Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir Read online

  "Spain!" Roger writes in his diary in 1959, after three days' hitchhike from Paris to Madrid. "If only I had a friend!"

  For if there was no man out there who was equal and simpatico, then what was the point of being gay? The baggage and the shit you had to take were bad enough. But it all jogged into place when we met, everything I'd brooded over from the ancient Greeks to Whitman. It all ceased to be literary. My life was a sort of amnesia till then, longing for something that couldn't be true until I'd found the rest of me. Is that feeling so different in straight people? Or is it that gay people have to keep it secret and so grow divided, with a bachelor's face to the world and a pang like dying inside?

  The reason he got such a late start as a lawyer was that Roger lived a whole other life first. During his freshman year at Harvard Law he was simultaneously writing his dissertation for a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. That work grew out of a decade of Europe and books, the bohemian ramble, complete with beret in one black-and-white of the period. A month before he was diagnosed, we saw a production of Philip Barry's Holiday, and Roger laughed on the way out, saying he'd done exactly what Barry's hero longed to do—retire at the age of twenty.

  He left Brandeis after his freshman year and went straight to Paris, where he worked as a waiter and flirted with being a poet. The patronne of Restaurant Papille was Madeleine Follain, a painter by vocation, the daughter of Maurice Denis and wife of the poet Jean Follain. Roger reveled in all that passionate life of art, and the journal of his nineteenth year, two hundred close-typed pages, burns with the search for the perfect feeling and the words to speak it. When he finally graduated from Brandeis, he returned to Paris for two more years, working at Larousse and Gallimard. Then he took a long sojourn in the Middle East, where his aunt was married to an Israeli diplomat. Once he wandered for weeks through Ethiopia, eating goat around village fires, walking up-country to the monastic caves at Lalibala, till even the guide lagged back for fear of bandits.

  Then in 1965 he packed in at Harvard's Widener Library, reading French, reading everything really, till he finally concentrated on the novels of Henri Thomas. He was senior tutor in Dudley House and took his meals at a co-op on Sacramento Street, a chaotic Queen

  Anne tenement bursting with Harvard and Radcliffe students, all at full throttle. Roger used to look back on those years at graduate school with a sort of amazement: to think that life could clear you a space to just sit and read! How he savored Harvard, the elm alleys and the musty bookstores, this place that had turned him down at seventeen and left him crying on the stoop of his parents' three-decker in Chicago.

  Whereas I had fumbled my way through Andover on a scholarship, too dazed to do much thinking in the thick of an atmosphere that felt as exotic to me as Brideshead. Yet I breezed into Harvard and Yale on half Roger's intellect, with whole hockey squads of my privileged classmates. Four years later I had neither the analytic cast of mind nor the stamina for graduate work. I made a half-wit decision to be a poet—that was the good half—without preparing any sort of career cushion. I ended up teaching at a prep school out of Boston, with the sinking feeling that I had become one of the privileges of the upper classes.

  But I wrote my poems and papered the East with them. My particular Left Bank was Cambridge in the early seventies, where poets passed through in caravan, some in sedan chairs, some like an underground railway. Parties in Cambridge had totems in every corner—Lowell, Miss Bishop, I. A. Richards ("Is he still alive?"), visiting constellations rare as Borges.

  In 1974 I was waiting for my first book of poems to come out and generally going about feeling heavily crowned with laurel. Yet the poems seethe with loneliness, the love that dared not speak its name like a stranglehold on the heart. Roger had just completed a year working in public television for a show called The Advocates, where bloody Sunday issues were debated hotly by brainy types. The show Roger was proudest of was about gay marriages. He'd been instrumental in pulling the brains together and airing a wildly controversial notion—single all the while, of course.

  We weren't kids anymore. We'd been hurting dull as a toothache for years. When we came together as lovers we knew precisely how happy we were. I only realized then that I'd never had someone to play with before. There was a lost time that wanted making up in spades. Six weeks before Roger died, he looked over at me astonished one day in the hospital, eyes dim with the gathering blindness. "But we're the same person," he said in a sort of bewildered delight. "When did that happen?"

  I related those two lines to my friend Craig (diagnosed 3/2/85) this past Christmas, and he laughed: "But that's what you always used to say in Boston. Roger and you were just two names for the same person." Something I don't remember saying, but clearly it was a collaborative theory of ours, rather like the Curies' twin Nobel.

  My recollection of the first year of Cesar's illness is in constant swing, a plumb line describing parabolas in sand. He was down to stay over Thanksgiving break, then for a week at Christmas, and it was those visits that brought home at last the physical reality. The biopsy in his groin had left a wound that never healed, not in the whole twenty-six months of his illness. Small black-purple lesions were clustered at the site, and the leg was slightly swollen with edema, though still there was nothing noticeable, not in his general demeanor.

  Yet why was he so tired on Christmas morning that he couldn't go with us to Roger's brother's house for breakfast? It is very hard to separate symptoms and degrees of illness anymore. The dozens of cases I've followed since then have blurred the boundaries. Besides, the particular indignities of AIDS are so grotesque, like that endlessly swelling leg, that the general aura of fatigue and accelerated aging are much more difficult to pin down. But the decision to stay home and rest on Christmas morning was a kind of watershed, as if for the first time the illness had moved to hold Cesar back from life.

  The emotional roller coaster was in full operation by now, because I know how happy Roger and I were in mid-November, when we stole away for ten days to Paris and Tuscany. I'm sure now that was a conscious decision too, concrete as the roll of sunset pictures from Big Sur. With Cesar sick, a new note of urgency had crept unspoken into our lives. The edge of the minefield is fairly common ground these days among gay men, and many speak openly of doing what they've always wanted now—this month, this summer, before they're forty. Neither of us had ever been to Italy in the fall, so what were we waiting for?

  By then Roger kept a diary only sporadically, and one night I left mine in a taxi near Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Two months suddenly vanished, and with them whatever I'd dared to speak about the weight of Cesar's sentence. Next morning, for the lark of it, Roger and I went to Gibert Jeune the stationer, near Place Saint-Michel, where we bought blue-cover student notebooks lined like graph paper. At the time I was reading The Name of the Rose as a sort of cracked guide to Tuscany, and Eco speaks at the beginning of the cahiers of Gibert Jeune. Roger filled only five pages of his, but on October 31 he writes of us sitting by the Medici Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. He's full of "the drag of nostalgia" and remembers reading Gide's Counterfeiters on the selfsame spot twenty years before. There's a brief aside to me: "Paul—the book opens with a scene at the Medici Fountain." Then, at the end of the entry: "These spells of fatigue... age? some virus? Nothing at all. Time to get up and move on, says Paul."

  Where is the pendulum swinging here? Are we up or down? Or do we not even have a clue till a year and a half later, when we will give anything to be back in the swing by the Medici Fountain? Our swift November trip through the Tuscan hills was the opposite of ominous. The disease had brought its scythe down among us now, and Cesar was who it had chosen. So our role, Roger's and mine, was all the more to be brimming with life, enough to spare to keep our friend afloat.

  I can see now that my way of interacting with Cesar that whole first year was full-out Positive Thinking, with a slightly frantic nimbus around the edges, like the start of a migraine. If laughter was th
erapeutic, there were days we could have cured the common cold. He came down to us to be taken care of in a place where he needed to play no games. A week here, three days there, he basked in the house on Kings Road, gathering strength for the stoic solitary fight to keep his life his own. Meanwhile he taught full time, reassuring everyone who knew that he was quite himself, not to worry. Besides, maybe it wasn't even AIDS. This last whistle-in-the-dark notion asked that we factor in his being from an exotic clime below the equator, plus all that sleeping in railway stations with the lepers in India—as if the whole thing might yet resolve itself as a rare but treatable rural fever. The truth is, nobody believed a word of it. But everyone nodded hopefully, as glad as he to go with a second opinion.

  At our house he slumped on the sofa in front of the Christmas tree or out by the pool at midday, waiting to joke with Roger and me whenever we put our heads around the door, but otherwise content to lie about. Husbanding his resources. I can see this quality now in myself as I sit on the hill above Roger's grave, or lie in bed writing in the back bedroom, bundled like Colette, resting in between things—and remember, I am fine.

  In '83, after two years of rattled disemployment, writing things nobody wanted, I'd sold and written two screenplays back to back and was feeling flush, so I showered Cesar with presents. He was proudest of a cashmere sweater I found in Rome, gray and pink and pale yellow, as if chosen specifically to draw attention off his leg. There's a picture of him wearing it, sitting on the sofa with Rog: my two best friends. They both ragged me unmercifully for being Father Christmas, even as they tore merrily at the mound of packages. Most of the forty people we had over on Christmas Eve knew Cesar had been diagnosed. In these parts he was practically everybody's first case.

  I'm not sure how depressed I was. I expect I was compensating madly. Again it is hard to separate out what is general California body lunacy from the frantic attempt to stay healthy. I know I was spending an hour and a half a day at the gym by then, eating lean and fibrous, like a pure soul who will only consume fallen fruit. I took fistfuls of vitamins, cut way back on smoking dope, and otherwise diluted a potentially nuclear case of hypochondria with waves of holistic self-absorption.

  How else to explain this peculiar entry in my journal for mid-December, when I agreed to pose in the nude for Jack Shear, a photographer friend of ours. Roger and I collected vintage photographs and enjoyed the work and heated opinions of the younger artists. I'd offered up myself to several of these photographers, whatever project they needed a model for, because I wanted to get inside this medium that riveted me. Narcissus and I are not unacquainted, to be sure, but I also had a confused romantic idea of the moment when Picasso showed Gertrude Stein her portrait and she said, "I don't look like this," only to be informed, "You will."

  In a cold studio off La Brea, backed by a huge wave of white paper like in Blow-Up:

  It felt so weirdly natural—the opposite of looking in a mirror, and like being naked at last, perfectly natural, as one wanted to be at 20. It didn't somehow matter whether one looked good or not. One was a man, pure and simple.

  The body as memorial, locked in time—all those ones. While Roger sat in a chair behind the lights, leafing magazines and loyally waiting out this peacock show of vanity.

  I think that unconsciously a lot of us were beginning to be pierced with dread of deterioration and lonely death, but again it was slow and subtle, the needles more like acupuncture. I felt exhilarated after Christmas week with Cesar, because we had brought the holiday off like a happy ending. Only I didn't countenance any talk of endings. We were living proof that the best of life could go on as before, weren't we? Then on Twelfth Night, as I packed away the decorations, I had a sudden horror about who would be diagnosed next year when the box of tinsel came down from the attic. I couldn't get it out of my mind for days. Time itself began to seem a minefield, the year ahead wired with booby traps.

  Yet I see in myself—the roller coaster again—a quality that later drove me crazy in other people, especially after Roger entered the lists. I went back to work with a fury. The first six months of '84 find me pulling together a production of a play in New York; doing draft after draft of a screenplay; making a deal to write a thriller for CBS with Alfred Sole. I met in New York with editors to discuss a new novel. My cottage industry was operating full tilt.

  Roger's too. After four years with a corporation and a fifth in a small firm, he'd finally decided in the spring of '83 to hang out his own shingle and work as a sole practitioner. He had no idea whether or not he could make a go of it and hustle himself the clients, but he'd had enough of the system. Since he'd paid all the bills during my two bouts of bad harvest, when I couldn't sell a paragraph, I was eager to return the favor. The worst that could happen, I told him, was he'd fall on his face.

  But the fact is, he loved the freedom from day one and pulled together an oddball miscellany of clients, from the Downtown Women's Center on skid row to an equity-waiver house called Room For Theatre. A couple of writers, photographers, budding directors... but here I am listing all the clients who didn't bring in a penny. His locus was on small businesses and one-man operations like our own. He worked twice as hard as he had in the corporate tower, but his work was all his own and human-scaled.

  The brooding, fretful Sundays vanished, when he used to despair with some variant of: But what am I going to do with my life? In truth he had come to a point where he could almost laugh at the existential thread that linked him still to the Paris of the perfect ice ling. Roger was a happy man with an ache inside about beauty and time, like a character out of Lawrence. There would always be a part of him that longed to be a poet, but having his own practice brought him to a place of delighted engagement and satisfaction that I'd never seen in him before. Besides, he had a poet in his pocket.

  There was this unspoken agreement between us: We were both putting in some very hard work for the sake of the longer-term freedom we were demanding more and more of. We'd sit on the front terrace on Saturdays, dawdling over coffee and reeling off places we hadn't been to yet versus those we had to go back to. Perhaps it was implicit now in the gathering dark of the plague that we would try to cram as much in as we could. On the plane coming home from Italy, Roger had turned and said, "Can we go back to Europe in the spring?" I grinned and nodded, and we did it. Cesar was the sword in our lives that proved there wasn't a day to waste.

  I wish of course we knew then what little we know now. That the Western Blot had been in place and we could have been tested for antibodies. That the antivirals had been sprung from the pharmaceutical morass. Then we would have slowed down and watched and monitored, the way I have myself. I wish my fellow warriors hadn't lost the first four or five years bogged down by homophobia and denial. When Larry Kramer tells Mathilde Krim in Interview about the closeted gay man at the National Institutes of Health who buried the AIDS data for two years, that's when I understand how doomed we were before we ever knew. It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.

  Still, it would have taken a lot to slow us down. Our drive to be at the center of the lives we'd fashioned was far too urgent. By now we were starting to know more and more cases. Though none was as close as Cesar, we would hear it murmured about one and another: Michel Foucault the philosopher, this actor, that dancer, all innuendo and secrecy. A distinguished and sweet-tempered producer we knew had been in the hospital for months now, but no, it wasn't AIDS. The disappearing had begun.

  There was nothing we could do about those cases, so we anchored ourselves in Cesar's case. I wondered sometimes if he was the first person from Uruguay to have it. The Africa connection was beginning to be in the news, with figures so pandemic the mind rejected the parallel. It was still only five thousand gay men, and nobody knew how long they had, but maybe years. Cases that died in a month were something else; there was nobody fighting.

  Meanwhile I was beginning to witness stages of denial I'd already
been through, and they left a taste like dirty metal in my mouth. Gay men in the high purlieus of West Hollywood—that nexus of arts and decoration, agentry, publicity, fifteen minutes in a minispot—would imply with a quaff of Perrier that AIDS was for losers. Too much sleaze, too many late nights, very non-Westside. And that's when I started getting angry, because my friend in San Francisco was limping to General Hospital and queuing for hours to see doctors who hadn't a clue. The guesswork of chemo, the leg that kept swelling, the scatterburst of lesions; and still the aerobic crowd was playing us and them. I saw a split develop in gay men around that time, as people fled into themselves. Gay liberation had only begun in 1969, when a gaggle of Village drag queens drew the line in the dirt outside the Stonewall Inn, resisting police harassment once and for all. Yet the solidarity that followed Stonewall wasn't rock-hard, binding us like the dissidents in Russia. AIDS was the jail with bread and water, hut there were gay men who would not hear of it. Too much of a downer.

  So I would talk about Cesar and explain what he was going through. I wanted to shove people's noses in it. The AIDS jokes began among us, or we adopted them comfortably enough—after all, Eddie Murphy was a funny guy otherwise. The story I want to tell is about heroism and sacrifice and love, but I will not be avoiding the anger. I watched AIDS become gossip, glib and dismissive, smutty, infantile. I gossiped myself. It was sometimes the only way to talk about it, but all the same it's a yellow and disgusting way.