“He played football in college,” Richard said.
I smiled, but I had already heard this story. Ned had told it at a party one night long ago, when he was drunk. It was one of the stories he liked best, because he appeared a little wild in it and a little cagey, and because somebody got his comeuppance. His stories were not all that different from those stories boys had often confided in me back in my college days—stories about dates and sexual conquests, told with ellipses to spare my delicate feelings.
“So I grabbed whatever was hanging behind me—just grabbed down a wad of clothes—and as the guy comes into the room, I throw open the door and spring,” Ned was saying. “Buck naked, I start out running, and here’s my bad luck: I slam right into him and knock him out. Like it’s a cartoon or something. I know he’s out cold, but I’m too terrified to think straight, so I keep on running. Turns out what I’ve grabbed is a white pleated shirt and a thing like a—what do you call those jackets the Japanese wear? Comes halfway down my thighs, thank God.”
“These are the things he thanks God for,” Richard said to me.
Ned got up, growing more animated. “It’s
Although I had heard the story before, this was the first mention of Ned’s broken nose. For a few seconds he seemed to lose steam, as if he himself were tired of the story, but then he started up again, revitalized.
“And here’s the rest of my good luck: I come out and the guy on the desk is a fag. I tell him I’ve run into a problem and will he please call my boyfriend at the hotel where we’re staying, because I don’t even have a coin to use the pay phone. So he looks up the number of the hotel, and he dials it and hands me the phone. They connect me with Sander, who is sound asleep, but he snaps to right away, screaming, ‘Another night on the town with a prettyboy? Suddenly the bars close and Ned realizes his wallet’s back at the hotel? And do you think I’m going to come get you, just because you and some pickup don’t have money to pay the bill’?”
Eyes wide, Ned turned first to me, then to Richard, playing to a full house. “While he was ranting, I had time to think. I said, ‘Wait a minute, Sander. You mean they didn’t get anything? You mean I left my wallet at the hotel?’ ” Ned sank into his chair. “Can you believe it? I’d actually left my fuckin’ wallet in our room, so all I had to do was pretend to Sander that I’d gotten mugged—sons of bitches made me strip and ran off with my pants. Then I told him that the guy at the hotel gave me the kimono to put on.” He clicked his fingers. “That’s what they’re called: ‘kimonos.’ ”
“He didn’t ask why a kimono?” Richard said wearily. He ran his hand over the stubble of his beard. His feet were tucked beside him on the sofa.
“Sure. And I tell him it’s because there’s a Japanese restaurant in the hotel, and if you want to wear kimonos and sit on the floor Japanese style, they let you. And the bellboy thought they’d never miss a kimono.”
“He believed you?” Richard said.
“Sander? He grew up in L.A. and spent the rest of his life in New York. He knew you had to believe everything. He drives me back to the hotel saying how great it is that the scum that jumped me didn’t get any money. The sun’s coming up, and we’re riding along in the rental car, and he’s holding my hand.” Ned locked his thumbs together. “Sander and I are like
In the silence, the room seemed to shrink around us. Sander died in 1985.
“I’m starting to feel cold,” Richard said. “It comes up my body like somebody’s rubbing ice up my spine.”
I got up and sat beside him, half hugging him, half massaging his back.
“There’s that damn baby again,” Richard said. “If that’s their first baby, I’ll bet they never have another one.”
Ned and I exchanged looks. The only sound, except for an intermittent hiss of steam from the radiator, was the humming of the refrigerator.
“What happened to your paws, Rac?” Richard said to me.
I looked at my hands, thumbs pressing into the muscles below his shoulders. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I’d forgotten to put on the lotion and the gloves before going to sleep. I was also reflexively doing something I’d trained myself not to do years ago. My insurance contract said I couldn’t use my hands that way: no cutting with a knife, no washing dishes, no making the bed, no polishing the furniture. But I kept pressing my thumbs in Richard’s back, rubbing them back and forth. Even after Ned dropped the heavy blanket over Richard’s trembling shoulders, I kept pressing some resistance to his hopeless dilemma deep into the bony ladder of Richard’s spine.
“It’s crazy to hate a baby for crying,” Richard said, “but I really hate that baby.”
Ned spread a blanket over Richard’s lap, then tucked it around his legs. He sat on the floor and bent one arm around Richard’s blanketed shins. “Richard,” he said quietly, “there’s no baby. We’ve gone through the building floor by floor, to humor you. That noise you get in your ears when your blood pressure starts to drop must sound to you like a baby crying.”
“Okay,” Richard said, shivering harder. “There’s no baby. Thank you for telling me. You promised you’d always tell me the truth.”
Ned looked up. “Truth? From the guy who just told the Puerto Rico story?”
“Or maybe you’re hearing something in the pipes, Richard,” I said. “Sometimes the radiators make noise.”
Richard nodded hard, in agreement. But he didn’t quite hear me. That was what Ned and I had found out about people who were dying: their minds always raced past whatever was being said, and still the pain went faster, leapfrogging ahead.
Two days later, Richard was admitted to the hospital with a high fever, and went into a coma from which he never awoke. His brother flew to Boston that night, to be with him. His godson, Jerry, came, too, getting there in time to go with us in the cab. The experimental treatment hadn’t worked. Of course, we still had no way of knowing—we’ll never know—whether Richard had been given the polysyllabic medicine we’d come to call “the real
