Rain pattered the old, loose windows of the loft where Jonah had grown up and still lived, and there was something exquisite about rain accompanying a long, first kiss. Robert Takahashi’s mouth was hot and assertive; they pulled back now and then as if to check in, to make sure the other person was still there, and that they weren’t just two disembodied mouths. But the kissing spoke to the larger question of what was allowed and what wasn’t. “What can we do?” Jonah whispered awkwardly, not at all sure of what was safe and what might one day kill him. Robert Takahashi’s body was in need of being explored, and yet there were parameters in going to bed with a man who had tested positive. You couldn’t just do whatever you desired. You had to pay attention, or else some years from now the nodes in your neck would swell like marbles in a bag because of a bout of sex you’d had long in the past, which might well have been ecstatic then, but which you could barely remember now.
Robert looked at him with focused eyes; how beautiful they were, with their epicanthic folds. Jonah didn’t even remember where he had learned that term—maybe a genetics class at MIT?—but it appeared now, summoned for the first time in his life, as he looked into these dark and marvelous eyes. “We can do a lot,” Robert said. “But carefully.” Those were the words that became Jonah Bay’s password phrase into the kind of sex he liked and could tolerate. A lot, but carefully. Robert ripped open the wrapper of a Trojan with his sharp teeth, and took out a tube of a water-based lubricant called, lasciviously, Loobjob.
“This is really okay?” Jonah asked. “I mean, you’re sure? Have you asked any experts?”
“Well, no,” said Robert, “but I’ve read about it pretty extensively, and I assume you have too. Do you want to talk to an expert?”
“Now?” Jonah laughed.
“Yes. Now. If it’ll make you feel better.”
“It’s a Sunday afternoon. Where are these experts? Aren’t they all at brunch?”
Robert was already on the phone, calling Information and asking for the number of a hotline he knew about. The operator connected him. Lately the hotline had been in constant use, with everyone calling in terror, afraid of what they’d already done, unsure of what they could now do, tortured with knowledge and ignorance, palpating their own necks for swollen glands.
“Hi,” said Robert. “I’m here with a friend, and he has a question for you.” Then Robert thrust the phone at Jonah, who was appalled, and said, “What? Me?” moving away from it. “Yes, you,” said Robert, clearly enjoying himself. Jonah reluctantly took the phone, the cord stretching tight across the bed, bisecting it, keeping the men in separate sections. “Hi,” he mumbled flatly into the receiver.
“Hi, my name’s Chris. How can I help you?”
“I just want to know what’s, you know . . . safe.”
“You’re talking about sexual safety between two partners?” asked Chris. “Two male partners?” Jonah imagined him blond-haired, early twenties, sitting in a shabby office with his Keds up on a cluttered desk.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. We can’t say for certain that any sex act carries zero risk, but some acts are clearly safer than others. For instance, oral isn’t risk-free. While we can’t prove anybody’s gotten it this way, we can’t prove they haven’t, either. If you have cuts, sores, or abrasions in your mouth it makes it riskier. Some people choose to pull out before coming. And then there’s mutual masturbation. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase, ‘On me, not in me.’”
No, Jonah had never heard the phrase. While Chris was talking, Robert had come forward and begun to kiss Jonah’s neck, which tickled and made Jonah strain away from him; and then Robert put his hand on Jonah’s thigh in a proprietary gesture. “As for intercourse,” Chris went on as if he were a waiter winding up as he described the nightly specials, “without a condom there’s a high risk of transmission if the active partner is infected. And even with a condom, the risk isn’t reduced to zero, given the fact that theoretically it could break. That said, with condom use between two partners, only one of whom tested positive, to my knowledge there haven’t been any reported incidents so far of seroconversion. This doesn’t mean there haven’t been any that haven’t been reported, or that there won’t be any in the future. But it’s important to use latex only, no natural skins, and also to use a water-based lubricant containing the spermicide Nonoxynol-9. Oils and petroleum jelly can weaken the latex and make it prone to breakage.”
Was Chris reading from a script? Was he bored? Excited? Did he suspect that on the other end of the phone line, two men were poised on a bed, waiting to spring into action once one of them received reassurances from a stranger on the telephone? Did Chris know that his name and his voice, so bland and young, were in themselves arousing to these men? “Chris,” whoever he was, was like an epidemiologic porn star.
“So you think it’s okay for my friend and me to try to do some things together?” Jonah asked in a constrained voice.
“I can’t say that. To achieve zero risk, cuddling is a good bet.”
“Cuddling?”
“Tell him you have to go,” whispered Robert.
“I have to go. But thank you.”
“Okay,” said Chris. “Have a good day. Stay dry,” he added, and then he hung up.
“What did he mean, ‘Stay dry’?” said Jonah with alarm.
“What?” said Robert.
“There at the end, he said, ‘Stay dry.’ Was he referring to fluids? Was he giving me his honest opinion, even though he wasn’t supposed to?”
“He meant that it’s raining out.”
“Oh. Oh. Right,” said Jonah.
“You are adorable,” said Robert. “I even like your anxiety.”
“I don’t. I hate it.”
“We don’t have to do anything, today or ever,” said Robert Takahashi, but the idea of this was unacceptable to Jonah Bay, who couldn’t have explained that although he was anxious and afraid, he wanted to partake of encumbered, restrictive sex, the only kind that wouldn’t threaten to bury him in sensation. Maybe he had found a perfect way to manage his problem of overstimulation, yet not deny his essential, exuberant queerness.
Over time, on gray, moody days in the loft or on days that fractured the loft into various columns of sunlight, or at night, in near darkness, he and Robert Takahashi, one pale-skinned, the other a kind of grain color, ripped open Trojan wrappers and slowly fucked each other. It amazed him the way body parts could fit together with the precision of Lego. Sex with Robert was a tense, highly careful experience that invariably led to great pleasure. Robert appeared to have bought out the entire mid-Atlantic supply of Loobjob, and he stored a couple of tubes in Jonah’s night table drawer, where Susannah used to keep dozens of guitar picks.
As a couple, Jonah and Robert didn’t look into their shared past, which didn’t go far back, nor did they look into the future, where they couldn’t see too far ahead. Robert Takahashi needed to keep his T-cell count up as long as he could. Neither of them wanted to discuss his condition very much, but the fact that Robert would in all likelihood die young could not be ignored. So far, he was mostly asymptomatic, and his T-cell count was good. Later, some friends were put on AZT, a drug that reduced their lives to a round-the-clock frenzy of beeping pill reminders and bouts of diarrhea and other indignities. The same frenzy would likely eventually arrive for Robert; but under the guidance of a somewhat renegade physician, he took bee pollen and wheatgrass shots and vitamin B12 and worked out at the gym for a solid, belligerent hour before work each day, each grunt a battle cry. His job at Lambda Legal was the center of his life. Jonah envied him this; his own job at Gage Systems, as he told people, was fine but left him feeling slightly empty. His design team had recently received a very emotional letter from a man whose upper body had been paralyzed in a car accident long ago, and who was now able to make himself breakfast each morning because of the robotics arm that Jonah’s team had perfected.
Yes, this work had meaning, but Robert’s work seemed to
be a calling, which was different. A year or so into their relationship, back in the spring of ’87, Robert had invited Jonah to come down to D.C. with him to take part in an act of civil disobedience in front of the White House. They made posters before they left, and much later, when Jonah thought about that day and that time in life, he remembered the smell of Magic Marker, sharp and strong like a draft of smelling salts held under the nose. Reagan’s actual presence could be felt; though he wasn’t there, Jonah pictured him in a big-shouldered coat, being ushered past the protestors, barely looking at them. Reagan wasn’t even a real person to Jonah, just a feelingless object, and though he’d been reelected in a landslide, he had not been able to bring himself to say “AIDS” for the longest time, had not even seemed able to imagine gay men in their beds or at the funerals of their lovers.
As the crowd at the White House began to chant, and the signs waved and bobbed, the police closed in wearing rubber gloves. Jonah had lain down on the ground, and in the chaos a heel went down on his thigh and he cried out. When he turned to Robert, he saw that he was no longer there. Frantically Jonah called Robert’s name, but there were too many people crushing in and too much movement. He had lost Robert Takahashi, and instead found himself pressed face-to-face against an old muscleman who looked like Popeye. “Robert!” Jonah called again, and then a hand was on his back, and Jonah looked up to see Robert standing directly above him. Robert’s powerhouse arms scooped Jonah up and staggered off with him.
Tonight, after Dennis Boyd had collapsed in the restaurant, Jonah and Robert had sat side by side in the ER waiting room at Beth Israel with Jules, Ethan, and Ash; and the awful, dislocating institutional scene had reminded Jonah of an image of himself and his friends sitting on molded plastic chairs in another brightly lit space. What was that space? At first he couldn’t remember. He thought hard, and there it was: the police station on the Upper West Side in the earliest hours of 1976. Jonah and the others had waited there all night; it was so long ago now that Jonah could barely recall it, and it had all been left unfinished. Cathy Kiplinger had simply been erased from the group of friends, hustled out by adult forces. He’d always liked Cathy; it was true that she was kind of hysterical, but he had also admired how expressive she was. He could never express anything, but she had often cried and yelled and was full of opinions. Also, she had always responded sardonically to Goodman, who needed it. Cathy had seemed brave in her own way, unafraid to make demands, carrying around a woman’s body when in fact at the time she was still pretty much a girl.
What had ever happened to her? Sometimes in the first several years after that night Jonah had wondered, but no one ever had a detailed or reliable answer to give. It was like hearing what had happened to former child stars from TV sitcoms; almost all of them had supposedly died in Vietnam. The reports were not to be trusted. Someone had “seen” Cathy, and had said she was doing okay. First they had seen her in college; then business school. Then, finally, Jonah had no idea where she was. No one had seen her or heard anything about her for years. Jonah occasionally felt a ghastly unease about Cathy Kiplinger, and about his own role in getting Goodman and Cathy a cab that night, when they were so stoned on the hash that Jonah had provided. Over and over his friends had insisted he was absolutely not responsible for anything that had happened. “Jesus, Jonah, do I have to hit you over the head with a frying pan?” Ethan had once said in exasperation, in the first few weeks after that New Year’s Eve. “I don’t know how to convey this to you any better than I already have. You had nothing to do with what happened between them. Nothing. You are innocent. You were not an ‘accessory,’ and you didn’t ‘drug’ anyone, okay?”
Over time Jonah began to believe that Ethan was right. He became preoccupied with other thoughts: fantasies about how certain teenaged boys might looked undressed, and certain men; and thoughts about what he wanted to do with his life now that he’d decided he definitely wasn’t going to be a musician. As the years passed he wondered about Cathy far less often than he used to. He went to college, he graduated, he got sidetracked by the Unification Church briefly, he took a robotics job at Gage Systems, and by 1989, even brash, exciting Goodman Wolf had completely faded—Goodman, who had been as sharply defined and as erotically charged as anyone on earth.
In the ER tonight, Ethan was the one who felt needlessly guilty; he kept pacing and saying to Jules in an agitated voice, “But don’t you get it? I arranged the dinner. I told them what Dennis couldn’t eat, but I should have made double sure.” Jules had told him, “Ethan, stop, it’s not your fault,” and then Ash had gotten upset with Ethan and said to him, “Would you please leave Jules alone about this? She has enough to deal with.” Everyone tended to believe everything was their fault; maybe it was just hard to imagine, when you were still fairly young, that there were some things in the world that were just not about you.
Finally a young doctor had come out and said, “I can tell you that Mr. Jacobson-Boyd had a very mild stroke. We do think it was caused by eating something contraindicated by his MAOI.” At dinner Dennis had apparently ingested a food that contained a substantial amount of tyramine, though no one would ever be able to figure out exactly which food it had been. His blood pressure had been “through the roof,” the doctor said. Dennis would recover, but he would need constant monitoring for a while. “We’re taking him off the MAOI immediately,” the doctor said. “There are much better antidepressants now anyway. At the time he was prescribed this one, back in the seventies, no one knew anything. Personally, I’d try him on a tricyclic. What does he need an MAOI for? It’s got so many problems, as you saw tonight. One piece of smoked cheese, and you’re having a hypertensive crisis at age thirty. We’ll keep him here for a few days, and we’ll worry about the depression later. And maybe he won’t even need treatment for that. It’s kind of a wait and see.”
“So he’s not going to die?” Ash said. “He’ll be okay? Jules, did you hear that?”
“Yes, he’ll survive this,” said the doctor. “You got him here in time.”
Jules began to cry in a sharp burst, and Ash did too, and they hugged each other and then Jules composed herself a little and said she had to go call Dennis’s parents in New Jersey. His mother would no doubt be beside herself, his father gruff and monosyllabic. Jules said she also had to go to hospital admissions and give them all the insurance information. There was so much to do; as a social worker she knew how much paperwork there would be. This was just the beginning, she said. But Ethan said to her, “You’re not doing any of that.”
“I’m not?” said Jules.
“No,” Ethan said. “Just go to Dennis now. Seriously. I’ll take care of everything.”
• • •
Jonah had been walking down a side street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one afternoon in June 1981, when a couple of members of the Unification Church came to him with a message. They didn’t say “God is love,” or anything similar. That wouldn’t have worked on Jonah Bay, who was deeply agnostic. Their message, though not stated directly, was that they recognized he was lonely, and they wanted to help him. Somehow, they were able to perceive his loneliness, though he had no idea how. He was leaving Dr. Pasolini’s mechanical engineering lab, where he was working for minimum wage. He’d just graduated from MIT and was living in one of the summer dorms until the fall, not sure what kind of job he would ultimately take or what city he would wind up in. Unlike almost everyone he knew at college, Jonah was not particularly ambitious. When people inquired about his ambitions, he told them that his mother’s non-acquisitive folksinger’s values must have rubbed off on him, because he didn’t feel the need to have his life figured out. But the truth was that he didn’t want to deal with it.
An old purple VW minibus was parked on the sloping street, and a man and woman, a few years older than he was, both dressed in generic leftover hippiewear, were sitting in the open doorway with a big Labrador retriever between them. Jonah smiled politely and the man said to him, “Nice sh
irt.”
Jonah was wearing a vintage bowling shirt that read Dex on the pocket.
The woman said, “And nice smile too, Dex.”
So Jonah smiled again for them, not bothering to say his name wasn’t Dex. “Thanks,” he said.
“Do you know where we could get some water for Cap’n Crunch?”
“You mean milk,” Jonah said.
They both laughed as if he were deeply witty. “Cap’n Crunch is our dog,” said the woman. “We’ve been in the car a long time, and he’s extremely thirsty. I’m Hannah,” she said. “And this is Joel.”
It was a reasonable act to bring them into the summer dorm with their dog and let them fill the dog’s bowl with genuine MIT tap water. The dorm was quiet, and the dog’s toenails clicked ostentatiously along the floors. The place felt melancholy, with whiteboards left up on some of the students’ doors, their once-relevant erasable-marker messages still visible. “Amy, we are going to see The Howling at 12!!!” Or, “SORRY, DAVE, ALL YOUR DROSOPHILA ARE DEAD AND I KILLED THEM!!!! HAHAHAHA—YOUR EVIL FUCKING LAB PARTNER.” The third floor was echoey, overly warm, but the man and woman looked around approvingly, as though they’d never been in a college dormitory before, and perhaps they hadn’t. Cap’n Crunch scarfed up the water Jonah got him, and looked beseechingly for a refill, his loose drape of lips still dripping.
“Easy there, Crunch,” Joel said, stroking the long black side of his dog. “You don’t want to get bloat.”
“What’s bloat?”
Hannah and Joel explained the sometimes fatal condition that dogs could develop. “I’m thinking about becoming a veterinarian,” Hannah said. “That’s just one of the things we study at the farm.”
“The farm,” Jonah repeated.