Good Things Happen Slowly

by Fred Hersch

  Living with Scott, like everything involving Scott, was a pleasure from the start. I found him to be generally easygoing, and in many ways he was more mature than I am, despite my being older. He was stable and patient where I was quicker to get angry and frustrated. (He’s helped me out more times than I can count when I have been in IT hell.) He had a solid sense of himself and his place in the world and cared deeply for those who didn’t have a voice. He solved his own problems, as a rule, but if he needed me, he knew that I would be there to talk things over or just to listen to him. And he would prove again and again that he was very good at taking care of me.

  We became best friends who like to be around each other but don’t need to be connected every second of the day. When we can’t be together, just thinking about him brightens my spirits. Scott has a great, subtle sense of humor. He’s not a jokester, but he’s very playful—affectionate and endearing nicknames are bestowed upon me regularly. Monogamy has been something we agreed on from the start, and it has been easy with him despite my years of wanderlust. We have been through a lot together, and our love is deep and strong.

  I’m not everybody’s idea of a perfect partner, I know. I’m a touring musician who’s traveling often for weeks at a time, and I’m not always available emotionally when I’m home or in composing mode. Often I come back from a road trip to do my laundry, dig out my in-box, and pay bills, then I repack and head out a day or two later. We have had to learn to manage these swift entrances and exits.

  I’ve never worked nine to five, and I can’t leave my work at the office. I can be preoccupied—and as time has gone by, my career and the music business take up more of my time. My office is in a corner of our loft, and I teach and rehearse there as well. I may be in the kitchen, hanging out with Scott, and suddenly get an idea for a tune. When that happens, my downtime is over. I’m at the piano, trying to make the most of that moment of inspiration. (I have to admit that these days it’s increasingly difficult for me to get to the piano in a non-distracted way—too often I succumb to the compulsive lure of e-mail and the Internet.)

  It takes a special kind of person to put up with someone like me, but Scott has always been up for the challenge. If I’m working on a big project, it consumes me for days and sometimes weeks at a time. The work takes up all my brain space, and there’s not much left of me for anything or anyone else. Sometimes, I admit, I get too lost in myself, for the sake of my work, and Scott is not afraid to call me on it. He’ll say, gently but firmly, “You know, Fred, there are two of us here. I don’t want to be ignored,” and I’ll wake up and realize, I’d better get out of my bubble for a while.

  Our relationship, more than fifteen years old as of this writing, is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. Scott is, by all definitions, a reasonable adult. I never thought I would have such a person for a partner—and one who is smart, sexy, committed, and fun to be around. I didn’t think I was worthy of that. For most of my life since adolescence, I was attracted to men who didn’t treat me particularly well, because deep down I didn’t think I was worthy of much better. I thought of myself as inadequate or defective, and I hooked up with people who reinforced that. Scott has been a gift to me I never thought I deserved.

  —

  Once Barkley left us, the house in Verona sold at a great price, leaving Scott with a windfall that he, with his good business sense and generous income from Microsoft, wanted to reinvest in other property.

  After I closed Classic Sound in 1988, I was justifiably worried about my health—which had been tenuous. My romantic fantasy in the years right after I was diagnosed was to have a second home outside the city, especially as I didn’t know how much time I had left. With what money I had from the sale of all the audio gear, in 1989 I bought a small house near a lake outside the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, and put a serviceable baby grand Yamaha piano in the living room. After I realized I had to take absolutely every gig, no matter how demeaning, to keep up with the expenses of maintaining the house, I sold it in 1993. But I remained fond of the area. It’s peaceful and woodsy—a refuge from New York City but only about two hours’ drive away, making it ideal for a weekend retreat. In 2003, after the sale of his house went through, Scott and I shopped around in that area for homes but couldn’t find anything with a living room big enough for the seven-foot Steinway that I wanted to move from our SoHo loft. So we decided to build.

  We found a secluded and affordable plot of land on the side of a hill in an area that real-estate agents were spinning as the Delaware Highlands but which everyone else considered the northern end of the Poconos—though the nearest hotel with a heart-shaped bathtub was at least forty-five minutes away. Working with a stock bi-level design, modified by an architect and built by a local contractor, we had a lovely 1,700-square-foot house built. It had an open plan, like a loft, for the primary space, as well as several gracious rooms on two levels. A forest of hickory and red oak surrounded the house. We constructed a huge deck running the length of the back of the house, and with the house being on the hill, you feel like you are living up in a tree house—especially in the summer when the trees are lush and full.

  We filled out the house with some new furniture (I am the one with the decorating gene) as well as some nice pieces that Scott had in storage from his Verona house, including a Stickley dining room set, and we decorated it with artwork and objects each of us had collected over the years—a photograph of a street scene in Calcutta by the fine-art photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon; whimsical animal wood carvings by the Santa Fe artist Miguel Rodriguez; visual works by artists I had met at MacDowell; an acrylic portrait of Barkley that Scott had commissioned…

  The first night we slept in the barely furnished house together, in October, it was spookily quiet and so dark outside that we could hardly see our hands in front of our faces. We were taking a bath by candlelight, giddily drinking a bottle of champagne (vintage, and a gift from Charlie) and wondering how the hell we had pulled this off—we were so thrilled. When I went to the house our first summer there and sat on the sofa or the deck, looking out at the trees, I felt happy and calm. I could barely believe how fortunate I was to have this beautiful home and the great partner who made it possible. Today when I go for a walk along the gravel road that leads to the house or for a lap swim in the community pool, or when I sit at the piano, looking out at the view of the treetops and hills, soaking in the sounds of the woodpeckers and hummingbirds while Scott is singing in the downstairs bedroom, I’ll think, Is this really happening? It feels like a dream, a fantastic one. I am one lucky man.

  —

  It takes a fairly high degree of commitment for two people to build a house together. In the world of my parents, engagement and marriage would generally come before the house. At the time Scott and I got together, however, matrimonial traditions and benefits were still restricted to straight couples. Bill Clinton had blithely signed the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which legally defined marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman,” redundantly defining a “spouse” as “a person of the opposite sex.” When our house in Pennsylvania was being built, in 2003, the landmark decision that led the Massachusetts Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage in the state had not yet been made. Legalization in New York State would not come until June 2011, followed by the great U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in June 2013.

  Ten years before that ruling, in 2003, Scott and I took the next step. While the house was under construction, we went on a short vacation to Saint Croix. We were staying in a fantastic Thai-style wooden guesthouse on the enormous estate of close friends. On a perfect moonlit night, sitting in a Jacuzzi after dinner (I am not making this up), it just felt like the perfect moment to ask Scott to marry me. I used those words, meaning that in the depth of my heart I was proposing a lifetime commitment. I didn’t give a shit if gay marriage was legal or illegal. I knew Scott and I loved each other, and I wanted us to be together for the r
est of our lives. I was in a good place emotionally after my time in recovery. All the hard work I had done on myself had brought me to a place where I was able to feel deeply and simply that he was the one. I saw this gorgeous, emotionally available man in front of me, and I asked him to marry me without hesitating or second-guessing myself.

  On October 3, 2004, a picture-perfect autumn day about two and a half years after we met, Scott and I had a commitment ceremony in a homey restaurant called the Kitchen Club on Prince and Mott Streets, where SoHo intersects with Little Italy. We worked out an arrangement with the owner, a visual artist from the Netherlands who had started the restaurant for her friends and maintained a neighborhood atmosphere in the midst of SoHo’s accelerated gentrification. Charlie Hamlen, the head of Classical Action, whom we thought of as the living embodiment of moral authority, officiated.

  Scott and I both wore suits, and everyone else wore what they wanted. Our parents, our siblings, and their families were there, and Hank’s children, Max and Eva, presented the rings. Scott had written his vows in advance and read them. I, extraordinarily for me, also used a prepared text, instead of improvising. I didn’t want to take any chance of not getting this right.

  Scott said, in part, “Commitment—the commitment to share your path with another person—is about the single biggest conscious choice that I think two people can make. This is a life-changing, life-affirming choice, and I’m privileged to be making it with Fred. Today, I feel very lucky to be here, with Fred, and whether it is part of some plan by a higher power, God, Allah, Yahweh—however you experience that which can’t really be explained with words or whether it was just the confluence of random events—I am grateful. And I have to say a huge thank you to Janis Siegel for singing at Birdland two and a half years ago.” Janis was there, beaming.

  There were just twenty immediate family members and two dozen close friends in attendance. Kate McGarry sang “A Wish,” music by me and words by Norma Winstone, moving almost everybody to tears. We chose texts to be read by selected friends and family, including Whitman’s poem “When I Heard at the Close of the Day.” Hearing those powerful words read aloud, standing next to Scott, brimming with love, I had never been happier in my life. My long personal journey was entering a new and promising phase. As icing on the wedding cake, we got our picture prominently placed in that Sunday’s New York Times Style section. We were as married as we could be.

  CHAPTER 15

  MADNESS

  Among the more treacherous myths about illness is the delusion that sick people can will themselves into wellness. If you just stay positive and pretend nothing’s wrong, by this way of thinking, you can push your way through whatever ailment afflicts you. There is indisputably some truth and real value to the idea that a good attitude is helpful. At the very least, positive thinking can make day-to-day life with a disease significantly more bearable. The danger lies in the proposition that human beings have absolute control over disease. We do not, and those who suffer terribly from an illness or die from it are not weaker or lesser people than those who recover and survive. The suffering of some people is not all their own fault any more than the wellness of others is all their own doing.

  For the first seven years of the new century, I felt as if AIDS and I had come to an uneasy truce. I had, at one point or another, taken every one of the fifteen major drugs that had been devised to treat the virus. By the mid-nineties, antiretroviral “cocktail” therapy, which combined three classes of medications (including the new protease inhibitors), had replaced the monotherapy that been prescribed to early AIDS patients, with limited success. My T-cell count was low but fairly stable, and my viral load, a measure of the efficacy of my immune system, fluctuated between acceptable and alarming. I was still far from the point of having an undetectable viral load, the holy grail of HIV treatment. I was on what was becoming known as “salvage therapy,” experimenting with new drugs as they came on the market, looking for a combination that would effectively suppress the virus.

  Many of the treatments carried serious, sometimes horrible and debilitating side effects. I was visibly, dangerously underweight. I suffered incontinence and developed medication-related diabetes, requiring additional treatment with insulin. One of the drugs I took for a while, a fusion inhibitor, had to be injected with a powerful CO2 gun in the ever-shrinking areas of my body where I could find a few cells of fat, and the drug itself had psychological side effects, including depression. My health was unstable but seemed to have reached a tolerable level of instability.

  I settled into a routine of pill taking that would continue to this day. Every morning I would go into the kitchen and take out a large plastic bin that held about two dozen pill bottles. I would sit at the table and make two piles: morning pills (fourteen) and dinner pills (nine). I would put them in small, clear, sealable plastic jewelry bags, to have them in my pocket at mealtimes. In addition to all these, I would take three before breakfast, one other pill before dinner, and six pills at bedtime for a total of thirty-three per day. Before bed, and before a heavy meal, I would inject my insulin.

  For many years I was relatively fortunate as an AIDS patient for having spent so little time in the hospital. Back when I was recording for Nonesuch, I had been admitted to St. Vincent’s for out-of-control diabetes. But that was treated quickly, and I was discharged in just a week. A few years later I was hospitalized, again at St. Vincent’s, for MRSA, a multiple-resistant staph infection that had taken form during a solo tour of Europe. The infection ate a hole in my back the size of a quarter but was treatable with potent intravenous antibiotics, and I was once again released in a week’s time.

  By 2007, I felt like AIDS was something I might well be able to live with. The year started out beautifully. I had been working since 2006 on a major new project, a staged song cycle on the theme of photography called Rooms of Light. I was writing it with the fine American poet Mary Jo Salter, whom I had met during one of my residencies at MacDowell. Lincoln Center had recently decided to reposition its American Songbook Series, expanding its programming beyond the Tin Pan Alley canon to present works by contemporary songwriters, and I was invited to perform an evening of my songs in a concert that January. I featured seven selections from Rooms of Light, some excerpts from Leaves of Grass, and a few of the tunes of mine that Norma Winstone had set to lyrics. There were four vocalists—Kate McGarry and Peter Eldridge from the jazz world, and Michael Winther and Jessica Molaskey, who were music-theater singers. I did the musical direction, wrote the arrangements, and played piano with a six-piece mixed ensemble. I took this event as a significant acknowledgment of my emergence as a writer of songs as well as instrumental works, and I was enormously gratified by that.

  Over the course of the year, I pushed myself hard. I went to Saint Louis for a staging of Leaves of Grass at the exquisite, historic Sheldon Concert Hall. A week later I flew to London for a duo show with my harmonica pal Toots Thielemans at Barbican Hall, coming back in time to do an American round of club dates to support my latest trio CD, Night & the Music. The trio now had the imaginative young Nasheet Waits on drums, along with Drew Gress on bass. I also recorded a night of duo performances at the Jazz Standard with the Portland-based jazz singer Nancy King, who is one of the purest in-the-moment performers I have ever known. (I had the recording done without Nancy’s knowledge at the time, so as not to spook her, not that she’s easily spooked.) The Maxjazz label released it, and it was nominated for a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album, overdue recognition for an artist who has long deserved much more.

  When summer came, I prepared for a recording of my collected concert works to be recorded at the Sosnoff Theater at Bard College’s Fisher Center in Upstate New York. The program, released by the classical label Naxos the following year, consisted of all the fully notated music for solo piano and chamber groups I had done to date. The centerpiece of the album was the twenty-five-minute piece “24 Variations on a Bach Chorale,” which I had composed at MacDowel
l in 2002. The composition is built on the famous theme Bach had used in his Saint Matthew Passion, which I had first heard as a teenager in an adaptation with lyrics by the folk singer Tom Glazer, called “Because All Men Are Brothers,” and recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary. After the events of September 11, 2001, the powerful, timeless melody and its universal spiritual quality inspired me to write my own set of variations.

  When fall came, my schedule grew heavier still. I pushed and pushed and pushed some more, flying around the country and all over Europe. For the eighth year, I did a three-day residency at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, conducting master classes and workshops and giving concerts. Immediately after that I flew off to Europe with my trio, which now had the superb bassist John Hébert along with Waits. It was a battering tour of twelve concerts in fourteen days in icy weather: Amsterdam one night, Paris the next, Dublin the night after that, and so on. Then I flew to Japan and gave a series of three solo concerts.

  I started to feel pretty awful. I had little energy and almost no appetite. I was having trouble salivating. On the road, I couldn’t even eat a sandwich—the bread was too dry for me to swallow. It was hard to find food that I could get down, even though I had to eat something for breakfast and dinner to go along with my pills. But I lost a lot of weight fast and got down to about 115 pounds, 20 pounds less than usual for me then; my debilitating incontinence grew worse, accelerating my weight loss. I forced myself through it. Through all my years with HIV, I had always made a point of keeping my calendar fully booked. After all, if I had a gig six months down the road, I would have to stay alive to make it. Now I was managing to keep the bookings but at the cost of my health. I was feeling the limits of the force of my will.

  When I came back from the European tour in early December, I felt absolutely beaten up, and I looked like hell—I could see it in Scott’s eyes when he first laid eyes on me. I was haggard and gaunt, with brittle, straw stalks for hair. With Scott’s encouragement, I went to see my doctor, Michael Liguori, and he said, “Well, there’s something we can try. Let’s do a strategic therapeutic interruption.” This was an experiment that some doctors were attempting with AIDS patients at the time. It was sometimes called a “drug holiday,” whereby patients went off all of their antiretroviral drugs for a short, controlled period. The term could only be taken ironically, since the experience was anything but a day at the beach.