Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  Five days later Roger and I went over to Susan and Robbert’s for dinner. Susan had been mugged that afternoon as she was getting out of the car with the peach pie she’d bought for dessert. Though her window was smashed and her purse snatched, the pie escaped unscathed, and we polished it off. Then we repaired to the studio, and I posed naked as the plummeting boy. A man of forty running to flab, his youth beached like a whale, makes a very unconvincing boy, but Susan assured me that I would do fine. She works by manipulation of photographic imagery, exploding things for their shrapnel value, the surface effect metallic, positive and negative at once. Mostly she wanted the right silhouette pose as the winged boy feels the burning sun and his wings fall away.

  Roger and I would watch the piece grow monumental over the next several months, but I recall the evening of the photo session as the opposite of the night two years before with Jack Shear. I could feel the lumpish dislocation of my body, ticking away as I did these Isadora Duncan tableaux, my arms up in front of my face. I had broken through to Diane Arbus status, and I didn’t care. Meanwhile Roger worked quietly as Susan’s assistant, adjusting lights and holding equipment, placid as he had been at the previous shoot.

  At the end of July a couple of friends were in town from Philadelphia. Joe and Stuart were both comfortably ensconced in chairs of English, and they’d been together forever. They reported that a mutual friend—Ed Tompkins, a Washington lawyer—had been unable to join them on the trip to L.A. because he was down with a virus, something to do with his nervous system. My face went blank as I stared at the diagnosis, but neither of them appeared to recognize the naked truth. Apparently there had been tests that proved nothing conclusive, but Ed was probably covering up. He was a shy and closeted man, with only the most tentative experience and a single love gone bad. He’d had the dubious distinction of being pursued by a member of the White House staff, that closet within a closet, but Ed had turned him down because the man was married. When Ed died three months later, Joe and Stuart finally admitted it was AIDS, but still in the face of the ghastly denial of Ed’s family, who kept the gay friends away and let no calls through as he lay dying.

  By Dose 10 we had put in the good word for Bruce, and he’d been accepted into the program. Roger and I simply asked if he could be scheduled for some other day than Friday. Bruce was so eager to start he was beside himself, and he kept up a flow of good news from all his various sources. Bruce was really Suramin Central, much more than I. His sister Carol came out from New York to visit, and we had the two of them over for Saturday lunch. It was the first time I’d seen Bruce in four months, and he looked okay, if a little thin. We mostly talked about other things. Carol told me months later how thrown she was that weekend; that lunch with us had been a kind of haven from the nightmare, proving that she and Bruce could still laugh. After lunch we sat in the garden, and Bruce waded in at the shallow end of the pool. He had been my gym buddy for years, strong and street tough and speeding with energy. Thus there was something terribly poignant in seeing him balk at a swim, saying he was feeling a chill and wouldn’t go in any further. He seemed suddenly modest in his body, he who always crowed and darted about. It was all going to be fine, though, once he started on suramin.

  On the Tuesday after Dose 10 Roger was running a fever, and Cope ordered a blood panel and blood-gas test. Just going upstairs again to the pulmonary unit was terror enough, and I started to go out of my mind again. But the tests proved negative, the fever disappeared, and we wanted so much to believe it wasn’t the suramin causing a problem that we blocked the thought. It couldn’t be the suramin, because then there would be no magic bullet. Now, in the last week of July, a wave of AIDS stories seemed to cluster on the news, all of them bad. We heard that Rock Hudson, flown from Paris on a rented 747 and brought to UCLA by helicopter, had only a couple of months to live. It was announced that dentists must start wearing masks. The first whine of panic began to mosquito the airwaves. There was never a word about antivirals or any other treatment. The “always fatal” illness, they said.

  But at some level it couldn’t get us down anymore, not after nearly three months of healing breezes through the banyan tree. On Friday, August 3, Roger came home from work and discovered he’d lost his watch, which had always seemed as grafted to him as the sapphire ring. He called the CRC, the office, the restaurant where we’d had lunch—no luck. As we nestled in bed that evening he let the watch go, with a mournful observation to the effect that things after all were nothing. Then we got up next morning to drive to Laguna, and the watch was in the front hall on top of his briefcase. The pin in the strap had worked loose. “Oh, the curse sometimes lifts!” I hooted in my journal, embracing all evidence of false alarms.

  I worked double time on Susan’s table during the days before we left for Chicago and Boston, the subject of its text being the art market and Neo Ex. By the time I was called in by the studio for the evisceration of The Manicurist, I was already very far away. It was a particularly savage and ugly meeting, with Whoopi’s people screaming that she’d become a secondary character to the guy, and the studio executives demurely let me take the heat as if it were all my bad idea. This movie has no hook, I was told. It had no setup, it wasn’t character based and it wasn’t funny. No one had a kind word to say about page 26. Yet the hand that jotted down their pointless notes was flecked with blue from the table painting and belonged to a man who didn’t care anymore.

  We hadn’t had a suitcase out of the closet since Greece, and the sanity of packing for two was terrific. We’d always worn the same size shirts and underwear and socks, so nothing belonged to anyone in our house. We were always disguised as each other anyway. I raced over to Susan’s the day before we flew so I could present the table. I always like to leave matters as finished as possible before a flight, though AIDS is a remarkable cure for fear of flying. We were definitely not going to die in a plane crash. This is another way of saying something Star once wrote me during her seven years in Asia: The cure for metaphysical pain is physical pain.

  The schedule was tight. We were due to leave for Chicago on a noon flight, and I didn’t sleep with excitement. We were early for Dose 12 and talked about our trip with the CRC staff as if we had a week’s pass from the battlefront. We raced home to meet the car that was taking us to the airport, barely five minutes to spare. As we came up Kings Road I spied our mail carrier in her Jeep, and I braked on the hill, got out and gave her a bunch of letters.

  When I tried to start the car again, it had frozen in gear and wouldn’t move. So we had to leave the Jaguar sitting out on the street as I ran up to the house, called Jaguar service, grabbed the bags and bolted to hail the airport driver. We always traveled madly, one well-laid plan going haywire after the next, but that after all is how a trip turns into a journey. All we knew was that we weren’t hostages anymore. We even had to laugh as we passed the mute Jag, dead on the hill, because there it was again in case we had missed it the first time: Things were nothing.

  •VII•

  It was a long flight, with a stopover in St. Louis, and the crowded plane and terminal chaos were daunting. Sometimes you just had to throw up your hands. There was no way to protect yourself from the germs of the teeming summer masses, except to touch the surface of life as little as possible. Al and Bernice picked us up at O’Hare, and we stopped at a deli in Skokie on the way home. When they marveled at how well Roger was looking, both of us could feel them relax at last about his recovery from the pneumonia of the spring. Roger and I slept on the Hide-a-Bed in the den, on an inch-thin mattress that felt like overnight camp. I remembered visiting the parents in ’75 on the way to California, when they didn’t understand we were lovers and put us in separate rooms. Now I was family.

  We were hustled up early and over to Jaimee and Michael’s where the children roared with excitement to see their uncle. Six-year-old Andrew trounced me at tetherball, a game I leaped to play only because I didn’t want Roger straining himself. Michael had arra
nged to borrow a friend’s boat for a cruise on Lake Michigan. All eight of us piled into Al’s Cadillac and drove to a marina in the city. Four-year-old Lisa sat on Roger’s lap, and they laughed and chatted happily—while I despaired of keeping the children from breathing in Roger’s face. But even I managed to unwind as the boat got under way, a thirty-foot Chris-Craft that looked like a rocket and slept six.

  We headed up the sapphire lake, the sunny day cool and dry, none of the choked humidity we expected in Chicago. As we passed through a choppy wake on the way out of the marina, Al suddenly gripped the rails and ordered Michael to turn back. He was scared of deep water because he’d had a brother who drowned, sixty years ago. In the peculiar way that families accommodate their unreason, they all benignly ignored Al’s expostulation, and after a moment the phobic spell passed. Ten minutes later he was serene as an old salt, beaming at his two generations of children.

  Roger had a glorious time. I have a great picture of him grinning at the camera in his rumpled sailor hat, and there are no qualifications in the evidence. He looks completely well again. Though sleepiness and fever had been dogging him during the Saturdays after the suramin, he was unaffected today, impish and laughing. No wonder they all thought he was out of the woods. He sat by Jaimee, both with their arms folded against the buffeting of the wind, talking close to be heard above the roar of the wake. They looked like brother and sister, no other way to say it—brother slightly older, sister all ears. But perhaps the memory is so vivid because Andrew and Lisa were a microcosm of the same. On the way back the children grew restless, being confined so long in a small place. The two of them bounced around the car as we headed back to Glencoe. Parents and grandparents both were accustomed to the ruckus, but Rog and I wilted like maiden aunts and couldn’t wait for a nap.

  There were no very sad times in Chicago, though Sunday morning as we dressed for breakfast Roger shook his head and said in simple wonder: “I don’t feel young anymore.” I of course started to cry, which is rough on an empty stomach. He didn’t look old or seem old then. I suppose some of it had to do with visiting his folks, where a man is always slightly out of tune with a vanished child playing in the next room. What made the moment especially hard was to think how boyish Roger had always been. Half the time we were like twelve-year-olds, and the world out there was a sort of field trip. He had the energy and sense of mischief of a seventh grader with all A’s, though he also had a sweet tooth for playing hooky. Since I had been such an ancient child myself, gloomy and bookish, the only kid I ever got to be was with him. So when he said his youth was over, two children seemed to disappear into the woods, hand in hand like Hansel and Gretel.

  Sunday afternoon we drove into the city with Al and Bernice and took a long walk around the downtown area. Al, who is no fan of L.A., busts with pride about his big-shouldered city. We passed the spot where H & H Restaurant had been, and they laughed about the time Roger managed it for a couple of weeks while his parents were in Europe. Then Al steered us on a tour of the city’s sprawl of outdoor sculpture, Nevelson to Dubuffet, showing each piece off as if he were part owner.

  During dinner at Jaimee’s, Michael took her aside and said, “Why is Paul like a mother hen around Roger?” And later, to me: “There’s nothing wrong, is there?”

  That night I asked to see the pictures of Roger’s bar mitzvah, and Bernice gladly pulled the albums out on the dining room table. I’d never seen him that young before. He had the most unabashed grin in his thirteenth year, and Jaimee in all the flounces of a party dress couldn’t hide the tomboy. As we leafed through the mid-fifties, all its catered optimism, there were groups of people scarcely older than Roger and I, arms around each other and grinning at the camera. “He’s gone,” Bernice said matter-of-factly, pointing at this one and that one, “she’s gone, he’s gone.…”

  Monday morning we were off to the airport, proud of the visit, the family content, the Chicago branch at least. Halfway to Boston, I started to cry—

  that I had nothing happy to report, that I was only going to have one bad ugly talk after another, that I was so sad and so finished.

  But things were easy with my parents right away, due to the fact that there was so much mutual affection between them and Roger. Since we moved to California I had taken to visiting them alone, and without Roger the days in Andover always made me feel as if I’d never escaped. I don’t have quite the grown-up relations with my parents that Roger enjoyed with Al and Bernice. I’ll take a lot of the heat for that, since I’m not very forgiving about the wrongheaded notions my parents once had about gay, or their anguish at having produced a writer. (“It’s fine that you want to write, but what are you going to do?”)

  Nevertheless, they are very decent and giving people, plain Yankee folk whose fences make good neighbors. The fly in the ointment for me had always been my mother’s Christian fervor, a long-standing matter of locked horns between us. Low Episcopal, we’re talking, not snakes and tongues and Tammy Faye. Christ Church in Andover was a fount of liberal outreach, shining with irreproachable convictions, yet my mother’s sprinkling of God in every conversation had created a cloying atmosphere from which I kept my distance. All the same, the longer Roger and I were together, the more we healed as a family. It’s not an accident, I think, that neither of us came out to our families until we found each other. Alone it is hard to want to face the barrage of clichés, and the closet is so much easier. But you can’t go on very long hearing your heart’s deepest core called your roommate.

  After dinner the first night, Roger went up to rest, and I had a pretty good talk with the parents about AIDS. They were reasonably well informed, though they clearly didn’t think it could touch us. Then I broke the news about Cesar, and I could see their assurances falter.

  Tuesday I took Roger to Phillips Academy, where I endured the existential acne of high school and later taught for five lambent summers. I took two pictures of Roger on the great lawn in front of the art gallery, the two I keep closest to me now. In both shots his arms are open in a great embrace, and he’s laughing with pleasure, the humid green of summer in the elm alley behind him, the sky milky and palpable. We walked from there into the Cochran Bird Sanctuary, a walled enclave like a private forest, where I’d taken a thousand solitary walks as a youth, winter and summer. We made our way to the pond and sat on the stone bridge above a lazy brook fanning its algae. We talked calmly about all we had and how we were doing fine. Then Roger looked up into the trees, and a choke came into his voice: “But what if I die?”

  “You’re not dead,” I retorted passionately, not quite addressing the question, though at the time it seemed the only answer. “We’re here. We’re going to win.”

  I believed it absolutely then, that we would lead the way. Soon the antiviral news would break, and the hope would come flooding in. We would be there to show the rest how to bear the joy. Now of course I can answer Roger’s question in endless sad Keatsian detail, but at that heightened moment I hardly took it in. Mid-August in the sanctuary was the peak of summer, gaudy with life. No wonder the grasshopper laughs at the ant. I’ve been on the stone bridge only one time since then, about three weeks after Roger died: snow and cold, a sky that smoked like dry ice, and no birds sang.

  My parents had arranged to take us to York Harbor in Maine for dinner, a favorite place of theirs on a spit of land at the mouth of the York River. When we arrived I settled Mother and Dad in the restaurant, then Roger and I went out to the beach for a breath of sunset. We walked down into a sort of cove with a rim of summer millionaires, white shingle with green and blue shutters, the opposite of Aegean. Roger stood, feet apart, in the sand, sniffing the sea breeze while I capered down to trail a hand in the water.

  When I came back with a smooth gray stone the size of a silver dollar, he was serene with delight. We talked about Proust and his grandmother, the seascape frieze at Balbec. I’d always hated Maine—too cold, too WASP, you blink and the summer’s gone—but I had to admit the
northern light was exquisite today. Yet I said I could only enjoy it because he was there with me. I didn’t particularly mean because he was still alive, rather that I wouldn’t have enjoyed it half so much if I’d been with my parents alone. Or worse, all by myself: I’d stood on enough solitary bluffs to last three lifetimes. But Roger’s eyes welled with tears at my words, and I wanted to scream with stupidity, because I hadn’t meant to make him sad. Yet sunset is so mercurial, it changes in front of your eyes. I remember us leaving the beach laughing, shoulder nudging shoulder as we furthered the larger conspiracy.

  Wednesday Roger went into Boston to visit old friends. I had lunch with my aunt Grace, who’d lost her husband about five years before. She said she missed him now more than ever. All afternoon I kept calling Rog in Boston, suddenly feeling trapped again in a small town, neuter as an old schoolteacher. Roger was very emotional. He’d had lunch with Miriam Goodman, a woman he’d known since Brandeis and the poet preceding me in his life, but he didn’t tell her. Then he went to Tony Smith’s, on Brimmer Street around the corner from our old place on Beacon Hill. Tony taught political science at Tufts and had been one of Roger’s best buddies in grad school, the only one who was gay. Tony asked about the pneumonia, but not really very concerned, and Roger tried to be stoic and dismiss it. Something in his voice made Tony turn from the stove, where he was cooking: “But you’re all right, aren’t you?” Roger shook his head and started to cry.

  I wanted to go in then and be with them for the evening; it was only a half hour away. But my mother was having a bad asthma attack after dinner, so I stayed home and waited. I played cribbage with my father to make the time go by, one eye on the clock. Then out of nowhere Alfred called from L.A., telling me CBS wanted to make a deal on a story of ours. My parents were elated, and I mimicked their excitement but felt myself hoarding the good news for Rog. I was only excited about telling him, not about the thing itself. I loved how thrilled he was for me when he got home.