Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  A man ought to be free to find his reason. Not that freedom alone will serve it up: it requires the gods’ own fury of luck to get two people to meet. But when it finally happens, two men in love can’t rejoice out loud—joy of the very thing everyone burns for—without bracing for the rant of prophets, the schoolyard bully, and Rome’s “intrinsic evil.” I try to remember that we fight as a ragged people to outlast the calamity so that others can sleep as safe as my friend and I, like a raft in the tempest.

  Random memories of that April are spots of time. I can see Roger sitting at the desk in the study, writing a condolence to Star’s mother, while I sit watching from across the room with nothing to do, till I run out and get him a milk shake. When in doubt, feed. I remember a brutal op-ed piece in the L.A. Times, written by a doctor at San Francisco General, where he tried to make graphic just how desperate the disease was. Yes, fifty percent of those stricken were still alive, but only because they weren’t dead yet. They would die soon enough. It’s one of the times I recall Roger crying, and I own the idiocy of my response. I said, “Look, Rog, the worst that can happen is both of us will die,” which really set him off. I try to remember that bit of backfire when someone says something off the wall to me.

  I remember renting The Night of the Shooting Stars and both of us being enthralled by it. A lucky draw, since I was a wash at the video store, where I would dither among the Rambos and be unable to locate anything. My brother had urged me for years to see The Horse’s Mouth, with Alec Guinness. We laughed all the way through—that great moment when Guinness disguises his voice on the phone, declaring he’s the Duchess of Blackpool. Yet when it ended and the madly sane painter sailed away down the Thames, I started to sob uncontrollably: “I always thought I was going to be Virginia Woolf, and now look at me!” A comic enough disguise all by itself, if it weren’t so sad.

  Gottlieb managed to throw us both off balance one morning after an examination, with a soft-spoken exhortation: “Make every day count.” Roger and I groaned over that one, comparing it to the moment in Great Expectations when Miss Havisham snarls at the terrified Pip: “Play!” Sam tried to place the doctor’s remark in context. It didn’t mean we were supposed to stumble around looking for roses to smell; rather, we had to learn to savor life as we used to—except now it could only be day by day, whether we liked it or not. I was acting as if I could keep Roger’s situation stable only by staying depressed and morbid. If we laughed too loud, the Big Foot would stomp us. My guilt and doomsday magic were keeping us from reclaiming the fullest measure of life, and if it kept up, I would rob us after all of the love we had. The question I needed to face was: Where had Paul Monette disappeared to?

  The only answer I can come up with is that the last and best and only PM I care about is the Paul of Paul & Roger, and now that I live with the sword over my head there is this constant pain and stupefied disbelief.

  But don’t you believe you can help him to live, demanded Sam. This “Paul & Roger” that I believed in so fervently required of me sometimes that I be stronger than I was. The loneliness of the secret was turning me inside out, and gradually I would have to accommodate more people like Star and Craig. I had to build myself a support system with others so I could be the mainstay to Rog. Some mornings I would lie in bed swirling with horrors, unable to get up at all. Fight to seize the day, Sam said, call somebody even worse off than you are, engage.

  Roger after all was busy at work, husbanding his energy, brimful with a world that had welcomed him back. He relished coming home to me—to us—more than ever, but now too often he’d find me glazed with pain and emptiness. Even to me it was sounding too close to what happened during the bad months of ’81, when I was reeling from my obsession over Joel, unable to work. Back then, Roger had finally admitted it was getting to be an ordeal to come home to my misery every day. Not in so many words, now he was pleading with me to get the AIDS despair behind me. I was the one who hadn’t recovered yet.

  I hope I make it clear that both were happening at once: raft and tempest, peak and valley, the prostrate Harlow and the ice cream messenger, all in a day. So much was Roger not blaming me for his illness, or beating me up with his own pain, that I’d fashioned a way of blaming myself twice over, till I was more invested in self-punishment than in relief. Sam told me I was fixated on the unfairness of it all, refusing to cope with this thing that didn’t belong in our lives. Sam practically shouted at me: There is no fairness! I was clinging to the iceberg instead of the raft. Life was about survival and challenge—so meet it.

  The suramin ticket came through at last. We went in for the first dose on Friday, May 24, with very little sense of what to expect. We knew that Roger would have to be officially admitted to the hospital and pay for a half-day’s room, even though he would be in the Clinical Research Center only three hours every Friday. Two other patients had already begun the program during the previous week, but on that first Friday Roger was the only one. We’d been told it would be administered intravenously, and we had the name of the doctor in charge, but all we knew for certain was that this was the only game in town.

  Clinical Research was altogether different from the tenth floor or any other bustling space at the medical center. Here the corridor was quiet as a Zurich clinic, with three or four rooms on each side, only a couple of them occupied at any given time. Cancer patients mostly, I suppose, watching daytime television while something quixotic dripped in their arms, and maybe a wife or husband flipping through a magazine. The room at the end of the hall on the right was a two-bedder, which happened to look out into the thick crown of a banyan tree. “It feels,” I wrote in my journal, “like we’re in a tropical hospital somewhere, getting treated for a rare jungle infection.” A dietitian came in and took an order for Roger’s lunch, though it was only 9 A.M. I don’t know why that seemed so generous—we were paying a hundred dollars an hour to be there—but this friendly woman was very proprietary about feeding her guinea-pig patients. The chief cook in me applauded the sentiment mightily.

  Then Peter Wolfe came in. This was the clinical researcher? He was disarmingly young, with a shag of blond hair that slumped across his forehead and gave him rather a hooded look, though he tended to peer through the thatch with wry amusement. It happened that he’d gone to Harvard, and Roger flushed with pleasure as they traded memories of Cambridge. It turned out Peter had also read a novel of mine, which was proof enough to me that he was gay, but on second thought he was pretty forthcoming with that information himself. Explaining that he had been treating AIDS patients since his first day as a doctor, he spoke simply and feelingly of looking down at a stricken man in bed and thinking: “This is me.”

  As he went through the technical rigmarole of the drug, dosage and possible side effects, Roger and I had much the same reaction. We were in the care of one of our own, and here I don’t simply mean gay. We shared with Peter a common geography of the mind, which only by chance happened to have the Charles River meandering through it. Still barely thirty, Peter was the age of the men and women Roger had worked with as senior tutor at Dudley House. Peter also had an eccentric sense of humor and love of puns that mirrored Roger’s own, to which Roger responded with quick delight.

  So began the first elixir. I soon came to think of that room looking out on the banyan tree as a safe haven. Over the course of the summer it grew populous with its own queer and hardscrabble island folk. Later, of course, when the Swiss Family treehouse came crashing down, the island seemed a mirage, but now the stronger memory is how happy we were to beach there. We still froze with terror at every bruise. Only a week before, we’d almost missed a wedding in Venice when I found a purple blotch on my upper arm, and now I searched both of us head to toe every day. But from the moment of that first dose in the tropics of the CRC, we had an ace in the hole. The picture in my mind was of the virus pulling back, shrinking into itself as the blood woke up.

  I can’t pretend the panic and despair shrank in direct proporti
on, but we left Clinical Research that first day with an awed feeling of gratitude. Roger had been required to sign a consent form, and I had witnessed it just below. That our names were twinned there meant more to me then than the marriage license the laws denied us. Peter Wolfe read the form aloud, and there was a sentence to the effect that one would have the satisfaction of knowing one was advancing the search for a cure. I sat up straight at that, quick as an old soldier to salute. Hope is not the same thing as believing anything higher, but it suffices unto itself. We had two secrets now, the illness and the treatment, and the second was so extravagant we fairly glowed. It’s a long way still to being a hero, but within a week the teary boy who would never be Virginia Woolf finally admitted there was something to say besides “More dead.”

  … frozen too long, and there is this ache like tears that wants to burst. It’s like I died, and I didn’t die. We are here, and we love each other, and now I have to find some work. Sentence by sentence, nothing by nothing, even if I can’t sing. Then hum a few bars at least. Whistle a bit in the dark. We cannot all go down to defeat and darkness, we have to say we have been here.

  •VI•

  Evenings at the brink of summer are yellow gold across the city’s western face, as the sun narrows toward the ocean, eye to eye with the white buildings of the coastal basin. The setting sun is especially prized in late May and June, because the Catalina eddy hugs the city often until midafternoon. Then clearness seizes the landscape. Summer is something else again, sunny all day long, till the light expires of heat and boredom after Labor Day. Perhaps because we had come from winter places, we were finely tuned to the threshold effects of summer. In any case, Memorial Day usually found us thrashing in the garden, giving a nudge to the rattling pool heater and pulling together a barbecue.

  This year we spent the weekend lying low, alert to any side effects of Dose 1, but they never materialized. So Monday evening we asked Dell Steadman over for supper, as if we couldn’t let the holiday expire without a show of colors. Because Dell was both doctor and friend, we’d talked with him extensively in the weeks before the diagnosis, but since he wasn’t on the short list of those who knew the truth, contact had lately been minimal. Thus Dell was in the peculiar position of suspecting Roger had AIDS yet having to leave the matter unspoken, and without any pregnant pauses either. He was more than up to the challenge, however, regaling us over dinner with his Late Roman view of the tattered state of the world. No doubt we were ready to laugh, fortified as we were by the quaff of elixir three days before. I know it felt good just having somebody in again, so much so that the wide swath of summer began to tantalize. For the first time I thought there might actually be a summer.

  Two calls came back-to-back that night. The first was from a business acquaintance in New York, who started to gossip about Bruce Weintraub having AIDS, as if I were party to the knowledge already. I put him on fast rewind, and he dryly observed that Bruce had been hospitalized a week with “regular” pneumonia. I felt two furies at once: protective about our own secret and angry at the slur on Bruce’s privacy, as if to try to escape the rumor mill were an act of contempt. But even the anger couldn’t cover the queer sickening feeling I’ve had fifteen different times in the last three years. How could Bruce be sick? You never stop asking that. There’s a strange recurrent wish to believe the epidemic has claimed enough, even as the shock waves widen. Above 8.5, an earthquake is said to liquefy the earth. I recalled joking with Bruce about AIDS in front of the gym two months before, ridiculing the hysteria of the very man who was calling me now.

  I put down the phone and it rang again. It was one of the Manicurist producers, typical of the breed that hates all holidays because of the three-day lag in deals. By now I had written perhaps two thirds of the Whoopi screenplay, with rabid input from the studio along the way, though only a couple of people were privy to the actual pages. Pages are not required, however, by those whose drug is opinions. “But has he read it?” I asked a few weeks later about a particularly wacko criticism, only to be told in oracular tones, “David doesn’t read, he hears.”

  The producer himself had in fact read pages, and after a fulsome wheeze of praise he explained that the studio was basing its decisions on how well a script conformed to a certain grid, which was all the rage in screenwriting courses. The great sage who deduced this foolproof method had codified every hit movie of the last twenty years and figured out that the main “plot point” always occurred between pages 26 and 28, with a secondary plot point around page 90. Therefore, said the producer, it was time to deconstruct my script and nail the plot on 26.

  The echo effect of these two calls resonated over the next month like force and counterforce, demanding what little energy I had left after me and Roger. It was probably a foregone conclusion which would dominate, and now I see that I needed to reach out to Bruce even as I washed my hands of comedy, though I didn’t know any of that on Memorial Day. For the present I was merely shaken by the calls, though accustomed now to the phone ringing like a siren.

  By Friday, when Roger received Dose 2, we’d been alerted that there might be a reaction, since the other two suramin patients were feeling feverish and wilted. But Rog was strong enough to go to work for the afternoon, and we decided to fill in the weekend, half full anyway. An old friend was in town from Toronto and eager to see us. Bohemian to the core, Gordon had improbably been appointed director of the Canadian Book Council. Before his elevation he’d lived in L.A. for several years without a green card, and been instrumental in opening A Different Light, the local flagship gay and lesbian bookstore. Since Roger and I last saw him, he’d become almost laughably respectable, commanding offices in three provincial capitals.

  Gordon arrived at sunset, with irises and champagne. I had determined not to bog down the evening with my oppressiveness and to minimize any talk of Roger’s recent illness. Gordon himself had had a bout of shingles in April, a perfectly respectable disease in general circulation, except there were far too many cases of it among gay men who went on to develop AIDS. Craig had had shingles; the power broker who got us on suramin had them; Roger would have them. I saw a man at the gym last month and laughed hollowly as he related with antic dismay that he’d just had chicken pox, the childhood variant of the shingles virus. Everything is in clusters now. What is innocent as the sniffles in single cases grows specter-thin with terror in groups. Needless to say, there was reason to think that Gordon would be glad to speak softly of illnesses that were nothing to worry about, nothing at all really.

  It was great fun to listen to Gordon’s tales of cultural czarism, and we did manage to keep the conversation virus-free. But I also couldn’t hide my jangled state and threw it all onto my work. I even asked at one point, “Gordon, what should I write about?” Thinking as I said it of the elderly Tennyson, begging his wife and children to slip ideas for poems under the door of his study because he was all written out. Gordon replied without a pause: “Write about what’s happened to desire.”

  Next day Gordon dropped by with his friend Anne, and we all had tea by the pool. Anne had recently been through kidney surgery and nearly died. I remember staring at her as she looked peacefully at the flowers, trying to figure how she’d stood it alone, always a sense of kinship now with anyone who’d been through fire. When the two of them left, Roger took a soak in the tub, a little feverish and washed out from the drug. He studied his hand for a moment and said tearfully, “I guess if anything happens to me, this should go to my brother.”

  The ring was a sapphire set in white gold that his father had won in a card game decades ago. I was there the morning in ’75, at the old apartment on Chestnut Street, when Al slipped it off and gave it to him. At the time I was jarred by the flash of it, a shade too Damon Runyon for Rog, but over the years I’d come to see it as one with the gentleness of his hand. I told him he mustn’t think that way, now that we finally had some hope, but he went on to wonder aloud if he should keep working at all. “Maybe I don
’t want to,” he said with a weary sigh. I swore he’d feel himself again as soon as the weak spell passed. It didn’t somehow factor in that I’d spent weeks of my own wondering why I kept plodding away at the computer. Did he really mean to consider cashing in? It was the only time he ever wavered about work, so I hope I didn’t too hastily close the subject off. Yet the deal between us always permitted the reopening of anything, or how would we ever have gotten to California, or Roger into private practice?

  By the next weekend we’d instituted a regular Sunday dinner on the front terrace, with four or five around the glass-top table: the first time I’d laid out a table or baked since Christmas—a lemon cake, I think it was. “No matter what happens,” Cesar used to wag when the Christmas cooking was in overdrive, “Mrs. Ramsay gets that leg of lamb on the table.” Sunday nights were the serial version of the silent film, where if you didn’t know what was racing in my head, the terrace on North Kings Road was casual as ever. Those evenings surface now like a string of summer islands.

  I note in my journal that Roger processed Dose 3 so well that he swam fifty-two laps of the pool—only a seven-stroke pool, but who’s counting? I also note that a main subject under discussion now was whether or not I ought to be on antidepressants. I’d just had a strained session with the Ferrari doctor, where he heard the state of my head and leaped for the phone, eager to refer me to a psychopharmacologist. His considered opinion seemed to be that I would love anti-depressants. The shrink in question had apparently brought Ferrari himself up to full potential. I threw a damper on his enthusiasm when I told him my Writers Guild insurance paid only fifteen dollars per psychiatric visit. Otherwise shrinks could bankrupt the guild in a matter of months. Since the psychopharmacologist was a hundred and fifty a visit, Ferrari shrugged me out with a prescription for more Halcion. What was I doing still seeing this man? It was almost a kind of paralysis, as if I didn’t deserve any better than his indifference. He had seemed a perfectly adequate doctor before the war, when nothing ever went wrong and all of us were going to live forever.