In Memory of Angel Clare

by Christopher Bram

  It was around this time that Michael came out to his family. It was the wrong time and Michael hadn’t intended to tell them, but he lost his temper one night during a telephone conversation with his father. Mr. Sousza couldn’t understand why his son had missed his exams, why he made no effort to make them up, what it was about “this hippie bum” from whom Michael had rented a room for three years that made Michael put aside his life to look after this guy while he was sick. Michael was feeling very righteous and noble. “This guy is my life,” he told his father. “He’s my lover and I’m gay. I’m gay, Papa. I’m gay and you’re stupid, or you would’ve understood that years ago.”

  He didn’t tell him what Clarence had. He hoarded that fact as something too important to share with any of them. If Mr. Sousza had been less emotional and more aware, he might have figured it out without being told, but he blocked out that idea just as he had blocked out his old suspicion his son might be gay. He felt insulted by Michael’s confession and too angry to continue. All later conversations were with Michael’s mother or his older brother, who called him a degenerate and an ingrate, accusing him of taking the family’s money under false pretenses to come to New York to become a faggot. His mother called him only during the day, when the men were at work. She too was angry and upset with Michael, but spoke as if all this would pass, her husband’s anger if not her son’s homosexuality. She timidly asked about the state of Michael’s “friend,” although she never pressed for details and didn’t mention AIDS, as if afraid to know. Everything happened over the telephone. Michael could not go home to Phillipsburg, and nobody came to see him. Mrs. Sousza told Michael to give his father and brother a little more time, but he thought her patience was misplaced. Besides, he was relieved to have his connections to his family severed. His life was now centered on something more dramatic than the small-minded people who had raised him.

  But very slowly, without Michael noticing when it happened, his life with Clarence ceased to be dramatic. It became daily life: normal, troublesome, and a little boring. Michael wasn’t the only one to feel this. Clarence’s friends from Disco of the Damned—Louise, the assistant editor, George, the cinematographer, a couple of actors, although not the leads or the boy-producer—visited Clarence his first weeks home, then stopped coming, accustomed to his condition and able to forget it while they went on with other projects and ambitions. His friends from life continued to come, but even that became routine. Ben bought groceries twice a week, Laurie came over to work out Clarence’s health insurance with him, and Jack dropped by simply to talk, yet all were slightly impatient with being there, treating Clarence as another duty in daily rounds already full of duties. And Clarence himself became accustomed to his condition, and bored with it.

  He slept late, then diligently shaved and dressed for the day ahead, although most of his day was spent on the sofa in the living room. When the weather turned warm he found he was more comfortable in his underwear and bathrobe; he no longer bothered to get dressed except when there was company. He spent his time sleeping, eating, and listening to music, methodically working his way through his record collection. He lost interest in the storyboards he’d been sketching. Michael rented movies for them to watch on the VCR, but all Clarence could see in other people’s films was the immense work that had gone into them for such paltry results; he couldn’t watch more than an hour of a film without becoming so exhausted he had to go to bed. He left the apartment only when Michael took him to the doctor or clinic. There was no other reason for him to go outside that hot, miserable summer. They waited for something like health, but Clarence remained the same, getting neither better nor worse, his T-cell count fluctuating slightly with no visible effect.

  Alone with an invalid all summer, Michael found his own rhythms slowing down until he became more and more like Clarence. Danny took him out dancing twice, but Michael felt guilty and lonely in a happy crowd without his lover; he came home early both times. Through an AIDS volunteer support group, Ben arranged for a “buddy” to come by the apartment once a week, just so Michael could get out. Michael spent his first free night idly walking around the city, noticing the sunny faces and worked-out bodies of guys his age, the baggy jams like long boxer shorts that were the fashion that summer, feeling as lonely and foreign as he had felt those first months before he met Clarence. He came home to find Clarence happily chatting with the volunteer, a pudgy serious guy in his late twenties, asking the guy about himself in a way he no longer asked Michael—Clarence already knew all there was to know about Michael. Michael was hurt to see him so talkative and friendly again. It was the fake friendliness Clarence showed with strangers, nothing more, but Michael was jealous. Whenever the volunteer came by after that, Michael only withdrew to the guest room, where he worked on poems about his father. He had discovered emotions that lent themselves to the broken phrasing he mistook for poetry, and enjoyed unleashing all his resentment toward his father. He attempted to make friends with the “buddy,” but the guy was officious and condescending with Michael, as if he thought he had replaced him in a job Michael neglected.

  Clarence continued to thank Michael for every little thing, which felt strange. Now and then he spoke in the short-tempered voice of his filmmaking self, demanding Michael find a misplaced record jacket or answer the door or reheat food that had grown cold while Clarence talked on the telephone. He always apologized afterward. Most of the time he was the gentle, undemanding fellow he had been before his movie, although Michael began to feel he was only impersonating that fellow. His real self seemed elsewhere; perhaps his real self had always been elsewhere: Michael began to doubt he had ever really known Clarence. It was as though illness had loosened Clarence’s personality just enough to suggest it was nothing but a mask, that he had never been as gentle, undemanding, accepting, and innocent as he appeared. Instead of feeling closer to his lover as they spent more time alone together, Michael found an unreal space growing around Clarence, a deep strangeness where everything seemed questionable or imaginary. He took Clarence only on trust.

  Only then, when reality became as elastic as thought, did Michael experience what most people go through when they first encounter just the idea of AIDS: he feared for himself.

  The fear was more common than the disease. Here was this disease people read about in newspapers or heard about on television, a disease so new and vague it registered first as a fear, a dread which easily worked its way into the imagination because it was so vague and general. People inured to old-fashioned worries about cancer or heart disease fell prey to this new fear. Anyone whose mind was already ajar with personal unhappiness or a neurotic disposition suffered it even more, experiencing a furious paranoia, a psychotic hypochondria intensified by the fact that one had good cause to be fearful, particularly if one was gay. There were hours of anxiety and many sleepless nights before one grew inured to the fear, just as one grew accustomed to the fear of nuclear war. People then went on with their lives, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes thoughtless, the thoughtful ones keeping the fear in perspective, worried but no longer debilitated by panic. The more passionately thoughtful turned their fear into anger.

  Michael had not yet experienced the fear; he had skipped that phase of knowledge. Before he knew he was gay, he thought only gays and addicts caught AIDS. When he discovered he was gay, he was too relieved to find love and sex in his life to be afraid—and Clarence was unobtrusively careful for both of them. When Clarence was diagnosed, Michael was too overwhelmed by the fact it was Clarence to think about his own vulnerability. Only when the situation lost its urgency and Clarence was no longer quite Clarence did Michael become afraid for himself.

  He developed a sore throat. He thought little of it the first few days, except to note which cups and glasses Clarence used so he wouldn’t use them too; he couldn’t give his cold to his defenseless lover. One night Michael lay on his bed in the guest room with the sheets kicked back. He had to do it quietly. They left their doors open in c
ase Clarence needed something in the night; Michael felt funny about doing this alone again, his partner at the other end of a silent, open apartment full of corners, shadows, and the soft glow of the night light in the hall. He hurried himself along by remembering sex with Clarence, the first times, then the routine times past counting, then the hidden, half-forgotten times—nights they began making love in their sleep, teasing each other the next morning with accounts of similar dirty dreams. Michael used his memories of that to finish now, then found himself alone and pointlessly naked in the empty bed. Listening for the familiar sandpapery breathing in the distance, he began touching the glands beneath his jaw. Had they always been safe during their half-awake dreams of sex? Michael repeatedly swallowed, exploring the soreness in his throat, then fingered the nodes beneath his arms. Hours passed while he worried the possibility around in his head, and it became a fear.

  In the days that followed, Michael forgot his fear while he waited on Clarence or spent any time with him. But when Clarence was asleep and Michael was alone, the fear returned: he had it too. He thought he had understood perfectly what Clarence was experiencing, but Michael had accepted much of it on trust, the way one accepts another person’s statement they have a headache or other private pain. Now he imagined suffering what Clarence must suffer, and he was terrified. He wasn’t afraid of death; he couldn’t imagine death. What he feared was sickness, the condition he had lived with for three months without ever feeling it himself. His fear was like a terrible sympathy with Clarence.

  Michael told himself he was crazy to believe he had AIDS—his glands weren’t swollen and his sore throat was nothing—but he could not reason himself out of his fear. All he had read about the disease, all the unanswered questions, only made his anxiety worse. He couldn’t share these worries with Clarence, but he was too ashamed to talk about them with Ben or Jack, either. It was too selfish and self-important a fear to share with anyone. Early on, Jack had mentioned the possibility of Michael getting himself tested. Ben argued against it, citing political reasons as well as the fact that, at the time, there was nothing they could do if you tested positive. Worry was only turned into a feeling of doom, and false-positives were so common as to make the whole procedure psychologically dangerous. But Michael was already crazy with worry. Without telling anyone, he went to a clinic one evening while the volunteer was with Clarence and had himself tested. On the appointed day, he telephoned the clinic while Clarence took a nap, gave his code number, and was given the results: negative.

  He was relieved at first, then guilty over his relief, then began to feel he had somehow betrayed Clarence by being tested. It might have been worth the guilt if the fear had been completely dispelled, but fear only moved into a deeper, more irrational place. The disease was all Clarence’s now. Michael’s fear became a fear of Clarence.

  He began to pay more attention to not drinking from a glass Clarence had used than he did to not letting Clarence use one of his glasses. When Clarence kissed him good night on the lips, Michael had to fight the urge to turn away so Clarence only kissed his cheek. He knew he could not catch the disease from saliva or touch, but the new fear was more impervious to reason than the first, even though it was more specific: an actual phobia for the body in his care. The harder Michael fought what he felt, the stronger the feelings became. Much of the time he could hide his feelings in a brusque, businesslike manner while he fixed the meals or cleaned the apartment—he became obsessed with keeping inanimate things clean and neatly ordered—but he betrayed himself when he was unoccupied and alone with Clarence. He found it difficult to speak to him except when he was telling Clarence to take his medicine or finish his food. He couldn’t sit on the sofa with Clarence’s head in his lap anymore, then he could not sit on the sofa at all. And he turned his head to the side when Clarence kissed him good night. Soon he was finding things to do in other rooms when it was time for Clarence to go to bed, then things that took him out of Clarence’s reach whenever it looked like he might touch Michael.

  He was ashamed of what he felt and how he gave in to it, but shame only fed the phobia. He made a point of not being in the same room with Clarence when Ben or Jack or anyone else came by, for fear they would see what he felt and know him to be selfish, perverse, and inhuman. He succeeded so well in hiding his emotions that Jack thought him young and oblivious while Ben thought he was being strong.

  Clarence noticed the change, of course, but he watched it guiltily, as though it were something he had done wrong. He never mentioned it to the others and seemed to gently accept it, then placidly ignore it, like a good Southerner not wanting to offend his host. He became more polite and undemanding than ever with Michael, looking out at him from his bubble of illness with a mild smile that suggested both understanding and indifference.

  One night he sat on his bed, bony and grandfatherly in the striped pajamas Laurie had bought him, and watched Michael snatch up the pieces of dirty clothes scattered around the room. He had ignored Michael’s command to lie down and get under the covers.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “I miss cigarettes more than I miss sex. But almost as much as cigs, I miss hugging and kissing. You must miss it, too.”

  Michael held the handful of empty clothes away from his body and moved toward the door. “No need to get mushy. There’ll be time for hugging and kissing when you’re feeling better.” He heard the coldness in his voice and looked back at Clarence, intending to hide the coldness with some kind of smile.

  “I’m not asking you to have sex or even kiss me, Michael. Can’t you just let me hold you? For a few minutes?”

  Michael was startled to be caught in his fear, stung and ashamed. It was as though he had believed the man was too sick to notice or care. But this was Clarence: of course he would notice. He found Clarence calmly watching him, without anger or resentment, not even sitting up straight to make the accusation.

  “Don’t be silly,” Michael told him. “Of course you can hold me.” He looked around the room, as if his only concern was to find a place to put the clothes he held in his hand. He carefully set the clothes on a chair and approached.

  He drew a deep breath, bent down, and laid his hands on Clarence’s back. He sensed the bony back through the pajama top, cool and moist like cheese, and his ear brushed hair and another ear he knew were powdered with dead skin. He felt himself freeze inside, sick with fear. When he thought enough time had passed to prove his love, he removed his hands and pulled back.

  But Clarence had his arms around Michael’s neck, and he held Michael there, kept Michael’s face close to his and whispered, “Poor Michael. You’re in over your head on this. You deserve ease and happiness at your age, don’t you?”

  He seemed to mean it kindly, but Michael detected bitterness and sarcasm behind the words, as if the words were thoughts Clarence attributed to Michael. He leaned into Clarence’s mouth and kissed him, angrily, getting his tongue into the mouth and licking at the roof.

  Clarence received the kiss from far away. He ran his hands over Michael’s clothes without passion, only curiosity. He gently pulled Michael back and shook his head. “I’m sorry. Hugging is all I’m good for anymore. It must feel peculiar to you. Like that old joke about kissing your aunt and having her slip you some tongue?”

  Michael slowly straightened up. He did not know what he had hoped to prove with the kiss. It had been sexless and angry and he didn’t know who the anger was for. He could not imagine how he had once kissed and touched Clarence with nothing in mind but the pleasure of kissing and touching. “You just need to get well,” he told him. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “You don’t hate me for being like this?” Clarence could say even that with matter-of-fact calm.

  “No. Of course not. You don’t hate somebody just because he’s sick. Here.” He pulled back the covers. “Lie down and get some sleep.”

  Clarence obeyed him, scooted up the bed and climbed beneath the clean sheets. He lay there like
a child while Michael tucked him in. “But it gets boring doesn’t it? You must be bored out of your skull. I know I am.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense. Get some sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.” Michael bent down and kissed him on the lips, lightly. He gathered the dirty clothes from the chair and held them against his chest while he reached for the light switch. “Sweet dreams,” he called out, looking at Clarence looking at him as he pulled the switch. The room went black and Clarence disappeared.

  Michael was relieved he was gone, but he stood in the door until his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he could see Clarence again.

  Michael’s fear of Clarence subsided a little after that, although the handful of words and even the kiss felt so inconclusive they were easily forgotten. The fear itself and all memory of it were completely forgotten in what followed a month later. The weather changed and there was another attack of pneumonia; Clarence was rushed back to the hospital. It seemed almost routine now, and nobody spent the night in the hospital waiting room. Michael was expecting Jack the next morning so they could visit the hospital together, when the telephone rang. The news came in a commonplace telephone call. The shock of death temporarily obliterated all that preceded it. When memory returned, Michael’s past was rearranged around his grief: memory short-circuited around his time of fear and guilt. As more time passed, Michael sensed he had forgotten something, but assumed what he missed was Clarence. He returned from Europe afraid he was forgetting Clarence, and he read the letters, saw their friends, watched the movie one more time, hoping to find something to fix Clarence in his thoughts all over again. But what he missed, and what he found, was the memory of himself. When his forgotten piece crowded into him on the dance floor at The World, it seemed more terrible and unforgivable than it had been when Clarence was alive. It came back to him isolated and magnified by the year of forgetting.