THE MEMORY LIVES ON (Book Review of The Great Believers)

An important book. That’s how I’d initially regarded Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers (Viking, 2018). I knew from skimming a review that it was a novel about AIDS, after all. But that hadn’t been enough. If it had come out in 1990, I’d have devoured it, just as I’d worked my way through Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On, sobbing at many spots, getting riled up at many more. But the urgency has long faded, at least here in North America. Maybe that’s why I only made it through the first twenty pages when I checked this book out from the library last year. I stumbled across the title again when I was in Stockholm this fall and jotted down the name, having forgotten that I’d abandoned the book once already. Thank god for memory lapses. This time around, the important book quickly evolved into a compelling, entertaining read.

The story begins in Chicago in 1985 at a makeshift memorial for Nico who has just died from complications from AIDS, his gay lover and friends excluded from the official family funeral held twenty miles away. Nico’s feisty twenty-one-year-old sister, Fiona, has boycotted the funeral, opting to be with loved ones who never shunned him. Chapters alternate between 1985 Chicago (and the years thereafter), told from the perspective of Nico’s dear friend Yale, and 2015 Paris where Fiona is trying to locate her adult daughter, with whom there has been no communication for three years. Parts of the story go back to pre- and post- World War I as well, since 1980s Yale, in his new position working for a fledgling art gallery at Northwestern University, has to make trips to Madison, Wisconsin to meet up with Fiona’s great-aunt, Nora, who may or may not have a significant art collection to bequeath from her time in the thick of the Parisian art scene, connecting with greats like Amedeo Modigliani and Tsuguharu Foujita.

The story is about profound loss and how to keep alive the memory of loved ones who died in what should have been the prime of life. Just as aging Nora is still driven by a passionate love affair from more than sixty years ago, Fiona finds her life forever impacted by her deceased brother and his gay community of friends. Indeed, in an excerpt from a 2015 chapter: “They weren’t all dead. Not all of them. On October 13 she’d held her own quiet memorial, alone in her house, for Nico. Candles and music and too much wine. Thirty years. How could it possibly have been thirty years? But that was just the start of the worst time, when the entire city she’d known was turning into lesions and echoing coughs and ropy fossils of limbs.”

Often, in reading this book, I ached right alongside Fiona. The book is so well-researched, the events of the AIDS crisis so realistically told, that my own friends and acquaintances—Stephen and Don and Farrell and Jose—came vividly back to life as well, frozen in time at twenty-eight and thirty-two. Knowing how prognoses began to change beginning around 1995, The Great Believers brings back heartache and a rueful, devastating series of If Onlys. Quoting from the same page: “She had so much guilt about so many of them—the ones she wished she’d talked into getting tested sooner, the ones she might have gone back in time to keep from going out on a particular night…, the ones she might have done more for when they got sick.”

The plots about the possibly valuable art donation and Fiona’s missing daughter are told well enough, but the heart of the novel involves how the AIDS crisis impacted one particular social circle in 1980s Chicago. The accounts of decisions to get tested (or not), of fretting over the results in what was then a tortuously long two-week wait period, of hospital visits, of rapid declines witnessed on the street or in bars, of debates about bathhouses and of rising civil disobedience vividly convey the time. For me personally, I was still closeted back then, my awareness of AIDS developments coming solely from news sources (and, yes, Shilts’ magnificent tome). The Great Believers masterfully adds flesh to the facts that I knew. This work of fiction makes things real.

Given the subject matter, there were scenes that I struggled to get through and I had to put the book aside one night, angry with a plot decision Makkai made. It was silly. She was keeping things brutally real; I was fighting for some trace of fairy tale. Happily ever afters had no place in that time. Didn’t we think it was only a matter of time before AIDS got us all?

For more than a generation now, there have been happier fates, endings postponed indefinitely. That means that a large portion of the LGBTQ community has no personal knowledge of such a darker time, one which also gave rise to more political activism leading to so many of the changes we see happening today. AIDS was our war. The Great Believers is a powerful book to help us remember, to help others understand. An important book, yes, but also one that is so very well told.

YOU AGAIN

It had to happen at some point. Ran into a hot guy I’d pined for all summer five years ago. It was different from my typical pining. This was a guy who actually pined back. For a while, at least.

For the month of June, I was giddy and smitten. Looks-wise, Tim was ridiculously out of my league. I’d first noticed him twenty years prior, when were technically in a common league—gay volleyball. But I was Friday nights (the “social” play evening, an unnecessary code word for hapless Novices); he was Sunday afternoons...Intermediate or Competitive. We didn’t even share the same facility. Still, he’d pop in from time to time to help run Fridays, whatever that involved. All I knew was he’d sit behind a folded out table on the stage in the high school gym and beam a smile that could sell a thousand tubes of toothpaste. Per second. (Turns out that, yes, he’d been a model. I never dared ask about commercials. Why highlight our differences?)

Back when we dated, I was still living a ferry ride away from Vancouver. It took some effort to see each other and, without a clear invitation to spend the night, I was always rushing back to the terminal to catch the last sailing home. The kisses were passionate, literally making me weak in the knees. I figured things would advance in due time. He was just being a gentleman.

Our courtship was interrupted because I’d committed to five weeks of dog-sitting/house-sitting for friends in Los Angeles. We kept in touch through texts and Facetime, though not as frequently as I’d have liked. Still, he’d sprinkle “handsome” and “sexy” into our exchanges, reassuring me that Too Good to Be True was actually true.

When I returned mid-August, I sensed a struggle in getting back to where we left off. Warm hugs, pecks on the lips. I knew that we just needed one passionate kiss—or, fingers crossed, something more—to get us back on track. Didn’t happen during our first get-together, but then that occasion had been especially rushed. Then came strike two. And then The Phone Call. Too good to be true, indeed.

He was hard to shake. It was good that we lived in different communities but I’d periodically be blindsided with “What the hell happened?!” entering my mind. It didn’t help that there were no new prospects for moving on. Having him still as a Facebook friend was triggering as well, but I didn’t want to unfriend him and come off as petty or hateful or what I really was: wounded. Thankfully his posts were rare. Golf scores mostly. Golf?! I really didn’t know him, did I? After a full year passed, I realized neither of us had reacted to a single Facebook post with a “like” or a comment. We weren’t “friends” in even the most tenuous sense. It was the right time to quietly do the unfriending. No more selfies of me in Whistler for him to scroll swiftly past.

By then I’d moved back to Vancouver. I figured we’d run into each other occasionally. We’d exchange pleasant smiles and I’d successfully bat away a sudden impulse to buy Crest Whitestrips. We’d catch up. Mostly a few nods and “good, good” replies before a perfectly civil “Nice to see you” in parting. Nothing, really. But still, a solid confirmation that I’d weathered the Summer of Love Infatuation and moved on.

There was a time when I was jogging the seawall, adjusting the retro disco playlist on my phone when I spotted him walking his dog. He didn’t seem to notice and I had the good sense to keep running. Sweat stains and a blotchy red face do not constitute a good look for me. Another opportunity would come soon enough.

Except it didn’t. Years passed. At times I’d pass his old haunts—his gym, his condo building, the restaurant where he literally swooped me off my feet after lunch—not as a stalker, but just as someone going from point A to point B. To take detours to avoid him would have felt weirder. I will admit to disappointment that a chance run-in never happened. My life is not a movie.

But today we finally shared the same space. I had to make a quick errand, stopping by my doctor’s office to pick up a medical form. The clientele is primarily gay so it can sometimes feel cruise-y. Hey, call me when your Staph infection clears up. But I was a man on a mission, eager to move on to a nearby cafe to begin my morning writing session. When I entered the waiting room, I headed straight for the receptionist’s desk, not even thinking to do a quick scan.

I was hyped up from the brisk twenty-minute walk. The pace often wakes up my brain as well as my legs. Writing ideas popped into my head, a few key phrases and an exact starting point for my writing. I knew it would be a productive day. Hence my heightened state. I blurted a friendly “Good morning!” a little too loudly to the receptionist. Same with when I gave my name. My first words of the day. Needed to turn down the volume button. Everyone in the waiting room would have heard me.

As the receptionist searched a filing cabinet for my form, I reached for a tissue and remembered my environment. This would be the gayest spot of my week. I did a casual pivot to survey the waiting room as I blew my nose. (An alluring look, no?) And, yes, there he was, leaning forward in a seat against the wall, head down, eyes on his phone.

It was probably a good thing that the receptionist so quickly found my form. If he had already seen me, he was making every effort to block me from sight. Hell, maybe there’s an app for that on his phone: Scram, right beside Shazam. I stepped away from the desk and rested my backpack on the arm of a chair to unzip it and toss in the form. I suppose I could have done that in the hallway while waiting for the elevator, but a part of me was wondering if I should extend this moment, walk all of six steps deeper into the waiting room, say, “Tim?!” and then finally have our how’ve-you-been, nod, nod (keep smiling) moment. Get it all out of my system.

As I zipped my backpack up again and flung it over my shoulder, his gaze was still fixed on the phone. If there was going to be an exchange, it would be all my doing. Door? Chair? I chose the door. I pressed the elevator button and, with my other hand in my jacket pocket, I used my index finger to draw a simple checkmark gesture. “Done that.” Paths crossed and as much of a meeting as I (and probably Tim) wanted. The elevator stopped at two floors on the way down. Plenty of time for me to berate myself for not having a conversation, for not seeing if this was our “When Harry Met Sally” moment, the one where we sit side by side on a bench, I look into a camera and say, “We met five years ago but he dumped me.”

He’d interject with, “It just wasn’t the right time.”

“Yes,” I’d say. “I suppose not. But then, there we were once again, in the waiting room of a doctor’s office five years later.”

He’d smile. “There was something about the way he blew his nose...”

Cut! Delete scene.

Not to be. I’d paused in the waiting room, expecting to stir up something. Maybe a little of that giddiness I’d felt back when we were together, perhaps a simple “Ooh!” as I took in his good looks again or, on the other hand, a sense of satisfaction. I’ve been feeling relatively confident these days. Just yesterday, a woman stopped me in the street to compliment me on my hair. (A new look, yes. My hairstylist managed to recreate what I’d described as a Swedish cut based on my time in Stockholm.) Had Tim and I exchanged pleasantries, it might have stirred up some regret in him. Let me be the one that got away.

But outside on the sidewalk, I walked even a little faster, still eager to start writing, but now feeling extra invigorated. That meeting with Tim had finally happened/not happened. A song from “A Chorus Line” popped into my head—yes, I know...so very gay—a line: “I felt nothing.” True enough. Complete closure. Sometimes feeling nothing is actually a pretty awesome feeling.