Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  Joe Perloff advised against antidepressants if I could make do without them. Sam and my brother concurred. There was a strange curl of vanity here that kept me medication-free. I knew a couple of AIDS-related people floating on Xanax and Sinequan, how they ballooned with weight—their faces round and bewildered as babies, like Lennie in Of Mice and Men. No, thanks.

  With Dose 3, the cast in Clinical Research grew. A certain Mr. Appleton appeared for his first dose, his encyclopedic knowledge of the antiviral territory dwarfing my own. He also seemed in demonic good health, brisk and alarmingly chatty, though Roger and I came to enjoy his tirelessness. He’d found out his T-cell ratio was reversed—I don’t think he had any other symptoms—and talked his way into the suramin program by sheer force of will and a thousand cascading phone calls. Appleton always seemed a fine example to me that one didn’t need higher contacts at all. A murderous push and refusal to take no for an answer had got him where he was. He had a home-brew recipe for HPA-23 that he’d got off a biochemist, in case the suramin didn’t pan out. Dr. Wolfe blanched a little at his torrent of questions, but nothing daunted Appleton. He had that quality of utter belief in his own story, like Ishmael, and a sense of being accountable only to himself.

  It was that day, I think, that Peter Wolfe happened to glance at Roger’s hands and remarked that the moons had disappeared from the nails. It was a curious minor feature of the disease, he said, and didn’t seem to mean anything, but I recall being jarred by the whole idea. The setting of the moons had some kind of inner planetary echo about it, indicating how very subtle the virus was, casting its shadow in places that had no pain or symptoms, no reason at all except to be bizarre. Similarly the intensification of dandruff, which now required a brown shampoo of industrial strength. The most casual things took a twist, as if to remind you that nothing in the body was to be taken for granted anymore. That is what aging feels like, isn’t it? It’s common among gay men now to say we’re all eighty years old, our friends dying off like Florida pensioners.

  Somewhere along in there, Cesar flew down for a few days. After nearly two years of me buoying him along, however manically, it was he this time who throbbed with life. He kept reassuring me how well Roger looked, and gallantly dismissed his own recent struggles with the illness. His hair was noticeably thinned by the chemo, his leg still swollen and suppurating, but he was irrepressible. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m eating a lot of quince.” It seemed important to him to get it across that all of it could be borne and processed. Nothing of life was irretrievable: that was the unspoken promise.

  One gray afternoon the three of us went to the old Doheny estate in Beverly Hills, empty now that the American Film Institute had vacated it. We wandered up and down through the gardens, the latter a bit brambled around the edges. We talked and laughed so comfortably that the afternoon has grown seamless, green as the gardens of a dozen years. Roger and I told Cesar about the lone Doheny heir in the thirties, a young man of ambiguous despairs who fell in love with the chauffeur and, unrequited, shot himself. I don’t know even now how much of the story is true, but it’s part of the pulp mythos of Beverly Hills, a properly Proustian end for the scion of an oil barony.

  Later we strolled around the city, and Roger went into a shoemaker’s to buy a pair of laces. Though I stood outside joking with Cesar, I recall being choked with emotion at the modesty of the errand. The laces are in a drawer in the bathroom, still in their cellophane, and they evoke a certain cast of Roger’s mind, his satisfaction with details. I never buy shoelaces; I throw the shoes away. And it’s only a beat from there to his sensible wingtip shoes and his flat feet, and his mother telling me after Roger’s funeral about giving her own mother’s clothes to Goodwill. “But not her shoes,” said Bernice defiantly. “No one can walk in her shoes.”

  What fascinated us most about Cesar during that visit was the tale of the swimmer. He’d spoken vaguely of the man for a couple of years, but only ever called him by his sport. In the beginning he was one of Cesar’s private tutorial students, though I can’t remember in which language anymore. Italian, it must have been, for Dennis the swimmer himself was Italian-American. About thirty years old, and got his nickname from the laps he did at the Y before his lesson. Now Cesar was talking as if they were getting rather thick.

  It wasn’t so different from the way he’d talked about Jerry nine months before, but here Cesar was even more enamored of the whole idea. Indeed, Dennis sounded like a catch. He knew the difference between books and their press coverage, and he and Cesar would talk away pots of coffee. It was even the sort of relationship Cesar had somehow missed: mentor-pupil, fifteen years between them, passing the history. The only problem was, he had some sort of live-in situation. I never could be sure if it was a current or former lover, only that Cesar was maddened by the complication. It also appeared that Dennis had buried two or three friends with AIDS, caring for them right up to the end.

  Something in me didn’t like it. Was he some sort of angel of death? Or was he out perhaps for a bit of a tease, now that the rose of his youth was past? There wasn’t any sex between them, so who was playing with whom? Yet for all my reservations, I could see how it made Cesar happy, gave him a sense of identity beyond his illness. What business was it of mine whether or not it was real? Relations on the battlefield are not governed by the same rules. Real is not a function of time. Or perhaps the pitch of time itself is the passion, and makes its own reality. In any case, I was intrigued enough to throw out the notion that Cesar should bring Dennis down to L.A. for a weekend.

  I don’t think I’d ever seen him brighten so much: “Could I?” Though Roger and I had known a couple of the men he’d been with—three months, a year, one of them married—there had never been the occasion where we could be together as two couples. I remember the day in the fall of ’74 when Roger and I drove down from Boston to Cape Cod so he could meet Cesar—like bringing him home for inspection. That was what Cesar wanted now.

  Half-naked out by the pool, where he wasn’t too shy to sunbathe even with his spots, Cesar told me about going to Rio after Uruguay in April. He’d been too weak to plunge off by himself, so he signed on for a day or two with a tour bus. At one point they stopped at a gorgeous beach, and Cesar stood weeping on the sand, thinking how far he was now in his hobbled condition, with his elephant leg, how far from cavorting and running in the sun. One of the tour guides came up to him and gently touched his shoulder. “Don’t be sad,” she said. “Come over and have some lunch.” And she led him down to a picnic with the other guide and the driver, and they all talked Spanish and made him laugh. “Isn’t it wonderful,” he said, “how people take you in?”

  One evening Roger had to go out to a Room For Theatre board meeting. He agreed that he might get overtired, but he always enjoyed the gatherings, and they valued his opinions. Besides, he was learning how to pace himself. Cope and Wolfe and the circle of friends all thought he should reach and push a little, fight for his stamina. I stayed home with Cesar and watched Risky Business, it having been decided that Whoopi’s foil in The Manicurist had to be more Tom Cruise. Cesar thought the movie was a hoot; I loathed it. Mostly I paced in my head, worrying about Roger till he got home. I think it exasperated Cesar that I couldn’t stop fretting. He could see that Roger was dealing with it, so why couldn’t I just let him? And that tied in with an old issue that nettled Cesar, the dependence of couples. He would usually exclude Roger and me from what he thought of as loss of self in the long-related. Ironic that we firmed it up that night: he would come down with Dennis a few weeks later, to shoot for a little interdependence.

  On Saturday of Dose 4, we watched the hostage footage of TWA Flight 841 from Athens. We had taken that very plane a year ago to the day, Athens to Rome, without incident. My parents called to say we couldn’t go to Europe anymore, it wasn’t safe. No, of course we can’t, I said, glad for any excuse to explain why we wouldn’t be traveling this summer. But it wasn’t a sad anniversary, no
t like Cesar weeping on the sand, because we were busy with treatment, cupping it like a candle in the wind. No side effects except for a temperature on Sunday.

  Next day Richard Howard called out of the blue, from Houston. He’d been a kind of mentor to me when I was first writing poems, and his dramatic monologues had stirred me deeply. He and Roger shared a passion for French, of which Richard was the primo translator into English. But more than anything else he has the credit for introducing Roger and me, having coaxed me to the fateful dinner party on Revere Street. I’d just staggered off the train from New York after a weekend of bad karma with a friend who wanted to be a lover. “Come along, dear,” Richard had said. “It’ll be an early evening.” Small miscalculation: the evening went on for twelve years.

  In the summer of ’85, Richard was teaching in Houston, a course called “How to Recognize a Modern Poem, and What to Do Till the Doctor Comes.” I hadn’t spoken with him in over six months, and he was startled at the blackness of my despair, which I attributed to Cesar. “But this is terrible,” retorted Richard, as if there had been an affront to the natural order. “You and Roger are the sort who know what to do with happiness. I can’t bear to think of either of you suffering.”

  Then he went on to remark that David Kalstone, a literary lion at Princeton, had been ill with pneumonia just like Roger, and was feeling much better now. I don’t think Richard was being ironic. Nor did he realize how clearly he was telling me Kalstone had AIDS. He meant to do quite the opposite, surely: there was still a natural order, and everything wasn’t dire. Regular pneumonia was such a refuge still, like a cold that leaves you no worse off than cozy in bed with tea and a novel. It’s a problem having to do with my perception, but I lived too long with pneumonia as a smoke screen to be able to buy it as a true diagnosis.

  I reported to Craig the nontoxicity of Dose 5, and he told me his Houston researcher had mentioned that his own four suramin patients were all sick from the drug. Not us, I thought. But right after the clinical note in my journal, the fear breaks through the optimism that counted every hour now by the number of the week’s dose.

  A dozen times a day, a hundred times, I think about Rog and what it would mean to lose him and I go to pieces inside. We had a supper delivered from J. Spector and a lovely quiet talk. But where am I going? All I want is what we have to go on and on. The world out there, I don’t understand what they want, how do they bear the matter of time?

  During the Dose 5 weekend we spent the evening with Peter Wolfe and his friend Jeff. It was clearly a complicated step for Peter to take, seeing us socially, especially with such a large caseload and the need to get some distance. But it felt terrific to be appreciated as something more than Friday at nine at the CRC. We drove next day to Laguna to have lunch with Mary McMeekin, the realtor who found us the house on Kings Road and whom Roger had toured through Paris twenty-five years ago. I realized even then that Roger thought through whom he wanted to see, not by way of valedictory but rather to keep lines open to things in his life that mattered to him. Anything that harked back to Paris was rich with feeling and bathed in a golden light.

  In that regard the most important letter he wrote after his diagnosis was to Madeleine: 24 Place des Vosges, an attic apartment in the old palace, a warren of rooms hung slapdash with paintings—her own, her father’s, a Renoir, a Vuillard. She responded to Roger’s news with an instant cable, saying a letter would follow. MILLE BAISERS, MADELEINE. During the next month three packages arrived: pâté de foie gras, rum babas, marrons glacés. The chestnuts came in a wooden box, individually wrapped in foil and tissue and redolent of a very specific Paris—chestnut trees lining the boulevards, roasted chestnuts in paper cones. All through that summer I remember Roger looking up from work or a book and announcing with satisfaction, “I think I’ll have a marron glacé.”

  The Sunday of Dose 5 was a national holiday in the people’s republic of West Hollywood. The kickoff to Gay Pride Week was a parade, which marked here as elsewhere the anniversary of the insurrection at the Stonewall Inn. Roger and I parked off Sunset and walked down into the checkered crowd on Santa Monica Boulevard. I worried about the germs and wouldn’t let us buy any streetside food. As I watched our people mill along the sidewalks, those still young and funky carousing in groups as the tatty floats cruised by, I was too disconnected to feel much pride. Still, Roger and I reminisced about the first gay parade we’d ever marched in,’75 in Boston, holding hands as we walked across the Common. I remember the marchers that day smiling from ear to ear, but not very loud, almost speechless with joy.

  An eon later we threaded our way down the jammed sidewalks of Boys’ Town, with punkers and beer drinkers, queens and commoners. A couple of groups paraded with AIDS banners. At one point an open car cruised by at ten miles an hour, boisterous people sitting out on the trunk. In the front passenger’s seat sat a man with AIDS, waving gamely to the crowd on the boulevard, rather like a blessing. His lesions and his hollow look filled me with terror. I didn’t want Roger to see him and turned us away: it was time to leave.

  As week after week went by and Roger had no bad reaction to the medication, summer began to have the feel of stasis. By late June a solstice point is reached in southern California, such that the weather never changes from day to day: cloudless, bright hot, then at night cool and star-clear. Cesar had managed to convince me he was holding his own; and Craig was fine, just one new lesion. Thus when certain nightmares intruded now I began to feel strangely removed, as if we might be a new generation of AIDS that would just squeak through. This is not entirely an illusion. In the seventh year we have reached at least a second generation, perhaps a third, and each with a better shot at holding ground. Living with AIDS is a rallying cry now, and the men of ’85 were the first division to hum a few bars.

  One afternoon Roger said he was stopping by to see a client about signing a will. The man was a studio publicist, and he’d been in the hospital with meningitis. Roger was naive enough or sufficiently in denial not to realize he’d be walking in on an AIDS situation, but this was still before we had a clear picture of dementia and the horrors of the brain. Roger found the man bedridden, very weak and disoriented. A sister had come from the Midwest to stay with him and had engaged a nurse, but she couldn’t remain away from her family any longer. It didn’t sound as if it would be very long. Roger had to be a sympathetic ear to her and her brother both. Even at the best of times the signing of wills lacks a certain charm. When Roger came home and explained it all, ashen and pained, he was most upset to think that when the sister left, there wouldn’t be anyone there. Was AIDS ever mentioned? Not by name, but pray, why else were forty-year-old publicists demented and dying?

  On June 25 I had a session with Sam where I talked much more about the anger than the despair, about all the things that would set me off, screaming at people over the phone. At the same time I was afraid to be tested or find out what my numbers were. The AIDS antibody test was finally in place. Sam suggested that I was turning denial into a state of continuous tantrum, so defiantly did I not want the issue in my life. He also made me think about my guilt at still being healthy—even more, that at some level I felt relief that I wasn’t the one with AIDS.

  For me this always means that I go back and stare at myself as a lost child, with no words to explain how guilty I feel, being able to walk when my brother can’t. The suppressed rage about the injustice, the astonishment that the rest of the world goes on its merry way—I’d been there before. And now I had to fight it anew and somehow make it okay that I wasn’t sick, for the reality of Roger’s condition was independent of my guilt and dread. My brother remarked one night, as I raked it all over with him, that sometimes I seemed to believe that if I suffered enough I wouldn’t get sick and Roger wouldn’t die.

  Despite my contempt for my mood swings, I remember what bothered me most then was how little of them I could share with Rog. I didn’t want the down times to distance us, even if I understood I mustn’t bu
rden him. I also agreed with Sam it would be good for Rog to be talking to a therapist himself, and I’d mention it every so often, but he was hard to bring around. He’d gone through a long therapy in Boston plus a year and a half of analysis. When he finished with all that, he checked out of the system. Finally he admitted it might be a good idea if he explored his feelings with a neutral ear, and I think it was the visit to the man with dementia that tipped the scale. I was the one who suggested Harry, a friend of ours who did a good deal of work with gay men and now with AIDS. He and Roger used to go to ballets and concerts together, since Harry had a lover who was immune to high culture. On their way to the Music Center one night in June, Roger asked casually about Harry’s AIDS group.

  Harry replied with a chill shrug: “They all said they weren’t going to die, and they all died. We’ve gone through two groups now. We’re not going to do a third.”

  Deflating as this was—and empty as the bravado is in any of us who profess to be toughened by having seen it all—Roger called Harry one morning and asked if he could see him professionally, just to get an idea where he might go for help. What Roger was really doing, I think, was finally admitting he wanted to tell more friends. But Harry pulled up short and said it wouldn’t be proper. Of course he had every legitimate reason professionally to take the position, though that didn’t mitigate my anger. And more troubling than that, Harry suddenly vanished—no more symphony, no more connection at all. Unfortunately, the disappointment over that foray pulled Roger back in again, and the subject was dropped.