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By Root 464 0

no one, not even his sister, about contracting HIV, Martin wanted to confide the true source of his doubts, namely his fear that he would be dead sooner rather than later. So he explained to Leo what had happened, how he had lived for the past few years, how he had resolved to change, and how—the second he saw it—this house seemed to embody such hopes. It was difficult going at first, because all of this had to be extracted from the mental safe-deposit box, but Leo was a receptive audience and reassured him in those places where he halted to find the right words. When, at the end of his story, Martin realized that they were both in tears, he laughed with relief at having finished and disbelief that he could have provoked such a reaction in a great performer.

“I know why I’m crying,” he said, “but why are you?”

“Why am I crying?” Leo repeated. “Because, mon chère, I’m old enough to remember myself at an age when a death sentence—comme tu dis—would have been something to be cherished, and it makes me sad to think how I arrived at such a point, not because I have regrets but because, as you’ve begun to understand, to live—to truly live, by which of course I mean to love—is to suffer. You’ve read Pascal, I assume—‘the soul is pained by all things it thinks upon’? When I was your age, I never thought it could be true, but the longer I live, the more inexorable it becomes. But—néanmoins—as much as we can know this about ourselves, the nature of compassion is to wish that it were not so hard for others, particularly when we see ourselves in them—and it’s also true that, as painful as it seems, we get only one chance, as you are also now realizing.”

Martin had not read Pascal, but he felt as if Leo were shining onto his thoughts a light that both warmed him and made him want to turn away. “How—how exactly do you see yourself in me?”

Leo barely paused. “I see someone whose ideals have been tested and quite possibly broken, I see someone with a great capacity for work, and I see someone who desperately wants to love and to understand, but who thinks it’s—as you say—beyond him to do so.”

Martin could not understand how Leo knew such things, and how his words could resonate so strongly. “You don’t think it is?”

Leo’s eyes flashed. “Didn’t you feel it last night at the opera? Wasn’t that love coursing through the music and absolving you? And if not, what was it? And if so—and I know you agree with me that it was—doesn’t that demonstrate a capacity to give yourself to the irrational side of life, to throw yourself on its mercy?” He softened. “It’s not like you don’t have courage—you just have to find it when you need it most.”

Martin could agree that he had loved things in his life—music in particular—but also knew that this was not exactly what they were discussing. “But for someone else?”

Leo sighed but was undaunted. “Yes, that’s perhaps the rarest love of all, but it’s also the most damning, because it will often seem like a mirage and be swept away, and when that happens, you long for nothing but death. But—and this is the greatest irony of all—it’s really the only way to learn who you are.” Leo paused to wipe the sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief as he continued. “When you suffer this kind of loss, you will know it, and until you have, love is hardly beyond you.” He turned to Martin and placed a hand on each of his shoulders. “I know this because if it were,” he said very gently, “you’d already be dead.”

AS IF PROMPTED by the disappearing sun, Martin’s thoughts drifted back to Keith Loris, with whom he had been so infatuated while living in the East Village. While they had started out as friends—“buddies”—it had quickly evolved into something more, as Martin both did and did not want to admit at the time. They went to the same bars and shows and record stores; they talked for hours about their favorite bands and the fallacy of trickle-down Reaganomics and the genius of Walter Benjamin; they walked around the East Village and discussed all the great things that had been done in the past and could still be done