The Men from the Boys Read Free Page A

know-Javitz on his community-college faculty pay, Lloyd with his grad-school loans, me barely making enough income to pay taxes. But every year, each of us writes down on a slip of paper the top limit of what we can afford, and then we toss the slips together and add them up. Somehow this quirky little experiment in socialism has worked for us every time.
    Once there, we rent old movies—our shared passion—and invite in the neighbors. A Dietrich night, a Cukor festival, a Liz Taylor cavalcade. But this year, with Javitz being sick, we haven’t yet had a chance to find a place. Actually, I’m ambivalent about doing it again, after everything that happened last summer, but I decide not to bring that up now.
    â€œAll right,” I concede. “But I can’t imagine who’d come to see Luise Rainer.”
    â€œRound up your little boys,” he says, and his smirk looks even more devious with his eyes closed. “We can tell them she was a great actress. They’ll believe anything.”
    â€œAlmost,” I correct him, and of course it’s Eduardo we both remember.
    The snow blasts the windows again. Javitz is quiet for a while. Then he says, “I wonder if Mrs. Maxwell is dead.”
    â€œWho’s Mrs. Maxwell?”
    â€œMy third-grade teacher. She probably is. She was old when I had her.”
    â€œYeah,” I agree, “she’s probably dead.”
    This is Javitz’s newest trick: thinking of someone for no apparent reason, someone we met briefly years ago or some friend of his I’ve never known, and wondering out loud if they’re dead. Sometimes I know; sometimes I don’t.
    Javitz thinks about death a lot, ever since he decided to leave teaching after twenty-three years and go on disability. His T cells had dropped to below one hundred, dangerous news not so long ago, but who can say anymore? That’s the thing these days: we know less than we ever thought. Javitz’s friend Ernie has four —not forty, but four T cells—and he’s been fine for over a year. Javitz’s T’s have actually been rising, so I don’t know why he thinks so much about death. He isn’t going to die, at least not soon. I sit here, thinking about little girls trapped in rooms with malevolent radiators waiting to gorge themselves on their flesh, and I know that yet again Javitz will come home, and that this time he’ll be able to do a little less for himself than before. And then he’ll get sick again and back here we’ll come and then home again—just as it has been for the last ten years. The curse of the long-term survivor, Javitz calls it.
    â€œDo you remember when we were at Hands Around the Capitol?” he asks. I nod. Of course I do. “I tricked with that guy. What was his name?”
    â€œJames,” I tell him.
    â€œOh, yeah. Is he dead?”
    â€œHow would I know?”
    â€œI was just wondering.” He closes his eyes. “Ask Lloyd. Maybe he knows. He tricked with him, too.”
    And he might very well. Lloyd stays in touch with his tricks, even falls in love with them a little bit. I could never understand that—at least, not before last summer. It’s a dangerous game, falling in love with tricks. They can break your heart in a whole different way than a lover can.
    Lloyd was supposed to come with me here tonight to Beth Israel to see Javitz, but he got beeped at the last minute. He’s a psychologist for a crisis program over at Mass General. Mom always wanted my sister to grow up and marry a doctor; I beat her to it. “Tell Javitz for me,” Lloyd said on his way out the door, “he better not die or anything when I’m not there.”
    Lloyd loves Javitz in a way I can’t: free of guilt, free of a history that lingers between us. I envy that love. What must it be like, I wonder, when there’s nothing that hangs around in the back of your mind like dirty socks