Wilde Lake(70)

The discussion of Noel—and happiness, come to think of it—ended when Davey arrived. Our old house was not well suited to a wheelchair, even an electric one. He needed help over the threshold, then had trouble coming down the skittery rug in the hallway that led to our living room. And while his friends had seen him in the chair before, his appearance seemed to throw them, as if they kept thinking this was a play that would eventually end, Davey standing up, announcing himself healed. Don Quixote is not dead, Dulcinea tells Sancho. Some man she never knew has died. Then the man rises from his deathbed, reverts to his true self, Miguel de Cervantes, and goes to face the Inquisition, manuscript in hand. Seeing Davey for the first time, it was all I could do not to say something stupid about Ironside, which was my only frame of reference for anyone in a wheelchair. People gathered around him, trying to pretend that they were interested in his stories about rehabilitation, that his autumn had been like theirs. Davey played along. Maybe it wasn’t playing, come to think of it. This was a time when everyone had gone off and crafted a new persona. Hadn’t Davey in effect done the same thing, to a greater extent? Everyone was starting over.

The sextet of AJ, Davey, Noel, Bash, Ariel, and Lynne would never be together again, unless one counts Noel’s funeral in May 1988. I’m not even sure the surviving five wanted to be together then. But Ariel had prevailed on all of them to come, no matter how difficult. (AJ, having finished law school at Yale, was now getting an MBA at Wharton, which was a factor in my decision to apply to Bryn Mawr. As was the realization that I would totally dominate everything at a girls-only school. Unfair, but I wanted to go to law school and I felt I needed not only top marks, but a résumé that showed me as president of the student body, or something equally impressive.) Ariel even asked Davey, who was active in his church choir, to sing at the service. It seemed to me his voice was more beautiful than ever, with richer, deeper tones. He sang a ballad, one requested by Noel, the song AJ had played on his record player so many years ago while they spied on Miss Maude, the one about the girl with moonlight in her eyes.

AJ, sitting next to me, coughed at the word girl. Liberace had died only a year before. Rock Hudson, whom I knew as McMillan of McMillan and Wife—television cops were basically my window on the world, if that’s not clear by now—had been dead three years. People, real people, people we knew, did not die this way. Yet Noel had.

The funeral was in D.C., Georgetown. The church was exceedingly pretty. In fact, I think it was chosen for its prettiness. There was no sense that the Episcopal priest who spoke had ever known Noel or his parents. An impressive number of Noel’s new friends came—from New York, even from Chicago. In fact, they quite outnumbered the family and the high school gang. The old friends—AJ, Bash, Davey, Ariel, Lynne—did not sit together in the church, but they gravitated toward one another at the reception, which was terrifyingly fancy, with an open bar and passed hors d’oeuvres. I was reminded of the party at Davey’s house, his gleaming glass house with all those levels; no wonder his parents had sold it. And I remembered Noel’s face when those boys screamed “faggot” and no one took offense. Had it really been almost ten years ago?

“Did Noel pick the song you sang?” AJ asked Davey. I sensed he wanted to ask: Why were you picked to sing, not me? Noel and I were closer.

Ariel answered for him. “He did. Noel accepted he was dying. He began making plans a year ago. All of this—the church, this restaurant, the service—was his idea. He outlined his plans to his mother and me months ago. He knew what was happening. It was the rest of us who were in denial, even when he went into hospice.”

“So you two were still close,” Bash said.

“Why wouldn’t we be?” Ariel, mild and quiet as a teenager, had become flamboyant. Her hair was full on one side, almost shaved on the other. She wore only one enormous earring, on the shaved side; her black dress had a bubble skirt, which I knew to be very fashionable. (It had taken years, but I had cracked the code of popularity. I dressed well, was cute verging on pretty, and was even considered somewhat cool. Too bad it had taken me until junior year in high school to get there.) Lynne, by contrast, wore a red “power” suit with padded shoulders. She was getting a little thick, I noticed, filing that information away. Petite women such as us had to stay petite as we aged or we would look like fireplugs. Maybe I could offer Lynne that helpful advice, as she had once advised me on my gymnastics career.

“Settle down,” Bash said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“It just would have been nice,” Ariel said, “if other people had visited him. He knew, even when he couldn’t really talk anymore. He knew when people came to see him.”

“Noel stopped talking to me,” AJ said. “Not the other way around. I just assumed he didn’t want to see me. Those are his friends.” Using his chin, he indicated the men who had come from New York and Chicago. And they were almost all men. Extremely somber, haunted-looking men, wearing red ribbons in their lapels. Looking back, I realize these men were just beginning to understand that their lives had become a horror film. They were being stalked. Their ranks would be decimated. How many of them would die within a decade? The conventional wisdom is that people my age, who came into their sexuality in a post-HIV world, were denied something. But I never felt that way. Maybe it came down to the old adage of not being able to miss what you never had. Noel had a few giddy years of finding his place in the world, of being his authentic self. It had killed him. Even at the age of eighteen, I could see how horribly unfair that was.