JD (32 page)

I
must have fallen asleep watching the news. Now a talk show host—I don't recognize him, I'm never up this late—is interviewing, so help me, Edgar Villard. Still alive, drawling some prepared bon mots about the Iraq War and the American Imperium.

I have been waiting up for Philip. I told him, just because he was staying here for the weekend, he didn't have to keep me company all the time. And—serves me right—he has taken me at my word. It must be two in the morning. What am I angry about? He has a key, there wasn't any need for me to stay up. He's fifty years old, why shouldn't he stay out until two in the morning?

I am angry because I am imagining what has kept him out. Picturing, with unwanted precision, little vignettes like lewd Pompeian frescoes. Why should this make me angry, what is it to me? I guess I am afraid of being abandoned. Here I have, however briefly, another creature in the house, and this very minute he may be with his next love, who will take him from me.

I make myself go to bed. Because I realize how silly I would feel if Philip came in and found me waiting. More exactly: because it is very silly of me to be waiting up for somebody else's son.

I
'm not sure when I got to sleep. This morning after I made the coffee I listened at the door of Philip's room and didn't hear snoring. So he has had a miracle cure or he never came home. I could open the door a little and just peek. But Jonathan's exploits suggest that nothing
good comes of bursting into that particular room. Which, I realize, I am calling Philip's.

It is half past eight and I am nearly through the
Times
when I hear Philip's key in the lock. He fumbles long enough that I am able to compose myself and look blandly incurious as he comes in, pipes “Good
mor
ning!” and starts the toast for his morning pill.

I can't resist, finally. “Did you have a nice time?”

He emerges from the kitchen with his toast. “Did I have a naughty time, you mean.”

“I suppose.”

“No, I went to a few bars and struck out, and then I went to the sauna and fell asleep. I'm getting too old for this. And starting to show it, I guess.”

If he is fishing, I don't take the bait. He goes on: “I was thinking last night—I started coming here sometimes for weekends in ‘71. I was eighteen, back then you could drink at eighteen in New York. And I went to some of the same bars Dr. Ascher writes about.”

“Do you have to keep calling him Dr. Ascher?”

“I can't help it. Even when I'm reading about him kneeling in a puddle and … I'm sorry. Well, I guess you know what's in that journal.”

“Yes.”

“Anyway, I was a kid. Kind of geeky, big aviator glasses and a Jewish afro. But, hey, eighteen, people in the bars will forgive a lot when you're eighteen. So I wonder—he was still alive then, I wonder if he ever saw me. Maybe even tried to make me. I would have turned him down flat, I was lousy to old men. As if their having the chutzpah to approach me were some kind of affront: you think in a million years I'd let you … ? Of course if I'd been really confident about my own looks back then I would have been gracious. Smiled, talked a little even with a gargoyle instead of just grimacing and swiveling away. But I would have been lousy to Dr. Ascher, if he had ever encountered me he would have walked away cursing me.”

“Do you think it happened?”

“Now that I think more about it, I kind of doubt I would have been his type. But I'm starting to know how he felt about being old.”

“You know, I don't remember him ever talking about that.”

“Really? It's all over the 1964 journal. Can I get you more coffee?”

“I already had too much, waiting …”

He tilts his head, registering the
waiting
. In the kitchen, he microwaves the last stale brew from this morning's pot; he comes back in and sits across from me. “The ‘64 journal, it's all about his … well, I guess just midlife crisis is too crude, I mean he got the book of his life out of it.” He chuckles, “Like Dante got his book out of the midlife crisis. But I think back to the book,
JD
, after reading the journal, and you can see, the book is all about his own aging. You think he's talking about finding a way for young people to live, and it's all about remaking a world so
he
still matters.”

“One of his colleagues thought it was just about making a world where he could have all the sex he wanted.”

“And I guess you agree?”

“No.” No, I have to be fair to him finally. “He wanted a decent world. A state that served citizens instead of stockholders, he said. A place where ‘productive' wasn't the nicest thing you could call somebody.”

“You could be him talking.”

“God knows I heard it plenty. And believed it, believed him. But it didn't happen. He saw it himself, before he died—the gay liberation stuff. It may have freed you to go out to the saunas till all hours of the night, but it didn't really free anybody.”

“Do you have any idea what my life would be like if it weren't for the liberation
stuff
? Of course you do, you must remember.” Then quietly, looking down into his cup: “Not to mention it's my business what I do till all hours of the night.”

“I don't mean your freedom shouldn't have happened. Neither did Jonathan, I guess. He just thought it shouldn't have been the
only
thing that happened.”

Philip sighs. “What did you want us to do? People keep waiting for gays to start the revolution, or women, or black people. But the only way to start the revolution is for straight white men to understand who's fucking them. What was it Dr. Ascher said about the graphite-lubed machine? And their whole world depends on their
not
understanding that they're being fucked.”

“I'm sure you're right,” I say. If only to stop him from saying fuck
over and over again. “It's just a shame that we never even tried for the world Jonathan wanted.”

“Well, but … I'd be dead, you know?”

“You'd be—?”

“If Dr. Ascher had got the world he wanted there wouldn't have been these drugs I take, no one was going to brew this stuff in his home chemistry lab. If it wasn't the big drug companies, it would be big government, something. I can think, in the abstract, I can think it isn't worth it: helping me live a few years longer isn't worth what it's cost for the way
everybody
lives, better I should be without the drugs than see what's happened to the world. But just in the abstract; I can't feel it.”

“Who could possibly feel that way? A saint.”

“I guess maybe you don't get a new world without saints.” He shrugged. “But I'm not volunteering.”

I
n the evening, Philip gets back from his day in the SLS library. He is through with the ‘64 journal, he says; now he's looking at the manuscript of
JD
. Which, typed on Corrasable Bond, probably shows no false starts or emendations—nothing of any use to a biographer. He is too tactful to press me about when he can see ‘66 or ‘70. Or ‘72, which I haven't even finished reading, can't get back to until Philip leaves for Delaware on Monday.

We have a glass of wine together, and I offer dinner, but he says, “No, it'd probably make me drowsy. I'll just get a slice or something later.” He means in between hunting for … whatever he hunts for, exactly.

I think maybe we're far enough along that I can ask: “Are you looking for someone to be with? Or just … someone to be with?”

He laughs at my unwillingness to use the obvious words. “I think you mean: for twenty minutes? Or for twenty years to life?”

“That's what I mean.”

“I … I don't think I'll be getting another life sentence.”

“Why? You're still young.”

“Me? Not in gay years. But it's not that. After Matt died—did we talk about Matt?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Anyway, I didn't even try seeing people at first. And then I did, especially after I started getting better. But if I went on a date with somebody, we needed a table for three, so there'd be room for Matt's ghost. You know how it is.”

“I'm not sure.”

“Oh.” He raises an eyebrow, as if he expects me to discuss my post-Jonathan dating history. He will wait a long time. “It was like … it's not that I heard some haunt going, ‘Beware! Do not forsake me!' It was more like, ‘Beware! This twerp doesn't get your jokes! Beware! This guy is wearing fuchsia, for God's sake!' It was the comparison, you know? Of course, nobody was Matt.

“But then I realized it wasn't the guys I was seeing. It was that I knew, inside, that I didn't deserve anybody.”

I brought all this up. I am dreading whatever kind of self-absorbed lament is coming, I am already composing in my mind some all-purpose comforting remarks. But I was the one who brought it up.

“I've never told anybody this,” he says. The way people say it when they are beginning a well-rehearsed confession. “Matt and I, you know, got diagnosed around the same time. I wondered sometimes if I was to blame. Well, not to blame, or even responsible: those words suggest agency. Possibly I was the … what do they call it? The vector. Probably: I'd been a pretty bad boy—not as bad as I wanted to be, but pretty frisky. While Matt had only been with a handful of guys since he'd left his wife. Just statistically I was the more likely culprit, suspect …”

“So that's what makes you feel undeserving?”

“No. I just can't find neutral words, words as innocent as I am. No, it was … Look, we were both positive, both with a lousy prognosis, and I had—for all I know both of us did—the strangest mix of desires. I wanted to go first, because I didn't want to be the one who was left alone with strangers taking care of me. I wanted him to go first, because I wanted to take care of him. I wanted him to go first because I wanted to live.

“And finally, when he got really sick and it was clear that he probably
was
going first: I wanted him to go. I nursed him, I shared the good days with him, I cleaned up after him, and I wanted him to hurry up and fucking go. So I—I know, I may be kind to animals and
I give money to panhandlers and charities and I cuddle sweetly with perfect strangers for a few hours, but I know I am … vile. Deep inside there is no love in me.”

“Because you had a wish? How can we blame ourselves for what we wish, what could be less voluntary than a wish?”

“What could be more voluntary?” he says. “What does voluntary even mean, other than that you're obeying your own wishes?”

“But you didn't obey.”

He doesn't answer this. “I better get changed,” he says.

He emerges from his room—Mickey's room—wearing one of his stretchy T-shirts and a fleece jacket with a little hood, such as I see on sixteen-year-olds. He looks at himself in the mirror, runs a hand through his hair to muss it just a little, a precise little. “Don't wait up,” he says.

M
onday morning. Philip is dressed in corduroy and tweed, playing a college professor as last night he played a high school letterman. “I need to get back for a two o'clock class,” he says. “I'll just get coffee or something at the station.”

“All right. When do you think you'll be back here?”

“I'm not sure. Midterms are coming up.” He adds, face neutral, “Maybe when there's something more to read.”

I pretend not to get this; he departs.

A wave of desolation passes over me as I close the door. Just for an instant, I am over it that quickly.

April 11, 1972

I called my brother, Bernie.

“Johnny. Long time. What's up?” Bernie's voice was tight with alarm. He must have figured, if I was calling after all these years, somebody had died.

I explained about Mickey. “Jeez,” Bernie said. “That poor sweet kid. What's he going to do?”

“That's why I'm calling my brother the doctor.”

“Huh?”

“I thought …”

“Oh. You mean some kind of medical thing.” He was silent for a minute. “I don't know, I'm not sure that kind of thing is right.”

“For Christ's sake.”

“Look, I'm not even sure it does much good. I got colleagues, tried all kinds of stuff, and off their sons have gone.”

“There has to be something.”

“Hell, why doesn't he just go in and tell them he's a faggot?” He didn't add: like his father.

We have never come close to talking about this. But it occurs to me that every conversation we've had in the last-maybe forty years, we've been distant that long--every terse, strained colloquy has been about
not
discussing my little peculiarity. Forty years ago, maybe, somebody told him something, or he just followed my eyes some time and made out what I was gazing at. If either of us had ever spoken, if one of us spoke now, would the ice be broken or would the freeze be forever?

Bernie said, “I'm sorry.” But he didn't specify what he was sorry about.

“What are you going to do about Alan?” I said.

“He's going to Penn Med next year. They'll let him finish, and then, you know, he'll go in the service as a doctor. He'll survive.”

I didn't answer, and he heard what he had said. My son will survive, my perfect Alan, we didn't fuck up like you did. I was jealous, but also glad for Alan: he, too, was a sweet kid, the last I'd seen him.

“Maybe there's something,” Bernie said. “I'll think about it.”

“Please. But listen, I don't want to tell Martha just now. Get her hopes up.”

“Okay.”

“We should all see each other some time. I know Mickey would love to see Alan.”

“Johnny, um …” No one else on earth calls me Johnny, not since Pop died. “No, I don't think we're going to see each other. I'll see what we can do for Mickey.”