He made a move to
go.
“Wait,” I said.
His look was
disbelieving. “You want me to stay?”
“You asked me here
to come out to me,” I said. “That couldn’t have been easy. I did a lot of harm
to Jim by not listening to him. I don’t want to make the same mistake with you.”
He sat down.
“So,” I continued, “you
want to talk?”
He shook his head. “No,
I want you to come home with me.”
I smiled. “You need
a friend, Josh, not another trick.”
“It doesn’t have to
mean anything to you to mean something to me.”
“That’s not the
point.”
He touched my hand.
“Are we really going to sit here and talk about this?
I looked up at him,
saw my face reflected in his glasses and saw past my reflection into his eyes.
A waiter came up and asked us if we wanted another drink.
“No,” I said. “We’re
leaving.”
*****
Josh lived in
Hollywood on a decayed street lined alternately with boxy apartment buildings
and little stucco houses whose front yards doubled as driveways. The squalor
was softened by the big elm trees that lined the road and the wild rose bushes
still putting forth their flowers four weeks before Christmas. I lowered my
window as I followed his car down the street. Mariachi music blared from one of
the houses where four men squatted on the front lawn guzzling beer. Lights were
on in every house, though it was now near two in the morning.
Josh flicked his
signal and turned into the carport of a two- story apartment building. I pulled
up along the curb and got out of my car. He met me at the sidewalk. It was
cold. Behind us, in the Hollywood Hills, the lights flickered like distant
stars. The big emptiness of the night was like a stage as we stood in the
grainy light of a streetlamp looking at each other. In the darkness, I smelled
jasmine.
“This is it,” he
said, nervously.
I put my arm around
his shoulders, and felt the tension in his neck seep out as he leaned into me.
“You’re cold,” I
observed, touching his face with the back of my hand.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
He led me around to
a tall gate, through it, and up a concrete staircase to the second floor
landing. “The place is kind of a mess,” he said, unlocking the door.
He held the door
open for me. The room I found myself in was, in fact, quite tidy. There was a
fake Oriental rug on a fake parquet floor. A shabby couch flanked by two sling
armchairs, and a glass-topped coffee table furnished the place. One wall was
taken up by wooden bookshelves crammed with books. A stereo and a small tv were
set on a couple of orange crates filled with records.
Josh stood beside
me. “Can I get you something to drink?” “No, thank you.”
“Excuse me, then,”
he said, and went into a small kitchen.
The far wall was
curtained. I went over and lifted the curtains, revealing a small patio behind
a sliding glass door. I sat down on the couch. There was a fish bowl filled
with change on the coffee table and next to it a photograph in a heavy bronze
frame. The photograph showed a handsome middle-aged couple, two pretty girls,
and a smiling Josh. He came back into the room holding a glass of milk.
“Your family?”
He nodded and sat
down beside me. “My dad’s a CPA,” he said.
“Where do they
live?”
“Sherman Oaks.” He
set the glass down on the table. “Are you comfortable?”
I loosened my tie.
Smiling faintly,
Josh asked, “Is that as relaxed as you get?” “It’s been a long time.”
“For me, too,” he
said. “I don’t want you to think I spend all my time at bars or anything.”
“I know.”
“This feels like
the first time for me,” he said, then smiled nervously. “That’s the wrong thing
to say, isn’t it?”
I held him. “No,” I
said. “My first time was almost twenty years ago. We thought we had invented
love.”
He kissed me. His
mouth tasted of milk and his skin beneath my fingers was smooth and firm. He
drew back and unknotted my tie, sliding it from my collar, and unbuttoned my
shirt. I removed my jacket and tossed it aside. Sinking into the couch, I
pulled him against me.
“What happened to
him?” Josh asked.
“To whom?”
“Your first time.”
“She got married.”
He lifted his head
and looked at me. “It was a girl?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Were you gay?”
“I’ve always been
gay, Josh. I just happened to be in love with a girl.” I kicked off my shoes
and smiled at him. “You can’t always specialize.”
His dark eyes were
unhappy. “Do you still go out with them?”
“Women? No,” I
said. “She was the only one.”
He smiled. “That
cuts down the competition.”
“Don’t worry about
that. It’s a buyer’s market.”
“We’ll see,” he said
with a lewd flicker in his eyes.
Sometime later we
lay on the couch, facing each other, our clothes discarded, bodies touching.
I watched my face
form in Josh’s eyes. “You called me the night Jim tried to kill himself,” I
said.
He was surprised. “How
did you know it was me?”
“Just a feeling. I
wish you hadn’t hung up.”
“I lost my nerve,”
he replied and smiled. “Are you tired?”
I pressed him
against me. “In a minute.”
*****
It was cold. I
opened my eyes and found that Josh had rolled himself into the blankets and now
slept contentedly at the edge of the narrow bed. A light shone from beneath the
bathroom door. He had carefully arranged my suit on a chair, leaving his own
clothes in a little pile beside it. I gently unwound the blankets from him and
lay against his back, putting my arm across his chest. He smelled of sweat and
soap and semen. I lowered my hand to his firm belly, cupped his genitals and
laid my hand, finally, between his thighs. He moved his head a fraction and I
knew he was awake. He pressed his rump against my groin. I raised my hand along
his torso to his nipples and grazed them with my palm. He sighed and pushed
harder.
“Do you want to?”
he whispered.
I raised myself on
my elbow and said, “Of course I do, but I haven’t carried rubbers with me since
I was sixteen.”
“Just this once,”
he said. “You could pull out before - you know.”
I squeezed his neck
between my fingers. “No,” I said softly. “There’s AIDS, Josh. It’s not worth
the risk.”
Abruptly he drew
away to the edge of the bed and lay on his back, looking at the darkness.
“I didn’t mean that
the way it sounded,” I said.
“I know what you
meant,” he said in a flat voice. “You’re right. It’s not worth it.”
He drew himself
rigidly apart from me as if daring me to make a move across the channel of
darkness between us.
“That’s not what I
meant at all,” I said, reaching for him.
He jerked away. “I
said it didn’t have to mean anything to you, Henry.”
I lay back in the
bed. “You’ve been awfully rough on yourself tonight, Josh. I’d like to know why.”
“Does it really
matter to you?” he asked, more in pain than defiance.
But I had long ago
stopped issuing blank checks on my emotions and I waited a moment too long to
answer.
“That’s what I
thought,” he said.
“What’s this about,
Josh?”
Instead of answering,
he turned away and quietly began to weep.
When he stopped crying, I asked, “Does
this have anything to do with Jim?”
“Please hold me,”
Josh said. I moved myself against him and took him in my arms, feeling the dull
thud of his heart against my ribs. “I don’t want to talk now.”
I opened my mouth
to speak but thought better of it. After a few minutes, Josh slipped into
sleep. A long time later, I did, too.
When I woke Josh
was standing beside me, dressed in jeans and a UCLA sweatshirt. He squinted at
me through his glasses. It was plain that he was seeing a stranger.
“I’ll make you some
breakfast,” he said, politely.
“Coffee will be
fine.”
He nodded and left.
I stretched my neck, shaking off the little aches that seemed to accumulate
there as I got older, wiping the sleep from my eyes. The bathroom was steamy
and smelled of Josh. A thin, suspicious face formed in the mirror. Deepening
lines and graying hair foretold the coming of middle- age, what the French
called — ironically, in my case — the age of discretion. I rinsed my mouth,
showered, put on the clothes I had worn the night before, and followed the
smell of coffee into the kitchen.
Josh stood at the
stove scrambling eggs. He looked at me and said, “You should eat something.”
“Whatever you’re
having.” I poured coffee into a mug from Disneyland and leaned against the
counter, watching him.
“Do you ever stop
thinking?” he asked.
“I did last night,”
I replied. He stirred the eggs savagely.
“Lowered your
standards, you mean.”
“That’s not what I
mean.”
“Don’t worry about
it.” He shut off the flame beneath the skillet and faced me.
“What were you
going to tell me last night?”
“Nothing.”
I set my cup on the
counter. “We shouldn’t start out by lying to each other.”
He jammed his hands
into his pockets. “Sometimes I don’t think there is any love, just a kind of
envy.” He looked at me. “I want to be who you are. What do you want from me, to
be twenty-two again?”
“I think I’d better
be on my way,” I said.
He started to say
something but then simply nodded. I let myself out. I told myself I didn’t want
to buy into his troubles, but I felt heavier going down the steps than I had
coming up.
*****
There was a black
Mercedes parked in front of Larry’s house. The plate read gldnboy. I pulled
into the driveway and went into the house. Tom Zane, Irene Gentry, and Sandy
Blenheim were sitting in the big front room with Larry. The coffee table was
littered with papers, coffee cups, and empty glasses. A half- empty bottle of
Old Bushmill’s sat near an ashtray filled with cigarette butts.
“Excuse me,” I
said.
Larry gave me a
look that made me acutely aware that I was in the same clothes I had worn the
night before. “I think you know everyone,” he said.
“Looks like someone
got lucky last night,” Zane said.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,”
I said, and headed up the stairs without looking back. I changed clothes and
called Freeman Vidor. He was surprised to hear from me.
“Read about you in
the paper today,” he said. “D.A. dumped the Pears case.”
“Justice triumphs
again,” I replied. Downstairs someone burst into loud laughter.
“You don’t sound
like a happy man.”
From the window I
watched shadows of clouds gather on the surface of Silver Lake. “It wasn’t
exactly an acquittal.”
“He wasn’t exactly
innocent.”
“There’s something
I’d like you to look into.”
“We still talking
about Pears?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t do pro
bono,” he said.
“I’ll pay you the
same rate we originally agreed on.”
“Go ahead.”
I told him about
the missing bar key.
“That’s it?” His
voice was incredulous. “You think someone broke in, slashed the Fox kid and
left the knife in Pears’s hand?”
“I’m less
interested in the bar key than I am in Josh Mandel,” I replied after a moment’s
hesitation.
“What does that
mean?”
“I think he’s
concealing information about the case,” I replied. “I’d like you to find out
what it is without approaching him.”
“I’m an
investigator, Henry, not a psychic.”
There was more
laughter from downstairs. “Then do what you have to do,” I replied.
“What do you think
he knows?”
“I have no idea,” I
said, irritably. “That’s what I’m hiring you to find out.”
“Uh-huh. You don’t
want to talk to him because, why? You think he’ll run or ... “ The sentence
trailed off.
“I slept with him
last night.”
Vidor said, “I’m
glad I’m not your boyfriend.”
“Go to hell.”
“I’ll be in touch,”
he replied. I set the phone down with a clang.
I was lying on the
bed flipping through the pages of a mystery called The Vines of Ferrara. As I
began the same paragraph for the fifth time, my attention wandered to the wall
where, inexplicably, the shadows of the tree outside the window reminded me of
Josh Mandel. That and everything else. What was this? Second adolescence? I
picked up the book again and examined the cover.
There was a knock
at the door. Expecting Larry, I hollered, “Come in.”
Irene Gentry
stepped in. I hopped off the bed, buttoning my shirt.
“Sit down, Henry,”
she said. She wore a suit in winter whites tailored to her body. It was quite a
good body. “Do you mind if we visit for a while?”
“Of course not.
Here,” I said, bringing a chair up to the bed. “Sit down.”
She arranged
herself in the chair and extracted a silver cigarette case from her pocket. “May
I?”
“Let me find you an
ashtray.” The best I could do was the soap dish from the bathroom. I held it
out to her. She smiled and set it at the edge of the bed.
She puffed on her
cigarette like a stevedore and said, finally, “I hate Sandy Blenheim.”
“Any reason in
particular?”
“It’s so obvious
that Tom’s nothing to him but a meal ticket.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “He
pushes Tom to take whatever crap’s offered to him. Anything to bring in money.”
She paused and looked at me. “I suppose you wonder what Tom is to me.”
“It’s not my
business to wonder that.”
She smiled without
amusement. “I’ll tell you anyway, Henry, since you’re bound to hear rumors. I
love him.”
In the musty
stillness of the room, the words were startlingly clear. Rennie studied my face
and said, “You seem surprised.”
“I’m sorry if I do.”
“We all love
according to our natures,” she continued. “You, of all people, should understand
that.”
“I don’t doubt you,”
I replied.
“Scoot over,” she
said, and kicked off her shoes. She climbed up on the bed beside me. “Larry
says you’re from San Francisco.”
“Close enough,” I
replied, and explained that I actually lived in a small university town on the
peninsula.
“Linden University?
Did you go to school there?”
“Yes.”
“That’s wonderful,”
she replied, shifting her weight so that our bodies touched. “The closest I
ever came to higher education was doing summer stock in Ann Arbor.”
I put my arm around
her. Today she smelled faintly of lilac.
“May I ask you
something?” she said, tipping her face toward mine.
“Sure.”
“Are you and Larry
lovers?”
“No,” I replied.
“Oh,” she said
perplexed. “I thought that’s why you were here, to take care of him.”
Since she had told
me she knew Larry was sick, it didn’t seem worth being evasive. “Larry’s not
the type to allow himself to be taken care of.”
“You don’t seem the
type either,” she said. “Frankly — and I don’t mean this badly — that always
surprises me in gay men. They often seem so needy.”
“Larry and I are
just the other extreme,” I replied. “It’s a kind of psychological machismo. Not
really much better than being constantly in need, when you get right down to
it.”
“And then there’s
Sandy,” she said, her shoulders stiffening. “He defies types. I wish I knew why
Tom keeps him around.” She relaxed and said, “Is it really true that you don’t
need anyone?”
Perhaps because I
had been thinking of Josh, the question tugged at my guts.
She must have seen
it in my face. “Have I touched a sore spot?” she asked gently.
“It’s just that I
met someone.”
“Last night?”
I nodded.
She closed her hand
around mine. “Then shouldn’t you be happy?”
“I don’t think it’s
going to work out.”
“The unlikeliest
matches do, you know,” she murmured.
Someone shouted her
name from downstairs.
“Time to go,” she
said, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. “Will you come and have lunch
with me day after tomorrow?”
“I’d love to,” I
replied.
She put her shoes
on, stood up and staightened her skirt. “Good, make it around noon. Larry can
tell you where I live.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “He’s a fool if he
lets you go,” she said.
“Larry?”
“You know who I
mean. Goodbye, Henry.”
“Goodbye, Rennie,”
I replied and listened as she made her way down the stairs. I got up and went
to the window. The Zanes were getting into the black Mercedes, Tom in front and
Rennie in back. Sandy Blenheim got into the driver’s seat. Sandy Blenheim was
Gldnboy? Only in Hollywood, I thought, and watched as the car pulled away.
A few minutes
later, Larry came in.
“They’re gone,” he
announced, pacing the room.
“I heard them
leave. I thought you weren’t taking new clients.”
He sat down. “I’m
not. That was just a little consulting.”
“It looked like the
IBM litigation to me.”
He picked up the
soap dish that Rennie had used as an ashtray and lifted an eyebrow. “You and
Mrs. Zane have a nice chat?”
“I like her,” I
said, taking exception to his tone.
“That’s allowed, I
suppose.”
“You don’t?”
He stood up and
paced to the doorway of the study. “In this business it doesn’t pay to like
anyone very much.” He ran his hand across a dusty bureau.
“That’s very
cynical,” I said.
He smiled at me,
wiping his dusty fingers on his trousers. “Are you going to tell me where you
spent the night?”
“With Josh Mandel,”
I said, amazed at how lightly I was able to speak his name.
“The
waiter-witness?” Larry asked. “That’s a surprise.”
“To me, too,” I
replied, not wanting to pursue it.
“Doesn’t the canon
of ethics proscribe screwing witnesses? Except on the witness stand, I mean.”
“There is no case,”
I snapped.
‘‘Sorry,” he said.
He looked at me. “Was it that good, Henry?”
“Can we talk about
something else?”
“Evidently, it was,”
he said as if to himself. “Forgive me, I’m just jealous.”