Did she want to hang out tomorrow night? he’d asked her. Oh, he was serious, she thought. Well, sure, she’d said. She thought about his head of curly, honey-hued hair, his very straight nose, his honeyed face fuzz. Their shoulders touching in that screening room in the dark for that class back in April, watching “O Superman,” having to soon write about all it signified. Her relative boredom with it; Jared’s fixation, his love of VHS as a medium. What would they do on such a hot night? They could have sushi, then go hear friends play at the Bitter End. Should she change? Put on makeup? It was so very hot.
Two guys came out of the apartment across the street in sleeveless T-shirts, jean shorts rolled up over the knees, and black boots. The dark-featured one put his arm around the blond one. Gay guys were hot, Milly thought idly. They had no issue showing off their bodies. She thought it was empowering. Then: wait! That was Hector, who’d worked with her mom at the Health Department till he’d left and started giving her hell. It had been awful, but he was breaking her down. He’d turned on her, from shy to right up in her face! That image made Milly laugh, her mother confronted by more confrontational, psycho types than herself, including her own former protégé.
The two men were making their way down the street. “Hector!” Milly was surprised to hear herself call out. The pair turned back, and she dropped her cigarette behind her back and strode across the street. Hector was ridiculously good-looking, so her mother had always said, and indeed her mother was right. He had considerable muscles in all the right places. His boyfriend, the blond guy, was good-looking too in that classic blond, blue-eyed, forever-a-boy way. He was a bit smaller, younger, than Hector.
“I’m Milly Heyman,” she said. “I’m Ava’s daughter. We met a few years ago — at an awards. . thing.” Her mother had received some dry public-service award for something having to do with food-service hygiene and they’d all dressed up and gone.
Hector peered at her. “Oh, riiiight,” he said slowly. He and the blond guy both had canvas bags loaded with flyers and folders. He stepped forward to shake her hand, then stepped in more and gave her a short, slightly awkward kiss hello. He nodded toward the blond guy. “This is Ricky,” he said.
She and Ricky shook hands, swapped hellos. Ricky’s voice was about two octaves higher than Hector’s — he sounded southern or midwestern or something.
They hit that bump of silence. “Well, I saw you,” she said, “and recognized you and just wanted to say hi.”
Hector nodded, smiling — a little patronizing or judging? Milly wondered.
“You’re in college now, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, I just finished my first year. I’m working there this summer.” She gestured back at Reminiscence. “I just got out.”
“Yeah, we saw you smoking that after-work cigarette, you bad girl,” Ricky teased her. They all laughed. Milly blushed and shrugged, a bit delighted to be called a bad girl.
“I know, not a healthy choice,” she said.
“We all have our vices,” Ricky said. They all laughed again before falling into silence.
“Well, okay,” Milly said brightly. “I just wanted to say hi. Hey, you’re not at the Health Department anymore, are you?”
Hector shook his head, seemed to frown. “No, no,” he said. “I’m doing activism full-time now.”
“AIDS activism, right?” Milly had noticed some of the stuff sticking out of their bags, the pink triangle that had become ubiquitous the past few years. “We have a chapter of that in college,” she said.
“That’s good!” the blond one — what was his name again? Billy? — piped up. “Are you in it?”
She shrugged, blushing with guilt. “Uh, I went to a fund-raiser dance?”
Hector and the blond one laughed. “That’s a start,” Hector said. “I also have a grant to help design clinical trials — that’s what’s supporting me right now.”
“Baby, I’m the one that’s supporting you,” the blond guy said, kicking Hector lightly in the thigh. “That grant money is—” He turned to Milly. “I think it pays the phone bill.”
“Okay, fine, you’re supporting me right now,” Hector conceded, putting his arm around the blond guy.
Milly laughed. She was charmed and touched. She knew a handful of gay guys and lesbians in college — she’d had her own inner (and at least one outer) flirtation with that in the past year — but she didn’t know any gay couples who actually lived together and schlepped bags around and bickered about the bills like her parents did.
Again, a moment of silence passed until Hector nudged the blond one. “We should go.” He pulled out a flyer with the pink triangle on it and waggled it toward Milly. “We’re off to a meeting right now.”
“Okay,” she said. “Oh! I think my mother’s going to that meeting.”
Hector’s eyes widened. He and the blond one looked at each other. “Your mother?” Hector asked. “Are you serious?”
“This morning I remember her saying she wanted to go to a meeting tonight for that.” Milly pointed at the triangle. “She was reading the Times and pointed to an article about it and a photo with you guys with your signs. Like, at a demonstration I think?”
“Montreal,” the blond one said. “We just did big demos at a big conference in Montreal.”
“I guess that’s what it was,” said Milly. “Anyway, yeah, I remember her saying something like, ‘That’s it, tonight I’m finally going,’ or something like that.”
Hector broke into a grin. “That should be very interesting to see,” he said.
“In-deed,” said the blond one.
“She—” Milly began. She had to choose her words carefully. “I think she’s frustrated with—”
“What she can do at Health?” Hector asked.
Milly sighed. “You said it, not me.”
“Maybe she can be an inside-outside,” the blond one said to Hector.
Milly wasn’t sure what that meant. “I guess you’ll have to see if she comes!”
They walked together a few blocks, making bits of small talk. Were they sick? Milly wondered. They certainly didn’t look sick. But she knew that years could go by before people got sick. They were arm in arm, and at a certain point, on a crowded sidewalk, they had to sidle ahead of her, leaving her trailing them a bit like an urchin. At a café, she announced she was going in.
“Come to the meeting with us and see if your mom shows up,” the blond one said.
Milly laughed. “Me? No, no, I — maybe I would, but I have plans. And I know better than to bother my mom when she’s working.”
The blond one laughed. “If she shows up, you won’t be the only one bothering her, believe me.”
Milly had no idea what to say to that. Hector leaned in and gave her a little hug good-bye. He smelled good, she noticed, something like nutmeg. “I’ll protect your mom if she shows up,” he said. “I know she’s on the right side of this.”
Then Hector slung his arm around Ricky again and left Ava’s clueless Ivy League daughter behind. He thought maybe he should wait until they turned a corner away from her, but he didn’t care — something about the conversation had been tiresome and oppressive and, leaving it, he felt a surge of tenderness, lust, and heartbreak toward Ricky, and he dropped his bag and held Ricky intensely by the nape of his neck with his left hand and by Ricky’s pert, taut right buttcheek with his right hand and thrust his tongue into Ricky’s mouth. When Hector kissed Ricky in public — okay, granted, it was the Village, but still — he felt like he was falling back, back, back, crashing backward through years of self-denial and self-containment, making up for lost time like a starving dog. He was thirty-two! How many years had he wasted?