The Two Kinds of Decay

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Before the diagnosis I had had intercourse with only one person, the man I call my college boyfriend. Which sounds as if we loved each other all through college, but we didn’t. We slept together for eleven weeks, and then he broke up with me.

I was very sad, but I enrolled in five classes the next semester and made a list of goals including run at least twice a week and avoid all time-wasting social engagements.

Two months into the semester, I got sick. And for a long time, I regretted I might die having had intercourse with only one person.

Like many freethinking college students, I thought intercourse was the greatest thing in life. And it just about killed me to hear of everyone’s rambunctious affairs while I was in the hospital.

So when a medical student came into my room alone, after his rounds were over, with a book to lend or a mix tape he’d recorded, I thought about which medical students I’d invite to have intercourse with me if I got to the end of the road there, in the hospital.

But I went back to college still sick, with my central line, not having had intercourse with any medical students, and every month or so I went back to the hospital to sit in the Oncology Outpatient ward to have my plasma replaced or to have a bag of gamma infused. And the only people there were the hem-onc nurses, who were women.

My line was implanted in June 1995, and in May 1996, after eleven and a half months, it was pulled.

I wasn’t well yet — I was taking steroids and gamma globulin. But those treatments kept me healthier than plasma replacement had. Those treatments actually slowed down the rate at which my immune system secreted the poisonous antibodies.

I would still relapse, but it was clear that the steroids and the gamma would keep me at least as well as apheresis would, so it was decided I wouldn’t have my plasma replaced again. The gamma from March had already lasted three months. My neurologist believed I’d turned a corner.

I believed, though, that I would stop secreting antibodies forever only after I had intercourse. And though I looked worse than I ever had in my life — thanks to the steroids I was fat and swollen, covered in acne, and had a gruesomely round face — I knew I would have to go through the humiliation of finding a man who would agree to have intercourse with me.

I thought my friend Victor, who was legendarily promiscuous and who had shown interest in me shortly after my college boyfriend dumped me, might still be interested.

So I called him and invited him to have a drink with me that night. We had our drink and walked back to our dorm and sat down in the courtyard, just talking.

It was two days before Commencement. Early June. He was graduating, and I was graduating, too, sort of, but the envelope I was getting wouldn’t have a diploma in it. It would be empty, because I had another semester of classwork to complete.

Since it was two days before Commencement, only the seniors were left at school, and everyone was awake, and most of them were in the courtyard with us. It was a party that had been going on all week.

And so I felt exposed — I felt too shy to seduce Victor in front of the entire senior class of Dunster House, even though I knew no one would notice or care.

Finally, Victor said, Your place? getting up from the bench we’d been sitting on.

And we went to my dorm room, which was a single suite I had all to myself, with my own living room and my own bathroom, because my neurologist had written a note to the university explaining I needed my space.

And we sat on my futon, taking turns drinking out of a plastic bottle of cheap vodka.

I was still unable to put the plan into motion.

Eventually Victor said, Do you have any other rooms in this places and walked me to the bedroom, and lay me on my bed, and had intercourse with me.

Then he asked me about the scabs on my chest from where the line had just been pulled out of me, and listened to the things I told him, and held me very tightly.

Two mornings later, when we were in the courtyard again, seated in rows, about to receive our diplomas, he was wearing a buttoned shirt and sweating, because his neck was covered with bright red marks.

Almost seven years passed. Victor and I wrote every day. I lived in New York and he lived in Chicago.

He told me some of his secrets, and I told him some of mine.

Our letters were intimate, but I didn’t get around to explaining to him that I’d recovered from my disease only because he had selflessly had intercourse with an ugly version of a girl he’d once had a crush on.

A little less than seven years after I was cured of my disease through the mystical power of intercourse, Victor had an aneurysm and died.