Issy lowered herself onto Hector. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed. She’d barely remembered what that felt like. It brought back the feelings of that night in the back of the car outside the club. How strange that she’d met Hector that night, and now—
She looked at him. He was staring at her, his eyes large with bewilderment.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Does it feel good?”
“It feels good,” he said. “It’s just—” His eyes welled and his voice broke. “It’s just I don’t understand anything. I feel like it’s all happening around me and there’s really nothing I can do about it.”
Issy drew in her breath. Her desire simmered for a moment and she clearly saw Hector’s confusion. “Let’s stop then,” she said, bracing herself on the couch to rise.
“No, no.” He pulled her back down. “Stay there.” He pulled her head down toward his, held their foreheads together, his hands behind her neck. “Stay like that.”
Issy moved up and down on Hector, her feelings a queasy jumble. She was using him, for one thing. She’d been pushy about it. Yet it felt so good, like scratching an itch, deeper and deeper. She felt like, as she moved, she was trying to work something out — something that, as she got closer and closer to it, felt like anger. Rage. She’d been so fearful and ashamed and shut down for three years. What she was feeling now was rage at her family, at her neighborhood, at the whole entire city. She’d been royally fucked over! She didn’t deserve this! And there was Hector. How dare he not love her the way he loved Ricky! And yet, also, there was Hector, his mouth wide open, breathing hard, his eyes squinched shut, with Ricky back at the hospital. She wanted to blot him out to the point where he was merely an object, a dildo, in this moment, but she couldn’t remove herself from his grief. It was all making for a very complicated fuck for Issy, and to mute her own intensity, she refocused on Hector.
“Does that feel good?” she asked him. “Like that?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “Yeah, definitely.”
Issy worked it like that, focusing on Hector’s face, until she felt the contractions and jerks that told her he was moving toward coming. Hector tried to pull away but Issy insisted he stay. He came inside her, noisily and hotly — he looked like a deranged eight-year-old, she thought amusedly as she watched his face — then she put the focus back on herself and made herself come, gouging her fingers into Hector’s neck. She felt hugely relieved when she was finished, like she’d thrown off years of misery and frustration. She slid off him and collapsed alongside him on the couch. The full force of her drunkenness hit her now, and the room began spinning. She focused on the feeling of his hairy stomach against her back, his hairy legs on hers, his breath on the back of her neck. He threw an arm around her, and she drew him closer. The room spun and spun, making her close her eyes to it. She spun uneasily into blackness and passed out.
When she woke, she found herself alone on the couch. Sunlight streamed in through a window and she heard traffic outside. She’d barely lifted her head before the wild spinning began again. She was still very drunk — she could feel it. She managed to stand up, spying the empty tequila bottle. The last thirty minutes before she passed out came rushing back to her. She gasped, covered her mouth with her hand. She pulled up her panties and jeans, buttoned her shirt, and walked toward the bedroom. Hector had moved there at some point and fallen asleep in a fetal position in his T-shirt and jeans. His body heaved up and down. Issy knew she should take a shower and leave, but she could barely stand up straight, the room was spinning so fast. She climbed up onto the bed and lay down on her side next to Hector, who sensed her body and rocked away from it.
Fourteen. Vancouver (1996)
Champagne glass in hand, Hector turned away from his conversation — he’d been talking with a local activist about where in Davie Village to have dinner later that night — when a nervous treble voice behind his back broke the cocktail din in the small reception room. He was shoulder to shoulder with Chris, whose trembling hand held a coupe of sparkling water, a thin ring of sweat staining his collar, his face a chalky color with another sweat film over his upper lip.
“You okay?” Hector murmured to him.
“I’m scared I need a toilet,” Chris murmured back. “Fucking, fucking, fucking meds, they are so vile.”
Hector briefly massaged Chris’s neck. “You gotta hold it, honey, you know she’s coming in soon. You can’t shit all over the queen.”
Chris allowed a grin. “That’s how we’ll remember this crowning moment.” Then he switched into a cheesy British accent. “When I shat myself before the queen!”
“Please, she’d probably help clean you up. You think you’d be the first soiled queen Liz Taylor’s seen in the past ten years?”
The treble voice belonged to an amfAR functionary, a handsome PR reptile with a long Italian last name Hector could never remember. “She is about five minutes away with Kessler’s deputy JoAnn Barbour accompanying her,” he announced to the room.
“Kessler’s not coming in with her?” The question had been asked by Maira Goode, to Chris’s left, the sole woman in their breakaway group. A five-foot-four pear whose high-school-lacrosse thighs anchored her into the floor when she spoke before a group, and whose dark curly hair was always disciplined back into a knot, Maira had never in her life uttered anything more charged than a mere incontestable fact, which was how she’d managed to disengage herself from the movement without leaving bitterness and recrimination in her wake. Even Hector, so much more loved than Chris, hadn’t fully escaped that fate, perhaps because people hadn’t expected such treason from him. When their group reported back to the movement, Maira led, Hector followed, and Chris stayed home.
“Kessler’s in front of another group,” said the amfAR functionary.
“Pharma?” Chris muttered under his breath to Hector.
Barbour, a fiftysomething ash blonde in a taupe rayon pantsuit, the conference lanyard around her neck, entered just in time to hear the conversation. “Believe me, Liz wasn’t happy about it, either,” she deadpanned.
That cracked up the room. Even Maira snorted out a laugh. To Hector, the moment felt good, a nanosecond bit of irreverence amid all the pomp, the relentless schedule of the conference, the fact that everyone was slowly realizing that, after more than a decade of meeting like this every other summer since Atlanta in 1985, this was likely the one everyone would look back on as the turning point. Hector couldn’t get past a shadow that fell between himself and the data; surely someone had to have missed something — surely it wouldn’t pan out. And yet he’d told himself a hundred times that, well, there was the data and there were the results, happening to his friends these past six months before his very eyes. There was Chris, ready to shit himself, but still with computer printouts showing numbers that meant he probably was going to live to see the twenty-first century. There it was, all around Hector. He’d thought that 1992, Ricky’s death, had been the most surreal year of his life, but maybe he was wrong. It looked like that title now belonged to 1996.