Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  So I would talk about Cesar and explain what he was going through. I wanted to shove people’s noses in it. The AIDS jokes began among us, or we adopted them comfortably enough—after all, Eddie Murphy was a funny guy otherwise. The story I want to tell is about heroism and sacrifice and love, but I will not be avoiding the anger. I watched AIDS become gossip, glib and dismissive, smutty, infantile. I gossiped myself. It was sometimes the only way to talk about it, but all the same it’s a yellow and disgusting way.

  For the time being, however, Cesar’s condition remained “stable,” a word that would have so many gallows shadings over the next years that finally it would come to mean simply “alive.” I remember in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, or was it the Bhopal disaster, midlevel officials speaking of the situation turning stable. Euphemism, the twentieth century’s most important product. For Cesar it meant the lesions weren’t dispersing exponentially, the swelling was no worse, and he had enough energy to finish the school year. Staying with us over Easter break, he decided to go ahead with another student tour of Europe, culminating in Spain, a country he considered a serious lacuna in his life’s itinerary.

  So it seemed the most natural thing in the world that Roger and I should be planning our own next trip, having decided over all that Saturday caffeine that we couldn’t go anywhere else before Greece. Roger had passed through it once, but knew the place had been beckoning me for years. Besides, our travels seemed to be taking us ever deeper into the Mediterranean, and I promised Rog the next trip would be an overdue return to Israel. Thus basking in the stasis of things, we left for Athens on June 1.

  I don’t know how not to gush about it. I realize I’m hardly the first to feel it, any more than Byron was, but the moment we set foot in Greece I was home free. Impossible to measure the symbolic weight of the place for a gay man. We grew up with glints and evasions in school about the homoerotic side, but if you’re alone and think you’re the only one in the world, the merest glimpse is enough. The ancient soil becomes peopled with warrior brothers equal to fate, arm in arm defending the marble-crowned hill of democracy from savage hordes. The source of such heroics is buried very deep—for me it lies in History I at Andover, the stone swell of the athletes’ muscles and marathon battle statistics, war after war till it all disappeared.

  But you find that your first bewildered erotic connection at fourteen stays with you, since most of the rest of gay history lies in shallow bachelors’ graves. I admit the baggage I took to Greece was cumbrous, that I swept across the Aegean at a fever pitch. But I can’t begin to say what brought us through the fire without telling this part at a hundred and three degrees. It was the last full blast of sunlight in our life. There is no medium cool for the final pang of joy, no more than there is for the horrors that wait like the Sphinx at the bend in the road.

  Others had groaned to us about the smog and chaos of Athens, but we savored every inch of it. The city was brisk with the winds of early summer, and the grass was thick in the agora, where Socrates had held forth. We drove to Delphi across the Theban plain, and I wrote in my diary that the day and a half we spent there was the deepest I’d ever plumbed my life. Roger and I walked about with an armload of guides, reconstructing the whole site, from the cleft in the mountain where Apollo slew Python to the Hague-like world court that gathered around the oracle in the temple.

  I should say that neither of us could bear the predations of modern religion or the bigotry and smarm of true believers of any stripe. Perhaps we were atheists by default, but the matter of God did not come into the equation of our love. We were, however, the most unreconstructed romantics, fanatic after our fashion as the human waves of Iranian boys who choke the ditches of Basra. And though I have come to be more godless than anyone I know after all this meaningless suffering, I have to admit that day at Delphi—plunging my hands in the Kastalian spring, where supplicants to the oracle purified themselves—I felt more religious than ever before or since.

  Yet it was the ancients’ religion, with its powers of earth and water, quake and tempest, especially its goddess of beauty and god of the sun. When I ran in the grassy stadium high on the mountain where the Pythian Games were held, their heroes sung by Pindar, I knew I was poised at the exact center of my life. I belonged at last to a brotherhood where body and spirit were one. When a victor at the games returned in triumph to his home, the city wall was breached to show that a place that possessed such a hero required no further defense. In the pitch of the moment it seemed to me that Roger and I and our secret brothers were heir to all of it.

  Just before we left, Cesar had said that ancient places “confirm” a person, uniting a man to the past and thus the future. Confirmed was just how I felt by the Greek idea. Hopeless romance, I know: they kept slaves, their women were powerless, they sacrificed in blood. But a gay man seeks his history in mythic fragments, random as blocks of stone in the ruins covered in Greek characters, gradually being erased in the summer rain. We have the poems of Sappho because the one rolled linen copy stoppered a wine jug in a cave, and the blanks are the words the acid of the wine has eaten away. Fragments are all you get. You jigsaw the rest with your heart.

  It was the happiest time Roger and I ever spent together. A tourist’s route, make no mistake, nothing too out of the way, but the full Aegean odyssey all the same. Three days in Crete, by sea to Santorini, then Mykonos, with a side jaunt to Delos to see the lake where Apollo was born. The latter drained and weeded up now, but guarded still by the stone lions of the Naxians, six of them crouched in the baking sun, staring into the same distance where the statues of Buddha stare.

  I look at pictures of Roger taken that week in the islands—the Minoan palace at Knossos, the valley of the windmills high on the mountain where Zeus was born, a wall above the caldera at Santorini. What am I looking for signs of—weight loss, pallor, fatigue? He looks terrific, as dazed as I by the clear light. Sometime that summer I know he began to cough, but ever so slightly, hardly more than a clearing of the throat late in the evening, or was that when things grew quiet enough for me to notice?

  I remember a morning in the ruins of ancient Thera, on the lee side of Santorini away from the volcano, the explosion of which in 1500 B.C. gave Plato his myth of Atlantis. The tidal wave hit Crete in an hour and leveled the whole Minoan palace culture. Thera perches on an abutment half a mile above the sea, with a view that goes all the way to Africa, a great sentry post to watch for Persians. They had an oracle there too, and a gymnasium with an outdoor court at the tip of the bluff where the boys danced naked to Apollo. There are inscriptions along the walls, erotic poems to the boys, though the guidebook wouldn’t recite a single line.

  This was not even the same galaxy as History I. We were the only tourists there that hour in the dancing court, and we couldn’t decide which was our truer ancestry, the boys or the dirty old men. You must discover the pagan on your own; it’s not in the books. As to where a man finds his ancestors, the longing is diffuse till you come to a place where they spring full-blown. It had happened to us once before, in a ruined abbey in Provence, north of Aries, standing in a tower and gazing out over the marshes. A dozen white horses were cropping the pale grass. People who travel have dreamlike moments where they borrow time from the past, but it’s not out-of-body at all. The echo of the ancient image, warrior or monk, is in you.

  Luckily we’d decided to fly home via Paris and London, because after Greece we had to de-escalate and re-enter. A couple of bonnes soirées with Madeleine, a day at the British Museum, and on the final leg to L.A. I turned to Roger and said, “We could always go to Egypt next time and then go to Israel. Do they let you do that?”

  I’m not sure how far I re-entered. Four weeks later the Olympics began in L.A., and you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to keep the connection Greek. Roger went to the diving competition with Richard Ide, our buddy from USC who teaches Shakespeare. Then all three of us attended the final day of track and field, August 11 in the Col
iseum. The gridlock crowds that had been expected in L.A. never materialized, and the city was curiously quiet from mid-July on, like Paris in August.

  As to whether Greece was a great whirlwind of denial, I note a strangely ashen mood in a paragraph written on a plane July 8, Atlanta—LAX. Alfred and I had been through Savannah, researching a ghost story. On Friday the sixth I’d jotted the inscription off a duelist’s grave.

  James Wilde, 22, shot by a man who a short time before would have been friendless without hint.

  Was that a gay story? I wondered. Then on the plane home, this disconnected passage where I sound more Tennessee than Georgia:

  It is not a matter of the summer—I mean, not the summer out there, in the muggy breeze off the river in Savannah (not so muggy, not what I thought, not what I wanted), but the summer I used to cry out for and run around in, looking looking. I do believe there is a constant summer in my life … till death anyway, till I die or Rog dies or Death starts being everywhere.

  Perhaps the world is always full of portents, as the oracle maintained it was, in every flight of birds that passes. The only thing we could do to hold the fates at bay was to keep our own world full to the brim, or that at least is how I read the magic of that summer’s end. As the reassuring postcards arrived from Cesar in Madrid, I cleared space to pick up a novel I’d stopped at a hundred pages eighteen months before. Roger and I decided to produce my play ourselves. Roger was on the board of Room For Theatre now, and he arranged for us to meet with production people and directors on the equity-waiver front. It was a neat close of a circle for us, since Just the Summers was about the testing of a marriage, and I’d written it during the most difficult year of our own.

  I always hesitate over the marriage word. It’s inexact and exactly right at the same time, but of course I don’t have a legal leg to stand on. The deed to the house on Kings Road says a single man after each of our names. So much for the lies of the law. There used to be gay marriages in the ancient world, even in the early Christian church, before the Paulist hate began to spew the boundaries of love. And yet I never felt quite comfortable calling Rog my lover. To me it smacked too much of the ephemeral, with a beaded sixties topspin. Friend always seemed more intimate to me, more flush with feeling. Ten years after we met, there would still be occasions when we’d find ourselves among strangers of the straight persuasion, and one of us would say, “This is my friend.” It never failed to quicken my heart, to say it or overhear it. Little friend was the diminutive form we used in private, the phrase that is fired in bronze beneath his name on the hill.

  I say all this about names because we were coming fast on Labor Day and our tenth anniversary. We pulled together a party for fifteen, the closest friends we could find who hadn’t bolted the city to end the summer on a proper beach. Actor, poet, professor, journalist, shrink, cardiologist—half men, half women, half straight, half gay. In a word, the family.

  A couple of weeks before, I’d bought at auction three photographs, and they were by way of my anniversary gift to us both. I admit that Roger’s first reaction was very Roger. He shook his head and said we were spending too much money, though he enjoyed the collecting as much as I and loved to walk about the house showing people our pictures. Anyway, these three images were new: a Philippe Halsman casual portrait of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn; a Kertesz of an angel on a roof at Chartres with two birds flying over; a Dorothea Lange of a haunted man at a counter in a diner.

  I sift these details now because they are so concrete, still here in the house, evidence of all the roads of our lives in the time before the war. Where the love had grown after ten years is not so quantifiable and will never go up at auction, though as I write I’m glued like a tabloid to the sale in Geneva of Wallis Simpson’s king’s ransom. What is the tenth anniversary in lawful marriages? Crystal? Brass? I somehow never learned such milestones, any more than we ever got eight toaster ovens to mark the white specific day. We still made do with the day we met.

  Kathy Hendrix, who was there that night, tells me she recalls with a stab of pain the joy of the anniversary party whenever she thinks of the onslaught of the next two years. Me too. I grope back to it and study the snapshots, ever the scholar of what we lost. Around midnight I toasted Roger with a line from Du Bellay: “Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage.” The words are set in paving stones around the points of a compass, on a crag above the harbor in Nice. Happy the man who like Ulysses has made a beautiful voyage.

  To us.

  •II•

  We had lunch at Trumps, end of September, with John Allison, to explore the possibility of his directing Just the Summers. John was managing director of the Call-board Theater, a blowsy Forty-second Street space just off Melrose, and he was known for getting the text right, especially comedy. We all got on like instant cousins. The backbone discipline of John’s National Theatre training in London shone through all his irreverence. Though he was surely in his mid-forties, he looked about twenty-five. He’d blurted out in a formal oration at his public school in the ninth grade the fact that he was gay, and still bristled with pride to recall the headmaster’s rattled dismay. Roger, who’d tracked John down, beamed at the two of us trading shoptalk, and by the end of lunch John was committed. We’d do the play in the winter, spring at the latest.

  John would be dead of AIDS eleven months later. He knew his diagnosis when we met him, but was single-mindedly forging ahead and planning new work. He was eager for us to see his production of Saint Joan at South Coast Rep, which we thought very sharp and elegant, despite a Joan who seemed to want to lead her army to Glendale. One critic observed that it wasn’t up to John’s high standards, and a year later I understood exactly the way his mind wasn’t quite on it, the vigor not up to the passion.

  Over and over I’ve watched those who are stricken fight their way back to some measure of health and go on working—those who are not let go, that is. Perhaps the work is especially important because AIDS is striking so many of us just as we’re hitting our stride at work. I mean of course the American AIDS of the first half-decade, before it began to burgeon in the black and brown communities. Most of the fallen in our years were urban gay men, and most of these were hard at their work when the symptoms started multiplying and nothing would go away. They wanted to hold on to their work as long as they could.

  Roger was no different, and neither am I. With him gone, there is just what work I can finish before it overtakes me. Again there are friends all around me, meaning well, who say I don’t have to feel so cornered: New treatments are coming down the pipeline every day; the antivirals data looks better and better. Et cetera. Perhaps it is just very human to want to die with your boots on. I don’t know if that’s a cowboy or a combat metaphor, but both are perfectly apt.

  After six years in the house on Kings Road, we’d fallen into a pattern of optimum tranquillity. Our most consistent time together—though we’d pick up the phone all day and call—was evenings seven to eleven. Some tag end of the workday might spill over here and there, but we usually ate at home on weeknights, did some reading and went for a walk. My whole life is like one of those weeknights now, plain and quiet and, here in the house at least, close to Rog. A stucco thirties cottage high in a box canyon above the Sunset Strip. There’s a view of the city lights through the coral tree out front and between the olive and the eucalyptus across the way. In square footage it’s about the size of a two-bedroom on Seventy-ninth and West End, the sort people kill for. Out back is a garden court shaded by Chinese elms and a blue-bottom pool that catches the sun from eleven to three.

  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.