The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [105]
RETURNING TO THE present, Martin—while remaining cognizant of the attacks, and everything they represented—could not help but consider the many ways in which his life—or just life in general—had changed since that night, and mostly for the better. For one thing, AIDS—though hardly a laughing matter—was not the specter it had been; in his case, the medicine had worked, and—except for those first few weeks, when he suffered from fever and aches—he had remained free from symptoms since his diagnosis, almost ten years earlier. Above all, he did not feel “branded,” or at least not in a bad way.
This shift in perspective had taken many years, of course, and—as he reflected on it now—went a long way toward explaining why he had embraced a career that had seemed anathema to him after college. His decision to go to law school had occurred roughly when he began having sex with men, and while at the time he had framed the issue in financial terms, it now seemed that the former had been done as a way to compensate for the latter. By pursuing a more conventional career, he could prove to himself—and those around him, or at least as he imagined them—that even a “homosexual” was capable of acting in a “productive” manner, doing his part to oil the gears of innovation that pushed society forward. For many years, he had in fact relished the broader approval and prestige that came with a high-paying position in a Manhattan law firm but with the passage of time and the accompanying acclimation to his desires, this motivation had waned; he no longer relied on his career as a crutch for his identity, to justify his existence, gay or otherwise. Although he could understand why others might view a decision to abandon his job at the height of his earning power—to quit, to give up—with a certain disdain, as if even to consider it at such a point in his life (not to mention what was going on in the rest of the country) was somehow inappropriate or even offensive, he now appreciated that by “coming out,” he had largely removed himself from such expectations (putting aside the question of whether they were real or imagined to begin with); in effect, for the first time in his life, he felt liberated, free to do what he liked.
He didn’t hate the firm—to the contrary, on many days, he enjoyed it—but there were so many other things he wanted to do in the time that remained to him (and here, HIV was a consideration, given that there was no telling how long the drugs would work); he wanted to plant alpine troughs, to cultivate orchids, to learn to speak Russian and maybe Chinese, and perhaps even to quilt; these were only a few items on a long list. And it was not just a desire to cultivate new hobbies that quickened his pulse with anticipation; as much as he liked and admired some of his legal colleagues, the demands of his practice had relegated even the possibility of almost any new relationship to the margins for many years. Besides Jay Wellings and his sister, he rarely talked to anyone outside work with any regularity, while his dating record had been even more sporadic. Although he—like some significant percentage of nonheterosexual men, in his experience—generally enjoyed sex whenever it suited him (this, too, was a perquisite of gay life he had not initially appreciated), simply by going to a gay bar or (more recently) a website, he wanted to learn more about someone else and (by extension) himself, to—why not just say it?—fall in love for more than a single night or—more typically—a single hour. It was a thought that both excited him and—if he wanted to be perfectly honest—made him nervous, as though he were just seeing the infinite horizons of the seas he hoped to sail.
He considered the many things in his life he had quit—marriage, music writing, the East Village, cigarettes, and more—and concluded that no matter how painful at the time, in retrospect it was always the better course of action. “Quitting is seriously underrated,” he noted to Dante, who slowly blinked and yawned, stretching his mouth to its widest point before delicately snapping