4.
RAINBOW + ARROW, the sign says. Spelled out in rainbow neon. Enclosed in a neon circle with a neon arrow blinking up. Not subtle, that’s for sure.
Luce goes in, mostly because it seems wiser than loitering out on Castro Street.
The city has eyes. He keeps his lowered as he navigates the dark staircase, and inside it’s dark, with flashes like weather from above, and loud music, padding his mind against the what-ifs. What if he’s been followed. What if he sees someone he knows. What if Jim’s already reading his mind. Music he recognizes from Rondelle’s radio; if not the song then the style, racy, beating like a heart, and the singer, a black lady with a soaring voice, singing about needing a man.
Nothing subtle about that, either.
It’s the kind of loudness that used to get on Luce’s nerves with the hippies —their blaring rock-and-roll and smelly painted buses. But these men aren’t dressed like hippies. They’re working men: plaid shirts, white vests, blue jeans, overalls peeled to the waist. Some shirtless.
Though it’s a weeknight, and early in the night, some men are dancing. Others standing close, talking, smoking, crushing up to the bar for drinks. He’ll need a drink. Shuffling to join the mass of men at the bar, he surreptitiously draws his wallet from his pocket, confirming that the five dollars intended for tonight’s offering plate is still there.
‘Daddy, you’re tall !’
Luce doesn’t know where the words come from or if they’re meant for him, but he is tall, and old enough to answer to ‘Daddy’. He stands a little taller, sucks his belly in tighter, holds his head at a dignified angle, like Paul Newman. Plenty of women have said he has a Paul Newman look. Plenty of women have thought him handsome, and no reason plenty of men shouldn’t, too, especially when the liquor’s flowing and the lights are dim. As the line inches forward, he lets his eyes rove to a muscle-bound Latino, lifting a vial to his nose. The Latino passes it along to a skinny fellow with a handlebar moustache, and within seconds they’re at each others’ necks like vampires, and Luce’s jeans, to his fearful pride, are tightening.
‘What can I get you, sugar?’
The song has changed; something by that Swedish pop group. The crowd has thinned to reveal the bar, and the man behind it: a well-oiled mahogany-wood bar, a well-oiled mahogany-haired man. He’s got on a pair of rainbow-striped shorts, very tight, very revealing.
‘Let me see …’ Luce stammers. ‘Uh … not wine …’
‘I’m only here to give you what you want, sweetie,’ the bartender cuts in, with just enough honey to keep Luce from feeling like he’s been sassed.
‘Let me see …’ Luce tries again. ‘Uh, whiskey.’ Then, worrying his choice isn’t flamboyant enough, will single him out as an imposter, he adds, ‘Sour. Whiskey sour.’
‘Whatever you say, babycakes.’
Luce watches the bartender sashay away to make his drink, his walk pert and bowlegged, and, oh, he’s good in those shorts, and, oh, his body’s good. Slight and not-too-tall; the kind of build Luce likes best, though he’s only just beginning to realize he has preferences. Only just beginning to realize that the thing he hasn’t considered a possibility in over two decades is more than a possibility; it’s low-hanging fruit to be plucked. Another man in rainbow shorts, bigger, broader, leans to take an order, pops a cherry in his mouth, then wiggles saucily over to the liquor shelf, where a bartender in female drag is shaking bottles. This doesn’t interest Luce. Men done up like women — what for? But the big guy is whipping her tail with a dishtowel, tweaking a nipple through her rainbow bra. She whips him in revenge. Flicks her Farrah Fawcett hair. Stalks to the counter, breasts jiggling, hips swiveling. Convincing.
‘Well. What do you want?’ she snaps at a queen to Luce’s right, and as soon as that raucous young voice comes out, he knows it is female, and not just that. It’s familiar.
‘Get those out of my face.’ The queen, who’s at least Luce’s age, waves dismissively at the barmaid’s chest, then inclines his head in the direction of the big guy. ‘I want him.’
‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’ Under its thick makeup, the barmaid’s face is disarmingly young, a glimmering stud in her big nose. ‘But you can get a drink.’
‘I’ll drink anything he pours in my mouth.’
‘Oh, for-fuck’s-sake.’ She turns her back, showing a Venus de Milo-esque curve that makes Luce’s blood run cold. ‘Rudy! Grandpa wants to pay a guy to flirt with him.’
The big guy, ‘Rudy’, immediately swaggers over to Luce with a grin.
‘Hi, cowboy. You’re cute! Anyone ever tell you you look like Paul Newman?’
‘Not him.’ The barmaid turns to Luce apologetically. ‘Hey, sir, I’m sor—’
She stops: struck by the same bolt that’s causing him to grip the bar, white-knuckled.
‘… Dad? ’
Luce doesn’t know how they get to his traitor-bitch daughter’s apartment. Well, they walk; he knows that. But what turns they take, what they talk about, how he keeps from strangling her along the way — these are things he doesn’t know.
Walking alongside her in her tattered lamé coat, waiting at traffic lights with her, he has the sense of being colorblind or partially deaf.
There is a simple answer to why he doesn’t strangle her, of course, and that’s that she’s his daughter — Roberta, Bobbi, Bobcat — and that means more than any vows he’s made to Jim these past years. He doesn’t like to think of it this way, though. Even if he was ready to forget all his responsibilities in the first pair of well-muscled arms that’d have him, he’s not ready to think of himself as a traitor.
‘I think there’s some beer in the fridge,’ Bobbi says, after she’s led him up three flights of stairs, sat him on a saffron-and-rhubarb-striped sofa, and fled to the kitchen.
Luce makes an ineffectual gesture as Bobbi returns with a couple of bottles of Budweiser, still dressed in that ridiculous rainbow outfit and gaudy old coat; probably from the 1920s, probably older than him. She takes a swig, then retreats to the edge of the room.
‘I’m gonna change. Be right back.’
Should he kill her? When she comes back, maybe? Luce looks at his sweating beer. Looks around, and is saddened that the room is nicer than the one he shares with Juanita. Furniture that matches the walls. Art on the walls. Arty movie posters: The Wicker Man, Holy Mountain. A Trojan horse wearing a feather boa. No TV, but a radio and a Victrola.
‘Ow!’ Bobbi cries as she collides with a table on her way back in.
The darndest clumsiest kid. How many times did she fall off Magic Dancer?
Luce sniffs the air disparagingly. ‘Can’t say you’re working with much. But you’ve made it interesting, I guess.’
‘… Thanks.’
Bobbi sits as far from him as possible, on the arm of a saffron leather chair, legs wide in short gym shorts. Luce points to the yellow lettering on her college sweatshirt. ‘Michigan?’
‘Yannis. My roommate.’
‘Another homosexual?’
‘Uh-huh. Another “homosexual”.’
‘Can’t walk two feet in this city without bumping into one.’ Luce snorts, shakes his head. ‘That bar of yours. Not helping the stereotype. The self-indulgence, I mean—’
‘And I guess you were there for selfless reasons?’
‘I mean, not much of a life. Snorting drugs on a weeknight. New partner every night. Not too healthy …’ He grapples for words to wipe the smug look from her face. ‘There’s gonna be a pestilence, Jim says. Hundreds of thousands of men infecting each other. Maybe millions.’
‘Well, Father knows best.’
‘Waste of life, all I’m saying.’ He punctuates with a swig. ‘Nice little revolutionary life you got here, pouring drinks in your underwear. Is that what all you Children of the Revolution are doing these days?’
‘Look, Dad.’ Like the yank of a dog’s chain, the way she says it, Dad. ‘I invited you here thinking you might be something other than a closet case, and maybe we still had things to say to each other. But if you wanna go back to your meeting, fine. I’m sure Jim hasn’t even noticed you’re gone yet.’
If this last part is meant to sting, Luce tries not to let it show. ‘Alright. I’m listening.’
‘Alright. Good.’ Now she’s been given her soapbox, it seems to Luce she hasn’t got the first clue what to do with it. ‘You know, my life is good.’ She looks at him like she wants him to nod. ‘Okay, I had some hard years, and maybe it’s not everything I thought it would be. But I’ve got good people; I’m reading, learning … seeing more of the world. Yannis and me, we’re saving to go to Europe. The Greek islands. The Acropolis.’
‘Gosh. “The Acropolis”.’
‘There’s a whole world out there, Dad.’ She pushes a wilting ash blond curl from her cheek. ‘It’s not perfect, but nobody’s telling you what to do every hour. Your life is yours. You’re free.’
Young people. Always the first to think they understand ‘freedom’.
‘I’m glad you get to feel free in a world where your black baby sister still gets called “nigger”,’ Luce snaps. ‘Could’ve asked how your brothers and sisters are doing, maybe. Could maybe spare a thought for someone other than yourself. But that’s alright. Good for you.’
Bobbi tosses her head, wipes her eyes. With a giddy sense of victory that goes back to boyhood, putting dead mice in his sisters’ beds, Luce realizes he’s made her cry.
But women’s tears, they tire him. His meanness in the face of them. All of a sudden, he’s tired of sitting and exchanging mean words. If only he could kill her.
He stands. Walks to the wall with his beer like he’s at an art gallery.
‘You dumb cracker. I was thinking of you.’ Bobbi tells his back. ‘All the time, working at that bar, I’ve been thinking someday you’d come in; it was only a matter of time …’
‘Should’ve gone to the bar across the street instead.’
‘It was only a matter of time,’ she repeats. ‘Dad, don’t you get it? This is your time.’
Another thing about young people: stupidly idealistic. ‘I’ve had my time.’
‘When? Indiana?’ She scoffs, reducing all memories of being young with Jim to something measly. ‘We’re not in Indiana anymore. This city right now … There’s never been anything like it. Men like you are finally accepted.’
‘The Temple has always been accepting of —’ he hesitates, thinking of Ralph and Tobias, with their slim bodies and loose gestures and arts degrees; are they really like him? ‘More accepting than the outside, I’d say.’
‘Is that why you’re still married to Mom?’
She’s seen his wedding band.
‘Sorry to tell you, but your mom and I have both remarried,’ Luce says, not sorry. ‘I’ve got a beautiful black wife. Juanita.’ He waits for Bobbi to look adequately impressed.
‘She’s quite a woman. Has had quite a life,’ he continues. ‘Not an easy life. Born in Alabama. Lost her first husband young. Second was a no-good man.’ Juanita’s words, gathered from various conversations during their year together, and waiting to be used as proof that there’s more to their marriage than the sad truth: that after all that time with Joya, he doesn’t know how not to be married. ‘Two children. Six miscarriages. Struck out on her own. Worked all sorts of jobs: assembly line, maid, seamstress … Started her own dry-cleaning business, even.’
‘Sounds like things have changed a lot,’ Bobbi admits.
‘Oh, sure,’ Luce says. ‘Lots of changes … Your brothers, guess you wouldn’t know? Your brothers are working for the Cause in South America. Dot, well …’ The image of Dot going upstairs with Jim wedges like a bone in Luce’s throat. ‘She’s grown up pretty. No surprises. As for your dad — well, you don’t have a cop for a dad anymore. I’m with the railroad police. It’s a change. Change, that’s life, isn’t it? Y’know, wish I could sit here and tell you all the changes, but Juanita, she’ll be wondering …’
At that, he gives his daughter a toothy smile, hefts himself from the sofa. If she looks at him oddly, he chooses not to notice. He strides to the door, stops to gulp his beer.
Not finishing his drink — that’d be rude, wouldn’t it?
‘You’re not a cop anymore?’ Bobbi marvels. ‘Why not?’
One of those committee decisions, like Isaiah’s daughter Alice not taking the bar after law school, or Meyer not taking an assistant professorship at one of the big city colleges. Like him proposing to Juanita after a single tepid date at an ice cream parlor in North Beach. ‘Got this other job. I like it plenty.’
‘But you were always a cop.’
‘Not always.’
‘As long as I’ve been alive, you’ve been a cop. As long as you’ve been in the Temple.’ She shakes her head. ‘It’s just so hard to imagine … I don’t even think I ever asked you why you became a cop in the first place.’
Luce shrugs again. ‘Just a thing I did.’
‘There must’ve been a reason.’
‘I liked the uniform.’
‘Come on, Dad.’ Bobbi gestures helplessly at the sofa. Obediently, casually sucking on his bottle, Luce wanders back in, leans over the top of the sofa like it’s a windowsill.
‘I did want a uniform.’ He takes another drink; lets it go to his head. ‘I was too young for the war. Seemed like the next best thing. Heck, I knew I was … but in uniform? Seemed like I could always count on being a little bit good.’
Luce wishes his daughter wouldn’t look at him like it’d be less embarrassing for everyone if he just dropped dead. ‘Is that why you joined the Temple, too?’ she asks. ‘To be “a little bit good”?’
‘Well. It’s complicated …’
‘Because of Jim?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You loved him, didn’t you?’
To Luce’s surprise, the question doesn’t surprise him. Maybe he’s been waiting years to hear it. ‘That was a long time ago.’
‘Do you still love him?’
‘It’s different.’ Luce swallows the bad taste in his mouth. ‘I don’t think of it like that.’
‘How do you think of it?’
Just two men. Born in different years and different towns, but close enough to maybe hear the same trains, to watch the same clouds, to smell the same storms hitting dirt, to come together like magnets. ‘It’s my life. That’s all.’
Luce straightens, moves to the window to cool his face. From the street below, men’s laughter rises, and further off, the nostalgic woop-woop of a police siren. ‘I owe him my life.’
Bobbi sighs. ‘If you saved someone from jumping off a bridge, you wouldn’t expect them to follow you around for life. Would you?’
Juanita almost jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge once. Why didn’t she? Jim hadn’t been there to save her.
‘It’s not like that.’ Luce comes back around to the sofa, sits. If he sits, maybe his thoughts will stop whirling. ‘It’s been a good life.’
Good, if he keeps his mind on certain things. Hattie holding his hand. The early years in the valley, when the girls were little and just wanted to ride horses. Indiana, when the boys were little, too: singing in church, church holidays, Roger with his nose painted red, playing Rudolph.
Good things. Not the bitter wine, making him gag.
‘… A good life. The only life. I guess I’d die, y’know, if I didn’t have this life …’
But something has been uncorked. Things better kept in, they’re rushing out in a wine-dark tide, and darned if he can do anything about it, except hide his face as he cries. Big shoulder-heaving, lung-squeezing cries he didn’t know he had in him, and wishes he didn’t have to know about. Cries like bodies hau
led out of a muddy trench, badly decomposing, tainting the air he breathes, so it seems he’ll never take a clean breath again.
He does, though.
Breathes deep.
‘I’m not ready to die,’ he says.
Book Three
Welcome to the Promised Land
1.
The air in the clinic is warm, but the stethoscope is cold, making Clarisse Luce shiver as it passes along her stomach. She laughs. Danny Luce, at the foot of the bed, laughs with her. Rosaline Jones, listening at the stethoscope, smiles and thinks: A beautiful couple.
‘Little galloping horses,’ she says softly.
Rosaline unloops the stethoscope and hands it to Clarisse. ‘Make sure you angle it forward.’ As the young woman fits the pieces in her ears, Rosaline draws the metal circle back down. ‘Baby’s ribcage is right here. Listen close and you’ll hear the heartbeat. Like little galloping horses.’
Clarisse’s eyebrows knit. Danny, watching her, knits his brows, too. Then joy melts the concern from their faces.
‘Oh my God,’ Clarisse marvels. ‘There it is.’
Danny crowds over to his wife’s side of the bed, presses his ear against hers, his silky blond head against the cushioning black fuzz of her natural. Though he surely can’t hear a thing, he beams, face shiny with the morning’s heat.
‘Oh my God,’ Clarisse says again. ‘It’s fast.’
‘Should it be fast?’ Danny asks, fixing Rosaline with his blue eyes, so pale against his outdoor complexion they have the look of being painted on. ‘Is that normal?’
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