Howtown (3 page)

“And Paul is caught in the cross fire.”

“Yes. The funny thing is that Mark and Paul have their own problems. Or did you already know they hate each other?”

“What I know about the Windsors is twenty years out of date.”

“We need your help, Henry. Can you see that?”

I could hear the fatigue in her voice, and what I saw was the makings of a first-class mess. “He’s already been arraigned, hasn’t he? Who was his lawyer for that?”

“A man named Robert Clayton,” she said. “He’s the company’s lawyer.”

“I don’t remember anyone named Robert Clayton.”

“He’s not a native,” Sara explained. “He’s already told Paul that he won’t be his lawyer if there’s a trial, not that Paul wants him. Bob says he doesn’t know enough about criminal law.”

“You don’t believe him.”

“I’ve become an expert in excuses,” she said bitterly. “Like your excuse, that it’s too far to travel.”

As we’d spoken, my recollection of Sara had become clearer. She was one of the bright, sharp-tongued girls that Elena seemed to surround herself with in high school. She’d carried herself as if she were coiled up and ready to strike. An unlikely match for Paul Windsor, who had to be several years younger than she. But then, if Paul was a pedophile, any match would have been unlikely. I wanted to hear more.

“I’m in San Francisco for a couple of days,” I said. “Can you come down here to talk to me?”

“Tell me when.”

“Day after tomorrow, for lunch. Do you know the city?”

“We have a place in Pacific Heights,” she said, dryly.

“Meet me in front of the St. Francis at twelve-thirty,” I said.

“Yes, all right. Thank you.”

“I’m not agreeing to anything, Sara.”

“So you do remember my first name,” she said sardonically. “Good-bye, Henry. I’ll see you Monday.”

“Who was that?” Josh asked, stepping out of the bathroom wrapping a towel around his waist.

“A friend of my sister’s. You went running with Kevin?”

“Ouch,” he said, standing at the wardrobe in front of the mirror, untangling his curly hair with a three-pronged metal Afro pick.

From where I sat I could see him in profile and, simultaneously, full-faced in the mirror, and the two views told different stories. The face in the mirror was the face he was born with, roundish, unlined, with a child’s softness to it, but in profile his fine bones asserted themselves just beneath the skin and I could see the man he was becoming, handsome, stubborn, fearless. I loved both the boy and man, but I didn’t always know which one I was dealing with. This made for complications I was unused to, and having lived alone until I met him, I sometimes wanted to run from the complexities. Sometimes I tried, but he had entered the bone and marrow of my life, making all such efforts futile.

“You’re just getting over a cold, Josh. Don’t push yourself.”

His back stiffened. “I feel fine, Henry.”

“You took your medicines?”

“Shit,” he snapped, ostensibly at the long lock of hair he was extricating from a mass of others. “I need a haircut.”

“How far did you run?” I asked, getting up from my chair. I picked up his levis, underwear and shirt from the floor, folded them, put them on the bed, and lay down, watching him.

“To the wharf,” he replied. “I was going to pick those clothes up. What did your sister want?”

I told him about my visit with Elena. He finished with his hair, shucked the towel and put on a pair of gray corduroys. He rummaged through his suitcase, retrieving a pink Oxford cloth shirt that I recognized as one of mine.

“Are you going to take the case?”

“I don’t know. It would probably mean being away from LA for long periods at a time.”

Josh flopped onto the bed beside me and stuffed pillows beneath his head. “Why not, Henry? You don’t seem all that busy.”

This was true. I had limited the number of cases I was taking so I could spend as much time as possible with Josh. In fact, I’d been exploring teaching at a local law school and shutting down my practice altogether.

“It’s me, isn’t it?” he asked. “You’re afraid to leave me by myself.”

I turned to him. “That has something to do with it.”

“There’s a really neat invention called the telephone,” Josh said. “You pick it up and you push some buttons and then you can talk to the person at the other end of the line.”

I laid my hand on his pink shoulder. “Sarcasm is not your strong point.”

“The more we give into it, the more it’s going to take over.” It. AIDS. “We already moved to LA because of it. Now all I want is a normal life.”

“I understand that.”

Briskly he asked, “Then why are you afraid to leave me by myself?”

The question cornered me. There was nothing to do but tell the truth. “Because I worry.”

“Well, then, stop.” He shook off my hand. “Just stop. I know what I have to do to take care of myself.” He folded his arms across his chest. “How do you think it makes me feel having you treat me like I was already dead.”

“That’s a cruel thing to say, Joshua.”

“But I’m right,” he insisted. “I’m alive right now, Henry. Right now.” He put out his hand. “See?”

I closed my hand around his. “There’s a difference between living with a disease and denying it.”

He pulled his hand away again. “Well, you’re the expert on that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know.”

And I did. Six months earlier, having been sober for four years, I’d gone on a binge following an especially bad fight with him and had spent a month at an alcohol rehab clinic. Now, whenever I raised the subject of his health, he had a ready answer. I didn’t like it.

“Are you saying that because I made a stupid decision about my health, you should be able to make stupid decisions about yours? The consequences in your case are a lot more serious.”

“Bullshit,” he snapped, hopping off the bed. “You’d be just as dead from drinking yourself to death as I’d be from AIDS. And who the hell are you to assume that the only decisions I can make about my health are stupid ones? Why don’t you give me a fucking chance.”

“And why don’t you give me a break? Are you going to hold this over my head for the rest of my life? Look, I’m sorry that you had to discover I’m human, Josh.” I climbed off the bed.

“Where are you going?”

“For a walk.”

“Can we just stop this, now?”

“You tell me.” I opened the door.

“Wait, Henry—”

I slammed the door on him and immediately regretted it but, too ashamed to apologize, I couldn’t bring myself to go back.

I leaned against the hallway wall and breathed. Inside my head familiar voices assailed me, telling me what a shit I was for fighting with him. Immediately, another voice attacked me for my guilt, saying that I felt it only because he was right, that I treated him as if he might die at any second. Beyond these voices was the silence of fear. Fear that he would die and I would be left alone. Until I’d met him I had never felt this fear because I had never expected to be anything other than alone.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” I said, aloud.

Well if you don’t, who will? I heard myself answer silently. Who else cares enough?

He does.

Well that’s the whole problem, isn’t it? The first time you’ve ever loved anyone and he’s not only thirteen years younger than you are but—

But, what?

Dying.

I heard a noise at the end of the hall and looked up. Terry Ormes, the bride-to-be, was standing there, the door to her room open behind her. She carried a brush in her hand, and her red hair spilled, half-combed, around her angular, intelligent face. Cool gray eyes regarded me and she raised a questioning eyebrow.

I’d first met Terry five years earlier, when she was a homicide detective in the small town on the peninsula where I was then in practice. Now she was a captain in the San Francisco Police Department, assistant to the chief and, in general, a big deal. I’d introduced her to Kevin Reilly, a fellow criminal defense lawyer, at a Christmas party a couple of years earlier, and now they were marrying. As a yenta, I was batting a thousand.

“I thought it was bad luck to see the bride before the ceremony.” I said, shutting up the voices as I approached her.

“That only applies to the bridegroom,” she replied, subduing her hair with three quick strokes. “I heard a commotion in your room. Are you all right?”

“Josh and I were having a fight.”

“Come in and have a cup of coffee with me and tell me all about it. I need some diversion or I’ll hyperventilate.”

I followed her into her room, a bigger and more ornately furnished version of mine. A brass peacock spread its tail feathers in front of the fireplace. The mantle was green marble. Near the four-poster bed, a silver coffee service and a plate of sweet rolls were laid out on a linen-covered tray. I helped myself to a cinnamon roll and a cup of coffee and we sat on the two wing chairs in front of the fireplace.

Inclining her red-haired head toward me, she said, “I thought I’d have to break down the door and make an arrest.”

“I didn’t realize we were that loud.”

“Anything serious?”

“No, nothing serious.”

She smiled uncertainly, revealing the small gap between her two front teeth. “You looked kind of pale out there in the hall.”

“The last thing you want to hear about now is what happens after happily ever after.”

“Try me.”

I tried to form a complicated explanation of what I was feeling, but what finally came out was, “What if he dies?”

“If you’re living in the ‘what ifs,’ you’ve lost him already,” she replied briskly, being as unsparing of her friends as she was of herself.

“He said something like that, too.”

In a gentler voice she said, “His ‘what ifs’ must be even scarier than yours.”

“He’s brave.”

“So are you. A gay public figure, a criminal defense lawyer and a Chicano—you didn’t choose the easy road, either.”

“I didn’t have any choice, Terry.”

“Of course you did,” she said, decisively. “You could have stayed closeted and gone for the big money on Montgomery Street as some huge firm’s token minority partner.”

“And drunk myself to death before I was forty. See, no choice.”

Impatiently, she said, “Stop belittling yourself, Henry. Josh doesn’t have a thing on you when it comes to courage. Now eat something. You’ll feel better.”

I ate a roll while she told me about how she and Kevin had spent the morning trying to figure out seating arrangements to avoid combustion between the cops and the lawyers.

“What did you do?”

“We decided to hell with it,” she said, laughing. “Let them fight. Thank God we wrote our own service. Can you imagine what would happen if the judge asked whether anyone objected to us being married?”

“Fifty lawyers would rise as one.”

“And the cops, too. Where’ve you been today?”

“Visiting my sister in Oakland. She has a job for me.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister. Is she in trouble?”

I shook my head and explained why I’d gone to see Elena.

“How does she know these people?”

“Childhood friends,” I replied, and told her about my conversation with Sara Windsor.

“When was the last time you were home?” she asked.

“For my mother’s funeral, ten years ago. All I ever wanted from Los Robles was to get out as fast and as far away as possible.”

She refilled my cup and placed another roll on my plate. “Was it so terrible?”

“Stultifying,” I replied. “You know there’s a poem by E. E. Cummings called ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town.’ It’s about two lovers in a little town populated by narrow-minded people so oblivious to passion they’re not even aware of this love story unfolding around them.”

I shut my eyes and tried to remember stanzas that I’d committed to memory as an undergrad.

“women and men (both little and small)

cared for anyone not at all

they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same

sun moon stars rain …”

“That’s lovely,” she said, “is there more?”

“Yes, something about … ‘someones married their everyones,’ what’s the rest—

“laughed their cryings and did their dance

(sleep wake hope and then) they

said their nevers they slept their dream.”

“What does that have to do with you, Henry? Were you in love?”

I thought about Mark Windsor. “I thought so at the time, but it was one-sided. No, it wasn’t because I was in love that I hated the place; it was because I was filled with so much—” I paused and wondered, what had I been filled with? “So much feeling that never got expressed.” I smiled, shrugged. “I was burning up from the inside and no one ever noticed.”

“Well,” she said, “if you never bothered to tell anyone, you can’t blame them for not noticing.”

I smiled at her. “You’re pitiless.”

There was a knock at the door. “Maid,” a woman called.

“I was going for a walk,” I said, “do you want to come?”

“You bet,” she said. “It’s my last morning as a free woman. Maybe we can make Kevin jealous.”

T
HE WEDDING WAS SET
for eight o’clock that night. While the other guests had drinks in the dining room before the ceremony, Josh and I, at peace again, inspected the parlor. All the chairs in the inn had been pressed into service: straight-backed wooden kitchen chairs, Art Deco armchairs, leather library chairs with brass studs, even an ottoman and a piano bench. They were arranged into a half-dozen rows, the wide aisle between covered with a white silk runner leading out of the parlor to a small antechamber, which was dominated by a triptych of tall leaded glass windows. In front of the center window was an antique wooden music stand, on either side of it two tall vases filled with white gladioluses. The windows caught the flicker of reflected light from candles burning on every available surface in both rooms as well as the light from antique brass and porcelain lamps. On the mantel over the fireplace, pink roses in a crystal bowl spilled a dry, sweet scent through the parlor.

“This is like a waiting room to heaven,” I said.

Josh settled into a high-backed plush thronelike chair and announced, “This is where God sits.”