I was awake the second I heard the movement in the shrubs outside the bedroom window. I glanced at the clock on the bed stand; it was a little after three a.m. The soft but distinctive shuffle of footsteps echoed outside and then I heard a quick rap at the front door. I got out of bed, pulled on a pair of pants and went into the living room. I stood near the door and listened. The last time I had been awakened at that hour was by a disgruntled, drunken client who wanted to break my legs. He might have, too, had he not passed out while we were talking.
There was another knock, louder and more urgent. I peered through the peephole. Hugh Paris stood shivering in the dark. He wore a pair of jeans and a gray polo shirt. I was startled to see him but not surprised. In the two weeks since I’d seen him at the jail, I’d thought of him often, the way one thinks of unfinished business. The thought of him nagged at the back of my mind for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was his beautiful, calm face. One could ascribe any kind of character, from priest to libertine, to his remote and handsome face. A breeze blew his hair across his forehead. He touched his knuckles to the door and rapped harder. I opened it enough for him to see me.
“Don’t turn on any lights,” he said. “I think I was followed.”
“Come in.” I opened the door a little wider and he slipped through. I ordered him to stand still and patted him down for weapons. He wasn’t even carrying a wallet. “All right,” I said. “Come over to my desk. I have a reading lamp that will give us enough light without attracting attention.” He followed me and sat down. I touched the light switch and his face leapt forward from the darkness like a flame.
He said, “I could use a drink.”
“First tell me how you got my address.”
“I called your office yesterday, and when they told me you quit I convinced the receptionist that we’d gone to college together and I was passing through town and wanted to surprise you.” He shivered I went over to the kitchen counter and brought back a bottle of Jack Daniels and two glasses. As he drank, I noticed for the first time that he was about my age — not younger, as I’d remembered. The skin beneath his eyes was pouched with fatigue, as though he had awakened from a long sleep. He set his empty glass on the desk, and I moved the bottle toward him. The liquor brought the color back to his face.
“When someone comes to visit me at this hour, I assume it’s not just to chat,” I said.
“I need a place to stay tonight.”
“And you don’t have any better friends?” He poured himself another drink. I caught the glint of his watch. It was very thin and elegant, mounted on a black leather strap. I had seen watches like that before. They went along with trust funds, prep schools and names ending with Roman numerals.
Hugh was saying something. I asked, “What?”
“You asked me if I had any better friends and I said no. I came down from the city.”
“And you were followed? By whom?”
“It’s a long story,” he said, and, as if as an afterthought he added, “I only need the bed for the night.” His inflection was sexual and I thought about it for a second before responding.
“As flattering as it is, I can’t believe you came here to proposition me,” I said, “which is not to say that couldn’t be part of the deal. But why don’t you tell me what you really want.”
He smiled, charmingly, ruefully. “All right, Henry. I may not look like it but I come from money. Old and famous money. A lot of it has been spent to keep me out of San Francisco.”
“Why?”
“My grandfather controls the money, and he hates me.”
“Because you’re gay?” “That probably has something to do with it,” he said, lightly. “There have been other problems through the years.”
“Drugs?” I guessed, remembering the circumstances of his arrest.
“You’ve seen hypes before?” I nodded. He held his right arm out beneath the dim yellow light. I saw bluish bruises clustered at intervals up and down his vein. They were faint and there were no recent marks or scabs.
“You stopped using?”
“Six months ago. I told my grandfather. He was not impressed.”
“Who is he?”
“Robert Paris,” he said, as if each syllable was significant.
I thought for a second the name meant something to me but recognition faded as quickly as it came.
“The name is not familiar.”
“No? It doesn’t mean anything to most people but I thought you might recognize it.” I shook my head and he shrugged. “I think he had me followed tonight.”
“Why? If he hates you, why should he concern himself with your whereabouts?”
“Money. I have certain rights to the family fortune,” he said, lifting his glass. “My grandfather would like to extinguish them.”
“You mean with some legal action?”
“No,” he replied, softly, “I mean murder.” He drained his glass. I knew at once that he believed what he was saying, but I did not believe it. From my experience, I did not believe in premeditated murder any more than an agnostic believes in God and for the same reason; there never was any proof. Whether a killing occurs in an instant or years after some remembered slight, no killer is ever in his right mind when he kills. For me, that ruled out premeditation.
“You’re exaggerating,” I said.
“No. He’s killed before.” He smiled, bleakly. “I’m not making this up. You don’t know my grandfather.”
“Rich people don’t go around planning to kill each other. They use lawyers, instead.”
Hugh laughed and said, “Not someone who thinks he’s above the law. Henry, I don’t mean he’s going to kill me himself or hire someone to shoot me in broad daylight. I’m sure it would be arranged to look like an accident or a suicide.”
I shook my head. “That’s unbelievable. I’ve known murderers. I’ve represented them and one or two I even got off. The perfect passionless murder does not exist. Killing is a sloppy business.”
“Have any of your murderers been rich?” I told him no. He continued, “I didn’t think so. Money buys a lot of insulation and silence. My grandfather could have us both killed and no one would ever suspect him.” He poured himself another drink and said, “I see by your face you don’t believe me.”
“I believe that you think you’re in danger. I’m not sure what you want from me.”
“You heard me out,” he said. “That’s all I wanted. And a bed. Wasn’t that the deal?”
“I guess so,” I said, aware, suddenly, of the nearness of his body and the noise of his breathing and the darkness of the room around us. We rose, wordlessly, and went into the bedroom.
I woke up alone and lay back, watching the shadow of the tree outside the window sway across the wall. The only noises were the clock ticking and the wind. The sheets and blankets were kicked back and over the foot of the bed. A wadded up towel lay crumpled on the floor among Hugh’s scattered clothes. The detritus of passion. I sat myself up against the wall and studied my nakedness impassively. I kept myself in shape out of habit and thought about my body only when it was sick, hurt, or hungry.
Once as an adolescent and twice as an adult, I had been in love, the last time having been four years earlier. Except for those times, sex was largely a matter of one-night stands. It wasn’t the best arrangement, but, I told myself, it was all that I had time for. Now that my career had come to an abrupt halt, there was a lot of time, more time than I’d ever had as an adult. Enough time to go crazy, or fall in love again. I got out of bed and dressed.
Stepping into the living room I saw him, wearing an old blue robe of mine, pacing the patio. From where I stood, he looked like a figure projected on a screen, luminous, distant and larger than life. He seemed to me at that moment the sum of every missed opportunity in my life. I let the feeling pass. He saw me, smiled, drew open the door and came into the room.
“You’re finally awake.”
“Yes, I like watching you. Hungry?”
“No, but how about some coffee?” I told him I would brew a pot. “I guess I should get dressed.” He disappeared into the bedroom emerging a few minutes later pulling on his shirt.
I handed him a mug of coffee and said, “Let’s go back outside.” We stepped out on the patio to a brilliant day. The smells of the potted plants hung in the air, musky and carnal. “What are you going to do?”
“Go back to the city.”
“And your grandfather?”
“He’ll find me when he wants to.” He sipped his coffee. “And you?”
“I’ve decided to set up my own practice and there’s a lot to be done to get ready.”
He nodded as if I’d said something significant. The air between us was thick with unspoken words. I reached over and touched his arm briefly. He smiled.
“Did you always want to be a lawyer?”
“No, I drifted into it from graduate school. I wanted to change the world and law offered more opportunities than history.”
“Did you know you were gay when you started law school?”
“I’ve always known.”
“It doesn’t seem to be a problem with you.”
“Is it with you?”
“No one ever prepared me for it,” he said, “or the experience of feeling different even though you don’t appear different to other people.”
I nodded. The sexual aspect of homosexuality was, in many ways, the least of it. The tough part was being truthful without painting yourself into a corner: I am different, but not as different as you think.
Aloud, I said, “It’s schizophrenic, isn’t it?” At once Hugh’s face changed. The placid blond handsomeness dissolved and was replaced by anger.
“Don’t use that word around me. You don’t have any idea of what schizophrenia is like.”
“I just meant-”
“That it’s an identity crisis? It’s the end of identity. It’s death.”
Startled by his outburst, I mumbled an apology. The fierceness went out of his eyes but not the distance. The intimacy between us was shattered and I could not think of any words to call him back.
“I’m all right, just sort of keyed up, I guess. I should be going now.”
“I’m really sorry, Hugh,” I said, again.
“You couldn’t’ve known,” he said, more to himself than me. “I’d like to see you again. I’ll call.”
“Sure. I’d like that.” We stood facing each other, but it seemed absurd to shake hands, so we just smiled, like two strangers who had collided by accident.
A week after Hugh’s nocturnal visit, I met Aaron Gold for drinks at a bar on University Avenue called Barney’s to talk about my future, again. Gold had been in solo practice in San Francisco for a couple of years before joining his current firm, and I relied on him for advice on setting up on my own. His years as an associate with a rich, prestigious firm had not eradicated his memories of the privations of his first practice.
Gold liked advising me. It allowed him to relive his days on his own when he expected to build a powerful firm from his own ambition and drive. In the end, he decided the world was insufficiently impressed and he signed on with a firm in town. A good firm, the best in the area and successful enough to have branch offices, but, after all, not a New York firm or even one in San Francisco.
His choice puzzled me. As an editor of law review, Gold could have written his ticket anywhere in the country, but he stayed in our backwater university town far from the centers of the power and influence he’d once set out to dazzle. And he had become a real company man, absolutely dedicated to the firm
We were getting along pretty well, Gold and I, I thought as I stepped into the bar from the muggy August afternoon. However, some aspects of my life remained a problem for him as I discovered again when I brought up the subject of Hugh Paris.
“You went to bed with a client?” he asked incredulously as the startled cocktail waitress brought our drinks.
“He’s not a client,” I said after she’d gone. “I didn’t take his case.”
“It’s the appearance of impropriety you should be concerned about.”
“Look, I haven’t exactly advertised the news. I was just telling you.”
He set his drink down and asked, “Why?”
“You asked what was new with me. I told you.”
“Some things you can omit.”
“Listen, Aaron, I get to thrill to your accounts of your latest girlfriend, but you treat me like a eunuch. You confide in me, but I can’t confide in you? Are we friends, or what?”
He rubbed his forehead and sighed, dramatically. “Yes, we’re friends. It’s just that — well, in addition to the fact that you’re gay — this Paris guy sounds like trouble. You should marry or something.”
“Hugh’s all right,” I said, defensively, and added, “and as for marriage, you’re nearly six years older than me and not married.”
“That’s different. I got into law late and I have to make up for lost time if I want to make partner before I’m forty. Then I’ll marry. A man can marry at any time.”
“If it makes you that uncomfortable for me to talk about being gay, I’ll stop talking about it.”
He waved his hand as though waving away a fly. “It’s part of your life. It’s just difficult. Give me time.”
“I told you ten years ago.”
“What, in law school? Everyone was something in law school. Marxists, feminists, homosexuals — I was a socialist. It was all theory, then. It didn’t mean anything. I never thought you were serious. Let’s have another drink.” He summoned the waitress.
“Did we sell out?”
“Sell out what?” He lifted an eyebrow. “What did we have to sell? Nothing. We had nothing. It’s now that we all have something to sell, and to lose.” He raised his glass and touched it against mine in an ironic toast.
For the next two days, I reviewed my options. Setting up practice in San Francisco was out of the question because of the expense and the fact that there were too many criminal defense lawyers there already, scrambling for a living. When I’d been transferred out of the Public Defender’s office in San Jose, I had burned too many bridges to find my way back. So, for the time being, I decided to stay where I was.
I rented a suite in an office building within walking distance of the courthouse. I bought a desk, installed a phone, and had a nameplate nailed to the door. My business cards were in the process of being printed. All I needed were clients. Since my practice had centered in San Jose, I had very little local reputation and knew I would have to rely, initially, on appointments to criminal cases from which the public defenders disqualified themselves. I had already decided that I did not want a civil law practice.
Appointments represented a steady source of income. Lawyers were appointed from a list maintained by the judges; one applied to be placed on the list. Appointments were sought after and placement on the lists was dictated by political considerations, which, in the world of a small town, meant appeasing those in a position to make life difficult for you. For the judges that meant the D.A. and the public defenders who not only belonged to the same union, but, between them, handled virtually all the criminal matters. The judges were unlikely to appoint any lawyer who had antagonized one or the other office. Therefore, I found it necessary to go make my peace with my ex-employer. I had set up an appointment to see Frances Kelly, to ask her pardon and to get her as a reference.
I climbed the five flights of stairs to the public defender’s office in the courthouse. By the time I got there I was sweaty from exertion and nervousness. The reception room was almost empty as I stepped up to the counter and gave my name. The receptionist was new. It had been a little less than a month since I’d quit but it seemed like a year, chiefly because nothing had changed. Even the calendar on the wall was still turned to July. A couple of my ex-colleagues passed through on their way to court. They saw me but said nothing. Omerta, I thought — apparently, I had become a non-person.
Fifteen minutes later, Frances’s secretary appeared and led me to her office, never once acknowledging that she knew me. I wondered if I would get the same reception from Frances. I knocked at her door and entered on her command.
She greeted me with friendly curiosity, rising slightly from behind her desk, extending a braceleted hand. “You look well,” she said.
“Thanks. So do you.” And, in fact, she looked as sleek and opulent as ever, carrying her avoirdupois like a summer parasol. We exchanged civilities and a little office gossip and then, mentally clearing my throat, I shifted subjects. “I have a favor to ask.” She smiled. “But first I want to apologize for the abruptness of my departure.’’
“You’re forgiven,” she said.
“I’m going to open my own practice.”
“Congratulations,” she murmured.
“I don’t have any clients yet. I plan to apply to the appointments’ list.”
“That’s wise.” I grimaced, mentally. This was like pulling teeth.
“I know the politics of the courthouse,” I said. “The presiding judge will know my name immediately, probably remember hearing that I quit, and call you for your opinion.”
“And you want to know what I’ll tell him.”
“No,” I said. “I’d like you to recommend me.”
She smiled. “I see. Well, your old spirit seems to be returning.” She lit a cigarette. “Do you need the money?”
“What?”
“Do you need the money, or do you just want to go back to work?”
It’s not the money,” I said. I knew I could live for a year on my savings. “I want the work. I’m good at it.”
“Yes, of course, but I’m confused. A month ago you left the office saying you needed time to think over your life.”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“And all that led to is concluding that you want to go back to doing the same thing you just left? Has anything really changed?” The question was rhetorical. She went on, “I would tell the presiding judge that you’re a brilliant lawyer but a troubled man. I would tell him that if I was a defendant I would gladly entrust you with my case but if I was a judge I would be concerned about saddling a client with a potentially sick lawyer.”
‘‘Those are hard words, Frances,” I said.
“You could try a case with no preparation and do a better job than another lawyer with unlimited time to prepare, but that’s not the point. Frankly, I think you would be tempted to wing it because your heart’s not in it anymore.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I have never walked into a courtroom unprepared.”
She pointed to a stack of files sitting on top of a bookcase. “Your last cases,” she said. “Nothing had been done on them.”
“I carried them in my head.”
“That’s the problem, Henry. You’re carrying too much in your head.”
I stood up. “I can’t change your mind?”
“Take all the time you need,” she said, and then come back to me. Not only would I recommend you to the list, I’d help you come back to the office if you wanted.”
How am I supposed to know how much time is enough?”
“You’ll know,” she said, as though making a promise to a child.
I sat at my desk watching the sun set from my new office. The air was dense with a buttery light; the golden hour we used to call it at school. I could see the ubiquitous red tile roofs of the university. The undergrads would not be arriving for another month, but the law school would start up again in a week or two. When I had graduated from there, ten years earlier, it seemed my life was a settled thing. I would rise in the public defender’s office, do important political work, and there would be a judgeship at the end, perhaps. I started out with all the right credentials, but somewhere along the line the ambiguities of my profession bogged me down. Truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, law and equity — this was the stuff of my daily bread. Just as I came to see that there were few clear answers in the law, I also saw there were even fewer such answers in my life.
Frances was right. I wasn’t ready to step back into the swamp. I wasn’t, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do with my life. I opened the side drawer and pulled out a bottle of bourbon and a glass. I kept the sunset company a little longer.
It was late when I stumbled in and the red light on my phone machine blinked a welcome. I navigated my way to it and played the messages. There were two of them, both from Hugh, a couple of hours apart. The first was brief, tentative, a greeting. The second asked me to meet him in the city the next day, at a bar in the Castro. I erased the messages, took off my shoes, stretched out on the couch and fell into a sodden sleep.
When I awoke it was light out but the room was shadowy. I inhaled the fumes of last night’s liquor and sat myself up. My body ached and my head felt as if someone was tightening a wire around my temples. I got myself into the bathroom and swallowed some aspirin. I went into the bedroom and changed into my running clothes. Outside, I forced myself to stretch and set off toward the university.
The first mile was torture. I passed beneath the massive stone arch at the entrance to the school, pulled off the road and threw up. I felt better and ran down the long palm-lined drive to the Old Quad. Lost somewhere in the thicket to my left was the mausoleum containing the remains of the family by whom the university had been founded. Directly ahead of me loomed a cluster of stone buildings, the Old Quad.
I stumbled up the steps and beneath an archway into a dusty courtyard which, with its clumps of spindly bushes and cacti, resembled the garden of a desert monastery. All around me the turrets and dingy stone walls radiated an ominous silence, as if behind each window there stood a soldier with a musket waiting to repel any invader. I looked up at the glittering facade of the chapel across which there was a mosaic depicting a blond Jesus and four angels representing Hope, Faith, Charity, and, for architectural rather than scriptural symmetry, Love. In its gloomy magnificence, the Old Quad never failed to remind me of the presidential palace of a banana republic.
Passing out of the quad I cut in front of the engineering school and headed for a back road that led up to the foothills. There was a radar installation at the summit of one of the hills called by the students the Dish. It sat among herds of cattle and the ruins of stables. It, too, was a ruin, shut down for many years, but when the wind whistled through it, the radar produced a strange trilling that could well be music from another planet.
The radar was silent as I slowed to a stop at the top of the Dish and caught my breath from the upward climb. I was soaked with sweat, and my headache was gone, replaced by giddy disorientation. It was a clear, hot morning. Looking north and west I saw the white buildings, bridges and spires of the city of San Francisco beneath a crayoned blue sky.
The city from this aspect appeared guileless and serene. Yet, when I walked in its streets what I noticed most was how the light seldom fell directly, but from angles, darkening the comers of things. You would look up at the eaves of a house expecting to see a gargoyle rather than the intricate but innocent woodwork. The city had this shadowy presence as if it was a living thing with secrets and memories. Its temperament was too much like my own for me to feel safe or comfortable there.
I looked briefly to the south where San Jose sprawled beneath a polluted sky, ugly and raw but without secrets or deceit. Then I stretched and began the slow descent back into town.
When I got to San Francisco that afternoon, it was one of those days that arrives at the end of summer just as the last tourists are leaving complaining about the cold and fog. The sky was cloudless. I parked my car on 19th and headed down into the Castro.
The sidewalks were jammed and the crowds drifted slowly past bars from which disco music blared and where men sat on bar stools looking out the windows. The air smelled of beer and sweat and amyl nitrate. At bus benches and on strips of grass in front of buildings, men sat, stripped of their shirts, sunbathing and watching the flow of pedestrians through mirrored sunglasses. Approaching the bar where I was meeting Hugh, I smelled marijuana, turned my head and saw a couple of kids sharing a joint as they manned a voter registration table for one of the gay political clubs. I stepped into the bar expecting to find more of the carnival but it was nearly empty. The solitary bartender wiped the counter pensively.
I ordered a gin-and-tonic and took it to a table at the back of the room. Plants hung from the ceiling in big ceramic pots and the lighting was so dim that the atmosphere was nocturnal. Here and there in the darkness I saw a glint of polished brass or a mirror. Suspended from the center of the room was a large fan turning almost imperceptibly in the stale air. It was a place for boozy meditation — emotion recollected in alcohol, as someone once told me in another bar — and I was in a contemplative mood. For the first time in my adult life, I could not see any farther into the future than the door through which Hugh now entered.
I watched him step from the brightly-lit doorway into the dimness of the room, weaving slowly between tables as he approached me. He came up to the table, mumbled a greeting and sat down. He’d had some sun since I’d seen him last. His skin was now the color of dried roses, and his hair was a lighter blond than before but just as disheveled. I restrained an impulse to touch him. He leaned back into his chair, into the shadows. The bartender drifted over and stood in front of us a moment before taking Hugh’s order. Hugh looked up, ordered mineral water, and turned away, missing the bartender’s bright, yearning smile.
“I didn’t actually think you’d come,” he said in a low, slow voice.
“You could’ve called sooner. It’s been a couple of weeks.”
“Too risky,” he said, vaguely, as the bartender set a bottle of Perrier before him. “I have to limit my contacts with outside people.”
“Still in hiding?”
“You still don’t believe me?”
“I don’t think anyone’s trying to kill you. Something else has got you scared.”
“Junkies are fearless,” he replied. He reached out to pour from his bottle into his glass, but his hand shook so violently that he spilled the water on the table. He very slowly set the bottle down. Then, swiftly, everything fell into place for me.
I reached across the table and pulled him forward into the light. He did not resist. His skin was feverish to the touch. His pupils were tightly balled up and too bright. I laid his right arm on the table and spotted the mark almost immediately, a reddish pinprick directly above the vein a few inches above his wrist.
“When did you shoot up?”
“Not long ago,” he said, licking his lips.
“You told me you were clean.”
“I was. I ran into a friend.”
“When?”
“I don’t remember. Last week? After I saw you.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I thought I could handle it. I can’t. I need help.” The princely face was covered with a film of sweat and its muscles sagged as though they were being pulled downward.
“I didn’t come here to babysit a hype,” I said, standing.
He reached out and grabbed my arm. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. I saw slow motion panic spread across his face. I stood above him for what seemed like a long time. Then, slowly, I eased back down into the chair beside him.