"Have you ever heard someone say they were too old for one of America's military adventures? Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan?"
"Sure. Although what they usually say is they were too young."
"AIDS was a war." Ollie was looking down at his gnarled hands, from which the talent was departing. "And I wasn't too old for all of it, because no one is when the war's on one's native soil, wouldn't you say?"
"I guess that's true enough."
"I was born in nineteen thirty. When AIDS was first observed and clinically described in the United States, I was fifty-two. I was living in New York, and working freelance for several advertising firms. My friends and I still used to go around to the clubs in the Village once in awhile. Not the Stonewall--a hellhole run by the Mafia--but some of the others. One night I was standing outside Peter Pepper's on Christopher Street, sharing a jay with a friend, and a bunch of young men went in. Good-looking guys in tight bellbottom pants and the shirts they all seemed to wear back then, the kind with the wide shoulders and narrow waists. Suede boots with stacked heels."
"Yummy boys," Dave ventured.
"I guess, but not the yummy boy. And my best friend--his name was Noah Freemont, died just last year, I went to the funeral--turned to me and said, 'They don't even see us anymore, do they?' I agreed. They saw you if you had enough money, but we were too . . . dignified for that, you might say. Paying for it was demeaning, although some of us did, from time to time. Yet in the late fifties, when I first came to New York . . ."
He shrugged and looked off into the distance.
"When you first came to New York?" Dave prompted.
"I'm thinking about how to say this. In the late fifties, when women were still sighing over Rock Hudson and Liberace, when homosexuality was the love that dared not speak its name instead of the one that never shuts up, my sex drive was at its absolute peak. In that way--there are others, I'm sure, many others--gay men and straight men are the same. I read somewhere that when they are in the presence of an attractive other, men think about sex every twenty seconds or so. But when a man's in his teens and twenties, he thinks about sex constantly, whether he's in the presence of an attractive other or not."
"You get hard when the wind blows," Dave said.
He was thinking of his first job, as a pump jockey, and of a pretty redhead he'd happened to see sliding out of the passenger seat of her boyfriend's truck. Her skirt had rucked up, revealing her plain white cotton panties for a single second, two at most. Yet he had played that moment over and over in his mind while masturbating, and although he had only been sixteen at the time, the memory was still fresh and clear. He doubted if that would have been the case if he'd been fifty. By then he'd seen plenty of women's underwear.
"Some of the conservative columnists called AIDS the gay plague, and with ill-concealed satisfaction. It was a plague, but by nineteen eighty-six or so, the gay community had a pretty good fix on it. We understood the two most basic preventive measures--no unprotected sex and no sharing of needles. But young men think they're immortal, and as my grandma used to say when she was in her cups, a stiff dick has no conscience. It's especially true when the owner of that dick is drunk, high, and in the throes of sexual attraction."
Ollie sighed, shrugged.
"Chances were taken. Mistakes were made. Even after the transmission vectors were well understood, tens of thousands of gay men died. People are only beginning to grasp the magnitude of that tragedy now that most folks understand gays don't choose their sexual orientation. Great poets, great musicians, great mathematicians and scientists--God knows how many died before their talents could flower. They died in gutters, in cold-water flats, in hospitals, and the indigent wards, all because they took a risk on a night when the music was loud, the wine was flowing, and the poppers were popping. By choice? There are still plenty who say so, but that's nonsense. The drive is too strong. Too primal. If I'd been born twenty years later, I might have been one of the casualties. My friend Noah, as well. But he died of a heart attack in his bed, and I'll die of . . . whatever. Because by fifty, there are fewer sexual temptations to resist, and even when the temptation is strong, the brain is sometimes able to overrule the cock, at least long enough to grab a condom. I'm not saying that plenty of men my age didn't die of AIDS. They did--no fool like an old fool, right? Some were my friends. But they were fewer than the younger fellows who jammed the clubs every night.
"My own clique--Noah, Henry Reed, John Rubin, Frank Diamond--sometimes went out just to watch those young guys do their mating dances. We didn't drool, but we watched. We weren't so different from the middle-aged hetero golfing buddies who go to Hooters once a week just to watch the waitresses bend over. That sort of behavior may be slightly pitiful, but it's not unnatural. Or do you disagree?"
Dave shook his head.
"One night four or five of us dropped by a dance club called Highpockets. I think we had just about decided to call it a night when this kid walked in on his own. Looked a little like David Bowie. He was tall, wearing tight white bike shorts and a blue tee with cutoff sleeves. Long blond hair, combed up in a high pompadour that was funny and sexy at the same time. High color--natural, not rouge--in his cheeks, along with a spangle of silvery stuff. A Cupid's bow of a mouth. Every eye in the place turned to look at him. Noah grabbed my arm and said, 'That's him. That's Mister Yummy. I'd give a thousand dollars to take him home.'
"I laughed and said a thousand dollars wouldn't buy him. At that age, and with those looks, all he wanted was to be admired and desired. Also to have great sex as often as possible. And when you're twenty-two, that's often.
"Pretty soon he was part of a group of good-looking guys--although none as good-looking as he was--all of them laughing and drinking and dancing whatever dance was in back then. None of them sparing a glance for the quartet of middle-aged men sitting at a table far back from the dance floor and drinking wine. Middle-aged men still five or ten years from quitting their efforts to look younger than their age. Why would he look at us with all those lovely young men vying for his attention?
"And Frank Diamond said, 'He'll be dead in a year. See how pretty he is then.' Only he didn't just say it; he spit it out. Like that was some kind of weird . . . I don't know . . . consolation prize."
Ollie, who had survived the age of the deep closet to live in one where gay marriage was legal in most states, once more shrugged his thin shoulders. As if to say it was all water under the bridge.
"So that was our Mister Yummy, a summation of all that was beautiful and desirable and out of reach. I never saw him again until two weeks ago. Not at Highpockets, not at Peter Pepper's or the Tall Glass, not at any of the other clubs I went to . . . although I went to those places less and less frequently as the so-called Reagan Era wore on. By the late eighties, going to the gay clubs was too weird. Like attending the masquerade ball in Poe's story about the Red Death. You know, 'Come on, everybody! Kick out the jams, have another glass of champagne, and ignore all those people dropping like flies.' There was no fun in that unless you were twenty-two and still under the impression that you were bulletproof."
"It must have been hard."
Ollie raised the hand not wedded to his cane and waggled it in a comme ci, comme ca gesture. "Was and wasn't. It was what the recovering alkies call life on life's terms."
Dave considered letting it go at that, and decided he couldn't. The gift of the watch was too dismaying. "Listen to your uncle Dave, Ollie. Words of one syllable: you did not see that kid. You might have seen someone who looked a little like him, but if your Mister Yummy was twenty-two back then, he'd be in his fifties himself by now. If he avoided AIDS, that is. It was just a trick your brain played on you."
"My elderly brain," Ollie said, smiling. "My going-on-senile brain."
"I never said senile. You're not that. But your brain is elderly."
"Undoubtedly, but it was him. It was. The first time I saw him, he was on Maryland Avenue, at the foot of the main drive. A few
days later he was lounging on the porch steps below the main entrance, smoking a clove cigarette. Two days ago he was sitting on a bench outside the admission office. Still wearing that blue sleeveless tee and those blinding white shorts. He should have stopped traffic, but nobody saw him. Except for me, that is."
I refuse to humor him, Dave thought. He deserves better.
"You're hallucinating, pal."
Ollie was unfazed. "Just now he was in the common room, watching TV with the rest of the early birds. I waved to him, and he waved back." A grin, startlingly youthful, broke on Ollie's face. "He also tipped me a wink."
"White bike shorts? Sleeveless tee? Twenty-two and good-looking? I may be straight, but I think I would have noticed that."
"He's here for me, so I'm the only one who can see him. QED." He hoisted himself to his feet. "Shall we go back? I'm ready for coffee."
They walked toward the patio, where they would climb the steps as carefully as they had descended them. Once they had lived in the Reagan Era; now they lived in the Era of Glass Hips.
When they reached the flagstones outside the common room, they both paused for breath. When Dave had his, he said, "So what have we learned today, class? That death personified isn't a skeleton riding on a pale horse with a scythe over his shoulder, but a hot dancehall kid with glitter on his cheeks."
"I imagine different people see different avatars," Ollie said mildly. "According to what I've read, the majority see their mothers once they reach death's door."
"Ollie, the majority sees no one. And you're not in mortal--"
"My mother, however, died shortly after I was born, so I wouldn't even recognize her."
He started for the double doors, but Dave took his arm. "I'll keep the watch until the Halloween party, how's that? Four months. And I'll wind it religiously. But if you're still around then, you take it back. Deal?"
Ollie beamed. "Absolutely. Let's go see how Olga's doing with La Tour Eiffel, shall we?"
Olga was back at the card table, staring down at the puzzle. It was not a happy stare. "I left you the last three pieces, Dave." Unhappy or not, she was at least clear on who he was again. "But that will still leave four holes. After a week's work, this is very disappointing."
"Shit happens, Olga," Dave said, sitting down. He tapped the remaining pieces into place with a satisfaction that went all the way back to rainy days at summer camp. Where, he now realized, the common room had been quite a bit like this. Life was a short shelf that came with bookends.
"Yes it does," she said, contemplating the missing four pieces. "It certainly does. But so much shit, Bob. So much."
"Olga, I'm Dave."
She turned her frown on him. "That's what I said."
No sense arguing, and no sense trying to convince her that nine hundred and ninety-six out of a thousand was a fine score. She's ten years from a hundred and still thinks she deserves perfection, Dave thought. Some people have remarkably sturdy illusions.
He looked up and saw Ollie emerging from the closet-sized craft center adjacent to the common room. He was holding a sheet of tissue paper and a pen. He made his way to the table and floated the tissue onto the puzzle.
"Here, here, what are you doing?" Olga asked.
"Show some patience for once in your life, dear. You'll see."
She stuck out her lower lip like a pouty child. "No. I'm going to smoke. If you want to take that damn thing apart, be my guest. Put it back in the box or knock it on the floor. Your choice. It's no good the way it is."
She stalked off with as much hauteur as her arthritis would allow. Ollie dropped into her seat with a sigh of relief. "That's much better. Bending's a bitch these days." He traced two of the missing pieces, which happened to be close together, then moved the paper to trace the other two.
Dave watched with interest. "Will that work?"
"Oh yeah," Ollie said. "There are some cardboard FedEx boxes in the mail room. I'll filch one of them. Do some cutting and a little drawing. Just don't let Olga have a tantrum and disassemble the damn thing before I get back."
"If you want photos--you know, for matching purposes--I'll get my iPhone."
"Don't need it." Ollie tapped his forehead gravely. "Got my camera up here. It's an old Brownie box instead of a smartphone, but even these days it works pretty well."
III
Olga was still in a snit when she came back from the loading dock, and she did indeed want to disassemble the not-quite-complete jigsaw, but Dave was able to distract her by waving the cribbage board in her face. They played three games. Dave lost all three, and was skunked in the last. Olga was not always sure who he was, and there were days when she believed she was back in Atlanta, living in an aunt's boardinghouse, but when it came to cribbage, she never missed a double run or a fifteen-for-two.
She's also really lucky, Dave thought, not without resentment. Who winds up with twenty points in the goddam crib?
Around quarter past eleven (Fox News had given way to Drew Carey flogging prizes on The Price Is Right), Ollie Franklin returned and made his way to the cribbage board. A shave and a neat short-sleeved shirt made him look almost dapper. "Hey, Olga. I have something for you, girlfriend."
"I'm not your girlfriend," Olga said. There was a small, meanly amused glint in her eye. "If you ever had a girlfriend, I'll be dipped in bearshit."
"Ingratitude, thy name is woman," Ollie said without rancor. "Hold out your hand." And when she did, he dropped four newly constructed jigsaw pieces into it.
She glared at them suspiciously. "What're these?"
"The missing pieces."
"Missing pieces to what?"
"The puzzle you and Dave were doing. Remember the puzzle?"
Dave could almost hear the clicking beneath her frizzy cloud of white hair as old relays and corroded memory banks came to life. "Of course I do. But these will never fit."
"Try them," Ollie invited.
Dave took them from her before she could. To him they looked perfect. One showed that lacework of girders; the two that had been close together showed part of a pink cloud at the horizon; the fourth showed the forehead and pertly cocked beret of a tiny boulevardier who could have been promenading on the Place Vendome. It was pretty amazing, he thought. Ollie might be eighty-five, but he still had game. Dave returned the pieces to Olga, who tapped them in, one after the other. Each fit perfectly.
"Voila," Dave said, and shook Ollie's hand. "Tout finit. Wonderful."
Olga was bent so close to the puzzle that her nose was touching it. "This new girder piece doesn't quite match up with the ones around it."
Dave said, "That's a little thankless, even for you, Olga."
Olga made a hmpf sound. Over her head, Ollie waggled his eyebrows.
Dave waggled back. "Sit with us at lunch."
"I may skip lunch," Ollie said. "Our walk and my latest artistic triumph have tired me out." He bent to look at the puzzle and sighed. "No, they don't match. But close."
"Close only counts in horseshoes," Olga said. "Boyfriend."
Ollie made his slow way toward the door opening on the Evergreen Wing, cane tapping its unmistakable one-two-three rhythm. He didn't appear at lunch, and when he didn't show up for dinner, that day's duty nurse checked on him and found him lying on the coverlet of his bed, with his talented hands laced together on his chest. He seemed to have died as he lived, peacefully and with no fuss.
That evening, Dave tried the door of his late friend's suite and found it open. He sat on the stripped bed with the silver pocket watch laid on his palm, the cover open so he could watch the second hand go around in the little circle above the 6. He looked at Ollie's possessions--the books on the shelf, the sketchpads on the desk, the various drawings taped to the walls--and wondered who would take them. The ne'er-do-well brother, he supposed. He fished for the name, and it came to him: Tom. And the niece was Martha.
Over the bed was a charcoal drawing of a handsome young man with his hair combed high and spangles on his
cheeks. On his Cupid's-bow lips was a smile. It was small but inviting.
IV
The summer came full, then began to ebb. Schoolbuses rolled down Maryland Avenue. Olga Glukhov's condition declined; she mistook Dave for her late husband more frequently. Her cribbage skills remained, but she began to lose her English. Although Dave's older son and daughter lived close by in the suburbs, it was Peter who came to visit most frequently, driving in from the farm in Hemingford County sixty miles away and often taking his father out to dinner.
Halloween rolled around. The staff decorated the common room with orange and black streamers. The residents of Lakeview Assisted Living Center celebrated All Hallows with cider, pumpkin pie, and popcorn balls for the few whose teeth were still up to the challenge. Many spent the evening in costume, which made Dave Calhoun think of something his old friend had said during their last conversation--about how, in the late eighties, going to the gay clubs had been too much like attending the masquerade in Poe's story about the Red Death. He supposed Lakeview was also a kind of club, and sometimes it was gay, but there was a drawback: you couldn't leave, unless you had relatives willing to take you in. Peter and his wife would have done that for Dave if he had asked, would have given him the room where their son Jerome had once lived, but Peter and Alicia were getting on themselves now, and he would not inflict himself on them.
One warm day in early November, he went out onto the flagstone patio and sat on one of the benches there. The paths beyond were inviting in the sunshine, but he no longer dared the steps. He might fall going down, which would be bad. He might not be able to get back up again without help, which would be humiliating.
He spied a young woman standing by the fountain. She wore the kind of shin-length, frilly-collared dress you only saw nowadays in old black-and-white movies on TCM. Her hair was bright red. She smiled at him. And waved.
Why, look at you, Dave thought. Didn't I see you not long after World War II ended, getting out of your boyfriend's pickup truck at the Humble Oil station in Omaha?
As if hearing this thought, the pretty redhead tipped him a wink and then twitched up the hem of her dress slightly, showing her knees.