She scrabbles around 

Outdistancing the gunshots
yours mine no matter

 

little dogs in the street

late at night

wandering in packs

sniffing the air

for weakened seizures

 

little dogs in the street

late at night

tethered by leads

scanning the road

for cowed retrievers

 

little dogs in the street

late at night

bark in time

warning imposters

with righteous anger

 

little dogs in the street

late at night

envy the cat

snuggled beside her

dream weavers sighing

 

little dogs in the street

late at night…

 

nyc 3.19.21

 

PLUMS

 

Lana Cook remembered exactly how she’d met Rodolfo. It was nearly fifteen years ago, in a part of Manhattan she rarely frequented anymore. 

Like Lana, the decade of the ’70s had been looking for the exit. She had been recently divorced. Her future was economically unsound, but she had immediately returned to painting with the renewed passion of a newly single woman who had learned her lesson. Her friend Manu, a Basque writer wanted her to meet Rodolfo Gomariz, an Argentine painter who had invited Manu to his studio.

On a sweltering morning in August, Lana and Manu stood under a metal canopy at the far west end of Fourteenth Street near Gansevoort Street. The Meatpacking District, as it was called, possessed a split personality driven by the time of day or night. An abandoned elevated railway line near Tenth Avenue added to the demilitarized feel of the place. Lana suspected the same characters who frequented the bars and sex clubs were dead asleep in other parts of the city, or on nearby Christopher Street. Manu would have been shocked to learn the unmarked doors they had walked past were entrances to places like 
The Anvil and The Mineshaft. And probably appalled to discover his friend Lana had been, on occasion, to some of those clubs with her gay male friends. 

Those friends had introduced her to a nightlife that began after midnight and lasted until they retired to some greasy spoon at daybreak, where she shared tables with frazzled, foot-sore drag queens staging a last curtain call. The sight of a bare-chested man’s naked buttocks bulging from leather chaps no longer surprised her. Once, after having been sneaked into a club dressed as a boy, she had laughed so hard she nearly gave the game away. The ruse proved fruitless. Instead of beefy naked men engaged in extraordinary sexual feats she’d only heard about, she’d seen merely one scrawny fellow in a jock strap swaying dispassionately on a swing above the bar. After fighting self-consciousness at her friends’ playful threat of audience participation, an off night had been just fine with Lana and she’d been secretly relieved. Other excursions, less charged, had brought her to The Spike for a Mother’s Day brunch as the guest of an older, leather-clad friend.

On that August morning Lana was coolly outfitted in a white sleeveless t-shirt under a pearl-gray, windowpane-check cotton dress from Putumayo. Her long, light-brown hair was pulled back in a single braid to which she had attached an artificial lily. She wore simple woven leather huaraches. Her legs and arms were radiantly tanned. Post-divorce, she wanted to feel feminine again. 

Manu was a broad-shouldered man in his early seventies. He and twenty-seven-year-old Lana had developed a robust, if unlikely, friendship that entailed long walks traversing the city, debating art and politics and life. Manu was enthralled and had his wife’s blessing because it exercised his old bones. He was a Basque Separatist, far from his embattled homeland. A full head of winter-white hair capped raging eyebrows. He preferred always to wear a jacket and tie, even in the sweat-stained summer months. 

He studied the scrap of paper in his bear-like hand until 
Lana grabbed it from him. She looked up from the scrawled address beyond a raw carcass that hung inches from her face. Neither of them mentioned the smell. She pointed to a red metal door and said, “This 
is the place.” 

Manu, who often regaled an international set of urbane dinner guests with tales of bloody revolt in his country, stepped back gingerly. “Lana, these are dead cows,” he said.

Bracing the back of her hand against a flank, she shoved the carcass aside, dislodging a few flies. “After me,” she giggled.

Later, Manu telephoned to tell her what a strong impression she had made on Rodolfo. Manu’s wife, Miriam, joined in on another phone—a habit of theirs—and reported that Rodolfo had called in high spirits to tell them he was in love. He wanted to marry Lana! She was taken aback. Not because they hadn’t clicked instantly. Lana was impressed with his work; sweeping canvases of somber urban abstracts. Rodolfo was handsome in a way that brought a flush to her cheeks, with an aristocratic bearing that melded seamlessly with his apparent poverty. He made her laugh and she was charmed by his attention, his unabashed inquiry into her own painting. Lana guessed he was a little older than she. But that was in actual years. In life-lived years he was well beyond her. 

They’d drunk sherry and enjoyed a rustic spread of herbed olives, fresh baguette, quince, and the Manchego cheese that Manu had brought. Music filled the loft. Caetano Veloso’s seductive voice shamelessly explored her spine and the heat in the un-air-conditioned loft caressed her. The room smelled of turpentine and oil paint and Manu’s strong cigarettes. She’d felt light-headed, seduced by it all. 

“But Miriam, that’s impossible. He can’t be in love with me.” 

Manu interjected. He was adamant. “Why no, Lana? He’s very handsome. A very good painter, no?” 

Miriam also persisted. “Lana, he was very taken with you.” 

Lana, unable to stop herself, blurted, “But he’s gay!” 

A few months after they’d met, Rodolfo had hosted a party in his loft for a friend, a celebration of sorts to which Lana had been invited. 

When she arrived, guests were still sparse. Shyness overtook her and she found a quiet corner to wait for Manu and his wife. The loft filled quickly and she wondered if she should circulate, if she had somehow missed her friends’ arrival. A man of indeterminate age in a rather bizarre getup, even by the standards of the rest of the party, made his way through the revelers. His rosebud lips puckered in his face, painted to look like a Kabuki actor. Shellacked hair rose in a black pompadour high above his whitened forehead. He headed right for her and spoke softly in a German accent as he offered her his hand, raised as a champion show dog might lift a paw. 

“How do you do?” he whispered. “Can you tell me, vere ist ze bathroom?” 

Lana, bemused, pointed in a direction and he floated through the crowd. Rodolfo swooped in. “My friend, Klaus Nomi. The guest of honor,” Rodolfo beamed. “He’s a jenyoos. We are so excited for heem. He’s singing with Daveed Bowiee—.

“I thought you said he was a pastry chef?” 

“He ees a pastry chef,” Rodolfo laughed, and left her to greet a fresh round of guests.

It was a wild affair—a bombastic mix of personalities and nationalities, genders specific and not so. Lana watched as Rodolfo, swarmed by a colony of fawning poseurs, basked in their giddy adoration. The intense level of excitement was exhilarating. Everyone danced as uninhibitedly as they drank and ate, laughed and argued. Manu held forth among a clutch of Spaniards in fervent political discourse under the smokers’ gauzy canopy. Strangers chatted up Lana in Spanish and French. Some spoke Portuguese. There was no language barrier to gesticulation and laughter and Lana, strangely, felt easily connected. She allowed herself to be drawn into a graceful tangle of dancers, swaying in a marijuana trance as if it were second nature.

Laughter slipped into the streets with departing guests who tripped carelessly over uneven cobblestones into a cold blue daybreak. Earlier, Manu had suggested dropping Lana at her apartment, but Rodolfo drew Lana to him. 

“I take good care of her. Don’t you worry, old man.”

Lana, high from the music, the wine and the pot, sensed the opening of a new chapter and played out a scenario over and over in her sweetly muddled mind. Would she have sex with him? If he was gay what did it matter? Maybe—surely—he was bisexual. 

They stood in the doorway in a brash, newfound place—eager and calculating at the same time. Rodolfo clasped Lana’s waist affectionately as the acolytes, the last to leave, exchanged pouty air kisses with him and minced past Lana, boldly ignoring her. Later, after he had made them strong coffee and while they were clearing up, she asked about the young men. “I have a lot of gay friends. You can tell me….”

Lana witnessed a meteoric eclipse in his eyes, a brief yet overpowering shadow, dispelled instantly in a flash of white teeth. 

He slipped a record onto the turntable. “No, La-a-a-na, for me only women.” He took her hand and dropped a small, ripe plum into her open palm. 

“It’s kind of late in the season for these. Where did you get…?” 

He lowered his eyelids and stretched his full height above her, covering her hand with both of his. “I can get anything for you.” A woman sang in Portuguese, her voice a muscular expression of lament, its meaning Lana could only intuit.

Her comment was forgotten. Rodolfo won a Guggenheim Fellowship and Lana watched, fascinated, as his reputation and his circle of friends grew. He prepared intimate meals when it was just the two of them. Impromptu parties materialized out of otherwise quiet afternoons, and she found her way easily around his kitchen. Lana listened raptly as he sketched out his future. The one-man shows in SoHo were not enough. 

“La-a-a-na, I have beeg ideas.” He ran, then, with artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. She was not invited along. He still wooed her, but the intensity leveled to an affectionate joke between them. Yes, of course she would marry him—someday.

Until AIDS put the fear into those who had the power to close the bars and bath houses, some of her gay friends still frequented Badlands and The Mineshaft. Danger went hand in hand with sexual bondage. But the playground proved intolerable when a murderous drive-by shooting scattered the men outside The Ramrod. 

If Lana was at all unsure of Rodolfo, doubt sharpened at parties or at a vernissage for Rodolfo’s latest exhibition, where he encountered men who were bolder. His disdain for them was palpable and he kept his eyes averted when introduced, but she caught a flicker of interest, a covert recognition. Later these men revealed to her that they had witnessed Rodolfo—or somebody who looked very much like him—engaging in sex play or cruising the treacherous territory of the piers.

Rodolfo dismissed her encouragement to “come out” as trespassing. “You know them,” she ventured. Once he became angry with her, she never spoke of it again. 

If he mentioned someone in his crowd, “La-a-a-na, I am a frahnd to Jean-Michel. What I can do? Terrible, terrible, the drugs,” she knew what kind of friend he meant. 

Lana remarried. Her husband—Ian, an English musician—eagerly embraced New York nightlife. Many of the clubs she had frequented and grown tired of were now his venues, and she ignored a mercurial relationship with rank caves like CBGB’s, returning to cheer his onstage bass playing. 

The first place she brought Ian was Petrol. Rodolfo, bored with painting, had flung himself into an entrepreneurial role and commanded an abandoned corner of Avenue B on the Lower East Side. With minimal attention to décor he transformed the formerly defunct gas station into a hip bar and performance space for the emerging trendsetters from abroad who flocked to New York City, ravenous for a bite of fertile urban underbelly. Alcohol was served illegally. One responded to the bartender’s query, “Congas or sín gas?” and vodka flowed surreptitiously into ice-blue drinks. 

Ian’s first encounter with Rodolfo was on a bitterly cold night. While Rodolfo fed a hunk of discarded timber into a blazing makeshift stove, one of the avant-garde writers published under Petrol’s imprimatur—a Nuyorican poet—spat out his poetry as he pelted a worshipful audience with condoms. Ian loved it and he and Rodolfo got on famously. 

Rodolfo moved to Brooklyn. Williamsburg would be, he predicted, the next big thing. Artists were attracted to the generous space and light, to the sense of entitled discovery an intrepid newcomer gets when renovated derelict overshadows entrenched residents. He put his shoulder to the dirtiest grindstones alongside day laborers, and in no time he was a sought-after contractor. In a factory building he’d renovated at the end of Berry Street, he carved out a sizeable loft for himself. 

Rodolfo had been ardently pursuing the lead singer of a band called Deus Ex Machina. Elvira was a sculpted Danish beauty, severe if you didn’t know her. Her ermine hair teased into an operatic frenzy to match her outsized voice. The Goth-driven band behind her generated a hard-core following. Rodolfo plagued Lana, moaning of his unrequited love for the singer, who coldly rejected his advances. He dragged Lana to all of her shows and stared white-hot at Elvira, frothed in billowing vintage gowns. He laid exotic blooms at her feet during the performance. Lana cautioned against stalking. 

And then, inexplicably, he and the Dane were a couple. He became her Svengali, dismissed her band, monitored her, and crafted her every move. She would be bigger than Madonna. Lana, disturbed, had pulled away for a while, but eventually came to see that sweet-natured Elvira was wholly dependent on Rodolfo and had entrusted her fate to him.

The wedding took place in the loft on Berry Street, presided over by a bald Buddhist monk in a saffron robe. Elvira was gowned spectacularly in yards of antique white satin, her hair embroidered with outlandish silk flowers, while Rodolfo was outfitted entirely in black. Never one to underestimate an impression, he wore a morning coat and a wide-brimmed fedora. A silken black veil hid his face. 

The couple exchanged plain gold bands, surrounded by collective disbelief. Guests gave Rodolfo wide berth, and a studied friendliness pervaded the surreal atmosphere of the after party. An Afro-Caribbean band went largely unnoticed until the guests had downed copious amounts of champagne. Commanding one end of the loft was the marriage bed, a grand four-poster. It was a gift from the Rivington Street Welders, the same artists who’d constructed the infamous iron fence around Petrol. The bed, sprung from a dark fairy tale, was heaped with duvets covered in lush funereal fabrics—dark plum-colored velvet, embossed black silk—its four iron tentacles curled against the ceiling. 

Seated alone on the bed, Rodolfo motioned for Lana. He took her hand in his and she was shocked by its coldness. “Tell me you love me,” he whispered. 

“Of course, of course,” she said. She and Ian loved both of them. 

“No, La-a-a-na, say you love me.” 

She squeezed his hand, trying to warm it with her own. “I do love you,” she said.

He lifted the dark veil from his wide-brimmed black hat, slowly. “Kiss me.” Lana brushed his damp cheek. “No, on the lips.” He held her face in his hands, her lips pillowed on his, for a long time.

Elvira’s career demanded all of his attention and Lana saw little of him after the ceremony. Rumors began to circulate; speculation boiled like an unwatched pot. He was losing weight or he was bloated. He was madly creative or he was rueful and detached. 

Lana pressed Elvira, who seemed oblivious to anything but the possibility that Rodolfo had some unshakable flu. 

Lana and Ian attended the premiere of Rodolfo’s pet project, meant to be a starring vehicle for Elvira. An audience of downtown luminaries took in Rodolfo’s dark tale of battling lovers, role reversal, a hyper-realistic set design of a bombed-out urban landscape. Lana found the opera confusing at best and overwrought at worst. Critics called it ambitious but pronounced that it fell short. Elvira, they wrote, though obviously talented, seemed out of her depth. Rodolfo, in black, looked wan and angry. The opera closed after three performances.

They saw less of the couple until Elvira telephoned in a panic. Rodolfo was painting over his canvases. It was a mess, she cried, bizarre, nightmarish images. And they were broke. Lana pressed Elvira for more information. Was he ill? How could they help? They would go right away to Brooklyn. Elvira dissuaded Lana and instead begged to meet her in the city. Lana was shocked at her appearance, the careful attention to hair and makeup no longer in evidence. Absent the garnish, Elvira seemed in a state of torpor. Lana gave her the money and made her promise to keep in touch.

Lana and Ian’s invitation for a night out to cheer them up was readily accepted, but Elvira pleaded, “Please, nothing fancy, make it early.” In an Indian restaurant on East Sixth Street that Lana knew well, the three of them chatted lightheartedly while Rodolfo gazed around the nearly empty dining room. He had lost weight. His shirt ballooned over his distended belly. Elvira fussed and spoke softly to him, as if he were a child. Midway through the meal, he rose from the table and shuffled toward the bathroom. After a while Elvira, discomfited by his absence, started from the table. Rodolfo appeared clutching the hem of his shirt. He stepped gingerly as he approached. He was completely naked from the waist down. Elvira, stricken with anguish, rushed to dress him. They left their unfinished meal. Lana made apologies along with a generous tip.

Keith Haring was dead. Basquiat was dead. Klaus Nomi had died in the same hospital where Lana was visiting Rodolfo. She’d lost so many friends to AIDS. Some, like her friend Brendan, still made art. Bren, an overtly political conceptual performance artist, was HIV positive. A U.S. embargo on the drugs for HIV caused him to consider leaving New York, but a return to Ireland would be too painful. His lover—Adrian, an Argentine—had a job waiting for him in London and wanted Bren to go with him, where he would be better taken care of. Adrian had enlightened Lana as to the shame of gay Latin-American men. At home, even the unmarried ones avoided the stigma with bisexual relationships. It was why there were so many of them in New York.

Turner, an impoverished British writer with expensive taste, bragged about his sexual conquests, scoffed at protection, and boasted of hiring rent boys, sometimes nine or a dozen at a time. Lana found out eventually that he was whoring himself out. Another friend, a paying customer, had told her. So far, Turner was untouched by the disease. 

Lana was now a middle-aged married woman with a punky bleached-blonde haircut who wore comfortably distressed linen. She’d had to ration her time for painting and go back to work. She and her husband both had. New York was an expensive city. She stood quietly in Rodolfo’s hospital room.

“No, no, no.” 

Lana Cook, mute and uncomfortable, regarded Rodolfo’s still handsome face, his pronounced forehead struck with a single thick eyebrow drawn from a brush loaded with India ink. A puckish glint had been dimmed for some time, but she detected sparks again; coal-black irises speckled with gold leaf. His aquiline nose pinched into an elegant curve. Teeth still white and even, but ill-fitting in his gaunt face, forced his mouth into a menacing grin. The full beard was new. His flawless hands danced tenuously across her offering.

She had chosen with care but now he was displeased. Artfully arranged on the bed table, nesting in a white plastic bag, was the fruit she had brought him. It was already into November and late-season plums were hard to come by. His last-minute request that morning had left Lana barely enough time, but she’d found the obscenely expensive fruit in a gourmet specialty market on Third Avenue. Further east, his request would have proved more of a challenge. Second Avenue boasted mostly restaurants and bars. It was chock-a-block with multifarious havens for boisterous students, aggressive social climbers, and bone-weary construction workers—all easily accommodated in their choice of libation. When she was younger, Lana had foraged for cheap vintage clothing among the many charity thrift shops on First Avenue. At York Avenue it was high-end auction houses, the antiseptic grandeur of acclaimed hospitals, like the one Rodolfo was in, and the leafy, gated enclave called the Rockefeller University, which gave the neighborhood the air of a separate reality. 

 “I’ll cut one up for you. Maybe?” She looked toward the door. “I could get the nurse to—.” 

“No,” he whispered hoarsely. “No plums.” 

She felt helpless and gripped the bed railing. 

“I want a banana. La-a-a-na, why didn’t you bring me a bana-a-a-na?”

Lana pouted. He had often confounded her, genially poked fun at her by exaggerating her name, and this is what she had always resorted to: curling her lower lip into a moist rebuttal. It usually made him laugh and softened her vexation with him.

 “You asked for these. You said the kind you liked. Remember?” Lana moved to the side of the bed and reached for a smooth blackish-purple orb. She hesitated. She picked another. After months of ignoring her calls, he’d reappeared. He didn’t want the plums. She would banish them from his sight.

He placed his hand on her sleeve. His touch was as light as the leave-taking of faeries. “No, don’t. They are beautiful,” he rasped. “I want to look.”

Rodolfo Gomariz stared up at her, his eyes dark and forgiving. It had been a while since she’d seen him, but that was not her choice. He was a painter, impresario, publisher, contractor; he wore all of those hats easily and well. He had the Golden Touch. Everyone said so. But to her mind he was a painter above all. He lay amidst the whiteness of pillows, bed linens, and a thermal blanket. He was a passive subject in a painting by El Greco: Christ nearly disrobed, clothed only in a disposable hospital gown. Lana followed the trail of an intravenous 
drip. His arms were exposed, furred with the thick, black hair that undid her still. 

A lock of hair had fallen onto his forehead, a black question mark on a blank slate. Lana pressed it back and, bewildered by its delicacy, let her thumb linger. At first sight it looked glossy with health, as seductive as the first time she’d met him, but stroking it from his face she felt the difference. 

“I’m going to get you a banana. I’ll be right back.” 

He gripped her hand fiercely, hurting her. 

Lana cried, “I don’t know, what?” 

Her pained expression caused him to loosen his grasp. He coughed and flashed a familiar wry expression. “La-a-a-na, where are you going?” 

She smiled from relief and drew her hand from his. “To find a banana for you, silly.” 

He giggled, nearly as lustily as she remembered when they’d parlayed innuendos between them. She looked back at him and his eyes were closed. His delicately sculpted fingers, like translucent porcelain bamboo, rested on his thighs.

The hospital corridors were decorated in subdued shades of gray and pink—a corporate decision to remain neutral on a ward of unjust diseases. Framed art prints pictured gazelle-necked Native American women, sleek black hair framing identical expressions, whether hugging clay pots, rolling fry dough, or gazing into a cloudless lavender sky. 

“Bad Santa Fe,” thought Lana. 

 “She know what she know. What I’m gonna do? She’s not a baby. She wait at the bakery across the street from her school.”

Lana stood patiently at the nurses’ station. The woman on the phone acknowledged her presence with a raised eyebrow and a finger held momentarily poised in Lana’s direction. Lana, arms folded, let her hands drop to her hips. Her elbows bent in readiness, demanding and yet respectful. The woman’s conversation continued. Lana guessed Jamaican. She made out the tiny cartoon characters printed on the woman’s scrubs: Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck. When had they stopped wearing white? And those starched white caps?

 “She be aw’right. The church is there, like a block away.” The woman paused before addressing the listener on the other end, who seemed to have annoyed her. “I’m only leaving my daughter until I can get her. She have half day. I’ll be off a here soon.” 

Lana tilted her head in a can-I-say-something manner. The finger curled, dropped limply to the desk and fidgeted. “Why you surprised?” There was an irritated pause. “Those boys killed by they own mama. She some ting to blame it on a black man. Why you surprised? Shame. Those poor little boys. A shame.” 

“Yes?”

Lana, startled, realized the woman was addressing her. “Oh, sorry I….” 

“Who are you here to see?” 

Lana said she was visiting Mister Gomariz in—. 

A petite Asian nurse approached Lana and said, “36A. Are you a family member?” 

Lana replied that she was a friend. She didn’t think he had any family here and he’d called her that morning. “I’m a close friend,” she added. Lana started to say where Rodolfo was from when the nurse 
cut her off. 

“Argentina. I know. His brother is due to take him home.” She looked at Lana as if expecting a rebuttal. 

“Oh,” was all Lana could manage before asking if it was possible to get a banana for him. “Only,” she added, “I brought fruit, what he asked for, and he doesn’t seem—.” 

“He’s being fed intravenously. It’s a long flight to Buenos Aires.” The nurse rolled the pronunciation, and it slid off her tongue as if she were a native, which, as far as Lana could tell, she was not. “I’ll see what I can dig up.” 

Lana asked: “Is there a—?” 

“Water fountain? In the visitors’ lounge,” the nurse replied curtly as she hurried off.

At just after six that morning she’d known it was Rodolfo, even before she’d heard his voice: sheer, but not frail. It had been many months since she’d heard from him. Not for lack of trying on her part. His condition had been revealed in whispered allusion between friends and inflammable rumor from hangers-on. 

Elvira had left a message on Lana’s answering machine a few weeks before. A dull monotone stood in for the singer’s usually dramatic timbre. “I’m leaving New York. Going back to Denmark. Thanks for everything.” Rodolfo’s close friends had no idea where he was. The studio was locked up, the telephone disconnected. Lana had tried to reach Rodolfo and gotten nowhere until the call that morning.

 “La-a-a-na, can you bring me a large bag?” was the first thing 
he said.

Lana asked where he was, how he was, but he told her only that he needed the bag for a painting, a gift for his doctor. Rodolfo sounded lucid, but she was confused. What doctor, she asked. She asked again “Where are you?” And then he begged her to bring him some fruit, his favorite kind. Lana, exasperated, nearly barked at him. “You have to tell me where you are if I am to bring you these things.” 

In the empty visitors’ lounge she filled a paper cup with water. Regarding the cup she decided against it, and drained its contents into the grill of the water cooler. She watched it trickle and then disappear before crushing the cup in her palm. “I’ll just sit for a minute,” she said under her breath, and sank into a chair. 

When Lana returned to his room Rodolfo was sitting up, laughing with the same nurse who had brought him a banana. His cheeks shone with mirth. “La-a-a-na, where were you? I have to make love to Miss Chen because you deserted me.” 

The diminutive nurse slapped him gently. “Be good, Mister Rodolfo.” 

“No, I’m back, sweetie.” Lana moved to the other side of the bed. “I thought you were sleeping. What can I do?” 

Miss Chen removed the intravenous drip. “He’ll be going home soon. He’s had lots of vitamins and minerals.” Her small yet tenacious frame righted him into a standing position. “Walk with him a bit, miss.” 

Lana was shocked, unprepared for his diminished state. “Are you…is it okay?” 

“Yes miss, it will be good for him. He has a long flight ahead of him.”

Rodolfo leaned gently on Lana’s arm. There was nothing to him. They walked slowly through the halls, he sneering at the pictures. “You are a real painter, La-a-a-na.”

She laughed. “How would you know? You haven’t seen anything of mine in—.” 

“I know,” he told her. She asked about his paintings. Where were they? Who had them? 

He dismissed the questions with a wave of his hand. “You are the painter, Lana.”

They talked about easy things until he abruptly told her he had stopped taking the AZT. It was the drug that was making him fat, he said and they giggled like schoolchildren. At a bank of elevators, Rodolfo stopped short, as though he had run out of gas. He told her he was tired. 

“New York is not a good place to be sick, Lana. I don’t want to die here.” He pushed the button for the elevator. Lana hesitated until she saw Miss Chen coming toward them, waving her on. She stepped into the elevator.

The doors began to close. Rodolfo pushed a button and opened the doors. “I want to look at you.” 

Lana smiled. The three other passengers smiled as the doors slid shut again. 

The doors sprang open again. “I love you,” he whispered, steadied by the nurse. Lana’s fellow passengers seemed undisturbed by the scene. 

“I love you too,” Lana said, fighting back the tears. 

Once again the doors sprang open. “The plums,” he said, “They hurt my mouth.”