As If Death Summoned. Alan E. Rose
as well. It would probably be too much of a shock to their middle-aged systems to see you.”
“I doubt they’d even remember me.”
“There you are wrong,” he said. I looked up from my salad. “I think they held you in a kind of awe. I know I did. You were one of those unapproachable people made for pedestals. So serious. Always so serious. And so self-contained. You didn’t join any club, didn’t belong to any group. It was like you didn’t want to belong, like you didn’t need anybody. How strange was that to the rest of us for whom belonging was all that mattered? I mean, what’s the point of being part of the in-crowd if the important kids don’t want in?”
“I don’t think I was an important kid,” I mumbled.
“You were one of the leaders at school, though more like the independent congressman with immense credibility and standing and no party affiliation. You seemed to rise above the politics of adolescence.”
“I remember high school . . . differently.”
“I always thought you were destined to be alone.”
I stopped eating. “Looks like you were right.”
“How on earth did you ever allow yourself a partner?”
“There was enough space in my relationship with Gray for me to be a loner when I needed to be.” I resumed eating. “Anyway, I’m more interested in hearing about your life.”
“Ah yes. So where was I?”
“You were a jerk.”
“That’s right. I was a real jerk. I married after college and cheated on my first wife with other women and blamed her. Then I married again, but it seemed my second wife had the same problem as my first. It took me three marriages, looking for the perfect woman, to realize it wasn’t a woman I really wanted.”
“How could you not know?”
“Believe me, if we could only harness the power of denial, we’d have a new and perpetual energy source. All those years I thought I was a heterosexual guy who occasionally got it off with men. Sure, I cheated on my wives with men. But I cheated on them with other women, too. Like I said, a real jerk.”
Some things don’t change. I remembered “Jerry” in high school as a charming, funny raconteur, always quick with some witty commentary: on Mr. Skylar’s hairpiece (“I’ve seen healthier looking road kills”), or which cheerleaders should not be wearing the school colors with their complexions. So, I suppose the signs had been there from the beginning. He was still the entertaining raconteur, though his observations had become less frivolous, his commentary more piercing and trenchant. The tone, too, had changed, from the lighthearted take of a youth with his life stretching before him like an endless horizon to the tired old man sitting across from me now hurtling toward that horizon. Over soup he told me about his coming-out years.
“That’s when I found God— the god Eros, I mean. It was quite exhilarating. This is what I had been missing! I became a real party boy, and my parties were legendary in the West Hills, my life one continuous round of sex, booze, and drugs. No kidding, if it weren’t for AIDS, I’d be dead by now.” He laughed, which turned into a coughing spasm.
“Some water?”
He waved his hand as he recovered. “My goal in life was to sleep with every handsome male in Portland, regardless of race, age, or sexual orientation. I would have made it, too, if my time hadn’t run out.” He leaned back in his chair. “I know, looking at me now, it’s hard to believe I was once handsome and desirable.” It wasn’t. I had envied Betsy Morton in high school. “But you should see the magnificent painting of Dorian Gray I have hanging in my attic. He’s still young and beautiful.” He reached for his glass of water. “Fuck him.”
I had only made it through the soup and salad, and I was already full.
“You’ll love the first entrée,” said Jerald as a waiter removed my bowl and another refilled my water glass.
“The first entrée?”
“Be sure to save room for dessert. It’s delish!”
Over the first entrée, his party life abruptly came to an end. “AIDS was my wake-up call. I don’t know how long I’d been infected. With all the screwing around I was doing it never occurred to me that I could get HIV. I knew, of course, the virus was out there, but like most of us, I guess I just thought it didn’t apply to me. I didn’t get tested until I was in the hospital with my first opportunistic infection. That’s when they told me.” He stopped to take a sip of his broth, his third so far. “And that’s when I met Cal. By the way, how’s he doing?”
“In Providence. Next stop, hospice.” With others, I would have tacked on unfortunately or sadly or something like that. But with another veteran, we tended to dispense with such sentimentalities. Likewise, Jerald didn’t engage in the socially appropriate How sad or I’m sorry to hear that. It was all understood.
“I met Cal at the first AIDS fundraiser I ever attended. I could still hide my status then and pretend I was spurred from some altruistic motive, which, to say the least, would have been out of character for me. Cal was the first person I told. It was he who got me involved with CAP, saying I could still make a positive difference in my time remaining. That was five years ago.” He said wistfully as if to himself, “I hope I have.”
A waiter removed the remnants of the broiled salmon as another placed a roasted pheasant with sautéed vegetables before me. I stared at it.
“You know, you don’t need to eat all of it. I meant for you only to have a taste of my favorites.”
That was nice, but as a member of the Clean Plate Club since childhood, I had fully imbibed that peculiar mother logic that if I didn’t eat everything on my dish, poor children in China would somehow starve. Over the pheasant, Jerald told me about his life change.
“So, I set about cleaning up my life. Gave up the sex. Gave up the drugs. Gave up the booze. Remained a jerk. I needed to hold onto something of my previous life.”
There is this need to tell one’s story. I have seen it many times before as one senses the end approaching. I expect it accounts for the plethora of memoirs we see in this self-centered, self-publishing age. It’s as if in the telling, people are trying to understand what it was all about, this life they lived. I realized I was the excuse for Jerald to express his thoughts for himself to hear and ponder.
“My diagnosis and meeting Cal shifted something in me. My life was no longer about just pleasure and getting high. I wanted it to matter before it was over. Maybe I could do something good with my money and my time. So, I became a volunteer, still pretending my motives were wholly altruistic. I raised big bucks. Even served on a care team and saw firsthand what awaited me.
“And you know, what was most surprising was I didn’t miss my former life. It was more like, What a waste of my time! Now it all seems like so much fuss and bother. I’ve come to the conclusion that the best people are those dying. Or maybe it’s that people are at their best when dying, although that’s not altogether true either. I’ve known some real assholes who were determined to remain assholes to the very end.”
Over the third and fourth entrees, he told me of his experiences on the front lines of the epidemic, and how they changed him. Eventually, as the lesions had started to appear a couple of years ago and he began spending time in the hospital, he could no longer pretend. Over dessert, an extremely creamy crème brûlée, he brought us up to the present.
“My volunteering days are almost over.” He paused. “My days are almost over.”
In earlier years, when someone said that, I would demur, “Oh, no, you’ve got plenty of time left,” or “I hear they’re coming out with a new drug. The trials sound very promising,” or whatever I could think to say. I had stopped some time ago after I’d found the