Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  I came home that night to find the goldfish dead in his bubbling tank. With the oddest dispassion, I gathered Schwartz, the tank and all the fish food, hauling them down to the trash barrel. And thought: If somebody has to die in this house, Schwartz, I’m glad it’s you. It took me days before I could bring myself to break the news to Rog.

  Fred was coming up to the hospital twice a week for their regular work schedule, and he and Roger coordinated the drawing up of the will with Esther. I was the problem here. Though Roger had been speaking off and on all summer about changing our wills, I couldn’t figure how I wanted to set up the trust that would guard my work when I died. In the ’80 will I’d appointed a fellow writer to be my literary executor, but he’d developed a certain contempt for my work, and I couldn’t figure who else to trust. I let the weeks drag by, and finally Roger decided to go ahead with his own will. He would leave everything to me, but if I should not survive him by six months, then his half would go to his family. There were gay couples dying all over now, within weeks or months of each other, so contingencies had to be written in. Also, Roger didn’t yet have the living will that Cope had mentioned eleven months before.

  I recall how delicately Roger would speak to me about the will, always qualifying the gloomy portents. “But that’s if you survive me,” he’d say, explaining some detail. “If I survive you …” He knew I couldn’t handle the death part. He worried to Dr. Martin during a therapy session at the hospital: “Paul says he can’t survive without me.” An accurate quotation, I’m afraid, and I’m grateful to Martin for allaying his concern: “Of course he can. He’ll do fine.” Even if it isn’t so, I’m glad he said it.

  Roger had been in ten days when Al and Bernice landed on the evening of Tuesday the sixteenth. I extracted a final promise from Rog that he would stay strong and stable. Then, with enormous trepidation, I got in the car and headed north, reaching Santa Maria at 1 A.M. We always left for the seven-hour trip to Big Sur late at night. Roger would sleep while I drove, and we’d stop in Santa Maria for a few hours’ sleep and have breakfast next morning at Morro Bay. Wednesday I started up the coast road in cloudy weather, three hours of the staggers of Route 1. I’ve never felt quite so schizoid as I did coming into the soaring calm and noble immensity of Big Sur, missing my friend and feeling as if I didn’t deserve this beauty anymore. I stopped at a turnout south of Partington Ridge and realized as I made my way along a trail to a waterfall that Roger and I had never walked together in exactly this place, and I fell apart. I knew then the only way I would get through the three days was to realize I had come here to say good-bye from both of us.

  I stayed at the Big Sur Lodge, hiking every morning to the mouth of the Big Sur River, where it spills out onto Andrew Molera Beach. Molera is where I took the pictures of the two of us in October ’83, the weekend after Cesar’s diagnosis. The wild beach sweeps five miles in a curve like the quarter-moon, banked by headlands bare as Scotland. If you walk a half mile along Molera, there is nothing after a while but where you are, and I’d hole up under the bluffs and sun naked. One morning I wrote with a finger in a drift of powder sand in a hollow below the bluff, “P & R,” just so I could tell Roger when I called him from the phone booth at the lodge. I left our mark, I told him.

  In the afternoon I’d go down Sycamore Canyon to Pfeiffer Beach, where the ocean roars through tunnels in the rocks. In between I walked in the redwood groves. But three times a day I’d home back to the outdoor phone booth and call the tenth floor at UCLA. I’d spill out all my travels and tell Roger about the strange double nature of it all, how I would be exalted one minute and crying the next with fear. Then I’d ask all the rote questions about his numbers and the doctors, and he’d make me easy and send me out for another hike, loving every description, for I was the last of our eyes. He talked me through the whole trip, and once when I couldn’t bear the pain of being far from him he said, “I miss you the same way, darling. But there’s part of me that’s rooting for you to have a good time. So try.”

  I tried. Sometimes I’d call the hospital and he’d be asleep. Perhaps his mother would talk to me, or a nurse would tell me to call later. Then I would walk in circles till I could call again, unsatisfied till I had the reassurance direct from his lips. But I did sleep eight or nine hours a night, with naps in the afternoon as well, and the best call was always at 9 P.M., before the switchboard shut down at UCLA. While we talked I’d look up through the redwoods at the billion stars, my breath smoking in the autumn cold. He’d laugh and tell me jokes from the old Jack Benny tapes his cousin Ruth had sent him. The last night I told him I was terrified. “Of what?” The future, I said. What’s going to happen to us. And he replied in the mildest voice: “You just come back, okay? And then we’ll continue our ongoing togetherness.”

  Saturday morning I left the lodge and drove north to Carmel to pick up the freeway, and for the whole twenty-five miles I took my last leave of Big Sur. It had been ours for a decade, and I didn’t want any more of it. I took the inland route down the spine of the state, the golden hills so arid they gleamed like platinum, and stopping every two hours to check in. I hit brutal traffic coming into L.A. and arrived fried at the hospital at six-thirty. When I walked in the room his parents greeted me with a cheer. Roger, lying half asleep in bed, was so pleased and excited that all he could do for a moment was moan with pleasure, rocking back and forth in a motion akin to wagging.

  We had finished the Apology by now and moved on to the Crito, the dialogue named for the friend of Socrates who visits him in prison and lays out a plot by which, the philosopher can escape into exile. It’s a very problematic piece to read, listening as Socrates decides he cannot flee the state that has put him to death without destroying all the laws of Athens in the process. Meanwhile, sublime to ridiculous, I’d been working for some weeks writing the novelization for Predator, the upcoming Schwarzenegger opus.

  While I was in Big Sur I decided I simply couldn’t make the November 1 deadline, and I curled up with Roger in his bed in room 1010 and said the project was too stressful. Though he’d encouraged me to keep working throughout his illness, now he said: “Paul, if you want to pull out of it, go ahead. I want you here with me now. Who cares about all that?” With a lifetime of Puritan ethic behind me, I’d never pulled out of any project, no matter how wrongheaded. For the first time I actually considered it, and we discussed it again and again. When I decided to go ahead with Arnold and the alien, I had to promise myself I wouldn’t let it make me crazy. I asked for more time from the sweet-tempered editor at Berkley, to whom I never mentioned Roger’s illness till after he died. Now it seems like yet another portent, his wanting all the time he could have with me, he who was so unpossessive.

  Before his parents left, Al once again paid him the highest compliment about his relationship with me. “You boys are the best friends I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You’re like Damon and Pythias.” It’s a long way for a man to come who couldn’t look me in the face for a year after Roger finally told him he was gay. A century after Socrates, Pythias was condemned to death in Syracuse but wished to go home and settle his affairs. Damon, his friend, took his place in jail, agreeing to be executed if Pythias didn’t return. Of course he returned, and the tyrant who’d condemned him was so moved by the friendship that he released them both. This is not a myth.

  Al and Bernice promised they would be back November 22 for Roger’s forty-fifth birthday, which coincided with the fifteenth-anniversary dinner of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. One of the themes of the Center dinner this year was the uniting of families, and people were being encouraged to bring along their parents and siblings. I remember Al and Bernice leaving us cheerfully in room 1010, with not a whisper of good-bye.

  One night I read an essay to Rog about Francis Parkman, on the occasion of the republication by the Library of America of his history of the French and Indian War. Parkman was virtually blind and in great pain during the long ordeal of writing his
book, and he had to work with a kind of iron grid over his paper to guide his pen. We both choked up at his fortitude in the face of daunting illness and disability. But if there was a certain weepy sentimentality to us now and then, Roger could be sharp and mordant as well. He had a call from a friend back east who didn’t know what to say, and when he asked, “How are you?” Roger replied, “How am I? Read the Book of Job.”

  He began to run a fever during the third week in the hospital, and Cope and Dr. Ahn decided that the catheter had become infected. A typical problem, apparently, though it was the first we’d ever heard of it. Roger would have to go into surgery Friday morning to replace it, but the good news was that he could come home Saturday. I remember taking him down Thursday night for an x-ray, always easier than waiting for an escort. The man in the wheelchair ahead of us was shrunken and covered with lesions, all alone, and for once I was glad Roger was sightless. I don’t remember him being anxious about the surgery, yet when Richard Ide came up to visit him Friday morning and arrived an hour late, Roger rebuked him in a wounded tone: “Richard, don’t do that to me again.” Richard is never late for anything anymore. I accompanied Roger down to the operating room, just as I had at Jules Stein in April, but this time it wasn’t so overwhelming. I squeezed his hand at the door to surgery and said, “You be okay now.”

  I wanted to be with him that evening, in case he was feeling “wimbly” after the operation, but I’d promised Rand Schrader that I would host an important meeting at the house that night. In order to develop a text for the video presentation at the Center dinner, I’d agreed to gather some key people who’d been there since the beginning to give us the narrative line. No history had yet been written down, of the Center or any other aspect of the gay movement in L.A. I was torn about leaving Rog, but he swore he’d be fine and felt the occasion was too important to miss. Besides, he was so looking forward to coming home next day that he appeared to shrug off any aftereffects of the surgery. Yet I was the same as he was now, jealous of any time that was stolen from us.

  About six people gathered in the house on Kings Road, including psychologist Don Kilhefner, the shaman granddaddy of the movement in L.A., and Steve Schulte, director of the Center during its turmoil years of the late seventies and now mayor of West Hollywood. Kilhefner told the story of the “gay survival committee” in the years following Stonewall, which led in 1971 to the opening of Edgemont Liberation House, the first truly public gay environment in the city, gay people helping each other. A clinic opened in 1973, and the Center gathered clout and respectability as it made inroads in the gay middle class, most of whose members were still officially in the closet.

  Everyone gay starts out in the closet, of course. The Center, by proclaiming “Gay” on the building on Highland, had made a stand about coming out, though what Kilhefner called the “inner coming out” would take more time. There was a difference between what we were and who we were as gay people, among other things that we were a people and not just a movement. It was extraordinarily moving to hear them talk about how far we’d come, despite the calamity, and about what we had marshaled to fight the calamity with.

  Cope ordered a transfusion for early Saturday morning. When I called at ten, Roger reported with a flush of pleasure that he’d declared to Cope when the doctor came to check him out, “Dennis, I’m feeling optimistic.” Cope replied, “I think there’s reason to, Roger.” So my friend was beaming when I came by at noon to pick him up, and he even laughed about a student nurse who’d treated him like a creature from outer space. We drove home in cool September weather, and the ritual of homecoming was an aching delight, from the dog turning inside out and whimpering to the tramp upstairs past the coral tree. I remember when we got into the back bedroom and sat down together on the bed, facing the garden, we laughed to think he was home, our heads tilted against each other as we savored having come again through fire. It was perhaps the last moment of full joy, but I can still taste the triumph of it.

  Admittedly the boost from the transfusion didn’t linger as it had in the past. On the other hand, we were accustomed now to the uphill fight for strength after PCP. We were fortunate to be able to have Scott reassigned to us. Though he had to move on to other cases when Roger went in, he’d been mostly working as a substitute and was eager to return to us. Our priority was the restoration of the quiet sanctuary of the summer. Right away we were back to mornings in the garden, Roger sitting in the dappled shade while I read him the paper, afternoons with Fred, suppers prepared by Scott, and Plato in the evening. I finally unpacked the boxes piled in the living room since February, when the office move had taken place. I even spent a couple of evenings going through drawers of snapshots, describing them to Roger as we called up a raft of memories.

  The restoration was real and tangible, and went on with gathering confidence for the next week or so. I was even bitten with the desire to bring the house back up to form. The specific goad was the sofa in the living room, whose re-covering we had abandoned when Roger first took sick. Thus the upholstery bore a year and a half more of Puck’s grime, and was smelling exceedingly doggy. Not wanting Rog to lie down on it anymore for fear of germs, I announced that we would re-cover at last. I decided we would also acquire a couple of easy chairs, and under the new rules Puck would be banished to the floor, where he belonged. Roger encouraged me in this sudden intense enterprise, as I called for estimates and hauled home fabric samples so he could feel them and approve them. I know I felt an extreme urgency to make the place comfortable for him now, no time to waste. I told every workman ASAP, or STAT, as they say in the medical labs.

  Because I’d planted late in the spring, the gardenia was still flowering two or three blooms a week, a rare thing for October. Gardenias were usually finished by August at our place. I took to bringing a blossom in and placing it in a dish of water on Roger’s nightstand, crowded by pill bottles and IV material though it was. I was actually returning a favor here, for Roger had been for years in the habit of bringing the occasional gardenia in and leaving it in a dish on my desk. Before setting it down I would give him a whiff, and he’d purr, “I love you so much.” But that was something he said more and more often now, as I would dart into the room with some fattening drink or chaotic question about our finances. You cannot ever say it enough, of course, but he spoke it now with a rare savor. More often than not I’d parrot it right back to him, but I had my own schedule of telling how much I loved him. It wasn’t a contest, nor was it ever perfunctory. For both of us it was simply a statement of fact, as much as to say I’m alive.

  This is not to say there were no moments of pain and loss, nor too much time to brood all alone in the darkness, in spite of all the visits, the Mozart tapes and the massages. I think he would comb the rich hours and countries of his life, till the tragedy would suddenly break over it all like a tidal wave, then he would cry out. The most painful of these, the one that cut deepest into me, was a moment in early October as I came into his room late one afternoon. He was looking out toward the garden, though by then he could scarcely see the light. He cried out softly, in an agonized voice, “What happened to our happy life?”

  I think about almost nothing else now. But at the time, I said what I really believed: “It’s here, Rog, it’s right here. Because we are.” I required nothing else, but then I was not hobbled and assaulted as he was. I did not have to inhabit the dark and remember the voyaging, the comradeship, life engaged to the full. In addition to which he had no manic phase as I did, to fill up with all the IV tasks, or the record I leave behind here. The memories that broke his heart with being gone are the ones I live with now, of a life so happy it hurt sometimes, like the meadow Miriam couldn’t take home in her arms in Sons and Lovers.

  It all goes one way now. Difficult in the extreme to steer the course of the last weeks without being thrown off by a feeling that I somehow failed to keep him alive. I punish myself for lack of vigilance, thinking if I’d got him to the hospital sooner I would
’ve pulled him through the final infection. Pulled him through to what? one could reasonably retort. They tell me I wouldn’t have wanted the lingering weeks of devastation, the final explosion of ravages that drags people in and out of comas, pleading to let it end. And I’ve come to understand, intellectually at least, that our triumph was in what we did do, keeping him alive and alert and on our island till the end. Yet I can’t think of almost any moment of October without feeling helpless, like flinching in the glare of the final air burst. But how was I to know? Then I knew nothing about death, and now I know everything short of my own.

  It must have been midweek the second week of October that Scott greeted me when I woke up with the news that Roger had been incontinent in the night. Incontinent is so curiously Protestant a term that it puts the reality at some distance, and I recall not even asking him or Roger what sort or what degree. Roger used the urinal bottle in bed much of the time now, at least once an hour, since we were filling him with so many liquids. I think it was misplaced modesty on my part, or my sense of how modest Roger was himself, that kept me from probing. So he’d pissed in bed, so what? After I went to sleep at 4 A.M. there wasn’t anyone to monitor him till the nurse arrived at seven-thirty for the morning IV. Accidents happen.

  Jaimee would call at eight-thirty or nine at night, and while he was talking with her I’d often slip down to the gym for twenty minutes on the Lifecycle, being as the place closed at nine-thirty. A couple of evenings Roger was unhappy about my going, disappointed even, because usually by the time I returned he’d be ready for bed. He was so weary since the hospital that I’d sometimes have to bring him his toothbrush bedside, and it was all I could do to coax a weigh-in out of him—145 and holding. This one night he was on the phone in the study, and I swore I’d be back in a half hour, before he knew it. When I returned at nine-forty-five he told me he’d gotten lost in the house, wandering around disoriented till he realized he was in the front bedroom and felt his way back to his own. I put it all down to the disorientation of blindness, purely directional, and didn’t connect it up with his getting lost by the pool equipment. He was on Haldol now, which did after all ease such problems, and perhaps even mask their depth.