Free You Are My Heart and Other Stories by Jay Neugeboren

wrong?”
    â€œEvidently—to judge by your anger—I’ve done lots wrong.”
    Jennifer leaned back and smiled broadly. “But not lately,” she said. “So let’s have another drink, you and me.”
    Â 
    Peter sat at the same table where he and Jennifer had had their drinks—to his invitation to have dinner together, she had pleaded fatigue—and he ordered supper: blanquette de veau , a salad, wine. The restaurant, about half full (the woman who had been sitting nearby was gone), was exceptionally quiet, and when he was done with his entrée, he ordered a favorite dessert—a tarte tatin , carmelized apple pie served upside down—and while he ate the pie and sipped coffee, he found himself remembering the first time he had flown into Durban, and of how, from the plane, the city’s harbor had reminded him of Miami Beach: golden beaches, sunbathers, surfers, fishing boats, cruise ships, modern hotels, skyscrapers…
    And thinking of Durban, he thought—how not?—of Khuthala, the health care worker who had been his companion during his visit to South Africa the previous summer. Was she still alive? Had she married again? Were her children well?
    Khuthala had two teenage daughters, but her husband, who had left four years earlier to work in the diamond mines in Kimberley, had not returned, and she did not expect that he would. Most South African women who were infected have had only one lover, she explained the first time she visited Peter in his apartment. The combination of migrant labor and an industrial
society in which men worked where their labor was needed—for gold, sugar, diamonds—had proven to be the deadliest of marriages, for as men moved around the country and, periodically, returned home, they carried with them the infections they acquired, which infections they passed on to their wives, who passed them on to their children. Because of this, and to reassure him that she was one of the lucky ones and had not herself been HIV-infected, she had, on this first visit, brought her medical records with her.
    Peter had responded by telling her that it was a surprise to the people he had worked with in the States, especially during the years when the AIDS epidemic was exploding, to discover he was not gay. They called me ‘a righteous heterosexual’ back then, he said, and explained the phrase’s frame of reference: that those non-Jews who had helped save Jews during the Second World War were known as righteous gentiles.
    Well, Khuthala had replied, because you came here to work, I already knew you were righteous. And I have certainly been happy to learn that you are, in addition, heterosexual. More exactly, he recalled her saying—this toward morning of their first night together—what I’m feeling now is akin to what I suspect you were feeling when you looked at my medical records: reassured.
    That they had been able to give each other mutual reassurances had become the basis of a running joke. If only, they would suggest after making love, others could be reassured in the way they were, what a kinder, happier world it might be. And yet, how not at the same time be acutely aware that the act that gave them enormous pleasure, and comfort, was also the cause of great suffering and of death.
    Morning and evening—before and after work—Peter had loved walking through the markets with Khuthala, where the pungent fragrance of a multitude of curries filled the air, and where most vendors and shoppers were dressed in Indian garb—in wildly bright and swirling colors that made them look
like enormous parakeets. And walking together to villages and encampments that neither cars nor motorbikes could reach—backpacks and bags of antiretroviral medications with them, and carrying umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun—he had been happy. He had felt something which, in another time and place he would have