Bleeder: A Memoir

The Handbook to Dating with HIV

125 the handbook to dating with hiv January . The holidays have come and gone. In my apartment, with nothing but the winter’s howl outside, I brew endless cups of coffee, prop my feet up on the couch, place a cold compress on their swelling, and I read. I glance up. The light outside darkens and a lone branch brushes against my window in a frigid breeze. Sleet falls and patters against the glass, the rooftop. I draw my blanket around me to keep winter from freezing all of me. In spring, the crabgrass grows high; the buttercups open and reveal their hidden anthers; and the azaleas bloom in coronations of white, yellow, pink, and red. And although the cold winter is now behind me, it yet lives in my heart. One evening William calls. He says that he wants to come to the coast and live, so we decide to make a go of it as roommates, and a few weeks later, he moves down. While I’m at work, he searches for a house—one with a sizeable backyard for his dog to run free in—and an afternoon that very same week, as I remove my work shoes and prepare to settle the customary ice pack upon my ankle, William returns, jubilant and talkative. “I’ve found one. It’s perfect.” Shelby Smoak 126 We drive to Castle Hayne, a small outskirts community affixed to Wilmington , and we tour a ranch-style brick house whose size is almost equal to that of my parents’ home. A large glassed A-frame arch tents over the den area, and the brick house stretches outwards from both sides of this and is trimmed in fresh white. Inside, the owner has rolled out new carpet, painted the walls, and put down new linoleum in the kitchen. I marvel at its newness , at its vastness. “So how much is he asking?” “Seven hundred a month,” William says. “That’s three-fifty a person.” I mull it over. Currently I pay $325 a month for rent, and $25 more for such a large place hardly seems an excessive increase, so I sign the rental agreement. It is only later that I realize the yoke of this house. Costs included in my apartment’s rent (the water bill and trash collection, for example) but not budgeted here will soon deplete my paycheck, while the enormity of our summer electric bills (a result of overrunning the air conditioning to keep the house tolerably cool) will leave me slack-jawed and newly attuned to the paucity of my earnings. But these burdens follow. Today, I feel the slight grant of clemency as levity supplants gravity. With the sheets signed and with the keys in hand, I run through the empty house, arms akimbo, all smiles. The following afternoon, we move our furniture. It does not take long, for we both have very little, so little in fact that even with our things in them, the rooms exude an empty and unlived-in feeling. I fill my room with a bed; a stand of crates that I use as a dresser; a waist-high bookshelf overflowing with novels, read and unread; and the stereo, its two speakers , and several dozen CDs which are stowed in boxes of varying size. In his room, William wrestles a dresser into the corner, and although the top drawer is split and several drawers lack handles, he finds his Goodwill item useful. He lays his mattress atop the carpet and also has a cactus under his window that gives a little life to our place. In our den, we set my old Zenith TV atop a plain table that yaws to the left, and we square a couch against the long wall facing the fireplace. In this couch we are lucky, for it appeared in my apartment’s dumpster as William and I were moving out, and needing one, we promptly hoisted it into the back of my truck, and, after some Bleeder 127 fabric cleaning and repairing its one broken leg (probably the reason for its disposal), the couch has a new home. As evening approaches, we make grilled cheese sandwiches and then we unscrew the cheap bottle of wine we purchased for our move-in celebration. We sit on our back deck and toast ourselves to happiness. The yard is spacious and lined by a grove of poplars, and a pair of robins twitter in the air and briskly swoop...