Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  We got to the door that said Roger D. Horwitz—a sign that’s still propped among the boxes in the garage, because I can’t bear to throw it away—and swung it open. In the middle of the floor was a pyramid of boxes. The photographs were stacked against one wall, the empty drawers of the desk pulled out as if they’d been ransacked. “Oh, God,” Roger said, covering his face with his hands and starting to cry.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, but the line that ran through my head was, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” It’s the first sentence of The Good Soldier, which Roger was given to quoting admiringly; it had hooked him like the beginning of no other book he’d ever read. Now I think about that moment in the office as a point of no return, as the moment in which he saw in a single look how very much he’d lost.

  Yet he was stronger and stronger—at least we said he was—and we started having people in again for dinner, though we were too scared of the numbers to venture out to a restaurant. The doctors tried to tell us we were getting too fixed on the white count, but how could we not, with the magic bullet dependent on it? Even when the count was up and Roger was beeping every four hours, we shied away from crowds. Saturday the fifteenth we went over to the Perloffs’ for dinner, along with Susan and Robbert. Roger wore a mask except when we ate, and I insisted we set up a tray table for him six feet away from the dining table, an elaborate and probably absurd precaution. But by then we just had to go with our instincts, and our friends did what they could to make us less afraid. That night the Perloffs showed their slides of France and Italy—circa 1955—for Susan was about to go to Europe for the first time. We laughed at how young the Perloffs were and chattered amiably about various totemic sights, but I burned with longing and jealousy to think we would never go back, never see Paris or Madeleine again.

  The office move was scheduled for February 25, but Rog had enough of his files at home now that he was working along smoothly, picking up business. We understood there might yet be a revolving door into the hospital until they’d figured out the proper dose of AZT, but meanwhile we had days and days in which we simply got to live again—however battered, and Roger constantly fighting the pain of the shingles, but going with the good times.

  I think we must have been very low on our stock of AZT, for though the company had finally retooled itself to dispense it in capsules rather than bottles, there was still a lot of suspense as to when the next batch would come in. I was scheduled to make a run to UCLA for a pickup, and Al and Bernice, in town from Palm Springs, were on their way over to visit with Rog while I was out. He had finished lunch and was in the living room working. I was in the study, and I called out a question to him, but he didn’t answer. When I went in he was sitting quietly on the sofa. I asked him again, though I can’t remember anymore what the question was.

  He began to speak, halting and slow: “Um … I … um …” His face was perfectly calm, and there was no panic in his voice. It was as if he was fishing for a word.

  “You what?” I asked. More hemming and hawing, as if his mind were on something else. Absentminded. I was frustrated rather than scared. “What are you trying to say, Rog?”

  With agonizing concentration, struggling with every sound, he spoke: “I … um … have to get … um … my medicine.”

  Now I could feel my knees turn to water. “What’s wrong?” I gasped, unnerved by the clench of his voice and the eerily quiet tone. He didn’t answer. I wanted to shake him. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Shut up,” he cried, and then he seemed to sink into himself. Now I could see fear in his eyes.

  “It’s okay, Rog, it’s okay.” I sat on the coffee table facing him and held his hand. “Are you all right?” He nodded, but he couldn’t talk. It was as if a curtain had been drawn across the speech center in his mind, and the only thing urgent enough to pierce it had been the need for more medicine. As if he understood instinctively how desperate the moment was, and his last plea was for AZT. I wasn’t sure how to keep him calm and get him to the hospital. I wasn’t sure what I would say to the parents, who were due in five minutes. I squeezed his hand; he squeezed back. All I knew was that we were in terrible trouble.

  •X•

  After a few minutes he was able to answer me “yes” and “no,” but when I stupidly tried to return to the original question he started looking panicked again. We went out for a walk up Harold Way, and I said we’d go over to UCLA together while I picked up the AZT. We’d call ahead and alert Cope so we could tell him about this episode. Roger was clearly very nervous but nodded agreement to the plan. When Al and Bernice pulled up, I informed them casually enough—as Roger hung back tense and shy—that he’d had a momentary blank, and they should follow us to the hospital. I recall remaining very sane all the way over: I kept asking Roger simple questions, so as to hear that reassuring yes and no.

  By the time Cope came into the clinic examining room, Roger and I were talking normally, if a bit subdued. There was a fragile air about Rog, worry under the shell shock, as if he’d just come through a train wreck without a scratch. Now as he sat in a straight chair and Cope prodded him with questions, he kept rubbing his hands along his thighs in a nervous tic. He answered every question clearly, but his voice was thin with emotional overload. Cope’s instinct was that the whole episode had been an anxiety attack, triggered by an irrational fear that there might be a break in delivery of AZT. To be safe, however, they’d better admit him for a couple of days and have a neurologist examine him.

  While he made phone calls to set that up, Suzette came down from Immunology with our next cache of the drug. As she and I were making the exchange in the hall, I tumbled out my relief that all we were here for today was stress—though the unspoken fear of viral invasion of the brain had left me in a state of shock as well. Suzette was gentle and supportive as always, but she made some reference to how we would handle things’ taking a bad turn. “Of course the two of you have talked about dying,” she said.

  “No, we haven’t,” I answered with some defiance. “We talk about fighting.”

  She gave it another shot, agreeing that the best course was hope, but even so we had to be realistic. The long-run chances were slim. But it went right over my head, so utterly would I not countenance any talk of death. Fortunately, the next two days’ hospitalization bore out the notion of false alarm. Roger ran another gauntlet of spinal tap and bone marrow biopsy, both clear. There was a long session with a neurologist, who asked him to repeat a series of numbers, then showed him pictures of People types, all of whom Roger identified except the football player. How many fingers; eleven times six; who is Cher? He came through swimmingly, though the whole time I was as nervous as a mother at a spelling bee, telegraphing answers, heart in my mouth if he paused for a split second.

  The neurologist concluded there was nothing manifestly wrong with the nervous system. I was so relieved I could have kissed him, though in fact he was a chill sort, who didn’t cotton one bit to my encyclopedic take on AIDS. He would not accept me as part of the situation. He was also an example of a curious phenomenon, the doctor with matinee-idol looks, about which my brother and I used to theorize at length. Bob had seen more beige hospital walls than I had, and we agreed about that certain species of good-looking specialist. Our theory was that pretty people got spoiled and coddled all their lives, and though their looks alone presumably didn’t get them through medical school, they still went around acting fair-haired and chosen. This can be quite galling when you’re not feeling very pretty yourself, in a shapeless gown with an IV in your arm.

  The next day they peered at an x-ray and decided there might be a slight congenital defect in the heart valve, which sometimes produces aphasic blips of the kind we had experienced, and for which they prescribed one baby aspirin a day, I think to thin the blood. The tiny orange tablet looked almost laughably cute among the heap of medications. It was the first hospitalization that turned out to be neither ravaging nor time-heavy, and the
second night we were feeling celebratory, telling all our friends on the tenth-floor staff about AZT. I remember walking with David Hardy to Immunology so he could spring me a few days’ worth of drug, and as he unlocked the cabinet that held the elixir and all the protocols, I felt as special as if I’d been invited into the principal’s office.

  The day I went to pick up Roger was also the day of the office move from Century City to Kings Road. I was up early and directing the movers which files went in the back bedroom and which into the storeroom under the house. Roger’s big walnut desk and credenza were put up on blocks in the garage, and a few days later I’d be frantically covering them with plastic trash bags, against a Manila rain that poured through the leaky garage roof. Except for three or four cartons that lay in corners in the living room and didn’t get unpacked till six months later, I managed to fit all the files in the back bedroom so it could serve double duty as an office. Roger came home that day strong and optimistic, and it was just as well that he hadn’t had to witness the move itself. With all his work in arm’s reach again at last, the worst of the change was over.

  That night I had a call from Joel, who told me Leo was no longer living with him in Santa Fe but was now in the spare room at his sister’s house in Hollywood. Leo was still on suramin—four months after the doctors at UCLA had stopped the protocol there—and was also taking another drug IV for the CMV infection in his eyes. Finally I broke the news to Joel that Roger had AIDS. Then I talked to Leo and went into automatic overdrive, full of the bracing data on AZT. When I asked him how long he’d be on the CMV drug, he said, “For the rest of my life.” It did not sound like a long time.

  “Leo’s better off there, really,” Joel said before he rang off. “He doesn’t really want me around. He wants me to get on with my life.”

  Cope prescribed twenty-five hundredths of a milligram of Xanax for anxiety, and the oval white pill got added to the daily pile. Rog never experienced anything again quite like that sudden overload, and even at the very end, when he did have flashes of disorientation, he never lost a word. I was anxious myself as a matter of course, though it never struck me quite as deep because I didn’t bottle it up so much as pour it out. I think back on the blank attack now as the one break in Roger’s stoic persistence, a man who would not otherwise blink at fate. Please don’t let him lose his mind, I remember thinking, even as the alarm died down and every passing day restored him to his wit and quick engagement. The fear was right, but the prayer was wrong. He had something else to lose.

  In the first week of March we were both working again, stepping over each other in the two-tiered home office and fielding one another’s calls. Rand Schrader dropped by one evening to visit, and as I was walking him down to his car, he told me a friend was staying at his place till he got his bearings. I knew Doug, his friend, had just been through a bout of PCP, but he was young and had managed to qualify for AZT with only one infection. Doug was still early as the pink of dawn compared to us. “But he’s all right, isn’t he?” I asked.

  It wasn’t a matter of his corporal health, said Rand. Doug had come home from work the other night to find that his lover of four years had moved out during the day, without a word, without a note; they never spoke again. Rand hadn’t wanted to mention it in front of Roger. A year and a half later Doug is still going strong on AZT, and the man who fled, a lawyer, is still nuzzling about in the legal gutters of L.A. Certain people have cut him dead, of course, but it’s a big city out there, and a man can manage to leave no traces of the lovers he’s left behind.

  We decided Roger was well enough to hazard a weekend trip to Palm Springs, something his parents had hoped for all winter, especially since the Israelis were still in residence in a condo across the pool. We set out Saturday morning, the first overnight outing away from Kings Road since the trip to the mountains half a year before. As it happened, the weather turned brutal, and when we came into the desert through a high-gust torrent of rain we somehow missed the turnoff we’d been taking for ten years. Then we got caught in a sandstorm that forced us to the side of the road, beating against the Jaguar like a steel band. We ended up in Banning, an hour out of the way, with me in a phone booth shouting to be heard above the wind. Roger had to vomit once in the ditch beside the road, while I tried not to yell. We arrived in the Springs under the weather, to put it mildly. Roger took to bed for most of the day we were there and scarcely ate. We all braved it out, being what family we could for each other. I felt schizoid as I veered from the front-room chat and the feeding rituals to check on Rog and wish we were home.

  This will sound crazy, but we promised as we headed back to L.A. that we’d be down again the next weekend, when Jaimee and Michael and the kids would be flying direct to the Springs from Chicago. Somehow we chalked up the sandstorm weekend to Roger’s being off AZT. Since the two incarcerations over the white blood count, Cope and the protocol people had grown more shrewd at stopping the drug when the white cells started to fall. This seemed to allow the count to recover again more quickly and, most important, didn’t require protective isolation. Roger was off the drug during the ten-day period that straddled the two weekends in the desert, and we were either too naive or too preoccupied to worry that an infection might slip in during the off time.

  In between, we had a busy week working at home, and Roger was a good deal stronger. We decided everything would be fine as long as we avoided sandstorms. Midweek I was down with a two-day spell of diarrhea, and again I sealed myself off in the front bedroom, wearing a mask whenever I left it. I didn’t bother with stool samples and the attendant lab terror, though the current bout was as propulsive as the previous September’s. This time I refused to knuckle under with hysteria and grimly waited it out. Yet I wonder if, as I focused on myself for those two days, Roger was experiencing any symptoms we didn’t track down.

  One night I went out late for groceries, since my schedule was firmly rooted now to a 3 A.M. bedtime. In L.A. you can do all manner of things in the middle of the night, if you don’t mind the vampire pallor of your fellow insomniac shoppers. I came home and went in to Rog, who woke up and said, groggy and melancholy, “I just had a dream about Paris. Oh, I wish I could see Madeleine again.” We hugged in the dark and talked about Paris, and what it would mean to plan for another trip, if only the AZT would give us a wide enough window. “We’ll get there,” I promised. “You’ll see.”

  Since Christmas we had been making do without an attendant from APLA, and we were proud of our independence. One of the pleasures of normalcy was that Beatriz was coming on Tuesdays again. She’d been cleaning house for us as long as we’d lived on Kings Road, and we’d watched her progress from a shy girl with fifty words of English to a savvy and vivid woman, comfortably bilingual, with property of her own in Mexico. Because I worked at home and was thankful for the diversion, Beatriz and I would always gossip on Tuesday afternoon. She was very close to her brother Lorenzo, who’d arrived in the States from Guadalajara before the rest of the family and helped all the rest get oriented as they came across the border.

  Lorenzo had been sick on and off for several months, including an extended stay in the hospital before Christmas, for diarrhea and general malaise. Beatriz and I had never used the “A” word about him, any more than we had about Roger in the year that had passed since the verdict. But though Lorenzo’s diagnosis was longer in coming, due to the nonspecific nature of the pre-AIDS symptoms, Beatriz and I would talk whenever she came about the state of research and the elixir Roger was on. The medical terminology was difficult for her, of course, but she listened with absolute concentration, sounding out the Latinate names. We spurred each other on with optimism and spoke often about how changed we felt about the acquisition of objects. Whenever I see people’s collections set out on étagères, with the price tags barely removed, I think of Beatriz dusting and shaking her head.

  Friday before the second desert trip, Roger’s friend Tony Smith from Boston flew down for an overnight fr
om San Francisco, where he was on the last leg of a trip around the world. I could hear the cold in his head when he called from San Francisco and asked him not to come. But Roger wanted to see him so badly, and Tony swore he’d be assiduous about wearing a mask, so I relented. The two of them had a marvelous afternoon together, and dinner was served in a way that was second nature now that the white count had become a red flag. Though I would eat with Rog at the dining room table when we were alone, if we had guests I’d eat with them around the coffee table in the living room, while Roger ate in state in the dining room, ten feet away. I was especially vigilant about this arrangement because of Tony’s cold, but I never stopped worrying that he’d lift his mask and blow his nose. And when the chaos fell full force the following week, part of me never stopped blaming Tony, as if the germs he’d carried from India or Micronesia were to blame.

  The second weekend in the desert wasn’t noticeably better than the first, especially for Roger. With Jaimee’s family there the cast had doubled, and Roger made a real effort to be up and about—hunched over a bit and woozy, but brightening in the charged air of the children’s wall-to-wall intensity. Those two nights we stayed at Rita and Aharon’s place, and I stayed up late talking with them, because they were night owls like me. I also recall taking separate walks with Jaimee and Michael, where I stressed over and over how well Roger was compared to November and December. I felt as if I had to keep up everyone’s spirits, and was convinced Roger had put out too much energy for Tony, and that’s why he was so tired. Then, after I’d reassured them all, I’d go into the bedroom and sit on the twin bed and watch Roger sleep, trying to calm myself with his peacefulness as he lay curled in a spoon, a half-smile on his face.

  After two ten-hour nights of sleeping in, Roger appeared to have proved me right, for he was much perkier Monday morning as we all sat at breakfast. Actually, as I remember now, Roger got up even later than I and was having breakfast himself, while the rest of us hovered and watched him eat. As he finished his cereal, he said almost offhandedly, “My eye feels funny.” Immediately I was alert, but I casually asked him to elaborate, not wanting to alarm the family. “It’s like there’s a shadow in it,” he said, blinking as he passed his hand back and forth in front of the right eye.