Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  Besides which it was summer, and Roger got back in the pool again. At four or four-thirty, with the white sun streaking through the elm trees, he’d do maybe fifteen or twenty laps. Especially if the two of us were swimming at the same time, we were suspended from all the misery, twinned and afloat as we’d been in the dolphin blue of the Aegean. Quality indeed. It must have been around then that Roger said, with a pained wistfulness, “If only it could stay like this for a while.” A while is the kind of modest goal you spend your life searching for.

  After midnight, during the hours when I used to sit and work, I’d be cleaning drawers and closets, tossing out masses of irrelevant clutter. When I worriedly complained to Sam that I felt as if I were throwing away the remains of people who’d died, he said it was entirely appropriate to clean out all the excess in one’s fortieth year. The more I tossed, the more I felt I was following Thoreau’s triple command: simplify, simplify, simplify. I remember going through drawers in the bathroom and finding Roger’s contact lenses in their case. I realized he wouldn’t ever be wearing them again, but was afraid to throw them away too, lest I discard the hope that held his vision. Two or three days later I finally steeled myself and stuffed the lens case in the trash, but guiltily, mentioning it to no one. And once I’d got rid of the lenses I combed the bathroom for every bottle of lens solution and all the eye paraphernalia that used to be so casually a part of Roger’s kit. I also recalled a moment from ten years before: finding a card in his wallet not long after we met, which said, “In case of accident I am wearing contact lenses.” Even back then I’d started to weep with dread, when nothing at all ever went wrong.

  The closed-circuit televisions of the kind we’d seen at the Center were a couple of thousand dollars. Sometimes one would come in secondhand, but there was a long waiting list for these. By now Roger had come to grips with and compensated for much of the narrow bound of his vision, but the business of being unable to read was terribly galling. We were still waffling about investing in a TV of our own when Roger had a call one afternoon from Susan Kirkpatrick, an old friend from Comp Lit days who taught at UC San Diego. By coincidence, a great-aunt of Susan’s, recently deceased, had used exactly the kind of unit we needed, and it was gathering dust in Susan’s attic. Her husband was on his way up to L.A. for a biology conference the next week, so he would drop it off.

  We set it up on a table in the brightest corner of the living room and began to play with its knobs and dials. I was so stupid about the closed circuit that the first few times I switched it on I tried to turn the volume up, when all it was designed to do was stare at a page and magnify it. Unfortunately, Roger was the only one in the household who could have made sense of the thing, but all he could do was squint at the blurred and tilted picture and tell us it wasn’t coming through. We finally got it centered and focused right so he could read individual words, yet I remember countless occasions when he’d sit down and struggle unsuccessfully to make it render whole sentences. There was something wrong with the contrast, and the periphery of the screen was blank. I don’t know why it took us so long—I only know I feel guilty about it—but it wasn’t till late in the summer that we finally got hold of the proper serviceman. And by the time it was fixed Roger was gone, so all it ever really did for us was stand as a symbol of what might yet be given back, just slightly out of reach. After Roger died I arranged to have it donated to the Center in his and Susan’s names, because I knew about that waiting list. “This will mean that someone can finish school,” I remember Joey telling me.

  June was rife with visitors from out of town, and if they were coming to say good-bye they kept it to themselves. To us it was all serendipitous. Richard Howard and his friend David Alexander, a painter, came out from New York on the way to comfort a friend in San Francisco, who’d lost his lover after a long fight. Richard read aloud to Rog a new poem, as well as a witty essay on baldness and a graceful obit for Jean Genet. We spent two lively evenings talking, and Richard was especially eloquent about Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor—a bracing caution about the scapegoating and self-blame that attach to certain diseases. We were all being assaulted now with the verbiage of self-help guerrillas who said gay men had brought AIDS on themselves. “I’m taking a course in miracles,” as one West Hollywood airhead shared with me on the phone one night. “People pick their own diseases,” he said, bragging that his lesions had faded to inconsequence.

  Sally Jackson, a woman I once roomed with in Cambridge, was in town on business and called out of the blue. “So how are you guys?” she asked enthusiastically, and then sat silent while I told her the whole terrible story. She was one of those people back east who hadn’t heard Roger was sick, and now she came by and made us laugh, leaving in her wake volumes of material on imaging and healing, and orders to eat brown rice. None of which managed to annoy me, because she was so dear. Perhaps, when it comes to the self-help business, it’s all a matter of the source. We’d had no problem learning imagery from Rita, and in fact we did eat more brown rice as the summer lengthened. But nobody picks his own disease—except, perhaps, the more rabid religions.

  I also remember Sally telling me over lunch that I wasn’t going to get sick. Usually this bit of cold comfort made me quiver with rage, but I could see how she longed to make it all better somehow. The more I heard it the more I understood it as a need people had to believe the disease would stop somewhere—to save me if they couldn’t save Roger. I try not to be offended by it anymore, and some dark side of me that lives under a rock presumably hungers for the assurance. Mostly it seems a necessary lie people tell so they won’t go mad from the horrors of war.

  The visit Rog took greatest joy in during the good month was from Peter Metcalf, an old buddy from Harvard who taught anthropology at UVa. Peter was born Cockney, grew up in New Zealand, and lived in Borneo once for a couple of years to study a Stone Age tribe. He arrived in L.A. when Roger was feeling most energized, when his vision had clarified to the highest degree it reached after the operation—maybe thirty percent of the left eye. Peter was an inexhaustibly antic man—“The only thing I ever wanted to grow up and be was a pirate”—and he and Roger reveled in old jokes and caricatures. Because he was also handy, we steered Peter around to various things that were falling apart in the house, which he fixed with dispatch. A girlfriend of his who taught anthro at an Ivy League school had told Peter that eight members of her department, grad students and faculty both, had AIDS.

  Peter was troubled to see the goldfish struggling for breath in his spherical bowl, and he announced that we must go get Schwartz a proper circulation pump. For some time I had been operating on the theory that Schwartz had to fend for himself. I cleaned his bowl once a week and fed him his dead flies, but that was about as far as I’d go. So it was truly an otherworldly errand to go to the tropical-fish mart, whence Schwartz himself had come, for a pump and a bigger tank. Peter busily set up the new pet exhibit, and now Schwartz swam around the tank with delirious energy. Within a week his gold had come back shiny again. This mattered because Roger could see Schwartz through most of the summer if he peered close to the glass.

  Peter also went with me to buy big-watted bulbs, which we screwed in all the lamps and overhead sockets where Roger sat at night. But the moment that clutches at me still happened the next afternoon, when the three of us drove up to Laurel Canyon Park to run the dog. There had been a great storm of protest at the park over the issue of leashing dogs. A few years earlier the dog people had reclaimed the park from bikers and druggies, so they figured their dogs had dibs. The county disagreed, and you couldn’t go to the park without confronting a barrage of canine agitprop and petitions to sign.

  We’d been telling the park saga to Peter, and when we got there he took Roger’s arm as we headed out onto the knoll. There was a sudden ruckus of leashless dogs, and Peter turned to look at them, for a moment letting go of Roger. Peter and I were watching the dogs, and Roger walked into a tree branch, which poked his fo
rehead—didn’t break the skin, but he cried out, startled. Peter and I spun around in dismay, to see Rog clutching his head. A couple of people who didn’t understand there was blindness here started laughing. The sharp end of the branch had poked not two inches above the eye we’d been fighting three months to save. From then on I would tell myself over and over, whenever I walked with Rog outside, to stay alert.

  On Monday night, as Peter and I were leaving for the airport, he went in and gave Roger a last hug. Roger cried for a second, then grinned in a puckish way. “I promise not to fall off my perch,” he said.

  If constant vigilance about food had become second nature to us, we had to be equally alert now about fluids. The sweats and fevers waxed and waned through the summer, but even so Roger had to get into the habit of drinking a glass of water every hour, or lemonade or Ensure, a potent nutritional supplement. If nothing else, he had to counteract the effect of all that medication on his kidneys. It can be a wearisome business when it seems every swallow of water is another kind of medicine, with its own rigorous schedule. I can see how people debilitated by AIDS let either the food or the fluids go, it all becomes such a chore. That is, it requires a team effort. The side effect of so much water was that he tended to have to piss all the time. He began to keep a plastic urinal bottle beside the bed, so he wouldn’t always have to be getting up at night.

  Did all this mean he was more of an invalid now? I don’t think that’s how it felt to either of us. It was too peaceful being at home. We were so grateful having our time together, plus the excursions and visitors, that the summer bore the character of a recuperation, like taking a rest cure. Objectively, of course, the narrowing of scope and a life that was mostly bounded by the house were skating nearer and nearer to the thin ice of a hospice. But that is to forget how much we had been through—upheaval and exile and suffering—and what a luxury it was to do nothing much at all. I remember several evenings in June, lying in bed beside Rog and reading from the Duino Elegies of Rilke, and the two of us sighing with rapture over the waves of feeling. Another time I was moved by a profile I’d read in The New Yorker about Bishop Moore, and read to Roger a passage from a memoir Moore had written about coming home from war:

  A man who has been to war will never be the same, for he has lost the virginity of living around the edges of life, and in the long gray waste of combat has had crushed his belief in smaller things.… It is enough for a man to live cleanly and quietly in peace with a few friends.

  That is what a whole generation of gay men are doing, as they care for each other and bury each other and take what respite they can in between. It all depends how close it has touched you, of course, how much you then feel that your near relations are all you really have. Only in the most extreme cases are people cashing out to go retire in a peaceful place, but I know four who have. Fast-track careers and the powers of money are the first to go, once you have been in the war.

  John Orders used to tell us about his friend Lee, who died a few years ago in his late sixties—Methuselah time to us. Lee had survived his lover by a few sad years, and said to John once, “All that will matter to you when you’re old is how much you’ve loved.” That is as true of sick as old. When the summer was full, it felt as if we became a peaceful place for our friends to visit. Roger and I always used to talk about getting to a point where we could take whole seasons off—a farmhouse in Tuscany or Provence, with a string of invitations issued to all our friends so they would stream through and taste the pure empyrean with us. We’d done that once in Big Sur, rented a house by the crashing surf and shuttled five or six friends to visit. Since we wouldn’t be doing the Provençal spring or the Tuscan autumn, we made do with the summer of Kings Road, for a while anyway.

  And if Rog was something of an invalid now, held down by his lower energy and the shadow tunnel of his one good eye, all of that could be wiped aside by the briefest glimpse of what remained. We were walking one bright noontime on Harold Way, about fifty feet short of the Liberace gates, when Roger turned and peered at me. “I see you,” he said softly, his lips curling in a smile. I laughed with delight, and we climbed to the top of the hill as if we could see to Africa.

  Roger’s parents were amazed and delighted at how well he looked—how well he saw—when they came at the end of June. It was probably the moment of peak efficiency for our various coping systems. Roger’s law assistant, Stan, was coming a couple of afternoons a week, and though there was some distress over the dyslexic tendencies of the letters he typed, he was keeping Roger current on five or six ongoing legal matters. We were entertaining friends practically every day—I mean visiting with them, not feeding them as we used to. But there was a casualness and ease about Roger as he visited with people now. The first night Al and Bernice were in town we had them over for chicken, the four of us around the table, bright light above it, no masks and no one in bed.

  They took him one day on an errand that would have had me bouncing off the walls, to the Social Security Administration to apply for disability benefits, amounting to two hundred dollars a week or so, which APLA had paved the way for bureaucratically. That night Roger was feeling well enough to go out for dinner, and we took the parents to Musso & Frank’s in Hollywood because they loved its downtown funk. We were seated in the paneled red-leather bar, and though we would have preferred a booth, it happened that Sean Penn and Madonna were sitting at the next table in jeans and black leather jackets. I told all the Horwitzes to take a discreet look. I remember Roger squinting to take them in, and then saying, “Who are Sean Penn and Madonna?” Al and Bernice didn’t know either, and it waited till they told six-year-old Lisa when they got back to Chicago before anyone got excited about it. But then Roger was always blissfully unaware of pop stars—the whole phenomenon went right by him. In ’75, when we first visited Sheldon, he took us through Bel-Air and slowed at a pair of gates imposing as Blenheim. “Cher’s house,” he said. And Roger turned and whispered to me, “Who’s Cher?”

  It must have been during the June visit that Roger and his father were sitting alone in the living room one afternoon, and Al asked Roger what he would like to do “if something happens.” Would he want to come back to Chicago? No, said Rog, he’d like to stay in California: “I’ve had so many happy years here.” Is nine so many? I’d said to him maybe half a dozen times in the last twelve years, “I want us to be buried together, Rog. I don’t want to go back to Massachusetts.” I don’t recall if he shrugged or nodded or answered me, but whatever it was, it was low-key affirmation, as if it wasn’t an issue that mattered a lot to him. About a month after that exchange with his father—unknown to me—I stumbled out something about funeral arrangements. We were stopped at the light at La Cienega and Santa Monica, and I said we’d never really talked about what either of us wanted at the end. Roger pulled back with a certain distaste and said, “You take care of all that.” From such fragments you have to make your way when the sky goes dark.

  Were we sad? Not after a month of respite. We were just going along. I recall watching the hoopla that attended Liberty Weekend, and going in and giving Roger updates from ABC. We reminisced about ’75 and ’76, the Fourth parties on the gravel-and-tar roof at 142. Chestnut, looking down on the Charles and the Hatch Shell, where the Boston Pops held forth to half a million people. We hadn’t required the television then to tell us how fine the light show was. On the fifth of July in ’76, Cesar had departed for California to start all over. Before he left for the airport he scribbled a note in my journal, thanking me for the party and the “happy ending” to his years in New England:

  If later on, as we read this, we might think “How happy we were then!” at least we’ll have that. That as we lived them, these moments, we knew they were important, and that’s all there is.

  Ten years later, Roger and I were sitting on the front terrace having knockwurst and baked beans for supper, the summer light fading slowly as neighborhood firecrackers bulleted the canyon and revelers started to
honk below on Sunset. Roger looked out through the coral tree—no, not so much looked as turned to the breeze—and he said, “We’re living on borrowed time, aren’t we?”

  “Yes. Except lately we seem to be borrowing an awful lot.”

  It was only a few days later that Kreiger flashed his glass at Roger’s eye and announced with calm dismay that the infection appeared to be moving again. Had I neglected to hold my breath when he made the examination? He told us we’d have to increase the acyclovir considerably, and the mode of delivery would have to be by IV. We were too aware of the need for immediate action to worry about the implications or the logistics. Cope and Kreiger quickly conferred, and they told us the IV could be administered at home by visiting nurses. They would help us make arrangements through a service for someone to come three times a day. There was some hope the course of the medication would only be a week. I remember, driving home from Kreiger’s, that the most Roger could muster was a weary shake of his head and a mordant “Oh, God.”

  But we quickly got used to the schedule because we had to, and Roger had extraordinarily charmed relations with the group of nurses. We liked their style, these women who moonlighted at home a couple of days a week and let their hair down and dished every hospital in the city. Roger of course was the one who had to go through the needle sticks, as the IV apparatus was changed from vein to vein every few days, left arm to right arm. He would purse his lips in a whistle and suck in breath when the needle went in, and didn’t complain or dwell on it.

  But after about a week of treatment, the condition of his veins was a real problem. Acyclovir was very caustic, and the veins in Roger’s arms were already shot from so much IV. The vein would “blow” sometimes after only a couple of doses, and then a nurse would have to search for another, sometimes even dig for one. For a while at least, we were able to count on the skill of the best of these women, who could slip a needle right in the first time. But the nurses themselves began to raise the issue of Roger’s getting a catheter implanted in his chest, where direct delivery of the medication into the artery precluded the problems of the collapsed peripheral veins. He’d find it so much easier, they said, and who knew what other medication he might need in the future?