Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  And they tweedled out, relieved to have it over with. I ran around the bed and clutched Roger’s hand. “We’ll fight it, darling, we’ll beat it, I promise. I won’t let you die.” The sentiments merged as they tumbled out. This is the liturgy of bonding. Mostly we clung together, as if time still had the decency to stop when we were entwined. After all, the whole world was right here in this room. I don’t think Roger said anything then. Neither of us cried. It begins in a country beyond tears. Once you have your arms around your friend with his terrible news, your eyes are too shut to cry.

  The intern had never once said the word.

  •IV•

  The first thing we did was call Sheldon. He must have told us to, because I can’t imagine why I wouldn’t have gone right across the hall to break the news to Al and Bernice. Sheldon said not to do anything till he got there, and since nothing was what we felt like, it was an easy order to follow. Fifteen minutes later he walked in, vigorous and very calm. His attitude was so startling, so unlike our own dumb aftershock, that we both looked readily to him for direction. He was relentlessly upbeat. Not surprised about the results, and the only thing to do was get the infection taken care of and back to work. There could be no question of telling Al, because the shock might kill him. Why burden the parents anyway? In fact we couldn’t tell anyone, for as soon as word got out, Roger would lose his practice. AIDS was that extreme a stigma. The losing of jobs was a foregone conclusion.

  It was an insidiously airtight argument, and Roger and I agreed immediately. After all, I’d already promised Rog we were in this thing to win, and what better way of winning than to go on as if nothing had changed? I knew from Craig’s example the week before, his lightning trip to Houston, that there were people out there who knew more than anyone told us. But I made it plain to Sheldon that certain ones would have to know. My brother, my therapist, the Perloffs—Joe had been following the case for two months. Sheldon resisted every name I mentioned, especially Rand Schrader and Richard Ide, as if gay men in particular couldn’t be trusted not to gossip. It almost came to an argument, but I wasn’t about to be budged, and we couldn’t start bickering in front of Roger.

  Having sealed the smallest circle he could get, Sheldon, brimming with optimism, sailed out. I still don’t know why we allowed him so much power, except that he’d always assumed the role of head of the family. He made it seem so much easier to island ourselves with the secret, putting off the cold reality of all our loved ones’ grief. I think Roger couldn’t endure the thought of pity, he who was always so self-contained. For him at least, the secrecy didn’t spring from shame, though I had a very bad case for a while. The shame of being different was rooted deeper in me than the fact of being gay: in the mesmerized faces of those who would stare at my brother on crutches, my brother too busy walking to notice. I noticed.

  It was left to me to walk across the hall to Al and Bernice, still innocently reading, and tell them the good news: Not AIDS. Their burst of relief was nearly as hard to take as the horror a bare half hour before. I hated the lie right away, but there was nothing I could do about it now. I explained that the organism in the lung was bacterial and would respond nicely to Bactrim. The mere brand name would tip people off these days, but not then. Roger was still only the second person I knew after Leo to be struck with pneumocystis, and I thought I knew everything.

  The day grew more and more surreal. There was a near-celebratory air around Roger’s bed as his parents cheered him, giddy from the release of tension. At the same time we had to be sure that Dennis Cope made himself scarce for the next twenty-four hours, since he didn’t feel he could lie bald-face to the parents. Incredibly, Roger’s calendar records a telephone call with a client that afternoon. At least until we could get Al and Bernice off to Palm Springs, we were to go on as if everything was thumbs up.

  The IV team came in and plugged into Roger’s forearm—he had beautiful veins there, like a Renaissance bronze. The Bactrim drip was started. When Gottlieb the immunologist appeared to say he was sorry and offer his support, the first words out of Roger’s mouth were: “What about Paul?”

  His anxiety was palpable. Gottlieb reassured him with a ballpark figure: only ten to fifteen percent of the partners of AIDS patients had broken through to full-blown infection. Yet, he might have added. I looked at Roger with a pang of unworthiness, that I should be the main thing in his mind as he teetered on the cliff edge. Gottlieb turned to me. “You’re a writer?” he asked with a skeptical air. “Why don’t you write about this? Nobody else does.”

  For his part, Dennis Cope couldn’t have been more supportive when we told him we chose to see the diagnosis not as a death sentence but rather as a life challenge. I made that announcement, and I know how it rang with a dare to be contradicted. In turn, Cope assured us that the infection had been caught at a very early stage and should eradicate without difficulty. Although people used to die fast from the initial bout of PCP, great progress had been made in zapping it. We were absolutely right, he said; the first glimmers of treatment for the underlying condition had begun to break in research circles. His confidence affirmed our own; his pledge to fight beside us was unswerving. No reason at all that Roger shouldn’t get strong and go back to work.

  I’d made an engagement weeks before to have dinner that night with an old friend from Yale, David McCarthy, now a cardiologist in Philadelphia. He was in town for a medical conference, and I held to the party line of normalcy and went ahead with the plan. Over dinner I told him everything had turned out fine at UCLA, but I’ve come to realize from his silence since that trip that he wasn’t buying any of it. How could he, with me so dark and disconnected, foisting off all my AIDS insanity on Cesar and Leo—trying to explain what the vortex was like, even as I masked the cracks in our own caving house.

  Roger and I agreed that he would deal with the parents on Wednesday morning and see them off to Palm Springs. I would stay as scarce as Dennis Cope till they were on the road. But Roger called in anguish the moment they left his room on an errand. “I can’t stand this,” he burst out. “I’m so sick of my father telling me how lucky I am!” I anchored him by narrowing down to the short term: Just get through the next hour and they’d be gone. By the time they returned two weeks later on the way to Chicago, he’d be on his feet and back to the office.

  I still have such conflicted feelings about hiding the diagnosis. What’s privacy and what’s denial? How much is guilt and the lingering self-hatred of the closet? I’ve tried to fever-chart the stages as they evolved over the next six months, but the simplest way to put it is that Roger fought his way back to real life, and I fell completely apart. Till the end I was sure we’d made a mistake holding back so long from the full resources of everybody. I blamed Sheldon for a decision we colluded in with open eyes. Now I’ve done a total reverse: I’m glad we did it the way we did, that Roger had those six months more of his law practice. But what about the parents, so brave and loving once they knew? Did we really think Al would have a heart attack? That we would be punished through the pain of others?

  The privacy issue surrounding AIDS engages vectors of the nightmare that make it different from every other medical crisis. I know half a dozen men who are dying right now, another dozen diagnosed, and everyone’s being kept out. Of course the pose has worn very thin. We are all too aware and paranoid to be fooled by the regular brands of pneumonia. Not back then. The difference in just two years is exponential ground: two or three cases in every gay man’s life are ten or fifteen now, and the clock keeps counting even when nobody knows or dares to ask.

  I took on the lion’s share of the calls among our friends, telling everybody it was all okay, then pulling back and shutting them out. I know I had to argue rigorously with Roger after the parents left to let me include at least one friend in L.A. I suggested Richard Ide as being less likely to be pressured for the truth than Rand, who knew everybody. For Sheldon was right about one thing: AIDS was rapidly turning into an inquisiti
on in the gay community, as rife with terror and scapegoats as any launched by Rome. Does this one have it? Really? I heard it was his roommate. It gets so you can’t be sick at all anymore. You hide colds, put Band-Aids on innocent bruises. You say you are fine when you want to scream.

  I also fought for Roger’s sister Jaimee, because I knew in my bones she’d be the rock my brother was proving to be. I’d only known her in the context of the family. She had a laugh as quick as her brother’s, and his eye for the clay feet of power. I don’t think Jaimee and I had ever spoken about anything major, but I knew she had an allergy to phoniness, as plainspoken and black-and-white as her father. She and Roger were effortless together. Jaimee could handle it, I told him.

  Two years later she remembers that he presented it in just these words: challenge, not a sentence. No lie there. I feel a curious puff of pride to recall how gallant was our unity of purpose. Or perhaps I’m just glad that he took what I said to heart. When I heard myself say it, I didn’t quite believe it. He was the one who forged a purpose out of it.

  Fortuitously Alfred went off to New York for ten days, because it wouldn’t have been easy to keep up the lie with him. We met nearly every afternoon for an hour of pitching. Richard Ide had already been given the thumbs-down sign by Marjorie Perloff, across a lecture hall at USC, but I only knew that after it was all over. It’s typical of Richard’s sense of honor—his leeriness of gossip—that he kept leaving messages in the two days following the diagnosis, asking me to call. This made me plead his case to Roger all the more eloquently, and thus we brought him in. So that is what I do now: I leave messages on machines, general and suitably vague, so as not to corner anyone. Call when you have a chance, I say.

  Has anything ever been quite like this? Bad enough to be stricken in the middle of life, but then to fear your best and dearest will suffer exactly the same. Cancer and the heart don’t sicken a man two ways like that. And it turns out all the certainties of health insurance and the job that waits are just a social contract, flimsy as the disappearing ink it’s written in. Has anything else so tested the medical system and blown all its weakest links? I have oceans of unresolved rage at those who ran from us, but I also see that plague and panic are inseparable. And nothing compares. That is something very important to understand about those on the moon of AIDS. Anything offered in comparison is a mockery to us. If hunger compares, or Hamburger Hill or the carnal dying of Calcutta, that is for us to say.

  My recollection of the two weeks Roger spent in 1028 is as fragmented as the weeks before the diagnosis. I’m not sure what preceded what, though I do have a sense of first week versus second, because the crisis took a turn midway that drove the panic off the graph. Roger was extraordinary in the days that followed the verdict, by which I mean he was utterly himself. There are fifteen separate client items in his calendar just for the two days after. I recall him bragging of that to Gottlieb with a laugh, saying that at five hundred a day for the room alone, he had to pay the bills somehow.

  This force of life continuing is what they mean by “positive denial.” When I first saw it in Cesar it bewildered me and made me fear for the crash landing. Now, as I watched Roger pick up and go forward, briefcase open on the bed, I felt how real and noble was the act of overcoming. I wanted to nourish that force in him and clear him room to horde it—hoping, too, that some would rub off. I quickly grew to hate being away from him, even for a couple of hours. It wasn’t just the pretending that business was usual, though that alone was vile enough. In those first few days I seemed to draw my only strength from Roger. If he could do it, then I could.

  Ernest Becker speaks in The Denial of Death of the heroism of doing anything at all in light of the mortal dilemma. I didn’t start heroic, but it turned out there was no place else to go. I had coffee with Sam late one night, when he tried to explain my heart-pounding terror. I was flailing at the knowledge that Roger might really die, and yet part of me was still waiting to wake up so we could leave for Egypt. I pulled back rigid, defiant inside, wanting to drag Sam up there to see Roger laughing and working. This man wouldn’t die; I wouldn’t let him.

  Besides—and here was the hero’s corollary, drawn like a line in the dirt—if Roger died then I died. As my life blew into smithereens that week, a fund-raising letter arrived from Yale, and I wanted to scrawl across it: Paul Monette died on March 12, 1985. But Roger Horwitz didn’t. I know because I was there.

  Still, by the third day of treatment he was feeling dreadful, coughing and feverish. The doctors said it was typical of PCP to get worse before it got better, which sounded as mean as an old wives’ tale. In any case, he had to channel all his energy to fight the egregious symptoms, plus the drug made him nauseous. Now I wanted to be there all the time—fuck normalcy—to handle the dealings with doctors and staff, to man the phone. It was just as well, since I became totally unhinged when I left the hospital.

  I went to my own doctor to get a prescription for sleeping pills, and I poured out the unspeakable news. “What do I do?” I said in desperation.

  He shrugged his shoulders with a cavalier unconcern I can only attribute to his certainty that he was safe himself. I’ve seen that straight man’s shrug a hundred times. “Burn the blankets,” he replied facetiously, scribbling a prescription for Halcion.

  I felt as if I’d just been run over by a truck, while he went on to give me the benefit of his own pain. His brother had died in a car crash while he was still in med school. “Sensitive as a toilet seat,” as Holden Caulfield says. I guess it was there in that encounter that I came to revile the comparisons of others. Is this how a Jew feels when he hears “holocaust” appropriated to some other calamity? Yet I was still so wounded by the news itself, desperate for allies, that I didn’t have the wit to slam out of his office. Besides, I needed him just as Roger needed Cope, didn’t I? I told him in some defiance that Roger hadn’t exhibited the two pre symptoms the way he’d said, for two months running. I never stopped feeling betrayed by all those phantom barriers that hadn’t worked.

  “You live alone, you die alone,” my doctor said sententiously, serene as Pilate. A month later I would overhear him fretting about what color Ferrari he should get.

  Not us, I thought, as the rage began to build like a boiling tsunami. My determination to be with Rog every minute I could, whatever happened, took stubborn form in the doctor’s office. White-hot rage is the only thing that keeps you going sometimes.

  It was sometime that week I had a nightmare that dragged me awake screaming and in a sweat: I walked into the bathroom and looked around the shower door, to see Roger sitting in the tub, the water to his waist. He was dead. Head lolled slightly to the side, he looked like a dreamer himself, fit and healthy, his skin beaded with water as if he’d just come in from swimming. It was only half a second before I was roaring in pain. I reached in and lifted him out of the water. His heaviness, actual as the weight of a man—my own dead self—pitched the scream to a howl like Lear’s as I lurched out to the bedroom, full of nothing forever. I’d never had a dream so physical or so desolating. Sam convinced me not to tell it to Roger, but I never came to terms with it. I’m still afraid it will come again, and have to remind myself in the middle of naps that Roger is already gone—I never sleep below the surface anymore—so the bathtub dream won’t engulf me.

  So many monsters have haunted the darkness of AIDS. Only four thousand had died by March ’85, but already we all knew stories of men left incoherent in their own excrement, abandoned overnight by friends, shipped back to a fundamentalist family to pay the wages of sin. They were chained to their beds with dementia in New York. They lost their houses and all their insurance. The most horrible death in modern medicine, people said. This was the gossip for years, whispered among us with the same appalled prurience as used to be generated by the sexual exploits of the seventies. The latter of course still went on full tilt among straight people, herpes or no, because the full story of AIDS wasn’t being told. It had stop
ped being somebody else for us, but not for them.

  Gottlieb told us people broke through with either KS or an opportunistic infection, rarely both. The OI situation was much the bleaker. Wherever I went now, someone would come up and ask how Roger was. Fine, I’d say, fine. I had to negotiate several calls with a self-obsessive business friend who went bananas every time he had the runs or cleared his throat. One day I was crossing Santa Monica Boulevard and met Bruce Weintraub, who’d worked as set designer on Scarface. Bruce was thirty-three, an exuberant, intoxicating man who just before Christmas had moved into a thirties house in the next canyon over from us. I stopped to chat with Bruce, floated the good news about Roger, and we ridiculed the neurotic friend who was certain every anomaly was AIDS. I remember thinking as I walked away that Bruce looked washed out. He’d been diagnosed with KS a couple of weeks before, and was prepared to live with it as a secret, till he nosedived a month and a half later with PCP. KS and an opportunistic infection at the same time constitute the bleakest AIDS situation of all, and the shortest fuse.

  I managed to be as positive around Roger as he was with himself. In the afternoons we’d go over legal matters and household bills; then I’d drop a packet of work by his office in Century City, telling everyone there he’d be back directly, flashing a tight smile. I see now the only place I could fall apart was my work. Within a day of the diagnosis I became convinced it was over for good. My novel Small Powers, benign and didactic, my shelter from the earlier storm of Cesar, had overnight become an eccentric joke. I would not be going past page 223 after all.

  This sounds ridiculously self-important, I know. I can only say it felt like a proper reaction to the life of self-importance writing itself suddenly looked to be. Just the Summers would never be put on now: no time and nothing to laugh at. All I could do was steel myself to finish The Manicurist so I could pay the bills, but the yucks were delivered with a skull’s grin, and the whole enterprise filled me with loathing. Roger tried to help me through this minefield of self-denial, but I only dug in deeper.