Hector spun on one foot, the other tucked against his thigh. The turn complete he stood on his right leg, bent forward from the hip, extended his right arm to the front and his left leg and arm to the back, parallel to the floor—an angle-perfect arabesque. I realized that Hector was a dancer, that such a fact should have been obvious to me: these were dancer’s legs, elegant yet brutally powerful, dancer’s arms, sculpted from years of lifting ballerinas, graceful from endlessly practicing the port de bras.
When I first moved to the city, one of my new friends told me never to date a dancer. “They’re bitchy little queens,” he said. “The lot of them. You fall in love with their perfect asses and they shit all over you.”
The spectators applauded and Hector gave a deep bow, then took my hand and we bowed together.
The party kept going until early morning, the other men partnering up and shaving each other. Water fights, mock wrestling, ass slapping—the usual locker-room antics. But the electricity was gone. Nobody else had a straightedge. Nobody else had Hector. Every man in that room wanted to fuck him, but he sat with me, on satin-slipped pillows piled in a dim corner of the room. We spoke in low tones and the other men stared at us. The art critic seemed particularly amused; at one point he called over to us: “Beware, young men. Dancers and painters make ill-fated couples. Think of Isadora Duncan.”
We did not think of Isadora Duncan. We talked for hours, every now and then walking out to the living room to fetch new drinks and stare at the rainy city. I felt a little stupid ordering vodka from a pale girl while sporting a semi-erection, but she never looked at me, only stole quick glances at Hector when he was facing the other way.
“Come see me dance,” he ordered me, sipping from a glass of mineral water.
“I’d love to.”
“We open this weekend. Rite of Spring. Do you like Stravinsky? It’s a very difficult dance, very harsh, very hard for the dancer.”
“Good luck with it.”
Hector widened his eyes in mock horror. “No, no. Never say good luck to a dancer.”
“Break a leg?”
He crossed himself. “God forbid. No, no. Never. Say, merde.”
“Merde? Really?”
“Merde.”
Hector told me he wanted to move on to acting; he felt that dance was a small world, that it limited him. Being the danseur in his company’s biggest productions, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, Prince Desiré in Sleeping Beauty, wasn’t enough for him. He wanted an audience of millions. He wanted to be in movies.
I listened to him talk and worked it out in my mind. I’d abandon my paints and man the camera; Hector could be the star. I’d zoom in for a close-up and he could smile his famous smile, bright teeth shining for all of America, a wink for the world to swoon by.
Sometime after midnight he beckoned for me to follow him again. He led me down dark corridors and into a vast bedroom. The rumpled sheets of an unmade bed; the paisley pajamas sprawled across a bench by the bed’s footboard; the leather-bound photo album splayed open, plastic sleeves filled with photographs of Hector—all blue-lit from the still-blazing city outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Hector, blue-skinned, placed his palms against the glass and stared at the neighboring buildings.
“Do you think anyone can see us up here?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. He was silent and I added, “Everyone in this city is a voyeur. Right this second hundreds of telescopes are trained on us.”
“I hope so,” he said, shimmying his hips and laughing. “Do you like me, Alexander?”
“God, yes.”
“Do you want me?”
I said nothing. I ran the backs of my hands up his thighs and began kissing him, everywhere, acres of tawny, silken skin. He set his feet wide apart and leaned into the window, and I thought: If we should fall forty stories they can pry my smile from the pavement below.
3
After the shaving party he hired me to paint his portrait. I hadn’t done any portraiture since school; the last three years had been spent on my water-tower series, “Water Towers: 1- 59,” and I doubted that I could do Hector’s form justice.
I was right; each study I began was an exercise in reduction. The full Hector wasn’t emerging on the paper. He stood naked on the concrete floor of my Red Hook studio, a converted butcher shop that I had leased with Tulip, an on-again, off-again lesbian from Manitoba.
“If she’s on-again, off-again,” asked Hector, after I had described my living situation, “why doesn’t she call herself bisexual?”
“She thinks bisexual is a cop-out.”
Hector raised his eyebrows. “But fucking men is not?”
“Shut up and pose.”
“She should only fuck gay men,” he said, hands behind his back, smiling coyly to flash his dimples. “If she’s worried about the politics.”
I looked up from my sketchpad. “Tulip’s not your type,” I said, and Hector shrugged.
“You don’t sleep with women?” I asked. “Do you?”
“Only when I want to.”
I resumed my work. “Don’t flex, okay? Just stand still.”
He stuck his tongue out at me. “When does Four-Lip come home, anyway?”
“Any second now. Where you’re standing, that used to be where the meat grinder was. The first six months after we moved in, the whole place reeked of beef.”
“Look at me,” he said, staring down at the small state of his cock. “Look at poor little me.”
“Are you cold?”
“No,” he said, “I’m lonely.” I dropped the pad and went to him.
The hardest part of Hector to capture on canvas was his feet. The rest of him was classically proportioned, the marmoreal angles and curves of Grecian statuary, but his feet were ugly. He had dancer’s feet, lumpy with knots and contusions, hammertoed, yellow with thick calluses. But Hector was proud of them; he walked around barefoot even when he was clothed, which was a rarity indoors. His feet helped me to understand him. Hector was a Puerto Rican from the Bronx. For all his flirtatious strutting, for all his preening before the mirror, Hector was a tough guy, as much athlete as artist.
One night we were invited to a costume party in Scarsdale hosted by a magazine editor (Hector was invited; I went along as his guest). I picked him up at his apartment and gasped when he opened the door. He wore a black spandex full-length bodysuit, so tight I could read the veins in his biceps, could see that he wore no underwear.
“You’re not actually wearing that,” I said. I grew up in a Pennsylvania town once known for steel and now known for birthing NFL linebackers; I always felt there was a fine line between gay pride and suicide.
“Of course I am,” he said, kissing me on the mouth. “I’m Catman!”
“Catman? There is no Catman. You mean Catwoman?”
“Fuck Catwoman. Catman!”
There was no getting out of it. I was masquerading as an investment banker: I wore a pin-striped suit with a red tie and red suspenders and would carry a five-foot-long penis, but the penis was inflatable, I didn’t have to blow it up until we got to the party.
On the subway ride to Grand Central Station I sat on the bench, blushing, while Hector stood above me, refusing to hold on to anything, swaying back and forth to the train’s rhythm and humming the same three bars of Prokofiev over and over. Behind him sat a row of elderly women gripping shopping bags. They never took their eyes off him. I had an idle fantasy that they might spring from their seats as one and devour him with gummy jaws.
In the great room of Grand Central, beneath the painted constellations, Hector actually cartwheeled—cartwheeled—three times in succession and laughed when he saw me biting my lip. He waved to a frowning cop who stood by the information kiosk, twirling his billy club.
“Come on,” I said to Hector, pushing him forward. “It leaves in two minutes.”
“The problem with spandex,” said Hector, pinching the fabric between his legs, “is it chafes.”
We boarded our train and chose an empty car. Hector sighed, frustrated at being cooped-up for forty minutes. A band of high school kids wearing their varsity jackets ran hooting into our car just before the train pulled away. The sight of them, their shaved heads and class rings, triggered warning alarms for me, but Hector seemed not to notice the boys. He rested his head on my shoulder and napped.
The boys noticed us. It started with smirks and whispered jokes. One of them lay his head on his friend’s shoulder in imitation of Hector; the friend pushed him away with mock disgust. The ticket collector passed through the car and I bought our tickets. I watched his blue-shirted back disappear through the sliding doors.
They started throwing things at us. First a paper airplane glided over our heads. Then balled-up pages from a newspaper. I nudged Hector with my shoulder; I wanted to move, to get into a car with people. Hector opened his eyes just as a crumpled soda can flew into my lap. He grabbed the can, sat up, and hurled it at the largest kid in the pack, a blue-eyed beefy bruiser. The can hit the boy on the nose and ricocheted away. Before the boy could decide what to do, Hector stood and leaned forward, thick forearms draped over the seat in front of him.
“When was the last time you got your face broke by a man in a catsuit?”
The boy had no answer. At the next stop a large family stepped into our car, broke the silence with the blessed cries of toddlers, and we made it to Scarsdale without further event.
“We’re taking a cab back,” I told Hector as we walked out of the station. “I’ll pay.”
“You’d better pay,” he said. “You think I’ve got room for a wallet?”
4
As we walked out one evening, walking through Chinatown, dodging the swarms of rushing people, pointing at the hanging ducks, the suckling pigs spitted and roasted, the crabs peering out from their glass tanks, their pincers clamped in blue rubber bands, Hector opened his mouth to say something but coughed instead, and kept coughing; he stood in the middle of the sidewalk with his hands on his knees, his body convulsed by fits of dry coughs. I held his shoulders for a full minute as pedestrians veered wide of us, none of them slowing for an instant.
“I’ve got to get out of this city,” he told me when he could finally speak, his eyes red. “I swear to God I’m allergic to New Yorkers.”
It was a brave joke. We had our blood tested and we heard the diagnosis pronounced. So we learned a new language. We read every article we could find on the new treatments. I called friends I hadn’t spoken to in years, sick friends who had quietly retreated from the desperate rounds of parties, dance clubs, and openings. I had dropped these men from my daily thoughts and it shamed me, it shamed me that I listened for signs of gratification in their voices when I told them the news.
Some of them snapped at me, berated me for never visiting, and I accepted their anger for what it was. When the gardener yells at you for trampling his grass, it’s not just you he’s yelling at. It’s every shortcutting bastard for the past ten years, every shirtless boy stomping through the azaleas, every yellow Labrador clawing up the newly planted turf. You are the last in a line of trespassers, and you bear the blame for every offender that has passed this way before.
I quizzed all my infected friends, asked them for names of good doctors and hospitals. I listened to them speak, took notes, and realized how grateful they were for the chance to unleash their tongues. They raged against the government, against their insurance carriers, against the men who infected them and the lovers who left them, against the pretty boys who would not meet their eyes, against a country that wanted them to die and get it over with.
I won’t get like that, I told myself. I’d rather put a bullet through my mouth than end as a bundle of hatred and fear. Not all of the men, though, had slipped into this loop of recriminations. Some were more hopeful. They spoke with great intensity about experimental new medicines, powerful drugs that were rumored to work. Nothing had been feder ally approved yet; only test subjects had access to the drugs.
Hector nodded when I told him this news. He already knew, had already called his powerful friends (“Patrons of the arts,” he told me, winking) and arranged for both of us to meet with a renowned doctor currently conducting tests at a midtown hospital.
“What we’re doing,” Dr. Kislyany told us, sitting behind neat stacks of papers and journals on his dust-free desk, “is trying to sterilize the bad guys. When we talk about a viral load, you know what that refers to?”
“I think so,” I said. Hector rolled his eyes at me. “But not really,” I added.
Dr. Kislyany smiled. He was a surprisingly young man, dark and trim and elegant. He wore wire-frame glasses; delicate butterflies winged across the yellow field of his tie.
“The virus clones itself, essentially. It replicates, makes copies. The number of copies floating through a milliliter of blood, that’s the viral load. Now, the therapy we’re studying here, you understand it was just born? This is an entirely new class of drug. We don’t know yet what the long-term effects might be. And we don’t know if the drugs work. Early results look pretty promising, but it’s too early to tell. It’s risky, is what I’m saying. If you decide to do this, if you volunteer, you’re making yourselves human guinea pigs.”
Hector was staring out the window. I looked at him and then at the doctor. “If it was you,” I asked him, “if you were sitting over here, is this the best way to go?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the only way to go.”
He handed us long contracts that released the hospital, the drug companies, and everyone else in the world from liability. We read the clauses quickly and signed our names, asking no questions.
“Now we check your blood. If the viral load’s below five thousand, we hold off. If it’s above, we begin. And gentlemen,” he told us, removing his glasses, “this is aggressive therapy. It’s not take a couple aspirin, call me in the morning. These pills, they’re heavyweights.”
We nodded, impatient to begin. I could feel the virus spreading through my body, spawning one hundred offspring a second, each of them intent on rotting me from the inside.
A nurse wearing long rubber gloves and a facemask drew our blood. The next morning Dr. Kislyany called us. Hector’s count was eighteen thousand; mine was twenty-five thousand. When we walked out of the hospital, into the cold winter sunshine, Hector asked me to move in with him.
“I want you around,” he said. “I’ll never remember what to take when. And you’re a better cook than me.” Being a better cook than Hector was no great compliment; all he ate were protein shakes and raw vegetables. But he didn’t want me to putter around the stove; he wanted me to watch over him. As long as I was there to bear witness, Hector could not disappear.
So I moved in with him, leaving Tulip and the butcher shop and Red Hook for Hector and his two-bedroom apartment in TriBeCa. It was my first time living in Manhattan. I had always imagined that when I finally made it to the city I would have arrived, with a one-man show in a Soho gallery and a slobbering review in Art Forum. But Hector was the one with the scrapbook of magazine reviews, with newspaper photographs of himself onstage, with a bundle of fan mail from actual fans (though mostly, he admitted to me, from his mother).
We began the first of many drug cycles. “Cocktail hour,” Hector would say, arranging the amber vials of pills on his kitchen table into separate stacks: Hector’s Morning; Alexander’s Morning. Hector’s Evening; Alexander’s Evening.
In those first days of living together we saw the pills as our little heroes, fresh-scrubbed American soldiers marching through Paris, waving to the cheering crowds. Nucleoside analogs, nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, protease inhibitors—we pronounced the names reverently, adoringly. They had come to save our lives.
Our affection for the pills did not last long. We had to plan our days around our medication, to remember that di danosine must be taken on an empty stomach, saquinavir with a high-fat meal, indinavir with a low-fat meal; that
ri tonavir tastes like acid and ought to be drunk with chocolate milk; that delavirdine must be mixed with eight ounces of water and swallowed rapidly, like a frat-boy chugging his beer. I learned that amivudine causes headaches, insomnia, and fatigue; that nevirapine triggers vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and violent purple blooms on the skin—the same symptoms as nelfinavir, except when nelfinavir is taken with saquinavir you feel that knives are carving through your ribs. Zalcitabine ate a hole in the lining of my esophagus. “Minor ulcer,” Dr. Kislyany told me, staring at a sonogram of my throat. “Painful, not dangerous.” Idovudine inhibits the production of new bone marrow, which meant nothing to me until I contracted pernicious anemia and lost forty pounds and the color from my skin, lost so much strength that for two weeks I could only walk with the aid of a cane. Every time I stood too quickly a swarm of bright flies flashed across my eyes. Painful and dangerous, but I recovered.
The first accident happened nine months into therapy, standing on a street corner, waiting for the light to change. I felt a tremor in my bowels and then the terrible wetness running down my thighs. My mind flashed an image of my four-year-old self, bawling on the overgrown lawn as my mother hollered at me. The light changed and I crossed the street.
Shame is black shit seeping into your pants’ legs, into your socks, as you climb the backstairs of your lover’s apartment building. Shame is bundling your dirtied clothes in a garbage bag and dropping them down the incinerator chute. Shame is standing in the shower, the water as hot as you can bear, scouring your skin with pumice, rubbing the skin raw, until stars of blood constellate the legs, and harder still, wanting to flay yourself, to step out of this hide, to slither free of this spoiled body.
Kislyany prescribed antidiarrheal pills and they worked too well; I could not move my bowels for six days. I stopped taking the antidiarrheals. Two months later I had another accident. I began wearing adult diapers. Kislyany gave me different pills, ones that allowed me to resume a natural rhythm, and after a few months I felt safe walking the streets without a diaper.