Curled in the Bed of Love by Catherine Brady Page B

blood tests. His T4 cell count is OK . He’s just tired. Too tired to want more than a cuddle when they curl up in bed. For two years they’ve fallen asleep every night in the embrace of new love, spooned together with their arms entwined, but now, after a quick hug, Jordan rolls away from Jim into a sleep he needs so desperately that it must be solitary.
    Usually Jordan invites artists he’s interested in to dinner parties with seven or eight other people, so they’ll be just one of the crowd. But Jordan invited Lawrence to dinner by himself, which means he wants the gallery to show Lawrence’s work more than Lawrence does. Jim has been reduced to the role of quiet housewife, serving up chicken simmered with chickpeas and star anise, clearing dishes, bringing dessert on a tray to the living room, andthen kneeling by the coffee table until the other two are willing to interrupt their study of Lawrence’s portfolio of slides.
    Lawrence and Jordan are talking about Paris, where to stay and where to eat cheaply, and sometimes they lapse into French, as if they’ve forgotten that Jim doesn’t understand them. Even French words sound crude, scatological, coming out of Lawrence’s mouth. He has an air of coarseness about him that inflects his speech, tangles the wild mass of his hair, shimmers in his sloppy gestures.
    Lawrence says he plans to go to Paris later this spring.
    â€œMaybe I should go when you’re there,” Jordan says. He used to go to Paris every year, before he got sick, before he met Jim.
    Jim hasn’t made the effort he should have to share Jordan’s interests. But then there’s the effort Jordan should make. Jim says, “You promised we’d go to Hawaii this spring.”
    Jordan turns to Lawrence, puts a hand on his wrist confidingly. “He wants to go to this place called Kona Village—Kontiki thatched huts and a pool where you lie around in swim trunks and drinkpiña coladas from coconut shells.”
    Jim has wanted to go back to Kona Village for a long time. Even if it was all put on for the tourists, he’d been captivated by how lazy life was there. “You’d look good lying around in swim trunks,” he says to Jordan.
    Lawrence gives Jordan a rudely appraising look. “I was gonna ask you what gym you go to.”
    The truth is, Jordan looks buff thanks to steroids. The AZT he’s taking wastes muscle tissue almost as drastically as the disease, so the doctors automatically put everyone on steroids to beef up before the drug begins to make inroads.
    â€œâ€™Cause my gym . . . I don’t know,” Lawrence says. “It’s such an autoerotic scene. Mirrors on every wall. Some of these guys get hard-ons looking at themselves on the Nautilus machine.”
    â€œSafe sex takes another turn for the worse,” Jordan says.
    Jordan has never looked so beautiful as he does now. There was a time, early in their relationship, when Jordan made Jimagree to help him die if it came to that. Such promises Jim made, lover’s promises like no others. They considered smothering Jordan, debated whether plastic bags or pillows would be better, then thought maybe they could collect enough sleeping pills to do the job. Jim conned one doctor after another into prescribing Vicodin for back pain. It was
their
stockpile,
their
beautiful death: they joked about lighting candles and listening to a Bach concerto at their very own glorious send-off.
    Lawrence reaches for his wine glass with a blunt paw. The glass tips over, threading red wine over the edge of the table onto the carpet, and Jim jumps up and runs for the saltshaker and a rag.
    He shakes salt on the stain and blots it carefully, ignoring Lawrence’s apology. It’s an Oriental carpet, an heirloom from Jordan’s family.
    â€œYou’re such a hausfrau,” Jordan says.
    Jordan can afford to be casual about the plenty with which he grew up, has