‘Have you told her?’
‘Told her what?’ said Dan. ‘I love her. I have always loved her. And I fucked her willingly. And none of that is a lie.’
They ended up kissing up against a chain link fence, in a deserted lot by the East River, hands sliding in each other’s come, waiting to be knifed by a passer-by.
So that was it. Dan went home at Christmas a new man and he came back to New York ready for more. He found Billy laid low with a cold and made him a hot whiskey to the Irish recipe with lemon and cloves, and he beefed on about his family, his mother who was the usual nightmare, his sister who was pregnant again and developing a martyred air.
‘When do you grow out of it?’ he said. ‘When is all that done?’
Billy sat up in a pair of pyjamas with a stripe of powder blue, his blond hair tousled with sweat and a thermometer sticking out of his mouth. He had been over at Massimo’s with Greg the day after Christmas, he said, and Mandy brought one of the Kennedys up — the really handsome one? — they had talked about Castro all afternoon, because, you know, Castro knew.
‘Huh,’ said Dan, jealous as hell.
Billy said he went to this enormous party on one of the piers for New Year’s Eve and met so many people, half of them in drag.
‘Drag?’ said Dan.
‘I was not in drag,’ said Billy. ‘Though I did — briefly, mind you — sport a fetching white tutu. No I was in my faithful 501s.’
‘Well that’s good to hear,’ said Dan.
‘Are you checking up on me?’ said Billy, and both of them paused right there. They were not ready for cutesie domesticity. Not yet.
‘No,’ said Dan.
‘Though I did catch this cold,’ said Billy. ‘So maybe you have a point.’
When Greg rang the next day, Billy was still feeling unwell — which was the wrong way around for them, really: they did not prolong the call. It was the offer of happiness, perhaps, that kept Dan away. For whatever reason, no one saw Billy for another seventy-two hours, when a passing neighbour heard his door open, and looked back to see him sliding down the side of it, before falling out behind her, into the hall.
In St Vincent’s, they took one look at him and sent him up to the seventh floor.
The news spread fast. Massimo rang Greg. He said Mandy was in with that dancer who used to be with Pina Bausch, and she could not believe it, she was walking down the corridor and there was a guy pulling at his breathing tube and trying to sit up and he was making quite a noise. And it was Billy.
‘Billy?’ said Greg. ‘No. Are you sure?’
Mandy had actually gone in to him, he was so agitated, and she you know pushed him back down, tried to soothe him a little, and it was Billy. Full-blown PCP.
‘I don’t think it could be Billy,’ said Greg, who was going through his kitchen cupboard, looking for something.
‘Oh Greg, I’m so sorry,’ said Massimo, and Greg stopped looking in the cupboard and said, ‘Billy?’
He grabbed a coat and took a cab over there and he walked the corridor thinking nothing could be worse than this: beyond the disease, this was the worst thing life could throw at him. He checked one bed after the other, and then he stopped in the middle of the corridor and he thought, It wasn’t me — we were careful. It wasn’t me. After a moment he walked on again, and his mind told him that his own dying would be easier now. Because death is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Everyone dies.
It’s the timing that matters. The first and second of it. The order in which we go.
And there was Billy’s blond head, and there was his chest, pushed evenly up and let mechanically down again, his mouth crammed with the breathing tube so he could not speak, though the wild look he gave to Greg was more vivid than words. Greg could not let his gaze go, he held on to it as he pulled a chair under himself and sat in by the bed.
Arthur arrived next, and Jessie an hour later — redoubtable, she had somehow gained access to Billy’s apartment and brought a bag of stuff for him, his address book was there, thick with Wite-Out, like everyone’s address book in those days, and there, surrounded by dancing shamrocks, was the listing: DAN!!
‘I’ll call him,’ she said. Billy understood that too, and he blinked in gratitude, and then he checked back for Greg’s eyes and settled into his gaze, after which, he did not look away.
Ten minutes later, she was back in the room.
‘You all right?’ said Arthur, and Jessie, floating on some new sadness, said, ‘He’s on his way.’
They sat in silence, broken only by the sad crinkle of a packet of Chee-tos that Jessie found in her bag, and time went by.
Jessie never spoke about the call she made to Dan, how polite he was, and unsurprised. It took her years to figure it out. The feeling she had talking to him, as though Dan knew, had known all along, that there was nothing remarkable — in fact there was something almost satisfying — in the fact that Billy was dying. How did he fool her out of the news, make her feel as though she was forming sounds rather than actual words? How long before she could say the obvious thing?
‘I think you should come in.’
‘When is visiting time?’ said Dan and she said, ‘Any time. There’s no set time on the sevens.’
‘Right,’ said Dan. ‘I just have to wrap up here,’ at which point Jessie was tempted to slam down the phone. The whole conversation was so flat and strange, Jessie put it out of her mind as they sat with Billy for the next hour and another hour after that, all the way past midnight. Greg did not leave the bedside. He did not let go of Billy’s hand. He refused food, ignored everyone around him. At ten past three in the morning he started to sing, very quietly, and when Billy recognised the tune he tried to smile up at him, and died.
After that, no one saw Dan for years. We did not blame him. At least, we tried not to blame him. These things are very hard.
Constance, Co. Limerick, 1997
CONSTANCE STILL COULD not believe the new section of road, after years of bad corners and blind spots, you just pointed the car and went — it was as though the fields unzipped, to let you straight through.
It used to be so epic, the four children in the back of the old Cortina, watching for a sign the journey was nearly done: a big plane lowering into the marshland at Shannon, then the castle at Bunratty, full of Americans in their broad plaid pants, and Durty Nelly’s, the yellow pub, squatting by the bridge.
Now Constance was past it all in a moment. The castle was still beautiful but it looked very exposed to the dual carriageway, and she missed the thrill of the old bridge. Her friend Lauren used to sing at the medieval banquets in Bunratty. It wasn’t just her voice, they used to audition the girls to fit the velvet dresses, at least that’s what Lauren said, who had to double as a serving wench between bouts of ‘Danny Boy’.
‘The sight of them’, she used to say, because Americans had no table manners, but they tipped like crazy, and all the men made passes, never mind the rotated dress. Her last summer there, Lauren worked on French tours in the Folk Park and now she was in Strasbourg for the EU, she was going to work in Prada trousers. Though maybe they hired the translators to fit the trousers — who knew?
It was a bitter thought, but the blouse she put on that morning was her last good blouse and Constance had to add a scarf to hide the place where the buttons gaped over breasts that had done their time.