The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  Alex hadn’t arrived at the Trattoria and the host sat me a table to wait. The restaurant was a single large room partitioned by a concrete wall with rectangular openings across it. The floors were also concrete, as was the ceiling with its exposed pipes and track lights. The walls were sponged a marmalade orange. The distant overhead lights and the candles flickering in brass wall sconces cast a low, flattering light over the sleek clientele, but with nothing to absorb the sound and an exposed kitchen, the room was also noisy and hot. The fashionable men and women fanned themselves with menus and shouted at each other over their fancy risottos. Fading sunlight seeped in through tall windows that looked out on Third Street to a car wash, a vacant lot and a store that sold secondhand clothes once worn by movie stars. I ate crusty bread, was glowered at by a movie star I happened to notice and declined the waiter’s offers of wine.

  Alex arrived a half-hour late. I saw him at the door wearing white jeans, white sneakers, a sky-blue La Coste polo shirt. He spoke to the host, who bent forward to listen and then pointed in my direction. Alex looked and nodded. Approaching me, he smiled. He had been so much the subject of my fantasies that it was as startling to see him in the flesh as it had been to see the movie star. He was shorter than I remembered and more muscular, and he moved with a confidence I didn’t recognize, but of course the last time I’d seen him was in a courthouse, a place that tested most people’s confidence.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said, kissing my cheek, a gesture that went unnoticed in that crowd. He was still using Obsession.

  “Traffic?”

  “I walked,” he replied. “It was a lot farther than I thought. I’m so used to driving I can’t get the hang of distances without a car.”

  “Your car break down again?”

  He looked at me blankly. “It was blown up.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? About six weeks ago, right in front of my house.”

  “Good God. Do you know who did it?”

  He shook his head. “It was in the middle of the night. I think it must have been a gay bashing, because I had one of those bumper stickers that said, ‘How dare you presume I’m straight.’ I was always getting flipped off on the freeway.”

  “Do you really believe people go around blowing up cars because they disagree with the politics of someone’s bumper stickers?”

  He mopped his forehead with his napkin. “It’s happened to other cars in my neighborhood, too. They all had some kind of gay bumper sticker,” he said. “You don’t live in West Hollywood; you don’t know the kinds of things that go on.”

  “Did you report it to the police?”

  “The police,” he said contemptuously.

  “You should’ve called me. I could’ve done something.”

  He smiled. “I like that shirt on you. Every other time I’ve seen you, you were wearing a suit.”

  “Every other time you’ve seen me, I’ve been working.”

  “You don’t have to work tonight,” he said. “Let’s forget about my car. I’m starved. What’s good here?”

  Over dinner, he told me he’d been raised in Foster City, outside of San Francisco, and gone to San Francisco State where he began as a business major to please his father, but then switched to drama, his true interest.

  “How did your parents react to that?” I asked.

  “My dad told me I was throwing away my life,” he said, pulping the peas on his plate. “That was ten years ago. He and my mom have come around. Kind of.”

  “They know you’re gay?”

  He smiled. “Our family invented ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’”

  “How did you get to LA?”

  “After I graduated, I spent a couple years at the American Conservatory Theater in the city. An agent from down here saw me in Ah, Wilderness! and said I had what it takes to be a movie star. I moved here and called him. He didn’t remember me.” He sipped some wine. “I found another agent. She got me a couple of commercials, a couple of walk-ons, then nothing.”

  “The competition for work must be brutal.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I never knew how many ways there were to fail until I moved here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Hollywood’s like a staircase that gets narrower and narrower,” he said. “Everyone starts out together, but at each step there’s less room and at the top step there’s only room for one. Meanwhile, a fresh crop is always starting out at the bottom, younger and prettier.”

  “What do you do to keep climbing?”

  “Whatever I have to,” he said. “Have you always wanted to be a lawyer?”

  “Yeah, since I was a kid.”

  “Why?”

  “I had this idea that lawyers helped people.”

  “Not to get rich?” he asked with genuine curiosity.

  “Very few criminal-defense lawyers get rich,” I said. “Anyway, making money’s never been a priority.”

  “What is?”

  “Living life on my own terms, I guess. What about you?”

  “I want it all,” he said. “I want to be rich and famous.”

  I touched my water glass to his wine glass. “Good luck.”

  “You must think I’m pretty shallow.”

  “No, I don’t,” I lied.

  “Because I am pretty shallow,” he said, smiling. “You should know that about me, so you won’t be disappointed.”

  “Why should I be disappointed?”

  “I’m a hustler, Henry,” he said. “That’s how I support myself while I wait to be discovered.”

  I let it sink in that the object of my obsession was a prostitute; that instead of anguishing over how to approach him for the last month and a half, I could simply have bought his services. I couldn’t repress a harsh laugh, at my foolishness. I saw the anger in Alex’s eyes and apologized.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not laughing at you.”

  “Then what’s so funny?” he asked, unmollified.

  “I confused you with someone else.”

  “Josh,” he said. “Your lover. You said I looked like him.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I confused you with Josh and I imagined I had feelings for you that I had for him.”

  “And you think it’s funny now because I’m a hustler?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be an asshole. Your business is your business. I’m not judging you. Josh is gone and he’s not coming back. If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry.”

  His anger faded. “You know why I said yes when you asked me out, Henry?”

  “No.”

  “Because of the way you kissed me when we were at the court. You kissed him that way, didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “I could feel all that emotion in you for him. You know, it was really beautiful, Henry.” The waiter came and cleared our plates. After he left, Alex said, “I want to be him for you tonight.”

  “You can’t.”

  “There’s no charge.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Listen to me, Henry,” he said. “I’m not a lawyer like you, so I don’t get to help people—not that I want to most of the time. I’ve got my own problems, but you helped me.”

  “You don’t owe me for that.”

  “I wouldn’t care if I did,” he said, “but there’s something about the way you treated me, the way you looked at me, that made me feel better about myself. It doesn’t matter that it was because when you looked at me you saw him. I felt the love.” He touched my hand beneath the table. “One time, no strings. Let me be Josh.”

  I looked at him. “It’s too weird, Alex.”

  “Believe me, Henry,” he replied. “Compared to most of the things I’m asked to do, it’s really sweet.”

  “How did you get from acting to …”

  “Hustling?”

  We had decided to skip the movie and were on our way to my house. The lo
ng summer dusk was holding in the sky, the violent pinks and oranges fading slowly into a gunpowder gray above the spindly palm trees.

  “It’s all the same thing,” he was saying. “You act a part.”

  “I meant …”

  “I know what you meant,” he said. He turned on the radio and changed the dial from the classical station to a dance station. “It’s not complicated. I needed money so I posed for a gay skin magazine. After the magazine came out, I got a call from someone who said he was a friend of a big agent who had seen my picture and wondered if I’d like to come to a party at his house in Malibu.” He smirked. “A pool party, of course. When I showed up, it was a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds posing around the pool in their Speedos and four middle-aged guys sort of pointing their fingers like, ‘I’ll take you and you and you.’”

  “The agent was one of them?”

  “It was the agent, a director, a producer and a guy who had just bought a studio. You’ve heard of them,” he said, and told me their names.

  “The boys were all actors, like you?”

  “Porno stars mostly,” he said. “I found out that these guys basically use porn movies and skin magazines like catalogues. Anyway, the agent picked me. I was with him for a while, then with the director. After that, there were other people. I didn’t ask for money at first because I still thought I was using these guys to help me with my career, but one day I realized, this was my career, so I better get something from it.”

  “How long have you been at it?”

  “Going on three years,” he said. “That’s a long time, but I’m small and I look younger than I am. That kid brother look. Guys go crazy for it.” He smiled. “Doesn’t it bother you that we’re talking like this? Doesn’t it ruin the fantasy?”

  “It’s like you said at the restaurant, Alex, I don’t have to work tonight. You don’t, either.”

  “I’m getting out of the life,” he said quietly.

  “I’ve heard it’s hard,” I replied.

  “You don’t know how hard,” he said. “Most of the guys who hire me hate themselves for being gay, so they take it out on me.”

  I didn’t understand how literally he meant that until I saw the bruises on his back when he removed his shirt. We were in the bedroom. He had stopped me when I reached for the light, and the room was filled with the shadows. I was standing at the foot of the bed. He was facing me with his back to the mirror and I saw in the murky glass the angry slashes across his smooth dark skin. He kicked off his shoes, unbuttoned his pants, removed them, stood naked, approached me.

  “What happened to your back?”

  He stopped, saw Josh’s coat on the bed. “Was this his?”

  “Your back.”

  He slipped the coat on. “Do I look like him?”

  I forgot about the bruises. “Yes.”

  “Come here, Henry,” he said. “Remind me what it feels like when someone loves you.”

  I slipped my hands beneath the coat and stroked his back.

  We made love in darkness and in silence. It had been such a long time for me that at first it felt awkward as if my body was remembering the taboo against the nakedness of another man that had once kept me locked in my desire like a prisoner. I emptied my mind and let myself feel the body beside me, at once familiar and mysterious, mouth, chest, penis, thigh, until touch dissolved the barriers and we were one body. And then I became aware that the damp sheets beneath him smelled of Josh. I said, “Josh?” He opened his eyes and smiled at me. “It is me, Henry,” he said. It was Josh’s voice, and the eyes that held me in their gaze were Josh’s eyes. “How?” I asked. He lifted my hand to his lips, kissed it, and murmured, “This feels so good. Don’t stop.” I buried myself in him, closed my eyes and came in a scalding orgasm, a cauterizing orgasm that closed a wound inside of me. When I opened my eyes again, Alex was looking at me. I lay down beside him, afraid to speak.

  “He was here,” Alex whispered. He touched his chest. “I could feel him here.”

  “I thought I saw him in your eyes.”

  He shivered. “This is so spooky.”

  I held him. “Are you afraid?”

  “Not of Josh,” he said. “Because he’s gone, Henry. This time he’s really gone.”

  “I feel that, too. But you are afraid, aren’t you?”

  “I saw something.”

  “What?”

  “It was like he opened a door as he was leaving,” Alex said. “And just for a second I saw death.”

  “Is this him?” Alex asked. We were in the living room, waiting for his cab. I sat on the couch in a bathrobe, watching him pick up the urn with Josh’s ashes from the mantel. He was jittery, pacing the room, avoiding my eyes.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “‘Joshua Scott Mandel,’” he said, reading the plate on the urn. “Are you going to keep them like this, on your fireplace?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  He returned the urn to its place, glanced at his watch. “Where’s that fucking cab?”

  “You could stay here,” I said, repeating an offer I’d made earlier, but his mood made me less enthusiastic.

  “I have an appointment.”

  “With the man who left those marks on your back?”

  “Maybe,” he said, his eyes suddenly cold. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “Why are you so angry, Alex?”

  “Did I say I was angry?”

  “It’s like you’re punishing me because you felt something in there,” I said, gesturing to the bedroom.

  “Hey, don’t get carried away,” he said, impatiently. Outside, a car horn honked. “I’m not the one who was doing the feeling in there.”

  “What do you mean, ‘don’t get carried away’?”

  He moved toward the door. “Remember what I told you, Henry. Acting and hustling are the same thing. You play a part.”

  I restrained him as he reached for the door. “It didn’t feel like you were acting.”

  He shook himself free. “You got off, didn’t you? That’s the important thing.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  He half-closed his eyes and murmured, “‘It is me, Henry. It’s Josh.’”

  “That’s not what it sounded like.”

  “You were two seconds from coming,” he said. “You heard what you wanted to hear.”

  I stepped back, stared at him. “You asshole.”

  He laughed. “Oh, come on, honey. I gave you the ride of your life and I didn’t even charge you.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “Okay, but next time you want to fuck your boyfriend, baby, call La Toya’s psychic line.”

  I grabbed him by the back of his collar and threw him against the door. He slumped to the floor, holding his hand over his nose. Blood seeped from between his fingers.

  “Fuck,” he said, getting to his feet. “I think you broke my nose.”

  “Jesus,” I said, appalled. “I’m sorry. Let me get you a towel or something.”

  “Don’t touch me.” The cab honked again. He grabbed at the doorknob with bloody fingers and yanked the door open. “Man,” he said, shaking his head. “Are all you fags crazy?”

  He slammed the door behind him. I heard him say something to the cab driver and then the car sped off, wheels squealing. A drop of his blood dripped from the door knob to the floor.

  I fell asleep on the couch, and when I woke up, late the next morning, a bitter sourness puckered my mouth. My head throbbed. The house was silent, but it was more than the usual morning stillness. This quiet was as dusty and thick as a tomb. Dazed, I wandered from room to room. There were dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, mold in the shower, a layer of powdery film over the furniture, and the air was rank. In the bedroom, the sheets were stained with semen and a bottle of lubricant had fallen on its side and spread a puddle of goo on the floor. A condom floated in the toilet bowl. I opened the medicine cabinet, searching for aspirin, and was confronted by row after row of
Josh’s medications. Pills, syrups, ointments, hundreds, thousands of dollars’ worth. I picked a bottle at random: Xanax, prescribed for the anxiety attacks that consumed him when his head cleared from all the other drugs long enough for him to realize he was dying. I poured the pills into the sink, then grabbed another bottle, Prozac for depression, and then an ointment I had rubbed on the parts of his body where his flesh had begun to necrotize. I didn’t stop until the medicine cabinet was empty.

  “Are you all right? You look like you’re suffering from sunstroke.”

  I looked at the woman who had spoken, puzzled by the inflections in her voice that were both Southern and English. She was sitting on the stone bench in the courtyard of the Columbarium of Radiant Destiny, with the messy remains of lunch beside her: an apple core, balled up wax paper, a rind of bread. She was wearing a white blouse, a foamy, flowered skirt, Birkenstock sandals and a red straw cowboy hat over messy gray hair. Her face was pitted with small, deep scars and deeply seamed but the architecture of her bones was beautiful. Her eyes were sky blue.

  “Sit down,” she said. There was a green mesh bag at her side with a thermos in it. She reached for it. “Have some tea.”

  I sat down, still clutching the map I’d been given when I had driven into the cemetery.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled, accepting a plastic glass of cloudy liquid.

  “It doesn’t do any good if you don’t drink it,” she said kindly.

  I took a swallow. It was cold, strong and sweet. “This is good.”

  “My mother was English,” she explained. “She taught how to brew real tea, though it would’ve killed her to see me drink it cold. Ah, well, one must adjust. Are you visiting someone?”

  Three of the walls of the Columbarium of Radiant Destiny held rows of niches where the ashes of the dead were interred behind marble plaques. The fourth wall, behind us, was a doorway that led out to the other vaults and columbaria of the Courts of Remembrance and from there to the green hillsides of Forest Lawn with its view of the freeway and Warner Brothers.

  “No,” I said. “I was looking for someplace to put my friend’s ashes.”

  “Oh, he’d like it here,” she said. “My husband does.” She pointed a bony finger. “That’s him.”