Johnny opened his mouth to indicate a laugh, kept it open long enough to give an accurate measure of his appreciation, then closed it. “Maybe I’d better not go,” he said. “At least not by myself. I used to have problems in that area.”
“That’s understandable,” Bianca said.
Johnny, through experience, was becoming more and more adept at transitions, at guiding a conversation from a closing sentence to an opening one. He was about to ask her about the artists’ retreat. That could keep her going until Dempsey would be ready to leave. “Tell me,” he said—then saw out of the corner of his eye a young man looking at one of the paintings. He was smiling, not just with his lips, but with his whole face. His cheeks, his forehead, all flesh, all muscles, seemed lifted up. His eyes were possessing the painting. They were taking it in, consuming it. Johnny expected him to start gagging if he didn’t stop. He wanted to move closer so he’d be there, at the man’s side, when the gagging began so he could help him catch his breath again. He made the slightest move in the young man’s direction.
Bianca, without the need of inquiry, had begun to tell him about the retreat, the solitude, the lakes, the lunches. As she was expanding on the subject of fresh carrot sticks, the young man whirled toward them as if Bianca and Johnny had called his name. His eyes still holding the vision of what he’d seen, he said, “They’re Coptic? Can you see? They’re Coptic!” Without waiting for either Johnny or Bianca to ask what, in this instance, Coptic meant, he continued, “Decorative. All decorative. Nothing but decorative in the morning, decorative in the evening, decorative in the summertime. But the Copts—for them the decorative wasn’t to embellish but to conceal. It had a purpose beyond pleasure. You know that. I know that. I don’t have to tell you. They weren’t allowed to display the Cross. They had to hide it, to paint, to sculpt elaborations, filigrees, distractions, exquisite patterns, unending labyrinths to prove that the Cross wasn’t really there. But it was, it was. And all the elaborations, they became a homage, they were praise as laughter, a cunning adoration. Mockery as veneration. And there, there in the painting, do you see it? The Cross. Not visible, hidden, but it’s there. Look. See it? Where’s the artist? Which one? Lead me so I can fall down and worship.”
His eyes were fevered, his lips dry and beginning to crack. And as he’d been speaking, Johnny saw the brown lesions—some with a tinge of pink, on his face, on his neck, on his forehead, and on the backs of his hands. He saw the skin drawn taut over the skull, the caved-in cheeks, the bones pushing outward beneath the eyes. If the young man failed to relax, if he persisted in his vision, surely the skin would split and curl away, exposing the naked bones beneath.
“Is the artist here?” His eyes were pleading now, frightened that his wish would be denied. Before Johnny could point to Winnie at the far end of the room, the man stumbled close to Johnny. “Where?” he asked, his voice a rasping whisper. Tears had welled up into his eyes. He took hold of Johnny’s shoulders.
The next breaths were a quick succession of drawn-in wheezes with no exhalations. Still struggling to speak, the man took in yet more air, the wheeze weaker than before. Johnny reached out his hand, not sure where to apply it. To ward Johnny off, the coughs began, not deep and rumbling, but weak, confined to the throat and the neck. They sounded fake, the kind of cough used to comment, to punctuate. Were the man not gasping for air, the coughs would seem no more than a nervous clearing of the throat. And yet he was still smiling and it seemed the choking had been induced by uncontrollable laughter.
Johnny reached his hand behind the young man, but hesitated to touch his back. Then he touched it, tapping lightly just to let him know the hand was there. In acknowledgment, the man nodded even as the coughing continued. Johnny tapped again, not harder, but with his whole hand, now a pat on the back. Again the man nodded, still sucking in air through the constricted passages that wheezed their fury at the intrusion, still the gleeful cough struggling to become an outright laugh.
Bianca had drawn away to give the man room. The pats on the back continued with growing force, bringing the man closer to Johnny by slow degrees. The pats became firmer, more insistent, a warning to the cough to abandon this man. Still harder Johnny hit, drawing the man closer. Johnny could feel dry spurts of breath aimed at his face. The man’s fevered eyes glared into Johnny’s eyes. Gently Johnny brought the man to himself, guiding the head to his left so it could rest on his shoulder. Two wisps of hair were curled behind the man’s ear, another wisp, higher on the dome of the skull, rose straight up, then fell, resting on the crown of the balding head. Near the ear were two lesions, pinker than those on the man’s face, like large paramecia stranded in a frozen waste.
With the tip of his nose Johnny touched first one lesion then the other. Into the man’s ear he whispered, “Shhhh. Shhhh.” Then, relaxing his lips, he pressed them against one of the lesions, against the dry flesh. “Shhhh. Shhhh.” Slowly he rocked the man back and forth. The wheezing, the coughing, the laughter had stopped.
The man, like someone awakening from a light sleep, pulled away from Johnny’s hold. “You’re Johnny the fireman,” he said. “You’re with Dempsey.” He reached out and touched Johnny’s cheek. “You poor man,” he said. “You poor, poor man.”
Before Johnny could say anything back, he felt a soft prod in his side. Dempsey had shoved the tote bag at him. “It’s time to take up my knitting again.” Johnny took the bag. He was still looking at the man. The man’s eyes were blank, emptied of what they’d seen. The vision, the Coptic Crosses, were no longer there. He was at peace.
Dempsey put her arm in Johnny’s and steered him toward the door. Johnny hesitated. The man had exhorted him to look at the paintings, at the Coptic labyrinths Winnie had so cunningly devised. Johnny wanted to look now; he wanted to assure himself that the man hadn’t been raving, that he had seen what was there and had brought himself near to death to proclaim its truth. But Dempsey seemed eager to leave.
Outside, walking west on Spring Street, Johnny could smell the bread in the top of the knitting bag. As they were crossing Wooster Street, Dempsey pulled her arm away and scratched her nose, then returned the arm. “You were beautiful just now, with that man,” she said quietly.
“He couldn’t stop coughing.”
“Sure. But you were the one who cared. I didn’t see anyone else ready to get himself coughed all over.”
“No big deal.”
Dempsey stopped there on the sidewalk, thought a minute, then started walking again. “It’s something to see, what the epidemic’s done. How some people respond. If you didn’t know he had AIDS, would you have helped him like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“We read about it all the time. People brought closer together.” She paused, then added, “Like us. If it weren’t for the epidemic… Well, you know the rest.”
“Then I’m supposed to be grateful for the epidemic?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
Now it was Johnny who stopped. He paused, took one more step, stopped again and, without looking at Dempsey, said, “If it took this epidemic to get us together again, I have to hope I’d never have seen you again, that we’d never have gotten together again. Ever.”
“I’m not sure that’s what you’re supposed to say.”
“Then I’ll say it again. If I can only walk down this street with you because of AIDS, then I have to wish I wouldn’t be walking down this street now, with you here and me with you. Nothing is worth this epidemic, nothing pays anyone for what you—and that guy too—what you’re going through, you or anyone else who is sick.”