stuff,” or whether he’d been part of the control group. We didn’t know whether the priest from Hartford was getting the real stuff, either, though it was rumored among us that his flushed face was a good sign. And what about the young veterinarian who always had something optimistic to say when we ran into each other in the transfusion room? Like Clark Kent, with his secret “S” beneath his shirt, the vet wore a T-shirt with a photograph reproduced on the front, a snapshot of him hugging his Border collie on the day the dog took a blue ribbon. He told me he wore it every Friday for good luck, as he sat in oncology getting the I.V. drip that sometimes gave him the strength to go to a restaurant with a friend that night.
Ned and I, exhausted from another all-nighter, took the presence of Richard’s brother and godson as an excuse to leave the hospital and go get a cup of coffee. I felt light-headed, though, and asked Ned to wait for me in the lobby while I went to the bathroom. I thought some cold water on my face might revive me.
There were two teenage girls in the bathroom. As they talked, it turned out they were sisters and had just visited their mother, who was in the oncology ward down the hall. Their boyfriends were coming to pick them up, and there was a sense of excitement in the air as one sister teased her hair into a sort of plume, and the other took off her torn stockings and threw them away, then rolled her knee-length skirt up to make it a micromini. “Come on, Mare,” her sister, standing at the mirror, said, though she was taking her time fixing her own hair. Mare reached into her cosmetic bag and took out a little box. She opened it and began to quickly streak a brush over the rectangle of color inside. Then, to my amazement, she began to swirl the brush over both knees, to make them blush. As I washed and dried my face, a fog of hair spray filtered down. The girl at the mirror fanned the air, put the hair spray back in her purse, then picked up a tube of lipstick, opened it, and parted her lips. As Mare straightened up after one last swipe at her knees, she knocked her sister’s arm, so that the lipstick shot slightly above her top lip.
“Jesus! You feeb!” the girl said shrilly. “Look what you made me
“Meet you at the car,” her sister said, grabbing the lipstick and tossing it into her makeup bag. She dropped the bag in her purse and almost skipped out, calling back, “Soap and water’s good for that!”
“What a bitch,” I said, more to myself than to the girl who remained.
“Our mother’s dying, and she doesn’t care,” the girl said. Tears began to well up in her eyes.
“Let me help you get it off,” I said, feeling more light-headed than I had when I’d come in. I felt as if I were sleepwalking.
The girl faced me, mascara smudged in half-moons beneath her eyes, her nose bright red, one side of her lip more pointed than the other. From the look in her eyes, I was just a person who happened to be in the room. The way I had happened to be in the room in New York the day Richard came out of the bathroom, one shirtsleeve rolled up, frowning, saying, “What do you think this rash is on my arm?”
“I’m all right,” the girl said, wiping her eyes. “It’s not your problem.”
“I’d say she does care,” I said. “People get very anxious in hospitals. I came in to throw some water on my face because I was feeling a little faint.”
“Do you feel better now?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“We’re not the ones who are dying,” she said.
It was a disembodied voice that came from some faraway, perplexing place, and it disturbed me so deeply that I needed to hold her for a moment—which I did, tapping my forehead lightly against hers and slipping my fingers through hers to give her a squeeze before I walked out the door.
Ned had gone outside and was leaning against a lamppost. He pointed the glowing tip of his cigarette to the right, asking silently if I wanted to go to the coffee shop down the block. I nodded, and we fell into step.
“I don’t think this is a walk we’re going to be taking too many more times,” he said. “The doctor stopped to talk, on his way out. He’s run out of anything optimistic to say. He also took a cigarette out of my fingers and crushed it under his heel, told me I shouldn’t smoke. I’m not crazy about doctors, but there’s still something about that one that I like. Hard to imagine I’d ever warm up to a guy with tassels on his shoes.”
It was freezing cold. At the coffee shop, hot air from the electric heater over the door smacked us in the face as we headed for our familiar seats at the counter. Just the fact that it wasn’t the hospital made it somehow pleasant, though it was only a block and a half away. Some of the doctors and nurses went there, and of course people like us—patients’ friends and relatives. Ned nodded when the waitress asked if we both wanted coffee.
“Winter in Boston,” Ned said. “Never knew there was anything worse than winter where I grew up, but I think this is worse.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Kearney, Nebraska. Right down Route Eighty, about halfway between Lincoln and the Wyoming border.”
“What was it like, growing up in Nebraska?”
“I screwed boys,” he said.
It was either the first thing that popped into his head, or he was trying to make me laugh.
“You know what the first thing fags always ask each other is, don’t you?” he said.
I shook my head no, braced for a joke.
“It’s gotten so the second thing is ‘Have you been tested?’ But the first thing is still always ‘When did you know?’ ”
“Okay,” I said. “Second question.”
“No,” he said, looking straight at me. “It can’t happen to me.”
“Be serious,” I said. “That’s not a serious answer.”
He cupped his hand over mine. “How the hell do you think I got out of Kearney, Nebraska?” he said. “Yeah, I had a football scholarship, but I had to hitchhike to California—never been to another state but Wyoming—hitched with whatever I had in a laundry bag. And if a truck driver put a hand on my knee, you don’t think I knew that was
