Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (26 page)

On September 28 we had dinner with the Perloffs and Susan and Robbert in an oddball Polish restaurant, to celebrate Marjorie's birthday, and we were all very merry. I look back on those early-autumn evenings and want to set them down defiantly as evidence of how stable things had grown. Among the shifting veils of magic, this one takes its power from the belief that every lighthearted occasion was proof we had come back to life for good. The full Cinderella version of this illusion was a party being planned by Sheldon for my fortieth birthday. Invitations had gone out to fifty people—Saturday, October 19, black tie, no gifts, to be catered by Trumps. There had been a certain tug-of-war between Sheldon and me about the guest list. He wanted more movie people and power types, while I wanted friends who would find it a hoot to attend a big deal in the ice palace at the top of Bel-Air. Still, I was touched that Sheldon had followed up on his casual offer months before of a party. I even managed a strained laugh at the dark humor of his subsequent remark to Roger.

"How old are
you
going to be this year?" asked Sheldon. "Forty-four? Well, we'll have one for you on your forty-fifth—if you're still here."

October began hot, shimmering with smog. On Wednesday, the second, Rock Hudson died, about four weeks after his shy and unadorned statement was read at the first AIDS Project Commitment to Life dinner. His death had been imminent all summer, but still it was one of those shocks that said no matter how much money you had, how quality the care, the virus had its own grim timetable. Sheldon called Roger with the Hudson news, and Roger groaned as if a friend had passed away. That same day Bruce phoned to announce a horrific statistic that would soon crop up as gospel in worst-case news accounts. Typically those who'd broken through with PCP lived an average of thirty weeks following diagnosis. Roger had been diagnosed twenty-seven weeks before. We said all the usual things
—
that the figures had their base in the early years, when so many died at the first onslaught, that IV drug abusers died quicker because they started weaker—but the number thirty burned like sulfur on the white October air.

Then Cesar called from San Francisco to say he was back in the hospital. The cough that had worsened through the summer, the breathlessness as he made his way to outpatient for chemo—he'd finally hit the wall. Yet at first it didn't appear he'd been admitted for PCP. From the sketchy picture he gave me, always trying to minimize, it was his tree stump of a leg that had finally gotten critical. For a week or so it was just a minor hospitalization—for tests, for observation, nothing dire—and Cesar and I talked inanely about what a lovely hospital it was. Nice rooms, nice nurses, all very nice.

On Saturday, October 5, Dose 20, we took it easy and went over to Sheldon's to discuss the birthday menu. Veal chops, we decided. That night we had tickets to an opening at the County Museum for the Cone collection of modern art, and as usual these days I'd crossed it off the calendar because I didn't want us in a crowd. But after supper that evening on the terrace it was wonderfully balmy, with Santa Ana winds, which always either electrify or jangle. On a sudden impulse, we rushed to the museum to see if the crowd had thinned by 9
P.M.
When we got there we had the place virtually to ourselves and cavorted among the boiling Matisses, grinning with delight and dragging each other excitedly from canvas to canvas. The attendant documentary material, lush with Left Bank trivia, evoked irresistibly the Paris of the perfect feeling.

The Cone opening is my trump card, my high ace. For Roger was fine that night, completely fine, no illusion. What I hadn't learned yet was the hairline disparity between being fine and being secure. There was the wedge where the nightmare incubated. When we got home from the museum we lay in bed listening to the swirling of the wind in the trees. I called Craig in New York, and he happened to be in a terrific mood himself. He'd met a psychologist during the summer, and things had flowered in the weeks since Craig got back from California. Craig and I laughed carelessly, startled by our own good humor, as if we might have to pinch ourselves before the night was done. Sometimes you manage to bring off a moment so astonishing you can't even say how you did it. You even pretend you can do it again.

Next morning Roger and I went down to Pennyfeathers for a late breakfast of pancakes. We were reading the Sunday paper, Roger leafing through the "Calendar" section, when suddenly his face crumpled. "Oh, no." I looked at him. "John Allison's dead."

There was a picture of John, his smile a Shakespearean imp's, and a moving obit by theater critic Sylvie Drake. She spoke of a call from John during the summer, when he'd said, "I'm in the last stages of AIDS." My emotions were all chaotic—what did he mean by
last?—
but everything fell into place now. That odd talk about giving it all up and going away. What had been his final vague excuse about not going forward with my play? We'll put it off till the fall, he'd said. And Roger and I were so busy with suramin and staying alive that I hadn't ever got back to him. In theater you have to get back to people, keep the energy up. Though we had scarcely known him, we were both blown away by the news. John represented the felicity of life before the moon, as Roger and I recalled the lunch at Trumps, a year ago almost to the day. At the end of my play, when the boy Tom leaves Julian—Joel is Tom, I am Julian—he asks: "Does it all go too fast?"

"You mean life?" says Julian. "Just the summers."

But where were the symptoms? What was the red flag? All we did was come back for a quiet Sunday, brooding on too many deaths, worrying about Cesar. Monday we went right back to work. I kept an appointment at Paramount, though the only note I have from the meeting is a scribble about John Allison's death. So what was it sent us over to UCLA on Tuesday morning? I can't remember. A fever, I suppose, or the cough in the throat, but nothing out of the ordinary. If the doom was very intense, colliding like ions in the heat-swollen sky, it was only because of all the bad news the previous week. It wasn't us.

Cope must have ordered a blood-gas test, and the oxygen level must have been low, so they decided to admit him for a bronc. Within twelve hours we knew the Pneumocystis was back. But all I remember anymore is the bewildering shift of seasons, from laughing among the Matisses Saturday night to the fever three days later and Roger overwhelmed. And they took him off suramin. When we pleaded for them to give it back, they said not while he was on Pentamidine. I remember Gottlieb coming up to me in the fourth-floor corridor. We hadn't bothered to check into the penthouse, thinking we'd be in and out. "I want you to know," said Gottlieb gravely, "we'll do absolutely everything we can." He meant to comfort me, but I just kept beating myself:
How did it get so bad so fast? What did we do wrong?

Even though I know now that the drug had turned on Roger, I still can't understand how we could have had no warning. Hope had left us so unprepared. We had grown so grateful for little things. Out of nowhere you go from light to dark, from winning to losing, go to sleep murmuring thanks and wake to an endless siren. The honeymoon was over, that much was clear. Now we would learn to borrow time in earnest, day by day, making what brief stays we could against the downward spiral from which all our wasted brothers did not return.

Once more Sheldon was there before the night was out, and again he played the single-issue politician:
Don't tell the parents.
I was still trying to find out how the infection could have got past the suramin. I'd made contact with all my antiviral sources, sending an SOS to some, to others a warning. Casualty on the front lines. I was only half there when Sheldon was purring reassurance. No big deal, he said, we already knew the procedure. Get the infection taken care of, and then back to work. The secret was intact; why bother two old people in Chicago when they'd managed to live in ignorance so far?

Roger nodded passively, too sick from all the tests to argue, gearing up for another siege of medication. When I tried to raise the issue that we seemed to have a magic-bullet problem here, and maybe it was time to go after Compound S, Sheldon changed the subject to my birthday dinner, only ten days away. Since the doctors were saying Roger would probably be home by then, there was no reason not to proceed on schedule. It was such a seductive idea, to think we could still breeze in in tuxes and put the calamity on hold. I thought of Bruce at the Oscars in March, nominated for
The Natural,
a moment of tonic gaudiness between the first lesion and the Pneumocystis. And here we were, agreeing again to the lie of normalcy and holding out for veal chops.

As to the burden of the secret, it wasn't Roger's parents I was worried about right now. I felt dread enough of hitting my parents with the news, assaulted as they were by the complications of my mother's emphysema. Indeed, we had all we could do, in the wake of the nightmare, to preserve our own dignity about being gay. I don't think we knew what to do yet with our parents' hard-won acceptance, the sense they'd had to overcome that being gay was a kind of doom. So the secret wasn't all Sheldon's idea, even now. We'd protect the parents as long as we could.

But I simply couldn't go on smiling at our friends and coasting along as if nothing were wrong. I couldn't face Alfred in the mornings, or all the calls that were pouring in about the party. I phoned Richard Ide in Washington; he was there for a term's sabbatical and bunking with a mutual friend. I had to banter inanely in order to get to Richard, who in turn was required to speak in coded monosyllables. It just couldn't continue this way or we'd go mad—though now was hardly the time to discuss it. Roger wasn't up to talking to anyone new, and especially kept his distance from the fuss of easy sympathy. I recall how we both looked grimly around at the flowers that had welcomed him home from the
last
hospitalization. "What is this," said Rog with wry dismay, "a funeral?"

But if he didn't need reinforcements, I plainly did. I was berserk, and it was coming out as anger. One afternoon in the underground garage beneath the city of pain, the Jaguar locked in gear again. I came racing up to use the phone in Roger's room, ranting as I dialed and then screaming at the dealer in a sort of free fall of rage. It was a reaction that would soon become a reflex, at every little thing that went wrong in the world of errands and customer service. Pure displacement: I was angry at Roger for being sick.

And it wasn't even being safely funneled off, since Roger had to lie there weak and fevered and listen to the Jaguar rant. "Please, I can't handle all this upheaval," he begged me.

I only wish the yelling had calmed me down, but it didn't. A day or two later he had a call from Tony Smith in Boston, and managed to rise above the fever and nausea to have a quiet talk with his friend. Somehow it made me jealous. I couldn't talk to anyone that way now, not in a state of emergency. I don't know what it was I did just then—nagged him to get off the phone, started wailing or getting frantic—but he hung up and turned and shrieked at me. "You can't take it! You just can't take it, can you?"

In eleven years he'd never yelled like that, and this in spite of a lung infection that often left him too exhausted to talk. But he was right; I was going over the edge again. What good was I going to be to either of us if I couldn't take it? And if I couldn't take it now, how would I ever see it through? The savage disdain and loneliness in his cry were as sobering a challenge as either of us ever made.
Don't leave me,
Roger had pleaded with me back in '81, in the aftermath of Joel, when it seemed I didn't know what I wanted anymore. At the time an embrace and a promise were half enough to reassure him; time and a little growing had done the rest. Now I was being asked for much more. Falling apart would just not do.

The first thing I did was tell the truth to Alfred, who sobbed in the Jeep and kept asking what he could do. Nothing, I said, but I knew what I wanted. We'd have to pull back now on work, since I wouldn't be caring about the two deadlines, at CBS and Warner Brothers. There would be no more hungering after career or catering to the hustle of Hollywood. Alfred tried in the weeks ahead to address this issue, suggesting that I had to keep working to keep my sanity. None of it mattered if Roger died, I replied, and when he tried to exhort that I must survive even if Roger
did
die, I distanced myself from him completely. In any case, all I felt like doing, besides keeping watch at Roger's bed and charming a whole new set of nurses, was making my endless phone calls about what had gone wrong with suramin and where the fuck was Compound S. The doctors were being very precise about the current infection, making no connection with the antiviral.

And then, on the third day in the hospital, Peter Wolfe and his colleague David Hardy came whipping into Roger's room. Brace Weintraub, they said, had just been admitted to a room three doors down the hall. It was extraordinarily sensitive of the two immunologists to care about our secret so. Perhaps because they were near our age, they understood how a young man fights to keep control of the options, for the young still cling to the illusion that their bodies are their own business. Hardy and Wolfe also knew how virulent the gossip could be; both had patients who'd lost their jobs, their friends and their reason. We knew how many familiar faces would be visiting Bruce, back and forth in the corridor. So as sick as Roger was that day, we decided it was time to move to the tenth floor. Since it couldn't be arranged till the next morning, we peeled Roger's name tag off the door, and whenever I left the room I checked to see if the coast was clear.