The Little Death (6 page)

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.”