Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (6 page)

The Egyptian things all have to do with the netherworld. The Egyptians, we’re told, put Death at the center of life; and we—who do not—have put on display the models of houses, cattle, servants, and boats they made for the tombs of men who owned such things in life. Against one wall I can still greet the gaze of those handsome men of the Hellenistic Age who resemble the men I saw Saturday nights on the floor at Flamingo. (I too live in a Hellenistic Age—half my friends I call “Helen”—an age, said Kierkegaard, when everyone goes about his business, believing in nothing.) Beneath the glass case in the middle of the floor I look down on the possessions of a rich Egyptian man, reproduced in miniature to keep their owner company during his residence in the next world. My favorite is the boat—little only in relation to a real one, floating down the Nile under sail and oar—made for a man who has died, the same way toys are made for small children to keep them company in their room at night, or food for a traveler to eat on a train. We do not make little boats. But then we do not really think there is an afterworld. The Egyptians considered death a journey; we think of it as disintegration. Thus—having disproved so many superstitions—we have stripped death not only of its mythology, but also of the comfort that mythology provided. The Egyptians had gods and goddesses. We have facts. Everything is chemistry. Somewhere between the Egyptians and us, Hamlet discovered the king could be used—after he dies—to plug a hole in the wall; and the afterworld became an undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.

And so, being unable to say with scientific certainty what’s there, we tend to ignore it altogether. Not these people. The Greeks, the Etruscans, the Egyptians believed what Europe, upstairs, tried to forget, and America seems to have refused to contemplate: The Nude and The Netherworld.

It’s five o’clock. Outside the sun has set. As I walk down the steps buttoning my coat, I feel the sharp stab of life that comes with the cold wind, the sight of the city after the museum. Welcome back to the world of fear and groaning, AIDS and the
New
York Post,
doctors’ offices and vials of blood. It is more shocking than leaving a church. Life, with its competition and decay, fills Fifth Avenue. I am supposed to telephone a friend who lives on the Lower East Side in a neighborhood populated by young men who resemble the portrait of Juan de Pareja in this museum. He has for the past few years been photographing them and has amassed a collection of his own that the museum is not interested in. Tonight Junior is coming over for a photographic session. I’m invited to watch. Strange. One used to sleep with Junior, but now you watch a friend take his picture. The whole city’s a museum now. We’re all voyeurs or exhibitionists. Once at this museum, I saw a fat man walking around the paintings with a beautiful youth in tow, and when I went down to the Club Baths later that evening, I passed a room whose door was open, looked in, and there they were: the fat man lying against the wall, an impresario displaying his concubine, a beauty whose bored air in the museum was replaced here by a sexual leer, full knowledge of his priapic power in this red-lighted chamber: Caravaggio with poppers. Tonight it is simply to be photographs. I reach the pay phone and dial the number. The trees of Central Park form a dark crosshatch against the pale orange sky. The wind is turning bitter. My friend does not answer. The museum behind me is closed by now, the city before me darkening as night falls. I hang up the phone and stand there, not knowing where to go.

T
HE FIRST PLACE I saw O. was Central Park—one sunny spring Sunday in the early seventies, after dancing all Saturday night, regrouping with friends the next day in an apartment on Madison Avenue, and then strolling west. The drummers were beating their bongos around Bethesda Fountain, the nannies from Park Avenue were watching their boys push sailboats across the pond, and clones were converging on the Rambles to cruise, when O.’s retinue was spotted on the horizon of blossoming apple trees. He was a man of medium height, with thick black hair, black eyes, and black mustache—of Hungarian and Turkish parentage. He spoke in a deep, resonant voice, slowly, with a pronounced Turkish-British accent that was, depending on his emphasis, capable of being either very funny or very serious. He had, even on a sunny Sunday in Central Park, surrounded by blossoms, a slightly melancholy, weary air—in those dark eyes, in that rich voice, was a sense of the difficulties of life. When he urged members of his entourage who split off that afternoon to go their separate ways to “Call me tomorrow, at the gallery!” “Don’t forget Tuesday night, La Escuelita!” “Irene is coming to town on Wednesday, let’s have dinner!” in each conventional exhortation there was an urgency, a seriousness, that might have characterized a father telling his child to watch out crossing the street and be home in time for dinner. This impression was not far off: O. had brought most of these people from a former life in London and ran a gallery with which several were connected—a gallery that sent O. traveling a lot. But when he was at home in New York, it was at his place that all of them got together.

Food was only part of it. An evening at O.’s involved, above all, conversation—with people one had never met: journalists from Athens, an artist from Mexico City, an old boyfriend of O.’s from Rome. His circle—a circle of friends so constant, so faithful, they had followed one another from city to city and constituted, more than any other I knew, a family—was fixed but fluid, loyal but independent, a function of O.’s affection most of all—his cooking, you might say. Most of them, including O., sold artifacts of one sort or another. But though the world that exchanges art for money is notorious for its meanness, O. was very kind. “Come on up, I am just back from Japan, I want to see you!” he said on the phone. And you went. O. included, invited, charmed, cooked for, and amused so many people that, going uptown to have dinner there, one always felt a bit like a child on Christmas morning—one never knew what would be under the tree.

He was the best of hosts—that’s all. The Middle Eastern food, the stories about Cavafy, Japan, Lima, the candles, the beautiful room in a brownstone on the Upper West Side we gathered in, were a kind of rosy, glowing tent that O. had set up for his friends. And set up skillfully. Somewhere Santayana distinguishes the arts of poetry, music, painting from the arts of life; the latter are not monuments more lasting than bronze—they last the length of a dinner party—and yet they provide, really, in so many cases, what earthly happiness we have. O. was a master of these. O. embodied that Spanish proverb: “Living well is the best revenge.” Once I ran into O. in the hallway of the St. Mark’s Baths, shortly after I had published a book. I was standing in the stairwell of the third floor, brooding about the hopelessness of this cold feast of flesh we gay men had evolved as a way of life, when O. came out of someone’s room, beaming. “I have just had a rather wonderful screw,” he said, rolling the last R. I had not, and dumped on him all the reasons this bathhouse was cold, cruel, alienating, and depressing. O. listened and then said with the faintest smile, “Ah! So success has not made you happy.” (Bingo.) His wit, however, did. O. saw things, but saw them without the slightest malice or reproach, so that even your own faults seemed merely human, and less important than the way in which they were phrased. Marriage, said George Bernard Shaw, is a long conversation—so, for that matter, is friendship.

Yet I don’t suppose I spoke to O. more than once every three or four months; but when I did—bicycling out to Prospect Park or coming back from Jones Beach on the train—the pleasure was so rich that no matter what we were talking about (the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the latest sex club south of Fourteenth Street, mutual friends), I think of that decade in part as a conversation with O. And the spell of that spring Sunday in the park—those white apple trees—continued intact, enriched by the passing of time, in each encounter. After leaving Manhattan at the end of the decade, I realized, before very long, how much I missed our conversations, and O. became for me, every return visit, one of the people I could not wait to call. He acquired, in fact, for me, an ideal quality; because I saw him rarely, perhaps, or because he
was
rare, or because he lived in a world different from mine, he became a dream of New York. A dream of New York, dreamt down South, that was harder to square with reality each time I returned. For every time I returned, it seemed everything had changed, changed utterly; even conversations with friends—they, like everything else, sank inevitably beneath the weight of that subject that, though it came last, had banished all humor, liveliness, and joy.

The names of the dead, the shock at their number and improbability, the forecasts for the future, the dismal withdrawal and isolation, left one, in the end, speechless. Impotent. There was no way to leave friends in a glow of laughter or affection anymore; there was not even a moral to draw, or an interesting observation, because the plague, with its time lag, its scope, was revealing itself to be some sort of indiscriminate flu, leaving each person alone in a solitary confinement of fear. Conversation, like so much else in New York these past few years, was not much fun.

Perhaps that was why I called O. each time—O. was out of New York as much as he was in it and would be able to describe not only his trip to London, but place in context, perhaps, all that was happening here. “Are you in town?” he said one evening in 1985. “Come by and have supper with us!” Yet the park I walked across that twilight seemed deserted now—a few men sat on the usual benches in the Rambles, seemingly as ignorant as the rats scampering across the path in front of them. And when I got to O.’s, only three of us—O., his boyfriend, and I—sat down in a corner of that large white room, at a small table by the window, in a shrunken pool of lamplight; the rest of the apartment in shadow, like some house whose owners have died, and whose furniture is all under sheets. We ended up discussing, after the amusing topics (the topics that had formed, I realized now in retrospect, the entire menu of our lives), the gloom of the city. “Most of my friends,” O. said in a weary voice, “are having trouble negotiating middle age.”
What did he mean by this?
I wondered, even as I admired the expression. The city was so full of secrets now—a minefield, and we the mines—I could not be sure what he was referring to. I finally took it on its face: O. meant that the plague was not the only thing happening to New York. Time had passed, too, and even O. had a distinguished silver streak down one side of his thick black hair. AIDS and middle age were but two very different versions of the same thing: dying. The first beyond our power of comprehension, the second all too familiar. So this is what even O. has come to, I remember thinking: middle age. A few months later, I learned this remark was more subtle and detached than that, was only his dry and characteristic way of alluding to something I did not know at the time: While in Japan—fascinated, observant, doing business—he had discovered he had AIDS.

When I returned to New York that fall, I called O. from a pay phone on Thirty-fourth Street. It was the middle of an October afternoon; I gathered he was at home alone and asked if I could stop by. I wanted to see O. for several reasons: One, I always wanted to see him; two, I wanted to learn the stage of his illness; and three, I thought I’d better see him one more time—combining, in one uneasy mixture, the past, present, and future. The past: the good times, the happiness. The present:
How far along is he?
The future:
Why didn’t you see him, tell him how you feel, let him
know you care for him?
(A friend who runs errands, sleeps over, takes someone to the hospital, does not have to say this. Only those who don’t wonder how they can.) The park was empty when I walked through it. I had been thinking since I heard the news I should write or phone O. about his diagnosis, but had been unable to find the words. And even now as I walked west, there seemed to be nothing to say that would sound right. I hoped in the act of visiting him that words would make themselves known. I rang the doorbell; the buzzer released the door; I went up the stairs, my heart accelerating not only with the climb; I heard a door open before I reached the top, and a moment later, there was O.—in his socks, looking much the same. We imagine from a distance all sorts of things. I walked in with the familiar pleasure of a child entering a chocolate shop—a place in which everything pleases—surviving even this, and we sat in the big white room and talked.

We talked about the novel he was reading that lay open on the table between us—a historical trilogy about the Balkans by a British writer. Then about mutual friends. And his trip to Tokyo. It was about the Japanese he talked at length in the way I loved: O. was such a good observer. He looked a bit haggard, but not much, and he still talked in the same calm, intelligent, vaguely melancholy, witty way. As he answered my questions about the Japanese, I felt that nothing had changed. Then I changed the topic. And he answered my questions about his health. He discussed the doctors, pneumonia, reactions to medicine (including one that had made his skin peel off ), inhalations, alternative therapies.
O.’s life is all doctors now,
I thought as I sat there,
all doctors
and hospitals.
He talked about telling his mother. He wanted to visit her, but a doctor had said there was an association between jet travel and the onset of pneumonia in some patients. He had gone to an avant-garde Hungarian whose mixture of medicines had proved a mistake. He was now going to Sloan-Kettering to inhale a medicine that blocked the pneumonia. He stopped finally—after I, completely comfortable, marveling at his enabling me to feel this way, posed yet another question—and asked, “Is this an interview?” He smiled, enjoying the irony, and his eyes sparkled. I smiled, and said, “No.” I wondered as we sat talking if I should, or could, tell O. how much I admired and liked him—but to do this seemed artificial and awkward. So I wondered if he knew without my saying so. And I began to think of Proust’s aunts. In
Remembrance of Things Past,
the narrator’s two aunts are so horrified by the idea of thanking Swann for the wine he brings them one day—thanking him in an obvious way, that is—that they ignore it altogether, until, shortly before Swann leaves, they slip in a reference to the gift so subtle that only the narrator realizes they are acknowledging the wine, so oblique that Swann leaves oblivious of their gratitude. I sat there thinking O. had given me wine, too—in this very room—a lot of wine, a lot of laughter, a lot of wit, conversation, happiness. But I could no more refer to it now than Proust’s aunts could draw attention to Swann’s present. Even worse, I didn’t want to thank O. for giving me anything; I wanted to thank him for being.(Including being himself, so wonderfully, now.) And there was certainly no way I could phrase that. So I left. I left O. twenty minutes before his own departure to visit a doctor and refused the tea he offered me, when he went to the stove to turn on the burner, thinking,
There is no need to stay with him. That would be
too solicitous.
It was a gray, gloomy afternoon, not one that made being at home alone cheerful; but I was loath to do anything that gave the impression this was a visit in the slightest bit final. I walked down the stairs thinking it had been, after all, only another visit with O. The huge wooden door closed behind me, I left O.’s block refusing to think this might be our last conversation—who could? And what if? There was
still
nothing to say. And I walked east into the park that had been, fifteen years ago, the site of those strolls, those springs, those conversations whose jokes now seemed to have occurred in another language. This Sunday was overcast and gray, the trees still green, and entering this park with that sense of expansion and hope it always gives, I thought,
O. is putting on his coat now to visit the doctor, while I am walking
into the park.
The sense of the unfairness of life was then replaced by a sense that I was being followed—by a lean, red-haired man, walking above me on the hill overlooking the Serpentine. I looked back, and we began to circle, like hawks on an air current. We met beneath a copper beech; we said nothing; I unbuttoned his shirt and ran my hands over his body; he turned away moments later and ejaculated into the air; zipped up, walked off, and disappeared from the park—without saying a word. All the way home the city seemed pervaded by silence.