Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (22 page)

Later we went outside and sat in the shade of a sycamore. There we both had a rush of the throat-tightening sweetness of things, the perfection of time in which nothing at all was happening except that we were together. Wouldn't it be grand, said Rog, if it could all just stay like this? Sleeping it off dose by dose, gathering back to life and willingly giving up any claim on the Nile or the Left Bank, only to sit and listen to the dry leaves of a sycamore clattering in the breeze.

I had turned in
The Manicurist
over the Fourth of July, and there was a brief flurry from one of the producers about how perfect it was, especially its plot points. I had delivered in spades on page
26
and page 90, so for the moment the whole enterprise was judged to be hilarious. When you go unproduced long enough, you know that this is the only time a script is still warm, before the studio starts the autopsy and heart transplant. I remember when it left my desk the desk itself seemed to heave a sigh. My work had already taken a sharp turn, though I was hard put to categorize the medium. I'd never worked in the garage before, or back and forth in the mail.

Conspiracy: literally, breathing together. Every week or two now, a poem would go in the mail to Carol, and one from her to me. We began in completely different places, shooting in the dark, but quickly felt our way to a workable form of address, a courtly sort of confessional. My conspiracy lines—like my table thoughts—were all about the calamity, though for a while I couched my terms. I wrote about the white-stripe snake in Franklin Canyon and his "one medium mouse a month." About being allergic to bees, and the cloud of killer swarms advancing toward Texas. Shot through every fragment are undigested references to those who died young.

Van Gogh was 36, Poe 40

Also Champagne Scott

and Frank O'Hara one of ours

no art news there

I was writing with a very blunt instrument, but groping at last toward leaving a record—"to say we have been here."

It wasn't exactly a conscious choice to write about AIDS, yet the privacy of the bargain with Carol gave me the freedom to close in on it. And there was an unexpected return: Gradually there began to reassert itself that delicious balance between Roger and me, home for the evening after work. Looking back now, I realize I am selectively shrugging off the countless moron meetings Alfred and I were having at the networks, being turned down in thirty-one flavors. But I was inured to all of that now. If it used to require learning not to flinch when someone spat in your face, I didn't even feel the spray anymore. The bracing thing about this new work was Roger's enthusiastic response. He'd been asking me to go back to writing poems for a decade. He put no value judgment on anything I was doing—never did—he only tried to convince me it
was
work, tables and secrets and all. It didn't matter to him if I got another studio deal, for he was doing the nine-to-five work every day. I think that must have made him feel terrific, like the old days in Boston when he'd walk across the Common to Herrick & Smith, while I sat home shadowboxing a novel.

On July 18 I had lunch with Susan Rankaitis, whose abundant cheer was glowering now as she worked through a transition between one body of work and another. She'd had a major show at the County Museum a couple of seasons before, huge photographic pieces layered with shard images of jet aircraft. She was openly in a state of turmoil, questioning all previous ideas, and wanted to hear about the dead end I'd been in. Haltingly I explained that I needed to find a voice to witness the nightmare, trying to tell her all the truth I could but keeping it focused on Cesar and his two years at war. Then I talked about Marjorie's table and the collaboration with Carol, and over coffee we began to speak of a collaboration of our own. Susan had been wanting to work with a human figure and explore the image of Icarus falling—the earliest manned flight in the books. I offered to do some lines on the same theme, then found myself agreeing to pose for the piece.

Five days later Roger and I went over to Susan and Robbert's for dinner. Susan had been mugged that afternoon as she was getting out of the car with the peach pie she'd bought for dessert. Though her window was smashed and her purse snatched, the pie escaped unscathed, and we polished it off. Then we repaired to the studio, and I posed naked as the plummeting boy. A man of forty running to flab, his youth beached like a whale, makes a very unconvincing boy, but Susan assured me that I would do fine. She works by manipulation of photographic imagery, exploding things for their shrapnel value, the surface effect metallic, positive and negative at once. Mostly she wanted the right silhouette pose as the winged boy feels the burning sun and his wings fall away.

Roger and I would watch the piece grow monumental over the next several months, but I recall the evening of the photo session as the opposite of the night two years before with Jack Shear. I could feel the lumpish dislocation of my body, ticking away as I did these Isadora Duncan tableaux, my arms up in front of my face. I had broken through to Diane Arbus status, and I didn't care. Meanwhile Roger worked quietly as Susan's assistant, adjusting lights and holding equipment, placid as he had been at the previous shoot.

At the end of July a couple of friends were in town from Philadelphia. Joe and Stuart were both comfortably ensconced in chairs of English, and they'd been together forever. They reported that a mutual friend—Ed Tompkins, a Washington lawyer—had been unable to join them on the trip to L.A. because he was down with a virus, something to do with his nervous system. My face went blank as I stared at the diagnosis, but neither of them appeared to recognize the naked truth. Apparently there had been tests that proved nothing conclusive, but Ed was probably covering up. He was a shy and closeted man, with only the most tentative experience and a single love gone bad. He'd had the dubious distinction of being pursued by a member of the White House staff, that closet within a closet, but Ed had turned him down because the man was married. When Ed died three months later, Joe and Stuart finally admitted it was AIDS, but still in the face of the ghastly denial of Ed's family, who kept the gay friends away and let no calls through as he lay dying.

By Dose 10 we had put in the good word for Bruce, and he'd been accepted into the program. Roger and I simply asked if he could be scheduled for some other day than Friday. Bruce was so eager to start he was beside himself, and he kept up a flow of good news from all his various sources. Bruce was really Suramin Central, much more than I. His sister Carol came out from New York to visit, and we had the two of them over for Saturday lunch. It was the first time I'd seen Bruce in four months, and he looked okay, if a little thin. We mostly talked about other things. Carol told me months later how thrown she was that weekend; that lunch with us had been a kind of haven from the nightmare, proving that she and Bruce could still laugh. After lunch we sat in the garden, and Bruce waded in at the shallow end of the pool. He had been my gym buddy for years, strong and street tough and speeding with energy. Thus there was something terribly poignant in seeing him balk at a swim, saying he was feeling a chill and wouldn't go in any further. He seemed suddenly modest in his body, he who always crowed and darted about. It was all going to be fine, though, once he started on suramin.

On the Tuesday after Dose 10 Roger was running a fever, and Cope ordered a blood panel and blood-gas test. Just going upstairs again to the pulmonary unit was terror enough, and I started to go out of my mind again. But the tests proved negative, the fever disappeared, and we wanted so much to believe it wasn't the suramin causing a problem that we blocked the thought. It couldn't be the suramin, because then there would be no magic bullet. Now, in the last week of July, a wave of AIDS stories seemed to cluster on the news, all of them bad. We heard that Rock Hudson, flown from Paris on a rented 747 and brought to UCLA by helicopter, had only a couple of months to live. It was announced that dentists must start wearing masks. The first whine of panic began to mosquito the airwaves. There was never a word about antivirals or any other treatment. The "always fatal" illness, they said.

But at some level it couldn't get us down anymore, not after nearly three months of healing breezes through the banyan tree. On Friday, August 3, Roger came home from work and discovered he'd lost his watch, which had always seemed as grafted to him as the sapphire ring. He called the CRC, the office, the restaurant where we'd had lunch—no luck. As we nestled in bed that evening he let the watch go, with a mournful observation to the effect that things after all were nothing. Then we got up next morning to drive to Laguna, and the watch was in the front hall on top of his briefcase. The pin in the strap had worked loose. "Oh, the curse sometimes lifts!" I hooted in my journal, embracing all evidence of false alarms.

I worked double time on Susan's table during the days before we left for Chicago and Boston, the subject of its text being the art market and Neo Ex. By the time I was called in by the studio for the evisceration of
The Manicurist,
I was already very far away. It was a particularly savage and ugly meeting, with Whoopi's people screaming that she'd become a secondary character to the guy, and the studio executives demurely let me take the heat as if it were all my bad idea. This movie has no hook, I was told. It had no setup, it wasn't character based and it wasn't funny. No one had a kind word to say about page 26. Yet the hand that jotted down their pointless notes was flecked with blue from the table painting and belonged to a man who didn't care anymore.

We hadn't had a suitcase out of the closet since Greece, and the sanity of packing for two was terrific. We'd always worn the same size shirts and underwear and socks, so nothing belonged to anyone in our house. We were always disguised as each other anyway. I raced over to Susan's the day before we flew so I could present the table. I always like to leave matters as finished as possible before a flight, though AIDS is a remarkable cure for fear of flying. We were definitely not going to die in a plane crash. This is another way of saying something Star once wrote me during her seven years in Asia:
The cure for metaphysical pain is physical pain.

The schedule was tight. We were due to leave for Chicago on a noon flight, and I didn't sleep with excitement. We were early for Dose 12 and talked about our trip with the CRC staff as if we had a week's pass from the battlefront. We raced home to meet the car that was taking us to the airport, barely five minutes to spare. As we came up Kings Road I spied our mail carrier in her Jeep, and I braked on the hill, got out and gave her a bunch of letters.

When I tried to start the car again, it had frozen in gear and wouldn't move. So we had to leave the Jaguar sitting out on the street as I ran up to the house, called Jaguar service, grabbed the bags and bolted to hail the airport driver. We always traveled madly, one well-laid plan going haywire after the next, but that after all is how a trip turns into a journey. All we knew was that we weren't hostages anymore. We even had to laugh as we passed the mute Jag, dead on the hill, because there it was again in case we had missed it the first time: Things were nothing.

It was a long flight, with a stopover in St. Louis, and the crowded plane and terminal chaos were daunting. Sometimes you just had to throw up your hands. There was no way to protect yourself from the germs of the teeming summer masses, except to touch the surface of life as little as possible. Al and Bernice picked us up at O'Hare, and we stopped at a deli in Skokie on the way home. When they marveled at how well Roger was looking, both of us could feel them relax at last about his recovery from the pneumonia of the spring. Roger and I slept on the Hide-a-Bed in the den, on an inch-thin mattress that felt like overnight camp. I remembered visiting the parents in '75 on the way to California, when they didn't understand we were lovers and put us in separate rooms. Now I was family.

We were hustled up early and over to Jaimee and Michael's where the children roared with excitement to see their uncle. Six-year-old Andrew trounced me at tetherball, a game I leaped to play only because I didn't want Roger straining himself. Michael had arranged to borrow a friend's boat for a cruise on Lake Michigan. All eight of us piled into Al's Cadillac and drove to a marina in the city. Four-year-old Lisa sat on Roger's lap, and they laughed and chatted happily—while I despaired of keeping the children from breathing in Roger's face. But even I managed to unwind as the boat got under way, a thirty-foot Chris-Craft that looked like a rocket and slept six.

We headed up the sapphire lake, the sunny day cool and dry, none of the choked humidity we expected in Chicago. As we passed through a choppy wake on the way out of the marina, Al suddenly gripped the rails and ordered Michael to turn back. He was scared of deep water because he'd had a brother who drowned, sixty years ago. In the peculiar way that families accommodate their unreason, they all benignly ignored Al's expostulation, and after a moment the phobic spell passed. Ten minutes later he was serene as an old salt, beaming at his two generations of children.