Each room along this fluorescent hospital corridor has about it an aura of abandonment. These doors seem as if they should be labeled not with patients’ names but with inscriptions: Shame, Suffering, Neglect, Nobody-Cares-Where-I-Am. These rooms are either starkly brilliant or entirely without light, and the men who live in them—all men here—have in common the absence of context: no personal effects, no clothes, pictures, no flowers, nothing that says, This is who I was. I use the past tense deliberately, since these men are already far along in the process of being erased. This is the AIDS ward of the Ione Shattuck Chronic Care Hospital, a state-run facility for people needing long-term care, a place with the reputation—and feeling—of the end of the road. Half the men here are gay, half IV drug users. There’s a quality in the air that bus terminals have, and the waiting rooms of free clinics and welfare offices, a sense that there’s no place else to go. It’s the ultimate disconnection; our things, our family, our friends, our attachments to life are what expose and externalize identity. Without them, we become these narrowed and diminished faces. How small the body looks like this, with nothing to extend its limits, stripped of intimacy, bathed in the moon-wash of institutional light.
My friend Bill has been here for twenty-three weeks, not because of his lesions, but because of devastating and continuous diarrhea caused by cryptosporidium, an intractable intestinal parasite. Wally had it too, though never to this extent. Nothing cures it, but Wally’s infection was controlled by an antibiotic. For Bill, drug after drug has done nothing, so he’s dehydrated, malnourished, and requires intravenous feeding, though the plastic tube inserted into his chest as a porthole for nourishment and drugs keeps getting infected and causing more problems. His insurance can’t pay for this kind of stay in a regular hospital, where in fact they really don’t want him anyway. This is a kind of maintenance care; this place, the less expensive alternative, seems some precinct of hell. Though the faces of the people behind the nursing station are kind and tired; it’s almost time for the shift change and they look as if they’ve fought a long day’s battle without much success or help. It’s not their fault the place is desolate; they can’t remake the inferno. In some of their faces you can see that they would like to.
I’ve come with Phil, Bill’s lover. We’ve been to a reading in Cambridge together, and we’ve stopped by to deliver some yogurt and a good night kiss from Phil. I haven’t seen either of them for months, though we’ve talked on the phone, and Phil and I have decided to take some time tonight and tomorrow to catch up face-to-face. We’re going to lunch at a museum, letting him relax into a different role for a few hours. I’m bracing myself for I don’t know what as we move down the corridor. This was, in a way, what I dreaded for Wally—his life wrenched out of our hands, into this institutional world where he’d be at their mercy, subject to invasion, unprotectable. My chest tightens as we come toward the end of the hall.
I wait at Bill’s door while Phil goes in first; it’s nearly ten-thirty and he expects Bill to be sound asleep. But in a moment he’s back, brightened. Bill is up and wants to see me, and Phil takes me by the hand and draws me in behind him.
The room’s a revelation. In memory it seems to me that Bill has draped a scarf across the shade of a bedside lamp, as Blanche DuBois would have, to warm the light to something rosy and flattering. Perhaps I’m inventing that; it feels like a room whose glow is filtered through figured silk, anyway. The walls are covered with paintings from Bill’s house, the windowsill thick with flowers and leafy plants, the whole room redolent of warmth and human habitation, an aura—in opposition to the severity of every floodlit room we passed to arrive here—of civility. This might be Bill’s little studio apartment, in the intimate upper floor of some city brownstone; room just for bed, tiny refrigerator, and the non-negotiable requirements of the civil life: flowers, paintings, music.
And here, in splendor, lies Bill. I realize, seeing him, the apprehension I’ve been carrying about not knowing how he’ll look; he’s the first really sick person I’ve seen since Wally died. But seeing his face I’m flooded, suddenly, with relief, with appreciation. Not because he looks well—always a boyish man, he’s become a large child, extremely thin, his head shaved, his lesions darkened against his pale skin, his eyes enormous—but because he is what people are, sometimes, very late in their lives: so fully himself, himself all the way to the edges, the way Rilke described roses as “flush with their own being.”
Bill is beautiful to me in the way that Wally was, not in any ornamental sense of the word, but in the way that all things which are absolutely authentic are beautiful. Is there a luminous threshold where the self becomes irreducible, stripped to the point where all that’s left to see is pure soul, the essence of character? Here, in unfailing self-ness, is no room or energy for anything inessential, for anything less than what counts.
Bill is unmistakably himself now, gracious host even here, charming, playful, somehow plaintive and fetching at once. He’s flat on his back, head propped on a small legion of favorite pillows; across his feet is draped a mint-green chenille bathrobe piped, like a birthday cake, with tendrils, scrolls, and blossoms of more chenille in frosting colors: orchid, lavender, tangerine.
The robe is something Lucy Ricardo might have worn for mornings in Connecticut, the sort of garment which almost invariably carries with it a narrative. Bill discovered it in a Provincetown shop devoted to the pleasures of the bath. There it hung, a magnetic glory charged with the subterranean powers of gender; I am someone’s mother, it seemed to say, in 1957. Both its over-the-top femininity and lavish price meant, of course, he’d leave it there. Wouldn’t he? It was a whim, an indulgence, though a potent—potentially dangerous?—attraction. But he found he couldn’t forget it; it began to occupy a new space in his imagination, or rather to draw to itself the energy and associations of a lifetime’s imaginings. To go back, to buy it, meant to embrace something profoundly, lushly nelly.
(Odd how the words for this sort of thing have about them a quality of Victoriana: nelly, sissy, fairy, fey. There’s something about them of girlishness preserved under glass, a curious kind of delicate, past-prime virginity—as though to give in to that aspect of ourselves is to become someone’s lavender-scented auntie, a specter of rosewater and pressed flowers and scraps of lace. Sometimes it seems to me like the last taboo for gay men, one of the most deeply internalized prohibitions, to allow oneself that swooning, gorgeous silliness; in 1995, weirdly enough, it’s more okay to be a queer than it is to be a sissy.)
The robe—first coveted, then accepted, then treasured—pools across Bill’s knees, its splendid piping the colors of a dissolving petit-four. Old disco lyrics come into my head, unbidden: Someone left the cake out in the rain…The fact that I’ve never known him well—I’ve been more a friend of Phil’s—melts away as we begin to speak; it’s impossible now not to know him. The more we talk the more I begin to feel I’m moving inside of some profound connection, the only one there’s likely to be between us. But enough. It’s the edge of that kind of intimacy I felt with Wally, the aura that surrounded his leave-taking drawing me in, closer and closer into his company, like moving with another person into a very small, warm circle of lamplight, which includes and defines you both. One clear, true instance of really knowing each other, which is becoming indelible even as we speak.
I can feel how large, how essential this moment is as it’s happening; that is what I have come to love about being an adult, to the extent that I can claim that title: that one knows more about how good things are, how much they matter, as they’re happening, that knowledge isn’t necessarily retrospective anymore. When I was younger, I missed so much, failing to be fully present, only recognizing the quality of particular moments and gifts after the fact. Perhaps that’s one thing that being “grown-up” is: to realize in the present the magnitude or grace of what we’re being offered.
Bill wants to hear, first, about Wally’s dying. I sit beside him with my hand resting on his, which moves from his side onto his delicate chest, so that soon my hand is resting just above his heart. Phil sits at the foot of the bed and doesn’t say much; our witness, Bill’s protector, is letting us have this time. I can tell it feels good to him, to sit quietly, to rest on the side of the bed, listening to someone else talk with Bill, in some interaction which is without threat, which asks nothing of either of them.
I tell Bill everything. About the ease of it, the awe and mystery, and Bill listens carefully, closing his eyes sometimes as if to listen more closely, sometimes opening them wide as if to take more of the story into himself. I try not to leave anything out; I can tell what he wants from me is completeness, any sense I can give of actuality, any guesses this eyewitness to last things may have made. I have feelings, experience, intuition more than I have knowledge in any conventional sense—but isn’t that part of what being with dying teaches us, different sorts of knowing?
Then Phil’s lying across Bill’s feet, resting on the soft green chenille, as though he’s fallen asleep there, dreaming. I understand, the way he holds him, what Phil has done. It’s him who’s made this room what it is, who has protected a space for Bill in which he can continue—so fully, and so fully supported—to be himself. My friend Jean, in whose safe blue bedroom I will fall apart, a month from now, wrote a poem that ends
And me,
I got what I wanted.
I died with my life around me.
Isn’t that what any of us would ask for, to be fully in our lives as we leave them, to have been ourselves all the way first? This is the gift that Phil’s love is giving to Bill. In the absolute endangerment of illness, here is safety. In the face of reduction, identity. In the face of indignity, respect. In the face of erasure, here is intimacy, the sustaining of context which preserves the self.
It’s as if Bill floats, sweet boy, talking now about his plans for his funeral—only white flowers, his music, but what color lining for his casket?—and the carefully orchestrated party he intends for Phil to throw afterward. He drifts in the space Phil’s attention has created, easy there, despite it all, an odd and heartbreaking ease.
I know what the price of this is for Phil—the exhaustion, the continuous focus on another, the postponement of one’s own needs, but it’s also clear to me how much he wants to give this to Bill; it doesn’t even seem a choice, exactly, just what there is to be done. Phil can’t see himself the depth and magnitude of the gift; he is so far inside it he has no means of measure.
Bill is having the best time, talking away, and suddenly he’s starving, and eats two turkey-on-white-bread sandwiches and two little packages of salty pretzels, more than he’s put away in weeks. We’ll learn, the next day, that he’ll throw it all up in the night, but it doesn’t matter; he’s hungry and happy in the moment. A vital pulse gleams through all his pleasures, his plans, his careful posthumous hosting of his friends.
What I’m seeing is the kindest and sweetest mirror of the last of my life with Wally, and so rather than returning me to difficulty and pain, the visit is somehow restorative, bracingly genuine, consoling. Where could it be clearer, here in the heart of abandonment, what love achieves?