Tiny Tango

by Judith Moffett

  But to the people in my department, who did know my name, I appeared by the age of twenty-nine to have contracted into a prematurely middle-aged schoolmarmish and spinsterish recluse, and nobody there seemed surprised when I accepted a job for which I was grossly overqualified, teaching basic biology and botany at a two-year branch of the Penn State System, fifteen miles out in the suburbs of Delaware County.

  My parents in Denver were also unsurprised. Neither had known how to read between the lines of my decision to stay put rather than go to Cornell. To them all college teaching seemed equally prestigious, and equally fantastic. They liked telling their friends about their daughter the future biology professor, but they knew too little about the life I would lead for the particulars to interest them much or invite their judgment. After the first grandchild came they'd been more incurious than ever about my doings, which had seemed less and less real to them anyway ever since I left the church. My new church was the Company, and of this they knew nothing, ever.

  My job was a dull one made duller by my refusal to be drawn into the school's social web. But it was tolerable work, adequately paid. I stayed in character as the reliable but lackluster biologist; I did what was necessary, capably, without zest or flair. My pre-tenure years were a balancing act, filled but not overfilled. I prepared and taught my classes, swam a mile or ran five every day, meditated for half an hour each morning and evening, carefully shopped for and cooked my excruciatingly wholesome and balanced meals, and took the train into the city one night a week to meet with the Company, and one afternoon a month for my aptly named gag p24 treatments. Every summer for five years I would spend some leisurely hours in the lab, then sit in my pleasant apartment and compose a solid, economical, careful paper developing one aspect or another of my Ph.D. research, which had dealt with the effects of stress on the immune system in rats. One after another these papers were published in perfectly respectable scientific journals, and were more than enough to satisfy the committee that in due course awarded me tenure.

  By the time they had approved me, in the fateful year 1999, my medical records had been destroyed. No document or disk anywhere in the world existed to identify me by name as a symptom-free carrier of the HIV-I virus, though no other personal fact spoke as eloquently about the drab thing I had become.

  The fourteen years had thinned the ranks of Companions, but a fair number of us were still around. Just about all of us survivors had faithfully -- often fanatically -- followed the prescribed fitness/nutrition/stress management regimen, and it was about then that our team of doctors began to congratulate us and each other that we were beating the bejeezus out of the odds. If you're wondering about the lost Companions, whether they too hadn't stuck to the routines and rules, the answer is that they usually said they had; but it was easy enough for us to see (or suppose) how this or that variable made their cases different from ours.

  I myself hardly ever fell ill, hardly had colds or indigestion, so extremely careful was I of myself. My habits, athletics aside, were those of a fussy old maid -- Miss Dove or Eleanor Rigby or W.H. Auden's Miss Edith Gee. They were effective though. When a bug did get through my defenses despite all my care -- as some inevitably did, for student populations have always harbored colds and flus of the most poisonous volatility -- I would promptly put myself to bed and stay there, swallowing aspirins, liquids by the bucket, and one-gram vitamin C tablets, copious supplies of which were always kept on hand. No staggering in with a fever to teach a class through the raging snowstorm -- no siree, not on your life. Not this survivor.

  After tenure I bought a little house in a pleasant development of modest brick tract homes on half-acre lots near the campus, and settled in for the long haul. For years I'd subscribed to the health magazine Prevention , published by the Rodale press; now at last I'd be able to act on their advice to grow my own vegetables instead of buying the toxin-doused produce sold in the supermarkets. I mailed off my subscription to Organic Gardening , had the soil tested, bought my first spade, hoe, trowel, and rake, and some organic fertilizers, spaded up a corner of the back yard, and began.

  That first post-tenure summer I made a garden and wrote no paper. My mood was reflective but the reflections led nowhere much. The next year of teaching was much the same: I did my job, steered clear of controversy, kept in character. But as the following spring came on -- spring of the year 2000 -- I became restless and vaguely uneasy. Even as I loosened the soil in my raised beds and spread over them the compost I had learned to make, I had dimly begun to know that the cards I'd been playing thus far were played out, that it was time for a new deal.

  What I felt, I know now, were the perfectly ordinary first stirrings of a midlife crisis, prohably initiated by the "marker event" of successfully se- curing my means of support for the foreseeable future. Ordinary it may have been, hut it scared me badly. Uneasiness is stressful; stress is lethal.

  I've stopped to read over what I've written to this point. It all seems true and correct, but it leaves too much out, and I think what it mainly leaves out is the terror. I don't mean the obvious terror of the Terror, the riots of 1998-99, when I might have been killed outright had the mob that stormed the Alternate Test Site on Walnut Street gotten its talons into my file and learned my name, when the Company met for months in church basements kept dark, when threatening phone calls woke Elizabeth night after night and she didn't dare come to meetings because the KKK was shadowing her in hopes of being led to us. I certainly don't deny we were scared to death while that nightmare lasted, but it was like a nightmare, born of hysteria and short-lived. In a while, we woke up ftom it. I'm talking about something else.

  It's true that we all know we're going to die. Whether we're crunched by a truck tomorrow while crossing the street, or expire peacefully in our sleep at ninety, we know it'll happen.

  Now, as long as one fate seems no more likely than the other, most people manage to live fairly cheerfully with the awareness that one day they will meet their death for sure. But knowing that your chances of dying young, and soon, and not pleasantly, are many percentage points higher than other people's, changes your viewpoint a lot. Some of the time my radically careful way of life kept the demons at bay, but some of the time I would get up and run my five miles and shower and dress and meditate and drive to school and teach my classes and buy cabbages and oranges at the market and drive home and grade quizzes and meditate and eat supper and go to bed, all in a state of anxiety so intense I could scarcely control it at all.

  There were drugs that helped some, but the best were addictive so you couldn't take those too often. The only thing that made years of such profound fear endurable was the Companionship of my fellow travelers. Together we could keep our courage up, we could talk out (or scream or sob out) our helpless rage at the medical establishment as years went by without producing the miracle drugs they'd been more or less promising, that would lift this bane of uncertainty from us and make us like everybody else -- mortal, but with equal chances. Now, terror and rage are extremely stressful. Stress is lethal. I had said so over and over in print, my white rats and I had demonstrated it in the lab, statistics of every sort bore out the instinctive conviction that we had more to fear from fear itself than from just about anything else; and so our very terrors terrified us worst of all. But we bore it better together than we possibly could have borne it alone.

  A few of my Companions in these miseries took the obvious next step and paired off. One or two probably told each other their real names. I wasn't even tempted. But sexual denial is stressful too; so on Saturday afternoons I used to rent a pornographic video or bob. A lot of these were boring, but trial and error taught me which brands showed some imagination in concept or direction, and voyeurism in that sanitary form did turn me on, it worked, it took care of the problem. Miniaturized in two or three dimensions, the shape-shifting penises of the actors seemed merely fascinating and the spurting semen innocent. No matter that a few spurts of semen had destroyed my life, a
nd that a penis, the only real one I'd ever had to do with, had been the murder weapon; these facts did not feel relevant to the moaning and slurping of the young folks -- certified AB-Negatives every one -- who provided my weekly turn-on.

  For a very long time I was content to release my sexuality, for hygienic reasons, into its narrow run for an hour or so each weekend, like some dangerous animal at the zoo. A few of the guys in the Company were straight, and maybe even willing, but a real relationship -- a business as steamy and complicated as that -- would have been out of the question for me. Others might have the skills; I lacked them. How much safer and less demanding the role of voyeur in the age of electronics, able to fast-forward through the dull bits and play the best ones over!

  The Company, directed by Elizabeth, seemed to understand the force of these feelings. At any rate I wasn't pushed to try to overcome them.

  Well, as I was saying: the beginning of my thirty-seventh summer, one year after receiving tenure at the two-year college where I seemed doomed to spend the rest of my life, however long that proved to be, and a year after the worst of the rioting ended -- the beginning of that summer found me jittery and depressed, and very worried about being jittery and depressed. Probably I wouldn't have acted even so; but at about the same time, or a bit earlier, I'd begun to exhibit a piece of obsessive-compulsive behavior that until then I'd only heard about at Company gatherings: one morning, toweling down after my shower, I caught myself scrutinizing the skin of my thighs and calves for the distinctive purplish blotches of Kaposi's sarcoma, the form of skin cancer, previously rare, whose appearance is a diagnostic sign of the acute form of AIDS.

  How long I'd been doing this half-consciously I couldn't have told you, but from that morning I was never entirely free of the behavior. I'd reached an age when my skin had begun to have its share of natural blotches and keratoses, and I gave myself heart failure more times than I can count, thinking some innocent bruise or lesion meant this was finally it . After several weeks, growing desperate, I gave up shaving my legs -- and shorts and skirts in consequence -- and suffered through the hot weather in loose overalls, just to avoid the chronic anxiety of seeing my own skin. I nearly drove myself nuts.

  The Company assaulted this symptom with shrewd concern and a certain amount of relish. Your unconscious is trying to tell you something, dummy, one or another of them would say; I used to do that when I got so freaked out in the riots -- sloppy about doing my Yoga -- too busy chasing the bucks -- into a bad way after I lost my mother -- upset because I couldn't afford to keep the house but didn't want to sell. Remember when I did that? they'd say. Just figure out what you're doing wrong and fix that , then you'll be okay. For starters, try deciding whether it's something you need to work into your life, or something you need to get rid of.

  I didn't see how it could very well be the latter, since my present life had been stripped to the bare essentials already. But what they said made sense. It was this sort of counsel that made us so necessary to one another.

  Elizabeth, moreover, had a concrete suggestion. On her advice I rented a condo in the Poconos near the Delaware Water Gap -- almost the vacation spot of my former Yuppie dreams -- for a couple of weeks. The Appalachian Trail, heavily used in summer unfortunately, passes through the Gap. I spent the two weeks of my private retreat hiking the Trail, canoeing on the river, and assessing the state of my life.

  So how was I doing?

  Well, on the plus side, I was still alive . Half the original Company of sixteen years before, when I'd just come into it, were not, most from having developed the disease, though in a few cases more than a decade after seroconverting. In the early days it had been hoped that if a person with HIV-I antibodies hadn't fallen ill after six or eight years or so he probably never would, but it hadn't turned out like that. So far, the longer we survived, the more of the virus we had in us; to be alive at all after such a long time was pretty remarkable. I tried to feel glad.

  I'd chosen a suitable job and fixed things so I could keep it; I'd also managed my money intelligently during the years before getting tenure. My salary, while not great, was adequate for a single person who hardly went anywhere and whose expensive tastes ran to top-of-the-line exercise equipment and holographic projectors. Raises would be regular, I would be able to manage my house payments easily. I'd already bought nearly all the furniture I needed, and had assembled a solid reference library of books, tapes, and disks on nutrition, fitness, stress management, and diseases, especially my own; and the gardening and preserving shelf was getting there. In short, all the details of the plan I had devised for myself sixteen years before were in place. And it had worked out: here I was.

  So how come I felt so lousy?

  At first, when I tried to tot up the negatives, it was hard to think of any at all. I was alive, wasn't I? Didn't that cancel out all the minuses right there?

  As a matter of fact, it didn't. Once I got started the list went on and on.

  As a bright college senior I had planned to make something really dazzling and grand of my life. That dream had been aborted; but I began to see that all these years I had been secretly grieving for it as for an aborted child. However obvious this looks now, at the time the recognition was a terrific shock. Years and years had lapsed since my last conscious fantasy of knocking the Cornell Biology Department on its collective ear, and I really believed I had ritualistically said goodbye to all that, early in my therapy.

  Just what was it I'd wanted to do after Cornell, apart from becoming rich and famous? I could hardly remember. But after a while (and an hour of stony trail, with magnificent views of New Jersey) I had called back into being a sense of outward-directedness, of largesse bestowed upon a grateful world, that differed absolutely from the intense and cautious self-preoccupation which had governed my life from the age of twenty-two. Once, I had craved to be a leader in an international scientific community of intellectual exchange. Now, I thought, planned, and worked for the well-being of just one individual, myself -- for what was the Company but just myself, mutiplied by fifteen or eleven or nine? I'd hardly given a thought to normal people, people not afflicted as we were, for a long, long time, and certainly I had given them nothing else -- not even a halfway decent course in botany.

  It was an awful shock, remembering what it had been like to take engagement with the great world for granted. I turned aside from the Trail and its traffic to climb a gray boulder shaggy with mountain laurel, and sat staring out over the summery woods, remembering the hours I'd spent talking with Bill -- my professor, the one who'd exposed me to the virus -- about world population control and sustainable agriculture. No details came back; but the sheer energy and breadth of vision, the ability to imagine tackling issues of such complexity and social import, now seemed unbelievable. How had I shrunk so small?

  At that moment on the mountain my triumph of continuing to live looked paltry and mean. I'd died anyway, hadn't I? Wasn't this death-in-life a kind of unwitting suicide? But I knew at bottom that it was no ignoble thing to have gone on living where so many had died. My fit of self-loathing ran its course, and I climbed down from the rock and started back down the Trail toward the Water Gap, three miles below, where I'd left my car.

  I pondered as I went. What was missing from my life now seemed clearer. Meaningful work, first and foremost. Engagement. Self-respect, if that wasn't asking too much -- not simply for having survived, but for contributing something real to society; and perhaps even the respect of others.

  And last of all I let myself remember, really remember, those springtime afternoons in Bill's sunny office with its coffee machine and little refrigerator and daybed, and added one more thing: intimacy, social and sexual. Not the Company, that bunch of neutered and clairvoyant clones, but I and Thou: intimacy with the Other.

  It was a list of things necessary to a fulfilled and happy life, and it bristled like a porcupine with potential stresses.

  The trail was rough and steep, and I was wiped out fr
om both my journeys, the inner more than the outer. When I let myself back into the condo the sun had set, and I thought with a fierce rush of resentment how nice it would be, just for once, to microwave a box of beans and franks and open a Coke, like a normal American citizen on holiday, instead of having to boil the goddamned homemade pasta and cook the spaghetti sauce from scratch. The strength of this resentment astounded me all over again: how long had I been sitting on the powderkeg of so much rage against the virus itself?

  Enlightenment came early in the first week of my retreat, so I had plenty of time left to process my insights and form conclusions.

  About personal intimacy first. Essential or not, I found that I still just didn't feel able to risk it. The potential trouble seemed bigger than the potential payoff, as I've mentioned, I lacked the skills.

  About engagement. More promising. The thought of connecting myself in a meaningful way to society by some means that didn't threaten my own stability appealed to me a lot. I could teach in a more engaged fashion, but that felt far too personal, too exposed and risky. Then I thought of something else, something actually quite perfect: I could volunteer to work with AIDS patients. This may sound uniquely stressful for someone in my position, but the prospect oddly wasn't. I already knew everything about the progression of the disease, I'd been through it half a dozen times with dying Companions, so could not be shocked; I needn't fear infection (being infected already); and I felt certain my powers of detachment would be adequate.