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  She didn’t think so. Maybe it was emotional remnants from the dream. Maybe she was just clinging to someone for life support when she suddenly found herself very alone in the world (she and Ramona had been homebodies in their relationship…their own little world unto each other). Maybe Robert could fill the same void she’d fill if she got a cat. She snickered. She could still get the cat.

  Jess stood when she heard him coming down the spiral staircase. When he emerged into view, the sight of him took her breath away. When he reached the bottom, she ran over to him and threw her arms around him without thinking twice about it.

  She kissed his lips tenderly and whispered, “You are so special to me.” Her face burned with embarrassment.

  Robert looked down at her, and his face registered no obvious surprise. “You’re special to me too, Jess.” He pulled away, but gently and with a smile. “There is definitely this weird sense of déjà vu with you. I don’t know what it is.”

  Jess nodded. “Like we’ve met before?”

  “Exactly.”

  Was this, Jess wondered, what it felt like to be attracted to a man? She had never felt such a thing in her life! Oh sure, she could appreciate a handsome man with a good body as much as anyone else, but it was an aesthetic, not a visceral, reaction. No man had ever brought about the peculiar quickening to her pulse and fluttering in her stomach like Robert was right then. Only a woman could send those particular synapses to firing in her nerves, only a woman could make her tingle the way Robert was able to…suddenly, without warning. Good Lord, she hoped she wasn’t turning straight. She laughed out loud at the prospect, and Robert regarded her, staring. He probably thought she was crazy. Jess really couldn’t blame him. Insanity from her was about all he had to go on so far.

  Robert pulled on a leather jacket and a pair of gloves. “I don’t think we could have met before. I don’t get out much. But there is definitely something about you I can’t quite put my finger on.” He shrugged. “But it’s a good something.”

  Jess nodded and followed him to the door. In her mind’s eye, she saw the bald spot on the back of his head filled in with lustrous blond curls, saw the slightly hairy neck smooth and rose-tinged, saw the shoulders broaden, and his gait become livelier. She saw a younger Robert.

  Just like in her dream.

  He turned, and for just an instant, his face wasn’t lined and his jowls had not begun their inevitable sag. And then it all went back to normal, as if she had flipped some sort of focus switch in her brain.

  “Do you have any pictures of yourself when you were younger?”

  Robert cocked his head. “What? Well yeah, right over here.” And he crossed the room to an ebony console, atop which sat a framed eight by ten photograph. He picked it up, looking at it. She noticed a slight tremble as he held the platinum frame. His voice was a little hoarse when he said, “Here. This is us. Keith and me.” He handed her the portrait.

  Smiling, Jess looked down. When she saw the picture, everything around her went fuzzy, the room began to swim, and quickly, everything faded to black.

  * * * *

  Robert didn’t expect Jess to faint when he handed her the portrait, but she went down immediately, knees buckling, eyes rolling back, the glass in the frame cracking as it hit the marble floor. He was able to snatch the front of her coat so her head didn’t hit the floor with a lot of impact.

  He let her slide gently from his grasp, wondering if the photograph had anything to do with why she fainted, or if it was just a coincidence and her spell was simply a culmination of all that had gone before—the trauma, the lack of sleep. The latter would certainly make more sense. But her eyes had widened when she looked at the photo of him and Keith, taken in the summer when Keith was still robust and healthy, just before things began to go awry.

  “What the fuck?”

  Robert, from his kneeling position above the girl, looked back at Ethan, who had crept down the stairs. He was just dressed in baggy jeans and an oversized hoodie, running shoes. His eyes looked sallow and sunken. Robert wondered if he was coming down with something.

  “This is my friend, Jess. I mentioned her.” Nervously, Robert put a hand to her forehead. It felt warm and normal. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. He was sure they didn’t have anything like smelling salts (whatever they were) lying around the house. “Do you know what to do when someone faints?”

  Ethan grinned. “Don’t they usually slap ‘em in the movies?”

  “I’m not going to slap her.” Robert looked down and saw that already, Jess’s eyelids were fluttering. In moments, her green-eyed gaze was meeting his. She got up on one elbow. “I don’t know what happened. One minute I glanced down at the picture and the next…I was out.”

  “Maybe you’re pregnant?” Ethan snickered.

  Robert watched as she peered over her shoulder to take in Ethan, who was standing above the two of them. “Not much chance of that,” Jess said.

  Robert stood and helped her to her feet.

  “I’m Jess.”

  “Ethan. Ethan Butler. I’m Robert’s partner. Lover. Significant other. Husband. Spouse. Ball and chain. Boy. You name it, honey, I’m it.” Ethan grinned like a little boy who had just done something bad, but who wasn’t in the least ashamed of it.

  “Well, good for you.” Jess smiled politely.

  Robert stared at the two in wonderment. It was almost as if the fainting spell had never happened. And he couldn’t help but detect, with a hint of both pride and panic, the territorial tone of Ethan’s voice.

  He looked to Jess, who was knotting a striped scarf around her throat. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I think so. I mean, I feel okay.”

  Robert stooped to pick up the portrait.

  “Daddy and his old man,” Ethan mumbled from behind them. “Take the word Keith out of my husband’s vocabulary and he wouldn’t have much to say.”

  “Don’t you have something else to do?” Robert snapped, more harshly than he’d intended. He turned to Ethan who showed him his palms.

  “No problem, sweetheart. I’m out of here.” In a voice tinged with sarcasm, he smiled at Jess and said, “So nice to meet you. Come back and visit us real soon.” And he hurried back up the stairs.

  Jess took the framed photo from Robert’s hands. Before looking down at it again, she mumbled, “Nice guy. I bet you have your hands full.”

  Robert was surprised at her comment and didn’t say anything.

  Once more, Jess looked down at the framed photograph. “You’re so young, here.” She glanced up at him. “Really handsome. That’s not to say, of course, you’re not nice-looking now, but you really had something here. You look so happy. You’re almost glowing.” As she said all this, she never took her gaze from the photo. She rubbed the cracked glass over the younger Robert’s face.

  “Careful! Don’t cut yourself.”

  Jess handed back the photo. “You look familiar. I mean in the portrait. Isn’t that funny? But you couldn’t, could you? I was just a baby, I guess, when that was taken.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t have even been born yet,” Robert said, and shivered. He wasn’t sure if he shivered because she had just made him feel old, or for some deeper reason, something his mind wasn’t ready to entertain, yet. He replaced the photo on the console and put his arm on Jess’s back.

  “Come on, we should be getting you home.”

  Chapter 6

  Ethan was ashamed. The words “I feel shame” were like hot red neon, branded into his heart. Or, maybe his brain, which he now pictured as something gray and spongy, eaten through with holes, like moths had gotten to it. He sat on the couch after Robert and his friend headed out, groped in his pocket, and lit a cigarette.

  He blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling and watched it, drumming the fingers of one hand on his lap. He knew Robert had thought Ethan was talking to a lover on Christmas Day, making plans for a clandestine rendezvous. Poor Robert! His mind was filled
with such naïve, old-fashioned concepts—innocent and quaint.

  Ethan had actually been talking to Tony, his drug dealer up in Boystown, who supplied ever-increasing numbers of young men with the drug of choice these days: a crystalline white powder affectionately known as Tina, but in more clinical circles referred to as crystal methamphetamine. He could understand how Robert might have taken his pleadings (“I need to see you” and crap like that) as the whining of a desperate paramour. He supposed there were certain similarities between a lover and Tony, Like a lover, Ethan pined for Tony (and what he could sell him) when he was not around. Like a lover, Ethan thought about him constantly. Like a lover, he brought a certain euphoria to Ethan’s brain and, on the downside, depressed him when he was gone for too long. Like a lover, he had a stranglehold on Ethan from which the young man worried he might never free himself.

  Ethan had smoked his cigarette down in about four or five pulls. He put it out in the Nambe bowl on the coffee table and lit another one. The hell with Robert’s pursed lips when he entered the apartment, the waving hands, and the accusatory stare. This was Ethan’s third straight day without sleep or food, his only nourishment several bottles of Gatorade. He wondered how he could continue to feel so good, so awake, so ready for anything…especially sex.

  After he had hooked up with Tony on Christmas, he had planned to head over to the baths for just an hour or two and then get back to Robert. After all, Daddy had been so good to him, it was only fair to spend the rest of the holiday with him, even though the thought of all the food Daddy was making repulsed Ethan. He wasn’t sure how he’d take more than two or three bites without puking.

  Besides, Ethan thought, there wouldn’t be anyone at the baths that day, not on Christmas. He was surprised to find out how wrong he was. And once there, and under the influence of the liquefied drug injected into a vein, he forgot all about Christmas and Robert. The hours flew by as Ethan took man after man in his ass, in his mouth, never able to get enough. The drug pulsed through his veins, making him hot in every sense of the word. He would look at the clock and see that it was eight, then suddenly it was eleven thirty, midnight. The time just flew by, and even though he lost count of the number of men who had used him as a sperm receptacle (or had he used them?), he still had the feeling of not being satisfied.

  In the end, the others wore out before he did, and he paced the dimly lit hallways, steam room, sauna, and hot tub searching for one more guy, just one more, with a slick sheen of sweat covering his face, dripping down his chest. His hair was wet with it, and his heart thudded uncomfortably in his chest. Finally, sick to his stomach, grinding his teeth, and wiping the sweat from his face every few minutes with his towel, he decided he had better take a shower and head home.

  It was almost morning by then. And, as he headed east in the taxi, he wondered how he had sunk so low, so fast. It was a little less than a year ago when a friend of his—more of an acquaintance, really, a muscular black guy named Kirk who had ties to the porn industry—was dancing with him at the French Quarter, a dance club at the corner of Broadway and Belmont. Kirk pointed to the neon sign above their heads that proclaimed, “Welcome to the French Quarter,” winked at him, and said, “Wanna kick it up a notch?”

  Ethan smiled, delirious from several gin and tonics and the sight of Kirk’s ripped abs and gyrating pelvis. He followed him into the restroom, where the two of them waited in line with several others, all squirming for access to one of the three stalls, even though the urinals were unoccupied. Grinning, Kirk gestured to look up at the ceiling, where Ethan could see, in silhouette, someone holding out a slim object and the other person in the stall leaning over to sniff it.

  Finally, their turn came, and Ethan eagerly followed Kirk into the stall. He still expected nothing more than a little groping, maybe even some sucking if he was bold enough, but Kirk wriggled his hand into his jeans and brought out a tiny pink baggie, stamped with little red kisses. It looked almost cute. Inside was a white powder that resembled Drano. Kirk held it up against the wall and gave it a couple quick hammers with his fist, making the crystals powdery. He giggled, shushing himself with a finger to his lips.

  Kirk made sure to stand over the light embedded in the floor tile. Ethan thought he did this so they wouldn’t present the same shadow show they had seen while waiting in line. He held up the baggie and groped for a key, then offered it to Ethan.

  “What is it?” Ethan whispered, his hand pressed to Kirk’s muscled chest, slick with sweat.

  “Tina, man, don’t tell me you never tried it.”

  Ethan didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to seem like he wasn’t “with it.” He took the baggie from Kirk, pulled it open, dipped in the key, and took two quick snorts. “Jesus!” he whispered. “That fuckin’ burns.”

  Kirk laughed. “S’posed to.” And then he echoed Ethan’s movements.

  Ethan stayed up the entire night with Kirk, progressing from the bars, to Kirk’s place, to finally an all-night sex party at some dirty apartment in Uptown, where he lost track of the number of guys who fucked him. Indeed, the only thing he remembered, curiously, was a scarred Salvation-Army-issued bureau atop which was a picture of the host’s mother on her wedding day.

  He promised himself he would never do it again. Not when he felt so awful the next day with sickness, the chills, and the nausea compounded by Robert’s disapproving stare. Thank God the old man had the decency not to press Ethan for details. It seemed Robert had actually felt sorry for Ethan, thinking he had the flu. It wasn’t until two o’clock that afternoon that Ethan finally found the energy to make up a story for his whereabouts. He didn’t have the strength to do much more than just lie on his bed and watch bad TV, wondering if he would ever feel normal again and reasserting his vow never to touch that horrible/wonderful white powder again.

  He tried it again the very next weekend. And the weekend after that, and the one after that. It wasn’t long before he had learned to smoke the stuff, and how the euphoria went much more quickly to his brain that way. He found Tony, he found a store in Edgewater that would sell him a little glass pipe on the down low (since pipes like these were technically illegal).

  It all became so bad, so good. Ethan hated the crashes but found that by doing a “maintenance bump” here and there during the week, he could function amazingly well. Robert never knew a thing.

  But Ethan couldn’t deny the bad effects the drug was having, the toll it was taking on his body and spirit. In his darker moments, he would acknowledge how the Tina smoke darkened his teeth. A couple in the back started to look brownish and almost porous, like they were beginning to rot. He found odd abscesses on his skin, which Tony explained were “speed bumps” where the drug came out of his pores when he sweated. It almost seemed as though Tony saw the fiery red bumps as a badge of honor.

  He didn’t have the energy to get to the gym anymore. That, coupled with hardly eating in spite of Robert continuing to press a full array of gourmet treats on him, saw his weight plummet and the muscle tone and definition he worked so hard to build, erode until finally he was rail-thin, a wraith. He hid this as best he could from Robert by never letting him see him naked and by wearing clothes he jokingly referred to as hip hop.

  Like the clothes he wore right now…baggy jeans, flannel boxers, and an oversized hoodie. It was hard to determine what kind of body lurked beneath the bulk of cotton and denim.

  He had progressed from smoking to “slamming,” what the more serious users called injecting the drug. He had never imagined a precocious boy from Terre Haute, Indiana would be into doing such things, but already, he was an expert at finding a good vein. And already, he was finding he couldn’t go for long without the immediate and powerful “slamming” rush he would get from using the drug this way.

  It frightened him. He knew he needed to stop but didn’t know where to turn. He could either stop himself or his heart would do it for him. His only friends, if they could be called that, were druggies like him
self…Tina queens who were out for the next fix and gang bang. His other friends, cultivated through his school years and his work (before he met Robert) had all faded away, unable to keep up with his new, up-all-night partying ways. He suspected his promiscuity repelled some of them. Robert didn’t know how lucky he was Ethan had stopped having sex with him months ago. He had protected Robert from countless infections: gonorrhea, chlamydia, crabs.

  And the thought of infection made Ethan go cold, particularly infection of the incurable variety. Because now, when he slept, he found himself waking in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat (he told himself it was the Tina). He had developed a persistent cough that wouldn’t go away (he told himself it was the Parliaments). He often felt he was just making it through the day, nursing a low-grade fever so frequent, it almost seemed to be normal after a while (again, the Tina). And worst of all, the lymph nodes in his neck had enlarged (he couldn’t find anything to explain these away with). He could feel them, hard, with his fingers. One touch was all it took to make him yank away his hand, feeling nauseous with worry.

  One day, Robert had been looking through one of the gay rags Ethan had brought home from bar-hopping the night before, blowing out a big sigh of disgust. “Look at this headline!

  HIV Infection Rate on the Rise in Young Gay Men

  “What’s wrong with them? Haven’t they seen enough death to know to put on a rubber? How hard is that? This barebacking shit makes me sick.” Robert had flung the newspaper to the floor and looked at Ethan pointedly.

  It was almost like he knew, but Ethan told himself that was just his paranoia talking. At least he wasn’t as far gone as a Tina queen he knew up in Edgewater who thought his neighbors were piping in voices through his heating ducts to torture him.

  In his most quiet moments, when the drug was at its lowest ebb in his system, Ethan knew he was infected and knew he should get himself down to the Howard Brown clinic, where he could be tested and treated. But he was afraid of what the doctor would say when he examined him, afraid of how apparent his overuse of crystal meth would be on his body. Afraid of the lecture. Scared to death of being Robert’s second lover to succumb to AIDS. Tortured by the thought of the scalding disdain Robert would surely heap upon him, not so much for cheating on him, but for being so stupid as to bareback countless times and to let himself get infected.