Going to Bend (14 page)

“Are you?”

He lowered his eyes to his plate. “She’s a good girl. Why would she make me angry?”

“If she’s crowding you, Jim, all you have to do is tell her. She can take it. It would be a kindness, really.”

“She’s not crowding me.”

“Well, if she was, though.”

“She’s not crowding me.”

“All right. I’m glad. It’s just, I wouldn’t want to see her hurt.”

While Christie ate his dinner Rose padded around the kitchen in her slippers, getting things ready for tomorrow’s soups, laying out ingredients, pots, utensils. She always moved fluidly through the lateness and the dark, as though some extra measure of grace was bestowed upon her in the vulnerable small hours of the morning. Christie finished his meal, stacked his plates and utensils neatly and brought them to the sink to wash. Rose dried them and stored them away. When they were done Christie lifted his hands to Rose’s shoulders and repeated in a low voice, “She’s a good girl. I wouldn’t hurt her.”

“I know.”

“It was a fine dinner.”

He pulled Rose close, and when he kissed her he smelled like salt air and rough clothing and the day’s work. She breathed him in as she put her arms around his neck, and he lifted her as though she was no more than air. He took her standing in the kitchen, very carefully and in absolute silence. When she closed her eyes the only thing that communicated pleasure was the quickened rhythm of his breathing.

W
HEN CARISSA
woke up for school the next morning Christie had breakfast waiting for her: juice, pancakes and sausage patties, prepared on an electric skillet in the living room so he wouldn’t get in the way of the day’s soups in the kitchen. Carissa gave a happy cry of pleasure, her disappointment of the night before completely erased by the sight of the breakfast he had made just for her.

“Aren’t you taking the
Blue Devil
out?” she asked, eagerly accepting the plate he served her.

“Nah. Rainy Tuesday in November, nobody in their right mind’s wanting to go out.”

“Yeah. Plus they all barf anyway in the winter, don’t they?”

“Lot of them do.”

Carissa nodded knowingly. “Did you eat the meat loaf?”

“It was real good.”

“We thought you’d be home.” Carissa pressed up syrup and bits of sausage patty with the back of her fork.

Christie nodded. “I couldn’t be, though.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Carissa said breezily. “Sometimes my mom just gets worried, that’s all.”

“Does she?”

“Well, just sometimes.”

“She shouldn’t,” Christie said. “You tell her that.”

“Okay. But she’s probably listening, anyway.”

“I am not,” Rose protested from the kitchen. Pot lids clashed.

A
S SOON
as Petie and Rose had made the morning delivery to Souperior’s, Rose headed over to Sawyer with her final batch of pages for Gordon. She’d never been to his apartment before, and had been looking forward to seeing it since Petie had described it to her. But now, climbing the stairs, she had a sudden feeling of dread. She didn’t know much about AIDS; as far as she knew, no one in Hubbard had ever had it, or even known anyone who’d had it. Were there rules about what you should touch and not touch? Were there certain things she shouldn’t say or do? Would he mind her being there? He had become her tutor, her mentor, her guide. She didn’t want to see him diminished, and most of all she didn’t want to be repulsed.

He met her at the door wearing maroon suede slippers, black sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt—sick clothes, at-home clothes. He was pale and had lost weight in the two weeks since Rose had seen him, but he was fundamentally himself. She thought all over again that his was one of the gentlest faces she knew. Where hardship had made Petie tough, it had beaten Gordon instead into a soft and supple leather.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, looking around his apartment from the doorway. “Petie had said it was.”

“Thank you. Come on in.”

Rose walked admiringly through the living room. It was just the way Petie had described it: the plants, the chintz, the pictures on the walls.
There was also a box of latex medical gloves on the coffee table, partially obscured by a maidenhair fern, although Gordon wore nothing on his own hands. Was she supposed to put on a pair? In the air, along with the smell of good coffee and cinnamon, was something bleachy.

“Gordon, do I—” She gestured towards the gloves and held up her hands.

He smiled a tight little smile. “No, they’re for Nadine, mostly. In case she has to touch certain things I’ve used.”

“Oh.”

He set a fresh cup of coffee in front of Rose and sat down across from her, in an armchair. “It’s just a precaution. Do you understand that you’re not in danger here? You can drink that safely.”

“Yes, I know,” said Rose, although she hadn’t until he said so. “How are you? Are you beginning to be better?”

“Not just yet.”

“Nadine wants you to move over.”

“She’s talked with you about that?”

“Yes.”

“I wish she wouldn’t.”

“She needs a friend. She was just thinking aloud.”

“It’s only a sinus infection. It’s treatable.”

“But we’re all over there, and you’re here. It would be so much easier. Less lonely, too. If you were over there with us we could see you more.”

“I don’t need to be taken care of. You understand that.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to be taken care of.”

“I wasn’t thinking that, Gordon. But if you won’t come into the cafe—”

“You know I can’t come into the cafe.” Three weeks ago, just two days after he and Nadine had talked her into working on
Local Flavor
, a purple lesion the size of a cat’s eye had appeared on the inside of Gordon’s left wrist. Kaposi’s sarcoma, Nadine had told her. The gay cancer. Having a KS lesion was just like wearing a big A on your chest, she’d said.
In L.A. it could clear out a bus seat in seconds flat. Rose had never heard of it before, much less been able to identify one inside the underside of somebody’s shirt cuff, but Nadine said Gordon was insistent: if anyone experienced caught sight of the lesion, there wouldn’t be a customer to be had for hundreds of miles around.

“Well, if you won’t come to the cafe, then no one gets to see you except for a few minutes when we can get over here. It seems lonely, that’s all. Plus Nadine misses you. I’d miss you, too, but I’ve been too busy writing for you.”

“What have you brought today?”

Rose sighed and reached for her big envelope. “Will you at least think about it?”

“I’ll think about it. Now show me what you’ve brought.”

“All of it.”

“The rest?”

“Everything.”

Gordon grinned, the first honest smile of the visit. “Then let’s get to work.”

For the next two hours they pored over recipe spreads and edited copy on Gordon’s computer, excising a word here, a sentence there, to make everything fit. Rose was mesmerized by the ease with which he manipulated the pages; she had never been close to a computer before, except in the school office or the Department of Motor Vehicles, and had never seen books built on anything at all. The more polished the pages became, the less familiar her words looked. If she’d had any idea what she was agreeing to when she said yes to Nadine and Gordon, she’d never have had the nerve.

“It’s going to fly, Rose, I know it,” Gordon said after he had printed out the last page. “I’ve got a friend in California I’ve already talked to about this, and he’s very interested in seeing what we’ve got. We’ll send it off tomorrow and then we’ll just have to wait and see.” He let Rose retrieve the whole set of pages from the printer and watched her tap them into order. She realized suddenly how ill and drawn he looked. They had
worked too long. Without laying a hand on him it was obvious he was running a fever.

“Oh God, look at you,” she cried, getting up and hurriedly putting her chair back at the kitchen table, where it had come from. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because it was fun.”

“Well, lie down on the sofa and let me fix you something. I’ve got half an hour before I go get Carissa at school. Hot or cold?”

“Nothing.”

“You need to take some aspirin, and if you’re taking aspirin you need to keep food in your stomach. Hot or cold?”

“Cold.”

“Good. Let’s see what we’ve got to work with.”

Gordon made his way to the sofa, stretching out and pulling Rose’s afghan around him. He stayed where he could see her as she puttered, probing his refrigerator, freezer and cupboards.

“Why did you smile when I said you needed to keep food in your stomach?” she asked from the kitchen.

“I wasn’t smiling at that. I was just remembering how I used to take aspirin for things and it would actually make them better. It seems so simplistic.”

“Don’t you take aspirin?”

Gordon smiled gently and closed his eyes. “Yes. I take aspirin.”

Rose nodded uncertainly and went back to her explorations. “Ice cream, milk, chocolate syrup, half a banana, a scoop of peanut butter, a dribble of vanilla. Okay. I need a blender. Do you have one?”

“There’s a food processor. Second shelf.”

Rose hauled it out, scooped, sliced, squeezed and poured. “Big noise,” she called in the habitual warning she’d developed for Ryan so many years before, when he still startled so badly. When the milk shake was foamy she poured it into a tumbler and brought it into the living room. Gordon was asleep, a pen still absently caught between his fingers.

Setting the tumbler on the coffee table, Rose secured the afghan under his shoulders so it wouldn’t slide off and put her hand very gently, very briefly, to his forehead. Hot, but not incandescent. She should wake him for the aspirin, but she didn’t have the heart. Bending over him as she had over Carissa and Loose and Ryan so often, she could see straight back to the young boy he must have been, moon pale and shy, a stammerer, wanting to please, damned for being smarter than everyone, doomed to years of speech therapy. Impulsively she put her lips to his forehead in a fever check, a mother’s kiss, a prayer to will away all harm. Then, on tiptoe, she let herself out the door and closed it soundlessly behind her.

R
OSE AND
Carissa stopped at Souperior’s on the way home. The cafe was deserted except for Nadine, who sat alone in one of the booths by the windows, folding napkins and watching a thin rain forming on the panes as though the air itself was weeping. Carissa went straight into the cafe’s kitchen to make a cup of hot chocolate with the espresso machine, the way Nadine had taught her. Rose slipped into the booth and backed her coat off her shoulders.

“We finished,” she said. “All the pages are done. He was really pleased.”

“He’s so excited about this, you have no idea.”

“He said he had a friend who might publish it.”

“Not just a friend. An editor at a very important regional publishing house. He and Gordon have known each other for a long time.” Nadine neglected to say that this man, too, was living an AIDS countdown, and a certain amount of his responsiveness came from the fact that he had nothing to lose. “If he’s still interested once he’s looked at the manuscript, Gordon wants to go down there to talk with him. Gordon should be better by then.”

“I think you should call him in a little while,” Rose said.

“Why?”

“It’s okay,” Rose soothed. “But he was running a fever. No more than a hundred, probably, hundred-point-five. But he fell asleep before he
took any aspirin. I was fixing him a milk shake, but he conked out before he could drink any of it, and I didn’t wake him up.”

In the kitchen, the steamer on the espresso machine hissed and spat furiously before succumbing to Carissa’s pitcher of milk. “How long ago was that?” Nadine asked. In the muted light of a Souperior’s evening, her face looked pale and tired, her overbite pronounced. Gordon wasn’t the only one who’d been losing weight. She’d tied a bright rag in her hair, but it wasn’t fooling anybody.

“Half an hour, forty minutes ago. I stayed as long as I could. Carissa was waiting for me.”

“I’m going to call tomorrow morning and
make
them switch him to a different antibiotic. Oh, I
wish
he’d move over here. He won’t even let me find us a bigger apartment we could share in Sawyer. As it is I don’t get over there to his place until eight-thirty or nine, and half the time he hasn’t eaten any dinner yet. I almost never get back over here before midnight.”

Rose looked at Nadine sympathetically. She’d had no idea. Petie still made fun of Nadine for her naïveté and convictions, and was outspoken in her certainty that she and Gordon would go broke by the end of the winter—if they were lucky and lasted that long. Looking across the table in the gloomy twilight, Rose thought Nadine looked almost as ill as Gordon, hunched over her coffee mug, picking absently at a blemish in the crockery. She leaned across the table and touched Nadine’s hand. It was icy. “Look. Let me come down here and do dinner and close up for you for a while. Then you could get over there earlier. Petie could probably even take a couple of nights a week.”

With an extraordinary effort, Nadine smiled. Her eyes were wet. “Thank you, Rose. No. You’ve got families. Your boyfriend is home.”

“They wouldn’t mind. And Carissa could help me. She’d love it.”

“I can’t afford to pay you,” Nadine said flatly. “You’ve already been great about the book, all that time and work. We’re very grateful. No. I’m thinking of closing the cafe for dinner except for maybe Friday, Saturday and Sunday, at least during the winter. Business is so bad it won’t matter much, and that way I could get home earlier.”

Carissa emerged from the kitchen and crossed the room on long colt legs. “She’s beautiful,” said Nadine absently, watching her. “Have I said that before?”

“No.”

“Well. Nothing needs to be decided right now. They’ll change his antibiotic and he’ll get better again and we’ll have some more time to think about it. If you hear of anything over here, though, a nice bright apartment or even a little house if it’s clean, would you let me know?”