Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (8 page)

I
T’S THE SORT of party I worked as a bartender my first few years in the city, and which I attend as a guest only a decade later. There’s someone by the elevator with a list, checking names when I enter the building. There’s a handsome young man in black tie running the elevator. There’s a woman in a bathrobe, smelling of Pepsodent, who says she got stuck in the elevator between the basement and the first floor—a neighbor of my host. I never see her again, but the encounter with her in the elevator before I get off lessens the dread, when the elevator operator pulls back the metal grille and I step forward, of entering the loft filled with guests and waiters in black tie. The invitation said FOOD AND MUSIC. Hurrying downtown through deserted streets, later than I wished to be, I had visions of a concert one could not enter till the first movement was finished. It is much more chaotic than that. The thirty-five guests I imagined are one hundred thirty-five; the music can barely be heard; the room is roaring. It is a cold April night. There are sprays of spring flowers throughout the room—more irises than I have ever seen at one time in a cylindrical glass vase; strange lilies in a spotlight; flowers whose names I do not know, which remind me of the Age of Parties—there were always flowers whose names I did not know.

I don’t imagine there has ever been a decade in New York when people did not party; the paradox of New York is that this cold northern city has always had the atmosphere we associate with cities like New Orleans or Rio de Janeiro. I moved to New York because of a party—the sight, from the balcony outside my room on Fire Island Pines one summer weekend, of a Tea Dance on the deck below: more good-looking men in one place than I’d ever seen before—and the moment I arrived in town, I began going out, first to the Loft, then the Tenth Floor, then to the parties given by a friend on Madison Avenue, then to the theme balls given on Fire Island in the summer, and then their continuation in town in the winter, climaxing, for me, at any rate, in the Fellini Ball staged by George Paul Rossel in the Rainbow Room. In the Age of Parties, the invitations did not fit in the mailbox, and when you opened them, glitter spilled out of the envelope; once it was a poster by the artist Michaele Vollbracht. Eventually, the Black Party and the White Party and the Star Wars Party and the Magic, Fantasy and Dreams Ball all began to blur, and I wondered whether they were going to run out of themes. The world was so small then that when I’d spot certain people on the street in suits and ties, on their way to work, I would connect them instantly with a Roman gladiator, a headdress involving fruit, a character from
La Dolce Vita
. And it seemed to me that the real New York was this nocturnal colony of people who lived primarily to go to parties.

Of the people at the party in this loft I know the names of ten. They are clustered together in a corner beyond the table on which the glasses are lined up in neat rows beside the bottles and the waiters. I stand there on the edge of the room, looking at it like a man selecting a spot on a crowded beach before he puts his blanket and books down, and then I ask one of the two waiters at the long table for a drink. For a long time parties were more enjoyable to me when I worked them than when I came as a guest, but I’ve not been to a party of this sort in so long, or seen certain friends, that this evening is welcome. “No one has given a party like this in five years!” a friend said on the phone earlier that day. (Parties are like books, like plays: Occasionally the right one comes along at the right time.) This one’s got everything: flowers whose names I have to ask, in thin spotlights; a quartet playing chamber music; waiters. It’s as if the Age of Parties had been recreated—with one pleasant change: This one doesn’t terrify. They used to. I used to attach myself like a leech to the only person I knew in the room—in the Age of Parties I only knew one—till he pried me loose with a lighted match and went off to talk, quite sensibly, to someone else, at which point I felt he had left me alone on a small ice floe, like Little Eva, in full view of the plantation owner’s dogs. Now I can stand alone and survey the room before going over to join the group I know—mainly because there is a group I know. No need to panic (though some never did, were poised from the start). It strikes me as I pause there looking at the room, moreover, that this is something to look at a while longer; that what we once took for granted now seems extraordinary.

In the Age of Parties, there was always a single gladiolus under a pin light—like a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe—because the Age of Parties—my Age of Parties—coincided with the seventies. The seventies produced a certain look. Sometimes it was called Industrial Chic. It was spare, modern, pared down, clean: the single gladiolus in a spotlight, a palette of grays and blacks, a loft in Soho or a new house in the Pines—they were all of a piece. Like the gay men who followed strict diets, exercised religiously, like dancers or athletes, and then on the weekends took enough drugs to kill a horse, the Age of Parties staged its fleshy bacchanals in rooms like this one, rooms you would have called minimalist. That was the look in art and the arts of life: flawless, clean, exact, controlled—so that the messiness of the sex that formed a petri dish in which HIV flourished seems to have been an escape from that life’s discipline and deprivations. In the Age of Parties, the duality just got more and more intense: The torsos got leaner and tighter, while the parties (and eventually the dance clubs) got bigger and bigger, so that now, this party into which I am stepping seems like a mere shrunken remnant of an age gone by.

Even the friends who ten years ago did not know each other now do, and I tell myself to speak with the ones I see once a year, rather than those I saw the previous evening. Of course, it’s still hard introducing oneself to strangers. But after many parties one learns there is nothing sillier than the reprimand, once the door has shut behind you, that your life might have been different had you only had the nerve to introduce yourself to Him. Perhaps this time I can introduce myself to the one in the red bow tie: one of several faces I have seen for years but never spoken to, and which now surprise, reassure, and comfort me because they are still alive. This is no small achievement in New York in 1985. Life here has assumed the suspense of a summer Sunday’s tea dance—you’re not sure who is going to disappear on the next boat. In this loft once lived a man who died at home, in complete secrecy, where now more than a hundred people go on with the next installment of the soap opera. He is in some sense still here. He was a handsome, kind, witty man who came to New York from Boston, a famous university, a close-knit family, to write about and live a homosexual life—and he collided with the thing that no artist’s dream ever included. It was thought this might be a memorial service, but I learn instead it is a birthday, and the message of the party seems to be: Life goes on, with lots of irises. This seems obvious but is not. I spot an old friend across the room and wonder if I should say hello—because I’ve not seen him since the mutual friend died. I do, and we don’t dwell long on the fact. The people who have introduced new mourning customs—replaced wakes with dinner parties at which slides of Fire Island are shown—refuse to give death more than its due. They refuse to be lugubrious. They refuse to be stupid, too, for the most part—and if before the hidden agenda of these gatherings was the pursuit of sex, now it is the avoidance of it. As a friend said, “No one in New York is having much sex anymore.” This makes the party even more curious: An odd reticence pervades the room. What we are not speaking of we are not speaking of by mutual agreement. The collective ego has been dampened. We’re all afraid and grateful to be mobile and nervous because we can’t say what the future holds. The curious thing is that, though one would think the decision that we are all so vulnerable would make us stay home and give up each other’s company—the opposite is true: I enjoy more than ever the sight of homosexuals together. And if a way of life that was once high-spirited, hilarious, is now restrained, solicitous (as if someone went from adolescence to late middle age without the intervening gradations)—we are therefore more grateful for the party. Its taste and generosity and style remind us: Life was once like this. We talk about everything but It. And instead of asking what someone does in bed, we inquire, “Will there be chocolate for dessert?”

Looking at some of the guests I can tell which ones are celibate; which ones are having less, more cautious sex; and which ones are going right on with the old ways. It has nothing to do with one’s degree of personal exposure to the dying; it has to do with temperament, with the way different minds respond to the same facts. We face each other, after all, over freshly dug graves. There are ghosts among us. We’re the actresses who meet in the ruined theater in
Follies.
We’re tourists who have been admitted to an exhibit of our own former lives. Here are the flowers, the lights, the faces—just as they used to be, when everyone was sleeping with one another. What fun that was. Watching
The Normal Heart
the previous evening, I stared—across the stage between my seat and those opposite—at a handsome man in a long-sleeved, button-down, neatly pressed shirt. He had thick, dark hair; a mustache; watchful, dark eyes; and—beneath his clean clothes—one of those substantial bodies whose broad shoulders, swelling thighs, represent meat, flesh, life.
“Stop screwing!”
the doctor on stage was telling the hero.
“Until this is over!”
And I looked at the man in the first row in the button-down shirt, as if at an éclair on the bakery shelf, and thought,
“Someday, when this is over, perhaps
I can have just . . . one . . . more . . . of those.”

That’s because there seems to be a lull on this spring evening—which, in this room full of flowers and handsome men, encourages fantasy. Someday life will be as it was again. In fact, on the surface of this city it seems exactly the same. In the past few days I have spent an afternoon in Central Park; seen the Caravaggios at the Metropolitan, the Mayan artifacts at the Museum of Natural History,
The Normal Heart
and
Parsifal
(two works with, strangely, a common theme); had lunch with friends on Second Avenue; watched men meet in my local park at night and leave together; even visited the baths and seen men too numerous to count. Anyone would say nothing has changed. The city goes on: The baths and bars and parks are busy. But there is another city. The doppelgänger that coexists with us: Invisible, mental, it draws attention to itself when I pass certain apartment buildings, a bathhouse that has closed, or enter a room in which someone used to live. So if this party seems to re-create a former life—whose felicities we took for granted—there is a mood in the room, the same sentimental delicacy two lovers feel who haven’t seen each other in five years but meet in a restaurant they first went to every night the first month of their affair. It’s not just that, as another friend said, “New Yorkers have a solution for every dilemma. But not this one.” It’s that what has happened has left its mark. What has happened to us in New York the past five years has made those who still remain
careful
with each other in a way they weren’t before—almost tender. Gone is the old, caustic gossip, the sexual current that lay beneath a party like this to such a degree that reaching for an hors d’oeuvre, you were always wondering,
Who’s in the bathroom now, and how long have
they been in there?

That’s all passé—and in its place is a new reserve based on the simple truth that everyone has adjusted to new facts. Each one of us is Diseased Meat. Diseased Meat is blue-green; it stinks. It makes us think we shouldn’t sleep with the man in the red bow tie even if we meet him. Now, there’s Clorox and Oxynol-9 and hydrogen peroxide and condoms, and mutual masturbation at ten paces, but that’s not what meeting someone in the Age of Parties led to. That’s why the Age of Parties ended. That’s why it took at least five years for the enormous impetus—the assumptions, standards, freedom, egotism—of Promiscuity, Inc., to slow. The men—who used to be hors d’oeuvres—are no longer edible. So the real hors d’oeuvres become the focus of our mouths. We praise the food, we talk about someone’s student days in Paris in the
pissoirs
that are no longer there, and finally, the cakes on the table lined with bowls of strawberries.

And I think of a novel I’ve been reading by Henry James—a novel in which the heroine dies of an unnamed illness when she is still young, and her life is all before her. The model for this character, it’s said, was James’s cousin, who died of the disease that in the previous century eclipsed lives before they had run their course or achieved their purpose: tuberculosis. Her death haunted James all his life. The death of people before their time often does. The young writer who lived here had his career still before him; we will never know what he might have written. But it seems to me he was following the advice the doctor gives the heroine of
The Wings of the Dove:
“You must be happy. Any way you can!” How ironic! As I look out over the room at the guests, the flowers, the food assembled by a host who brought to his dead lover’s illness the same tact and imagination he has shown in re-creating the Age of Parties, I remember something else from
Wings of the Dove
—the very last lines. As the quartet saws away at its instruments in the flower-banked corner, I think of the two lovers who meet each other in the final scene of the book and realize their plan to defraud the heroine of her millions has failed in a way that not only turns their world upside down but introduces a certain estrangement between them. “I’ll marry you, mind you,” says the man in an attempt to reassure the woman, “in an hour.”

“As we were?” she says.

“As we were,” he says.

And then: “We shall never,” she says, “be again as we were!”