Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (19 page)

Evenings at the brink of summer are yellow gold across the city's western face, as the sun narrows toward the ocean, eye to eye with the white buildings of the coastal basin. The setting sun is especially prized in late May and June, because the Catalina eddy hugs the city often until midafternoon. Then clearness seizes the landscape. Summer is something else again, sunny all day long, till the light expires of heat and boredom after Labor Day. Perhaps because we had come from winter places, we were finely tuned to the threshold effects of summer. In any case, Memorial Day usually found us thrashing in the garden, giving a nudge to the rattling pool heater and pulling together a barbecue.

This year we spent the weekend lying low, alert to any side effects of Dose 1, but they never materialized. So Monday evening we asked Dell Steadman over for supper, as if we couldn't let the holiday expire without a show of colors. Because Dell was both doctor and friend, we'd talked with him extensively in the weeks before the diagnosis, but since he wasn't on the short list of those who knew the truth, contact had lately been minimal. Thus Dell was in the peculiar position of suspecting Roger had AIDS yet having to leave the matter unspoken, and without any pregnant pauses either. He was more than up to the challenge, however, regaling us over dinner with his Late Roman view of the tattered state of the world. No doubt we were ready to laugh, fortified as we were by the quaff of elixir three days before. I know it felt good just having somebody in again, so much so that the wide swath of summer began to tantalize. For the first time I thought there might actually
be
a summer.

Two calls came back-to-back that night. The first was from a business acquaintance in New York, who started to gossip about Bruce Weintraub having AIDS, as if I were party to the knowledge already. I put him on fast rewind, and he dryly observed that Bruce had been hospitalized a week with "regular" pneumonia. I felt two furies at once: protective about our own secret and angry at the slur on Bruce's privacy, as if to try to escape the rumor mill were an act of contempt. But even the anger couldn't cover the queer sickening feeling I've had fifteen different times in the last three years. How could Bruce be sick? You never stop asking that. There's a strange recurrent wish to believe the epidemic has claimed enough, even as the shock waves widen. Above 8.5, an earthquake is said to liquefy the earth. I recalled joking with Bruce about AIDS in front of the gym two months before, ridiculing the hysteria of the very man who was calling me now.

I put down the phone and it rang again. It was one of the
Manicurist
producers, typical of the breed that hates all holidays because of the three-day lag in deals. By now I had written perhaps two thirds of the Whoopi screenplay, with rabid input from the studio along the way, though only a couple of people were privy to the actual pages. Pages are not required, however, by those whose drug is opinions. "But has he
read
it?" I asked a few weeks later about a particularly wacko criticism, only to be told in oracular tones, "David doesn't read, he hears."

The producer himself had in fact read pages, and after a fulsome wheeze of praise he explained that the studio was basing its decisions on how well a script conformed to a certain grid, which was all the rage in screenwriting courses. The great sage who deduced this foolproof method had codified every hit movie of the last twenty years and figured out that the main "plot point" always occurred between pages
26 and 28, with a secondary plot point around page 90. Therefore, said the producer, it was time to deconstruct my script and nail the plot on 26.

The echo effect of these two calls resonated over the next month like force and counterforce, demanding what little energy I had left after me and Roger. It was probably a foregone conclusion which would dominate, and now I see that I needed to reach out to Bruce even as I washed my hands of comedy, though I didn't know any of that on Memorial Day. For the present I was merely shaken by the calls, though accustomed now to the phone ringing like a siren.

By Friday, when Roger received Dose 2, we'd been alerted that there might be a reaction, since the other two suramin patients were feeling feverish and wilted. But Rog was strong enough to go to work for the afternoon, and we decided to fill in the weekend, half full anyway. An old friend was in town from Toronto and eager to see us. Bohemian to the core, Gordon had improbably been appointed director of the Canadian Book Council. Before his elevation he'd lived in L.A. for several years without a green card, and been instrumental in opening A Different Light, the local flagship gay and lesbian bookstore. Since Roger and I last saw him, he'd become almost laughably respectable, commanding offices in three provincial capitals.

Gordon arrived at sunset, with irises and champagne. I had determined not to bog down the evening with my oppressiveness and to minimize any talk of Roger's recent illness. Gordon himself had had a bout of shingles in April, a perfectly respectable disease in general circulation, except there were far too many cases of it among gay men who went on to develop AIDS. Craig had had shingles; the power broker who got us on suramin had them; Roger would have them. I saw a man at the gym last month and laughed hollowly as he related with antic dismay that he'd just had chicken pox, the childhood variant of the shingles virus. Everything is in clusters now. What is innocent as the sniffles in single cases grows specter-thin with terror in groups. Needless to say, there was reason to think that Gordon would be glad to speak softly of illnesses that were nothing to worry about, nothing at all really.

It was great fun to listen to Gordon's tales of cultural czarism, and we did manage to keep the conversation virus-free. But I also couldn't hide my jangled state and threw it all onto my work. I even asked at one point, "Gordon, what should I write about?" Thinking as I said it of the elderly Tennyson, begging his wife and children to slip ideas for poems under the door of his study because he was all written out. Gordon replied without a pause: "Write about what's happened to desire."

Next day Gordon dropped by with his friend Anne, and we all had tea by the pool. Anne had recently been through kidney surgery and nearly died. I remember staring at her as she looked peacefully at the flowers, trying to figure how she'd stood it alone, always a sense of kinship now with anyone who'd been through fire. When the two of them left, Roger took a soak in the tub, a little feverish and washed out from the drug. He studied his hand for a moment and said tearfully, "I guess if anything happens to me, this should go to my brother."

The ring was a sapphire set in white gold that his father had won in a card game decades ago. I was there the morning in '75, at the old apartment on Chestnut Street, when Al slipped it off and gave it to him. At the time I was jarred by the flash of it, a shade too Damon Runyon for Rog, but over the years I'd come to see it as one with the gentleness of his hand. I told him he mustn't think that way, now that we finally had some hope, but he went on to wonder aloud if he should keep working at all. "Maybe I don't want to," he said with a weary sigh. I swore he'd feel himself again as soon as the weak spell passed. It didn't somehow factor in that I'd spent weeks of my own wondering why I kept plodding away at the computer. Did he really mean to consider cashing in? It was the only time he ever wavered about work, so I hope I didn't too hastily close the subject off. Yet the deal between us always permitted the reopening of anything, or how would we ever have gotten to California, or Roger into private practice?

By the next weekend we'd instituted a regular Sunday dinner on the front terrace, with four or five around the glass-top table: the first time I'd laid out a table or baked since Christmas—a lemon cake, I think it was. "No matter what happens," Cesar used to wag when the Christmas cooking was in overdrive, "Mrs. Ramsay gets that leg of lamb on the table." Sunday nights were the serial version of the silent film, where if you didn't know what was racing in my head, the terrace on North Kings Road was casual as ever. Those evenings surface now like a string of summer islands.

I note in my journal that Roger processed Dose 3 so well that he swam fifty-two laps of the pool—only a seven-stroke pool, but who's counting? I also note that a main subject under discussion now was whether or not I ought to be on antidepressants. I'd just had a strained session with the Ferrari doctor, where he heard the state of my head and leaped for the phone, eager to refer me to a psychopharmacologist. His considered opinion seemed to be that I would love antidepressants. The shrink in question had apparently brought Ferrari himself up to full potential. I threw a damper on his enthusiasm when I told him my Writers Guild insurance paid only fifteen dollars per psychiatric visit. Otherwise shrinks could bankrupt the guild in a matter of months. Since the psychopharmacologist was a hundred and fifty a visit, Ferrari shrugged me out with a prescription for more Halcion. What was I doing still seeing this man? It was almost a kind of paralysis, as if I didn't deserve any better than his indifference. He had seemed a perfectly adequate doctor before the war, when nothing ever went wrong and all of us were going to live forever.

Joe Perloff advised against antidepressants if I could make do without them. Sam and my brother concurred. There was a strange curl of vanity here that kept me medication-free. I knew a couple of AIDS-related people floating on Xanax and Sinequan, how they ballooned with weight—their faces round and bewildered as babies, like Lennie in
Of Mice and Men.
No, thanks.

With Dose 3, the cast in Clinical Research grew. A certain Mr. Appleton appeared for his first dose, his encyclopedic knowledge of the antiviral territory dwarfing my own. He also seemed in demonic good health, brisk and alarmingly chatty, though Roger and I came to enjoy his tirelessness. He'd found out his T-cell ratio was reversed—I don't think he had any other symptoms—and talked his way into the suramin program by sheer force of will and a thousand cascading phone calls. Appleton always seemed a fine example to me that one didn't need higher contacts at all. A murderous push and refusal to take no for an answer had got him where he was. He had a home-brew recipe for HPA-23 that he'd got off a biochemist, in case the suramin didn't pan out. Dr. Wolfe blanched a little at his torrent of questions, but nothing daunted Appleton. He had that quality of utter belief in his own story, like Ishmael, and a sense of being accountable only to himself.

It was that day, I think, that Peter Wolfe happened to glance at Roger's hands and remarked that the moons had disappeared from the nails. It was a curious minor feature of the disease, he said, and didn't seem to mean anything, but I recall being jarred by the whole idea. The setting of the moons had some kind of inner planetary echo about it, indicating how very subtle the virus was, casting its shadow in places that had no pain or symptoms, no reason at all except to be bizarre. Similarly the intensification of dandruff, which now required a brown shampoo of industrial strength. The most casual things took a twist, as if to remind you that nothing in the body was to be taken for granted anymore. That is what aging feels like, isn't it? It's common among gay men now to say we're all eighty years old, our friends dying off like Florida pensioners.

Somewhere along in there, Cesar flew down for a few days. After nearly two years of me buoying him along, however manically, it was he this time who throbbed with life. He kept reassuring me how well Roger looked, and gallantly dismissed his own recent struggles with the illness. His hair was noticeably thinned by the chemo, his leg still swollen and suppurating, but he was irrepressible. "Don't worry," he said, "I'm eating a lot of quince." It seemed important to him to get it across that all of it could be borne and processed. Nothing of life was irretrievable: that was the unspoken promise.

One gray afternoon the three of us went to the old Doheny estate in Beverly Hills, empty now that the American Film Institute had vacated it. We wandered up and down through the gardens, the latter a bit brambled around the edges. We talked and laughed so comfortably that the afternoon has grown seamless, green as the gardens of a dozen years. Roger and I told Cesar about the lone Doheny heir in the thirties, a young man of ambiguous despairs who fell in love with the chauffeur and, unrequited, shot himself. I don't know even now how much of the story is true, but it's part of the pulp mythos of Beverly Hills, a properly Proustian end for the scion of an oil barony.

Later we strolled around the city, and Roger went into a shoemaker's to buy a pair of laces. Though I stood outside joking with Cesar, I recall being choked with emotion at the modesty of the errand. The laces are in a drawer in the bathroom, still in their cellophane, and they evoke a certain cast of Roger's mind, his satisfaction with details. I never buy shoelaces; I throw the shoes away. And it's only a beat from there to his sensible wingtip shoes and his flat feet, and his mother telling me after Roger's funeral about giving her own mother's clothes to Goodwill. "But not her shoes," said Bernice defiantly. "No one can walk in her shoes."