Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [77]
“That’s goddamn romantic.”
“There’s even something like it in The Laws of Manu. If a guy can’t procreate, his wife takes up with his brother so they can have a kid.”
“There’s a word for that, baby, but it ain’t widow inheritance. It’s called livin’ in the closet. Fags have been doin’ that for thousands of years, too.”
Johnny had finished his apple. The core was browning in his hand. “The Laws of Manu says after the baby is born the woman and the brother can go back to being how they were. Platonic.”
“So you’re gonna be happily married to your platonic widow wife. You’ll still be kissin’ her every morning and every night, in fifty, sixty years.”
Johnny didn’t know what would happen after the baby was born. Maybe he’d love the baby so much he’d figure out how to love Eliza, too. Maybe they’d all move to California and live in a tent on an ocean cliff, and he’d walk Teddy’s baby on the beach.
Rooster added, “Unless we’re both dead of AIDS.”
Johnny looked up. Rooster had his back to him, the defeated mass of his body still collapsed facedown. They’d never said it aloud, not to each other. They talked about the people they knew who were wasting away, the bums and junkies and squatters, people whose own families refused to visit them in the hospital, and in their obituaries—if they even got obituaries, let alone funerals—were listing the cause of death as pneumonia, cancer. Cancer! Together Johnny and Rooster shook their heads at the injustice.
But wasn’t Johnny as cowardly as everyone else? In the hushed alleys of their neighborhood, where the virus glinted like the silver needles left on the sidewalk, it was easy for him to pretend that it was a junkie disease. He never talked about the possibility that one day it might catch him, too. He and Rooster were careful, always scrupulously careful, and yet it was Johnny’s unvoiced fear that this was how he’d be found out: one day he’d get sick, and even though no one would say it everyone would know why.
“Silence=Death,” the new AIDS posters went. The triangle symbol was as ominous as the Missing Foundation’s toppled martini glass.
Maybe, if things were different, Johnny could say the word back to Rooster now. AIDS. He could tell Rooster how scared he was. They’d go get tests, and put it behind them, and together they could sail down Fifth Avenue on a parade float, throwing confetti into the wind.
But now? If he was found out, no one would let him raise Teddy’s baby. And if he got sick, he wouldn’t be around long enough to raise the baby. Before long, he’d be wherever Teddy was. Gone. And he wanted to be alive.
Johnny sat up, but Rooster didn’t move. He didn’t show Johnny his face. Rooster was a big man, but for the first time, his body now looked like a brittle thing, each knuckle of his spine visible. What Johnny would remember was that ink-ruined plane of his back in the dim room, Johnny’s imperfect work branded forever in his pores.
“Just take your fuckin’ shower,” Rooster said.
To the wedding of his best friends, the first wedding he had ever attended, Jude wore the same clothes he’d worn to Teddy’s funeral. Johnny had wanted him to wear a robe, maybe in yellow or gold (Johnny’s was white), but Jude had grown tired of the details Johnny had planned—the vermilion powder he would dab on the part of Eliza’s hair, the firmness of the eggplants for the fire sacrifice. He had sent Jude out to buy six bouquets of roses, which Jude had then disassembled, petal by petal, for the guests to toss at the bride and groom—the householders, Hindus called them—while Johnny and Eliza had taken the PATH to Hoboken to apply for a marriage license. So Jude stood firm on his choice of attire, the one act of disobedience he could muster. Les, for his part, wore the suit he had worn to his own wedding in 1969, chocolate brown, with a vest that could not be buttoned.
The rest of his clothes, along with the handful of possessions with which he preferred not to part, Les had packed into his trunk. After arranging with