Marine Park: Stories (8 page)

I remember once Hayden told me that he was finding it difficult to live in the moment, and that he thought this was the major problem in his life from which everything else stemmed. Hanging out with me, he said, he was always thinking about the next time I'd be able to come up. When meditating (he'd started meditating), he could only think about texts waiting on the phone in his pocket. He felt that if there were some way to narrow in, appreciate some type of now, he would be cured. It was a Heisenberg uncertainty issue, which the “Mathematical Topics” professor was always ragging on: only being able to know position or momentum. Physically, if you tried to measure either, you'd be pushing it just a little bit. The professor put red marks all over that on a test.
Close,
he wrote.
Good to think about this.

It seemed like Hayden was going to bring something like that up again. There was a straightening of his posture that came when he was about to say something important. But instead he asked if I wouldn't mind walking through the cemetery instead of going to find another party. He said it was absurdly beautiful at night—he used the word
beautiful
; I don't think I'd ever heard someone use that word out loud before—and he liked to walk on the gravel path.

We were leaning against a pedestal,
TAYMAN, JAMES—1927,
off the path, out of the wind. Hayden said, You know, I've thought about kissing you, but I don't think that would make me happy either.

I asked what he meant.

He straightened his back and raised his head, and then he slumped back down lower on the rock.

It sounds a little like something, but that's not the way it really was in my head, he said.

I'm sure.

It's just something I said.

Yeah, yeah, I said.

He tapped his finger against the
T
in Tayman, and I watched the dirt get under his fingernail. His nail and the rock made a dry clink, again and again.

Then he said, Let's try something. He jumped up. Let's be spontaneous, he said.

What do you want to do? I asked.

He told me, and we ran down the hill—toward the Charles, frozen there on the bottom.

It was close. He was ahead of me. There were the train tracks; up at the top of the little mountain the castle was blinking, an antenna hovering up above, some of the windows lit, full of the warmth of other people, their books and lights and extra sweatshirts. Hayden got to the edge of the ice first, and he rolled up one sleeve and threw a big rock from the bank out toward the middle, and it bounced. There was a cracking sound, as if something live was coming up from the bottom. But he was already at the center, and I started running to catch up, and I've always felt that you run faster at night, that you're counting the lampposts, or the trees, or the number of man-made objects stuck in the ice flow, as if to say that we have been here. We must have run for miles, Hayden half a pace in front of me in that perfect form he had, dodging islands and branches and large objects in the dark.

It was a cold winter. Fall came late, winter early. It snowed a little, but mostly it was just cold. You could run on rivers like that, without any problem, the dry ice tractioning your feet. The air bit the back of your throat. The surface was always solid. The skin on your fingers got dry and white. The ice cracks in the night sounded like conversation.

T
he first one of them to get herpes was Desmond. He was at NYU graduate school at the time, studying microbiology, and they offered him a free room in the grad student cabins on the Sterling Forest upstate campus for a semester. He didn't have much money. His dad wasn't getting the same amount of plumbing work as he used to. He took it, and moved out of Brooklyn, for the first and last time, and sequestered himself in the woods near Woodstock, which he'd always wanted to get to but never had the chance.

Those were long winter nights. The skiing was good, and cheap, in Sterling Forest. It's only an hour north of the city. But nobody much knows about it. Desmond taught himself how to ski that season. One evening, right as it was getting dark, he dislocated his thumb sticking his hand into the hard snow for balance, and had to go to the office for a first-aid kit. The woman working there was warm and gave him hot chocolate. She told him to make himself comfortable, and he did. He stayed on the couch while she changed radio stations, looking for the Rangers game. Later, when they went to his cabin, he had almost forgotten what it was like to love a woman. He came quickly, embarrassingly, hot and sweaty under the polyester sheets. She left to drive to her house in the dark, and he didn't offer to take her; and he never called again. In two weeks he started getting cold sores. Perhaps it hadn't been her, but he always assumed.

This was the seventies. Nobody cared too much about a bit of abnormal skin. And it was on his face. It seemed more like a chronic but unimportant dermatological problem. Desmond tried not to think so much about it. He went through a sexual revelation after getting back from Sterling Forest. His crowd liked to go out to Staten Island, where the bouncers let you in without the best clothing, and the girls were Italian and loose. Desmond and his best friend, Harlan, would borrow the car of their friend Perry, who was gay, and they'd drive down the Belt Parkway over the Verrazano together. Perry's scene was more in Manhattan, but he kept the car because his father gave it to him. His roommate, Carol, used it to drive to the beach. Desmond and Harlan would pick up the car from Perry's apartment, pat him on the shoulder, and fly over the bridge. Desmond entertained Harlan on the ride with stories from his semester upstate. Harlan had never been farther north than Van Cortlandt Park. While Desmond drove the candy-red Mustang, the windows down, the radio on 104.3, Harlan curled in the passenger seat and complained about finding true love. Yeah, Desmond said, but why say the truth about it?

It was on Staten Island where they first met Ida, who had perpetual thick-rimmed glasses. They had noticed her a few times before they formally met, because she was known to stand on the bar at that particular place every Saturday just as it turned midnight, and slowly take off the turtleneck sweaters she liked to wear. One night Desmond pushed forward and put a hand up to help her back onto the dance floor, and instead of taking his hand she jumped down and pushed her finger on his lips. By the time they left they had already kissed backed up next to the jukebox, so when Desmond got the keys from Harlan and took her back to the Mustang he knew they'd be going further. She pulled her pants down herself but wouldn't help him with his. He suddenly felt shy about it. So he did what he could with his mouth and she seemed to enjoy it, because eventually she unbuttoned his fly and blew him while he leaned back, every so often, on the horn.

Ida's herpes was much worse than Desmond's, and though she was certain it was from him, she never said anything about it. She wasn't the type of girl who was involved with many men, and the turtleneck stunt was something she'd seen a cousin of hers do. She'd had a serious boyfriend in Vietnam who, before he left, had taught her all about sex. They did it everywhere he could imagine, and, eventually, some of the places she tentatively suggested. Can it be standing up somewhere? she said. Girl, he said, how come you're so naive? When he came back with chlamydia and was good enough to tell her about it beforehand, she broke it off. She felt somewhat guilty. She'd been looking for a good time ever since. The ex-boyfriend only called on the phone, from Montana, where he was living.

The blisters that she got, every few weeks, on the inner upper part of her thighs, turned pink after a day. There were worse diseases, and Ida knew this. Grand scheme, what she had didn't compare. Even still, it hurt to walk when the blisters were in full. On the second day they would begin to stream pus. A day later they scabbed over. She learned the schedule quickly enough, but worse was the uncertainty. Doctors didn't know what it was, but they advised that she inform everyone whom she would potentially be having sex with. They were fairly sure, they said, that it couldn't be transmitted between outbreaks. They asked questions about her habits, shook their heads. She began to police her body, so strictly that sometimes she'd step out of film lectures at the New School to go to the bathroom and take a look. In the stalls with no locks, so that she had to hold the door shut with one hand, she kept her head down, watching her legs. The panic seemed to rise from them, from below her toes, and by the time it seeped up to her head she'd have to let go of the door and clutch her arms around her chest.

One Saturday, after having gotten only three hours of sleep the night before, she got drunk too quickly. These things aren't anybody's fault. She had been at Two Fish Bar with Desmond and Harlan again, and, as they'd become accustomed to doing, they came stumbling out the wooden doorway onto Father Capodanno Boulevard walking toward the real clubs, closer to the bad end of the island. They passed the red Mustang parked at a smashed meter. Ida kept tripping, and Desmond was ignoring her, so it fell to Harlan to guide her with his arm. She kept adjusting her pant legs. By the end of the boulevard they had gotten fairly close. Desmond went inside, and ordered his own drink, but Ida and Harlan walked back to the Mustang, and they had unprotected sex. How do you feel about me? Harlan said. Ida pushed him out in time.

Harlan's experience with herpes began with a hard day at work. He had a job as a stringer for the New York office of the
Washington Post
, and because there was so much crime in New York in those days, the paper had a full office. Washingtonians loved reading about how unclean New York was. It was the only thing that people responded positively to in readership surveys. New York was a mess. Harlan himself had gotten mugged three times in the past month, so that he'd taken to taping a five-dollar bill under his sock, only a dollar or two in his wallet. The annoying part was the trip to the DMV for a new license. He needed the license because he drove in to work, Brooklyn to the city, and it was one day on the drive that he started feeling particularly under the weather. He trudged the stairs up to the eighth floor because the elevator was broken again.

In the office for three days straight he wrote crime copy with a 102-degree fever. It came in bursts with the chills, so that he couldn't turn the fan off fast enough to get the heavy woolen blanket he'd taken to stowing under his chair. He went to the doctor, who gave him ibuprofen and asked if he'd been to Europe recently, or a farm, and didn't understand anything until he got the blisters on his penis. One doctor misdiagnosed it as a ruptured birthmark, but the infectious disease unit at Maimonides knew better. Even stringers at the
Post
had health insurance. He won a Scripps Award for a series he was working on during that time, but his head wasn't in it.

Harlan reacted by looking for someone to blame. He never talked about it openly, and it began to eat away at his chest from the inside. He made little whimpering noises at his desk when the typewriter broke. He never asked Desmond about it. Desmond was cold for a few weeks after the Ida-car situation. Harlan hadn't considered Ida a possibility. They hardly knew each other. He formed the mistaken idea that he got it from an ex-girlfriend who'd recently come out of the closet, and he began to feel disgusted by the idea of gay sex. He used the word
faggot
indiscriminately. Still, he went to work every day.

He began to play out imagined situations in his head. He didn't like the idea of having sex with someone without telling them about it. He also wasn't very good at talking to people. It was the only thing holding him back as a reporter, though he wrote good copy. If he couldn't tell anyone and he didn't have sex, then he couldn't get married. No marriage, no kids, no grandkids, getting old alone. He'd be like his uncle Vance, who called on the phone every Friday. The call came at the same time every week. It was a before-dinner call. Just checking in, his uncle Vance would say. And he'd say good-bye: Good to talk.

One afternoon Perry called Harlan at his office. He told him that he wanted to get a drink together. Harlan assumed that it was something about his recent behavior and the slurs. He was indignant, then embarrassed. He left his coat on the rack on the way out.

At the bar, in Greenwich Village, at the place where West Fourth Street meets West Twelfth, a nightmare of geometry, they sat in the dark back and drank McSorley's beer brewed in a basement nearby. Perry and Harlan had been drinking it since they were kids, taking the train in from Bensonhurst. It had an aftertaste, like candy, that they'd never found anywhere else. Harlan used to put a piece of bread in his pocket before going out, when they were in high school, and eat it before sneaking back into the dark house, to mask the smell. Italian bread was the only thing that could do it. After four beers Perry put a hand on his leg. Harlan left it there for a minute, and then angled away. After another beer Perry put his hand on the other leg, and Harlan left it. In the small bathroom, with graffiti on the walls, Perry leaned down and unbuttoned his pants, and Harlan put his hands through Perry's long hair.

At first Perry decided that he'd go on with his usual life. That it was his right—this wasn't a Scarlet Letter—to do what he wanted as long as he wasn't endangering anyone else. No one died from herpes. Then, after weeks of no communication from Harlan, in the moment after he told a strange man about it while they walked out of a bar in Bay Ridge to hail a taxi to his home, he realized his mistake. The look on the man's face did it. It's what? he said. Blotches appeared on his face. He took the cab himself and the cab screamed away. Perry sat on the curb. Then he walked home. He decided to put sex out of his mind until he could think of a better option. Still, he couldn't escape it entirely. One morning after not enough sleep, staying awake walking the night streets, he emerged from the shower and, without paying attention, took his roommate Carol's towel. He rubbed it all over his body, trying to get clean; the way the steam gets under pores, as if something has been forgotten. Jumping into a pile of autumn leaves as a young boy, the tongue of a first kiss, the particular light from a dying lightbulb in the ceiling of that room, his voice whispering, Maybe. He rubbed and he rubbed. He didn't realize it was her towel until she was already in the shower, and by then he didn't want to knock or make excuses. Besides, the thing couldn't be that transmittable.

Within months, Carol was displaying symptoms that she mistook for mosquito bites. She was new to the city. She came from Michigan. She had grown up on a horse farm. She had always wanted to be a milkmaid princess, and then, in high school, a theater star. She hawked tickets to comedy clubs late nights, to make the money for auditions. She didn't tell her parents about it. She read plays over breakfast, walked the lonely morning streets with coffee, went to see anything avant-garde, tentatively liked the Living Theatre. She'd never had sex before. She assumed that it would be like a thunderclap. She had the low-grade symptom kind, and she didn't know until after she was married, to a good man who moved them to Suffolk County, where she taught drama in the junior high school. He had words for her. They thought about getting a divorce. They slept for many months afterward with their backs to each other, until one day the husband turned over. She looked at him over her shoulder with something resembling desire. Fuck it, he said.