by John Foster
We never returned to Fairfield. As far as planning our lives was concerned, we concentrated on getting ourselves to Sydney for a few days. The trip to Sydney is normally no more arduous than taking a tram to the city, but the night before we left Juan contrived to stand on a sewing needle and drive it into his heel. In the middle of the night we hobbled to the casualty department at the Royal Melbourne to have it extracted. When we arrived in Sydney he was still hobbling and it was still raining, as it had been on our previous visit. Then, we had laughed at the inconvenience, and imagined that Sydney would one day go the way of Venice, or slide off its foundations in a gigantic avalanche of mud and simply float away to sea under the Harbour Bridge. And the queens in Oxford Street discos would still be dancing. This time the rain was no joke. It was threatening, and for most of that week Juan holed himself up in the safety of the hotel TV room, warding off bronchitis or pneumonia or some other opportunistic infection that the virus was waiting to unleash.
Slowly the panic subsided. And the virus—if there was a virus—was so quiet that we dared to reassure each other with the possibility that we’d been wrong. It isn’t easy to give up hoping. But I noticed that he was moving with less energy now, though he managed to mask his condition by playing on the image of the lethargic Latin. In June we went with Rickard on an expedition to Hanging Rock, for which Juan prepared with thermal underwear and a fleece-lined jacket. It was not exactly climbing gear, so when Rickard skipped ahead up the rock path, there was some excuse for Juan to trail behind, and to linger at the summit and wonder about the children who disappeared.
The signs were multiplying. A few days after the climb up Hanging Rock he came back from a trip to the local chemist dejectedly wheeling the pink and grey bike and leaned it against the wall near the front door. That was its last outing; he could no longer ride it up the Queensberry Hill. And there was no denying the fact that it was now taking us twenty minutes to walk to the doctor, when previously we had covered the distance in a brisk twelve or comfortable fifteen.
The doctor prescribed more Lomotil for the diarrhoea, and more Mylanta for the stomach. He cooed with sympathy when Juan related the events that had taken place at Fairfield and suggested now an alternative. Perhaps Juan would like to consult a specialist in the gastroenterology clinic at the Royal Melbourne. This, Juan agreed, would be sensible, because the Royal Melbourne was no more than a few minutes’ walk from our flat, and there was a convenience store on the corner where you could buy a soda on the way home.
He weighed in at the clinic, rather light at fifty-five kilograms, and we sat—in the couple of hours I had free between classes—on the bench outside the consulting rooms and discussed the problem of his ‘ulcer’ with an Italian woman who recommended chickpeas as an infallible cure. And then we were ushered into the presence of Dr Wall, who was neither smooth nor silky, but pleasantly avuncular and just old and silvery enough to give the impression of being infinitely wise. He explained that it would be necessary to do some tests, and of course it would be sensible to include an AIDS test because, as he was sure Juan understood, it was better to look at all the possibilities so we could get a proper handle on this problem. After the shock treatment at Fairfield, this advice seemed perfectly reasonable. The result, as he knew and we knew, was perfectly predictable. Juan was HIV-positive.
He received the news with a curious detachment. Coming out of the hospital, the first choice he faced was whether he wanted a can of Fanta or a can of Sprite, since Murray had long since shamed him out of drinking Coke. The next problem was whether I had time to cook dinner and still arrive at a public lecture on time to propose a vote of thanks. He phoned a taxi for me, and when I reached the venue I called the priest’s wife, Ann, and told her his result. Would she mind calling in during the evening and spending some time with Juan until I got back?
The lecture washed over me. My mind was full of AIDS. Did the lecturer have an argument? Was she running a line that I should comment on? I had no idea. In proposing the vote of thanks, I wanted to confront the audience and demand to know how they could sit there so complacently when my friend, my lover, Juan, was dying of AIDS. Instead, I mumbled some forgettable words of appreciation, and when they moved on to a sociable cup of tea and buns, I phoned home. Ann answered.
‘How is he?’
‘He’s fine,’ she said. ‘We’re watching Dynasty.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘And what of His sure mercies that He swore in the ancient days—where is His tempering for our bare back and sides—where is provided the escape on that open plain?’
—David Jones, from ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’
It could not be said that his condition was secret. Rather, it was simply private, in the way that so much about him was private. He preferred to listen than to talk, to watch than to be watched, except for those increasingly rare social occasions when he propelled himself on to centre stage with a burst of self-parodying theatricality. It is true that he was beginning to acquire the aura of an invalid, which is what happens when people repeatedly ask ‘How are you?’ with a meaningful stress on the present tense. But as his replies were vague and inconclusive, the world at large—insofar as it was interested in him—had no choice but to accept his fiction of the ulcer and to speculate. He confided in Murray and I confided in Ann and Rickard, and it helped to hear them echo back the assurances that we had from Dr Wall.
He did not have AIDS. Dr Wall was quite clear about that. He had the virus, and he had some specific complaints for which he took specific remedies: Fasigyn and Maxolan and other pills with equally meaningless names, names so devoid of fantasy that I was inclined to feel sorry for the disenchanted world of the pharmaceutical industry which invented them. Beyond prescribing these pills, Dr Walls offered no prognostications. He required no threatening plan for living, and his tactics and his temperament reinforced Juan’s own inclination, after the initial shock, to let the morrow take thought for the things of itself. So there was no reason to abandon the dinner party we had planned for his thirty-third birthday and no, said Dr Wall, there was absolutely no prohibition against drinking French champagne.
With this medical imprimatur, which Juan interpreted more as a command, the small dinner party I had imagined, with four or five guests, expanded and began to assume the dimensions of a community feast. The guest list grew to two dozen, who could only be accommodated by clearing out Juan’s sewing room, borrowing some trestle tables and setting them up in the form of a capital E. We begged and borrowed chairs: Bauhaus tubular steel, Victorian rosewood, Viennese bentwood and canvas garden chairs smelling of winter mould, all of which created the impression of a furniture sale room, though this effect was adequately subdued by the starched damask tablecloths. In Juan’s view these cloths, which came from the trousseau of an elderly German-Jewish friend, had class. He claimed the task of laying them out for himself, smoothing them down with the reverence that he reserved for objects of special quality: the Movado watch, the Russian icon of Our Lady of Sorrows, his own fur coat.
‘Two meats,’ he said, when we discussed the menu. ‘You cannot have a feast without two meats.’ I was sufficiently well trained to know that this meant automatically chicken and crackling pork. Then he added a third, a crown roast of lamb filled with apricot stuffing and cracked wheat. He detested the strong flavour of lamb. (Indeed the worst thing about Australian men, he once told me, was that they smelled like sheep, and I had wondered with a jealous twinge how many such men he had been on sniffing terms with.) The crown roast was there for its looks. The rest was pure Cuba: dishes of beans, plates of saffron rice, deep-fried balls of sweet potato that were supposed to come out of the oil with a crispy coat and a creamy centre. And tamales, minced corn that was heavily spiced and wrapped and tied and boiled in the corn husks like little green Christmas bonbons.
The guests, when they arrived, were as oddly assorted as the chairs. Father Jim was there, and Ann, and Judith, the director of a local gall
ery. There were three or four gay couples, all on their best mixed-company behaviour except for Patrick, who had once sung in a church choir where he had acquired a repertoire of scandalous ecclesiastical jokes. Inviting Patrick had been a risk and Juan kept a strict eye on him because, as he explained to him in a serious talk in the kitchen, the guest of honour was a bishop, and he would not like the bishop to be offended.
This was Juan’s third bishop, but unlike the others this was a real Church of England prelate with a seat in the House of Lords and a wife who was entitled to use the Lady Peeresses’ room in the same establishment. Here, Juan learned with some hilarity, the peeresses retired as occasion required to perch on polished mahogany lavatory seats and to twinkle aristocratically into bowls of finely patterned porcelain. That was a piece of information he would store up for Hiram—if he should ever see him again.
In fact, the bishop and his wife were a modest couple. They were visiting for the wedding of their daughter Alison, and as she happened to live in the upstairs apartment, for a few weeks they became our neighbours. On the evening of the dinner the bishop was in an expansive mood, and after a sufficient drop of champagne he responded to Juan’s entreaties to tell us, again, about his visits to Sandringham, and what the Queen had said to Prince Philip, and what Prince Philip said to the chambermaid. As the bishop launched with mock reticence into his recitation, Juan sat back in his chair at the centre of the capital E, relaxed and beaming at the unlikely moment of this command performance. It was as good as Dynasty, and hardly less consequential.
Reflecting on the birthday dinner I realised that if Juan were going to be ill, it would have to be a sociable illness. No dim lights, drawn blinds, closed curtains; no signs hanging for months on the front door like the one I had heard about in Fitzroy: ‘Thank you for your visit but I do not wish to be disturbed.’ On the contrary, he was hungry for company.
In the weeks following the dinner there was more than enough company and a positive whirl of activity as Alison prepared for her wedding. Alison was an action woman. She was forever skiing, bushwalking, riding, zipping around the outback in a two-seater plane or trekking through Indonesian jungles, which is where she had met Chris. But now that her jungle romance was to be formalised at the altar, she was plunged into an agony of indecision about such normally unproblematic things as dresses and shoes and bouquets. Although Juan had never been to a wedding in his life, he was more than willing to be drawn into the consultations that flowed up and down the back stairs, happily flipping through bridal catalogues over a cup of tea with the bishop’s wife, and pronouncing as authoritatively as anyone else on the relative merits of taffetas and silks and brocades. Under the strain of these considerations the bishop’s wife developed a nervous diarrhoea, and on this subject too Juan was in a position to give advice.
Juan would miss Alison and her homely, unaffected friendship. A couple of days after the wedding she and Chris flew out to Chris’s home in New Zealand, and Juan returned to his interminable waiting. Sometimes it seemed that his whole life now was filled with waiting: waiting in the queue at the hospital (and no matter what time he made the appointment, no matter how early or how late, they would ensure that he spent most of the afternoon waiting); waiting on the virus that was in him, wondering how it would next announce itself and waiting, despite himself, for the first telltale violet spots; waiting on the Immigration Department, anxious for some finitude, some certainty or decision that would shape the shapeless passage of the days.
Each month we received a newsletter from the GITF. The list of approved applications was lengthening: Erling and Joe; Heike and Heather; Alan and Graeme; Victor and Terence. Why the delay in our case? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that, according to the newsletter, ‘couples where there is a wide age difference and/or cultural backgrounds may expect to undergo an interview’. Was nine years a wide age difference? Did Cuba make us eligible for an interview on the grounds of possible cultural incompatibility, or did New York cancel out our cultural divergence? Or could this delay be accounted for by a continued hunt for evidence of Juan’s subversive Communist connexions?
We wondered how we would handle an interview. I didn’t like the sound of that word ‘undergo’. The newsletter reported that Leon and Bhoy had been grilled for two and a half hours, separately and together. When, where and how had they met? Did they sleep together? What was their previous sexual experience (hetero and homo)? Was their relationship exclusive? Were they exclusively homosexual? Would they ever get married? It was good to be forewarned about the Department’s questions though, as Juan pointed out, it wasn’t terribly helpful if they didn’t tell you what the correct answers were. We guessed, though, from the drift of the questions, that exclusive, pure gay monogamy was what they were likely to reward.
*
If that was what they were looking for, I wonder what they would have made of a letter that was sitting in the drawer of Juan’s sewing desk. I came across it after he died. It was from Ronnie. Many years ago Ronnie had arrived from Israel to make a name on Broadway, and ended by teaching classes in college maths. Somewhere along the way, he met Juan.
New York
June 2, 1984
Dear Michel,
Hope you had a great trip to Australia and arrived safely. I want to wish you a good summer and hopefully you’ll come back in good shape, anyway better than you left.
It’s sad that our relationship had to come to an end on such a sour note, but I guess that’s the way you chose to do it.
It was evident to me for the last two months that you either planned it to upset me, because I didn’t give you enough money, or that you are so disturbed that I hope you’ll seek some kind of psychiatric help. Your absolute refusal to discuss the reasons for your behaviour are puzzling to me. It’s unfortunate that you can’t, or don’t want to verbalize your feelings. Every time I tried to talk to you, you didn’t even want to listen. The TV was always more important.
I really don’t think I deserved that kind of treatment and I am just angry at myself that I didn’t put an end to it when you started your crazy moods. It is really hard to take.
I tried to help you a bit with my limited resources. But you never thought it’s enough. Even our sex life became very monotonous and one-sided. To get a decent kiss out of you was like pulling a tooth, increasing my feeling that you really only wanted to use me. Your friend in Australia is obviously more important to you than I, which is O.K., but you should at least have said so and not act so nastily.
I am writing all that because you never wanted to listen or talk seriously to me. Anyway it’s over now, and I hope for your own sake that you will make an effort to change.
I leave for Calif. in four days.
All the best, yours,
Ronnie
‘It’s an old story,’ I would say to the interviewer if he had confronted me with Ronnie. ‘Look at the date. Two years ago.’ Yes, but what did this letter say about the claim that Juan and I had been through thick and thin together? What did it say about our claim on each other?
Well, I might have said, in a way I knew about Ronnie. There were letters from time to time, and when I asked who Ronnie was, Juan was vague. A friend. So I assumed there was probably some kind of sexual liaison involved. I would have preferred it otherwise. I might have been jealous, even angry, if I had known the details. But it was all very far away, in New York, and I didn’t need to know. As for the sex, gay men have sex with other men all the time. No particular emotions are involved. You might consider that a scandal, or you might think of it as a kind of liberation, but the fact is, that is the way the gay world often works.
Of course this affair with Ronnie was more than a fleeting encounter, and it went on long enough for each of them to hurt the other. I regret that pain, and I’m sorry for Ronnie’s bitterness. He clearly didn’t realise that he was the latest in Juan’s succession of patrons, a successor to the priest and the engineer. There was affection in t
hese relationships, but from Juan’s point of view they were never exclusive, or binding, or passionate. Ronnie didn’t see that. He hoped for more, even when Juan tried to explain. (Why else would he have mentioned me?) They were caught in a tangled web, unable to manage their unequal desires.
If the Immigration authorities had known these things, I suppose they might have said to me, ‘And what makes you think that you are any different from those other men? From Ronnie, and Ernie and the engineer? Why do you imagine he is committed to you?’
To that question I could only have said, ‘Believe me. I know. Trust us.’ What other guarantee could anyone give? ‘Let’s see how things turn out.’
It was six months now since Juan had made his application, and he was nagging me to phone them, just to see how the case was getting on. Thinking of the medical examination that would come at the end of the bureaucratic process, I shrank from hastening the day. In his condition he would never pass the check-up. He was obviously underweight, and though he cheated the hospital weighing machine by wearing a heavy overcoat and a pair of boots, the evidence of his decline was undeniable. Fifty-five kilos, fifty-four, fifty-two. For a couple of weeks his weight would stabilise, and then the process resumed.
At the end of August, when his stomach was not responding to treatment, Dr Wall decided on a gastroscopy. The results, like the results of the colonoscopy six months earlier, were inconclusive. On a sheet of hospital notepaper, Dr Wall stamped a diagram of a stomach that looked like a billabong in a particularly winding river of intestine, and annotated it with the words: ‘No ulcer. No cancer.’ Beside a small patch he had marked on the lower edge of the billabong he wrote: ‘Mild gastritis. The Ulsanic is good for this, so complete the course.’ It sounded such a minor complaint, so manageable that it would have been churlish not to respond to his sensible cheerfulness.
