Finally, he had brought it up himself. Listen, he’d said, I don’t have it, and he had watched Charles’s face sag.
“Thank god,” he had said. He had waited for Charles to say that he didn’t have it, either, but he didn’t. “Nobody knows,” he said. “But you should. But aside from Olivier—my ex—no one else does: Just my doctor, him, me, and now you. Oh, and Adams, of course. But no one at work. They can’t.”
He had been momentarily speechless, but Charles had spoken into his silence. “I’m very healthy,” he said. “I have the drugs, I tolerate them well.” He paused. “No one has to know.”
He had been surprised, and then surprised at his surprise. He had made out with and even dated men with the illness, but Charles seemed the antithesis of the disease, a person in whom it would dare not reside. He knew that was silly, but it was also how he felt. After they became a couple, Charles’s friends would ask him—half teasing, half serious—what on earth he had seen in their old, old friend （“Fuck you,” Charles would say, grinning）， and David would say that it was Charles’s confidence （“Note that he didn’t say your looks, Charlie,” Peter would say）。 And while that was true, it wasn’t only what attracted him, or rather not just; it was Charles’s ability to project a certain indestructibility, his radical conviction that anything was solvable, that anything could be fixed as long as you had the right money and connections and mind. No less than death would have to yield to Charles, or so it seemed. It was a quality he would have for the rest of his life, and the thing David would miss the most about him when he was gone.
And it was that same quality that allowed David to forget—not always, but for periods of time—that Charles was infected at all. He saw him take his medication, he knew that he saw his doctor at lunchtime on the first Monday of every month, but for hours, days, weeks, he was able to pretend that Charles’s life, and his life with him, would go on and on, a roll of parchment unscrolling down a long grassy path. He was able to tease Charles about how much time he spent in front of the mirror, the way he patted creams on his face before they went to bed, flexing his mouth into different grimaces, the way he would examine his reflection after getting out of the shower, holding his towel in place around his waist with one hand as he twisted his neck to examine his back, the way he would bare his teeth, tapping at his gums with his fingernail. Charles’s self-scrutiny was the result of middle-aged vanity and insecurity, yes, the kind that was exacerbated by David’s presence, by his youth, but it was also, David knew—knew, but tried to ignore—an expression of Charles’s fear: Was he losing weight? Were his fingernails discoloring? Were his cheeks hollowing? Had he sprouted a lesion? When would the illness write itself on his body? When would the drugs that had so far kept the illness away do the same? When would he become a citizen in the land of the sick? Pretending was foolish, and yet they both did it, except when it was perilous to do so; Charles pretended and David let him. Or was it that David pretended and Charles let him? Either way, the outcome was the same: They rarely discussed the disease; they never even said its name.
But though Charles refused to claim the disease for himself, he never denied it in his friends. Percival, Timothy, Teddy, Norris: Charles gave them money, he arranged appointments with his doctor, he hired cooks and housekeepers and nurses who would dare, would deign, to help them. He had even moved Teddy, who had died shortly before David had begun seeing Charles, into the study next to his bedroom, and it was there, surrounded by Charles’s collection of botanical prints, that Teddy had spent his final months. When Teddy had died, it had been Charles, along with Teddy’s other friends, who had found a sympathetic priest, who had arranged the wake, who had divided Teddy’s ashes among them. The next day, he had gone to work. Work was one realm, and outside of work was another, and he seemed to accept that the two would never overlap, that his friend’s death would never be an adequate excuse for coming in late or for not coming in at all. His grief, like his love, was something he would never expect anyone at Larsson, Wesley to understand or share. He was exhausted, David would later understand, but he never complained about it, because exhaustion was a privilege of the living.
And here, too, David felt ashamed, ashamed because he was frightened, because he was repulsed. He didn’t want to look at Timothy’s shrunken face; he didn’t want to confront Peter’s wrists, grown so bony that he had exchanged his metal watch for a child’s plastic one, which even so slid down his arm like a bangle. He had had friends who had gotten sick, but he had shrunk from them, blowing them kisses goodbye instead of kissing them on the cheek, crossing the street to avoid talking to them, dawdling outside buildings he used to dash into, standing in corners when Eden went to hug them, skirting out of rooms that were desperate for visitors. Wasn’t it enough that he was twenty-five and had to live like this? Wasn’t that courage enough? How could he be expected to do more, to be more?
His behavior, his cowardice—they had been the source of his and Eden’s first big fight. “You’re such an asshole,” Eden had hissed at him when she found him downstairs, sitting on one of their friends’ stoops, waiting for her in the cold for thirty minutes. He hadn’t been able to take it—the smells of the room, its closeness, the fear and resignation. “How would you feel, David?” she’d yelled at him, and, when he admitted he was scared, she’d snorted. “You’re scared,” she said. “You’re scared? God, David, I hope you grow a fucking pair by the time I die.” And he had: By the time Eden herself was dying, twenty-two years later, it was he who sat by her side, night after night, for months; it was he who picked her up from her chemotherapy appointments; it was he who held her that final day, he who stroked her back as the skin turned cold and smooth. In the way that people decided they would become healthier, he had decided to become better, braver, and when Eden finally died, he had sobbed, both because she had left him but also because no one had been prouder of him, no one had seen how hard he had worked at not running away. She had been the final witness of the person he had been, and now she was gone, and her memory of his transformation was gone with her.
Decades later, when Charles was long dead and David was an old man himself, his husband, who was much younger than he was—history repeating itself, but inverted—would have a curious nostalgia for these years, and a curious wonder for the disease, which he insisted on calling “the plague.” “Didn’t you just feel that everything was falling to pieces around you?” he’d ask, ready to be outraged on David’s and his friends’ behalf, ready to offer him sympathy and solace, and David, who had by then lived with the disease for almost as long as his husband had been alive, would say he hadn’t. Maybe Charles did, he said, but I didn’t. The year I started having sex was the year the disease was given a name—I never knew sex, or adulthood, without it. “But how could you even function when it killed so many? Didn’t it feel impossible?” his husband would ask, and David would struggle to articulate what he wanted Aubrey to understand. Yes, he’d say slowly, it sometimes did. But we all functioned; we all had to. We went to funerals and to hospitals, but we also went to work and to parties and to gallery shows and ran errands and had sex and dated and were young and stupid. We helped each other, it’s true, we loved each other, but we also gossiped about people and made fun of them and got into fights and were shitty friends and boyfriends, sometimes. We did both—we did it all. He didn’t say that it was only years later that he came to an understanding of how extraordinary that period had been, of how numerous its terrors, of how strange that some of what he remembered most clearly were the mundanities, stray details, little things significant to no one but himself: not the hospital rooms or faces but the evening he and Eden decided they were going to stay up until dawn, drinking cup after cup of coffee until they were so punchy they lost the ability to speak, or the gray-and-white cat that lived in the little flower shop he used to visit on Horatio and Eighth Avenue, or the kind of bagels that Nathaniel, the man he had lived with and loved after Charles, liked to eat: poppy seed, with a smoked-salmon-and-chive spread. （He had named his and Aubrey’s son after Nathaniel—the first firstborn male Bingham in generations not to be called David.） It was also not until years later that he came to realize how much he had simply accepted as fact, when, really, he should never have accepted it at all—that he should have spent his twenties going to memorial services instead of plotting his own future; that his fantasies never extended beyond the year. He had, he was able to see, drifted through that decade, moving through it with the cool detachment of a sleepwalker—to have awakened would have been to be overwhelmed with all he had seen and withstood. Others had been able to do this, but he had not; he had sought to cosset himself, to invent a place of safety, one in which the outside world was unable to fully intrude. Theirs had been a generational suspension—some had found solace in anger, and others in silence. His friends marched and protested and shouted against the government and the pharmaceutical companies; they volunteered, they submerged themselves into the horror that surrounded them. But he did nothing, as if doing nothing meant that nothing would be done to him; it was a noisy time, but he had chosen quiet instead, and although he had been ashamed of his passivity, of his fear, not even shame had been enough to motivate him to seek a greater engagement with the world around him. He wanted protection. He wanted to be removed. He sought, he knew, what his father might also have sought in Lipo-wao-nahele. And like his father, he had chosen incorrectly—he had attempted not to reckon with his own anger but to hide from it. But hiding hadn’t stopped things from happening. The only thing it prevented was eventually being found.