“One day we took a bus to Siena. It was overcast and cooler. By afternoon it was misting rain. We climbed to the top of the fourteenth-century tower in the middle of that incredible town square, and no one was up there but us. Leland described the famous horse races they hold there every summer. The Palio. How Siena’s divided into districts and each has its special name for the race—Eagle, Giraffe, Caterpillar, Goose.”
“Did he ever touch you when you were there?”
“Never. He wouldn’t even hold my hand unless I took his. Ever since he told me about being sick he’d been wary of any kind of physical contact between us. That was the strange part—there was so much passion and intensity crackling between us, but so little physical contact. As if we were both naked and mad to touch, but separated by a thick piece of glass. Frustrating, but in a way delicious too. I felt like a virtuous teenager in love for the first time and dying to do it, but the boy respected me and agreed I should be a virgin when I get married. That was mostly from his side; I wanted the contact bad.”
“Would you have actually slept with him? A man who was HIV positive?”
“I don’t know, to be totally honest with you. Pure suicide, huh? I thought if it happened, we’d deck ourselves out with double condoms and spermicides . . . maximum safety, but who was I kidding? It was insane, and so was I for him after a while. Who knows.”
“You loved him that much?”
“Sometimes I’d look at him and couldn’t breathe. Sometimes I felt I was being crushed from inside by my swelling heart.
“Anyway, after Italy we flew to London because he wanted to show me things there he loved. It was terrific. More bliss, more great days together.
“Only one curious thing happened while we were there, which didn’t amount to much, so I basically ignored it. I love roses and somehow that came out when we were in London. One day we split up to do separate errands. When I got back to his apartment, he wasn’t there but a giant bouquet of yellow and white roses was sitting on the kitchen table. Propped against it was a note in his handwriting: ‘I think we are not only a secret place but also a dangerous place. It’s a world so beautiful, so pure, that now that we’ve gone inside, we have two problems. First, how can we bear all this beauty and stay alive? And second, how will we ever manage to get out and keep living in the ordinary world?’
“Any other time, flowers and a note like that would have sent me over the moon. Instead, I put it down, frowned, and didn’t know whether to be upset or feel even sorrier for the guy. I stared at the gorgeous flowers and, after a while, walked into his bedroom for the proof I knew was there.
“As I’d expected, he lived very modestly in London except for the books and music. His entire apartment was floor-to-ceiling shelves for the most colossal collection of books, records, and CDs. They were done in this beautiful honey-colored oak, and he must have spent a fortune on them, because the apartment was oddly shaped in many places and the shelves were custom-fitted into just about every available nook and cranny. And needed to be, because they all were packed to the brim. There was no order either, which surprised me, because other book collectors or audio freaks I know are absolutely gaga for order. But Leland’s collection was everywhere. Books, records, and CDs were all together helter-skelter and since there were so many—thousands of each—it would have taken a hell of a long time to find something. When I asked him about it he said he rarely wanted to read or listen to specific things. He was a browser, responded to a mood, and liked nothing better than roaming around his shelves and discovering what was there. He chuckled and said sometimes he’d even buy something, bring it home, put it on the shelf, and forget it. Then he’d rediscover it with new delight days or even weeks later. It made sense. His life was spent going from one deadly situation to another. At home, why not relax and let everything have its spontaneous way? He’d known so much horrible riot; at least here the riot was enjoyable.
“But I knew what I was looking for and exactly where it was. A few days before I’d been looking through the books and come across a novel called Minotaur by Benjamin Tammuz, a writer I’d never heard of. It was short, and since I was waiting for Leland to come home, I’d sat down and read it straight through. I liked it very much, and one memorable passage in particular: the one I had just read on the note pinned to the flowers. Having received his many postcards from Yugoslavia, I was used to his quoting from things he was reading. But he always put the name of the work and the author’s name afterward so that if I liked it, I could read the book too. I took it for granted that anything else on those cards were Leland’s own thoughts, which was great because I usually liked them more than the quotes.
“I remembered where the Tammuz was and took it down from the shelf. Skimming through, I found the passage. With the exception of a few words, the lines were exactly the same as on his card. I put the book back and went into the kitchen to cut the stems on the flowers and place them in a larger vase. After that, I kept trying to push the thought away but couldn’t. When he came in a few hours later, the first thing I said was how much I loved both the flowers and his quote. He said he was glad. That’s all. It made something in me cringe. What if everything he’d written to me was someone else’s? What if none of those canny, moving, funny lines, insights, observations were his? The possibility made me feel sorry for him, then ashamed I’d ever asked. But I had, and that was that. I remember looking at one of the bookcases as if it were to blame, as if it held the real culprit. I’m sure too that on my face was the blush of a person caught looking through a keyhole or going through someone else’s drawers.”
“Arlen! Why would you feel guilty? He was the guilty one. He was lying.”
“That’s a big word. And come on, Wyatt, you know the rules—whoever says I love you first, loses. This was a double whammy—I told him I loved him first, but then was also the first to discover he was lying in a pathetic way. I felt guilty and hurt but didn’t know if I had any reason to feel either. It was all very strange.
“Anyway, maybe because of that, I started feeling itchy to get back to Vienna and quietly suggested it to him. He could do whatever he wanted—come with me, or stay in London and then come over. But he seemed to like my suggestion, and a day later we flew back. Neither of us knew how things would work out or what exactly we were going to do, but I fully believed that our being as happy as we were with each other would take care of problems. He agreed. We’d do it one day at a time and whenever there was even the slightest anything, we’d face it square on.
“I’ve never had so much fun hanging around with any man. We cooked together and walked and watched TV and he told me anything I wanted to know about him. We talked about high school and old flames and what we felt about our parents. He said just when we grow up enough to begin forgiving them for whatever happened when we were young, we have to get used to pitying them. I thought it a strange comment, and then the question raced nastily across my mind: Was it his thought or something he’d read? I said nothing, but it returned later to hit me on the back of the head like an iron boomerang.
“Every morning we followed the same routine. He’d get up first and wake me. Then he’d take Minnie out for a walk in the vineyards while I made breakfast. At his request his breakfast was always the same—bacon and eggs because that was the first meal I’d ever cooked for him.