“It’s really good to see you,” Larry said, and picked up his menu as if not expecting a response. I ventured one anyway.
“You’ve been working too hard,” I said.
“I suspect you’re right,” he replied.
I dithered with the menu as I tried to decide whether to pursue the subject.
“What you want to say,” Larry said, “is that I look terrible.”
“You look-” I fumbled for a word.
“Different?” he asked, almost mockingly. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke out of the comer of his mouth away from me. I waited for him to continue. Instead, the waiter came and Larry ordered his dinner. When it was my turn I asked for the same.
We sat in nervous silence until our salads were brought to us. The waiter drizzled dressing over the salads. Larry caught my eye and held it. When the waiter departed, Larry picked up his fork, set it down again and relit his discarded cigarette.
“I’m dying, Henry,” he said softly.
“Larry- “
“I was diagnosed eight months ago. I’ve already survived one bout of pneumocystis.” He smiled a little. “Two years ago I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce that word. AIDS has taught me a new vocabulary.” He put out his cigarette.
“I’m so sorry,” I said stupidly.
The waiter came by. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes, fine,” Larry said.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked.
“There was nothing you could have done then,” he said, cutting up a slice of tomato.
“Is there now?”
“Yes. Defend Jim Pears.” He put a forkful of salad in his mouth and chewed gingerly.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m going to die, Henry,” he said slowly. “Not just because of AIDS but also because the lives of queers are expendable. Highly expendable.” He stopped abruptly and stared down at his plate, then continued, more emphatically. “They hate us, Henry, and they’d just as soon we all died. I’m dying. Save Jim Pears’s life for me.”
“Don’t die,” I said, and the words sounded childlike even to my own ears.
“I won’t just yet,” he replied. “But when I do I want it to be my life for Jim’s. That would balance the accounts.”
“But it’s entirely different,” I said.
“It’s the same disease,” he insisted. “Bigotry. It doesn’t matter whether it shows itself in letting people die of AIDS or making it so difficult for them to come out that it’s easier to murder.”
“Then you do think he did it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Not that it makes any difference to me.”
“It will to a jury.”
“You’ll have to persuade them,” he said, “that Jim was justified.”
“Self-defense?”
Larry said, “There might be a problem there. Jim’s P.D. told me Jim doesn’t remember anything about what happened.”
“Doesn’t remember?” I echoed.
“She called it retrograde amnesia.”
The waiter came and took Larry’s salad plate. He cast a baleful glance at my plate from which I had eaten nothing and said, “Sir, shall I leave your salad?”
“Yes, please.”
We were served dinner. Looking at Larry I reflected how quickly we had retreated into talk of Jim Pears’s case as if the subject of Larry’s illness had never been raised.
“I want to talk some more about you,” I said.
Larry compressed his lips into a frown. “I’ve told you all there is to know.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“Henry, I’ve turned myself inside out examining my feelings. It was painful enough the first time without repeating the exercise for you.”
“Sorry.” I addressed myself to the food on my plate, some sort of chicken glistening with gravy. A wave of nausea rose from my stomach to my throat.
Larry was saying, “But I won’t go quietly. Depend on that.”
We got through dinner. Afterwards, we went upstairs to the bar. Sitting at the window seat with glasses of mineral water we watched men passing on the street below us in front of what had been the Jaguar Bookstore.
Abruptly, Larry said, “I wondered at first how I could have been infected. It really puzzled me because I thought AIDS was only transmitted during tawdry little episodes in the back rooms of places like that.” He gestured toward the Jaguar. “All my tawdry little episodes were twenty years in the past, and then there was Ned.” Ned was his lover who had died four years ago.
“Were you monogamous with Ned?”
He smiled grimly. “I was monogamous, yes.”
“But not Ned.”
“You don’t get this from doorknobs, Henry.” He frowned.
“Do you think he knew?”
“He killed himself didn’t he?” Larry snapped. “At least now I know why,” he added, quietly.
“Who have you told?”
“You.”
“That’s all?”
He nodded. “My clients are movie stars. Having a gay lawyer is considered amusing in that set but a leper is a different matter.”
“But — your appearance.”
“You haven’t seen me in, what? A year? And even you were willing to accept the way I look as the result of overwork. It’s not really noticeable from day to day.”
“But you must have been in the hospital?”
“With the flu,” he said. “A virulent, obscure Asian flu with complications brought on by fatigue.”
“People believed that?”
“People are remarkably incurious and besides… “ He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to. I knew he was going to say that people preferred not to think about AIDS, much less believe that someone they knew had it. I was struggling with my own disbelief and, at some deeper level, my terror.
“How long can you keep it a secret?”
“Henry, you’re talking to a man who was in the closet for almost thirty-five years. I know from secrets.” He yawned. “I’d like to go for a walk down by the water, then we have to talk some more about Jim Pears.”
It had stopped raining by the time we reached Fisherman’s
Wharf but that loud, normally crowded, arcade of tourist traps and overpriced fish restaurants was deserted anyway. We walked around aimlessly, jostling against each other on the narrow walks, stopping to comment on some particularly egregious monstrosity in the shop front windows. We walked to the edge of the pier where the fishing boats were berthed, creaking in the water like old beds. A rift in the clouds above the Golden Gate revealed a black sky and three faint stars. Larry looked at them and then at me.
“Do you wish on stars, Henry?” he asked.
“Not since I was a kid.”
“I do,” Larry replied. “Wish on stars. Pray. Plead. It doesn’t do any good.” We stood there for a few more minutes until he complained of the cold.
I drove us to Washington Square and we found an espresso bar. Tony Bennett played on the jukebox. We
