Goldenboy (2 page)
To cover my shock
at his appearance I asked, “Do you have any luggage?”
“No, I’m catching
the red-eye back to L.A. Where are we eating?”
I named a
restaurant in the Castro. As we talked, he looked less strange to me, and I
thought perhaps it was only exhaustion I saw on his face. He worked achingly
long hours in the bizarre vineyard of Hollywood. We talked of small things as I
drove into San Francisco. We came over a hill and then, abruptly, the city’s
towers rose before us through the mist and rain, glittering stalagmites in the
cave of night, and beyond them, sensed rather than seen, the wintry tumble of
the ocean.
We rolled through
the city on glassy streets shimmering with reflected lights. On Castro, the
sidewalks were jammed with men who, in their flak jackets, flannel shirts,
tight jeans, wool caps and long scarves, resembled a retreating army. I parked
and we walked back down to Nineteenth Street to the restaurant. Inside it was
dim and loud. Elegant waiters in threadbare tuxedos raced through the small
dining rooms with imperturbable poise. We were seated at a table in the smaller
of the two dining rooms in the back with a view of the derelict patio just
outside. Menus were placed before us.
“It’s really good
to see you,” Larry said, and picked up his menu as if not expecting a response.
I ventured one anyway.
“You’ve been
working too hard,” I said.
“I suspect you’re
right,” he replied.
I dithered with the
menu as I tried to decide whether to pursue the subject.
“What you want to
say,” Larry said, “is that I look terrible.”
“You look—” I
fumbled for a word.
“Different?” he
asked, almost mockingly. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke out of the comer of
his mouth away from me. I waited for him to continue. Instead, the waiter came
and Larry ordered his dinner. When it was my turn I asked for the same.
We sat in nervous
silence until our salads were brought to us. The waiter drizzled dressing over
the salads. Larry caught my eye and held it. When the waiter departed, Larry
picked up his fork, set it down again and relit his discarded cigarette.
“I’m dying, Henry,”
he said softly.
“Larry— “
“I was diagnosed
eight months ago. I’ve already survived one bout of pneumocystis.” He smiled a
little. “Two years ago I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce that word. AIDS
has taught me a new vocabulary.” He put out his cigarette.
“I’m so sorry,” I
said stupidly.
The waiter came by.
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes, fine,” Larry
said.
“Why didn’t you
tell me sooner?” I asked.
“There was nothing
you could have done then,” he said, cutting up a slice of tomato.
“Is there now?”
“Yes. Defend Jim
Pears.” He put a forkful of salad in his mouth and chewed gingerly.
“I don’t
understand.”
“I’m going to die,
Henry,” he said slowly. “Not just because of AIDS but also because the lives of
queers are expendable. Highly expendable.” He stopped abruptly and stared down
at his plate, then continued, more emphatically. “They hate us, Henry, and they’d
just as soon we all died. I’m dying. Save Jim Pears’s life for me.”
“Don’t die,” I
said, and the words sounded childlike even to my own ears.
“I won’t just yet,”
he replied. “But when I do I want it to be my life for Jim’s. That would
balance the accounts.”
“But it’s entirely
different,” I said.
“It’s the same
disease,” he insisted. “Bigotry. It doesn’t matter whether it shows itself in
letting people die of AIDS or making it so difficult for them to come out that
it’s easier to murder.”
“Then you do think
he did it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Not
that it makes any difference to me.”
“It will to a jury.”
“You’ll have to
persuade them,” he said, “that Jim was justified.”
“Self-defense?”
Larry said, “There
might be a problem there. Jim’s P.D. told me Jim doesn’t remember anything
about what happened.”
“Doesn’t remember?”
I echoed.
“She called it
retrograde amnesia.”
The waiter came and
took Larry’s salad plate. He cast a baleful glance at my plate from which I had
eaten nothing and said, “Sir, shall I leave your salad?”
“Yes, please.”
We were served
dinner. Looking at Larry I reflected how quickly we had retreated into talk of
Jim Pears’s case as if the subject of Larry’s illness had never been raised.
“I want to talk
some more about you,” I said.
Larry compressed
his lips into a frown. “I’ve told you all there is to know.”
“How do you feel
about it?”
“Henry, I’ve turned
myself inside out examining my feelings. It was painful enough the first time
without repeating the exercise for you.”
“Sorry.” I
addressed myself to the food on my plate, some sort of chicken glistening with
gravy. A wave of nausea rose from my stomach to my throat.
Larry was saying, “But
I won’t go quietly. Depend on that.”
We got through
dinner. Afterwards, we went upstairs to the bar. Sitting at the window seat
with glasses of mineral water we watched men passing on the street below us in
front of what had been the Jaguar Bookstore.
Abruptly, Larry
said, “I wondered at first how I could have been infected. It really puzzled me
because I thought AIDS was only transmitted during tawdry little episodes in the
back rooms of places like that.” He gestured toward the Jaguar. “All my tawdry
little episodes were twenty years in the past, and then there was Ned.” Ned was
his lover who had died four years ago.
“Were you
monogamous with Ned?”
He smiled grimly. “I
was monogamous, yes.”
“But not Ned.”
“You don’t get this
from doorknobs, Henry.” He frowned.
“Do you think he
knew?”
“He killed himself
didn’t he?” Larry snapped. “At least now I know why,” he added, quietly.
“Who have you told?”
“You.”
“That’s all?”
He nodded. “My
clients are movie stars. Having a gay lawyer is considered amusing in that set
but a leper is a different matter.”
“But — your
appearance.”
“You haven’t seen
me in, what? A year? And even you were willing to accept the way I look as the
result of overwork. It’s not really noticeable from day to day.”
“But you must have
been in the hospital?”
“With the flu,” he
said. “A virulent, obscure Asian flu with complications brought on by fatigue.”
“People believed
that?”
“People are
remarkably incurious and besides... “ He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t
have to. I knew he was going to say that people preferred not to think about
AIDS, much less believe that someone they knew had it. I was struggling with my
own disbelief and, at some deeper level, my terror.
“How long can you
keep it a secret?”
“Henry, you’re
talking to a man who was in the closet for almost thirty-five years. I know
from secrets.” He yawned. “I’d like to go for a walk down by the water, then we
have to talk some more about Jim Pears.”
It had stopped
raining by the time we reached Fisherman’s
Wharf but that
loud, normally crowded, arcade of tourist traps and overpriced fish restaurants
was deserted anyway. We walked around aimlessly, jostling against each other on
the narrow walks, stopping to comment on some particularly egregious
monstrosity in the shop front windows. We walked to the edge of the pier where
the fishing boats were berthed, creaking in the water like old beds. A rift in
the clouds above the Golden Gate revealed a black sky and three faint stars.
Larry looked at them and then at me.
“Do you wish on
stars, Henry?” he asked.
“Not since I was a
kid.”
“I do,” Larry
replied. “Wish on stars. Pray. Plead. It doesn’t do any good.” We stood there
for a few more minutes until he complained of the cold.
I drove us to
Washington Square and we found an espresso bar. Tony Bennett played on the
jukebox. We each ordered a caffè latte. Larry brought out a bulky folder from
his briefcase and put it on the table between us.
“What is it?” I asked.
“My file on Jim
Pears. You’re taking the case, aren’t you?” I hesitated. “Yes. I’ll fly down on
Monday morning. Will I have a chance to talk to Jim before the hearing?”
“I don’t know. You’ll
have to ask his P.D. A woman named Sharon Hart.” He paused and sipped his
coffee. “She’s not a bad lawyer but something’s not working out between her and
Jim.” “It happens. I’m always running up against the expectations of my
clients. You learn to be tactful.”
Larry wasn’t
listening. He was looking at his reflection in the window. When he looked back
at me, he asked, “Do I seem hysterical to you?”
I shook my head.
“I do to myself
sometimes.” He rattled his cup. “I’m so angry, Henry. When I wake up in the
morning I think I’ll explode from rage.”
He tightened his
jaw and clamped a hand over his mouth. “Don’t you expect that?” I asked,
awkwardly.
He lowered his
hand, revealing a faintly hostile smile. “You’ve been reading too much
Kubler-Ross,” he said. “There are only two stages to dying, Henry. Being alive
and being dead. We treat death like a bad smell. I’m supposed to excuse myself
and leave the room.”
His eyes were
bright. It was the only time I had ever seen Larry even approach tears and it
was frightening.
“Why should you
care what other people think? You never have before.”
“Well, that’s not
true,” he snapped. “I was the original closet queen, remember?” He expelled a
noisy breath, then sipped from his coffee. “I don’t know why I’m taking it out
on you.”
“Because I’m here?”
He shook his head. “Because
I love you.” He tried to smile but his face wouldn’t cooperate. “I’ll miss you.”
He lowered his face
toward the table and I watched the tears slide down his cheeks and splatter on
the table top. I reached for his hand and held it. After a moment or two it was
over. He looked up, drew a dazzlingly white handkerchief from his breast pocket
and wiped his face.
He glanced at his
watch. “It’s the witching hour. You’d better get me back to the airport.”
I pulled up in
front of the terminal and helped Larry gather his things. He put his hand on
the door handle.
“Wait,” I said.
He looked over at
me. I leaned across the seat and kissed him.
“I love you, too,”
I said.
“I know.”
A moment later he
was gone.
Inside I was
greeted by silence. The only unusual thing about this was that I noticed it at
all. I put the folder on my desk, added the paper to the stack in the kitchen
and leafed through the bills and solicitations that comprised my mail. I turned
on a burner and poured water into the tea kettle, set it on the flame, opened a
bag of Chips Ahoy and ate a few. When the water was boiling I poured it into a
blue mug with “Henry” emblazoned on it — the gift of a client — and added a bag
of Earl Grey tea. Then there was that silence again. It seemed to flow out of
the electrical outlets and drip from the tap.
Only the silence
was not quite silent enough. It was filled with my loneliness. I had lived
alone long enough and I did not want to die this way. These days, death no
longer seemed like such a distant prospect to me. I sipped my tea. I thought of
my empty bed. I opened the folder and found the transcripts of Jim Pears’s
preliminary hearing.
*****
The purpose of a
preliminary hearing is to see whether the prosecutor can establish probable
cause to bring the defendant to trial — to “hold him to answer,” in the arcane
language of the law. For the defense, however, the prelim is an opportunity to
preview the prosecution’s evidence so as to prepare to refute it at trial.
Consequently, the prosecutor puts on as little evidence as possible to show
probable cause, holding what he can in reserve.
The transcripts of
Jim’s prelim consisted of two slender volumes. The events leading up to Brian
Fox’s death were narrated by two witnesses who had also worked at the
restaurant. The first was a waiter named Josh Mandel. I set my cup down and
began reading: