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She stopped and peered more closely at my face.
"Cara mia,
are you all right? You're looking more than usual like the French leftenant's woman."

"I just had a heart attack."

"Come on, I'll make you hot chocolate." See? Very Mom-is-it-lunch-yet. "I brought you a tin of shortbread. Twenty-two bucks at Neiman's. Now this
girl.
Rosy as a cheerleader, practically carrying pompoms. I was wet all day."

She steered me across the terra-cotta terrace, through the peeling colonnade and into the musty cool of the house. I tried on a pouting scowl, but Mona was off, full of raptures about her little bimbette from Torrance. In the kitchen I sat at the zinc-top table, a palimpsest of dents and scratches, while Mona free-floated about, putting the milk to boil.

The workshop she speaks of is Introduction to Performance, a grab-bag of mime and movement and "auto-exploration," thirty dollars for three Saturday sessions, a veritable magnet for the egregiously untalented. But it keeps the wolf from the door of AGORA—our feisty open space in Venice that we reclaimed from a ball-point pen factory, famous throughout the netherworld of Performance, with its own FBI file to boot. Except "our" is not exactly right. It's Mona's. I am no longer an impresario.

"Someone was looking for you today," says Mona, mixing the cocoa.

"A rabid fan, perhaps."

"Some guy.Looked like he sold insurance. He came by during the break—said nobody'd seen you around your apartment since Christmas."

"Probably sent to cancel my disability. I've been getting these 'Aren't you dead yet' letters from Sacramento."

We took the tray of chocolate and biscuits into the parlor. Through the arched gallery windows the sunset had turned to dusty rose. Mona went to the woodbox, knelt, and laid a fire, more butch than I. I cozied up in an afghan as old as the shedding velvet that covered the swayback sofa. No one has bothered to upgrade anything at the beach house, not for decades. When Gray dies this last piece of the Baldwin vastness will be disposed of, and then some starlet can swath it in white upholstery, so it looks like everyone else's house. Meanwhile the tattiness and furred edges are just my cup of tea.

Once the fire is crackling, Mona snuggles in under the afghan with me. "You know," she says conspiratorially, "we don't have anything set for tomorrow night. Queen Isabella canceled—the piece isn't ready. If you just did forty-five minutes, you'd save our ass." I begin to shake my head slowly, as if I have a slight crick in my neck. "Oh, Tommy, why not?" says Mona, more pettish now. "It'd do you good. You're stronger than you realize."

I turn and give her a withering look. Mona is of the persuasion, diametrically opposed to the "Aren't you dead yet" theory, that I am not really
sick
sick, and thus should push my limits. "My life on the stage is like a dream to me now," I reply in a dusky Garbo voice. "I have put away childish things."

"People still call and ask, 'When are you having Miss Jesus?' I swear, we could fill the place three months running."

Mona sighs. She knows I am not convinceable. Not that I'm unsympathetic. I understand the longing for a breakthrough gig that sets the whole town buzzing. In the first two years of AGORA, before I retired, Miss Jesus was a sensation whenever I did it. Bomb threats would pour in, and church groups from Pacoima would picket back and forth in the parking lot, practically speaking in tongues. Mona and I were devastated to have only ninety-nine seats, with ten standees additional permitted by the fire laws, because at the height of the outrage we could have packed two-fifty in.

I lay my head on her shoulder and offer her the plate of shortbread. She shakes her head no thanks. We sit there slumped against each other, watching the fire, not needing to talk. I love the smoky elusiveness of Mona's perfume, a scent she swears is the very same Dietrich wears, a beauty tip passed in whispers through the shadowy dyke underground. She seems more pensive than I today, unusual for her, an action girl. I think she's about to ask me something about my illness, like how do I stand it, but she says, "Do you ever think about your brother?"

I shoot her the most baleful look I can summon. "In a word, no."

"But don't you ever wonder? He's prob'ly got kids—" She waves her hands in a circular motion, flailing with possibilities. "I mean he could be
dead,
and you wouldn't even know."

If anything I grow more icily impassive. "I believe I'm the one who's passing away around here."

"Don't be defensive. I just wondered."

"Mona, how is it you are the only person in the world who knows this person exists, and yet you forget the punch line. He
loathes
me. I make his skin crawl. I have not imagined these things. He said them, over and over for years, knuckles white with passion. Get it?"

She pulls her head slightly in under the afghan, rather like a blond turtle. Cautiously she observes, "People change."

I scramble out of my side of the blanket. Kneeling almost on top of her, I push my face close and hiss: "Girl, what's your problem today? I did not request an Ann Landers consultation. I
hope
he's dead, frankly, may he rot in hell. And I hope his orphan children are begging with bowls in the street—"

"Sorry I brought it up."

"Well, it's a little late for that now, isn't it?"

I'm actually feeling rather juiced, more energy than I've had in days. Mona knows I'm not going to actually pummel her. I'm a total wimp, abuse-wise. She may even think it's good for me to blow off steam. I am speechless though as I pant with rage, my head reeling with images of Brian. Midfield, running for daylight. Serving Mass with Father Donegan. Riding away laughing in his first new car, surrounded by his mick buddies, leaving me in the driveway eating their exhaust. Not even the really painful stuff, the punishment and the hatred, and still I want to let out a primal scream, as if I know I have to die before all of this is really put to rest.

Then we hear a knocking on the screen door in the kitchen. And the really strange thing is this: suddenly Mona looks terrified. As I clamber off the sofa to go and answer, her face is ashen, the hand on my arm beseeching, as if I am about to let a monster in.

I
know
who it is. I zap Mona with a perplexed frown—what's
she
on—as I amble into the kitchen. "Coming!"

Gray stands resolutely on the back stoop, a bag of groceries in either arm, which was why he couldn't let himself in. The beach house is never locked, unlike the compounds on either side, which have laser rays and aerial surveillance. "Did I say I needed anything?" I ask as I bang the door wide.

"Just a few staples," he says, trooping by me to set the bags on the zinc table. Then turns and searches my face. "How you feeling?"

Earnest Gray, in drab and rumpled Brooks Brothers mufti, his wispy vanishing hair somehow making him look younger than his fifty-one years. But then WASPs on the high end age in an absentminded fashion, like the old shoes they never throw away. In addition to which, Gray has been effectively retired his whole life. He is also the least vain man I have ever known.

"I had heart failure coming up from the beach, but otherwise I'm dandy. How much was all this?" I grab my jacket from behind the door to pull out my wallet, but Gray, who is already unloading muffins and ginger ale, waves vaguely, as if money is something vulgar that gentlemen don't discuss. "Gray, you can't keep buying me groceries."

And I wave twenty dollars by his shoulder, but he has that maddening WASP habit of pretending things aren't happening. "I thought I'd barbecue tonight," he says with boyish enthusiasm, and I lay the twenty on the table, in no-man's-land.

The irony is, Gray doesn't have a lot to spare, despite being the last of one of the nine families that owned California. There's a trust, of course, and coupons to clip, and the beach house is his for life, as well as the gardener's cottage on the ranch where he's lived for twenty-five years. But none of this amounts to very much actual cash, because the old man poured almost everything into his wacko foundation, funding white supremacist day camps and fag-bash seminars, that sort of thing. Still, with all those connections no one ever expected Gray to grow up to be a loser, unable to make his own harvest in the Reagan fields of money. On the contrary, he's spent most of his life giving away his share, as a sort of patron saint of the avant-garde.

"That one he injected looks smaller to me," observes Gray, slapping a couple of steaks on the counter. He's talking about the eggplant-purple lesion on my right cheek, the size of a dime. This is the only public sign of my leprous state, and on my last visit the doctor gave it a direct hit of chemo. It doesn't look any different to me. Gray is the only one who ever mentions my lesion. Everyone else steps around it, like a turd on the carpet. "And look, we'll make some guacamole," he says, triumphantly producing three dented avocadoes.

Then Mona is standing in the doorway, giving a hopeless impersonation of demure. Gray spots her and instantly wilts. "Oh I'm sorry," he murmurs fretfully, unable to meet our eyes, gazing with dismay at all the groceries he's unpacked, as if he's come to the wrong place.

"Listen, I was just leaving, you guys go ahead," declares Mona magnanimously.

"Don't be silly, there's plenty," I say, perversely enjoying their twin discomfort. They don't exactly dislike each other, but they're like in-laws from different marriages, unrelated except by bad shit.
"You
make the margaritas," I command Mona with a bony finger.

And because I am the sick boy, what can they do? Guilt has gotten more dinners on the table than hunger ever dreamed of. Mona goes right to the liquor cabinet, and Gray is already peeling the avocadoes. Like a veritable matchmaker I decide to give them some time alone and run up to my room for a sweater.

First thing I do, I check my cheek in the mirror. Maybe he's right, one edge is faintly lighter, but nothing to write home about. It's not like I could cruise a boy at the Malibu Safeway. I move to shut the balcony doors, catching a glimpse of the gibbous moon as it flings its pearls on the water. Then I grab my red-checked crew-neck from the dresser and shrug it on.

Though I only brought a single duffel bag with me here when I came just after New Year's, right away this place felt more like home than my own place ever did. My bleak one-bedroom in West Hollywood, with a view out over four dumpsters, looks like a garage sale driven indoors by rain. Nothing nice or comfortable, not a nesting person's space by any stretch. Whereas here I have a lovely overstuffed chaise across from the bed, swathed in a faded Arcadian chintz, and a blue-painted wicker table by the window with shelves underneath for books. The ancient curtains are swagged and fringed and look like they would crumble at the touch. If it sounds a bit Miss Havisham, don't forget the sea breeze blowing through clean as sunlight every day.

Above the mahogany bed is a poster of Miss Jesus. The cross is propped against the wall at AGORA, and I'm leaning against it in full drag, pulling up my caftan to show a little leg. The expression on my face can only be called abandoned. My crown of thorns is cocked at a rakish angle. In the lower right-hand corner, in Gothic script, it says
"Oh Mary!"

This is only the third time I've managed to put Mona and Gray together, and I find myself excited by the prospect of spending an evening, just us three. The two of them have come to be my most immediate family, somewhat by elimination, my friends all having died, but I couldn't have chosen better. I realize I want them to know each other as well as I know them, for when it gets bad. When I'm curled in a ball and can't play anymore, sucking on a respirator, and then of course when it's over. They'll be good for each other, so opposite in every way.

I've forgiven Mona already for bringing up Brian. It clearly won't happen again; she's not
that
dumb. The memory overload has passed, and once again my brother has faded into the septic murk of the past. What surprises me is this: as I trot down the spiral stair and hear my two friends laughing in the kitchen, I am so happy that some part of my heart kicks in and takes back the curse.
I hope you're not dead and your kids are great.
That's all. Good-bye. Fini.

Gray is regaling Mona with the tale of his three Baldwin aunts—Cora, Nonny, and Foo. Mona is riveted. These three estimable ladies, maiden sisters of Gray's grandfather, the old rancher tycoon himself, had the beach house built for themselves and resided here every summer for sixty years. I who have heard this all before never tire of the least detail.

We bear the steaks and our margaritas out the kitchen door to the side terrace, where Gray lights the gas barbecue. At the other end of the arbor we can hear the fountain playing. The moon is all the light we need. It's too cold to actually eat outside, but for now there's something delicious about being together around the fire, knocking down tequila and imagining the aunts.

"They used to put on plays and musicales, right here," says Gray, gesturing down the arbor, then to the gentle slope of lawn beside it. "We'd all sit out there. I don't remember the plays, except Foo wrote them. They were very peculiar."

"And none of these women ever married?" Mona stares over the rim of her drink into the shadows of the arbor, willfully trying to conjure them. "Were they ugly?"

"Oh no, they were all very striking. Wonderful masses of hair, even when they were old ladies. And they wore these flowing gowns like Greek statues."

"They sound like Isadora Duncan," I say.

"They sound like dykes," Mona declares emphatically, then turns to Gray. "Weren't they?"

I feel this sudden protective urge toward Gray, as he lays the steaks sizzling on the grill. He has barely ever admitted to me that he's gay himself. There's not a whole lot to admit, I gather. He seems to carry on his rounded shoulders centuries of repression. But now he shrugs easily as he slathers on the barbecue sauce. "You'd have to ask them," he declares. "I never really gave it a thought. Something tells me they never really did either."