Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (23 page)

Thousands of miles from Dad, my own life continued. The next morning I woke up and took the Métro to the Champs-Elysées, walked to the offices of Cleary Gottlieb, and spent the day filing legal briefs for bespectacled young lawyers, chatting up my French officemates and drinking liter bottles of water. That weekend I went on a picnic with the French girls to the Bois du Boulogne and walked with them through the woods, all of us getting drenched in a sudden summer rain.

I RECENTLY DISCOVERED
that this letter Dad sent to me in Paris isn’t the first in which he mentions being HIV-positive. On March 23, nearly three months before I left for Europe, he wrote, “Got results from my blood test. My t-cell count is 363. That’s below average – which is 450–1500. So I’m getting physical & evaluation @ UC AIDS Clinic. Maybe they can put me on some experimental drugs before I get sick.” But I have no memory of reading this letter, or even reacting to it, while in New York.

Which is why I focus on that day at the window. It was the first time I remember thinking of Dad with AIDS.

I never understood why it was so hard to recall Dad as HIV-positive before Paris. Then, carefully sifting through Dad’s journals, I found a copy of a letter he wrote to Dede Donovan that same summer of 1989:

Alysia knows I have some health problems but I haven’t wanted to alarm her about their seriousness. But one reason I’ve wanted her to learn to fend for herself more is that it’s not unlikely that she’ll be without her remaining parent in 2–3 years, if not before. I haven’t told her grandparents about this either.

Dad was indeed careful not to alarm me about the seriousness of his health. In the letters he wrote to me while I was at university, news on the progress of his infection was always couched between news of the banal—updates on plans for his fall tour promoting his novel,
Holy Terror
, and his book of essays,
View Askew
, troubles with the chatty roommate sleeping in my old room (“He has talk-arreah!”), and his many unrequited crushes: “What I mostly am, my dear, is celibate. It seems too much bother to get these boys in bed. But I
do
love them.”

Unconsciously I took my father’s lead. If Dad didn’t want to give me reason to worry about the status of his health, I didn’t look for it. Why should I cooperate with the possibility of this loss, with the dissolution of my world? Besides, there was still so much life to live.

IN FRANCE
later that summer, I learned to ride a bicycle for the first time. The headmistress at the Foyer had organized a weekend trip to the countryside, driving the rowdy Filles du Calvaire in a rented bus to a dormitory on the Brittany coast. The trip cost us each thirty francs, then the equivalent of six dollars. On the five-hour drive from Paris, the girls in the back of the bus sang along to French pop songs playing loudly on a cheap transistor radio.

When we arrived at the dormitory in Brittany it was already dark, but I noticed next to the front door, under a bare bulb buzzing with moths, seven pink single-speed bicycles leaning against the wall outside our rooms. Over dinner the next night, the Norman girl with the sharp nose suggested that we go for a ride before bed. I sheepishly confessed that I didn’t know how to ride a bike, a fact I’d somehow managed to hide from my friends for most of my life.

“Then you’ll learn,” she said in French, her thin lips curling into a smile. “I’ll teach you.”

She took me out that evening on an abandoned road near the rooming house. As we started along the wooded path, the dorm shrinking behind us, I wanted to tell her that I’d changed my mind, that I’d rather go to the beach, watch TV, do anything else. But though my French was good I didn’t feel competent enough, or intimate enough with this new friend, to jettison our plan without seeming rude. Instead, ten minutes later, this twenty-two-year-old girl wearing pearl earrings and a conservative navy sweater with tiny white buttons, this girl whom I’d known only two months, dug her neat canvas sneakers into the dirt and patiently held my bicycle steady as I tried again and again to pedal forward without falling over. This girl, whose name I can’t even remember, worked so hard to keep me aloft on that rusted pink bike that her cheeks flushed and a thin moustache of perspiration appeared above her mouth, which was drawn tight with concentration. I felt heavy and stupid on the bike and was grateful that no one was around to see us. I was thinking of how to rescue us both from what was clearly a futile pursuit when suddenly I was moving forward on my own. I felt like I was flying.

The sun was low on the horizon as I pedaled back and forth down that patch of dusty dirt road, gaining speed as I gained confidence. I bicycled into a nearby clearing, passing fields of grass in which I could see small farmhouses and rolled bales of hay painted golden pink by the evening sun. It was just like the Monet paintings I’d studied in my freshman year and I had to laugh at this almost prepackaged postcard moment. The fresh evening wind blew into my face and I couldn’t stop smiling. Pedaling in large swooping circles, I accepted the wind as a reward for my perseverance. Behind me, the Norman girl was laughing and clapping.

I later wrote Dad about that day. I wrote him about the Norman girl (my heroine! my Joan of Arc!), who’d later take me to meet her family in Rouen, including her welcoming father, still grateful to those Americans who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II. I wrote about how I’d never felt as good as I had in that moment, riding a bicycle in the countryside of Brittany, the westernmost province in the western arm of France, which stretches into the Atlantic as if trying to reach the distant United States.

17.

I
RETURNED TO NEW YORK
in the fall of 1989. I continued traveling to the Weiksners’ Upper East Side townhouse every week, clinging to it as a familiar base. One cold Monday evening that October, I was typing a paper in their upstairs office (formerly my bedroom) when their fourteen-year-old-son Nicky burst into my room. He’d been in their library watching game three of the World Series on TV. It was a match between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants, the so-called BART game, named after the subway that connected the two cities.

“Alysi
aaa
!” he called as he thundered up the stairs. “There’s been an earthquake in San Francisco! The Golden Gate Bridge
collapsed
!”

I immediately telephoned my father, who informed me that it was the Bay Bridge, not the Golden Gate, and that only a portion of the upper freeway had collapsed, crushing two vehicles beneath. In our dining room the mantelshelf had cracked and fallen, destroying two blue marble goblets handmade by a friend.

As a San Francisco native, the fear of “the big one” had always been a part of my identity; it pained me to not be there. Although the quake’s epicenter was in the hills of Loma Prieta Santa Cruz, eighty miles north of the city, to miss the Bay Area’s worst earthquake since 1906 fractured my foundation, my sense of self. I felt as if a part of me, the San Francisco me, was somehow slipping away.

Though he didn’t say so, Dad’s journals reveal that the Loma Prieta earthquake made him feel disconnected also, but differently:

I was on Haight Street bus and didn’t feel it. Saw a couple broken windows & a toppled chimney & folks outside talking excitedly but I went to Flore for coffee & then sat zazen. Only afterwards did I begin to understand the magnitude of the event: walking home in total darkness & seeing my bookcase toppled, 2 windows broken. Didn’t want to be alone & walked around the city looking for open bars. In a way I felt friendless during this time.

Two days after our phone call, I received an overnight package from Dad. He’d sent me crisp copies of the
San Francisco Chronicle
and
Examiner
, with their extensive reporting on the quake. Paging through the coverage in my hometown papers, instead of in the
New York Times
, the news felt more real. The earthquake killed sixty-three people throughout northern California and left more than 12,000 homeless. Along with the newspapers, my father mailed me a t-shirt. On the front, printed in red serif type, was “October 17, 1989. 5:04pm.” Above the type was a black-and-white photo, the same image featured on every front page, showing the Bay Bridge, its upper roadway collapsed.

Thumbing through these papers and then pulling my new earthquake t-shirt over my head, I felt overwhelmed with love for Dad. Somehow he knew just what I needed at that moment. I ached with a longing to return home, to our apartment, to him. I wanted to fly home for the holidays but he’d already dipped into his savings to pay for the East Coast tour promoting
Holy Terror
and
View Askew
and didn’t have the money. So while he was peeling and mashing ten pounds of potatoes for the Hartford Street Zen Center Thanksgiving, I was snacking on shrimp cocktail in the Weiksners’ country home, feeling as fake as the painted papier-mâché fruits that decorated the dinner table.

I knew I was lonely and unhappy in New York. After a three-month respite from calorie counting in Paris, the margins of my school notebooks were again filling up with my detailed meal accounting. Then one night I hatched a plan. I could transfer to one of the highly rated University of California colleges, which could return me to California’s warm bosom. The next day I phoned UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, both close to the city, and asked them to mail me applications.

I made an appointment with an NYU counselor to explore what I’d need for a transfer. The counselor had me sit in a chair opposite hers in the dark office cubby where she worked. Adjusting her wire glasses, she asked me exactly why I wanted to leave NYU. I considered telling her about the earthquake, about Dad and his falling T-cell count, but I hadn’t even told the Weiksners about Dad and just thinking about all of this made my head heavy and thick.

“I want to be closer to home,” I sighed.

I returned to Third Avenue North that afternoon with a stack of NYU transfer forms, which I kept on the corner of my desk beneath the glossy UC applications that started arriving by mail. They pictured grassy campus quads under clear blue skies, a planet away from my bitter New York winter. But as the year progressed, I found myself caught in a powerful gust of readings, deadlines, and midterm exams. The UC applications and NYU forms were soon buried under a pile of clothes and books.

In San Francisco, my father was keeping himself busy. He organized an event with poets Judy Grahn and Allen Ginsberg at the University of San Francisco, attended by more than 600 people. And he was invited to speak at the San Francisco Out/Write conference, which brought together 1,800 lesbians and gay men for three days of readings, panels, and talks. His panel was “Outrageous Queer Journalism.”

The writer Edmund White attended the Out/Write conference the following year, 1991, where my father also organized a number of panels. In his
New York Times
op-ed about gay literature, “Out of the Closet and Onto the Bookshelf,” White noted the irony that at the very moment that gay literature was flourishing, so many gay writers were threatened with extinction:

Every other writer at the Out/Write conference appeared to be ill. People who were HIV positive (like me) exchanged T-cell counts as though they were the latest Wall Street figures. Many who were robust a year ago were now dramatically thin or blind or covered with lesions. During the last session of the last day of the conference a member of the audience seized the microphone, ostensibly to denounce [keynote speaker] Edward Albee once again. But in an instant the pale, emotional man had segued into a cry from the heart: “I wanted everything to be perfect since obviously I won’t be at the conference next year.”

Although Dad didn’t share with me details of either conference, he did mail me articles he was writing on the impact of the AIDS crisis on the gay community for the
Sentinel
, the
Advocate
, and a new column of his own in the
Bay Guardian
. Young guys came up to him in bars and clubs saying how much they liked his writing, which delighted Dad greatly. But his journals reveal that finances were an ongoing concern. He’d cut down his involvement with
Poetry Flash
, which he’d stopped editing but where he was still a regular contributor, because he wanted to focus on better-paying assignments. Yet the money he was paid for editing Sam’s anthology and for the articles and columns he wrote for the
Sentinel
and various weeklies was meager at best.

He was well liked at the University of San Francisco, where he was now teaching two expository writing classes three times a week, but a senior administrator there said that unless he got a master’s degree he wouldn’t be able to return in the spring. My father had been pursuing a master’s in English at Emory University when he met my mom in the late sixties, but dropped out before graduation. To secure his job, he was now pursuing a graduate writing degree at San Francisco State.

For the last year, my father had been supporting himself with freelance legal summarizing which he did from home, but his boss had disbanded the company for “personal reasons.” The AIDS Emergency Fund paid Dad’s rent that March.

He applied and interviewed for several jobs, including one at
Mother Jones
. But halfway through that interview he was asked to name his greatest character defect. “Moodiness,” he answered. “I’m not going to write that down,” said his interviewer, “or you’ll immediately be disqualified.” She then advised my dad to pick up some books on interviewing techniques. In his journal he wrote, “She must have liked me to give me this advice.” He didn’t get the job.

Despite these setbacks, Dad continued to send me money, as he had started to do as soon as I left for New York. “I will be sending you $2,000 of your social security checks over the next four months,” he wrote to me when I started school. “Will make it tough on me financially but its yours & I want you to have every opportunity over this next year. It you don’t need it for school, you could put in into savings & use it to pay for travel expenses or whatever.”

In fact I did need it for school. When Dede helped me apply to NYU, she assumed it would be priced like the University of California system. Instead NYU, which billed itself “a Private University in the Public Service,” was among the most expensive colleges in the country. What my grandparents couldn’t cover I made up with student loans, financial aid, and my father’s Social Security checks. Another incentive for transferring into a University of California college was that it would be much less expensive. In letters, Dad checked on my progress: “Hope you’ve gotten your applications in for UC Berkeley & UC Santa Cruz too. I hear the latter is best for undergrad, but if you went to Berkeley you could stay here again. It would be nice to see more of you, kiddo.” But for some reason I failed to complete these applications, let alone mail them in. While I missed Dad and the city, I was also ambivalent about returning home—I suspect, because I was afraid.

In French class that spring I made friends with a Jersey girl named Lauren. The spitting image of Raphael’s Virgin Mary, she loved opera, small dogs, and everything French. She’d even named her shih tzu Bisou (“kiss”). Whenever Lauren became excited, which was often, her face flushed crimson and her voice trilled like a young girl’s. One day as we were heading to a favorite café after class, she told me she’d applied to NYU’s junior year abroad program in Paris.

“I just spent last summer in Paris,” I told her. “I worked at a law firm near the Champs Elys—”

“Oh. My. God,” she interrupted, gripping my arm. “You should
totally
apply! We could be there
together
!”

When we finished our cappuccinos, she walked me to the Maison Française, NYU’s “French House,” where I picked up an application.

Remembering my summer as a Parisienne, the beauty of rural Brittany, and the kindness of the Norman girl, I completed my application that evening. When I received the letter in April telling me I’d been accepted into the NYU in France program I telephoned my dad, ecstatic. He was thrilled because I was thrilled. But of course, instead of moving closer to him, I was making plans to move farther away.