Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (2 page)

Cesar wasn't lucky in matters of the heart. He was still in the closet during his years back east, and the move to San Francisco was an extraordinary rite of passage for him. He always wanted a great love, but the couple of relationships he'd been involved in scarcely left the station. Still, he was very proud and indulged in no self-pity. He learned to accept the limited terms of the once-a-week relations he found in San Francisco, and broke through to the freedom of his own manhood without the mythic partner. The open sexual exultation that marked San Francisco in those days was something he rejoiced in.

Yet even though he went to the baths a couple of times a week, Cesar wasn't into anything
weird
—or that's how I might have put it at that stage of my own denial. No hepatitis, no history of VD, built tall and fierce—of course he was safe. The profile of AIDS continued to be mostly a matter of shadows. The L.A.
Times
wasn't covering it, though by then I had come to learn how embattled things had grown in New York. The Gay Men's Health Crisis was up to its ears in clients; Larry Kramer was screaming at the mayor; and the body count was appearing weekly in the
Native.
A writer I knew slightly was walking around with Kaposi's sarcoma. A young composer kept getting sicker and sicker, though he stubbornly didn't fit the CDC's hopelessly narrow categories, so that case was still officially a toss-up. And again, we're talking New York.

I came home at six on the evening of the first, and Roger met me gravely at the door. "There's a message from Cesar," he said. "It's not good."

Numbly I played back the answering machine, where so much appalling misery would be left on tape over the years to come, as if a record were crying out to be kept. "I have a little bit of bad news." Cesar's voice sounded strained, almost embarrassed. He left no details. I called and called him throughout the evening, convinced I was about to hear cancer news. The lymph nodes, of course—a hypochondriac knows all there is to know about the sites of malignancy. Already I was figuring what the treatments might be; no question in my mind but that it was treatable. I had Cesar practically cured by the time I reached Tom, a friend and former student of his. But as usual with me in crisis, I was jabbering and wouldn't let Tom get a word in. Finally he broke through: "He's got it."

"Got what?"

It's not till you first hear it attached to someone you love that you realize how little you know about it. My mind went utterly blank. The carefully constructed wall collapsed as if a 7.5 quake had rumbled under it. At that point I didn't even know the difference between KS and the opportunistic infections. I kept picturing that swollen gland in his groin, thinking: What's
that
got to do with AIDS? And a parallel track in my mind began careening with another thought: the swollen glands in my own groin, always dismissed by my straight doctor as herpes-related and "not a significant sign."

"We're not going to die young," Cesar used to say with a wag of his finger, his black Latin eyes dancing. "We won't get out of it
that
easily!" Then he would laugh and clap his hands, downing the coffee he always took with cream and four sugars. It looked like pudding.

I reached him very late that night and mouthed again the same words I'd said so bravely two days before: We'll deal with it. There is no end to the litany of reassurance that springs to your lips to ward away the specter. They've caught it early; you're fine; there's got to be some kind of treatment. That old chestnut, the imminent breakthrough. You fling these phrases instinctively, like pennies down a well. Cesar and I bent backward to calm each other. It was just a couple of lesions in the groin; you could hardly see them. And the reason everything was going to be all right was really very simple: We would fight this thing like demons.

But the hollowness and disbelief pursued Roger and me all the way up the gold coast. Big Sur was towering and bracing as ever—exalted as Homer's Ithaca, as Robinson Jeffers described it. We were staying at Ventana, the lavish inn high in the hills above the canyon of the Big Sur River. We used the inn as a base camp for our daylong hikes, returning in the evening to posh amenities worthy of an Edwardian big-game hunt. On the second morning we walked out to Andrew Molera Beach, where the Big Sur empties into the Pacific. Molera stretches unblemished for five miles down the coast, curving like a crescent moon, with weathered headlands clean as Scotland. It was a kind of holy place for Roger and me, like the yearly end of a quest.

"What if we got it?" I said, staring out at the otters belly up in the kelp beds, taking the sun.

I don't remember how we answered that, because of course there wasn't any answer. Merely to pose the question was by way of another shot at magic. Mention the unmentionable and it will go away, like shining a light around a child's bedroom to shoo the monster. The great ache we were feeling at that moment was for our stricken friend, and we were too ignorant still to envision the medieval tortures that might await him.

But I know that the roll of pictures I took that day was my first conscious memorializing of Roger and me, as if I could hold the present as security on the future. There's one of me on the beach, then a mirror image of him as we traded off the camera, both of us squinting in the clear autumn light with the river mouth behind. Back at the inn, I took a picture of Rog in a rope hammock, his blue eyes resting on me as if the camera weren't even there, in total equilibrium, nine years to the day since our paths crossed on Revere Street. His lips are barely curved in a quarter-smile, his hands at rest in his lap as the last wave of the westering sun washes his left side through the diamond weave of the rope.

How do I speak of the person who was my life's best reason? The most completely unpretentious man I ever met, modest and decent to such a degree that he seemed to release what was most real in everyone he knew. It was always a relief to be with Roger, not to have to play any games at all. By a safe mile he was the least flashy of all our bright circle of friends, but he spoke about books and the wide world he had journeyed with huge conviction and a hunger to know everything.

He had a contagious, impish sense of humor, especially about the folly of things, especially self-importance. Yet he was blissfully unfrivolous, without a clue as to what was "in." He had thought life through somehow and come out the other side with a proper respect for small pleasures. "
Quelle bonne soirée
," as Madeleine once exclaimed after dinner one night with us in Les Halles, a bistro called Pig's Foot. Wonderful evenings were second nature to us by then, with long walks at the end, especially when we traveled. Days we spent cavorting through museums, drunk on old things, like ten-year-olds loose in a castle. Roger loved nothing better than a one-on-one talk with a friend, and he had never lost track of a single one, all the way back to high school. The luck of the draw was mine, for I was the best and the most.

We met on the eve of Labor Day in 1974, at a dinner party at a mutual friend's apartment on Beacon Hill, just two days before Roger was to start work as an attorney at a stately firm in Boston. He was thirty-two; I was twenty-eight. Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slant of yellow light, and I for one was in love before the night was done. I suppose we'd been waiting for each other all our lives. The business of coming out had been difficult for both of us, partly because of the closet nature of all relations in a Puritan town like Boston, partly because we were both so sure of what we wanted and it kept not coming to life.

"Spain!" Roger writes in his diary in 1959, after three days' hitchhike from Paris to Madrid. "If only I had a friend!"

For if there was no man out there who was equal and simpatico, then what was the point of being gay? The baggage and the shit you had to take were bad enough. But it all jogged into place when we met, everything I'd brooded over from the ancient Greeks to Whitman. It all ceased to be literary. My life was a sort of amnesia till then, longing for something that couldn't be true until I'd found the rest of me. Is that feeling so different in straight people? Or is it that gay people have to keep it secret and so grow divided, with a bachelor's face to the world and a pang like dying inside?

The reason he got such a late start as a lawyer was that Roger lived a whole other life first. During his freshman year at Harvard Law he was simultaneously writing his dissertation for a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. That work grew out of a decade of Europe and books, the bohemian ramble, complete with beret in one black-and-white of the period. A month before he was diagnosed, we saw a production of Philip Barry's
Holiday
, and Roger laughed on the way out, saying he'd done exactly what Barry's hero longed to do—retire at the age of twenty.

He left Brandeis after his freshman year and went straight to Paris, where he worked as a waiter and flirted with being a poet. The
patronne
of Restaurant Papille was Madeleine Follain, a painter by vocation, the daughter of Maurice Denis and wife of the poet Jean Follain. Roger reveled in all that passionate life of art, and the journal of his nineteenth year, two hundred close-typed pages, burns with the search for the perfect feeling and the words to speak it. When he finally graduated from Brandeis, he returned to Paris for two more years, working at Larousse and Gallimard. Then he took a long sojourn in the Middle East, where his aunt was married to an Israeli diplomat. Once he wandered for weeks through Ethiopia, eating goat around village fires, walking up-country to the monastic caves at Lalibala, till even the guide lagged back for fear of bandits.

Then in 1965 he packed in at Harvard's Widener Library, reading French, reading everything really, till he finally concentrated on the novels of Henri Thomas. He was senior tutor in Dudley House and took his meals at a co-op on Sacramento Street, a chaotic Queen

Anne tenement bursting with Harvard and Radcliffe students, all at full throttle. Roger used to look back on those years at graduate school with a sort of amazement: to think that life could clear you a space to just sit and read! How he savored Harvard, the elm alleys and the musty bookstores, this place that had turned him down at seventeen and left him crying on the stoop of his parents' three-decker in Chicago.

Whereas I had fumbled my way through Andover on a scholarship, too dazed to do much thinking in the thick of an atmosphere that felt as exotic to me as Brideshead. Yet I breezed into Harvard and Yale on half Roger's intellect, with whole hockey squads of my privileged classmates. Four years later I had neither the analytic cast of mind nor the stamina for graduate work. I made a half-wit decision to be a poet—that was the good half—without preparing any sort of career cushion. I ended up teaching at a prep school out of Boston, with the sinking feeling that I had
become
one of the privileges of the upper classes.

But I wrote my poems and papered the East with them. My particular Left Bank was Cambridge in the early seventies, where poets passed through in caravan, some in sedan chairs, some like an underground railway. Parties in Cambridge had totems in every corner—Lowell, Miss Bishop, I. A. Richards ("Is
he
still alive?"), visiting constellations rare as Borges.

In 1974 I was waiting for my first book of poems to come out and generally going about feeling heavily crowned with laurel. Yet the poems seethe with loneliness, the love that dared not speak its name like a stranglehold on the heart. Roger had just completed a year working in public television for a show called
The Advocates
, where bloody Sunday issues were debated hotly by brainy types. The show Roger was proudest of was about gay marriages. He'd been instrumental in pulling the brains together and airing a wildly controversial notion—single all the while, of course.

We weren't kids anymore. We'd been hurting dull as a toothache for years. When we came together as lovers we knew precisely how happy we were. I only realized then that I'd never had someone to play with before.
There
was a lost time that wanted making up in spades. Six weeks before Roger died, he looked over at me astonished one day in the hospital, eyes dim with the gathering blindness. "But we're the same person," he said in a sort of bewildered delight. "When did that happen?"

I related those two lines to my friend Craig (diagnosed 3/2/85) this past Christmas, and he laughed: "But that's what
you
always used to say in Boston. Roger and you were just two names for the same person." Something I don't remember saying, but clearly it was a collaborative theory of ours, rather like the Curies' twin Nobel.

My recollection of the first year of Cesar's illness is in constant swing, a plumb line describing parabolas in sand. He was down to stay over Thanksgiving break, then for a week at Christmas, and it was those visits that brought home at last the physical reality. The biopsy in his groin had left a wound that never healed, not in the whole twenty-six months of his illness. Small black-purple lesions were clustered at the site, and the leg was slightly swollen with edema, though still there was nothing noticeable, not in his general demeanor.

Yet why was he so tired on Christmas morning that he couldn't go with us to Roger's brother's house for breakfast? It is very hard to separate symptoms and degrees of illness anymore. The dozens of cases I've followed since then have blurred the boundaries. Besides, the particular indignities of AIDS are so grotesque, like that endlessly swelling leg, that the general aura of fatigue and accelerated aging are much more difficult to pin down. But the decision to stay home and rest on Christmas morning was a kind of watershed, as if for the first time the illness had moved to hold Cesar back from life.

The emotional roller coaster was in full operation by now, because I know how happy Roger and I were in mid-November, when we stole away for ten days to Paris and Tuscany. I'm sure now that was a conscious decision too, concrete as the roll of sunset pictures from Big Sur. With Cesar sick, a new note of urgency had crept unspoken into our lives. The edge of the minefield is fairly common ground these days among gay men, and many speak openly of doing what they've always wanted
now
—this month, this summer, before they're forty. Neither of us had ever been to Italy in the fall, so what were we waiting for?