Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

was designing. The night he brought us white peaches from the Farmers Market. A Sunday trip to the Headlands, where we lay all day on an army blanket, comrades-in-arms, without having sex at all. Little doubt remained, in fact, when “Hugs, Ben” became “Love, Ben” and the floodgates finally opened, inundating our emails with reckless Victorian endearments:
My Darling Boy
My Handsome Man
My Wonderful One
My Own
    We were sitting on a bench at Lands End, watching a sunset exactly the color of the bridge, when he popped the question:
    “I don’t think I could ever be totally monogamous, do you?”
    I was momentarily at a loss for an answer.
    “I mean,” he went on, “it’s not like I’m a sex addict or anything. I don’t want you to think that…but sometimes, you know…opportunities arise.”
    I laughed nervously. “That’s one way of putting it.”
    “And if you really love the guy you’re with…and you see yourselves as soul mates and all…then you should want each other to have those experiences, shouldn’t you? I mean, shouldn’t your love make that possible?”
    “Mmm.” It was more of a noise, really, than an actual reply.
    “Everyone I know who agrees to monogamy just ends up sneaking around, deceiving the person who matters to them most. That hurts a lot more than just…adjusting the rules, so that your love for each other can just make things better. Men aren’t designed to be monogamous, in my opinion, and the ones who force themselves into that mold either break each other’s hearts eventually or just…completely neuter themselves. I don’t mean a new playmate every week, or even every month necessarily, but…as long as it’s out in the open and doesn’t impinge upon…you know…your intimacy with each other, or becomes, like… romantic or something that’s really…consciously hurtful, then I don’t see why two people can’t just agree to….” Flustered, he gave up the effort altogether. “Feel free to jump in any time, Michael.”
    I stroked his cheek for a moment. “You’re too young to be monogamous,” I told him. “And I’m too old.”
    He studied me seriously for a moment. “You mean that?”
    I nodded, smiling dimly. “In some ways I wish I didn’t, but I do. I know too much about life to think otherwise. Which is not to say I can’t still get jealous—”
    “Good,” he blurted.
    “Is it?”
    “Well, yeah, because I can get jealous, too. And I could get really jealous about you.”
    Why did that make me feel so much better? “We’ll work on that together,” I said.
    He was grinning broadly now, revealing that adorable gap again. “Could we take about thirty years?”
    I counted soberly on my fingers for a moment. “That may be doable, yeah.”
    The next day he removed his personals ad from the website.
    And that spoke more eloquently than any marriage license from City Hall.

3
    Far Beyond Saving
    O kay, thirty years might be stretching it, given the virus I’ve lived with for the past twenty. I’m still in the Valley of the Shadow—as Mama would put it—but at least it’s a bigger valley these days, and the scenery has improved considerably. In my best moments I’m filled with a curious peace, an almost passable impersonation of how it used to be. Then my T cells drop suddenly or I sprout a virulent rash on my back or shit my best corduroys while waiting in line at the DMV, and I’m once again reminded how fucking tenuous it all is. My life, whatever its duration, is still a lurching, lopsided contraption held together by chewing gum and baling wire.
    And here’s the kicker: the longer you survive the virus, the closer you get to dying the regular way. My current recipe for continued existence, a fine-tuned mélange of Viramune and Combivir, now competes for shelf space in my medicine cabinet with Lipitor, Wellbutrin, and Glucosamine Chondroitin, remedies commonly associated with age and decrepitude. (Well, maybe not Wellbutrin, since even the young get depressed, but that was no big deal in my own youth.) There are plenty of ironies in this, lessons to be learned about fate and the fickleness of death and getting on with life while the getting is good, but you won’t read them here. I’ve had enough lessons from this disease.
    Strange as it seems, I can remember a time when I was sure I wouldn’t outlive my dog. I acknowledged this to Harry, the dog himself, one drizzly winter night when Thack was away on business. As Harry lay