiona looked at the doorways, the storefronts, as if she could figure it out by squinting. Nothing looked right.
Was she glad? She found herself at least partly relieved.
And then she spotted Serge’s motorbike parked on the broad sidewalk, propped against the wall of a building.
She steeled herself and said, “Okay, then.”
She felt her phone before she heard it.
“Yes?” She was shouting, and she didn’t care. She plugged her other ear.
“Hey, calm down,” Arnaud said.
“I’m calm. What.”
“Can you get to Le Marais? I think we have a couple hours.”
She spun around to look for a cab. If nothing else, this timing was a sign, wasn’t it? She wasn’t meant to go in there and dwell on the past. She was here for Claire, not Nico. She left Richard’s studio behind like it was on fire.
1986
Yale nearly forgot to go into work the next day. He’d somehow believed that it was Saturday, that after he went to the grocery store and the GNC for Terrence, after he packed up and tiptoed out of the apartment, all he had on his agenda was finding a place to stay tonight, maybe buying a clean shirt. But at ten o’clock, walking down Halsted with a headache, he saw a guy in a necktie and realized it was Friday.
At least it gave him somewhere to be. He already had his overnight bag, so he just got on the El, his clothes wrinkled from Terrence’s couch. As the doors closed, someone came running at them, as if he’d fit through the inch of space left. He stood there, desolate, as