Taking the shuttle to Boston every weekend had finally convinced me that I was never going to develop any fondness for Beantown. To be fair about it, I didn’t have much chance to see Boston as a place where anyone might be happy. Ned and I walked the path between the apartment (rented by the month) and the hospital. Once or twice I took a cab to the natural-food store, and one night, as irresponsible as the babysitters of every mother’s nightmare, we had gone to a bar and then to the movies, while Richard slept a drug-induced sleep, with the starfish night-light Hattie had brought him from her honeymoon in Bermuda shining on the bedside table. In the bar, Ned had asked me what I’d do if time could stop: Richard wouldn’t get any better and he wouldn’t get any worse, and the days we’d gone through—with the crises, the circumlocutions, the gallows humor, the perplexity, the sudden, all-too-clear medical knowledge—would simply persist. Winter, also, would persist: intermittent snow, strong winds, the harsh late-afternoon sun we couldn’t stand without the filter of a curtain. I was never a speculative person, but Ned thrived on speculation. In fact, he had studied poetry at Stanford, years ago, where he had written a series of “What If” poems. Richard, visiting California, answering questions onstage after one of the movies he’d produced had been screened, had suddenly found himself challenged by a student whose questions were complex and rhetorical. In the following fifteen years, they had been lovers, enemies, and finally best friends, associated in work. They had gone from Stanford to New York, New York to London, then from Hampstead Heath back to West Twenty-eighth Street, with side trips to gamble in Aruba and to ski in Aspen at Christmas.
“You’re breaking the rules,” I said. “No what-ifs.”
“What if we went outside and flowers were blooming, and there were a car—a convertible—and we drove to Plum Island,” he went on. “Moon on the water. Big Dipper in the sky. Think about it. Visualize it and your negative energy will be replaced by helpful, healing energy.”
“Is there such a place as Plum Island or did you make it up?”
“It’s famous. Banana Beach is there. Bands play at night in the Prune Pavilion.”
“There is a Plum Island,” the man next to me said. “It’s up by Newburyport. It’s full of poison ivy in the summer, so you’ve got to be careful. I once got poison ivy in my lungs from some asshole who was burning the stuff with his leaves. Two weeks in the hospital, and me with a thousand-dollar deductible.”
Ned and I looked at the man.
“Buy you a round,” he said. “I just saved a bundle. The hotel I’m staying at gives you a rate equal to the temperature when you check in. It’s a come-on. I’ve got a queen-size bed, an honor bar, and one of those showers you can adjust so it feels like needles shooting into you, all for sixteen dollars. I could live there cheaper than heating my house.”
“Where you from?” Ned asked.
“Hope Valley, Rhode Island,” the man said, his arm shooting in front of me to shake Ned’s hand. “Harvey Milgrim,” he said, nodding at my face. “Captain, United States Army Reserve.”
“Harvey,” Ned said, “I don’t think you have any use for guys like me. I’m homosexual.”
The man looked at me. I was surprised, too; it wasn’t like Ned to talk about this with strangers. Circumstance had thrown me together with Ned; fate precipitated our unlikely bonding. Neither of us could think of life without Richard. Richard opened up to very few people, but when he did he made it a point to be indispensable.
“He’s kidding,” I said. It seemed the easiest thing to say.
“Dangerous joke,” Harvey Milgrim said.
“He’s depressed because I’m leaving him,” I said.
“Well, now, I wouldn’t rush into a thing like that,” Harvey said. “I’m Bud on draft. What are you two?”
The bartender walked over the minute the conversation shifted to alcohol.
“Stoli straight up,” Ned said.
“Vodka tonic,” I said.
“Switch me to Jim Beam,” Harvey said. He rolled his hand with the quick motion of someone shaking dice. “Couple of rocks on the side.”
“Harvey,” Ned said, “my world’s coming apart. My ex-lover is also my boss, and his white-blood-cell count is sinking too low for him to stay alive. The program he’s in at Bishopgate is his last chance. He’s a Friday-afternoon vampire. They pump blood into him so he has enough energy to take part in an experimental study and keep his outpatient status, but do you know how helpful that is? Imagine he’s driving the Indy. He’s in the lead. He screeches in for gas, and what does the pit crew do but blow him a kiss? The other cars are still out there, whipping past. He starts to yell, because they’re supposed to fill the car with gas, but the guys are nuts or something. They just blow air kisses.”
Harvey looked at Ned’s hand, the fingers fanned open, deep Vs of space between them. Then Ned slowly curled them in, kissing his fingernails as they came to rest on his bottom lip.
The bartender put the drinks down, one-two-three. He scooped a few ice cubes into a glass and put the glass beside Harvey’s shot glass of bourbon. Harvey frowned, looking from glass to glass without saying anything. Then he threw down the shot of bourbon and picked up the other glass, lifted one ice cube out, and slowly sucked it. He did not look at us or speak to us again.
The night after Ned and I snuck off to the bar, Richard started to hyperventilate. In a minute his pajamas were soaked, his teeth chattering. It was morning, 4 a.m. He was holding on to the door frame, his feet in close, his body curved away, like someone windsurfing. Ned woke up groggily from his sleeping bag on the floor at the foot of Richard’s bed. I was on the foldout sofa in the living room, again awakened by the slightest sound. Before I’d fallen asleep, I’d gone into the kitchen to get a drink of water, and a mouse had run under the refrigerator. It startled me, but then tears sprang to my eyes because if Richard knew there were mice—mice polluting the environment he was trying to purify with air ionizers, and humidifiers that misted the room with mineral water— he’d make us move. The idea of gathering up the piles of holistic-health books, the pamphlets on meditation, the countless jars of vitamins and chelated minerals and organically grown grains, the eye of God that hung over the stove, the passages he’d made Ned transcribe from Bernie Siegel and tape to the refrigerator—we’d already moved twice, neither time for any good reason. Something couldn’t just scurry in and make us pack it all up again, could it? And where was there left to go anymore? He was too sick to be in a hotel, and I knew there was no other apartment anywhere near the hospital. We would have to persuade him that the mouse existed only in his head. We’d tell him he was hallucinating; we’d talk him out of it, in the same way we patiently tried to soothe him by explaining that the terror he was experiencing was only a nightmare. He was not in a plane that had crashed in the jungle; he was tangled in sheets, not weighed down with concrete.
