Borrowed Time by Paul Monette

Author:Paul Monette
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

•VIII•

Once more Sheldon was there before the night was out, and again he played the single-issue politician: Don’t tell the parents. I was still trying to find out how the infection could have got past the suramin. I’d made contact with all my antiviral sources, sending an SOS to some, to others a warning. Casualty on the front lines. I was only half there when Sheldon was purring reassurance. No big deal, he said, we already knew the procedure. Get the infection taken care of, and then back to work. The secret was intact; why bother two old people in Chicago when they’d managed to live in ignorance so far?

Roger nodded passively, too sick from all the tests to argue, gearing up for another siege of medication. When I tried to raise the issue that we seemed to have a magic-bullet problem here, and maybe it was time to go after Compound S, Sheldon changed the subject to my birthday dinner, only ten days away. Since the doctors were saying Roger would probably be home by then, there was no reason not to proceed on schedule. It was such a seductive idea, to think we could still breeze in in tuxes and put the calamity on hold. I thought of Bruce at the Oscars in March, nominated for The Natural, a moment of tonic gaudiness between the first lesion and the pneumocystis. And here we were, agreeing again to the lie of normalcy and holding out for veal chops.

As to the burden of the secret, it wasn’t Roger’s parents I was worried about right now. I felt dread enough of hitting my parents with the news, assaulted as they were by the complications of my mother’s emphysema. Indeed, we had all we could do, in the wake of the nightmare, to preserve our own dignity about being gay. I don’t think we knew what to do yet with our parents’ hard-won acceptance, the sense they’d had to overcome that being gay was a kind of doom. So the secret wasn’t all Sheldon’s idea, even now. We’d protect the parents as long as we could.

But I simply couldn’t go on smiling at our friends and coasting along as if nothing were wrong. I couldn’t face Alfred in the mornings, or all the calls that were pouring in about the party. I phoned Richard Ide in Washington; he was there for a term’s sabbatical and bunking with a mutual friend. I had to banter inanely in order to get to Richard, who in turn was required to speak in coded monosyllables. It just couldn’t continue this way or we’d go mad—though now was hardly the time to discuss it. Roger wasn’t up to talking to anyone new, and especially kept his distance from the fuss of easy sympathy. I recall how we both looked grimly around at the flowers that had welcomed him home from the last hospitalization. “What is this,” said Rog with wry dismay, “a funeral?”

But if he didn’t need reinforcements, I plainly did.

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