Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (45 page)

One night I read an essay to Rog about Francis Parkman, on the occasion of the republication by the Library of America of his history of the French and Indian War. Parkman was virtually blind and in great pain during the long ordeal of writing his book, and he had to work with a kind of iron grid over his paper to guide his pen. We both choked up at his fortitude in the face of daunting illness and disability. But if there was a certain weepy sentimentality to us now and then, Roger could be sharp and mordant as well. He had a call from a friend back east who didn't know what to say, and when he asked, "How are you?" Roger replied, "How am I? Read the Book of Job."

He began to run a fever during the third week in the hospital, and Cope and Dr. Ahn decided that the catheter had become infected. A typical problem, apparently, though it was the first we'd ever heard of it. Roger would have to go into surgery Friday morning to replace it, but the good news was that he could come home Saturday. I remember taking him down Thursday night for an x-ray, always easier than waiting for an escort. The man in the wheelchair ahead of us was shrunken and covered with lesions, all alone, and for once I was glad Roger was sightless. I don't remember him being anxious about the surgery, yet when Richard Ide came up to visit him Friday morning and arrived an hour late, Roger rebuked him in a wounded tone: "Richard, don't do that to me again." Richard is never late for anything anymore. I accompanied Roger down to the operating room, just as I had at Jules Stein in April, but this time it wasn't so overwhelming. I squeezed his hand at the door to surgery and said, "You be okay now."

I wanted to be with him that evening, in case he was feeling "wimbly" after the operation, but I'd promised Rand Schrader that I would host an important meeting at the house that night. In order to develop a text for the video presentation at the Center dinner, I'd agreed to gather some key people who'd been there since the beginning to give us the narrative line. No history had yet been written down, of the Center or any other aspect of the gay movement in L.A. I was torn about leaving Rog, but he swore he'd be fine and felt the occasion was too important to miss. Besides, he was so looking forward to coming home next day that he appeared to shrug off any aftereffects of the surgery. Yet I was the same as he was now, jealous of any time that was stolen from us.

About six people gathered in the house on Kings Road, including psychologist Don Kilhefner, the shaman granddaddy of the movement in L.A., and Steve Schulte, director of the Center during its turmoil years of the late seventies and now mayor of West Hollywood. Kilhefner told the story of the "gay survival committee" in the years following Stonewall, which led in 1971 to the opening of Edgemont Liberation House, the first truly public gay environment in the city, gay people helping each other. A clinic opened in 1973, and the Center gathered clout and respectability as it made inroads in the gay middle class, most of whose members were still officially in the closet.

Everyone gay starts out in the closet, of course. The Center, by proclaiming "Gay" on the building on Highland, had made a stand about coming out, though what Kilhefner called the "inner coming out" would take more time. There was a difference between what we were and who we were as gay people, among other things that we were a people and not just a movement. It was extraordinarily moving to hear them talk about how far we'd come, despite the calamity, and about what we had marshaled to fight the calamity with.

Cope ordered a transfusion for early Saturday morning. When I called at ten, Roger reported with a flush of pleasure that he'd declared to Cope when the doctor came to check him out, "Dennis, I'm feeling optimistic." Cope replied, "I think there's reason to, Roger." So my friend was beaming when I came by at noon to pick him up, and he even laughed about a student nurse who'd treated him like a creature from outer space. We drove home in cool September weather, and the ritual of homecoming was an aching delight, from the dog turning inside out and whimpering to the tramp upstairs past the coral tree. I remember when we got into the back bedroom and sat down together on the bed, facing the garden, we laughed to think he was home, our heads tilted against each other as we savored having come again through fire. It was perhaps the last moment of full joy, but I can still taste the triumph of it.

Admittedly the boost from the transfusion didn't linger as it had in the past. On the other hand, we were accustomed now to the uphill fight for strength after PCP. We were fortunate to be able to have Scott reassigned to us. Though he had to move on to other cases when Roger went in, he'd been mostly working as a substitute and was eager to return to us. Our priority was the restoration of the quiet sanctuary of the summer. Right away we were back to mornings in the garden, Roger sitting in the dappled shade while I read him the paper, afternoons with Fred, suppers prepared by Scott, and Plato in the evening. I finally unpacked the boxes piled in the living room since February, when the office move had taken place. I even spent a couple of evenings going through drawers of snapshots, describing them to Roger as we called up a raft of memories.

The restoration was real and tangible, and went on with gathering confidence for the next week or so. I was even bitten with the desire to bring the house back up to form. The specific goad was the sofa in the living room, whose re-covering we had abandoned when Roger first took sick. Thus the upholstery bore a year and a half more of Puck's grime, and was smelling exceedingly doggy. Not wanting Rog to lie down on it anymore for fear of germs, I announced that we would re-cover at last. I decided we would also acquire a couple of easy chairs, and under the new rules Puck would be banished to the floor, where he belonged. Roger encouraged me in this sudden intense enterprise, as I called for estimates and hauled home fabric samples so he could feel them and approve them. I know I felt an extreme urgency to make the place comfortable for him now, no time to waste. I told every workman ASAP, or STAT, as they say in the medical labs.

Because I'd planted late in the spring, the gardenia was still flowering two or three blooms a week, a rare thing for October. Gardenias were usually finished by August at our place. I took to bringing a blossom in and placing it in a dish of water on Roger's nightstand, crowded by pill bottles and IV material though it was. I was actually returning a favor here, for Roger had been for years in the habit of bringing the occasional gardenia in and leaving it in a dish on my desk. Before setting it down I would give him a whiff, and he'd purr, "I love you so much." But that was something he said more and more often now, as I would dart into the room with some fattening drink or chaotic question about our finances. You cannot ever say it enough, of course, but he spoke it now with a rare savor. More often than not I'd parrot it right back to him, but I had my own schedule of telling how much I loved him. It wasn't a contest, nor was it ever perfunctory. For both of us it was simply a statement of fact, as much as to say
I'm alive.

This is not to say there were no moments of pain and loss, nor too much time to brood all alone in the darkness, in spite of all the visits, the Mozart tapes and the massages. I think he would comb the rich hours and countries of his life, till the tragedy would suddenly break over it all like a tidal wave, then he would cry out. The most painful of these, the one that cut deepest into me, was a moment in early October as I came into his room late one afternoon. He was looking out toward the garden, though by then he could scarcely see the light. He cried out softly, in an agonized voice, "What happened to our happy life?"

I think about almost nothing else now. But at the time, I said what I really believed: "It's here, Rog, it's right here. Because
we
are." I required nothing else, but then I was not hobbled and assaulted as he was. I did not have to inhabit the dark and remember the voyaging, the comradeship, life engaged to the full. In addition to which he had no manic phase as I did, to fill up with all the IV tasks, or the record I leave behind here. The memories that broke his heart with being gone are the ones I live with now, of a life so happy it hurt sometimes, like the meadow Miriam couldn't take home in her arms in
Sons and Lovers.

It all goes one way now. Difficult in the extreme to steer the course of the last weeks without being thrown off by a feeling that I somehow failed to keep him alive. I punish myself for lack of vigilance, thinking if I'd got him to the hospital sooner I would've pulled him through the final infection. Pulled him through to what? one could reasonably retort. They tell me I wouldn't have wanted the lingering weeks of devastation, the final explosion of ravages that drags people in and out of comas, pleading to let it end. And I've come to understand, intellectually at least, that our triumph was in what we
did
do, keeping him alive and alert and on our island till the end. Yet I can't think of almost any moment of October without feeling helpless, like flinching in the glare of the final air burst. But how was I to know? Then I knew nothing about death, and now I know everything short of my own.

It must have been midweek the second week of October that Scott greeted me when I woke up with the news that Roger had been incontinent in the night. Incontinent is so curiously Protestant a term that it puts the reality at some distance, and I recall not even asking him or Roger what sort or what degree. Roger used the urinal bottle in bed much of the time now, at least once an hour, since we were filling him with so many liquids. I think it was misplaced modesty on my part, or my sense of how modest Roger was himself, that kept me from probing. So he'd pissed in bed, so what? After I went to sleep at 4
A.M.
there wasn't anyone to monitor him till the nurse arrived at seven-thirty for the morning IV. Accidents happen.

Jaimee would call at eight-thirty or nine at night, and while he was talking with her I'd often slip down to the gym for twenty minutes on the Lifecycle, being as the place closed at nine-thirty. A couple of evenings Roger was unhappy about my going, disappointed even, because usually by the time I returned he'd be ready for bed. He was so weary since the hospital that I'd sometimes have to bring him his toothbrush bedside, and it was all I could do to coax a weigh-in out of him—145 and holding. This one night he was on the phone in the study, and I swore I'd be back in a half hour, before he knew it. When I returned at nine-forty-five he told me he'd gotten lost in the house, wandering around disoriented till he realized he was in the front bedroom and felt his way back to his own. I put it all down to the disorientation of blindness, purely directional, and didn't connect it up with his getting lost by the pool equipment. He was on Haldol now, which did after all ease such problems, and perhaps even mask their depth.

I don't know in any case how much was a manifestation of dementia caused by viral invasion of the brain, since there wasn't anything dramatic about it. He was fully coherent, if spending a fair amount of the day sleeping, but this was also the time when he was getting the greatest pleasure listening to various tapes friends had brought him. Sometime during those last weeks he listened to
Julius Caesar
straight through. He hadn't read the play since tenth grade and was thrilled by its eloquent tightening web, talking it over enthusiastically with Richard Ide, our resident Shakespearean. He chortled through
The Importance of Being Earnest
, which Marjorie brought him, and was spellbound by a tape the photographer Holly Wright had made of the "Overture" to
Swann's Way
in French. It was impossible for me to focus on the diminishing of his mind, with him talking about literature with such evident delight and lucidity.

And yet I was manic and busy and didn't pay close attention. Saturday the eleventh I went out and took care of a groaning board of errands. I happened to pass a new postmodern minimall with a restaurant opening called Beau Thai. I could hardly wait to get home to tell Rog, who loved the idiot puns of California signage. But when I related it to him as I served him lunch, he made me repeat it and didn't get much of a laugh over it. Win some lose some, I thought. Then when Richard dropped by an hour later, Roger asked me to tell him the Beau Thai pun. And when I did, Roger commented, "Can you believe I didn't get that?" It was the one moment when he seemed to have a conscious sense of something not being quite right, but none of us really picked up on it or knew what to do with it. How do you factor in the missing of a single pun? That night we finished the
Crito
and launched into the
Phaedo
, Plato's dialogue about the spiritual life and the immortality of the soul.

Sunday afternoon the twelfth, Susan and Robbert brought over a birthday cake for me, since they would be swamped at school on Thursday, my actual forty-first. I recall we sat out on the front terrace in clear October light, and Robbert and Susan asked Roger a list of questions about a loft space they were thinking of buying. They'd never owned property before and wanted advice about how to talk to a banker. Roger was utterly in his element as he laid out a set of options for them, promising to make contact with our banker in West Hollywood. He was logical and patient, tuned to them alone, totally absorbed.

That night he said to me while we were puttering in his room, "You know, you're the most beautiful man." I grinned: "You mean physically?" He nodded with mock gravity: "Oh, yes, I always thought so." I've never seen anyone do that, spending all his endearments and giving voice to the best he knew in people. Over and over I'd hear from friends who talked to him in the last weeks—how they would call to try to stumble something out, and Roger would turn it around and want to help them with
their
problems. Each time he lobbed one of his encomiums to me I was so stirred and touched I didn't stop to think it was any sort of final testament. On the contrary, at such moments he could hardly have been more alive.