Free Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath by Andrew Holleran Page A

friends so constant, so faithful, they had followed one another from city to city and constituted, more than any other I knew, a family—was fixed but fluid, loyal but independent, a function of O.’s affection most of all—his cooking, you might say. Most of them, including O., sold artifacts of one sort or another. But though the world that exchanges art for money is notorious for its meanness, O. was very kind. “Come on up, I am just back from Japan, I want to see you!” he said on the phone. And you went. O. included, invited, charmed, cooked for, and amused so many people that, going uptown to have dinner there, one always felt a bit like a child on Christmas morning—one never knew what would be under the tree.
    He was the best of hosts—that’s all. The Middle Eastern food, the stories about Cavafy, Japan, Lima, the candles, the beautiful room in a brownstone on the Upper West Side we gathered in, were a kind of rosy, glowing tent that O. had set up for his friends. And set up skillfully. Somewhere Santayana distinguishes the arts of poetry, music, painting from the arts of life; the latter are not monuments more lasting than bronze—they last the length of a dinner party—and yet they provide, really, in so many cases, what earthly happiness we have. O. was a master of these. O. embodied that Spanish proverb: “Living well is the best revenge.” Once I ran into O. in the hallway of the St. Mark’s Baths, shortly after I had published a book. I was standing in the stairwell of the third floor, brooding about the hopelessness of this cold feast of flesh we gay men had evolved as a way of life, when O. came out of someone’s room, beaming. “I have just had a rather wonderful screw,” he said, rolling the last R. I had not, and dumped on him all the reasons this bathhouse was cold, cruel, alienating, and depressing. O. listened and then said with the faintest smile, “Ah! So success has not made you happy.” (Bingo.) His wit, however, did. O. saw things, but saw them without the slightest malice or reproach, so that even your own faults seemed merely human, and less important than the way in which they were phrased. Marriage, said George Bernard Shaw, is a long conversation—so, for that matter, is friendship.
    Yet I don’t suppose I spoke to O. more than once every three or four months; but when I did—bicycling out to Prospect Park or coming back from Jones Beach on the train—the pleasure was so rich that no matter what we were talking about (the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the latest sex club south of Fourteenth Street, mutual friends), I think of that decade in part as a conversation with O. And the spell of that spring Sunday in the park—those white apple trees—continued intact, enriched by the passing of time, in each encounter. After leaving Manhattan at the end of the decade, I realized, before very long, how much I missed our conversations, and O. became for me, every return visit, one of the people I could not wait to call. He acquired, in fact, for me, an ideal quality; because I saw him rarely, perhaps, or because he was rare, or because he lived in a world different from mine, he became a dream of New York. A dream of New York, dreamt down South, that was harder to square with reality each time I returned. For every time I returned, it seemed everything had changed, changed utterly; even conversations with friends—they, like everything else, sank inevitably beneath the weight of that subject that, though it came last, had banished all humor, liveliness, and joy.
    The names of the dead, the shock at their number and improbability, the forecasts for the future, the dismal withdrawal and isolation, left one, in the end, speechless. Impotent. There was no way to leave friends in a glow of laughter or affection anymore; there was not even a moral to draw, or an interesting observation, because the plague, with its time lag, its scope, was revealing itself to be some sort of