by Paul Monette
Sunday the thirty-first was our twelfth anniversary, and I decided to invite a few friends for dinner to celebrate. It turned out to be a bad idea, because I was beyond manic all day long as I did my IV chores and tended to Rog and tried to cobble together a proper cold supper. I would forget about people not knowing the rhythms of dealing with Roger's blindness, especially that it was easier for him to have one-on-one conversation. At the table the guests talked too much and didn't address themselves to Rog, so he ended up feeling ignored and lost. Meanwhile I was angry as I dished out the dinner. I couldn't wait for them to leave, and when they did I walked them downstairs, where they wished me a dubious happy anniversary, as if to say how could I be happy? "I'm just glad we're still here," I said evenly. "That's all I care about anymore."
Still we were going to UCLA three and four times a week, to have blood drawn and to see Kreiger. They were fairly dispiriting visits, and sometimes Roger would be so tired or feverish that we'd use a wheelchair to go from the parking lot to the clinics. Every appointment with Kreiger was sadder now, as Roger saw less and less of the chart, especially when he had fever. Kreiger avoided sounding falsely optimistic, but he swore they could do a quick laser surgery on the cataract, once it had ripened enough. Then Roger would have back the limited vision he had achieved in the summer. At least it was something to hold on to.
Wednesday, September 3, I had my first appointment with Dr. Wolfe, who'd left UCLA and was in private practice in Century City. I wanted his measured and cautious approach to treatment as a balance against the aggressive approach of Dr. Scolaro. Wolfe for instance didn't think much of ribavirin, I could tell. The visit was smooth till I was driving out of the parking lot and suddenly faced the twin office towers where Roger had had his digs, and I burst into tears at the sight of what he'd lost. I wouldn't go to Century City for months thereafter.
I came home to find the dog had a running open wound on his leg, and we realized he'd taken a tooth tear from one of the German shepherds. So I made an appointment with the vet for Friday morning, which is why I didn't take Roger over to UCLA for his blood transfusion. Cope called Thursday and asked him to come in next day to receive two units. We got a driver from APLA to take Rog over in the morning, and the plan was that I would pick him up at two. Then I sat with fifteen dogs in a waiting room for an hour and a half, waiting to leave Puck off.
Arriving at UCLA, I expected Rog to be feeling spunky, since previous transfusions had always energized him so much. I knew Cope had spoken of checking out his cough and perhaps giving him a blood-gas test, but when I'd talked to Roger on the phone at noon he said the meeting with Cope had gone fine. I walked in at one-thirty and saw Roger sitting on the edge of the bed, all fresh-blooded, and I greeted him heartily. And hearing my voice, he looked over full of pain, and said in a tragic voice, "They're carving my tombstone."
One of Cope's colleagues had just been in to tell him his blood-gas number was in the sixties, which had always indicated PCP in Roger's case. They could only be sure with a bronchoscopy, but Roger categorically refused. He would not go through that test again, recalling the night when his throat had frozen and he begged us word by slow word, "Why is this happening to me?" If they felt so certain he'd broken through again, then they should just go ahead with treatment. I fell instantly into the support mode, promising him he wasn't dying: We knew this infection, we'd pulled him through three other bouts of it. I truly believed it as I said it, and didn't start obsessing about Roy Cohn and the breach of the AZT wall till later that night. They were admitting Roger right away, and I felt this helpless yearning to take him home.
Some of the agonies that burn in the heart forever begin as brief as snapshots. A nurse came to wheel Rog through the dozen corridors and bridges that connected the Bowyer Clinic to 10 East, and at one point we were on an elevator. Roger looked over and tried to see me five feet away, straining his one eye as if he were reaching for me, as if from a train pulling out of a station. That was the first time I ever suffered dying, and I can't even say what death it was. Roger's and mine both, to be sure, but something more as well. I understood then that the tragedy of parting was deeper than death—which only the very wisest have anything true to say about, like Mrs. Knecht across the street. "Here I am, Rog," I declared softly. He knew then that it couldn't be very far off, and I must've known as well but couldn't face it.
Yet that three-week hospitalization, the final extended stay, wasn't really so horrible. I was right when I said we knew this infection cold, and we stayed on top of it throughout, conquering four for four. In addition, we were blessed with a marvelous intern, Dr. Beal, who got who we were as soon as she met us. Her empathy and humaneness only threw into bold relief the gawky discomfort of the male interns we'd dealt with. Perhaps it was because Dr. Beal had gone to med school later than the rest and was ten years older than the kid doctors. She enjoyed us thoroughly, even after the incident. On the day following Roger's admission she was drawing blood, properly gloved of course, and she and I were chatting as she injected the blood into various culture mediums. Suddenly I saw her drop the needle; when she reached for it, it jabbed deep into her wrist. She stayed cool and went down for a gamma globulin shot, while I tortured myself with guilt that I was responsible, talking while she was working. She dismissed these thoughts firmly and did not go off the case and utterly minimized her own fears, though I could tell Cope was worried for her.
Gradually the hospital rhythms took the terror of death away, especially when Cope assured us Roger would beat the PCP. Except for that cry about his grave and the haunted piercing look in the elevator, Roger was fairly calm and comfortable, and for some reason didn't develop any drug reaction to Pentamidine. By the end of the first weekend his cough was already abating. Unhappily, I wasn't sleeping. I'd chosen this month to taper down on the drugs I took at night, and was weaning myself from the sleeping pill, figuring I needed the Xanax more, for anxiety. What I didn't know then, but which became clearer as the days passed, was that ribavirin had the side effect of insomnia. The night dose was like a jolt of caffeine, but I couldn't get anyone to corroborate that. Craig, who'd been on it for a year now, said he'd long ago given up sleeping deeper than an inch below the surface.
The tiredness made me punchy and weepy, especially when I would come back to the empty house. A few days after Roger went in, I arrived home and the phone was ringing. I stupidly picked it up, though by now I never answered without monitoring every call through the machine. It was Joel from Santa Fe, whom I hadn't spoken to since Leo died in April. The sound of his voice tied my stomach in knots, especially because the tone was so post-AIDS—by which I mean every word was full of his antibody-negative status and the putting of AIDS behind him, as he swore he would. About Leo dying he said, "Leo was ready to go. He didn't want the rest of us suffering anymore."
I suppose he must have asked about Roger, but what he seemed most eager to talk about was his new boyfriend, "who's very understanding about what I've been through, and helps me get on with my life." I was gasping with rage by this point, but all I said was: "I'm not going to be around long myself, and I don't want to talk to people without AIDS anymore." He hastened to say some drivel about not committing suicide for the sake of one's friends. "Have a good life," I told him, and hung up in the middle of his saying "I love you." In the middle of the verb, in fact.
By now Roger was registered with the Braille Institute, which had provided him with a special tape recorder and a catalogue of books on tape. He had listened at home to a specially prepared text for the suddenly blind, but in the main the catalogue was fairly middlebrow for our tastes. Yet Robbert Flick would go back and forth to the Institute, fielding tapes that Roger might like, and I recall the day when Roger tried one of Mary Renault's novels of the ancient world. When we were in Greece we'd both read books from her Athenian cycle and loved them. But when I came up that evening he'd abandoned it because he couldn't figure out how to fast-forward the tape. He'd gotten mi
red in the prefatory tables, listening to an endless chronology of kings and dynasties. I remember him making people laugh for days afterwards, telling how he'd been trapped in the lineage of Persia.
Yet the boredom factor was very real during that first week before his parents arrived, especially since he was feeling pretty well. He was strong enough to walk in the corridor, even to go outside in the plaza, though the latter entailed a tricky juggling of IV pole and wheelchair. But when I wasn't there he would usually be by himself, since most of our friends couldn't be with him on weekdays, even if the loyalists did drop by in the evening. I tended to arrive at the hospital myself midafternoon, but I can't remember exactly, because by then I was glazed with fatigue. Why did I let him stay there alone, with nothing better to do than sleep? I suppose I tried to carry on a couple of hours of business every day. It's a curious kind of guilt, wishing I'd known how little time was left. My seven or eight hours a day at UCLA seem so paltry to me now, and I must have wasted the rest of the day, since nothing comes back to mind. I'd gladly give a year to have any one of those days again, for I know precisely where I'd be, the whole twenty-four hours.
We decided—everyone decided—that I was so strung out and exhausted from lack of sleep that I must get away for a few days once Al and Bernice came to town. My parents had been pleading with me to visit them in Massachusetts, since they hadn't seen me in a year. I didn't want to go anywhere—couldn't leave Rog—though by now Sam was concerned enough about my hysterical fatigue to suggest my checking into a hotel, any hotel, just to collapse. In the happier part of the summer I'd mentioned to Rog that if things stayed stable we might get up to Big Sur for a long weekend, the way we used to. It wouldn't matter what he could see, because I would be there to tell him. Besides, we knew every trail and overlook in our sleep. Now, with friends warning that I was on the edge of a breakdown, I wistfully brought up Big Sur again. Roger pounced on the idea: clearly that's where I must go. I always liked it when he'd pull me off a fence and make a decision. I also suspect he colluded with Cope, who reassured me that all would be fine while I was away.
We decided I'd leave on Tuesday night, the day the parents were arriving from Chicago. Then they would have the house to themselves and be able to take care of Puck. During the weekend before, we talked about the trip and what I would see. Roger promised—I made him promise it over and over—that I could call him several times a day, and he'd send everyone out of the room and talk to me. I started to feel excited in spite of myself.
One afternoon, I walked in calling "Here I am," as usual. I realize now that I would announce myself this way as a counter to his blindness, but it's still the phrase I speak when I visit the grave, or sometimes when I walk into the empty house. As soon as he heard my greeting he smiled and declared, with a mixture of astonishment and tenderness, "But we're the same person. When did that happen?" As if he'd been waiting all day to say it. I agreed up and down right away, yet I've also brooded on it longer than almost anything he ever said. I think the reason for the "But" is that this was his answer to the darkness that told him he would die. But how could he die and leave me? How was it even physically possible to separate us now, with the two of us so interchangeably one?
I came home that night to find the goldfish dead in his bubbling tank. With the oddest dispassion, I gathered Schwartz, the tank and all the fish food, hauling them down to the trash barrel. And thought: If somebody has to die in this house, Schwartz, I'm glad it's you. It took me days before I could bring myself to break the news to Rog.
Fred was coming up to the hospital twice a week for their regular work schedule, and he and Roger coordinated the drawing up of the will with Esther. I was the problem here. Though Roger had been speaking off and on all summer about changing our wills, I couldn't figure how I wanted to set up the trust that would guard my work when I died. In the '80 will I'd appointed a fellow writer to be my literary executor, but he'd developed a certain contempt for my work, and I couldn't figure who else to trust. I let the weeks drag by, and finally Roger decided to go ahead with his own will. He would leave everything to me, but if I should not survive him by six months, then his half would go to his family. There were gay couples dying all over now, within weeks or months of each other, so contingencies had to be written in. Also, Roger didn't yet have the living will that Cope had mentioned eleven months before.
I recall how delicately Roger would speak to me about the will, always qualifying the gloomy portents. "But that's if you survive me," he'd say, explaining some detail. "If I survive you..." He knew I couldn't handle the death part. He worried to Dr. Martin during a therapy session at the hospital: "Paul says he can't survive without me." An accurate quotation, I'm afraid, and I'm grateful to Martin for allaying his concern: "Of course he can. He'll do fine." Even if it isn't so, I'm glad he said it.
Roger had been in ten days when Al and Bernice landed on the evening of Tuesday the sixteenth. I extracted a final promise from Rog that he would stay strong and stable. Then, with enormous trepidation, I got in the car and headed north, reaching Santa Maria at 1 A.M. We always left for the seven-hour trip to Big Sur late at night. Roger would sleep while I drove, and we'd stop in Santa Maria for a few hours' sleep and have breakfast next morning at Morro Bay. Wednesday I started up the coast road in cloudy weather, three hours of the staggers of Route i. I've never felt quite so schizoid as I did coming into the soaring calm and noble immensity of Big Sur, missing my friend and feeling as if I didn't deserve this beauty anymore. I stopped at a turnout south of Partington Ridge and realized as I made my way along a trail to a waterfall that Roger and I had never walked together in exactly this place, and I fell apart. I knew then the only way I would get through the three days was to realize I had come here to say good-bye from both of us.
I stayed at the Big Sur Lodge, hiking every morning to the mouth of the Big Sur River, where it spills out onto Andrew Molera Beach. Molera is where I took the pictures of the two of us in October '83, the weekend after Cesar's diagnosis. The wild beach sweeps five miles in a curve like the quarter-moon, banked by headlands bare as Scotland. If you walk a half mile along Molera, there is nothing after a while but where you are, and I'd hole up under the bluffs and sun naked. One morning I wrote with a finger in a drift of powder sand in a hollow below the bluff, "P & R," just so I could tell Roger when I called him from the phone booth at the lodge. I left our mark, I told him.
In the afternoon I'd go down Sycamore Canyon to Pfeiffer Beach, where the ocean roars through tunnels in the rocks. In between I walked in the redwood groves. But three times a day I'd home back to the outdoor phone booth and call the tenth floor at UCLA. I'd spill out all my travels and tell Roger about the strange double nature of it all, how I would be exalted one minute and crying the next with fear. Then I'd ask all the rote questions about his numbers and the doctors, and he'd make me easy and send me out for another hike, loving every description, for I was the last of our eyes. He talked me through the whole trip, and once when I couldn't bear the pain of being far from him he said, "I miss you the same way, darling. But there's part of me that's rooting for you to have a good time. So try."
I tried. Sometimes I'd call the hospital and he'd be asleep. Perhaps his mother would talk to me, or a nurse would tell me to call later. Then I would walk in circles till I could call again, unsatisfied till I had the reassurance direct from his lips. But I did sleep eight or nine hours a night, with naps in the afternoon as well, and the best call was always at 9 P.M., before the switchboard shut down at UCLA. While we talked I'd look up through the redwoods at the billion stars, my breath smoking in the autumn cold. He'd laugh and tell me jokes from the old Jack Benny tapes his cousin Ruth had sent him. The last night I told him I was terrified. "Of what?" The future, I said. What's going to happen to us. And he replied in the mildest voice: "You just come back, okay? And then we'll continue our ongoing togetherness."
Saturday morning I left the lodge and drove north to Carmel to pick up
the freeway, and for the whole twenty-five miles I took my last leave of Big Sur. It had been ours for a decade, and I didn't want any more of it. I took the inland route down the spine of the state, the golden hills so arid they gleamed like platinum, and stopping every two hours to check in. I hit brutal traffic coming into L.A. and arrived fried at the hospital at six-thirty. When I walked in the room his parents greeted me with a cheer. Roger, lying half asleep in bed, was so pleased and excited that all he could do for a moment was moan with pleasure, rocking back and forth in a motion akin to wagging.
We had finished the Apology by now and moved on to the Crito, the dialogue named for the friend of Socrates who visits him in prison and lays out a plot by which the philosopher can escape into exile. It's a very problematic piece to read, listening as Socrates decides he cannot flee the state that has put him to death without destroying all the laws of Athens in the process. Meanwhile, sublime to ridiculous, I'd been working for some weeks writing the novelization for Predator, the upcoming Schwarzenegger opus.
While I was in Big Sur I decided I simply couldn't make the November i deadline, and I curled up with Roger in his bed in room 1010 and said the project was too stressful. Though he'd encouraged me to keep working throughout his illness, now he said: "Paul, if you want to pull out of it, go ahead. I want you here with me now. Who cares about all that?" With a lifetime of Puritan ethic behind me, I'd never pulled out of any project, no matter how wrongheaded. For the first time I actually considered it, and we discussed it again and again. When I decided to go ahead with Arnold and the alien, I had to promise myself I wouldn't let it make me crazy. I asked for more time from the sweet-tempered editor at Berkley, to whom I never mentioned Roger's illness till after he died. Now it seems like yet another portent, his wanting all the time he could have with me, he who was so unpossessive.