by Susan Sontag
And when he was in the hospital, his spirits seemed to lighten, according to Donny. He seemed more cheerful than he had been in the last months, Ursula said, and the bad news seemed to come almost as a relief, according to Ira, as a truly unexpected blow, according to Quentin, but you’d hardly expect him to have said the same thing to all his friends, because his relation to Ira was so different from his relation to Quentin (this according to Quentin, who was proud of their friendship), and perhaps he thought Quentin wouldn’t be undone by seeing him weep, but Ira insisted that couldn’t be the reason he behaved so differently with each, and that maybe he was feeling less shocked, mobilizing his strength to fight for his life, at the moment he saw Ira but overcome by feelings of hopelessness when Quentin arrived with flowers, because anyway the flowers threw him into a bad mood, as Quentin told Kate, since the hospital room was choked with flowers, you couldn’t have crammed another flower into that room, but surely you’re exaggerating, Kate said, smiling, everybody likes flowers. Well, who wouldn’t exaggerate at a time like this, Quentin said sharply. Don’t you think this is an exaggeration. Of course I do, said Kate gently, I was only teasing, I mean I didn’t mean to tease. I know that, Quentin said, with tears in his eyes, and Kate hugged him and said well, when I go this evening I guess I won’t bring flowers, what does he want, and Quentin said, according to Max, what he likes best is chocolate. Is there anything else, asked Kate, I mean like chocolate but not chocolate. Licorice, said Quentin, blowing his nose. And besides that. Aren’t you exaggerating now, Quentin said, smiling. Right, said Kate, so if I want to bring him a whole raft of stuff, besides chocolate and licorice, what else. Jelly beans, Quentin said.
He didn’t want to be alone, according to Paolo, and lots of people came in the first week, and the Jamaican nurse said there were other patients on the floor who would be glad to have the surplus flowers, and people weren’t afraid to visit, it wasn’t like the old days, as Kate pointed out to Aileen, they’re not even segregated in the hospital any more, as Hilda observed, there’s nothing on the door of his room warning visitors of the possibility of contagion, as there was a few years ago; in fact, he’s in a double room and, as he told Orson, the old guy on the far side of the curtain (who’s clearly on the way out, said Stephen) doesn’t even have the disease, so, as Kate went on, you really should go and see him, he’d be happy to see you, he likes having people visit, you aren’t not going because you’re afraid, are you. Of course not, Aileen said, but I don’t know what to say, I think I’ll feel awkward, which he’s bound to notice, and that will make him feel worse, so I won’t be doing him any good, will I. But he won’t notice anything, Kate said, patting Aileen’s hand, it’s not like that, it’s not the way you imagine, he’s not judging people or wondering about their motives, he’s just happy to see his friends. But I never was really a friend of his, Aileen said, you’re a friend, he’s always liked you, you told me he talks about Nora with you, I know he likes me, he’s even attracted to me, but he respects you. But, according to Wesley, the reason Aileen was so stingy with her visits was that she could never have him to herself, there were always others there already and by the time they left still others had arrived, she’d been in love with him for years, and I can understand, said Donny, that Aileen should feel bitter that if there could have been a woman friend he did more than occasionally bed, a woman he really loved, and my God, Victor said, who had known him in those years, he was crazy about Nora, what a heartrending couple they were, two surly angels, then it couldn’t have been she.
And when some of the friends, the ones who came every day, waylaid the doctor in the corridor, Stephen was the one who asked the most informed questions, who’d been keeping up not just with the stories that appeared several times a week in the Times (which Greg confessed to have stopped reading, unable to stand it any more) but with articles in the medical journals published here and in England and France, and who knew socially one of the principal doctors in Paris who was doing some much-publicized research on the disease, but his doctor said little more than that the pneumonia was not life-threatening, the fever was subsiding, of course he was still weak but he was responding well to the antibiotics, that he’d have to complete his stay in the hospital, which entailed a minimum of twenty-one days on the I.V., before she could start him on the new drug, for she was optimistic about the possibility of getting him into the protocol; and when Victor said that if he had so much trouble eating (he’d say to everyone, when they coaxed him to eat some of the hospital meals, that food didn’t taste right, that he had a funny metallic taste in his mouth) it couldn’t be good that friends were bringing him all that chocolate, the doctor just smiled and said that in these cases the patient’s morale was also an important factor, and if chocolate made him feel better she saw no harm in it, which worried Stephen, as Stephen said later to Donny, because they wanted to believe in the promises and taboos of today’s high-tech medicine but here this reassuringly curt and silver-haired specialist in the disease, someone quoted frequently in the papers, was talking like some oldfangled country G.P. who tells the family that tea with honey or chicken soup may do as much for the patient as penicillin, which might mean, as Max said, that they were just going through the motions of treating him, that they were not sure about what to do, or rather, as Xavier interjected, that they didn’t know what the hell they were doing, that the truth, the real truth, as Hilda said, upping the ante, was that they didn’t, the doctors, really have any hope.
Oh, no, said Lewis, I can’t stand it, wait a minute, I can’t believe it, are you sure, I mean are they sure, have they done all the tests, it’s getting so when the phone rings I’m scared to answer because I think it will be someone telling me someone else is ill; but did Lewis really not know until yesterday, Robert said testily, I find that hard to believe, everybody is talking about it, it seems impossible that someone wouldn’t have called Lewis; and perhaps Lewis did know, was for some reason pretending not to know already, because, Jan recalled, didn’t Lewis say something months ago to Greg, and not only to Greg, about his not looking well, losing weight, and being worried about him and wishing he’d see a doctor, so it couldn’t come as a total surprise. Well, everybody is worried about everybody now, said Betsy, that seems to be the way we live, the way we live now. And, after all, they were once very close, doesn’t Lewis still have the keys to his apartment, you know the way you let someone keep the keys after you’ve broken up, only a little because you hope the person might just saunter in, drunk or high, late some evening, but mainly because it’s wise to have a few sets of keys strewn around town, if you live alone, at the top of a former commercial building that, pretentious as it is, will never acquire a doorman or even a resident superintendent, someone whom you can call on for the keys late one night if you find you’ve lost yours or have locked yourself out. Who else has keys, Tanya inquired, I was thinking somebody might drop by tomorrow before coming to the hospital and bring some treasures, because the other day, Ira said, he was complaining about how dreary the hospital room was, and how it was like being locked up in a motel room, which got everybody started telling funny stories about motel rooms they’d known, and at Ursula’s story, about the Luxury Budget Inn in Schenectady, there was an uproar of laughter around his bed, while he watched them in silence, eyes bright with fever, all the while, as Victor recalled, gobbling that damned chocolate. But, according to Jan, whom Lewis’s keys enabled to tour the swank of his bachelor lair with an eye to bringing over some art consolation to brighten up the hospital room, the Byzantine icon wasn’t on the wall over his bed, and that was a puzzle until Orson remembered that he’d recounted without seeming upset (this disputed by Greg) that the boy he’d recently gotten rid of had stolen it, along with four of the maki-e lacquer boxes, as if these were objects as easy to sell on the street as a TV or a stereo. But he’s always been very generous, Kate said quietly, and though he loves beautiful things isn’t really attached to them, to things, as Orson said, which is u
nusual in a collector, as Frank commented, and when Kate shuddered and tears sprang to her eyes and Orson inquired anxiously if he, Orson, had said something wrong, she pointed out that they’d begun talking about him in a retrospective mode, summing up what he was like, what made them fond of him, as if he were finished, completed, already a part of the past.
Perhaps he was getting tired of having so many visitors, said Robert, who was, as Ellen couldn’t help mentioning, someone who had come only twice and was probably looking for a reason not to be in regular attendance, but there could be no doubt, according to Ursula, that his spirits had dipped, not that there was any discouraging news from the doctors, and he seemed now to prefer being alone a few hours of the day; and he told Donny that he’d begun keeping a diary for the first time in his life, because he wanted to record the course of his mental reactions to this astonishing turn of events, to do something parallel to what the doctors were doing, who came every morning and conferred at his bedside about his body, and that perhaps it wasn’t so important what he wrote in it, which amounted, as he said wryly to Quentin, to little more than the usual banalities about terror and amazement that this was happening to him, to him also, plus the usual remorseful assessments of his past life, his pardonable superficialities, capped by resolves to live better, more deeply, more in touch with his work and his friends, and not to care so passionately about what people thought of him, interspersed with admonitions to himself that in this situation his will to live counted more than anything else and that if he really wanted to live, and trusted life, and liked himself well enough (down, ol’ debbil Thanatos!), he would live, he would be an exception; but perhaps all this, as Quentin ruminated, talking on the phone to Kate, wasn’t the point, the point was that by the very keeping of the diary he was accumulating something to reread one day, slyly staking out his claim to a future time, in which the diary would be an object, a relic, in which he might not actually reread it, because he would want to have put this ordeal behind him, but the diary would be there in the drawer of his stupendous Majorelle desk, and he could already, he did actually say to Quentin one late sunny afternoon, propped up in the hospital bed, with the stain of chocolate framing one corner of a heartbreaking smile, see himself in the penthouse, the October sun streaming through those clear windows instead of this streaked one, and the diary, the pathetic diary, safe inside the drawer.
It doesn’t matter about the treatment’s side effects, Stephen said (when talking to Max), I don’t know why you’re so worried about that, every strong treatment has some dangerous side effects, it’s inevitable, you mean otherwise the treatment wouldn’t be effective, Hilda interjected, and anyway, Stephen went on doggedly, just because there are side effects it doesn’t mean he has to get them, or all of them, each one, or even some of them. That’s just a list of all the possible things that could go wrong, because the doctors have to cover themselves, so they make up a worst-case scenario, but isn’t what’s happening to him, and to so many other people, Tanya interrupted, a worst-case scenario, a catastrophe no one could have imagined, it’s too cruel, and isn’t everything a side effect, quipped Ira, even we are all side effects, but we’re not bad side effects, Frank said, he likes having his friends around, and we’re helping each other, too; because his illness sticks us all in the same glue, mused Xavier, and, whatever the jealousies and grievances from the past that have made us wary and cranky with each other, when something like this happens (the sky is falling, the sky is falling!) you understand what’s really important. I agree, Chicken Little, he is reported to have said. But don’t you think, Quentin observed to Max, that being as close to him as we are, making time to drop by the hospital every day, is a way of our trying to define ourselves more firmly and irrevocably as the well, those who aren’t ill, who aren’t going to fall ill, as if what’s happened to him couldn’t happen to us, when in fact the chances are that before long one of us will end up where he is, which is probably what he felt when he was one of the cohort visiting Zack in the spring (you never knew Zack, did you?), and, according to Clarice, Zack’s widow, he didn’t come very often, he said he hated hospitals, and didn’t feel he was doing Zack any good, that Zack would see on his face how uncomfortable he was. Oh, he was one of those, Aileen said. A coward. Like me.
And after he was sent home from the hospital, and Quentin had volunteered to move in and was cooking meals and taking telephone messages and keeping the mother in Mississippi informed, well, mainly keeping her from flying to New York and heaping her grief on her son and confusing the household routine with her oppressive ministrations, he was able to work an hour or two in his study, on days he didn’t insist on going out, for a meal or a movie, which tired him. He seemed optimistic, Kate thought, his appetite was good, and what he said, Orson reported, was that he agreed when Stephen advised him that the main thing was to keep in shape, he was a fighter, right, he wouldn’t be who he was if he weren’t, and was he ready for the big fight, Stephen asked rhetorically (as Max told it to Donny), and he said you bet, and Stephen added it could be a lot worse, you could have gotten the disease two years ago, but now so many scientists are working on it, the American team and the French team, everyone bucking for that Nobel Prize a few years down the road, that all you have to do is stay healthy for another year or two and then there will be good treatment, real treatment. Yes, he said, Stephen said, my timing is good. And Betsy, who had been climbing on and rolling off macrobiotic diets for a decade, came up with a Japanese specialist she wanted him to see but thank God, Donny reported, he’d had the sense to refuse, but he did agree to see Victor’s visualization therapist, although what could one possibly visualize, said Hilda, when the point of visualizing disease was to see it as an entity with contours, borders, here rather than there, something limited, something you were the host of, in the sense that you could disinvite the disease, while this was so total; or would be, Max said. But the main thing, said Greg, was to see that he didn’t go the macrobiotic route, which might be harmless for plump Betsy but could only be devastating for him, lean as he’d always been, with all the cigarettes and other appetite-suppressing chemicals he’d been welcoming into his body for years; and now was hardly the time, as Stephen pointed out, to be worried about cleaning up his act, and eliminating the chemical additives and other pollutants that we’re all blithely or not so blithely feasting on, blithely since we’re healthy, healthy as we can be; so far, Ira said. Meat and potatoes is what I’d be happy to see him eating, Ursula said wistfully. And spaghetti and clam sauce, Greg added. And thick cholesterol-rich omelettes with smoked mozzarella, suggested Yvonne, who had flown from London for the weekend to see him. Chocolate cake, said Frank. Maybe not chocolate cake, Ursula said, he’s already eating so much chocolate.
And when, not right away but still only three weeks later, he was accepted into the protocol for the new drug, which took considerable behind-the-scenes lobbying with the doctors, he talked less about being ill, according to Donny, which seemed like a good sign, Kate felt, a sign that he was not feeling like a victim, feeling not that he had a disease but, rather, was living with a disease (that was the right cliché, wasn’t it?), a more hospitable arrangement, said Jan, a kind of cohabitation which implied that it was something temporary, that it could be terminated, but terminated how, said Hilda, and when you say hospitable, Jan, I hear hospital. And it was encouraging, Stephen insisted, that from the start, at least from the time he was finally persuaded to make the telephone call to his doctor, he was willing to say the name of the disease, pronounce it often and easily, as if it were just another word, like boy or gallery or cigarette or money or deal, as in no big deal, Paolo interjected, because, as Stephen continued, to utter the name is a sign of health, a sign that one has accepted being who one is, mortal, vulnerable, not exempt, not an exception after all, it’s a sign that one is willing, truly willing, to fight for one’s life. And we must say the name, too, and often, Tanya added, we mustn’t lag behind him in honesty, or let him f
eel that, the effort of honesty having been made, it’s something done with and he can go on to other things. One is so much better prepared to help him, Wesley replied. In a way he’s fortunate, said Yvonne, who had taken care of a problem at the New York store and was flying back to London this evening, sure, fortunate, said Wesley, no one is shunning him, Yvonne went on, no one’s afraid to hug him or kiss him lightly on the mouth, in London we are, as usual, a few years behind you, people I know, people who would seem to be not even remotely at risk, are just terrified, but I’m impressed by how cool and rational you all are; you find us cool, asked Quentin. But I have to say, he’s reported to have said, I’m terrified, I find it very hard to read (and you know how he loves to read, said Greg; yes, reading is his television, said Paolo) or to think, but I don’t feel hysterical. I feel quite hysterical, Lewis said to Yvonne. But you’re able to do something for him, that’s wonderful, how I wish I could stay longer, Yvonne answered, it’s rather beautiful, I can’t help thinking, this utopia of friendship you’ve assembled around him (this pathetic utopia, said Kate), so that the disease, Yvonne concluded, is not, any more, out there. Yes, don’t you think we’re more at home here, with him, with the disease, said Tanya, because the imagined disease is so much worse than the reality of him, whom we all love, each in our fashion, having it. I know for me his getting it has quite demystified the disease, said Jan, I don’t feel afraid, spooked, as I did before he became ill, when it was only news about remote acquaintances, whom I never saw again after they became ill. But you know you’re not going to come down with the disease, Quentin said, to which Ellen replied, on her behalf, that’s not the point, and possibly untrue, my gynecologist says that everyone is at risk, everyone who has a sexual life, because sexuality is a chain that links each of us to many others, unknown others, and now the great chain of being has become a chain of death as well. It’s not the same for you, Quentin insisted, it’s not the same for you as it is for me or Lewis or Frank or Paolo or Max, I’m more and more frightened, and I have every reason to be. I don’t think about whether I’m at risk or not, said Hilda, I know that I was afraid to know someone with the disease, afraid of what I’d see, what I’d feel, and after the first day I came to the hospital I felt so relieved. I’ll never feel that way, that fear, again; he doesn’t seem different from me. He’s not, Quentin said.