Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (39 page)

As each test came back clear I was more and more certain we'd pull him through, even as the temperature would swing to 103 or 104, followed by a typhoon sweat. The nurse had to monitor him almost constantly, and for the first time we engaged a private duty nurse to stay with him during the night. We didn't want him lying there chill with sweat and no one to change him, waiting for a floor nurse to make her rounds at night. I didn't realize just how frightened Al and Bernice were, or how off the wall was Sheldon's Malibu perception of it all. I only heard it afterwards, but on that second day he drove in from the beach, cased the situation in Roger's room, then took the parents downstairs to the cafeteria and broke it to them. "This is the end," he said. "You have to prepare yourselves."

His worst-case prognostication didn't tumble out till later that night, when Cope was in and the crisis seemed to be turning. Roger was sleeping comfortably as Cope told the parents all the tests were negative. Rog was going to be all right. Al started to shake with relief and said: "We thought he was going today. Our hearts are breaking, Doctor. Not just for him but for this boy too." And he pointed at me across the bed. I demurred and assured him I was fine. All I cared about was that we'd come through. No need for any broken hearts.

I think Rog was in for five or six days that time. I'd stay till 1
A.M.
and talk to him while I changed his sweat-soaked gown, sometimes every hour at night. With the fever broken, he'd feel more comfortable. Then he'd perk up to have me there, and we'd fall into our private ironic shorthand. That's why the night sweats never scared me much, because I could see how hard the body fought, kicking free of the viral quicksand. And when the sweating was done with, there he'd be. I remember bringing him home on a Saturday morning, up through the back gate into the garden. He was choked with pleasure to see it again, even partially and dimly. For a while all he wanted to do was sit there and absorb it, the breeze and the smell of gardenia, the dog lying beside him, paws over the lip of the pool.

Then began our best reprieve, most of the month of June. Of course we still had a fair amount of checking in to do. Twice a week we'd have to go to UCLA to have the blood drawn and visit the pharmacy.

Everyone in the clinics knew Roger and me: we'd been in and out of there for a year and a half. And these people have a real connoisseur's appreciation of the fine points of war and the way men fight it. Even on bad days we tried to be up for them, the receptionists and technicians, for their morale was as much at stake as ours, and we had to help each other. The man who drew the blood at noon was Tonio, an unruffled Filipino who was as plainspoken as Rog. When he'd lean over to prick Roger's skin, they would talk quietly to each other, close as brother monks. Tonio was gay, as was a goodly percent of the hospital staff. Since the plague they had been laboring under an extra load of burnout, though their sympathy and compassion never seemed to fail.

Then once a week we'd have to go see Kreiger. The infection stayed in check, and the millimeters held. Kreiger was pleased by the progress of Roger's vision, though it wasn't ever fast enough for us. Dr. Martin came to the house on Wednesday afternoons for the fifty-minute hour. Meanwhile Dennis the attendant was a necessary figure in Roger's everyday life now. He'd help Rog get up and dressed in the morning, serve him breakfast, massage his legs, sit with him by the phone dialing Roger's business calls. Dennis made it possible for Roger to gather himself and spend his liveliest hours in full command of his battered resources.

And thus we had our own good time together—quality time, we call it in the mortal department, just as in the parental department. Always at midday for an hour, once I got going and before I'd meet with Alfred. Then again in the late afternoon, reading or out for a walk in the canyon. Then dinner and afterwards calling around to the family, and late at night the islands of time at
1
or
2 A.M
., when he'd wake up and want to talk. Once we even called Jerusalem in the middle of the night, to wish Rita happy birthday.

Besides which it was summer, and Roger got back in the pool again. At four or four-thirty, with the white sun streaking through the elm trees, he'd do maybe fifteen or twenty laps. Especially if the two of us were swimming at the same time, we were suspended from all the misery, twinned and afloat as we'd been in the dolphin blue of the Aegean. Quality indeed. It must have been around then that Roger said, with a pained wistfulness, "If only it could stay like this for a while." A while is the kind of modest goal you spend your life searching for.

After midnight, during the hours when I used to sit and work, I'd be cleaning drawers and closets, tossing out masses of irrelevant clutter. When I worriedly complained to Sam that I felt as if I were throwing away the remains of people who'd died, he said it was entirely appropriate to clean out all the excess in one's fortieth year. The more I tossed, the more I felt I was following Thoreau's triple command:
simplify, simplify, simplify.
I remember going through drawers in the bathroom and finding Roger's contact lenses in their case. I realized he wouldn't ever be wearing them again, but was afraid to throw them away too, lest I discard the hope that held his vision. Two or three days later I finally steeled myself and stuffed the lens case in the trash, but guiltily, mentioning it to no one. And once I'd got rid of the lenses I combed the bathroom for every bottle of lens solution and all the eye paraphernalia that used to be so casually a part of Roger's kit. I also recalled a moment from ten years before: finding a card in his wallet not long after we met, which said, "In case of accident I am wearing contact lenses." Even back then I'd started to weep with dread, when nothing at all ever went wrong.

The closed-circuit televisions of the kind we'd seen at the Center were a couple of thousand dollars. Sometimes one would come in secondhand, but there was a long waiting list for these. By now Roger had come to grips with and compensated for much of the narrow bound of his vision, but the business of being unable to read was terribly galling. We were still waffling about investing in a TV of our own when Roger had a call one afternoon from Susan Kirkpatrick, an old friend from Comp Lit days who taught at UC San Diego. By coincidence, a great-aunt of Susan's, recently deceased, had used exactly the kind of unit we needed, and it was gathering dust in Susan's attic. Her husband was on his way up to L.A. for a biology conference the next week, so he would drop it off.

We set it up on a table in the brightest corner of the living room and began to play with its knobs and dials. I was so stupid about the closed circuit that the first few times I switched it on I tried to turn the volume up, when all it was designed to do was stare at a page and magnify it. Unfortunately, Roger was the only one in the household who could have made sense of the thing, but all he could do was squint at the blurred and tilted picture and tell us it wasn't coming through. We finally got it centered and focused right so he could read individual words, yet I remember countless occasions when he'd sit down and struggle unsuccessfully to make it render whole sentences. There was something wrong with the contrast, and the periphery of the screen was blank. I don't know why it took us so long—I only know I feel guilty about it—but it wasn't till late in the summer that we finally got hold of the proper serviceman. And by the time it was fixed Roger was gone, so all it ever really did for us was stand as a symbol of what might yet be given back, just slightly out of reach. After Roger died I arranged to have it donated to the Center in his and Susan's names, because I knew about that waiting list. "This will mean that someone can finish school," I remember Joey telling me.

June was rife with visitors from out of town, and if they were coming to say good-bye they kept it to themselves. To us it was all serendipitous. Richard Howard and his friend David Alexander, a painter, came out from New York on the way to comfort a friend in San Francisco, who'd lost his lover after a long fight. Richard read aloud to Rog a new poem, as well as a witty essay on baldness and a graceful obit for Jean Genet. We spent two lively evenings talking, and Richard was especially eloquent about Susan Sontag's
Illness as Metaphor
—a bracing caution about the scapegoating and self-blame that attach to certain diseases. We were all being assaulted now with the verbiage of self-help guerrillas who said gay men had brought AIDS on themselves. "I'm taking a course in miracles," as one West Hollywood airhead shared with me on the phone one night. "People pick their own diseases," he said, bragging that his lesions had faded to inconsequence.

Sally Jackson, a woman I once roomed with in Cambridge, was in town on business and called out of the blue. "So how are you guys?" she asked enthusiastically, and then sat silent while I told her the whole terrible story. She was one of those people back east who hadn't heard Roger was sick, and now she came by and made us laugh, leaving in her wake volumes of material on imaging and healing, and orders to eat brown rice. None of which managed to annoy me, because she was so dear. Perhaps, when it comes to the self-help business, it's all a matter of the source. We'd had no problem learning imagery from Rita, and in fact we did eat more brown rice as the summer lengthened. But nobody picks his own disease—except, perhaps, the more rabid religions.

I also remember Sally telling me over lunch that I wasn't going to get sick. Usually this bit of cold comfort made me quiver with rage, but I could see how she longed to make it all better somehow. The more I heard it the more I understood it as a need people had to believe the disease would stop somewhere—to save me if they couldn't save Roger. I try not to be offended by it anymore, and some dark side of me that lives under a rock presumably hungers for the assurance. Mostly it seems a necessary lie people tell so they won't go mad from the horrors of war.

The visit Rog took greatest joy in during the good month was from Peter Metcalf, an old buddy from Harvard who taught anthropology at UVa. Peter was born Cockney, grew up in New Zealand, and lived in Borneo once for a couple of years to study a Stone Age tribe. He arrived in L.A. when Roger was feeling most energized, when his vision had clarified to the highest degree it reached after the operation—maybe thirty percent of the left eye. Peter was an inexhaustibly antic man—"The only thing I ever wanted to grow up and be was a pirate"—and he and Roger reveled in old jokes and caricatures. Because he was also handy, we steered Peter around to various things that were falling apart in the house, which he fixed with dispatch. A girlfriend of his who taught anthro at an Ivy League school had told Peter that eight members of her department, grad students and faculty both, had AIDS.

Peter was troubled to see the goldfish struggling for breath in his spherical bowl, and he announced that we must go get Schwartz a proper circulation pump. For some time I had been operating on the theory that Schwartz had to fend for himself. I cleaned his bowl once a week and fed him his dead flies, but that was about as far as I'd go. So it was truly an otherworldly errand to go to the tropical-fish mart, whence Schwartz himself had come, for a pump and a bigger tank. Peter busily set up the new pet exhibit, and now Schwartz swam around the tank with delirious energy. Within a week his gold had come back shiny again. This mattered because Roger could see Schwartz through most of the summer if he peered close to the glass.

Peter also went with me to buy big-watted bulbs, which we screwed in all the lamps and overhead sockets where Roger sat at night. But the moment that clutches at me still happened the next afternoon, when the three of us drove up to Laurel Canyon Park to run the dog. There had been a great storm of protest at the park over the issue of leashing dogs. A few years earlier the dog people had reclaimed the park from bikers and druggies, so they figured their dogs had dibs. The county disagreed, and you couldn't go to the park without confronting a barrage of canine agitprop and petitions to sign.

We'd been telling the park saga to Peter, and when we got there he took Roger's arm as we headed out onto the knoll. There was a sudden ruckus of leashless dogs, and Peter turned to look at them, for a moment letting go of Roger. Peter and I were watching the dogs, and Roger walked into a tree branch, which poked his forehead—didn't break the skin, but he cried out, startled. Peter and I spun around in dismay, to see Rog clutching his head. A couple of people who didn't understand there was blindness here started laughing. The sharp end of the branch had poked not two inches above the eye we'd been fighting three months to save. From then on I would tell myself over and over, whenever I walked with Rog outside, to stay alert.

On Monday night, as Peter and I were leaving for the airport, he went in and gave Roger a last hug. Roger cried for a second, then grinned in a puckish way. "I promise not to fall off my perch," he said.

If constant vigilance about food had become second nature to us, we had to be equally alert now about fluids. The sweats and fevers waxed and waned through the summer, but even so Roger had to get into the habit of drinking a glass of water every hour, or lemonade or Ensure, a potent nutritional supplement. If nothing else, he had to counteract the effect of all that medication on his kidneys. It can be a wearisome business when it seems every swallow of water is another kind of medicine, with its own rigorous schedule. I can see how people debilitated by AIDS let either the food or the fluids go, it all becomes such a chore. That is, it requires a team effort. The side effect of so much water was that he tended to have to piss all the time. He began to keep a plastic urinal bottle beside the bed, so he wouldn't always have to be getting up at night.

Did ail this mean he was more of an invalid now? I don't think that's how it felt to either of us. It was too peaceful being at home. We were so grateful having our time together, plus the excursions and visitors, that the summer bore the character of a recuperation, like taking a rest cure. Objectively, of course, the narrowing of scope and a life that was mostly bounded by the house were skating nearer and nearer to the thin ice of a hospice. But that is to forget how much we had been through—upheaval and exile and suffering—and what a luxury it was to do nothing much at all. I remember several evenings in June, lying in bed beside Rog and reading from the
Duino Elegies
of Rilke, and the two of us sighing with rapture over the waves of feeling. Another time I was moved by a profile I'd read in
The New Yorker
about Bishop Moore, and read to Roger a passage from a memoir Moore had written about coming home from war: