Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

When Isaac burst in, he looked terrible. He was puffing like a steam-train, wheezing, gasping, as he steadied himself against a table and looked round wildly, blind after the sunlight. He was papery-white, his skin shone with sweat, beads of moisture and strange dark patches he never had before.

‘Isaac, over here,’ Chris called, but I got up and ran over to him. It was unpremeditated; I tried to kiss him. He looked at me as if I had attacked him with a knife, but perhaps he was in pain.

Now it was clear he was ill, things were simpler in my mind, if not in his. It removed some walls of sulky dignity; his illness seemed to invite me to touch him. Maybe Isaac himself just felt less defended. He certainly felt the cold. It was very hot, but he wore a jumper, and as soon as he stopped sweating he was shivering. There was a look on his face I did not remember, a brief strained look when he seemed not to focus or to stare into the unfocused distance, and I think he saw death, and was afraid; yet for the first time since the reunion in Switzerland I wasn’t afraid of him.

— Everyone else was afraid of him, or afraid of what they could see he had. We soon had a vacant table. Half-a-dozen heads had stopped blocking the light. He wasn’t puffing any more, but there was still a faint sound of wheezing. He seemed unwilling to look at us, perhaps because he didn’t want to read our expressions, and as he stared down at his orange-juice I got a proper look at him in the harsh daylight that poured through the window.

— He had aged ten years in the last four months. His skin was drawn tightly across his bones (I half-remembered something I’d once told him: You’re like your father, you’ve got good bones. The girls will be wild for you in your late thirties). Now the bones were getting ready to come out and dance. Around his eyes the skin seemed to have retracted, and had a brownish tinge. His mouth was slightly open, allowing him to breathe, and it twitched into strange accidental half-smiles completely devoid of humour or pleasure.

Only four months had passed. I wondered how long was left. Suddenly he looked up, his sharp blue eyes entirely intelligent, and caught me staring.

‘I know I look fucking awful,’ he wheezed. ‘But I’m going to live to see the year 2000.’

‘Of course you are —’ ‘We never doubted it —’ After an awkward pause, we carolled reassurance, shocked by the littleness of his hopes. It was the first time he had admitted, even tacitly, that he was going to die.

Chris moved on hurriedly to small talk, comparing notes with Isaac about Micronesia. They were prosing on about whether it mattered that something called ‘outriggers’ were disappearing, that the young no longer wanted to fish or grow taro, that Guam was a nightmare of soldiers and tourists — it was boring, and I cut across them. There were things about Isaac’s trip which interested me much more.

‘I really had hoped we’d get together with Gus. Did you say he went back to New York early?’

‘Yes…’ his voice trailed downwards.

‘Is he OK?’ I was fumbling this. ‘I mean, he hasn’t got…?’

‘He hasn’t, no. His latest test was still negative. But he can’t stand the pressure of my being ill. We’ve been rowing a lot. I told him to go.’

‘You mean he left you when you needed him?’

He didn’t answer; he smiled at me, a smile of purest irony, looking almost like himself again, letting my own words ring in my ears.

‘Oh Alexandra. You’re priceless. Yes, Gus took a leaf out of you and Dad’s book… actually I didn’t really need him. In the end I might need people to look after me, but I’ve got a lot of friends. We’re good to each other. Gus was never that sort of guy. It’s OK, really…’ I’d begun to apologise. ‘Don’t justify yourself. I’ve started to feel more forgiving towards you. Nothing seems to make much difference, now.’

— And perhaps his smile did become more forgiving.

He liked to be asked about his illness; he liked to describe the fluctuating symptoms, the little details which made up his new life, the new short life he had been given to live. He wanted us to know he was learning things; he also wanted us to feel his pain. I would say he was a hypochondriac, except that people with AIDS aren’t hypochondriacs, but he had that same loving, compendious interest in every facet of his body’s decline. I understood that, and was happy to listen; I’ve always been interested in bodies. And sometimes the disease seemed almost playful. He got better, he got worse, but there was always something different, some new cause for hope or despair, a new drug, a new symptom, a new horror to tease us with. But Chris couldn’t bear those conversations; he never joined in, just sat there, frozen, staring at the carpet, or out of the window, while Isaac and I rattled on about Kaposi’s sarcoma, or he tried to tell us the meaning of life, and God knows we needed someone to do that, for sometimes our lives seemed meaningless — yet how could death give a meaning to life? He insisted it did, and I listened, politely.

After each meeting, I felt better, but Chris withdrew into his private suffering.

We were in touch with Susy, too. Susy’s attitude to Isaac was not always appealing. I suppose that whenever she contacted us we must have talked about Isaac too much, but then, she was his sister.

‘You really love all this, don’t you, Alex,’ she hissed at me one day, long distance to Australia, soon after we met Isaac in the pub at West Rocks. The long distance silences made her seem brain-damaged. ‘You’re really excited by what’s happening to Isaac.’

‘That’s — sick —’

‘Maybe it is. I have been sick. I had a lot of abortions, remember. Nobody seems to care about me. All I ever hear about is Isaac’s latest symptoms…’

Actually her attitude was thoroughly normal. Sibling rivalry is thoroughly normal. For the last two years of the twentieth century we were once again more like an ordinary family, richer than most, perhaps, less happy than some, keeping in touch with our grown-up children, seeing them occasionally, bickering, bargaining…

I was becoming more ordinary, too. I could never be ordinary, of course, but age is ordinary, and I was growing older, I was forty-eight, I was forty-nine, I wanted something I couldn’t have, I who had always had everything I wanted; I hardly talked to my husband, which is normal, and I hadn’t a lover, and I wasn’t happy.

It didn’t suit me. It couldn’t last. It was the lull before the millennial explosion; guns and love and death and dancing and fireworks spattering the skies with rubies…

They fell in the bay around the Statue of Liberty in sprays of bright new blood. Isaac kept his word, and saw in the new century. And he made me a present: Benjamin.

Benjamin was his friend — young enough to be my son, you see. Benjamin was Isaac’s protégé. He had his first two private shows at Isaac’s London gallery. Then he started selling, and being noticed. Isaac encouraged him to move to New York, and found him a studio with nominal rent. Perhaps Isaac was in love with him, for he left his diaries to Benjamin.

I read them, of course, without Benjamin’s consent, though I told him afterwards what I’d done, I’m not dishonest, I thought I should tell him. It turned out he hadn’t read them himself; Benjamin’s incurious in certain ways. I told him not to bother, they were rather depressing.

Isaac wasn’t as forgiving in private as he sometimes seemed when we were together, but of course the diary petered out in the end, and the end was the time when we came closest.

There are passages I can’t forget. There are passages his father couldn’t bear to read, but luckily his father will never read them. (Is it possible that I shall never see Chris again?)