“Who knows what the right word is. You do not have the virus. You don’t even show any leftover signs of the lung and liver damage, any of the signs that should still be there no matter what. It’s as though you were never infected, never been ill. All gone—without a trace. It has to be called a cure. Why not?” The doctor’s voice had become more professional, the words clipped, precise.
The old indifference, Doctor Norstar’s first line of defense against challenge or contradiction, brought coldness into her eyes. She lifted her head even higher. She’d arrived at the proud imperiousness that Dempsey recognized as her last defense. “In medical terms,” the doctor said, “you’re declared a cure.”
Dempsey rubbed her forefinger along a streak of paint on her jeans—Davy’s Gray, the paint was called. She scratched it with her fingernail, then rubbed it again, but more gently than before as if apologizing to her jeans for the scratching. “You’re sure?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t have dared mention it—even hint at it—if I weren’t sure. Yes. I’m sure. It’s been verified. A whole team of us. A team, a horde, an army—”
“But how?”
“You tell me. Maybe I’m the one demented, but I even caught myself thinking: Dempsey will know. Dempsey will tell me. Tell all of us. Well? Do you know? Can you tell me?”
“How can I tell you anything when I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
“You don’t have AIDS. You have no antibodies. You test negative. No AIDS. No HIV. Cured. Can you understand that?”
“No.”
Doctor Norstar closed the folder and put her hand on top. “That’s all right. Neither can I.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
The doctor flinched. “I’m happy for you. We all are. You must come meet the team, hear what we have to say, how pleased—” She stopped and placed both hands on top of the file. She leaned down and gave all her weight to the closed folder. “No, we’re not happy,” she said. “We’re furious. Why you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t know. If there was anything to be known, we’d know it. We’re not stupid—all evidence to the contrary. We do know something. We work, we slave, we grope, we crawl. We ache until we can’t move, until we can’t think. Until we’ve nothing left. Which means we’re back at the beginning and we start all over again. And again. And then—you come along and we’ve done nothing, no one’s done anything—and you’re cured. Now can you hear me? Cured, Goddamn it. Cured. Now do you know what I’m talking about? Now do you understand?”
“No.”
“Then don’t.”
Doctor Norstar waited. She put her hand to her cheek as if to check for a fever. After she’d taken the hand away, she said quite gently, “Do you ever pray? Did you ever pray that—” She stopped. “No! Don’t answer that. It’s nothing I want even to come near. Forget I asked. I didn’t ask. That has nothing to do with me. Forget I even mentioned it.”
The elevator door opened and the two men came out, marching almost in lockstep, one behind the other, their arms swinging in measured arcs as if they’d been sent by some higher authority to perform an important official act. They broke step as the older one came and stood in front of Dempsey, facing Doctor Norstar. “We have to take the couch now,” he said.
“And the chair and table,” the other man added.
“Yeah. And the chair and table.”
“Then we’re finished on time,” the younger man said.
“Yeah. Five minutes into the next hour and you have to pay the whole hour. We want to save you.”
Doctor Norstar stood up. Dempsey stood up. They moved free of the couch, the chair, the table. The doctor had the folder in her hand.
The older man carried the chair, the younger man came back for the table. Doctor Norstar moved toward the counter where Daphne, the receptionist, had worked. At one end, near the wall, there was a paper clip. The doctor picked it up, rubbed it with her fingers. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have become so impatient. Forgive me. I made a common mistake. As a doctor it’s an occupational hazard to forget that I’m dealing with the human body. I should learn to expect anything.” She put down the paper clip.
The men marched back into the room and stationed themselves one at each end of the couch. At a nod from the older man, they squatted and picked the couch up from underneath and lifted it, raising it no farther than a few feet from the floor. With short, prissy little steps they hauled the couch, like a final helpless corpse, to the elevator. “We should have done the couch first,” the younger man said.
“Shut up and get in,” the older man said.
The younger man got in, then the older man. The door closed. The office was empty except for Dempsey, Doctor Norstar, and the paper clip. Everything, everyone else had gone.
8.
As Dempsey walked down Hudson Street on her way home, she kept repeating, like a mantra, cured, cured, cured—trying to understand what it meant. Soon it would threaten her sanity. Maybe if she concentrated on things more specifically implied by the word she kept repeating, she might be able to grasp the reality of what she’d been told.
Her first choice of subject was that now she’d very definitely be able to finish the Lazarus paintings. Then what would she do? It appalled her to realize she’d made no plans beyond that. She’d given it no thought. Now she told herself to come up with a few possibilities before she crossed Horatio Street. She decided to move on to an even more unexplored subject.
She would, of course, marry Johnny. And then—? And then they’d have a long life together. And then—? There would be children. She tried to rush past the subject, but that was not to be allowed. Then the children would live. She’d be a mother, Johnny, a father. But what did that mean?
No actual scenes presented themselves to her imagination. She tried, but the only image she could summon was of the men carrying the couch into the elevator. When she came to Christopher Street, she considered just standing there, refusing to cross until she could visualize some event made possible by this inexplicable bewilderment. But before she could come to an image, she heard a voice, rasping and high-pitched, call out, “Dempsey!”
Tom Van Tyl was coming toward her. Slowly, very slowly. He was wearing a heavy woolen Irish sweater. Around his neck was a gray-and-black cashmere scarf and on his head a black-knitted cap pulled halfway down over his ears. It took Dempsey a few seconds to decipher the strangeness of what she saw. The day was warm with only the softest breeze coming up from the river. It took fewer seconds for Dempsey to connect this unseasonable garb with a known fact. Tom had AIDS, and the last she’d heard, he had closed the gallery on Wooster Street that he and his companion Michael—already dead—had run for more than seventeen years. Tom would be subject to chills or, quite possibly, he was feeling the final chill that had become unrelenting.
“Tom!”
Now she could see his face, the lesions caused by an all-too-common affliction, Kaposi’s sarcoma, that had disfigured his once-handsome face. She quickly said the obligatory, “You look great!”
Tom could only grunt. He was out of breath. He did manage to say, “Tell that to my doctor. He keeps telling me my T-cells are dropping like a January thermometer. The way he talks, you’d think they were close to ten below.”
To enjoy Dempsey’s response to his witticism, he looked directly into her eyes. His own eyes were so needful that, with effort, Dempsey tapped his upper right arm and let out a near-credible laugh. “Tom! You still make me laugh.”