My friend Howard doesn’t want me to know that he’s dying. He hates all the movies and books and plays about AIDS, especially what happens at the end. He says they turn something real into a sappy, pointless melodrama. But that’s not why he hasn’t told me.
When Howard’s mother died at nearly ninety, I took him out for dinner the next day. We went to a Burmese restaurant downtown, a small, dark place with a lot of sweet-and-sour dishes. Whenever I brought up his mother, he changed the subject. At dessert, he finally said, “She never really loved me. I can’t help but be relieved.” This startled me, and I asked him why he was so sure it was true. “I was born too late,” he said. “The others were grown. She wanted to travel, not to have me.” And that is the one and only conversation we have had about his mother. We’ve discussed everything else, of course: his many lovers, his odd three years of married life, his time in Greece, in Majorca, in Rome.
