The Little Death hr-1

by Michael Nava

  When I got to San Francisco that afternoon, it was one of those days that arrives at the end of summer just as the last tourists are leaving complaining about the cold and fog. The sky was cloudless. I parked my car on 19th and headed down into the Castro.

  The sidewalks were jammed and the crowds drifted slowly past bars from which disco music blared and where men sat on bar stools looking out the windows. The air smelled of beer and sweat and amyl nitrate. At bus benches and on strips of grass in front of buildings, men sat, stripped of their shirts, sunbathing and watching the flow of pedestrians through mirrored sunglasses. Approaching the bar where I was meeting Hugh, I smelled marijuana, turned my head and saw a couple of kids sharing a joint as they manned a voter registration table for one of the gay political clubs. I stepped into the bar expecting to find more of the carnival but it was nearly empty. The solitary bartender wiped the counter pensively.

  I ordered a gin-and-tonic and took it to a table at the back of the room. Plants hung from the ceiling in big ceramic pots and the lighting was so dim that the atmosphere was nocturnal. Here and there in the darkness I saw a glint of polished brass or a mirror. Suspended from the center of the room was a large fan turning almost imperceptibly in the stale air. It was a place for boozy meditation — emotion recollected in alcohol, as someone once told me in another bar — and I was in a contemplative mood. For the first time in my adult life, I could not see any farther into the future than the door through which Hugh now entered.

  I watched him step from the brightly-lit doorway into the dimness of the room, weaving slowly between tables as he approached me. He came up to the table, mumbled a greeting and sat down. He’d had some sun since I’d seen him last. His skin was now the color of dried roses, and his hair was a lighter blond than before but just as disheveled. I restrained an impulse to touch him. He leaned back into his chair, into the shadows. The bartender drifted over and stood in front of us a moment before taking Hugh’s order. Hugh looked up, ordered mineral water, and turned away, missing the bartender’s bright, yearning smile.

  “I didn’t actually think you’d come,” he said in a low, slow voice.

  “You could’ve called sooner. It’s been a couple of weeks.”

  “Too risky,” he said, vaguely, as the bartender set a bottle of Perrier before him. “I have to limit my contacts with outside people.”

  “Still in hiding?”

  “You still don’t believe me?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s trying to kill you. Something else has got you scared.”

  “Junkies are fearless,” he replied. He reached out to pour from his bottle into his glass, but his hand shook so violently that he spilled the water on the table. He very slowly set the bottle down. Then, swiftly, everything fell into place for me.

  I reached across the table and pulled him forward into the light. He did not resist. His skin was feverish to the touch. His pupils were tightly balled up and too bright. I laid his right arm on the table and spotted the mark almost immediately, a reddish pinprick directly above the vein a few inches above his wrist.

  “When did you shoot up?”

  “Not long ago,” he said, licking his lips.

  “You told me you were clean.”

  “I was. I ran into a friend.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t remember. Last week? After I saw you.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I thought I could handle it. I can’t. I need help.” The princely face was covered with a film of sweat and its muscles sagged as though they were being pulled downward.

  “I didn’t come here to babysit a hype,” I said, standing.

  He reached out and grabbed my arm. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. I saw slow motion panic spread across his face. I stood above him for what seemed like a long time. Then, slowly, I eased back down into the chair beside him.

  3

  Outside it was dusk. I turned from the window back to the room, fumbling for a light switch. I pushed a button and three lights flickered on, unsteadily, from a brass fixture in the center of the room. Hugh was asleep in the bedroom at the end of the long, narrow entrance corridor. The toilet gurgled from the bathroom where I’d poured out his vomit and flushed it away.

  From my law practice I knew that a heroin addict could stay clean long enough to clear his body of the addiction. If he began to use again it took him awhile to become re-addicted. Some addicts used casually — chipping, they called it — but sooner or later their habit caught up with them. Hugh was in the first stage of re-addiction. His body, recognizing the opiate for what it was — poison — struggled to reject it, making him sick. If he continued using, the sickness would stop and the body would make its lethal adjustments. That he was sick was encouraging because it meant there was still time to prevent his re-addiction.

  Not that I knew how to prevent it. I poured myself a drink from the bottle of brandy I’d found in the kitchen. When a hype came to me, it wasn’t for medical advice or psychological counseling, but simply to stay out of jail. If I did that much for one of them, got him into a hospital or a drug program, then I considered myself successful. As to why someone became addicted or how he rid himself of the habit, those things remained mysteries to me. The only thing I was pretty sure about was that when dealing with an addict, the fact of addiction was more important than the drug. Thinking about Hugh I wished, for his sake, that I knew more.

  I wandered aimlessly across the big, bare room. The house had the dank, decaying smell of so many Victorian houses, as if the walls were stuffed with wet newspaper. Hugh’s house, only a couple of blocks from Castro, was in a neighborhood undergoing renovation; many of the neighboring houses looked freshly painted or were in the process of reconstruction or were for sale. His house was untouched by this activity. Strips of paint peeled from the banister of the stairs leading up to the porch. Inside, the rooms were painted white, badly, in some spots barely covering the last application of gaudy wallpaper. The wooden floors were scarred and dirty. From the kitchen, the refrigerator shrieked and buzzed, then subsided to a low whine. It wasn’t the house of an heir.

  Yet there were incongruous, aristocratic touches. There were dazzlingly white sheets on his bed and freshly laundered towels piled in the bathroom. The few pieces of furniture scattered around the house were of obvious quality. The brandy I was drinking was Courvoisier VSOP, and the glass from which I drank it appeared to be crystal.

  I found myself at the bookshelves which held a couple of dozen books. Many of them were worn-out paperbacks, Tolkien, Herman Hesse, a volume of Ginsberg — the library of a college sophomore of the sixties. I opened the Ginsberg. Written on the flyleaf were Hugh’s name, the year 1971, and the words New Haven. Inspecting the second shelf, I saw the books were poetry, mostly, and by people I’d never heard of. The spine of one volume was cracked and when I opened it a sheaf of pages fell out, fluttering to the floor. I knelt down to pick them up and saw, on the bottom shelf, a framed photograph laid face down. I picked it up with the pages, put the book back together and turned the picture over.

  It was the portrait of a woman, a lady, I thought. She may have been as young as fifty. It was hard to tell from the black and white photo whether her hair was white or an ashy shade of blond. Light and darkness had been tactfully deployed on the plain background behind her. The obvious effect was timelessness and the apparent reason was the woman’s age. Still, there was an elegance in her angular, handsome face quite apart from the photographer’s craft, and a kind of luster in the brightness of her hair and eyes. I thought she must have once been beautiful.

  “My mother,” a voice commented behind me. I nearly dropped the picture in surprise and turned to find Hugh standing at the edge of the room, just outside the light. He stepped forward, white-faced, his eyes exhausted. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to come up on you like that.” He held out his hand for the photo and I gave it to him. He studied it a moment then returned it. I laid it b
ack on the bookshelf.

  “Nice picture,” I said. “Looks professional.”

  “The official portrait,” he said, with a trace of contempt in his voice. “It appears on all the dust jackets.”

  “She writes?”

  He nodded, seating himself on a corner of the couch, drawing a thick sweater across his bare chest. I noticed for the first time, watching him, that the room was cold. “What has she written?”

  “Poetry, mostly.”

  “I didn’t notice any of her books on your shelves.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “You’re not close to her?”

  “I haven’t seen her in years.”

  “Does she live in San Francisco?”

  “No, in the east. Boston, I think.”

  “With your father?”

  He hesitated a second before saying, “He’s dead.”

  I heard his hesitation with a lawyer’s ear and something about it was not quite right, so I asked, “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t cross-examine me.” He shivered and reached to the table for the brandy, swigging it directly from the bottle. Then he put it down and ran a hand through his already disheveled hair. He looked fragile and unhappy.

  “I’ll make you some coffee,” I said, still standing by the books, “if you’ll tell me where it is.”

  “Blue canister in the refrigerator,” he said, shivering again.

  When I returned to the living room he was standing at the window, which was now black with night, facing himself — a ghostly reflection. I set the mugs of coffee down and went over.

  “Something out there?” “A car passed by, slowly, without its lights on.”

  “Has that happened before?”

  “No,” he said, “and maybe it wasn’t meant for me.” I made a noise in the back of my throat. “You still don’t believe that I’m in danger of being killed.”

  “You’re doing a pretty effective job of killing yourself.” He turned away, abruptly, went to the table and picked up a cup of coffee.

  “I’m sorry about today.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I was bored and lonely.”

  “Some would call that the human condition.”

  He laughed mirthlessly. “My coping mechanism is easily overwhelmed.”

  “That sounds like a diagnosis.”

  “My last analyst,” he replied, carelessly, “who also told me that intimacy is difficult for me.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Sex is not the same thing.”

  “I see. Thank you for setting me straight.”

  “Wait,” he said. “Let’s start over. I asked you to come up because I wanted to see you again, not to score points against you.”

  “All right,” I said, crossing over to the couch and sitting down beside him. I lay my hand, tentatively, on his. “Tell me what happened between last weekend and today.”

  He looked at me intently through cloudy blue eyes, then said, “Have you ever heard of a poet named Cavafy?” I told him no. “A Greek poet. Gay, in fact. He wrote a poem about a young dissolute man who tires of his life and resolves to move to a new city and mend his ways. The poet’s comment is that moving away is futile because, having ruined his life in one place, he has ruined it everywhere.”

  “And?”

  “I had so many good reasons for leaving New York and coming home, but when I got here they — evaporated. I was the same person, it was the same life.”

  “People overcome addictions.”

  “But not self-contempt.” He poured brandy into his coffee cup and leaned back as if to tell a bedtime story. “My grandfather, who raised me after my father died, had very primitive and set notions about what a man is. He never missed an opportunity to let me know that I didn’t measure up.”

  “Let it go,” I said, thinking back to my own father. “You’ll live to bury him. That changes everything.”

  “He poisoned my childhood,” Hugh said, ignoring me, “and I looked for causes, not knowing they didn’t exist, believing that I deserved his abuse.”

  Something in his tone made me ask, “What kind of abuse, Hugh?”

  “He said I was too pretty to be a boy,” Hugh replied, his eyes bright with defiance and shame. Slowly, I understood.

  “He assaulted you — sexually?”

  “The joke is that I already knew I was gay. Knew I was different, anyway. What took me years to learn is that it didn’t have — “ he paused, searching for words — “to be so demeaning.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That I led him on, that I wanted it.” He smiled, bitterly. “I was the seductive twelve year old. A few weeks after it happened he sent me to a prep school in the east. Eighteen years ago. I can count on my fingers the times I’ve seen him since.”

  “Why have you come back?”

  “I’m living on my anger, Henry. It’s the only life I’ve got left in me, and I’ve come back to confront him. But I need to be strong when I see him, and I’m not strong yet.”

  “In the meantime, you brood and destroy yourself.”

  “I thought, in the meantime, you and I could become friends.” I heard the ghost of seduction in his voice, yet it was not meant seductively. It was a plea for help. “If only I had met you — even five years ago.”

  “What’s wrong with now?” I asked and drew him close.

  The next morning I woke to find Hugh standing perfectly still in a wide sunny space near the window, facing the wall above my head, wearing only a pair of faded red sweatpants. He held his hands at his side, fingers splayed, but not stiffly. He breathed, slowly, deeply. His breath filled his entire torso with quivery tension as he inhaled, bringing his chest and abdominal muscles into sharp relief. As he exhaled, his chest fell with delicate control. The color of his skin darkened as the blood rushed in a torrent beneath the skin. Each muscle of his body was elegantly delineated, like an ancient statue that time had rendered human.

  He lifted his chin a little, drew his shoulders even straighter and parted his legs, one forward and one back. I watched as he sank to the floor, raising his arms at his side until he was fully extended in a split. There was the slightest tremor in his fingertips giving away the effort but no other part of his body moved. He pulled his back straighter, closed his eyes and held the position until the tremor in his fingers died. Then, he carefully brought his back leg forward in a wide arc, lowering his arms at the same time, until he was sitting. He opened his eyes.

  “That was amazing,” I said.

  “I was so much better once,” he replied, shaking his head vigorously, scattering drops of sweat from his hair. “I studied dance in college.”

  “Where?”

  “Where?” he repeated, smiling. “I was at Yale for a couple of years, and N.Y.U. for a semester or two and Vanderbilt for a few months. I moved around.”

  “Without ever graduating?”

  “I never did, no.” He stood up, crossed over to the bed, a mattress laid against a corner, and extended his hand. “Get up and I’ll take you to breakfast.”

  I let him pull me out of bed and our bodies tangled. He was flushed and a little sweaty and his hair brushed against the side of my face like a warm wind as we drew each other close.

  An hour later we were sitting at a table in a dark, smoky corner of a coffeehouse on Castro. The waiter cleared our breakfast plates and poured more coffee.

  “So you still consider yourself a hype?” I asked, pursuing our conversation.

  “Of course. I’m addicted whether I use or not because being high is normal for me and how I function best. When I’m not using, I’m anxious.”

  “I’m pretty anxious myself, sometimes, but I’ve never felt the desire to obliterate myself.”

  “It’s not just the sedative effect a hype craves. It’s also the rush, and the rush is so intense, like coming without sex.”

  “I’ve heard that before from my clients. One of them sa
id it was like a little death.”

  Hugh looked at me curiously and asked, “Do you know what that means?”

  “I imagine he meant you lose yourself.”

  “Exactly. La petite mort — that’s what the French called orgasm. They believed that semen is sort of concentrated blood so that each time a man came he shortened his life a little by spilling blood that couldn’t be replenished.”

  “And women?”

  “Then, as now, men didn’t much concern themselves with how women felt.” He finished his coffee. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Walking down Castro toward Market, Hugh reached over and took my hand. Self-consciously, I left it there. It perplexed me how sex with other men seemed natural to me but not the small physical gestures of affection and concern. What I remembered most clearly from my first sex with another man was the unexpected tenderness. It disturbed me — disoriented me, I guess. I had expected homosexuality to be dark and furtive, but it wasn’t. It was shattering but liberating to come out and it ended a lot of doubts that had been eroding my self-confidence. I remember thinking, back then, so this is it, one of the worst things I can imagine happening has happened. And life goes on.

  As we rounded the corner of Castro and crossed over to Market, he gently let go of my hand. We were out of the ghetto. I reached over and put my hand back into his. He looked over at me, startled, then tightened his grip. And life went on.

  There were three messages from Aaron Gold on my answering machine when I got to my apartment, each a little more frantic than the last. I couldn’t blame him. I had gone to San Francisco for a day and stayed a week. Finally, tired of wearing Hugh’s clothes and needing a little time away from the intensity of our developing relationship, I drove home to pick up the mail and for a change of clothes.

  I called Gold’s office. His first words were, “Are you all right? I was ready to start calling the hospitals.”

  “I’m fine. Why are you so alarmed?”

  “We were supposed to have dinner on Monday night. It is now Friday.”