Exquisite Corpse (21 page)

He opened his eyes and found himself gazing up at Soren Carruthers, a kid he knew in a vaguely friendly way from clubs, coffeehouses, and parties. Behind Soren's head loomed the white spires of St. Louis Cathedral. Apparently he had fallen asleep on a bench in Jackson Square. The way he'd been feeling when he left Jay's house, Tran supposed he was lucky to have made it to a bench.

He had managed to get his head into Soren's lap, and Soren was cradling it, gently brushing Tran's hair back with one slender hand. It felt so good to be touched in a kind, nonsexual way that Tran's eyes filled with tears. He remembered his flood of emotion at Jay's yesterday. Something in him cringed from the memory, and he did not cry.

He hooked an arm over the back of the bench and pulled himself up to a sitting position, ran his hands over his eyes and through his hair, sneaked a sheepish glance at Soren.

“Don't even bother being embarrassed,” Soren told him. “I once spent three nights out here.”

“Really?” Tran couldn't imagine Soren living on the street, with no mirrors, no mousse, no scented shampoo. Soren seemed the sort of person for whom luxury was essential to the sustenance of life. But apparently he had an underlayer not visible through the polished surface. Tran realized that he barely knew this quiet young man, had never really taken the trouble to know him. He'd spent so much time with Luke that most of his other friendships were either in ruins or dying of terminal shallowness.

“Really,” Soren said. “I've been more or less on my own since I was sixteen. My family pays me handsomely to stay away and not associate myself with them. Last year my grandfather offered me a quarter-million dollars to leave New Orleans for good, but I wouldn't go. I have things to do in this city.”
Like what?
Tran wanted to ask, but didn't.

“Anyway, what are
you
doing here? Did your family kick you out?”

“Yeah, for starters. How'd you guess?”

Soren rolled his eyes. “Gee, I only know about twenty other queers it's happened to. You'll be OK. If they disrespect your basic identity enough to kick you out, they were damaging you anyway.”

“They're Vietnamese. They don't understand being gay.”

“Bullshit! Queers exist in every culture in the world. It's just that most cultures try to sweep them under the carpet. You can bet there are gay Vietnamese. You're one.”

“I'm American.”

“There are queers in Vietnam. The government may be willing to kill them in order to hide them, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.”

“I don't think the Vietnamese government has any special vendetta against queers,” Tran said, hoping they could drop the subject. He wondered when Soren had gotten so cryptomysto-political, and why.

“Well, do you want to get a cup of coffee and talk?”

Tran's stomach cramped at the very thought. He'd had enough stimulants for a while. “Anything but coffee.”

“What would you like?”

Tran thought about it, realized he hadn't eaten anything since the cold meat sandwich last night at Jay's. “What I'd really like is some Vietnamese food.”

“Sounds great. Let's do it.” Soren pulled Tran up off the bench. Tran still had traces of a dream-boner, but luckily his shirttail was long and loose enough to hide it.

He wasn't about to return to Versailles, where he would almost certainly see someone who knew him in any of the restaurants, and it would get back to his family before nightfall. He hadn't thought much about his family since turning up at Jay's. Now his feelings toward them had begun to crystallize into a stubborn anger. If his father never regretted throwing him out,
if his mother and brothers could be brainwashed into despising him, then Tran would let them be equally dead to him.

They drove across the river on the bridge called the Crescent City Connection after the way the Mississippi curves in a half-moon shape around the city. Versailles was populated with North Vietnamese, but there was a large South Vietnamese community over here. They wound up at a dim little café lodged between a seedy bowling alley and a cheap motel. Incense sticks smoldered in a tiny Buddhist shrine below the cash register. Soren had a green curry flavored with sweet basil and coconut milk. This was an Indian-influenced Southern dish, and though Tran liked the savory pieces of chicken and sweet potato stewed in the rich emerald sauce, the flavor was strange to him.

His own meal was more familiar:
phó bò hà nâi,
a huge bowl of clear spicy broth filled with tender shredded meat, chewy beef tripe, and masses of elastic rice noodles. It was served with a platter of fresh greens, lime wedges, and fiery red chilies for seasoning. He'd been surprised to see it on the menu, for this was the signature soup of Hanoi, the northern capital. But he guessed Vietnamese people ate it everywhere.

This revelation made Tran think about how insular life in his community had been. He'd grown up knowing nothing about the lives of these other Vietnamese, and little about the lives of Americans except what he gleaned in school. People in Versailles lived as they would in a middle-sized Vietnamese village; they ventured into the city when they had to, but they ate, worked, and loved among themselves. And they punished their children for wanting to step outside.

He and Soren talked of what it was to leave home, of how sometimes you couldn't go until you had to, even if you knew it was what you needed most; of how you never wanted to return until some tiny random image rose up in your mind. The pitcher of water in the refrigerator, yellow lemons painted on cool green glass; your mother's antique dressing table; the
perilous archeology of your own closet. For Tran it was the clutter of the family bathroom, the homey mess he'd thought of when confronting the sterile expanse of Jay's John. He remembered masturbating in there, remembered the bag full of multicolored hair, and a little shudder ran through him.

Soren seemed to comprehend the range and depth of emotions you could feel toward a family who had essentially revoked your membership. By the time the dishes were cleared away, Tran thought they had forged a fragile bond of friendship. It had been a long time since he'd had a friend who didn't want to fuck him or score acid from him; he wasn't sure he'd ever met a Caucasian who didn't want to do one or the other, or both. Halfway through dessert—strong coffee with sweetened condensed milk for Soren, a jackfruit shake for Tran—he felt comfortable enough to ask, “Have you seen Luke Ransom lately?”

Something passed across the gray haze of Soren's eyes, some veil of wariness or pity. Tran had no idea what that might be about. Luke and Soren had scarcely known each other when Tran had been on the scene, and Soren seemed like the type of boy Luke could really get into hating.

“No. Not lately.” Soren seemed on the verge of saying something else, but did not.

Tran fidgeted in his chair, toyed with the metal napkin holder, the bottles of fish sauce, vinegar, and the
sriracha
pepper sauce that was a staple of every Vietnamese restaurant he'd ever been in. Soren knew something about Luke. Maybe only that he had tested positive, maybe something more. Finally he couldn't stand it.
“What?”

“Nothing. It's just that last time I saw Luke, he was in really bad shape over you.”

Tran shrugged. “If calling me at three o'clock every morning for a month, sending me twenty-page psycho-love rants, and threatening my life qualifies as being in really bad shape, then I guess he was.”

Soren arched one elegant eyebrow. “He threatened your
life?”

“He once threatened to kidnap me and rape me. He said he'd keep me locked up somewhere for a week, fuck me without a condom, make me swallow his come and his blood.”
He also said he'd make me like it … but I don't think I can say that out loud.
“Then he'd let me go, and I could turn him in if I wanted, but he would die happy knowing I was infected too.”

“Luke is never going to die happy,” Soren murmured.

Tran stared at his hands encircling the milk shake tumbler, at his ragged cuticles and grimy knuckles. “I don't even know if you knew Luke was sick,” he said.

“Yes, I know. I'm positive too.”

Tran nearly choked on the last drops of ice cream sliding up through his straw. He couldn't have anticipated that one in a million years. With Luke it had been so easy to believe; sloppy, hard-partying, pissed-off Luke, his brain always burning, his body and heart wide open to any number of poisons. AIDS seemed no worse than Luke had always expected the world to dole out to him.

And of course, Luke and Tran had been born a decade apart. They were at such different places in their lives. Tran liked spending time with someone so much older than himself, yet clued in. Luke had written, had fucked, had traveled. He
knew
things, not only facts but truths of existence, and he could talk about them for hours. Tran often felt wordless and ignorant in his presence. But Luke drew the intelligence from him, and found people his age amusingly amoral, and worshiped his tender young body.

Still, when Luke tested positive, the difference in their ages allowed Tran to rationalize so many things. He imagined that Luke had had hundreds of lovers in San Francisco and on his cross-country travels. He knew that men Luke's age often got sick; they had been the last generation to experience sex without
fear. AIDS was comparatively rare among gay men in their teens and early twenties. And they had always been so careful, Tran and Luke.

He wondered if Soren had been careful too. Tran wasn't sure, but he thought Soren was a year or two younger than him.

He must have looked stunned, because Soren began to laugh. “What, you think we can't get it because we're young and cute? I hope
you ‘ve
been tested.”

Tran managed to nod.

“Still negative?”

Tran nodded again, but glanced away from Soren. Soren leaned across the table and laid his hand on Tran's wrist. “Forgive me. We get so used to discussing our status, it starts to seem like a kind of small talk. I shouldn't have asked.”

The sensation of Soren's skin against his own alarmed him, and Tran slid his wrist out from under Soren's cool, dry palm. Whenever he walked into a Vietnamese restaurant, Tran couldn't help feeling that all eyes in the place had suddenly turned on him, were scrutinizing his behavior for signs of deviance. Usually this small paranoia wasn't all that far from the truth, considering his reputation in Versailles. But it had been a problem the few times he'd eaten Vietnamese food with Luke. Luke knew better than to touch him here as he would in a French Quarter bar, or even on the street; still, Tran couldn't help flinching away every time their hands reached for the same dish or Luke's knee accidentally bumped his under the table, until his flinching made him feel more conspicuous than their touching would have done.

It had hurt Luke's feelings then, and Soren looked faintly injured now, but he hid it well. The infected, as Luke had called them, probably got used to people sliding away from their touch.

Tran wanted to recapture the easy conversation of a few minutes ago. Why had he mentioned Luke anyway? Luke already got in the way of everything he did, everything he
wanted. He didn't have to conjure the ghost himself. He decided to tell Soren about his experience of last night.

“Do you know Jay Byrne?” he asked.

Soren's gray eyes flared. “That creep! He tried to pick me up at the Hand of Glory once—actually offered me
money
to pose for some dirty pictures, as if I needed his money. I only considered taking it for a second, because I knew it would make my ancestors roll over in their graves, and I like to do that whenever possible.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, see, the Byrnes are a mixture of old money and new money, which is death in some circles. And they say the old money they
do
have is cursed. His mother is a Devore, but she also comes from a line of swamp trash, as my family would say, right up through the nineteenth century. Her great-uncle was Jonathan Daigrepoint.”

“Who's Jonathan Deg—”

“Daigrepoint. I thought every kid who ever grew up in New Orleans would've heard of Jonathan Daigrepoint.”

“Versailles isn't exactly New Orleans.”

“Well, this didn't happen in New Orleans, either. Jonathan Daigrepoint lived in Point Grosse Tete, deep in the bayou country south of here. His family were Cajun fishermen and trappers. Jonathan didn't go out drinking and dancing as his brothers and sisters loved to do. He never had much to say, never married or had a girlfriend, and no one took any notice of him until they found the abandoned boat shed where he'd killed fifteen little boys. Most of them were still in there—cut up with a hunting knife, it looked like, though there was really too much decomposition to tell. Some were black children from the next town over, and he probably could have gotten away with that, but some were Cajun kids, and one was a runaway from New Orleans. They brought him here to stand trial. The court had to hire an interpreter because the Daigrepoints spoke only French, and swamp French at that. This was in eighteen seventy-five.”

“Wow.” Tran made a mental note to tell Soren about the decapitation of Jayne Mansfield out on Chef Menteur. Right now, though, he wanted to hear the rest of this tale. “So where does the old Devore money come in?”

“Louis Devore was twenty-one when the trial was held. He got called as a juror. The whole Daigrepoint clan had come up from the swamps to watch their son get crucified. During the long hours in court every day, Louis took a fancy to Jonathan's sister Eulalie, who was just fifteen. At the end of the trial, Louis voted ‘guilty' with the rest of the jury, but he and Eulalie were in love. His family threatened to disown him if he married a miserable piece of swamp trash with killer's blood in her veins, but they didn't. At least she was the right gender, I suppose.