White Leather and Flawed Pearls

by Susan Altstatt

  Father Malachi taught me catechism. He’s agreed to spend twenty-four hours with Tom and vouch we’ve both had marriage preparation. Irregular. But acceptable.

  Father Malachi is a Hungarian refugee. Papa defines a Hungarian as a man who goes in the revolving door behind you and comes out ahead. All the older monks at Redwood are revolving-door Hungarians. Father Malachi’s taught boys all his life. I’ve suspected sometimes that he thought I was one, and that was why we got along. He also counseled at Juvy Hall. I was never able to shock him.

  Up till now.

  What about now?

  Sunday, August 24

  Ring. That’s how it would start, the late-night phone call. Not Tom, not Father ’Chi, not for me. The Prior. For Papa. “We cannot sign this paper; we will not be made accessory; we see impediments to this marriage.” A term I never contemplated, embedded now in one of my more painful sectors like a broadhead arrow.

  Morning.

  The last thing Papa said when he put Tom out of the car was, “You might take a look at those guys’ chapel floor; there’s a crack you can put your foot in, and the whole back end is sliding down the gully.”

  “Right,” said Tom.

  My own father.

  On the way home he said “How long is it since he’s been to church?” Twenty years, maybe. “You know they’ll ask him for a lifetime confession.”

  Maybe the Priory’s phones are down. Temptation to ring out there myself, hang up if anyone answers. So I’ll know. Some younger monk drove in to sing the High Mass at Saint Ann’s. In place of Father ’Chi. He wasn’t very good at it.

  Try to come in through the narrow door. Many, I tell you, will try to enter and be unable. When once the master of the house has risen to lock the door and you stand outside knocking and saying, ‘Sir, open for us,’ he will say in reply, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ This is the Gospel of the Lord.

  Home at one o’clock, I locked my own door, pulled the covers up, prayed sad prayers (my passport), and dreamed bad dreams (Tom’s lifetime confession: I pictured it about the size of the Congressional Record) until seven o’clock. As our usual crew was showing up for Sunday dinner, Tom’s empty rented limo came.

  I rode out to Redwood in it. Father ’Chi was waiting on the steps below the monastery, in the green shadow. He has this whinnying laugh, the greeting of a friendly horse. “Your husband has told me much about you that I do not know—He is a very beautiful young man.” That’s all. He started back up to get him.

  I called after him, “You don’t think he’s too old for me?” and meant something much scarier than that.

  “Maybe you’re too old for him! He is like your posters, yes?”

  Surprise, surprise. What could Tom possibly have told him? What did he tell him about Harlan? Certainly not the stuff he’s dragged out of his heart with me.

  Or?

  Maybe it isn’t so bizarre a situation; maybe half the guys Father ’Chi comforted all those years at Juvy Hall were just like Tom inside. Just not as pretty outside. The griefs were all the same; only the gifts were different. And nobody paid anybody off, there were no hypocrites and liars, the truth itself was not unmentionable, and the priest had heard it all and worse a hundred times. The Church could love Tom as he stood. Maybe.

  There is Tom, talking to Father ’Chi. Suddenly I see him kneel on the gravel walk and hide his face against the old priest’s habit. How easy it would be to laugh and turn away. Who kneels to anybody, after all, these days?

  But Father motions, so I run up the stairs instead and kneel beside him, embarrassment suspended in a cool black woolen evening. Father put one skeletal fine brown hand on Tom’s red head and one on mine and blessed us—with all the real old stuff too, my being like vines on the sides of his house and his seeing his children’s children to the third generation—until both of us cried.

  The Church is a clone to the Federal Government in so many ways, you really have to think the Holy Spirit bears with it as advertised, or, like Papa says, the whole mess should have crashed and burned a thousand years ago. The Church has said an awful lot of stuff beside its prayers.

  But how to image that indwelling? Is it, as they’d like you to suppose, hard-ass human folly at the bottom, and a trickle down of Spirit? Spiritual Reaganomics?

  Or insidious Spirit infesting high and low, subtle as a virus spliced into the gene code of its host? Surviving in the same illusive habitat the Psalmist says His Mercy does, “—from generation to generation of those who fear Him?”

  Undetectable, indestructible, incorrigible Mercy.

  Thank God I’m never likely to know everything.

  ———

  Knowing more might be a help sometimes.

  Sight isn’t always hooked to understanding.

  Airport security blocked off a waiting area for Belshangles. We were in it. Tom had been kissing me goodbye, peaceful, as if no one else existed in the world and well in advance so his public would be sure to notice. No great mob of fans beyond the barriers, but the favored few had cameras. I asked him if he wanted to do it in the middle of the airport concourse. He whispered “Better house at Heathrow.”

  Tom left me and went to Harlan by the windows. The plane flashed in the dark outside. The interminable fuel and luggage was all on. Tom said something to him, ashamed, I thought, apologetic. For what? Saddling him with me?

  Harlan’s reply was steady-eyed and much too glib.

  I saw Tom wince. Fear moved in like San Francisco fog. I hadn’t wanted to stay with Harlan when he and Tom were on the best of terms. Tom tried again. Harlan glanced carefully both ways along the concourse, and made one brief suggestion.

  I thought Tom was going to hit him.

  Instead he wheeled off, angry, nervous, striding up and down. Harlan at his elbow matching words as quiet as shared thoughts, shared hurt that clings like acid in the face, and if you try to wipe it, transfers to your hands and burns in two places. A movie camera might have caught the body language. Still snapshots would only show their smooth, hard public faces. That pair could die in public and make it pass for part of the act.

  Tom left him and kissed me again. I felt, rather than saw, a percussion accompaniment of flashbulbs. Then an airline person came, wings on uniformed chest, to usher Belshangles onboard discreetly, even before the handicapped and travelers with small children.

  Another detained Harlan, murmured, “This way, please.” Taking my elbow, she steered us down the gray metal, gray plastic, gray indoor-outdoor carpet ramp after the rest. Wild surmise for a moment. We were going too. Fame and money could buy anything.

  We reached the curved door of the plane. I could see into the First Class, see Tom at the far end laughing with Nicki. But there beside us was another door, and a metal stairway down to asphalt, flashing lights, diesel stink, and screaming turbine roar. We picked our way down, leaning on wet wind. A ground level door took us back through baggage areas, straight to the escalators for the parking lot.

  No fans followed. We hiked the length of the indoor parking. Harlan had a rented car, a blue Nissan Sentra, as are all rented cars. It wouldn’t start. He popped its hood, swearing with quiet interest in what, from total otherness, I fancied must be Arabic.

  I watched his coattails and narrow little rear. The rest of him was under the hood. How tempting. Up with his silly Italian shoes, pitch him into the engine, and slam the hood. And run. Yeah.

  He convinced the rent-a-Sentra with regrettable ease. His hobby was sports car racing, after all. We drove from airport garage to hotel garage in silence, rode the freight elevator in silence, walked to the suite and our separate rooms in silence. I recognized the landscape: what Tom called “Real Life.” Only Tom wasn’t in it. There was fresh cold hotel linen on the bed. It didn’t smell like Tom’s love anymore.

  Chapter 5

  Monday, August 25. 9:00 a.m.

  A maritime sun sheds salty light and little warmth, while wind and trash and seagulls whip around the
corners. It makes a body feel like running, but we walk, half a mile down Second from the rented car (parked under a Bay Bridge on-ramp), to the corner of Market and the building, great gaunt futuristic overwhelmer, stainless steel, black tile, glass as black as Darth Vader’s goggles: a sci-fi locale for social injustice. Things get marginally more humane above the escalators.

  There is a photo place; we pass it. I already have mine.

  School pics were handy for turning into manifestos, about the only fun I ever saw in the whole exercise. For senior yearbook all the rah-rahs hire their own photographers to take these glamour shots. So I went to the school hack with the rest of the guys, wearing one of Papa’s shirts, loose tie, big hair and a truculent expression, like some lanky little deathrock person dressed up too civilly for his convictions. Not very satisfactory at the time; it turned out much too normal. Just (in fact) like a passport photo.

  But imagine our entrance now, Harlan in his tweeds, hair neatly minimized, me in my black Levi’s, black Nikes, and dead-black Pendleton with the holey elbows, into that office: into a compacted jam of third-world bodies, a winding queue, a human Wall of China, confined by vinyl ropes on weighted stainless stands. At the tail of the dragon, a pushy red-lozenge sign demands, Enter Here. Another reads,

  U.S. Passport Fees:

  All minors under 18 must use

  DSP 11. Fee is $27.

  15 year validity.

  All adults using DSP 11

  fee is $42. 10 year validity.

  Adults qualified to use

  DSP 82, fee is $35.

  So I fill out my DSP 11, growing aware meanwhile of certain stock dialogues happening at the head of the line:

  “Do you have a departure date in mind, sir?”

  “Oh, I don’t know yet, how long does it take?”

  “Two to three weeks—”

  “Are you sure you don’t have a certified copy? How about your parents? This was Xeroxed from a certified original, I can see the seal—”

  “Do I sign this?”

  “No, you sign in front of an agent. Have a seat.”

  “How long is the wait?”

  “I’d say about forty minutes—”

  “Where is the original of this, from Florida?”

  “That’s it. That’s all they send you.”

  “When were you leaving?”

  “Friday!”

  “The agent on the other side will probably request you get it certified—”

  “Okay, your passport should come to you in the mail in about four weeks.”

  “I’ll send you over to the agents to see if they’ll accept this for identity. Take a seat, please. You are number ninety-four.”

  I am not a number. I am a free man.

  Above the agents’ desk, on the far side of the room, an electric sign shows the number being served: 28. While I’m looking, it lets out a buzz, and goes to 29. Buzz, 30.

  Harlan doesn’t have to stand through this whole line with me. I don’t plan to need his services; I can fill in blanks as well as anybody. He is doing it anyway. Outside the plate glass is a view of canyon streets: parking garage signs, double-parked delivery vans, jointed buses crawling centipede-like between them. The street sign I can see says, Battery. Do Not Enter. So the one I can’t reads, Market. What fun if it said Assault, instead, and this was the corner of Assault and Battery? At the end of Battery a mid-air segment of Embarcadero Freeway cuts across blue sky. More wind, more seagulls, San Francisco Bay.

  The two ahead of me have reached the counter now, a dark Hispanic type in turquoise rings, and a very tall girl, skin as pretty as café au lait.

  DARK MAN: “I have lost my naturalization papers.”

  MAN BEHIND COUNTER TO TALL GIRL: “This birth certificate is not valid.”

  WOMAN BEHIND COUNTER TO DARK MAN: “Where were you naturalized?”

  TALL GIRL: “It’s the only one I have!”

  DARK MAN: “Here, in San Francisco.”

  MAN BEHIND COUNTER: “This is a Xerox copy, it isn’t certified.”

  WOMAN BEHIND COUNTER: “Go to the District Court on such-and-such street, floor such-and-such, obtain a certified copy of your naturalization records, bring it with two photographs—”

  TALL GIRL (now wailing): “It’s the only one I have!”

  WOMAN B.C.: “Next, please.” (That’s me.)

  MAN B.C.: “Then you must obtain a certified copy—”

  I hand the woman my DSP 11, driver’s license, and birth certificate, familiar items from all those years I had to prove my age at track meets. I fingered the Santa Clara County seal chomped into it to show that it was certified.

  TALL GIRL: “I haven’t a faintest idea how to do that!”

  WOMAN B.C.: “Is this your identification? Your form is filled out in a different name.”

  “I was married last week.”

  WOMAN B.C.: “Then we’ll need a certified copy of your marriage certificate.”

  “My husband has the only copy, he’s a British citizen, he’s in London; I’m trying to join him—”

  WOMAN B.C.: Then you must obtain a certified copy. Were you married in the State of California?”

  And I stand there, remembering Tom’s hurt at little things, remembering, through a haze of sleep, the endless time it took the wedding chapel woman to write out that certificate, “The Pretty One” she’d called it (from the minute bit of gold illumination): “Now this one isn’t certified,” she said, “It has to be filed and recorded, and they won’t be open till Monday, then your official copy will be mailed to you, it may take as long as twelve weeks—”

  Tom’s mailing address was London.

  HARLAN: “Pardon me, but Mrs. Rhymer’s husband is my business partner. Would my statement under oath—”

  WOMAN B.C.: That might be allowable under certain requirements: you must be an American citizen, of legal age, and present at the event witnessed. Of course (back to me), you can always make the application in your maiden name. Is time important?”

  ———

  I wrote my letter to Carson City on hotel stationery and mailed it from the lobby. Harlan had nothing, nothing, nothing to say. Upstairs he traded his tweeds for jeans and a turtleneck, and selecting a guitar from a corner of the strangely lifeless living room, sat down to play.

  So, I’d been put to the test when I hadn’t expected it; and, like your ordinary teenage dumb-ass, I’d fucked up. I glowered at his self-absorbed and unresponsive back in blind frustration. Directionless fury. Directed fury.

  What an uncompromising little back, slender and muscular as an otter’s, a likeness his silk turtleneck did nothing to diminish, glossing him wrist to shoulder, chin to waist in rich black sheen. And the jeans artistically ripped fore and aft, very much like Tom’s. Only on Harlan, no skin showed.

  Black silk long johns to match the shirt.

  He had me toying with a kid’s story, half-remembered, witches or aliens who looked okay because they wore these indistinguishable masks, but when the masks came off, the faces underneath weren’t human. Suppose the silk was his skin, sleek black pelt all over. The hands were gloves and the face an ivory mask. If you yanked it off, underneath would be darkness. He’d been playing guitar for almost an hour.

  “So damn it, what should I have done?”

  “When?” (playing on)

  “Back there. It was a toss-up between joining him with my maiden name on, or waiting here till I could prove I had a right to his—and I could just see him—if my passport for the next ten years had got my maiden name on it because he’d gone off with the marriage certificate, like he hadn’t known how to care for me or something—I could just see him freaking out—”

  “Oh,” he said, “especially—since, as far as you’re concerned—after what you did to him before—he remains so abnormally—trusting. You’re the little miracle worker.”

  I stared at him in utter amazement. He went on playing. It was too much for me. “So what are you suggesting that
I did to him?”

  He played a bluesy phrase, acid and simple, it repeated, and repeated—“Isolation—” he said. Now the phrase acquired a slow disconsolate variation. “Loss of familiar environment—” The original phrase sunk to a lower register while the broken-hearted variation lived on above it, a uniquely ornamented life of its own. “Weakened physical condition—induced emotional dependency on the captor—the Stockholm Syndrome. A classic case. What else would you call it?” He continued to play.

  “Well I didn’t do it on purpose!”

  “Surely,” he said, the fingers never stopping their slow, elaborate progress on the strings, “even you have lived long enough to realize—the thousands of degrees or grades of ‘on purpose’ possible to human behavior: some of us act with malice aforethought—some merely have our predator instincts still intact—”

  “Look, what are you trying to prove?”

  He shrugged blandly and got up. “Proof is irrelevant.” He began to look around in corners. The room was really lined with guitars, propped against things in their cases. More seemed to have come while Tom and I were at the cabin, and now that Tom was gone, even more had mushroomed out of the carpet.

  Those jeans weren’t very much like Tom’s; they were exactly like Tom’s. Maybe he’d been cute and torn his to match. But no, he had the bottoms rolled, and the tears and white patches were worn there by longer knees. They weren’t exactly like Tom’s. They were Tom’s.

  So what’s he doing, daring me to notice?

  He’d found what he wanted: a spacey evil-looking black graphite bass. He plugged it in, began to tune it up.

  “Nicki’s?”

  “Mine. I believe you play.”

  “That’s more than I do.” Don’t know why: it never occurred to me that Harlan owned a bass. If it had, I might’ve taken up drums.

  He wriggled impatiently. “Tom says that you play.”