Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  Thankfully, we qualified for the program. They would try to assign someone as early as Monday, the day before Bernice was leaving. We walked out of there relieved, our dignity remarkably intact. Through the trials of the next ten months our dealings with the Project were notably life-affirming, with a hands-on human touch that never wavered. When we got home, Roger called Sheldon to tell him we’d found someone, but when he told him where, Sheldon clucked with disgust and said, “Somebody’s got to put a stop to this.” Implying that we were stealing from the indigent, offended that we should be stooping to charity.

  I was so sick of people’s opinions. Unsolicited advice comes pouring in from those who can’t be really there, till you feel like a laboratory of other people’s whims. We were having a hard enough time believing our life was still our own. Later that night, on our walk, I gnashed my teeth with anxiety. “What’s happening to us?” I asked in desperation. “What are we going to do?”

  “Paul, we have to accept our fate,” said Rog, firm and unsentimental. “There’s no other choice.”

  “But I can’t,” I whined, and I meant I won’t. Yet even as I said it, it struck me how Greek Roger’s attitude was. I can’t express how small I felt just then, or how alone, as I looked at Rog in the dark and understood he had reached a kind of acceptance. I still wanted Greece to be sunny and exalted, with white stone ruins and statues of gods so perfectly human they breathed. Beauty was as far as I needed to go, and I wasn’t equipped for the tragic design of fate.

  But being home was so seductive: Within days we’d started to make plans for Christmas. Craig and I had been leaving it open for weeks now as to whether he’d come for the holiday, and in fact he didn’t decide for sure till the twenty-third. Now I began to coax him to make the trip, and Roger encouraged me to buy a tree and have people over on Christmas Eve, as we always did. We would keep the whole thing on a much smaller scale, but I think he figured it as a way for me to proclaim we were still in the game. He himself was eagerly making plans to be back to work right after Christmas, and I told Alfred we could go ahead with the horror script for Warner Brothers. All this AZT optimism was better than a Currier & Ives snowfall.

  I knew, of course, that Bruce had been gravely ill during all the weeks Roger was in the hospital. I even managed to check in every few days with Chana, in the hope that I could at least talk to Bruce and let him know we had copped the AZT. I realized only later how carefully his friends were couching what they said to me. I had some indication that there were episodes when his mind wasn’t right, but dementia was still largely undefined and unspoken, even in the AIDS underground. I heard that nurses had been brought in around the clock. But none of it struck me as fatal: It had been only a few weeks since I’d seen Bruce myself, and it was Roger, after all, who had just nearly died.

  Bruce wasn’t even hospitalized, so I kept assuming he must be treading water, the way Roger had before his crisis. Surely one day soon I’d call and he’d actually answer the phone. But it was always Chana who answered, and she would say carefully: “Bruce’s case is completely different from Roger’s. He’s been a lot sicker from the very beginning.” She was trying to break it to me easy that he wasn’t going to make it, but the subtlety went right by me. They obviously didn’t understand how close as a shadow death could be and still you could squeak through and outwit it. In any case, it was only a matter of weeks before we’d force them to expand the AZT protocol. Bruce just had to hold on.

  I woke with a start on Sunday morning the fifteenth when the phone rang. I was sleeping in late again because Bernice was covering the morning shift, and this was the day I meant to go get the Christmas tree. But I panicked at the sound of the phone and scrambled out of bed, instinctively feeling I had to get it before Roger did. Then I heard him say hello from the back bedroom, and as I came out into the hall he gave out a low wail of pain: “Oh, no.” I stood dumbly in the bedroom doorway as he looked at me in total defeat. “Bruce died last night,” he said.

  I felt the same spurt of annoyance as when Ted called a month before to tell me Cesar was dead: Why are they bothering Roger? I had no time to mourn Bruce either. At one point I wanted to go over and see his sister Carol, who flew in from New York, especially when I heard she was asking for me. But I was afraid to walk the two blocks and be in the presence of death, afraid I might bring it back with me or see too much of the apparatus of mourning. If there had been a funeral I would have gone, but they decided to put off the memorial till mid-January.

  Six months later Chana called to tell me Bruce had left me the huge Francis Bacon lithograph in his will, because it was a picture of a writer. And I thought: He left me that because I got him the drug that killed him. By then Roger was blind, and I wouldn’t bring a new picture into the house if he couldn’t see it, so the Bacon never arrived till six weeks after Roger died. I still haven’t hung it up.

  It all came full circle in August ’87. The final flourish in Bruce’s will was the wish to have his ashes scattered at Fire Island, where he’d played out so much of the glamour of his youth. The most beautiful place, as he would have said, with the most beautiful boys. I flew east to join the family at the ferry slip in Sayville—his parents, his sister, his friend Jimmy—and we went over on a milky summer morning, the plan being to toss the ashes from the ferry window into the bay. Illegal, of course: ashes belong in the open sea, beyond the three-mile limit. Bruce’s cousin passed the box around, and I watched Jimmy cradle it and start to cry. Then he passed it to me. It was heavier than I expected—the box was bronze—and it felt truly as if I were holding the final weight of a man. That’s when I cried for Bruce. An hour later on the dunes I cried for Cesar, whose ashes I never held, dispersed I know not where. Then I cried all the way back to L.A. on the plane, for Roger mostly by then, but really for all of us, this generation of widows and groping survivors.

  The first attendant we had from APLA was Jack, a bald, enthusiastic fellow who bustled about the house dispensing cheer as his marinara sauce simmered on the stove. It was such an odd time for him to be there, because I was in the middle of Christmas preparations, readying the loft for Craig, and Alfred and I were brawling in the study as we brought a script to completion. The house on Kings Road didn’t feel like a hospice at all, and Roger seemed very much part of the bustle, though I could see Jack attune himself to Roger’s pace, to the rhythm of his naps—quietly tidying cupboards and reading Theosophy during his breaks. I felt guilty eating anything he made, since he was supposed to be cooking for Roger. Yet Jack didn’t seem to mind the upbeat air in the house at all. He’d already been through a couple of grim final stages, and plainly we were a picnic by comparison.

  About three days before Christmas, Roger got word from his secretary that she would be leaving in February and moving back to the Midwest. Ricki was the best assistant he ever had, and she’d covered all his bases at the office with superhuman skill for months, never breaching the discretion of the unnamed sickness. Her giving notice was a blow to Roger, who thought of her as his last vital link to Century City, the office he hadn’t been in for six weeks. I swore we’d find somebody else as good, but that night when Roger told his brother on the phone, Sheldon said, “Maybe this is a blessing in disguise.” He clearly felt it was time to close the office, and I can’t remember seeing Roger as depressed as he was after that call.

  But that same night he also took a call from a friend in Boston, an obsessive woman who’d fallen in love yet again with the wrong man and whose mind was racing with self-deception. Roger listened with understanding and compassion, and then bluntly confronted her with her acting out of the same old pattern. She still speaks of his extraordinary clarity that night—how he was able to shake free of his own dilemma, determined that nobody else waste any more time. This dynamic would repeat itself over and over through his illness—friends would call with clumsy words of comfort, only to find themselves opening up to Rog and hearing him comfort them.

  “But that’s
not important,” I’d hear him say bemusedly, though never by way of dismissal. He’d tease his friends about their timeworn frets and quibbles, then heap them back on himself with a laugh. The phone was becoming a lifeline to his past as people caught up with the secret, and the one-on-one conversations he loved best never failed to lift his spirits. There were times when the phone link was the last thing he was left with, aside from me.

  Once more the box of decorations came down from the attic, and Roger, dozing on the sofa in the very position Cesar had assumed the previous two years, watched me put up the tree. I was too happy to have him home to dwell very much on the sad losses of the year in between. Richard Ide came over on Saturday the twenty-first, before leaving town for the holidays; he had an armload of packages, Roger having instructed him what to buy me for Christmas. Richard cooked lunch and announced as he served it to us on the terrace: “The secret of Sloppy Joes is the buns.” Roger and I cracked each other up repeating that line for months, or sometimes we’d murmur it perfectly straight-faced while sitting in endless waiting rooms.

  Those first few weeks of AZT, I didn’t trust Roger to wake up in the middle of the night, or perhaps I just needed to be around for every dose. In any case, I bolted awake at two and six when I heard the beeper. I uncapped the bottles, poured the elixir into the juice and gave it to Rog, who happily stayed half asleep through the whole procedure. Every dose was a miracle to me. On the twenty-third I ran over to UCLA for the next batch, taking with me a bagful of empties. There was something chaotic going on with the protocol, so Suzette had to officially not give me the next week’s supply under the table, while she untangled the red tape. As I was leaving, the doctor in charge came up and asked how Roger was doing, and I waxed eloquent about the drug, saying that everyone ought to be on it. He seemed worried that my enthusiasm would find its way into print. Several of the doctors, burned the previous summer by the Rock Hudson media show, were skittish that I was a writer.

  Craig arrived the night of the twenty-third, and we went into immediate overdrive to prepare for fifteen guests on Christmas Eve. Craig recalls that Roger was in and out of the bedroom the whole week of his visit, up for a couple of hours, then down again for a nap. He seemed more fragile than frail, and of course he carried an aura of marvelous expectancy wherever he went, on account of the AZT. I realize now that a great change had set in after the long battle of autumn. Between mid-October and mid-December Roger had crossed a minefield, and the price he paid to get through to the other side was that now he would need to rest an hour for an hour of strength. But that was a bargain we were both so grateful to strike after the pass with death that we hardly noticed it at first. The cup was half full, period. If it took twelve or fifteen hours of rest and sleep every day to process coming back to life, that only made the remaining time more festive. The minor presents we wrapped were props and tokens of the occasion, but the real gift—we all knew this—was being consumed at a rate of eighteen bottles a day in the back bedroom.

  Just before Craig flew to California, he’d banded together with four other men with AIDS to form a group very like a platoon. They’d all been dissatisfied by the groups they’d sat in on—too much negativity, whining and bitching about hospital crap, the blank-stare bureaucrats at every turn. Craig’s group wanted to get out and find the magic bullet. None of their doctors seemed to agree about alternative therapies and the state of antiviral research. Since each had high contacts in one establishment or another, they figured they’d come together to share the scuttlebutt, the rumors and leaks. The group included Vito Russo, the incandescent film historian, all Brooklyn edges and a foot-wide grin. Since AZT was at the top of the list of what they wanted to know, part of Craig’s visit was in the nature of a field trip.

  “You’re the AZT poster child,” I’d tell Rog as he drank his dose.

  The party on Christmas Eve was strange but not without cheer. Alfred and his friend Barry Miller arrived directly from Tom Kiwan’s funeral. Roger slept in until everyone had assembled, then made an appearance for an hour or so, talking quietly with one and another as they slipped into a chair beside him. Almost everyone there had been coming to our house on Christmas Eve for years, and I expect that the great change between ’84 and ’85 was more difficult for them than for us. I don’t think anyone fully understood how close we’d come to the edge in November or how charged with hope we were again. After a while Roger excused himself to lie down again, and most of the guests took their leave of him from the bedroom doorway.

  What did we do that week? I’ve asked Craig since, and he can’t remember us going anywhere. In one way it was intrinsic to the season that people came to us instead. Robbert and Susan dropped over on Christmas Day, and their gift to Rog was a photograph from Robbert’s Midwest Diary, a plain of new-fallen snow, with telephone poles and a stop sign. It embodied the spare poetry Roger loved in art, from the wire circus of Calder to the cloister at St. Trophime. I think I must have had a certain need to stay close to the house, now that we’d finally been given the house back. I knew how dead and empty it became when Roger was in the hospital. There was also the matter of the four-hour rhythm and never wanting to miss the dispensing of AZT.

  Mostly Craig and I just talked about being alive, and I swung back and forth through the house like a yo-yo, from living room to back bedroom, checking up on Rog. By now there was a fairly intense political consciousness evolving in New York, and we in L.A. were as far behind that as we’d been behind the disease in the first four years of the calamity. The indifference of the press remained deafening; AIDS activists liked to talk about the occasion when the New York Times devoted front-page space to a disease that felled seventeen Lippizaner stallions in Europe, when no story about AIDS had ever appeared on page one. The morass in Washington went on and on. And yet Craig and I insisted we’d keep fighting, become spies and outlaws if we had to, but we wouldn’t go quietly.

  I’d had the same caution as Craig’s platoon about the focus of many AIDS programs, which seemed designed to help people write their wills and memorial services. The old medical chestnut—Hope for the best, prepare for the worst—had been truncated of its better half. Craig and I decided we didn’t want to be in touch with letting go, not by a long shot. Yet we bristled, from the other side, at the growing “empowerment” movement, which tended to start with the assumption that people brought on their own illnesses. From there they moved to the notion that once you could fully love yourself the virus would evaporate like fog. The whole guilt-and-redemption trip was much too Catholic for my taste, besides which it seemed to consign those who died to the status of losers. Also, several of the self-healers were against any form of medication, while we were engaged in a major struggle for antivirals. Happily, these positions have become less rigid in the last year or so, and there is considerably more cooperation as people with AIDS dictate the agenda of the fight themselves.

  But what I remember most about Christmas week with Craig was telling him how much I loved him. Loss teaches you very fast what cannot go without saying. The course of our lives had paralleled the course of the movement itself since Stonewall, and now our bitterness about the indifference of the system made us feel keenly how tenuous our history was. Everything we had been together—brothers and friends beyond anything the suffocating years in the closet could dream of—might yet be wiped away. If we all died and all our books were burned, then a hundred years from now no one would ever know. So we figured we had to know and name it ourselves, tell each other what we had become in coming out. I also believed that Craig understood what Roger had been through, as much as anyone could outside us. Every night the three of us gathered for dinner, lazy and content with Christmas leftovers as we recalled the snows of Beacon Hill. When Craig left on the twenty-ninth, the house was suddenly terribly quiet, in spite of Jack’s post-Christmas hum of positive thinking.

  My friend Star was planning to come through L.A. from Hawaii over New Year’s, so I resisted the impulse
to haul the tree out to the trash with all its ornaments. I certainly didn’t relish boxing them up again, contemplating all the while who might be gone by next year. Then suddenly, on the thirtieth, we had a call from Dennis Cope, saying Roger’s white blood count had fallen precipitously over the previous few days. He was to go off AZT immediately and come into the hospital for tests. It was a cruel upheaval—he’d been home only seventeen days—and we packed in stunned and wounded silence.

  We didn’t really understand that bone marrow suppression was a typical drug reaction. In any case, it required two days of renewed terror before they could establish for certain there was nothing else going on. Now we would learn the subtle enslavement of the numbers. The white blood count was healthy above, say, 3,000, but after a few weeks of AZT it would start to swing down. If they didn’t halt the drug the count would fall below a thousand, leaving Roger at risk for all manner of bacterial infections. It tended to hover stubbornly at its lowest ebb for several days, then creep up again as we waited with mad impatience for the restoration of the magic bullet. When the count was very low, Roger had to be in the hospital under protective isolation. It was two weeks before he got home again.

  But it took days for all of that to make sense, and for us to believe the count was really going up. I remember sitting on his bed on New Year’s Eve and holding hands—the hospital unbelievably quiet, everyone who could still crawl sent home for the holidays—wondering if the roller coaster would ever stop, and resolving on the stroke of midnight that nothing mattered as long as we stayed together. We had finally had our introduction to the elaborate procedures of isolation. For the first time I had to put on a blue mask, like the ones the more jittery nurses had been donning for some time. Now everyone had to wear one for Roger’s protection, and gloves and gowns in addition for the hospital staff. Cope told me I could do without the gloves as long as I washed my hands thoroughly. It took me only a matter of hours to reorient myself to the new crisis, keeping germs away. I washed my hands about every fifteen minutes, a habit I can’t seem to shake even now.