The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  Then I saw her, Conchita, some thirty-five feet distant, stepping out of a glass door into the terrace. She was wearing a flimsy, pearl-hued robe with matching sandal-strap heels. A drawstring bag flung over one shoulder.

  I was about to call her over, into the shade … I already had my hand raised in gesture, when Conchita dropped the bag with a soft smash and spread an eye-hurting white towel I’d not seen her holding across one of the sun chairs always paired at the fountain’s edge. She half turned and in a theatrical gesture flung her hands out, angled to let the robe slither off her arms, down her naked body, to gather at her feet. She kicked off the big shoes, gently prodded the clothing with her toes and turned to the fountain, which immediately responded by covering her curved, high-tipped breasts and nubbed hipbones, her held-high face, the tawny skin of her arms and her long legs with spray, dewing her so consistently she might have been a statue in a morning park.

  Any earlier thought I might innocently have had of getting her attention and drawing her into the shade died quietly inside me then. I watched as she slowly twisted her slender torso within the fountain’s invisible wet penumbra until her entire body shone, aquamarine, violet, chartreuse and magenta: an iridescent glitter in the sun. That moment, the two doves chose to fly out of arboreal shelter and into the open space, circling her head. She swanned a regal hand up to provide a perch and one actually touched down a fraction of a second, before shying off, encircling her head as she cooed back at it, and the two birds fluttered around before alighting on the fountain’s edge. Alone, she half turned, still not seeing me in the pergola’s obscurity, bent down as though in athletic stretch, lifted her hands high on either side, then let her entire frame collapse, as gradually, as silkily as her robe had a moment before, as she slowly slid onto the warm awaiting chaise.

  I felt then as Actaeon must have, chancing upon Artemis bathing in Arcady’s woods millennia ago: awestruck, gifted, aware I was perceiving what no mortal must; overconsciously masculine; awkwardly invasive; human; non-natural, in comparison. I must have stopped breathing, because when I began again I noticed my lungs, could hear how labored my respiration was. While unaware of me, Conchita sighed once, murmured surrender to the sun and in seconds was asleep.

  I waited a longish time before picking my way out of the arbor and quietly getting back to my room, afraid to be discovered, though I’d done nothing amiss, not been where I shouldn’t have. Once safely indoors, what had seemed so stifling not long before was now unambiguous warmth. I wasn’t sexually aroused, but my nape hurt, as though I’d slept at an odd angle and awakened with a stiff neck.

  The combination of Conchita’s appearance and Thom Dodge’s revelation had made me nervous, itchy, I couldn’t stay still. So I quietly made my way out of the guest-bedroom suite along the hallway, past where I knew but couldn’t bring myself to stare at Conchita asleep, upstairs into the library. Maybe a book would distract me. The first one I laid eyes on was Aaron Axenfeld’s very personal essays and I thought, wait, he must know about Len Spurgeon. I plopped myself in a chair behind Von Slyke’s oversized desk, found his number on the Rolodex and phoned.

  It rang and rang, and I had almost despaired when he picked it up. A cautious hello: he must have been bothered by telephone salesmen, I thought. I began to identify myself, when I became aware that the voice was continuing to speak: a machine-activated message. I left as brief a message as I could, asking Axenfeld if he knew Len Spurgeon and, if so, asking him exactly who Len was and what Len’s relationship to Jeff Weber was.

  I got up, walked out of the library over to the stairs to where I could peer out the dining room’s high windows to the terrace, to see if Conchita was still there. She was, flat on her back, the dark V where her legs met her torso … The phone was ringing. Certain it was Axenfeld calling back with something more concrete, more illuminating to tell me, I rushed to pick it up.

  ‘Un-for-tu-nate-ly, I can’t speak long nor give details.’ It was Irian St George, sounding very piqued. ‘Waterford Machado and his proctor have just posted his doctoral thesis topic, and I thought you’d want to be amongst the very first to know.’

  ‘Oh?’ I replied, wondering what this had to do with me.

  ‘Es-pec-i-al-ly,’ St George continued, ‘as, ex-as-per-at-ing-ly, the topic is more or less up your chosen al-lée!’

  ‘Oh?’ I stupidly repeated.

  ‘In fact, the title is “The Re-if-ic-at-ion of the Non-nor-ma-tive: An In-no-va-tive Ap-proach to the Purple Circle”. Machado claims to have new Purple Circle material. “New and unpublished primary sources,” he noted.’

  ‘Meaning what exactly?’

  ‘Un-for-tun-ate-ly he provided no details, and his advisor ev-id-ent-ly thought not to ask for their inclusion.’

  St George sounded amused, which naturally irritated me.

  ‘That gives no idea,’ I said. ‘It could mean anything! What do you think he’s found? Isn’t everything the Purple Circle has written already published or catalogued?’

  ‘The dead ones, yes. Pretty much everything. But even my own bit of heaven and trib-u-lat-ion – I mean, of course, Dominic De Petrie -has never chosen to release everything he’s written.’

  ‘You mean he tells you he’s holding back material?’

  ‘He hints. He prevaricates. He works in great looping figure eights around poor un-sus-pect-ing me. On purpose, I believe. For example, De Petrie has, on more than one oc-cas-ion, released three or four volumes of his journal autographs to the Timrod Collection. Generally it’s some months before I receive their Purple Circle Catalogue update and appendix and discover his de-lic-ious per-fi-dy.’

  ‘Maybe he does it for the money?’

  ‘Nat-ur-al-ly, that would be his own ex-plan-at-ion. Dis-in-gen-u-ous in the extreme!’ St George sighed. ‘On the brighter side, as Machado is not currently sorting out Damon Von Slyke’s papers,’ St George said, stating the obvious, ‘I feel confident in strongly doubting his discovery is the same as what you have found. It’s probably something quite minor. Some unknown letters between the Purples perhaps.’

  I wasn’t ready to let it go yet. ‘Even so!’

  ‘Even so it na-tu-ral-ly adds pressure on poor you,’ St George sympathized. ‘But then again, stress is not an entirely unknown sensation among these Pierian groves, is it? Must run.’ St George signed off.

  ‘Pierian groves, my ass!’ I commented to the walls. But on top of everything else, nevertheless, the phone call had managed to ruin my day.

  Once past the tunnel into Contra Costa County the scenery turned almost rural. There were unexpectedly high hills through which I occasionally made out spots of blue from three surrounding reservoirs. I felt like I’d been driving most of the day. In truth it had been more than six hours up through central California from Los Angeles, with another half-hour negotiating San Francisco’s urban nightmare of traffic, with a short break while I settled my bags with the concierge at my brother-in-law’s fancy apartment building, then almost another hour out of the city’s bad-dream traffic and directly west, across the Bay Bridge and into the East Bay area, passing around Oakland and Berkeley. The Orinda Valley I was now driving through wasn’t much, but what I could make out of the next two large canyons, Bear Creek and Happy Valley, showed they seemed to retain a bit of original forest. The highway narrowed, and after some dips and rises through a narrow pass I arrived at where it divided, north and south. Walnut Creek, once a ‘bedroom community’ of San Francisco and Oakland, now its own thriving town, lay dead ahead. I got off where I’d been directed and followed a widely curving main road to another curved road and another and another and another, always headed left, as though in some great maze, until I arrived at my destination.

  Oak Grove Estates proved to be a sizable, much-wooded and landscaped private neighborhood, gated with entry post, two armed guards, a sign-in logbook and a good-for-twenty-four-hours electronic decal slapped on the car’s windshield. Inside the park were swan ponds, tennis courts
and a small ‘village’ including shops surrounding an administration building, and as I checked the map handed out to me when I entered and drove on, a handful of cedarsided, enormous-windowed, oddly shaped, Gehry School, two-, three- and four-story Architectural Digest houses scattered here and there along the road, each ‘sited’ and obviously designed to be unique.

  Thom Dodge’s place sat atop a soft hill surrounded by lawns, one and a half stories tall, a bit less of an architectural ‘statement’ than its neighbors (most of them hidden from view) yet unquestionably expensive. Definitely not the kind of place an Air Force officer of his rank should be able to afford. I immediately wondered how much money used to buy it came from royalties of his brother’s books and concluded most, if not all.

  That financial success was one aspect of the Mark Dodge legend. He’d been a golden boy: golden in looks, golden in love, golden in finances, but especially golden in his career and reputation. Which was why, when he’d shown the first symptoms of AIDS, been hospitalized, almost died twice from pneumocystis, recovered twice, rapidly worsened and then did die, so many people had been shocked to their core.

  Not merely the other members of the Purple Circle, not merely members of what there was then of the gay literary community, not merely the literary world, but anyone who knew Mark, had read him, or even read of him – since by the 1984 publication of We All Drive Fords, articles and interviews had begun flowing. His New York Times obituary was an unprecedented four columns across and six inches down, with a photograph: a first for someone openly gay and not yet thirty-seven years old.

  Hundreds of mourners had flocked to his Manhattan memorial service, had stood in the rain outside the funeral home. Scores had met his body at the Oakland Amtrak station when it arrived on the West Coast and hundreds had attended the East Bay burial. Later the day of the funeral, one poor soul, claiming to have been one of Mark Dodge’s lovers and himself suffering from AIDS dementia, threw himself out the window of the TransAmerica building in downtown San Francisco. Another half-dozen suicide attempts ensued on both coasts, directly attributable to Dodge’s death: five gay men and a woman.

  Gay politicians still struggling to get the word out on the disease had immediately grasped the advantage of Mark Dodge’s very public tragedy, and instantly adopted him as a posthumous Poster Child for the illness. In its first five years of existence, the foundation named after Mark Dodge raised more money faster than any other AIDS organization.

  Given the enormous amount of extra-literary attention attached to his work, it was surprising how well Mark Dodge’s published writing had stood the test of time. All three of his novels had remained in print since their first publication. The American trade paperback of Keep Frozen was by now in its twenty-eighth printing, and also available in a lesbian and gay book series from a book club. We All Drive Fords had been an international seller since it had come out, not only in the US but also in Britain, France, Germany, Israel and Japan. His first novel, Buffalo Nickel, which was not overtly gay, had been published thirty years ago and was now on reading lists at a score of American universities, including two I’d attended. Unlike Jeff Weber, Mark had lived off his writing from the beginning. Advances, royalties, grants, awards, foreign sales, paperbacks, film options, all had brought it in. It was almost twenty years since he’d died and no diminution of his reputation had occurred, but instead a rather steady line.

  I’d myself concluded that Dodge’s reputation remained high because he had adroitly limited his books to easily identifiable subject matter. For his debut work, Buffalo Nickel, published when he was barely a youth himself, he’d written about the high-school graduation year of four members of a teenaged brass band in a rural-changing-to-suburban setting in central California. Those same kids grown up, returning to the town with families of their own, or having remained there, was the subject of We All Drive Fords, his last novel, published nearly a decade later. The title derived from the words written on the doors of the gigantic auto plant which dominated the town they lived in and which had in one way or another become connected to all of their fates. In between the two was Keep Frozen, Dodge’s artlessly masterful tale of a talented young man from the provinces moving to the big city to become an artist in the late 1960s, a book that delighted straight and gay readers with its deliciously eccentric cast of characters and their madcap lives the protagonist moves in and out of and finally becomes a part of.

  Another reason for Dodge’s continued popularity was his writing itself. It was never as obviously ‘styled’ as, say, Axenfeld’s or Powers’s, never drew attention to itself as Etheridge’s and Von Slyke’s writing invariably did. It was quiet and precise but never prosaic. Of the Purple Circle members, perhaps only De Petrie could write so ‘down’. But unlike De Petrie, with Dodge it wasn’t a sign of an author wielding yet another aspect of his astonishing versatility; it was the only style Dodge possessed, and luckily one perfectly wed to the material.

  Mark Dodge’s poignancy was nearly not present. His humor was so lightly touched as to be almost evanescent. Yet one didn’t come away from the books with the sense he’d reined himself in, calculated that ‘restraint’ that so many minimalist reviewers had demanded of 1970s and 1980s work before it could be considered literary – and which now dated it so much. It was simply how a boy growing up on a farm overlooking the vast inland sea of the San Francisco Bay would think, would write.

  ‘Not so much major or minor, as perfect,’ Irian St George had summed up Mark Dodge’s work in his study of Dominic De Petrie, ‘with the perfection of a classical odist or pastoral eclogist, not an epic singer of wars and dynasties, nations and heroes. Hesiod rather than Homer.’

  Reuben Weatherbury had put it another way. ‘When we read De Petrie or Von Slyke, we’re lost in admiration and quite often in wonder,’ he had written in his intro to the first volume of the Purple Circle Reader. ‘When we read Dodge, we want to phone him, invite him for a Pepsi and a game of checkers.’

  Fleming’s study had wondered if ‘Dodge’s nearly monochromatic gouaches could survive the ultimate competition of time from his more brilliant fellows’ murals’. A question I’d answer somewhat in the negative, never having been taken with any of Dodge’s novels as many other readers had. While Cummings – concerned with the psychology of the Nine’s art – put it biographically: ‘It’s as though Mark Dodge consciously used language to put himself on a more equal footing with the others; as though he wished to tamp down with words, to modify with sentence structure, the lavish physical gifts he’d received, so he’d be on the same plane. An impossibility, of course.’ Cummings had concluded, ‘In any group photo one sees Mark Dodge instantly, the eye is drawn, even decades later. So imagine how very much it was drawn when Dodge was still alive.’

  Cummings had written of the resonating effect of Dodge’s death on his family. Robert Dodge, his father, already suffering from cancer, died six weeks later. Anthea, Mark’s mother, followed a year after. The two brothers’ lives had both gone into tailspins: Thom divorced and requested a transfer to an overseas posting, from which he’d returned a few years ago. Peter abandoned his wife and children, became a homeless alcoholic, wandering southern California’s many beach towns. He’d only just recently gotten back on his feet, partly due to the continued earnings of his brother’s books. The self-deprecating, easy to get along with, astonishingly handsome Mark Dodge had turned out not to be the ‘interior alien, the outsider who only, and falsely, looked and spoke and acted like the insiders’ he had always thought he was and had so often written about. Instead, and all unknowing, he’d been the center around which a half-dozen other lives revolved, upon which in fact they depended. With the stability of his existence gone, the others had crashed, and taken a very long while to recover.

  This house, the Mercedes roadster and Minivan in the driveway, the children’s bikes thrown slapdash against a retaining wall, the pointed prow of a powder-blue ketch half in a shed, were the most material manifestatio
ns of that.

  I parked by the bikes and ascended the slate steps embedded in the perfect lawn up to the front door, a slab of burled oak and frosted glass. Paper fluttering in the breeze read: ‘I’m in back. In the garden or in the hothouse.’

  Both garden and hothouse were unexpectedly large, both were filled with roses. The garden was more like an aboretum for roses. Rows of rose bushes, squares of them, circles within landscaped circles of them, in every size and color possible, on the pathways, along the sides of the house, dropping down a hill, rising up behind a toolshed, surrounding the hothouse itself, three-quarters open. Thom Dodge was wearing huge canvas gloves and a darkly soiled canvas apron over a big T-shirt and stained cargo shorts. He waved a trowel to get my attention. I waved back, threading through thorny-looking tea roses toward him.

  ‘You don’t want to shake,’ he assured me. ‘I’m even dirtier inside the gloves.’

  ‘English tea roses?’ I pointed to those behind me.

  ‘Not bad! Actually they’re New Delhi’s. Based on the English ones. Don’t tell me you know roses?’

  ‘A very little. A woman friend gardened.’

  ‘My passion,’ he said simply. He nodded toward a shelf on which a dozen minuscule pots each held a single fragile cutting. ‘Those are my newest obsession: Andes White. Allegedly first grown by Incas to keep animals out of their cocoa-tree groves. Thorns sharp as shark teeth.’

  Explaining the industrial-strength apron and gloves.

  ‘I’ve got no signs. But I’ve planted the following: Ring Red, Lucille Balls, Amazing, Ultra-Brites, Tawny, Nightshade Black, Tantalus, Wing of White, Tom-Tom, Shaggy Pink and of course American Beauties. Among the tea roses, dozens more.’ He bent to a lower shelf and came up with two beers. I nodded sure, and he popped them open and handed me one. ‘The hell of it all is, until five years ago, I never looked at a flower. I’d buy roses for my wife on her birthday. But I never saw the things. Never even smelled one. Then coupla’ years ago, when I was posted in Oahu, I was put into a cottage formerly occupied by another officer, with a rose garden already in place out back. Little Hawaiian fellow came to tend them, got to talking about them, showing them to me, naming them. They were like kids to him. Or big-league batters. Must have been the sun, ’cause I got hooked. And once I came back and moved here, well, hell, the place turned out to be perfect for ninety-eight varieties.’