Sway (15 page)

They went past the kitchen and into the apartment’s extra bedroom. It was an old ballroom with molded ceilings and high windows
that looked out on the sycamores below. It was cluttered with boxes. Bobby peeled off his shirt, dropping it on the floor,
his back to Anger. He roughed up his hair with his fingers. He bent over and let its ends fall to his knees, then stood up
straight and flipped his head up so that the wet black strands shot back over his shoulders.

“I appreciate this,” he said, looking into Anger’s eyes.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“No, really. I appreciate it.”

His face was younger and plainer without all of his hair falling over his forehead. Bare-chested, his white skin taut with
goose pimples, he looked like a high school boy damp from the shower after gym.

Anger moved some of his boxes and trunks into the closet and stacked some others against the two far walls. He plugged a desk
lamp into the socket by the window, trying not to look at him.

An hour later, they were in Anger’s room — the only room in the apartment resembling a common room — where they sat on the
couch and shared a joint. Through the leaded windows, the leaves on the trees were a shiny green, sagging from their branches.
The rain had stopped, but the sky was still gray, making every color stand out like something permanent.

“You’re not telling me what really happened,” said Anger.

Bobby shook his head in a bored way, his eyes closed. Anger watched the smoke come out of his nostrils.

“Some things went wrong,” he finally said. “On the way to L.A., it didn’t happen the way I thought it would. There are people
— some people don’t care about themselves. So then they can’t care about anything. That’s the way it happens sometimes.”

“You never made it to L.A.”

Bobby wiped the corners of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “That’s all I can say,” he said. “I’ll leave, if you want
me to leave.”

There was a newspaper on the floor. It brought word of Vietnam — Saigon, Haiphong, Da Nang — the names by now somehow remote
without being exotic. Anger looked at the words without quite seeing them, and for some reason he thought of Bobby’s band,
the tuneless, naively serious band that he thought was going to make him a star. He thought of the foolish scheme — a drug
deal, he supposed — that had failed to facilitate that plan.

He brought his fingers to Bobby’s still-damp hair. He had touched him like this before, while filming, but there was no camera
now, and Bobby went still, calibrating his response. He didn’t stand up or push Anger away, but only sat there with an abstracted
expression in his eyes, as if this were happening to someone else.

“You’re having a strange day,” said Anger.

“Everything is strange.”

“No, not everything is strange. Some things are ordinary.”

When he reached for Bobby’s thigh, Bobby didn’t move, he just looked down at the hand, his lips parted slightly. Anger loomed
over him for a moment, watching, then he shifted himself onto the floor. Bobby’s eyes were fixed on his now, his forgotten
joint still burning between his thumb and forefinger. Then he looked down at Anger’s hand, his Adam’s apple shifting drily
in his throat.

Bobby’s damp skin smelled faintly, oddly, like kerosene. Anger pressed his thumbs to where his abdomen met his hips, feeling
it expand and contract with his breaths. He had unzipped Bobby’s pants, but it was Bobby, not Anger, who had pushed them farther
down over his knees. After he came, he kept his eyes closed, breathing heavily through his nostrils. His face was peaceful
then, as if in sleep, except at the corner of his mouth, where there was the faintest shadow of a grimace.

“I just think you should know,” Bobby said. “I’m not like that.”

“You’re not like that.”

“You know . . . I’m not that way. I don’t mind it sometimes, if it’s there. I’m not uptight. But it’s no big deal either way.”

Bobby moved into the extra bedroom that week. Anger bought him a mattress and a blanket and some pillows, and he stacked the
rest of the boxes as well as he could in the closet. He bought Bobby groceries: white bread, potato chips, beer. It happened
gradually, without much discussion. The mention of all these practicalities was not something either of them believed in.

Late at night, through the half-opened door, he would sometimes see Bobby on the floor of his new room, smoking pot with his
friends, listening to music or playing music on their guitars. They would lean their heads back toward the ceiling in neutral
contemplation, as if the world had just been created for their benign explorations. There would be girlfriends, an endless
succession, in jeans or flowered skirts, long hair falling into their eyes. One or two of them would always end up in Bobby’s
bed by the end of the night, lying beside him in the dim light of a few candles, Bobby with one of Anger’s effects in his
hands — a toy motorcycle, a deck of tarot cards — anything he could absently study while the girls waited and watched.

Anger never felt that he was being taken advantage of. He saw their arrangement through Bobby’s eyes: the sense of justice
that would come from having his own room in the apartment, a private place to take his girlfriends, a sink in which to leave
his dirty dishes. When Anger had his own guests over — filmmakers, artists, theater people — there was a cachet in having
so many young people around. It made him feel like Bobby’s accomplice, younger than he really was, young enough to be Bobby
himself.

He had only the vaguest idea of what the film they were making was actually going to consist of. So far, he was just filming
Bobby’s life: playing his guitar, smoking a joint, standing in front of the house where they had painted the door purple and
scrawled the words THY WILL BE DONE! What happened between them, when the day’s filming was over and there were no more guests
around, was a secret that Bobby seemed to keep even from himself. His ambivalence — his obstinate, closed eyes — never resolved
into a refusal or an invitation. He had threatened to kill Anger if he ever told anyone.

If you took away the nails and the cross, then the god would be only a naked boy, extending his arms in calm recognition.
Removed from his post, he would be free to go where you’d always wanted to follow, stepping down into that fiery zone where
there was no meaning for words like “self” and “other,” “reality” and “dream,” “desire” and “fear.” Lucifer, the morning star.
His paleness would cast a green reflection in the night sky. In the secret darkness, he would be as glad as you were to see
that the stupid pretense of his chastity had finally come to an end. But he could be as distant and elusive as any other god.
Like his counterpart, the god on the cross, he came to bring not peace but a sword.

“That’s how the cable cars work,” Anger explained one afternoon that fall, pointing out three enormous cogs connected to chains
and engines, the city’s powerhouse. Bobby was standing in front of him in a brown leather overcoat, looking at the cogs, painted
bright green, bright red, and bright yellow. He couldn’t help moving toward them — Anger could see from the way he’d forgotten
his posture that he had never considered the cable cars, or the electric current that pulled them, or anything else about
the city’s mysterious infrastructure.

He turned around then, hands in his front pockets so that his coat hung behind him like a cape. “I forgot to tell you,” he
said. “There was a phone call the other night. I forget his name.”

Anger stared at him.

“The one who helped you direct the last film,” Bobby said. “In New York.”

Anger bowed his head, then raised it abjectly at the sky. He’d been waiting for a phone call from a film society in Germany,
a potential source of funding, but now he knew who had called.

“Bruce Byron,” he said. “Was that his name?”

“That’s right. Bruce Byron. He wanted to talk to you about the next film. He said he has a new idea. Something about motorcycles.”
He was looking at Anger through the orange lenses of his sunglasses, something almost accusatory in his gaze, as if he knew
more about Bruce Byron than he was letting on. He seemed to be always surprising Anger with some disappointing news that he
only pretended to not know was disappointing.

“I’m not speaking to him,” Anger said.

“You’re not speaking to him.”

“No, I’m serious. If he wants something, he can call my lawyer.”

Bobby nodded to himself, his head bowed. Lawyers — Anger could tell that that’s what he was thinking. They were absurd to
him in the same way that Anger was absurd.

When they got home that afternoon, there was more news of Vietnam. The Vietcong had shelled Saigon: they were growing stronger,
not weaker, and the war had spread from the jungle villages to the capital city. It was no longer something you could even
pretend to ignore. It was, Anger realized, another reason for someone like Bobby to keep out of sight, to have no fixed address.

That night, they stayed up talking. Bobby was looking at the images on the bedroom walls, the gods and occult signs: the pentacle,
the zodiac, the sephiroth with its Hebrew letters designating each of the ten emanations of God. Anger offered him a few explanations,
casual and brief, but would not make it clear what was a game to him and what was serious. “You don’t need to know all that,”
he said.

Bobby turned.

“You already know about it in some ways,” said Anger. “This is just part of the game.”

“What game?”

“Thinking that you don’t know what I’m talking about. That we have less in common than we do.” He sat down in a chair by the
window and looked down at the floor. “I don’t want to talk about this,” he said. “It’s not going to be helpful. But I think
you feel the same way. You’re here for yourself, not for me. I understand that. That’s one of the things we have in common.”

They smoked a joint. He watched Bobby go thoughtful and quiet, reclining in his chair, his fingertips touching, as the angular
music made dim shapes in the air. He told Bobby a little bit about Bruce Byron then. He said that Bruce Byron was a kind of
Frankenstein’s monster he had created by filming him in bad faith. He said that filmmaking could have real consequences, that
it was more than just a game, that it could be like an act of aggression if director and actor didn’t understand each other
deeply. He said that understanding each other had nothing to do with words, that words could be a hindrance to knowing another
person. He said that New York had been a dead city and a dead culture and that was why he had come west, in search of fresh
ideas. He didn’t mention the tin shed he’d lived in on the Gances’ roof, or the mix of arousal and scorn he’d felt in the
presence of Bruce Byron’s body. He didn’t mention that on the night of Byron’s phone call he’d been in a dark basement off
Castro Street, prostrating himself on the floor for five anonymous men. He knew that Bobby — this boy he’d cast as Lucifer
— would see it only as an image of degradation. He didn’t try to explain how it had been transcendent in its brutality, how
for a few moments it had reconfigured the surface of everything around him. Instead, he said that the point of art, like magick,
was to undercut the rational mind, to remind us of how difficult it was to know what was real and what had merely been created
to appear real.

He went into the kitchen and made some tea, bringing it back in two stained cups that he carried on a plate. As a way of changing
the subject, he took out some photographs of Paris. He talked about his time there, about the artists he’d known. He talked
about his former mentor, Jean Cocteau (dropping another name that Bobby had never heard), letting it all come gushing out,
all that feminine talk.

Sometimes Byron would call, usually in the middle of the night, usually without saying a word. Anger would pick up the receiver
to stop it ringing — Byron could wait for several minutes — and hear nothing but the faint static that conjured the distance
between them, the miles of wire tense and responsive in the darkness.

He would see Byron’s face, unshaven, somehow off-kilter behind the large green sunglasses he had made him wear for all those
bedroom scenes.
I want it to be real. I’m the only one putting anything real into this. Every time it gets serious, you start smirking, playing
your games.

In the bathroom, he would find Bobby’s jeans lying in a pile by the toilet. Through the cracked door of the extra bedroom,
he would see the bare shoulders of the girl who moved slowly above him in the dark.

“I don’t really see where this is going,” Bobby said.

He was sitting naked on a wooden crate, cross-legged, raising his arms up in the darkness. With Anger’s watching presence
invisible behind the camera — with the music on, the jagged meanderings of Sun Ra — Bobby had been stoned enough to enter
into the role, aroused by his own nakedness, holding the pose, but now the moment was over and he was ashamed.

“The band is playing tomorrow,” he said, getting down off the crate. “Light show, everything. You could film that, help us
out for once.”

Anger looked down at the camera. “I can’t always film the band, Bobby. You know that. It’s expensive.”

“Right.”

“I’m not going to talk about this anymore.”

“But that’s what it always comes down to, isn’t it? Money.”

“I don’t know what you think that means. Like I’m trying to rip you off or something.”

“There’s no script, no anything.”

“This is the script.”

“I’m making a bunch of gestures in front of a camera.”

“Why are you getting angry?”

“I’m just saying who has the money? That’s all I’m saying.”

He bent over to pull his pants on, clumsy on one foot, then the other. The strobe light was still on. It made everything hysterical,
exaggerated, prolonged.

“I don’t have any money,” said Anger. “That’s the truth. It won’t change anything, getting angry.”

“I’m not getting angry. You’re always making more out of this than there is. The truth is I really don’t give a shit anymore.”