Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (16 page)

“The Island: Running along the beach in the Pines from Water Island, the sun on the sea, that feeling—sitting by the pool with T. after ham sandwich and beer—carpenters hammering all around—Rosa stoned in the bus house, getting packed, singing, ‘My man loves my big dick, and the bigger it gets the more he likes it.’”

The first person is alive; the second is dead, but he lives again, completely, in that bawdy song. The other entries reflect the same dichotomy. I read a few more descriptions: of sex partners, trips to San Francisco, Fire Island; and then put it aside for the moment, open a drawer and pick up several guest passes to a gym I no longer belong to; a dusty slide of a man I thought the handsomest on Fire Island in the early seventies; a tube of Bain de Soleil 6 (we now prefer 15; the sun is considered as lethal as sperm); a checkbook I thought I’d lost; the metallic ruler with which I measured my penis after I moved to New York and learned that these dimensions mattered; bottles of moisturizer; a squash racket with a broken string; Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet
; Freud’s
Civilization and Its Discontents
; an invitation to an exhibit of a friend’s architectural drawings, from August 20 to September 15, 1983, at a gallery in Southampton. (Can George be dead only two years? It seems much longer.) In the same heap of papers the invitation is in, I find a plastic sandwich bag in which two white quaaludes and a shattered, pale blue valium lie. Quaaludes: relaxation of the sphincter, the languorous erotic surrender forbidden now. What would I do if I took these quaaludes now—yoga? I put them in a drawer, pick up a scrap of paper, which I read and try to make sense of:
Michael Greenberg, Sweeney Todd (tire store),
Christopher Street.
What does that mean? My bedroom is half cleared, and I put the scraps in a basket on the chest of drawers, sexual confetti, in a wicker Out box. Then I pick up the old issue of
Honcho
(April 1979). Inside is a long article on fisting by James Henry—celebratory, informative, upbeat. A doctor is interviewed. The author closes with a recollection of one of his “best experiences ever. Two lovers, both into fisting, both with magnificent, talented holes. We did a threesome on an outdoor waterbed on Fire Island, in the middle of the afternoon.” He speculates about the future: “It is possible, given our sophistication and jadedness, that such an esoteric practice . . . will someday be the norm for homosexual men. . . . Or perhaps sexual heads, and the trips that go along with them, are subject to change and evolution.” (You bet.)

“We may all wind up back in a heavily oral stage . . . we may wind up tripping out on ourselves in elaborate multimedia jerk-off trips. Others say we’ll be into asexuality.” (How prescient!)

“Who knows? Whether fisting is here to stay, or just the hit of the seventies, I’m glad I’ll be able to tell my hypothetical grandchildren what it was like when fisting was young.”
When fisting
was young
—it seems, this jaunty piece, like a letter written by someone in the lounge of the
Titanic
: “Having a wonderful crossing, the food is superb, Father and I are just about to go down to dinner.” (Crash.)

W
E MET IN 1979—shortly after he’d moved from San Francisco to New York. He was a correspondent for the French newspaper
Gai Pied
, and wanted to talk to me about a novel I had written. We sat on a park bench in Washington Square. After our conversation, he closed the little notebook, put away his pen, looked straight ahead and said, with the air of someone taking inventory, “You are my first friend in New York.” I was both touched and taken aback—we had only spent an hour together, and I wondered how this could be construed as friendship. But then sometimes an hour, a first meeting, feels like that. Of course, we often wonder why a person likes us, and I asked that question almost immediately after meeting Emmanuel. I concluded that it was simply because I’d written a book about a New York milieu he was interested in—a milieu I was tired of at that point (the world of discos, and Fire Island), but which he, a newcomer to Manhattan, a foreigner, found glamorous. Dreams are like revolving doors, I’d written in my novel—someone is always coming into the one you are going out of. Emmanuel had written a study of the gay ghetto in San Francisco called
La So-ciété
Invertie
, but New York, Fire Island, the dance clubs of Manhattan, were all new to him.

He had a bony face, with a shock of blond hair hanging over his forehead. He sometimes wore bow ties, and smoked little thin cheroots that, cocked at an angle, gave him the air of a dandy. Was his hair dyed? Did he toss it with a certain affectation, as he held his cigarillo? Did he care about the newest restaurant, movie, book, too much? It didn’t bother me, because both of us were observers who loved to exchange impressions, particularly of people.

There were a lot of people in Emmanuel’s life. I worked at home, nearly a recluse. Emmanuel seemed to require a large cast of characters. He had a French wife with whom he had traveled all around the world. He had a lover named Jorge, a best friend named Jean Michel, and a clique consisting of an astonishingly handsome Brazilian and two crazies named Antonio and Patricio, one Spanish, one Argentine. New York seemed to be simply where Emmanuel had alighted for the moment. Born in Egypt, raised in Indochina, he had set out with his wife, after his parents retired to France, to India and Yemen and San Francisco. He had written his book on San Francisco while living in Rio de Janeiro. In New York he got a job translating at the United Nations. He had no desire to live in Paris—his best friend, Jean Michel, had given up Paris too, for Montreal; they both seemed to hold French people in contempt, even though Emmanuel had gone to school at the Sorbonne and written his thesis on Proust. (He said he had learned more about life by reading Proust than through any other source. Proust formed a common text, with which we could turn to one another and compare someone to Madame de Verdurin, or Bloch.) At any rate, Emmanuel appeared to be the center of a circle. When we met, the circle was stationed on Bank Street, but then he bought a loft on the southern edge of Soho where all these people reassembled.

For such a busy person, Emmanuel was the soul of calm—he spoke in a soft, gentle voice, often paused to reflect before speaking, as he held one of his little cheroots between his fingers, and his conversation was so even-tempered that no matter what was going on in his life that might be upsetting, he spoke of it with a reflective detachment. Yet he had made sure his life was anything but uneventful. How he had time to read at all perplexed me, yet read he did—he was reading everything by Julio Cortázar, for instance, when we met, and a disciple of Freud of whom I’d never heard. He also seemed to be going to virtually every movie that opened in New York, not to mention the newest restaurant, and the gym—yet, in the midst of this, maintaining the intellectual calm which I so enjoyed when we spoke. I think of him almost purely in terms of conversation; we seldom did things together; we mainly talked.

His wife, a good-looking woman with short blond hair, moved to the East Village to live with an American not long after her arrival in New York. Emmanuel’s boyfriend was five or six years younger than he. Even when we met, Emmanuel began to complain about Jorge’s behavior, character, and ethics, in a way I attributed to the tension that comes between two people who have been on a long trip together. But when an opportunity to visit Rio de Janeiro came up, and Emmanuel was not free to go, and Jorge and I went down together, he seemed the best of companions: cheerful, easygoing, uncomplaining. Nevertheless, on our return it became clear to me that Emmanuel wanted to get rid of him, so, when they did separate, Emmanuel purchased Jorge’s interest in the loft—though the agreement specified that if Emmanuel should die before five years had passed, the loft would revert to Jorge.

Once Emmanuel was unattached, however, I learned this was a condition he did not like. He began spending hours cruising the piers on the Hudson; but he was inherently uxorial. That summer he shared a house with me and my friends at the beach. His friends dropped by: Patricio, the Argentine carpenter who resembled a quattrocento angel; Tony, the Spanish
loca
; Jean Michel, the publisher from Montreal; André, the French dealer in antiques with the beautiful Brazilian boyfriend. But Emmanuel, ever the anthropologist, the tourist, the foreigner, seemed to prize the much more ordinary Americans I introduced him to, simply because, in his eyes, I guess, they were natives, privy to the culture of Fire Island, the one in which he was now residing. He told me once that he had no type, that beauty did not matter to him.

The boyfriend who succeeded Jorge, I suppose, was not unattractive: a tall, skinny twenty-one-year-old from a family of nine kids on a farm in Illinois who had only one thing in common with Jorge—he was younger than Emmanuel—though Matthew was much younger. Matthew, the corn-fed youth from Illinois who had come east to study fashion, was a rather silly, shallow youth, I thought, but then we accept our friends’ lovers and keep our mouths shut. There was something so American about his face it always reminded me of an ad for chewing gum: blue eyes, straight nose, dirty blond hair that he combed into a little pompadour. The little pompadour was hardly that of a rube, however; Matthew was enrolled in the Fashion Institute of Technology, worked the cosmetics counter at Bloomingdale’s, and knew just about everything there was to know about fashion, cosmetics, and New York nightlife.

One always suspects a much younger boyfriend; one assumes the bond is purely sexual, that it will fade, and the young person disappear. Emmanuel and Matthew had met at the baths. He was one of those young people attracted to older men—there was a doctor in his past. He moved into Emmanuel’s loft, and for the next few years they rented a house at the beach, danced at the Saint, took drugs, and went to the baths. Yet I was not surprised one day when Emmanuel told me he had no interest in the Saint, or the drugs they took, or the baths they went to afterward, except as a bond between him and Matthew. That was what mattered to Emmanuel. He was one of those people who cannot live without a partner. Emmanuel was happy with Matthew and that, for his friends, was all that mattered. As for Matthew: He was no intellectual, but he was smart, and it was fun to talk to someone in his generation. His style was not ours. Matthew wore red basketball sneakers and black 501s, big overcoats from used clothes stores in the East Village, the fifties pompadour, the clean-shaven face that fascinated because it was new and because it belonged to youth. He was a bridge to another generation, the post-clone. Yet he evidently had little interest in his peers; he spent his time with Emmanuel and Emmanuel’s friends, all in their thirties, forties, fifties. He sat there patiently on the big pillows, listening; then he went to the Saint and danced till ten A.M. He was not a big reader, and when he went to France with Emmanuel he could not understand the language. But he was ambitious. He was a hard worker. He went to school, and got a job at Bloomingdale’s, and put in his hours behind the counter; and sometimes I looked at him in the loft with his older French lover, his summers on Fire Island, and thought: He is a lot further along than I was at that age—he was that ageless creature, someone who knew what he wanted.

Then one day, not long after he said they were looking for a third sexual partner, which indicated to me that their bond was fading in that regard, Emmanuel told me he’d gone to the doctor and learned his white blood cell count was abnormal, and that he felt tired. Thus began what seemed at the time simply Emmanuel’s latest obsession. It was certainly a switch. Michel Fou-cault is said to have laughed on first hearing about AIDS—it was so obvious a fantasy of American puritanism—and Emmanuel too, at the start, told me he thought AIDS was one more example of the prudery of American culture. Now he was starting treatment for it. One hesitated, especially then, to ask about the details of a friend’s health; one was afraid to hear he was not all right; things were depressing enough, the first years of the plague. So it was his friends who asked each other, “What does Emmanuel have? What exactly is wrong with him?” “He says he has ARC, but I don’t see any symptoms,” someone said. He began going to a doctor uptown who advocated perfusions of vitamins into the blood (a new word, “perfusions”). He sat in an office on his lunch hour with other people whose arms were connected to machines that dripped vitamins into their veins as they read magazines. I pictured women under hair dryers in a Helen Hopkin-son cartoon in the
New Yorker
, or a Ruth Draper monologue, or even Molière’s Imaginary Invalid. He enrolled in an experimental drug program with a different doctor and kept the two physicians in the dark about each other so he could participate in both protocols, and on his lunch hour would rush from one to the other in a taxi, like a man in a Feydeau farce. All this I decided was simply part of Emmanuel’s restless pursuit of the newest thing, in books, movies, places, health care. Emmanuel was always traveling, in other words; Matthew and the Saint, Fire Island and the perfusions, were just part of that. The only permanent thing was his restless curiosity—and the loft.

The fact that Emmanuel was now exposed (the euphemism for “infected”) meant he could now return to the old pleasure of reading books. In the summer, on Fire Island, he would go to bed at a reasonable hour (“For a long time, I used to go to bed early,” is the opening line of Proust) in order to preserve his health, or just stay in the city. Emmanuel no longer wanted to go out to the Pines with a boyfriend, take drugs, and dance, so he began staying home on weekends, while Matthew continued to go out. It was Matthew we saw at Tea Dance now. His presence there made me uneasy, however. There were many times when I wanted to tell Emmanuel that I was worried that Matthew was going to infect him, because Matthew was still going out to Fire Island and tricking, I assumed, when Emmanuel had stopped. Matthew, I feared, was the vector that made Emmanuel’s caution meaningless—since what Matthew picked up would be brought home to the loft they shared. Who knows what really happened—when either man was infected?

That fall Emmanuel moved to Paris for three months to take a drug (HPA23) the Pasteur Institute was offering—the one for which Rock Hudson flew over in a state far worse than Emmanuel’s, chartering his own 747, one of the famous images of the plague. Rock Hudson was visibly sick—kissing Linda Evans on the cover of the tabloid at the supermarket he looked like a vampire—but since we had still not seen any symptoms in Emmanuel, this made his friends wonder: Did Emmanuel know something the rest of us did not? Was he simply anticipating a future, forestalling a fate the rest of us would be mown down by because we were doing nothing? The Imaginary Invalid now became The Man on the Cutting Edge with the good sense to act before it was too late—even if Emmanuel wrote me that the doctors were having trouble cultivating the virus from his blood. Back in New York, Matthew enrolled at Hunter, and had a classmate move into the loft with him. Emmanuel wrote the long letters that only a recluse could write, about the books he was reading, the occasional need to move from one friend’s apartment to another, the weather, his isolation. For three months he went out only to eat or to visit the clinic. He did not like Paris, he said, or the Parisians, and he concluded, during the course of the psychiatric therapy the clinic provided, and reading books written by a disciple of Freud who believed most illness was psychosomatic, that the reason he had AIDS was that he had a death wish.

Emmanuel completed the treatment, nevertheless, and then went to Southeast Asia, where Matthew joined him and Emmanuel’s skepticism about AIDS increased. From a hotel on a beach in Thailand he wrote that AIDS was like Vietnam: a creation of the press—a hysteria, a frame of mind, induced by our exposure to the media—and that, on this beach, favored by hippies, far from the United States, it seemed very distant. But they were not going to stay there long. “Matthew is not a good traveler,” Emmanuel wrote, “he does not like being so far away from hamburgers and Fire Island, I believe he finds this all a bit déclassé, and of course it is true—Thailand, or Bangkok, at least, is just the brothel of Europe.” In Thailand they decided not to have sex with each other—or rather Matthew indicated his preference that they not—and so the sex which they’d been forced to modify since Emmanuel’s blood test, a sex with precautions, now vanished completely; and I wondered how long the rest would last. Not very long. That summer—back on Fire Island—they announced a breakup.

That still left the summer to get through in the beach house, and there was also the loft in the city. There were in short all the problems that come from any separation; and to make it worse—it made everything worse—there was the disease. A friend who saw Matthew at Tea Dance that summer said he was looking so thin, almost anorexic, that Bloomingdale’s had asked him to quit. (A cadaverous figure out of Edvard Munch is not what sells perfume.) Emmanuel, however, looked fine. Indeed, he did look healthy when I saw him that fall on a visit to Manhattan; though he’d told me, when I called from a pay phone on the corner, that he would come down, instead of the usual “Come up!” When he reached the sidewalk, he said that Matthew was home sick. Matthew was now sicker than he was, Emmanuel explained, and he could not stay out very long. He only had time for breakfast. Matthew had been in the hospital, but was now taking his medications at home. His mother—a retired registered nurse—had arrived to help care for him. The three of them—Matthew, his mother, Emmanuel—were all sleeping in the same big bed. Emmanuel himself had contracted pneumonia a few months ago but had responded so favorably to the medicine he had not even been hospitalized, though he did have Kaposi’s sarcoma.