A blonde woman, walking her dog, shot Phil an odd look. He forced a smile in her direction and hurried down narrow cement steps into the motel.
The motel lobby looked just as Phil remembered—maybe large enough to hold three thin people. Mildew stained the wooden wall paneling. The receptionist's desk was a narrow, waist-high table. It all smelled of stale crackers, though no crackers were in sight.
A cheerful, matronly blonde smiled at him from behind the desk. "You'd be Mr. Cesari?" she asked. "Phillip Cesari?"
Phil nodded.
"I'm Joanna. I'm the manager here." She reached under the desk for a key, handed it to him. "Room three, right? Well, they're actually efficiencies, with a little kitchen, you know? Glad you requested it in advance, because normally it would be booked, with the weekend coming up." She pointed him out of the office. "It's out that door to your left as you go, down the sidewalk, and through the gate in the picket fence. Then straight ahead, down the five steps. If you find anything wrong, let me know."
Phil followed her instructions. Out and down to the left and through the garden gate, to a patio door that his key opened.
Inside the room, memories returned. Phil's mind showed him the suite as it had been superimposed on the suite as it now was. The violently green shag pile carpeting peeked through the ecru Berber of the nineties. The wide, wide brown couch trembled like a double exposure over today's three prim blue and pink armchairs.
On the couch, Nick reclined and smiled his cat smile. There was a pad of paper on his knees. He would be writing a song. Nick's long hand moved over the paper, holding the pen; Nick's black eyes stared straight into Phil's.
Phil stared and smiled at Nick, then swallowed, shook his head. Nothing there. His memory played tricks on him.
The living room smelled musty. The only pieces of furniture Phil remembered was the brown Formica dining room table and the four metallic chairs clustered around it. They sat in front of the counter that divided the kitchenette from the living room.
The small kitchenette had been painted white and decorated in blue Swedish motifs.
Incongruous for an Oregon coast motel. Or maybe not.
Phil knew little of the region and its ethnic composition. Twenty years ago, he and Nicky had come from Ohio for a month, because Nick's parents had paid for them to take a vacation. Twenty years ago, neither Nick nor Phil had been interested in anthropological studies.
Phil felt a vague discontent.
In the bedroom that formed a short leg of an L off the living room the four poster bed had endured a coat of pastel pink paint, but it was the same bed Phil remembered in its natural pine state. Teddy bears adorned the top of the built-in dresser, the built-in vanity and the bedside table. Phil dropped his suitcase on the bed and frowned.
He'd thought
Back in the living room, Phil looked around again, as if expecting Nick to materialize out of the pale yellow walls.
An old radio cabinet just inside the door called Phil's gaze. It was narrow and its domed top stood waist high. Its ivory buttons were almost as yellow as the horrible paint someone had slapped on the fine old wood. Worse, someone had nailed pieces of wood on either side of the dome, so as to balance a TV on top of the radio.
Nick's grandparents had owned a radio like this, but it had been kept, waxed and spotless, in a corner of Nick's grandmother's living room.
Phil's discontent remained.
A sense of let down set in, after his frantic race to get here. A feeling of emptiness made his throat close.
Some part of him, some deluded part that still believed in happy endings and premonitions, must really have expected to find Nick here, sleeping on the bed, as Phil had last left him.
Phil glared at the mirror on the wall, above the built-in chest of drawers. His sunken eyes glared back at him, from within dark circles.
So, he didn't have active AIDS. Something to be grateful for, these days, that the final illness could be kept away with drugs. But those same drugs robbed him of energy and strength, of desire to live and hope. Daily, almost hourly, they reminded him of the death sentence that hung suspended over his head.
He ran his hands back through his brown hair, trying to ignore the grey threads. If cancer came—when cancer came—then the hair would be gone and perhaps, before long-drawn death finished her invasion of his ravaged body, he would long for his hair back, grey and all.
For now Phil should sleep, recover from the journey. He needed his rest, a regular schedule. Dr. Michelopolis had been very specific about that. All the medicines in the world would not save him if he didn't eat and didn't sleep.
So first the medicines.
Phil pulled the first of his tablet case from his bag. The label, glued to the plastic cover of the giant daisy wheel, read "Six p.m." It was five local time, so it would be six in Denver. The compartment for today contained the fifteen pills he'd carefully sorted and counted into it this morning, before leaving home. He had five such cases, carefully labeled with the hour at which he should take the medicines.
Centuries from now, future archaeologists would open his grave and pry into his remains for clues into the twentieth century. They'd think they'd stumbled onto a new breed and he would be embalmed in some museum, displayed as the first Homo Chemicus.
He took his tablets to the kitchen, set them on the violently yellow counter. Same counter, twenty years later. Nick had liked the color. He had said it was cheerful.
Phil frowned at the counter.
Cheerful.
He got a glass from the overhead cabinets, filled it with tap water and started the endless job of swallowing tablets: one, two, three tablets.
At first, a year or so ago, when he'd been prescribed this mix to keep full blown AIDS away, he'd read the indications on each of the medicines prescribed for him. The cross-linking of side effects had given him nightmares and he'd given up.
He now took what Dr. Michelopolis told him to take. Two of the blue, three of the red, four of the light pink and half a dozen of the yellow.
Oh, and swallow his multivitamins, everyday, like a good little boy and take calcium to prevent the medicines leaching calcium from his bones. Four, five and six. Seven, eight and nine. The tiny pink one and the mammoth purple capsule were last.
He'd gotten so that he could swallow each pill dry, but he forced himself to drink a little water after each, and then drank a full glass afterwards.
Done, he noticed a thin phone book on the counter and a glimmer of not-quite-hope made him reach for it and turn to the s. He ran his finger down the Stev-column—from Steva to Stevenson and back up—but there were no Stevelanos listed and, therefore, no Nicholas Stevelanos.
Phil closed the book, pushed it away, set his empty glass down next to it.
He hadn't really expected it to be this easy. He couldn't expect it to be this easy.
To begin with, there was no reason for Nick to be in Gold-port. True, no one had picked up a trace of his leaving Goldport, but that could just be shoddy investigation. Surely, if finding Nick were as easy as looking in the phone book, one of the detectives would have managed it.
Of course, Nick might be living with someone and the phone under his partner's name. Gay men could be as hard to find as women who married and changed their names.
The thought of Nick's living with someone else hurt and Phil flinched from it, like a man favoring a twisted ankle, putting all his weight on the other. Even to himself, Phil couldn't pretend that it would be logical for Nick to have lived celibate for twenty years now. He couldn't hope that Nick had never found anyone to replace him; never found a love to compare to the sweaty groping and shaky promises of a twenty-two year old's crush—composed as much of lust and relief at finding someone who understood, as of friendship and confused admiration.
Phil made a face at his hollow eyed mental image of himself.
Sure, boy. Nick has never found anyone to compare to yourself as a clumsy virgin.
What about you? Didn't you find others? How many Phil? Can you count them? Should we make an accounting of every one-night-stand, every grope in the dark, every time you thought you'd fallen in love and crossed your fingers and believed, really believed in ever after?
And yet, through it all, ups and downs, hopes and disappointments, he had remembered Nick, hadn't he?
Maybe Nick remembered him.
Maybe. Or maybe, maybe, just maybe, Nick only talked of him as a joke, a youthful mistake.
Nicky, with his sensitive fingers, so nimble on the guitar strings, his perfect voice, his renaissance features, his quick, quick mind. Nick had deserved better, even then. Maybe he'd found it.
The
maybe
felt like a nail, driven into Phil's future coffin. A shiver went up Phil's spine. Tired. He was tired.
He stumbled to the bed, shoved his bag to the floor, pulled his jacket off, and fell, face down, on the mattress. Sleep overtook him immediately, as if a switch had been thrown.
Sleep brought a dream, a dream he could neither define nor describe when he woke on his back, in the dark room, staring at the ceiling and listening to the radio.
It played very low, just loud enough to be perceived as a whisper over the sound of the raging waves outside the window. But when the voice of the announcer came on, even low, what he said made Phil sit up, stark awake, trembling.
"That was Nicky Stevelanos, folks, with his latest ballad
The Songs I Wrote For You
. All the talking heads say he hasn't grown as a musician and that his songs need to develop some different rhythm and some different theme. Yeah, right. Bet you he's laughing all the way to the bank, uh? Now, let us listen to one of his older hits,
Saying Goodbye
and see if any of you agree with the talking heads, uh? Call me and give me your opinion, right? The phone is"
Phil repeated the phone number to himself—bemused—and got out of bed, and hung, speechless by the radio. Laughing all the way to the bank? Nicky was living off his song-writing? Off his singing? Was he well known? He must be a local phenomenon, or Phil would have heard of him in Denver. The detectives must truly be incompetent, not to have found Nick.
Would the radio announcer know Nick's address? Oh, please, please, please.
It would be some other Nick, though. Someone with the same name. Unlikely but possible . . ..
The seconds before the song started stretched in Phil's perception, endless and barren. He licked lips that felt too dry.
Then the song started with a whisper of acoustic guitar, followed by Nick's voice. Unmistakably Nicky's voice, clear and pure and perfect, a voice that couldn't be forgotten if you tried to forget it.
Phil's emotion caught in a knot at his throat, a pulsing in his chest. The song Nick sang was something that Phil had never heard. And yet, Phil couldn't avoid thinking it had been written for him. The line about "My hand shall not hold yours ever again," wrung his heart and "Though I still want you, I don't expect your kiss, ever again," might as well have been an accusation aimed at Phil.
Closing his eyes, Phil could imagine that Nicky was right here, sitting in the living room, on the old brown couch, his guitar held like a lover, his eyes closed, his voice caressing every note as it dropped from his lips.
Nick sang for him, for him alone. Nicky had forgiven Phil's desertion, Phil's indefensible cowardice.
He wanted Phil back.
The song ended. The music stopped. Phil waited for the announcer's voice. Nothing. Not even static.
Slowly, Phil opened his eyes, glared at the yellow-painted radio, now as dead as the table or the yellow counter top.
He punched an ivory button, two. Nothing. He looked behind, to see if the thing was plugged in, but couldn't even see a cord. The only plug had one cord attached to it, and that was the cord for the television.
Well, Phil still knew the number to call. This was weird, but weird things happened.
Maybe the radio had been on next door. That must be it.
He found the phone behind a teddy bear on the bedside table, and dialed the number from memory.
It rang for a long time, before it was picked up. "Yes?" a woman's voice.
"Uh . . .Ah . . ." Phil had no idea what the station was, or if it was local. No, wait, the phone number had dialed local But what information could they give him on Nick? They'd think he was a crank. "I—You asked for opinions on Nick Stevelanos. I—I'm an old college friend and I've lost touch—Lost touch. I don't suppose you'd tell me what he's doing these days and the name of his albums? I'd love to"
"Who is this?" the woman's voice sounded alarmed, on the verge of hysteria.
Great, great. They really thought he was a crank. "I'm Phillip Cesari," he said. "I'm a—I teach history in a community college in Denver. I—I'm not a crank—I"
"Phil?" the woman's voice said. "Phil Cesari? Little Cesar? Nick's roommate?"
Now it was Phil's turn to be silent. Some woman in Goldport knew his college nick-name, his connection to Nick.
"Where are you?" The woman asked. "I mean, where are you calling from?"
"Uh . . .Gateways motel." Right after saying it, he repented. What if it really was some sort of joke? What if
"I'll come and see you. Don't go anywhere."
"Who are you?"
"Oh." The woman giggled. "I'm sorry, never thought you wouldn't recognize me. I'm Nicky's mother. Mrs. Stevelanos, I used be. When I came to town to look after Nicky's—Well—To wrap up things, I—damn." Her laugh turned to something that sounded remarkably like a sob. "Damn, I hadn't thought of all this in years. I have a letter for you. Nicky's" She drew in breath like a woman drowning. "How are you doing? What have you done with yourself?"
"We can talk when I see you," Phil said. She had a letter from him. A letter from Nicky. Even if it was a kiss-off letter, it would be closure. "If you'll come over."
Minutes that seemed like hours later, she knocked at his door. He opened it and there she stood, tall and limber as Nick had been, with the same pointed chin, the same huge eyes. Only hers were light brown, and her hair honey-blond. Nick's eyes and hair came from his Polish father.