Goldenboy (20 page)
“Silver Lake is -
far away,” she said, tentatively, looking at her husband. Then, more
confidently she added, “The sofa folds out and there’s a bathroom down here.”
“Well, I’m going to
bed,” Mr. Mandel said “You want to stay Henry, stay.”
“Thank you,” I said
to his back.
Mrs. Mandel opened
a closet and pulled out some sheets and blankets. She put them on the couch.
“It folds out,” she
said.
“Thanks.”
We looked at each
other, then she looked at Josh. “Go to bed, Josh.”
“In a minute, Mom,”
he said. “I’ll just help Henry with the couch.”
Defeated, she
murmured her good-nights and slipped out of the room. We listened to her
footsteps as she climbed the stairs.
“What a little brat
you are,” I said.
“It isn’t over yet,
you know,” Josh said.
“I know. I know.”
“It might go on
forever.”
“One day at a time,”
I said and nuzzled him. “I’m really tired.”
“Do you mind us not
sleeping together?”
“This is their
house,” I said. “Let’s make it easy on them. They’re probably upstairs awake as
it is.”
“How do you know
that?” he asked, smiling.
“Years of legal
training,” I replied and kissed him. He kept his lips closed. “Josh, that’s not
how to kiss.”
“My saliva,” he
said, biting his lower lip. “It might carry the virus.”
“In negligible
amounts, if at all,” I replied. “Let’s not let this thing run our lives.”
We kissed again,
properly.
“Go to bed, Josh,
and let your parents get some sleep.”
He pulled himself
up from the floor and said, “You know what’s really going to drive them crazy,
is when it sinks in that you’re not Jewish.”
I smiled, then,
remembering, asked, “Josh, the night Jim tried to kill himself and you called
me, you didn’t actually speak to me, did you?”
He shook his head. “No,
I hung up before you answered. Why?”
“Because someone
else called, too,” I said, “and I now know who it was.”
“Is it important?”
“Could be,” I
replied. “Good night, Josh.”
“I love you,” he
said, and slipped quietly from the room. I watched the last embers spark and
burn themselves out. When I finally arranged myself on the couch, my last
conscious thought was not of Josh but of Jim Pears.
“You want a cup?”
he asked.
“Thank you.” I
studied him. Short and slender, he so resembled Josh that it was like looking
forty years into the future.
“You want some
cake?” Mr. Mandel asked, unwrapping a crumb cake.
“No thanks,” I
replied. It made my teeth ache just to look at it.
He caught my
expression. “I have a sweet tooth,” he said. “So does Joshua.”
“He likes
chocolate,” I volunteered, remembering a box of chocolate cookies I’d seen at
his apartment.
“Anything
chocolate,” Mr. Mandel agreed. “And marzipan. He likes that.”
He brought two cups
of coffee to the table and then went back to the counter for his piece of cake.
We sat down. He blew over the top of his coffee before sipping it. I noticed
the thin gold wedding band he wore. The kitchen was filled with light and
papered in a light blue wallpaper with a pattern of daisies. Copper aspic molds
decorated the walls. All the appliances — refrigerator, microwave, dishwasher,
Cuisinart — were spotlessly clean and new- looking. We were sitting at a little
pine table.
“Your house,” I
said, tentatively, “is very nice.”
“Selma,” he
replied, referring to his wife, “puts a lot of work into it. She wallpapered
this room by herself.”
“It looks
professional.”
“You sure you’re
not hungry? There’s cereal, eggs.”
“No, I don’t eat
much.”
He looked at me
appraisingly. “You are on the thin side. So, you live up in San Francisco.”
“Not exactly. I
live in a little town down the bay. It’s where Linden University is located.”
“Yes, Linden
University,” he said, impressed. “You go to school there?”
“Law school.”
“Good,” he said,
taking a bite of his cake. “I wish I could get Joshie interested in something
like law school.”
“He’s still pretty
young.”
This was the wrong
thing to say. Mr. Mandel glared at me and then pressed the bottom of his fork
into the little crumbs of sugar that had fallen from the cake to the plate.
“Mr. Mandel,” I
began.
“Listen,” he said
wearily. “We talked enough last night. We’ll talk again. For now, let’s just
enjoy our coffee.”
“Sure.”
We enjoyed our
coffee for five tense minutes. At the end of that time Mrs. Mandel came in,
wearing a padded floral bathrobe and black Chinese slippers. She said her
good-mornings and offered me breakfast.
“He doesn’t eat,”
her husband informed her.
“But you should,”
she said. “You’re so thin.”
Our discussion of
my weight was cut short by Josh’s appearance. He was wearing a ratty plaid
bathrobe, the original belt of which had apparently been lost and was replaced
by a soiled necktie. His hair was completely disheveled, his glasses sat
halfway down his nose and he cleared his throat loudly. Ignoring us, he poured
himself a cup of coffee. He cut a piece of crumb cake which he ate at the
counter, and then announced, “I’m starving.”
The rest of us, who
had been watching him, transfixed, came back to life.
“Good morning,
Josh,” his father said acerbically.
“Good morning,” he
replied crankily.
“What do you want,
Joshie?” his mother asked.
“Scrambled eggs,”
he said, “with cheese. And matzoh brei. And sausage.”
“Sausage he wants
with matzoh brei,” Mr. Mandel said, smiling at me. I smiled back, feeling like
a complete intruder.
Josh smiled at me,
too. That smile packed a lot of meaning and it was lost on no one. “How did you
sleep, Henry?”
“Fine,” I replied.
“Not me,” he said. “I
missed you.”
Mr. Mandel said, “You
say this to hurt your mother.”
“Shut up, Sam,”
Mrs. Mandel snapped. “Get me the eggs out of the refrigerator, Josh.” She
turned to me and said, in a quavering voice, “You eat, too, Henry. You’re too
thin.”
Mr. Mandel rose
noisily from the table and left the room. Somewhere in the house a door slammed
shut. Mrs. Mandel looked at us and said, “He’s - it’s going to take time.” Then
she began to weep.
*****
I called Tony Good,
got his answering machine, and left a message that I wanted to see him. Josh
came into the room and sat on the ottoman at the foot of my chair.
“Who was that?” he
asked.
“Business,” I
replied, not wanting to have to explain Tony Good to Josh. There were enough Tony’s
in the world — Josh would encounter one of them eventually. “You’re full of
little surprises,” I added.
“You mean about not
sleeping well.”
I nodded.
“They have to get
used to the idea,” he replied, but his eyes were uncertain.
“You’re right.” We
looked at each other. “I have a confession to make “
“What?”
“I never told my
parents.”
He cocked his head
and stared at me. “You didn’t? Why not?”
“I guess the easy
answer is that they died before I got around to it,” I replied. “But the honest
answer is — I was afraid.”
He scooted forward
on the ottoman so that our knees touched and said, “I can’t believe you’re
afraid of anything.”
“No? Well, I try to
stay outraged and that keeps me from being afraid. But—” I put my hand on his
leg, “—I don’t think that’s going to work with how I feel about you.”
He put his hand on
mine. “You’re not afraid of me.”
“Not of you,” I
replied, “for you. I can’t stand the idea that anyone or anything might hurt
you.”
He smiled and
seemed, suddenly, older, quite my equal. “Don’t think of me as a job, Henry.
You don’t need a reason to love me.”
*****
Just as I got to
the door of Larry’s house, it opened and I found myself face-to-face with a
young woman carrying a clipboard.
“Excuse me,” she
said, and stepped aside to let me pass. Larry was standing behind her with two
mugs in his hand. “Goodbye, Larry,” she told him. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Thanks Cindy.”
“Goodbye,” she said
to me in a pleasant tone.
“Goodbye,” I
answered, puzzled. When she left I asked Larry who she was.
“My travel agent,”
he said, heading into the kitchen. I followed him. “Where have you been?”
“Are you going
somewhere?”
“My question gets
priority,” he replied, rinsing the mugs in the sink and setting them in the
dish rack. In his Levis and black turtleneck he looked spectrally thin.
“It’s sort of a
long story.”
“Tell me while I
fix myself something to eat. Do you want anything?”
Mrs. Mandel’s ponderous
breakfast was sitting in my stomach. “No.”
I told Larry about
the previous night’s proceedings while he constructed an omelet. He brought it
to the table where I joined him. Before he ate, he swallowed a fistful of
vitamins, washing them down with cranberry juice. He cut an edge of the egg and
ate it, chewing slowly but without much apparent pleasure.
“Josh sounds like a
very smart boy,” he said when I related
Josh’s parting
comment to me.
“Don’t say boy. It
makes me feel like a child molester.”
Larry smiled. “Twenty-two
is several years past the age of consent,” he replied. “And you should stop
thinking of yourself as an old man.’’
“I suppose. Anyway,
I’m relieved that Josh didn’t have anything to do with Brian Fox’s murder.’’
Larry set down his
fork. “You’re still thinking about that?’’
“Do you remember
the night Jim Pears tried to kill himself?” I asked.
“How could I
forget,” he replied, grimly.
“The phone rang
three times. The first time it was a drunk who told me that Jim was innocent.
The second time it was the jail. The third time the caller hung up before I
could answer.” I poured myself a cup of coffee from the pot on the table. “I
thought that the first caller was Josh.’’
“Why?” Larry asked,
finishing his meal.
“I’d talked to him
earlier and it was clear he wasn’t telling the truth about where he’d been when
Brian was killed. I just thought, I don’t know, that he was trying to relieve
his guilty conscience, but — ‘‘ I sipped the coffee, “ — this guy flirted with
me.”
“Really?” Larry
asked, amused.
“It was strange in
the context. But I still thought it was Josh. Well, Josh did call that night,
but he was the third caller, the one who hung up before I could answer the
phone.”
Larry’s eyebrow
arched above his eye. “Do you know who the first caller was?”
“I think it was
Tony Good,” I replied.
Larry looked at me
closely and said, “Why?”
“Something he said
at the Zanes’ party as you were leaving with him. Some words he used were the
same words the first caller used,” I said, remembering that on both occasions
Good had said, You’re kind of cute, Henry. You gotta lover! “And the way he
insisted that I take his number. What I don’t understand, though, is why Tony
Good would know anything about Brian Fox’s murder.”
Larry lit a
cigarette. He squinted slightly as the smoke rose into his eyes and said, “It
was Tony.”
“How do you know
that?”
“He called again
that night,” Larry replied, tapping an ash into his plate.
“Why didn’t you
tell me then?”
He shook his head. “I
didn’t know he’d called before,” he said, “and I wouldn’t have had any reason
to think he’d be calling you.”
“But he would call
you?” I asked.
Larry nodded. “I’ve
known Tony for a long time,” he said, smiling without humor. “And in many
capacities. A drunken call in the middle of the night is about par for the
course.”
“What did he tell
you?”
“Nothing,” Larry
said. “I mean nothing about you or Jim Pears. We just talked.” He looked at me
guiltily.
“You’re sure?”
“Believe me, Henry,
I had no idea.” He pushed his plate away. “I told him I was sick.” He shrugged.
“That’s what we talked about.” He paused. “He went on a crying jag, but I’m
sure he didn’t mean anything by it.”
“You didn’t answer
my question about whether you’re taking a trip.”
He picked up his
plate and took it to the sink. “As a matter of fact,” he said, sticking his
cigarette beneath the tap, “I’m going to Paris on Friday.”
“Day after
tomorrow?”
He nodded, his back
still turned to me.
“Why?”
“To check myself in
at an AIDS clinic,” he replied, coming back to the table.
“Isn’t this kind of
precipitous?”
He rolled up one
sleeve of his turtleneck and held his arm out. There was what appeared to be a
purple welt on his forearm, but it wasn’t a welt. It was a lesion. I stared at
it.
“Kaposi?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he
said. “The first one appeared two weeks ago.”