Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  Then Dennis the attendant gave notice to APLA. He’d grown tired of the daily commute from Long Beach and wanted to work closer to home. I wasn’t so sorry to see him go, but Roger was: “He’s so sweet to me, Paul. He’s so peaceful.” It was our great good fortune that Scott, the widow nurse from Florida, was just coming off a case for APLA and free to start with Roger right away. That is, he had just buried the previous case. Scott was immensely helpful to me, because he had all the IV training and could spot me when I did the four o’clock procedure, though he legally couldn’t touch the IV himself. He possessed an innately sunny temper and reservoirs of enthusiasm, despite the fact that he left us every night and went home to take care of his dying friend. I was glad of his volubility for Roger’s sake, and just as glad to be rid of too much peacefulness from Dennis, fearing anything that smacked of disconnection from life.

  Sometimes I would go into Roger’s room and he’d announce plaintively that he couldn’t see much at all. Then I’d notice his glasses sitting on the nightstand and tell him to put them on, and suddenly things would look better again, and we’d laugh. Other times there was no quick fix. It wasn’t so much the shape and clarity of things he’d lost, but light itself. The part of the retina that saw light had diminished into dusk. Thus the most wrenching thing of all was to walk in after sundown and hear him say, “Are the lights on, Paul?” And of course they were. Maybe this part came later in August, yet it fits the particular twist of fate that took hold after the catheter surgery. Kreiger looked in Roger’s eye and declared the infection hadn’t moved, which was good, but now he could also see a cataract starting to form. So week by week Roger would begin to lose the precious lines on the “E” chart that he’d gained since the April operation.

  Rand Schrader came over every Sunday morning all summer long to have breakfast with Rog. I’d leave the coffee ready to go the night before, and Rand would arrive with croissants and help Roger get up and dressed while I slept in. Early on, in May and June, Rog would sometimes say how he didn’t want to die, but with a rueful unspoken acknowledgment that that’s where things appeared to be headed. As time went on, the matter of death came up less and less, but who knows if that is the same thing as acceptance? With Roger increasingly compromised by his illness, Rand would have to search for common ground, since he didn’t want to just chatter on about life out there, where the young were still young. So he found himself lobbing questions about Roger’s years in Europe, what it was like to leave home at nineteen or to meet a man in Paris. “But they were nice and easy times,” Rand insists, “they weren’t the least bit sad. And Roger was all there all summer, till the last Sunday. He never checked out of the world.”

  On Tuesday the twelfth I had a battery of test results come back from Dr. Scolaro. The good news was that my T-4 number was up from 430 in May to 480, a degree of difference that nearly anyone in the know would put down to lab variation. When you’re on the receiving end of the numbers you tend to say it’s lab variation if the number has gone down, and if it’s gone up you feel you have started reversing the trend because of whatever magic you’re practicing at the time. In my case it was yeast and soy and eight different vitamins. Plus I redoubled my relaxation exercises, which I did instead of a nap, sleep having taken the summer off. The bad news was that the viral culture indicated the AIDS virus was active in my system, not dormant and tucked in a deep genetic cave. Scolaro advised that I start ribavirin as soon as I could.

  Mid-August was hot, and we usually wouldn’t take a drive up to the park till nearly sunset. I remember walking with Roger across the lawn to a grove of beeches where picnic tables were set out in the shade. Though the light was bright gold and clear, Roger was seeing poorly; as I remember now, he saw worse when he had a fever and better when it was down. We sat on a picnic bench, and I read him the paper—unless by then we had started Plato, which I would read him in snatches several times a day, sometimes only a page or two. Today he wasn’t listening much, and I could tell he was sad. So we just sat there for a bit, not talking, while I watched the various dogs and their owners cavort in the park. We used to call it La Grande Jatte, after the Seurat in the Art Institute.

  Suddenly Roger began to recite Milton’s sonnet on his blindness: “‘When I consider how my light is spent / Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide …’” I don’t remember how far he got before he choked up and couldn’t go on, but that didn’t matter. Neither of us would have been very receptive to the bullshit about bearing God’s “mild yoke.” But I can’t ever forget the moment, looking out at all the sunset yuppies and their dogs while Roger declaimed his loss in a broken voice.

  Yet I also recall the Perloffs coming over to visit late one Saturday afternoon, while I was out doing errands. Roger heard the doorbell and felt his way through the house to the front hall, hollering that he was on his way. He opened the front door, and no one was there. “Marjorie? Joe?” he asked, and heard their muffled voices answering him from outside. He had opened the hall closet instead of the front door, just beside it. As he hastened to let them in, he announced, “I’m becoming Mr. Magoo.” And told that story on himself, laughing at himself, for the rest of his days. That is the rhythm to try to understand about him, “On His Blindness” and Mr. Magoo.

  The last photographs I have of him are mid-August, a hot Sunday afternoon in the courtyard under the carob tree. An old friend from Boston who was very big in public relations and worked like a team of sled dogs dropped by on the way to the hospital to visit a colleague down with PCP. I didn’t discover the pictures till three months after Roger died, when I finished off the roll taking shots of Lawrence’s grave in Taos. At first I was afraid to look close because they came so near to his death, but they’re marvelous pictures, without a shadow. Peaceful, in fact, and sporting the sweetest smile and a dazzling white shirt as the sun plays in the courtyard. The right eye is still, because that’s the blind one. The left eye peers and doesn’t see much, but it sees me. In the country of the blind, as the French say, one-eyed men are kings. I am the one with the camera, who has taken his picture in every shady court from Athens to Kauai. The PR friend who visited that day was jovial and round, lamenting the lunch demands of his job, which kept him so fattened up. He was diagnosed with PCP himself five months later.

  But August in my mind was mostly Plato. Those were the hours when we sat in the hurricane’s eye together. We knew full well we had reached a summit, just as we’d known at Delos, facing the row of stone lions that guards the lake where Apollo was born. When you have the time to read a little Plato, when the other half of you wants to do it as much as you do, nobody wastes a moment worrying that he’s wasting time. For the moment, no numb distractions are required, no maddening details to attend to. Jaimee sighed to Michael one night when he asked her how she was: “Fine. I watch the soaps all afternoon, and Paul reads Plato to Roger.”

  We used the blue-cloth Oxford volume called Portrait of Socrates, comprising the Apology and the two last dialogues of the philosopher’s life, edited by the aforementioned Livingstone. Being good students, we started with the introduction, which took us nearly a week to read because we’d stop and talk about it so much. Livingstone’s elegant sketch of Socrates’ place in his own culture, and thus in ours, turned out to be a sort of lightning rod for us, who had profited all our lives from the gifts and whips of the intellect. Please, we were the only Harvard/Yale marriage on our block.

  That Socrates was unpretentious almost to a fault, never believing wisdom was his alone or made him superior, but that everyone possessed it if one could only talk it out. That his method was conversation—this alone gave a sort of romantic burnish to the running Platonic dialogue the two of us had volleyed for twelve years. That he lived in a time of “official” gods, the golden age of his people seizing up as Athens fell under the wheels of war. It all made a certain Mediterranean sense, of connection if you will, which ought to temper my stridency toward those who contrive their essential self
from the Bible, or indeed from Warren Beatty’s sister. Livingstone imagined what a threat Socrates must have been to established ideas and self-important men. The more we thought about him, the more he seemed a first principle of all our own reading and travel and yearning for definition.

  Then we turned to the Apology, Socrates’ defense, delivered in the agora below the Temple of Hermes. Two years before, we had wandered the very spot, our guidebooks out like dousing rods, trying to make a city out of fallen stones. Socrates says—but you know all this part already, or at least you’re supposed to. Or maybe you don’t really need it till you’re right at the edge of the cliff, as we were. “It’s miraculous, isn’t it?” a fellow poet, Sandy McClatchy, said to me on the phone one day when I was waxing on about Plato. There was nothing to figure out or understand at all. Just the clarity of it, unfiltered by vanity or bullshit or the need to kiss ass. And how tough Socrates is as he goads the pompous and self-deluded and dares them to put him to death.

  “He sounds like Cesar,” Roger would say after some effortless parry or thrust of rhetoric. And we laughed to remember our friend, the wagging finger in four languages as Cesar browbeat culture and self into his wayward students.

  What direction were we going in? All downhill? It felt like a kind of stasis as the summer perceptibly ripened. Not that I have forgotten the times when Rog would cry out in pain, “Paul, I’m blind!” Or how, stirred by an aching nostalgia, he would shake his head and choke back tears and say, “I miss Cesar.” But now was also the time when the drenching sweats would leave him awake and curiously refreshed at 1 A.M., and he’d ask for the tin of cashews and a glass of lemonade, and we’d talk and read aloud till three. I remember our friend Gordon came through from Canada and spent a couple of days doting on us, cooking gourmet dinners and reading to Rog, taking me to the beach for a swim. And that was all fine, but I could see how far gone Roger was in Gordon’s eyes, in the year since they’d last been together. It only made me feel that our safest time was the two of us alone, when the shorthand kept us utterly in balance.

  On Wednesday, August 20, Roger had blood transfused, about three units, as I recall. Though the white count is most consistently affected by AZT, the red count is also a problem. Many full-blown AIDS patients on long-term AZT have become transfusion-dependent. They have also gotten fairly blasé about the vampire part; but we still thought of transfusion as a grave and unsettling procedure. Yet the new blood perked Roger up considerably for several days, animated and energized him for work. He even talked with Esther Richmond about getting a new will written, the matter unbroached since we’d tucked the ’80 version in a drawer.

  He was coughing again, but even my radar wasn’t especially flashing red. It was more than anything a clearing of the throat, and though in the past that very quality had been part of the ominous slippage toward PCP, I would not see it that way. Or perhaps I couldn’t and still go on giving IV twice a day, not to mention keeping up food and fluids and twenty-two pills and Plato.

  After one of his Wednesday sessions with Dr. Martin, Roger reported that he had admitted he’d had a good life. I remember how lucidly he repeated the phrase, amazed almost to be saying such a curiously final thing, and with no foreboding of death in the tone, or nothing gloomy at least. But I can’t be sure, for I was behind in the death department. Even now, when I’m all caught up, it bewilders me to try to figure what he knew and I didn’t. I had an appointment with Martin myself a month after Roger died. The first thing he said was: “He loved you greatly.” Then he explained how Roger had gotten beyond the fear of death. Toward the end, he said, Roger’s world was one of constricted hopes—Will I have enough energy to work with Fred? Will I be able to eat my supper? “It’s impossible to conceive of ourselves without ego,” Martin said, but that is where Roger arrived. I can’t, of course, know what he must have thought in the hours when he lay there quietly, all but blind. I only know we never seemed any different, not between ourselves. And I felt no shadow of death when he said that his life had been good. Mine too, I thought with a pang of pride.

  Near the end of August he spoke of being disoriented sometimes when he woke up, because he never knew in the darkness whether it was night or day. He spoke of this so precisely that I took it at face value. Martin prescribed the antipsychotic Haldol, saying that many AIDS patients had found it helpful. Only he didn’t just mean blind patients, did he? I never really picked up on the possibility that the disorientation might be organic. I didn’t like Haldol and didn’t see why it was needed on top of Xanax, but Roger stopped complaining about the problem, so I figured it must be working. Then one night at four or five, after I’d gone to bed, Roger got up and walked out the back door. He felt his way along the back of the house, skirting the lip of the pool and ending up by the pool equipment. When he finally came to himself and realized where he was, he called my name as he thrashed at the ivy. A neighbor shouted irritably from a window, “Go around to the door; you’re in the bushes!”

  I never heard Rog calling. Somehow he was able to retrace all his steps and come in and find me in the front bedroom. I shot awake and held him, scratched and wet from the bushes and so glad to be in my arms. He told me the whole story as I put him back to bed, and to me it was more of a dream disorientation, compounded into sleepwalking. If in fact it was dementia, it came on him for fractions of seconds only. The night by the ivy was the one extreme moment, but now I see it’s like a dozen other stories I’ve heard of AIDS people wandering outside, very late on in the illness, sometimes into the ice and snow. With us it wasn’t a pattern, and there was nothing to compare it to—except perhaps the lapse of speech in February, the so-called false alarm.

  I cannot somehow put together those nightmare cries with the lazy Sundays talking with friends in the back garden, or the evenings reading Plato. Thus if things were darkening I did not see, and that is one of the crudest ruses of the virus, letting you think the good times are the real times. Besides, I was locked in a true romantic’s presumption now, with every page I turned. No matter how scorched the earth became, no one could take Plato away from us, not what we’d managed to read together. And I did think it consciously, even when he made the ironic comparison with Cesar, that it was Roger who was like Socrates.

  He, of course, would have groaned with distress to hear such an outrageous exaggeration. Whenever I’d tell Cesar a Hollywood story thick with prices and salaries, Roger would always murmur, “Divide by three.” But I don’t especially mean that his mind was as fine as Socrates’, or his integrity so unsullied. I only mean the honesty and simplicity, the instinct that he wasn’t better or wiser than anyone else. I was too shy to say it out loud, but then, from here on, there was much that would have to go without saying. Whoever Socrates was, we read the blue book for the same reason, to see how a man of honor faces death without any lies.

  •XII•

  8/25 Monday

  V. difficult weekend, esp yesterday—we did not move from the house except a little walk up Harold Way. I lay on my bed at 4 PM & thought I’m just waiting to get sick.

  I kept telling Sam late at night that I wasn’t exactly depressed, I was frantic, and I liked that better. I could neither hold to nor project a future anymore, and the consequent dread and rage had left me wildly manic. Sometimes I could feel my heart pounding as I counted out the day’s pills from eight different vials, or ventriloquized a smile in order to talk business. Sam thought it was partly to do with the news I’d had about my active viral status. If I dared to slow down or think too much I’d end up looking blankly at the ceiling as I did on the twenty-fifth, staring into the coming storm.

  Yet I don’t recall that Roger and I were arguing or using each other as punching bags. We were much more drawn to comforting now, and curling like spoons to rest, talking softly of nothing much. If I suddenly panicked and told my fear of the calamity falling on me—the old horror of the two of us in separate hospital rooms, dying the same death—Roger would quickly fo
rce me to take a cold-eyed look at the reality: “You’re fine.” As if he would not countenance any moaning about an abstraction less savage than blindness. I am the same way now myself, ready to jump out of my skin if someone gets testy or whiny about anything less apocalyptic than AIDS.

  Sheldon had been pushing for some time about selling the apartment house on Detroit, and now he grew insistent. I couldn’t believe he was engineering yet another way of cutting himself off from us, and he seemed to have no feeling at all for how thrown we were by matters that smacked of final payments. His argument was that Roger and I could no longer keep up our end of the maintenance, and he simply wasn’t of a mind to pick up the slack. I could see what a blow it was to Rog to lose the property he’d invested so much pride in. It all just seemed unnecessary, since Sheldon had a whole organization to manage his properties, but he apparently saw it merely as a business proposition that was going down the drain.

  Roger didn’t try to evade his nagging, but struggled to ask the right questions about the market, whether it was a good time to sell. After all that work he didn’t want the investment to be a bust. He’d laid out five thousand once on a stock tip that went in the toilet, and he always worried afterwards that he might be dumb with money. I never indulged this brand of fretting. “Don’t worry, darling,” I used to tell him. “I’m a terrific investment.”