Perique had been dipping into the opium stock for some time, but that was acceptable to a point. When Tom Lee found his son in bed with two girls and a boy, a position not enhanced by the fact that the girls were hungrily sucking each other's pussies while the boys watched, mesmerized—well, that was completely unacceptable.
Perique didn't care. In fact, he had been taking all sorts of stupid risks, hoping something like this would happen. It was tiresome listening to shouted phrases like “you soft French faggot” and “your mother's poison blood” as he packed his considerable wardrobe, but as soon as he stepped out of his father's house, he was glad to have made the break at last.
He had his trunks sent ahead to the train station, then spent the afternoon shopping at Sincere's department store, his favorite place in Shanghai. He loved the ornate ceilings and fixtures, the red banners with their gold lettering, the air of opulence. He bought clothes, accessories, brightly colored little packages of soap, tea, candy. For a time it felt as if he would never stop buying things. Finally he caught a rickshaw to the station and boarded the express that was the first leg of the journey to Hong Kong. Evening gilded Shanghai's rococo skyline as the train pulled away from the platform.
***
If Shanghai was an aging courtesan in ragged Victorian lace, then Hong Kong was a ripe young whore whose gaudy makeup advertised a delectable array of treats. Perique found it a paradise.
He never spoke to his father, but once each month a package arrived from Shanghai full of more money than even Perique could spend. He had always liked the feel of money, but this money had the feel of shame. He let it slip through his fingers heedlessly, never walking anywhere when he could take a rickshaw, never settling for a rickshaw when his hotel's Bentley was available. He frequented the most scandalous nightclubs, acquired Western friends and mannerisms, learned the ways of the stinking, seething island city.
He had lived in Hong Kong for one year when his mother's ghost began to speak to him.
It was a ghost in his heart, the kind that never quite seems real but never quite goes away. It whispered to him in French—Perique was certain it was French, and he spoke fluent French, yet he could make out scarcely any of the words. This voice insinuated itself beneath the jazz music of nightclubs; it murmured in the pipes as he bathed. Opium could not drown it out. Upon waking, he often felt that the voice had just been speaking clearly in the room, but he could never recall what it had said.
He tried to distract himself with sex. One night when the whispering seemed especially loud to him, the American girl he was fucking gripped his shoulder and asked, “What's that?"
“What's what?"
“I could have sworn I heard a woman talking."
“In French?"
“Maybe ... Say, is this some kind of set-up?"
Perique stopped going out. He huddled in his luxury suite drinking pots of room-service coffee, listening to the voice instead of trying to drown it. And, gradually, he began to understand. When he understood enough, he took the ferry to the mainland and boarded a train for Shanghai.
He had his hair cut short and removed all his jewelry before making his way to the French Concession. Night had fallen, and the neighborhood was silent, the wide streets and fine gardens lit only with flickering lanterns. The whispering was very loud.
He was recognized and received by the servant, who clearly didn't know whether he would be welcome or not. The old man brought a pot of tea, then left Perique sitting in the parlor for a long time. The voice was quieter now, a faint susurrant backdrop.
When the servant reappeared, he was smiling. “Your father is pleased to receive you. He says it has been too long."
Tom Lee sat behind his desk, his smile more strained than the servant's had been. Perique tried to seem contrite, implied that he had pressing business in the city and had decided to visit on a whim. “Of course, I have a room at the Grand,” he lied.
“Certainly not—you'll stay here.” His father paused, looking for a rebellious reaction. Perique offered none. “You've changed,” Tom Lee said at last. “You seem much older.” His tone was approving.
Perique bowed his head. “I am only sixteen. I still know little of the world.” Inside him welled a dark joy. If his father was happy to see him—well, then, so much the better. Happiness was more precious than life, and just as easy to destroy.
He was given his old bedroom, which was unchanged but immaculate. For four hours he lay awake in the dark, watching the moon and breathing the scent of the roses.
He almost dozed. A sharp whisper woke him.
Perique slipped silently down the hall and stopped before an onyx replica of a Florentine cathedral. He lifted the glass top and gently tilted the carving. A brass key lay beneath it, as he had known it would.
He entered his father's office and crossed the thick carpet to the massive desk. The key opened the top drawer, as he had known it would. His fingers hovered over the contents—papers, a jade name chop, a pistol—then touched a long, narrow box.
"Yes," the voice sighed.
He placed the box on the desktop and lifted the lid. Inside was a silver hatpin, its last six inches still caked with dry blood.
***
The voice was gone when Perique woke the next morning. His head felt blessedly clear.
He had no trouble feigning surprise when the servant came in to say that Tom Lee had died in the night, apparently of a heart attack or brain stroke. “It was Providence that made you come home when you did, to see him one last time,” the old man said.
Perique could read the suspicion in his eyes, and also the fear. The master was dead, and the son was now a very rich man.
When Perique went in to dress his father for the funeral, Tom Lee's face was exquisitely tranquil, the crow's feet around his eyes gone, his mouth relaxed into a half-smile. Only a small trickle of blood from his left nostril spoiled the illusion of peace.
America
Just a ditty to keep up with two of my favorite characters, whom I don't see often enough. The Magic 8-Ball says YES, Steve and Ghost may appear in another novel someday, but not right now.
America
The desert after midnight was an arid zone of silver and blue, the highway a glittering black ribbon into nowhere. The formations of rock and sand were incomprehensible to a Southern boy, wrong somehow, like the bones of the world showing through the desiccated flesh that was this land. Buttes. Dry lakes. Mesas. Who had ever heard of such things? Steve shook his head and took another hit off the sticky green bomber he was holding, and the desert went a shade weirder.
They had picked up a thirty-dollar quarter bag way back in Dallas, and it was so good it looked like it was going to last them through the next Lost Souls show in Flagstaff. When your two-man band was touring the country in a gas hog of a ‘72 T-bird, when your household consisted of a guitar, an amp, a couple of microphones, a cooler, two backpacks full of dirty laundry, and a blanket stolen from Holiday Inn, when you'd been on the road for upwards of a month, thirty-dollar quarter bags of excellent pot were a small but welcome manifestation of slack.
Steve cocked his elbow out the window and leaned into the wind. His dark hair whipped across his face, five days unwashed and one year uncut. He could put it in a ponytail now, but he left it loose when he drove because he liked the feel of it blowing. He had a fresh six-pack of Bud on ice. There was only one thing wrong with his world tonight.
Ghost, curled in the passenger seat with his sneakers propped up on the dash, kept singing a toneless snatch of song under his breath. "Been through the desert on a horse with no name ... Felt good to get out of the rain ..."
Steve twisted the radio dial. FM, AM, it was all the same: dry scratchy static clear down the line, like the sound of the desert clearing its throat.
"Ain't no one for to give ya no pain ... Nuh, NUH, nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh—"
“Quit singing that fuckin’ song!"
“Huh?” Ghost looked up. The moonlight turn
ed his eyes and hair paler than ever, turned his skin translucent, made him seem a true thing of ectoplasm, subject to shimmer and disappear at any moment. The open can of beer in his hand spoiled the illusion a little.
“You're singing that America song again. Quit it. I hate that song."
“Oh. Sorry."
Ghost shut his mouth and returned to whatever reverie Steve had dragged him out of. For thirteen years they had spent long easy stretches of time in each other's company. They had passed the last part of their childhood together, had grown up together. During these weeks in the car, though, their friendship had reached a new equilibrium. They talked obsessively and often, but they understood one another's silences too. Sometimes they went for hours without saying a word.
But once in a while they got on each other's nerves. A few miles later, over the roar of the slipstream from his cranked-down window, Steve heard, 'Nuh, NUH, nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh ..."
He gritted his teeth. He knew Ghost wasn't even conscious of singing aloud. Being a singer, Ghost tended to give voice to whatever scrap of music flickered through his brain. Sometimes it was unique and brilliant. Sometimes it was a glob of dreck from the seventies. America was only the first in a turgid alphabet soup of bands Steve hated, horrible bands with stupid one-word names: Boston, Foreigner, Triumph, Journey, Bread...
“Nuh, NUH—"
“Guess you heard of the man-headed cat that lives around here,” Steve said.
Ghost stopped singing, looked again at Steve. His pale blue eyes shone silver in the light. “The what?"
“The man-headed cat. It lives out here in the desert, eats horned toads and rattlesnakes and roadkill, drinks liquor from cacti. About the size of a bobcat, but with the head of a man, shrunk down like."
“Really?"
That was the fun of telling tales to Ghost: he was always prepared to believe them. Born and partly raised in the mountains of North Carolina, he'd seen and touched things as weird as any Steve could come up with.
“Sure, man. Way I heard it, this guy got lost real late at night and his car broke down. Not on a main highway but way the fuck out on some desert track you can't find on the map. So he drank a bottle of whiskey he had with him and passed out on the hood of his car.
“When he woke up, the man-headed cat was sitting there watching him. There was a full moon shining off the sand and he could see it clear as day, the bald head and little wrinkled face. It had green eyes and the fur started at the neck, right at the collarbone. From there down it was all cat. But man-headed."
“Could it talk?"
“Shit, yeah! It could cuss! It opened its mouth and what came out was, ‘Goddamn-shit-ass-motherfuckin'-bitchofagoddamnfuckin'—'
“Then all of a sudden it lunged and took off chasing him. They ran and ran out across the desert, so far that the guy knew he couldn't ever find his car again, so he knew that either the man-headed cat would kill him or he'd thirst to death out there. He figured it'd be better to go quick, so he stopped to wait for the cat. He was out of breath, exhausted; he'd run as hard as he could for miles.
“But when he turned around, there was the man-headed cat grinning and cleaning the sand off its paws. ‘That was a nice little run we had,’ said the man-headed cat. 'Motherfuckin'-piss-cunt-Jesus-lickin'—' Then it crouched down, and its green eyes glowed in the moonlight, and the guy could see hundreds of tiny sharp teeth in its grin..."
Steve stopped.
Ghost waited about ten seconds, his eyes wide, his fingers scrunching the hem of his T-shirt. “What did it do to him?” he asked finally.
“Nothing,” said Steve. “A little pussy never hurt anybody."
Entertaining Mr. Orton
Bill, an anthologist, was editing a book of erotic ghost stories for gay men. He asked if he could reprint “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” my irreverent homage to Lovecraft's “The Hound” and my most reprinted story ever. I said sure, forgetting that I had already agreed to let two other anthologists, Michael and Tom, reprint it in a book of gay vampire stories for the same publisher. (Evidently nobody could figure out what the hell this story was supposed to be about.)
Michael and Tom's book came out a few weeks before Bill's was due at the publisher, and Bill sent me a remarkably polite but obviously nervous e-mail: his editor had been into having me in the ghost book; she wasn't going to be happy about this; she wasn't going to be happy with Bill; and I was going to look like a double-crossing full-scale weasel. (Well, he didn't say that, but it was obvious to me.)
“Don't worry!” I e-mailed back. “It is all my fault and I will write you a story by the end of this week and it will be even better.” And I slammed this baby out. I don't know if “Entertaining Mr. Orton” is better than “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” but I did invent marginally more of the plot.
Entertaining Mr. Orton
London, 1 August 1967
“Have you been reading my diary?"
Kenneth looks up from the baboon's head he is pasting onto the madonna's body. He is standing on the bed to reach the upper part of his collage, which covers most of the wall, and the top of his bald cranium nearly brushes the pink and yellow tiles of the flat's low ceiling. They have lived together in this tiny space in Islington for eight years.
“No, I have not been reading your diary,” Kenneth lies.
“Why not?"
“Because it would drive me to suicide."
“Right,” says Joe with an edge of impatience in his voice. He has heard this threat many times before, in one form or another, and Kenneth realizes dimly that his lover either doesn't believe it or just doesn't care. That doesn't mean Kenneth can make himself stop saying it, though.
“But if you won't read my diary and you won't talk to me,” Joe continues, “what's the point of remaining in this relationship? You're always telling everyone how I make your life miserable. What keeps you hanging about?"
Kenneth wipes glue from his fingers onto his pants, then turns and sits heavily on the bed. He took a number of Valiums earlier in the day, but something in Joe's voice pulls his brain out of its pleasant half-numb fog. They can still listen to each other, and even talk seriously when they really try.
Of course, most of the serious talk these days is about writing. Writing Joe's plays, to be precise. The very same brilliant and successful plays that have made Joe's name synonymous with decadence, black wit, and tawdry glamour as far as London is concerned. If the talk isn't about Joe's plays, it is about what they should do with all the money Joe's plays are making. Joe spends most of it on toys: clothes, Polaroid cameras, holidays in Morocco.
“What surprises me,” Joe continues, “is that you haven't killed me. I think you don't leave, or off yourself, because you can't stand the thought of anyone else having me."
“Rubbish. All sorts of people have you."
“Ah! You have been reading my diary."
Kenneth rises up suddenly in one of his outbursts. “When you come home reeking of cheap aftershave, I don't need your diary to tell me where you've been!"
Joe waves this away. “I mean, of anyone else having me permanently. And I can't conceive of it either, honestly. It's as if we've become inextricable."
Suspicion flares in Kenneth's mind. “Why are you talking about me killing you? Are you setting me up for something?"
Joe throws back his head and brays laughter, a sound which usually lessens Kenneth's tension but now induces a smoldering rage. “What did you have in mind? Me setting you up for murder and slipping back off to Tangier? My family gets your fat arse thrown in prison and you do your Ballad of Reading Gaol bit again? Oh, Ken...” Tears are spilling out of Joe's eyes now, tears of laughter, the kind he used to cry in bed after a joyous orgasm. Kenneth remembers how they tasted, salt and copper on his tongue like blood.
“I think I could kill you,” he says, but Joe doesn't hear him.
Tangier, 25 May 1967
Five English queens stoned on hash and Valium and Moroccan boy-f
lesh, sipping red wine on a café terrace against a blood-orange sky. Two American tourists, an older married couple, sitting nearby eavesdropping on the conversation and making their disapproval evident. Joe Orton lets his voice rise gradually until he is not so much shouting as projecting, trained Shakespearian actor that he is:
“He took me right up the arse, and afterward he thanked me for giving him such a good fucking. They're a most polite people. We've got a leopard-skin rug in the flat and he wanted me to fuck him on that, only I'm afraid of the spunk, you see, it might adversely affect the spots of the leopard."
“Those tourists can hear what you're saying,” one of the entourage advises. (Not Kenneth Halliwell; though he is present, he wouldn't bother trying to curb Joe even if he wanted to.)
“I mean for them to hear,” Joe booms. “They have no right to be occupying chairs reserved for decent sex perverts ... He might bite a hole in the rug. It's the writhing he does, you see, when my prick is up him, that might grievously damage the rug, and I can't ask him to control his excitement. It wouldn't be natural when you're six inches up the bum, would it?"
The Americans pay for their coffee and move away, looking as if they've had it considerably more than six inches up the bum—dry.
“You shouldn't drive people like that away,” says the sensitive queen. “The town needs tourists."
Joe sneers. He has practiced it in the mirror. “Not that kind, it doesn't. This is our country, our town, our civilization. I want nothing to do with the civilization they made. Fuck them! They'll sit and listen to buggers’ talk from me and drink their coffee and piss off."
“It seems rather a strange joke,” offers another member of the entourage, timidly.
“It isn't a joke. There's no such thing as a joke,” says the author of the most successful comedy now playing in London's West End.
Are You Loathsome Tonight?: A Collection of Short Stories Page 9