Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (27 page)

But though privacy was the immediate issue, part of me was reeling from the coincidence of Bruce and Roger down with infections at the same time. Only in Bruce's case it wasn't PCP, it was something wrong with his blood, a plummeting of his white count, as I recall. This was a whole other territory from the pulmonary department, and my knowledge was sketchy at best. But it struck me then that it wasn't just something hit-or-miss about suramin that had allowed the protozoa to fulminate again in Roger's lungs. There was something more deeply wrong here, something bad that nobody could name yet, against which the elixir was powerless.

I couldn't wait to leave the fourth floor. In just those few days we'd become acutely aware of the man in the next room, obviously gravely ill, his parents in hovering attendance. You pass people in the hall, sometimes walking with their patient while you walk with yours, or in the elevator or the coffee room. Some will spill you the whole story of the loved one's illness, but even the random nods and hellos speak volumes. These two modest parents were clearly bowed down by a very late stage of AIDS. I think there was a lover there as well, and various overdressed friends, but it was the parents you wanted to rock in your arms, they looked so lost. So I was very relieved to flee to the optimistic luxury of the tenth floor.

Once I realized Roger was stable, I forced myself to stay calm. After the shock of the sudden diagnosis wore off, I think neither of us was quite so terrified of PCP as before, knowing he had come through it once. For Rog the harder thing than fear was the disappointment, being thrown down again after climbing a mountain. Familiarity with IV nurses and the protocol of contagion didn't make them easier. But he finally told the truth about what he delicately called "my situation" to one of his law buddies, and thus was able to channel off some of the pressure of work. He was in phone contact with his secretary every day and returned the lion's share of his calls. All of which more or less shamed me into working with Alfred in the afternoons, though in truth I spent most of that time crying and complaining.

I'd stay with Roger in 1016 till eleven or midnight, always enjoying the quiet that descended on the floor late at night. We'd put in long calls to Jaimee and my brother and generally end the day feeling safe. Then on the way down I'd stop by the fourth floor and go into Bruce's room. He was always asleep, but I never had time to pop in during the day. Right now I longed to talk to Bruce about suramin and Compound S. Of all of us, he would have been happiest to sift the evidence for hours and spur me on. But I also didn't mind just sitting there watching him sleep. It grounded me to realize that Roger and I weren't in the fight alone, and Bruce made the hospital seem less overwhelming, more like a satellite station than the moon.

After a while he would stir and wake up and stare at me for a moment in the half-dark. Then he'd flash me a peaked grin: "Hi, Paulie." I don't remember much of what we said: just a few sentences before he drifted back to sleep. He was plainly very ill, and the doctors were stumped. It was sometime during those first days that they decided they'd have to remove his spleen. I remember talking with him about that, very matter-of-fact, toneless in the dark. I also had a very specific memory of the composer in New York who'd had his spleen removed, and all his friends said the operation was "the beginning of the end." And then there was the rumor that any surgery at all seemed to accelerate the AIDS "process," an onrush of final infection.

Yet I'd always hold out for Compound S and swear to Bruce we'd get it somehow. No matter if he was too weak to fight for it now; I would fight for it. Then I would think as I took the elevator down from four that the hospital was going to get fuller and fuller with AIDS cases, till there wouldn't be any beds for anything else. How many AIDS patients would you need before people didn't want to have elective surgery at a hospital, or their babies delivered, or even their blood drawn?

My actual fortieth birthday was Wednesday the sixteenth, three days before the main event at Sheldon's. The doctors were sticking to their promise that Roger would be home in time, but it was equally clear after a week of Pentamidine nausea that he'd never make the party. I don't know why we just didn't cancel it, but Sheldon had a thought. We would simply postpone the party three weeks, till November 10, when my brother and sister-in-law would be visiting from Philadelphia. Bob and Brenda had had to decline the original invitation, and now they would be the excuse to reschedule. Sheldon said he'd take care of all the details, and the fifty guests were called and shifted. Their varying degrees of suspicion about the sudden postponement have filtered back in the two years since, but at the time you grasp at straws. Besides, I really did think we could have Roger on his feet two weeks after the Pentamidine was finished, for that was how we had done it before.

Meanwhile, all day Wednesday, I had to grin and bear phone calls and cards and especially the cheerful wishes of my parents, who had sent forty birthday candles in a soapstone dish and insisted I use them on the fictitious cake I said Roger had brought home. In fact I catalogued for them the whole evening we had planned, dinner and gifts and friends dropping by for cake. Then I went out for a quick supper with Rand Schrader to break the news—one by one, I was convincing Roger to let in our near and dearest. I arrived at 1016 about nine o'clock. We lit one of the two-inch candles and warbled me a happy fortieth. I'd already started a bloody poem called "40," about the final birthday, which took its cue from the losses of World War I. Yet we managed to laugh that night, at the absurd interface of the forty milestone and the fight to the death.

The next night I was sobbing when I came into the main lobby of the hospital. Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border. I was tilting across the lobby toward the elevators when I saw dead in front of me a group of five people, friends of Bruce, none of whom I knew well. One, a woman writer, caught my eye and looked shocked. I couldn't pass or duck.

"Paul?" she said, as if she couldn't believe how upset I was. I tried to cover by talking about Bruce, then said I had several friends in the hospital, and after an awkward few seconds they all backed away from my disconnected grief. A few days later it entered the rumor mill that I had AIDS myself. The woman told a friend—another writer—and the story was off, like children playing Telephone.

Somehow we made it home by the end of the week, and by then we thought we knew just what we needed to do. The rebuilding process: the schedule of medications constant as a monastery, work to regain the lost pounds, eat around the nausea, bide the time to go back on suramin. I remember Dennis Cope telling Roger specifically there was no reason he shouldn't regain his strength as before, and he should push himself to get his stamina back. Cope had visited 1016 every evening, not so much to examine as to hear us out and urge us forward. As always, his gentleness of manner and quiet optimism occasioned the deepest healing in us. He was encouraged about what we were hearing of Compound S, but noncommittal about whether it was an option for Rog. Perhaps he was having doubts himself about how much time suramin had bought us.

So we tried to do just as we were told. Susan and Robbert brought over a cake on Saturday, since they were party to the secret now. Though the stated point was not to let the black-tie night pass uncelebrated, in fact it was Roger's homecoming we were cheering. He was still dozing in the bedroom and Susan and I were setting the table, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door without even thinking, and there was Bill Ingoldsby, all spiffed up in a tux and carrying a bouquet of flowers about four feet across. Sheldon's secretary had skipped his name on the recall list, and he and his friend Dan had been driving around the darkness of Sheldon's house, wondering what had gone wrong.

I stepped all over myself apologizing, but not wanting to invite him in either. I hastily explained about the change of plans, then steered him down to his car, where Dan was waiting in a new tux he'd bought for the party. I stood holding the great floral tribute, spinning off lies—Roger was out for the evening, I had a business meeting going on, everything was fine. Regrettably they were going to be away on November 10, but they couldn't have been more gracious, relieved to hear nothing was wrong. As they drove away I was racked with guilt and inadequacy, longing now for everyone to know, loathing what was left of the charade.

I have virtually no record of the next three months. Except for a few doctors' appointments, Roger's calendar is completely blank for the rest of the year, and he wouldn't even bother with a calendar for '86. Between then and the end of January there is a single five-line entry in my journal, and my daily calendar is as empty as Roger's, because I ceased to write my appointments down. I kept the ones I could remember. Indeed, we both went on working as long as we could, struggling into November, but it was as if the whole idea of calendars had become a horrible mockery.

I wish I had an account of just the meals we ate, or a log of the calls that came in, for there was where we lived. From now on we wouldn't be spending much time in the abstract, not at least as it related to future or careers. Besides, when you live so utterly in the present, the yearning to record it goes away. To write in a diary you have to hope to read it later—or to last long enough to make the appointment two weeks down the road. Right now you are trying not to vomit dinner.

I remember the whole of that autumn as ominous and desperate, but that had as much to do with the hurricane of other cases as our own. I was talking to Cesar now every third or fourth day, but except for my telling him I loved him I don't remember what we said. He did finally get diagnosed with PCP, and was on Pentamidine at the same time Roger was. He would tell me how one old friend whom we'd always found maddening would come in the afternoons and read to him, thus wiping out all his black marks.

Most precious of all was Dennis, who'd arrive at the hospital every evening directly from work and was, in Cesar's oft-repeated phrase, "an angel." If I remember nothing else about Cesar's last weeks, I recall the opulent tenderness of his feelings about Dennis. So intensely had he lived the Platonic intimacy of the last few months that it flooded his mind with light. His voice grew fainter and fainter, more and more tired, yet still he could laugh coquettishly or brag that all the nurses and the other patients on the floor knew Dennis was his special friend. Sometimes I would talk to Dennis himself in passing, just for a few moments, and he would make oblique remarks about how bad it was getting. Yet with all that, I knew Cesar's friends were trying to arrange for attendant care at home so he could leave the hospital. I didn't think of it as a hospice situation. I couldn't really think that far ahead, or perhaps I couldn't bear to.

And for some reason nothing was ever said about me visiting. I guess it just wasn't an option because I was so busy taking care of Rog, and I don't doubt Cesar leaped to defend me to anyone who wondered where I was, his best friend for seventeen years. Or perhaps he simply told them all the truth about Roger's situation—he knew the secret was over now. But though I've made my peace with not going up to say good-bye, I wish I'd been able to talk to him to better effect than I did. For it seems to me I kept promising him drugs he was clearly beyond the reach of, and silences would develop on the phone because I couldn't laugh or think of a witty retort. Maybe it was enough that we kept on saying we loved each other. That is all you are sure of afterwards.

"Hello, darling," he'd say when he heard my voice, his own voice sweet and grinning as ever, no matter how faint. And then before we hung up: "You keep the pool open. I'm coming down for that swim."

Roger's recovery proved to be discouragingly slow, and the nausea that went with the Pentamidine seemed worse this time, so he wasn't eating well at all. I'd had him on a regimen of vitamins during the so-called honeymoon, but now his stomach was too queasy for him to take the pills. Once when I insisted, he choked on a mineral capsule and heaved up half a day's food, sending me into a wave of hysteria. One likes to think one will be endlessly gentle, easing the difficult symptoms, always comforting, making light of every indignity. But the fear and the heartbreak twist you up, and your own helplessness blinds you till you don't even take the modest steps you can. "Hysteria is not sexy," as Cesar once said in another context. Soon you are absolutely fixated on every meal, for that is still the best you can do, and when it's not good enough you start banging pots in the kitchen and stuffing whole meals down the disposal.

The one person who could calm me down and make me see the minor crises in perspective was Roger—the only one ever in my life. Over the years, relations between us had evolved to a place where he was the grown-up and I the child, at least in matters that required the filling out of forms, lines to stand in, the engine of running a house. Roger always seemed to take care of everything, and now that state of affairs was in flux, because he simply didn't have the energy anymore. He who had always been so independent, who'd lived on thirty dollars a week in Paris, now had to sit and be waited on while he recovered, with all the attendant hovering. He'd hand me bills to pay, and I'd go bananas trying to keep the seven accounts straight. Not the least bit sexy.

Yet we would take our stamina walk up Harold Way in the late afternoon, and Roger would say in anguish, "I don't want to be an invalid, I don't want you to have to take care of me." And I would fire him with a speech about our interdependence, gripping his shoulders as if I would fuse us into a unit. The minefield of lunch would be forgotten, the byzantine mess of bills. We still had a feel for loftiness, and there was only one way to go: onward.

The one perspective I did seem to have was that Roger was doing better than Cesar or Bruce, and I told myself over and over to worry about them instead and fight to keep them in the arena. One afternoon I went over to UCLA to pick up a load of medication at the pharmacy—something for the nausea, plus an oral dose of Pentamidine, which they thought might be prophylactic against the PCP. Bruce had had his splenectomy several days before and had come through it fine, so I stopped up to visit him. His parents were there, his mother bewildered and knitting. Bruce was in antic good spirits, with two or three friends around him and his sister Carol calling in from the East. He made me laugh and treated me like some kind of special envoy. Then his lawyer came in with his will to sign, and the rest of us repaired to the waiting room, where Chana, his roommate, held my hand—for my sake, for hers, who knew anymore? I went into an automatic lecture about Compound S, and I remember Bruce's father listening hungrily.