Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette Page A

it. Joe Perloff promised the test was remarkably negotiable, though I recalled Joel saying the doctor had managed to puncture Leo's lung.
    Roger would have to go into the hospital overnight to have it. Neither of us had spent so much as a day in that nether place, not in our whole ten years together. Till then I affected to feel rather phobic about the whole idea. The previous fall, when Kathy Hendrix had been in for surgery, I told her over lunch a week later that I hadn't been up to visit because I wasn't good at hospitals. I think I Still clung to the trauma of the past, pressed against the Shriners window, like a shield. I would learn now to put such bullshit behind me very fast, and afterwards would feel a kind of nuclear contempt for those who practiced it anywhere in Roger's orbit.
    Over the weekend before he went in, we just hunkered down. I'd finished reading Forster and turned to The Golden Bough , as preparation for the powers of Egypt. Every night I would pore through Frazer's laundry-list account of magic and fear and atavism. I kept beside me a folder of Nile cruises, which I would scribble with lofty problems: Did it matter if we booked port or starboard? Mostly what I was doing was repeating the interstitial news like a mantra, over and over, to drown out the week's other blip of evidence. Roger had failed the scratch test for mumps—had shown no red or blistering when the patch was removed from his arm—and this was considered a crude sounding of weakened immune function. If the choice was either impaired immunity or, an unreliable test, I was for betting the farm against the test.
    Roger was comfortable resting in bed, still no cough to speak of, animated with everyone who visited. Saturday night he convinced me to go out for dinner with the Perloffs and the Rankaitis/Flicks. These were the couples we saw most often, who gathered around them the most stimulating people, mind over Mammon. Marjorie Perloff was then at the University of Southern California, an encyclopedic and inexhaustible literary critic who knew every cusp of modernism backwards. Robbert Flick and Susan Rankaitis both make photographs, but the camera is merely the common denominator here. The light these two work by is opposite as sun and moon. Marjorie and Joe, Susan and Robbert, Roger and I—we had constituted an inner circle for many years.
    At the restaurant I made Joe explain the interstitial data all over again, and he tried to ease my mind about Tuesday morning's test. Finally I lightened up enough to eat. Susan says she never suspected Roger had AIDS till I told her seven months later, so Joe presumably succeeded in reassuring somebody. When I got home, however, I found Rog sitting in the study coughing, and looking more drained, worn out and lost than he had all month. He was so glad to see me and be taken care of. At such a moment you move like an avalanche to oblige, for all the reasons of love but also just to keep busy. It was going to be fine, he'd be home by Tuesday afternoon, and after that there were no more tests. Then he would have to get better, I thought, as I kneaded his shoulders and curled him to sleep. I read The Golden Bough till 4 A.M.
    Al and Bernice had decided to drive in from the desert, even though we told them it wasn't necessary. They agreed to hold off till Monday and just stay overnight till we got the results of the bronc. On Sunday evening I fixed the two of us as cheery a supper as I could muster. Roger's appetite hadn't suffered, at least. But in the middle of the meal he excused himself to go to the bathroom, where he had a twinge of diarrhea. This didn't prove to lead to anything ominous on its own, and in fact through all his sickness Roger didn't have to deal with much intestinal static. But as I sat at the dining room table waiting for him to come back, the food like ashes on my tongue, I had a sudden vision of what a flimsy wall we'd been building the last few weeks, brick by brick.
    He seemed