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averted my eyes.
    “Look, I left Tara with David, and I drove all the way here. We’re going.” She came closer to me and stood over the couch.
    “Fuck off, Lily. I’m not going.”
    When she saw how adamant I was, she sat down on the coffee table, her knees touching mine, and looked me in the eyes. “Why? Tell me why, Michael.”
    My voice cracked. “We’ve been to four funerals in the last year. Four. Guys in their prime. Guys who looked like me—healthy, in great shape—who ended up walking cadavers before they ever made it into the casket. I can’t remember everyone I’ve slept with since I was sixteen. Can you?”
    She nodded. “Actually, I can. But it doesn’t mean I know everyone that they were with. Look…I’m going to be right there to hold your hand, Michael. But you have a moral responsibility to get tested. You could be out there infecting people. And if you’re negative, don’t you want to know that, too?”
    “No. God,” I snapped at her and stood up. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you fucking get it?”
    “Get what?”
    “You’re off playing house with Professor Perfect there. I’m here trying to live my life as a gay man in a straight man’s world. And I’m watching men I love—friends, lovers—getting picked off like this is some cosmic game of Russian roulette. There’s no cure. There’s no hope. So why bother, Lily? I don’t want to know.”
    “Because if you’re sick, you could be making other people sick. Sooner or later, the dance has to stop, Michael. You can’t be out there screwing around and not caring about the consequences. What about the people who love you?”
    “Sure. If I’ve got AIDS, are you really going to take me—” I inhaled and swallowed hard.
    “Take you where?”
    “Fuck it. Forget it.”
    “No. Where?”
    “Into your home? Let me sleep on your sheets and eat on your plates? Do you know that when Sammy went home to say goodbye to his family back in Ohio that they made him eat with plastic cutlery? They were afraid to mingle his stuff with theirs in the damn dishwasher. How’s that for saying goodbye?”
    She looked down at the wedding ring on her hand and then stood up and hugged me. “If you’re sick, Michael, yes, I will take you into my home. You can sleep on my sheets and eat on my plates, and you can use my silverware and kiss my baby.”
    It felt enormous, this thing she’d said, there between us. I started to cry and held onto her. I hadn’t been able to cry at a single funeral. I was too worried about whether I had the plague. Too self-involved. I can’t have AIDS, I told myself. But I was terrified. Now I cried and let it all out—the fear and the grief.
    “Are you getting snot in my hair?”
    “Maybe if you didn’t tease it so high I wouldn’t.”
    She squeezed me harder. “Come on.”
    “All right. I’ll go. I’ll get tested.”
    We took a cab to a clinic near Christopher Street. The floors were a filthy gray-white, and the place smelled like rubbing alcohol. The plastic chairs in the waiting room were filled with gay men. Some of them already looked sick, and I suppose they were there hoping against hope that the lost weight, the lesions of Karposi’s sarcoma wasn’t HIV, wasn’t AIDS.
    The nurse gave me a number. We were identified by number only—the shame and stigma was so great then, not to mention the danger of losing health insurance. I’d have to return in two weeks for my results—they wouldn’t give them to you over the telephone for fear you’d blow your brains out or jump out a window if you were positive. Both those options crossed my mind whenever I thought about maybe being positive.
    They were the longest two weeks of my life. I couldn’t write. I sat at my computer and stared at the screen, the cursor mocking me, taunting me with its blinking. Queer. Queer. Queer. Sick. Sick. Sick.
    Lily was the one to take me back for my results. During that two-week period, I didn’t sleep with anyone. I was