I walk into the orchid show with Ed. As soon as I see the tumultuous hall I know he won’t last long. Ed walks like an old man though he is forty. After ten minutes on his feet, he vomits on some purple phalaenopsis. I get him outside through a fire exit and he vomits into the Bay. I find him a chair and he goes right to sleep, body caved in.
Once Ed understood that he would not have a long life, he began working on himself, guided by banal authorities. He inhabits them like an eccentric tenant, his innocence repurposing them: Louise Hay, The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive Approach. Magazine articles: “Positive Thinking as a Cure.” A culture too stupid to know what it is asking directs Ed to undertake an impossible task, as though AIDS can be healed with love and forgiveness.
Ed’s family needs lots of forgiveness, but they’ll never get it from me. They exploit his illness to stage extravaganzas of selfishness and ignorance, disallowing him contact with their children and erasing him entirely in a carnival of self-pity. Even in cold brutalizing fucked-up angry families there is love that devastates by making us participate. But if Ed is not at peace it will hurt to die.
Yusuf gives me a little push toward the bed. We’ve been together for a year, but he is still in a hurry—it makes me laugh with excitement. He wants to be continually acknowledged, even waking me at night. Yusuf is a Moroccan muscle-builder postdoc in early modern at UC Berkeley. I don’t know what I am in his life. Possibly homosexuality itself.
The phone startles me. Hearing Ed’s voice is odd—I’d forgotten about him for a few days. Daniel looks after him, as he has for years, and that is always a relief. Ed’s voice is strange because it’s as familiar to me as the voice that speaks inside my head, as the feeling of my tongue inside my mouth. “Lately, my body gives me moments of peace, moments of sweet decay, like a dead mouse in a trap,” he says. “I think my body is showing me how to die. And sometimes a little girl jumps up and down on my bed. There’s no sound, just the girl and her shadow.” Ed is diagnosed with lymphoma a few weeks later. The doctor gives him a week before treatment begins, as though a week were the period allotted to accept his fate.
I am in Rome in June and July 1992 with Yusuf—sharing a high bed whose parts slide around on their own like the layers of an unstable sandwich. He studies in Queen Christina’s library and I write the first draft of . We live on the Vicolo della Penitenza, where prostitutes retired long ago. Shutters bang all day long, canaries trill in cages as the sun comes around, the sky turns ultramarine, at dusk gnats and huge bugs with helicopter wings crowd the
