We talk for a few more minutes and by the time we are finished. Tommy seems calmed down. Unlike his sister, he wants to trust me.
Tuesday afternoon I hurry home to see Sarah, who is home for spring
break. She has stayed in Fayetteville with a friend for the first three days, so I am anxious to see her. When I turn in the drive, there is a Subaru behind Sarah’s ancient Beetle. Perhaps one of her friends from Fayetteville has dropped by. These girls look so young to me that I wonder how any of them are taken seriously when they apply for jobs. As I go in the back door, I hope Sarah has picked up a little.
College hasn’t made her a better housekeeper.
Though I can tell she has matured in the last couple of years, she comes home and sometimes regresses into an adolescent who might not make it out of junior high.
In the living room Sarah is sitting on the couch with a guy who is much too old for her. Though not bad looking in the face, this man even has a receding hairline and looks kind of flashy in a sports jacket that reminds me of the coat the Masters golf champion is presented after he wins.
“Hi, Dad!” Sarah says brightly.
“This is my friend Larry. He’s down here for a meeting for his company and I invited him to come by.”
The AIDS patient! He jumps to his feet and offers his hand.
“Larry Burdette, Mr. Page,” he says, giving me a firm grip and looking me straight in the eye like every other salesman I’ve known.
“Your daughter talks about you all the time. It’s a pleasure to meet
you.”
“Nice to meet you,” I murmur, noticing he looks pretty good for someone on his last legs.
Though I know all the literature says you can’t get AIDS except by sexual contact or through contact with their blood, I feel uneasy. A plastic glass full of water sits on the table by his chair. I need to try to remember to wash it thoroughly. I wonder if the guy has used the bathroom.
“Dad, you want a beer?” Sarah asks, her voice too loud, since she is standing right beside me. I feel in a daze. I wasn’t expecting this guy.
“Yeah,” I manage.
“That’d be good.” I need something.
“Have a seat,” I say to Larry, who is appraising me coolly. I watch Sarah disappear into the kitchen and wish she had warned me about this visit.
When he sits back down, I take the chair opposite him.
“Sarah says you sell computers. I can hardly turn one on, much less do anything with it. A friend of mine down the hall has one, but it just sits on his desk like a pet rock.”
He crosses his legs.
“In ten years they’ll be as simple to learn as driving a car.”
“Given some of the drivers I see around here,” I say, “I don’t know if that’ll help much.” He doesn’t even look gay to me.
He smiles as my daughter walks into the room and hands me a Miller Lite.
“Would you like one?” I ask, wondering if Sarah has already offered.
“I haven’t had a drink in five years,” he says, moving back his legs to let Sarah by.
“I’m in AA.”
Damn. AIDS. An alcoholic. If I were this guy, I’d be climbing the walls, but he seems pretty laid back. Maybe he’s on drugs.
“After a couple of drinks,” I say, watching Sarah’s face, “alcohol has never done me any favors.”
“Or solved a single one of my problems,” he responds amiably.
“Which are not inconsiderable, Sarah tells me,” I say, taking a long swallow.
“Dad!” Sarah shrieks. I wonder if she was expecting him to come by.
She is wearing old baggy jeans and a faded Razorback sweatshirt.
“Larry is the guy you’ve been writing me about, isn’t he?” I ask
innocently.
“It’s okay, Sarah,” Larry says.
“I don’t expect to live in a vacuum. The more people get to know us, the less afraid they’ll be.”
Out of politeness I nod, but I wonder if the reverse is true. I’ve been nervous ever since I found out who he was.
“How long since you’ve been diagnosed?” I ask, not really wanting to talk about this, but morbidly curious.
“Two years,” he says.
“It’s been quite an adjustment, but the support people like Sarah have given me has made all the difference in the world. You’ve got some daughter.”
For an instant I feel as if I am going to cry. This poor sucker is dying, and he credits my child with helping him want to live.
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I say, watching Sarah blush.
“Has she told you about her personal odyssey the last few years? She’s quite the seeker.” “No,” he says, turning to Sarah.
“I’m afraid I’ve done most of the talking.”
Sarah gives me a look but answers, “Oh, I just went through a period in
high school when I was real religious and went to a fundamentalist church, and then last semester I got kind of caught up in a feminist movement on campus.”
Larry runs his arm down the back of the sofa.
“So I’m part of the quest, huh?” he asks, gently.
“No!” Sarah says, her face suddenly agonized.
“I just got involved with RAIN because it seemed the right thing to do.
Everybody in school is so self-centered. All they talk about is themselves and parties and dating and the Razorbacks. It feels good to be a part of something more important than who got drunk last week at the Sigma Nu house.”
By the expression on her face I know Sarah is mad at me. So be it. I am not particularly pleased with her for having set this visit up without talking to me first. I suggest that we invite Larry to go out to eat with us, and though he says he needs to work for a while, Sarah easily persuades him to come with us. At my suggestion we drive out to the Breadbox in western Blackwell County for Mexican food. I have eaten out here with Amy, and not only is it cheap, I am not likely to run into anybody I know. It is not that I think this guy will suddenly start bleeding on the dishes, but I feel uncomfortable with him. Yet, for all I know, half the staff at the Breadbox has AIDS.
Larry proves to be an entertaining dinner date.
Open and talkative, it is easy to see why Sarah responds to him.
“I had no clear understanding something was different about me,” he says over bread pudding and coffee after polishing off a full chicken enchilada dinner, “until I was in junior high. And then I spent the rest of high school and college trying to pretend I was normal and feeling incredibly lonely. I was like a bad magician telling a ridiculous joke while doing sleight-of-hand tricks, hoping nobody would notice what was actually going on.”
His parents had been stalwarts of a nondenominational Bible church in Texarkana, and the minister ranked homosexuality with mass murder on the top ten sin chart. Not to fear, however.
Homosexuals could be saved through prayer and rigorous counseling. When I ask whether he let them try, he responded quickly, “I wouldn’t have confessed to being gay in that church if they had put me on the rack.”
As he talks, I think of old Mr. Carpenter and resolve to go by to see him when I return to Bear Creek. He has asked me every time I have seen him.
“What was scary was that by the time I was seventeen I had gone from simple loneliness to thinking I might be some kind of monster. The day I graduated from high school I took off for San Francisco. I’ve never been back home for more than a couple of weeks.”
His brave talk earlier of educating people that AIDS victims are just plain folks has disappeared.
Yet who does not regress to childhood in front of their parents?
“How’d you wind up in Fayetteville?” I ask, curious. There are gay hangouts up there, but it’s hardly San Francisco.
While he explains that it was cheaper to go to school in Arkansas and pay in-state tuition, I glance at my daughter’s face. She has doubtlessly heard this story before, but she is hanging on his every word. Her mother was the same way. She was a sucker for victims. Yet, to this guy’s credit, he isn’t whining. This was how his life was.