She focused on what Hector had resumed saying: “So, yes, ddI. .” How the clinical trials for ddI were so rigid, so exclusionary — God, Hector explained this heavy stuff to a lay audience so well, so clearly, no bullshit! — that nobody who really needed the drug could get in the trial. So, as activists, they’d forced the FDA and the drugmaker into meetings with them where they’d come up with a novel concept called parallel tracking: the drug company would fill its classic trial as best it could with patients who met the strict criteria, but it would also give the drug in a parallel-track trial to whoever needed it and met only minimal basic criteria. The whole thing would start in a few weeks.
Ava nudged Ithke. “It’s amazing they pulled that off,” she said. “That kind of model at FDA is unheard of.”
Ithke smirked. “Little by little, you’re all learning not to shut us out,” he said.
So cocky! These boys. . really! She could only smile back at him in the half-charmed, half-reproving way a mother might to her bratty son. Was Ithke HIV-positive? she wondered. Who around her was? A few looked sick, but most looked great — sexy, young, lithe. She felt like she was at a gay disco but with slogan T-shirts and sign-up boards instead of throbbing music. She thought about pills. All the fucking pills she’d had to take the past several years — the exhausting, rotating mix of pills and their weird, sweaty, enervating, weight-gaining, narcolepsy-inducing, strange-tics-and-sparks-in-the-brain-provoking side effects — the constant titrating up and down, the mind-numbing trips to her autocratic psychopharmacologist, all the tinkering and tweaking, constantly trying to get to that point where you felt balanced and minimally stable but not like a walled-off zombie. The mood swings and the pills had made her not only a public-health official, but a patient, conferring on her an empathy for sick people she hadn’t particularly asked for and still half resented.
So many pills for her to choose from, and so hard to know how to use them. Whereas these guys — hardly any pills at all. The only real pill, AZT, so nasty and toxic. She’d probably never die of her disease as long as she stayed on her funky pharmaceutical soup. But who here would live? What if she knew that Milly might decline and die in the next five years? The thought gave her a wave of stomach sickness. What did the mothers of these boys think, feel? Did they even know their kids were gay? And Hector. Did he have it? She could never bring herself to ask him, not even in his final year at DOH when, for the first time, the edges of his anger and disgust started showing, more and more, in meetings and random conversations for the first time since he showed up as her shy intern in 1981.
Ithke and Karl left her side now to present on housing issues. Hector stepped down from the dais, was working his way through the crowd to her. Before he reached her, a woman with wire-framed glasses, in a pair of overalls and massive black boots, approached her.
“I’m Esther Hurwitz,” the woman announced. “I’m an activist and a writer. I chronicle the death toll. And I’d like to ask you: With how little you’ve done in this plague, can you live with yourself as a woman and a Jew?”
Ava’s eyes grew wide. Then she laughed, incredulous. “I can live with myself as a woman and a Jew just fine,” she said. “How about you? And another thing: Is that really how you think you make allies with the health establishment in an epidemic?” she asked.
“You’ve hardly been an ally,” Esther shot back. “You’ve been useless.”
Hector joined them. Ava turned to him. “Who is this woman? She just accosted me.”
Hector, baffled, said nothing. Ava glanced at him again. She missed him so much! She was. . she found the word: she was proud of him.
“Esther, she’s on our side,” Hector finally said to Esther. “Honestly.”
Esther eyed Ava for several seconds behind her glasses. “None of you guys,” she finally said, “have done much to make us believe that.”
Something in her tone softened Ava up. She was moved to see how many women — lesbians mostly, it seemed — were here tonight, when the women easily could’ve said this was the boys’ problem, not gotten involved. “That’s why I’m here tonight, honey,” she said.
Esther folded her arms over her chest and frowned. “We’ll see, then,” she said. “Honey.” She turned and walked away.
Ava turned to Hector. “Tough fucking crowd,” she said.
“You don’t even know the half,” he said. He led Ava out of the main room toward the foyer, which was quiet. They sat down on a bench. “I saw your daughter tonight.”
“Milly?”
“She’s working across the street from our apartment.”
Ava cocked her head quizzically. “Oh my goodness, that’s right. At a café, right?”
Hector couldn’t help a smile. Poor Milly. Ava’d never exactly been the most attentive mother — she’d had the city’s health to think about. “At a boutique,” he said. “Reminiscence.”
“Oh, of course, I knew that. Isn’t she a beautiful girl?”
“She is,” Hector agreed.
“I’m proud of her,” Ava murmured absently.
They fell into silence. They could hear shouts and scattered applause in the great hall, but they were alone for the moment in the foyer. Their eyes met; they both smiled awkwardly. Ava took Hector’s large hand in hers for a moment, moved it to her lap, set it back on his own. “You’re a grant recipient!” she joked.
He shrugged. “That’s me.”
More silence. “Are you all right, Hector?” she finally mustered the nerve to ask him.
He looked at her, shrugged again. “I am,” he said. “At least I was as of February, the last test. And I haven’t been with anyone but Ricky since.”
“What about Ricky?”
Hector pursed his lips. “This is between us, right?”
“Of course.”
“I think he might be. Swollen lymphs and a long cold this winter. I want him to get tested but he won’t. He’s afraid.”
Ava said nothing for a while. Finally, she turned on the bench and said to him, in a deadly serious whisper, as though she was afraid someone might hear, because she was: “I care about you and I want to apologize to you. I didn’t do enough when this emerged. None of us did. Because of who it affected, and we didn’t want to get our hands dirty with it. We kept putting it off. Everyone has.”
Hector laughed a bitter, soft laugh. “You think I don’t know that? You think that any of us don’t know that? Ava, why do you think we’re here, showing up at your offices with the New York Times on our tail, trying to embarrass you? This is what you pushed us to.” His hands were clenching as he spoke — oh, he hated showing his anger! “I would much rather be fighting this fight from inside Health, with my fucking colleagues.”
“You know I spoke up for this, Hector,” she said. “With Steve. With Ed!”
“Ava, you know that fucking closeted queen of a mayor hasn’t done enough. And neither have you.”
Had he just said that square into the face of his boss of seven years? Apparently. A moment later, guilt stabbed him. For seven years he’d watched her drag herself to work, sometimes sweaty, sometime bloated, walking through the haze of new meds, new med combos. She had virtually bolted her mind down with meds to show up for work, for her daughter’s high-school years, so she’d never humiliate her husband and daughter again. Through it all, she’d missed only two weeks of work, for a hospitalization upstate in ’87, a kind of support camp to come to grips with her illness and, together with others in the same situation, learn to live with it. The deep lines in her forehead and around her eyes and jaw, at not even fifty, traced every sweaty, depressed, off-the-beam year of her past decade. Her hair was salt-and-pepper now, frizzy, pulled back in a plastic clip; she didn’t care much about being stylish and sexy anymore. She’d lost something and she had that dark nimbus, embodied by her ridiculously heavy old black workbag, to prove it.