That poor Tom thought Kittredge was beautiful—well, that I had no trouble imagining. But Atkins had seemed to indicate that Kittredge was and wasn’t gay; according to Tom, Kittredge looked exactly like his mother! (I wasn’t about to tell Elaine that!) How could Kittredge look exactly like Mrs. Kittredge? I was wondering.
Emily screamed. It must be Charles, the nurse, I thought, but no—it was Jacques, the dog. The old Lab was standing there, in the kitchen.
“It’s just Jacques, Emily—he’s a dog, not a man,” Peter said disdainfully to his sister, but the girl wouldn’t stop screaming.
“Leave her alone, Peter. Jacques is a male dog—maybe that did it,” Mrs. Atkins said. But when Emily didn’t or couldn’t stop screaming, Sue Atkins said to Elaine and me: “Well, it is unusual to see Jacques anywhere but at Tom’s bedside. Since Tom got sick, that dog won’t leave him. We have to drag Jacques outside to pee!”
“We have to offer Jacques a treat just to get him to come to the kitchen and eat,” Peter Atkins was explaining, while his sister went on screaming.
“Imagine a Lab you have to force to eat!” Sue Atkins said; she suddenly looked again at the old dog and started screaming. Now Emily and Mrs. Atkins were both screaming.
“It must be Tom, Billy—something’s happened,” Elaine said, over the screaming. Either Peter Atkins heard her, or he’d figured it out by himself—he was clearly a smart boy.
“Daddy!” the boy called, but his mother grabbed him and clutched him to her.
“Wait for Charles, Peter—Charles is with him,” Mrs. Atkins managed to say, though her shortness of breath had worsened. Jacques (the Labrador) sat there, just breathing.
Elaine and I chose not to “wait for Charles.” We left the kitchen and ran along the downstairs hall to the now-open door to Tom’s onetime study. (Jacques, who—for a hesitant second—seemed of a mind to follow us, stayed behind on the kitchen floor. The old dog must have known that his master had departed.) Elaine and I entered the transformed room, where we saw Charles bent over the body on the hospital bed, which the nurse had elevated to ease his task. Charles kept his head down; he did not look up at Elaine and me, though it was clear to us both that the nurse knew we were there.
I was horribly reminded of a man I’d seen a few times at the Mineshaft, that S&M club on Washington Street—at Little West Twelfth, in the Meatpacking District. (Larry would tell me the club was closed by the city’s Department of Health, but that wouldn’t be till ’85—four years after AIDS first appeared—which was when Elaine and I were conducting our experiment in living together in San Francisco.) The Mineshaft had a lot of disquieting action going on: There was a sling, for fist-fucking, suspended from the ceiling; there was a whole wall of glory holes; there was a room with a bathtub, where men were pissed on.
The man Charles closely resembled was a tattooed muscleman with ivory-pale skin; he had a shaved-bald head, with a black patch of whiskers on the point of his chin, and two diamond-stud earrings. He wore a black leather vest and a jockstrap, and a well-shined pair of motorcycle boots, and his job at the Mineshaft was to dispatch people who needed dispatching. He was called Mephistopheles; on his nights “off” from the Mineshaft, he would hang out at a gay black bar called Keller’s. I think Keller’s was on West Street, on the corner of Barrow, near the Christopher Street pier, but I never went there—no white guys I knew did. (The story I’d heard at the Mineshaft was that Mephistopheles went to Keller’s to fuck black guys, or to pick fights with them, and it didn’t matter to Mephistopheles which he did; the fucking and the fighting were all the same to him, which was no doubt why he fit right in at an S&M joint like the Mineshaft.)
Yet the male nurse, who was attending so carefully to my dead friend, was not that same Mephistopheles—nor were the ministrations Charles made to poor Tom’s remains of a deviant or sexual nature. Charles was fussing over the Hickman catheter dangling from Atkins’s unmoving chest.
“Poor Tommy—it’s not my job to remove the Hickman,” the nurse explained to Elaine and me. “The undertaker will pull it out. You see, there’s a cuff—it’s like a Velcro collar, around the tube—just inside the point where it enters the skin. Tommy’s cells, his skin and body cells, have grown into that Velcro mesh. That’s what keeps the catheter in place, so it doesn’t fall out or get tugged loose. All the undertaker has to do is give it a very firm jerk, and out it comes,” Charles told us; Elaine looked away.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have left Tom alone,” I told the nurse.
“Lots of people want to die alone,” the nurse said. “I know Tommy wanted to see you—I know he had something to say. I’ll bet he said it, right?” Charles asked me. He looked up at me and smiled. He was a strong, good-looking man with a crew cut and one silver earring—in the upper, cartilaginous part of his left ear. He was clean-shaven, and when he smiled, Charles looked nothing at all like the man I knew as Mephistopheles—a Mineshaft thug-enforcer.
“Yes, I think Tom said what he had to say,” I told Charles. “He wanted me to keep an eye on Peter.”
“Yes, well—good luck with that. I’m guessing that’ll be up to Peter!” Charles said. (I’d not been entirely wrong to mistake him for a bouncer at the Mineshaft; Charles had some of the same cavalier qualities.)
“No, no, no!” we could hear young Peter crying all the way from the kitchen. The girl, Emily, had stopped screaming; so had her mom.
Charles was unseasonably dressed for December in New Jersey, the tight black T-shirt showing off his muscles and his tattoos.
“It didn’t seem that the oxygen was working,” I said to Charles.
“It was working only a little. The problem with PCP is that it’s diffuse, it affects both lungs, and it affects your ability to get oxygen into your blood vessels—hence into your body,” the nurse explained.
“Tom’s hands were so cold,” Elaine said.
“Tommy didn’t want the ventilator,” Charles continued; he appeared to be done with the Hickman catheter. The nurse was washing the crusted Candida from the area of Atkins’s mouth. “I want to clean him up before Sue and the kids see him,” Charles said.
“And Mrs. Atkins—her cough,” I said. “It’s just going to get worse, right?”
“It’s a dry cough—sometimes it’s no cough. People make too much of the cough. It’s the shortness of breath that gets worse,” the nurse told me. “Tommy just ran out of breath,” Charles said.
“Charles—we want to see him!” Mrs. Atkins was calling.
“No, no, no,” Peter kept crying.
“I hate you, Charles!” Emily shouted from the kitchen.
“I know you do, honey!” Charles called back. “Just give me a second—all of you!”
I bent over Atkins and kissed his clammy forehead. “I underestimated him,” I said to Elaine.
“Don’t cry now, Billy,” Elaine told me.
I tensed up suddenly, because I thought Charles was going to hug me or kiss me—or perhaps only push me away from the raised bed—but he was merely trying to give me his business card. “Call me, William Abbott—let me know how Peter can contact you, if he wants to.”
“If he wants to,” I repeated, taking the nurse’s card.
Usually, when anyone addressed me as “William Abbott,” I could tell the person was a reader—or that he (or she) at least knew I was “the writer.” But beyond my certainty that Charles was gay, I couldn’t tell about the reader part.