Like People in History (69 page)

If Sydelle presented herself as being the unwilling instrument of extraterrestrial forces, Cynthia, in her long discussions with me about her lover, presented Sydelle as the twisted result of a typical patriarchal upbringing in a hypocritical society. She laid out Sydelle's past like a quilt for the two of us to inspect, critique, deconstruct. Her food binging, her anorexia, her smoking and drinking, her failures in relationships (until now), her sick and guilt-ridden relationships with her father, her mother, her brother, her excessive sensitivity and vulnerability, her... Didn't I think Sydelle should try acting? Cynthia did. Sydelle, of course, had so very little self-esteem, Cynthia told me, it had taken weeks to get her even to enroll in HB Studio, where, of course, she'd been brilliant, had Sydelle told me about that? No, Cynthia guessed she wouldn't. But Sydelle was good. In fact, if it weren't for her and my past difficulties, Blaise would have let her be an understudy in the show. They only had one understudy. That was news to me, who was unaware we had any. As was the news that Bernard Dixon was that one understudy, although that explained somewhat why he was often found in a lower row of the theater, eating sandwiches and doing the crossword puzzle various afternoons. They really could use a second understudy, Cynthia insisted. Especially a non-Equity one. What did I think? If I approached Blaise about Second Why, wouldn't that be proof I'd buried the hatchet?

It would, I agreed. So I said sure, okay, why not? I could afford to be philosophical: my life no longer centered around the play; it was wider now, beyond the shabby little theater.

Walking across town every afternoon to the hospital, I found myself stopping to sit a few minutes at whatever part of Union Square wasn't at that hour being ripped up by jackhammers or steam shovels in its endless ongoing redesign. The shops of the upper teens at Fifth Avenue and Broadway also seemed to beckon more. I could always tell myself that if I did spend hours at Barnes & Noble or China Books or the big discount mart, it was to pick up a book or cassette or sundry Matt would like.

Every day, I found myself leaving the theater earlier, spending time in the open air, and arriving at the hospital earlier. One time I'd arrived so early, lunch trays still hadn't been collected and Matt was in the bathroom, audibly brushing his teeth and gargling. I left without being noticed, and walked around Gramercy Park before coming back as though I'd not been there already, afraid, although I couldn't quite explain it, of seeming too eager, like some young suitor. Another time I'd arrived just as lunch trays were being collected, only to find Matt already asleep. I wondered whether I ought to leave, but Matt awoke slightly and, seeing me, smiled wanly, took my hand, and said, "Today's not a good day." But when I said, "I'll come back later," Matt quickly replied, "Don't go!" Then explained, "I like knowing you're here," before slipping back into slumber for another hour. What had he meant? That this way he would know where I was? That he felt protected with me there?

Following the early afternoon bustle serving lunch, was a quiet time in the hospital. Trays were removed by orderlies. Nurses came to check temperature and blood pressure. Patients read or slept.

Increasingly, I couldn't help but notice, Matt too slept. He slept after lunch, and sometimes again after our daily game of chess before dinner and night visitor hours. At first, our chess games had been true tiny battles, tests of skill, plots and counterplots, long sallies and retreats, reveilles and sudden defeats, that had taken up most of my afternoon visit, interrupted though they might be by nurses or the arrival of an unexpected snack, accompanied as they often were by conversation and phone calls. But more often now, our chess games were brief, enigmatic: an unconventional opening, a few skirmishes, pounce, I'd be checkmated!

The shorter the games became, the more concentrated and arcane was Matt's technique shown to be, as though decades of play and thought about the game were being explosively revealed. Traps and mysteries abounded. I would make four moves and discover myself completely enclosed, way out of my league, unable to mount anything approximating a challenge, at times unable even to understand Matt's explanations of how he'd done it. The game would be over, or Matt would charitably say, "to be continued," though they seldom were continued, and I would try to figure out what had happened.

Equally brief, concentrated, and arcane was the poem of Matt's I'd stumbled across, carefully written on a hospital pad and dated a few days earlier, found under the bed while I was hunting one of Matt's slippers. When Matt sleepily acknowledged the poem to be his, I asked if I could copy it. "If you want," Matt said, unconcerned. But when I asked if he'd written any more, and were they too on hospital pads somewhere around the room, behind the curtains, in the shower stall, under the bed, Matt put a sweating palm up to my mouth, stopping my questions, saying, "Don't worry about it." Then he turned over in bed and went to sleep.

The poem was titled "nightcall":

the whirr of leather

over the river of your voice

the pause & clatter the

telephone brings     i am skating again

as fast as i go

you flow beneath me     white

white     our lives coming down

to these two small blades

What was it about? I felt, I couldn't say how or why, that it was about us. Matt and me. Years ago. At the Pines. And now.

As my question about the poem went unanswered, as our chess games shortened, our reading sessions got longer, with Matt farther back on the bed, looking out the window at the afternoon light (looking for his future, it sometimes seemed) while I read aloud from gossip columns, news items, and reviews in the
Times
or
Post
or one of the magazines left by a visitor the previous night. Yet if I should stop reading for a minute, Matt would invariably, gently protest, "I love the sound of your voice! It's so soothing!" And I would go on reading, soothing with my voice, until Matt would fall asleep, and I would get up and check that the little oxygen tube Matt now kept close by or right in his lips was loose enough and wouldn't inadvertently shut off. I'd brush Matt's forehead with my lips for fever, button or unbutton his pajama tops, lightly sponge him with alcohol if he seemed too hot. If Matt happened to be attached that day to a metal hat rack of IV tubes inserted into his wrist, giving anti-virals or nutriments, I would make sure they were all open and dripping. Then I'd sit and do my own reading. I sat close, as Matt had taken to reaching out suddenly in his sleep to grasp my thigh or hand, sometimes gripping so hard, during a dream or while mumbling in his sleep, that I would wince in pained surprise.

That was rare. Less rare, if equally inexplicable, were those times Matt would suddenly wake up while I was reading—in the salons or streets of Paris, in the grand hotel dining rooms and on the beach at Balbec in 1885—and suddenly say, "There's a favor I have to ask of you." To which I would reply, "Sure. What?" To which Matt would enigmatically respond, "In time. All in good time. But it's very important. No one else can do it." And I would—even the fifth or sixth time this occurred—say, "Anything! Anything at all."

Seconds later Matt would be snoring, and I would be utterly at sea, unable to discern whether Matt had been truly awake or just seeming to be awake but really talking in his sleep, his question not real, the favor he expected of me not so much a real one, but some kind of reassurance he required, that would allow him to more comfortably sleep.

If those sudden events of reaching out or asking for a totally mysterious favor were strange adjuncts, they were worth having to put up with, worth the equally inexplicable contentment I seemed to experience—and which I'd never dare admit—sitting and reading the new translation of Proust on a spring afternoon that smelled of fresh flowers, while Matt slept so close by.

Not only was Matt sleeping more, but so was his roommate, one Joe Veselka, a man barely thirty, who'd been very ill indeed, suffering a variety of minor ills and irritations beyond the Pneumocystis that had kept him in intensive care a week. Joe's sessions with a nurse, overheard through closed curtains, to help alleviate some awful skin condition, could get so loud and disturbing I usually managed to get Matt out of the room, over to the little lobby near the elevator.

Out in the hospital's twelfth-floor lobby, Matt and I would play chess or read, and in a small way hold court among visitors and other patients, occasionally even an intern or two. All the staff adored Matt, naturally, and would come by, stop to ask how he was. And I never failed to remark how gracious Matt was to them all, how distinctively beautiful with his single lock of white hair, his posture so erect, even though he was undoubtedly thinner now, his attitude modest despite his regal looks.

How proud I was that Matt wanted me near him, how proud he would tell anyone who would bother to ask that, yes, we'd been lovers, still were, really, in another, higher sense. Matt's courtesy was so easy. He'd never deflect questions, no matter how pointed. Not even when another patient on the floor—a middle-aged harridan with a Dutch-boy haircut of obviously dyed yellow—said to him, "Donch'a feel weird going around with a hole in your chest?" She was referring to the infusolator surgically embedded in Matt's upper left pectoral, a medical device called a Hickman catheter, through which he was receiving far more directly than was otherwise possible a potent new drug to fight off the cytomegalovirus that had begun to cloud his eyesight and infect his throat. "It's not open all the time," Matt replied, opening his pajama top to bare himself—an alabaster torso from a Gothic crucifix—to her. "See! It's got a lid!" At other times, he'd tell visitors, "I'm the lucky one. Poor Joe and poor Raimundo in the next room. They're suffering so much. I'm just a little tired."

And afterward, when I, leaving for the day, stopped at the nurse's station, one of the staff there would invariably say hello, stop me, ask if Matt needed anything, and if, as increasingly happened lately, I asked them to bring Matt a sleeping pill (he complained of awakening in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep), they'd say, "Oh, sure! Right away!" Then they'd confide, "He's no trouble. Never complains. Never asks for anything. If his room light goes on here, it's always for his roommate." And I would feel even prouder of Matt, more certain of him, and I'd make sure that even with a full night's schedule, say concert and dinner, I'd find time to phone Matt before lights out.

Once, I was at dinner with Alistair and a woman named Toni Kauffer, whom Alistair had somehow talked into doing free publicity for the show, when I excused myself to go make that phone call to Matt. When I returned to the table, Alistair took Toni's bare arm and mewed, "Look at him, Toni!
L'amour! L'amour!
As Mary Boland said! Don't deny it, Cuz! You're, as they say of the newly engaged and the freshly pregnant, 'simply radiant.'"

From the minute I arrived at the theater that morning, I sensed something wasn't as it ought to be, but I couldn't put my finger on what.

Up onstage, all seemed usual enough: Blaise was working with virtually the entire cast, trying to put together more smoothly the complex series of spoken lines and carefully choreographed action that would constitute the "fight" for the Stonewall Inn. They mostly seemed to be working on details, and they seemed awfully intent, so I paid more attention to the newspapers I'd bought that morning:
Times, Post,
and the
New York Native
with its scary "11,234 and Still Counting" headline. Meanwhile, around one end of the stage momentarily cleared of actors, Henry and Bernard Dixon were up on ladders, moving ceiling stage lights, replacing bulbs, etc., to Cynthia's direction from the control booth.

Sipping coffee, I moved on to the
Times
crossword puzzle.

"That your
Post?"

David J. Temporarily not needed onstage. He didn't even wait for me to say yes, but immediately turned to the middle of the paper, found the Horoscope section, and read. His shoulders slumped a little more, and a sound like "hummmph" emerged from somewhere deep inside him.

"Bad news?"

David J. looked as if he wanted to say something, but instead shrugged and went back up onstage.

I took the discarded paper and checked my own horoscope for the day: "Disasters abound. Unpleasant news in the
A.M
. is followed by a
P.M
. disappointment. Later tonight, it's all you can do to keep body and soul together. No matter what happens, keep a cool head, and something will be salvaged."

Wow! I thought these things were always Pollyanna-positive. This one was a complete downer.

I scanned the other horoscopes, and several looked equally bad. As I read mine again, I felt a tiny twist inside my guts, as though something were alive in there. I recognized the sensation. I'd last felt it a few years back, swimming back to the Pines, suddenly discovering myself having to fight against a tide that seemed intent upon drawing me out to sea: fear, the beginning of unreasoning, unceasing fear.

Was it my imagination? Or did everyone in the theater suddenly look as though they'd been suffering from food poisoning all last night? Slightly dazed, sour looks on all their faces. Even the love-struck Bernard and the normally giggly Henry looked dour.

I watched them more closely for confirmation. Trudged up the aisle to the last rows to check Cynthia. She too looked subdued. The final proof.

I knocked on the window to get her attention, then gestured that I was coming into the booth.

"We've
got
to have a
few
more blue gels," Cynthia was saying through the microphone, into the headphones Henry and Bernard were wearing. Her voice had a querulous edge I'd never heard before. She remained at the board, barely acknowledging my presence. "Then try those two greens. Double them if you have to!" she insisted. She still hadn't turned to where I had perched on a stool. "I guess that'll have to do."