The Trouble Boy, page 17
“Just a simple recipe my mom taught me,” he said, putting it into the oven.
I was impressed. The idea of cooking a whole chicken terrified me.
After preparing our salads, he joined me in the living room, where I was reading a screenplay I had brought from the office. He handed me a glass of red wine.
“It should take about forty-five minutes to cook,” he said, looking at his watch.
Donovan had brought along a copy of La Dolce Vita, even though we had both already seen it. In the first several minutes, when the helicopter is flying the statue of Christ over Rome, he paused the DVD.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
I turned towards him.
“Are you talking with Elizabeth?” he asked.
“No. Are you?”
“We speak occasionally.”
“She got brainwashed by that stupid seminar,” I said.
“She wanted me to take it, too,” he said. “I told her to forget about it.”
“I don’t understand how a seminar can make you dump a friend.”
“She’s just crazy, Toby. You can’t let her get to you.”
As we watched the movie, we lost track of time and the smell of chicken roasting quickly turned into the smell of chicken burning.
“Do you smell that?” I asked.
“Smell what?”
“The chicken is burning.”
He rushed to the kitchen and pulled the pan out of the oven. The chicken was charred on the bottom. He returned to the living room, embarrassed.
“I’m glad you caught that,” he said.
“Couldn’t you smell it?”
He blushed. “Oh. I guess you don’t know. I figured Jamie would have told you by now.”
“Told me what?”
“I can’t smell.”
“Why not?”
“I had my nose fixed when I was seventeen, and they fucked up my olfactory sensors.”
“You had a nose job?” It must have been a good one, because I had never noticed.
“I had a deviated septum, and I was having trouble breathing. But honestly, I think I would have had it fixed anyway. I had a swell the size of a ski jump.”
I started laughing. “You’re a food writer, and you can’t smell?”
His voice grew quiet. “Please don’t tell anyone, okay? I could be fired if anyone found out.”
“It makes no difference to me,” I said. “I’ll just have to warn you before you step in shit.”
Both of us had long days to look forward to, so after finishing dinner and the movie, we got ready for bed. I took a set of sheets out of the closet so Donovan could sleep on the couch.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I can just sleep next to you.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised. “Sure.”
“I mean, you have a queen, right?”
I nodded, and tried to control my hard-on as I considered the possibilities. Maybe this would be the night we hooked up.
Donovan changed in the bathroom and came out wearing boxers and a T-shirt. He slid into bed next to me.
As we drifted asleep, I was careful not to let my body touch his, though I desperately wanted to.
When I woke up, my arm was wrapped around Donovan. I withdrew it in horror before he could notice. He stirred slightly.
After waking up, Donovan took a shower first. I kept one eye open as he came out of the bathroom in a towel and proceeded to get dressed. He put on a fresh pair of pink boxers by sliding them under his towel.
“Hey, do you have a sweater I can borrow?” he asked. “It’s supposed to get really cold today.”
“In the drawer.”
He picked one out that I thought looked terrible on me. He put it on and looked great.
As soon as he left, I rolled over to his side of the bed and breathed in his scent. It was a combination of his hair, whatever he styled with, soap, deodorant, facial products, and sweat. It was sweet, like tanning oil.
I thought about him, being as close as I was, to the indentation he had left on the pillow, to his odor left on the sheets.
This, I thought, is all I will ever get of him.
While my relationship with Cameron started off curiously buddy-buddy, it soon became clear I was little more than a hired gun. One minute I would be his confidant, and the next minute he would have me picking up steamed vegetables for his lunch. I never got to accompany him to other companies’ premieres, though I was permitted to sit in on the occasional meeting. I learned from Margaret that his previous assistant, the one who had reportedly joined the circus, actually had joined the circus. He and Cameron had been having an affair, and he was terminated once Cameron decided the relationship was over. He was given a confidential—though obviously not so confidential that the entire office didn’t know about it—severance package of $25,000, and decided to use it to fulfill his lifelong dream of attending Clown College. Perhaps because of this, Cameron went back and forth between treating me like a friend and treating me like the janitor. He wasn’t above asking me to dump out his ashtray when it got too full.
One day in February, he asked me to stop by his apartment and pick up a screenplay he needed that afternoon. I was sure I had a copy of it on file, but he insisted he needed “that exact copy of that exact version,” so I hopped on the subway and rode up to Chelsea, where Cameron lived in a co-op with units that went for seven figures. By now, I was on a first-name basis with his doormen, so I was let up without a fuss.
The other times I had seen Cameron’s apartment had been right after his maid had given everything a thorough scrubbing. This time, however, the place was filthy. There were dirty dishes in the kitchen, a coffee pot left dangerously on, magazines and screenplays strewn all over the living room. I peeked into his bedroom and saw his bedsheets in a tangle. Had he had a tryst last night? Was my boss getting more play than I was? There were two condom wrappers on the floor and a bottle of lube nearby. I wondered if Cameron was a top or a bottom.
After I found the screenplay, I had to use the toilet. Cameron’s bathroom was enormous compared to my East Village water closet, with mirrors on every wall. I lifted the lid to discover a mess of tissue and a used condom. At least Cameron had the good taste to throw away his condoms before he left for work in the morning.
I flushed, and the toilet let out an enormous gurgle. The tissue went down, and then came back up again. I flushed again. Water started rushing in as the bowl refilled at a rate that seemed faster than usual. Shit, shit, shit, I thought to myself. Soon water was spilling onto the floor and the tissue and condom were floating near the rim of the toilet like a little barge.
Even worse, I still had to pee.
Okay, Cameron, I thought, this is your fault for being such a slob. I relieved myself in his sink and then quickly rinsed it out with water. I looked for a plunger, but couldn’t find one. I ran downstairs and had the doorman call maintenance. As I stood in Cameron’s bathroom while the maintenance guy shoved an industrial-sized plunger into the toilet, spilling tissue and the guilty condom everywhere, my cell phone rang.
“Toby, where are you? I need that script, dude.” Cameron thought calling me “dude” made him more affable. I found it annoying; “dude” was an affectation I had left behind after eighth grade in California.
“I had to use the bathroom and the toilet got clogged. I mean, I didn’t clog it up. I just had to pee, but there was something in there and—” I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation with my boss.
“Why were you using my bathroom?”
“Look, I’m sorry. I’ll be right back down as soon as possible. I’ve got the maintenance guy here.”
“You called maintenance? Make sure you give them a tip or something.”
The maintenance guy finished his work and proclaimed the toilet “good as new.” I knew, however, that I couldn’t leave the bathroom looking like this. Using wads of clean tissue as a buffer, I picked up the wet tissue and the condom and threw them in the trash. My stomach churned, and I nearly retched. Dealing with other people’s bodily functions was not my forte, especially when it was my boss’s shit I was cleaning up.
As I took the elevator down, I thought, it can’t get much worse than this.
If I could just stick it out, though, I had the feeling success would be waiting for me.
That next meeting, that next phone call, that next drink.
It would be there, and then it would be gone.
On a Tuesday around the end of February, I called Jamie at his office. His secretary, who had strict instructions to give his friends his actual whereabouts and not the “he isn’t available” line, told me she hadn’t heard from him today. I tried his cell and home numbers, leaving messages in both places. It was unlike Jamie not to return a phone call, especially from me. I kept calling every few hours, but got no answer. At 6 P.M., I called Donovan at his office.
“What do you think is wrong with him?” I asked. “I mean, he could be dead for all we know, kidnapped or drowned in his bathtub!” I was overtaken with the melodramatic reaction Jamie would have toward his own disappearance. Underneath it all, though, I was really worried.
“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” Donovan said. “Maybe we should call his parents. I have their number if you want it.”
“Let me go over to his building first,” I offered. Jamie was still not out to his parents, and they had a notoriously difficult relationship.
I left the office just after six, earlier than usual, and caught a cab uptown.
Jamie’s building was in the east seventies, a mid-century apartment building that had seen better days but still carried a hint of New York glamour. His parents had bought him the apartment as an investment when he moved to New York.
I spoke with Miguel, Jamie’s Puerto Rican doorman. Jamie called Miguel “the hot one.”
“He was out in the morning, but he’s been home since then,” Miguel said.
I had him ring Jamie’s buzzer. There was no answer.
“Maybe he’s sleeping,” Miguel said. On his good ear, I thought.
I called him on my cell phone and started to speak into his answering machine. “Jamie, pick up the phone, we’re all worried about why you haven’t—”
He picked up.
There was no sound on the other end of the line. I went out onto the street for some privacy.
“Are you there?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. He sounded choked up, as if he had been crying.
“What’s going on? Your secretary said you didn’t even call in this morning.”
“I had a doctor’s appointment and I—”
“Look, can I come up? I feel so stupid standing here in the street.”
“I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“Jamie, I’ve seen you much worse. Just buzz me up.”
I went back into the lobby and Miguel let me up.
In the elevator, I wondered what it could be. Had someone done something to him?
I wanted to protect him, to wrap my arms around him and hold him. I wanted to be there for him where I hadn’t been before. Jamie was the closest friend I had made since moving to New York, and I couldn’t stand the thought of him in trouble again.
When he opened the door, Jamie was wearing sweats and an old Princeton T-shirt. He was unshaven and his face was streaked with tears. I sat down on his sofa while he stood.
“I went to the doctor this morning, and oh, God, this is embarrassing—”
“Come on, out with it. We’ve all done embarrassing things.”
“I had this pain in my nuts, and it wouldn’t go away, so I was worried, and I saw a doctor last week about it, and I didn’t want to see my normal family doctor, so I picked this doctor from the company’s insurance plan and—”
“And what happened?” I was getting impatient.
“He did some tests, and he tested also for, you know—”
“HIV?”
“It was just precautionary; he didn’t think I had it or anything—”
“And?”
“And the test came back and it was positive.” He said it all in one quick breath and then broke into tears as he collapsed onto the couch.
“Jamie, I don’t know if—” What was I talking about? What could I tell him? What did I know about any of this?
“Don’t you think it’s too early for it to show up in a test?” I finally said. I had thought it took six months for HIV antibodies to be detected in a person’s blood.
“It’s borderline. It’s been almost three months since that, that awful night, and sometimes these things show up early—”
“Have you been with anyone else in the past six months?” Please don’t let it be from that night, I thought.
He looked up at me and started to cry again. “No,” he finally said.
He had gotten it that night. It was my fault he had gotten it.
I could have prevented this.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “I’m sorry, I mean, that wasn’t about your not, you know, sleeping with anyone, but just the whole thing—” I was becoming incoherent.
“Toby, you can’t tell anyone. No one can know about this. Not Donovan, not Brett, not any of the others. This has to stay between the two of us.”
I nodded. Of course, it wasn’t between us. It was between him and himself. It was his body that had this disease, and his body that would have to fight it off. It was his body that would be vulnerable to everything from now on: every cough, every cold, every sniffle would be a sign of what was to come.
I had to get things under control. I grabbed a tissue and blew my nose. Every part of me wanted to cry, but I didn’t. It would only have made Jamie feel worse.
I tried to pull myself together. This was like any other hurdle in life: diagnose the problem, find a solution. Of course, I knew this wasn’t like anything Jamie or I had experienced.
“I just want to kill myself,” Jamie said.
I looked at him closely. “Don’t say that,” I said. “You don’t know what that means.”
“You have no idea how it feels, Toby.”
I took a deep breath. “We need to be pro-active about this. First of all, did you feel comfortable with this doctor?”
“No,” he said. “His office was like a hundred years old and I don’t think he knew anything about . . . you know. I don’t think he’d ever even had a 429 patient before.” I knew Jamie had a deep mistrust of doctors that stemmed from having two for parents.
“Look, you need to find a new doctor, someone you trust, someone who knows what he’s doing with this sort of thing. And you don’t know what’s going on. Sometimes these tests are false. And there are medications you can take . . .” It was too awful to think about Jamie having to take those drug cocktails advertised with smiling gay couples who went rock climbing and celebrated their anniversaries as they popped pills every hour. No matter how fashionable the ads made it look, it didn’t get around the fact that you had it. You were dirty, like an infected needle thrown in the trash. No one would want to be your partner. No matter how much the media played it all down, it was no different than it was fifteen years ago. Now there were just more ways to cover it up, to make people feel better about it. But it still wasn’t okay.
I knew I was prejudiced about the disease, but I couldn’t help it. I had always thought people like Jamie didn’t get it.
After I left his apartment, I felt a surge of anger. How could he have been so stupid? It was basic knowledge that you didn’t do it without a condom, ever. I knew there were uninfected guys out there who had unprotected sex with multiple partners, chasing the disease until it closed in on them. I knew there were guys who ended up in bed too high on crystal or coke to have any idea what they were being penetrated with. But I didn’t include those people among my friends, and I didn’t think my friends would ever be like those people.
I thought about Jamie, and Rico, and how it had all happened in my apartment, and how it was my fault there was no condom, and I felt sick to my stomach. I walked shakily through the lobby past Miguel and into the icy street. Holding myself up against someone’s Lexus, I vomited into the gutter, first a stream of liquid, then a series of dry heaves that left my throat scratchy and hoarse. The entire time, Miguel stood there watching me.
10
In college, the guy I had drinks with on Friday night would usually be the person I was still with on Saturday morning, before sliding on stiff jeans and dirty socks and making the walk across campus, the infamous Walk of Shame, viewed only by early risers and the inevitable tour group. Traveling alone in those days, as I often did, I was braver about approaching guys. Advancing meant the possibility of sex, while doing nothing meant standing alone. Without a group backing me up, it was easier to make contact. Now that I was almost always accompanied by my clique, my Heathers, my junior-high-styled infantry of bitch-boys, it was more difficult to advance. Why risk rejection when I could dish everyone in the joint to my friends? Sometimes the only remedy was to go out alone, usually in a state of intoxication, to have a few more for the road at some dark dive after I had bid farewell to my friends for the evening. There, at two or three in the morning, everyone was out for the same reason.
It was this impulse that landed me one Saturday night at Rocket, a hole-in-the-wall bar in the East Village no bigger than my bedroom. It only served the cheapest wine and beer, and featured nearly naked eighteen-year-old go-go boys who would pause in the middle of a song to do double duty as busboys. There were always a few lurkers, leering old men hoping for a piece of boy meat, but for the most part, the crowd was young and virile, freshly supplied by an underground pipeline leading directly from the dorms at NYU, Cooper Union, and FIT.
I always held out hope that someone like Subway Boy would walk in the door on a night like this, we would hit it off brilliantly, and become boyfriends on the spot.
Instead, I met Xander.
“Like Alexander?” I asked after he had introduced himself.
