Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise Read online

  Yet we never stopped taking that evening walk, along the rim of the hill that led from Kings Canyon to Queens, Puck rooting ahead of us through the chaparral. I’m not quite sure how he managed to serve two masters, but was clearly far too well-bred to choose sides. We simply represented different orbits, centered of course on him. I was the one who sat at the desk while he slept at my feet all day, and Roger the one who came home at six, sending him into paroxysms of excited barking. The late-night walk was a threesome, no hierarchy of power. I’m not saying it kept Roger and me together, all on its own, but the evening stroll had about it a Zen calm—so many steps to the bower of jacarandas at Queens Road, so many steps home.

  I remember the first time the dog howled, when a line of fire trucks shrilled up the canyon to try to cut off a brushfire. Puck threw back his head and gave vent to a call so ancient, so lupine really, that it seemed to have more in common with the ravening of fire and the night stalk of predators than with the drowsy life of a house pet. The howl didn’t erupt very often; usually it was kicked off by a siren or a chorus of baying coyotes up-canyon quarreling with the moon. And it was clear Puck didn’t like to have us watch him when he did it, especially to laugh or applaud him. He’d been seized by a primal hunger, sacred even, and needed to be alone with it. Usually it lasted no more than a minute, and then he’d be back with us, wagging and begging for biscuits.

  We didn’t have him fixed, either. More of an oversight than anything else, though I wonder now if it didn’t have something to do with the neutering Roger and I had been through during our own years in the closet. It meant of course that Puck could be excruciatingly randy. His favorite sexual activity was to hump our knees as we lay in bed reading at night, barking insistently if we tried to ignore his throbbing need. We more or less took turns, Roger and I, propping our knees beneath the comforter so Puck could have his ride. He never actually came, not a full load, though he dribbled a lot. I can’t say if all this made him more of a gay dog or not.

  Except for that nightly erotic charge he never actually jumped up on people, though he could be a handful when friends came over, turning himself inside out to greet them. And for some reason—probably having to do with the turkey and ham on the buffet—he loved parties, the bigger the better, wagging about from guest to guest all evening, one eye always on the kitchen and the disposition of scraps.

  A dog’s life, to be sure, but not really a life destined for heroics—huddling beside a wounded hiker to keep him warm or leading smoke-blinded tenants from a conflagrated house. That was all right: heroics weren’t part of the contract. I once read about a woman in England who applied for a seeing-eye dog but specified that she wanted one who’d flunked. She wasn’t very blind, you see, and besides she wasn’t very good at passing tests herself. So she wanted a sort of second-best companion to muck along with her, doing the best they could. My sentiments exactly. I wasn’t planning on any heroics in my life either. Puck didn’t have to save me and Roger, and we didn’t have to save him.

  Except he did, save us in the end. I don’t see how he could have known about the insidious onset of AIDS, the dread and the fevers, the letting of blood by the bucketful for tests that told us nothing, and finally Roger’s exile to UCLA Medical Center, sentence without parole. I suppose Puck must’ve picked up on my own panic and grief, suddenly so ignored that he probably counted himself lucky to get his supper. I had no expectations of him except that he stay out of the way. It was then that I began to let him out on his own late at night.

  Nobody liked that. Several about-to-be-former friends thought it was terribly irresponsible of me, leaving the dog prey to the coked-up traffic that thundered up the hill when the clubs on the Strip closed. Not to mention those coyotes traveling in packs from trash barrel to trash barrel. They didn’t understand how rigorously I’d admonish Puck that he not go far and come back straightaway, any more than they understood that they were just displacing the helplessness they felt over Roger’s illness. One time Roger’s brother had a near-foaming tantrum about the sofa in the living room, grimy and doubtless flea-infested from years of dog naps. “You can’t expect people to visit,” Sheldon sputtered. “It smells like a kennel in here.”

  No, it actually smelled like death, when you came right down to it. The whole house did. And frankly, the only one who could live with the stink, the battlefield stench of shallow unmarked graves, was Puck. Those who proposed re-upholstery as a general solution to keeping death away stopped in less and less, good riddance. The ones who thought we were letting the dog run wild were lucky I didn’t sic him on them. Only I really understood, because I saw it happen, how Puck would temper his huge ebullience if Roger was feeling a little fragile. Always there to be petted, sometimes a paw on your knee to nudge you into it.

  The world narrowed and narrowed, no end to the tunnel and thus no pin of light in the distance. Not to say there weren’t precious months, then weeks, then days, that still had the feel of normalcy. I’d cook up a plate of spaghetti, and we’d sit in the dining room talking of nothing at all, just glad to have a lull in the shelling. And we both looked over one night and saw Puck sitting at attention on his haunches, the sable sheen of his coat set off by the flash of white at his heart, head lifted as if on show, utterly still. In all probability he was just waiting for leftovers. But Roger, bemused and quietly beaming with pride, studied the pose and finally said, “Puck, when did you get to be such a noble beast?”

  We both laughed”, because we knew we’d had nothing to do with it. But from that point on, Noble Beast became the changeling’s nickname. If he took the pose beside you, it meant he wanted his chest scratched. Nothing dramatic, you understand, but somehow Puck came to represent the space left over from AIDS. With no notion of the mortal sting that shaped our human doggedness, he managed to keep the real world ambient, the normal one. Filling it edge to edge with what the thirteenth century divine, Duns Scotus, called “thisness.” There gets to be almost nothing more to say about the daily choke of drugs to get down, the nurses streaming in to start the IV drips, the numbing reports to the scatter of family and those few friends who’ve squeaked through with you. Nothing more to say except what the dog brings in, even if it’s mostly fleas.

  That last morning, when the home nurse woke me at seven to say it was very bad, Roger virtually comatose, no time to wait for our noon appointment at UCLA, I leapt out of bed and got us out of there in a matter of minutes. I don’t remember the dog underfoot. Only holding Roger upright as we staggered down the steps to the car, talking frantically to keep him conscious. Puck would’ve been perched on the top step watching us go, he’d done that often enough. But I don’t really know what he saw, any more than I knew what Roger saw—what dim nimbus of light still lingered with one eye gone blind overnight six months before, the other saved by a thrice-daily blast of Acyclovir, but even it milked over with a cataract.

  He died that night, and the weeks after are a cataract blur of their own. Somebody must’ve fed the dog, for I have the impression of him wandering among the houseful of family and friends, trying to find someone who’d lead him to Rog. When we brought home from the hospital the last pitiful overnight bag, the final effects as it were, and Roger’s father shook out the maroon coat sweater and put it on for closeness’ sake, Puck began to leap up and down, dancing about the old man in a circle, barking deliriously. Because he could still smell life in there.

  Have we gotten sentimental yet—gone over the edge? I spent that first annihilating year of grief dragging myself out of bed because somebody had to let the dog out, writing so I wouldn’t have to think. I can’t count the times when I’d crawl under one of the tables where Puck lay sleeping, to hold him so I could cry. He grumbled at being invaded, but his growl was pretty pro forma. And somewhere in there I started to talk to him, asking him if he missed Rog, wondering out loud how we were ever going to get through this—daft as a Booth cartoon. He sat unblinking, the Noble Beast as listener.

 
I don’t know when it started, his peculiar habit of barking whenever visitors would leave. He’d always barked eruptively in greeting, whenever he heard the footfall of a friend coming up the stairs outside. But this new bark was something far more urgent, angry and troubled, a peal of warning, so that I’d have to drag him back by the collar as one bewildered friend or another made his drowned-out goodnights. “He doesn’t like people to leave,” I’d tell them, but I didn’t understand for months what he was warning them of: that if they left they might not come back, might get lost the way Roger did. Don’t leave, stay here, I’ll keep you safe as I keep this man. Meaning me.

  Still, he got over the grief sooner than I, testimony to his blessed unconsciousness of death. He became himself again, inexhaustible, excited anew by the dailiness of life. I’m afraid I’d aged much more than he, maybe twenty years for the twenty months of Roger’s illness. Puck was just six, a warrior still in his prime. I had to do a fair bit of traveling there for a while, the self-appointed seropositive poster child. And Puck would lie waiting under my desk, caretaken by Dan the house-sitter, ears perked at every sound outside in case it was me returning from the wars.

  Like Argos, Odysseus’ dog. Twenty years old and shunted aside because he was too frail to hunt anymore. Waiting ten years for his master’s return from Troy, and the only one in the palace to recognize the king beneath the grizzle and the tattered raiment. The earliest wagging tail in literature, I believe. There was no shyness in that time of gods and heroes when it came to the sentiments of reunion, let alone what loyalty meant. So I would come home from ten days’ book-touring, from what seemed a mix of overweening flattery and drive-time call-ins from rabid Baptists who painted me as the incarnation of Satan; I would return scarcely able to say who the real Monette was, indeed if there was one anymore—till Puck ran out to welcome me.

  Around that time I began to feel ready to risk the heart again, I who hadn’t really had a date in fifteen years. I “lingered hopefully” (to quote the advice that Stevie Smith’s lion aunt read out to her niece from the lovelorn column); lingered hopefully, I say, at the edges of various parties, in smoke-filled boîtes, even at rallies and protests, looking to connect. Held back by my own sero status as much as anything, unsure if I wanted to find only another positive, or whether a lucky negative might rescue my brain from the constant pound of AIDS.

  I was on a stationary bike at the gym, pumping hard and going nowhere (too sweaty to be lingering hopefully), when a young man of thirty or so came up and stood before me, catching my eye with a bright expectant nod. “Excuse me,” he said, “but aren’t you Edmund White?”

  “Not exactly,” I retorted. Yet it was such an eccentric pickup line that I let him pick me up with it. At least he was literate. I waxed quite eloquent about Ed’s work, was quite modest about my own, and gave no further thought to the not-so-subtle omen that the young man might have no interest whatever in Monette, real or otherwise. After all, if you want to read Moby Dick, Jane Eyre just won’t do.

  A few nights later he came over for Chinese takeout. And took an immediate dislike to Puck—nothing personal, he assured me, all dogs really—especially not wanting to sit on the dog-haired sofa in his ice-cream linen trousers. Puck returned the compliment in spades, grumping beneath the coffee table, growling when the young man came too close to me. I apologized for Puck’s ragged manners, then deftly turned the subject to AIDS, my own reality check.

  His green eyes lit on me. “There’s no reason for anyone to die of that,” he observed. “All you have to do is take care of yourself. People who die of it, that’s just their excuse.”

  Too stunned or too Episcopalian to savage my first date since puberty, I left the growling to Puck. But I only barely restrained his collar when the young man left, wincing palely at the mastiff shrill of the dog’s goodbye.

  Stevie had it easier all around. He liked Puck’s attitude from the first, recognizing a certain orneriness and perversity that neatly matched his own. If you wanted Puck to come over to you, it did no good to call unless you had a biscuit in hand. In fact I had been bribing him so long—a Meaty Bone to get him outside, another to bring him in—that he acted as if you must be crazy to order him around without reward. It had to be his idea to clamber up on the bed or play with a squeak toy. With the latter he wasn’t into give-and-take in any case, but snatched it out of your hand and disappeared with it into his lair. Needless to say, “fetch” wasn’t in his vocabulary.

  I had to learn to back off and feint with Stevie, three months’ uncertain courtship. He’d never really made the couple thing work before, and couldn’t imagine starting now in the midst of a minefield. It required the barricades for us, going to Washington in October with ACT UP to take over the FDA. A sobbing afternoon spent lurching down the walkways of the quilt, a candle march along the reflecting pool with a hundred thousand others. Then massing at FDA headquarters in Maryland, not even dawn yet (and I don’t do mornings), standing groggily with Vito Russo as we briefed the press. A standoff most of the day, squads of cops huddled as if at a doughnut stand, trying not to arrest us.

  And then a small gang of six, all from L.A., found a lacuna in the security. Somebody smashed a ground-floor window, and the L.A. guerrillas poured in—Stevie bringing up the rear, impish as Peter Pan himself. When they dragged him out in handcuffs twenty minutes later, the look that passed between us was the purest sign I could’ve wanted of his being in love with life again. Civil disobedience as aphrodisiac. Within a day we were lovers for real, unarmed and no turning back.

  But he wouldn’t move in, not to my place. I thought it had to do with the freight of memory, too much Roger wherever you looked. Then I understood how determined he was not to turn the house on Kings Road into a sickroom again—a sickroom that only went one way, to the hospice stage and the last racked weeks. From his own falling numbers, and then the bone-chilling arrival of the first lesion on the roof of his mouth, he knew he’d be out of here sooner than I. (Unless of course I got hit by the bus that seronegatives were forever invoking to prove we were all a hairsbreadth away from the grave—a bus that was always as far behind schedule as we were ahead of it.)

  So Stevie began the search for an apartment near me in West Hollywood. Even then we almost broke up a couple of times. He was too far sunk in the quicksand of the endless doctoring, too out of control to be loved. He savaged me one day, calling me blameless even as the arrows found the target of my heart, then fell into a three-day silence. To Victor, who served as go-between in the pained negotiation that followed, he declared: “Why am I breaking up with Paul? I don’t know. I like his dog too much.”

  Oh, that. The fear of getting too attached to the things of life, till you sometimes feel you’re better off lying in bed with the shades all down, no visitors welcome. And NO GIFTS, as the invitations all pointedly warn whenever we agree to a final birthday or one more Christmas. No more things to add to the pile that will only have to be dispersed, the yard sale more certain than heaven or hell.

  Happily, Puck and I won out. Steve found a place just blocks away, a post-mod apartment behind the Pacific Design Center. And twice a day I’d duck my head under the desk and propose to Puck: “You want to go over to Stevie’s?” Then an explosion of barking and dancing, and a long whine of backseat driving as we headed downhill to Huntley Street. As soon as he saw the house, Puck would leap from the moving car to leave his mark on the bushes, then bark me into the downstairs garage as if I were some recalcitrant sheep.

  Stevie was usually in bed, his IVs having doubled, with nothing better to do than flip the remote between one numb banality and the next. Television gave him a place to center his anger, I think, railing at the bad hair and the laugh tracks. A business where he had once commanded so much power—and now his big-screen set practically needed windshield wipers, there was so much spit aimed at it.

  But his face would brighten like a kid’s when Puck tore in and bounded onto the bed, burrowing in and groanin
g with pleasure as Stevie gave him a scratch. “Puck, you’re better than people,” he’d praise the beast—a real irony there, for the beast preferred people to dogs any day.

  As for sentiment, Stevie carried that off with the effortless charm he once squandered on agents and actors and network VPs. We’d be driving to one of the neighborhood restaurants, pass a street dog rooting for garbage, and Steve would give an appraising look and wonder aloud: “You think he’s a friend of Puck’s?” No response required from me, as the answer was quickly forthcoming: “I think he is.”

  In fact, the question went international quite soon thereafter. With so much medicine required on a daily basis, bags of IV drugs to be kept chilled, the only way we could travel was by ship. So we cruised through the final year—Monte Carlo to Venice, Tahiti to Bora Bora, Greece and Turkey—spending the fat disability checks from Columbia.

  One day ashore in the Iles des Saintes, a necklace of pirate lagoons below Guadeloupe, we motorbiked to the highest point, winding through denuded fields, for goats were the main livestock here. We sat on a wall of mortared conchs and looked out to sea. It was one of those moments you want to stop time, knowing what torments lie waiting at journey’s end. From a shack behind us emerged a gaggle of children, and behind them a tiny black goat still wobbly on its kid legs. No way could it keep up with the children running downhill to the harbor. So the goat crossed the road to where we were, made for Stevie and butted his knee, so gently it might have been a kiss. Then did it again.

  “Friend of Puck’s, definitely,” Stevie observed with a laugh. A laugh fit for paradise, utterly careless, a holiday from dying.

  So what do you carry with you once you have started to leave the world behind? Stevie was right that last Monday in the ICU: he was never going to see Puck again. Didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye, except inside. For his part Puck made his own bewildered peace, still tearing into Huntley Street as we packed and gave away one man’s universe of things, the beast still hoping against hope that Stevie himself would walk in any minute.