Free Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette Page B

guaranteed to curb baldness; no, actually grow hair. One receding fellow knew the name: minoxidil. He and Roger laughed that it had come along none too soon. I'm sure it was that night Bernice and I were talking about Cesar. She shook her head with compassion at some indignity he was suffering, and I shifted gears quickly and spoke with rigorous optimism.
    "Well, of course, you have to have hope," she agreed, and though she meant it sincerely there was a gaping hole over to one side of the remark. For a moment I seemed to look over the edge into nothing.
    I reached page 200 of the novel the same day as the dinner of the baldness cure. I don't remember anymore what happens right then in the book, but at the time I was thrilled at the rightness of it and torn about putting it aside to write manicure jokes. Yet all my notes from a session with Sam two days later are about mourning, what to feel about all the wasted time of your life, the wrongheaded decisions. I guess this must've sprung from some tortured version of What if it all got taken away ? Mourning, said Sam, was a form of self-compassion. Looking back with sadness and asking why was the proof that one had grown. Don't just mourn; celebrate movement forward. As to how to get off the dime of all those squandered hours, the bottom line was this:
     
I know that when I was in Greece I felt X and I dreamed Y and it felt good. So onward.
     
    I had lunch with George Browning, an old friend who managed the mad American Express office in Beverly Center, the mall-in-the-sky at the southern tip of West Hollywood. George was delighted to sketch us a proper Nile itinerary, with a possible side to Jerusalem. But I had a new idea—I can almost hear my wheels spinning even now. We could do a week on the Nile, then fly home via Greece for a few days in the Peloponnesus, since I had to see Olympia now that I'd seen the Games. And then we could go to Israel in October, by which time our bonus mileage would be astronomical. We could do it all first cabin, coming home via Rome so I could spend my fortieth birthday perhaps in Capri, gazing out to sea from Tiberius's villa.
    I lay all this out in its full hummingbird intensity because it was our last grope for the whole world, and none of it would happen. We had already had all of the world we were going to get. But you can't fault a guy for waving his ticket, even as the gate swings shut.
    At 2 A.M . on Sunday, the third of February, I finished the last lined page of my bound notebook, the type I use for a journal. I don't appear in a millennial mood as I close the volume. The sheer casualness of it shows how much recovering one does from shocks like Cesar's visit or Leo's diagnosis. I still had a place to come home to, apart from all that:
     
The dog is sleeping in a curl beside me.... May this house be safe from tigers.... R & I both struggling with viruses, and we had a heaping bowl of oatmeal after the ballet.
     
    That is the first reference, right there, to the beginning of the end. But the twin flu is another sort of magic, homely as the oatmeal, for I felt safer that Roger and I were both under the weather. I knew deep down that all it was in me was a cold, ergo the same with him.
    The day before, I'd had coffee with Carol Muske in the Valley. Carol is both a fellow poet and fellow iconoclast, with a laser wit and dead-center delivery. We always have a great romp, trading the silk scarves of literary gossip. Carol is married to actor David Dukes and mother to Annie, then two years old. She was as sentimental as I about Christmas, and I think she did string the popcorn and cranberries I drew the line at.
    How it got started I don't know, but we'd spent nearly the whole time together talking about this tidal wave of doom we were feeling. It jarred the air around us like a siren din pitched just too high for human ears. My own horrors were all about AIDS now; Carol's were more in the deep cave of a mother's fear, where the only