Lies With Man

by Michael Nava

  Knight was saying, “. . . want to present some possible— and I emphasize possible— strategies to defeat 54. Like Wen said, the Christian right’s all over this, but we are not without our allies in the church. Reverend Hester Price from St. George Episcopal has some ideas for mobilizing the Christian left—”

  “Fuck that!” The tall QUEER T-shirted man who had disrupted the proceedings earlier was on his feet again. “Who invited her? Christians are the enemy. They’re all bigots and homophobes.”

  The man sitting in front of me stood up and shouted back, “I’m gay and I’m a Christian!”

  The tall man strode toward us, got in the second man’s face, and screamed, “Then you’re an asshole and a traitor.”

  He shoved the second man, who slammed into me with such force I went over in my flimsy folding chair, smacked the back of my head on the concrete floor, and saw stars. I rolled away from the chair, touched the back of my head, and came away with blood on my fingers. Meanwhile, the meeting had dissolved into screaming voices and flailing arms.

  A young man’s face swam into my line of vision. A moment later he was kneeling on the floor beside me and saying, “Are you all right?”

  “Help me up.”

  He pulled me to my feet. “Are you bleeding?” he asked, the blood from my fingers now staining his.

  “A little, from my head. I need some air.”

  Still dazed, I staggered out of the room and slumped down on a bench outside the building. The young man reappeared, a wad of damp paper towels in his hand.

  “Let me look at you.”

  I rested my chin on my chest and felt his fingers gently part my hair, then dab my skull with the paper towels. “It’s not deep. There’s a first aid kit inside. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

  He returned with a metal first aid kit, again parted my hair, applied a stinging antiseptic and then a Band-Aid to the cut.

  “There,” he said. “Good as new.”

  I smiled. “Are you a doctor?”

  He smiled back. “Ex-Eagle scout. My name is Josh.”

  “I’m Henry. Thanks for coming to my rescue.”

  He glanced down at his feet, then up at me, and said shyly, “Um, it was my chance to meet you. Not,” he added quickly, “that I wanted you to get hurt.”

  I guessed he was in his early twenties. His hair was a mass of black curls restrained by a shiny mousse. He had a delicate, bony face; a long nose; a wide, strong mouth; and a dimpled chin. Behind the lenses of his tortoise-shell framed glasses his eyes were the color of honey, the same tone as his skin.

  “It was worth the blow to my head,” I replied. He was wearing a QUEER T-shirt. “You’re with that group.”

  He smiled. “For today anyway. My roommate drafted me. He said—”

  The tall man from QUEER stomped out of the center accompanied by a shorter but more muscular Latino, also in a QUEER T-shirt. He regarded me with cool, confiding eyes, as if to say, Can you believe these gringos?

  The taller man said to Josh, “Come on, we’re leaving.” He glared at me. “These people are losers.”

  Josh said, “He’s the roommate I was—”

  “Come on, Josh,” he interrupted. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m the one with the car,” he said to me, apologetically. He took a pen from his pants pocket, lifted my hand, and carefully wrote a phone number on the back of it. “Call me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  He smiled, said, “Okay, talk to you later,” and went off with the QUEER cohort. At the edge of the parking lot, he turned back, smiled, and waved.

  ••••

  “Queers United to End Erasure and Repression.”

  Madison Knight— “a pseudonym, my dear, adopted back in the ’50s when you could get locked up for daring to suggest homosexuals were human”— pronounced each word with slightly disdainful precision.

  We were sitting in the now nearly empty community room, the town hall having ended. A few people still milled around, plotting, planning, despairing.

  “That’s quite a mouthful,” I said.

  Madison laughed. “The whole point is the acronym. Queer. A hate word for people our age. These boys and girls fling it in our faces, reclaim it, they say, to show us what old fuddy-duddies we are. Sellouts. And worst of all, the ultimate curse word, assimilationists.”

  “As opposed to what? Separatists?”

  He shook his head. “No, my dear. Revolutionaries.” He laid a liver-spotted hand on my arm. “It’s part of an old, ongoing quarrel in the community between people willing to work in the system and people who want to bring it down. It started with Harry Hay and his Mattachine Society in the ’50s. Hay had been a Communist. When they tossed him out of the party for sucking cock, he transferred his ideals from overthrowing the capitalists to overthrowing the straights. But most of us,” he said, glancing around the room, “aren’t revolutionaries. We just want what other people have—”

  “‘The most comprehensive of the rights,’” I quoted. “‘The right to be let alone.”

  “Ah, I recognize that. Justice Brandeis.” His glasses had begun to slip down his nose. He pushed them up and said, “Yes, the right to a truly private life. One where the government and the church aren’t down on their knees outside the bedroom door peering through the keyhole and clucking in disgust. Within a few years Hay had been tossed out of Mattachine and it was taken over by what our QUEER comrades would call assimilationists.” He smiled, showing cigarette smoke-stained teeth. “The irony, of course, is that we need both groups. The bomb throwers and compromisers. But they rarely see it that way.” He sighed. “Sadly.”

  I imagined when the QUEER kids looked at him all they saw was a musty old man with a big heavy body, a lined face, and a crepe-y neck and thinning white hair. They had no idea of how he had put his life on the line for them long before they were born and what he had sacrificed to do it.

  “Those kids owe you,” I said, bitter on his behalf.

  He laughed. “Oh, darling, nothing exists for the young but each other.”

  “Narcissists,” I said, dismissively.

  He shook his head. “Biological imperative, but thank you. What was I saying? Oh, yes. AIDS has only sharpened the division among us. With our lives now literally at stake, some of us see that the only solution is to cooperate with the politicians and the medical people to find a cure while groups like QUEER are convinced the pols and the doctors are bent on genocide. When something like 54 comes up, it’s harder to write those views off as paranoia.”

  A deep voice boomed, “Is this viejo filling your head with stories about the good old days?”

  I looked up and extended my hand. “Hello, Laura.”

  Laura Acosta casually crunched my hand. “Hey, Henry, how’s your head?”

  “I’ll live. Madison was telling me about QUEER.”

  She smirked. “I bet. Listen, whatever he says, he’s wrong. We’re committed to peaceful civil disobedience. That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

  Madison got up. “I’ll excuse myself now. Henry, Laura.”

  She gave him a bear hug. “You know I love you, viejo. Thanks for organizing this.”

  “Try to stay out of jail.”

  She laughed. “I wouldn’t be doing my job right if I did. Anyway, that’s why we need Henry.”

  “Need me for what?” I asked, after Madison departed.

  She sat down and spoke urgently. “Everyone’s got to fight this pinche proposition in their own way. The lawyers in the courts, the political consultants with their ad campaigns. We’re going to fight it in the streets. We’re planning a bunch of demos and protests between now and November, and some of them,” she grinned, “might cross a legal line or two. We need lawyers to observe the cops during the demos and to get us out of jail and represent us in court, if need be. What about it, Henry?” She leaned forward urgently in her chair. “Will you help?” />
  “No violence.”

  “Not from us,” she replied. “Cross my heart.”

  “Do you run QUEER?”

  She laughed loudly. “No one runs QUEER, hombre. We’re a collective made up of smaller affinity groups. The affinities propose the actions and we talk about them. Endlessly. Then we reach a consensus whether or not to support the action as a group.”

  “What if the consensus goes against the action?”

  She shrugged. “We can’t stop it if that’s what you’re asking. All we can do is issue a statement saying it doesn’t represent the group.”

  “So, if someone wants to throw a bomb or two, you can’t prevent it?”

  “We’re angry, not stupid. No one’s going to be throwing any bombs.”

  “What about the guy who started the ruckus where I ended up with a head wound?”

  “Theo? Ah, he’s a speed freak, that’s all. Was probably high tonight. Gets aggressive when he’s high.”

  “There a lot of drug use in QUEER?”

  “Who am I, the DEA? Look, Theo’s loud but harmless. Freddy keeps him in line.”

  “Freddy?”

  “His boyfriend. The Chicano dude.” She got up. “Can we count on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cool. Come to our meeting on Monday at Plummer Park and you can see how we operate. It starts at eight and goes until— well, plan on a late night.”

  ••••

  I turned the doorknob to let myself into the house from the garage and saw the phone number Josh had written on the back of my hand. It was a sweet, childlike gesture, as if we were little boys and he’d grabbed my hand to tug me to the playground. I hadn’t been on the playground for a long time. The numbers were starting to blur. I dropped my keys into the bowl where I kept them, went into the kitchen, and wrote his name and phone number on a message pad. I’ll give him a call sometime, I thought. Sometime? What was I waiting for? I picked up the phone and dialed.

  THREE

  Max Taggert had built his church on a drab, industrial section of South La Brea Boulevard, buying up warehouses and vacant lots and converting them to the landscaped grounds and the glass-and-concrete structures that made up the Ekklesia compound. Taggert was not a man for subtlety or nuance and the compound reflected his personality.

  The sanctuary, built for up to 800 worshippers, was a jutting, soaring edifice that looked like an immense grouping of stalagmites. The entrance was plate-glass windows and doors that looked into a foyer paved with marble. A second set of doors led into a chapel paneled in mahogany, carpeted in plush gold wall-to-wall, and illuminated by stained-glass windows and dripping crystal chandeliers. The rows of well-padded, red-upholstered seats descended in a semi-circle to the raised platform of the altar. Throne-like chairs for the church elders made a semicircle behind the raised pulpit. Hidden in the rafters, TV cameras recorded and broadcast Sunday services on a Christian network to tens of thousands throughout California.

  Behind the sanctuary was a courtyard bounded north and south by two long buildings. The north building held meeting places and administrative offices; the south building was a K to sixth-grade school. The courtyard between the buildings was divided in two. Half of it was a grassy playground, and the other half a rose garden in the center of which was a sculpture of a weeping angel in Carrera marble that marked the tomb of Max Taggert. The eastern boundary of the courtyard was marked by an ivy-covered wall and behind it was the church’s parking lot. The entire compound was surrounded by immaculately kept lawns and flower beds. Over the entrance were enormous letters spelling out “Ekklesia,” which at night blazed the name in blue neon, like a road sign to Heaven.

  ••••

  Daniel pulled into his parking space in the lot behind the church, noting that his wife’s car was already in the spot reserved for the pastor’s wife. Those were the words painted on her spot: “Reserved for the pastor’s wife.” His read: “Reserved for Pastor Herron.” He was always more keenly aware of these tiny affronts to her dignity after he’d returned from seeing Gwen who would not have suffered them in silence. Jessica never mentioned it, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t noticed. He had learned early on in their marriage that Jessica noticed everything that affected her status as founder’s daughter and pastor’s wife, but she chose her battles carefully. Chose them not only for their significance to her, but whether the terrain was favorable to her particular battle techniques.

  Jessica was coaxing, adaptable, and deferential. Her arguments often began with references to “my father,” a reminder she was, after all, his only child, the last direct link to him. She never claimed this entitled her to special privileges. Rather, she would suggest her participation in this or that committee or initiative especially if controversy would help legitimize it. She was also thinking of the women of the church, she would say. If they had questions about a position or policy the men adopted, wouldn’t it be better for them to direct those questions to her than for them to trouble the men?

  When, inevitably, the men turned to Daniel for his thoughts, he almost always backed his wife. “Almost always” because there were times when he vetoed one of her requests, not so much because he disagreed with it, but because his position required him to occasionally assert his dominance over her as her pastor and her husband. He was well aware the other male leaders of the church believed women were, if not a different species entirely, then certainly, as scripture said, “the weaker vessel.”

  Max Taggert’s teaching on this point was very clear. His standard texts on the status of women in the church were Timothy’s admonition: “I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man; she is to remain quiet.” And Paul: “Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” Daniel, with his pre-conversion exposure to women like Gwen, found these references antiquated and condescending. But when, early on as youth minister, he had suggested as much, the blowback was immediate, fierce and, surprising to him, led by the women. He never raised the subject again.

  ••••

  In the same passage in Timothy that forbade women from exercising authority over men and directed them to keep quiet, the apostle offered women a single path to salvation: “Yet she will be saved through childbearing— if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.” That path was closed to his wife.

  Jessica was seven years older than him, thirty-five when they married. Why she had remained unmarried so long was the subject of speculation in the church, some kind, some not. The kind explanation was that she had forfeited marriage to care for her own mother— a frail, nervous woman who suffered a litany of health problems before cancer carried her off. The unkind explanation alluded to her appearance— short, stocky, and plain. The unkind whispered that marriage to Taggert’s unprepossessing, aging daughter was forced on Daniel as a condition of succeeding Taggert as head of the church.

  It was true that Taggert had told Daniel if he wished to succeed him he would have to marry. He made the comment in Jessica’s presence, leaving no room for doubt as to his meaning. But what drew them together wasn’t Taggert’s unspoken directive, but a shared secret. Taggert had begun to slip into dementia in the last years of his life. Between them, Daniel and Jessica concealed his condition until his death. In that work, Daniel saw firsthand her intelligence, discretion, and shrewdness. He also knew she was worried that when her father died, she would lose her standing in a community that was all she had ever known. For his part, Daniel knew a faction of the leadership opposed Taggert’s choice of him as his successor. For these men, who’d been with Taggert from the start, Daniel was an interloper, too young, not born into the faith, and his preaching lacked the hard edge their fanaticism demanded. They wouldn’t challenge him while Taggert was alive, but once he was gone, they would come for him.

  A marriage to Jessica would consolidate his position and hers. When he proposed, her reply startled him.

  “I can’t have children.” Before he coul
d ask, she continued, “I have a condition called endometriosis. You can ask your doctor to explain it, if you’re interested. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Is that why you haven’t married before?”

  “Do you think I’ve had this conversation with other men?” she said, sharply. “With anyone outside my doctor? I’ll marry you because it’s what Dad wants, but if you marry me, you won’t have children.”

  But Daniel had a child, Wyatt, so her news, while shocking, also came as a relief; he wouldn’t have to create a second family while concealing his first. Still, because he did not want her to sense his relief, he asked, “What about adoption?”

  She glared at him. “Do you think all children are alike, one as good as another? I could never be a mother to a stranger’s child. It would only remind me of my— burden.”

  It was then he knew he could never tell her about his son.

  He told her, “We’ll carry the burden together.”

  ••••

  Despite his good intentions, the burden had lain most heavily on her. In their family-centered, family-driven community, her childlessness was thrown into high relief, and because her body was the vessel, its failure was attributed to her. Jessica was, depending on temperament, faulted or pitied by the members of the congregation. The whispers and gossip withered her spirit even as it enraged her. Of course, she could show neither grief nor rage to the community. She hid her grief even from him, except when, once or twice, it emerged in a comment or quiet tears. She did not, however, conceal her anger.

  “Do you want a divorce?” she demanded after recounting gossip in the church that he was planning to leave her and marry a woman who could give him children.

  “Of course not, Jess. I don’t know how those rumors got started.”

  “Because I won’t give you one,” she said, ignoring him.

  “I don’t want a divorce.”

  “I won’t be set aside,” she said. “Not by you, not by anyone.”