The Green Road: A Novel Page 4

  Greg was the kind of guy who had a hand mirror in the bathroom cabinet so he could check the skin of his back for marks and lesions, and he used this hand mirror, once, twice, six times a day. On two occasions he had to leave the restaurant just before a lunch engagement and run back to work and lock himself in the washroom to strip and check himself over and then dress again and run five blocks so he could arrive at his table on time, sliding along the banquette with a smile while, on his back, the prickle of sweat became the itch of cancer pushing up under the skin.

  Of all the signs, the purple bruise of Kaposi’s was the one we hated most because there was no doubting it and, after the first mother snatches her child from the seat beside you on the subway, it gets hard to leave the house. Sex is also hard to find. Even a hug, when you are speckled by death, is a complicated thing. And the people who would sleep with you now – what kind of people are they?

  We did not want to be loved when we got sick, because that would be unbearable, and love was all we looked for, in our last days.

  So Gregory Savalas, art hustler, dealer, executor, smiles and sweats through two courses and coffee, and when he is back in his tiny gallery downtown and nothing new is coming in – except the imagined lesions on his back – he picks up the phone and he dials.

  The people who are at home are mostly sick too, and the people who are not sick do not like being called up during work hours, because these are long and aimless calls full of hints and silences and it is hard to take the solid tension that Greg pushes down the line at you. He used to ring Max who worked in his studio all day, but Max was just so arrogant, and then he died. He used to ring a lot of people. His girlfriend Jessie has abandonment issues – or whatever – she is mad as a snake, these days, so Greg rings Billy up because although Billy is a bit normal, sometimes normal is what you need.

  ‘Graphics.’

  ‘Hello, cubicle man.’

  ‘As I live and breathe.’

  And Greg is away. First up he tells Billy that Massimo spent the afternoon in Oscar’s talking over the lighting for his autumn show and this woman came in with four hundred bags and a boy to carry them, turns out she is the Maharani of Jaipur, which is, like, the Jackie O of all India and she has an emerald on her chest that is bigger than your left eye. The bag boy, it turns out, is an actual prince – as in, turban with a plume at the front – and Massimo has bagged him for dinner Thursday night. Greg says he has offered to do a risotto but he can’t find the one everyone liked the last time, the one with the red wine. He says his mother called from Tampa, with an earrings-plus-tracksuit dilemma, and did not mention his father, not once. And when he pointed this out to her she said, ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Gregory!’

  This is all dangerous talk. Words like ‘risotto’ pull at Billy like he is back in his boyhood bedroom in Elk County, Pennsylvania: there are years of loneliness in a word like ‘risotto’. Billy is working on the news today, writing ‘New York Fire Chief in Mattress Hazard Warning’ on his Quantel Paintbox. He uhuh’s and ahah’s and dabs about with his stylus until the risotto effect wanes, while Greg talks and talks and doesn’t ever really get there. Finally, after a small silence, Billy heaves it out.

  ‘So, how are you?’ and Greg says, ‘I have a kind of pain in my lung.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Just, you know, when I inhale.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Like a stitch.’

  ‘Well maybe it is a stitch,’ says Billy, knowing that this is the wrong thing to say as well as the only thing to say, waiting for Greg to untangle the silence enough to reply.

  ‘Maybe.’

  You couldn’t put the phone down on a dying man, but in those days we were putting the phone down on each other all over New York, gently, we were extricating ourselves.

  ‘You need an X-ray, maybe?’

  We were letting each other go, back to the various rooms and beds in which we would die – but not yet. Not until we put the phone down. Because nobody ever died on the phone.

  ‘Maybe. It’s just a kind of catch. Like . . . there.’

  ‘There?’

  ‘You probably can’t hear – there! – you hear that? You probably can’t hear it over the phone.’

  ‘You want me to come round?’ says Billy. And because Greg is so difficult these days, he says, ‘Not tonight. I am really behind.’

  ‘Or go out, maybe?’

  ‘I can’t go out.’

  Of course he can’t go out, Greg has lost his looks. How could Billy ask him to come out?

  ‘All right. I’m coming round.’

  When he was nineteen years old, fresh in from New Jersey, Gregory Savalas fell in love with a gallerist called Christian whose eyes were the colour of ice when it is blue. Christian was an actual Dane who tested as soon as there was a test to take, after which he kept trying to kill himself in a deliberate, very Danish sort of way. Greg never knew what he would find when he opened the door to the apartment. Blood everywhere – Christian bleeding into the bathwater, or bleeding into the Brazilian linen sheets; Christian shaking on the bed, the floor beneath him littered with empty paracetamol bottles, his chin gleaming with bile. Ironically, it took him for ever to die from the disease itself. He wasted and wasted. He trembled under the sponge when Greg gave him a bath and his eyes were stone-crazy chips of blue.

  They were in St Vincent’s, on the seventh floor, with the staff in space suits and six different tubes coming out of Christian, when his mother finally showed. Handsome, of course, her blonde hair shading into silver, she hurried over to her unrecognisable son and leaned over his hospital bed.

  ‘Hey.’

  They looked at each other, ice to ice, and whispered in Danish and something happened to Christian. He became human again. He became pure. They gazed at each other for three days straight and then he died.

  Greg could recognise, as much as the next person, a moment of grace, but he still thought that death was a big surprise for being the most horrible fuck-up possible. Beyond anything known. Christian was dead and the sight of the living filled Greg with contempt. This was 1986 and the horror was everywhere: your neighbours used a Kleenex to press the elevator button, and strangers shouted ‘I hope you die, faggot!’ when they passed you in the street. Greg found it hard to remember his lover as a person. He spent a lot of time thinking about the sex they’d had and about all the blood he’d mopped up and touched, but the truth was, it was ages before he’d let Christian inside him, it wasn’t really his thing.

  That was back in the day, when Gregory the Greek was plump and smooth as a Caravaggio boy. By the time Billy came to town, some years later, on a mission to eat risotto and much cock, Greg was gymmed up and slimmed down, he was almost ‘mature’. They hooked up between the shelves of the bookshop on Christopher Street and tricked in the staff toilet. Then they went for coffee, which was sort of the wrong way around, really. A few weeks later, they spotted each other watching some guys make out at the back of Meat on 14th and Billy nodded to say, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Which Greg immediately did. Of course.

  ‘What were we thinking?’ Billy said, when they hit the open air, and he took Greg by the lapels of his jacket and gave him a big, muscular kiss. He was so sexy, Billy. He was as sexy as Greg used to be, when he first came to town. Greg could feel the magic leaving him, flowing, almost, into Billy, so golden and easy against his dark grey sheets. Because Greg used to be the one that everyone wanted; now he was the one who did the wanting. He would be, for the rest of his life, a guy more cruising than cruised. He was twenty-nine years old.

  At twenty-nine, Greg had gone to Meat because he was so desperate for a blow job, he thought if he didn’t get one he would lie down like an old dog and whine. A bad knee had put a stop to his morning jog and the pain was moving into his hip – also downwards. By the time he and Billy had spun out their last kiss, some six weeks after their first, Greg walked as though there was something trapped under his foot, almost like a limp.
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br />   In January 1991, Greg slipped on fresh snow on Third Avenue and he rolled on to his back and just lay there for a moment. It was four in the morning, and his collarbone was broken: he had actually heard the snap. Greg looked up at the falling snow, trying to figure out which flakes would end up on his face and which would not. A surprising number of them missed, then one drifted on to his forehead in a tiny, delayed flare of cold. This was followed by two more – one on his top lip, another on the side of his nose. The pain in his shoulder was intense and Greg could taste fur on his tongue, but he stayed where he was, second-guessing the snow, knowing that as soon as he walked into the hospital his dying would begin.

  Max and Arthur came to St Vincent’s with him for his HIV results. They talked about David Wojnarowicz who was really fading, and Max shouted about Rothko while they waited on the stackable plastic chairs. Because Max was unflinching, you might say remorseless in the face of the disease; the freaked-out staff were a satisfaction to him. Pity just made him impatient.

  ‘Fuck Rothko,’ he said. ‘Fuck Rothko.’

  ‘You can’t say that,’ said Greg.

  ‘I just said it.’

  ‘You can’t just say fuck Mark Rothko.’

  Arthur said, ‘I think Max is uncomfortable with the spiritual aspects of the work.’

  ‘Fuck that. I am uncomfortable with the way he owns a colour.’

  ‘You can’t own a colour, you just make a colour.’

  Max had a narrow shaved head, like a weasel, and small, surprisingly child-like hands. He sat in a green military trench and jackboots with his elbows on his knees.

  ‘There is nothing but owning. That’s all he does. He says, This colour is mine. He says, I am as important as this colour. This is how important I am.’

  ‘You’re ruthless,’ Greg said.

  ‘How can I be ruthless?’ said Max. ‘I’m dying.’

  ‘You are dying in a ruthless fashion,’ said Greg, but he was really thinking about Christian, remembering Christian’s eyes looking at him from the chair as he moved about the room – not attracted any more, not even jealous. Just crossing him off the list. His young body. His hips. His hands.

  Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

  Gregory Savalas was about to die himself, now. And he was not sure he would do it well.

  And there was Dr Torres, calling him in to the consulting room. Such a hero, Gabriel Torres, so thrilling and kind. We talked about him endlessly, about how he smiled and what he wore, whether he was happy with our bloods, our retinas, our lungs.

  When Greg came back outside, Arthur said, ‘How is Gabriel? What did he say?’

  It was not Billy’s fault he did not know Greg’s test results, because Greg did not tell him his results. But Greg managed to resent him for it anyway. They went to a thing at the Fawbush and so many of the men were fading, there was this terrible, dark courage in the room, Greg lost all respect for Billy for being so fucking normal, and it was through gritted teeth he said, ‘Well there is a reason I haven’t been, you know, fun, recently. There is a reason why I haven’t been picking up the phone.’

  This was when they were walking back uptown.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ Billy said.

  ‘What do you mean, something wrong? I can’t walk that fast, any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I am not asking for you to be sorry, I am asking for you to slow down.’

  Billy did slow down and then he stopped.

  ‘Greg?’

  Greg turned.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  Billy, to Greg’s great surprise, was devastated. He twisted around, and around again, as though looking for a missing chair. He stood in the street and looked at Greg, then he lifted his hands to cover his eyes. He started to cry.

  ‘Oh my God, Greg. Oh my God.’

  ‘Well, what did you expect?’ said Greg.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Billy. ‘I just didn’t. I didn’t expect.’

  They went to one bar, and then another and they got very drunk. At one point, Billy wept and Greg comforted him, looking up at the ceiling as he rocked him briefly in his arms, thinking, ‘But I am the one. I am the one who is going to die.’

  Through all those years, whenever Greg looked into the mirror at his changing face, he thought about Christian and wondered if his lover would be proud of him now. After he and Billy had finished their mercy fuck (drunk – yes – but careful, so careful) he went into the bathroom and checked his skin for black marks and looked into his own eyes and he remembered just how dead Christian was, after he died. There was no one looking at him in the mirror, except himself.

  It was hard to cry when there was no one watching, he thought, then he brushed his teeth and went back to bed.

  In the months that followed, they were often on the phone. When Greg lost weight, Billy took him out shopping for smaller jeans. He brought up wine and treats from the local deli which quite quickly turned into ordinary bags of food.

  ‘Just the heavy stuff,’ he said, smiling at Greg’s door that was three flights up – not even breathless after the climb.

  ‘You shouldn’t have.’

  ‘I want to.’

  And he did. Billy knew that, even if he did not love Greg, even if he had other guys, and other plans for the long term, he would still do this thing. He would help Greg in his last months, or years. And he might resent it but he would not regret it: because this was the thing that was given him to do.

  Which did not mean that Greg was easy. The groceries were always wrong, for a start. Billy could never tell what was fun trashy food – like Oreos, say – and what was just trash.

  ‘You call this stuff cheese?’

  In fact, there was no Indian prince at Massimo’s on Thursday evening. There was a very nice risotto, which Billy personally found a bit disappointing.

  ‘It’s a bit like . . . rice?’ he said.

  Massimo’s boyfriend Alex was in from the west coast and he brought a rather grizzled Ellen Derrick, who stuck to gin and smoked throughout. Jessie was there, of course, as was Greg. There was a wonderful Dominican boy who said very little and, as Jessie later pointed out, only ate three grains of rice all night. There was Arthur, who had aged so much since Max died. And there was an Irish guy, called Dan, who had sandy hair you might flatter to red and beautiful, pale skin.

  Massimo’s place on Broome Street was an old sweatshop and its floor was made from two foot wide hardwood boards. He had factory windows that kept nothing in or out – not the heat, the cold, nor the noise of the printworks two floors below – but were beautiful nonetheless, each one of them dividing the dusk into thirty rectangles of fading light. Inside, he had many candles and a table so long and monastic that eight people felt like few. The place had cast-iron columns, Marsalis was on the stereo and a long scribbled piece by Helen Frankenthaler took up an entire cross-wall. After the risotto came noisettes of lamb with roast garlic and a mint-pea purée, which Massimo served with a Saumur-Champigny that was like an elevator in a glass, as Greg said, it brought you to a whole new level. Massimo, with his slow gestures and careful, sing-song voice, was alert to everyone’s smallest need; unpushy, prepared.

  Greg glanced at Billy, as if to say, ‘Watch and learn.’

  They tried not to talk about the disease. They went through Twin Peaks, they talked about the art scene, what Larry was showing next, how money was wrecking the East Village now, and whatever happened to that guy who used to walk a tightrope and piss, beautifully, in an arc, perfectly balanced, into the East River? No, he pissed on the floor down in that club on 48th Street. Should have been the river. Whatever happened to him? Every name they spoke dragged its own tiny silence after it.

  Gone. Gone silent. Alive.

  Arthur was positive for six years and he hadn’t a thing wrong with him, people wanted to touch him, he was so old now. Arthur remembered things no else remembered. Who could keep all that? Who could hold
on to it? His head was a museum. And when he died the museum would be empty. The museum would fall down.

  Greg read nothing but the classics now, tender of his eyesight and of his time, he talked about Achilles’ dream of dead Patroclus, how the dead man would not touch him but only boss him about, when all Achilles wanted was to feel the guy in his arms. Why is that? That the dead have voices in our dreams but no density. It’s just this huge sense of themness, it is all meaning and no words. Because words are also physical, don’t you think? The way they touch you.

  ‘Sometimes they do. Use words, I mean,’ said Arthur. ‘“My tree is all hibiscus”. Someone said that to me, once.’

  No one asked who.

  ‘It’s a war,’ Massimo said.

  Greg said fuck that he never signed up for any damn war. He wanted a civilian’s death, he said. A personal death. He wanted a death he could call his own.

  Massimo said Gabriel Torres was working out in the Y on West 23rd and the stir as he wiped down one machine and went to the next. Gabriel Torres was the most beautiful man you have ever seen.

  ‘Where he gets the time?’ said Arthur.

  ‘You know,’ said Greg, ‘Sometimes I think we’d all be better off with a woman in sensible shoes.’

  Dan’s face, through all of this, was a thing of quiet attention. His pale skin soaked up the candlelight and he listened so well, it seemed the whole table was talking just for him. Greg lifted his glass and said, ‘Look at those cheekbones,’ and Dan gave a smile.