The saint of travelers pulled back a moment. “Why are you crying, baby?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and she truly didn’t. She vaguely remembered Tavi telling her that the MDMA would make her feel all emotional and open, that shrinks used it to get patients to open up about their feelings. “I just feel really happy. It’s been a great night.”
He laughed. “It is a great night,” he said. “Because we met.”
Her blouse and bra were coming off; her leggings were coming off. The saint of travelers certainly appeared to be truly bisexual, she noted, impressed. As he penetrated her, as she sank deeper and deeper into the cushions of the backseat, she drew her arms more tightly around San Cristóbal’s neck, letting everything fall away but the power of their conjoined bodies. Eventually, as their rhythm intensified, she felt the stirrings of a massive inner thrill. She was going to have her first orgasm with a man! She was so overwhelmed by the sensations racking her. She thought it would never actually happen, it would just build and build, but then when it finally did happen, she thought it would never end. Amid that, San Cristóbal himself came, deep inside her. They held each other, saying nothing, just breathing and shaking, until the sky changed from black to a deep blue.
San Cristóbal finally sat up unceremoniously, disentangled himself, and fished a cigarette from a compartment near the front seat. “You want one?” he asked her.
She was a little disappointed these were his first words after sex. They were hardly very romantic. “That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t smoke. It’s bad for your teeth.” She began to pull her clothes back on.
“I brush and floss,” he said, blowing smoke out the window. He was now sitting a foot or so away from her. He put his free left hand on the back of her neck as a halfhearted concession to intimacy. Issy didn’t want the moment to end, though. She lay down again, resting her head on his thigh.
“I can’t believe we have to go in there again and I gotta find Tavi,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said hesitantly. Then, after a pause, “Actually, I think I’m gonna just be getting home, now that I’m out of the club. I made some plans for today. You’ll be okay getting back in yourself.”
This crushed her, deepening the cheap feeling that the oozy MDMA couldn’t quite override. “Of course I will,” she managed to say. “Don’t worry about it.”
“No, I didn’t mean it as a question,” he said. “I meant, I knew you’d be okay getting back in because the guys at the door are cool. I know them.”
Double crushed. He didn’t even sound mean about it, Issy thought, just matter-of-fact, as though he genuinely wanted to clarify his intent.
“No,” she said. “I mean, I know how you meant it.” At this point, she made herself sit up, then check and fix her hair in the rearview window. Everything she saw — the streets and the buildings and the passing cabs — looked sparkly and extra-sharp from the MDMA, all of which made for a strange counterpoint to the core of badness she was suddenly feeling.
“Well”—she turned to him—“good-bye.” This, she thought, was the moment of truth. Please, she thought, trying not to betray herself with her eyes, ask me for a phone number or something.
“Good-bye, baby.” He took a final drag off his cigarette, flicked it out the window, and leaned over to kiss her dutifully on the lips. “Get back in there safe, okay.”
The final crush. She could feel tears welling in her eyes, so she turned quickly and stepped out of the car. She made a point of not looking back as she walked toward the corner of Hudson and King Streets. She would just go inside and find Tavi and forget that had ever happened.
She was approaching the rather forbidding-looking bouncer, a muscular black man with a yellow Mohawk, to ask politely if she could reenter the club, when Tavi’s handsome, nerdy friend walked out of the club.
“Issy!” he called to her. He remembered her name, and she felt bad for having forgotten his. “You waiting for Tavi?”
She wondered if he could tell how disoriented and jangled she felt, between the lingering druggy feeling and the prior moment’s encounter. “Huh?” she asked. “Oh. Well, I’m going back in to find Tavi. I needed to get some air.”
He peered more closely at her behind his glasses. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I just really needed some air.”
He studied her a moment longer. “Well, come on,” he finally said, putting an arm around her. “I’ll go back in and help you find him.”
“But you were leaving, right?”
“It’ll only take a minute. Besides, there’s a guy I met whose number I should try to get. A little blond kid.”
“Oh, boy,” Issy managed to say. “Well, okay then, thanks.”
The bouncer, who’d witnessed this exchange, brushed them back inside. Issy couldn’t believe how crowded the club still was, even though it was now early morning. She’d certainly had enough for tonight, though. The DJ was playing something instrumental, heavy on African-sounding drums and a weird sort of flying-saucer sound. The nerdy guy reached back for her hand, which she offered, as they navigated themselves through the dancers.
She pulled him back toward her for a moment. “What’s your name again?” she shouted.
“Hector,” he shouted back. “Hector Villanueva.”
“Thank you, Hector,” she said. “You’re sweet.” This was enough, somehow, to trigger a runaway tear. All she really wanted was a sweet guy, she thought. Why was it so hard to find one?
Hector put his hands on her shoulders. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“It’s just been a crazy night.”
“Well, don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get you to Tavi now and then you can get home.” He gave her an awkward little hug, as though to reassure her. Issy hugged him back and found it hard to let go.
Six. Learning to Breathe: An Early Memoir (1995)
At LaGuardia, waiting to board her flight to L.A., Milly made two calls. First, she called her mother, something she did pretty much every day.
“I’m exhausted,” Ava told her. “Two deaths in the house so far this month. Two lovely ladies gone.”
“That’s horrible,” Milly murmured. “I’m so sorry, Ava.” Milly mostly kept her distance from her mother’s work; it just made her too sad.
“Plus,” Ava continued, “the boiler’s on the fritz and we had to run out and buy space heaters for the entire house because you can’t have a houseful of immune-compromised women sleeping without heat in February.”
“You have to be careful, Mom,” Milly told her mother. When had she started toggling between calling her mother Mom and Ava? Probably when she was around sixteen; by that point, she’d done so much mothering of her own mother that “Ava” instead of “Mom” had started popping out of her mouth — sometimes with something like barely suppressed indignation, with a sardonic bite that felt good to the tongue, and yet sometimes tenderly, like, well, let’s face it, she was the little girl here, not Milly, and you needed to say her name gently so she heard it.
And now, often, Milly had to admit, she said Ava’s name with respect. Because for over a decade now, her mother had bitten the bullet, soldiered through the heavy doses of lithium, the weekly psychopharmacological visits, the support groups. She’d said good-bye to her own manic pleasures so she could be there for others. For whom, exactly? For the sick, the poor, the dying. By 1989, what had started as a few strange cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma had blown up into one of the worst epidemics the city had ever seen, one that seemed to prey on homosexuals and drug addicts, groups that people already shunned. Yet the city had done so little about it — for many reasons, certainly, but mainly because the city was run, everyone knew, by a closeted mayor terrified of getting his hands dirty with a gay disease.