Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  On Saturday, October 5, Dose 20, we took it easy and went over to Sheldon’s to discuss the birthday menu. Veal chops, we decided. That night we had tickets to an opening at the County Museum for the Cone collection of modern art, and as usual these days I’d crossed it off the calendar because I didn’t want us in a crowd. But after supper that evening on the terrace it was wonderfully balmy, with Santa Ana winds, which always either electrify or jangle. On a sudden impulse, we rushed to the museum to see if the crowd had thinned by 9 P.M. When we got there we had the place virtually to ourselves and cavorted among the boiling Matisses, grinning with delight and dragging each other excitedly from canvas to canvas. The attendant documentary material, lush with Left Bank trivia, evoked irresistibly the Paris of the perfect feeling.

  The Cone opening is my trump card, my high ace. For Roger was fine that night, completely fine, no illusion. What I hadn’t learned yet was the hairline disparity between being fine and being secure. There was the wedge where the nightmare incubated. When we got home from the museum we lay in bed listening to the swirling of the wind in the trees. I called Craig in New York, and he happened to be in a terrific mood himself. He’d met a psychologist during the summer, and things had flowered in the weeks since Craig got back from California. Craig and I laughed carelessly, startled by our own good humor, as if we might have to pinch ourselves before the night was done. Sometimes you manage to bring off a moment so astonishing you can’t even say how you did it. You even pretend you can do it again.

  Next morning Roger and I went down to Pennyfeathers for a late breakfast of pancakes. We were reading the Sunday paper, Roger leafing through the “Calendar” section, when suddenly his face crumpled. “Oh, no.” I looked at him. “John Allison’s dead.”

  There was a picture of John, his smile a Shakespearean imp’s, and a moving obit by theater critic Sylvie Drake. She spoke of a call from John during the summer, when he’d said, “I’m in the last stages of, AIDS.” My emotions were all chaotic—what did he mean by last?—but everything fell into place now. That odd talk about giving it all up and going away. What had been his final vague excuse about not going forward with my play? We’ll put it off till the fall, he’d said. And Roger and I were so busy with suramin and staying alive that I hadn’t ever got back to him. In theater you have to get back to people, keep the energy up. Though we had scarcely known him, we were both blown away by the news. John represented the felicity of life before the moon, as Roger and I recalled the lunch at Trumps, a year ago almost to the day. At the end of my play, when the boy Tom leaves Julian—Joel is Tom, I am Julian—he asks: “Does it all go too fast?”

  “You mean life?” says Julian. “Just the summers.”

  But where were the symptoms? What was the red flag? All we did was come back for a quiet Sunday, brooding on too many deaths, worrying about Cesar. Monday we went right back to work. I kept an appointment at Paramount, though the only note I have from the meeting is a scribble about John Allison’s death. So what was it sent us over to UCLA on Tuesday morning? I can’t remember. A fever, I suppose, or the cough in the throat, but nothing out of the ordinary. If the doom was very intense, colliding like ions in the heat-swollen sky, it was only because of all the bad news the previous week. It wasn’t us.

  Cope must have ordered a blood-gas test, and the oxygen level must have been low, so they decided to admit him for a bronc. Within twelve hours we knew the pneumocystis was back. But all I remember anymore is the bewildering shift of seasons, from laughing among the Matisses Saturday night to the fever three days later and Roger overwhelmed. And they took him off suramin. When we pleaded for them to give it back, they said not while he was on Pentamidine. I remember Gottlieb coming up to me in the fourth-floor corridor. We hadn’t bothered to check into the penthouse, thinking we’d be in and out. “I want you to know,” said Gottlieb gravely, “we’ll do absolutely everything we can.” He meant to comfort me, but I just kept beating myself: How did it get so bad so fast? What did we do wrong?

  Even though I know now that the drug had turned on Roger, I still can’t understand how we could have had no warning. Hope had left us so unprepared. We had grown so grateful for little things. Out of nowhere you go from light to dark, from winning to losing, go to sleep murmuring thanks and wake to an endless siren. The honeymoon was over, that much was clear. Now we would learn to borrow time in earnest, day by day, making what brief stays we could against the downward spiral from which all our wasted brothers did not return.

  •VIII•

  Once more Sheldon was there before the night was out, and again he played the single-issue politician: Don’t tell the parents. I was still trying to find out how the infection could have got past the suramin. I’d made contact with all my antiviral sources, sending an SOS to some, to others a warning. Casualty on the front lines. I was only half there when Sheldon was purring reassurance. No big deal, he said, we already knew the procedure. Get the infection taken care of, and then back to work. The secret was intact; why bother two old people in Chicago when they’d managed to live in ignorance so far?

  Roger nodded passively, too sick from all the tests to argue, gearing up for another siege of medication. When I tried to raise the issue that we seemed to have a magic-bullet problem here, and maybe it was time to go after Compound S, Sheldon changed the subject to my birthday dinner, only ten days away. Since the doctors were saying Roger would probably be home by then, there was no reason not to proceed on schedule. It was such a seductive idea, to think we could still breeze in in tuxes and put the calamity on hold. I thought of Bruce at the Oscars in March, nominated for The Natural, a moment of tonic gaudiness between the first lesion and the pneumocystis. And here we were, agreeing again to the lie of normalcy and holding out for veal chops.

  As to the burden of the secret, it wasn’t Roger’s parents I was worried about right now. I felt dread enough of hitting my parents with the news, assaulted as they were by the complications of my mother’s emphysema. Indeed, we had all we could do, in the wake of the nightmare, to preserve our own dignity about being gay. I don’t think we knew what to do yet with our parents’ hard-won acceptance, the sense they’d had to overcome that being gay was a kind of doom. So the secret wasn’t all Sheldon’s idea, even now. We’d protect the parents as long as we could.

  But I simply couldn’t go on smiling at our friends and coasting along as if nothing were wrong. I couldn’t face Alfred in the mornings, or all the calls that were pouring in about the party. I phoned Richard Ide in Washington; he was there for a term’s sabbatical and bunking with a mutual friend. I had to banter inanely in order to get to Richard, who in turn was required to speak in coded monosyllables. It just couldn’t continue this way or we’d go mad—though now was hardly the time to discuss it. Roger wasn’t up to talking to anyone new, and especially kept his distance from the fuss of easy sympathy. I recall how we both looked grimly around at the flowers that had welcomed him home from the last hospitalization. “What is this,” said Rog with wry dismay, “a funeral?”

  But if he didn’t need reinforcements, I plainly did. I was berserk, and it was coming out as anger. One afternoon in the underground garage beneath the city of pain, the Jaguar locked in gear again. I came racing up to use the phone in Roger’s room, ranting as I dialed and then screaming at the dealer in a sort of free fall of rage. It was a reaction that would soon become a reflex, at every little thing that went wrong in the world of errands and customer service. Pure displacement: I was angry at Roger for being sick.

  And it wasn’t even being safely funneled off, since Roger had to lie there weak and fevered and listen to the Jaguar rant. “Please, I can’t handle all this upheaval,” he begged me.

  I only wish the yelling had calmed me down, but it didn’t. A day or two later he had a call from Tony Smith in Boston, and managed to rise above the fever and nausea to have a quiet talk with his friend. Somehow it made me jealous. I couldn’t talk to anyone that way now, not in a sta
te of emergency. I don’t know what it was I did just then—nagged him to get off the phone, started wailing or getting frantic—but he hung up and turned and shrieked at me. “You can’t take it! You just can’t take it, can you?”

  In eleven years he’d never yelled like that, and this in spite of a lung infection that often left him too exhausted to talk. But he was right; I was going over the edge again. What good was I going to be to either of us if I couldn’t take it? And if I couldn’t take it now, how would I ever see it through? The savage disdain and loneliness in his cry were as sobering a challenge as either of us ever made. Don’t leave me, Roger had pleaded with me back in ’81, in the aftermath of Joel, when it seemed I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. At the time an embrace and a promise were half enough to reassure him; time and a little growing had done the rest. Now I was being asked for much more. Falling apart would just not do.

  The first thing I did was tell the truth to Alfred, who sobbed in the Jeep and kept asking what he could do. Nothing, I said, but I knew what I wanted. We’d have to pull back now on work, since I wouldn’t be caring about the two deadlines, at CBS and Warner Brothers. There would be no more hungering after career or catering to the hustle of Hollywood. Alfred tried in the weeks ahead to address this issue, suggesting that I had to keep working to keep my sanity. None of it mattered if Roger died, I replied, and when he tried to exhort that I must survive even if Roger did die, I distanced myself from him completely. In any case, all I felt like doing, besides keeping watch at Roger’s bed and charming a whole new set of nurses, was making my endless phone calls about what had gone wrong with suramin and where the fuck was Compound S. The doctors were being very precise about the current infection, making no connection with the antiviral.

  And then, on the third day in the hospital, Peter Wolfe and his colleague David Hardy came whipping into Roger’s room. Bruce Weintraub, they said, had just been admitted to a room three doors down the hall. It was extraordinarily sensitive of the two immunologists to care about our secret so. Perhaps because they were near our age, they understood how a young man fights to keep control of the options, for the young still cling to the illusion that their bodies are their own business. Hardy and Wolfe also knew how virulent the gossip could be; both had patients who’d lost their jobs, their friends and their reason. We knew how many familiar faces would be visiting Bruce, back and forth in the corridor. So as sick as Roger was that day, we decided it was time to move to the tenth floor. Since it couldn’t be arranged till the next morning, we peeled Roger’s name tag off the door, and whenever I left the room I checked to see if the coast was dear.

  But though privacy was the immediate issue, part of me was reeling from the coincidence of Bruce and Roger down with infections at the same time. Only in Bruce’s case it wasn’t PCP, it was something wrong with his blood, a plummeting of his white count, as I recall. This was a whole other territory from the pulmonary department, and my knowledge was sketchy at best. But it struck me then that it wasn’t just something hit-or-miss about suramin that had allowed the protozoa to fulminate again in Roger’s lungs. There was something more deeply wrong here, something bad that nobody could name yet, against which the elixir was powerless.

  I couldn’t wait to leave the fourth floor. In just those few days we’d become acutely aware of the man in the next room, obviously gravely ill, his parents in hovering attendance. You pass people in the hall, sometimes walking with their patient while you walk with yours, or in the elevator or the coffee room. Some will spill you the whole story of the loved one’s illness, but even the random nods and hellos speak volumes. These two modest parents were clearly bowed down by a very late stage of AIDS. I think there was a lover there as well, and various overdressed friends, but it was the parents you wanted to rock in your arms, they looked so lost. So I was very relieved to flee to the optimistic luxury of the tenth floor.

  Once I realized Roger was stable, I forced myself to stay calm. After the shock of the sudden diagnosis wore off, I think neither of us was quite so terrified of PCP as before, knowing he had come through it once. For Rog the harder thing than fear was the disappointment, being thrown down again after climbing a mountain. Familiarity with IV nurses and the protocol of contagion didn’t make them easier. But he finally told the truth about what he delicately called “my situation” to one of his law buddies, and thus was able to channel off some of the pressure of work. He was in phone contact with his secretary every day and returned the lion’s share of his calls. All of which more or less shamed me into working with Alfred in the afternoons, though in truth I spent most of that time crying and complaining.

  I’d stay with Roger in 1016 till eleven or midnight, always enjoying the quiet that descended on the floor late at night. We’d put in long calls to Jaimee and my brother and generally end the day feeling safe. Then on the way down I’d stop by the fourth floor and go into Bruce’s room. He was always asleep, but I never had time to pop in during the day. Right now I longed to talk to Bruce about suramin and Compound S. Of all of us, he would have been happiest to sift the evidence for hours and spur me on. But I also didn’t mind just sitting there watching him sleep. It grounded me to realize that Roger and I weren’t in the fight alone, and Bruce made the hospital seem less overwhelming, more like a satellite station than the moon.

  After a while he would stir and wake up and stare at me for a moment in the half-dark. Then he’d flash me a peaked grin: “Hi, Paulie.” I don’t remember much of what we said: just a few sentences before he drifted back to sleep. He was plainly very ill, and the doctors were stumped. It was sometime during those first days that they decided they’d have to remove his spleen. I remember talking with him about that, very matter-of-fact, toneless in the dark. I also had a very specific memory of the composer in New York who’d had his spleen removed, and all his friends said the operation was “the beginning of the end.” And then there was the rumor that any surgery at all seemed to accelerate the AIDS “process,” an onrush of final infection.

  Yet I’d always hold out for Compound S and swear to Bruce we’d get it somehow. No matter if he was too weak to fight for it now; I would fight for it. Then I would think as I took the elevator down from four that the hospital was going to get fuller and fuller with AIDS cases, till there wouldn’t be any beds for anything else. How many AIDS patients would you need before people didn’t want to have elective surgery at a hospital, or their babies delivered, or even their blood drawn?

  My actual fortieth birthday was Wednesday the sixteenth, three days before the main event at Sheldon’s. The doctors were sticking to their promise that Roger would be home in time, but it was equally clear after a week of Pentamidine nausea that he’d never make the party. I don’t know why we just didn’t cancel it, but Sheldon had a thought. We would simply postpone the party three weeks, till November 10, when my brother and sister-in-law would be visiting from Philadelphia. Bob and Brenda had had to decline the original invitation, and now they would be the excuse to reschedule. Sheldon said he’d take care of all the details, and the fifty guests were called and shifted. Their varying degrees of suspicion about the sudden postponement have filtered back in the two years since, but at the time you grasp at straws. Besides, I really did think we could have Roger on his feet two weeks after the Pentamidine was finished, for that was how we had done it before.

  Meanwhile, all day Wednesday, I had to grin and bear phone calls and cards and especially the cheerful wishes of my parents, who had sent forty birthday candles in a soapstone dish and insisted I use them on the fictitious cake I said Roger had brought home. In fact I catalogued for them the whole evening we had planned, dinner and gifts and friends dropping by for cake. Then I went out for a quick supper with Rand Schrader to break the news—one by one, I was convincing Roger to let in our near and dearest. I arrived at 1016 about nine o’clock. We lit one of the two-inch candles and warbled me a happy fortieth. I’d already started a bloody poem called “40,” about t
he final birthday, which took its cue from the losses of World War I. Yet we managed to laugh that night, at the absurd interface of the forty milestone and the fight to the death.

  The next night I was sobbing when I came into the main lobby of the hospital. Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient’s bed. You don’t care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one’s previous citizenship at the border. I was tilting across the lobby toward the elevators when I saw dead in front of me a group of five people, friends of Bruce, none of whom I knew well. One, a woman writer, caught my eye and looked shocked. I couldn’t pass or duck.

  “Paul?” she said, as if she couldn’t believe how upset I was. I tried to cover by talking about Bruce, then said I had several friends in the hospital, and after an awkward few seconds they all backed away from my disconnected grief. A few days later it entered the rumor mill that I had AIDS myself. The woman told a friend—another writer—and the story was off, like children playing Telephone.

  Somehow we made it home by the end of the week, and by then we thought we knew just what we needed to do. The rebuilding process: the schedule of medications constant as a monastery, work to regain the lost pounds, eat around the nausea, bide the time to go back on suramin. I remember Dennis Cope telling Roger specifically there was no reason he shouldn’t regain his strength as before, and he should push himself to get his stamina back. Cope had visited 1016 every evening, not so much to examine as to hear us out and urge us forward. As always, his gentleness of manner and quiet optimism occasioned the deepest healing in us. He was encouraged about what we were hearing of Compound S, but noncommittal about whether it was an option for Rog. Perhaps he was having doubts himself about how much time suramin had bought us.