The Road Taken (37 page)

Chapter Forty-Six

Hugh did not consider himself old enough to retire; his interest in beautiful things was what kept him young. Many of his clients had become long-standing friends. After fifty years at the same little landmark shop, he was a Greenwich Village fixture. If he had worked at a large company, he thought, the people on top would have thrown him out by now—a man in his seventies—would have thought him redundant. But he dealt with antiquities, thus old was better, and he was his own boss. His sense of humor would not fade, nor would his curiosity and his knowledge. And he liked young people, especially young gay men. Having them around amused him and kept him au courant.

The handsome young gay man who had been helping him in his shop for the past four years was named Bill. In a way he reminded Hugh of himself when he was that age, newly arrived in New York, working for Zazu. But Bill was not a paint queen; he went to the gym and kept his body buffed, he seemed more like a smiling, tawny-haired, Ivy League college boy. He was very popular, and Hugh enjoyed hearing about his exploits and parties and summer weekends on Fire Island with other young male beauties, the New York nights at the newest, and sometimes rather sinister, bars, the discos and drugs, the bathhouses with uncountable and soon forgotten sexual partners—the hedonistic new homosexual freedom taking place in the decade that had gone merrily past.

Ah, Hugh thought, these lovely boys remind me of the frieze of figures around a Grecian urn; something I can look at and fantasize about but never join. Not anymore. The flesh becomes an embarrassment instead of an allure, and the suitors have long since disappeared, but I am content because I still have Teddy.

It had been quite a few years since he and Teddy had had sex with each other, or even thought of one another in that way. They were best friends and life companions, as comfortable and devoted as good brothers; two men who had once been lovers for longer than many of the lovers he knew. Many of their friends had separate rooms now. Hugh and Teddy still slept in the same king-sized bed, and often held each other in their sleep.

Hugh had become convinced that a short attention span in sex was natural for most men. Certainly the homosexual couples he knew who had been together for many decades were more often companions than lovers, as were the heterosexual couples, from what he had gathered. He didn’t even like to think of elderly people, of whatever persuasion, having sex, because physical appearance was very important to him. He supposed one could hire a hustler at any age, but why would you want to? Who could believe such paid-for pretense was passion, at least on the part of the young, attractive one? Just close your eyes, dearie, and pretend I’m your granny. One thing Hugh never wanted to do was to be made a fool of.

He and Teddy had cheated, secretly and considerately, in their heyday. That, too, Hugh thought, was a province of men, although what he had read lately was making him realize he was old-fashioned and limited to think it. They had been sure they would never leave each other, and they were still surprised when they hadn’t. Love was ambiguous.

Beautiful Bill’s mysterious affliction appeared slowly at first. A purple blotch on his neck.Annoying, ugly, but not threatening. More blotches. His dermatologist told him it was a kind of cancer. How could that be? He was twenty-eight years old and in the best of health. Then he got pneumonia. Then something else, and something else, until he was wasting away and dying in front of Hugh’s eyes—the young man who had been so full of fun was now unrecognizable and in hideous pain. All Hugh could do was visit him and bring him soup, hold his hand, be appalled at the symptoms, and be grateful Bill’s friends had not deserted him.

Some of them were getting sick too.

At first most people did not know about the spreading plague, did not want to know, but in the world where he traveled Hugh was aware. The purple blotches of Kaposi’s sarcoma, or sometimes the stab of shingles, followed by toxoplasmosis, or pneumonia, or tuberculosis, or lymph cancer or massive thrush or herpes—in short, any opportunistic infection that could destroy the body and brain—were striking young homosexual men. Handsome young men in the prime of their lives were dying quickly—and yet too slowly when you considered the suffering—of horrific things. In a year or two it finally became recognized as an epidemic. At first the epidemic was called GRID: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.

Later it would be called AIDS.

Bringing the sensationalism, the otherness, the strangeness, of this mysterious tragedy to the straight world,
People
magazine ran a cover story about a former drag queen named Brandy Alexander who was now a mortally ill patient in a hospital, almost bald, covered with sores inside and outside of his body, a dying man the nurses were afraid to go near to tend because whatever he had they didn’t want to get it. The “gay disease” was weird, straight people thought, and although they were sure it had nothing to do with them, it was frightening. To Hugh it was more. Any of these men could have been me, he thought, if I had been born in a different time. I, too, was young and beautiful once, and wild.

The researchers found that exchange of bodily fluids spread the disease, whatever it was. Doctors warned their gay patients against anal sex, some against any sex at all. Gay sex had become lethal. “This is retribution,” said some of Hugh’s young friends, in terror. “I’m not going to give up my lifestyle,” said others of them, defiantly. Everyone Hugh knew had lost friends and people they loved; the outcasts who had formed merry extended families of young men like themselves were now constantly going to funerals. There was fear in the streets of the Village these days, but despite warnings, men still went to bathhouses, still looked for sex in clubs. There was no test yet for a disease people didn’t understand, that remained without symptoms for years; and if there was a test, who would want to take it, to find himself condemned to death?

Straight people didn’t want to invite gay people to their homes any more, or touch what they had touched. Some of Hugh’s customers looked at him oddly, and avoided coming near him. One, a young wife and mother who had been planning to have him help her decorate her new apartment, stopped coming to the store altogether. Everyone was afraid except for the people who were in denial. The disease also afflicted heterosexual Haitians, so now everyone was afraid of them too.

AIDS, Hugh thought, was to the twentieth century what syphilis had been to the straight people of his grandfather’s and father’s generations: lurking and incurable, the wages of sin as death. And then, finally, a cure for syphilis had been found, and it was nearly gone. Now here was another scourge.

Thousands of men were dying and the number was growing. AIDS victims were fired from their jobs and deserted by their loved ones, evicted from their apartments, turned into outcasts. Paranoia was rampant. Hugh, who had marched in gay pride parades and stood so proudly as an onlooker at the Stonewall riot at the end of the sixties, which ushered in the new era of freedom, now joined the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, helped organize fund-raisers, tended the sick and dying patients he knew, and finally even went to visit desperate people he had never met before. His life had changed, just when he had thought it would fade away in peace. Unexpectedly, he had a mission.

He was almost eighty now, alert and trim; and the sight of this feisty old man marching on the politicians with a placard in his hand, enthusiastically becoming so much a part of the quest for research aid, made people smile. They considered him a character and they liked him. The press liked him, and took his picture. His family didn’t know what to think.

Rose, of course, was proud of him. “A crisis always brings out the best in you,” she told him. “Remember how you enlisted in the war when you didn’t have to?”

“Bravo, Uncle Hugh!” Joan said, and saved the clippings.

“Uncle Hugh always finds a way to embarrass us,” Peggy grumbled.

Ginger told him to be careful around the sick. “The nurses in the hospital won’t wipe the blood off the AIDS patients for good reason,” she said. “Wear surgical gloves. Wear a mask.”

“There is no ‘good reason’ to be cruel,” Hugh said, but he wore the gloves anyway because no one knew for sure how you could become infected. He stopped short at the mask because it was off-putting, and hoped no one would cough on him.

Teddy was nervous to see Hugh playing at nurse. “You’ll get it,” he said. “No, I won’t,” Hugh said. He didn’t know why he was so sure of it, but he felt that in some way he was meant to be helpful and the same force that had made him compassionate would keep him safe.

He and Teddy knew they were lucky that no one had given either of them AIDS. That my life was spared was a simple case of timing, Hugh thought, and he felt a kind of survivor guilt. Then, to expiate it, he packed up another basket of food and went back to feed the sick, like Little Red Riding Hood going to feed the Big Bad Wolf, except the wolf he visited was too weak to get out of bed.

In 1984, AIDS was discovered to be caused by a virus. It seemed to be knocking out the immune systems of not only gay men and Haitians, but hemophiliacs of whatever sex or age, even children, who had received blood transfusions, and heroin addicts who had shared needles, and babies who had been infected through the placental blood supply from their mothers in the womb. Only a while ago herpes had been the dreaded sexually transmitted straight disease of the decade, but now AIDS was. Men could get it from women. Women could get it from men.

Hugh warned Markie and Angel about the dangers of unprotected sex—not that they hadn’t heard it from the media—since he knew they weren’t going to hear it from their parents. Markie was a young lawyer now, working in New York, as lovely to look at as her mother and aunt (whichever was which) had been at her age. Angel was a downtown painter, and Hugh knew her life was as free as that implied. Men loved those two young women, and they loved men. Markie and Angel assured him they used condoms, but Hugh wasn’t sure. They seemed resentful, annoyed, nervous, at his meddling.

“I always know my dates well before I sleep with them,” they said, and he knew that meant nothing. Straight women who did not sleep with heroin addicts or bisexuals still thought they were safe, and straight men thought they lived charmed lives because they were throwers not catchers.

In 1985 there was, finally, a test. Now you could know the truth about what you most feared. The masculine movie star Rock Hudson revealed that he was gay and that he was dying of AIDS, and people began to realize it could happen to anyone. For gay men, the party had stopped. The following year the first drug for AIDS was discovered, AZT, but it was extremely expensive.

Hugh continued to be an activist. He joined a new politically active group called ACT UP, for gays and lesbians. Now he and his group were lobbying the pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of AZT so more people could afford it. Hugh tried but couldn’t make Teddy join, however—poor old thing so set in his ways. Teddy insisted he was too elderly to march. But one day he came to watch. Hugh was jubilant: Teddy, long since retired, nothing to lose anymore, coming out along with the young people, finding his pride in what he was.

People continued to notice Hugh. In a way, he had become to the AIDS cure movement what Dr. Spock, at eighty, had been to the Vietnam peace initiative. He didn’t wear makeup in public anymore; he felt it was undignified in his new role, not to mention for someone of his advanced maturity. A touch of blush on freshly shaven cheeks on his missions of mercy was as far as he would go, and only because he thought someone in the room should look healthy.

Gay and straight, movie stars, celebrities, ordinary people, were wearing the red looped ribbon on their lapels. It had become a symbol of honorable intent. How sad it was, Hugh thought, that something as terrible as this disease should be the force that finally united people in brotherhood.

At least, some people. There was a long way to go, but he had known that all his life, and now he was surprised to look back and see how far he had come.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Research is like a galaxy, and every research lab is a different planet. Ginger’s was in an old medical facility containing many other labs, only a block away from the one-bedroom apartment where she now lived, thus making her world smaller and smaller. She had a tiny office nestled next to a slightly larger laboratory—all hers. She had a tech, a young woman named Sheila Huang, who was her research assistant, with whom she met every day; she had a fellow, this year a young man from Pakistan, who was paid by the fellowship program and thus was sort of free labor; and one or two days a week she herself did hands-on bench work. At nearly fifty, and established, Ginger was no longer a “lab rat.” She was the administrator. Her family, if they tried to understand her work at all, imagined her peering at a Bunsen burner, but it had been years since her fingers had touched anything like that.

Outside of her cluttered little unit, in the corridor, were files, and large machines filled with carbon dioxide that kept samples of tissue frozen—everyday cryogenics, really—until they were needed. A refrigerator held samples of blood. Across the hall and next door researchers were working on other kinds of cancer, following other leads. Three of those other labs were researching breast cancer, as she was.

Three afternoons a week Ginger worked at the oncology clinic in the hospital to help support her research projects. On weekends she was either in her lab or sequestered in her little office, struggling over the writing of articles for medical journals like
The New England Journal of Medicine,
describing her findings to keep herself known, and the rest of the time, during long days that ended at ten o’clock at night, she wrote applications for grants, to places like the National Institute of Health, or the Department of Defense. After all this time in medicine she was still working eighty hours a week, sixteen hours a day.

She told herself she was no different from the Wall Street types who put in those long hours; you had to be obsessed. After all, she was making $150,000 a year. She looked back at how she had begun her life’s work, with so much altruism and starstruck fantasy, and now most of the time she felt she was slogging through it as a beggar and a clerk.

Detail overwhelmed her. The applications and the work proposals and the budget were complex. It took three months to write a grant application, and they were judged very harshly. People had multiple grants, overlapping in duration, so they spent a lot of time obsessing over getting the next one. If you didn’t get the money you wouldn’t be able to continue the research, or have a salary to live on. Some people liked the routine and the challenge, the paperwork and anxiety, and some hated it. It had taken Ginger this long to realize she hated it. But it let her do the part she loved, to follow her dream of discovering something no one else had found. The one thing she had always been was stubborn.

She still had friends and colleagues, many of them one and the same because colleagues became friends and there was little time to keep up with the others. The married male doctor down the hall worked from six
A.M.
to six
P.M.
and thought that was an abbreviated day because he could go home to have supper with his children. He remarked that he hadn’t seen his children in the morning for years; not that it was a bad thing, he added, smiling. The young single people who worked in the labs, a transient group, amused her and kept her aware of the outside world, although she thought of them as an odd bunch, and she wondered if she had been odd too. Who would want to sit in a lonely room day after day doing repetitive work?

She was not sure now, looking back, if her lifelong dedication after polio had paralyzed her legs had been partly a way to remain hidden and to avoid being hurt.

She’d had lovers but not love; the love she’d had was so long ago now that she sometimes wondered what she had seen in him. Ginger was realistic, and she knew the chances of finding love now, of having a life’s companion, were remote. Would it have helped if she were desperate, if she wanted a man so much that she made seeking and getting him as much a project as she did finding a cure for cancer? But even able-bodied women in their twenties, out and about, looking, trying, complained they could never find a man to marry. What could
she
expect?

She had her habits by now and she was attached to them. She was a workaholic, and, in her few spare moments, she was the new term, a Couch Potato. Sometimes it made her content, a reward after taxing her brain, and sometimes she realized that she felt about her solitary life the same way she did about the administration duties: She hated it.

Holidays were the hardest. What would she do without her mother, Uncle Hugh and Teddy, her sisters, her nieces and nephew, her extended family filling up her mother’s house? They got her through Christmas, but New Year’s Eve was unspeakable, with or without plans, because she was always without a date. Even three-day weekends were depressing (throngs at sales in the stores, families struggling to airports to get away for a mini vacation), so Ginger always worked and ignored them.

Sometimes she felt guilty that she wasn’t trying to spend more time with her mother, who was getting older—eighty-seven, after all, was an age where you couldn’t put things off—but Rose seemed almost as busy as Ginger was, and certainly happier. Even Rose did not live alone. Peter and Jamie and their menagerie were a fixture and showed no sign of planning to leave, although Peter and Jamie had finally gotten married, in Las Vegas, of all bizarre places. They expressed no desire to have children. Children, Peter and Jamie said, would interfere with their perfect symbiosis.

So Peggy had no grandchildren . . . yet. There would always be Markie and Angel to reproduce, whenever they settled down. But Peggy’s voluntarily childless son, whom they all had underrated for so many years as a dilettante, had finally gotten his first novel published, to excellent reviews and a few weeks of exciting attention.

The other reason Ginger didn’t visit with her mother alone was that she knew Rose would sense that she was depressed, and wondered if Rose would suggest she give a salon again. But it was too late, there was no time, and she was, at least for now but perhaps forever, no longer the hostess type.

That year, 1987, Harriette’s husband, Julius, died of liver cancer. He had refused chemotherapy, which his doctors said wouldn’t add much length to his life, and he said he wanted to go peacefully and quickly, which he did. Harriette, who had always deferred to him, didn’t ask him to consider any other way.

After her husband died and she had recovered her good spirits, Harriette asked Ginger to come on a lecture cruise of the coast of Italy with her, which Ginger thought was like something out of a Victorian novel—the lively, elderly, rich, widowed aunt; the intelligent, crippled, spinster niece—and Ginger said she was too busy. “It will be good for you,” Aunt Harriette said. “You can afford it. What do you do with your money? You should have some fun. Life is short and unpredictable. You never know if an opportunity is your last.”

“Maybe some other time,” Ginger said. Maybe never, she thought. Aunt Harriette went with a friend.

Of course I know life is short and unpredictable, Ginger wanted to say. I work in a cancer clinic. Every time I see those terribly sick people I feel thankful I’m not them. And sometimes I see one or another, a nice-enough-looking man, no wife, who is going to get well, and I wonder if under different circumstances we would feel about each other in a more personal way. It’s unethical to date patients while they’re under your care, and then they’re gone, back to their real lives. Doctors marry patients, it’s true. I’ve seen it. Your patients depend on you, they need you so much, and it becomes a kind of emotion very like a crush. Then sometimes it happens that you go out with each other afterward, while the closeness is still there.

As the song goes: “But not for me.”

And yet sometimes she felt such a burst of joy, as if the unexpected love would sneak up on her if she only stopped thinking about it and let these things happen.

As the other song went: “
Que Sera Sera.
”