One of them held up a sign that said Living with AIDS for Two Years and Five Months-No Time for Red Tape.
These are men with AIDS, Peter realized.
Forty of them.
But that one doesn't look like he has it.
He looks like he works out.
The thin one has definitely got it.
He took another look at the familiar one and decided that he had definitely seen him somewhere before and that that guy probably didn't have it.
That black man, thought Peter.
I wonder if he's gay or if he got it from drugs.
Then the black man spoke.
"The church is the world's most powerful hypocrite," he said.
Peter noted that the man's voice and gestures were campy.
They shouldn't have let him be the spokesm:an, Peter thought.
They should have picked somebody more masculine, so people would be more sympathetic.
The man kept speaking.
"Why don't all you gay priests and nuns come out and get the church off the backs of your brothers and sisters?
Stop spending poor people's money trying to take away everyone's sexuality.
Spend it on affirmative care for people with AIDS."
The crowd behaved pretty well.
All these months of media blitz had prepared them in some way for this moment.
A flurry of simultaneous translation into a variety of languages subsided once the audience was fully informed as to the content of that man's speech.
Some of the visitors murmured with disapproval, others with compassion.
Some looked like they wished they hadn't brought their children.
Some tourists brushed it off as one of those "typical New York experiences" they'd heard so much about, then prided themselves on actually encountering.
Some took pictures with flash.
The men stood quietly, the worshipers sat quietly and the only noise was the voice of the priest droning over the sound system as though these men were nothing, as though they were not there.
Then the mass was over and the men filed out.
Peter decided to be natural and went to the front steps trying not to express any opinion to anyone who might be looking at him.
It was a windy day, suddenly, for the first time all season.
Some of the men were cold because they had not thought to bring sweaters.
They stood around not knowing what to do for the rest of the afternoon.
The ones who were used to being sick always carried sweaters, which they put on over their T-shirts.
Then they dispersed, quickly.
Some went off to have coffee, others went home to rest.
Once those shirts were covered, they stopped looking like gay men with AIDS.
They looked just like everyone else.
That, thought Peter, is their most effective trick.
The play he was designing that week was called Crossing the Border, about a love affair between a Mexican migrant worker and a Russian emigre' nuclear physicist.
It was a musical.
Peter knew he couldn't work the best material all the time and that really his finest work was ahead of him.
He'd always dreamed of designing for the greats, for Richard Foreman or Bob Wilson or the Wooster Group.
But those jobs were sewn up by an elite clique.
So in the meantime he had a generally accepting attitude about the work that did come his way.
Peter's new intern was waiting for him inside the theater.
He had been working all day but was wearing a suit and tie.
Every time he climbed up the ladder, the intern carefully took off his jacket, unbuttoned his sleeves, folded them twice up his forearm and then climbed.
When he came down again he put his clothing back in order immediately.
He was a short black man named Robert who had just graduated from Yale Drama School and was assigned to Peter by the playwright, who was an old college buddy of Robert's father.
Something about him annoyed Peter deeply.
He was organized, true, but he was businesslike, that was his problem.
He looked like a stockbroker, not an artist.
Robert carried a briefcase.
He never opened it balanced on one knee.
He always laid it down deliberately on a flat surface and snapped the metal clasps so that they clicked and popped at the same time.
He had been one of five black students in his prep school and one of five black students in his program at Yale.
He moved similarly to Peter, like a man who knew he could have been in finance but chose something more dangerous and obscure.
But his briefcase reflected those other options a bit too blatantly for Peter's tastes.
Inside it were little I ompartments for tools and a tape measure.
He had smaller cases to hold his brandnew stencils for drawing leikos and Fresnels.
At Yale he had learned up-to-the-minute technology for the various applications of mechanized light.
"I supervised the put-in," he said.
"And I programmed the cues."
"I hate computers," Peter said trying to be personal.
"I've refused to learn how to use them.
It is a lot more interesting to try to run a show by candle or flashlight than to push one button and have everything done by computer."
Robert sharpened his pencil.
"Okay," he said, meaning nothing.
"Let's run the cues."
Then he carefully removed his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair, folding his sleeves up his brown forearms.
He had clearly been one of those kids who wore suits to school.
A kid who was most comfortable in a jacket.
"Okay," Peter said.
"The audience has come in and taken their seats.
So, flick the houselights and then, take them down."
"They don't flick," Robert said.
"They are not programmed to flick.
They can go bright or dim, on or off, but not both."
Peter couldn't imagine what to say.
He felt very tired suddenly.
He felt older than he'd ever felt in his whole life.
His role was becoming obsolete.
He was being replaced by something with a level of information and ability that was not higher than his.
"Do you know how to make lights out of coffee cans?"
he asked, hearing himself creak like someone's backwoods grandfather asking "Do you know how to make a fishing pole?"
"No," Robert said.
"No," Peter repeated, completely unprepared.
"No," Robert said.
"Why would I want to?"
That, Peter thought, is the difference between theater and science.
After the cues were run Peter did warm up a bit because Robert had done everything perfectly.
He sat back and watched the young man roll down his sleeves.
"Do you know anyone with AIDS?"
Peter asked, suddenly.
For one second he panicked because maybe Robert had AIDS, but then he looked at him again and decided that Robert was not a homosexual.
He was probably a virgin or else had the same girlfriend since high school on whom he made a lot of demands.
"Yes," he said.
"Of course."
Then he said, "Do you have AIDS?
I'm not afraid of people with AIDS.
I can still work with you if you have AIDS."
"No, I'm straight."
Peter watched Robert's facial muscles.
Throughout this entire encounter he had not changed his expression.
He would have stayed calm even if Peter had said yes, because Robert was growing up accustomed to being with dying people.
"My father's lover has AIDS.
He was already in dementia when they gave him the AZT.
He was walking around on a cane like an old, old man.
The AZT brought him back.
He has a lot of nausea and diarrhea but he's still there.
You can talk to him and go places with him.
He's an actor.
He was around in the sixties."
"I used to work in black theater," Peter said, realizing immediately that the man in question might not be black, and then added, "In the sixties" to pretend that was the connection.
"I'm not interested in black theater," Robert said.
"I don't care about a woman in a black leotard doing jazz monologues.
I think black actors should be able to play any parts they want to play and not always have to play black."
"Well," said Peter, relaxing into his favorite kind of distance: discourse on the role of theater in everyday life.
"Of course actors should be able to play a wide range of characters but community theater is an important training ground."
"You don't know anything about black people," Robert said with the same tone he had used to say, "Do you have AIDS?"
"Do you know what kind of music young black people listen to?
They don't listen to jazz and they don't listen to blues.
They don't listen to soul or R&B.
Did you know that?
Have you been keeping up to date?"
"No," said Peter, "I'm out of date."
"You should correct that," Robert said.
"So that you at least know what it is you feel superior to."
"I'm totally out of date," Peter said.
"I have no idea what's going on."
"Look," Robert said, swinging his jacket over his shoulder and letting it hang from one finger like the guys in the ads for Harvey's Bristol Cream.
"Just watch two hours of TV a week and you can find out."
He snapped the two metal clasps on his briefcase, swung it by the handle off the table and smiled at Peter as though he was the oldest man in the world.
As though he, Robert, was in charge now.
"I want to get a job on the new Horne musical opening on Broadway, Ronald's Dream.
They've got lasers.
Do you know anyone there?"
"Or Stephen Sondheim.
Do you know him?"
"We were at the same party once."
"Well then."
Peter watched the boy walk out the door.
Then he went into the house manager's office and took out the portable TV.
He plugged it in and waited.
There was a show on called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
Some guy went around interviewing movie stars in their luxurious homes and the audience watched them play tennis and cook.
The most startling aspect of the lives of these celebrities was that they could be so famous and at the same time Peter had never heard of any of them or any of the shows or movies that they appeared in.
Then Peter reached over and switched on the office radio, flipping through all the stations from Top Forty to country.
He didn't know one song.
He had never heard of any of the groups.
He put his hand up flat against the right side of his face and thought for one fleeting second that he had turned into a very silly man.
He flipped to the jazz station and listened to that for a while.
Then he went home.
When Kate came back from the studio that night she asked what he'd done all day.
"I listened to jazz and worked on a show," he said.
"Working on a show" was the perfect way to explain away any block of time.
Then he raised his eyes to hers and saw that she had that look.
She had on her sunglasses and her scarf and too much lipstick and a big smile with lots of "yeah"s so he knew that she also had a secret because she was being much too polite.
16
By the end of October Kate realized that she had developed a habit of taking the same walk once or twice a week down the same street.
Only the weather changed.
The neighborhood was still jumping, though, with people trying to have their last outdoor party, their last street-corner conversation before the cold weather's isolation.
There were so many people on the street asking for money.
During the many months of late-night walks home from Molly's Kate had often wondered, Have there always been so many?
There was a huge black market on Second Avenue every night after eleven between Saint Mark's Place and Seventh Street.
You could buy anything.
There were people selling hot ten-speed bikes for thirty dollars and hot three-speed bikes for fifteen.
There were crates of brand-new tape recorders and cassettes and CDs with cellophane still around them.
But there were also entire contents of various people's ripped-off homes that were pulled out and excreted onto the sidewalk.
You could buy half-used tubes of oil paint, half-eaten jars of peanut butter, plants, worn bedroom slippers and dirty towels.
There were endless answering machines with the messages still on them and endless leather jackets.