The Burning Plain (7 page)

“What happened?”

“Raskin and Duke decided to counterattack.”

“How?”

“That’s the piece Duke’s afraid of.” He opened the door. “Goodnight, Henry. Remember Mother’s advice. Call Alex.”

I didn’t give Richie’s account of the nefarious goings on at Parnassus Company any more thought that night, and when I woke up the next morning, the details were already receding. The gist of it seemed to be crooks versus assholes, which more or less summed up Hollywood as far as I could tell. But I did call Alex.

“H
ELLO, ALEX? IT’S
Henry. Rios.”

“Mr. Rios?” Alarm crept into his voice. “Is there a problem with my case?”

“No, nothing like that,” I replied, as reassuringly as my own nervousness permitted. “This is a social call, to see how you are.”

“Everything’s great.”

In the pause that followed I wandered into the dining room and caught my reflection in the gilt mirror—a gift from Richie—that hung on the wall. There I saw a tall, thin man in khakis and a denim shirt with a long face and prematurely—well, at forty-five maybe not so prematurely anymore—white hair. Dark-skinned, the face unmistakably
mestizo
and clearly middle-aged. What did Richie say? After thirty-five, gay men aged in dog years.

I temporized, “That’s good, Alex.” Then, in a rush, “I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner sometime, take in a movie?”

A pause. “Are you asking me out on a date?”

My face was on fire. “Something like that.”

“That would be great. When?”

I was so invested in rejection, it took me a minute to respond. “What about—are you free on Friday?”

“Friday’s cool,” he said.

We made arrangements to meet for dinner at a restaurant on Third Street and then take in a movie at the Beverly Center called
Letters.
I put the phone down and took another look at myself in the mirror. I had mysteriously become better-looking.

According to the
Times
movie critic,
Letters
was a “postmodern remake of Agatha Christie’s book,
The ABC Murders
,” a description I couldn’t begin to fathom except that I gathered it was a lot grislier than Dame Agatha’s original, which I vaguely remembered having read as a teenager. It was playing to sold-out houses, so on Friday morning I drove to the Beverly Center as soon as the box office opened and bought two tickets for the nine o’clock show. I spent the morning downtown at the county law library, and the afternoon in Santa Monica with my accountant, trying to figure out how to pay my taxes. Josh had had no health insurance, and his parents, who were retired and lived on a fixed income, could not shoulder the burden. I had picked up the tab for everything Medicare refused to pay, including the twenty-four-hour nursing care that allowed him to die at home instead of a hospital. The bills had pretty much exhausted my savings, and caring for him had played havoc with my practice, leaving me, basically, broke. The IRS was not sympathetic. I resolved the crisis by emptying my last retirement accounts. I promised Marty, my accountant, that I would try to pay myself back as soon as I could, because, as he reminded me, “You’re not getting any younger, Henry. You’re going to need that money.”

Back at home, I took a shower then stood at the closet for a long time, water puddling at my feet, looking for something to wear in a wardrobe that seemed to consist either of dark suits or blue jeans and tee shirts. In the recesses of my closet, I found a black motorcycle jacket, the grain of the leather carefully distressed by the manufacturer. I lay it on the bed. A bright green sticker over the right breast proclaimed
ACT UP FIGHT AIDS
. The coat had belonged to Josh, a souvenir of his days as an AIDS activist, when he was still well enough to sit through hours of Act Up meetings or spend the night in jail after being arrested at demonstrations at the federal building or the county hospital. He had met Steven at one of those demonstrations and left me for him to join the army of lovers battling for a cure for AIDS, trying to save their own lives. I remembered what Richie had said about wondering why he had survived while others had died. I wondered that, too, from time to time. I ran my hands over the jacket; maybe we survived to remember the ones who hadn’t.

I went back into the closet and found a white, banded-collar shirt I had bought in an attempt to update my clothes and had yet to wear. I paired it with my least-faded Levis, a black belt with a silver buckle and black shoes. For a second I considered wearing Josh’s jacket, but it would’ve looked absurd on me. I threw on a black linen blazer, and studied the result in the gilt mirror. The combination of the collarless white shirt and black blazer made me look like a priest. Not exactly the effect I was after. I tossed the coat aside and headed out.

I drove to the restaurant with the windows down, a warm breeze blowing through the car. The air was drenched in a cantaloupe-colored light that faded things to the hues of an old, hand-tinted postcard. I had never really been on a date. In high school and college I watched from afar as straight friends performed the dance of courtship while I buried my head in books and ran distance on the track team. When I finally stumbled into a world of men like myself in San Francisco in the sexually liberated seventies, a date was the hour or two you spent drinking before you found someone to go home with. Josh and I had not so much dated as collided in the midst of a murder case in which he was a witness. Dinner and a movie was a first for me.

Alex hadn’t arrived at the Trattoria and the host sat me a table to wait. The restaurant was a single large room partitioned by a concrete wall with rectangular openings across it. The floors were also concrete, as was the ceiling with its exposed pipes and track lights. The walls were sponged a marmalade orange. The distant overhead lights and the candles flickering in brass wall sconces cast a low, flattering light over the sleek clientele, but with nothing to absorb the sound and an exposed kitchen, the room was also noisy and hot. The fashionable men and women fanned themselves with menus and shouted at each other over their fancy risottos. Fading sunlight seeped in through tall windows that looked out on Third Street to a car wash, a vacant lot and a store that sold secondhand clothes once worn by movie stars. I ate crusty bread, was glowered at by a movie star I happened to notice and declined the waiter’s offers of wine.

Alex arrived a half-hour late. I saw him at the door wearing white jeans, white sneakers, a sky-blue La Coste polo shirt. He spoke to the host, who bent forward to listen and then pointed in my direction. Alex looked and nodded. Approaching me, he smiled. He had been so much the subject of my fantasies that it was as startling to see him in the flesh as it had been to see the movie star. He was shorter than I remembered and more muscular, and he moved with a confidence I didn’t recognize, but of course the last time I’d seen him was in a courthouse, a place that tested most people’s confidence.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said, kissing my cheek, a gesture that went unnoticed in that crowd. He was still using Obsession.

“Traffic?”

“I walked,” he replied. “It was a lot farther than I thought. I’m so used to driving I can’t get the hang of distances without a car.”

“Your car break down again?”

He looked at me blankly. “It was blown up.”

“When did that happen?”

“Didn’t I tell you? About six weeks ago, right in front of my house.”

“Good God. Do you know who did it?”

He shook his head. “It was in the middle of the night. I think it must have been a gay bashing, because I had one of those bumper stickers that said, ‘How dare you presume I’m straight.’ I was always getting flipped off on the freeway.”

“Do you really believe people go around blowing up cars because they disagree with the politics of someone’s bumper stickers?”

He mopped his forehead with his napkin. “It’s happened to other cars in my neighborhood, too. They all had some kind of gay bumper sticker,” he said. “You don’t live in West Hollywood; you don’t know the kinds of things that go on.”

“Did you report it to the police?”

“The police,” he said contemptuously.

“You should’ve called me. I could’ve done something.”

He smiled. “I like that shirt on you. Every other time I’ve seen you, you were wearing a suit.”

“Every other time you’ve seen me, I’ve been working.”

“You don’t have to work tonight,” he said. “Let’s forget about my car. I’m starved. What’s good here?”

Over dinner, he told me he’d been raised in Foster City, outside of San Francisco, and gone to San Francisco State where he began as a business major to please his father, but then switched to drama, his true interest.

“How did your parents react to that?” I asked.

“My dad told me I was throwing away my life,” he said, pulping the peas on his plate. “That was ten years ago. He and my mom have come around. Kind of.”

“They know you’re gay?”

He smiled. “Our family invented ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’”

“How did you get to LA?”

“After I graduated, I spent a couple years at the American Conservatory Theater in the city. An agent from down here saw me in
Ah, Wilderness!
and said I had what it takes to be a movie star. I moved here and called him. He didn’t remember me.” He sipped some wine. “I found another agent. She got me a couple of commercials, a couple of walk-ons, then nothing.”

“The competition for work must be brutal.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I never knew how many ways there were to fail until I moved here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Hollywood’s like a staircase that gets narrower and narrower,” he said. “Everyone starts out together, but at each step there’s less room and at the top step there’s only room for one. Meanwhile, a fresh crop is always starting out at the bottom, younger and prettier.”

“What do you do to keep climbing?”

“Whatever I have to,” he said. “Have you always wanted to be a lawyer?”

“Yeah, since I was a kid.”

“Why?”

“I had this idea that lawyers helped people.”

“Not to get rich?” he asked with genuine curiosity.

“Very few criminal-defense lawyers get rich,” I said. “Anyway, making money’s never been a priority.”

“What is?”

“Living life on my own terms, I guess. What about you?”

“I want it all,” he said. “I want to be rich and famous.”

I touched my water glass to his wine glass. “Good luck.”

“You must think I’m pretty shallow.”

“No, I don’t,” I lied.

“Because I
am
pretty shallow,” he said, smiling. “You should know that about me, so you won’t be disappointed.”

“Why should I be disappointed?”

“I’m a hustler, Henry,” he said. “That’s how I support myself while I wait to be discovered.”

I let it sink in that the object of my obsession was a prostitute; that instead of anguishing over how to approach him for the last month and a half, I could simply have bought his services. I couldn’t repress a harsh laugh, at my foolishness. I saw the anger in Alex’s eyes and apologized.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not laughing at you.”

“Then what’s so funny?” he asked, unmollified.

“I confused you with someone else.”

“Josh,” he said. “Your lover. You said I looked like him.”

I nodded. “Yes, I confused you with Josh and I imagined I had feelings for you that I had for him.”

“And you think it’s funny now because I’m a hustler?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be an asshole. Your business is your business. I’m not judging you. Josh is gone and he’s not coming back. If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry.”

His anger faded. “You know why I said yes when you asked me out, Henry?”

“No.”

“Because of the way you kissed me when we were at the court. You kissed him that way, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “I could feel all that emotion in you for him. You know, it was really beautiful, Henry.” The waiter came and cleared our plates. After he left, Alex said, “I want to be him for you tonight.”

“You can’t.”

“There’s no charge.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Listen to me, Henry,” he said. “I’m not a lawyer like you, so I don’t get to help people—not that I want to most of the time. I’ve got my own problems, but you helped me.”

“You don’t owe me for that.”

“I wouldn’t care if I did,” he said, “but there’s something about the way you treated me, the way you looked at me, that made me feel better about myself. It doesn’t matter that it was because when you looked at me you saw him. I felt the love.” He touched my hand beneath the table. “One time, no strings. Let me be Josh.”

I looked at him. “It’s too weird, Alex.”

“Believe me, Henry,” he replied. “Compared to most of the things I’m asked to do, it’s really sweet.”

“How did you get from acting to …”

“Hustling?”

We had decided to skip the movie and were on our way to my house. The long summer dusk was holding in the sky, the violent pinks and oranges fading slowly into a gunpowder gray above the spindly palm trees.

“It’s all the same thing,” he was saying. “You act a part.”

“I meant …”

“I know what you meant,” he said. He turned on the radio and changed the dial from the classical station to a dance station. “It’s not complicated. I needed money so I posed for a gay skin magazine. After the magazine came out, I got a call from someone who said he was a friend of a big agent who had seen my picture and wondered if I’d like to come to a party at his house in Malibu.” He smirked. “A pool party, of course. When I showed up, it was a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds posing around the pool in their Speedos and four middle-aged guys sort of pointing their fingers like, ‘I’ll take you and you and you.’”

“The agent was one of them?”

“It was the agent, a director, a producer and a guy who had just bought a studio. You’ve heard of them,” he said, and told me their names.

“The boys were all actors, like you?”

“Porno stars mostly,” he said. “I found out that these guys basically use porn movies and skin magazines like catalogues. Anyway, the agent picked me. I was with him for a while, then with the director. After that, there were other people. I didn’t ask for money at first because I still thought I was using these guys to help me with my career, but one day I realized, this was my career, so I better get something from it.”