“No,” he said. “Only a little. Only from Adam. I met her that night, of course.” He paused. “She seemed very nice, though,” he lamely added.
“You would have liked her,” said Natalie.
“Oh, I’m sure I would have,” he said tolerantly.
She looked at him hard, her eyes narrowing. “You’ve been wearing that shirt a lot,” she said. “No offense, Shawn, but don’t you have any other clothes with you?”
Shawn blushed. “Actually, no, I don’t,” he said. “I hadn’t planned on staying here more than a day or two. But then Sara, well—
you
know—and I decided to stay on for Adam’s benefit. So here I am.”
“I shall take you shopping,” Natalie announced.
“You don’t need to do that,” said Shawn. “Thank you, but I really can’t afford to buy anything new right now.”
“My treat,” she said. “I insist.”
He shrugged and laughed nervously, then found himself agreeing to let her take him to the store that morning. So a few hours later they drove to town in her car. Shawn enjoyed sitting beside her and listening as she pressed the search button on the radio, little blips of music or talk emerging from the good speakers and then disappearing, passed over in expectation of something better. When they pulled into the parking lot of a men’s store called Dover’s, he was almost disappointed, and would have preferred just driving around all morning. In the window, mannequins stood with hands on hips, sunglasses on their eyeless faces, bodies hard and perenially tanned. Shawn followed Natalie inside, where a doorbell discreetly chimed at their approach. A
middle-aged salesman came over to them and asked, “May I help your?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Natalie. “We’d like to find this gentleman a few things. A couple of shirts, maybe a jacket. Trousers. Sandals. He seems to have packed too lightly this summer.”
The salesman studied Natalie and Shawn, trying to figure out the situation. Mother and son? Aunt and nephew? Or maybe something slightly sexual and perverted. Shawn enjoyed giving the illusion of being a kept man, someone fawned over by an older woman. In the dressing room, he slipped off his shirt, realizing that it had begun to smell a little bit too human; maybe that was why Natalie had suggested he buy some new clothes. He was mortified. Hygiene had always been important to Shawn; once he had gone to bed with a man named Buddy whose fingernails were embedded with dirt, as though he’d come directly to bed after having spent the day digging up a sewer. Shawn himself tried to be scrupulous. If he couldn’t be famous or brilliant or wealthy, at least he could be clean. Now he balled his shirt up and threw it into a corner of the dressing room, slipping a new white shirt over his head. Then he stepped into a pair of linen trousers and observed the effect in the mirror.
“How does it look?” Natalie asked from outside the door.
“I’m not sure,” Shawn said, trying to mute the feeling of pleasure that he felt upon looking at himself in good clothes. “Come see.” He unlatched the slatted door and let her in. She stepped into doorway of the tiny room tentatively, as though this were an illicit act.
“Oh, you look wonderful,” Natalie said. Together they gazed at Shawn in the three mirrors in the dressing room. She came closer to him, and then, with a hesitant hand, reached out and straightened the collar of his shirt. “There,” she said. “Perfection.”
He looked at himself again, and as he did he noticed in the mirror that her face had changed; she seemed suddenly on the verge of panic. “Natalie?” he said, turning to her. “What’s wrong?”
“Sara,” she said, her hand to her throat. “I was thinking how I used to take her shopping with me. We’d leave early in the morning, and we wouldn’t get home until it was dark outside.” She choked on the words. In the near distance, the salesman lurked and bobbed, pretending to be busy among a soft pile of men’s sport shirts. Shawn closed the door, blocking the salesman’s view, giving himself and Natalie the illusion of privacy, for certainly everything could be heard through this flimsy piece of slatted wood.
“Ooh, I feel dizzy,” said Natalie, and Shawn sat her down on the floor. If you looked closely, you could see the occasional straight pin embedded in the field of pale carpeting. She leaned against the mirror and closed her eyes. “Sara and I always turned shopping into a big outing,” she said. “At the end of the day, before the department store closed, they would blink the lights, like when an intermission is over at the theater and you’re supposed to return to your seats. A voice would come over the intercom telling you that you had fifteen minutes of shopping time left. At that point, we’d just rev it up, as though we were on that old television show
Supermarket Sweep,
where they give you a limited amount of time to buy everything in sight.”
Natalie reached into her mesh shoulder bag and began to rummage around, finally fishing out a pack of cigarettes and offering one to Shawn. He accepted, and sat beside her against the mirror. She ran her thumb along the wheel of a lighter and lit first his cigarette, then hers. They smoked silently for a few moments.
“Shopping was a whole different ball game in my family,” Shawn finally said. “There were six of us kids back then.”
“Were?” said Natalie.
“Yes, now there’s five,” he continued. “My older brother Ray overdosed on methadone; he’d been in and out of residential treatment. But when we were kids, the six of us would squeeze into the back of the station wagon. We just bounced around in the back of that old car, with our mother or father screaming at us to shut up, to calm down, to stop fighting, whatever. Mostly we wore hand-me-downs—for years I would pretend I was Ray, because I
always got his clothes. He was older, cooler, more regular than me, and I’d stand in front of the mirror looking at myself. There was this one shirt—it was in this totally awful seventies style, you know, with a little zipper that went halfway down the front, and the material was some spongy polyester blend. But I loved that shirt, because I could become Ray in it. I could be normal, straight, whatever. And when we all went shopping, I’d pay attention to what Ray was getting, because in a year or two it would be mine. We shopped at this huge store near our house called Kernicky’s Value Land,” he said. “It was like a warehouse; it not only had clothes, it also sold farm equipment and bizarre things like animal enemas. I said to my mother: I cannot buy a suit from a store that sells animal enemas. But she always said something like: Who are you to complain, you’re just one of six kids, so shut your trap.”
“‘Shut your trap.’ She actually said that? I think that’s terrible,” said Natalie. “Do you speak to her often now?”
“No,” said Shawn. “Almost never. Her secret wish is that I would get AIDS and die so she wouldn’t have to deal with me ever again.”
“No mother wishes that!” said Natalie. “But you’re not sick, Shawn, are you?”
“I don’t know, actually,” he said. “I haven’t been tested, and to tell you the truth, I’m a chicken about it. But some of the people I’ve slept with, they’ve already dropped dead. I tried to call one of them just to make sure he was alive, and it turned out his phone had been disconnected. It’s freaked me out, I have to say.”
“Then you must get tested,” said Natalie. “Tell Adam you want him to go with you and hold your hand.”
“No, no, I can’t,” said Shawn. “The subject freaks
him
out too. He was always a little paranoid about it, but now, with Sara and everything, I can’t ask him to deal with this, too. It’s my concern, not his. He doesn’t have to worry; we’ve only had ‘safe sex,’ as they say, and he was tested right before we met.”
“Then I will go with you myself,” said Natalie. “This afternoon. We’ll get in the car and we’ll—”
“No,” said Shawn. “Thank you, but no. It’s enough right now that I look halfway good in these clothes. That’s enough for today. Let me take it one step at a time.” He did look good; he knew it, and he was relieved. To be a gay man at the end of the twentieth century meant having to look good, unless you were Adam Langer, and then you could look sort of bad, but it didn’t matter. Usually, the men Shawn became involved with were as handsome as he was; together over dinner or in bed the men looked like an evenly matched set: two gleaming cufflinks, a pair of bookends. But he and these men often shared a kind of desperation, as though they all knew that they needed their looks to carry them through life. Their jobs were uniformly boring: paralegal, word processor, and, in Shawn’s case, telemarketing representative. The work lives of these young men were as dull as that of the dullest suburban dad on his way home to Scarsdale or Darien. But they had a secret code that kept them from sinking into despair, a system of flirting and winking and calling each other up and discussing who was fuckable, and who wasn’t.
He thought of Natalie’s offer to take him for an HIV test, and rejected it again in his mind. Five men he had been sexually involved with over the years had died: Steven H., Steven P., Jonathan from the gym, Andrew, and Donald the bartender at the Bedrock Club. One by one, like characters trapped in an old mansion in a mystery novel, the men had been knocked off. In the beginning, Shawn had assumed that it was a foregone conclusion that he would develop AIDS and die too. He had walked around with palpitations, giddy and expectant. But time kept passing, and to his astonishment there were no symptoms, not even a slight swelling of swollen glands in the neck, or a lingering cold, or fatigue. He knew men who regularly visited a local juice bar called Squeeze, where they ordered wheat grass cocktails, a bright green liquid that was served in tiny plastic cups. The men downed
their miniature drinks, silently willing the liquid to provide them with energy and longevity and an invisible shield against infection. But still they fell ill, these men he saw at the gym, or knew from the clubs, or from his unsuccessful stint as a waiter, or from the week he had spent at a friend’s share in the Fire Island Pines (in a house that was, for the record, much nicer than this one). And still Shawn stayed healthy. Which didn’t necessarily mean it would last. It was entirely possible that one morning, a year from now, he would wake up with a rash, or an odd marking on his leg, and that would be that.
He often imagined his own death, the mourners filing into the funeral, none of them having been particularly close to him. His parents would probably refuse to come in from Michigan, out of some half-baked moral conviction. But his roommates would be there, already wondering who they could get to rent Shawn’s room, and a couple of his siblings would make the trip too, as well as the loose grouping of casual friends he had made over the years. But no one would be passionate about him if he died, the way Sara’s friends had been about her. No one would be hysterical, or driven half-mad, or endlessly obsessing and even deifying him, the way they did with Sara.
Since Sara Swerdlow died, Shawn’s worries about himself had gotten so extreme that he thought Natalie was right: He ought to find out his fate once and for all. As it was, he woke up every day not knowing. It occurred to him that he might suddenly weaken, and that his life might slide into oblivion, and he would die without ever having achieved
anything,
without a single song he had written having ever been sung aloud in a theater by professional actor-singers. But still he behaved as though
not
knowing his HIV status provided him a bright green, protective shield. He kept his boyishness alive, and in fact worked hard to preserve it, although in his heart he knew that this year, this summer perhaps, marked the very end of boyishness for him. And the realization made him long, more than anything, to have his musical produced.
For years, it had been acceptable to say you were a writer of musicals but to still make your living from telemarketing. It wasn’t a bad job, really. Most of the people you called hated you, and spoke back in truculent voices. In the background you could hear the clash of dinnerware, for you were invariably getting them smack in the middle of a meal. The overburdened American family had one brief moment of breaking bread together and you arrived to spoil it.
Good evening, ma am, I’m calling from Advantage America, and we’d like to ask you a few questions about your leisure and entertainment needs.
Often they were bewildered, mouths full of food.
Wht? Fmmf um, wahl, unh
… But sometimes they’d come right out and say,
“Fuck you, asshole!”
Occasionally, you would stumble upon a deeply lonely person over the telephone who would quickly agree to be interviewed, and then wouldn’t let
you
off the phone at the end of your survey. They’d actually invent reasons to keep you on the line, asking you to repeat the last question, or asking what other surveys they might participate in. They pulled you into the jaws of their lonesome misery, and you could easily picture their home: a studio apartment with a hotplate, or else the big, chilly house of a widow in a kelly green cardigan.
When the evening ended, very late (at 11:30
P.M.
you could still call homes in the Pacific Time Zone), you and the other telemarketers would close up shop, shutting off the banks of fluorescent lights and heading down together in the elevator of this seedy but clean building in the West Thirties, a nowhere neighborhood dominated by Madison Square Garden and a long, slow crawl of taxicabs outside Penn Station. You’d hop onto the subway, or catch one of those cabs if you were feeling flush, and go back to your own home where, at any given hour, you yourself might get a phone call from a total stranger, asking if you had a few minutes to spare.
Now Shawn was away from the phone, away from his own shared apartment. His two roommates, Dirk and Arthur, one an
actor/waiter and one a weight trainer/musician, seemed peeved that Shawn had escaped the city for a good chunk of August, despite the fact that he was all paid up on the rent. No one in New York could stand it when anyone else got a summer reprieve. It wasn’t exactly as though this beach house was much of an escape, anyway. The place was terrible, and everyone in it was depressed about their friend Sara’s death.