Bleeder (18 page)

“Do you love him?” I ask.

“I don’t know. It’s too early for that.” She turns away, pinches at a biscuit.

“But you have feelings for him?”

“Maybe.” Kaitlin sips sweet tea. “I still love you.”

“But not in the same way?”

“No. My feelings have changed.”

I stare out the window to the cars lined up under a sky of rain. Inside, it is quiet. I am quiet. Kaitlin is quiet.

“Is this about my ankles? My ears? My HIV? Is it because I go to the hospital like other people go to the mall?”

“No. Not at all. It has nothing to do with that. It’s me.”

“Did you sleep with him?” I blurt out. “I have to know.”

“Well, no. Of course not. At least not like you think. But, yes, I did stay over there.” She says that she is sorry and apologies float from her mouth in a weightless and invisible stream of language. She still wants to be friends. She didn’t want it to happen, not like this at least.

“But it did happen.”

She turns her eyes away and looks outside. “I guess so,” she replies sorrowfully. “It did.”

“Then it’s over? We’re through?”

She sniffles. “I guess so.”

With that comment, it is as if my heart has been looted of all its love. When I slide out from the booth, preparing to leave, Kaitlin glances up at me, a loose tear slipping from her eye.

“Why?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. It just happened.”

Kaitlin folds her hands over her face and slumps her body forward, and I suddenly miss her terribly. I want to console her and comfort me and pretend that this isn’t happening. But I don’t. Instead, I shrug my shoulders, shake my head in a gesture of regret and incomprehension, and I leave.
Perhaps this is best,
I think.
We never really consummated the relationship anyway.
Oh, I am hateful in my rationalization. But, no matter how I turn it, it still brings me to tears.

I sink into my couch and watch the rain and then I watch it stop and then I watch the sun begin to peek out. My apartment seeming a cell of sadness, I drive to the beach and push out into the warm fall water as the waves rise above me and swallow me. Even though the sun shines, the sea is full of cold rainwater. I let myself sink below the waterline and imagine what it would be like if I never surfaced.

Not knowing where else to turn but to a friend, I visit Sean, and as I park, I see him reclined in a lawn chair outside his apartment. The sun hangs low in the sky and Sean’s chair faces its descent. I walk behind him, smell his cigar.

“She left me,” I say to his back and the descending sun.

“Kaitlin?” He exhales smoke from his stout cigar.

“Yes. Kaitlin.”

“That’s too bad. That’s rough.” Sean reaches beside him and pulls another chair next to his. “Have a seat, my friend. Watch this sunset with me.”

I sit. I look to Sean. He gives me a wink then flicks his cigar toward the darkening sky, directing my gaze. The sun perches on a grove of far-off pines, their greenery washed black into a ragged silhouette horizon line. This dusk, the sun is bulbous in the sky: a giant glowing orb of warmth and light. Then the sun dips; its bottom lip hides behind the evergreens. As it descends from view, the sun projects a thin curve of light over dark pine and paints the pastel sky in shades of supple lavender. A plane has flown across, and its exhaust puffs up as cumulous and pretends to be its own cloud as it colors this baby-purple dusk in its manufactured whiteness.

Sean draws in his cheeks, inhales a shallow taste of cigar. “Gorgeous,” he declares. “Absolutely gorgeous.”

I agree and nod my head to say so.

“That’s what you have to think about, my friend. Kaitlin,” Sean says, thumping cigar ash against his metal chair, “is no different than that sunset. With a sunset, for a time you shine in the glory of that beauty. It makes you happy. You feel good. And you’re part of it. But then it’s gone. It fades and all you’re left with is the memory of it. And you know what the hardest part is?” I say that I do not. “The hardest part is realizing you have no control over it. No control at all. You just have to let it be. You have to understand that some sunsets are longer than others.” He exhales, breathes in. “And I say that one,” he points to the sky, still a faint purple, “is quite a good one. Even grand perhaps.”

“Is this
your
metaphor for relationships?”

“Well, not mine completely. Somebody else’s ideas translated by yours truly. But that doesn’t matter.”

We sit quietly for a moment as the night ensues.

“Well, how do you explain the relationships that last, the ones that don’t end?” I ask.

“Oh, they end,” Sean says, seeming ready for my challenge. “Sadly, everyone eventually ends, and that is their sunset, their purple going black.”

“I guess that’s true,” I allow. I lean back in the chair and make out the feeble light of a few stars. “I think for my next relationship, Sean, I’m going to aim for catching a girl who is like the sun around the middle of June.”

“Yeah. That’s good. I suppose, then, that my last one was more like a December sun. Short and cold.” I give a half-laugh at his humor, then turn back to the evening sky.

We sit mutely for a moment, lost in our separate worlds of thought. I imagine Kaitlin and half wonder if she’s with
him
tonight, but the thought is too vivid and painful to consider. I tousle a flip of my hair as, around me, the diamond evening fades into coal night.

THE HANDBOOK TO DATING WITH HIV

J
ANUARY 1995
. T
HE HOLIDAYS HAVE COME AND GONE
.

In my apartment, with nothing but the winter’s howl outside, I brew endless cups of coffee, prop my feet up on the couch, place a cold compress on their swelling, and I read. I glance up. The light outside darkens and a lone branch brushes against my window in a frigid breeze. Sleet falls and patters against the glass, the rooftop. I draw my blanket around me to keep winter from freezing all of me.

In spring, the crabgrass grows high; the buttercups open and reveal their hidden anthers; and the azaleas bloom in coronations of white, yellow, pink, and red. And although the cold winter is now behind me, it yet lives in my heart.

One evening William calls. He says that he wants to come to the coast and live, so we decide to make a go of it as roommates, and a few weeks later, he moves down. While I’m at work, he searches for a house—one with a sizeable backyard for his dog to run free in—and an afternoon that very same week, as I remove my work shoes and prepare to settle the customary ice pack upon my ankle, William returns, jubilant and talkative.

“I’ve found one. It’s perfect.”

We drive to Castle Hayne, a small outskirts community affixed to Wilmington, and we tour a ranch-style brick house whose size is almost equal to that of my parents’ home. A large glassed A-frame arch tents over the den area, and the brick house stretches outwards from both sides of this and is trimmed in fresh white. Inside, the owner has rolled out new carpet, painted the walls, and put down new linoleum in the kitchen. I marvel at its newness, at its vastness.

“So how much is he asking?”

“Seven hundred a month,” William says. “That’s three-fifty a person.”

I mull it over. Currently I pay $325 a month for rent, and $25 more for such a large place hardly seems an excessive increase, so I sign the rental agreement. It is only later that I realize the yoke of this house. Costs included in my apartment’s rent (the water bill and trash collection, for example) but not budgeted here will soon deplete my paycheck, while the enormity of our summer electric bills (a result of overrunning the air conditioning to keep the house tolerably cool) will leave me slack-jawed and newly attuned to the paucity of my earnings. But these burdens follow. Today, I feel the slight grant of clemency as levity supplants gravity. With the sheets signed and with the keys in hand, I run through the empty house, arms akimbo, all smiles.

The following afternoon, we move our furniture. It does not take long, for we both have very little, so little in fact that even with our things in them, the rooms exude an empty and unlived-in feeling. I fill my room with a bed; a stand of crates that I use as a dresser; a waist-high bookshelf overflowing with novels, read and unread; and the stereo, its two speakers, and several dozen CDs which are stowed in boxes of varying size. In his room, William wrestles a dresser into the corner, and although the top drawer is split and several drawers lack handles, he finds his Goodwill item useful. He lays his mattress atop the carpet and also has a cactus under his window that gives a little life to our place. In our den, we set my old Zenith TV atop a plain table that yaws to the left, and we square a couch against the long wall facing the fireplace. In this couch we are lucky, for it appeared in my apartment’s dumpster as William and I were moving out, and needing one, we promptly hoisted it into the back of my truck, and, after some
fabric cleaning and repairing its one broken leg (probably the reason for its disposal), the couch has a new home.

As evening approaches, we make grilled cheese sandwiches and then we unscrew the cheap bottle of wine we purchased for our move-in celebration. We sit on our back deck and toast ourselves to happiness. The yard is spacious and lined by a grove of poplars, and a pair of robins twitter in the air and briskly swoop from limb to limb, flitting in front of me before alighting in a dogwood off to the backyard’s right. Nearby, William’s dog wanders about, sniffing here and there in her new home.

“We should go out tonight and keep on with our celebration,” William suggests. “Besides, it might brighten your spirits. How about Lula’s? You like that place, don’t you?”

“Lula’s it is.”

In downtown Wilmington, William and I walk the long stone hallway to this underground tavern, a local favorite. Its entrance always reminds me of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” and on my way out, if I’ve had enough beers, I imagine that I can hear the name Fortunato being called out from behind its walls.

Inside, William buys the first round of PBR drafts and we carry the pints to a small table in the rear. William lights a cigarette, pulls heavy on it, gulps his beer, and then lounges against the bar chair.

“When it gets here, it’s going to be a good summer,” he proclaims.

The first beers go quickly, so I set us up for the second round, spilling foam on the floor as I already totter a bit from the wine and the beer. The alcohol warms and enlivens me and unhinges my tongue.

“This summer,” I tell William, “I’m going to find me a girl.”

“Good for you. So you’re finally over Kaitlin?”

“Oh, yeah. At least I think so.”

The crowd packs in and the bar roars with the sound of heavy voices and clinking glass. Smoke reddens my eyes as I drink another pint.

“But, you know, William. It’s not easy for me to date. You see, there’s no handbook. No
HIV for Dummies
or anything.”

“Oh, come on, now. You’re just being hard on yourself. I think you’ve done pretty damn good. This is just a low point.”

“No, really it is hard. I’m being serious.”

“I know you are. And yes, it’s bullshit that you have to deal with this. But I think you’ve done pretty damn good. Myself, I haven’t had a girl in three years. Not since Kelly at least.”

“Well, I’ve created my own dating rules, you know. These are to help out the heterosexual HIV-positive male who’s trying to get a girl. There’s Rule 1,” I explain loudly while tilting back my beer. “Smile and laugh like you are the happiest fuck in the world.”

“That’s good,” William says. “No one wants a sad fuck for a date.”

“No, of course not. Who wants to date a sorry old sod? And, even more, who wants to date a sorry old sod with HIV?” For emphasis, I pound my fist upon the table. Then I motion for William to quiet his vociferating agreement. “Now here’s Rule 2,” I interject. “On your first date, if they ask why you limp, discount it as a sprained ankle. Never, ever mention hemophilia on that first date . . . Too many connections can be made. I think it’s just better to make a slight lie about my ankle than to invite anything that might have to do with HIV.” I sip my draft. The room blurs in a dim fluorescent haze while the thrum of rowdy chatter hums in my ears.

“Hmm,” William says thoughtfully. “That’s insightful. Well thought out.” He affects an exaggerated contemplative manner by placing his hand beneath his chin in the attitude of Rodin’s
Thinker.
“And pray tell, what is Rule 3?”

“Rule 3,” I announce. “Reveal your HIV on the third date, and, when the news is dropped, the apocryphal look returned to you in her eyes, immediately relate yourself to drama and call this your one tragic flaw.”

“Ah, yes,” William says. “The tragic flaw. Your Achilles’ heel.” He sips his draft. “But why the third date?”

“Well, I’m still doing the research, you understand, but that seems to be the time when things either heat up or run cold. If you wait too long, well, your girl’s going to begin to wonder why you haven’t made any advances. But if you spill the beans too early, it’ll chase her away. Why would she stick around after hearing something like that?”