[28]

Men, 1989

I’m not an idiot. I have feelings. I deserve to be treated with kindness and respect. “She’s upset about her grade.” Who does he think he is?

She called Apple Pie at home. She took the Valium and drank the beers and waited for him to rush over or call a fucking ambulance.

Instead, he said, “Don’t call here again.”

The next night, she was desperate and messy, complicated and bursting with apologies about why she kept calling. It was her dog. Whiskers died. He was gone. She didn’t get to say goodbye. Was that too pathetic? She’d had too much to drink. She’d never call him at home again.

She waited outside his office at ten o’clock. He always stopped there after his studio class. She’d win him back. She’d make him desperate for her. She’d done it before. She was special. She didn’t realize that there were four special students before her.

She leaned against the wall of the narrow hallway facing his office door. Maybe she should hide, but there was no place to hide. So she waited. She stared at a white knot of wood, like a bleach stain, just below the doorknob. It spiraled outward, growing darker and darker with each spiral, but the center was completely white. She was naked beneath a raincoat and army boots. She’d become desperate the way Aunt Claire had been for Tom—not fat like Aunt Claire, but the other extreme: waiflike, subsisting on cheap wine, Cheerios, and Fig Newtons.

Who the hell does he think he is? “Don’t call me”?! “Don’t call me”!?

She was drunk. She was mad. It was ten-thirty. She was sorry. She was seething. Floyd, the custodian, walked past, pretending not to see her. She fingered the white spot below the doorknob, hearing the tick-tock of the clock down the hall. She sat with her back against the door, her freckled white legs poking out from under her coat, bouncing the back of her head off the white spirals, pressing the rubber soles of her boots onto the opposite wall. At midnight, she kicked Apple Pie’s locked office door and hurt her big toe despite the heavy boots. She hopped on one foot in the tiny hallway, cursing his name.

Apple Pie had messed with the wrong woman. She wasn’t going to let him get away with it. He said he loved her. He said he only stayed with his wife “for the children.” He was a liar. All men are liars.

After Apple Pie, there were one-night stands. There was Chris-with-no-last-name. There was a Joseph, a Danny, and a Richard. They came and went. Some of them were artists or musicians, but a lot of them were professionals with nine-to-five jobs. In a few years, they’d be nine-to-six jobs, eventually eight-to-six. “If you want to be successful and if you want to get ahead, you work: longer and longer hours.”

It was 1989. AIDS and Republicans ran amok.

Lucy told Becca, “You’d better get tested.”

“I use protection.”

“It doesn’t matter. You should get tested.”

In Panama, U.S. troops captured General Manuel Noriega in Operation Just Cause. Richard Martin, Buckley’s biological father, hid in a Panama City hotel, while nearby, his longtime girlfriend, Gabriela, fled her house with another of Richard’s sons—Hector. Her house, her whole village, caught fire and burned to the ground. She saw people fleeing. She saw people shot. She wondered if Richard would really take her and Hector to Miami. There was nothing left in Panama for them.

The CIA found Richard in his hotel room three days after U.S. forces took Noriega into custody. They also found six kilos of cocaine and one plane ticket to Miami. Richard had a penchant for ditching women.

He was flown to Miami first, next to Washington, D.C., where he was charged with treason and international drug trafficking. He claimed repeatedly that Noriega had set him up. Buckley’s biological father, Richard Martin, was a liar.

Gabriela met a U.S. Marine named Claiborne Dodge, who gave her his rations. She gave him a photograph of herself that she’d saved from the ashes.

In New York, Becca took Lucy’s advice. She got an HIV test. Two weeks later, she waited on a cushioned white table, kicking her feet back and forth, for the results. The nurse practitioner opened Becca’s folder and said, “This test is confidential. Do you understand?” She said a number of other things, all implying to Becca that there was bad news. She kept asking, “Do you understand?”

Becca thought she might vomit. “Yes, I understand.”

“The test is negative for HIV.”

Becca was fortunate, and she knew it.