Outside it was dusk. I turned from the window back to the room, fumbling for a light switch. I pushed a button and three lights flickered on, unsteadily, from a brass fixture in the center of the room. Hugh was asleep in the bedroom at the end of the long, narrow entrance corridor. The toilet gurgled from the bathroom where I’d poured out his vomit and flushed it away.
From my law practice I knew that a heroin addict could stay clean long enough to clear his body of the addiction. If he began to use again it took him awhile to become re-addicted. Some addicts used casually — chipping, they called it — but sooner or later their habit caught up with them. Hugh was in the first stage of re-addiction. His body, recognizing the opiate for what it was — poison — struggled to reject it, making him sick. If he continued using, the sickness would stop and the body would make its lethal adjustments. That he was sick was encouraging because it meant there was still time to prevent his re-addiction.
Not that I knew how to prevent it. I poured myself a drink from the bottle of brandy I’d found in the kitchen. When a hype came to me, it wasn’t for medical advice or psychological counseling, but simply to stay out of jail. If I did that much for one of them, got him into a hospital or a drug program, then I considered myself successful. As to why someone became addicted or how he rid himself of the habit, those things remained mysteries to me. The only thing I was pretty sure about was that when dealing with an addict, the fact of addiction was more important than the drug. Thinking about Hugh I wished, for his sake, that I knew more.
I wandered aimlessly across the big, bare room. The house had the dank, decaying smell of so many Victorian houses, as if the walls were stuffed with wet newspaper. Hugh’s house, only a couple of blocks from Castro, was in a neighborhood undergoing renovation; many of the neighboring houses looked freshly painted or were in the process of reconstruction or were for sale. His house was untouched by this activity. Strips of paint peeled from the banister of the stairs leading up to the porch. Inside, the rooms were painted white, badly, in some spots barely covering the last application of gaudy wallpaper. The wooden floors were scarred and dirty. From the kitchen, the refrigerator shrieked and buzzed, then subsided to a low whine. It wasn’t the house of an heir.
Yet there were incongruous, aristocratic touches. There were dazzlingly white sheets on his bed and freshly laundered towels piled in the bathroom. The few pieces of furniture scattered around the house were of obvious quality. The brandy I was drinking was Courvoisier VSOP, and the glass from which I drank it appeared to be crystal.
I found myself at the bookshelves which held a couple of dozen books. Many of them were worn-out paperbacks, Tolkien, Herman Hesse, a volume of Ginsberg — the library of a college sophomore of the sixties. I opened the Ginsberg. Written on the flyleaf were Hugh’s name, the year 1971, and the words New Haven. Inspecting the second shelf, I saw the books were poetry, mostly, and by people I’d never heard of. The spine of one volume was cracked and when I opened it a sheaf of pages fell out, fluttering to the floor. I knelt down to pick them up and saw, on the bottom shelf, a framed photograph laid face down. I picked it up with the pages, put the book back together and turned the picture over.
It was the portrait of a woman, a lady, I thought. She may have been as young as fifty. It was hard to tell from the black and white photo whether her hair was white or an ashy shade of blond. Light and darkness had been tactfully deployed on the plain background behind her. The obvious effect was timelessness and the apparent reason was the woman’s age. Still, there was an elegance in her angular, handsome face quite apart from the photographer’s craft, and a kind of luster in the brightness of her hair and eyes. I thought she must have once been beautiful.
“My mother,” a voice commented behind me. I nearly dropped the picture in surprise and turned to find Hugh standing at the edge of the room, just outside the light. He stepped forward, white-faced, his eyes exhausted. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to come up on you like that.” He held out his hand for the photo and I gave it to him. He studied it a moment then returned it. I laid it back on the bookshelf.
“Nice picture,” I said. “Looks professional.”
“The official portrait,” he said, with a trace of contempt in his voice. “It appears on all the dust jackets.”
“She writes?”
He nodded, seating himself on a corner of the couch, drawing a thick sweater across his bare chest. I noticed for the first time, watching him, that the room was cold. “What has she written?”
“Poetry, mostly.”
“I didn’t notice any of her books on your shelves.”
“I don’t have any.”
“You’re not close to her?”
“I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Does she live in San Francisco?”
“No, in the east. Boston, I think.”
“With your father?”
He hesitated a second before saying, “He’s dead.”
I heard his hesitation with a lawyer’s ear and something about it was not quite right, so I asked, “Are you sure?”
“Don’t cross-examine me.” He shivered and reached to the table for the brandy, swigging it directly from the bottle. Then he put it down and ran a hand through his already disheveled hair. He looked fragile and unhappy.
“I’ll make you some coffee,” I said, still standing by the books, “if you’ll tell me where it is.”
“Blue canister in the refrigerator,” he said, shivering again.
When I returned to the living room he was standing at the window, which was now black with night, facing himself — a ghostly reflection. I set the mugs of coffee down and went over.
“Something out there?” “A car passed by, slowly, without its lights on.”
“Has that happened before?”
“No,” he said, “and maybe it wasn’t meant for me.” I made a noise in the back of my throat. “You still don’t believe that I’m in danger of being killed.”
“You’re doing a pretty effective job of killing yourself.” He turned away, abruptly, went to the table and picked up a cup of coffee.
“I’m sorry about today.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I was bored and lonely.”
“Some would call that the human condition.”
He laughed mirthlessly. “My coping mechanism is easily overwhelmed.”
“That sounds like a diagnosis.”
“My last analyst,” he replied, carelessly, “who also told me that intimacy is difficult for me.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Sex is not the same thing.”
“I see. Thank you for setting me straight.”
“Wait,” he said. “Let’s start over. I asked you to come up because I wanted to see you again, not to score points against you.”
“All right,” I said, crossing over to the couch and sitting down beside him. I lay my hand, tentatively, on his. “Tell me what happened between last weekend and today.”
He looked at me intently through cloudy blue eyes, then said, “Have you ever heard of a poet named Cavafy?” I told him no. “A Greek poet. Gay, in fact. He wrote a poem about a young dissolute man who tires of his life and resolves to move to a new city and mend his ways. The poet’s comment is that moving away is futile because, having ruined his life in one place, he has ruined it everywhere.”
“And?”
“I had so many good reasons for leaving New York and coming home, but when I got here they — evaporated. I was the same person, it was the same life.”
“People overcome addictions.”
“But not self-contempt.” He poured brandy into his coffee cup and leaned back as if to tell a bedtime story. “My grandfather, who raised me after my father died, had very primitive and set notions about what a man is. He never missed an opportunity to let me know that I didn’t measure up.”
“Let it go,” I said, thinking back to my own father. “You’ll live to bury him. That changes everything.”
“He poisoned my childhood,” Hugh said, ignoring me, “and I looked for causes, not knowing they didn’t exist, believing that I deserved his abuse.”
Something in his tone made me ask, “What kind of abuse, Hugh?”
“He said I was too pretty to be a boy,” Hugh replied, his eyes bright with defiance and shame. Slowly, I understood.
“He assaulted you — sexually?”
“The joke is that I already knew I was gay. Knew I was different, anyway. What took me years to learn is that it didn’t have — “ he paused, searching for words — “to be so demeaning.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That I led him on, that I wanted it.” He smiled, bitterly. “I was the seductive twelve year old. A few weeks after it happened he sent me to a prep school in the east. Eighteen years ago. I can count on my fingers the times I’ve seen him since.”
“Why have you come back?”
“I’m living on my anger, Henry. It’s the only life I’ve got left in me, and I’ve come back to confront him. But I need to be strong when I see him, and I’m not strong yet.”
“In the meantime, you brood and destroy yourself.”
“I thought, in the meantime, you and I could become friends.” I heard the ghost of seduction in his voice, yet it was not meant seductively. It was a plea for help. “If only I had met you — even five years ago.”
“What’s wrong with now?” I asked and drew him close.
The next morning I woke to find Hugh standing perfectly still in a wide sunny space near the window, facing the wall above my head, wearing only a pair of faded red sweatpants. He held his hands at his side, fingers splayed, but not stiffly. He breathed, slowly, deeply. His breath filled his entire torso with quivery tension as he inhaled, bringing his chest and abdominal muscles into sharp relief. As he exhaled, his chest fell with delicate control. The color of his skin darkened as the blood rushed in a torrent beneath the skin. Each muscle of his body was elegantly delineated, like an ancient statue that time had rendered human.
He lifted his chin a little, drew his shoulders even straighter and parted his legs, one forward and one back. I watched as he sank to the floor, raising his arms at his side until he was fully extended in a split. There was the slightest tremor in his fingertips giving away the effort but no other part of his body moved. He pulled his back straighter, closed his eyes and held the position until the tremor in his fingers died. Then, he carefully brought his back leg forward in a wide arc, lowering his arms at the same time, until he was sitting. He opened his eyes.
“That was amazing,” I said.
“I was so much better once,” he replied, shaking his head vigorously, scattering drops of sweat from his hair. “I studied dance in college.”
“Where?”
“Where?” he repeated, smiling. “I was at Yale for a couple of years, and N.Y.U. for a semester or two and Vanderbilt for a few months. I moved around.”
“Without ever graduating?”
“I never did, no.” He stood up, crossed over to the bed, a mattress laid against a corner, and extended his hand. “Get up and I’ll take you to breakfast.”
I let him pull me out of bed and our bodies tangled. He was flushed and a little sweaty and his hair brushed against the side of my face like a warm wind as we drew each other close.
An hour later we were sitting at a table in a dark, smoky corner of a coffeehouse on Castro. The waiter cleared our breakfast plates and poured more coffee.
“So you still consider yourself a hype?” I asked, pursuing our conversation.
“Of course. I’m addicted whether I use or not because being high is normal for me and how I function best. When I’m not using, I’m anxious.”
“I’m pretty anxious myself, sometimes, but I’ve never felt the desire to obliterate myself.”
“It’s not just the sedative effect a hype craves. It’s also the rush, and the rush is so intense, like coming without sex.”
“I’ve heard that before from my clients. One of them said it was like a little death.”
Hugh looked at me curiously and asked, “Do you know what that means?”
“I imagine he meant you lose yourself.”
“Exactly. La petite mort — that’s what the French called orgasm. They believed that semen is sort of concentrated blood so that each time a man came he shortened his life a little by spilling blood that couldn’t be replenished.”
“And women?”
“Then, as now, men didn’t much concern themselves with how women felt.” He finished his coffee. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Walking down Castro toward Market, Hugh reached over and took my hand. Self-consciously, I left it there. It perplexed me how sex with other men seemed natural to me but not the small physical gestures of affection and concern. What I remembered most clearly from my first sex with another man was the unexpected tenderness. It disturbed me — disoriented me, I guess. I had expected homosexuality to be dark and furtive, but it wasn’t. It was shattering but liberating to come out and it ended a lot of doubts that had been eroding my self-confidence. I remember thinking, back then, so this is it, one of the worst things I can imagine happening has happened. And life goes on.
As we rounded the corner of Castro and crossed over to Market, he gently let go of my hand. We were out of the ghetto. I reached over and put my hand back into his. He looked over at me, startled, then tightened his grip. And life went on.
There were three messages from Aaron Gold on my answering machine when I got to my apartment, each a little more frantic than the last. I couldn’t blame him. I had gone to San Francisco for a day and stayed a week. Finally, tired of wearing Hugh’s clothes and needing a little time away from the intensity of our developing relationship, I drove home to pick up the mail and for a change of clothes.
I called Gold’s office. His first words were, “Are you all right? I was ready to start calling the hospitals.”
“I’m fine. Why are you so alarmed?”
“We were supposed to have dinner on Monday night. It is now Friday.”
“Jesus, Aaron. I completely forgot. I should’ve called from the city.”
“The city? Is that where you’ve been?”
“Yes, at Hugh Paris’s.”
“He lives there? Where?”
“Why?” There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “Aaron, are you still there?”
“Are you going back up?”
“Tonight,” I said.
“I need to see you before you go,” he said in a strange voice.
“Sure. When?”
“I’ll meet you in an hour at Barney’s,” he said.
He was already at the bar when I got there, staring, a bit morosely over a tall drink with a lot of fruit jammed into the glass.
“You look like you’ve lost your best friend,” I said, sitting down. Touching his glass, I said, “What’s that you’re drinking? A Pink Lady?” He said nothing. I added, to provoke him, “Jews really don’t have the hang of ordering alcohol.’’
“You’re pretty chipper,” he said, sourly. The waitress came over and I ordered a Mexican beer.
“I’m happy, Aaron.”
“Hugh Paris?” he asked, with almost a sneer in his voice. “Tell me, what do you really know about him?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
He waited until I had my drink, then said, “You’ve heard of Grover Linden.”
“In this town,” I said, “you might as well ask me if I know who my father is.”
“Great-great-grandfather,” he said. “That’s his relation to Hugh Paris.”
“You’re not serious.”
Gold merely nodded.
The first time I heard Grover Linden’s name I was a fourth- grade student in Marysville. His picture appeared in my social studies book and the caption beneath it identified the broad-faced bearded man as the man who built the railroad. The railroad that connected the west and the east, I learned in high school, took ten years to construct and cost the lives of hundreds as an army of Chinese coolies worked feverishly to break through the Sierras during three of the coldest winters in the nineteenth-century. It was the railroad that raised San Francisco from a backwater village to an international city. It was the railroad from which Grover Linden, who began his adult life as a blacksmith in Utica, derived the wealth that made him the richest man in America.
Linden rose to become a United States senator and bought the Democratic nomination to the presidency. He lost that election, too opulent and corrupt even for that opulent and corrupt era, the Gilded Age. Popular opinion turned against him and he was forced to divest himself of his railroad in a decision by the Supreme Court that I read in my law school anti-trust course. He died in 1920, having nearly lived a century, leaving an immense personal fortune. Almost incidentally, he donated a vast tract of land on the San Francisco peninsula to found the university that bore his name. The first president of the school, Jeremiah Smith, Linden’s son-in-law, raided the Ivy League luring entire faculties to California with the promise of unlimited wealth to support their research. In less than a century, Linden University had acquired an international reputation as one of the country’s great private schools. The year Gold and I graduated from the law school, the commencement speaker, a United States Supreme Court justice, addressed a distinguished audience that included half the California Supreme Court as well as the sitting governors of three states, all of them alumns. And Linden, statues and paintings of whom were everywhere, lay entombed on the grounds of the school in a marble mausoleum along with his wife, daughter and son-in-law.
“Hugh hasn’t told you who his family is?” Gold asked.
“No, not really. I mean — he mentioned money, but I had no idea.”
“He didn’t tell you his grandfather was Judge Paris?”
“Robert Paris, you mean?”
Gold nodded.
“He told me that, but it’s a far cry from someone named Robert Paris to Grover Linden.”
“It’s complicated,” Aaron said. He pulled the slightly soggy cocktail napkin from beneath his drink and got out his pen. “Look,” he said. “This is Linden’s family tree.”
At the top of the tree were Linden and his wife, Sarah. The next generation consisted of their daughter, Allison, who married Jeremiah Smith.
“Then,” Gold said, “there were two kids, John Smith and Christina Smith, Linden’s grandchildren. Christina married Robert Paris.”
“John Smith never married?”
“No,” he shrugged. “Linden’s descendants aren’t prolific. Christina and Robert Paris had two sons, Jeremy and Nicholas.” He traced the tree down into that generation. “Nicholas married Katherine Seaton. Hugh is their son.”
He tucked his pen back into his coat pocket. I studied the napkin.
“Hugh’s the last living descendant of Grover Linden?”
“No, John Smith is very much alive. He controls the Linden Trust,” Gold said, referring to the megafund, the income of which supported the university’s research which ranged from cancer cures to bigger and deadlier nuclear bombs, with the emphasis on the latter.
“John Smith,” I repeated, and, suddenly, it came to me. “He bailed Hugh out of jail.”
Gold lifted an eyebrow but said nothing.
“Are there any other descendants?”
“Hugh’s father, Nicholas.” “Hugh told me his father was dead.”
“He might as well be,” Gold said. “Nicholas is locked up in an asylum. A basket case.”
“And Hugh’s mother, Katherine?”
“The parents divorced twenty years ago. I don’t know anything about her.”
“You seem to know a lot. Why?”
“Robert Paris is one of my firm’s clients,” he said glumly. “I’m telling you more than I should have as it is.”
“Why tell me this much?”
“For your own good. Hugh’s a black sheep.”
“Meaning?”
“He has a serious drug problem.” I nodded and sipped my beer. “And he’s been hospitalized for — I guess you’d call them emotional problems.” This I hadn’t known but, swallowing my surprise, I nodded again.
Gold looked annoyed, probably having expected shock from me.
“I know about those things.”
“And you still plan to see him?”
“I’m not an eighteen-year-old coed,” I said, to irritate him further. “What I want to know is your source of information. Robert Paris?”
“Don’t ask me to violate a client confidence.”
“A strategic attack of ethics, Aaron?”
“Look, Henry, I’m going out on a limb for you. The guy’s crazy. He’s been threatening his grandfather, calling day and night, writing nutty letters.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, not without a twinge of anxiety that the allegations were true.
Gold dug into his breast pocket and withdrew a wad of rubberbanded letters. He tossed them at me. “Read them,” he commanded.
I leafed through the envelopes. They were postmarked San Francisco, addressed to Robert Paris in Portola Valley but gave no return address. It occurred to me that I did not know what Hugh’s handwriting looked like. Clinging to that thread of doubt, I dropped the letters on the table.
“Where did you get these?”
“Afraid to read them?”
“Go to hell,” I said, rising, but Gold was on his feet first.
“Fine,” he said. “You can shut me out but you have your own doubts about the guy, don’t you?” It was a fair statement but I was not inclined to concede the point. “Keep these,” he said, indicating the letters. “They make enlightening reading.” He drew himself up and walked out. I saw him pass in the window, looking straight ahead. I resisted the impulse to go after him — since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say — and finished my drink. Then, I gathered up the letters and put them in my coat pocket as I rose to leave.
The letters were heavy in my pocket as I walked to my car. There had not been enough time to know Hugh well, particularly since I saw him through the haze of infatuation, but my mind hadn’t gone entirely out of commission. Hugh was a troubled man, troubled enough to make threats if not to carry them out. His hatred with his grandfather was fused with his sexual awakening, and his grandfather remained for him a figure who was frightening but seductive. Then, too, the years of drug addiction had taken their toll. Beneath the charm and humor, there was ruin. I saw all this and it made my feeling for him more intense and protective. The letters — and really, I had little doubt he’d written them — complicated matters. They were a sign that the sickness was deeper than I thought, but, even so, he deserved the chance to explain or deny them.
I called Hugh as soon as I got back to my apartment. The phone rang and rang; I pictured the empty room in his house, the phone wailing into the silence. The anxiety I felt in the bar was increasing by the minute and growing more diffuse; fed by emotional and physical exhaustion, it now verged on simple, unthinking panic. Throwing some clothes into a duffle bag, I hurried out to my car and headed for the city.
I was hardly aware of the other traffic on the road or the fading light of late afternoon. By the time I got to Hugh’s house it was sunset. The first thing I noticed was that the lights were out. Walking up the stairs to the porch, my hands shook. I searched the door quickly for signs of forced entry but found none. I knocked, much too loudly and for too long. There was no answer. I craned my neck around the side of the porch and looked into the front window. The living room filled with shadowy gray light and the emptiness of the place was an almost physical force. I knew no one was there.
I went back to my car and got in, telling myself he would have to come back eventually. All I had to do was wait. So I waited. The streetlights came on. A police car rolled by. I heard a dog bark. A man and a woman walked by, hand in hand, glancing into my car as they passed. I checked my watch. It was ten. The next time I checked it was nearly six in the morning and I was cramped up behind the steering wheel. My panic had dissipated but, as I looked at the house, it seemed to emanate a kind of deadness.
I went back up the stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. I waited a few minutes, watching the neighborhood awaken to another perfect end of summer day. Defeated, I turned away, went down to my car and left. The drive home seemed endless.
A tall, sandy-haired policewoman was leaning against the wall outside the door to my apartment. She asked me if I was Henry Rios, and, when I agreed that I was, she asked me to step over to her patrol car.
“What’s going on, officer?”
“A man died,” she said, simply, “and he had your business card on him.”
“Who was he?” I asked, as a chill settled along my spine. The bright morning light suddenly seemed stale and unreal.
“We don’t know,” she said, briskly. “He wasn’t carrying a wallet. We’d like you to come down to the morgue and see if you can identify the body.”
We went over to the patrol car. Her partner was standing alongside the car drumming his fingers on the roof. He opened the back door for me and I got in. They got into the front and we swept down the quiet street.
“You’re a hard man to track down,” she said. “We’ve been trying since last night.”
“I was out,” I said.
“A bachelor,” her partner said, smiling into the rearview mirror. I smiled back.
The coroner was a black man, his dark skin contrasting with his immaculate white frock. He had a round, placid face and his eyes were black and bright. It was a decent face, one that kept its secrets. He led me down a still corridor that stank of chemicals. The officers followed a few steps behind, talking softly. We came to the room and he instructed the police to wait outside. He and I went in.
“They’re like kids in here,” he said, speaking of the officers. “They get into everything.”
I merely nodded and looked around the room. One wall had several metal drawers in it. On the drawers, just below the handles, were slots into which there had been fitted squares of cardboard with names typed on them. There was a row of steel tables, set on casters, lined up against another wall. It was quite cold in the room. A white room. White lights overhead. The coroner moved around quickly and efficiently.
“When did all this happen?” I asked as he put his hand on the handle of a drawer marked John Doe.
“Estimated time of death around 10:30 last night. They found him in San Francisquito Creek just below the footbridge leading out of campus. Drowned.”
“In three feet of water?” I asked incredulously.
“We took some blood,” he explained quietly. “There was enough heroin in his system to get five junkies off.” I opened my mouth but nothing came out. “Are you ready now?”
“Yes.”
He pulled at the handle. The drawer came out slowly, exposing first the head, and then the torso, down to the sunken genitals. The coroner stopped and took a step back, as if inspecting death’s work.
The elegant body was as white as marble. I could see a dark blue vein running up the length of his arm, and a jagged red mark just beneath his armpit where the needle went in. There were bruises on his chest. His head rested on a kind of pillow. Death had robbed his face of its seductive animation but I recognized him.
“His name is Hugh Paris,” I said, and the coroner took a pencil and pad of paper from his pocket and wrote. “His grandfather’s name is Robert Paris and he lives somewhere in Portola Valley. I don’t know where.” I heard the pencil scratching but I could not take my eyes off of Hugh’s face.
“Is that it?”
“Yes, that’s all.”
“The police will want a statement.” I looked at the coroner. The dark eyes were impassive but remotely sad as he studied Hugh. “Such a young man. It’s a shame.”
I agreed that it was a shame and excused myself, hearing, as I left, the drawer slide shut. The two officers were at the far end of the corridor, smoking. They looked up when they saw me and the woman smiled. As I approached, I saw the smile leak from her face. I stopped, ran the back of my hand across my eyes and inspected it. It was wet. I hadn’t realized I was crying.