Bill shook his hand. Bill always did that to show Jonathan he didn’t think of him as being different from anyone else. It was like the visualizations: Jonathan was aware of everything that Bill Davison was doing. He was still surprised when it worked. He was still surprised by the softness of Bill Davison’s hands.
He was surprised by the face; swollen by age, with hatchet marks around the eyes. The teeth grinned out at Jonathan, part of the skull peeking out. Hi, there, the skull seemed to say from underneath its temporary flesh. I won’t go away.
“Anyway, see you later tonight,” Bill was saying, still alive.
Jonathan’s mind went blank. He still saw the skull.
“You’re coming to our place for dinner, remember?” It was yet another way in which Bill Davison was unconventional. He was a psychiatrist who invited his clients home.
Jonathan stepped out into the hot white vastness of Wilshire Boulevard. He felt exposed and alone. The traffic roared past, impersonal, as if the cars carried no people in them. There was no one else on the sidewalk, all the way down from Barrington to Bundy. The lights changed; Jonathan began to cross and the traffic still advanced toward him, crawling to a stop, like bulls with their heads down. Jonathan found himself scurrying to get out of their way, even though the lights were still with him.
Jonathan sat down on a bench to wait for a big blue bus. The backrest was covered in a painted advertisement for a funeral home. Gleeful, thought Jonathan, but at least my back is toward it. He looked at the shadows cast by the giant buildings. They marched in rows like morons and gleamed like glaciers. Poor old silver-coated Barrington Plaza looked ancient now beside them. When Jonathan had first come to Los Angeles in the early seventies, the Plaza had been the biggest building all the way from the ocean to the Veterans’ Hospital. Jonathan could see the ocean, four miles away at the end of the wide straight road. The sea sparkled in sunlight. Everything was blue with fumes.
Jonathan remembered his contract.
Okay, he told himself, I am waiting for a big blue bus in Oz. The sidewalks are perfectly laid, because if someone is dumb enough to trip on the edge of a paving slab, they can sue the city. Because the paving is perfect, people roller-skate to work. They wear shorts and shades and a Walkman.
Can I imagine Munchkins here, little people flooding out of shopping malls and insurance offices the size of mountains? Do Munchkins wear mirror shades now? If this is the Emerald City, then the towers are tall because of the value of the land underneath them. And all the windows and doors are sealed because the air inside them is temperature-controlled. If Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man went tripping by, no one would notice. They’d think they were high.
It was a twenty-minute wait for the big blue bus. Jonathan read a free paper. It listed courses in adult education. On the cover an attractive woman pouted in a leotard and tried to look as though she were selling fitness courses and not sex. RELAX, said the headline, IT’S SO EASY.
There were courses about making money. How to Sell Real Estate in Your Spare Time. How to Make $ in Catering. How to Get Credit Cards.
And there were courses in Self Discovery Through Metaphysics. Coming Alive with Love. How to Flirt and Not Get Hurt. Courses in counseling or shiatsu or how to begin a conversation.
And there were courses that were an odd mix of the two. One offered instruction in Interviewing Techniques for Selecting a Husband:
Dating is time-wasting and inefficient. Before accepting that time-consuming invitation to dinner, you need to apply the techniques of market research to discover if the man is really interested in marriage. Manipulative? Yes—and we make no apologies for that. If you change your makeup and put on a nice new dress for a date, then you’re manipulating. This course will simply help you to LEARN TO MANIPULATE FOR SUCCESS.
And I was thinking of learning Spanish, thought Jonathan.
He thought of bars where the men all wore nothing but leather harnesses or Dodgers T-shirts, baseball caps and jockstraps.
Oz, he reminded himself, I’m supposed to be in Oz.
HOW TO FIND A LOVER OR A LOVING PARTNER
A solid, proven system for finding that special someone who’s fun to be with, able to carry on a sparkling conversation, financially stable—maybe even rich.
Which, thought Jonathan, is why they haven’t found love. And never will.
The bus finally came, and Jonathan got on it, wrestling with coins. He had never, in all his thirty-eight years, learned how to count out change quickly. The door whooshed shut; the bus lurched; the driver said nothing, his face blanked out by sunglasses.
Jonathan sat in the back, where he always did. He tried to pretend the bus was full of Munchkins, all of them talking in speeded-up voices. The bus was full of Angelinos instead. Angelinos have never met each other and cannot trust each other. They suspect each other of carrying murder weapons, possibly with some reason. Angelinos sit alone, in silence, no one next to them. As Jonathan was doing.
On the seat in front of him, a very fat man in dirty shorts sat reading the Style section of the
Los Angeles Times
. The person across the aisle from Jonathan stood up and moved two seats farther back, to be more alone. He was reading
People
magazine. He was thin and smelly, in what looked like standard-issue Veterans’ Hospital couture—a tartan shirt with rolled up sleeves and khaki trousers. UNITY BY THE SEA, said a passing billboard, JOIN US FOR A LOVING EXPERIENCE.
The bus stopped with a slight squeal of brakes. The squeal came and went with the rhythm of a kiss. An old man got on. He was very thin, very brown. His skin was somehow translucent and splotchy. He stumbled unsteadily toward his seat, and when the bus lurched forward, he fell into it, swinging around one of the support poles. The old man was almost too frail to walk, but he wore a jaunty tracksuit. A yellow plastic Sony Walkman whispered disco music into his ear.
Lighting-fixture shops and banks passed by, with acres of parking in the back. Beside a large drugstore, a sign said PARKING FOR PATRONS ONLY, in lettering that imitated nineteenth-century script. Jonathan loved that word “patrons” and that word “only.” An old-time, old-fashioned drugstore with an admissions policy?
At the next stop, a middle-aged woman got on with a boy. Her hair was yellow and she wore black tights that showed how far and loose her hips had spread. The boy was about seventeen and wore long, boxy swim trunks and a vest and a bomber jacket. His upper lip was trying, and failing, to grow a mustache. They sat down just in front of Jonathan. The jacket was shrugged back and the woman began to peel sunburned skin off the boy’s back. The windows of the bus were open. Patches of skin were caught up in the wind and were whirled about like snow.
A few moments later, the boy got up and started to ask people for money. “Don’t have any, man,” said Jonathan, wondering if that was how seventeen-year-olds still spoke. He went back to reading about adult education. If this is what they teach adults, he thought, what are they teaching the kids? He finally found his course in Spanish. It was opposite Hot Air Ballooning.
He got off the bus at Fourteenth Street, and across Wilshire Boulevard there was a billboard, an ad for chocolates. IT’S NEVER TOO LATE, it said, TO HAVE A HAPPY CHILDHOOD.
Jonathan lived on Euclid—Thirteenth Street, except that people were too superstitious to call it that. Euclid Avenue was tree-lined and residential and quite pleasant, but it was as if the shrubs and the flowers and the sprinklers and the sunlight and the glimpses of the Santa Monica mountains were all lying. They could bring no real comfort.
Jonathan’s property was quite extensive. There were two bungalows in front that he used to rent out in his days of relative penury as an actor. Behind them was his garden, and backing the property, a two-story house for him and Ira. Downstairs were the garage and Ira’s office. Upstairs was the house itself. Jonathan trudged wearily up the steps and pulled out his keys.
The key for the house wasn’t on it.
What? Jonathan tried to remember what he had done with it. Who could he have given it to? He had his car keys. What could he have done with the key to his house?
It had been happening a lot lately. Forgetting things. Jonathan climbed back down the steps. Well. It was three o’clock. He would just have to wait until Ira got home. He slumped down into his chair, in the garden by the pond.
Jonathan did not want to sit in the garden. It made him feel vulnerable, as if his back were unguarded. He wanted to sit in the house, on the couch just behind the stained-glass window, sheltered in his own little nook, hidden away from people. He wanted to listen to National Public Radio.
Funny the things that kept him going now. NPR saw him through the desolate afternoons like a friend. The music, the features, reassured him that there were other people who thought like him.
Downstairs, outside in the silence, he sat so that no one could see him from the street, and he began to feel a sick and creeping fear crawl up over him. He was going to die, and no sunlight and flowers, no songs, no prayer, could save him. He tried to look at his garden.
He looked at the base of the palm tree. The roots reached down like sinuous worms into the earth. He looked at his ornamental pond and the lilies growing out of a tub under the water. Jonathan remembered. He remembered the party they had held to dig the pond. People had got carried away and dug it so deep it had to be partially refilled.
What happens to a garden, he wondered, when its owner is gone? Ira had no time for gardening. Would the world, heartless, kill the little blue flowers, the succulent ground cover? Would the dry dead stems haunt Ira, like ghosts? Or would he dig the garden late at night, to keep it going, out of love, for the memory?
Fear was a chill light sweat on Jonathan’s forehead. Upstairs the telephone began to ring over and over.
Jonathan remembered the day he had been told he was ill. He had spent an eternal, twisted afternoon waiting for Ira to come home. He had paced the floor, weeping, chewing on his fingers, unable to quell the horrible, quivering animal panic that made him want to run and hide. Then Ira had come, and Jonathan had collapsed against him and told him, and the terror had abated. Ira took the terror away.
“The first thing,” Ira had said, “is that we both go into counseling. Did they tell you where to go?”
Jonathan nodded. “They gave me a name. Some hotshot psychiatrist who volunteers.”
“Did you get in contact with him? Her?”
Jonathan shook his head. “Not yet. Dr. Podryska had a long talk with me anyway. She gave me some happy pills.”
“Did you take them?”
“No. I thought they might be bad for me.”
“Stress is bad for you. Take the pills.”
“I’m worried about you too, Ira.”
Ira sighed and shifted in his smart lawyer working clothes. “It’s not your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault.” Ira was puritanically insistent on good behavior.
“You’ll have it too.”
“Probably,” Ira admitted.
“I’ll be careful around the house and things.” Jonathan meant he would mop up his own blood. He meant they would stop having sex. What he felt was immense relief. Already he knew that Ira was planning to stay with him.
Ira’s body jerked with rueful, silent laughter. “You mean you’ll eat with a separate knife and fork? Use a different toilet maybe. Maybe I should put some black insulating tape around the handle of your toothbrush. Good thing you have your own electric razor, huh?”
They both looked at each other. Jonathan knew he was in danger of saying something stupid. Stupidity made Ira cross.
“It’s a bit late for precautions, Baby,” said Ira.
Jonathan retaliated with a practicality. “You should take the test,” he said.
“I’m not taking that test,” said Ira. They had had arguments about it before.
“Because you said that whatever the result, you had to do the same thing. No casual sex and look after your health. No point taking it, you said, unless you would do something different depending on the result. Well, if you take the test and by any chance you’re negative, then we both will have to be a lot more careful, huh? That’s a good reason for you to take the test.”
Ira was trapped. “Maybe,” he said, and he shrugged his beefy arms, convulsively, as if trying to break his way out of his business jacket.
Jonathan knew Ira didn’t want to take the test because it would mean coming out to his doctor. Ira’s doctor did not know he was gay. Ira was a curious mix of decency and misplaced self-respect. He thought the people where he worked had not noticed that the company lawyer was unmarried and living with another man. Jonathan didn’t push any further. He knew that he was right and that Ira would force himself to be logical, force himself to take the test. Talk about the English having a stiff upper lip. Ira forced a set of strictures on himself that were wholly his own.
They had met at UCLA. At twenty-eight years of age, after eight years of professional acting, Jonathan had gone back to school. He studied history. In some quiet place in his actor’s soul, he found something very mysterious and soothing in studying the past and in recovering it.
There was a great weight of things that had been lost. Pioneers made houses out of earth and withstood plagues of locusts. The ancient Assyrians left behind them treasure troves of family letters baked in clay. Jonathan’s family name was in the Domesday Book. The name meant Dweller by Low Water. They had been a marsh people, farming for their master and hunting birds in the reeds in what was now the county of Hampshire in England.
Ira’s people had been Russian Jews. Jonathan met Ira in one of his history tutorials. Ira was huge and jovial and bound for law school after an improving degree in history. When Ira suddenly invited him to lunch, Jonathan was pleased. It was not always easy to meet people at UCLA. Jonathan was pleased when Ira invited him to play a game of tennis. Jonathan had always found sports easy, though he made no effort at them. Ira beamed back at him, hot, sweaty, his tummy bulging over his immaculate white shorts. What a decent fellow, thought Jonathan. Ira, it turned out, lived at home. His parents seemed to want to protect him from corruption. He was a strange mix of the deeply worldly—he talked about stocks and shares, and the details of Democratic Party politics—and bestilled innocence. At age twenty, Ira lived in the world of a bright seventeen-year-old.
Ira invited Jonathan to an evening of Israeli folk dancing. It did not occur to Jonathan that Ira was doing all the work. Jonathan was amused. Someone else had thought he was Jewish. People usually did. Maybe it was his mother’s side of the family, his Cornish ancestors with their black curly hair and Mediterranean complexion.