The Burning Plain Read Free

know how long I sat there looking at his picture before I was roused to the front door by the doorbell. I peered through the peephole at my friend Richie Florentino, his fist poised to bang on the door. I opened it.
    Tall and thin, his long face was framed by a luxuriance of thick, wavy dark hair and he had the square-jawed glamour of a forties movie star, a look he carefully cultivated. Always draped in the latest fashions, he was wearing a burnt-orange sports coat over a linen shirt of paler orange, a silk tie the color of new grass and cream-colored linen trousers. On his large feet were lime-green suede loafers with brass buckles forming by the letters GV, Gianni Versace, his favorite designer. Richie lived in an apartment in West Hollywood that had once belonged to Jean Harlow and edited a magazine called L.A. Mode that catalogued the antics of the rich and famous. His lover of twenty years, Joel Miller, was a studio executive. Richie claimed descent from the de Medicis and a family fortune going back five hundred years. His friends knew never to question his veracity, but simply assumed that, out of any ten statements, Richie had made up nine of them.
    “Good, you’re home,” Richie said, sweeping past me in a flood of Guerlain’s Derby. “Oh, honey, it’s so hot in here. Turn on the air-conditioning.”
    “You’ve been here before,” I said. “You know my house isn’t air-conditioned.”
    “But I keep hoping.” He flung himself into an armchair and lit a Marlboro Light. “You don’t mind, do you?”
    “Would it matter if I did?”
    He pretended to think it over. “No.”
    “I’ll find you an ashtray.”
    “You like the coat?” he shouted. “It’s Versace.”
    “Who would’ve guessed?” I replied, slipping, gratefully, into his mocking locutions. I handed him a saucer for his cigarette.
    Richie was the kind of friend who touched down in my life like a whirlwind, rearranged the landscape and then blew on. I wasn’t always happy to see him, but today I was glad because whatever he wanted—and it was always something—would, at the very least, drive me out of my grief.
    He picked up the saucer, scrutinized it, pretended to weigh it in his palm. “Baccarat?”
    “Cost Plus,” I said. “It’s good to see you, Richie. How are you?”
    “Not dead yet,” he said, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth like Bogart.
    “No, really.”
    “Really? I feel great, Henry.”
    Richie had AIDS (“But darling,” he liked to say, “all the best people do.”) I’d met him at a hospital where I’d gone to visit Josh. Richie came into Josh’s room, trailing his IV behind him, an unlit cigarette clamped in his mouth and excused himself to the small balcony off the room where, with Josh’s permission, he could light up. At one point, he’d been so sick that he’d planned his memorial service, but then he’d bounced back and now he was on a regimen of protease inhibitors, the new miracle antivirals that were bringing so many people with AIDS back from the brink of death.
    “My viral load is almost undetectable,” he continued. “My T-cells have gone from fourteen to eight hundred and they’re still climbing.” He had dropped all affectation and there was awe in his voice. “If this isn’t cured, Henry, I don’t know what cured means.”
    “I’m happy for you,” I said.
    “It could all change tomorrow,” he replied. “I know people the drugs stopped working for, or never worked for, and no one knows about their long-term effectiveness, but I’ve never lived in the long term. I’m sorry Josh didn’t get to try them.”
    “I am, too,” I said. “He was like the soldier who gets killed the day before armistice.”
    “I think about the people who didn’t make it—Mario, Steven—and wonder, why me?”
    “Every lawyer knows you never ask a question of a witness to which you do not already know the answer. It works in life, too. How’s Joel?”
    “Three things in life are