The Conversion (11 page)

His words pop and blister on the page. Stunned and whirling from this revelation, I barely manage to collate the manuscript and once again turn it over. Everything—the bookcases chock full of Pléiade, my writing desk with two Italian/English dictionaries, a stack of documents in the process of translation, an open bag of toiletries whose ingredients and directions for use are printed in several different languages—vibrates with this sense of terrible betrayal. “
You
didn’t care if I got slammed,” I speak to Ed aloud. “
You
just couldn’t bear the idea of that relationship. So you did whatever you could to keep us apart. To keep me with you.”

I read further. From Ed’s revelation to Michel, he goes on to discuss a poem that he wrote that I never saw, and so I imagine he must have destroyed for not living up to his expectations. The poem, written at the end of October 2003, apparently personified my state of mind when I visited Sainte-Chapelle after my breakup with Michel, right before I went to get the result of my HIV test.

For I’d told Ed about having spent an hour meditating in this, my favorite chapel in all of Paris, a vaulting jewel box of stained glass that tells various biblical allegories, how I watched the prisms of sunlight shifting through the colored panes, reminding myself that no matter what happened, I was not going to die tomorrow. Even if I were to learn that my body was full of virus, I would, at the very least, be able to return and bask in the marquise setting of this chapel. What I didn’t tell Ed was how I sat there in Sainte-Chapelle, daydreaming about Michel and all our rides through Paris. How, from the rear of his motorcycle, the architectural grandeur of the city used to fall away like a cascade of golden dominoes, blurred wonderfully by speed. I imagined myself clinging to his rib cage, nuzzling the nape of his neck that I so loved, so broad and long and covered with the faintest down of silver-blond hair. I constantly had to resist the temptation to lean forward and kiss it. And how when I did
succumb to temptation, he’d squeeze his shoulders together and press back against me and say how good it felt to have me behind him. Roaring down boulevard after boulevard, he’d turn his head sideways and I’d see his blissful smile, his intimate words rattling against the wind. And I would shut my eyes and feel at once exhilarated and then desperately afraid of losing him. I’d begin my pathetic praying that somehow he’d be
psychologically
unable to sever the cord between us. Who would ever know that if we settled into a domestic arrangement whether or not we’d last, but the physical bond was so urgent that it seemed sacrilegious to harm it. And even though I always feared that he would eventually leave me, riding on the back of his motorcycle I just could never begin to fathom life without him.

But then in the midst of all the foreign visitors, the groups of
boisterous
schoolchildren who suddenly stopped their clowning and fell under Sainte-Chapelle’s rapture, I imagined a pair of arms snaking around me, powerful arms gripping me the way he did when our bodies rocked together. And for a moment I actually believed that he, whom I hadn’t seen in months, was there with me. Then I shook off the illusion, spooked by it.

Anxious about the test results, I decided to walk from Sainte-Chapelle, in the center of Paris, to the American hospital in Neuilly, on the outskirts of the city. The mid-October weather was breezy and glorious. I wandered along streets lined with trees whose leaves had turned a
translucent
golden and lent the city, already famous for its light, an added
refraction
. I like to imagine that, in comparison to the harsh purity of American sunlight, the light in certain European countries has an aged quality, like a candle flame burning on tallow rather than wax.

It took me an hour and a half to reach the hospital. From the
sumptuous
à la
Architectural Digest
waiting lounge, I was shown to a barren examining room with a school desk and chair in the middle of it, no other chairs, a few stainless-steel cabinets filled with gauze pads and knee braces and sacks of cotton balls and dark amber bottles of purgatives and
antiseptic
. Walls, painted gray, suggested the utilitarian tone of a way station in some far-flung country. Sitting there in the hard, uncomfortable chair, I thought to myself: This is it, the moment whose outcome I shall never forget for the rest of my life, and how rare to know that something yet to happen will become a lasting recollection.

The door unlatched, a young doctor entered, and I was astonished by dark, Latino matinee-idol looks, momentarily catapulted out of
desperation
only to feel foolish and shallow. He introduced himself, an American with a slight Southern drawl. I searched his face to see if he was harboring good news or bad.

“We’re having a little trouble locating your test result,” he said by way of explanation.

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “I don’t believe this!”

His handsome brow furrowed. “Don’t worry. It’s here somewhere. We’ll find it. I just wanted to tell you.” It was strange to feel so nervous and distraught in the presence of a man who normally would be rousing me in an entirely different way.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Are the results always positive or negative?”

“Meaning?”

“Is there any possible way that the results could be neither?”

The doctor squinted at me. “It can happen, I suppose. But why so concerned?”

Was this guy for real? What planet was
he
from? “You don’t know what I’ve done.”

His eyes narrowed as something occurred to him. “Wait, are you gay?”

I nodded.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, flustered. “I didn’t realize.”

Here is one occasion where the assumption that one might be straight was actually denying me a compassion or an understanding that otherwise would have been elicited from this doctor. At this point a knock came on the door. The man looked at me keenly. “Hang on now. This may be our answer.” He got up and opened it a crack, was told something in French, and then slipped through and didn’t return.

My heart sputtering, I now imagined getting the result, leaving the hospital in a daze, taking the Métro back to Ed, and watching his reaction. Then one clear thought occurred to me in the midst of this anxiety reflux: Ed, on some level, would want me to be infected also; for then we’d be in it together and there would be less chance that I’d leave him. I was feeling this so acutely when the door opened; the young doctor stuck his head in and said with mock derision, “You’re fine. Now get the hell out of
here. And play safe,” as though I were a baseball player trotting out toward center field.

In his memoir Ed finally admits that he would have said and done
whatever
he could to discourage Michel—even to the point of lying about my HIV status. Reading this confession, knowing that at least Ed was aware of what he was doing, I feel completely deflated by his willingness to rob me of my happiness for the sake of his own. I want to hate him for what he’s done, but it’s difficult; I know how unhappy he was
au fond,
despite all the fame and validation of his career.

Putting the manuscript aside for a moment, I try to think back to the evening just after I learned the results of my blood test. It was a chilly
evening
, and Ed and I sat warming ourselves by a fire. I’d just finished confessing to him how the waiting had nearly done me in. He then confessed to me that his waiting period for the test result was mild in comparison to the aftermath of dismal depression over the result.

“It was very difficult because I knew just how and when it happened,” he explained, “knew the precise moment I became infected, like some women know the moment they conceive.”

“Really?” I said.

He nodded and smiled grimly. “It certainly wasn’t romantic, the punch line of some candlelit dinner, or a thrumming fuck after a motorcycle ride through the Bois de Bologne. It was a quick pickup in the Tuileries. A manly beauty, incredibly exciting, a high moment of eroticism in my life.” Ed stopped for a moment, eyes blinking rapidly in what I imagined to be his reliving some of the lurid details of the encounter. “And what’s strange is that I had a choice whether or not to use protection. There was one of those great polyurethane condoms in my pocket. But the man was so hot.” His face flushed. “No longer the stud I once was, I actually worried that I might not ever have the same kind of opportunity again. Being so caught up, so ‘mastered by his brute blood,’” Ed paraphrased Yeats. “I just wanted him to fuck me as he was. As I was. And what I actually think I realized then, the burning truth was that getting caught up in the power of that kind of sex makes everything that goes against the grain diluted.” Ed finally took off his reading glasses and stared at me with his naked deep blue eyes. “You see, Russell, in my life I’ve always chased pure experience. And so I took my moment of raw passion and it was absolutely divine.
And afterward as I was walking back here to the apartment I somehow knew in my gut that I was, at that very moment, in the earliest stages of sero-conversion.”

Disturbed, I looked away toward the fire whose flames were suddenly roaring higher. I contemplated the idea of “sero-conversion,” a medical phrase that has become part of the general lexicon, widely known, even among the less educated, a phrase that for many has the same far-reaching resonance as “terrorist attack.” But it was an attack within the body itself, a rampage of an inscrutable virus that takes charge of healthy cells and converts them to carry out a slow self-destruction. Finally I said, “I can’t believe you never told me this story.”

“It’s not an easy thing to speak about, or even admit to. It’s in the memoir, though. You’d have read about it at some point, even if I hadn’t told you.”

“Better that you’re explaining it now. Because obviously I want to ask you things.”

“Like what?” he asked in a suspicious tone.

“Like how it is dealing with such specifics. Knowing when and who did it to you.”

Surprisingly, it quickly ceased to make a difference, Ed told me. In fact, the diagnosis itself demanded a far broader consideration. For example, it forced him to be philosophical, to contemplate all the terrible infirmities that could and did happen to people, to realize his viral infection was a lot that must be borne, like losing a loved one, or suffering from yet another chronic but treatable disease. How he’d had to accept that his life probably wouldn’t be quite as long as he’d once hoped or imagined it would be. Yes, toward the end of his life he’d probably come down with more
opportunistic
illnesses than the run-of-the-mill person. Then again, can there ever be guarantees of everlasting good health or longevity for anyone? That night he’d said to me, “It also made me want to get on with it, write harder, time being more of the essence.”

“You also know that you’ll be leaving a substantial body of work that is respected and even taught at universities,” I’d told him, thinking at the same time that I would probably never leave behind such a legacy.

“Well, yes, it’s a comfort, but nothing can cheat the feeling that there is a specific time bomb ticking in your body that could go off at any moment. After all, nobody has yet been cured of this.”

“Well, at least you’d lived awhile—you were in your early fifties—before you became infected. Think of all the people in their twenties and thirties who are dealing with this.”

“You’re too young to understand that that doesn’t really make a
difference
!” Ed countered, getting up quickly, deftly grabbing a log and laying it crosswise on the fire. “Nobody can deal with dying
sooner
, bucko!” He sat down again next to me and looked at me crosswise over his reading glasses. “Not even octogenarians. They drum the thought out of their heads by talking about doctors and medicine and especially about
everybody
else who is sick and dying.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to minimize what it’s like for you.”

“Don’t worry. It’s all right,” he said. “The interesting thing is that, being of a depressive nature, even before I knew I was HIV positive, I used to wake up, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes early in the morning, with this feeling of dread.”

“Dread?” I asked. “What do you mean by that exactly?”

He shrugged. “Hard to explain, really. A sense that I’d lived a lot of my life, that most of it had already gone by, that I wasn’t really young anymore, even though I kept trying to play at being young. Or had
youthful
partners around to prop myself up.” He paused, allowing the remainder of his thoughts on the matter to refine themselves for a few moments. “I guess it was more that I’d reached an age where there was this constant feeling that anything could happen to me, that I could suffer and die in all manner of ways, from an illness to some freak accident. It was a terrible feeling, a constant feeling of foreboding and worry that I’d never been able to shake. And then, when I got infected, it certainly gave some meaning to that inexplicable terror.”

Meditating on this for a moment, I said at last, “I wish our culture raised us to be more prepared for death.”

Ed nodded. “Now, this is a truth. The idea of death is certainly not integrated into our youth-obsessed culture, which now only makes it more difficult to get older. In my lifetime I’ve watched how the elderly have commanded less and less veneration from the young.”

A brief silence fell between us, and then he said, “I have to say, I’m surprised to see how much you
obsessed
over the results of this test, Russell. Even though you tried to hide it, you couldn’t.”

I said nothing in response. What, after all, could I say?

“So I was right, wasn’t I? That you weren’t careful with your
lover
.” He said the last word mockingly.

“Please don’t!”

“Why are we so foolish? Why do we blind ourselves to these risks?” Ed asked emphatically.

I tried to think about this. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s what you say: getting caught up in the brute passion of it all.”