Sunday, September 26, 1999

Alan picked me up at the House on Tuesday night after my shift. That's the third time now. He waits out on the porch; he says the living room belongs to the House, and he's right. This time the parrot, who is older than anybody can account for, looked him over for a long while, one eye and then the other, and said "Hello, beautiful" in that voice none of us has ever been able to place. Alan said, "Thank you," very gravely, to the parrot. Maxine had to go back inside.

Last night I read this journal from the beginning, which I don't recommend. The man writing in March of 1996 was sure of two things. He was sure he'd be doing the dishes and the sitting and the dying for the rest of his life, and he was sure that whatever was left of his life was mostly for other people. He wasn't wrong to be sure. He just hadn't met Sonny's soldiers yet, or Gil's couch.

So here is what I've decided, and I'm putting it where people can read it so I can't take it back. I am allowed to be happy. Not instead of Philip. Not in spite of the thirty. Alongside them. Philip used to say a sky is never one color; you put all of them down wet and let them run into each other, and that's the only way it ever looks true.

I don't entirely believe it yet. I've decided it anyway, which is how I've done most of the important things: signed the lease, took the test, walked into the House that first night, sewed the 3.

The Walk is next month. Alan bought new shoes for it. He showed them to me in the box, like a boy.

Tuesday, September 21, 1999

Last night I broke the fast at Alan's sister's house in Encino. I hadn't fasted. I'm not Jewish and Alan said nobody expected it, but I skipped lunch out of what I told myself was solidarity and was, by five o'clock, only hunger. Alan hadn't eaten since Sunday evening and was pale and very funny about it.

His sister Naomi has a table that seats fourteen, and it seated seventeen. Bagels, lox, a noodle kugel with raisins, two coffee cakes, four kinds of cream cheese, and an uncle who told me the same joke twice with total confidence. Naomi's husband asked what I do, and when I said book jackets he went to the shelves in the den and came back with an armful, and one of them was mine, and the whole table applauded. I didn't know where to look.

In the car afterward Alan told me that at services that morning there's a memorial prayer, Yizkor, for the dead. He says it for his parents, and for the last ten years he's said it for his friends as well. Then he said, "This year I said it for Philip too. I hope that's all right."

I said it was. Then I looked out the window at the lights of the Valley the whole way over the hill.

I'm writing this before my shift. I'll be at the House by six.

Monday, September 13, 1999

Saturday Alan asked what Philip's panel looks like. I told him, and then I went and found the Polaroid, the only picture I have of it. Gil took it on my living room floor the night I finished, April of last year, with my bare feet at the bottom of the frame.

Alan held it for a long time. He asked if it bothers me that the panel is somewhere I can't see it. I said that's the point. The Quilt travels. It gets unfolded in gymnasiums and churches and convention halls, and folded up again, and sent on. Philip spent his whole life painting skies for places he never went. Now he gets to go.

What I didn't tell Alan, I'll tell you. The night I sewed the last number, I thought I'd feel something close, like a door. It didn't close. It's never closed. What happened instead was that I could get up off the floor, and I did, and I rinsed out the Chinese food cartons and went to bed and slept. It was the first night in five years I slept straight through.

Alan gave me back the Polaroid and said, "The streaks are the best part." I hadn't told him about the streaks.

Saturday, September 4, 1999

Pledges for the AIDS Walk as of tonight: $1,315. My clients have been generous and a little alarmed; I've never asked them for anything but checks. The woman who owns the Thai place I did menus for pledged a hundred dollars and a dinner for the whole team afterward.

The House has a team this year, the first time we've had enough volunteers with enough free Sundays to put one together. Maxine is captain. She's had T-shirts made in a color she calls "hospice lavender," and she will hear nothing against it. Sonny is driving down from Bakersfield the night before and sleeping on my couch. Gil and Neil are walking. And Alan asked, very carefully, whether he might walk with us, and I said yes before I'd thought about it, which Gil says is the healthiest thing I've done in a decade.

I've been walking in the mornings to get ready, up the hill and back down before it gets hot. I'm forty-nine. I'm allowed to train for a walk.

The last time I did the Walk was 1992. Philip rode most of it in a borrowed wheelchair, with Gil pushing and me carrying the water, and Philip critiquing everybody's signs. He said the lettering on ours was the worst on the route. It was mine.

Wednesday, August 25, 1999

We lost a man at the House on Sunday. He was fifty-eight and had been positive for fifteen years, and his body, as he put it himself last week, was tired of the argument. His sister was with him, and Maxine. I'd sat with him Saturday night, and he'd asked me to read him the TV listings, the whole evening, every channel, slowly, like poetry. So I did.

He's the second man we've lost this year. Maxine has been doing the arithmetic for a grant report, and she read it to me on the porch afterward. In 1995 the House lost fifty-three men. In 1999, so far, two. She read the numbers twice and then folded the paper and put it in her pocket, and we sat there.

Good news too, and I'm going to let it stand right next to the other: the young man who came to us in June went home to his sister's in Riverside last week. He walked to the car.

Monday night I had dinner with Alan and laughed at something he said, really laughed, and in the middle of it I thought of Saturday night and the TV listings and had to put my fork down. Alan didn't ask. He waited, and passed me the bread, and then went on with his story. I don't know how he knew to do that.

Sunday, August 8, 1999

Alan took me to the movies yesterday, a Saturday matinee, and his pick was a cartoon. The Iron Giant. A boy in Maine in the 1950s finds an enormous metal robot in the woods. I sat down prepared to be patient.

I won't give anything away. I'll only say that I cried, and not the polite kind. Alan passed me a handkerchief, an actual cotton handkerchief, ironed and folded in a square. I said, "Who carries a handkerchief?" He said, "History teachers. We're prepared for the past."

Afterward we had supper on a patio on Ventura Boulevard and talked until the busboy started stacking chairs around us. He told me about his daughter, who is twenty-three and stubborn and, he says, much smarter than he is. I told him about the House. I didn't tell him about the thirty. There will be time for the thirty.

Tuesday, July 27, 1999

Tuesday at the House. Played gin rummy with the young man from June, who is sitting up in a chair now and cheats with real talent. He asked me if I had someone. I said, "I might." It's the first time I've said that to anyone.

He said, "Then what are you doing here on a Tuesday night?"

Some questions come around again.

Sunday, July 18, 1999

Alan called last Saturday night from his car, hoarse, driving home from the Rose Bowl. He'd gone to the women's World Cup final with his daughter, who flew down from Portland for it, and the Americans won on penalty kicks, in the heat, in front of more people than I can picture. He described the last kick to me stroke by stroke. I know nothing about soccer. I stood in the kitchen with the phone cord wound around my wrist and grinned like a fool.

Then I hung up and sat down at the table and felt so guilty I couldn't breathe right. Not about Alan. About being a man in a kitchen grinning at a telephone. About the phone ringing and it being somebody alive.

I told the counselor on Thursday. I still see her every other week. She said, "Russell, is there a rule?" I said there must be. She asked me to write the rule down, word for word. I've been trying all week. The closest I can get is: You don't get to have a good time while they can't. When I read it back it sounds like something a nine-year-old would say, and I suppose that's about how old that part of me is.

Friday, July 2, 1999

Coffee with Alan, yesterday, four o'clock, at Open Book.

I changed my shirt three times and ended up in the French blue one, because Gil called at three to remind me it exists.

Alan was there first. He'd saved the table by the window and had a book open, and when I sat down he turned it around to show me the cover, and it was another one of mine. He'd gone through the shelves and found it. That's either charming or very well planned, and I've decided I don't mind which.

An hour, Gil said. It was two hours and forty minutes. We talked about book jackets and the Valley and his daughter, and about teaching the Civil War to nineteen-year-olds who work nights. He asked about Philip straight out, with his hands flat on the table. I told him. Not everything. The skies. The fourteen years. April.

He said, "I came out in 1987. Which meant I came out into a funeral." Then: "I'm sorry. That isn't the same thing." I said, "No. But it isn't nothing, either."

When we left he shook my hand, and then held on to it a second longer than you hold a handshake. That was all. I drove home the long way, down Sunset, with the windows down, and didn't turn on the radio, because I didn't want anything in the car but that.