Arkansas (21 page)

“Jerry,” he said, “I hope you don't think—”

All at once a blond boy in a Notre Dame T-shirt and white biking shorts was looming over our table. “Phil, my man!” he crowed, grabbing him by the neck.

Phil, slightly dazed, stood up. “Hey, Kein, how you doing, buddy?” He patted the boy on the shoulder.

“I'm doing great,” Kein said. “Did Justin tell you I'm in
Show Boat
over in Simi Valley? A small part, but it's better than waitering.”

“That's terrific.”

“And you?”

“Oh, holding up, holding up. By the way, this is Jerry. Jerry, Kein.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Good to meet you too.” Kein turned back to Phil. “By the way, how is Justin these days? I haven't heard from him lately.”

“Pretty good. Busy right now.”

“Yeah, it's the season. Well, give him my best, will you? And come see me! I can get you comps.”

“Sure thing.”

“Bye.” (This time to me.)

“So long.”

He wandered away.

“Friend of Justin's,” Phil said.

“Ah, Justin.” I lowered my voice. “Listen, do you want to get out of here?”

“Yes.”

We paid the bill and left.

 

“Kein and Justin used to be lovers,” Phil explained in the car. “I only met him once. A strange guy. Like, his real name is Kevin Levy. Then he goes and changes it to Kevin Prescott because he thinks it'll be better for his career. Then when all he gets are parts in like
Friday the 13th, Part 978,
he changes it back, and then Justin gets this thing in the mail, a card like a change of address, except it says, ‘
NEW NAME! NEW AGENT
! Kevin Levy is now
Kein
Levy.' ”

“Kein! Do you think he knows what it means in German?”

“What?”

“It means ‘no.' It means ‘none.'”

Phil laughed. “I doubt it. Kein's not exactly what you'd call the intellectual type.”

He put his elbow out the window. “I tell you, sometimes it seems like the world's outrunning me. For instance, the other day, I'm thumbing through
Frontiers
, right? And I'm looking at those model and escort ads, when I come across one for this guy who calls himself a ‘cuddle buddy.' Cuddle buddy! ‘No sex,' the ad says, ‘no nudity. Just cuddles. Twenty-five bucks an hour.'” Phil shook his head. “If you ask me, some things shouldn't be sold.”

“Cuddle buddy,” I repeated.

“Or take these boys at the restaurant. Probably every one of them shaves his chest, shaves his balls. Which is fine. I just can't quite figure it out. Maybe you can tell me. What is the thing about hairlessness? To me they look like Foster's Farms chickens.”

“I guess it's an aesthetic. Frankly, I've always preferred hairy men.”

“Me too. Which means that these days in L.A., I'm basically shit out of luck Even the porn videos—you have to get the old ones if you want to see an unshaved, excuse me, asshole. It used to be different. In my day body hair was hot because it was masculine. Even when we dressed up as Lucille Ball, that felt masculine—you know, Lucy Ball with hairy arms. It was like, we knew we were faggots and we liked it. But these guys, with them it's so much about this separate-but-equal thing, about living in the gay neighborhood and eating at the gay restaurant and having
the look,
whatever the look happens to be. I know, I used to go out with some of them, and what I wanted to ask them, I wanted to say, Hey, whatever happened to the sense of spontaneity? Whatever happened to adventure?”

“I guess spontaneity got dangerous.”

“Sex got dangerous. It's not the same thing.”

We were at a stoplight. I turned and looked at him, his beard phosphorescent in the sunlight.

“I don't know what it means, Phil,” I said. “Regression to childhood, maybe. Everyone wants to be daddy's little boy. Or they pack on muscle like it's some sort of armor. To feel protected that way. Or they just rechannel all their energy into working out or biking or volunteering for the Angels. What's obvious is that it's operating from fear. These days everyone operates from fear.”

“Maybe,” Phil said. “I can't say for sure. I only know that it makes me feel outmoded. Like Saturn Street.”

“Saturn Street?”

“Some dead generation's idea of the future, getting yellow around the edges: that's me.”

The light changed. We crossed Olympic. On the left, Ships aimed its fins at the stars. I wished we'd gone there instead of the place on Third Street.

 

We stopped at a video store and rented
Forbidden Planet,
which Phil had been urging me to see. He was just sliding the cassette into the VCR when the phone rang.

“Hello?” he said. “Hi! Yeah, we just got back. No, I can talk.” A long pause. “And what did you tell him?”

A smile. A laugh.

“Perfect. By the way, I ran into Kein today.” Pause. “The same as ever. Yes. Listen, I'd better go. Yeah. So I'll see you around five, okay? Good deal. Bye. I know. Bye.”

He hung up. “Justin,” he said, aiming the remote control at the television.

“Oh,Justin,”Isaid.

Forbidden Planet
began. I had trouble following its plot, which seemed to borrow heavily both from Freud and
The Tempest.
Early on, however, my ears perked up when one of the astronauts lifted a shiny chrome microphone to his lips and uttered the memorable words, “Blastermen, activate your scopes.”

“So that's where you heard it,” I said.

“Heard what?”

“That line you quoted on the way to the clinic.”

“Oh, yeah. I guess. I didn't remember.”

His eyes were fixed on the set. Very lightly I touched him on the shoulder; he tensed; perhaps I left my hand there a fraction of a second too long before taking it away.

Simple as that, I had my answer.

As soon as the movie ended, I got up. “Well, it's nearly three,” I said. “I'd better be going.”

“What, you're expected somewhere?”

“No, but you're probably tired.”

“I'm not tired.”

“Even so, you'll want to rest.”

“Jerry—”

“You'll want to be fresh when Justin comes.”

Phil gazed at me.

“What?”

“Just ... so you're not tired.”

He looked surprised, as if he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. Then the surprised look gave way to a look of unaccountable sadness. Then he turned away.

“Whatever,” he said. Just that: “Whatever.” And returned his attention to the blank television screen.

“All right,” I said. “Well, see you tomorrow, I guess.”

“Sure.”

“Bye.”

I let myself out.

 

Back at the hotel I tried to work on my screenplay. But I couldn't concentrate, so I called the phone sex line. Nobody was on it except an old leather queen from Long Beach. Finally around four I got dressed again, went down to the garage, and climbed into my car. For about twenty minutes I drove aimlessly, wishing I could undo things, start again, go back to the real beginning, my very first lunch with Phil. And yet if I could have gone back to that first lunch, what would I have said differently? What would I have done differently? Probably nothing. My fear of illness still would have prevented me from making a move on Phil. And if his behavior today was any clue, Phil wouldn't have wanted me then any more than he did now, either because I was who I was, or because of the illness, or both.

About Justin I still wasn't sure. Yes, that “I know,” that “No, I can talk,” spoke of intimacy, even trust. But did intimacy mean they were lovers? For that matter, did I really even believe they were lovers? Perhaps I was playacting at suspicion in order to heighten the gratitude I'd feel when at some later date I discovered I was wrong. Or perhaps I wasn't wrong. Perhaps the
real
fake wasn't Phil's affair with Justin so much as my pretending not to believe in it in the first place. In such Rosemarys, and worse, I lost myself for the better part of an hour.

And of course, around five, I found myself turning onto Saturn Street. In retrospect, this seemed predestined. I parked in front of Phil's building. I didn't get out of the car. Some kids on bicycles were chasing a bunch of very black crows that hopped and lunged on the parched lawn. I watched them jump away from the wheels, hop back, jump away again, as if either they enjoyed their own torment, or were too stupid to realize that they could fly away.

A few minutes later a car swung round the corner, a battered white Corolla (I noted the make) that parked directly across from mine. A fellow I judged to be in his late twenties got out. He was carrying a grocery bag. Short, maybe five-seven, with windblown ragged hair, dark eyes, a faint beard. Sinewy and sexy. Locking his car door, he strolled over to Phil's building and rang the buzzer. The gate opened. He went in. It was the last I would see of Justin for a very long time.

I looked at the clock. I told myself I would wait fifteen minutes to see if he had left. But fifteen minutes later he hadn't left. Nor had he left thirty minutes after that.

It started getting darker outside. Switching on the ignition, I drove around the block three times. Each time I returned the Corolla was still there.

At six-thirty the Corolla was still there.

Not anything unusual. Not surprising that a buddy might stick around for an hour and a half.

I went back to the hotel. My jealousy had dissipated, swallowed up by a homesickness so dizzying I nearly swooned. Suddenly I wanted my apartment in New York—our apartment, Julian's and mine. Usually I tried not to think about Julian, for the simple reason that thinking about him made me want to talk to him, which I couldn't do. But now I missed him so much that I did a dangerous thing: I took his picture out from the drawer of the bedside table. I always kept his picture in the drawer of the bedside table because even though I couldn't bear to look at it, I also couldn't bear sleeping without it nearby.

And suddenly, there he was: Julian. Gray-streaked hair, big reddish nose, that weird half smile he affected because he was embarrassed by his teeth. “There's nothing wrong with your teeth,” I always told him. But if I have to be honest, like mine, they were slightly yellowed, the result of a wonder drug his mother and my mother and half the mothers of the 1960s had been given during their pregnancies: another outmoded stab at the future.

Nine months, two weeks, and four days had now passed since the afternoon Julian had done away with himself; nine months, one week and two days since the police had found his body, dragging the river...

Maudlin emotion flooded me. “Julian,” I said to the picture, “oh, Julian, why'd you leave me?”—sounding strange even to myself, like someone in a play, or someone trying to sound like someone in a play. Even where my own emotions were concerned, I had trouble distinguishing the genuine from the counterfeit. I wasn't sure whether this sudden flood of grief was an alias for admitting (as I now had to admit) that I'd fallen in love with Phil, or whether my jealousy where Justin was concerned was a front for pent-up grief, or both. The mask and the face fused to the point of being indistinguishable.

It occurred to me, then, that telling Phil about Julian's suicide might be the trump card I hadn't thought of; the express train to winning his sympathy, even his love. Or would that constitute misuse of Julian's memory? Unfortunately, the only person I could have asked that question was Julian.

I put the photograph away. I redialed the phone sex line. It was busier than before. A fellow called Tim invited me to a jack-off party in Highland Park. Having jotted down his address, I got in the car and drove along freeways and winding hill roads to his house, rang the doorbell, found myself standing face to face with a six-foot-three albino, naked except for two nipple rings and a hoop through his foreskin. And so I turned around, I got back in my car, I drove to the hotel and redialed the phone sex line. Sometimes brutality is the only antidote for sorrow.

But I found no one. You never do in such situations. Even through the telephone, people smell panic. And they run from it.

Around one in the morning there was another botched rendezvous. The fellow, having opened his front door and looked me over, backed away. “I think I've changed my mind,” he said.

“No problem,” I said.

He shut the door in my face.

I got in the car and switched on the radio. A late-night talk show, the opposite of Dr. Delia. No screeners. The people who called could talk about anything they wanted.

“But if the physical is natural, and the natural is good,” a young woman was saying.

“I don't understand your point, Sarah.”

“I'm talking about religion. I'm talking about faith. In the body.”

“Why do you insist on using these relative terms? What does ‘natural' mean? What does ‘good' mean?”

“Yes, I agree. I don't know what they mean. And that's why when they say, “It's not nice to fool Mother Nature,' then what I want to ask is, If the physical is good, why can't we just put two and two together? Love is nature and God is love. Death is nature and God is death. Why can't we connect them?”

I switched off the radio. Not surprisingly, I was back on Saturn Street.

The Corolla was gone.

I kept driving. At the Circus of Books, I rounded up three videos I'd never seen before and took them all back to the hotel. It was now two-fifteen in the morning. Speeded up, all that ordinary sexual gesturing looked Tourretic, spastic. The liquid flow of fucking became hummingbird flight. Cocks shot into mouths like pistons. Semen flew out in spores. Nonetheless I never took my finger off the fast-forward button. I wanted the world hurried up; a different scale of time.