One Day In Summer, We Went Ballooning

Then, I got the text.

“When I visited Charles, a therapist was with him trying to get him to exercise his arms with a 5-pound medicine ball,” the E-mail, on which I am copied, reads. “Charles was having serious difficulty lifting it up and down with both hands. He was sitting in a wheelchair …. His upper left leg has no musculature. His upper right leg has some musculature but the muscles have no tone. To move him from the chair to his bed, two nurses needed to employ a hoist and sling.”

Why is Charles, a freelance photographer with whom I once lived, in a wheelchair in a rundown rehab center in the Bronx? Why is a man who had walked himself to an urgent care center three months ago now unable to use his legs? How did he get this weak so fast? 

I am late to this movie. I have spoken to Charles just once in the last ten years; he called me the day after my mother died, he had a strong feeling he should check on me, he said. I don’t believe one bit in woo-woo, but that’s something I have never been able to figure out.

Now a friend of Charles is coming to the rehab place every two days with his laundry. The friend returns to his home in England in two months. Free-lance photographers do not have pensions and fat savings accounts. Who will bring Charles clean clothes then?

I am a month into this horror story.

“Can you call me, please?”, an e-mail I get late Saturday night reads when I turn on my phone after getting out of the movies. “Charles is not well.”

I am old enough to know what a message like this means. I call back before I get on the down escalator.  That’s when I get the basics: Charles, who is 80, felt ill during a summer heat wave and collapsed as he walked into an urgent care center. He went into a hospital, where he caught COVID, then into a city rehab center. In the last month, he lost the ability to walk. Doctors are doing tests.

 “His mind was not clear,” one e-mail reads. “He did not know where he was. He thought that I had come to take him to see a play in Providence and wanted me to call an Uber.”

This strikes me as a rather gay fantasy. Charles was a late-to-the-party gay man, realizing his preferences a few years after we break up, when he is 45, stupefying everyone we knew.

“Aren’t gay men supposed to be neat?” my friend Herb asks.

Charles is a careless dresser, a horrible housekeeper, and an impractical businessman, totally unsuited to be a freelance photographer, except that he is very, very good. He is also very smart. He has an undergraduate degree from Harvard, gets a law degree at Columbia University while working full-time as a photographer at the New York Times, and practices corporate law for two years. Then, because he hates law, he goes back to being a newspaper photographer. 

I am 30 when I meet him, working out of New York for The Washington Post. We have some good times, but life with a man who lives without a financial safety net and is chronically late is not for me, no matter how smart and kind.

It’s a dangerous time for men to love men. The first man Charles lives with tests negative for HIV then gives it to Charles then dies. Charles is smart about treatment. He waits for one with real promise, getting himself into an early protease inhibitor trial in 1996, a few months after I am diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  Charles is treated at Rockefeller Center; I am treated across the street at Memorial Sloan Kettering. In six months, when both our blood tests drop to normal we go to dinner and make a toast.

“Better living through chemistry,” we say.

Marco, the next man Charles lives with, has Parkinson’s and diabetes and is terrifically sweet. I am dating a balloon pilot, one weekend we all go to a hot air balloon festival in the Hudson Valley.  Marco is excited, it’s something he’s always wanted to do.

“I don’t care about myself,” Charles tells me. “I want Marco to go up as much as possible.”

 A year later, Marco dies.

Pictures, I think, when I’m getting ready to visit Charles, that’s the most important thing. I know this from my mother and grandmother, both of whom ended their days in nursing homes. Even if your memory is spotty, a picture is a short circuit to the heart. 

I don’t have anything recent, I haven’t seen Charles since we went ballooning, twelve years ago, but that weekend we were all taking pictures. That’s the real legacy of iPhones, no day will ever be undocumented again. It was a great weekend: I was crazy in love with the balloon pilot and he was crazy in love with me; we had gotten a free hotel room for Charles and Marco, as crew; the weather was blue-sky perfect.  

I pull up my photo files. There’s Charles, tall and muscular, in shorts and a crazy Hawaiian shirt – still, no clothing style – hauling the heavy balloon basket out of the truck; Charles, spreading the balloon on the ground before inflation. It’s a tie-dyed balloon of purple, pinks, and yellows; conspicuous even among its brightly colored canvas pals; a balloon with the spirit of Woodstock and a hippie name: “Lucy in the Sky With the Diamonds”. No photos of Marco, though I know there is at least one; he must have been off to the side, shooting.

Then I find it, from the second or third day of the festival. It’s an emotionally loaded picture, that must be why it stuck in my head. The pilot is in the basket, checking the burner, Marco is beside him, Charles is standing outside beside the basket, looking at Marco as if he’s worried about his health.  Marco, though he was excited all weekend, also looks sober. It strikes me, looking at that photo, that it is as if Charles knew the future.  I wish I had a happier photo of the two of them, something where they’re smiling, but it’s the only one I can find.

I get the picture printed and put it in a plastic frame, which won’t break if someone knocks it over. I wrap it in hand-blocked Japanese gift paper, with oranges and yellows, using lots of tape because it’s an irregular shape, and make a gift card from the same paper.  The package won’t win any design awards, but it's bright and the circle of yellow on the front of the card looks like the sun. I pick up flowers and sandwiches and babka. Then I drive up to the rehab center in the Bronx, where I take a turn too tight into the parking lot and bang up the car. I blame age and peripheral vision. It’s probably nerves.

Charles is sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a T-shirt and cargo shorts. The muscles of his legs are atrophied like the muscles of someone I once saw who had been in a coma for two years.  I cannot understand how in three months, they have become so withered.

“They wanted me up at the New Hampshire State House last night,” Charles says. “I looked under the bed, but I couldn’t find them.”

“So, it felt very real to you,” I say.

“It was real,” Charles says, but he knows who I am and shows me where to ring for a nurse to bring a container for the flowers.

A thought occurs to me: Perhaps the hallucinations were caused by a urinary tract infection, which is not uncommon in older people in nursing homes. I like this theory: a urinary tract infection can be treated.

The rehab center is bare-bones. When I go to the bathroom to get water for the flowers, I see there’s no shower, only a toilet. There’s no room for anything personal in the room. I put the flowers on the narrow window sill and give Charles his gift. He has trouble unwrapping it, so I help, and when Charles sees the picture he starts to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t want it to make you sad. I wanted it to make you happy. It was the only picture of you two together I could find.”

“It does make me happy,” Charles says.

He opens the makeshift card, where my message is muted among the bright colors.

“Can you read it?” I ask.

“ ‘One day in summer, we went ballooning’ ”,  Charles says.