The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 33: September 7

Today I went to the doctor for a physical. I took tests to discover if I had diseases I am certain I do not have. Like AIDS. Even during the ’80s, I never, save one time, worried that I’d contracted it, even though my friends had regular freak-outs and disappeared to the health services clinic to have their blood drawn after long nights of death-worry. In part I was not worried about becoming sick and dying because I never worried about becoming sick and dying. Hypochondria, until my recent health scare, was not a tempting velodrome for my neuroses.

But primarily I never worried about getting AIDS because I slept with extremely straight straight people. None of them used needles. None of them had been in moped accidents in Kenya, and so none of them had received sketchy blood transfusions in huts. I cavorted, or so I believed, with a low-risk crowd.

Thus, in my nearly thirty years of sexual activity, I’ve had only one long night of AIDS worry. This night was spent at LaGuardia Airport in New York. It was summer. I was trying to get back to New Hampshire, where I and fifteen other people slept on floor mattresses in a house hanging over a river. I’d been in Oregon visiting my boyfriend, who’d been living in South America for the year. He’d returned to see his family for a week, and we reconnected in his hometown like the devoted couple we were, though unbeknownst to him I’d been having sex with another guy. My boyfriend and I didn’t have an open relationship, but I considered the vast distance (time zones and miles) between us as license to sleep with someone else temporarily, especially since I planned eventually to move to South America to join him. Especially since I planned eventually to marry him. I was totally committed to him while sleeping with another guy. This made sense to me then. It makes sense to me now.

Moreover I didn’t love this other guy. He was more like a conquest. A class or maybe a social clique conquest. He was from Greenwich. His girlfriend prior to me — she’d grown up in Manhattan — had been dating “the Preppie Killer” Robert Chambers when he accidentally-or-not strangled Jennifer Levin in Central Park during a bout of rough sex. I continued to sleep with this guy I didn’t love because he made me feel I was part of a world I desperately wished, at that time, to be part of. If it took sleeping with a man who slept with a woman who slept with a murderer, so be it. Now I was only three fucks away from Robert Chambers. Now I was practically at Dorrian’s Red Hand, the Upper East Side bar that had served alcohol to underage prep schoolers the night Chambers and Levin hooked up. I had practically seen them leave the bar together. I had practically turned to my best friend, whose family owned a private plane and a captain’s house on Nantucket, and said, Something terrible is about to happen! (Even when I fantasized about being on the scene that night at Dorrian’s Red Hand, I was still little better than an outsider; i.e., if I managed to have any value at all in that world, it would have been as a spooky, future-predicting witch.)

So I was at LaGuardia. I had just left my boyfriend in Oregon and was returning to my not-boyfriend in New Hampshire. The heavens protested. They heaved a lot of lightning around. My flight was canceled. This tart would be spending the night in the airport, forced to confront her deceitful ways until dawn.

The best way to pass an overnight in an airport is with a junky book. I’d buy a mystery before the newsstand closed. That was my plan, but then I saw a copy of Wasted: The Preppie Murder by Linda Wolfe, the true crime account of Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin. I’d heard about this book. I’d been dying to read this book. (Published in 1989, it has a goodreads ranking. One woman gave it three stars and wrote, “Very interesting true story but the ending is a letdown.”)

I bought it. I started reading. I thought I knew everything about Robert Chambers, but it turned out I didn’t. He’d been a drug addict and needle user. He’d been possibly bisexual in New York City in the ’80s. Had I known these things I might have practiced safe sex for once in my life. My three-fucks-away-from-Robert-Chambers status initiated a long night of death worry. I could have AIDS! Heritage AIDS! I decided I couldn’t stay in the airport, or I’d drive myself crazy, reading Wasted: The Preppie Murder by the half-light of the closed concessions, anxiously obsessing about my death, and also the death of my boyfriend (whom I would have basically killed with my dishonesty), and how, if my boyfriend didn’t break up with me for cheating on him and giving him AIDS, we’d have to forgo living in South America and instead spend our final days at an experimental treatment facility in Mexico, where we could still get married, and after our wedding, I would ideally die first, because I had, as a kid, read Love Story by Erich Segal upward of fifty-nine times, and I wanted my husband/boyfriend to be able to say at my funeral, “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?” and (even though I had given him AIDS), “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

I made calls from a payphone using a credit card I’d failed to make any payments on for months, but which, by some glitch, worked. It was a Saturday night, but I found some friends at home. I took a cab to their apartment. We went to an Irish bar and got drunk. I slept on their couch. By the next morning, I was cured of my worry. I continued to sleep with the three-fucks-away guy for the rest of the summer and fall. This didn’t make sense to me then. It doesn’t make sense to me now. Despite what I learned in the airport, I didn’t get tested for AIDS for another three years. When I did, I was not positive.