The door unlatched, a young doctor entered, and I was astonished by dark, Latino matinee-idol looks, momentarily catapulted out of desperation only to feel foolish and shallow. He introduced himself, an American with a slight Southern drawl. I searched his face to see if he was harboring good news or bad.
“We’re having a little trouble locating your test result,” he said by way of explanation.
“Oh, Christ,” I said. “I don’t believe this!”
His handsome brow furrowed. “Don’t worry. It’s here somewhere. We’ll find it. I just wanted to tell you.” It was strange to feel so nervous and distraught in the presence of a man who normally would be rousing me in an entirely different way.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Are the results always positive or negative?”
“Meaning?”
“Is there any possible way that the results could be neither?”
The doctor squinted at me. “It can happen, I suppose. But why so concerned?”
Was this guy for real? What planet was he from? “You don’t know what I’ve done.”
His eyes narrowed as something occurred to him. “Wait, are you gay?”
I nodded.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, flustered. “I didn’t realize.”
Here is one occasion where the assumption that one might be straight was actually denying me a compassion or an understanding that otherwise would have been elicited from this doctor. At this point a knock came on the door. The man looked at me keenly. “Hang on now. This may be our answer.” He got up and opened it a crack, was told something in French, and then slipped through and didn’t return.
My heart sputtering, I now imagined getting the result, leaving the hospital in a daze, taking the Métro back to Ed, and watching his reaction. Then one clear thought occurred to me in the midst of this anxiety reflux: Ed, on some level, would want me to be infected also; for then we’d be in it together and there would be less chance that I’d leave him. I was feeling this so acutely when the door opened; the young doctor stuck his head in and said with mock derision, “You’re fine. Now get the hell out of here. And play safe,” as though I were a baseball player trotting out toward center field.
In his memoir Ed finally admits that he would have said and done whatever he could to discourage Michel—even to the point of lying about my HIV status. Reading this confession, knowing that at least Ed was aware of what he was doing, I feel completely deflated by his willingness to rob me of my happiness for the sake of his own. I want to hate him for what he’s done, but it’s difficult; I know how unhappy he was au fond, despite all the fame and validation of his career.
Putting the manuscript aside for a moment, I try to think back to the evening just after I learned the results of my blood test. It was a chilly evening, and Ed and I sat warming ourselves by a fire. I’d just finished confessing to him how the waiting had nearly done me in. He then confessed to me that his waiting period for the test result was mild in comparison to the aftermath of dismal depression over the result.
“It was very difficult because I knew just how and when it happened,” he explained, “knew the precise moment I became infected, like some women know the moment they conceive.”
“Really?” I said.
He nodded and smiled grimly. “It certainly wasn’t romantic, the punch line of some candlelit dinner, or a thrumming fuck after a motorcycle ride through the Bois de Bologne. It was a quick pickup in the Tuileries. A manly beauty, incredibly exciting, a high moment of eroticism in my life.” Ed stopped for a moment, eyes blinking rapidly in what I imagined to be his reliving some of the lurid details of the encounter. “And what’s strange is that I had a choice whether or not to use protection. There was one of those great polyurethane condoms in my pocket. But the man was so hot.” His face flushed. “No longer the stud I once was, I actually worried that I might not ever have the same kind of opportunity again. Being so caught up, so ‘mastered by his brute blood,’” Ed paraphrased Yeats. “I just wanted him to fuck me as he was. As I was. And what I actually think I realized then, the burning truth was that getting caught up in the power of that kind of sex makes everything that goes against the grain diluted.” Ed finally took off his reading glasses and stared at me with his naked deep blue eyes. “You see, Russell, in my life I’ve always chased pure experience. And so I took my moment of raw passion and it was absolutely divine. And afterward as I was walking back here to the apartment I somehow knew in my gut that I was, at that very moment, in the earliest stages of sero-conversion.”
Disturbed, I looked away toward the fire whose flames were suddenly roaring higher. I contemplated the idea of “sero-conversion,” a medical phrase that has become part of the general lexicon, widely known, even among the less educated, a phrase that for many has the same far-reaching resonance as “terrorist attack.” But it was an attack within the body itself, a rampage of an inscrutable virus that takes charge of healthy cells and converts them to carry out a slow self-destruction. Finally I said, “I can’t believe you never told me this story.”
“It’s not an easy thing to speak about, or even admit to. It’s in the memoir, though. You’d have read about it at some point, even if I hadn’t told you.”
“Better that you’re explaining it now. Because obviously I want to ask you things.”
“Like what?” he asked in a suspicious tone.
“Like how it is dealing with such specifics. Knowing when and who did it to you.”
Surprisingly, it quickly ceased to make a difference, Ed told me. In fact, the diagnosis itself demanded a far broader consideration. For example, it forced him to be philosophical, to contemplate all the terrible infirmities that could and did happen to people, to realize his viral infection was a lot that must be borne, like losing a loved one, or suffering from yet another chronic but treatable disease. How he’d had to accept that his life probably wouldn’t be quite as long as he’d once hoped or imagined it would be. Yes, toward the end of his life he’d probably come down with more opportunistic illnesses than the run-of-the-mill person. Then again, can there ever be guarantees of everlasting good health or longevity for anyone? That night he’d said to me, “It also made me want to get on with it, write harder, time being more of the essence.”
“You also know that you’ll be leaving a substantial body of work that is respected and even taught at universities,” I’d told him, thinking at the same time that I would probably never leave behind such a legacy.
“Well, yes, it’s a comfort, but nothing can cheat the feeling that there is a specific time bomb ticking in your body that could go off at any moment. After all, nobody has yet been cured of this.”
“Well, at least you’d lived awhile—you were in your early fifties—before you became infected. Think of all the people in their twenties and thirties who are dealing with this.”
“You’re too young to understand that that doesn’t really make a difference!” Ed countered, getting up quickly, deftly grabbing a log and laying it crosswise on the fire. “Nobody can deal with dying sooner, bucko!” He sat down again next to me and looked at me crosswise over his reading glasses. “Not even octogenarians. They drum the thought out of their heads by talking about doctors and medicine and especially about everybody else who is sick and dying.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to minimize what it’s like for you.”
“Don’t worry. It’s all right,” he said. “The interesting thing is that, being of a depressive nature, even before I knew I was HIV positive, I used to wake up, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes early in the morning, with this feeling of dread.”
“Dread?” I asked. “What do you mean by that exactly?”
He shrugged. “Hard to explain, really. A sense that I’d lived a lot of my life, that most of it had already gone by, that I wasn’t really young anymore, even though I kept trying to play at being young.
Or had youthful partners around to prop myself up.” He paused, allowing the remainder of his thoughts on the matter to refine themselves for a few moments. “I guess it was more that I’d reached an age where there was this constant feeling that anything could happen to me, that I could suffer and die in all manner of ways, from an illness to some freak accident. It was a terrible feeling, a constant feeling of foreboding and worry that I’d never been able to shake. And then, when I got infected, it certainly gave some meaning to that inexplicable terror.”
Meditating on this for a moment, I said at last, “I wish our culture raised us to be more prepared for death.”
Ed nodded. “Now, this is a truth. The idea of death is certainly not integrated into our youth-obsessed culture, which now only makes it more difficult to get older. In my lifetime I’ve watched how the elderly have commanded less and less veneration from the young.”
A brief silence fell between us, and then he said, “I have to say, I’m surprised to see how much you obsessed over the results of this test, Russell. Even though you tried to hide it, you couldn’t.”
I said nothing in response. What, after all, could I say?
“So I was right, wasn’t I? That you weren’t careful with your lover.” He said the last word mockingly.
“Please don’t!”
“Why are we so foolish? Why do we blind ourselves to these risks?” Ed asked emphatically.
I tried to think about this. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s what you say: getting caught up in the brute passion of it all.”
But Ed, unmoved by my candor, was becoming increasingly more wound up over his own insecurities. “So, you totally cut loose with him. Whereas you’ve been so scrupulous, so careful, so vigilant with me.” This was said bitterly.
“Stop doing this!”
“Why? There are so many things in bed that you refuse to do.”
I let the harsh complaint seep into me. Looking at Ed in a blousy navy-blue sweater with white piping around the cuffs and neck, I thought guiltily that his jealous scowl not only made him look poorly, it made him suddenly appear even older than his years. And this scared me in an entirely new way: Would Ed actually expect me to dedicate myself to taking care of him when the time came? “Are you actually saying you’d want me to put myself at risk?”
“No, but you’ve always taken that extra measure of precaution with me. Whereas I bet there was nothing that you wouldn’t do with him.”
I said nothing in response.
Ed went on. “We’re talking about love here and attraction. We’re talking about rejection and repulsion. No matter how accomplished or self-confident people are, they still have the basic hunger to want and be wanted by somebody else.”
I now think of the young college student with whom Ed had had the affair of his life, somebody who probably loved him but who then, in an alcoholic stupor, had tragically fallen off the roof of a fraternity house.
“Let me ask you just one question,” Ed resumed, raking aside some hair that had tumbled into his eyes. “What would have happened if the result was … if you’d found out you’d been infected. Would that have changed the way you make love to me?”
I looked at him, incredulous. He knew as well as I that it would have changed nothing. So why ask such a question? “You really want me to try to imagine that? Now?”
Was it here that I really failed to understand his great distress? Did this obvious hedging of what we both knew to be the truth end up insulting him even more profoundly? He got up again and stoked the fire violently with a black iron poker that had been leaning against the limestone fireplace. Remaining standing, he turned to face me. “It was always your excuse to avoid any real intimacy.”
“Sex is just one part of any relationship,” I stated the obvious.
“Yes,” he said sadly, and then made a pinching gesture with his thumb and forefinger. “And a tiny part of this one. Because you don’t find me attractive … probably because I’m not young enough.”
“That’s absolutely not true.”
“Then what is it?”
I tried to warn him. “You’ll feel terrible about this part of the conversation later on.”
Now I see this as yet another remark that might have deeply offended him. Because he looked at me askance and his voice quieted into a tremulous rage. “Feel terrible about it later on? I feel terrible about it now, Russell,” he hissed. “I’ve fallen in love with somebody who cannot return my affection. I’m aware of it constantly. Don’t you understand? It’s torture. If I could take a pill to reverse it, that would let me wake up tomorrow free of you, I’d swallow it in a second.”
And of course I had to sympathize. Because, after all, I knew this feeling; I’d searched high and low for an antidote to Michel. And now, weeks after Ed’s death, I find myself wondering if he truly realized that his feelings for me were in their own way as utopian as my feelings for Michel Soyer.
“One day,” he said arrogantly, “mark my words, the same thing will happen to you. You’ll understand firsthand what I’m going through now.”
“Don’t you think I’ve gone through something like this already?”
“No, I mean how it feels when you lose your power, when suddenly there’s not quite enough—quite is the operative word here—to sustain yourself in somebody else’s affections. Believe it or not, I once had a lot of power, too.”
“I’m sure you could have had anybody you wanted.”
As though not hearing me, he said, “At thirty-one you’re at the peak of it. But that loss is inescapable, as inescapable as death. And it happens to every man, straight or gay.”
“Yes and no. There are lots of younger guys who’d lust after a hot older man like you.”
“Older man?”
“You’re fifty-nine years old, Ed,” I gently reminded him.
He forced a smile. “So it is true. If I were younger things would be different.”
“I really don’t believe so.”
“You don’t believe so.” He stared at me, his eyes watery with emotion. He suddenly looked afraid and went on more quietly, “Russell, I realize there’s nearly a thirty-year age difference between us. And in fact, whenever I used to see a much older man with a much younger guy, I was … well, actually disdainful. But this, what I feel for you, is something that has taken me completely by surprise. I can’t believe it. I don’t understand it. And yet I can’t drag myself away from it. To be quite honest …” He sighed. “I have absolutely no idea why you’re even with me.” The words stumbled out.
I tried to gather my thoughts for a moment. And then I said, “Ed, I admire you enormously. But, as you well know, chemistry is chemistry. I can’t help that and I can’t change it, either. But leave that aside for a moment. I’ve never been so close to anybody whose writing is so powerful and so beautiful. Just like you say, whatever attractiveness I have will fade. But your writing, which is a huge part of your life, has only gotten stronger and greater as you’ve gotten older.”
I remember how he looked at me with guarded fondness. “Well put,” he said to me that day. “Bravo. Alas, this is why I love to be with you. And it’s also why I love you,” he’d said boldly, knowing I wouldn’t be able to respond.
Now I find myself thinking of Michel and how I lived from day to day, wishing to hear such words from him.
That day, I said to Ed, “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe for me, this editing I’m doing for you is like making a contribution to your literary legacy? And that it helps to shield me against the thought that my own work probably won’t amount to much?”
Ed smiled. “Yes, I’ve thought that. And I’ve been afraid that wanting to do this is all that’s holding you to me.”
The echo of truth in his words silenced me for a while. We both stared at the fire. Finally Ed said, “Well, you know, despite everything I say, I still want you to stay with me. That’s really the problem.”
I thanked him and, feeling a bit more resolute, repli
ed, “Then I guess you’ll just have to accept my limitations. And not punish me for them.”
“I try not to, Russell. I really do. But … well, I guess punishing you is painfully compulsive on my part.”
At the time I didn’t understand the true meaning of Ed’s feeling goaded to punish me. I believed that he was merely rebuking me for my lack of romantic involvement in his life, for my lackluster physical attraction to him. Now I realize Ed was implying he’d already done my life some serious injury by lying to ensure that Michel Soyer would steer clear of me forever.
Part Two
Eight
The only request that Marina has ever made about my staying at Villa Guidi is that if I ever write anything about it, I will fictionalize the location. “You could easily say, for example, that it is a village quite close to a major Tuscan town. And you certainly have your choice among those. It might be near Volterra, for instance, or San Gimignano. It could be near Siena, Pisa, Santo Stefano, or even San Vincenzo in the Maremma. Besides, two contemporary works of fiction should never take place at the same house. It would be literary redundancy, not to mention that, after all, I do guard my privacy.”
Ironically, her novel Conversion, of which I have now read the first hundred pages, makes the location of the villa rather obvious. An account of the Nazi occupation of the villa and the story of the Jewish family who converts to Catholicism is wonderfully controlled, written with great elegance and imagination. However, in the midst of her virtuosity for invention, Marina never bothers to fictionalize the surroundings. She describes, for example, the coral-colored chapel that was erected two hundred years after the villa was built. She details the secret passageway that runs perpendicular to the villa’s most southern wall and surfaces near the stone embankment that circumscribes the entire property. An afternoon’s walk up to the convent where Puccini’s sister lived is even described in marvelous detail. Reading this latter passage, most opera fans would easily identify the region. She has also written that the villa itself is a half-hour walk from the ramparts of an entirely walled city. There are few cities in Italy entirely enclosed by walls, and only one of them is in Tuscany.
The Conversion Page 12