Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  Star, who visited on New Year’s Day, recalls that Roger looked startlingly well, his weight up again and his color good. But I was a total wreck, and I railed at her for waiting a day to come by, for cornering Gottlieb in the hall to ask him if she was at risk, and she finally took me on a walk through the UCLA grounds and let me talk out the madness. I begged her to come to the house next day to help me take down the Christmas tree, and when she did she saw for the first time how transformed the place was, with its rows of medications and cartons of AZT. Before she left L.A. she wrote out a three-page list of daily things to do, an attempt to get me to focus and stop careening off the graph. I would stare at the list every morning—PRESENT ROGER WITH AN UPBEAT ATTITUDE, WHEN EMOTIONAL DO NOT ACT RIGHT AWAY, GET EXERCISE—and I’d stay on an even keel for a couple of hours, then collapse into panic again.

  The big decision that couldn’t be put off any longer was the closing of the office, and Sheldon was probably right to keep steering the conversation that way. The situation had grown too unpredictable: Roger couldn’t run an office he couldn’t get to. Sheldon felt it was time for him to pull back and devote his full energy to regaining his health. Within a few days Al was being similarly supportive, assuring Rog it would be no sweat to reopen the office once he was on his feet—that phrase again. None of it went down easily with Roger, who saw the loss of his work as the beginning of the end. I remember him turning to me and saying in a helpless voice, fighting back tears, “But what about all my files?”

  That one line is as painful to recall as anything not strictly medical during the whole course of the calamity. His files were the accumulation of his years in California, both his lawyering and all our common interests. There’s an enormous amount of basic research and format material you have to have to service a private practice, and Roger was proud of the range of his files and their rigorous organization under Ricki. I kept thinking of the photographs on the office walls, so carefully chosen to startle but not intimidate, and the black leather Italian desk chair I’d given him when he opened for business.

  The most coherent decision we made during the crisis over the office was that he bring all the files home and work from there. It was a bit unsettling to contemplate how this arrangement would work in practice, in a house where there was already one ragged sole proprietorship in operation. I couldn’t imagine where everything would go, but as we talked about it more, Roger grew confident and ready to give it a try. At least he would have Ricki for a few more weeks, to separate files and pack up boxes. Meanwhile he was working in the hospital again, difficult though the logistics were. His drive and energy had returned, a more significant measure of his status as a lawyer than where he hung his shingle. Cleaning out drawers, I still come upon pages of yellow legal paper, full of notes on contracts and partnerships. Though they sound like Martian to me, if they’re dated January ’86 I read them through amazed, till I want to cheer at the sheer concreteness of them.

  Once we understood that Roger wasn’t actually sick with anything, we went back to singing the praises of AZT and how well it was making him feel. But things were veering into chaos again between the two of us. Roger’s feeling stronger only served to accentuate his impatience at being holed up on the tenth floor, and I was trapped in a deadline with Alfred and squabbling every time we sat down to write. It’s not that Roger and I were bickering, exactly. But I was overreacting again to every slight and turmoil, and he couldn’t take it. A couple of times he bellowed at me to get out of his room, dissolving me in tears. Sam had been pushing for weeks now, ever since Roger came out of the woods, that he needed some kind of counseling. Fortuitously, a psychiatrist we knew—Ronald Martin—mentioned to Rand that he’d like to help if he could. The protective hospitalization finally tipped the balance for Rog, and he decided to see Dr. Martin once a week following his release.

  Roger came home the eleventh. On the fifteenth I went to Bruce’s memorial service. I felt calm driving over to Bruce’s house, because I’d left Roger out on the terrace chatting happily with a friend. The service was on the bluff in front of Bruce’s house, and I sat at the end of a row and stared out over Hollywood while several people made quiet remarks—including Marisa Berenson, the sight of whom made me think I must call Cesar, who’d always loved her style. Pat Ast arrived late in a cab that couldn’t make it up the hill through the chaos of parked cars, and she shrieked as she ran up the steep driveway: “Wait! Wait!” She came barreling in in her full zaftig eminence and read a childlike poem to Bruce. All through the service I just kept thinking, Rog, please don’t die.

  A couple of days later I had a meeting with my Hollywood agent to discuss the splintered progress of my career, and he said categorically, “You can’t work anymore, not with your lover sick like this.” He probably meant to suggest that I was too busy being a nurse, but it came out sounding as if he didn’t want all this unpleasantness around him. Then he wanted to gossip about Stan Kamen, the superagent at the William Morris Agency, who’d just informed his stable of megabuck clients that he was taking a leave of absence on account of liver cancer. Kamen’s was the most popular case of AIDS in Hollywood at the time, a source of endless gossip for the barracudas.

  Then the agent asked if Roger was “covered with sores,” and I informed him icily that lesions were not sores, and no, he wasn’t. But I swallowed all of it and begged him to track me down a novelization for the summer, since I had a bit of topspin in that department and thought the work might not be too taxing. Oh, yes, he said, leave it all up to him, but he never called me back.

  Ricki came by one afternoon with boxes of client files, so Roger could begin to regroup his active practice at the house. And we began the mostly benign fencing match as to whose turn it was on the word processor and when do you think you’ll be finished with the phone. Yet it was clear we were going to make the details work, and once again we played it as if the future would be free of further complication.

  My happiest memory of the window of mid-January was a dusty Saturday afternoon downtown. We’d gone to UCLA for a set of blood tests—they drew it every third day now, trying to keep ahead of the white count—and afterwards drove in to USC, deep in the old city. We wandered across the campus, poking in courtyards and admiring old trees, ending up at the university museum, where Susan Rankaitis was having a show. Two pieces from the Icarus series were on exhibit, including a huge diptych called The Rog Chant. Its centrifugal explosion of abstract forms was intercut with the repeated image of a figure with arms crossed over its face, as if blinded by the burning of the sun. The show had been up for several weeks, and we were the only ones there for a while. I remember Roger standing in front of it, studying it with utter concentration, as if he owed this one the deepest look he had. It was the last time we were ever in a museum together.

  The window lasted about two weeks, and again we had the sudden call ordering Roger off AZT and back into the hospital. This time the white count had fallen to 500, and this time it really felt like the last straw. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in the hospital,” Roger declared with furious anguish as we drove over once again—the overnight bag packed automatically now with slippers and robe and toilet kit, a couple of changes of underwear. I happened to be strong at that moment, spurring him forward, making him see that he’d recovered beyond our imagining in the six weeks of AZT.

  Sam tried to sort out the feelings behind my rage at minor things and Roger’s corresponding sullenness and withdrawal. Somehow I had to get it across to Rog that I was angry at the illness, not at him. Our lives had utterly changed, and though I was willing to accept those changes, I hated them still. Meanwhile Roger was doubtless feeling guilty about the ways in which his illness had shattered my life. My falling apart only deepened his sense of having hurt me. On January 30 the Jaguar—possessed by a devil, clearly—locked in gear again in the parking lot. I proceeded to go bananas, an instant replay of four months earlier. Roger screamed at me to call Triple A and leav
e him out of it. The car was merely a triggering device, Sam said, symbol of how meaninglessly things kept going wrong. But I simply had to control my lunacy over these everyday problems: Roger needed the positive aspects of normalcy, not the mess of things gone haywire.

  Unfortunately, our scrapes and dislocations were closing off communication instead of opening it up. We needed crisis management, needed to devise a better radar for giving one another what we needed. Sometimes, after all, I’d be rattled or weepy, and Roger would be right there to prop me up. “I know you so well,” he’d say tenderly, tousling my hair and forcing me to smile. “I know everything about you.” But if he was having a day that was especially bad and he wasn’t coping well, I needed to know that. Otherwise we were stuck with this clash of my volatility and his closing off.

  I had an appointment with Dr. Martin myself, in an office right out of a New Yorker cartoon, with its analytic couch and its Freudian wall of books. I told him how upset it made me when I saw Roger in a sort of infantilized state with the nurses, relying on them too much. I admitted I wasn’t doing well handling Roger’s particular brand of mood swing, from hopelessness to a sort of nonchalance, while my own emotions suddenly seemed inappropriately overscale. I realized it was hard for Rog to understand, assaulted as he was, that there were two damaged people here. In this perpetual state of tension, this waiting for the other shoe to drop, even normal wasn’t normal anymore. How could we plan on anything? How could I go back to work with all this rage and fear? I remember Martin talking intelligently and helpfully, but I took only one note in his office: I can’t tell Roger not to die. It’s not fair.

  Somehow we pulled together and talked the deadlock through, and it never got quite so out of hand again. Meanwhile we groped for ways to alleviate the imprisonment. Since Roger continued to feel energized, we took long walks in the courtyard outside the hospital, and a couple of times even ventured through the botanical garden that filled the shallow canyon beyond the emergency entrance. We managed to cop some afternoon passes so Roger could come to the house for lunch, to sit in the garden and play with the dog. As we drove back and forth in the car, one of us would always wear a mask, and people stared at us in traffic. After Roger died I found pictures on a forgotten roll of film in the camera: He’s holding his blue mask in one hand, the tree ferns fanning behind him. Now I see how changed he was since the previous pictures, from Massachusetts in August. He’s balder and more frazzled, and he’s got a belly from all the feeding, but he manages the gentlest smile, and the imp is still in his eye.

  Dr. Martin said we should reminisce more, so I hauled all the Greece pictures up there, even all the guidebooks, and we talked our way through the Aegean again. One day when Rog was especially stir-crazy, I brought a new address book with me, and he spent a couple of afternoons transcribing addresses from the old—in sensible pencil, of course, so changes could always be made. Over Christmas I’d started to read through an old pile of National Geographics, the magazine that is designed to end up in a pile, and I’d report to Roger on all these exotic places. By way of armchair travel we especially liked to talk about digs, since they inevitably reminded us of sifting through the palace ruins in Crete. One Sunday I ducked out to West-wood Village and bought a basic archaeology text, and for the next several weeks we covered Egypt, Troy and Mesopotamia, pricking memories of Roger’s year in the Middle East.

  These were the days of February when the Marcoses were toppling in Manila, and there was considerable flurry on the tenth floor as the news broke. Two of our favorite nurses—Rosemary and Luzminda—were Filipino, and the drama being played out was their own. I realize now how the headlines served to pull us together up there, on a sort of neutral emotional ground. We were there the day of the Challenger disaster too, and later on in the spring for the strafing of Libya. It was a sign of engagement to be able to pay attention to any sort of crisis beyond the four walls.

  One morning the L.A. Times had a long piece about Roy Cohn and the rumor—rigorously denied—that he had AIDS. One of the AZT doctors was in, and we talked about the futility of stonewalling but also tried to figure out the psychology of it, since one man’s secret was never quite the same as another’s. The doctor let slip a remark about a movie star, not naming him by name, but I knew right away who it was. We in the underground had been fielding speculation on the case for months. There had been a recent sighting of the star in question at a hospital in Houston. Craig and I had decided that two sightings were required to make a rumor stick, and the doctor’s implication that he’d treated X at UCLA sewed up the case. This didn’t mean we necessarily spread the rumor, but we got a certain satisfaction out of running it to ground. Roger didn’t care about any of this, not the way Craig and I did. Somewhere in that knot of our anger and despair there was a National Enquirer streak that wanted celebrity blood. Because part of what allowed people to keep the disease at a distance was believing it couldn’t touch anyone they cared about.

  When did the shingles appear? I didn’t pay that much attention, frankly, not at first. One day there were a couple of spots on Roger’s stomach, and we immediately paged the intern, fearful it was some kind of drug reaction, or even worse, KS. When they said it was shingles, all I could think was that it couldn’t kill him. Half the gay men I knew had had shingles. But three or four days later it was a flaming crimson sash of blisters across the right side of his rib cage, and it stung on that maddening knife edge between itch and pain. There was nothing to do to relieve it, and it went on for weeks, the pain echoing long after the rash had faded.

  The shingles must have started during the late-January imprisonment, then, not the one over New Year’s, when the white count was all we could think of. There are two cheerful entries in my journal for February, so he can’t have been suffering the worst of the shingles still. Though I can’t pin down the date exactly, I can see him wincing from the pain, arching his back and barely holding off from clawing the blisters open. I’d apply cold cloths and, when the itch became insane, paint him with great swaths of calamine lotion.

  I remember one especially bad day of shingles in the hospital, when we had a visit from a brainless couple who said all the wrong things and brought up gloomy details of the sudden demise of others, till I thought one of us would scream if they didn’t leave. But as it happened, they segued into real estate, and talked of a house for sale on their street. Roger perked up instantly and grilled them about the particulars. Richard Ide had been looking for a house for months, and he and Roger talked endlessly about financing and neighborhoods. Roger couldn’t wait to tell him about the house on Holly Drive, since it hadn’t gone on the market yet. Within a matter of days Richard had made an offer on it, and all through escrow Roger reviewed the paperwork. It made him feel terrific that he could still accomplish something, even from his tenth-floor cell.

  When he finally got in to see Richard’s house he was practically blind, though all through the final summer we would have happy times there. And as we’d drive away to go home, Roger would always say, “Isn’t it great that he found this place?” Not quite taking the credit.

  He was home again at the beginning of February and back on elixir. The shingles clung like barnacles, but we never really thought of them as an opportunistic infection, though of course they were. We hadn’t really thought through the scary notion that AZT had somehow let an infection in. All we cared about was that he was on it again, and we felt the roller coaster click into its uphill rise and went with the ride. Sunday, February 9:

  … today we were up at Will Rogers [State Park] in this aching sunny weather, & we ate on the lawn & then took a walk & watched 3 horses crop a hill pasture & we sat on a log & had this nodding acquaintance with what a moment is.

  “Wouldn’t you like right now to last forever?” Roger said as we lolled on the picnic slope. The afterglow of it lasted for days, for we bragged about it as if we’d just ascended K-2.

  Then Roger’s aunt and uncle arrived from Jerusal
em and put up at Sheldon’s for a couple of weeks before going on to Palm Springs. Rita and Aharon would visit with us every day, smoking like chimneys and regaling us with all the contortions of Mideast politics. Aharon Remez, whose father had signed the Israeli constitution, had been Israeli ambassador to Britain in the late sixties, then head of the Weizmann Institute, and most recently director of ports. Rita was Bernice’s sister, passionate and intuitive, heart on her slightly unraveled sleeve. Their visit happened to coincide with a swath of stable time, and Roger was flush with delight to have them around. They were utterly unpretentious, and our sort of bohemians. Rita arrived laden with material about imaging, a process we’d barely heard about. She took Roger through a lot of exercises designed to isolate and control the shingles pain, and even I managed to sit down long enough to learn a few techniques.

  We made a plan to meet Rita and Aharon at Sheldon’s for lunch on the Saturday we dropped by Roger’s office to check on the packing. As we came into the empty lobby, signed in and rode to the twenty-fourth floor, I thought of the countless times I’d gone with Rog to the office on a weekend, taking with me something to work on quietly by his desk, so neither of us would have to be alone. I don’t know if we bothered to try to prepare ourselves for the shock, but nothing is like reality after all.