“Henry!”
I clicked off the light and got out of the car. “It’s all right.”
“I thought you had a gun,” she said, recovering her breath.
“I’m a lawyer, not a cowboy,” I replied. “I can hardly see you in here. Let’s go outside.”
I reached for her hand, found it, and led her back out where the streetlamp illuminated the quiet street. Although she wore an overcoat, she was still shivering. I put my arm around her.
“Where did you come from?” I asked.
“My car,” she answered, pointing to a white Mercedes parked at the curb just past the house. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Why didn’t you wait inside?”
“I needed to see you alone,” she said. “I didn’t want Larry to know.”
Her shivering subsided. In the bright white light her face was tired but seemed much younger, sharper. This is how she looks on stage, I thought.
“Come back to my car with me,” she half-pleaded. I followed her to the Mercedes and got in. The car reeked of cigarettes. The dashboard clock read 12:30.
“Tom’s in trouble,” she said abruptly.
“Go on.”
She stared out into the street. “I was at home, alone, when there was a call from someone — male, asking for Tom. He wouldn’t tell me who he was. I hung up.” She glanced at me. “I know it’s rude but the strangest people somehow get our number, fans, salesmen, you name it.”
She was getting off the point. “What happened next?” I prompted.
“He called again. He demanded to talk to Tom. I told him Tom wasn’t in and he said-” Shallow lines appeared across her forehead. “ — that if I was lying it wouldn’t save Tom, and if I wasn’t, he would find him.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes,” she nodded.
“But you must be used to crank calls,” I said. “Why did this one bring you to me?”
She fumbled with her cigarette case and extracted a cigarette. I rolled down the window when she lit it. “I know I’m not being clear,” she said. She exhaled, jerkily, a stream of smoke. “Tom goes to bars. Homosexual bars. He meets men, has sex with them, and comes home. He doesn’t do it often. It’s a part of his life we don’t discuss.”
“But you know about it.”
She dug into the pocket of her overcoat and came up with a handful of matchbooks. “It’s these,” she said.
I examined them. They were all from local gay bars.
“He leaves them for me to see,” she said, softly.
Some of the matchbooks had names and phone numbers written in them. “That seems cruel,” I commented.
“To an outsider,” she said, stubbing her cigarette out. She smiled, faintly, ironically. “Tom is — he doesn’t lie very well. He can’t bring himself to talk about this with me, but he won’t lie about it, either. These,” she nodded toward the matchbooks, “are his way of letting me know.”
“Why?” I asked. “Aren’t you the one who told me that discretion is the better part of marriage?”
“I’m more his mother than his wife,” she said as if giving the time. “He depends on me to look after him. And I have a mother’s intuition about him — when his hurts are real, when they’re not,” she continued with a sort of mocking tenderness. “When there’s danger.”
“Lawyers have a kind of intuition, too,” I said, “and my intuition tells me that there’s something you’re holding back.’’
She was silent for a moment, then said, ‘‘I lied about the call. It wasn’t anonymous.”
“Who was it?”
“Sandy,” she replied.
“Why would he threaten Tom?”
She shook her head. “I honestly don’t know. There’s something going on between them. Sandy’s been completely out of control. He and Tom had a big fight a couple of days ago and Tom finally threw him out of the house. Then this.” She shuddered. “I’m afraid, Henry. He’s crazy. Help me find Tom.”
I put aside the questions I wanted to ask her about Tom and Sandy. They seemed irrelevant when I remembered that Sandy Blenheim was a killer.
“You think he’s at one of these places?” I asked, holding up the matchbooks.
“I don’t know where else to look,” she replied.
Last call had been called five minutes earlier but no one was moving. I walked around the bar again, the last in Tom’s match- book collection. The other three had also been like this, dark and out of the way, far from the glittery strip of Santa Monica Boulevard known by the locals as Boys Town with its trendy bars and discos.
This bar, The Keep, was on a Hollywood side street that had disappeared from the maps around 1930. There wasn’t much to the place: a bar lined with stools where customers could sit and watch their reflections blur in the mirror as the night wore on, a small dance floor bathed in blue light, a few tables lit by orange candles. Posters of beefy naked men covered the walls. Many of the patrons were middle-aged or older, and the level of shrieking was pretty high. Definitely a pre- Stonewall scene.
I leaned against the wall and looked around. Half a dozen of the bar stools were occupied. A handsome man’s reflection smiled at me. I smiled back and continued inspecting the other customers. Tom Zane was not among them.
As I started out the door, I heard someone say, “Ambassador.”
I stopped. “Zane,” I replied.
The skinny bartender jerked his head toward me, his long earring dangling against his cheek.
“You say something?” he asked me.
I shook my head and walked back to where I had been standing. The man in the mirror was still smiling. He wore a plaid shirt beneath a black leather jacket. He had dark hair and a moustache. His eyes were brown.
Holding his eye in the minor, I stepped forward until I stood directly behind him. His smile widened.
“Zane?”
“Ambassador,” he replied, and swung around on the bar stool until he faced me.
“I didn’t recognize you at all.”
“Were you trying to?”
“As a matter of fact, I was. Rennie sent me to find you.”
He frowned. “Rennie?”
“There was a call tonight, threatening you. She brought your matchbook collection to me and sent me looking for you.”
“Goddammit,” he breathed. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She was worried, Tom. The caller was Sandy.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What did she tell you about Sandy?”
“That you had a fight and kicked him out of your house.”
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. He dropped a ten dollar bill on the bar and we went out to the street. It was drizzling. The bar was in a warehouse district and, as we headed down the street toward Cahuenga, a Doberman sprang out from a fenced- in lot and barked. A woman in the tatters of a coat hurried by, stopped, and screamed invectives at the dog. We reached Cahuenga and Tom’s car, a red Fiat Spider with a plate that read “Drifter.”
“Where are you parked?” Tom asked.
“Just down the street.”
“I think you should forget any of this happened,” he said, reaching to the moustache and pulling it from his face. I watched, fascinated.
“What about the eyes?” I asked.
“Brown contact lenses. The hair’s just a colored mousse. Washes right out,” he smiled. “It’s Hollywood, Henry.”
“Seems like a lot of trouble just to have a drink at a place like that.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to be invisible, Henry?’’ he asked, opening the car door.
I shook my head.
“No,” he said. “I guess you wouldn’t miss what you haven’t lost. Me, I can’t walk down the street without some girl throwing her tits in my face or some fag groping me. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’m down on sex, but I like to choose the time and the place.” He got into the car and smiled. “You heard what I said about forgetting about tonight.’’
‘‘I heard,” I said, “but Sandy’s about to have some other problems.”
“Don’t tell me anything,” he said, starting up his car. “I’m finished with Sandy.”
I looked at him. “Then you know,” I said.
He shook his head. “I don’t know anything. See you around, Henry.” He put the car in gear and skidded off down the wet black street toward Sunset and, I hoped, home. I stood there for a minute, as if on an empty stage, and then started back to my car.
It was two-thirty-five when I knocked at the door to Josh’s apartment. There was some noise from within and then he opened the door, drawing his robe around him. His hair was a sleepy tumble and his eyes beneath his glasses were tired.
“Hi,” he said as I stepped into the warm room. There was a lamp on over the sofa and an open book on the floor.
“I’m sorry I’m so late.”
“That’s okay,” he said and kissed me. “I’m happy you’re here. I was just reading.”
I took off my coat and tossed it to the sofa. The day had begun in the Mandels’ kitchen, included Larry’s revelation that he had contracted Kaposi, took in Tony Good’s allegation that Blenheim killed Brian Fox, and ended in a Hollywood bar where a man with brown eyes watched me in a mirror. Images drifted across my brain with a lot of darkness between them.
“I’m exhausted,” I said, smiling at Josh who watched me with dark, serious eyes. “How are you? How did things go with your folks after I left?”
He smiled, wearily. “As soon as you left they started in on me.”
“I’m sorry, Josh,” I said, and held him.
“It’s okay,” he replied uncertainly.
I kissed his warm cheek, feeling the faint stubble there against my lips. “Do they think I corrupted you?”
“It’s not fair. I was gay before I met you.”
“You can’t expect them to be fair.”
“Don’t defend them,” he said, momentarily annoyed. “Sorry, Henry. I’m just tired.”
“Let’s go to bed then.”
He yawned in agreement and we went into the bedroom. He got into bed while I undressed and washed my face and mouth at the bathroom sink. I slipped into bed beside him and we reached for each other, pressing the lengths of our bodies, one against the other, everything touching, foot, groin, belly, chest. In my mind — my relentless mind — I pictured our embrace, my exhausted thinness against his young sumpture, like a Durer etching of the embrace of youth with middle age. Thirty-six: that’s middle age, isn’t it? Midway down the road of life?
“You’re thinking again,” Josh whispered into my ear. “I can tell because your whole body gets stiff except one part.”
I relaxed.
This dream I entered unwillingly because I knew where it would take me. I was sitting at the bar of The Keep, as thirsty as I had ever been. The bartender with the dangling earring refused to serve me because he said that I had stopped drinking. I looked into the mirror behind the bar. A stage illuminated by three blue lights formed in it.
As I watched I saw Tom Zane, naked, doing the last scene from Edward the Second, but instead of the black actor, Sandy Blenheim played the part of Lightborn. Blenheim was hugely fat, flesh almost dripping from his body, and wore only a jock strap. The scene was so grotesque I began to laugh.
“You think I’m funny?” Blenheim shrieked. “Then watch.”
Suddenly he was holding a poker, with a red hot tip. He began to insert it into the anus of the body lying on the pallet on the stage. It should have been Zane, but it wasn’t. It was Jim Pears, comatose and unable to protect himself.
“Stop it,” I shouted. “Stop it!”
“Isn’t this funny, isn’t this funny,” Blenheim yelled back.
I turned away from the scene to another part of the mirror. There, instead of my own reflection, I saw Larry’s cadaverous face.
“Why is this happening?” I demanded of the bartender.
He looked at me. Now he had Mr. Mandel’s face and he said, “Because you’re a queer. A queer. A queer.”
The last thing I remembered was ordering myself to wake up.
I opened my eyes. Josh, wide-eyed, had lifted his face above mine.
“Henry,” he said.
I expelled a gust of pent-up breath. “It’s all right. Bad dream.”
He held me. I smelled his smells, felt his skin beneath my fingers and his hair against my face. At that moment, he was the only real thing in the world.