Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (5 page)

There was always a sort of double clock to the evening, because Roger was asleep by midnight, never a night's insomnia, and I didn't go to bed till three. I typed like a dervish once the phone couldn't possibly ring. But I'd usually loll in bed with Rog for a half hour—Ted Koppel too, if the issue was ripe—and he'd nod off curled beside me, the two of us nestled like a pair of spoons. By way of trade-off I'd be half aware of him getting up at seven-thirty, padding about while I burrowed in for the morning, to rise at eleven like Harlow. Between us we covered the night and the morning watch.

I realize now how peaceful it was to be writing while Rog lay asleep in the next room. I can't describe how safe it made me feel, how free to work. I think mothers must feel safe like that, when it's so late at night you can hear a baby breathe. We had gone along this way for so many years that when I had to do it for real—watch over him half the night, wake him and give him pills, run the IV, change his sweat-soaked pajamas three different times—it never stopped feeling safe, not when I had him at home. In the deep ultramarine of the night, nothing could really go wrong, and nothing ever did.

In October we managed to get away to Big Sur as usual, though Roger was working time and a half, having taken on several projects for other lawyers. I was back into my novel about a nymph and a loveless man, very Aegean. At the same time I was steering through the Hollywood jabberwocky a project called
The Manicurist
, a comedy for Whoopi Goldberg. The trip up Highway 1 on an aching clear Sunday morning was our first long ride in the black Jaguar, a vehicle we had acquired by default, after my Mercedes was stolen at gunpoint on the Strip.

Just before we left, Cesar was down for half a weekend. We tooled around in the Jag, and he seemed in fine shape. Relations had suddenly gotten tight with his friend Jerry, an antique dealer he'd known for years. They might've become an item once, but the stars were crossed. Now they were spending a great deal of time together, no term of attachment required. "Buddies" is what has evolved in AIDS parlance for the bond between the mainstay friend and the one in the ring doing battle. Jerry had clearly come forward to take that role, but Cesar wasn't acting as if it had anything to do with his illness, properly so. The bond between them had its own sweet Platonic tang, and Cesar was thrilled to have somebody else to talk about.

It was the last time he would play down the swelling leg and the lesions, regaling us with tales of Spain. All summer long, when anyone would whine at me about some benign indignity of daily life, I'd stare and say, "Cesar's in Spain," as if to sting them with the challenge. What the fuck was their excuse? Now, in October, Cesar remarked to us offhandedly, "You know, I've traveled enough now," but it didn't seem morbid or ominous at all. He specifically meant he'd rather come stay with us when he had a little vacation. Enough of the world out there.

Besides, we were clearly holding the line. A year into his diagnosis, and he'd still never been in the hospital. His doctors kept telling him there were drugs in the works nearly ready for testing. Research was galloping. Keep taking the chemo, they said, even if it didn't seem to be doing a thing. I don't recall seeing his leg naked during that brief visit. We'd dropped the fiction of the rural virus in the terminus at Benares, but only because AIDS was proving manageable. Management skills were what we needed now.

The obverse of this optimism was the hair ball of fear at the pit of my stomach. I'd convinced myself by this point that I was more than likely in the direct line of fire. I can't say what was hypochondriacal here. It was certainty born of dread: The glands in my neck and armpits were no bigger than almonds; they didn't hurt; they were nice and soft. Moreover, they didn't appear to be growing, but oh they were most definitely there.

My doctor's little speech about them, reiterated for two or three years now, came down to the same bland assertion that they could be anything. Dozens of things make the lymph nodes swell—stress, for instance, the blanket diagnosis of the age—but now the news was getting very specific about the lymph nodes being a flashing amber sign.
Pre-AIDS.
We still had that word then. Certain gay men I knew, in fact, were becoming obsessed with the notion. How deep exactly did
pre
go? Could you see it in a person's face? And how much time before
pre
burned down like a fuse on a keg of powder?

I tried not to talk nonstop about it; it sounded vain even then. I simply redoubled my efforts to mount a holding action. Lifecycle at the gym, vitamins, writing in bed, monitoring my almonds like a sort of DEW line. I vividly saw the process as a struggle to keep it from breaking through—a wall of-water behind a dike, or the mangled son pounding on the door in Kipling's "The Monkey's Paw." "Breakthrough" was not then commonly used to describe the onset of fullblown infection, but the word has just the right edge, chilling and paranormal, like the breakthrough of alien life out of John Hurt's belly.

I knew all the warning signals now, rote as the seven danger signs of cancer that I carried on a card in my wallet in high school. Did I think I'd forget them? Night sweats, fevers, weight loss, diarrhea, tongue sores, bruises that didn't heal. None of the above. But I'd run through them every day, examining my body inch by inch as cowering people must have done in medieval plague cities, when X's were chalked on afflicted houses. I didn't even want to eat Asian food anymore, because it shot my bowels for a day after.

Any change, any slight modification... even a bruise you remembered the impact of, you'd watch like an x-ray till it started turning yellow around the purple. KS lesions do not go yellow. They also do not go white if you press them hard with your thumb. A whole gibberish of phrases and clues was beginning to gain currency. A canker sore in the mouth would ruin a day, for fear it was thrush—patches of white on the gums or the tongue. I read my tongue like a palmist before I went to bed at night.

In none of this paranoid fantasy did I have the slightest worry that Roger was at risk. I hadn't forgotten the flu in '81, or the assault of the wrongheaded drugs for amoebas. There were shakes and fevers that winter, and for a week or two Roger would break out at night in hives the size of silver dollars. It had been an awful siege, but that was all three years ago now. Never a complainer about his health, he didn't mention losing weight till the end of November, and even then it was only a couple of pounds. He was tired at night, but a wholesome kind of tired, with a long untroubled slumber from twelve to seven-thirty like clockwork—what the French call
le sommeil du juste
. And his cough was still such a minor two-note matter. He'd be putting on his pajamas, and I'd turn from
Nightline
and tease him: "What are you coughing for? Stop it." That was how ordinary it sounded.

Is that denial? If it was, it was warring in me with a doomed acceptance, as I struggled to figure how I would bear the sentence myself. Late at night I'd walk in the canyon and think about Roger watching me suffer. I was already riddled with guilt: None of this would be happening if I'd never had sex with strangers. I suppose I felt there was something innately shameful about dying of a venereal disease. All the self-hating years in the closet were not so far behind me. And any brand of shame lays one open to the smug triage of the moralists, whose vision of AIDS as a final closet is clean and efficient as Buchenwald. Of
course
we didn't deserve this thing, but how do you go up against them when you're suddenly feeling wasted by every lost half hour in bed? After all, the very qualities that used to recommend such aimless sport were its junk-food suddenness and its meaning nothing.

My therapist, Sam Dubreville, reeled in every tortuous loop of self-flagellation. All right, so I couldn't deny the dread. The menace was real as the man with the .38, swinging it wildly back and forth between my head and the gray Mercedes. It might be true that all of us were trapped by the careless time before we heard the first siren. But the disease wasn't drawn to obsessive sex or meaningless sex. Sex itself, pure and simple, was the medium, and the world out there was ravenous for it. Straight and gay alike, they wailed like Patsy Cline, rubbing up against their home screens. Don't personalize the illness, Sam said, don't embrace it with obsession. Live now, in other words, sobered and alert. Relish the time Roger and I are whole, because something is going to beat the door down someday.
Live now
sounds simple enough to be carved on the temple at Delphi, except they preferred to chisel instead:
Know yourself.

I did what I could with my panic, riding the energy like body surfing, turning its intensity to consciousness of now, where Roger was. I started making plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas before Halloween. In this regard Ned Rorem recounts a crystalline remark of Jean Cocteau's. When asked what one thing he would carry away from a burning house, Cocteau replied, "I would take the fire." There's something in there about the fire of inspiration, but I choose to see it the other way, carrying out the fire to spare the house. I made time happy. I worked at it. And when Roger and I would saunter through the County Museum or run out late for Häagen-Dazs and a stroll in Boys' Town, the thought of him all alone without me—alone in our house, in this city where he came to be with me—would vaporize like a bad dream.

On November 7 we had dinner with Rand Schrader, municipal judge and past president of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, which mouthful was the premier channel of local good works for those on the bus. The Center was a national model for a kind of gay sanctuary for the troubled, lost and burned. It was the yearning to be free to love that appeared to bond us as a people, a bond that turns out to be as strong as land or language. Roger and I were part of a growing core of gay professionals who helped to fund social services for runaways, alcoholics, the banished of all persuasions. The Center occupied a building that had the motel air of cheap dentistry, but proudly wore its long name ribboned across a lintel on Highland Avenue.

We were together to talk about the Center's annual dinner, where Abigail Van Buren was being given the Ambassador's Award. I was to write introductory remarks for Julie Harris, who would make the presentation. What you have here is practically the textbook definition of thankless writing. But I had a particular memory of reading
Dear Abby
as a kid. In a straight New England town, out of reach of therapy, Abby's column in the Hearst rag was the only consistent forum for the radical notion that gay people could be happy despite the hate and discrimination.
Love and let love
was more or less the way she put it. The effect is incalculable, to finally hear somebody say it isn't wrong.

Rand was probably Roger's closest friend in L.A., a passionate, unguarded man who was out in every quarter of his life, with a decade of therapy behind him to prove it. Roger and I always sponsored a table at the Center dinner, though Roger was the one who gently badgered our friends to fork over the two-fifty for the ticket. Gay people have had to be taught to take care of their own, having grown so accustomed to taking care of themselves. I couldn't bear the drone of self-congratulation at these affairs, but Roger said it was boredom in a good cause, so we always went and I helped with the speeches—shortening, shortening.

It is in fact very moving to hear Julie Harris read your lines, and she pulled off every laugh and stirred the place too. AIDS was a growing subtext at any community gathering now, but it was salutary to recall that as a people we were still making progress, countering hate. My first year as a teacher, twenty-two and stuck in a prep school run by Dickensian colonels in Connecticut, I had a student called Styler, by turns diffident and shyly charming, working to please, wouldn't swat a fly. I was in the closet and never thought twice about him, until three years later when he killed himself, and his sister wrote to tell me. Oh, I thought with a knot of hopeless sorrow, so he was gay. I hadn't thought to help him, because I couldn't even help myself then. Anyway, I knew we were sitting in tuxes at these gelid chicken dinners for Bob Styler's sake.

The night before Thanksgiving, Cesar arrived, and within five seconds of lurching in he fell in a chair, near hysterical. Not crying or raging, just letting it all tumble out—the circular talk of the doctors, the brave front at school, the pain and rot of the swollen leg. The dog went up to sniff at him in the chair, just the regular sort of canine radar work, and Cesar cried: "See him smell it? I can't stand it anymore!"

It
was his leg.

We just let him talk till midnight, apologizing even as he spilled it—how could he bring this misery on our house? We reassured him over and over, gently easing him off the panic, sorting out the players around his Lear, finally comprehending how much he'd been bottling up ever since school began in September. Still fighting not to depend on anyone, he who always seemed to have half a dozen shoulders to prop up all his friends.

Through the whole four-day weekend we forced him to rest—allowed him to, really. Ten, eleven hours a night he slept, and seemed to get stronger and laughed again. But the leg was really repulsive now, twice its proper size, raw and mottled, the lesions clustered at the groin angry and blood-blistered around the wound, which sagged open and wept. It had been that way for a year now.

Yet at Thanksgiving dinner in Robbert Flick and Susan Rankaitis's studio, his social grace was mesmerizing as ever. I could see how drained he looked, his hair beginning to thin from the chemo, circles under his eyes. He told Roger and me how he would sneak naps in the storage closet off his classroom, curling up on the floor during his free periods. But over dinner he scintillated and coaxed out people's travels, tossing a few doubloons from his own. And when it came to books and films, the irrepressible passion was undiminished, pleading with people to read
Sentimental Education
or go rent
Gilda.
The dinner table was Cesar's stadium, no doubt about it.