by Paul Monette
I didn’t get there myself till the following summer, nine months after burying Roger and only a little less raving mad and death-haunted, not exactly ready to be a houseguest. Like Heathcliff invited for a tennis weekend. But East Wind proved to be every bit as boggling as Craig had painted it—library out of Conan Doyle, music room hung with tapestries of the Muses, suites of silken bedchambers. One of the garden crew’s main jobs when the owners were in residence was splitting and stocking wood for the thirty-two fireplaces, including the Lilliputian one in my bath. All set to be lit in case of a June chill.
As the synergy of AIDS would have it, I liked James Merion right away, though somehow Craig had never said how purple he was, with lesions rampant. And so bone-thin you could practically see right through him to the candlelight behind him on the sideboard. “I hope they told you,” he drawled, “that I look like E.T.’s brother.”
He was thoroughly unpretentious, a pianist with impeccable credentials, but he’d fallen away from his music since turning purple, at least when it came to giving recitals. He mostly delighted in conducting tours of the gardens and the quarter mile of shoreline by golf cart, lacking the strength to walk his acreage now. Appearing to know the botanical minutiae of every leaf and sprout.
But at meals in the Roman-painted dining room, the discussion was every bit as maddened over AIDS and the straights’ indifference as it was anywhere gay men gathered. Obsessively following up on the latest treatments and pipe-dream rumors. East Wind turned out to be a safehouse, boiling over with last-ditch schemes and anarchic plots, like an ACT UP meeting in’Versailles. Or we’d assemble together in the walnut-paneled parlor to hear James’s latest blood counts—never good—and help him negotiate a course like so many outlaw biochemists, even as a formal tea was being laid out by the under-butler.
AIDS was the canker in the rose of East Wind, but after Bermuda the juxtaposition of sybaritic and mortal made a kind of cockeyed sense. And the walks we took at night, Craig and I—Arthur, too, if he was in from London, living as he did in a state of permanent jet lag—were the closest talks I ever had about dying. With the salt breeze off the marshes and the flash of herons rising into the moonlight, we made a certain provisional peace with the nightmare that would never leave us now. More death talk than I ever had with Roger, with whom I’d groped to stay alive with a murderous single-mindedness, our fingers pulped to bloody stumps from clawing up the mountain.
James was dying before our eyes, but Craig and I still had a ways to go. So what was left? And how would we bear it? And how bear the banalities of everyone’s well-meaningness, especially the seronegatives’?
I went out there again in October, an overnight with Craig on our way to Tuscany. James was weaker than ever, a half-sleep taking up the heart of his days at East Wind. And yet still able to draw the strength for the golf-cart circuit of the gardens, the trees aching with color in the blue-gold light of autumn, roses still at their peak, and flights of Canada geese stopping over in the marshes as they headed south. Even then James was engaged in a massive garden project, the laying out and planting of the longest perennial border in Long Island—or was it North America? I didn’t expect that James would see it through, though he had his gardeners bustling like the Queen’s in Alice. I also didn’t think I would be seeing James again.
And didn’t. He died on a bright cold day in February, Valentine’s Day in fact, in Arthur’s arms, Arthur’s children and James’s Virginia family grouped about the bed in a sad half-circle. Arthur propped him up so he could see to the Sound at sunset, the great lawn blanketed in snow, and then it was over.
It was decided to wait till the roses bloomed again for the memorial service, and I surely thought it would mark the end of our days on the Gold Coast. I couldn’t imagine Arthur keeping the place alone, so inextricably linked as it was with James and suffused with the echoes of Liszt and Chopin. And besides, Arthur was having to spend more time in the sheikdoms of Arabia.
I hadn’t counted on his—what? Generosity is hardly the word. On the life-force decision to let Craig come and go the same as ever, the skeleton staff instructed to keep the house ready and stocked for the random sojourns of my penniless friend.
And thus began a different age, for East Wind and for us. I came back later that winter and again in the first dogwood flush of spring. The east wind was indeed a biting presence then, whipping in off the water, giving our walks a Wuthering edge. But the wind was no match for those three-foot walls of stone and the roaring fires we sat by, room after room. It wasn’t as if we felt we owned it in any real way, or that we harbored a secret fantasy that here at least we were safe from the Valley of the Shadow; or that we’d be doing this season after season, no end in sight. No—East Wind was just for now, but now was all we had.
And the talk of dying came to be a way of talking out our lives, how we’d loved and whom we’d failed, and what was the legacy of this pointless suffering we had witnessed and endured. I’d met Craig, after all, the very same night I met Roger, and nobody else could quite replace so much history shared. We knew we were the last of our kind, come of age in the seventies. The very last queers of a certain caste of mind—formed in the crucible of revolution, yet trailing in our wake the gaudy streamers of Mardi Gras, a certain carnal swagger, and the last grace notes of Judy and the Ridiculous Theatre Company. Not all of it lost once we were gone, but the loss of what it all meant.
East Wind was our last refuge before the millennial rummage sale, a philosophical stroll through marbled halls, still prone to the camp imagining that we were a couple of dukes ourselves. In June the memorial service played itself out among the roses, accompanied by tapes of James at the piano. I had written a proper elegy for James, but in the end was too sick—a danger flag in my lungs—to fly back and deliver it myself. I went back later that summer when Arthur was in residence alone, grieving after his fashion—which was invisible under his so unflappable charm, with its overlay of discretion and still waters. But East Wind wasn’t the same, and he knew it, and Craig and I couldn’t make it the same.
Finally not even for ourselves. By the last days of that summer I’d become involved with Stephen, and I brought him with me when we were invited out to East Wind for Thanksgiving. Arthur’s daughter was using the occasion to announce her engagement, and she filled the house with friends and oversaw a banquet—as in the old days, almost, or the old old days of the Midases. Craig had his regular room, and I had mine; but the presence of so many others, Stephen especially, left Craig and me feeling a bit estranged.
I remember sitting with Stephen in the music room, reading Coleridge to him, “Frost at Midnight.” Craig poked his head in, saw right away the lay of the land, and turned to go—over our protests, especially Stevie’s, who’d had his fill of Coleridge. But Craig just waved it off and headed upstairs for a nap. My friend who would’ve gladly given up East Wind and all its playing fields to have a lover to read to. He was fraying around the edges now himself, slowing down like an unwound clock—though in fact, of course, his AIDS clock had started speeding up.
Still, we had a weekend to ourselves four months later, over the blustering Ides of March. Walking our acreage yet again. Though the island had not ceased to feel like a second home, Craig admitted he was considering a move to Boston where we’d all started from, it seemed a century ago. Nobody traveled lighter than Craig, whose life’s accumulation would fit neatly in a rucksack. Besides, he said, he’d had it up to here with New York, and the endless wait in waiting rooms. East Wind wasn’t enough of a compensation anymore, especially being there alone.
Our swan song came in the middle of June, over Gay Pride Weekend. Arthur was in from Saudi, and the roses were at full blast. “I’ll still be able to get down here whenever I want,” Craig assured me as we lounged on the steps of the Moorish folly, shirtless and sunning in the glare off the Sound. But we both knew scheduling a visit together would be geometrically more complicated. Stevie was napping away in a hamm
ock under the sycamores, seeming to understand instinctively that Craig and I needed to be alone to say goodbye. Not to each other yet—that was still more than a year away—but to all of this. To the dreamscape in all its midsummer effusion, and the fall of titans that had left East Wind to us for a time, a couple of boho queers.
And the rest is so predictable, it hardly bears repeating. For by the time the clock had wound itself so tight as to burst its springs, what had been unendurable tragedy for so long had now begun to feel most cruelly banal. Stevie and Craig were both beginning the final year, the exhausting mechanics of staying half alive. Stevie was finally taken out in September 1990, followed by Craig just after New Year’s. No sunset over the great lawn, no herons in the marsh, no crackling fire by the bathtub. Just more tubes and choking oxygen feeds and the creeping up of the morphine drip.
I never heard from Arthur again, but understood he’d acquitted himself with honor throughout, holding off the final disposition of East Wind till its last sentinel was gone. I could take care of myself, he knew that. And when, some months later, a friend called excitedly to tell me the place was up for sale—an aerial view of the Midas kingdom in all the toniest realty listings—I hardly reacted at all. The cautionary tale in which you-can’t-take-it-with-you was so engrained in me that I couldn’t quite comprehend how the moral of it had changed.
For me anyway. Something to do with the final overcoming of that 157. Or passing the windows at Hammacher Schlemmer and barely glancing at the picnic hamper laid out in its finery. I see the difference now between mere baggage and what the heart possesses. Not that the latter is any less stolen goods—the brimming of love and the joy of a comrade—requiring every bit of a pirate’s brazen stealth. And no less snatched in the end by the icy clutch of Death than all the baronies and all their rummage.
But the heart transformed in the process, no longer just a thing that ticks and no longer simply mortal, though half in shadow already. There’s a cautionary tale in there as well, perhaps, involving a soul-deep self-delusion—but not worth the caution anyway. Something lasts, firm as the pen in my hand. Jackals and buzzards cannot get at it. Its price doesn’t translate into dollars. Saved as it is in the spending, till nothing’s left in the vault. Invisible in the blinding shine of the setting sun, weightless as a mid-ocean breeze. To have greatly loved is to sail without ballast—with neither chart nor cargo, not bound for the least of kingdoms. Nothing remains, except this being free.
1. James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Avenel Books, 1981), page 221. Citation from Plutarch’s Agesilaus.
2. J. R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal, New York: Penguin, 1984.
3. James D. Hart, The Oxford Companion to American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), page 634.
4. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1979; revised, 1987.
SOME AFTERTHOUGHTS
THE ESSAYS GATHERED here were written over the course of a year and a half, between August of 1992 and New Year’s Eve, 1993. They appear in the order of composition—not so much because they were conceived as a thematic sequence as that I feared my illness would stop the project in mid-stride. A romantic presumption, having as its source The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel—cut short by a coronary in a house about six blocks from me. Leaving behind a mere scatter of notes as to what would have followed, and ending with his famous dictum, all in caps: ACTION IS CHARACTER. Or Dickens, who slumped at his half-acre desk before he could finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood, leaving the identity of the murderer eternally in doubt.
But of course those books were published anyway, filled out with notes and literary guesswork, and especially poignant to their readers by the very fact of their incompleteness. I was under no illusion that my own work-in-progress would qualify for the Dickens/Fitzgerald treatment. I figured I had to get more than halfway through to make it worth publication by fragment. And it wasn’t just lofty thoughts about the pantheon of the unfinished Greats that proved such a goad to “Work, for the night is coming,” as the Protestant hymnal has it. No, it had more to do with the generation of the incomplete to which AIDS had consigned me—a legion of my fellow writers from Robert Ferro to Allen Barnett, Bo Huston to Vito Russo, all of them snatched mid-sentence.
Working under the gun, in other words, two years now since being diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Leashed to three separate IV drugs and a small mountain of oral medication. I don’t offer this, not consciously, to seek the reader’s sympathy or forbearance. But it does explain why I never had the slightest idea what the next essay would be till I finished the one before. Beginning each with a blank slate, and perhaps a stray anecdote or two waiting in the wings. As much as possible, then, letting the text itself take me where it went till I more or less stumbled on a theme.
In one sense I am being disingenuous, of course, since the subtext first to last—and not so very sub at all—serves as a kind of picaresque chronology of the progression of disease and treatment. It had been suggested to me before I began this work that I might just keep a diary of AIDS, one man’s eyewitness report from the battlefront. But I felt as if I’d been doing nothing but that for years and years and didn’t have the stomach for World War III, Part V. Besides, others had covered that waterfront all along. From Emmanuel Dreuilhe to Paul Reed and George Whitmore, urgent personal witness that stood on the shelves with the history of the plague—Randy Shilts’s definitive And the Band Played On—and the work of its various analysts, notably Douglas Crimp and Susan Sontag, and John Preston’s compendium of Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS.
What I wanted to do instead was look at the vectors of my life, the people and places and politics that had stuck with me, resonant still despite the deluge of the last twelve years of calamity. How had it changed the way I looked at things? Had anything survived intact? And did anything mean the same anymore? I had never started a book with so little strategy aforethought, or worked so much from instinct.
And everything had changed. Not surprisingly, my rabid contempt for official religions, the Orwellian lies and the Kapos, had only deepened over time. The entropy inherent in what was still quaintly called the civilized world continued geometrically toward utter disintegration. For mine was a classic fin-de-siècle gloom, Henry Adams without the education, convinced the world was just about over. Which put me in bed with the real wackos—the millennial Christian cults and the Rapturists—the difference being that the end of my civilization was as much their fault as the ozone hole or the plummet toward universal illiteracy or the opening of the hundred millionth McDonald’s.
My ranting therefore didn’t surprise me a bit. What took me more than slightly aback was discovering just how much certain people and incidents and feelings had only grown more precious over time. Had mattered more and changed me more than I’d ever quite acknowledged. Sources of affirmation that reflected, as in a mirror, the self I hoped to be—and incidentally serving to light the way of the checkered heart.
Of course, nothing stands still either. I would have to issue a daily bulletin to keep up with the burgeoning scandal of the pedophile priests, even as the Polish Pope has publicly tried to shift the blame to the anarchy of permissiveness. Society’s to blame. Or, as one of the mealy Neo-Con apologists for the Church has written, we end up with the priests we deserve. It’s our own damned fault. How’s that for spin control? Mark Twain would’ve loved the gobbledygook in all of this: call it the spiritual equivalent of the Twinkie defense.
Fortuitously, by way of counterforce, there are certain heartening updates to report since the writing of these pieces. The Episcopal Bishop who came for tea last winter, for instance, took Winston’s advice and came out to the House of Bishops. In his own way, of course: quietly sending an epistle to his colleagues just before the general meeting of the House, this year in Panama. In part he wrote:
I have promised myself that I will not remain silent, invisible, unknown. After all is said and
done, the choice for me is not whether or not I am a gay man, but whether or not I am honest about who I am with myself and others. It is a choice to take down the wall of silence I have built around an important and vital part of my life, to end the separation and isolation I have imposed on myself all these yean.1
Thus did Bishop Otis Charles—I can name him now for real, unlike so many of his fellow divines in “My Priests,” identified pseudonymously so as not to incur an Inquisition—become the first Bishop of any mainline denomination to disclose publicly the truth of his sexual orientation. An important moment in gay and lesbian history, and a ringing challenge to the status quo of invisibility. The reception to his coming out can be imagined. In Panama several Bishops embraced him for his courage, while others averted their faces and would not meet his eyes.
Still, a beginning. Personally, we retain our precarious balance on Kings Road. It’s a year now since Victor—fellow traveler and soulmate—managed to save Puck’s life when it was hanging by a thread. Winston and I were in Big Sur just after the turn of the year, dozing by the fire with a pummeling rain on the roof, the glorious deep of winter. Back in Los Angeles, Puck went out in the garden in the thick of the storm, nothing unusual in that, but Victor realized some minutes later that he hadn’t come back in. He discovered Puck lying beneath the tree ferns at the top of the garden. He coaxed the dog inside, only to have Puck collapse on the kitchen floor, near comatose. A quick call to the Westside Animal Hospital, where the receptionist said it sounded like “bloat,” requiring immediate surgery. Victor and a friend carried Puck’s deadweight eighty-five pounds to the car and raced across town. As the dog was whisked into the operating room, Victor was given to understand that he’d made it just in time. Ten minutes later and Puck would have been gone.