The Snow Garden (19 page)

          Michael’s penthouse was a vast, loftlike space decorated without discernible color. Absent walls, the living spaces were marked off by metal-framed furniture arranged along axes. A massive chandelier hung from the vaulted ceiling, which the photo blurb described as “a Gaudi-inspired amalgamation of wrought iron and ceramic, paying tribute to various forms of sea life.”
Mutated octopus
would have been a better description. The soaring plate-glass windows commanded the downtown Manhattan skyline, and the expansive terrace took up the remaining roof of the building. Eric wasn’t surprised to see that Michael had crowded the terrace with his ghostly white, wax sculptures; a strange carnival of dancing figures that looked naked beneath the sun’s glare.

     Eric fought the flutter of panic he felt every time he was forced to recognize that Michael hadn’t ceased to exist—even though Eric hadn’t spoken to him in twenty years—and continued reading.

          Price grins when asked about the now infamous
Village Voice
cover, a cartoon rendering of the dashingly outfitted, barrel-chested architect straddling lower Manhattan with the Bowery Tower extending from his groin like a missile. Anyone familiar with the architect’s pedigree knows he has reason to smile . . . and straddle. At the age of twenty-seven, Price was a relative unknown. What name he had managed to make for himself was due to a handful of John Lautner-inspired residential projects throughout the Northeast. His critics accused him of importing the most superficial elements of Southern California Modern to the opposite coast. But it was his bold proposal for the Seattle Aviation Museum that earned him overnight status as the enfant terrible of the contemporary architecture set, vaulting him into the ranks of Frank Gehry and Gwathmey Siegel. The young Manhattan architect beat out several prestigious West Coast firms for the Seattle commission, and seized his sudden celebrity status as a chance to both shape and create trends in a movement considered stale and lacking surprise.

          For all Price’s swagger and courting of controversy, his critics might be surprised to learn that despite his celebrity, the architect still pines for his college days at prestigious Atherton University. He’s completed three commissions for his alma mater at half his normal fee, further inciting critics to speculate on whether or not Price is in it for the art or the glory. Price’s explanation of his nostalgia is brief, almost terse: “I had a tremendous experience there. Why wouldn’t I want to give something back?” While his private life is generally off-limits to journalists—Price adamantly claims He is a workaholic with little of interest to discuss beyond his work—the architect did reveal one of his more personal pursuits. One room of his Manhattan penthouse has been turned into a studio so that he can pursue his undercelebrated talent: sculpture. One can’t help but wonder if the wax sculptures populating his expansive terrace are the only company such a driven public figure can afford.

     Eric flipped the magazine shut and tossed it onto the sofa.

     Under-celebrated? Michael’s sculptures were crap. They always had been.

     When the two. men met during their sophomore year at Atherton, it had been in an introductory sculpture class called The Kinetics of Form. Michael had mastered the technical aspects in no time flat, so the other ten students in the class decided to take out their frustration on him when he presented his finished pieces. Michael had defended his perfectly proportioned, physically accurate representations of the human form with a passion that turned into self-righteousness, all of it made more intolerable by his always-coiffed movie-star good looks matched with an excess of charisma, which, Eric guessed, had charmed everyone except his fellow sculptors.

      Represent something intangible or spiritual? Michael had practically sneered at the idea.

     “My genius is for making people,” he had announced. “I deal in the real.”

     Eric held his tongue as the war dragged on for a semester, watching Michael put up a fight and feeling anger and a measure of envy toward his arrogance, until the cabal of art students at Atherton banished Michael with their silent disapproval, which led Michael to shift majors. To Eric that seemed like a desperate move, but Michael had ended up laying the foundation for a career that was as impossible to avoid as Atherton’s Tech Center, But the fact remained that Michael was not an artist. Eric found all of his projects to be towering amalgamations that, for all their flash and their defiance of gravity, dazzled, clashed with themselves, and then died of asphyxiation.

     Perhaps that was why Eric had forced himself to read the article. So that he could make sure that, after all these years, Michael was still a collector and manipulator of styles, one whose ego made up for his absence of vision. He needed to know that the man he had lived with, the first man he had ever felt something close to love for, still had the same fault lines running through his soul.

     Still, when he shut his eyes, he saw Michael descending the front steps of the house they had shared together for almost a year. “Eric, you study art because you’re envious of people who can actually create. Because you can’t. Because when you try, all your hear is the scraping of your fingers against the wall of your empty soul.”

     The phone rang. “Hello,” Eric answered, sounding drugged. “Can’t make it tonight.” Randall’s voice was low and slightly hushed. Maybe he was trying not to be overheard by his roommate.

     “How is it?”

     “What?” Randall asked.

     “Your hand.”

     “Better.”

     He thought of Michael Price, who had narcotized him and led him where he promised he would never go again. Pamela Milford’s dead eyes rose up from the ice to accuse him. But whoever else he was, the fact remained that Randall Stone was not Michael Price. He had to remember that.

     “Randall?”

     “Yeah.”

     “We need to be careful.”

     In the ensuing silence, Eric anticipated anger, but all Randall said was, “Aren’t we?” Eric heard a door open on the other end of the line, and before he could say anything else, Randall hung up.

THE MCKINLEY BALLROOM WAS USUALLY RESERVED FOR THE MOST
exclusive of alumni fund-raisers, but for one Friday night it had been transformed into a gay club. “Absolution" was the theme of the second Gay and Lesbian Alliance Dance of the year. The word was written in string lights on the wall. Crepe paper hung between the brass chandeliers, and strobe lights flickered over the plush burgundy draperies. The dances were some of the most popular on campus, regardless of sexual orientation of the clubgoers, and as Randall pulled her onto the dance floor, Kathryn found herself searching the gyrating crowd for Mitchell Seaver.

     She still hadn’t spotted him by the time Randall fell into rhythm beside her, dancing with restricted hip motions, his neck rigid as he scoped out the crowd around them; he exercised just enough movement to look into it, but not so much that it distracted from his perpetual search for the next hottie. Or maybe he was just looking for Tim, considering that the two of them were giving it “another shot,” whatever that meant. She felt the first familiar seizure of awkwardness and found the best that she could manage was shifting her weight from foot to foot while she held both fists in front of her chest, as if to protect herself from the flailing arms on either side of her.

     Across the dance floor, Tim Mathis spotted her and gave her a wave with his glow stick. Most dancers were wearing them around their necks, but Tim had unfastened his and was waving it through the air like a wand. She shouted into Randall’s ear, “Tim’s right there!” and stopped dancing.

     “Nobody likes a quitter!”

     “I can’t keep up tonight, Riverdance. Go mingle with your own kind!”

     She gave him a slap on the ass as she left. April and her date for the evening were sitting on the burgundy upholstered chairs that had been shoved to the wall. Kathryn had barely exchanged a word with April’s new squeeze, mainly because she’d been so whispery she was difficult to hear on the way to the dance and was now unintelligible over the music. She thought her name was Kelly, but didn’t want to risk saying it out loud. She flounced down into the empty chair next to April; it barely gave under her weight and she pitied the alum who had to sit through entire dinners in it.

     On the dance floor, Randall had fallen in with Tim and his circle of bopping, tank-top wearing boys, all of whom had exerted considerable effort to look like twelve-year-old white supremacists. Their buzz cuts were all the same color, a flat shade of gel, and their limbs extended, lanky and shaved smooth, from their sleeveless shirts. Tim, clad in a two-sizes-too-small T-shirt that screamed out
Porn Star
in red letters and black pants made out of some material that reflected the disco lights above, inched closer to Randall before hooking one arm around his waist and bringing his crotch to Randall’s rear end in a pose that might have ended in their murder anywhere off the hill.

     Randall let his head roll forward, eyes shut. He was either enjoying the pressure of Tim’s groin so intensely that she shouldn’t be watching, or he was enduring it without protest. Kathryn couldn’t decide which. In contrast to the rest of the group, Randall seemed strangely adult, moving in rhythm but without the excessive arms-in-the-air antics of the surrounding dancers. All the other gay boys took to the dance floor with a newcomer’s enthusiasm enlivened by a sense of newfound liberation. Randall shared neither their joy nor their acrobatics.

     “I don't get it!” April shouted, and Kathryn anticipated a remark that was intended more for Kelly’s amusement than hers. “Fags take all these perfectly good songs and then mix in a bunch of pots and pans falling down stairs while some disco diva groans out half a lyric over and over. The only way I could dance to this shit is if you set me on fire!”

     Kelly said something inaudible, and April took it as an excuse to laugh and slide her arm around her shoulders. “Hey Kathryn! Why don’t you go back to the dorm and call your boyfriend so you don’t bring the rest of us down?”

     “He’s not my boyfriend,” Kathryn shouted back. “We haven’t been on a date.”

     “Talk to someone at Atherton for longer than fifteen minutes and it’s a date.”

     “He lives off campus.”

     “What?”

     “I said he lives off campus!”

     “So what?”

     “I looked him up in the directory and he wasn’t listed.”

     “Kathryn, you
have
his phone number!” April shouted.

     “He’s probably thirty.”

     She wasn’t about to tell April that Randall’s dislike of Mitchell had wormed its way under her skin, forming a perfect excuse not to make a potentially awkward call every time she reached for the phone. Never mind that Mitchell had been one of the first people to whom she’d expressed her feeling of listlessness and repression and in return received flashes of wit, a phone number, and an abrupt departure. She was listed too. Kathryn knew this was all bullshit, but April would probably point that out soon enough,

     “Fine. Don’t call him,” April barked. She threw one arm out toward the dance floor. “And welcome to the rest of your college career.”

On the third floor of the Student Union, the ballroom’s terrace offered an expansive view of the quad below and the campus beyond, which ambled over the hill in a sea of sloping rooftops that looked stark and semi-nude without leafy branches to bridge the gaps among them. Smokers crowded between the ballroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows and the waist-high stone banister, which Randall rested his butt against as he held Tim around the waist. Both of them puffed cigarettes and watched Tim’s gel-haired, tank-top-clad circle crouch, around a guy named Taylor, who had curled into a ball, his arms clamped around knees that were weakly bent against his chest.

     “X?” Randall asked.

     “I wish I knew,” Tim said. “He’s a cute kid.”

     Randall grunted, wondering if Tim’s entourage of activists and scholars-by-day, muscle-hungry whores by night, would have been paying as much attention to a party foul if it didn’t involve a stocky, corn-fed boy with dimpled cheeks and pouty lips. “Now looks like your time to score,” Randall said.

     Taylor’s caretakers had begun vigorously massaging his shoulders and back.

     “You’re sick, you know that, Randall? He’s from Tennessee.” 

     “What? That puts him out of your league?”

     “Parents are also total Bible thumpers and he’s thinking of letting them in on a little secret over Thanksgiving.” Taylor’s head rolled forward and a weak groan fought to escape his chest. His masseurs exchanged worried looks and struggled to keep his shoulders upright. “Someone needs to call Health Services,” Randall said gravely. Obviously not wanting to leave Randall’s embrace, Tim barked, “Ethan! Call Health Services!”

     The guy Randall assumed was Ethan shot Tim a withering look to thank him for his input as he and several others hoisted Taylor to his rubbery feet. Taylor’s athletic arms, covered in a sheen of sweat, and his shoulders, taut against the tight-fitting club gear he had probably been outfitted in by his caretakers, bore too much of a resemblance to Jesse’s for Randall, so he downed a slug of scotch while Taylor was carted out of sight. The flask was full. It had been a Catch-22 in his jacket pocket for the last three days; each time he thought about how he had filled it he wanted to take a drink to sand the edge off his guilt, and each time he brought it to his lips he saw Lisa Eberman’s face.

     He clamped his eyes shut, wiped his brain clear, and swallowed more. The slug had a stringent bite to it. It burned as it went down and Randall sucked in a breath to cool the inside of his mouth. Just then, Tim let out a small cry when he saw Randall’s blistered hand wrapped around the flask. “What’s that from? Intro to Juggling Flaming Batons?” he asked.

     “Close,” Randall answered. “Where are they taking him?” Confused, Tim followed Randall’s gesture toward the window where Taylor had been. “Don’t know,” Tim answered, glancing again at the blister. “Maybe Health Services. Thank God it doesn’t go on your record. The guy’s got enough shit to go through with his parents as it is.” Tim clasped the flask, trying to pull it from Randall’s hand. Randall pulled back. “Shouldn’t you have something
on
that?”