“I tend to be a light lunch eater.”
“Do it for me. Please? I sense this is going to be a long lunch.”
And it was. Three hours. I now remember that marathon meal and our discussion (or really, Jerald’s monologue) by the courses I was served. Jerald took an occasional sip of broth and nibbled on half a roll. Over my Caesar salad and warm, fresh-baked sourdough bread, he summed up his life, like some opening symphonic overture, setting the tone for what was to come.
“If there were to be an epitaph on my grave, it would read ‘He was a jerk’— only because no self-respecting cemetery would allow ‘asshole’ on its tombstones.”
Buttering the bread, I said, “I don’t recall you being a jerk in high school.”
“I was a jerk-in-training back then.”
I put down the butter knife. “I do remember hearing rumors that you got Betsy Morton pregnant.”
“Now that’s not true. It was she who got me pregnant. Try to set the record straight at the class reunion, will you?”
“Jerald, you know I don’t go to class reunions.”
“Just as well. It would probably be too much of a shock to their middle-aged systems to see you.”
“I doubt they’d even remember me.”
“There you are wrong,” he said. I looked up from my salad. “I think they held you in a kind of awe. I know I did. You were one of those unapproachable people made for pedestals. So serious. Always so serious. And so self-contained. You didn’t join any club, didn’t belong to any group. It was like you didn’t want to belong, like you didn’t need anybody. How strange was that to the rest of us for whom belonging was all that mattered? I mean, what’s the point of being part of the in-crowd if the important kids don’t want in?”
“I don’t think I was an important kid,” I mumbled.
“You were one of the leaders at school, though more like the independent congressman with immense credibility and standing and no party affiliation. You seemed to rise above the politics of adolescence.”
“I remember high school . . . differently.”
“I always thought you were destined to be alone.”
I stopped eating. “Looks like you were right.”
“How on earth did you ever allow yourself a partner?”
“There was enough space in my relationship with Gray for me to be a loner when I needed to be.” I resumed eating. “Anyway, I’m more interested in hearing about your life.”
“Ah yes. So where was I?”
“You were a jerk.”
“That’s right. I was a real jerk. I married after college and cheated on my first wife with other women and blamed her. Then I married again, but it seemed my second wife had the same problem as my first. It took me three marriages, looking for the perfect woman, to realize it wasn’t a woman I really wanted.”
“How could you not know?”
“Believe me, if we could only harness the power of denial, we’d have a new and perpetual energy source. All those years I thought I was a heterosexual guy who occasionally got it off with men. Sure, I cheated on my wives with men. But I cheated on them with other women, too. Like I said, a real jerk.”
Some things don’t change. I remembered “Jerry” in high school as a charming, funny raconteur, always quick with some witty commentary: on Mr. Skylar’s hairpiece (“I’ve seen healthier looking road kills”), or which cheerleaders should not be wearing the school colors with their complexions. So, I suppose the signs had been there from the beginning. He was still the entertaining raconteur, though his observations had become less frivolous, his commentary more piercing and trenchant. The tone, too, had changed, from the lighthearted take of a youth with his life stretching before him like an endless horizon to the tired old man sitting across from me now hurtling toward that horizon. Over soup he told me about his coming-out years.
“That’s when I found God— the god Eros, I mean. It was quite exhilarating. This is what I had been missing! I became a real party boy, and my parties were legendary in the West Hills, my life one continuous round of sex, booze, and drugs. No kidding, if it weren’t for AIDS, I’d be dead by now.” He laughed, which turned into a coughing spasm.
“Some water?”
He waved his hand as he recovered. “My goal in life was to sleep with every handsome male in Portland, regardless of race, age, or sexual orientation. I would have made it, too, if my time hadn’t run out.” He leaned back in his chair. “I know, looking at me now, it’s hard to believe I was once handsome and desirable.” It wasn’t. I had envied Betsy Morton in high school. “But you should see the magnificent painting of Dorian Gray I have hanging in my attic. He’s still young and beautiful.” He reached for his glass of water. “Fuck him.”
I had only made it through the soup and salad, and I was already full.
“You’ll love the first entrée,” said Jerald as a waiter removed my bowl and another refilled my water glass.
“The first entrée?”
“Be sure to save room for dessert. It’s delish!”
Over the first entrée, his party life abruptly came to an end. “AIDS was my wake-up call. I don’t know how long I’d been infected. With all the screwing around I was doing it never occurred to me that I could get HIV. I knew, of course, the virus was out there, but like most of us, I guess I just thought it didn’t apply to me. I didn’t get tested until I was in the hospital with my first opportunistic infection. That’s when they told me.” He stopped to take a sip of his broth, his third so far. “And that’s when I met Cal. By the way, how’s he doing?”
“In Providence. Next stop, hospice.” With others, I would have tacked on unfortunately or sadly or something like that. But with another veteran, we tended to dispense with such sentimentalities. Likewise, Jerald didn’t engage in the socially appropriate How sad or I’m sorry to hear that. It was all understood.
“I met Cal at the first AIDS fundraiser I ever attended. I could still hide my status then and pretend I was spurred from some altruistic motive, which, to say the least, would have been out of character for me. Cal was the first person I told. It was he who got me involved with CAP, saying I could still make a positive difference in my time remaining. That was five years ago.” He said wistfully as if to himself, “I hope I have.”
A waiter removed the remnants of the broiled salmon as another placed a roasted pheasant with sautéed vegetables before me. I stared at it.
“You know, you don’t need to eat all of it. I meant for you only to have a taste of my favorites.”
That was nice, but as a member of the Clean Plate Club since childhood, I had fully imbibed that peculiar mother logic that if I didn’t eat everything on my dish, poor children in China would somehow starve. Over the pheasant, Jerald told me about his life change.
“So,
