Death Warrants and Contracts
David and the Lion’s Den, chapter 7
I spotted the crumpled-up printout on the floor and gasped. I must have dropped it, I figured. Stupid of me! How could I leave something so important just lying around?
As I smoothed it out and read it, though, I tasted bile in my mouth. It definitely wasn’t mine.
Howie and I had gone back to the clinic a couple of days before. I’d worked myself up pretty good. I hadn’t been able to paint properly that morning. I’d tried but I couldn’t concentrate. My fingers wouldn’t cooperate.
I’d stared at the white paint that would slowly poison me if I weren’t careful, would rob me of my mind over the course of decades if I didn’t take precautions. I wondered if it even mattered. HIV kills a fuck of a lot faster than chronic lead poisoning.
When Howie showed up, I’d barely even started. I had a simple outline roughed in — a middle-aged Puerto Rican woman resting in a leather recliner — but the morning was basically a waste.
By the time we’d subway-ed to the testing center, my stomach was in knots — actually hurting. Howie’s relentless voice was an annoying fly that wouldn’t stop buzzing around my ears. I had to grip with all my self control not to lash out.
When they called my name and I stepped into the counselor’s office, I was composing my will in my head. Richard can have that Hilda painting. When the guy smiled, shook my hand, passed over the printout, and told me the good news, I needed a moment before I could understand.
I floated out of his office clutching a fistful of free condoms, safer-sex pamphlets, and a whole new appreciation for being alive and healthy. I stopped being immortal that summer, but that afternoon I received a temporary stay of execution.
I guess I was too overwhelmed to pay attention to Howie. Oh, sure, I asked him if his results were OK, but I must not have been paying very close attention.
What was it he said? Something like, “Same as usual,” or, “Just like always.” But — damn! — he’d been smiling and joking around.
And so now, here I stood behind his bar, smoothing out his death warrant. Such a tiny little difference. Just one little “x.” Where mine had filled the box next to ELISA non-reactive, Howie’s marked the box beside reactive.
“David!”
My head jerked up, and there he stood at the top of the stairs. “Hold the bar down for a few more minutes? The fish guy’s here, and Alonzo’s busy.”
I had my speech worked out before he got back. It was elegant and supportive. All the right touches. I was going to be the perfect friend. When he stepped behind the bar, though, all I could do was ball the printout up in my hand and choke out, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I’m sure my face was the color of an old brick. I kept seeing Howie in one of my paintings, shrunken and waxy. My throat hurt when I tried to breathe.
He looked down at the test results and then back up at me. “Because I didn’t want to see you like this.” His arm wrapped around me. “And because it’s not a big deal. I’m not sick.”
Incredible. He was comforting ME. “David, I’ve been positive for three years. Longer, probably way longer. That’s just the first time I got tested.”
“Why then?” I stammered. “Why did you come with me?”
“So you’d have company, goofball. Whaddya think? We worked our balls off to get free , anonymous testing. So I use it. Who knows — maybe one day they’ll say I’m negative.”
He pried the paper out of my fist. “I could swear I took this home with me. Where’d you find it?”
I pointed at the floor as he smoothed it out on the bar. “Dude, this isn’t mine,” he muttered, sounding puzzled. “That’s not my testing number.”
Hilda perched a tiny pair of reading glasses on her nose, fingered a delicate chain that hung from the frames, and started reading. Carla relaxed on the bench across from me, gently airing her inch-deep makeup with an elaborate silk fan.
The sun pierced a layer of steamy air to heat the potted plants that released an emerald perfume to match my mood.
Richard had poured over the contract first — the night before. “I dunno, kid,” he’d frowned. “Looks OK to me. Nothing blatantly crooked about it. You retain all rights and control, blah, blah, blahditty blah. But what do I know? I’m a Madison Avenue man. You need to run this by a lawyer.”
“Like I can afford that?”
“Hm… Good point. What about Hilda?”
“What about her?” What I thought is — Hilda’s just this eccentric old lady. She sits around the garden sipping coffee out of a paper cup like all the other weird characters there — me included — with no place else to go. She wears faded house dresses, chats in Yiddish, and entertains an elderly transvestite prostitute who carries a whip.
“David, Hilda’s a retired tax attorney — one of the City’s best in her day. That’s how I met her. She represented my firm in a dispute with the IRS twenty years ago.”
“Hilda? Our Hilda? Are we talking about the same person?”
Richard laughed. One dry bark. “Kid, you wanna live here, you gotta learn not to assume things about people. They usually aren’t who you think they are.”
I thought his smile went a little weird right then, but I’d run the contract down to the garden the very next morning, anyway.
“Ja,” Hilda murmured, squinting against the sun. “Goot, I think. But we have no big hurry, I also think. Nein?”
I shrugged as she continued. “Is standard agreement of representation for commission. I see maybe 10,000 of these in 30 years. But I tell you true, is not my expertise, the exact terms. I make some phone call before you sign, yes?”
Carla minced from behind her fan. “Good thinking! Renaud’s not a crook, but Miss Fancy French Art Dealer can be SUCH a shark at the bargaining table.”
“You know him too?” I asked, perplexed.
She winked at me over the top of her Japanese silk, eyes muddy with melting mascara. “Mistress Carla knows everybody, Cookie.”
I shook my head and turned back to Hilda. “The messenger said he needed it back today. I was planning on running it down to the gallery later.”
“He can wait. If he pesters you, Liebchen, you tell him your lawyer is reviewing. Ja,” she nodded briskly. “You come see me tomorrow morning. Not before.”
I started setting up an unfinished canvas and we talked as I worked. I’d barely got this one started. She’d died two days after I met her. It was getting to be that I was only interested in healthier looking subjects. I’d had to abandon two portraits because I didn’t have enough to work with. I thought this one might be OK. I’d roughed in all her features, now I just had to squint and remember her spark.
“Hilda?” I asked as I mixed pigments. “When did you become a lawyer? How did you manage law school with your daughter and everything?”
“Ach, but I was still single. My husband I met at the bar exam.”
“But …” I protested as I squinted and squeezed more flake white into my mix. “Didn’t you tell me about taking your daughter to the museums in Vienna? When she was still a baby?”
“No, no, Liebchen. Not my daughter. She came much later. My little boy.”
“Oh! I thought Sarah was your only child.” She’d often shown off Sarah’s work to me, her credit under photos in the Times. She worked at the Washington bureau and Hilda was enormously proud that her daughter’s subjects often included senators and presidents.
Her voice reached for me very quietly from the bench. “No, first came Kurt.”
I heard Carla sigh, but I blundered on, oblivious. “So, how did you take care of him while you were in school? I guess he must have been old enough to look after himself by then?”
She looked at me oddly. “Yes, I suppose so. Maybe 14 or 15. A big boy he would have been.”
“Would have?” I asked, troubled to see pain building in her soft grey eyes. “I’m sorry … if you don’t want to talk about it…”
I applied my brush carefully, working on my memory of the eyes, stippling around tiny folds and creases.
“Kurt didn’t come here,” Hilda continued after a moment. “I almost didn’t either. I almost didn’t get away from them.”
I peered over my canvas. “From the Nazis. I remember you telling me about it. What happened exactly? What was it like when they came?”
Her voice and her eyes turned to the same cold steel. “Things happened such that a young person like you could not imagine. But this is not so important, the details, no? We are all reading stories of those days in our books. Mine is just one more little tale out of so many.”
I’d read Anne Frank in 8th grade just like we all do. I’d seen movies about concentration camps. I’d never thought of it as being close enough to connect to. I knew it was real, but it was history — stories buried deep in the middle of an impersonal fog.
My eyes must have prompted her. “Do you really want to know, David?”
So, of course I said yes. I think I even said please. It’s hard — remembering being so young.
Tell me a story.
I want to know things.
Show me your soul.
She did, and I could never look at Hilda the same way again.
You just read chapter 7 of a character-driven mystery set in Greenwich Village during the worst of the HIV Plague Years. David, Jill, Hilda, Richard, and Howie are walking a path that leads to intense friendship and love, to the creation of gorgeous but wrenching art, and to the unraveling of a series of horrific events that nobody sees, not even as they happen.Because sometimes what you’re looking at isn’t what you see.
