“You’re so fucking beautiful, Milly,” he told her, just resting there, before the wildness really began, as she took huge breaths and adjusted. “I’m in love with you.”
The words shook her from her roving images. “You don’t know that yet,” she said.
“I know it so well.”
Thunder shook the apartment. In a second, rain was pounding on the window screens. She could hear it instantly pooling on the sills. “We have to close the windows,” she said.
But Jared’s smile was so wide! “No, we don’t,” he said. Then — and how did he do this? — staying deep inside, he twisted them both until he held her from behind, his lips on her shoulder blades. Milly stared deeply into the complicated rattan weave on the front of the stereo console, and, as Jared began to move, for the next several minutes she forgot about him and about all the moving images and she let the world focus on her, and she was finally comfortable with it.
The rain — and obviously it was a very warm rain — had already pooled so deeply off the curb that Issy was about to step into it in her sandal up to her ankle when Ricky, his bag of flyers already wet, went, “Whoa, girl!” and sort of lifted her from the waist so she missed the big puddle. They were leaving a diner where they’d gone to eat after the big meeting — her, Hector, this guy Ricky who was obviously his boyfriend, and a guy named Korie who really didn’t look good.
She had stood alongside Hector throughout the rambunctious meeting, a bit overwhelmed and dazed but also strangely relieved and safe, and then when it adjourned, Hector — and she could tell that Hector was a big shot here — had introduced her to a bunch of women, some of them Latinas but most of them looking like lesbianas, and before she knew it she was on a committee to try to get the federal definition of AIDS expanded to include more symptoms that only women had. Like not getting your periods regularly! That had been happening to her! And after, Hector had said, “Come on, we’re getting something to eat at Joe Jr. Come with us.” So she had, sitting there with a bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese (Hector picked up the tab) while the guys talked mainly about a Chinese drug and whether you could take it for AIDS or not, because Korie wanted to know. Overall, Hector didn’t think it was a good idea.
“I think you should wait and get into parallel tracking with ddI,” he told Korie, who took a deep breath, as though he was digesting this new idea. Everyone had been talking about this new drug ddI at the meeting, Issy had noticed. Could this be the drug that was going to change everything? What if she lived? She sipped her soup and listened quietly to Hector and Korie go back and forth. There was a lot of new terminology she was learning tonight. Some folks had told her they didn’t know jack shit about AIDS or science or the body or anything before they started coming to the meetings, and now, only a few months in, they could hold their own, read medical papers, follow a conversation. Maybe that would happen to her, too! She already had dental knowledge. (And, at her dental hygienist job, she suffered intense guilt that she had told no colleagues she was infected, as well as terror that someone might somehow find out and she’d be fired, or — worse — that she might somehow bleed into a patient’s mouth and infect them.)
Ricky put his arm around her. She knew he was in his twenties, but he looked like he could be twelve with that little-boy face! “How’s your soup ’n’ sandwich, girl?” he asked her.
She laughed. “It’s fine. I didn’t eat much today before. I was nervous about coming to the meeting.”
“Well, you came and you made a splash!” he said. She liked Ricky. He reminded her of when you were flipping TV channels and came across an old musical set on a farm or something, that kind of guy. All-American and smiley and wholesome, even though he had a punk haircut.
The boys were getting up now and talking about going to dance at a bar called Boy Bar. She didn’t think she’d ever been there with Tavi — maybe it was new.
“What are you going to do now?” Ricky asked her.
She shrugged. “I guess I’m gonna take the subway back to Queens.” God, it was so stressful living with her family, hiding this from them. What if she started looking like Korie? How would she hide it then?
“Come dance with us!” Ricky said.
She laughed. “Me? No, you guys go ahead.”
Korie put his arm around her. “Oh, honey, please, if I can go for a while, so can you.”
She looked up at Hector. “Come out with us for a while, chica,” he said.
The place was basically a dark pit with loud music, like Paradise Garage had been. Tavi, she thought when she walked in, the music’s throb hitting her. They were walking forward in a crowd of guys and she felt herself shuffling, her hand rising to her neck. Oh, she had pushed down these feelings about Tavi! Oh God, he had been like her brother, far more than her real brother. Well, maybe he was more like her sister. And she couldn’t bring herself to tell him, in his final months when he was so sick, that she had the same thing. He’d died without knowing. She’d pushed down all this Tavi stuff for months now. She hadn’t set foot in a club, heard this thump-thump music, since Tavi.
Hector spied her, put a hand on her neck. “You okay?” he shouted in her ear.
“I haven’t been to a club since Tavi,” she shouted back into his ear, on her tippy-toes.
He put his arm around her. “It’s too much for you? I can walk you out.”
She didn’t share that she’d barely stepped into a club since that night five years ago, the night she was fairly certain she’d gotten the virus from that moreno in the back of the car. Four years later, she’d started having the private-area problems, catching colds that seemed never to go away, noticing her glands were always hard and swollen. The doctor she’d visited asked her if she had any reason to believe she might have HIV.
She didn’t have to think back too hard. Literally from the week after the encounter with the moreno, she wondered if she’d done a stupid thing, especially as she read more and more about the disease. She’d insisted on a condom the two times she’d had sex with someone since.
“I had sex once with a bisexual guy,” she told the doctor. “Without a condom.”
The two weeks she waited for the test results, she stopped in a church every day to light a candle and pray she didn’t have it. When the doctor called her back in and told her she did in fact have it, she felt an immediate disgust with herself for being so naive and trusting as to think God would have cut her a break. What a fool she was! She wasn’t getting a thing she wanted out of life, the deck was stacked against her, and this was fate’s last laugh at the sad, not-much life of Ysabel Mendes. That sense she’d long buried, that perhaps the world really wasn’t a fair and good place, as dictated by the church, came rushing up in a hot, humiliating blaze in her throat.
“So I’m gonna get more sick and die?” she asked the doctor, tears welling in her eyes. And meanwhile, she calculated to herself, she’d be fired from her job and would have to endure the scorn and rejection of her family, the neighborhood. That would be fun. “How soon do I have?”
“Don’t look at it that way,” the doctor had said. “You’re in decent health now. Your T cells are high. We’ll monitor you and if they ever get really low, we can talk about AZT.”
“What?”
“It’s a drug for HIV.”
“Does it cure it?”
“No, but it can keep it in check for a while. And other drugs will be coming down the pike. So meanwhile, eat well, don’t drink or smoke, exercise, don’t get too stressed. You’ll be okay.”