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Raul Carlos Fernandez could fix almost anything, and in our apartment building at 200 E. 77th St. he was something of a legend not only among the tenants but among the doormen and the other building employees and even among the building’s owners - an investment company based in Flushing, Queens.

Henry, the day doorman, told me of an occasion shortly before I moved into the building when Raul went up to the 20th floor at 2 a.m. to unclog Irma Radcliff’s toilet. Raul found the problem was a decomposing hamster that Irma had flushed six weeks earlier. Irma had a heart attack when she saw furry little Felix the hamster, somewhat dissolved and thoroughly putrid and jabbed through the stomach on the end of Raul’s plumbing snake. Raul performed CPR on Irma and saved her life.

Early on Christmas Day in 1990, before his children had even opened their presents, Raul replaced the element in Elaine and Roger Kirchenbaum’s brand new oven so that they could bake a ham for relatives from New Jersey. Later that day he crawled into the incinerator chute to remove a Christmas tree.

Raul kept a watchful eye on our two elevators. He overhauled the building’s outdoor lighting system. And more than once during the three summers that I lived in the building he saved me from a humid meltdown when the window air conditioner in my bedroom balked at its assigned duties. He repaired my door ringer and replaced the leaky faucet in my kitchen. Raul was a real hero to the tenants in our building.

My friend Margot used to go on and on about how Raul’s hammer swung at his side in a precise, complex rhythm timed to the movements of his fantastically tight behind. It was indeed a strangely biological and highly erotic motion - lub-dub-dub, lub-dub-dub, lub-dud-dub - and I squirmed and giggled in girlish delight when Margot described it.

It was always an immense and wonderful release to be an immature, swooning fool with Margot. She was more the swooning type, I the fool, and together we were able to forget for a few hours the loneliness of our progressing careers and the dozens of meaningless acquaintances and our silly, desperate dates, and how we missed our families and the college friends who, it seemed, had forgotten us completely.

Twice I had to physically restrain Margot when she wanted to dial Raul’s apartment and invite him to join us in my apartment. The first time was a Saturday night in early December when we had finished a bottle of wine and were bored with each other and with what was on television. Margot was hungry for a man. She wanted to gaze into Raul’s dark, Latin eyes. She wanted him to plant his hot lips on all parts of her body and she wanted him to caress her while she ran her hands along his rough, square jaw and on to that swinging hammer of his.

“God,” she said, almost moaning, and we rolled over laughing on the carpeted floor of my living room, and it was a laughter I had not felt in weeks - a true, unburdening, oxygenated charge. Then Margot sat up and lunged for the beige telephone on the floor and she started dialing a number and I had to wrestle the phone away from her, and it was an additional relief to wrap my arms around her. I felt safe. I felt I would live forever.

“Please,” she said when she managed to overcome her laughter, “Let me call. Let me call.”

“No,” I said, and instead of Raul we settled that night for a second bottle of wine.

Two nights later Raul was polishing the brass rails in the lobby when I got back from work. He offered to help carry the groceries I’d bought on my way home, and after a long, unpleasant Monday at work, I would have welcomed anyone’s offer of help, even if I had to pay.

I handed Raul one of the two bags and we took the elevator up to the eleventh floor. At my door - apartment 1107 - I said “Thank you so much. It’s been such a day,” and he smiled and said “No problem.” I unlocked the door and he carried the bag into the tiny kitchen. I dropped the mail and my attaché case on the dining table and followed Raul into the kitchen with my own bag of groceries, which included a quart of rum raisin ice cream. Raul had leaned his bag against the refrigerator.

“Thanks,” I said, and he smiled again. I lowered my bag of groceries slowly to the floor. He never took his eyes off of me.

“Melissa, it is my pleasure,” he said, and he looked at me with those dark Latin eyes and smiled a knowing smile as if he had just told some inside joke that together we understood. He asked, “Shall I go?” And rather than answer, I fell into his arms. We kissed.

It was never a completely fulfilling affair, because Raul was married, with three children, and he lived with his family on the first floor just to the left of the elevators. We had eyed each other for years, but I never imagined until that evening as our lips came together that anything other than friendly, lustful glances would ever pass between us. I never imagined I would sleep with a man on what amounted to a momentary whim. My two one-night stands in college were due entirely to inexperienced freshman year intoxication, and I regretted them for years until Margot said to me one night, “Look Melissa, you didn’t get pregnant, you didn’t get V.D., you don’t even remember their names, so what’s to regret? It’s like regretting a past life. Our bodies and our minds and our karma are not defiled by sex. They live for it. They grow with it. They need it. So move on. Each breath is new, each step your first and your last, and every man in your life adds something to it. Those two men are part of your history. They are history, to be studied, admired, to be learned from, and to be left where they are, in the past. Okay? So move on.”

It was her talk of karma that hit me over the head and made me take notice of what she was saying, because it was my own sense of lasting, damning immorality that had made me regret those two boys in college. I regretted not knowing their names. I regretted what I might have said, what I might have done, and I regretted losing control of myself. They were regrets that I could not shake, the lifelong burdens of my careless and callous sexuality, and I thought I would have to carry those burdens with me forever. I thought my karma had been tainted forever by my past mistakes. I felt damned. Margot helped strip those mistakes away. She reminded me of the pleasure of nakedness - the pleasure of being fully exposed to the past, the present and the future.

So it was not regret that I felt when Raul went home late that Monday night, but an innate sense of foreboding. Something inside me told me that my pleasure with Raul would become a regret, though at the time it was simple, delicious, fully sober and fully conscious, rational pleasure.

The affair with Raul lasted six days, which is precisely how long his wife was away with the children in Florida visiting her parents. Each night Raul would greet me in the lobby when I got home from work, and then we went up to my apartment and made love, first in the bedroom and then toward the end of the week on the carpeted floor just in front of the door and in the living room, and once in the bathroom. His sperm dripped out of me most of the week. It was uncomfortable, and several times I had to run to the ladies room at work because what seemed like a gallon of his juice suddenly made the return trip from my womb, but it was also an additional and private joy that I shared at work only with myself.

We spent all day Saturday in my apartment, mostly naked. Every few hours Raul would call down to his apartment to see if his wife had left a message on their answering machine. She called once, and while I showered he went down to his apartment so he could call her back and explain that he had gone for a walk in the park and that he missed her terribly. He said she had called to remind him of her flight information.

That night, after our last dinner together, I promised that I would tell no one of our affair. I suspected that Henry the door man and some of the other building employees already knew about it, but I promised. I promised that I would not tell his wife, Miriam. After dinner we made love one last time and then Raul went back to his apartment. I called my mother in Syracuse and we chatted for over an hour. She had burned a roast beef Thursday night and my parents ended up going to a Mexican restaurant that gave my father diarrhea.

After work the following Tuesday I ran into Miriam in the lobby. She held her baby daughter in one arm while the older daughter ran around the lobby. The door to Miriam and Raul’s apartment was open and I could hear the 7-year-old son shouting something in broken English-Spanish, to which Miriam responded by walking to the open apartment door, shouting in English, “Gabriel, don’t yell,” and then closing the door so that we could no longer hear Gabriel’s noise. Raul was elsewhere.

I was waiting for the elevator. Jorge, the night doorman, stood outside the building under the blue awning.

“Hello,” I said to Miriam, and I smiled at the baby.

“Hello,” she answered, returning the smile.

“How was Florida?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Florida. How was your visit?”

“Florida?”

“Yes, Florida. Raul said you went to Florida.”

The smile disappeared from her face. I did not think there would be anything strange about my question, but already it was apparent to me that I had made a terrible mistake by saying anything to her.

“I wasn’t in Florida,” she said. “Raul lied to you. I was in San Francisco, at a clinic.”

“Oh,” I said, not at all sure how to respond. “A health clinic?”

“Yes, a health clinic. Didn’t Raul tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“About the clinic,” she said. “We have AIDS. I have AIDS. Raul has AIDS. Our children have AIDS. We are all dying. Didn’t he tell you?”

I stared at her for a moment.Finally I answered, “No.”

“Too bad,” she said. “He said he told her. He told me about a woman. He said he told her. He said he was safe. You were the woman, yes? I hope you were safe.”

She turned her back on me and walked back into her apartment, followed by the older daughter, who had been playing by herself in the lobby.

At first, I could not breath. We had not been safe. What could possibly have been safe about an affair with a married man who lived with his wife in the same apartment building as me? I was on the pill, but we had not been safe. Not once. Our fluids had mixed over and over again.

There was a hand clenched around my throat and I realized soon enough that it was my own hand, gripping my throat and briefly cutting off my air supply. I felt my face heat up and redden and I did not release myself until I was alone in the elevator, between the third and fourth floors. I saw in the elevator’s mirrored walls that my face had turned a deep shade of purple and that my brown hair had fallen out of its ties and onto my shoulders.

I took deep breaths until the elevator reached my floor and I walked calmly to my apartment. My hands remained perfectly controlled as I unlocked the door. I closed it behind me with a gentle thud, dropped my pocket book and attaché at my feet, and I fell to my knees. I stayed down on the beige carpet for a long time on a spot in front of my closed door where Raul had taken me three times in one night.

Later I showered and put on my green flannel nightgown and I ate a frozen beef stir fry dinner in front of the television. Then, while I waited for the world to return to normal, I ate half a quart of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

I expected the resolution to my uncertain dilemma to arrive in 22 minutes, as on the sit coms I watched. But by ten I felt no better, and by eleven when the news came on even my on-and-off crying seemed a wasted, lonely effort.

The telephone was on the floor, near my feet, its cord stretched across the living room from the phone jack near the wood and tin dining table I bought in September at Macy’s. The table was covered with junk mail, on top of which lay my black pocket book and my burgundy leather attaché case. My blue wool coat was draped over the back of a chair at the dining table and my black leather pumps were on the floor beneath the chair.

The answering machine, which had no messages when I checked after my shower, was on a small table next to the television.

The telephone taunted me because I knew as I swallowed each spoonful of ice cream that I should have been on the phone talking with Margot. I should have called her and asked for the advice she would have been happy to offer, just as she called me the day she suspected, incorrectly, that she was pregnant. What had begun in college as a friendship of convenience or at best of mutual respect for each other’s experiences and beliefs, had evolved since we moved to New York into what I imagine sisterhood is like in some ideal families.

That my own family was not so ideal had dropped from my list of priorities when I realized that Margot had become family too and that even if I could not call on my mother or father or even on my sister Alice for advice on the most serious decisions, I could ask Margot about anything and expect sincere, sisterly concern.

But on the night of my encounter with Miriam I did not call on Margot, because I felt too ashamed and too terrified to utter the words that had flowed so fluidly and emotionlessly from Miriam’s lips: “We are all dying. Didn’t he tell you?”

I considered calling Raul for confirmation of Miriam’s pronouncement. But regardless of what he told me he could not remedy my uncertainty or alter whatever fate our relationship had laid for me. Talk could do no good and I did not want to hear what he might say. Whether his words or Miriam’s were lies, their words no longer mattered. I needed a test. I wanted a test. I wanted to know for sure something that language could not convey.

By eleven, when the news came on the television, my need for words of any meaning returned, and I called Margot. Like me she had been in bed but had not yet turned off the lights or the television. She had spent the day at a film shoot for a breath freshener commercial. I asked her about her date Saturday night. She said the date was a failure but that she had met a new computer consultant at her office who seemed interested in her.

“I’m laying the trap,” she said. “He will be mine. We’re going out Friday.”

We made plans to have dinner and watch movies at my apartment that Saturday, and she promised to tell me about the computer man date. I said nothing about Raul on the phone but decided to wait until Saturday to tell my story, when my own thoughts would have cleared enough to be rational and to listen carefully to what she might say. We hung up and I went to bed feeling that Margot would help me understand the lies and truths I was about to uncover.

The idea of dying of AIDS or of any other disease seemed only a remote, statistically unlikely possibility and I slept well that night. Nobody I knew had AIDS, so other than death I really didn’t know what to fear. I had seen pictures on public television of emaciated AIDS patients whose bodies were covered with dark sores, and I’d read about how AIDS had wiped out entire villages in Uganda. Friends of friends at work had died of the disease, but nobody I knew had it or, I thought, ever would have it.

I remembered none of my dreams the next morning when I called in sick at work and walked over to the hospital clinic to get tested. It took four hours in a waiting room and two minutes with a nurse to have two ounces of blood removed from my arm. While I waited I read all the information brochures about AIDS. One brochure, which I read no fewer than half a dozen times, said that the AIDS test itself carried a slight risk of AIDS infection.

The waiting room was crowded with sick people. Though I had annual check ups with a Park Avenue internist and annual pap tests at a midtown gynecologist I chose to get the AIDS test at a hospital because I didn’t want to alert my doctors to something that might not be true. I had heard of doctors who would not treat AIDS patients because it was bad for their business.

The more I read, the more I became concerned. I’d had sex with Raul at least 15 times in our six-day affair and each of those “high-risk encounters” increased my chances of contracting the human immunodeficiency virus. I learned even before the blood was extracted that it could take years for the virus to show up in a blood test and years after that before I might show signs of the disease, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. But then again, another brochure noted, I might get sick very quickly and be dead in a year. Researchers were still trying to figure out the mysterious timing of AIDS. The brochure said: “AIDS diagnosis and onset, and associated physical ailments leading to death, though delayed in some patients, can occur within weeks or months of infection in others.”

A young boy sitting beside me began to scream and his mother, who seemed no more than a child herself, stroked the boy’s soft, brown head. The boy cried, he sobbed, he put his hand on his mother’s lap.

“It hurts,” he moaned. His mother stroked his head, whispered into his ear and kissed his cheek and wiped the tears away with her hand. She saw me watching and she said, “Ear ache.”

A nurse called my name and led me to a small room with a cabinet full of drugs and a chair with a special arm rest. The nurse smiled and asked me to roll up my sleeve. After waiting four hours in a noisy hospital clinic managed by rude, hostile nurses, the test itself was a pleasure. The nurse - they called her a phlebotomist, which is someone skilled at extracting blood - spoke with a soft, gentle voice. She asked me to make a fist and I watched the needle slip almost effortlessly into the vein in my left arm. It was just a slight prick, and then for the next six or seven seconds I had a new hole in my body, a new opening to the world, and I leaked into a test tube as Raul had leaked into me.

The test tube must have been tinted, because I didn’t see it fill with blood and at first I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought that maybe my blood pressure was abnormally low - too low, I feared, to pump blood into the test tube. But a moment later the phlebotomist gently tugged out the needle and placed a cotton swab soaked in alcohol over the tiny spot where the needle had been inserted. She taped the swab down with white medical tape and I saw that the test tube she had placed on a rack on the counter was filled with my blood.

“That’s it,” she said cheerfully, and I stood and left the hospital.

It had only been two ounces of blood, but when I left the hospital I felt light. I walked slowly down Lexington Avenue, ready at the slightest sign of faintness to either sit down at the curb or, if I happened to be passing a restaurant, to step in and ask for a table. If I fainted in a booth in a restaurant it would simply look like I fell asleep.

The cold fall air began to revive me as I cut over to Madison Avenue, and it seemed, to my great relief, that I was not going to faint.

And then, at the corner of East 87th Street and Madison Avenue, I ran into Raul.

“Melissa,” I heard him say with great surprise, and then I fainted.

---

I was in his arms, looking into his passionate, dark eyes, and he was speaking softly, touching a cold hand to may face.

“Melissa,” he whispered. “Melissa.”

The touch of his hand was at first like that of a kitten’s soft paw, delicate, enticing, and I waited for his kiss.

“Melissa,” he said louder. “Are you okay?”

I smiled.

“Yes,” I said, thinking how nice it was to be in his arms. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

And before he answered I felt the cold of his hand and I noticed that we were standing outdoors and that all around us cars were rushing down a busy street, honking, and I noticed so many faceless people who walked quickly past us.

“You fainted,” Raul said, and I pulled myself up and out of his arms.

“Raul?”

“Melissa, are you okay? You just blacked out.”

“I did?”

“Yes. You walked into me and you collapsed.”

“I fainted?”

“Yes, you fainted. Are you okay?”

“When did I faint?”

“Just now, half a second ago. You walked into me, and then you fainted.”

And then I remembered.

“You need some help?” he asked. He was always offering to help. “I was heading across town, but I’ll help you back. Come.”

He smiled and offered a hand and leaned toward walking downtown. I rested against a No Parking sign and did not move to his hand.

“I spoke with Miriam yesterday,” I said, feeling as if I were floating because most of my weight was being supported by the sign. “She told me.”

“Told you what?” he said softly in that caring, helpful voice of his. He smiled.

“She told me about her trip. To San Francisco.”

“I didn’t know you spoke,” he said. “Yes, she enjoyed the trip very much. You didn’t tell her about us, did you?”

“You said she went to Florida to visit her family.”

“Florida? No, I said she went to San Francisco. Did you say something about us?”

He was becoming nervous.

“You said Florida,” I said.

“Florida? No, she went to San Francisco. I told you San Francisco.”

“To get drugs for AIDS?”

Raul smiled once again, but this time it was a weakened, pained, embarrassed smile. He blushed and glanced down for a moment at the sidewalk.

“She told you that?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And she told you about us? About the family?”

“Yes.”

He looked into my eyes for the briefest, most imperceptible of moments, and then he broke the eye contact and looked past me, into the space just above my right shoulder. I hung there in the space between the street sign and his arms, but he barely knew I was there.

Then he looked at me again and said, “So she knows. Please, let me help you home.”

“No thank you,” I said. “You’ve helped enough.”

I pulled myself away from the sign and I was terribly light headed for the first few steps away from Raul. I walked slowly and my head cleared and Raul didn’t try to follow.

I walked downtown, vaguely in the direction of my apartment on East 77th Street,
but as I began to feel stronger, healthier, more vital, I decided to walk down to 58th Street, where Margot worked for an advertising agency. I had planned to wait for the test result before saying anything to anyone about Raul - that is, about me - but the meeting on Madison Avenue with Raul somehow pushed me to seek out Margot, who would have something useful to say about the situation. I realized that Raul’s words had not solved anything, and I determined that I would avoid future contact with him. I craved certainty, and he could not offer it. Perhaps Margot could.

It was 1:30 p.m. when I got to Margot’s office, and she was out to lunch. I left a little note that said I had stopped by.

It was a cold, clear day, and I was dressed warmly in the blue, beltless woolen overcoat that I wore every day to work. Beneath it I wore blue jeans and a cashmere sweater. A purple and white snowflake wool hat knit by my mother covered my ears and green and gray mittens knit by my sister warmed my hands. The toes inside my Nike’s were cold, but they warmed as I walked further and faster.

I had nowhere to go. As far as anyone at work new, I was sick. I had a bad cold, I said when I called at 8:15 a.m. just before I left for the hospital. A head cold. Sniffles, sneezes, clogged sinuses. The works. But of course I was perfectly healthy, perfectly fit for a good long walk to figure out what to do next.

All of a sudden I needed to know what to do next. I had never before felt like this. Until I met Miriam in the lobby I had lived from day to day with maybe some grand scheme of where I wanted to be in a year or two but never a thought about where I wanted to be in the next hour or in the next day or in the next decade. My job as a European Manager of Farobund-Itaki’s international trade department was usually exciting, mildly satisfying, and socially impressive. I made more money than many of the 32-year-old women I knew and more money than my mother earned as a public school teacher in Syracuse. My father, a lawyer, made substantially more than me, which was just as well. My sister the eternal graduate student had little income to speak of.

The fact that I was unmarried and in a perpetual state of loneliness had nothing to do with my job. That was me: the quiet, ambitious, studious girl who toured museums by herself and who spent nine out of ten nights alone in her apartment not scheming about meeting new people but finally, after years of dating and dancing and drinking vodka martinis, accepting that she was simply not going to find Mr. Right. Perhaps he would find me. Perhaps we would stumble into each other on the street, as I had stumbled into Raul. I was not gong to find him.

I was pretty enough and didn’t doubt my looks. I worked out three times a week, wore nice clothes, and was usually cheerful and friendly. None of that mattered. What mattered was that I preferred to be home alone and at peace with a life I had chosen for myself. It was appropriate that the affair Raul began in my own kitchen after a long day of work when I expected nothing more than a hot bath and an hour or two of television. He caught me with my guard down, in the place where I belonged - my home.

Margot and I were both desperate for men, but it was all she could think about. I always faithfully played along with her desperation act so that she would not feel more alone, more desperate, but she knew that I had come to terms with being alone. I wanted a man, but I did not want to go through the rituals of finding him. Margot kept faith in the rituals.

All my men came and went as suddenly and unexpectedly as Raul, but most made me happy in some way. Raul was my first and only married lover. Roger, my 54-year-old painting instructor, was the oldest. Roger and I knew in our hearts when we first ate lunch together after class that though our passions might have been sincere, we would not spend the rest of our lives together. And this understanding, among two people who cared for each other, was a remarkable, freeing experience that I never matched again. Roger was a loving man, and we were tender with each other and we kissed and smiled and hugged at the airport when he left for Venice and when we knew that we were parting forever.

As I walked down Madison Avenue, remembering these things as if they came to me from nowhere, I wondered if I would perhaps see Roger once again. I had no idea where he was and no intention of looking for him. But I couldn’t help but wonder: would my blood test take me to Venice? Would it take me to San Francisco? To Jerusalem. To Mecca? Where would it take me? My job had taken me to London twice and there were nights in New York when I fantasized about the many exotic cities I would see if things went well at work. So I wondered where my job would take me, as I had always wondered where life would take me. My blood test was different. I felt without a bit of fantasy that it was going to take me somewhere unexpected. Perhaps that’s because I knew it might take me to my grave.

That afternoon the test, the brochures in the hospital and my new sense of perilous movement toward some undetermined location took me west across 57th Street, past Carnegie Hall, and I turned down Seventh Avenue. At 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue I bought a hot pretzel from a street vendor. I had craved a pretzel since 59th Street and the one I bought was crunchy and heavily salted on the outside and moist on the inside, the dough ever so slightly sweet, and the steam that puffed out of the pretzel when I broke into it with my first bite warmed my nose.

After the salt, I craved chocolate and I paid dearly for it. I went to Teuscher in Rockefeller Plaza and bought four truffles for $10: two champagne, one rum and one Frangelico. I stood above the ice skating rink and ate the Frangelico and one of the champagne truffles while the ice was cleaned and polished for waiting skaters. I put the other two chocolates in my pocket book and headed toward Times Square.

I would like to think that I worked through my initial flurry of AIDS emotions that afternoon when I walked to Battery Park City at the southern tip of Manhattan, but as my pace quickened and I began to enjoy the sound of my feet on the sidewalk, of the cars and buses and the shouts from all directions, and as I grew more aware of the fine and bitter aromas that floated through the air like other people’s dreams, so many of the things that I have since considered drained out of my head, like my parents, my sister, Margot and my will. I found myself wandering, remembering AIDS every now and then, but more intent upon reaching some destination which, when the day ended, was as unclear as when the day began.

I moved on, and when I hit 47th Street I forgot completely about my blood test and about Raul’s cruel lie. I was enthralled with the diamonds and with the Jews.

The Jews sold the diamonds, and 47th Street was something of a modern commuter ghetto with bearded men in dark suits, hats and long, improbable-looking sideburns. They lived in large houses with large families in Brooklyn and they traveled frequently to Switzerland and Israel and South Africa and Australia and South America to buy million-dollar gems. But on 47th Street they acted like poor, security-conscious ghetto Jews.

“Mordeci, listen to me,” an old man said to a younger man. “It’s New York plus 14 over Washington. Are you crazy? You’re throwing your money away.”

“Like you know,” the younger man said.

“Yes, I know.”

“So what about the Eagles last week?” the younger one said. “You didn’t know anything about the Eagles.”

“Look,” the old man said, “You want to throw your money away, throw it to me. The Giants are not going to beat that spread. You’re crazy. That’s it. End of discussion. You hear me? You’re giving your money to some schvartze who’s going to buy crack with it. Okay, that’s it. I don’t have time for your meshegas. End of discussion.”

“Izzy, if you’re so smart, how come the Eagles lost? Just tell me that. Meshegas. You’re the one full of meshegas.”

They stood not two feet away from me in front of the entrance to Israel Berman Imports Inc. I stared at the diamond necklaces, the emerald bracelets, the opal rings and at the Swiss watches in the small, poorly lit display case. Every item in the window was probably worth as much as I earned in a year. The two men ignored me completely and walked back into the store. I stood still, almost frozen in my terror of the beautiful stones that I would never own, until I was shoved by an elegantly dressed old man with a cane who stopped, turned and faced me and said with a German accent, “Excuse me, Madam. I’m terribly sorry.” I smiled and waved my hand and the man returned my smile and continued east along 47th Street. I followed him until he turned into Samuel Eichelbaum’s Diamond Imports, and at Fifth Avenue I turned downtown once again. As I walked I realized what it was that was so disturbing about the old man: it was that he stopped, apologized and smiled. Nobody does that in New York. His smile was more frightening than the diamonds.

At 42nd Street I glanced west toward the Port Authority bus terminal and I studied the porno houses and the sex-infested street life beneath the flashing lights, and I wondered how many people within my field of vision had already contracted AIDS, how many would contract it that day, and how many of the hundreds of people before me were already dying of it? I looked to my left, I looked to my right.

At Herald Square I again forgot completely about AIDS. Christmas was in the air. Macy’s pumped sleigh bell sounds and Christmas songs onto the street through speakers on all sides of the building.

I strolled through the flower markets of the 20s, past Barnes and Noble on 18th Street, and I remember almost nothing other than the noises, the smells and the feel of the air against my lips and cheeks. My senses were heightened and entranced by some awareness of the speeding life around me and inside me, and I embraced it all the way to Battery Park City, where I worked.

There was only one place I needed to avoid that day when I got my blood test and when I was supposed to be in my apartment, sick in bed. And there was no place easier to avoid. Battery Park City sits on a man-made extension of Manhattan island’s southwestern shore and it is for all intensive purposes a self-contained city within a city, cut off from the rest of New York by West Street to the east, by Battery Park to the south, and by the Hudson River to the west. Its northern border is an undeveloped dustbowl north of the new Stuyvesant High School. Battery Park City is a chunk of space tacked onto the rest of New York, and though it is now headquarters to some of the world’s largest corporations, including the one I work for, and though more than one hundred thousand people live in apartment buildings there and an additional quarter million commute to work there every day, and though its massive architecture is in some cases a remarkable contribution to that art, Battery Park City remains an unnecessary, irrelevant and inappropriate appendage to New York City that, unless one lives or works there, might as well not exist. Like Raul’s words, it adds and subtracts nothing. It simply floats off to one side. It is where the multinational manufacturing and commodities conglomerate Farobund-Itaki had its New York offices, on the fifty-fifth through fifty-eighth floors of the World Financial Center. At 4:30 p.m., as the sun began to set over New Jersey, I stood beneath that building and stared across the Hudson River to New Jersey. And Tom McMennamin, my boss at Farobund-Itaki, picked me out of a crowd of three hundred thousand people. It seemed as if he had done so from fifty-six floors up and had swooped down like a vulture when he spotted me.

“Melissa,” Tom said jovially as he grabbed my elbow. I was standing on the promenade by the river, where a large yacht had been docked for the past few weeks.

“Melissa, you didn’t have to come in today,” Tom said. “You didn’t did you? You look terrible.”

In his capacity as my superior and what he took to be my friend, Tom McMennamin, a Vice President of European Trade, believed he could say anything to me. The touch of his hand and the sound of his voice awoke me from what must have been a deep, deep daze that took me clear past Union Square, Greenwich Village, SoHo, China Town, the fabric and electronics districts and City Hall. Somewhere along the way I had lost my hat. My hair, which had been clasped to my head by a beret when I started out in the morning, was blowing in all directions. I had been staring into the wind and my cheeks and nose were red and raw, my lips chapped and bleeding.

“Hi Tom,” I said, smiling, leaning my weight into my left hip and trying to act as if there was nothing unusual about our meeting. I ran a hand through my hair and tried to keep it out of my face. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“A breather,” he said. “Got my ass chewed off like you wouldn’t believe. No bonus if I don’t close the Hammersmith deal. So we’re fucked, Melissa. Totally fucked. Hammersmith is going to fizzle by the end of the week. I can feel it in my bones. Better get the resume out. They’ll can us both if we lose Hammersmith. Better yet, get your ass into work tomorrow. You okay, you look like shit. You see a doctor?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just a cold.”

“So you wanted to hang out here?”

“Yes.”

“Look, if you’re desperate for work, we’ve got plenty. Otherwise, get the hell out of here before Jerry Greenberg sees you. He’s on a warpath. See you tomorrow.”

“Thanks Tom,” I said, my hand still in my hair, and I watched him walk back toward the building. When he reached it I also headed indoors to walk across the skybridge over West Street. I continued my southward walk, past the New York Athletic Club where they award the Heisman trophy, and I turned along the north end of Battery Park.

The wind had reach gale force and my eyes teared when I tried to look forward. The streets were packed with people heading home from the financial district, some masses of bodies moving toward the Staten Island ferry and others trying to make their way to the subway to get uptown or to Brooklyn.

It was nearly dark except for the last glimmer of daylight in the sky and I was walking alone among the headlights and dark bodies toward the end of Manhattan island. I was at the end and I did not know where to go next. All around me the wind kicked up coats and dresses and pushed people to their destinations, but I had no destination. For all I knew, I was as far as I was ever going to go. I didn’t know it for sure, but I felt like I was dying, and I thought I might drop dead before I took another step. Each step was my last.

The motion of the people moving toward the Staten Island ferry carried me forward and I found myself waiting down beneath the burnt-out ferry terminal in a cold, makeshift waiting area that was lined in all directions with human beings. I felt a hand on my shoulder, but when I turned, there was no hand. I turned back to face the slip where the boat was just then arriving, and soon we moved like unwilling cattle across the grated gang planks onto the ferry.

I didn’t choose where to go. I simply moved with the crowd and wound up on the bottom deck of the boat. I saw a yellow plastic seat beside a window on the Brooklyn side of the boat, and I claimed it.

“Man, what a day,” the young woman sitting to my left said. “You know, if it keeps up like this, I’m gonna quit. I can’t take it, you know. I’m serious. I can’t fuckin’ take it.”

“Your job?” an older woman across from her asked.

“My job, my boyfriend, my mother, my boss, my younger sister who’s getting married. Everything. It’s driving me nuts, I’m telling you. You know? And now we have to take blood tests. Can you fuckin’ believe it? So I don’t do any shit this week and next, you know, coke and pot and stuff, and then I come in Monday morning and piss into a cup, and then I can do shit that night. You know? Like they think we’re so fuckin’ stupid we’re gonna do shit even though they tell us when the test is. Right? So they pretty much tell us, `don’t do shit for two weeks and you’ll pass.’ Right? So my boyfriend, Tony, you met him, right? Well he’s all pissed because he wanted to do coke tonight.”

The older woman shook her head and frowned in disapproval.

“I know, I know,” the younger woman continued. “It’s bad, but, like, what? He can’t wait two weeks? I mean my god, if he loves me don’t you think he’ll wait two weeks and share it with me? Well, no, not Tony. He’s buyin’ it after work today. And you know what he said? He said he’s gonna do it with the guys in Brooklyn. I told him, `Tony, if I find out you’re sharing your coke with another girl, you can forget about me.’ Right? Wouldn’t you say that? See, I know he ain’t sharing with the guys, Œcause I called Billy Monahan this afternoon and I asked him and he don’t know nothin’ about no coke. So now my sister is getting married and I’m not even gonna have a boyfriend. Christ, like it’s only Tuesday and my life is totally fucked. I broke a nail at work today. I’m telling you, I don’t know how I’m gonna make it. And now my mother wants me to help her with the dress. I mean why can’t Doris help with her own freakin’ wedding dress? She’s the one getting married.”

A short, pudgy little man dressed like a caricature of a street sweeper passed by and offered to shine my sneakers. The young woman said, “Get the fuck…” before I had a chance to respond. The shoe shine man moved on without missing a beat in his song: “Shine,” he sang in a contralto voice like a high-pitched fog horn. He paused, and then said it again. “Shine. Shine. Shoe shine.”

“Like anybody can afford that,” the young woman said to herself.

I, of course, could have afforded the two-dollar shoe shine, and if I had been in my work shoes I might have paid for it. I’d never had the nerve to sit down in one of those shoe shine booths in front of Trinity Church that the men use, and frankly I never knew how they had the nerve to climb up into a throne and have a man cower at their feet for five minutes for two dollars. But then again, I’ve seen men not think twice about closing down factories and entire companies and I’ve seen them lose millions of dollars of other people’s pension money, and I’ve had bosses fired by bosses fired by bosses who went to jail, and I slept fifteen times with a man who had AIDS but didn’t tell me, so why should it surprise me that some men can deal with a throne and a peasant spitting on their shoes? They fancy themselves kings for five minutes a week on a lower Broadway throne in front of Trinity Church, or they give you AIDS. It happens.

I tried to look out the ferry window to see the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines, but the window was filthy so that all I could see was an occasional beacon of blue or red light and briefly the outlines of South Street Seaport, downtown Brooklyn and Governor’s Island. Even the passing tugboats were mere blurs. My feet were too sore to stand up and walk to the back of the boat, where the view was no doubt spectacular.

It was good that I sat and rested my feet, because the boat was nearly empty on the return trip to Manhattan when I stood at the front and watched, with the cold, damp wind in my face and a nearby pair of tourists entwined in each other’s arms and legs and lips, as the green Statue of Liberty and the sparkling Manhattan skyline grew larger until lower Manhattan loomed over me like an immense hammer wielded by some giant species of maintenance man. I felt like a grain of dust. Even if the hammer came down on my head, I was so small that I was immune to the thundering, head crushing blows of the giants above me. I was subatomic and would squeeze between the molecules of steel in the hammerhead, and though I might notice the seismic shockwave of the hammer’s crash, I would survive. The lovers leaning against the rail would be killed instantly.

I began to sob uncontrollably, and if the lovers noticed, they did not turn or draw their lips apart for one second until the boat docked in Manhattan, and then they ran off together into the night. My tears might as well have been ocean spray in their hair.

---

Margot left four messages on my answering machine. I explained that I had played hooky and had hoped to have lunch with her. At first she found it hard to believe that I would simply not go to work, but I explained that the post Thanksgiving blues had caught up with me and that I needed a day off for myself. She was the one who always talked about the post Thanksgiving blues, so she immediately understood what I was saying even though I didn’t.

“Girl, what you need is Raul’s hammer banging your bones. Hard, honey. Listen, you want a blind date? There’s a guy at work, a writer, very nice, doesn’t belong in the business, isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life, a real sweet, sweet guy who happens to be uninterested in me. His name is Gary. You want to meet him?”

“How old is he?”

“He’s 23. Does that make a difference?”

“He’s so young.”

“Well excuse me miss modern maturity. What’s the difference? Should I set it up or not?”

“I don’t know Margot.”

“How about Friday. A double date. I’ll take the hunk I’m after, and you take Gary. He’s nice, trust me. We’ll go to El Capitan and let them buy us margaritas.”

“Is he good looking?”

“A stud, hun. He’s a total stud. Like Raul.”

“Do you think he’s gay?” I asked.

“I don’t know. You ask him.”

“When?”

“Hello, Melissa? Earth to Melissa. What’s with you? Friday. Seven-thirty. My apartment. Yes or no?”

“All right,” I said, wondering if he really looked like Raul. “See you Friday.”

I was the last to arrive. Margot introduced me to John the computer programmer and then to Gary the writer. He was my height, with sandy hair and blue eyes and a friendly, shy smile. He was from Montana. He was awkward. He was handsome. He was the loveliest man on earth and we fell in love that night.

At the restaurant, I could not take my eyes off of him. Margot and her programmer did not hit it off and the double date ended just after 10 p.m. back at Margot’s apartment. Her programmer left first and then Gary and I left together.

“I’m not sure what to do,” he said while we waited for cabs in front of Margot’s building. “Do you want to come back to my apartment?”

Maybe it was the wine, the Margaritas, the Irish coffee, or maybe it was my hormones, or maybe it was because I was truly damned - whatever the reason, I did want to go back with this handsome, gentle man.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Do you want to wait?” he asked.

“No.”

His eyes widened and a broad smile spread across his face.

“Really?” he asked.

When I answered, it was like I was standing nearby and listening to myself. I said, “Really,” and Gary’s smile moved closer and touched mine.

He lived on the west side in an older building with scratched, dark oak floors. I sat on his futon couch in the living room while he poured us small glasses of Amarretto. Then he sat next to me and we toasted each other. And then we kissed.

We kissed and began to feel each other and I could feel his breathing grow stronger and deeper and hotter and soon our hands were touching skin and hair, and before long we were all skin and hair in the bedroom.

Between each of his kisses I kept wondering, do I have it? Do I have it?

Gary rolled me onto my back and was about to enter me when I stopped him and sat up and ran to the bathroom. I wrapped myself in a towel and sat on the edge of the bathtub.

“What’s wrong,” he shouted through the closed door.

“I can’t do it yet,” I said. “It’s too soon.”

“Okay,” he said, understanding. “I’m not sure about this either.”

We dressed and we kissed at his door and I went back to my apartment.

The following night Margot came over and she once again talked of passion with Raul. I dutifully played the part of the swooning fool, and more than ever I felt like the fool. I said nothing about my affair with Raul, nothing about AIDS and nothing about Gary except that I liked him and hoped to see him again. I wanted to wait until I had the test results before I said anything about my terrible fear - that Miriam spoke the truth; that Raul was dying; that I was dying. There was no point in saying anything until I had the results.

Again I had to wrestle Margot to the floor to stop her from calling Raul, and I wanted desperately to tell her then, but I was overcome by the softness of her skin and the hardness of her muscles and the sweetness of her outlook and the emptiness of my fear. I was weak and I knew that Margot’s words would fail me as Miriam’s words and Raul’s words had failed me. I wanted truth, but I knew Margot could not offer the truth I wanted to hear. I wanted to be safe, and no words would ever make me safe again. I stood up and ran for a second bottle of wine.