at its peak. He needed to yell at Charlie now, not when he’d calmed down, had time to think. Except he wasn’t calming down. Every few minutes, it would hit him fresh. Every few minutes, his blood pressure rose.
* * *
—
The next day, Saturday, Yale went to the movies. He saw Spies Like Us and Out of Africa, but they weren’t as distracting as he’d hoped. He was more absorbed with the people around him, the couples and teenagers and solo film buffs having perfectly normal days. He’d had thousands of normal days himself. It seemed such an alien concept now, to have a normal day. To walk around oblivious, just participating in the world. It seemed unreasonable for anyone to be allowed a normal day.
That night he played Battleship with Kurt and insisted on doing the dishes. As he scrubbed, Cecily said, “Do you want me to call my friend Andrew? He and his boyfriend were the ones I went to the Howard Brown thing with. He lost a lover, and he’s a counselor now.”
“Thanks. I’m not ready.” Yale could think of two Andrews, and wondered if this was one of them. Hadn’t Andrew Parr lost someone? The out population of Chicago had always been small enough as it was, and now they’d lost more than a hundred men. And who knew how many they’d lose this year. Soon there would only be one gay Andrew left in the whole city. No last names needed. Even now, the odds that Cecily’s Andrew knew Charlie were high.
Yale said, “I can’t get my thoughts straight. I feel like—like my head is full of oil and vinegar, and someone’s shaken it all up.”
Kurt, painting a model airplane at the table, said, “Your head is salad dressing.”
“Sure.”
“Salad head.”
2015
Fiona met Arnaud outside the Saint-Paul Métro. He had the key to the building’s front door already, and right around now, he hoped, the landlady would be unlocking Kurt’s apartment. She’d call Arnaud to let him know it was done.
He checked his messages. “Nothing yet, but we have to walk anyway.” Fiona had imagined them breaking into Kurt’s in the middle of the night, or at least in the dark, but that made no sense. They had to do it when he and his wife were at work. And she had assumed this landlady would want to be present, to make sure they weren’t stealing anything, but no—it was more important that she wasn’t around to be implicated.
Fiona looked at every face they passed, and it wasn’t, this time, to find Claire—it was to check for Kurt, make sure she didn’t have to duck behind Arnaud, pull her hair across her face.
“You need to calm down,” Arnaud said.
“Ha. Well. I’ll try.”
The neighborhood was relatively swank at first, but slowly, as they walked, the streets—which were indeed full of both falafel places and rainbow flags—grew dingier. This side street in particular had what looked like either a sex club or peep show. She couldn’t quite decipher the signs, but that was the gist. Arnaud stopped at a newsstand and bought Le Monde. He said, “It’s around the corner. While we wait I’ll buy you a whiskey.”
“It’s not even two o’clock!”
“You need a whiskey to calm you down.”
“It’s one fifty-four!” she said, but she followed him. Her painkiller was wearing off, and she was fighting this cold, and wasn’t whiskey basically medicine? They found a café that was really more of a bar.
Arnaud sat Fiona with a whiskey at a tiny round table in the corner. He read his paper and drank a beer, the foam sticking to his lip.
This wasn’t the worst thing. She’d be less likely, now, to jump if the floorboards creaked, to shriek if she saw a spider. She held the glass with her left hand, kept her bandaged right hand in her lap. She still couldn’t uncurl her fingers without sending white-hot pain up her arm.
She was the one facing the windows, and she watched the sidewalk the whole time.
At the only other occupied table, a couple argued quietly in French over their espressos. The man looked a good deal older than the woman, although what French woman between fifteen and fifty didn’t look twenty-six? This is how she and Damian must first have appeared to the outside world: the young student and her professor, the fifteen-year gap just small enough that no one took them for father and daughter. And how could they, the way she used to hang on him? They’d