It was his sister, Jean, who picked up the folded scrap of paper fluttering out of Bill’s journal. She was the one who opened it. She started laughing – at first a titter, then deep guffaws, rolling in waves. She showed it to me - a passingly good pencil sketch of a nude man, lying on his side, eyes closed in slumber. Underneath, Bill had written “Dan in Marseilles.” I was confused. I didn’t remember his drawing it. He must have done it while I was sleeping. He never mentioned it. He simply stowed it away. I was looking at it for the first time.
The trip that brought us to Marseille was a happy one. The winter prior, I came across an out-of-print travel book on France. The author cited the Constellation of the Kite, six stars said to resemble a kite, and he drew a comparison to the six tourist spots on the map he included: Avignon, Pont du Gard, Nimes, Arles, Les Baux, St. Remy and Vaucluse. The same configuration as the constellation. We pored over that map and ultimately decided we’d go to each of those places. We’d start in Paris; Bill had a friend there he wanted to look up. And we’d end the trip in Barcelona, whose grimy, down-at-the-heels architectural treasures I had loved since my student days, in an era before the Olympics upturned the city, before tourists swamped it in numbers too large for any city to handle.
I kept a journal throughout the trip. Bill did, too, although I never read his. We would spend our late afternoons in bed resting, recording what we’d seen, penning random thoughts in synch with each other’s silence. At the end of my journal I wrote: “He was a wonderful travelling companion, organized, interested in learning, able to identify something pleasant and memorable about each sight… In one sense, we did all that we did as much for each other as for ourselves. There’s a lesson in this about companionship.” I read this today and want to scream at myself. “Were you blind? Could you not come up with something more self-aware?”
* * *
Our first few years we saw each other mostly on Friday night trysts. Then Bill and I started venturing out. We went to New York, slumming our way through the sleazy movie houses around 42nd Street. Once we went up and back just to see Sunday in the Park with George on Broadway. We rented cabins in the Blue Ridge with my straight, White friends. He mixed well with them. We didn’t often mingle with his Black friends, most of them were gay and came on to me at parties - confident, curious and disarmingly appealing. It always made me uncomfortable, ready to leave early. Bill found it amusing that I didn’t sleep around. Not that he ever urged me to. At any rate, whatever anyone had in mind, it was not going to happen. Over time he came to value being the only one with whom I was intimate. It kept things simple, cleared space for us in a way that an open relationship – the default for most of his friends – would not have permitted. I wasn’t seeking moral high ground; I was simply wired that way – as are more men than people appreciate. Less attuned to the lure of new conquest than to the fear of the chaos each threatens. Not blind to others’ beauty, but to my own. In the gaps between boyfriends I could be as randy as anyone, but my heat-seeking heart looked for commitment. When it wasn’t forthcoming, I would be crushingly disappointed and break things off. Or, if I hadn’t figured things out yet, I would be ghosted. Someone was suddenly busy that day. And the next. And the next. Until I read the tea leaves.
That tour through France was the only major trip we took together. I went to Europe on my own most summers. Just the year before, I had travelled around Spain, taking night trains, boarding in pensiones, living out adventures I had yearned for since student days, years before my career, my mortgage. It was on my return from that trip to Spain, over our Friday night dinner of fried fish and greens that Bill was fixing in the kitchen, in the middle of I-forget-what that we were talking about, that he told me. He was deceptively off-hand. Confusingly so. He’d been to the doctor while I was gone. He’d had himself tested. He was HIV positive.
I uttered the first thought that came to me, slowly, into the silence that seemed to demand I say something. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.” It was not my finest moment.
What I meant, of course, was that I didn’t want him to be diagnosed with a terminal disease. I didn’t want him to face what he would now struggle to accept. We hadn’t talked much about AIDS. The epidemic surrounded us, of course. We both knew people who had died of it. Michael was gone – tall, beautiful Michael, so witty, so quick to smile - as were at least two choir members at church that we knew of. An administrative assistant who worked in another department came up to me in my office to announce his diagnosis, assuring me he was not contagious. I’d watched friends turn gaunt - White ones become pale, Black ones gray - then dodge invitations, assume low profiles, and ultimately authorize a mutual friend to let me know, to say they didn’t want my pity.
My unexpressed second thought was that I must have it, too. How could I not? I walked across to the stove where Bill stood over the frying pan, closed in behind him, put my arms around him and rested my head on the back of his shoulders. Neither of us said anything. Neither of us cried. We simply stood there until it was time to turn the fish over in the pan.
Washington had been undergoing a building boom. Then rampant inflation hit. Most large construction projects were brought to a halt. Near my downtown office - a marginal area slated by developers for a massive remake - multi-story steel frames had their cranes dismantled and removed, leaving behind skeletal silhouettes. See-throughs, they were called. I came to think of myself as a see-through, a project halted mid-completion. I reminded myself I wouldn’t live to see those buildings completed. My reaction to the idea of dying was embarrassment. What will people think when they find out? I felt more shame than self-pity. I was numb with resignation, incapable of panic, oddly haunted by a phantasmic nostalgia for what was not going to happen, now that life was to be cut short.
I became alert to signs in either of us of weight loss, undue fatigue, sores or night sweats. The effect of my monitoring was to feel more intimately connected to Bill, more invested in his physical well-being. This concern drew us closer, even if we never acknowledged it. The diagnosis engendered solicitude and a heightened tenderness. We opted not to talk about it. We each had our own fears; we avoided provoking the other’s.
For the previous two winters we had been going for Tuesday-night swimming sessions at the Marie Reed Center community pool. Men got a reduced entry free on Tuesday nights. The workout felt great. I was up to fifty laps, Bill not far behind me. As he stripped off his swimming togs, one foot up on the bench in front of his locker, I started scanning his body, alert for signs of weight loss. He still looked great. There wasn’t much known about the disease, only that it spread through the exchange of bodily fluids. We made adjustments, on the theory that we should do nothing to accelerate it. We resolved to carry on, to put dread aside, to be grateful things were going fine. That winter, when I summoned the nerve to get tested, I was relieved and confused to learn I was HIV negative. Bill beamed when I told him. “I knew it. I knew it.” Proof he cared for my well-being all along. An act of grace on his part, offered across the unbridgeable gap between his fate and mine.
To celebrate my news we decided on the trip to France. And it went so well that we began planning another trip when we got back, this time to North Africa. Bill knew his way around Africa from his Peace Corps days. We’d start in Morocco. We’d go as far as Mali, to Timbuktu. He’d been there a couple of times.
The spring before our North Africa trip, over the Easter break, I had an annual convention to attend in Pasadena. Tired of winter, I booked a couple of extra days after the business commitments down in Laguna Beach, at a quiet motel. My plan was to walk the beach and read by the pool if it was warm enough. I’d eat well and rest up. When I’d been away a week I rang Bill from the motel room. He’d had a heavy cold for some time, but now I heard a profound frailty in his voice. He said he was running a temperature and was exhausted.
“I’ll see you when I get back. Stay in bed. Call the doctor on Monday.”
I got back Sunday night and rang him. No answer. He must be feeling better, I reasoned. He must have gone out. On Monday morning I rang his office. He’d called in sick. I rang his home. No answer. I told my secretary I had an emergency. I drove uptown to his place and let myself into his apartment with my own key. His bedroom was at the end of the hall. When he saw me come in, he raised his head a bit from the pillow and smiled weakly.
“You do love me. You do.”
The first hospital stay was for nearly two weeks. They put a catheter and port into his chest. It sat there like a small bathtub drain. He didn’t want it. He hadn’t wanted to go to the hospital; I had to talk him into that. When they mentioned the port he turned to me, as if to ask what I thought. I said the doctor said it would help him gain back some weight. He’d be getting lipids, something I had never heard of before. The nurse came in and showed me how it worked. She said I’d do just fine.
After years of living separately, Bill moved in with me. Into a hospital bed in the back bedroom, overlooking the back garden. With a catheter and pump station at his side. Twice a day I cleaned the catheter, forced in more lipids, took his vitals, phoned in the numbers. Life went on around us. The Supreme Leader of Iran died, and the TV set up near Bill’s bed aired footage of a funeral mob tossing the Ayatollah’s body out of its coffin and across thousands of upraised hands. I was cleaning the area around his chest port while Bill watched this. He was cogent at that moment.
“Will you look at that!”
The last trip we took together was to Washington Hospital Center. When I phoned in his vitals the GP rang back to tell me to bring him straight on past the ER desk, to ask for him, that he’d be waiting for us back there. I drove through every stop light, every stop sign, honking my horn and hoping a cop car would stop us so we could get a police escort. Bill had lost so much weight I could carry him cradled in my arms, like a child. Someone yelled at me as I walked straight through the waiting room, complaining they’d all been there before us, been waiting longer. A room had been prepared, a small private room on an upper floor along a quiet hall. Bill’s temperature was running above 103, and they laid him on a cooling mattress. He was shivering and complaining, but the night nurse said if they couldn’t get the temperature down he had no chance. I sat for hours staring out the window. Soundless medivac helicopters were leaving and landing from a helipad, their floodlights playing across the dark surface as evening drew in. A silent train of misery. Near the end, we both dozed off, our fingers laced in a forceless curl. I woke at the end to see him letting go a final, shallow breath.
I rang his sister Jean just at dawn. She flew down from Pittsburgh that afternoon with three of her adult children. Two of his brothers came the next day from Tennessee. They all stayed at my place. Everything was a blur up to and throughout a funeral I had never given any thought to, organized in a fog of disbelief, carried through by Jean. It was a couple of days after that, at his apartment, sorting out which of his things the family wanted, that Jean pulled the journal off the shelf, and the sketch from Marseilles fell to the floor. It was the first time I had laughed in months.
* * *
A full year later I was walking by the Whitman-Walker Gay Men’s Clinic on 14th Street. I don’t remember where I was headed. I saw a sign out of the corner of my eye listing their community services. The word I saw was Counseling. And in that moment my orientation to the world around me involuntarily jumped tracks. Without asking myself why, I opened the door, walked in and went directly to the reception desk. An earnest young fellow sitting there asked me if he could help.
And finally, I wept. It was more of a wail. Two staff members came running over, lifting me up from my sprawl across the desk as I let out what I had been holding in for so long. All those things I held at bay – the macho silence, the homophobia, the self-abnegation, the death and loss, the cramped, repressive way of living – caved in and gave way.
Miraculously, its missing counterweight came rushing in, too.
“Yes, Bill, I do love you. I do.”