Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (9 page)

I couldn't bear the details myself, being the sort who never would've gotten the mortgage or the taxes paid without a lawyer in residence. I expect he'd given up asking me to help out much; it wasn't worth the shrill of complaint from the resident word processor. This is where survivor's guilt and helplessness merge, because you start to think if only there were fewer errands to the apartment building, if only I'd picked up the Wednesday meeting, he wouldn't have gotten so run down. Maybe he would've been able to hold it back another two months. That way madness lies, I know, but you find yourself far down such paths in the woods before you know it. Then darkness falls and you're lost.

I was leaving for New York and the nail research on Sunday afternoon, so I had a torrent of errands of my own, from taking the dog for his shots to dropping by my doctor's for a dose of hepatitis vaccine. There was some vague theory around this time that hepatitis immunity was a line of defense against AIDS. People I knew still believed you had to have hepatitis first. As it happened, however, I'd already been through the six-month course of the shots and fallen in the one percent for whom the vaccine didn't take.

When I started the second go-round, I asked my doctor if presence of the AIDS virus couldn't have run interference and blocked the hep vaccine. Not too patiently, he explained for the nth time that I showed no sign of AIDS infection. He pulled out a learned journal and read the now-familiar catechism of pre-AIDS symptoms. You had to have at least two of these for at least two months to be
pre,
he said. He was growing very weary of this particular strain of somatic whine.

On Saturday night we went to a screening of Rob Reiner's
The Sure Thing
, because a swell lady of our acquaintance, Lindsay Doran, had been executive in charge of the production. The movie was half an inch deep but rather endearing, and in any case we were there to celebrate with Lindsay, who'd just landed a plum job at Paramount. There was a milling reception after the screening, which the three of us ducked to go eat at the Ritz Café, the Cajun beachhead in West L.A. As we were leaving, I bumped into a pair of writers who snarled with outrage at Reiner's little movie, attacking it with poisonous overkill. "It is not enough to succeed," as Gore Vidal first told me about writers in Hollywood. "All others must fail." Roger and I rolled our eyes as we left, relieved to have gotten past
that
stage at least. We laughed ourselves silly at the Ritz. Lindsay was the only Hollywood big shot we knew who had a hair-trigger aversion to taking herself too seriously. In this she and Roger were very much alike.

That was the last unravaged time. If Roger was feeling bad that night he didn't say, or maybe I'd just dismissed it as the tail of the cold I'd barely shaken myself. Sunday he was feverish and fluish, and I told him to relax by the pool and rest all day. I packed; I went to the gym for twenty minutes, pacing myself for a four o'clock flight. Midafternoon, Roger was in bed, yet his fever was barely ninety-nine. He didn't really have to take me to the airport, but he wasn't the type to spring the twenty-five for a needless cab. We were driving down Sunset, me at the wheel, when he suddenly said, in a frail voice with a quiver of tears: "Don't go."

I looked at him, startled. "I'll be back in four days. You'll be all right." As tender and reassuring as I could be, because I knew how unanchored we were when either of us was away. We'd always agreed it was harder on the one who stayed home. He fretted about feeling weak and awful, and I told him he'd be fine. I had a knack for soothing and calming him down, de-escalating crises. He did the same for me. Of course I would've canceled the trip if he'd pushed, but he didn't. I was sure he only needed to spill the low-grade misery and be stroked a little.

I arrived in New York about midnight and went straight to Craig Rowland's place, a Caligari railroad flat on Second Avenue in the Seventies. Craig was thirty-six, a free-lance journalist who lived on a wing and a prayer like all free-lance types. I'd met him the same night I met Roger. We'd been pals in Boston, then lost touch when Craig relocated to Houston and I to L.A., but had recemented our friendship during the two years he'd been in New York. Two minutes after I dropped my bags on the floor of his apartment, I showed Craig a sore on the shaft of my penis that I'd noticed over the weekend. "That's not AIDS, is it?"

He examined me closely and shook his head. "No, it doesn't look like that."

I immediately got in the bathtub, which happened to be in his kitchen, so I could soak it. Meanwhile we were talking about fifteen things at once. Craig had hung up the phone from Houston just as I'd arrived; a friend was calling to tell him they'd pulled the plug that morning on a young man who ten days before had seemed as well as you or I. Suddenly Craig pulled back the sleeve of his flannel shirt and showed me his arm. "What about this?" he asked. I looked at a small red spot above his wrist, slightly raised, barely a quarter-inch across. "No way," I said. "They're never raised."

I was wrong.

But we didn't know any better that night, and we joked for another half hour before he went to bed. I cozied up in the loft in the back bedroom and called Roger. We had a marvelous chat, full of our private ironies and shorthand. He was feeling a bit better and more rested, and promised he'd take care till I got back on Thursday. Craig recalls my exhilaration next morning, telling him what a good talk I'd had with Roger.

At dinner that evening I ate a single mussel out of a colorless bouillabaisse, and within four hours I was violently sick, groaning all night in bed without the wherewithal to vomit. I was bent double with cramps as I walked in the pouring rain on Tuesday to the Russian Tea Room to have lunch with Whoopi. I can't imagine what she remembers of that occasion, if anything, though it must've dismayed her considerably to think this humorless man sipping broth and Coca-Cola was meant to be her breakthrough into feature comedy.

I'd talked to Roger midnausea the night before, and he was complaining again about feeling awful, but for once we had to call it a draw. Tuesday night I was stronger after spending most of the day in bed. I could hear how rattled Roger was when I called him late: he wasn't just sick, he was worried. But if it was AIDS worry it was still unconscious. He never thought he'd get it; he said so in the hospital. It was harder and harder to soothe him from three thousand miles away, and now I was near frantic to finish up my manicure research and get back to L.A.

Wednesday night I had dinner in the Village with Star Black, my oldest friend. Star was a photojournalist who was also a closet poet. One Sunday in 1968 we'd driven out to Newton, Massachusetts, and sat in the car in front of Anne Sexton's house, I'm still not sure why: for purposes of osmosis, perhaps. It was always a great pleasure for me to encourage Star's writing, but that night in '85 all I could talk about was my fear for Roger:
What if he has AIDS?
I expressed it openly for the first time. Star's response was as adamant as it was instant: Impossible. We'd been safe too long; neither of us had been really sick; I was overreacting to all those other cases. I don't think she succeeded in calming me down. But this notion that we had somehow squeaked in under the wire to a sort of viral demilitarized zone, while it didn't comfort me then, became one of the totems I clung to through the next unyielding weeks.

I left New York on the fourteenth, badly shaken. All the dazzle and energy I connected with the city—cinematography by Gordon Willis—seemed utterly dissipated now. On the way to the airport a speeding car in the next lane hit a dog, who went yowling off up a side street. On the plane I sank into my first-class studio-paid seat and talked to no one, I who usually acted as unpaid social director on a flight. I buried myself in a biography of E. M. Forster.

The plane was fitted out with a novelty item, an air-to-ground pay phone. I called Roger to wish him Happy Valentine's over Kansas. He was home in bed, too distracted by fluish aches and pains to appreciate the call. We were to meet that evening—I was going direct from LAX—at the Variety Arts Theater, where Roger was sponsoring a table at a benefit for Room For Theatre. I figured we'd play a little ship-to-shore, but the connection sucked, and besides, he wasn't in the mood. I went back to my seat and forced myself to finish the Forster. I wrote out my notes from the visits to all the haute salons. The in-flight movie was
Garbo Talks
, but I didn't take the earphones. I needed to keep busier than that. Yet there was a random moment when I looked up to think and stared unexpectedly at the silent screen, and Anne Bancroft was lying in bed in a hospital, dying. I started to heave with sobs. The stewardess gently skirted by me with the liqueurs, as if I were on my way to a funeral.

I shlepped my bags from the airport to the Variety Arts, and went limp with relief when Roger came in, beaming, with Alfred Sole. A look was all we needed by way of anchorage. The evening was structured as a musical revue, and I remember sharing a grin with Rog as a high-camp comedienne did a flaming send-up of the benefit circuit. Even so I was feeling annoyed that he'd been stiffed to pull together yet another charity affair. We already did this sort of thing twice a year for the brothers and sisters. I felt a surge of protectiveness, as if people were taking advantage of Roger's benign nature. He couldn't say no to a good cause. Yet he seemed in terrific form that night, bantering with his fellow board members, in tune with the collective goodwill as usual. Unlike me, who soured easily these days, on the edge of burnout.

Next day he came home early from the office and went to bed. It was then I told him he really had to call Dr. Cope at UCLA. Not to panic, I quickly added as he winced apprehensively, but he could be harboring some sort of low-grade walking pneumonia that needed antibiotics. He agreed with a certain relief, comforted just to be talking about it as a concrete thing with beginning and end.

I might note here, with an odd dispassion, that while I was back east the carpets were cleaned, and all through the house were little white squares of Styrofoam under the feet of the furniture. Two years later there are still tables and chests with the Styrofoam crumbling beneath. As I say, it's the details that get away from me.

I cooked stevedore meals and pampered Rog all weekend. "Everyone's got the flu, it's all over the place, everyone says," I wrote two weeks later. grasping at the straws of the flu tautology. Yet from the moment I said the "A" word out loud to Star in the dive on Irving Place, I had crossed a line. I spoke openly now of this marrow terror of sickness—not to Rog, I didn't want to upset him, but to certain gay friends. I know now I uttered the word as a sort of reverse hex, as if by daring to speak I would neutralize its power. Being scared is not the same as being convinced. Fear still has room to maneuver, and every wave of its energy goes into pushing the terrible thing away, like the ocean leaving a body on the sand.

My journal gets very spotty here, with only a single detailed entry for the whole sea change of the next six weeks. As if the record itself didn't know how to stop taking its cue from Mrs. Woolf and learn to be
The Plague Year.
I know the refrain of the next month, from every side, was constant:
It's not, it can't be.
Roger was the last man anyone thought would get it, just as Leo had been in his circle. To the gay men around us, admitting the shadow had fallen on Roger was to unleash a wild surmise naked as the pandemic across the belly of Africa.

My memory of those weeks, back and forth to UCLA, is mostly shell-shock fragments. I can't even put them in chronological order, let alone weigh them. I know Roger spent three days in bed, then tried one at the office, only to wilt and crash with another fever. That would be February 19, the day the water pipe burst in the bathroom off the guest room and another burst on Detroit Street, so we had plumbers slogging in and out, distracting us with the chaos of banality. Thursday Roger put in a full day at work, came home with 101.6 and logged yet another weekend in bed. He would seem to get stronger if he laid low for a day or two—he wasn't getting worse, just not getting better. People would drop by to visit, full of statistics about the alphabet of influenza coursing through the city like an ill wind from the East. How much denial was everyone practicing? Enough to power Chernobyl, but nobody did it consciously; that's why it's called denial.

Then Monday the twenty-fifth, Craig called from New York. He was reeling from a session with a doctor who had diagnosed KS right in the office, after the briefest eyeball of that minor spot on his forearm. Since the biopsy would take a couple of weeks to be certain—laboratory backup, one of the essential elements of plague—Craig was on his way to Houston the next day. He had high-level connections in the medical world there, having been founding VP of the Houston AIDS Committee. He promised he'd call as soon as he knew one way or the other. He knew already, but there is the matter of the formal confirmation. One spreads the shock as best one can over several days. I wasn't much help from my end, having suddenly developed amnesia in the positive-attitude department.

I was also running out of friends who weren't sick. Now I began to hyperventilate with panic and claustrophobia, the stakes seeming to double every time the phone rang. What morning was it that I first woke up suspended in that instant before a car wreck? The hysteria first to last was much more acute in me than in Roger. It's with a certain awe I look back and see how balanced and focused he stayed, even as he gathered and husbanded his strength, patiently trying to get back to work. It's not just that he wasn't a complainer, or that his attitude was stoic. That would come. It was rather that he took refuge now in his temperate nature, a capacity for quietness that began as instinct and ended as character.

There's a complicated Greek idea that the Greeks pared down to a single word:
sophrosyn
é. R. W. Livingstone, the Oxford don who translated the Plato we read a far summer later, describes the force field of the word with eloquent high-mindedness.
Sophrosyn
é, he says,