MY SECOND APPOINTMENT with Doctor Cawley was at eight o’clock in the morning on a Friday. I got up early and had a shower and, once more, I dressed carefully in the most expensive clothes I owned. I put gel on my hair. He wanted to go through the results of my blood test and talk about starting on AZT. My T-cells, he said, were less than one hundred. At best, patients lost between fifty and one hundred per year, he said, but the AZT would bring the count up for a while, and improve things generally, though he did not know for how long this would last. I understood what he was saying. I did not ask him any questions. He told me if I noticed anything in my eyes, I should contact him immediately, and he asked me to take off my shirt and tie so that he could examine me.

Afterward, I paid his secretary and made an appointment for two months later. And then when I opened the door to leave I saw Pablo sitting in the small waiting area reading a magazine. He looked up and our eyes met. The secretary told him that he could go in. It was like meeting someone who has been dead for years, who comes into a dream. He looked frightened. I knew that he must be sick. He stood up.

“I’ll wait for you here,” I said.

He touched my hand for a moment, it was a gesture of reassurance, of recognition, before he went into the office. I sat and waited for him. I wondered what was wrong, whether he had just the virus, or any symptoms, whether his family knew or not, whether he would want to see me or not. I flicked through the pages of a woman’s magazine, and then left it down. Maybe he was here to get the results of a test, and maybe he was all right. If he came out now, I thought, and told me that he did not want to see me and did not want to talk, I would understand, I would go home on my own. I would have other things to think about. But if, on the other hand, he came out of the office and said that he wanted us to go for a walk, or a cup of coffee, have a drink together, go back to the apartment together, then, I knew, it would make all the difference to me, it would lift me in a way that I was too scared to contemplate.