South of Broad (25 page)

“You helped yourself to the wine, I hope.”

“Emptied the open bottle, got a head start on a second.”

“Why do we drink so much in Charleston?” I pour myself a splash of Hennessy.

“Because we’re human,” she says. “Like everyone else. And the older we get, the more human we get. The more human we get, the more painful everything becomes. That was a bad scene today, wasn’t it?”

“It was memorable.”

“What happened after I left? I’m terrified to know the answer. But I need to know.”

“Chad bled to death in his sister’s arms. Fraser was like the Virgin Mary, holding Chad in the pietà style. Before he succumbed, he looked at me and said, ‘Leo, thou has a very small peter. And upon this rock I shall build my church.’ Ike and Betty are patrolling the streets hunting down the murderess. Bloodhounds are roaming South of Broad.”

“Why’d I ask you a serious question?”

I take a seat in the chair beside her. Both of us stare out the Palladian window at the rooftops that run together until the steeple of St. Michael’s interrupts their irregular march.

“Your punch was a good one. At first we thought Chad’s nose was broken. As you might expect, he did not handle public humiliation well. He denied that he was having an affair. Claimed you were crazy. But the good news is he’s having you tested next week, and you’ll soon be getting shock treatments and living in a padded cell.”

“He said that?”

“No, but those were the implications.”

“Did he go to the hospital?”

“Don’t know. But he went somewhere. In a big hurry.”

“He went to see that Brazilian bitch, didn’t he?”

“He didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

“How long’ve you known?” Molly asks, still not looking at me.

“Unfair question. I’m a columnist. I hear every rumor, true or not. If Mayor Riley wears a dress to a city council meeting. If the head of the NAACP has a sex-change operation. If your father turns his house into a whorehouse. I hear it all.”

“Sarah Ellen Jenkins saw you going into Chad’s office yesterday,” she says, looking at me with enough fury to put me on fair notice that I need to change my tactics. “Did you discuss his affair?”

“I told him the rumors that I’d been hearing.”

“Why didn’t you come to me? Our friendship’s a lot stronger than yours and Chad’s has ever been. Tell me that’s a lie.”

“That’s the Lord’s truth.”

“You’ve never liked Chad,” she says.

“That’s not true,” I defend myself. “I had to get accustomed to him.”

“Which part?”

“The asshole factor. It’s a strong genetic trait that runs in all males in the family. He denied having the affair, by the way.”

“Did you meet the Brazilian girl?” Molly asks.

I flinch when I nod my head.

“Was she beautiful?”

“She had the loveliest mustache. It covered her harelip quite nicely. She could use a better-fitting set of dentures. Her breath smelled like a bag of shrimp left out in the heat for a month.”

“That pretty, huh?”

“Made me wish I’d been born in Brazil.”

She slaps my hand hard, and we both laugh. We look out again at the white steeple and hear the bells of St. Michael’s tolling the midnight hour. In her chair, she shifts to the left and props her bare feet on my ankles. The shock of her flesh on mine sends a jolt right through me.

“Do you remember our dance Friday night?”

“No,” I lie.

“Do you remember how we kissed once we got free from the others?”

“No,” I say again.

“Sheba saw it,” Molly says. “She thinks we kiss pretty good.”

“I was drunk. I don’t remember a thing.”

“Let me tell you about it, then, Leo. You kissed me like you meant it. Like I was the only woman in the world you cared anything about. You kissed me like you wanted my mouth around yours forever. You’re only the second man I’ve ever kissed. I liked it a lot. Now you say something.”

“I’m glad you liked it.” I rise to pour a little more Cognac. “It was one of the great moments of my life. I’ve dreamed about kissing you since we met. Never thought it would happen. But we’re both married. Both of us. Me in name only, but you’re really married, and I happen to know you still love Chad. I know something else that you probably can’t even imagine now: he still loves you, and he always will. He’s a guy, Molly. He’s got a dick. It makes us all act nuts.”

With surprising grace and speed, Molly rises from her chair and sits in my lap. She sets her wineglass down, wraps her arms around my neck, and puts her face close to mine. Her eyes are clear and pale and determined. The whole scene feels dangerous and wonderful, like a prayer I threw at God in high school has finally arrived in his range of hearing.

“Do you think Starla is ever coming back to you, Leo?” she says. “A year is a long time to be gone. She used to run off for a month or two. It’s gotten serious, and I know it bothers you.”

“She calls me every week, Molly. No, that’s not true now. It was true at first. Now she calls me once a month, sometimes two months. Cries a lot. Feels guilty. Asks me to wait for her. I say, ‘You’re my wife. I’ll always wait for you.’ Which makes her mad for some reason. As though that was the last answer she was waiting for. Lots of times, she’ll start screaming. Tells me the number of men she’s sleeping with. Tells me their names. Their professions. Their wives’ names. Then she catches herself. She comes back to herself. The real Starla. Cries again. Feels guilty. And on it goes into the night. It always ends the same way. She passes out.”

“Leo.” Molly kisses my nose. “What a darling, foolish man. No, let me change that. Let me be a little more accurate: what a stupid, stupid,
stupid
man.”

“I knew what I was getting into,” I say, then think better about it. “Or I was foolish enough to think I did.”

“I need you to answer a question,” Molly says. “I’d like a serious answer.”

“Go ahead.”

“Are you in love with me?”

I twist uncomfortably in the chair and try to get up, but she pins my shoulders and glares at me with an expression that brooks no opposition.

“I thought I answered that Friday night. Why do you keep asking? Why now? Why tonight? Ask me on the happiest day of your marriage with Chad. Ask me on the day you think you have the perfect marriage with the finest man in the city limits. But it’s not right to ask it now. Look, you just smashed his nose, got blood all over his Porsche, and canceled his trip to Brazil for Mardi Gras.”

She hits me on the shoulder, then cries out in pain. She used the same fist to bust open Chad’s schnozzola, and I think she is going to weep from sheer pain.

“Let me see that hand.” I lean over and turn on a lamp. Her hand is swollen and turning purple. Gently, I feel for broken bones, but cannot tell if there has been real damage. I did notice that Chad was lucky Molly had punched him with her right fist: the two-carat wedding ring she wears on her left hand could have put out one of his eyeballs.

“You’ll need to get that X-rayed tomorrow,” I say.

“Are you really in love with me?” she insists. “Answer my damn question. Everyone has always teased me about it. Especially Fraser, and even Chad. Hell, Starla used to tease me about it in the early years, when she actually lived with you.”

“I’ve loved you since the day I first met you, like I told you the other night,” I tell her.

“Why? That’s stupid. That’s unheard-of. You didn’t know me, or one thing about me.”

“I knew your style. The way you carried yourself. Your courtesy and attentiveness to everything going on around you. I loved your defense of Fraser the day I first met you. I knew you were a match for Chad. A match for anyone. I felt your strength. Then there was your beauty, your extraordinary beauty. Does that answer your question, Molly, you pain in the ass? Does that mean you won’t punch me again?”

“If I punch you again, I’ll use the other hand.”

“Why are you sitting on my lap?” I ask her.

“Gosh, Leo,” she says, laughing. Reaching over, she turns off the lamp and we are staring at each other in dim moonlight. “Let’s put our heads together and try to figure this out as a team. Let’s look at the evidence. I have a fight with my philandering husband in front of my best friends. I bloody his nose and run home to wait for him. Silly me. I thought he’d come and apologize for putting me through such hell. But no, time goes by, and I realize he’s gone over to seek comfort in the arms of his piña colada. Do they drink piña coladas in Brazil?”

“Never been there.”

“So then I realize there’ll be no tender reconciliation, none of the sweet crap. So I take a walk to clear my head, and walk straight to your house. Like all of us, I know where you hide your spare key in the gutter spout, so I let myself in. I grabbed a bottle of wine, crawled into your bed, and slept for two hours. I felt safe. Relaxed. I got up and took a shower, washed my hair, made myself at home. At Starla’s dressing table, I used her cosmetics and makeup and perfume. Then I turned on the Braves game and waited for you to come home.”

“Who won the game?”

“Shut up,” she says. “The question in the air is still in the air. Why am I sitting in your lap?”

“You go first,” I suggest.

“Friday night, when Sheba caught us making out, she went back to the guesthouse. She came over for lunch. We talked a little girl talk. Turns out that Chad sneaked back to the guesthouse to hit on Sheba. Sheba told him it was one of the highest compliments she ever received. But she thought it a bit tacky to bang him while staying in his and his wife’s guesthouse. He admitted she had a point, and skulked back to his office. Big case, you know. Big,
big
case.”

“A gentle rebuff from Sheba. Chad, ever the gentleman.”

“We all know who Chad is,” says Molly. “We always have. He’s the only one among us who never pretended to be good. I always admired that about him. Chad’s view of the human race is a dark one. He’s finally convinced me. Now his Molly has changed. Ergo, you thick-skulled son of a bitch, that is why Molly presently finds herself on your lap.”

“Good forensic argument,” I say. “Bad idea.”

“Have you noticed lately, Leo, that I’ve been looking at you in the same way you’ve always looked at me?” She kisses me sweetly on my lips, on both cheeks, on the tip of my nose.

“I don’t want your anger at Chad to get hooked up to your feelings about me—in any way, shape, or form.”

“You don’t know a thing about women.”

“I know a few bad things about them,” I say. “I even know some good things.”

“No, listen to me. You’re a blank, a zero, when it comes to what makes a woman tick. Or what turns them on or off or puts them in neutral or overdrive or on cruise control or whatever the hell I’m trying to say.”

“Chad’s putting you through a hard time. May I make a suggestion?” I ask.

“Ah, an invitation to your boudoir at last.”

“No. Here’s what I’d like you to know: if Chad leaves you, if Starla leaves me as she’s threatened to do a thousand times, I’d rather be married to you than anyone in the world. I’ll never be good enough for you, and I know that better than anyone. But if that kiss the other night was the beginning, then I’d like that feeling to last the rest of our lives. Together.”

“What do we do in the meantime?”

“Let me make you some coffee,” I say. “Let’s go down to the kitchen. Because I have something important to tell you, something that’s going to change all our lives. I think it’ll prove whether Chad’s right about humanity—its darkness, its hopelessness—or it might prove that there is reason to hope, that we can be better than we were born to be.”

Molly kisses me a last time, but this one is sisterly, the sealing of a friendship, a door opening to the future. “Give me a hint. What’s going to turn us all toward the light? Where does this path to goodness begin?”

“San Francisco,” I say. “The Renegades ride again. We’re going out to find Trevor Poe. He’s dying of AIDS. We’re going to bring him home, Molly. We’re not going to let him die alone.”

PART THREE

CHAPTER 14
Pacific Heights

T
he West is both a great thirst and a dry, weatherless curiosity. In California, the mad, deep breath of deserts is never far away. The sky above San Francisco is often so dazzling a blue that it merits the overripe description of cerulean, or comparison to lapis lazuli. Its clouds are sea-born and formed in the odd depths of its mysterious bay, where the fog moves inland in a billion-celled, mindless creature, amoeba-shaped and poisonous, like a stillborn member of the nightshade family. Southern fogs calm me as they paint the marshes with their milk-stained fingers. The San Francisco fog is a silver-lined hunter of the predator class, and I always find it troubling. When I awaken to its fog horns, they sound like the exiled whimpering of a city in endless sexual distress.

As a Charlestonian, I know I am not supposed to bend a knee in admiration of a hill country of such amazing, brittle wildness. But San Francisco seduced me on my first visit to Trevor Poe’s flat on Union Street. In its profusion of roses and eucalyptus and palms, the city seems voluptuous and decadent in its very pores, a place that revels in folly and rolls around in the carcasses of human vice. The whole place feels graded, uplifted, maxed out; the views are all spectacular and aha-inducing. San Francisco is a city that requires a fine pair of legs, a city of cliffs misnamed as hills, honeycombed with a fine webbing of showy houses that cling to the slanted streets with the fierceness of abalones. You can spot a whale sounding in the waters between the Presidio and Sausalito in the morning, buy a live eel for lunch in Chinatown, see the Shakespeare Garden at Golden Gate Park in midafternoon, catch a wave in the Pacific along the Great Highway, inhale the unforgettable farts of sea lions on Pier 39, catch part of a gay-lesbian film festival at the Castro Theatre, get a book signed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books, buy a drink at the Top of the Mark. Trevor Poe gave us this astonishing city as a gift, once he abandoned us to our less glitzy lives in Charleston.

His place on Union Street served as a home away from home for all of us, a vacation wonderland. He opened his doors to us and proved an indefatigable lover and sightseer of his adopted city. So it feels like a homecoming to us as the jet lands in Oakland and a limousine transports us to the mansion on Vallejo Street owned by the producer, a man named Saul Marks, which he has offered to Sheba in her search for her twin. The house is Italianate with a view of the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, Sausalito, and the white linen majesty of the city itself. The laconic Irish chauffeur tells us to call him Murray.

“What did you have to do to get the producer to give you this house?” Betty asks Sheba, whistling as Murray helps us get our luggage inside the ornate entryway.

“I had to play with his little weenie,” Sheba replies. She gives Murray a lavish tip, then directs us to our various bedrooms. She apologizes as she sends me down into the entrails of the house, where I have a bedroom without windows, then says, “I’ve ordered in some Chinese. Meet up in the dining room after you unpack.”

When I make my way upstairs, I find my noisy group of friends gathered in front of a massive window watching the sun set against a cloudless Pacific in a wilderness of blue. The sun blisters the waters with a seething gold, then a flare or red, followed by a pink-fingered, rosy exit left.

Betty says, “Sunsets make me believe in God.”

Molly adds, “They make me know that one day I’m going to die.”

“Tell me why we brought Molly again?” Fraser smiles at her best friend and sister-in-law.

“Comic relief,” I suggest.

“It’s one more day we’ll never see again,” Molly says. “One day closer to our own demise.”

“I just think it’s prettier than shit,” Ike says, pouring a drink over at the bar. “I always noted that white people thought too much.”

As we feast on the takeout that is far superior to any Chinese food I’ve tasted in the South, we moan over dishes that we never had until Trevor brought us out to San Francisco in the early 1970s. Niles reminds me that I once outraged the minuscule Charleston Chinese community by claiming that all people of Chinese ancestry forgot how to cook as soon as they crossed the South Carolina state line; this was after my first two-week visit in Trevor’s flat, which served as my honeymoon with Starla.

Fraser says, “I’m wearing down. The liquor’s good, the vino’s great. But we’re out here for a reason, and I already miss my kids. Give me a job, Sheba. Tell me what to do tomorrow.”

Sheba hands us all copies of a long list of names. Her efficiency at this is real, and it’s moving. With rare patience, Sheba has waited for the proper moment before she springs into the business side of this hunt. From a beautiful doe-skin briefcase, she hands us each a folder filled with hints and possibilities and rumors that have accrued around the last sightings of Trevor.

“Betty and Ike, I’d like you to present yourself to the police department, tell them what you’re doing here, and ask them for any assistance possible. Leo is meeting with his columnist friend Herb Caen. The list contains the names of all the gay men who’ve been friends or lovers of Trevor’s over the past fifteen years. Or musicians who’ve played music with him. Or hostesses who hired him to play piano at their parties. I’d like my Junior Leaguers, Molly and Fraser, to track down any clues from this list. Let me show all of you something. This is a photograph of the last time I visited Trevor here.”

“Did you stay with Trevor?” Ike asks, studying the photograph.

“I’m a movie star, honey,” Sheba snorts. “I don’t do flats. I do penthouses at the top of the Fairmont.”

“What a peasant loser you are, Ike,” Molly teases. “To think that a movie star would even think about parking her butt in a flat.”

Sheba ignores Molly. “Remember, Trevor and I haven’t been close all these years. He kept in much better touch with all of you. We reminded each other of a hideous childhood we were both in a hurry to forget. I’ve pinned all of your assignments on your pillows. You’ve got the necessary maps and the folders. Some of you’ll be pounding the pavement for the first couple of days. That’s you, boys. One of the worst things about dying of AIDS is that you’re penniless at the end. You end up in a fleabag hotel at the end of the line.”

Fraser gets down to business again. “Who was the last person to see Trevor?”

“His doctor at the AIDS clinic in the Castro,” Sheba responds. “He told me Trevor had lost twenty pounds in the last two years.”

“Jesus!” Betty cries. “He was such a puny thing anyway.”

“Then he dropped off the face of the earth,” Sheba continues. “The last time he saw him the doctor treated Trevor for Kaposi’s sarcoma.”

“Oh, no,” Molly says. “That’s not good. That causes those sores and scales on the face.”

“What about Ben Steinberg? Georgie Stickney? Or Tillman Carson?” Betty asks. “They were three of his running buddies when Ike and I were here a couple of years ago.”

“All dead,” Sheba says. “All kids, and all dead.”

Molly rises from her chair and walks over to one of the extravagant windows that take in the lit-up grandeur of the nighttime city. Her silhouette is forlorn and round-shouldered, looking like one of those helpless witnesses who watch the Passion of Christ play out in those innumerable Renaissance paintings. Our group gathers in quiet solidarity around her. The city glitters beneath us like a prodigious swarm of fireflies. My eye catches the Golden Gate Bridge, which looks like a piece of jewelry linking two music boxes. A stringed trio of architecture, art, and hopelessness all gather up in perfect unity as we hover near our damaged friend.

Sheba looks at each of us and says, “Why don’t all of us go beddy-bye now?”

Ike says, “I haven’t wanted to bring this up, Sheba. I’ve been waiting for a good time, but there’s not going to be a good time: where’s your goddamn daddy?”

I watch as Sheba’s face contorts into sudden hatred, then she catches herself. “I don’t like to talk about that bastard. You know that, Ike.”

Ike says, “But you know why I have to ask, and you know why it’s important.”

I say, “We all got to know about your daddy over the years, and none of us has enjoyed it much.”

“If it hurts too much to answer, Sheba,” Molly says, “then don’t.”

“Not good enough, Molly,” Niles tells her. “We’ve got to know at least where he is.”

“You’re right,” Sheba says. “Here’s the short story: after my graduation from high school, he followed me out to L.A. I didn’t know it. But he is brilliant, smarter than anyone. I started working soon as an actress. He found me living in an apartment in Westwood. He raped me.”

“Don’t tell us any more,” Fraser says.

“No, the boys are right, all of you need to know. He held me prisoner, did lots of stuff, but no different from when I was a little girl. I learned to dissociate then. I did it again. Then he let me go, went to San Francisco, and did the same thing to Trevor. Next movie, I hired a bodyguard. My dad almost killed that poor man. What name was I to give to the cops? What description? He’s used a hundred names. Had red hair, gray hair, no hair. Wore beards, mustaches, goatees. Brown-eyed, blue-eyed, green-eyed. Turbaned. Yarmulke. Beret. Baseball cap.”

“Now. Where is he now?” Ike demands. “He’s stalked all of us over the years.”

“He’s dead, thank God. He finally made a mistake. Five years ago, I made that movie in New York. By then, I had enough bodyguards to take on the Secret Service. I was staying at a fancy high-rise. My dad came in disguised as a deliveryman. When he was stopped and questioned by the doorman, Dad killed the man by stabbing him in the heart. An alarm was sounded. He was overpowered. The murder was caught on security tapes. Jack Cross pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life without parole at Sing Sing. He went nuts. Got transferred to a high-security nuthouse, where he jumped off the roof. End of story. No one knows to this day that Jack Cross was my dad.”

“How do you know?” Betty asks. “We’ve got to know this for certain.”

“Jack Cross wrote me from prison,” Sheba says. “Almost every day.”

“Was that your dad’s real name?” Molly asks.

“No,” Sheba says. “When Trevor and I were born, he was named Houston Poe.”

“But you’re sure he’s dead?” Niles asks.

“I have his ashes in a vase in my place in Santa Monica,” Sheba says. “I should’ve said something to all of you before this. I try to pretend he never lived.”

“To bed,” Betty says, and we hug each other good night. “Do you mind if I check that story out?” Ike asks as he bear-hugs Sheba.

“Not at all, Ike,” Sheba says. “But I’ve got his ashes.”

“You’ve got someone’s ashes,” Ike says. “You may even have Jack Cross’s ashes. That doesn’t mean they’re your daddy’s.”

When I enter my windowless, claustrophobic quarters in the basement, I am pleased to discover good lighting and a comfortable bed and a wall full of carefully selected books. Sheba has typed out my instructions on a piece of heavy personal stationery and I read them as I undress.

1) Meet with Herb Caen at 9:00 A.M. for breakfast at Perry’s on Union Street. (Sheba will attend the meeting.) Very important he helps us.

2) Go to Trevor’s old address at 1038 Union Street and meet the new tenant, a lawyer named Anna Cole, to see if she knows anything about Trevor or his disappearance. Be flirtatious with her, Toad. Use the charm you claim you don’t have. Make notes of everything, whether you think it’s important or not.

3) Meet the group back at Washington Square Bar and Grill at one for lunch and comparison of notes.

Your favorite movie star, Sheba Poe

I turn out the lights and climb into bed, into a darkness that seems more than dark, living a life that feels much the same way.

W
hen Trevor first moved to San Francisco, he would tease us poor mortals who were doomed to live out our boring lives in South Carolina. He has always been a conversationalist of rare gifts, and in his first years in the city, he would call and talk to me for hours. I would marvel at his easy command of language and his jeweler’s eye for the precise and necessary detail. His first job was as a piano player at a bar called the Curtain Call in the theater district. To the surprise of none of us, he was a sensation from his first night. The great columnist Herb Caen authenticated Trevor’s success by visiting the Curtain Call on the first anniversary of Trevor’s hiring. He wrote that “a young Southern wizard has been tickling the ivories and has become legendary for his witty one-liners and flashing repartee.” Being written up in Herb Caen’s column was a defining moment in Trevor’s career. Trevor sent Herb’s columns to me so I could learn how a truly accomplished writer defined his city with wit, sophistication, and flair.

The next morning I walk into Perry’s and see that Herb Caen is already holding court at the best table in the house. He has surrounded himself with a dewy-eyed bunch of low-key sycophants, two ecstatic owners, and tourists snapping pictures of him. His aura creates a swarm of emotion that is something more than hero worship and a bit less than a Zen Buddhist satori. I have my work cut out for me this morning. Before we left Charleston, I contacted Herb and asked for his help. But now I have to try again to convince him to write a story about Trevor Poe’s disappearance and the search party of his high school friends from South Carolina.

When he catches me studying him, he motions me to his table. “Sorry I didn’t use your friend in Sunday’s column, Leo. Not much of a story there,
bubeleh
. We’ve got thousands of guys dying of AIDS in this city. I spotted six guys with AIDS in this restaurant this morning.”

“How do you spot them?” I ask.

“You’ll be an expert in a couple of days. Pretend you’re a Russian soldier and you’ve just arrived at the gates of Auschwitz. That starved, haunted look. That look is a death warrant in this town.”

“But you remember Trevor Poe,” I say. “You’ve written about him before.”

“He’s a great guy. Funny as hell. Hell of a piano player. But you’ve got to get me a story. No hook, no story. A gay musician who’s got AIDS? Big deal.”