Spider Season (6 page)

“But you are, Benjamin! And you have so much to look forward to.” He pushed me gently toward the podium. “Now get up there and share your fine book with us. That’s what we’ve all come to hear.”

As I made my way forward, I ran into Judith Zeitler, who was complaining to the manager that she hadn’t ordered enough books, although there appeared to be several tall stacks of them on a side table, ready to be signed. Alexandra Templeton was also there, near the front, next to Lawrence Kase. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man who wore his thick gray hair in a wavy mane and his salt-and-pepper beard carefully trimmed. For all his famous bravado as a prosecutor, he looked uncomfortable in this little bookstore filled with queers, sitting stiffly on his metal folding chair like someone dragged along against his will, who hoped he wouldn’t have to buy a book. Sitting on Templeton’s other side was Cathryn Conroy, her notebook already open and her lethal pen poised for duty.

Most of the crowd was older, fifty and up, and well represented with activists, all friends of Maurice, who’d been out of the closet and working hard for gay rights for decades. Then my eyes fell on a handsome man sitting in the back row, whom I hadn’t seen for several years but whose face was imprinted indelibly in my memory. Ismael Aragon had been a compassionate Catholic priest when I’d become involved in a disturbing investigation of child molestation and murder that had led me to the Los Angeles archdiocese, for which Ismael oversaw a small church on the Eastside. He’d be close to forty now, but the intervening years had done nothing to diminish his tawny Aztec beauty; if anything, there was a new radiance about him that I hadn’t seen five years ago. I could have easily fallen in love with Ismael back then—or Father Aragon, as he’d been known—but he’d made it clear that his vow of celibacy and devotion to church and God were absolute. He was without his cleric’s collar tonight, dressed more casually in a loose-fitting cotton shirt and khaki slacks. Seeing him again after so long triggered a rush of unexpected emotions.

The store manager, a sturdily built woman with close-cropped hair and handsome, square-jawed looks, took the podium and welcomed the audience in a husky voice.

“There’s more testosterone in this crowd than your average professional football team,” she joked, looking around at all the activists. “And that’s just the women.”

As the laughter faded, she introduced me and I stepped to the podium with a copy of
Deep Background
in hand. Before I’d written my memoir, I’d read a dozen that Jan Long had recommended. Some had been composed in a terse, detached style, perhaps to suggest distance and objectivity. Others had been less a memoir than a long string of entertaining anecdotes, organized with clever chapter headings but without much depth or meaningful reflection. But the ones I’d admired most had been novelistic in approach, which had seemed to give the authors more freedom to call up memory and detail in a deeply felt and sensory way. For better or worse, that was the style I’d chosen for my book.

For my reading that night, I’d selected a long passage from my lengthy epilogue, which I’d added at Jan Long’s suggestion. She felt the bleakness of the main narrative—the scandal that had engulfed me and the events leading up to it—needed some light at the end of a dark tunnel, a note of hope and possible redemption at the end. As an editor, she might also have wanted to leave the reader with the hint of a possible sequel, should my first book sell enough to warrant another. My epilogue began roughly twelve years ago, as my old editor, Harry Brofsky, came back into my life six years after I’d been forced to give back my Pulitzer, a visit that would draw me out of self-imposed seclusion and dramatically change my life.

I cleared my throat, sipped from a bottle of water, and began reading.

“‘Billy Lusk was murdered on a Tuesday, shortly after midnight, and Harry Brofsky came looking for me that afternoon.

“‘It was mid-July. Hot winds that felt like the devil’s breath blew into Los Angeles from the desert, rattling through the shaggy eucalyptus trees like a dry cough.

“‘The city was golden, blinding, blasted by heavenly light. It was one of those days that made nipples rise and minds wander and bodies shiver with sensuality and inexplicable dread. The kind of day when the heat wrapped snugly around you but sent an ominous chill up your back at the same time, like the first sexual touch in a dark room from a beautiful stranger whose name you’d never know.

“‘Harry found me in West Hollywood, bobbing my head to an old Coltrane tape and trying not to think about alcohol.

“‘“Look who’s caught up with me,” I said to the empty room, when I saw Harry’s car pull up. “My, my, my.”

“‘I was staying in a small garage apartment in a leafy neighborhood known for its irregular shape as the Norma Triangle, where quaint little houses crowded cozy lots and lush greenery crawled unrestricted over the rotting corpses of old wood fences. My single room was up a wooden stairway at the deep end of an unpaved driveway, which ran alongside a neatly kept California Craftsman, one of those finely beveled, wood-framed bungalows that sprouted up by the thousands during the building boom of the 1930s and 1940s. Through the kindness of the owners, Maurice and Fred, I was able to live in the apartment rent-free, in exchange for performing odd chores. It wasn’t the most dignified arrangement for a former reporter, but how and where I lived didn’t matter much anymore. Nothing really did now, except somehow getting through another day, until all the days were mercifully used up.

“‘Through the unwashed window of my room, I looked down on the rear yard, where a loose-limbed jacaranda swayed like a lonely dancer in the restless breeze. Three plump cats lounged in the tree’s shade, their tails barely twitching in the oppressive heat, watching a hummingbird dart among syrupy pistils of honeysuckle while I watched them.

“‘In the three months since Maurice and Fred had installed me in the apartment, I’d spent most of my time at this window, where I could see down the narrow driveway to the street without anyone clearly seeing me. When Harry finally showed up, unannounced, I felt as though I’d spent most of those hours waiting for him.

“‘I watched him wrestle his Ford Escort into a space at the curb and struggle wearily out. He mopped his round face with a handkerchief, found a cigarette, and adjusted his bifocals to check a scrap of paper for the Norma Place address. When he’d confirmed the numbers, he glanced up at the apartment, just long enough for me to see what the years had done to him, and to feel the gnaw of guilt.

“‘I briefly wondered how he’d found me after all this time. Then I remembered that Harry had once been a reporter too, and a good reporter knows how to find people who don’t want to be found.

“‘“Oh, Harry.” I listened to Coltrane blow the final jumpy notes of “My Favorite Things,” the fourteen-minute version, then heard the machine click off. “I do wish you’d left well enough alone.”

“‘As he crossed Norma, came up the drive, then mounted the stairs, I listened to his hacking smoker’s cough. He’d always had trouble with warm weather, and by the time he reached the top, oily sweat pebbled his forehead, and his pale face was blotchy. It was the first time I’d seen or spoken to Harry Brofsky in six years.

“‘“You can’t afford a phone?” He squinted at me through the screen. “Things are that bad?”

“‘For a moment, I considered asking him to leave. Jacques had lived in this apartment when I’d first met him ten years ago. He’d stayed through the years until the virus got him and he became too sick to take care of himself, moving into my apartment the last months of his life, in his twenty-ninth year. After he’d died, Maurice and Fred had never rented the place again. They’d loved Jacques like a son, and I think they missed him nearly as much as I did. I could feel his presence in the room, fragile and fading with time, like my memories of him, and I didn’t want intruders.

“‘“Hello, Harry.”

“‘“I have to stand out here like a salesman?”

“‘I felt the guilt again, flushing through me like a sickness coming on. I opened the screen door and stepped aside to let him pass. He took a final, nervous drag on his cigarette, crushed it underfoot on the landing, and shuffled in. His sad gray eyes, bright and mischievous not all that many years ago, surveyed the small room. There wasn’t much to look at, except for a framed photo of Jacques on a shelf, next to one of my sister, Elizabeth Jane, snapped at her eleventh birthday party, smiling for the camera with a sadness I’d been too blind to see.

“‘“Lovely,” Harry said, looking around. “Early Salvation Army, if I’m not mistaken.”

“‘“What’s on your mind, Harry?”

“‘“Where the hell have you been?”

“‘“Around.”

“‘“Doing what?”

“‘“Living in the backseat of the Mustang. Trying not to drink myself to death.”

“‘Harry had never had much time for self-pity. “I guess you fucked that up too.”

“‘“I guess I did.”

“‘I could have told him more: That Maurice and Fred had rescued me from the backseat of my old Mustang convertible, just as they’d once rescued Jacques as a troubled teenager from the streets. That they’d moved me into the apartment and shamed me into pulling myself halfway together, telling me that I owed Jacques at least that much after he’d fought so hard for so long to hang on, before slipping away from us.

“‘But that was intimate stuff, and Harry and I had never been too comfortable with intimate stuff.

“‘“Cut to the chase, Harry.”

“‘He perched himself on the only chair in the room and asked for a glass of water. Then he told me he had a young reporter he was bringing along who needed mentoring he didn’t have time to handle himself. She was exceptionally bright, he said, extremely ambitious, and had the chance to go all the way, like I’d once had before I’d committed my infamous act of fraud, taking Harry down part of the way with me. She was investigating the murder of a young man named Billy Lusk outside a gay bar in Silver Lake, Harry said, but she was in over her head. He wanted me to come around to the
Los Angeles Sun,
the second-rate newspaper where he was forced to toil now, and take Alexandra Templeton under my wing.

“‘“Not a chance, Harry.” The idea of leaving the safety of my little apartment, venturing back into the world, being around people again, filled me with dread. “I’m sorry, Harry. I can’t.”

“‘I saw muscles tighten along the jawbone of his soft face, and his eyes turn to cold stones. “You’re going to do this for me,” he said. “For one simple reason.”

“‘Then he spoke the words that for nearly six years I’d hoped I’d never hear from Harry Brofsky.

“‘“You owe me.”’”

I stopped reading, and closed the book.

A moment later, applause erupted that ranged from polite to enthusiastic. I saw Templeton clapping harder than anyone, tears streaking her lovely brown face. After the applause had ended and I’d sipped more water, I mentioned the contentious and combative relationship Templeton and I had shared at the beginning, and how we’d overcome our differences and grown close over the years. I introduced her and insisted she stand, which she did briefly, laughing with embarrassment and brushing away her tears. Next to her, Lawrence Kase smiled like a puppet with tight strings.

The questions that followed from the audience were generally genial and inoffensive. One woman asked if I thought I would ever work as a journalist again, and I told her no, and that I didn’t feel I deserved to. A man asked how I was coping with the loss of my left eye, and I said I’d become so accustomed to the prosthetic I was rarely aware of it. Another man asked what had been the most difficult part about writing the book, and I said it had been deciding what to put in and what to leave out, along with the general worry that the writing was awful and no one would want to read it.

The exception to these respectful questions came from a slender, effete fellow standing at the back. His hair was died an unconvincing blond and his narrow face had been so cosmetically carved up that gauging his age was difficult.

“Do you feel any shame,” he asked, in a pointedly superior voice, “making money off such an egregious act of deception?”

“After my agent takes her fifteen percent and the government gets its cut,” I said, “I’ll barely make enough to cover the two years I spent organizing and writing the book.”

I turned to point at another raised hand, but the man jumped in again.

“Did you write the book yourself, or is that just another of your lies?”

I offered him a diplomatic smile. “I wrote it myself.”

He started to blurt another question, but the manager stepped quickly to the podium, announcing that it was getting late, and that I had a lot of books to sign. She thanked everyone for coming, escorted me to the table where the books were stacked, and handed me a Sharpie with black ink and a fine point. She’d already flapped each book—marked the title page with the front edge of the dust jacket—a thoughtful gesture that allowed the signing to move more quickly.

Everyone I knew personally purchased a book—Templeton took five—and quite a few strangers bought copies as well. I dutifully signed each one, adding “creative inscriptions” when they were requested. It was nearing nine o’clock when the end of the line finally drew near.

The unpleasant man with the unfortunate blond hair and obvious cosmetic surgery stepped forward. His pasty face had a taut and unnaturally smooth quality that gave him the appearance of a burn victim, apparently from multiple nips, tucks, and peels. His eyes were a washed-out yellow, set close together in his narrow face. Up close, the blondness of his fine hair looked like it might have been accomplished at home, with a bottle of cheap peroxide. Yet he carried himself as if oblivious to his ghastly appearance, with a manner that conveyed more conceit than insecurity. He thrust forward a copy of my book with a small, pale hand.

“I bought it earlier this month online,” he said tartly. “It was cheaper that way. But they let me bring it in, anyway, to have you sign it.”

“Would you like it personalized, or just my signature?”