Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (23 page)

Roger had a glorious time. I have a great picture of him grinning at the camera in his rumpled sailor hat, and there are no qualifications in the evidence. He looks completely well again. Though sleepiness and fever had been dogging him during the Saturdays after the suramin, he was unaffected today, impish and laughing. No wonder they all thought he was out of the woods. He sat by Jaimee, both with their arms folded against the buffeting of the wind, talking close to be heard above the roar of the wake. They looked like brother and sister, no other way to say it—brother slightly older, sister all ears. But perhaps the memory is so vivid because Andrew and Lisa were a microcosm of the same. On the way back the children grew restless, being confined so long in a small place. The two of them bounced around the car as we headed back to Glencoe. Parents and grandparents both were accustomed to the ruckus, but Rog and I wilted like maiden aunts and couldn't wait for a nap.

There were no very sad times in Chicago, though Sunday morning as we dressed for breakfast Roger shook his head and said in simple wonder: "I don't feel young anymore." I of course started to cry, which is rough on an empty stomach. He didn't look old or seem old then. I suppose some of it had to do with visiting his folks, where a man is always slightly out of tune with a vanished child playing in the next room. What made the moment especially hard was to think how boyish Roger had always been. Half the time we were like twelve-year-olds, and the world out there was a sort of field trip. He had the energy and sense of mischief of a seventh grader with all A's, though he also had a sweet tooth for playing hooky. Since I had been such an ancient child myself, gloomy and bookish, the only kid I ever got to be was with him. So when he said his youth was over, two children seemed to disappear into the woods, hand in hand like Hansel and Gretel.

Sunday afternoon we drove into the city with Al and Bernice and took a long walk around the downtown area. Al, who is no fan of L.A., busts with pride about his big-shouldered city. We passed the spot where H & H Restaurant had been, and they laughed about the time Roger managed it for a couple of weeks while his parents were in Europe. Then Al steered us on a tour of the city's sprawl of outdoor sculpture, Nevelson to Dubuffet, showing each piece off as if he were part owner.

During dinner at Jaimee's, Michael took her aside and said, "Why is Paul like a mother hen around Roger?" And later, to me: "There's nothing wrong, is there?"

That night I asked to see the pictures of Roger's bar mitzvah, and Bernice gladly pulled the albums out on the dining room table. I'd never seen him that young before. He had the most unabashed grin in his thirteenth year, and Jaimee in all the flounces of a party dress couldn't hide the tomboy. As we leafed through the mid-fifties, all its catered optimism, there were groups of people scarcely older than Roger and I, arms around each other and grinning at the camera. "He's gone," Bernice said matter-of-factly, pointing at this one and that one, "she's gone, he's gone...."

Monday morning we were off to the airport, proud of the visit, the family content, the Chicago branch at least. Halfway to Boston, I started to cry—

that I had nothing happy to report, that I was only going to have one bad ugly talk after another, that I was so sad and so finished.

But things were easy with my parents right away, due to the fact that there was so much mutual affection between them and Roger. Since we moved to California I had taken to visiting them alone, and without Roger the days in Andover always made me feel as if I'd never escaped. I don't have quite the grown-up relations with my parents that Roger enjoyed with Al and Bernice. I'll take a lot of the heat for that, since I'm not very forgiving about the wrongheaded notions my parents once had about gay, or their anguish at having produced a writer. ("It's fine that you want to write, but what are you going to
do?")

Nevertheless, they are very decent and giving people, plain Yankee folk whose fences make good neighbors. The fly in the ointment for me had always been my mother's Christian fervor, a long-standing matter of locked horns between us. Low Episcopal, we're talking, not snakes and tongues and Tammy Faye. Christ Church in Andover was a fount of liberal outreach, shining with irreproachable convictions, yet my mother's sprinkling of God in every conversation had created a cloying atmosphere from which I kept my distance. All the same, the longer Roger and I were together, the more we healed as a family. It's not an accident, I think, that neither of us came out to our families until we found each other. Alone it is hard to want to face the barrage of clichés, and the closet is so much easier. But you can't go on very long hearing your heart's deepest core called your roommate.

After dinner the first night, Roger went up to rest, and I had a pretty good talk with the parents about AIDS. They were reasonably well informed, though they clearly didn't think it could touch us. Then I broke the news about Cesar, and I could see their assurances falter.

Tuesday I took Roger to Phillips Academy, where I endured the existential acne of high school and later taught for five lambent summers. I took two pictures of Roger on the great lawn in front of the art gallery, the two I keep closest to me now. In both shots his arms are open in a great embrace, and he's laughing with pleasure, the humid green of summer in the elm alley behind him, the sky milky and palpable. We walked from there into the Cochran Bird Sanctuary, a walled enclave like a private forest, where I'd taken a thousand solitary walks as a youth, winter and summer. We made our way to the pond and sat on the stone bridge above a lazy brook fanning its algae. We talked calmly about all we had and how we were doing fine. Then Roger looked up into the trees, and a choke came into his voice: "But what if I die?"

"You're not dead," I retorted passionately, not quite addressing the question, though at the time it seemed the only answer. "We're
here.
We're going to win."

I believed it absolutely then, that we would lead the way. Soon the antiviral news would break, and the hope would come flooding in. We would be there to show the rest how to bear the joy. Now of course I can answer Roger's question in endless sad Keatsian detail, but at that heightened moment I hardly took it in. Mid-August in the sanctuary was the peak of summer, gaudy with life. No wonder the grasshopper laughs at the ant. I've been on the stone bridge only one time since then, about three weeks after Roger died: snow and cold, a sky that smoked like dry ice, and no birds sang.

My parents had arranged to take us to York Harbor in Maine for dinner, a favorite place of theirs on a spit of land at the mouth of the York River. When we arrived I settled Mother and Dad in the restaurant, then Roger and I went out to the beach for a breath of sunset. We walked down into a sort of cove with a rim of summer millionaires, white shingle with green and blue shutters, the opposite of Aegean. Roger stood, feet apart, in the sand, sniffing the sea breeze while I capered down to trail a hand in the water.

When I came back with a smooth gray stone the size of a silver dollar, he was serene with delight. We talked about Proust and his grandmother, the seascape frieze at Balbec. I'd always hated Maine—too cold, too WASP, you blink and the summer's gone—but I had to admit the northern light was exquisite today. Yet I said I could only enjoy it because he was there with me. I didn't particularly mean because he was still alive, rather that I wouldn't have enjoyed it half so much if I'd been with my parents alone. Or worse, all by myself: I'd stood on enough solitary bluffs to last three lifetimes. But Roger's eyes welled with tears at my words, and I wanted to scream with stupidity, because I hadn't meant to make him sad. Yet sunset is so mercurial, it changes in front of your eyes. I remember us leaving the beach laughing, shoulder nudging shoulder as we furthered the larger conspiracy.

Wednesday Roger went into Boston to visit old friends. I had lunch with my aunt Grace, who'd lost her husband about five years before. She said she missed him now more than ever. All afternoon I kept calling Rog in Boston, suddenly feeling trapped again in a small town, neuter as an old schoolteacher. Roger was very emotional. He'd had lunch with Miriam Goodman, a woman he'd known since Brandeis and the poet preceding me in his life, but he didn't tell her. Then he went to Tony Smith's, on Brimmer Street around the corner from our old place on Beacon Hill. Tony taught political science at Tufts and had been one of Roger's best buddies in grad school, the only one who was gay. Tony asked about the pneumonia, but not really very concerned, and Roger tried to be stoic and dismiss it. Something in his voice made Tony turn from the stove, where he was cooking: "But you're all right, aren't you?" Roger shook his head and started to cry.

I wanted to go in then and be with them for the evening; it was only a half hour away. But my mother was having a bad asthma attack after dinner, so I stayed home and waited. I played cribbage with my father to make the time go by, one eye on the clock. Then out of nowhere Alfred called from L.A., telling me CBS wanted to make a deal on a story of ours. My parents were elated, and I mimicked their excitement but felt myself hoarding the good news for Rog. I was only excited about telling him, not about the thing itself. I loved how thrilled he was for me when he got home.

After midnight the two of us sat out alone on the back porch in the ink-green quiet, and I couldn't stop crying. I was just so glad to be with him again; the half-day alone had left me a wreck. Yet the whole trip seemed to release a bottled-up flood of tears, and a thousand things hit me sad. At one point my mother was reminiscing about what a darling baby I was, happy and verbal in the extreme, and all I could think was I couldn't think back that far. I always got stuck around eight or nine, my brother in Springfield with casts on both legs, surrounded by bewildered toys. And then she told me something my grandmother used to say: When the children are safe in bed at night, those are your best years. Packing to leave on Thursday, in the bedroom under the eaves where I'd slept off and on for thirty years, I blubbered to Roger, "I'm crying because our parents can't get us out of this."

The flight home was interminable, rerouted to Canada because of thunderstorms, which meant we ran out of fuel and had to pit-stop in Vegas. During two hours on the tarmac with no air-conditioning, I could practically smell the germs as the sealed air thickened and choked. We were due in at seven and got back at eleven, but made it to the CRC next morning for Dose 13. And heard that Appleton wasn't feeling well that day, so it was decided he wouldn't come in. To miss a dose of the precious liquor was simply unheard of. It seemed immoral to let that bed go empty, but if you're racked with diarrhea what are you going to do? It remained unspoken whether or not the suramin could be causing it. And week by week, as Appleton stayed out sick, I grew more and more pissed off that he was screwing up the curve.

Against all that there was Brace's optimism, as he would tell in exquisite detail about his appointments at the CRC, not realizing I knew the place far better than he. At this point they hired on a nurse-practitioner, Suzette Chaffey, to oversee the study. There was endless gossip among us moonfolk about this perky lady. She had spent time abroad as a child and worked in Switzerland, as I recall, so she had about her a European savvy that Roger and I found irresistible. Besides, she was somebody new to tumble out all our Ancient Mariner tales of fevers and flagged hours. Since she would ultimately come to oversee AZT as well, we were to travel a long road with Suzette.

Joel called in mid-August from Santa Fe to say that Leo was doing terrifically well. They were living high in a piñon forest above the city and had become vegetarians. Leo had had the good fortune to be accepted into the suramin study at another hospital in L.A., so he would be flying up every week for a dose. It was clear that Joel would not be accompanying him. In the most offhanded way, during this Pollyanna blizzard of good cheer, Joel happened to say he was negative—meaning he didn't have the virus.

Here it gets very subtle, because the fiction is spun as fine as Scheherazade. "You know, Leo and I never fucked each other," he said. "In fact we never had much sex at all." I thought: He's getting ready to split and wants to look clean for the next one. A man on the make has to set the record straight.

There is such infinite variety about the way people tell you their negative status. Some are openly full of remorse and feel they have failed you. A man I've never met wrote me after an interview I gave about my antibody status:

When my test came back negative last month, I was overwhelmed with a sadness I hadn't expected. Coming back alive is a guilt, a terrible betrayal, a necessary starting point.

Some hoot with excitement and forget you might not be as thrilled as they. I have friends who will not be tested at all because they know how shamefully glad they'll be. Their gut instinct is they're negative, so who are they trying to kid? They are always the first to tell you to stop being so AIDS-related.
Lighten up
, they say.

My own consistent opinion is selfish enough and sounds suspiciously Orange County. I want the two million—or the five million, depending on whose scenario piques your fancy—to have themselves tested and know, so I will have people to talk to. Because after midnight and during weekends I cannot talk to those who play at business as usual. I want to tap into the rage of the positives so we can throw buckets of sheep's blood on the White House lawn and spit in the faces of cops with yellow gloves.

How tired was Roger on Fridays? It's very difficult to assess, because that was the focus of our denial now. Appleton's weeks of diarrhea were something apart and ARC-related. The continuing cautions of Craig's researcher friend in Houston didn't somehow translate to the safe haven that looked out on the banyan tree. The sample was so minimal, after all, with only a hundred or so on suramin protocols throughout the country. Peter Wolfe was too busy now to be spending his mornings with the Friday club, and Suzette didn't seem to be privy to the latest data. Mostly we tried not to worry about the drug, because we had enough to worry about the disease.