Like a Love Story(36)
“Sorry I’m late,” a voice I recognize calls out from behind me. I turn around to see Jimmy, wearing the same black fur coat he wore the last time I saw him, inside the Korean deli, that awful night I thought Reza and I were going to fall in love and live happily ever after. I hate that night and want to forget everything about it except for Jimmy and his fabulous coat. I love that he’s wearing it to church.
Jimmy kisses everyone on the cheek, saving me for last. By the time he gets to me, everyone else has begun to enter the church. Jimmy locks his arm in mine. “Art, mon amour,” he says with a conspiratorial wink. “You just get more handsome, while the rest of us degenerate into one giant lesion.”
“You look like Mahogany,” I say.
“I look like Mahogany with an eating disorder and jaundice,” he says. “Darling, do you remember that photo you took of me and Walt in the deli?”
“Of course,” I say.
“Could you . . .” His voice quivers. He takes a breath of crisp winter air. I can feel the shallowness of his breath, his lungs working overtime to do their job. “I think it was the last photo of the two of us together while he was still . . .” He takes another big breath in, but this time, he doesn’t finish the sentence.
I know the end, of course. Walt is dead. Died almost two months ago, just weeks after I saw them. And I should’ve given him a copy of that photo as soon as I found out. I’m sure he would’ve appreciated it. But the thing is that I never developed that roll of film. I knew it would remind me of Reza, and I didn’t want to see any of those photos.
“I’m on it,” I say, putting my hand on his shoulder.
We are almost at the entrance of the church when Jimmy whispers to me, “Do you believe in God?”
I pause for a moment. I don’t know what the right answer is. If I say yes, I’m lying. If I say no, I’m telling a dying man who just lost the love of his life that there is nothing left for him but dust. “I don’t know,” I finally say.
“I didn’t think I did,” Jimmy says. “But since getting sick, I’ve started to wonder, or to hope . . .” Another breath, and then he says, “Hey, do you know that Walt died the day after Bette Davis? Honestly, that queen was such a fan that he had to follow Jezebel to the afterlife. You didn’t see me croaking when Joan died, did you?”
I laugh, grateful that he lightened the mood. But I feel his pain. His body is wasting away. His lover is gone. And he doesn’t even have a copy of the final photo taken of them because the kid who took it is too self-involved to develop the roll.
“Welcome,” a woman says when we reach the entrance. She holds her hand out to us, first to me, and then to Jimmy. She fixes her gaze on him as she shakes his hand, inspecting him. “I hope you enjoy today’s mass,” she says.
As we move away from her, I tell Jimmy, “I hate that she stared at you like that.”
“Honey,” he says, “white ladies were staring scornfully at my queer black ass long before I had AIDS. I’m used to it.”
“Is it awful that I think this place is absolutely gorgeous?” Stephen asks, approaching me.
“Good Lord,” Jimmy says. “Next you’ll be telling us that you find Reagan gorgeous too.”
“Not in the least,” Stephen says. “But I could have my way with Cardinal O’Connor.” Seeing the shock on our faces, he quickly says. “It was a joke. Jesus Christ, I’m not that desperate.”
I realize that both Stephen and Jimmy just took the Lord’s name in vain without thinking much of it, and it makes me think about how adeptly religion has seeped into every part of our language. Even those of us who want to shake the shackles of religion off us are tied to it somehow. I look up and take the vastness in. The cathedral is majestic and so imposing, like the church wants to remind you of its power through its architecture. Near the entrance is a gift shop. Candles are for sale, and Bibles, and postcards, and pens, all there to raise funds for the church, the money going toward reaching more people with their message of intolerance. It feels completely absurd to me. I know that ACT UP meetings have a merchandise table too, but that’s because we have no money and no funding. The church has countless cathedrals just like this one, real estate everywhere, and they still want people to give them more.
We make our way to pews in the back of the church. I sit in between Stephen and Jimmy, but pretty soon, we are standing as Cardinal O’Connor enters in his ornate robe, looking like an extra from a Cecil B. DeMille movie. I look over at Stephen, Jimmy, and the rest of the activists as O’Connor enters, and daggers shoot from their eyes, all pointed straight at this man. This awful man, who was brought to New York to bring conservatism back to the Catholic Church by a Vatican that wants to push back against some of the reforms the church has taken on recently. Cardinal O’Connor made it his business to take our condoms away, so we can all die.
As the choir sings a song, Stephen whispers to the group, “So the idea being batted around is that we all lie down in the aisle when he does the homily.”
A woman in front of us shushes him. I close my eyes for most of the ceremony. It’s not my first time in church, and most of the memories it brings to mind are bad ones. But this time, something about the choir moves me. The sound of all those voices harmonizing together is undeniably beautiful, and the acoustics of the space make it sound like the voices are surrounding me. If angels do exist, I suppose this is what they’d sound like. And the voices remind me of the choir in “Like a Prayer,” and I think that if it weren’t for all the bullshit rules of Catholicism, then there would be no Madonna, because what is she if not a rebellion against all of this? I guess I need to be grateful for that. I hear her song playing in my head, and I imagine Reza’s face when he listened to it for the first time. I could feel it washing over him. I could feel him come alive, forming into something new in front of my eyes, and then he pulled away from me. I keep my eyes closed until the choir stops, and I imagine myself kissing Reza’s lips, his eyelids, his nose, his chest, his thighs. I imagine everything that would disgust the church and the Cardinal, all set to their holy music. I guess that’s the thing. I don’t want to burn this place to the ground. What I want is to make them see that I AM HOLY. These thoughts of me and Reza, they are holy. Well, except for that part about him being my best friend’s boyfriend now. That’s a sinful detail.