Oonya Kempadoo - All Decent Animals

Two lead performers tower close over him, trying.

Slinger just exhales hard, collapses his shoulders, and walks off to the office, while they promise they’ll come up with something, he can trust them.

The manager and Ata know that they will make up something. And the dancers know that halfway through rehearsing it, Slinger will come back with choreography better than theirs and make them start all over again. But they wouldn’t complain. Not to his face.

The manager grimaces and turns to slouch off but catches the tremor in Ata’s face. “He’s HIV, isn’t he?”

She shakes her head but walks into his embrace. His chest is warm and it purrs as he murmurs, “Shhh. It’s okay, you can cry. We’ve lost so many. So many. Shhh.”

* * *

Ata and Pierre help Fraser move from the warm guest room into the bright sun by the flashing pool.

“Sorry, we can’t put it off any longer.”

“I know, I know.” His voice as stiff as his body tensing and clenching around the tube in his stomach.

Maybe the virus moves like the millipede that has fallen into the water, jerking and twisting in the jet stream. Crystals spark and blue light snakes as it dies. Then you can’t even tell if it’s dead, or if the water is still moving it. Whose job is it to tell?

Helen and Fraser’s lawyer-friend arrive precisely on time and step across the blazing grass. Fraser watches them approach, reading the tightness, the grim squinting energy they hold. He sighs deeply and blanches for a second in the white daylight. “I’m ready,” he says. “Let’s talk about this. Not that any of the fuckers who have it ever do, but anyway…”

They all watch him sitting there, fresh and clean, dressed in soft comfortable clothes, with his eyes closed. They wait.

“Yes, go ahead,” he says with his eyes still closed.

Ata looks at his feet, alive again and moist in his Birkenstocks.

“Fraser, you know as hard as it is, there is a moral responsibility with HIV, with AIDS…”

“And since when am I moral?”

“… to contact those you may have exposed to…”

Fraser holds up his hand, eyes still closed. “Could someone help me to the room, please? I am not feeling well.”

Helen and Pierre take him. He asks them to drop the bamboo blinds and leave him to rest. He says he’s sorry.

* * *

“Won’t the doctors or AIDS clinic contact Fraser’s partners?” Ata asks.

Helen frowns, sitting on the edge of the bench, and Pierre spreads his fingers out on the teak tabletop. “I don’t think they do that here,” she murmurs, and Ericka, the lawyer-lady, agrees.

“They only provide testing and a little counseling. They don’t have the right to contact other people…”

Pierre looks up quickly. “They do in some countries. There should be a routine of passing on his information to the public center so they could follow up.”

“They don’t here. They used to trace but it became a mess and the policies … the confidentiality thing too, especially in such a small place.”

“Bloody human rights. I know, the U.N. caused that too but I don’t agree with it.”

“He can’t even tell his mother.” Helen shakes her head repeatedly, like Angelica’s toy dog with its spring neck. “He should … the others. Or we could do it — if he gives us the names. But he can’t even tell his mother. He’s angry.”

“He should be, at himself,” Pierre slips in, and they all stare silently at him for saying it.

Knowledge — that the lovers are entitled to — sits like a shadow over them in broad daylight. Sorrow sleeps inside. In the room just past the philodendron vine, behind the bamboo blinds.

“He needs counseling.”

“I could book two sessions a week for him,” Helen says. “But he said he doesn’t want it. I’ll try to talk to him. He might open up to me easier than a stranger. Is just denial still, right now.”

They all look at the room.

“They’re entitled to know,” Ata says. But if Fraser asks, which one of them would be prepared to break the news? To someone whom they know.

“Terence. Oh gosh, Terence.” Helen holds her head and the lawyer-friend rests a hand on the small of her back.

“You remember him from your birthday, don’t you?” Ata asks Pierre. She watches his face go back and escapes with him to that night. Pierre with his haircut fresh from London, clucking and blushing. She couldn’t kiss him hard enough. Dinner out by this pool, with flambeaux waving lights around them. Thomas had filled beer bottles with kerosene, stuffed rag-wicks in, and stuck them in bamboo poles, fixed all fifty upright. Fraser had sent Vernon and all afternoon he was busy helping, rushing around the Savannah many times, to deliver fifty full balloons — cussing how they flying out escaping, excited with the silliness of it all. They cut the cake like it was their wedding. Fraser and Terence approving and solemn on the side, happy for them and slightly sad about something.

Just from sharing a few moments with Fraser and Terence, Ata could see how irresistible Terence’s intelligence made him. He charmed his students with his professor-knowledge of Caribbean history and literature, as well as current music and film. He was creating an archive, spending his own money on first-edition books and tapes, videos and photos, which others had overlooked. He inspired his students with politics and theory from ancient to first world, to third world. And from the genuine timbre of his voice, and the care with which he chose his words and spoke, Ata sensed he charmed women easily as well. He never overdoes the flirting, Fraser swore — he is so decent, he deserves a perfect life.

That was what Terence was busy creating when Fraser met him. He had moved from Yale to the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, arriving with his beautiful wife, a lovely person and teacher too. With his mother’s approval, Terence had courted and did the right thing by marrying. He was one of these people who worked hard all his life and the right things were his biggest reward. Doing right by his family, he supported his mother and put her upstairs in the brownstone house he bought with his first-world salary, proud that he could buy one at his age and be the right person for his lovely wife, her friends, his friends and colleagues, students, nieces and nephews. When they moved to Trinidad to start their own family, he reassured his wife that she would make friends easily and she did, falling more in love with her husband as they re-created a home full of books and paintings and souvenirs they had collected from their happy vacations all over the world. He’d tell stories about them always being the lone, perfect black couple, in those off-the-path tourist adventures. In Trinidad, the women were openly after this prize husband but his wife’s good heart smiled at them — she trusted her husband. She had welcomed Fraser with black American food and jazz into their homey home. She deserves a true life too, Fraser had said.

Ata remembered Terence’s smile, that birthday night. Out of his big gentle shape, a soft smile and gold wire-rimmed spectacles. He was simply and quietly there. Fraser’s glance at him was melty, in that moment. Soft and strong love all around them. And more beauty from the piano. Long, gorgeous André stroked it, rippling out sounds it had never uttered before. Notes flowed through the open windows, past the dark leaves outside, streaming — rushing feelings together, like only piano music can, sinking them into the settees and love dreams of their own. Close friends. Family. Lovers.

* * *

“What about Vernon? Anybody spoken to him about it?”

“You think they have that kind of relationship?”

Three heads turn to look at Helen while minds stretch back again, to all the introductions and possibilities.