Page 65 of Here We Go Again
Rosemary glances over at Logan to find she’s already glancing at her. Her eyes look like honey in the morning sun.
Rosemary pulls her gaze away.
“We lived together, in Bar Harbor, for five years,” Joe continues, “but we met long before that. At NYU in ’81. My junior year of undergrad. I was a good Catholic boy back then. I was living the life my parents wanted, even though I’d moved across the country to escape them. I went to mass every Sunday, I was active in the on-campus ministry, and I was even dating a good Catholic girl named Alma Ortiz.”
Rosemary tries to picture twenty-year-old Joe: Bible tucked under his arm and a girl’s hand in his. Nothing feels right about that image.
Joe keeps talking, and his voice begins to take on that rhythmic quality she associates with his lectures. “Alma was from New Orleans, and my family lived in San Antonio at the time. Junior year, we decided to carpool home for the holidays. The plan was for me to stay with her family for a few days, and then my brother would come to pick me up on Christmas Eve and take me home. Alma had a Pontiac station wagon, and to help cover the cost of gas, we put up one of those bulletin board ads offering to drive other students who lived along the way. Remy was the only person who answered.”
“Like inWhen Harry Met Sally?” Logan asks.
“Yes, exactly like that, except my girlfriend was there too. But Remy…” Here Joe pauses. Sighs. “He was the prettiest boy I’dever seen, and I felt this immediate need to know him, to impress him. We talked the whole drive, about Cervantes and Márquez and Goya. Audre Lorde and Angela Davis. About being brown and Black in a place like NYU, navigating spaces that weren’t meant for us. About Freire, and artists we loved. He showed me his sketchbook, and I showed him my poems. In his presence, I felt like I was transforming into the person I was always meant to be. I… I loved him instantly.”
Rosemary forces herself not to look at Logan, not to think about friendship and kisses and becoming your truest self around someone who makes you feel safe.
“When we arrived at Remy’s parents’ house in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, I broke up with Alma and I stayed with Remy instead.”
Logan whistles. “Joe, that’s abrutalway to break up with someone. And this is coming from me, the king of brutal breakups.”
Joe looks entirely unapologetic. “Alma was comfortable. Remy was real.”
Absolutely not. Rosemary will not look at Logan.
“It was the most perfect week of my life. I spent the holidays with his family, sleeping on the floor of his childhood bedroom. Remy’s parents knew he was gay, and they just… loved him anyway. That was such a miracle to me.”
“What about your parents?” Logan asks gently.
Joe takes a bite of his porridge and swallows. “Alma’s father called my father to tell him what happened, what he… suspected. My brother never came to pick me up for Christmas.”
“Joe, I’m so—”
“No sorrys, Rosie darling.” Joe offers her a wan smile. “I chose what I chose, and I knew choosing Remy would come with pain. I chose him anyway.”
She can’t help it any longer. Rosemary looks at Logan, andoh, the ache of yesterday’s kiss floods her bones. She’s fourteen again, tasting that popsicle mouth. She’s thirty-two, and that mouth is astrawberry milkshake. If she kissed her right now, would she taste like homemade tortillas and green chilies and Pueblo pie, like sugar and spice? Like something real?
Yesterday, kissing Logan in the rain felt like writing when the words were good. It felt like everything inside her was clicking together, instinct and art melding in her fingertips, likethatwas the thing she was put on this earth to do. Write stories and kiss Logan Maletis.
“Remy and I moved in together as soon as we got back to New York,” Joe says, pulling Rosemary out of her own thoughts. “I came out to our small circle of friends. I stopped going to church. My parents wouldn’t talk to me, but I didn’t care. We were young, idealistic artists living on the Lower East Side. We thought nothing could touch us, until everything did. Remy was my first… everything.”
“You were an artist?” Logan asks with that pouty mouth Rosemary can’t stop staring at.
“Poetry. That’s what I studied at NYU. After undergrad, I got a job teaching at a Waldorf school to support myself while I did open mic nights and poetry readings. On the weekends, we did drag shows, making just enough money to cover the cost of submissions to magazines that might publish my work. Remy waited tables to pay the rent and painted every other second of the day. We lived above a Middle Eastern restaurant, and the apartment always smelled like falafel and turpentine, and I truly thought we would never stop loving each other.”
The words fall out of his mouth in that musical voice he used as a teacher, and Rosemary feels like she’s listening to him read a poem she knows will rip her heart out in the end.
“So, what happened?”
“The AIDS crisis happened.”
Logan’s tan face goes visibly ashen across the table. “Remy… he didn’t…die, did he?”
“No,” Joe answers, “but so many of our friends did. It waseverywhere, all the time. The specter of death. I felt like I was choking on the air I breathed on the way to work.” The tears come quickly to Joe’s eyes, and then they’re in Rosemary’s eyes, too, as she absorbs his hurt. Joe hasn’t publicly cried over his prognosis in the last four years, but here he is, sobbing now at the memory of everything he lost. She’s always known there are parts of Joe’s queer experience she will never fully understand as a white woman, but she’d never allowed the true horrors of what he lived through to sink in.
“Remy was always the fighter, and he got involved right away. Attended Act Up meetings, went to protests, got arrested—so completely desperate to get the government to care that we were dying. He always coped with tragedy by turning outward to those around him, to people he could help. I coped by turning inward.”
He shakes his head like he still carries guilt over such a valid reaction to the sheer terror of an epidemic of that magnitude.
“I never wanted to leave our apartment. I stopped writing poetry. I sat on the couch watchingMary Tyler Moorereruns, wishing I could live in the version of America I saw on TV. I was so consumed by the fear of losing Remy that I started losing him while he was still right in front of me.”
