The Death of Friends (4 page)

It was my turn to bristle. “You assume I’m a scholarship student because I’m Mexican?”

“No,” he said, “because you told me so last night.” He smiled. “You said it as if you were proving a point to me.”

“I thought you were another rich preppie here on his daddy’s money.”

His smile faded. “I haven’t seen my dad in ten years.”

“Does the woman you’re engaged to mean anything more to you than the ones you went out with in college?”

“You’ve really got a mouth on you,” he said. “You’ll do well in court.”

“Does she?” I persisted.

“No,” he said. “I like her. I like her a lot.”

“Her name’s Bay? Like the body of water?”

“Asshole,” he said, but he laughed when he said it. “Yes, Bay, Bay Kimball,” he said. “She’s a senior at a Catholic girls’ school over in Marin, St. Clare’s. Her father’s Joe Kimball, the senior partner at the firm in L.A. where I clerked the last two summers. Awesome guy, Henry. I met Bay at a firm picnic. We both play tennis, so we played some and since we’re both at school up here, I’d meet her in the city sometimes.” He folded his hands behind his head. “I have to admit I kept in touch with her at first mainly because I really wanted an offer from the firm, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt if I was friends with Joe’s daughter. But after I got to know her, I liked her for herself and I could tell she really liked me. By the time I went back to the firm for my second summer, we were definitely dating.”

“Someone who didn’t like you as much as I do might say you’re kind of an opportunist, Chris.”

He moved away from me and said, “I know what you’re thinking. I marry the senior partner’s daughter and I can write my own ticket. You just have to trust that I’m not that much of an asshole. Look, Henry, try to understand. I knew I was homosexual when I was fourteen years old. When I was in high school, I used to bike to the library across town and look up everything I could find on the subject. All the books said I’d grow out of it. I waited and waited, but that didn’t happen. I didn’t want to be different, Henry. I still don’t.”

“You think getting married will change you?”

“God, I hope so,” he said, in a voice so full of hurt that it made me ashamed for a moment of who I was.

“You think it’s wrong to be gay, Chris?”

“It’s wrong for me,” he said.

“Maybe I should leave.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“You’re a very confusing guy,” I said.

“Are you so sure of yourself?” he asked me.

“No,” I said, and I stayed.

After I talked to Captain Closet, I called Josh, but his line was busy. I tried again a half hour later, but it was still busy, so I decided to drive to West Hollywood and check on him. My route took me past Azul, the restaurant where Zack said he worked. I pulled into the empty parking lot. A handwritten sign on the door said “Closed Due to Act of God” and there was a number for emergencies. I jotted it down and headed west on Sunset.

The light glittered through the warm, hazy air and I pretty much had the road to myself. The traffic lights were out and businesses were shuttered, but the only visible damage from the quake was a few cracked walls. This hadn’t been the big one, the cataclysm that was supposed to drop us into the Pacific, leaving only wisps of smog as a memorial to the city of the angels.

No doubt, a few thousand people would move on to stabler ground, and for a while those of us who remained would be more conscientious about our earthquake preparedness kits. Eventually, though, new residents would take the places of those who’d left, and the rest of us would forget to change the batteries in our flashlights. You need a short memory to live in L.A. That, and a blithe indifference to your own mortality. But for me, it was a city of death.

In the past few years, a dozen friends of mine had died from AIDS. I’d sat the watch with many of them. It sometimes seemed to me that I was living in one of those South American countries ruled by colonels, where people disappeared from the streets into the backseats of blue Fords, never to be seen again. The streets were haunted with their absence and there were rips in the fabric of my reality that could not be mended by grieving or the passage of time. And now the cars were coming for Josh.

Josh Mandel was the friend I thought I’d found in Chris Chandler all those years ago. I’d had to wait a long time and stumble into a lot of blind alleys before I found him. I’d been thirty-six, a recovering alcoholic fresh off his last binge and trying to get back the legal career I’d very nearly succeeding in drinking away. He was twenty-three and HIV-positive. Definitely not your traditional family, more like a couple of outcasts. They say love is blind, but only to convention. We saw each other clearly enough. Then he started to get sick, and decided I couldn’t understand, and he left me for someone who could, and now he was even sicker, and his friend had died, and we could see each other again.

I pulled up in front of the brightly painted apartment where Josh lived. The front wall was orange, the beamed walkway to the street purple. Josh called it the HIV Hilton, because it had been built by the county to house people with AIDS. I rang the bell to his apartment, and a second later, a buzzer let me in. I crossed the courtyard and climbed the stairs to the third floor; inside the building, the colors were more subdued, pastel greens and blues. There was, as usual, little apparent activity and the quiet had the lassitude of a sickroom. Not all the tenants were sick, but, like a home for old people, a certain mortal inevitability hung in the air.

The door to Josh’s apartment was ajar. I stepped inside and called out, “Josh.”

He came to the door in a heavy robe. “Have you been trying to call me?”

“Yeah, but your line was busy.”

“I know,” he said. “My parents called, then my sisters, then my second cousin twice removed. Everyone was rallying around the fag.”

“Are you all right?”

“Bushed,” he said. He embraced me. I felt the lightness of his body beneath the robe. Had he lost more weight? It was hard to tell. Over the past year, his T-cell count had dropped into single digits and he had suffered from arrhythmia, diarrhea, fevers, disorientation, thrush, CMV and a bout of pneumonia. He had lost twenty pounds from his already slender frame and he exuded a faint chemical smell from all the drugs he took.

“Anything break in the quake?” I asked him.

He moved away. “I lost Steven,” he said.

Since Steven was dead, I wondered if he was slipping into dementia, but then I followed his gaze across the room to the bookshelf where he’d kept a ginger jar containing Steven’s ashes. It was gone.

“He fell and broke,” Josh continued. “I swept up most of the ashes but some of them got in the carpet. You’re probably stepping in him.”

I lifted my shoe and inspected the sole. No Steven. “What did you do with the ashes?”

“I put them in a mason jar. I was about to scatter them.” He turned toward the bedroom. “Will you help me?”

“Now?”

“I should’ve done it a long time ago,” he said, “but I couldn’t let go.” He looked at me, frowned. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“My feelings aren’t hurt,” I lied.

I followed him through the bedroom to the small balcony where the jar of ashes rested on the railing. On the street below, papery bougainvillea blossoms swirled in the tail wind of a UPS truck. Josh clutched the railing with one frail hand while, with the other, he emptied the jar. I leaned over, watching the cloud of ash disperse in the luminous air, and thought, what a strange day. I felt Josh’s thin fingers graze my hand.

“All flesh is grass,” I murmured. “All its goodness like flowers of the field. Grass withers, flowers fade when the breath of the Lord blows on them.”

“Isaiah,” Josh said. “How do you know that?”

“Someone read it at Tim Taylor’s memorial last month. It stayed with me.”

“I remember it from Hebrew class,” Josh said, and spoke a fragment of Hebrew in which I recognized only the word for God.

“What was that?”

“The beginning of the Kaddish.” Then he laughed, the old, sharp yelp of a laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Stevey was an Episcopalian. I hope his God understands Hebrew.” He grunted.

“What’s wrong?”

“The neuropathy’s killing me today,” he said. “My feet feel like they’re on fire.”

“Come inside, I’ll massage them.”

“Good-bye, Steven,” Josh said, looking back at the dazzling emptiness of the air.

Josh slipped off his bathrobe, revealing boxer shorts patterned with ants, and lay down on his bed. His fine bones were clearly visible beneath sallow skin. His buttocks hung loosely, the muscle tone gone, and his genitals were sunken and limp. His once-sculpted chest and firm belly sagged, and he hunched his shoulders like an old man. I thought about all the times I’d made love to this body and how the vitality had seeped away from it, like a light burning out.

His face had thinned, but otherwise it was the thing least changed about him. I could still see, without too much squinting, Josh as he had been seven years ago; a boy of twenty-three with green eyes and lucent skin. I remembered the first time I had held him naked against my own naked body, the erotic shock that had passed through me, bringing me back to the life of the senses after so many years of living in my head, like someone starving in the garret of a mansion. Now his body reminded me that grief, like love, was also physical, and my body would have to grieve every detail of Josh’s dying.

I poured a little baby oil in the palm of my hand and began to work his toes. They were curled from the neuropathy, an arthritic-like condition that affected his joints and made movement torture. He rarely complained about it.

“That feels good,” Josh said. “Was your house okay in the quake?”

“Just a little broken glass. It didn’t get really weird until after the quake.”

“What do you mean?”

I told him about Zack Bowen.

When I finished, he said, “I’m sorry for Bay. I liked her.”

“She liked you, too,” I said. “She asks about you whenever I talk to her.”

“I’m sorry about Chris, too,” he added, tactfully. The two of them had taken an instant dislike to each other and for that reason we’d rarely seen the Chandlers when the two of us had lived together. “What are you going to do?”

“Find Zack before the police do, if I can. Help him.”

“Even if he killed Chris?”

I kneaded his foot. “I don’t think he did.”

“How can you know that?” Josh said. “You just met him.”

“He seemed kind of helpless to me.”

He chided me. “Henry, you’re such a sucker sometimes.”

“Look, Josh,” I reminded him, “I’ve defended dozens of murderers. You develop a sense about whether someone’s capable of it or not. Zack didn’t seem the type. He was too—I don’t know, passive,” I said, repeating my earlier thought. “More like a victim than a perpetrator.”

After a moment, Josh said, “You said he was good-looking.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with it.”

“Chris fell for him,” Josh said, slyly. “And he was an older guy, too. Like you.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You go for that type, Henry. The little bird with a broken wing.”

“Now you’re being a jerk,” I said.

“When you find him, bring him to me. I’ll tell you if he did it.”

J
OSH FELL ASLEEP WHILE
I was massaging his feet. I covered him with a blanket, then went into the living room and called the number I’d written down from Azul. After a half-dozen rings, a distracted male voice said, “Yello.”

“Hi,” I said, “I got this number from the door at Azul. I’m trying to get ahold of Zack Bowen. I understand he works there.”

“Just a minute,” the man said. I heard him shouting at someone to get the door. “This place is a fucking madhouse. Now what did you want?”

“Zack Bowen,” I said. “Do you know him?”

“Well, who is this?” he demanded.

“My name is Henry Rios,” I said. “I’m a lawyer and it’s very, very important that I find Zack.”

A pause. “Is he in trouble?”

“I just need to talk to him.”

“I don’t give out information about my employees.”

“I’m a criminal defense lawyer,” I said, “and this is very serious.”

“Look, even if I did give you Zack’s phone number, it’s not going to do you any good. He lives out in the valley, right where the quake hit, and I’ve been trying to call him myself. The phones are still out.”

“What’s your name?”

“Milt. Milt Harriman, and I’m really stressed right now.”

“Give me his address, Milt. If I find him, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”

Another pause. “How do I know you’re on the level?”

“You’ll have to take my word, Milt. If you don’t, you’ll be creating some big problems for Zack.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, and rattled off an address.

I left a note for Josh, telling him I’d drop by tomorrow, and headed over Laurel Canyon into the valley. It was five in the afternoon. In the past fourteen hours, I’d survived an earthquake, learned that one of my oldest friends had been murdered from his secret boyfriend and helped spread the ashes of the man for whom my lover had left me. Now I was passing through a neighborhood of little houses behind white picket fences, with children’s toys scattered across carefully tended yards. I felt like Oscar Wilde in the suburbs.

This is what Chris had meant when he said he didn’t want to be different. He wanted that white-picket-fence domesticity, the safety of fitting in, a map to living. Being gay meant being exiled from that ordinary world, banished to the fringes where you met a lot of fringe people in some pretty dubious situations. At least that’s what it had seemed like twenty years ago to a couple of naive gay boys trying to figure out how to become men. I couldn’t really stay mad at him for the choice he’d made, especially after I’d met Bay.

I met her at a party in someone’s backyard, a couple of months after Chris and I had started sleeping together. It was just after winter finals and the place was packed with haggard law students intent on getting drunk and possibly laid. Music blasted from inside the house, shattering the surrounding suburban silence. The yard was littered with plastic cups, and another keg had just been tapped. I was wandering around half drunk when I heard someone calling my name. I looked around, and saw Chris coming out of the house holding hands with a blonde girl. My instinct was to walk the other way, but the tide was against me and I was pushed toward them.