Don't You Forget About Me (20 page)

And then she thought of Pam and Marie again. Certainly, she got the virus from Jack. She’d had a negative HIV/AIDS test after her last “real” boyfriend. It was something all of her friends in New York did. So it had to be Jack. That meant that both his wife and her sister had been exposed. She didn’t know enough yet about the virus and its incubation. They may have built up immunity to him after all these years.
Was that even possible?
In spite of her Pam-bashing thoughts just minutes earlier, now she wanted to talk to Pam. She
needed
to talk to Pam. There was no one else.

26

M
arie and Pam finally caught up with each other. Pam had to talk to Marie about getting tested for HIV/AIDS right away. Pam knew it had come from Jack because Marie had been a virgin when she met him and had claimed never to have been with anyone else. Somehow, she would find the courage to tell her sister the awful news. It was yet another affront to her life and what she had mistakenly believed it to be. Her husband had had sex with her own sister and possibly infected her with HIV. What could be worse?

“Do you think you can come by before this weekend?” Pam asked. “We need to talk.”

“What do you have in mind?” Marie asked in return. “After work either today or tomorrow is all we have.”

“What about Friday night? And then you can stay if you want,” Pam replied, leaving out the part about Sandra possibly being there on Saturday.

“I was supposed to have dinner with Arthur on Friday night. I haven’t seen him all summer because he has a new boyfriend.” Marie thought there was a good chance her friend would cancel on her; it had already happened twice in August alone. “You tell me,” she told Pam. “You’re the ill one.”

Pam had never begged for anything in her life, and this was starting to feel like “a beg.”

“Are you okay? I mean, I know you’re sick, but it’s not more than ‘sick,’ is it? You’re starting to scare me.”

“Well, come tonight, then,” she replied. “I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

Marie’s heart missed a beat.

Then Pam added in explanation, “More news about our beloved Jack.”

Okay, I can handle that
. Marie thought.
What could be worse than what we already know?

They hung up.

Pam was relieved that step one of the big reveal was going to be over in few hours. She sat at the kitchen counter, looking out the big windows that opened out to the vast dunes and beach grasses and then down to the water. No matter what happened in this house, that vista never changed. It was the one and only constant in her life. The momentary fear that she might not be able to afford to stay there after Jack died taught her that she would have to stay no matter what. The beach, not the house as she had once thought, was her lifeline. It was the stabilizing force in a sea of drama for which she had no control. The things that scared her a few months ago were resolved; she no longer felt like the sand would suck her in, that the undertow would take the house out of her reach. Those manifestations may have been a response to stress. Lately, she spent many nights out on the veranda, falling asleep and waking up there in the morning, which was stupid of her, because vagrants and social misfits were known to canvass the beach at night, looking for loot left behind by day-trippers, sleeping on the sand, or looking for an unlocked garage to steal from or get out of the weather. Her
neighbors had barking dogs, thank God, and they were roused by the passing of a fly. She would be safe as long as they lived next door.

The ringing phone disturbed her revelry at the window. She picked it up and saw Sandra’s number. She must have decided when she would come.

“Hi again,” Pam said. “So will you come this weekend?” She was trying to get her old enthusiasm back for company in spite of the reason for the gathering. “The weather is supposed to be gorgeous again.” And then she heard it—a soft moan, sniffling. Sandra was crying. “What is it Sandra? Are you okay?” Pam stood up with the phone and started pacing.

“No, Pam, I’m not okay. I’ll never be okay again. And I’m afraid you and Marie won’t be, either.” And then was crying in earnest—
wailing
was a better word—and snorting.

“Sandra, what is it?” She had already forgotten about her own diagnosis. “Please tell me!”

“I’m HIV positive! The doctor just called me not five minutes ago. I was going to wait to tell you, because of you being sick now and everything, but I am so worried about the baby! I have to start taking all of these drugs and going to a different doctor. Jack gave it to me, too! So that means you and Marie have to be tested.” She launched into a new wailing. Possibly for the first time, Sandra sounded like the twenty-something woman she was.

Pam had stopped pacing and walked into her bedroom, pulling the covers back and getting into bed again. She waited while Sandra’s crying seemed to be calming
down somewhat; she wasn’t crying out loud, anyway. “Sandra, are you there?” Pam asked. “Answer me, dear.”

Sandra mumbled into the phone that she was. “I found out last night I have AIDS,” Pam admitted. “I wanted to tell you in person. It didn’t occur to me that they test for it in pregnancy now. What I am sick with right now is just the flu. The doctor thinks I may have converted this summer because of all the stress with Jack dying. They can tell by the virus load and some other things.”

“You have AIDS?” Sandra asked, incredulous. “Not just HIV?”
How could this be happening?

“AIDS.” Pam fell back against the pillows again. She was exhausted. “I still have to warn my sister. She’s coming here tonight.”
Oh God
. “She’ll need to be tested right away. Sandra, I have to hang up now. I’m completely wiped out. I’m sorry this happened to you. It’s the worst. It was Jack’s fault, entirely his fault. Please accept my apologies. But I have to rest. I hope you’ll visit this weekend.” She didn’t wait for a response from Sandra. “Good-bye, my friend.” And then she was gone.

Sandra looked out her window again. There was a momma Cardinal on the ledge of the feeder, looking in at Sandra. She was very still, as to not scare the little bird away. Time was moving on. Two people in the world had received devastating news, news that would connect them in yet another macabre way. They had gotten an everlasting gift from the same man. Yet a baby would be born in less than four months who would bear the worst burden of all—the possibility that he or she might also be sick through no fault of his own but his mother’s sin and that he might be orphaned at a young age.

In spite of the tragedy, people were still making reservations to dine out tonight. Someone was preparing for their wedding this weekend. The minister at the Methodist church on the corner was writing his sermon for Sunday service. The cabdriver she had yelled at that very morning was getting ready to go home to his family for dinner. About eighteen million people in New York City were coming or going, working or sleeping, fighting or loving, being born or dying. Life was going on. It wasn’t affected by Sandra’s melodrama. It was of her own making. Ego, pride, loneliness, all of the things that made up why she slept with a married man she didn’t know very well, after all. A beautiful face in a smoldering, putrid body, riddled with a virus he had picked up from who knew what, maybe from his own father.

When she had first discovered she was pregnant, she had praised a God she didn’t worship. How had her situation changed? She was still pregnant. The huge unknown was a possibility for prayer, to put her faith in something that she had relied on in the past, only in the direst times. So without wasting another minute, she slid off the chair onto her knees. She blubbered once and caught herself. She leaned over the seat of the chair and grasped her hands together.

“Dear God, please help me,” she said out loud. “Please don’t let this hurt my baby.” The tears came swiftly and violently then. She yelled out to a god she didn’t know and wasn’t sure existed, but she was desperate. “Please, God, please!” And then quietly, with head bowed and jaw clenched she growled, “Punish him, Lord. Punish Jack.”

27

W
ork was crazy busy all afternoon, and by the time Marie was able to leave, it was in the middle of rush hour. She had to go to the garage at her apartment building and get the car first before she could leave for Pam’s. The possibility that she would end up staying the night loomed, so she ran into her apartment and threw clothes into an overnight bag. Traffic in town had started to die down by the time she pulled onto Thirty-fourth Street, headed toward Long Island. For some reason, she started to count up the number of times she had made this trip over the years. Not counting the times she had taken the train or driven with her brother-in-law, it might have been close to a thousand times. Most of the trips were loaded with happy anticipation. Even now, knowing that she may be getting more crappy news about Jack, she was excited about the trip. She wanted to see that her sister was safe, and it would be good to see the ocean midweek.

She remembered when Jack was alive. During one of their many rendezvous for lunch at a hot dog vendor, he would say to her, “I think I am going to go home tonight. I miss my girl.” Marie had never told Pam that; she didn’t want her to know all the times that she and Jack had lunch together. It was several times a week until he started to fuck Sandra. Maybe she would tell her sister the story tonight. He had missed his wife. He had loved her in
his own way. He expected nothing from her because she was all that he thought he needed outside of his sexual escapades with Marie. When she refused him, not wanting to come into the city, he never, ever said a negative word about it. “It was just Pam,” he said. He would do whatever it took to make her happy, even if it meant not living with her throughout the week. Of course, it backfired. He was incapable of being faithful to her. Sex was just something that you did to relieve yourself from an urge that wouldn’t go away. If he saw something on TV that aroused him, he had to take care of it soon after. The weekends were filled with sex for him, both his wife and his sister-in-law, if necessary. What Marie knew of him was miniscule, the tip of the iceberg.

Marie was aware that he had a sexual addiction of the extreme kind. He was a compulsive masturbator. He admitted to jacking-off in the toilet stall of the train on the way home on Friday night, never worrying about getting caught, about having his reputation destroyed. It was habit, jacking-off in the shower. He probably did it at work in his private bathroom as well. She remembered the many times he came to her bed when they were still in the apartment on the Upper West Side, the chances he took getting caught molesting her, she just a young girl. The urge was greater than the fear. Who knew why? He had something wrong in his brain, some wires crossed. Of course, she didn’t know about his own terror, his father torturing him. She was obsessing over the thought.
Did Pam know? Did she know he was masturbating?
Maybe she thought it was normal. Marie couldn’t know just yet how
trivial masturbating was; if only that was all Jack was doing.

After the molestation began, he would come to Marie’s room at night, after they had already had sex once or twice or three times that weekend, and he would ask her to use her hand. She was mesmerized watching him, his facial expressions. She became addicted to the power she had over him. He didn’t ask her for oral sex until she was older, out of high school. “It’s not appropriate,” he told her when she asked to do it to him. All the girls at school were doing it. You didn’t even have to be dating a guy to do it for him. Jack was appalled. “Never, ever let a boy make you do that! Promise me!” He’d take her by her shoulders and shake her gently. “You are too good for that, too lovely and too pure. Besides, I would kill whoever made you do that, and you wouldn’t want me to go to jail, now would you?” He would take her in his arms then and hold her, murmuring over and over, “Never ever, never ever.” It didn’t occur to him that what he was making her do was much worse, the long-lasting effects devastating.

“Poor Jack,” she whispered. The memory of the first time she gave him oral sex floated through her mind like gossamer, elusive and delicate. She loved doing it to him and the effect it had on him. He actually cried. He would moan out loud, writhing in ecstasy. Soon Marie thought that might be all that she had to do for the rest of her life, give blow jobs. She imagined getting paid for it. But then, wasn’t that what a prostitute did? Oh well, it was a good idea while it lasted. He would ask for it whenever they were together in the city, often coming to her apartment nightly just for that. Now she realized that, of course, it
meant nothing to him outside of the physical sensation. He was saving money, getting her to do it rather than a whore. He cared nothing for her. He used her. These thoughts occupied her mind until she got into Babylon and arrived in front of Pam’s house. She would make it an act of her will to be loving to her sister and only say loving things. She would definitely tell Pam tonight that Jack loved her. Loved her as much as he was capable of loving.

Pam was still looking out the window when her sister pulled up. It was after 8:00 p.m. She was exhausted, but had thought to get something for Marie to eat. She could only have imagined what her day at work had been like and then to be summoned to the beach like this in the middle of the week. Opening the front door for her, she waited as Marie got her suitcase out of the passenger side of the car and walked up the path to the house. They embraced, Pam reluctant to let go.