The Green Road (6 page)

It was hard to cry when there was no one watching, he thought, then he brushed his teeth and went back to bed.

In the months that followed, they were often on the phone. When Greg lost weight, Billy took him out shopping for smaller jeans. He brought up wine and treats from the local deli which quite quickly turned into ordinary bags of food.

‘Just the heavy stuff,’ he said, smiling at Greg’s door that was three flights up – not even breathless after the climb.

‘You shouldn’t have.’

‘I want to.’

And he did. Billy knew that, even if he did not love Greg, even if he had other guys, and other plans for the long term, he would still do this thing. He would help Greg in his last months, or years. And he might resent it but he would not regret it: because this was the thing that was given him to do.

Which did not mean that Greg was easy. The groceries were always wrong, for a start. Billy could never tell what was fun trashy food – like Oreos, say – and what was just trash.

‘You call this stuff
cheese
?’

In fact, there was no Indian prince at Massimo’s on Thursday evening. There was a very nice risotto, which Billy personally found a bit disappointing.

‘It’s a bit like . . . rice?’ he said.

Massimo’s boyfriend Alex was in from the west coast and he brought a rather grizzled Ellen Derrick, who stuck to gin and smoked throughout. Jessie was there, of course, as was Greg. There was a wonderful Dominican boy who said very little and, as Jessie later pointed out, only ate three grains of rice all night. There was Arthur, who had aged so much since Max died. And there was an Irish guy, called Dan, who had sandy hair you might flatter to red and beautiful, pale skin.

Massimo’s place on Broome Street was an old sweatshop and its floor was made from two foot wide hardwood boards. He had factory windows that kept nothing in or out – not the heat, the cold, nor the noise of the printworks two floors below – but were beautiful nonetheless, each one of them dividing the dusk into thirty rectangles of fading light. Inside, he had many candles and a table so long and monastic that eight people felt like few. The place had cast-iron columns, Marsalis was on the stereo and a long scribbled piece by Helen Frankenthaler took up an entire cross-wall. After the risotto came noisettes of lamb with roast garlic and a mint-pea purée, which Massimo served with a Saumur-Champigny that was like an elevator in a glass, as Greg said, it brought you to a whole new level. Massimo, with his slow gestures and careful, sing-song voice, was alert to everyone’s smallest need; unpushy, prepared.

Greg glanced at Billy, as if to say, ‘Watch and learn.’

They tried not to talk about the disease. They went through
Twin Peaks
, they talked about the art scene, what Larry was showing next, how money was wrecking the East Village now, and whatever happened to that guy who used to walk a tightrope and piss, beautifully, in an arc, perfectly balanced, into the East River? No, he pissed on the floor down in that club on 48th Street. Should have been the river. Whatever happened to him? Every name they spoke dragged its own tiny silence after it.

Gone. Gone silent. Alive.

Arthur was positive for six years and he hadn’t a thing wrong with him, people wanted to touch him, he was so old now. Arthur remembered things no else remembered. Who could keep all that? Who could hold on to it? His head was a museum. And when he died the museum would be empty. The museum would fall down.

Greg read nothing but the classics now, tender of his eyesight and of his time, he talked about Achilles’ dream of dead Patroclus, how the dead man would not touch him but only boss him about, when all Achilles wanted was to feel the guy in his arms. Why is that? That the dead have voices in our dreams but no density. It’s just this huge sense of themness, it is all meaning and no words. Because words are also physical, don’t you think? The way they touch you.

‘Sometimes they do. Use words, I mean,’ said Arthur. ‘“My tree is all hibiscus”. Someone said that to me, once.’

No one asked who.

‘It’s a war,’ Massimo said.

Greg said fuck that he never signed up for any damn war. He wanted a civilian’s death, he said. A personal death. He wanted a death he could call his own.

Massimo said Gabriel Torres was working out in the Y on West 23rd and the
stir
as he wiped down one machine and went to the next. Gabriel Torres was the most beautiful man you have ever seen.

‘Where he gets the time?’ said Arthur.

‘You know,’ said Greg, ‘Sometimes I think we’d all be better off with a woman in sensible shoes.’

Dan’s face, through all of this, was a thing of quiet attention. His pale skin soaked up the candlelight and he listened so well, it seemed the whole table was talking just for him. Greg lifted his glass and said, ‘Look at those cheekbones,’ and Dan gave a smile.

‘The poet. That Irish poet.’

‘Yeats?’ said Arthur.

On which, to everyone’s amazement and delight, Dan opened his mouth and a ream of poetry fell out. Line after line – it was like a scroll unfurling along the tabletop, a carpet unrolled. And each of us, as we heard it, realised where we were, and who was with us. We saw our shadows shifting on the back wall, the office cleaner across the way in trembling fluorescent tinged with green, the dark city brown of the sky.

Dan finished, placed a hand to his chest and inclined his head. There was applause. Alex told him he had a voice like wild honey. And a face, said Massimo, like some portrait with a red hat, what was that one? In the Palazzo Pitti. Some cardinal, anyway, in a red hat.

Dan said, ‘Don’t fucking cardinal me. Whatever else you do.’ And we all laughed. And then we looked at him. That mixture of shyness and blurting arrogance: he was quite the thing, we thought. And we also thought about his freckled white skin, with the blue veins under it, and about his uncut Irish cock.

‘You are so wrong,’ said Arthur, ‘I’m thinking Dutch. Something direct and entirely austere. Like that wonderful sandy-haired boy in the Met.’

And in fact, Arthur walked up to the museum a couple of days later, going through the rooms until he stood in front of it again, a sixteenth-century boy in velvet black against a green background; oil on wood. It was the honesty of the wood that did it, because the full-lipped young man did not, himself, look especially truthful or sincere. The picture was full of integrity, the boy might be anything at all.

After the lamb they had figs poached in marsala with a mascarpone mousse. Alex took off his jacket to help with the plates, and he and Massimo moved with such synchronous ease, you knew they loved each other still.

Greg lit up a cigarette and contemplated Dan through half-closed eyes.

‘So. Ireland,’ he said. ‘Are you from, like, a
farm
?’

Dan refused the question with a smile.

‘I’m
sorry
,’ said Greg. He was flirting now.

‘Actually, yes,’ said Dan, relenting. ‘Yes. We have a farm.’

‘Billy grew up in Elk County, Pennsylvania but he’s not reciting Whitman. Are you, Billy?’

‘Why not?’ said Dan, looking to Billy. ‘Why not?!’

‘Just,’ said Billy.

‘He’s wonderful.’

‘Is he?’

‘I sing the body electric,’ said Dan, raising his preacher’s hands, and we looked at them; the square bones of his knuckles, the tiny tremble in his fingertips, held open that moment too long.

And we looked at Billy, who blushed in the candlelight.

‘What’s the next line, Billy?’ said Greg. ‘You see how dumbass the American education system can be? What’s the next line?’

But Billy was too busy falling in love to think about the next line so Alex quietly filled it in. ‘The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,’ as Massimo set down some glasses for port, and reached to the counter for the platter of cheese.

Later, Greg wondered, if he had not needled Billy then Billy would not have turned to Dan and to all that Dan offered him, there at the table: the guilt and the glory; the pomp and cruelty of his love. And he wondered also if it could have played out in any other way. They made such a handsome couple. It was meant, we all knew it. Dan and Billy, Billy and Dan. It had to be.

After cheese, and more cigarettes, and the offer of whiskey, tequila, more wine, Massimo went over to the window to throw down a key, and a whole bunch of people came up on their way out clubbing: Jerry from the Fawbush Gallery, that landscape gardener who did white plantings all over the Hamptons, Estella who was an outrageous queen and this guy in a Weimar-type leather thing – call it a corset – with a German accent no one believed for an instant and considerable quantities of cocaine. Jessie’s archrival Mandy was also in the mix, with her glossy trustafarian hair and mid-Atlantic drawl and, years later when Jessie was truly fat and Mandy still wonderfully slim, they met and remembered that evening which went on till dawn, and all the hard work they put in, years of it, helping, loving, mourning these men.

A few weeks after this dinner Greg was admitted to St Vincent’s for the first time. It was just a thing, he told Billy, they would blitz him with anti-fungals and let him go. Jessie brought him in a cab, with six pairs of ironed pyjamas and a cotton kimono with beautiful cross-hatchings of indigo blue. Greg had a problem with his mouth and tongue. He also had a haemorrhoid that obsessed him more than it deserved, though Jessie told him her father had a real bunch of grapes hanging out there for a while, and she went off to find ice. She also found a bag of doughnuts to fatten him up, then ate most of them herself, but she sat there for another hour and laughed at every small thing.

Arthur arrived with champagne and they pretended to drink it. He said when Max was first up here in the sevens, just two rooms down, the staff slid his food tray across the floor, and he had to change his own sheets. He said it was so much better now, thank you Dr Torres – how was he, by the way? And Greg said, ‘I think he’s just exhausted, he’s just working so hard.’

The drip went in. Billy did not come and, after a while, the visitors went home.

Three hours later, Greg started shaking. He was cold in places that were new to him, and sweat pooled at the base of his neck. A nurse came in to switch on a bedside fan and fold down his sheet. An ordinary white woman in her fifties, she looked at his terror and acknowledged it, eye to eye. Then she left.

Greg could not catch a breath. He pulled the air into him in tiny, shallow draughts, on and on, his body panicking until his mind snapped free and started to wander around the room – also around the thoughts that were in the room, and the memories that were hiding in the corners and under the bed. There was the occasional hallucination: a woman – who looked like his mother but was not his mother – sat in the chair sewing a long grey smock for him to wear when he was dead. Dr Torres, who might really be there, leaned over him and smiled. There was a panting cat draped across the top of his skull and he was terrified of its claws. This went on all night, until a tray startled him and he realised it was only supper time. The night was yet to come.

Two men died towards dawn: at least Greg was pretty sure that men died. He could hear praying in Spanish, then people weeping and helping each other away. In the morning, a man covered in Kaposi’s stood in his doorway and said, ‘I just need enough to do it. Don’t you think?’

The fever was less on this second day. Greg was able to swallow some Xanax, a big tub of which a tranny nurse called Celeste slapped down on his locker.

‘You want a cigarette, honey? You want some tea?’

All day, Greg drifted in and out of sleep, watching the sunlight cross the room, and the shadow following it. He smiled and thought about Billy and Dan, trying to imagine how they were together: he just couldn’t see it.

And this was strange, because no one else had any trouble seeing it. They were two beautiful young men up in the big city. One was pale and interesting, the other easy and tan, and Billy flung a friendly arm over Dan’s shoulder as they took the ferry over to Fire Island while, back in St Vincent’s, the Xanax kicked in.

It was a long, hot weekend.

On Monday morning, Greg woke to see Billy standing in his hospital room.

‘Hello.’

There are hours and days that change people, and they both had been changed. They were different people now. After a moment, Billy stepped up to kiss Greg briefly on the mouth. And this was such a nice gesture in that place of death, it was as though Greg’s fever had never happened and Fire Island was just a dream – though it was not a dream. Billy and Dan had taken several and various substances, they had danced till dawn: we all saw them, and we liked the way Dan kept his shirt on when everyone else stripped down; the two top buttons undone and his sternum gleaming in there, white as the inside of a seashell.

‘Where were you?’ said Greg.

‘I got a house-share in the Pines,’ said Billy. ‘Didn’t I say?’

‘Gold dust,’ said Greg.

‘I know.’

When Billy came back in to the hospital the next day, Greg was sitting on the edge of the bed, very weak but determined to go home. Billy had to find his pants, and push each leg up over Greg’s knees. Then he leaned in for an awkward hug, to lift him up off the bed and slip them up the rest of the way.

‘Oh God,’ said Greg.

‘That’s it,’ Billy said.

‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’

‘Good luck with that bitch,’ said Billy. ‘Is this your shirt? Arm. Shush.’

Greg had started to moan. He moaned incontinently. He dribbled noise.

‘Hush, now.’

Billy got Greg’s shirt on and struggled with buttons and cuffs. He pulled his belt tight, attempted and abandoned the zipper, then he turned to sit beside Greg and for a moment they were both slumped on the edge of the bed.

‘Quiet down, will you? Come on.’

The legs he had just handled were the same legs Billy had once hauled up on either side of himself, while Greg’s dark and dreamy eyes looked up from the pillow. They were the same legs, except they were half the circumference. They were the same bones.