The Burning Plain (8 page)

“How long have you been at it?”

“Going on three years,” he said. “That’s a long time, but I’m small and I look younger than I am. That kid brother look. Guys go crazy for it.” He smiled. “Doesn’t it bother you that we’re talking like this? Doesn’t it ruin the fantasy?”

“It’s like you said at the restaurant, Alex, I don’t have to work tonight. You don’t, either.”

“I’m getting out of the life,” he said quietly.

“I’ve heard it’s hard,” I replied.

“You don’t know how hard,” he said. “Most of the guys who hire me hate themselves for being gay, so they take it out on me.”

I didn’t understand how literally he meant that until I saw the bruises on his back when he removed his shirt. We were in the bedroom. He had stopped me when I reached for the light, and the room was filled with the shadows. I was standing at the foot of the bed. He was facing me with his back to the mirror and I saw in the murky glass the angry slashes across his smooth dark skin. He kicked off his shoes, unbuttoned his pants, removed them, stood naked, approached me.

“What happened to your back?”

He stopped, saw Josh’s coat on the bed. “Was this his?”

“Your back.”

He slipped the coat on. “Do I look like him?”

I forgot about the bruises. “Yes.”

“Come here, Henry,” he said. “Remind me what it feels like when someone loves you.”

I slipped my hands beneath the coat and stroked his back.

We made love in darkness and in silence. It had been such a long time for me that at first it felt awkward as if my body was remembering the taboo against the nakedness of another man that had once kept me locked in my desire like a prisoner. I emptied my mind and let myself feel the body beside me, at once familiar and mysterious, mouth, chest, penis, thigh, until touch dissolved the barriers and we were one body. And then I became aware that the damp sheets beneath him smelled of Josh. I said, “Josh?” He opened his eyes and smiled at me. “It is me, Henry,” he said. It was Josh’s voice, and the eyes that held me in their gaze were Josh’s eyes. “How?” I asked. He lifted my hand to his lips, kissed it, and murmured, “This feels so good. Don’t stop.” I buried myself in him, closed my eyes and came in a scalding orgasm, a cauterizing orgasm that closed a wound inside of me. When I opened my eyes again, Alex was looking at me. I lay down beside him, afraid to speak.

“He was here,” Alex whispered. He touched his chest. “I could feel him here.”

“I thought I saw him in your eyes.”

He shivered. “This is so spooky.”

I held him. “Are you afraid?”

“Not of Josh,” he said. “Because he’s gone, Henry. This time he’s really gone.”

“I feel that, too. But you are afraid, aren’t you?”

“I saw something.”

“What?”

“It was like he opened a door as he was leaving,” Alex said. “And just for a second I saw death.”

“Is this him?” Alex asked. We were in the living room, waiting for his cab. I sat on the couch in a bathrobe, watching him pick up the urn with Josh’s ashes from the mantel. He was jittery, pacing the room, avoiding my eyes.

“Yes,” I said.

“‘Joshua Scott Mandel,’” he said, reading the plate on the urn. “Are you going to keep them like this, on your fireplace?”

“It’s a long story.”

He returned the urn to its place, glanced at his watch. “Where’s that fucking cab?”

“You could stay here,” I said, repeating an offer I’d made earlier, but his mood made me less enthusiastic.

“I have an appointment.”

“With the man who left those marks on your back?”

“Maybe,” he said, his eyes suddenly cold. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Why are you so angry, Alex?”

“Did I say I was angry?”

“It’s like you’re punishing me because you felt something in there,” I said, gesturing to the bedroom.

“Hey, don’t get carried away,” he said, impatiently. Outside, a car horn honked. “I’m not the one who was doing the feeling in there.”

“What do you mean, ‘don’t get carried away’?”

He moved toward the door. “Remember what I told you, Henry. Acting and hustling are the same thing. You play a part.”

I restrained him as he reached for the door. “It didn’t feel like you were acting.”

He shook himself free. “You got off, didn’t you? That’s the important thing.”

“Don’t say that.”

He half-closed his eyes and murmured, “‘It is me, Henry. It’s Josh.’”

“That’s not what it sounded like.”

“You were two seconds from coming,” he said. “You heard what you wanted to hear.”

I stepped back, stared at him. “You asshole.”

He laughed. “Oh, come on, honey. I gave you the ride of your life and I didn’t even charge you.”

“Get out of here.”

“Okay, but next time you want to fuck your boyfriend, baby, call La Toya’s psychic line.”

I grabbed him by the back of his collar and threw him against the door. He slumped to the floor, holding his hand over his nose. Blood seeped from between his fingers.

“Fuck,” he said, getting to his feet. “I think you broke my nose.”

“Jesus,” I said, appalled. “I’m sorry. Let me get you a towel or something.”

“Don’t touch me.” The cab honked again. He grabbed at the doorknob with bloody fingers and yanked the door open. “Man,” he said, shaking his head. “Are all you fags crazy?”

He slammed the door behind him. I heard him say something to the cab driver and then the car sped off, wheels squealing. A drop of his blood dripped from the door knob to the floor.

I fell asleep on the couch, and when I woke up, late the next morning, a bitter sourness puckered my mouth. My head throbbed. The house was silent, but it was more than the usual morning stillness. This quiet was as dusty and thick as a tomb. Dazed, I wandered from room to room. There were dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, mold in the shower, a layer of powdery film over the furniture, and the air was rank. In the bedroom, the sheets were stained with semen and a bottle of lubricant had fallen on its side and spread a puddle of goo on the floor. A condom floated in the toilet bowl. I opened the medicine cabinet, searching for aspirin, and was confronted by row after row of Josh’s medications. Pills, syrups, ointments, hundreds, thousands of dollars’ worth. I picked a bottle at random: Xanax, prescribed for the anxiety attacks that consumed him when his head cleared from all the other drugs long enough for him to realize he was dying. I poured the pills into the sink, then grabbed another bottle, Prozac for depression, and then an ointment I had rubbed on the parts of his body where his flesh had begun to necrotize. I didn’t stop until the medicine cabinet was empty.

“Are you all right? You look like you’re suffering from sunstroke.”

I looked at the woman who had spoken, puzzled by the inflections in her voice that were both Southern and English. She was sitting on the stone bench in the courtyard of the Columbarium of Radiant Destiny, with the messy remains of lunch beside her: an apple core, balled up wax paper, a rind of bread. She was wearing a white blouse, a foamy, flowered skirt, Birkenstock sandals and a red straw cowboy hat over messy gray hair. Her face was pitted with small, deep scars and deeply seamed but the architecture of her bones was beautiful. Her eyes were sky blue.

“Sit down,” she said. There was a green mesh bag at her side with a thermos in it. She reached for it. “Have some tea.”

I sat down, still clutching the map I’d been given when I had driven into the cemetery.

“Thank you,” I mumbled, accepting a plastic glass of cloudy liquid.

“It doesn’t do any good if you don’t drink it,” she said kindly.

I took a swallow. It was cold, strong and sweet. “This is good.”

“My mother was English,” she explained. “She taught how to brew real tea, though it would’ve killed her to see me drink it cold. Ah, well, one must adjust. Are you visiting someone?”

Three of the walls of the Columbarium of Radiant Destiny held rows of niches where the ashes of the dead were interred behind marble plaques. The fourth wall, behind us, was a doorway that led out to the other vaults and columbaria of the Courts of Remembrance and from there to the green hillsides of Forest Lawn with its view of the freeway and Warner Brothers.

“No,” I said. “I was looking for someplace to put my friend’s ashes.”

“Oh, he’d like it here,” she said. “My husband does.” She pointed a bony finger. “That’s him.”

“Gregory Slade,” I read.

“Yes, and I’m Amiga.”

“Amiga?”

“I know it’s an odd name, but as I said, my mother was English. She married a Texan, who took her to live in a small town down by the Gulf where people were terribly prejudiced against the Mexicans, but my mother thought they were wonderful people and that Spanish was the most beautiful language she had ever heard.” She squinted at me. “You’re of Mexican descent, if I’m not mistaken. Finish your tea. There’s more.”

“How do you know your husband’s happy here?”

“I know,” she said.

“I don’t think the dead are either happy or unhappy,” I said. “They’re just dead.”

“If you truly believed that,” she replied, “you wouldn’t care about your friend’s ashes. You really do look unwell. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“There’s a religion that believes the world was created by the devil, that this is hell.”

“Of course, it’s hell,” Amiga Slade said cheerfully. “It’s also heaven. It depends entirely on how you look at it.” She touched my hand. “Whatever you think you’ve done, it’s not so terrible that you deserve to be condemned to hell.”

“I’m a homosexual.”

“What does that matter to God? He made you.”

“My friend died of AIDS.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, grasping my hand. “I am so sorry.”

“I can’t let go of him.”

“But Henry you don’t have to,” she said. “You can put him here with Greg, and the four of us can visit.”

“I didn’t tell you my name,” I said.

She touched the center of her forehead. “I have second sight. Another gift of my English mother.” She reached into her mesh bag and brought out a slab of yellow cake wrapped in wax paper. “You’re hungry,” she said. “Eat this.”

It was dense and moist and sugary. I wolfed it down. “What do you do?” I asked her between bites.

She smiled, “I’m a fortune teller at a coffeehouse in Venice. Madame Helene. The kids love me. One of them even designed a Website for me.”

I licked the crumbs of the cake from my fingers. “What’s my fortune?”

“Nothing that can’t be survived,” she said, “but be careful who you trust.”

It was late in the afternoon when I returned home. After I had left Amiga Slade and Forest Lawn, I looked at the adjacent Jewish cemetery, Mount Sinai, but I wasn’t sure that interring Josh’s ashes there wouldn’t strike his parents as adding insult to injury. At any rate, by the time I pulled into my garage, it no longer seemed as urgent that I dispose of Josh’s ashes as it had when I’d left, after dumping his medicines and cleaning out the closet of the last of his clothes. I was still unable to think about the previous night without remorse and shame. I had lost myself in this obsession for Alex the same way I had once lost myself in a bottle. Sitting in the Columbarium of Radiant Destiny with Amiga Slade, I had had a revelation that the death I was running from wasn’t Josh’s but my own. For two years I’d watched him die, cell by cell, and in the murk beneath consciousness it had awakened my own terror of death. My maniacal busyness was a kind of prolonged anxiety attack and now that I understood that, maybe the real grieving could start.

The message light was flashing on my answering machine. I played back the messages, three of them, all from Richie, each more urgent than the last. I picked up the phone and dialed his number. He picked up on the first ring.

“Henry?”

“Hi, Richie. What’s so important?”

“Where have you been all day?”

“Looking at cemeteries. Why?”

“Alex Amerian was with you last night, wasn’t he?”

“How did you know that?”

“That’s not important. When did he leave your house?”

“I don’t know, between eleven and midnight. Why?”

“He’s been murdered. They found his body in a Dumpster in Vaseline Alley.”

“A
RE YOU SURE
?”

“I heard it from one of the cops at the scene,” Richie said. “What happened last night?”

From where I was standing I could see across the breakfast counter into the kitchen. There was a rag in the sink with Alex Amerian’s blood on it.

“Do you think I killed him?”

“No, of course not,” Richie said. “It must have happened after he left you. Did he say where he was going?”

I had walked into the kitchen. I picked the rag out of the sink and carried it into the pantry, where I tossed it into the washing machine.

“Henry?”

“He didn’t say. I assumed it was a John.”

There was a pause. “He told you he was a hustler.”

Something clicked. “You hired him last night.”

“That’s crazy. He didn’t come here.”

“No,” I said. “You hired him to go out with me.”

“I was only trying to help you get over this thing you had about him and Josh.”

“With what, a sex exorcism?” I asked bitterly.

“He wasn’t supposed to tell you.”

“It was part of his act,” I said. “The hardened pro with the heart of gold. Was that your idea, too? Well, it didn’t work, Richie. He couldn’t keep up the act. His mask slipped and it got a little ugly at the end.”

“What happened?”

“I shoved him, he hurt himself.”

“How bad.”

“A bloody nose.”

“That doesn’t sound like you, Henry,” he said.

“Maybe my mask slipped a little, too.”

Richie said, “He kept an appointment book. Your name will be in it for last night.”

“Then so will the name of his last appointment.”

“You were supposed to be his last appointment,” Richie said. “I paid him for an all-nighter.”

The bloody rag, my name in his appointment book. I felt a surge of panic.

“Have you talked to his roommate?” I asked. “Katie?”

“The speed-freak fag hag? I’ve been calling all day. The line is busy.”