"This guy stopped me.
He needs to get a prescription filled but all the pharmacies are closed and I'm not sure of what to do.
Do you know of an open pharmacy?"
She looked at the prescription.
"Tylenol Three.
That's a painkiller.
It has codeine."
"Oh,'' he said.
Then she walked over to the guy standing under the awning.
"Do you need a painkiller?"
"Yes I do."
"How much does it hurt?"
"It hurts.
It aches.
It's sore.
I need to stop the pain."
--"Then what are you going to do?"
she asked him, not sympathetically, but with a challenge in her voice, like she expected to hear the correct answer to that question.
She's so aggressive, Peter thought.
You'd think she'd have a little more heart for a guy in trouble.
It's probably because he's a man.
"I don't know."
"Look, we'll get you something now, but you have to go back in the hospital tomorrow morning and tell them to look at it again.
Do you have Medicaid?"
"I don't have a card."
I"Wait here."
She walked into the deli, avoiding Peter, not discussing any of it with him.
Then she came out with a bottle of Tylenol, a pack of Marlboros and two quarts of Budweiser.
"Take six of these and drink these and you'll numb out for a while."
The guy took everything and split.
He ran away.
He didn't want to be around them anymore.
Peter and Molly looked at each other.
They had to.
"How are you?"
Peter said.
"I've been really busy," Molly said.
"I've been doing a lot of organizing work."
"Oh really?"
Peter said.
"Are you a secretary?"
He saw her mouth open like she was going to say a specific thing, but then she decided to say something else instead.
"You can only do so much for people you don't love," she said.
"There are a lot of deprived people in this city.
You have to know where they stop and you begin."
"But maybe I should have taken him to Bellevue in a cab," Peter said, looking down the empty street.
"Or I could have tried a few more places.
There must be an all-night drugstore some-where in Manhattan."
He watched the droplets of rain drip off her nose and down her neck.
She didn't even try to step out of it.
"Well, you could have done that, but at some point you would have to say stop.
You weren't going to take him home with you and give him a pair of your pajamas, were you?"
-"I was just trying to help someone," he said.
"Yes, I know," she said.
"I'm sure you're a very nice person."
The rain was noisy.
It smelled good.
The next day would be --fresh.
There would be buds on the trees on Saint Mark's Place.
"My personal life is falling apart," Peter said.
"I'm balding."
"Well, you could get a little tattoo, like a shooting star on your temple.
It would fill in your hairline.
Besides, people would be so busy looking at your tattoo they would forget that you were losing your hair."
He didn't want her to leave.
"When I first saw you I couldn't understand why Kate would be attracted, but now that I've watched you moving around, I can see why she's interested."
"Oh no," Molly said.
"I know you think I'm a macho hetero," he said, feeling sort -of masculine at that moment.
"But I have a real problem with your separatism."
-4"My what?"
"Your separatism.
You see, I think people are all the same.
But you want to run around in gay-this and gay-that.
You know, Molly, men are people too.
People have rights even if they're not gay."
"You can't take anything that isn't about you, can you?"
"What?"
he said.
He hadn't heard her properly.
"I understand what you're saying," Molly answered, changing her body language, like she had got very tired all of a sudden.
"I don't agree, but I know exactly where you're coming from and I understand precisely what you mean."
Peter was so happy right then that he grabbed both of her shoulders and kissed her on the mouth, pulling her body toward him.
She barely stood there after that, didn't even give him a full look, just turned and walked away too slowly, not noticing the rain at all.
Not looking back.
Peter was elated.
He had made friends with his wife's affair.
Who could be more flexible and easygoing than that?
He knew this would make Kate proud of him.
Peter went directly to her studio.
It was long after midnight.
He stopped across the street and bought a bouquet of flowers from an all-night fruit stand.
Tulips.
Tulips in the middle of March.
Were they in season?
That was New York.
You could buy a kiwi fruit at two in the morning any day of the year without going more than three blocks.
He picked out deep purples and reds with black lines running through the petals.
They were -almost opened.
He could picture Kate, white and fruity against the dark purple as she pressed the flowers to her face.
"They look so much better when you hold them," he would say.
Then he took out his copy of her keys and climbed the stairs.
"What are you doing, Katie?
It's late."
She was sitting on the floor with long gray sheets of plastic in her lap.
She was painting on them from a little glass jar.
He came closer, but not too close, and knelt down reaching toward her with the top of his body only.
"What are you painting on?"
"Two kinds of X rays," she said, never looking up once.
-These in my hand are plain films.
For a tumor to be seen on plain film it must be big enough and it must be more dense than the surrounding normal tissue."
"And those?"
"Those are contrast films.
That's when they inject dye into you.
The contrast film relates to the paint differently than the plain film.
It practically rejects it."
She looked up then.
She stood, leaving Peter crouching underneath her.
Then he stood up as well.
"Aren't you tired, Katie?
Don't you want to sleep some?"
"No," she said.
"This is the last piece.
When I put this in, People in Trouble will be almost finished.
I'll just have to mount it on the wooden boards and polyurethane the sections and it will be ready for installation."
Then they held each other very tightly.
But a close embrace is never the last moment between two people.
The last moment is the release and so much more emotion shows then.
5) The cashier in the Chinese restaurant was listening to a preparatory cassette for her green-card interview.
The windows were fogged with pork grease pouring out of the kitchen, but the front door was open too, so spring came in in bits and pieces.
Kate -and Molly got buzzed on the sunshine and too much Chinese tea.
"Are you willing to take the full oath of allegiance to the United States of America?"
asked the authoritative male voice with a mid-Atlantic accent, speaking on tape.
He had no intonation.
"Yes," said the woman automatically, rolling chopped meat into dumpling dough.
Her teenage daughter was chewing on the edge of a pencil, going back and forth from her calculator to her notebook at one of the empty tables.
"Are you willing to bear arms for the United States?"
"Yes," she said.
"Have you ever sold drugs?"
"Sewed drugs?"
she repeated with some doubt.
"Prostitution?"
said the tape.
-"Pastu shin?"
she said, again quizzically.
"Adultery?"
said the tape.
"Adol?"
she said.
"No!"
screamed her daughter.
"Sold drugs!
Prostitution!
Adultery!
Adultery!
Adultery!"
They both cracked up laughing then and inhaled in unison before returning to their separate tasks.
"When we were making love this afternoon," Kate said, tracing the veins on the inside of Molly's wrist, "I felt my hand almost completely inside you and I could touch a ball of fire, a hot core.
Then you gripped me and brought me deeper into the heat."
"What do you like best about me?"
Molly asked.
"There is a sky below," Kate said.
"And a pair of jeans, a calico rose in the middle of your skull.
A red mask.
A red egg.
A moonscape made of glass.
Magnified tongue cells, salted spongy things, mountains of black.
Gray hills."' "I'm so happy," Molly said.
"This is great.
This is like sitting next to a waterfall.
This is Paradise Now."
They turned the corner at 103rd Street and walked into the lobby of Mount Sinai Hospital, where Scott had been for the last few days.
It wasn't his first time there, and it wasn't his first complication.
James had called around welcoming visitors since Scott felt too isolated, not seeing familiar faces.
He was propped up in bed with his hair brushed out loose around his shoulders.
He looked like a Madonna, even though his skin was coming apart.
For Kate there was no more sun, there was no more closeness.
There was only this other world with two distinct smells: ammonia clean and filthy, stinking dirty.
It was hard to believe this raw, bleeding skin was Scott and not just something laid on top of him.
She had known, intellectually, that once someone's immune system was shot, every little thing became something enormous.
But she had breezed into the hospital room without having accepted that she was going to visit the first friend of hers who would probably die of AIDS.
-Funny, she thought.
Cancer used to be this big dramatic event.
Now, with people dropping dead, cancer is just another thing.
She looked at Scott.
Only a month before, all four of them had eaten dinner together at the guys' apartment.
Scott's two daughters had been over too, spending the weekend.
He had done all the cooking and serving up the plates.
Then the girls bowed their heads for grace so Molly and Kate followed.
"May we each have everything we need and want, immediately, plus self-determination for all people.
Amen."
"I was married for four years," Scott told them over dinner that night.
"Now we live three blocks from my ex-wife's so I can be near my girls.
Greta is seven and Andrea is nine."
While he was speaking James helped Andrea to some food - and made sure that Greta didn't get sauce all over her clothes.
"Dad?"
Andrea said with a mouthful of food.
"What?"
"Can a kid be brought up to be antigay and still be gay?"
"Yes," he said.
"How come?"
"Because," Scott answered, patting her long hair, wrapping it over her ears and away from her face.
"Because people don't become what they were brought up to be, people become them selves."' That night as they sat and talked, Scott and James looked so happy together.
They couldn't help but be close and touch from time to time, until James gave into his feelings and curled up in his boyfriend's arms.
Kate saw Molly watching her during all of this.
At the same time Kate was watching herself.
She was seeing herself as part of gay coupling, socializing as a lesbian, watching two men in love with no need for restraint or nervousness.
She had become part of their natural environment.
And vice versa, almost.