Look Away Silence (23 page)

So I buried myself in books while I waited for Matt
to come home from the hospital. I read at my counter at work. I got
brochures and sought out the solace of the Kielers, when I could. I
made lists. Lists. Page after page of lists. I would ponder them
while I waited for visiting hours to begin. Sometimes I would sit
alone, wondering whether Nurse Ratchet would let me see him.
Sometimes the Kielers were there. I was more subdued then, afraid
to express myself in front of them, even though Matt was out of the
oxygen tent and looked almost human again. Then Viv visited, with
her
How’re ya doin’ Harpooner?
She was so loud we received a
reprimand and stern warning from the nurse’s station.

I spent most of my hospital time sitting and waiting
and reading. Sometimes I’d share my reading with Matt. Sometimes
I’d ask Doctor Farrell a question of two. No matter how it came
down during those two months, as Matt got stronger, it was clear to
me that he would be home and I would need to adjust my scopes to a
new way of living — the life of the dutiful wife, vigilant of
someone else’s behavior. I thought it would be somewhere between a
mother and a wet nurse. I wasn’t sure what it would be. As time
passed, I felt comfortable that I could master the new duties as
long as I could control my emotional state. I would need ice in my
veins, not Cosmopolitans. However, in the end, Viv was correct. I
was unbrave and what I imagined was nothing like what eventually
transpired.

Matt left the hospital like a maternity case. I
pushed him in a wheelchair, while mother Kieler and sister Mary
pawed him. Sammy helped me get him into the car. Matt, however,
exerted his independence from the outset. Even when we arrived
home, he didn’t want me to wait on him hand and foot. I could see
he wasn’t strong enough yet and it would be another two weeks
before he was able to return to Axum Labs. Even then, I insisted on
driving him — changed my hours at the store for him. It was
important that he dived back into the routine of programming — his
career — his life. He talked incessantly about how the
McKinley
Database Project
would be hopelessly off schedule without him.
The fact is I met with his boss, a descent guy named Doug Lynch,
who thought the world of Matt and couldn’t care less about gay
relationships.
As long as he’s able,
Lynch said,
we’ll
keep him on. Hell, if he wants to work from home, that’s fine with
us too.

Axum Labs was a rarity. Most firms wouldn’t want a
man with AIDS on the premises and I was sure that if all the
employees knew, they would have a health revolution — picket signs
and law suits and a rash of resignations. I watched the news. I saw
the bullshit. However, Lynch was a good egg. He kept the nature of
Matt’s condition confined to a
bout of pneumonia
. I was
grateful for that, because as time progressed — as the fall moved
onward toward Thanksgiving, Matt was having difficulties working a
full day. He would start out the morning primed to go, but by
lunchtime he began to fade. I’d give him a call to see how he was
doing, and he usually lied and said
Fine, Pumpkin.
But on
four occasions, I insisted he leave work. My management wasn’t as
forgiving. On those occasions they dressed me down for darting out
— my vacation time had thinned, and it didn’t work that way anyhow.
You needed to request vacation in advance. On the fourth occasion,
I was docked. But shit, I had no choice.

The fact is, I did have a choice, but I wasn’t about
to chance things now. Matt took his medication — a cocktail of
capsules and pills that would have choked a horse. And he did
choke. I believed the meds were keeping him going, but the AZT,
which the doctor insisted was the best thing to strengthen the
immune system, had bad side effects — vomiting and diarrhea. In
fact, on two of those occasions when I rescued Matt from work, he
had . . . soiled himself.

“I’m not wearing a diaper,” he snapped, when I
suggested it.

“Why not, sweetie? There’s no embarrassment in it.
No one will know.”

I eased him onto the couch. He was tired that day,
even though he had enough snap in him to resist my suggestion.

“I’ll know,” he said. “I’m not a baby.”

“You’re my baby,” I said, kissing him.

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, it’s a sight better than shitting your pants
and having to call me to wipe your ass.”

I marched away. He wasn’t working with me here. I
was docked a half-day’s pay to save him from a situation, which
wasn’t his fault, but still, prevention could be applied. Still, he
fought me in this. As I slammed things around the kitchen,
wondering what I could feed him that wouldn’t upset his stomach
further, I remembered that he had another cup of pills to
swallow.

“It’s time for your meds.”

“Not now,” he barked. “They won’t stay down.”

I came to the kitchen door, my hands on my hips —
the perfect salad cruet pose.

“You can take them with peanut butter.”

“I didn’t like them that way.”

“Well, milk will only give you the shits.”

“I already have the shits.”

“So what do we do?”

So what do we do?
He sat there, my perfect
specimen — still the cowboy in a suit jacket without pants and a
bit pathetic. However, he was my beauty, his eyes pleading for love
and fun, not meds in peanut butter. Why was I torturing him? No, I
wasn’t torturing him. It was the
bug
that swam in his veins
— a bug that I was beginning to know better and better. His T-cell
count was still strong enough to keep him afloat, but that wouldn’t
last if he didn’t ingest pills, get a bad belly ache and take a run
at the toilet like some dysentery patient. Oh, I was learning.
Reading and learning.
Who was the victim here?
I
wondered.

I moseyed to his side. He glanced at me with those
wonder-eyes. He was tempting me to forgo my notions of meds and
lectures on diapers.

“How about if we just take a dive into the bed and
call it a night?” he suggested.

Tempting, but . . .

“It’s still daytime,” I said. “And you’re going to
take your meds or the nice people at Axum Labs will be finding
themselves a new
wunderkind
to finish their super-duper
database project.”

He pouted.

“I hate it with peanut butter.”

I looked him in the eye.

“Tough shit. If you don’t behave yourself, I call
your mother.”

“She wouldn’t make me wear a diaper.”

A chink in the armor.

“Let’s call her and find out. Or better still, I’ll
call Viv.”

He surrendered. He took his meds on bread with
butter and honey. He still gagged, but the God of T-cell counts was
served. Then he dozed and I crept out to buy a package of
Depends
, that is, after I soaked his crappy under drawers
and got a stain and the stink out of his suit pants. Thank God for
lavender linen spray. I knew the dry cleaner wouldn’t touch them in
their native condition. By the time I finished these chores,
dropped by my apartment for the mail, boiled the silverware to keep
the germ population down, washed the kitchen floor for the same
reason, made a cheese plate to bind Matt’s rear and wolf down a
cold cheeseburger I had picked up at McDonald’s, I was ready for
bed. However, I never made it there. I fell asleep in a chair with
one sock on and one sock off. I woke up at two in the morning just
in time for Matt’s meds . . . bread, butter, honey, pills and
resistance — the perfect combination for a little Miss nobody like
me who just wanted one thing now. To fight the odds and not be
unbrave.

Good days. Bad days. I knew them well as we moved
toward Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was never sure when I’d get
the call at work to retrieve my cowboy from a dizzy spell or a
faint. I did win the diaper war. He even carried a spare in his
attaché
case. Still, I was called on the carpet by my blue
pencil on the job for reading instead of folding. I had told her
that Viv was having some problems. I could never admit to a lover
with AIDS. I would be sent to the stockroom and never emerge. And
as for the reading, I mixed the pamphlets in with travel brochures
so no one would suspect. With Russ no longer at the Tux shop, I
took my breaks alone and read and read and read. I was learning a
new language, an education in immune systems and retroviruses and
serum conversion. I had learned that AIDS wasn’t a disease but a
condition, like diabetes. No one ever died of diabetes. With
diabetes, you always went from kidney failure, a heart attack or
too many toes and legs lopped off. With AIDS, it wasn’t the bug,
the HIV (excuse me the Human Immune-deficient Virus) that got you.
It was the critters that invaded your body because the white
corpuscle police were nodding off somewhere. In fact, you could
host the virus (or, as I learned, the retrovirus, although that
always made me think of sperm swimming backwards — ass-backwards),
and never get sick. If you developed . . .
complications
,
then you had
full-blown
AIDS. I was learning, and the lingo
was difficult, and it got harder as I progressed.

Matt had
full-blown
AIDS, because his immune
system was
compromised
and that bout in the hospital was
pneumonia.
But not just any
pneumonia
. A special
kind. How sinister. It was PCP —
Pneumocystis
carinii pneumonia.
It was rare in healthy
human beings as it was caused by a parasitic virus that infected
the lungs making it difficult to breathe. In fact, although he had
survived it, he still had it. If he went off his meds, it could
take over again. Doctor Farrell told me that most
full-blown
AIDS patients
had multiple episodes of PCP and would be periodically
hospitalized. I was fearful. Every time Matt coughed, and it was
often, I had my hand near the phone ready to dial. There were worse
things, which to my knowledge he didn’t have like
Toxoplasmosis
, a deadly
parasitic infection you caught from cats, and
Candidiasis
, which he did have — a
fungal infection of the tongue and mouth. That was controllable. I
was constantly on the lookout for
Kaposi’s
sarcoma
, a cancer that only old men
contracted — until now. The patient broke out in blotchy, purple
lesions. Every little bruise I found on Matt’s hand or leg was
suspected now.

I figured that the more I knew about these
complications and their prevention, the better I’d be to combat
them. However, the question was how to do this and still live. The
only easy time I actually had was at work. It was almost downtime
as it turned out. Even on the good days, when Matt could get around
on his own — working on his computer and not under my feet, I still
had a strict schedule. He insisted I go to rehearsal, but that was
a short-lived fancy. I went to the first one, was greeted by an
enthusiastic throng of well wishers, but when presented with the
assigned solos, I sighed and declined.

I expected Jasper would do cartwheels, but actually
he had changed. I guess our Colorado experience made him more aware
of his vocal shortcomings and his ascension to my tenorial throne
was assumed with humility. In fact, he was sorry to see me go — and
go I did. I couldn’t concentrate on the music. I had no patience
for the note by note honing. And . . . Russ was among the missing.
Tim couldn’t give me much information. They were an item only at
the festival, Tim jumping ship shortly after their return home. One
of the Rons said Russ was in the hospital and I immediately
demonstrated my grasp of the lingo (not intentionally) by asking
PCP?
This got me a shrug. I had decided that I should stop
up and visit Russ, but it never happened. I’m not sure whether it
was the lack of time or AIDS overload, but I never made it up
there. I didn’t even mention it to Matt, fearing it might upset
him.
What kind of friend was I?
What kind of human being had
I become? The unbrave, as Viv dubbed me. I guess that numbed me to
everything but my cowboy and getting him through these turgid
waters.

“Marty,” Jasper called to me after the
rehearsal.

It was dark as I passed Richardson Auditorium on my
way to the car. I recognized the voice and even succumbed to the
sacrilege of anyone calling me
Marty
. In days past, I would
have ignored Jasper’s hark, but I needed the company now. I heaved
a deep sigh.

“If you’re going to try to talk me into staying,” I
said, “don’t waste your breath.”

“I understand,” Jasper said. “It’s a shame. The
sound will suffer . . . greatly.”

“Thank you. I guess we’ve had our ups and
downs.”

“My fault,” he said.

I looked at his goofy expression in the street
light. It wasn’t so goofy as I had recalled.

“It’s been mutual,” I conceded. “Our duet was
brilliant.”

“It was. But that’s not what I wanted to say.”

I feared that maybe I had sparked something
incorrect in Jasper’s soul. Mixed signals. I mean, why would he be
so attentive to me in Colorado? It was beginning to make sense. I
raised my hand, and then continued toward the car.

“You need a buddy,” he stammered.

“I’m flattered, Jasper. Truly, I am.”

“No, no. You have it wrong.”

I stopped.
Did I?
What was he talking
about?

“Do I? Then set me straight — in a manner of
speaking.”

He giggled.

“I mean, you need someone from Buddy Services. I
work for Buddy Services.”

Comprehension gelled. In my reading on cures and
treatment, I came across a mention of the corps of volunteers that
helped out with AIDS patients and their caregivers. This was a
sweet offer.