Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  So we tried to do just as we were told. Susan and Robbert brought over a cake on Saturday, since they were party to the secret now. Though the stated point was not to let the black-tie night pass uncelebrated, in fact it was Roger’s homecoming we were cheering. He was still dozing in the bedroom and Susan and I were setting the table, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door without even thinking, and there was Bill Ingoldsby, all spiffed up in a tux and carrying a bouquet of flowers about four feet across. Sheldon’s secretary had skipped his name on the recall list, and he and his friend Dan had been driving around the darkness of Sheldon’s house, wondering what had gone wrong.

  I stepped all over myself apologizing, but not wanting to invite him in either. I hastily explained about the change of plans, then steered him down to his car, where Dan was waiting in a new tux he’d bought for the party. I stood holding the great floral tribute, spinning off lies—Roger was out for the evening, I had a business meeting going on, everything was fine. Regrettably they were going to be away on November 10, but they couldn’t have been more gracious, relieved to hear nothing was wrong. As they drove away I was racked with guilt and inadequacy, longing now for everyone to know, loathing what was left of the charade.

  I have virtually no record of the next three months. Except for a few doctors’ appointments, Roger’s calendar is completely blank for the rest of the year, and he wouldn’t even bother with a calendar for ’86. Between then and the end of January there is a single five-line entry in my journal, and my daily calendar is as empty as Roger’s, because I ceased to write my appointments down. I kept the ones I could remember. Indeed, we both went on working as long as we could, struggling into November, but it was as if the whole idea of calendars had become a horrible mockery.

  I wish I had an account of just the meals we ate, or a log of the calls that came in, for there was where we lived. From now on we wouldn’t be spending much time in the abstract, not at least as it related to future or careers. Besides, when you live so utterly in the present, the yearning to record it goes away. To write in a diary you have to hope to read it later—or to last long enough to make the appointment two weeks down the road. Right now you are trying not to vomit dinner.

  I remember the whole of that autumn as ominous and desperate, but that had as much to do with the hurricane of other cases as our own. I was talking to Cesar now every third or fourth day, but except for my telling him I loved him I don’t remember what we said. He did finally get diagnosed with PCP, and was on Pentamidine at the same time Roger was. He would tell me how one old friend whom we’d always found maddening would come in the afternoons and read to him, thus wiping out all his black marks.

  Most precious of all was Dennis, who’d arrive at the hospital every evening directly from work and was, in Cesar’s oft-repeated phrase, “an angel.” If I remember nothing else about Cesar’s last weeks, I recall the opulent tenderness of his feelings about Dennis. So intensely had he lived the Platonic intimacy of the last few months that it flooded his mind with light. His voice grew fainter and fainter, more and more tired, yet still he could laugh coquettishly or brag that all the nurses and the other patients on the floor knew Dennis was his special friend. Sometimes I would talk to Dennis himself in passing, just for a few moments, and he would make oblique remarks about how bad it was getting. Yet with all that, I knew Cesar’s friends were trying to arrange for attendant care at home so he could leave the hospital. I didn’t think of it as a hospice situation. I couldn’t really think that far ahead, or perhaps I couldn’t bear to.

  And for some reason nothing was ever said about me visiting. I guess it just wasn’t an option because I was so busy taking care of Rog, and I don’t doubt Cesar leaped to defend me to anyone who wondered where I was, his best friend for seventeen years. Or perhaps he simply told them all the truth about Roger’s situation—he knew the secret was over now. But though I’ve made my peace with not going up to say good-bye, I wish I’d been able to talk to him to better effect than I did. For it seems to me I kept promising him drugs he was clearly beyond the reach of, and silences would develop on the phone because I couldn’t laugh or think of a witty retort. Maybe it was enough that we kept on saying we loved each other. That is all you are sure of afterwards.

  “Hello, darling,” he’d say when he heard my voice, his own voice sweet and grinning as ever, no matter how faint. And then before we hung up: “You keep the pool open. I’m coming down for that swim.”

  Roger’s recovery proved to be discouragingly slow, and the nausea that went with the Pentamidine seemed worse this time, so he wasn’t eating well at all. I’d had him on a regimen of vitamins during the so-called honeymoon, but now his stomach was too queasy for him to take the pills. Once when I insisted, he choked on a mineral capsule and heaved up half a day’s food, sending me into a wave of hysteria. One likes to think one will be endlessly gentle, easing the difficult symptoms, always comforting, making light of every indignity. But the fear and the heartbreak twist you up, and your own helplessness blinds you till you don’t even take the modest steps you can. “Hysteria is not sexy,” as Cesar once said in another context. Soon you are absolutely fixated on every meal, for that is still the best you can do, and when it’s not good enough you start banging pots in the kitchen and stuffing whole meals down the disposal.

  The one person who could calm me down and make me see the minor crises in perspective was Roger—the only one ever in my life. Over the years, relations between us had evolved to a place where he was the grown-up and I the child, at least in matters that required the filling out of forms, lines to stand in, the engine of running a house. Roger always seemed to take care of everything, and now that state of affairs was in flux, because he simply didn’t have the energy anymore. He who had always been so independent, who’d lived on thirty dollars a week in Paris, now had to sit and be waited on while he recovered, with all the attendant hovering. He’d hand me bills to pay, and I’d go bananas trying to keep the seven accounts straight. Not the least bit sexy.

  Yet we would take our stamina walk up Harold Way in the late afternoon, and Roger would say in anguish, “I don’t want to be an invalid, I don’t want you to have to take care of me.” And I would fire him with a speech about our interdependence, gripping his shoulders as if I would fuse us into a unit. The minefield of lunch would be forgotten, the byzantine mess of bills. We still had a feel for loftiness, and there was only one way to go: onward.

  The one perspective I did seem to have was that Roger was doing better than Cesar or Bruce, and I told myself over and over to worry about them instead and fight to keep them in the arena. One afternoon I went over to UCLA to pick up a load of medication at the pharmacy—something for the nausea, plus an oral dose of Pentamidine, which they thought might be prophylactic against the PCP. Bruce had had his splenectomy several days before and had come through it fine, so I stopped up to visit him. His parents were there, his mother bewildered and knitting. Bruce was in antic good spirits, with two or three friends around him and his sister Carol calling in from the East. He made me laugh and treated me like some kind of special envoy. Then his lawyer came in with his will to sign, and the rest of us repaired to the waiting room, where Chana, his roommate, held my hand—for my sake, for hers, who knew anymore? I went into an automatic lecture about Compound S, and I remember Bruce’s father listening hungrily.

  Checking in with Bruce and Cesar was my way of assuring myself there would be no break in the line, for they were my platoon. Our deep-pocket source in the UC system was already beginning to bend elbows about Compound S, so we all just had to hold on. If Roger could be home and fighting after two bouts of PCP, surely Cesar would be fine after one. With Bruce so irrepressible on the day of the will signing, it was easy enough to believe the short-term notion of the doctors that a person could live as normal as you please without a spleen. A person with normal immunity, they might have said. I’d bring all the reports home to Roger, and we’d hold tight to o
ur little population sample, relishing the safety in numbers.

  By the next week, on sheer willpower, Roger started going into the office. He was still feeling dreadful and queasy, and the doctors couldn’t quite understand why he wasn’t bouncing back. But weak as he was, the very mobility seemed to prove we were on our way again. I recall an afternoon when I took over a poetry class for Carol Muske at USC: I had to teach William Carlos Williams’s “Queen Anne’s Lace,” which put me in a swooning mood. After the class I called Roger at home. He was all excited because he’d just had a new bulletin from a friend about Compound S and the extraordinary results they seemed to be getting at Duke, especially from those who went on the drug early. “This one might really work,” said Rog in a kind of stunned delight. I started to cry with relief. I was so giddy with hope I could barely drive home.

  We heard we might have to go to North Carolina ourselves to get the drug, which now we knew by its clinical name—azidothymidine, or AZT. Months before, I’d had the vision of Paris and the barracks of HPA-23, everything changed by the war we bore within us. Now I imagined a mild autumn in the Great Smokies, a hospital terrace looking out on a view that would taunt us with loveliness, like The Magic Mountain. Then a few days later our source told us we might be able to get the drug in California after all, perhaps within the month, but it would all have to be top secret. The thrill of the undercover operation kept us going, and this at a time when AZT had the status of a Holy Grail in the AIDS underground. I’d immediately pass on all the details to Bruce and Cesar to keep them going, then call Craig in New York. Don’t tell anyone, I’d tell everyone, meaning shout it from the rooftops but you don’t know where you heard it. There was a time when I must have been the major leak on AZT.

  No doubt we were letting ourselves get lost in magic again, just as we had with suramin, but with one important qualifier: this time the silver bullet was for real. Yet we almost lost the war waiting for the bullet. Maybe we should have been demanding something more immediate from the doctors, to get to the bottom of Roger’s wearying symptoms. But I’m not sure they would have caught the problem, even with a lot of probing. The general AIDS symptoms are so diffuse and fluish that they could be evidence of anything or nothing. More often than not, you just have to wait and see. And it’s all so changeable: already we were experts at the triage of good days and bad days, where you develop a hundred coping mechanisms to get you through. Late at night we’d be lying quietly in bed together, reading and watching the news. Always the hope that the next day might be better, and only a few more weeks to the next elixir.

  Meanwhile our short-term goal was the party on November 10, and the visit from my brother and sister-in-law. Somehow these two bustling events mitigated or even masked the bad days, the fevers and fatigues, though finally Roger began to reconsider about his parents. Sheldon and Jaimee were both still arguing that it wasn’t necessary to bring the parents in, but Sheldon didn’t even know Jaimee knew, and Jaimee in Chicago couldn’t see how overwhelmed we were. She was already possessed by the hope of AZT, as fervent as we were.

  As November began, the only concrete detail I can recall—beyond the dinner battles and the assaults of malaise—was the matter of the Ganges. The house just above us on Kings Road had a problematic septic tank, which would now and then kick up and overflow. Then a rank-smelling stream would run down the street along the curb by our house. It stunk like raw sewage, but the problem was intermittent enough that we’d ignored it for years. Cesar had caught a whiff of it long ago and dubbed it the Ganges. Now for some reason the septic tank broke down in earnest, and the Ganges was flowing every day, sending up a stench we could smell on the front terrace.

  I wrote a polite note to the neighbors, but nothing happened. I lapsed into an exponential terror about the infections carried by raw sewage: I realized the dog walked through it every day, then sometimes jumped up to curl at the foot of the bed when Roger was resting. I had already reached new heights of cleaning, my rag streaming with ammonia nightly as I wiped every surface. I’d throw away half of every lettuce and wash fruits till they whimpered. When the Ganges was flowing I wouldn’t even let Roger have lunch on the front terrace, for fear of airborne horrors. I finally confronted the septic neighbors and said Roger was sick—sick, period, not the “A” word—and they simply had to do something. They were two gay men, both psychologists, both working heavily with AIDS patients, and at last they hustled to get the job done, though it took till after Christmas.

  That first week of November, Alfred came over with the news that one of the cases we’d been following had shot himself dead the night before. This was a man of some wealth and prestige, very big in the art world, and he’d walled himself in with his secret. Alfred and I talked with the strange dispassion we have these days about whether the guy had been too sick to get pills, or had his friends all refused to make it easy? Did somebody bring him a gun, or did he have it already? It was then I made Alfred promise that if I got to that place and no one else would get me what I needed, he would provide. He said yes, but there’s no way of knowing if he meant it. You never know till you’re at the wire. A friend of mine in New York promised a friend of his to help him die, but when the time came the dying man was two thousand miles away, with a family who loathed his gayness and the sin of his illness. Luckily, he was lucid enough to pull his own plug.

  Three days before Bob and Brenda were to arrive, my brother called to say he had a kidney infection. This necessitated a worried call to Cope, who reassured us Roger wouldn’t be in any danger, but I was tense and frightened when they first arrived. My brother remembers how manic I was, scarcely able to sit for five minutes without going in to check on Rog. He says Roger was very thin—not Auschwitz-thin; that is a different stage entirely—and he recalls the difficulty Roger had eating and keeping down food. On Saturday we all went out for lunch, but Rog scarcely touched his meal, and had to excuse himself to lie down in the car.

  Saturday was the tenth, the night of the black-tie dinner. In the afternoon Bob and Brenda and I stopped by Sheldon’s house in Bel-Air to check on some last-minute seating arrangements, and Sheldon and I had a brief talk upstairs. I think until that day he kept hoping Roger would pull it out of the hat and appear for dinner. Sheldon seemed to want to say something to me, but he kept veering off into tangents of humor. When I talked about what a hard time his brother was having, I remember him saying his grandmother used to tell him, “Anything’s better than being dead. It’s better to be a whipped dog than dead.”

  It was pouring that night, and Roger took pictures of the three of us in our evening gear and sent us off with the admonition to be good children. All the way over in the car, we strategized about how we’d handle the schizoid nature of the evening. Perhaps fifteen of the fifty knew the truth, and another dozen suspected as much and were waiting for us to make a move. But Sheldon had won his point on the guest list weeks before, so there were twenty more who were black-tie regulars, perfectly nice acquaintances from the business who would presumably buy the ridiculous excuse that Roger was down with the flu.

  Sheldon’s house is designed for parties, the main room forty by forty by twenty, all in sand tones, with ceiling beams that are bleached telephone poles—no art, no color, the whole design vaguely Santa Fe but wildly outscale and utterly un-Indian. I went around with a frozen smile, introducing my brother and sister-in-law. My brother, because he was in a wheelchair, was perhaps sufficient decoy for people to cover their clumsy feelings about where Roger was. I spotted a couple of people and grimaced at the gauntlet of chitchat I would have to run. As soon as I escaped into the dining room to see about the seating, I placed a quick call to Roger from the kitchen to get some moral support. I’d be fine, he said, dozing comfortably. I should just try to have a good time.

  Sheldon ran a dinner as smooth and punctual as a board meeting. The flow from the bar to the dining room was terrific, the catering top-drawer. Bob and Brenda and I sat at the center table with
Sheldon, his half-brothers and their wives. Roger’s cousin Merle was down from San Francisco, and I put her at a head table with friends—including Rand, whom she’d dated at Berkeley decades ago—because she was still reeling from the news, broken to her only tonight. All during dinner I wrestled with whether to read my “40” poem. I’d mentioned it to Sheldon that afternoon, and he’d nixed the idea. He didn’t have a clue it was all about AIDS and the end of us all, but I think he had an instinct that it wouldn’t be about the moon in June.

  Between the veal and the salad, I slipped into the breakfast room and called home again. “Should I read my poem, Rog?” I’d finished it only a few days before, and no one had heard it but Roger and my brother.

  “You do what you want, darling,” he said mildly. “It’s your birthday.”

  Then Sheldon popped his head in. “What are you doing? You’ve got fifty guests out here.”

  Sheldon gave the first toast, which was warm and oddly intimate. He said he’d tried to tell me that afternoon that he loved me, but couldn’t find the words. It is the truest thing about him that he could only say it now, in front of fifty people, but it was no less moving for that. He had earlier gone around and fingered various friends to follow him, choreographing a seemingly spontaneous outpouring. They all rose in turn, in the proper order, but there Sheldon’s control of the flow of events ended.

  The toasts were uniformly sober, not very successfully couched and extremely painful. Susan toasted Roger and me, saying what great friends we were. Charlie’s voice cracked as he toasted “my most original friend, who’s always there for all of us.” Carol spoke about our poetry conspiracy and ended with: “You’ve taught us what it means to love.”

  It’s not that I’m so wonderful. These very friends have seen the wallpaper curl from my overwrought opinions. I am nice to old ladies and dogs, but otherwise I might say anything at all, often about as subtle as a pipe bomb. But they were all having the same problem I was, staggering under the subtext of this party, a tragedy all around it like the Alaska storm that roared across the high Bel-Air hills. So they spoke their valedictories to a life that ought to have been an Astaire and Rogers movie by the time it played Bel-Air. And everyone wanted to spill a drop for the absent friend who anchored us.