Read The Little Death Online

Authors: Michael Nava

Tags: #detective, #mystery, #gay

The Little Death (6 page)

When
I got to San Francisco that afternoon, it was one of those days that arrives at
the end of summer just as the last tourists are leaving complaining about the
cold and fog. The sky was cloudless. I parked my car on 19th and headed down
into the Castro.

The
sidewalks were jammed and the crowds drifted slowly past bars from which disco
music blared and where men sat on bar stools looking out the windows. The air
smelled of beer and sweat and amyl nitrate. At bus benches and on strips of
grass in front of buildings, men sat, stripped of their shirts, sunbathing and
watching the flow of pedestrians through mirrored sunglasses. Approaching the
bar where I was meeting Hugh, I smelled marijuana, turned my head and saw a
couple of kids sharing a joint as they manned a voter registration table for
one of the gay political clubs. I stepped into the bar expecting to find more
of the carnival but it was nearly empty. The solitary bartender wiped the
counter pensively.

I
ordered a gin-and-tonic and took it to a table at the back of the room. Plants
hung from the ceiling in big ceramic pots and the lighting was so dim that the
atmosphere was nocturnal. Here and there in the darkness I saw a glint of
polished brass or a mirror. Suspended from the center of the room was a large
fan turning almost imperceptibly in the stale air. It was a place for boozy
meditation — emotion recollected in alcohol, as someone once told me in another
bar — and I was in a contemplative mood. For the first time in my adult life, I
could not see any farther into the future than the door through which Hugh now
entered.

I
watched him step from the brightly-lit doorway into the dimness of the room,
weaving slowly between tables as he approached me. He came up to the table,
mumbled a greeting and sat down. He’d had some sun since I’d seen him last. His
skin was now the color of dried roses, and his hair was a lighter blond than
before but just as disheveled. I restrained an impulse to touch him. He leaned
back into his chair, into the shadows. The bartender drifted over and stood in
front of us a moment before taking Hugh’s order. Hugh looked up, ordered
mineral water, and turned away, missing the bartender’s bright, yearning smile.

“I
didn’t actually think you’d come,” he said in a low, slow voice.

“You
could’ve called sooner. It’s been a couple of weeks.”

“Too
risky,” he said, vaguely, as the bartender set a bottle of Perrier before him. “I
have to limit my contacts with outside people.”

“Still
in hiding?”

“You
still don’t believe me?”

“I
don’t think anyone’s trying to kill you. Something else has got you scared.”

“Junkies
are fearless,” he replied. He reached out to pour from his bottle into his
glass, but his hand shook so violently that he spilled the water on the table.
He very slowly set the bottle down. Then, swiftly, everything fell into place
for me.

I
reached across the table and pulled him forward into the light. He did not
resist. His skin was feverish to the touch. His pupils were tightly balled up
and too bright. I laid his right arm on the table and spotted the mark almost
immediately, a reddish pinprick directly above the vein a few inches above his
wrist.

“When
did you shoot up?”

“Not
long ago,” he said, licking his lips.

“You
told me you were clean.”

“I
was. I ran into a friend.”

“When?”

“I
don’t remember. Last week? After I saw you.”

“Why
didn’t you call me?”

“I
thought I could handle it. I can’t. I need help.” The princely face was covered
with a film of sweat and its muscles sagged as though they were being pulled
downward.

“I
didn’t come here to babysit a hype,” I said, standing.

He
reached out and grabbed my arm. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. I saw
slow motion panic spread across his face. I stood above him for what seemed
like a long time. Then, slowly, I eased back down into the chair beside him.

3

Outside
it was dusk. I turned from the window back to the room, fumbling for a light
switch. I pushed a button and three lights flickered on, unsteadily, from a
brass fixture in the center of the room. Hugh was asleep in the bedroom at the
end of the long, narrow entrance corridor. The toilet gurgled from the bathroom
where I’d poured out his vomit and flushed it away.

From
my law practice I knew that a heroin addict could stay clean long enough to
clear his body of the addiction. If he began to use again it took him awhile to
become re-addicted. Some addicts used casually — chipping, they called it —
but sooner or later their habit caught up with them. Hugh was in the first
stage of re-addiction. His body, recognizing the opiate for what it was —
poison — struggled to reject it, making him sick. If he continued using, the
sickness would stop and the body would make its lethal adjustments. That he was
sick was encouraging because it meant there was still time to prevent his re-addiction.

Not
that I knew how to prevent it. I poured myself a drink from the bottle of
brandy I’d found in the kitchen. When a hype came to me, it wasn’t for medical
advice or psychological counseling, but simply to stay out of jail. If I did
that much for one of them, got him into a hospital or a drug program, then I
considered myself successful. As to why someone became addicted or how he rid
himself of the habit, those things remained mysteries to me. The only thing I
was pretty sure about was that when dealing with an addict, the fact of
addiction was more important than the drug. Thinking about Hugh I wished, for
his sake, that I knew more.

I
wandered aimlessly across the big, bare room. The house had the dank, decaying
smell of so many Victorian houses, as if the walls were stuffed with wet
newspaper. Hugh’s house, only a couple of blocks from Castro, was in a
neighborhood undergoing renovation; many of the neighboring houses looked
freshly painted or were in the process of reconstruction or were for sale. His
house was untouched by this activity. Strips of paint peeled from the banister
of the stairs leading up to the porch. Inside, the rooms were painted white,
badly, in some spots barely covering the last application of gaudy wallpaper.
The wooden floors were scarred and dirty. From the kitchen, the refrigerator
shrieked and buzzed, then subsided to a low whine. It wasn’t the house of an
heir.

Yet
there were incongruous, aristocratic touches. There were dazzlingly white
sheets on his bed and freshly laundered towels piled in the bathroom. The few
pieces of furniture scattered around the house were of obvious quality. The
brandy I was drinking was Courvoisier VSOP, and the glass from which I drank it
appeared to be crystal.

I
found myself at the bookshelves which held a couple of dozen books. Many of
them were worn-out paperbacks, Tolkien, Herman Hesse, a volume of Ginsberg —
the library of a college sophomore of the sixties. I opened the Ginsberg.
Written on the flyleaf were Hugh’s name, the year 1971, and the words New
Haven. Inspecting the second shelf, I saw the books were poetry, mostly, and by
people I’d never heard of. The spine of one volume was cracked and when I
opened it a sheaf of pages fell out, fluttering to the floor. I knelt down to
pick them up and saw, on the bottom shelf, a framed photograph laid face down.
I picked it up with the pages, put the book back together and turned the
picture over.

It
was the portrait of a woman, a lady, I thought. She may have been as young as
fifty. It was hard to tell from the black and white photo whether her hair was
white or an ashy shade of blond. Light and darkness had been tactfully deployed
on the plain background behind her. The obvious effect was timelessness and
the apparent reason was the woman’s age. Still, there was an elegance in her
angular, handsome face quite apart from

the
photographer’s craft, and a kind of luster in the brightness of her hair and
eyes. I thought she must have once been beautiful.

“My
mother,” a voice commented behind me. I nearly dropped the picture in surprise
and turned to find Hugh standing at the edge of the room, just outside the
light. He stepped forward, white-faced, his eyes exhausted. “Sorry. I didn’t
mean to come up on you like that.” He held out his hand for the photo and I
gave it to him. He studied it a moment then returned it. I laid it back on the
bookshelf.

“Nice
picture,” I said. “Looks professional.”

“The
official portrait,” he said, with a trace of contempt in his voice. “It appears
on all the dust jackets.”

“She
writes?”

He
nodded, seating himself on a corner of the couch, drawing a thick sweater
across his bare chest. I noticed for the first time, watching him, that the
room was cold. “What has she written?”

“Poetry,
mostly.”

“I
didn’t notice any of her books on your shelves.”

“I
don’t have any.”

“You’re
not close to her?”

“I
haven’t seen her in years.”

“Does
she live in San Francisco?”

“No,
in the east. Boston, I think.”

“With
your father?”

He
hesitated a second before saying, “He’s dead.”

I
heard his hesitation with a lawyer’s ear and something about it was not quite
right, so I asked, “Are you sure?”

“Don’t
cross-examine me.” He shivered and reached to the table for the brandy,
swigging it directly from the bottle. Then he put it down and ran a hand
through his already disheveled hair. He looked fragile and unhappy.

“I’ll
make you some coffee,” I said, still standing by the books, “if you’ll tell me
where it is.”

“Blue
canister in the refrigerator,” he said, shivering again.

When
I returned to the living room he was standing at the window, which was now
black with night, facing himself — a ghostly reflection. I set the mugs of
coffee down and went over.

“Something
out there?” “A car passed by, slowly, without its lights on.”

“Has
that happened before?”

“No,”
he said, “and maybe it wasn’t meant for me.” I made a noise in the back of my
throat. “You still don’t believe that I’m in danger of being killed.”

“You’re
doing a pretty effective job of killing yourself.” He turned away, abruptly,
went to the table and picked up a cup of coffee.

“I’m
sorry about today.”

“Do
you want to talk about it?”

“I
was bored and lonely.”

“Some
would call that the human condition.”

He
laughed mirthlessly. “My coping mechanism is easily overwhelmed.”

“That
sounds like a diagnosis.”

“My
last analyst,” he replied, carelessly, “who also told me that intimacy is
difficult for me.”

“I
hadn’t noticed.”

“Sex
is not the same thing.”

“I
see. Thank you for setting me straight.”

“Wait,”
he said. “Let’s start over. I asked you to come up because I wanted to see you
again, not to score points against you.”

“All
right,” I said, crossing over to the couch and sitting down beside him. I lay
my hand, tentatively, on his. “Tell me what happened between last weekend and
today.”

He
looked at me intently through cloudy blue eyes, then said, “Have you ever heard
of a poet named Cavafy?” I told him no. “A Greek poet. Gay, in fact. He wrote a
poem about a young dissolute man who tires of his life and resolves to move to
a new city and mend his ways. The poet’s comment is that moving away is futile
because, having ruined his life in one place, he has ruined it everywhere.”

“And?”

“I
had so many good reasons for leaving New York and coming home, but when I got
here they — evaporated. I was the same person, it was the same life.”

“People
overcome addictions.”

“But
not self-contempt.” He poured brandy into his coffee cup and leaned back as if
to tell a bedtime story. “My grandfather, who raised me after my father died,
had very primitive and set notions about what a man is. He never missed an
opportunity to let me know that I didn’t measure up.”

“Let
it go,” I said, thinking back to my own father. “You’ll live to bury him. That
changes everything.”

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