"What a melodrama," Elaine said wearily, when--as early as the summer of '81--Mrs. Hadley and Richard started living together. Old hippie that she was, Martha Hadley refused to get married again, and Richard (I'm sure) was happy just to be in Mrs. Hadley's uncomplaining presence. What did Richard Abbott care about remarrying?
Besides, they both understood that if they didn't get married, they would be asked to move out of Bancroft Hall. It may have been the start of the eighties, but it was small-town Vermont, and Favorite River had its share of boarding-school rules. An unmarried couple, living together in a faculty apartment in a prep school--well, this wouldn't quite do. Both Mrs. Hadley and Richard had had it with an all-boys' dorm; Elaine and I didn't doubt that. It's entirely possible that Richard Abbott and Martha Hadley decided they would be crazy to get married; by choosing to live together in sin, they got out of living in a dorm!
Mrs. Hadley and Richard had the summer to find a place to live in town, or at least near First Sister--a modest house, something a couple of secondary-school teachers could afford. The place they found was not more than a few doors down River Street from what had once been the First Sister Public Library--now the historical society. The house had gone through a succession of owners in recent years; it needed some repairs, Richard told me somewhat haltingly over the phone.
I sensed his hesitation; if it was money he needed, I would have gladly given him what I could, but I was surprised Richard hadn't asked Grandpa Harry first. Harry loved Richard, and I knew that Grandpa Harry had given his blessing to Richard's living with Martha Hadley.
"The house isn't more than a ten-minute walk from Grandpa Harry's house, Bill," Richard said over the phone. I could tell he was stalling.
"What is it, Richard?" I asked him.
"It's the former Frost home, Bill," Richard said. Given the history of the many recent and unreliable owners, we both knew that no traces of Miss Frost could conceivably have remained. Miss Frost was gone--both Richard Abbott and I knew that. Yet the house being "the former Frost home" was a glimpse into the darkness--the past darkness, I thought at the time. I saw no foreshadow of a future darkness.
AS FOR MY SECOND warning that a plague was coming, I just plain missed it. There'd been no Christmas card from the Atkins family in 1980; I hadn't noticed. When a card came--it was long after the holiday, but the card still proclaimed "Season's Greetings"--I remember being surprised that Tom hadn't included a review of my fourth novel. (The book wasn't yet published, but I'd sent Atkins a copy of the galleys; I thought that such a faithful fan of my writing deserved a sneak preview. After all, no one else was comparing me favorably to Flaubert!)
But there was nothing enclosed with the "Season's Greetings" card, which arrived sometime in February of '81--at least I think it showed up that late. I noted that the children and the dog looked older. What gave me pause was how much older poor Tom looked; it was almost as if he'd aged several years between Christmases.
My guess was that the photo had been taken on a family ski trip--everyone was dressed for skiing, and Atkins even wore a ski hat. They'd brought the dog skiing! I marveled.
The kids looked tanned--the wife, too. Remembering how fair-skinned Tom was, he probably had to be careful about the sun; thus I saw nothing amiss about Tom not being tanned. (Knowing Atkins, he'd probably heeded the earliest alarms about skin cancer and the importance of wearing sunscreen--he'd always been a boy who had heeded every alarm.)
But there was something silvery about Tom's skin color, I thought--not that I could see much of his face, because Atkins's stupid ski hat covered his eyebrows. Yet I could tell--just from that partial view of poor Tom's face--that he'd lost weight. Quite a lot of weight, I speculated, but, given the ski clothes, I couldn't really tell. Maybe Atkins had always been a bit hollow-cheeked.
Yet I'd stared at this belated Christmas card for the longest time. There was a look I hadn't seen before in the expression of Tom's wife. How was it possible, in a single expression, to convey a fear of both the unknown and the known?
Mrs. Atkins's expression reminded me of that line in Madame Bovary--it's at the end of chapter 6. (The one that goes like a dart to a bull's-eye, or to your heart--"it seemed quite inconceivable that this calm life of hers could really be the happiness of which she used to dream.") Tom's wife didn't look afraid--she seemed terrified! But what could possibly have frightened her so?
And where was the smile that the Tom Atkins I knew could rarely suppress for long? Atkins had this goofy, openmouthed smile--with lots of teeth and his tongue showing. But poor Tom had tightly closed his mouth--like a kid who's trying to conceal a wad of chewing gum from a teacher, or like someone who knows his breath is bad.
For some reason, I'd shown the Atkins family photo to Elaine. "You remember Atkins," I said, handing her the late-arriving Christmas card.
"Poor Tom," Elaine automatically said; we both laughed, but Elaine stopped laughing when she had a look at the photograph. "What's the matter with him--what's he got in his mouth?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said.
"He's got something in his mouth, Billy--he doesn't want anyone to see it," Elaine told me. "And what's the matter with those children?"
"The children?" I asked her. I'd not noticed that anything was wrong with the kids.
"They look like they've been crying," Elaine explained. "Jesus--it looks like they cry all the time!"
"Let me see that," I said, taking the photo. The children looked okay to me. "Atkins used to cry a lot," I told Elaine. "He was a real crybaby--maybe the kids got it from Tom."
"Come on, Billy--something's not normal. I mean with all of them," Elaine said.
"The dog looks normal," I said. (I was just fooling around.)
"I'm not talking about the dog, Billy," Elaine said.
IF YOUR PASSAGE THROUGH the Reagan years (1981-89) was unclouded by watching someone you knew die of AIDS, then you don't remember those years (or Ronald Reagan) the way I do. What a decade it was--and we would have that horseback-riding B actor in charge for most of it! (For seven of the eight years he was president, Reagan would not say the AIDS word.) Those years have been blurred by the passage of time, and by the conscious and unconscious forgetting of the worst details. Some decades slip by, others drag on; what made the eighties last forever was that my friends and lovers kept dying--into the nineties, and beyond. By '95--in New York, alone--more Americans had died of AIDS than were killed in Vietnam.
It was some months after that February conversation Elaine and I had about the Atkins family photo--I know it was later in '81--when Larry's young lover Russell got sick. (I felt awful that I'd dismissed Russell as a Wall Street guy; I'd called him a poetaster, too.)
I was a snob; I used to turn up my nose at the patrons Larry surrounded himself with. But Larry was a poet--poets don't make any money. Why shouldn't poets, and other artists, have patrons?
PCP was the big killer--a pneumonia (Pneumocystis carinii). In young Russell's case, as it often was, this pneumonia was the first presentation of AIDS--a young and otherwise healthy-looking guy with a cough (or shortness of breath) and a fever. It was the X-ray that didn't look great--in the parlance of radiologists and doctors, a "whiteout." Yet there was no suspicion of the disease; there was, at first, the phase of not getting better on antibiotics--finally, there was a biopsy (or lung lavage), which showed the cause to be PCP, that insidious pneumonia. They usually put you on Bactrim; that's what Russell was taking. Russell was the first AIDS patient I watched waste away--and, don't forget, Russell had money and he had Larry.
Many writers who knew Larry saw him as spoiled and self-centered--even pompous. I shamefully include my former self in this category of Lawrence Upton observers. But Larry was one of those people who improve in a crisis.
"It should be me, Bill," Larry told me when I first paid a visit to Russell. "I've had a life--Russell is just beginning his." Russell was placed in hospice care in his own magnificent Chelsea brownstone; he had
his own nurse. All this was new to me then--that Russell had chosen not to go on a breathing machine allowed him to be cared for at home. (Intubating at home is problematic; it's easier to hook a person up to a ventilator in a hospital.) I later saw and remembered that gob of Xylocaine jelly on the tip of the endotracheal tube, but not in Russell's case; he wasn't intubated, not at home.
I remember Larry feeding Russell. I could see the cheesy patches of Candida in Russell's mouth, and his white-coated tongue.
Russell had been a beautiful young man; his face would soon be disfigured with Kaposi's sarcoma lesions. A violet-colored lesion dangled from one of Russell's eyebrows where it resembled a fleshy, misplaced earlobe; another purplish lesion drooped from Russell's nose. (The latter was so strikingly prominent that Russell later chose to hide it behind a bandanna.) Larry told me that Russell referred to himself as "the turkey"--because of the Kaposi's sarcoma lesions.
"Why are they so young, Bill?" Larry kept asking me--when "they," the sheer number of young men who were dying in New York, had made us realize that Russell was just the beginning.
We saw Russell age, in just a few months--his hair thinned, his skin turned leaden, he was often covered with a cool-to-the-touch film of sweat, and his fevers went on forever. The Candida went down his throat, into the esophagus; Russell had difficulty swallowing, and his lips were crusted white and fissured. The lymph nodes in his neck bulged. He could scarcely breathe, but Russell refused to go on a ventilator (or to a hospital); in the end, he faked taking the Bactrim--Larry would find the tablets scattered in Russell's bed.
Russell died in Larry's arms; I'm sure Larry wished it had been the other way around. ("He weighed nothing," Larry said.) By then, Larry and I were already visiting friends at St. Vincent's Hospital. As Larry predicted, it would get so crowded at St. Vincent's that you couldn't go to visit a friend, or a former lover, and not encounter someone else you knew. You would glance in a doorway, and there was someone you hadn't known was sick; in more than one instance, Larry claimed, he'd spotted someone he hadn't known was gay!
Women found out that their husbands had been seeing men--only when their husbands were dying. Parents learned that their young male children were dying before they knew (or had figured out) that their kids were gay.
Only a few women friends of mine were infected--not many. I was terrified about Elaine; she'd slept with some men I knew were bisexual. But two abortions had taught Elaine to insist on condoms; she was of the opinion that nothing else could keep her from getting pregnant.
We'd had an earlier condom conversation; when the AIDS epidemic started, Elaine had asked me, "You're still a condom guy--right, Billy?" (Since '68! I'd told her.)
"I should be dead," Larry said. He wasn't sick; he looked fine. I wasn't sick, either. We kept our fingers crossed.
It was still in '81, near the end of the year, when there was that bleeding episode in the wrestling room at the New York Athletic Club. I'm not sure if all the wrestlers knew that the AIDS virus was mainly transmitted by blood and semen, because there was a time when hospital workers were afraid they could catch it from a cough or a sneeze, but that day I got a nosebleed in the wrestling room, everyone already knew enough to be scared shitless of blood.
It often happens in wrestling: You don't know you're bleeding until you see your blood on your opponent. I was working out with Sonny; when I saw the blood on Sonny's shoulder, I backed away. "You're bleeding--" I started to say; then I saw Sonny's face. He was staring at my nosebleed. I put my hand to my face and saw the blood--on my hand, on my chest, on the mat. "Oh, it's me," I said, but Sonny had left the wrestling room--running. The locker room, where the training room was, was on another floor.
"Go get the trainer, Billy--tell him we've got blood here," Arthur told me. All the wrestlers had stopped wrestling; no one would touch the blood on the mat. Normally, a nosebleed was no big deal; you just wiped off the mat with a towel. Blood, in a wrestling room, used to be of no importance.
Sonny had already sent the trainer to the wrestling room; the trainer arrived with rubber gloves on, and with towels soaked in alcohol. Minutes later, I saw Sonny standing under the shower in the locker room--he was wearing his wrestling gear, even his shoes, in the shower. I emptied out my locker before I took a shower. I wanted to give Sonny time to finish showering before I went anywhere near the shower room. I was betting that Sonny hadn't told the trainer that "the writer" had bled in the wrestling room; Sonny must have told him that "the gay guy" was bleeding. I know that's what I would have said to the trainer, at that time.
Arthur saw me only when I was leaving the locker room; I'd showered and dressed, and I had some cautionary cotton balls stuffed up both nostrils--not a drop of blood in sight, but I was carrying a green plastic garbage bag with the entire contents of my locker. I got the garbage bag from a guy in the equipment room; boy, did he look happy I was leaving!
"Are you okay, Billy?" Arthur asked me. Someone would keep asking me that question--for about fourteen or fifteen years.
"I'm going to withdraw my application for lifetime membership, Arthur--if that's okay with you," I said. "The dress code at this place is a nuisance for a writer. I don't wear a coat and tie when I write. Yet I have to put on a coat and tie just to get in the front door here--only to get undressed to wrestle."
"I totally understand, Billy. I just hope you're going to be okay," Arthur said.
"I can't belong to a club with such an uptight dress code. It's all wrong for a writer," I told him.
Some of the other wrestlers were showing up in the locker room after practice--Ed and Wolfie and Jim, my former workout partners, among them. Everyone saw me holding the green plastic garbage bag; I didn't have to tell them it was my last wrestling practice.
I left the club by the back door to the lobby. You look odd carrying a garbage bag on Central Park South. I went out of the New York Athletic Club on West Fifty-eighth Street, where there were a few narrow alleys that served as delivery entrances to the hotels on Central Park South. I knew I would find a Dumpster for my garbage bag, and what amounted to my life as a beginning wrestler in the dawn of the AIDS crisis.
IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER the inglorious nosebleed had ended my wrestling career that Larry and I were having dinner downtown and he told me he'd heard that bottoms were more likely to get sick than tops. I knew tops who had it, but more bottoms got it--this was true. I never knew how Larry managed to have "heard" everything, but he heard right most of the time.
"Blow jobs aren't too terribly risky, Bill--just so you know." Larry was the first person to tell me that. Of course Larry seemed to know (or he assumed) that the number of sex partners in your life was a factor. Ironically, I didn't hear about the condom factor from Larry.
Larry had responded to Russell's death by seeking to help every young man he knew who was dying; Larry had an admirably stronger stomach for visiting the AIDS patients we knew at St. Vincent's, and in hospice care, than I did. I could sense myself withdrawing, just as I was aware of people shrinking away from me--not only my fellow wrestlers.
Rachel had retreated immediately. "She may think she can catch the disease from your writing, Billy," Elaine told me.
Elaine and I had talked about getting out of New York, but the problem with living in New York for any length of time is that many New Yorkers can't imagine that there's anywhere else they could live.
As more of our friends contracted the virus, Elaine and I would imagine ourselves with one or another of the AIDS-associated, opportunistic illnesses. Elaine developed night sweats. I woke up imagining I could feel the white plaques of Candida encroaching on my teeth. (I admitted to Elaine that I often woke up at night and peered into my mouth in a mirror--with a flashlight!) And there was that seborrheic dermatitis; it was flaky and greasy-looking--it cropped up mostly on your eyebrows and scalp, and on the sides of your nose. Herpes could run wild on your lips; the ulcers simply wouldn't heal. There were also those clusters of molluscum; they lo
oked like smallpox--they could completely cover your face.
And there's a certain smell your hair has when it is matted by your sweat and flattened by your pillow. It's not just how translucent-looking and funny-smelling your hair is. It's the salt that dries and hardens on your forehead, from the unremitting fever and the incessant sweating; it's your mucous membranes, too--they get chock-full of yeast. It's a yeasty but, at the same time, fruity smell--the way curd smells, or mildew, or a dog's ears when they're wet.
I wasn't afraid of dying; I was afraid of feeling guilty, forever, because I wasn't dying. I couldn't accept that I would or might escape the AIDS virus for as accidental a reason as being told to wear a condom by a doctor who disliked me, or that the random luck of my being a top would or might save me. I was not ashamed of my sex life; I was ashamed of myself for not wanting to be there for the people who were dying.
"I'm not good at this. You are," I told Larry; I meant more than the hand-holding and the pep talks.
Cryptococcal meningitis was caused by a fungus; it affected your brain, and was diagnosed by a lumbar puncture--it presented with fever and headache and confusion. There was a separate spinal-cord disease, a myelopathy that caused progressive weakness--loss of function in your legs, incontinence. There was little one could do about it--vacuolar myelopathy, it was called.
I was watching Larry empty the bedpan of our friend who had this awful myelopathy; I was truly marveling at Larry--he'd become a saint--when I suddenly realized that I had no difficulty pronouncing the myelopathy word, or any of the other AIDS-associated words. (That Pneumocystis pneumonia, for example--I could actually say it. Kaposi's sarcoma, those terrible lesions, gave me no pronunciation problem; I could say "cryptococcal meningitis" as if it meant no more to me than the common cold. I didn't even hesitate to pronounce "cytomegalovirus"--a major cause of blindness in AIDS.)
"I should call your mother," I told Elaine. "I seem to be having a pronunciation breakthrough."
"It's just because you're distancing yourself from this disease, Billy," Elaine said. "You're like me--you're imagining yourself as standing on the outside, looking in."