The Dinner Party by Howard Fast

legs—I go over my whole body and bring it into my consciousness.”
    It was a strange experience for Elizabeth, fighting with all her mental strength to empty her mind, not to think of Leonard and his fate, not to remember their childhood together, the games they played; the time when the two of them were lost in the endless halls and rooms of the Capitol building in Washington; the hours in this same old barn when the two of them groomed her horse; their secret talks and investigations; hard to put that away from her mind; yet it happened, long moments of nothing that washed over her like a very strange benediction.
    â€œI let go of all the tension in my body, in my arms, my neck and around my head.…” His voice trailed away and Elizabeth raised her eyes to look at her brother. His eyes were shadowed. He sat very straight. She wondered how long he had been doing this. It didn’t protect him. Nothing could protect him. He sat cross-legged, slender, erect, handsome, and pledged to death.
    And silently he pleaded, fearful and wistful, Let it go away. But to whom? What gods listen to prayers? When he came weeping to his mother as a child, a bruise, a cut, a bump on his head, she could kiss it and make the pain go away, and then the cut or bruise or bang would go away; but now, remembering that terrible, icy line of Swinburne’s, Only the sleep eternal in the eternal night , nothing could make the pain go away.
    So easy for Jones to say, “Empty your mind.” Jones had persuaded him into meditation. “It’s bad enough that the world doesn’t know what we are. We don’t know what we are or who we are, and that’s the thing to find out isn’t it? The only thing.”
    Over the winter break, instead of going home, he had gone with Jones to a place in the Maine woods, which they called an ashram, and there for six days they had sat and meditated with thirty-seven others in the cold, short winter days, cold always and mimicking the Buddha, who had meditated for many, many years until one day he was able to say, “I know the answers to all the questions.” But Leonard knew no answers. Not why and not how, and the only real prayer now was in thanks, since Jones, miraculously, was free of it. Or was he?
    If Jones was clean, Leonard was grateful, yet suppose Jones had it too. Would it be easier, the two of them together; and for that thought, he punished himself. No, Jones must live and he must die. He had the mark of the beast, he told himself defiantly. He could be like that, defiant, death be damned, I am not afraid, resting peacefully for a moment in the memory of what an old Buddhist rashi had said, “Death? You ask where you will be? Where were you before you were born?” But only for a moment this kind of defiant indifference; then the quiet emptiness that comes sometimes out of meditation and then he remembered again.
    He remembered the thing on his foot, the purple spot like a blueberry, and the old doctor who looked at it and then murmured softly, “Kaposi’s sarcoma,” but with such sadness in the two whispered words that Leonard’s heart stopped; and then tests and more tests, but never even a suggestion of hope. The only positive thing he could exact from them was an agreement not to inform his family; and in return he nodded to the old doctor’s warning, “Your semen and your blood are deadly now. Remember. They have the power to kill.”

NINE
    D ressed now, Senator Cromwell set out to avoid being chosen to drive to the airport and pick up his in-laws. If Dolly pointed a finger at him, he would use the fact that his secretary, Joan Herman, was coming by in a half hour or so to take some letters and a few notes. When Dolly informed him that the kids would drive to the airfield, he felt relieved. At the same time, Dolly told him that she didn’t know where the kids were, except that they were somewhere on the property