Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  After midnight the two of us sat out alone on the back porch in the ink-green quiet, and I couldn’t stop crying. I was just so glad to be with him again; the half-day alone had left me a wreck. Yet the whole trip seemed to release a bottled-up flood of tears, and a thousand things hit me sad. At one point my mother was reminiscing about what a darling baby I was, happy and verbal in the extreme, and all I could think was I couldn’t think back that far. I always got stuck around eight or nine, my brother in Springfield with casts on both legs, surrounded by bewildered toys. And then she told me something my grandmother used to say: When the children are safe in bed at night, those are your best years. Packing to leave on Thursday, in the bedroom under the eaves where I’d slept off and on for thirty years, I blubbered to Roger, “I’m crying because our parents can’t get us out of this.”

  The flight home was interminable, rerouted to Canada because of thunderstorms, which meant we ran out of fuel and had to pit-stop in Vegas. During two hours on the tarmac with no air-conditioning, I could practically smell the germs as the sealed air thickened and choked. We were due in at seven and got back at eleven, but made it to the CRC next morning for Dose 13. And heard that Appleton wasn’t feeling well that day, so it was decided he wouldn’t come in. To miss a dose of the precious liquor was simply unheard of. It seemed immoral to let that bed go empty, but if you’re racked with diarrhea what are you going to do? It remained unspoken whether or not the suramin could be causing it. And week by week, as Appleton stayed out sick, I grew more and more pissed off that he was screwing up the curve.

  Against all that there was Bruce’s optimism, as he would tell in exquisite detail about his appointments at the CRC, not realizing I knew the place far better than he. At this point they hired on a nursepractitioner, Suzette Chaffey, to oversee the study. There was endless gossip among us moonfolk about this perky lady. She had spent time abroad as a child and worked in Switzerland, as I recall, so she had about her a European savvy that Roger and I found irresistible. Besides, she was somebody new to tumble out all our Ancient Mariner tales of fevers and flagged hours. Since she would ultimately come to oversee AZT as well, we were to travel a long road with Suzette.

  Joel called in mid-August from Santa Fe to say that Leo was doing terrifically well. They were living high in a pinon forest above the city and had become vegetarians. Leo had had the good fortune to be accepted into the suramin study at another hospital in L.A., so he would be flying up every week for a dose. It was clear that Joel would not be accompanying him. In the most offhanded way, during this Pollyanna blizzard of good cheer, Joel happened to say he was negative—meaning he didn’t have the virus.

  Here it gets very subtle, because the fiction is spun as fine as Scheherazade. “You know, Leo and I never fucked each other,” he said. “In fact we never had much sex at all.” I thought: He’s getting ready to split and wants to look clean for the next one. A man on the make has to set the record straight.

  There is such infinite variety about the way people tell you their negative status. Some are openly full of remorse and feel they have failed you. A man I’ve never met wrote me after an interview I gave about my antibody status:

  When my test came back negative last month, I was overwhelmed with a sadness I hadn’t expected. Coming back alive is a guilt, a terrible betrayal, a necessary starting point.

  Some hoot with excitement and forget you might not be as thrilled as they. I have friends who will not be tested at all because they know how shamefully glad they’ll be. Their gut instinct is they’re negative, so who are they trying to kid? They are always the first to tell you to stop being so AIDS-related. Lighten up, they say.

  My own consistent opinion is selfish enough and sounds suspiciously Orange County. I want the two million—or the five million, depending on whose scenario piques your fancy—to have themselves tested and know, so I will have people to talk to. Because after midnight and during weekends I cannot talk to those who play at business as usual. I want to tap into the rage of the positives so we can throw buckets of sheep’s blood on the White House lawn and spit in the faces of cops with yellow gloves.

  How tired was Roger on Fridays? It’s very difficult to assess, because that was the focus of our denial now. Appleton’s weeks of diarrhea were something apart and ARC-related. The continuing cautions of Craig’s researcher friend in Houston didn’t somehow translate to the safe haven that looked out on the banyan tree. The sample was so minimal, after all, with only a hundred or so on suramin protocols throughout the country. Peter Wolfe was too busy now to be spending his mornings with the Friday club, and Suzette didn’t seem to be privy to the latest data. Mostly we tried not to worry about the drug, because we had enough to worry about the disease.

  The major drug reaction was rage anyway. It made us crazy to think the FDA or the NIH hadn’t made funds available so that thousands could be on the drug. There was desultory talk in Washington of an HPA-23 study, when we all knew in the AIDS underground that the drug was useless. How could suramin still be the only game in town? We understood already, even as laymen, that what was needed was a new antiviral, especially one that would cross the dreaded blood-brain barrier. The gathering evidence during that summer indicated that a higher and higher percentage of AIDS patients were suffering from effects of the virus in the brain. The fear was that an antiviral that controlled HIV in the blood would somehow send it ravaging into the brain, where most drugs couldn’t follow—including suramin.

  By now I was fielding calls from all over, friends of friends saying they understood I knew someone on suramin. I would give the status report as hopefully as I could, sometimes referring them on to Bruce, the indefatigable spokesman. The burden of my own message was that everyone must start demanding these drugs, because the system wasn’t out to cut the red tape. Indeed, red tape was—and largely still is—the system.

  The rumors were appalling. It was said that everyone appointed by the Reagan administration in a major public health capacity was either a Mormon or a fundamentalist. The chief spokesman for the administration now was the overripe and venomous Patrick Buchanan, one of whose major qualifications for the job was his widely quoted remark that nature was finally exacting her price on homosexuals for having spilled their seed against her. The right-wing firebrands are obsessed with sodomy, always forgetting that half of the gay world is women. This deterministic smugness, whereby we were only getting what we deserved, was so widespread in the upper chambers of the government that the AIDS issue probably never darkened the threshold of the Oval Office. Not to mention the fundamentalists: Though the press would not report anything about the antivirals and wouldn’t assess the scope of the death of a gay generation, they reported with loving detail every ranting speech of the Falwell-Schlaflys and their money-changing brethren. “God’s punishment” was the major level of public debate in 1985: hate, it appeared, was the only public health tool available.

  Toward the end of August, Cesar came down with Dennis for the weekend. I picked them up at the airport and immediately felt easier about the swimmer. He was witty and very self-assured, extraordinarily tender and deferential to Cesar, who was himself transported by the notion of putting together the alpha and omega of his life, love and friendship. He’d obviously been bragging to Dennis for months about his blood-brother ties to me, painting a sunstruck version of me that was hopelessly prewar. I thought I was pretty casual and breezy that afternoon, but Dennis started to question Cesar as soon as they were alone. Why isn’t Paul happier to see you? he asked suspiciously. I knew the next morning that Cesar had finally told him the truth, because Dennis stared at Roger across the coffee with a stung look of desolation.

  It was altogether a heartrending time, rife with the end of summer. Each night I would curl up beside Cesar in the back bedroom for the day’s final gossip, as I had since I was twenty-five. Dennis was sleeping upstairs in the loft. But now the wrap-up moment at evening’s end was skewed by the encroaching horror. The
weeping from the open wound in his groin was so severe that the rank burnt-sugar smell seemed to pulse out into the room in waves. The lesions had spread between his fingers, and his body was peppered all over with them. Bravely he looked on the bright side: at least they weren’t on his face.

  And amazingly enough, he talked on and on about Dennis as if it were a growing and consolidating relationship. He was furious that Dennis continued to stay with the safe old roommate who used to be a lover but wasn’t quite. “It’s now or never,” Cesar said. “I need a little commitment here!” It was so close to a delusion it took my breath away, but it wasn’t quite. He was drunk with love, and the passion in his voice, the helpless spill of feeling, were on a wholly different plane from his body.

  I told him to go slow and be glad of what it was—so easy is it to play with other people’s time. On Saturday we were out by the pool, and Cesar swore he’d be swimming again by Thanksgiving. That evening the four of us went out to dinner, chic cold pizza at Bistango, the double date Cesar had been waiting a decade for. He was magic that night, the topspin of his stories dazzling. When we all came laughing home, Roger and Cesar both turned in, and Dennis and I sat outside and talked. When at last we came in, we hugged each other good night, and something about the moment turned the hug to stone. We clung together for what must have been ten minutes, saying absolutely nothing.

  On the final night of their visit, some plainspoken friends of ours who’d always enjoyed Cesar begged to be able to see him. I said yes without giving it much thought. They were a long-hitched couple who’d just returned from a trip to North Africa, and knowing what a spellbinding traveler Cesar was, they wanted to trade stories with him. It took Cesar over an hour to dress his groin and get ready. As he painstakingly bandaged himself, something he did twice a day now, he looked over exasperated at Dennis and said, ever the linguist: “This is what it means in French, quand même.”

  We all went out for Indian food, and the mild folk told their African story, admittedly rather tame. I could see the flare in Cesar’s nostrils as he asked, “But didn’t anything unexpected happen?” My Uruguayan friend was simply not an angry man, yet I could feel his spine stiffen. “You don’t still travel to go see the tourist sights, do you? What about the atmosphere?”

  They tried the best they could to describe the atmosphere. Later, when they’d left, Cesar was scathing in his satire of them, no matter how decent they were, because they were well. Their bourgeois marriage, with its twice-yearly tours of the world’s garden spots, mocked poor Cesar, who only wanted a little space for his own sweet season with Dennis. The other thing I recall from the Indian dinner was observing that I’d known Cesar for fifteen years, and him correcting me. “Seventeen,” he said, reminding me of the first evening, talking Borges in a drawing room. No rounding off of years allowed.

  When I took them to the plane next afternoon, so much still hadn’t been decided, even whether Cesar would go back to school in September. Phrases like “leave of absence” were beginning to creep into his conversation, however. The other gay teacher at his school had been diagnosed with PCP that summer and had already dropped out. The rattled headmaster called Cesar’s doctor and asked, point-blank, did he have AIDS, only to be told Cesar was being treated for cancer. Cesar still thought he could give it a try, but I suggested perhaps it was time to focus his full attention on his health. We got to the airport and had a last bear hug outside the terminal, as we had after two dozen holidays. “Thanksgiving,” he promised resolutely. “Quince,” I replied with a wag of a finger, and he and Dennis went off laughing. I never saw Cesar again.

  “There’s a kind of grace sometimes, isn’t there?” Roger said when I got home. He meant the relationship with Dennis, knowing as well as I how fiercely Cesar had always longed for the eloquent partner.

  I rack my brain to think what the signs were at the end of August, but nothing out of the ordinary. We were both working along, and if normal is too strong a word, then perhaps it’s enough to say that compared to the nightmares we heard about, nothing much was happening to us. Roger’s publicist client with meningitis died around that time, and Roger began the probate process. “He didn’t have very much,” Roger said simply, putting much more work into the estate than he’d ever be able to charge it. The mechanics of that probate, which I would hear about every now and then, evoked the specter of single men in one-bedroom apartments all over West Hollywood: the little collection of antiques, the closet full of labels and Hollywood memorabilia, the small life-insurance premium left to a sister in the Midwest.

  “People do die of other things,” a couple of friends have observed trenchantly when I’ve talked as if only the war still kills. Such a useful perspective. Of course I knew people were dying of everything out there, because now I read obituaries and never missed a beat of any other disease, from lupus to yaws. A woman I know who lost her two-year-old son last year says she never tires of reading books about other tragic children. This is called “being immersed,” by those who are not immersed. Still, I’d reached a point where I couldn’t shed tears anymore about people dying in their proper time. If someone had seventy years, I’d think: So what’s the big deal?

  Yet all it takes to soften such an attitude is someone you know. At the end of August the old Viennese doctor who lived across the street died suddenly of a heart attack. We were friendly neighbors to him and his wife, and I used to take the dog to visit Mrs. Knecht, who adored animals. A week after Dr. Knecht died, I hauled the dog over for a proper condolence call. I’d never confronted a widow in the full moment of loss before. Just then it seemed as sad as anything—even AIDS—that Rudolf Knecht, who’d escaped the Nazis by the skin of his teeth in ’42, had died at eighty-five and now left behind this remarkable lonely woman. If by that time I had come to a point where I felt most comfortable talking with those in the war, it proved a natural thing to include Mrs. Knecht. I took to visiting her every week, and listened as she talked about what it all meant.

  “Life,” said Mrs. Knecht with a fine Viennese loftiness, “is like a curtain pulled avay from a vindow, and you see the beautiful landscape, and then the curtain drops.”

  Over Labor Day weekend a writer friend from New York who summered in Vermont wrote us a short and breezy note about all the odds and ends he was writing, reviews and essays and poems. He was not an unkind or insensitive man, and he would prove a caring friend, once he knew. But I felt a rage toward him akin to what Cesar felt for the two men back from Africa. Business as usual in the literary department was especially galling, and I’d already started snarling to people that no one should write about anything anymore but AIDS. I loved it when the Eastern Europeans complained at the annual PEN conference: Why don’t Americans write about anything? Reagan would be remembered, I said, for just one thing, that he presided over the denial of the calamity. I’m not saying any of this was true or even coherent, only that it was what I thought as my rage came to consume my despair. And about my friend idly writing from the country as the roses faded in his Vermont garden, I said:

  those back east

  with their head up their ass will all have

  tenure soon.

  On September 5 there was a meeting to discuss the video presentation for the annual Center dinner. I was meant to put together a text for a slide tape that would show the wide net of the Center’s reach in the community. The man who would handle the visuals was a supercilious type who noted at the previous meeting in June that he didn’t know anyone with AIDS, only to be withered by a member of the board: “You will.” Now we were trying to brainstorm a way to talk about the Center as even more precious and necessary during the nightmare of AIDS. We had to have a place to serve as a sanctuary for our gropings as a people, especially in a dark age when it would be harder and harder to be openly gay. For once we would not internalize the homophobia. We must remember and pass on what it was like when the community was effectively splintered by the closet, like dissidents in solitary.
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br />   It all sounded stirring enough, though I wasn’t buying the reality. Brave men and women all over were starting the AIDS lifelines and speaking out, but my sense of the man on the street—Christopher, Montrose, Santa Monica—was of a growing loss of center. If you have enough barriers up, it doesn’t matter whether the closet door is open or shut. As Rand Schrader drove me home from that meeting, I kept talking about the mushrooming numbers. “We’re all going to get it,” I said.

  “Paul,” he replied evenly, “there are only thirteen thousand cases.”

  Only. In one way of course I don’t blame him, since I was such a broken record, and he was just trying to get his dinner program set. I know the L.A. gay community was responding to the caseload with money and passion. In part my estrangement was self-propelled. About three weeks before the meeting there had been a cocktail hour at a swank house in the hills just below Bruce’s, with a pool that seemed to hover above the city. The two men hosting the party were bright and successful professionals, GQ profiles with a flash of Melrose funk. The purpose of the affair was very bald: The upper-income brothers were meant to announce their support for the annual dinner by volunteering to sponsor tables. In a scene that struck me as vaguely medieval, a hundred of us stood around the pool—agents, lawyers, doctors, realtors—and sounded off one by one.

  I recall being pissed at everyone that night for being healthy and cheery and tan. I don’t think Roger felt any of this. As the event went on and on, he sat down to rest on a chaise by the diving board, benignly calling out when it came his turn. I worried about how cold it was out there, and could he get a chill from the breeze off the pool. I actually liked a lot of these people; I even missed them in our lives. But we were on the moon, and they weren’t, and we usually declined their invitations. I only brood about the moment now because the two men who gave the party have both been diagnosed since, and they’ve sold the house with the view to Catalina, and the GQ jobs are gone.