Blood Count. Jack Batten

      Chapter One

      So many people turned out for the wake that it had overflowed up the stairs of the house and into my apartment. I own the house. It’s a duplex on the west side of Beverley Street across from Grange Park, behind the Art Gallery of Ontario. I live in the upper apartment and had rented the lower to two gay guys named Alex and Ian. Alex was the wake’s host, if host is the proper term for the person who’s left behind when his companion has died. Ian had died.

      “I think Ian would have adored every minute of it,” Alex said.

      “Except for the food,” I said. “Not up to Ian’s standards, the little bitty Simpsons sandwiches and those puffy cheese things.”

      “Oh, he’d have been absolutely appalled if he knew I had his wake catered.” Alex paused and got a reflective look. “Imagine what Ian would have done if he’d cooked for his very own wake. Pull out all the stops, I mean heaven.”

      “Ian was divine in the kitchen,” Annie said. “Divine out of it, too.”

      Annie is Annie B. Cooke, the woman in my life. She and I and Alex were sitting in my living room. It was about ten thirty. Everybody else had left. Plumes of cigarette smoke still floated in the air, and someone had planted a glass half full of Scotch and water on top of the stack of magazines on the pine table behind the sofa. The glass left a ring in the middle of Branford Marsalis’s face. He was on the cover of DownBeat.

      “Smells like Rick’s American Café in here,” I said.

      I walked across the room and lifted a window higher. A light May breeze wafted through the stale cigarette residue.

      “Practically every person we knew in the world came,” Alex said. “Ian would have loved that part.”

      “Ian was a party guy,” I said.

      Conversation was limping along. I didn’t mind. The idea was to keep Alex company, even if the company was limp.

      “Who was the dramatic-looking woman?” Annie asked Alex. “In the black with all the veils?”

      “His mother.”

      “Whose?” I said. “Ian had a mother?”

      “She never gave up her dream that Ian would find the right girl and settle down. Old witch, she couldn’t abide me.”

      “So that’s why, all the years you guys’ve been tenants, what, nine years and change, I never laid eyes on his mother?”

      “Listen, dears,” Alex said, “we got off lucky. I was petrified Ian’s grandmother might attend today.”

      “Grandmother.”

      “The tongue on her. She’s ninety-one. She phoned Ian at Casey House toward the end. He was all skin and bones and sores and lesions, and the call came from Grannie Argyll. Ian got on the line. I was there, and he managed some banter, you know, and Grannie said, ‘Well, boy, if you’d never gone queer on us, you’d at least have died of something a person could tell her friends about.’”

      “Did Ian laugh?”

      “Damn near till he did die.”

      “Except,” Annie said, “it isn’t a laughing matter.”

      “No,” Alex said, “AIDS definitely isn’t.”

      I went over and took Alex’s wineglass from his hand. He was sitting in the wing chair. Annie and I occupied the sofa. I carried the glass to the kitchen and topped it up from an opened bottle of Australian Chardonnay in the refrigerator.

      “Stop me if it’s none of our concern, Alex,” Annie was saying, “but I think it is.”

      I handed Alex his glass.

      “No, I don’t have AIDS,” he said, speaking past me to Annie. “There, does that take care of what’s on your mind?”

      “We’ve been worrying, Crang and I, ever since we heard about Ian.” Annie wasn’t flustered by Alex’s direct answer. “AIDS is so virulent. I’m not an expert or anything, just what I read in magazines, but aren’t you at risk?”

      Alex was smiling. It wasn’t a sad smile, more like an expression of resignation. I’d liked Alex’s face from the first day he and Ian moved in. He was handsome in a rueful way. He had the face of a guy who might be entertaining a long-running secret joke. He was tall and slim, in his mid-sixties. Ian Argyll had been almost twenty years younger than Alex, and the opposite in build, short and chunky. Ian was a real estate agent, a natural at it, a peppy, sweet-tongued guy.

      “I’m not at risk, as you put it,” Alex said. “All I happen to be is angry, which is quite enough, thank you very much.”

      “A doctor’s cleared you?” Annie was in her persevering-interviewer mode, something she does for pay on television. “You have no symptoms?”

      “Annie, I couldn’t possibly have got AIDS from Ian, not unless it’s conveyed by hugs and snuggles. Now, can we agree to get off this particular topic?”

      I was drinking Wyborowa on the rocks. “But what you are,” I asked Alex, “is angry?”

      Annie laced her fingers through mine and squeezed. The squeeze meant I should lay off and leave the interrogation to her.

      “It’s natural you’d feel angry,” she said to Alex. “Angry at fate or whatever for taking Ian.”

      “Oh, screw fate.” Alex flapped his hand in the air. “My rage is much more constructive than that.”

      “At Ian?” Annie said, persisting. “That’s who you’re angry at?”

      “Where Ian’s concerned, I never felt anger. With him, I went through a regular catalogue of wretched emotions. Devastation … I was devastated he had AIDS, and for a time there, not too long, I felt … betrayed. But I forgave him.”

      “You forgave him,” Annie said, “for straying.”

      “Annie, dear,” Alex said, “what a charmingly archaic word. Straying.”

      “Well, having an affair.”

      Alex was holding up the index finger of his left hand. “Actually,” he said, “one man, one time, one-night stand.”

      “And that’s how Ian contracted AIDS?”

      “One night is to exaggerate. More like a few nasty moments.”

      “That sounds so awful, so wasteful, I want to cry.”

      “I tried that already, Annie. Buckets. It didn’t help much of anything. Not the bloody rage, anyway. It’s sitting in me like some malevolent lump.”

      Annie’s hand in mine felt damp. “Ian told you about this other man?” she asked Alex. “When? Toward the end?”

      “Longer ago than that. He sat me down for a real heart-to-heart and poured it all out at once, the AIDS, the encounter, the certainty he was going to die. A real black-letter day, I tell you, last February fifth. Drank an entire bottle of Chivas between the two of us.”

      “Now I am prying,” Annie said, “but I remember Ian looking very much not himself back from about late autumn on.”

      Alex nodded. “Flu. He kept saying he had the flu, Shanghai flu, Hong Kong flu, bloody Mississauga flu, whatever strain was going. It was a litany with him. ‘Oh, luv, I’ve just come down with a touch of old devil ague and no time to bring