The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  I now had to wonder if in fact that fable wasn’t at all about Len, but about De Petrie himself. Since, as I recalled it, he never actually told me that Len had written it.

  In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought maybe I had it all wrong. Hadn’t Axenfeld out and out said he hadn’t written ‘The Flamingos’? Was that true? Was I assuming those were the authors of the pieces merely because it was in their archives the fragments were found? Couldn’t Axenfeld have never written it, but found the piece in his library under Tales of the Offeekenofee, as he’d said? Maybe Cameron Powers put it there? or De Petrie? Both had been on that sunporch? And hadn’t Thom Dodge had two of the pieces? How did I know which, if any of them, Mark Dodge had written? What if there were the same five fragments somewhere in all eight of their collected papers? What if …? Whatever the truth was, I’d never discover it. They’d covered their tracks too well. That much was quite clear.

  When I’d finished reading the entries, grasping how utterly I’d been had, fooled, screwed over, done in, mishandled by the Purple Circlers, both the living and dead, after I went over and over in my mind what had happened, or what I suspected had happened, and more importantly why it had happened, how it had been brought about via my complete and utter obsession with Len Spurgeon, what that obsession had done to me, led me to, where it had landed me, then and only then did I attempt to open the hotel window to throw myself out.

  It was, like most legal hotel windows, of course, barred from opening beyond six inches. I did the next best thing. I took the elevator downstairs and jaywalked directly into the noonday traffic on Wilshire Boulevard, at that point six lanes thick, without a traffic light in a half-mile, moving at about sixty miles per hour. Others have died doing it. Among them, the 1960s activist Jerry Rubin.

  I was struck three times. The first time glancingly, whirling me around on my feet and directly into the path of a second car, which veered to avoid me, but hit me anyway. I was rendered unconscious and slammed directly into the front left fender of another car. My body veered off and was hurled twenty-five feet against the trunk of a palm tree fifty feet in from the corner of Wilshire and Selby. I caused a fourteen-car pile-up and stopped traffic for several hours in both directions. It was on the five o’clock, six o’clock and eleven o’clock news. Also in the next morning’s papers.

  EPILOGUE

  NEEDLESS TO SAY, I DIDN’T DIE. In fact, despite the photogenic spectacularity of the accident, I didn’t suffer more than a dislocated right shoulder, three broken ribs, hairline fractured tibia, neckbone, wrist, cheekbone and nose. Oh, and I was in a coma for about three days. That was the bad part.

  The good part was that the papers firing me weren’t official until two weeks later, so I was medically covered by the school. Since I was so close I was taken to UCLA’s own hospital, one of the best in the country, where – as a colleague – I received terrific care and healed with only the most minor of scars. Best of all, the news of my arrival in the Intensive Care Unit spread to my class within a few hours, and Pamela Agosian talked her way into my wardroom, lying about her relationship to me. She and the others from my class then took turns staying with me, and ‘talking me’ out of my coma. It was Pam’s voice I heard, Pam’s face I saw, when I came to. I asked her to stay, asked her to be my friend, little by little told her everything that had happened to me, to explain how I’d ended up there. I had to tell someone.

  To my delight, she remained a friend, and more. After summer session, when I was well enough to hobble around on my own, I took up my sister and brother-in-law, Bart and Judy Vanuzzi’s offer to stay with them in San Francisco until I’d fully recovered. Pam switched classes for her last term in January to Berkeley. By then I’d gotten my own place. She moved in with me.

  We’re still together and she’s my biggest supporter. It was partly her doing that I got this job teaching at the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita. Yes, we’re back in southern California. She’s teaching too, grade school, nearby in Castaic. I’m only an assistant professor, but with two incomes we’ve found an inexpensive place to rent. I teach four classes, really basic stuff, two freshman composition and two ordinary literature classes, in American lit. It’s okay.

  Because of Pam’s continued support and belief in me, I’ve at last come back to work on the thesis about the Purple Circle. Redoing it, but not a great deal. It took a great deal of courage on my part, but when Pam and I at last told Judy and Bart what had happened, Vanuzzi said he thought it was the right thing to do. It was Bart who’d pointed out to me that not one of the three surviving Purple Circlers had said the fragments I called The Book of Lies was their work. It was bold, pushy Bart who suggested that I contact the three of them with the idea that I publish The Book of Lies with all of my documentation and my introduction as a book. That I send the MS to Von Slyke, De Petrie, Axenfeld and Reuben Weatherbury and ask them either to confirm their authorship of the pieces or to allow me to list Len Spurgeon as the author.

  To my surprise, all four of them wrote back and said they would not accept responsibility for having written the pieces. So my supposition as to the book’s authorship will have to remain as good as anyone else’s.

  The next step, however, was what really jump-started the controversy. One of my colleagues at the College of the Canyons was to deliver a paper at the next Modern Language Association Conference on some aspects of a contemporary African slang. Instead, he gave over his slot in the program to me and I delivered my own revamped introduction, calling the paper I delivered ‘The Enigmatic Muse: An Unfinished Book by the Unknown Member of the Purple Circle’. The listing for my talk was not in the catalogue for the event. However, it very definitely was posted on those flyers handed out at the conference registration and orientation, showing ‘amendments and errata’ to the programs.

  As a result, there were more than the expected number of people in the audience when I got up to speak than if it had been, as planned, Dr Anton Scherzer speaking on ‘Non-glottal Agglutinative Origins of Contemporary Zimbabwean and South African Argot’. Among the listeners, Reuben Weatherbury, Tanya Cull, Irian St George – and, of course, his shiny new UCLA protege, Waterford Machado. My paper caused a sensation. During the lengthy, stormy question and comment period, Machado and I ended up in a shouting match that almost turned into a fist fight.

  While I was packing to leave my hotel room, two people from renegade MLA offshoot groups called my room asking to publish the paper. I gave it to them both and it appeared, with fullest editorial approbation, in their very next quarterly issues. Meanwhile, that final night of the MLA conference, Reuben Weatherbury had approached me in the hotel restaurant and we’d had late-night coffee, during which I’d revealed all of what had happened to me re: the Purples. ‘I never thought you were gay,’ he said. ‘You never said or did anything to make me think so.’ He also agreed to ask his editor, the one who’d put out the two volumes of the Reader, to look at my work, although he thought the project somewhat ‘arcane’ for them.

  The next issue of the MLA Journal, coming out barely two months after the renegades’ quarterlies, contained the expected response, a paper co-authored by St George and Machado decrying the ‘wholesale, reckless aggrandizement and attempted heterosexualization of the works of the Purple Circle by scholars intelligent enough to realize how superior their work is to their own benighted people, but too greedy to leave gay work to gay academics’. Their attack was on several fronts, was well thought out, cogent, evidently a long-simmering offensive on St George’s part, as it went after virtually every non-gay author who’d made the slightest foray into gay lit. in the past two decades. They knocked over a few big names, some of whom even I would admit needed a good bashing. Naturally, I was saved for the last, and the most virulent, assault.

  Among the things they wrote was that I had gone into the affair with my eyes open, searching for, indeed hoping to find, ‘some ignominious and belittling person or thing’ to denigrate the gro
up. Also that I had intended ‘from the beginning to deceive, disparage, ridicule, and lower the Purple Circle members’ literary standing’. I’d done so via ‘calculated mendacity’ in misrepresenting myself and my sexuality, going so far as to ‘inveigle a defenseless and sexually unresolved undergraduate student into providing’ me with ‘totally specious credentials of hoaxed gender preference’. Furthermore, I had ‘entranced, bewitched, cock-teased and even offered myself as bait’ to whomever was naive enough to be taken in by me. Capping it, I’d ‘bought my way into possession of literary works’.

  But worse, I’d done all this in an attempt to destroy not merely the work but, more importantly, the private lives of the Purple Circle members at their most vulnerable point: their affections. According to St George and Machado, from the onset, with my bigotry securely in place, I’d never for a second ‘accepted, believed, thought possible or worthwhile the existence of, the strength of, or the efficacy of one man’s sexual love for another’. It was this ‘deep and unshakeable prejudice’, they believed, which had ‘driven me to fraudulence, lucre, and devastation’.

  That’s not true. No matter what anyone thinks or says, I know differently. I know unswervingly otherwise. Because while it’s true that before I’d arrived at UCLA and moved into the Casa Herrera y Lopez, I’d had virtually no same-sex experience, I’d never been opposed to it. The truth is I’d been secretly fascinated by it, quietly wondering whether my absolute devotion to the works of the Purple Circle wasn’t in fact extra-literary, even a result of unconscious latent homosexuality. My early good looks had pulled me in the other direction from the beginning. From almost before puberty, I’d been surrounded by, undressed by, caressed by, seduced by girls and women. I’d had a ‘steady girl’ since junior high. The minute one fell away, there had been six to take her place. I’d had all the sexual activity an American teenager would desire, with not a single conflicting complication – say, of unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease. I’d led a completely charmed heterosexual life, right up until the break-up and divorce from Chris Crowell while we were graduate students at Columbia.

  It was at that time, headed toward UCLA, that I decided I would open myself up to men, give in to those unformed feelings and desires, and see what happened. Had he been less ambivalent himself – and less of a jerk – Ray Rice probably would have had me every way and any way he wanted. I’d kept hoping for one of the men I met on my quest to put the make on me, to demand sex from me in return for information or a manuscript, to crawl into my bed and ravage me as I slept. I couldn’t believe not one of them would even touch me. But they didn’t. Not one of the Purple Circle survivors, their heirs or executors! So much for fundamentalist propaganda!

  No, it remained for someone else to do it. Someone who proved to me what no army of Machados or St Georges can ever otherwise persuade me may be altered, disputed, or doubted. The man whom I slowly came to realize I’d fallen for, the man I was ‘saving myself for’, and whom I’d come to utterly desire. In fact, the only man who could possibly provide me with what I required. Because of him, and that experience with him, I now strongly believe in what Whitman called manly love. Indeed, despite the fact that I’ll probably marry Pam Agosian next year and raise a family with her and live out the rest of my life as a conventional heterosexual, it was because of him that I’ve come to understand what had first and so much attracted me to what the Purple Circle was writing about, suggesting, aiming toward – a love stronger, more trenchant, more metaphysical than any other. I do understand that. I believe it. I accept it.

  It happened that morning in July in Truro, Massachusetts, during the last minutes of my visit to Dominic De Petrie. Recall that I’d awakened late that morning, had breakfast, gone upstairs to his little office, talked with him, found out what more he knew about Len, experienced that sudden, odd sense of shared déjà vu, and when it was over, he’d asked if I was packed and ready in a voice that appeared to have undergone some kind of under-sea change. Minutes later, he was out at the Beemer rummaging through the car’s trunk as I brought out my bags.

  ‘You didn’t happen to see a narrow flashlight back here?’ he asked. ‘It’s supposed to be attached here, next to the internal CD changer.’

  I said no, then recalled where I had seen it. ‘Could it be in the garage?’

  Before he could ask how I would possibly know that I headed toward the garage, and slipped in through the accessible double doors.

  The place was as I recalled it the night before, though the light source now derived from a different direction: the three tall rubber pails, the boxes of beercans and soda bottles, the workshop bench, were all as I’d remembered. Beneath the workbench was where, the night before, I’d seen the pale green flashlight with its distinctive Beemer logo. I bent down to get it, stood up again with it in hand, instantaneously felt a return of that peculiar sense of déjà vu De Petrie and I had shared in his office not long before.

  Of course I had been here before. Only hours before. Late at night. I registered that fact, but it was instantly swept away by another cognizance, that I was in the proximity of someone, something, perhaps the same ‘house spirit’ I’d intuited then. Whatever impression that was for me, it was short-lived, fleeting, transitory. This awareness began the same way but it quickly became more complex and far more concentrated. I had a sensation of total, sudden languor as though all vigor had been drawn from my limbs, rendering me powerless. At the same time, I remarked an indisputably new and until then unknown scent as it surrounded me, brushing my face, a cologne that only months later and after many trials and errors in department store men’s cosmetics counters, I would discover was Guerlain’s du Coc for men. Simultaneously I experienced … how can I put it that doesn’t sound utterly deranged? I can’t. So I’ll come out and say I had the unassailable sensation that I was thoroughly enveloped by love. My body, my neck and shoulders, my hair, my ears, my face, all were wrapped in the most passionate unconditional affection I’ve ever experienced.

  Its effect was so powerful as to dizzy me, to render me without capacity to resist as it continued to enfold me within wave after wave of the most unceasing ardor, until I vaguely thought I must surely be moaning aloud in pleasure, on the brink of losing consciousness, and drenching myself in the most intense, attenuated orgasm I’ve ever experienced. At the same time I felt supported, gently caught up, almost lifted.

  I can’t say how long this went on, only that it seemed a very long time and I wished it would never end. It did draw to an end, eventually, and I was left stunned and wholly drained. The very last actual manifestation I can recall was the sensation of a pair of lips longingly caressing the nape of my neck. When even that was gone, and when I’d felt the presence completely withdraw, I staggered, reeled, almost fell, held onto the worktable with my fingertips, and at last was able to turn back to the room.

  There, rising up the five wooden steps into the house – those same wooden steps I’d used to come into this garage last night – was a pillar of what appeared at first to be ash-gray smoke that slowly spun and resolved itself into a six-foot column, and a shape. It was configured in place only a second, fifteen feet away, but there was no question at all of what was imaged. Wearing tight black Levi’s and cowboy boots and a black T-shirt with sleeves rolled up on the biceps, who else could it be? He gazed at me fondly, lasciviously licked his tongue over his top lip, dissolved into whatever ectoplasmic state he diurnally existed in, swirled up the steps as squirming gray smoke, and was gone.

  I remained where I’d been forsaken at the workbench, debilitated, wholly slaked, my thoughts a categorical muddle. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure to my left, and turned just enough to make out Dominic De Petrie standing in the space between the garage’s double doors, stopped from entering. He was staring, almost gaping, not at me, but at those five wooden steps that led up and into the house. Staring for I can’t say how long. At last, he made the effort and looked at me. As he did, the ca
lm gaze of acceptance, the melancholic gaze he cast my way, filled as it was of so many different emotions – pride, proof, frustration released, yet also annoyance and, yes, even betrayal – all that forced my mind to finally conjoin my senses in grasping what had just occurred to me. De Petrie had seen it all! Seen and heard it all! He was a witness. He could corroborate!

  My physical response to his unspoken confirmation of what had, impossibly, just occurred to me was utter consternation: the hair stood up on the back of my neck and my body temperature plunged. I began to shudder uncontrollably until I was sure I’d fall to the ground, where, who knew, I might begin frothing at the mouth. In a second, De Petrie was there, holding me, wrapping a sweater over my shoulders, murmuring unintelligible words at me, leading me out of the arctically chilled garage into the cinematically bogus-looking reality of a sun-warmed Cape Cod summer day. He continued to hold me even after I’d stopped shivering and had grown humanly warm again.

  Warmed and suddenly embarrassed, I withdrew from him. He stood back, accepted his sweater, took the flashlight I held out to him with a hint of a laugh. Without a word, he tossed it into the car trunk. A few seconds later we were in the Z-5, speeding toward the airport.

  We never spoke a word of it, Dominic De Petrie and me. Not in the car, not at the airport lounge waiting for my plane to land and taxi in, not when my flight was called and we shook hands. Not when I walked onto the tarmac and ascended into the commuter transport that would fly me to Logan Airport in Boston, and from there back to LA to face what would turn out to be my wholly unanticipated yet after all inevitable, and unmistakably individual destiny. Not then. Not later. Not ever. Yet every time we do speak – infrequent as that is – it’s always present somehow, unverbalized, implicit, no matter what else we actually say.