by Michael Nava
In the silence that followed I calculated my debt. “That’s true,” I replied.
“And I’m desperate,” he continued. Something in Larry’s voice troubled me—not for Jim Pears, but for Larry Ross.
“Are you telling me everything?” I asked after a moment.
“I need to see you, Henry,” he said. “I’ll fly up tonight and we’ll have dinner. All right? I’ll be there on the five-fifteen PSA flight.”
“That’ll be fine, Larry.” I said goodbye.
After I hung up, I went across the hall to Catherine McKinley’s office. She and I had both worked as public defenders and had remained friends after leaving the P.D. Now and then we referred clients to each other, though this happened less often as she took fewer and fewer criminal defense matters, preferring the greener pastures of civil law. I had remained in the trenches.
Her secretary, a thin young man named Derek, was taping a child’s drawing to the side of his file cabinet. The drawing depicted a green house with a lot of blue windows, a red roof, a yellow door and what appeared to be an elephant in the foreground.
“Is your daughter the artist?” I asked.
He turned to me and smiled. “It’s our house,” he replied.
“And your pet elephant?”
“That’s the dog. You want to see her?” he asked, gesturing toward Catherine’s closed door.
“If she’s not busy.”
He glanced at the phone console. “Go ahead,” he said, and handed me a bulky file. “Would you give this to her?”
“Sure.”
I knocked at the door. Catherine said, “Come in.”
In contrast to my own office which could charitably be described as furnished, Catherine’s office was decorated. The color green predominated. Dark green wallpaper. Wing chairs upholstered in the same shade. All the green, she told me, was to provide subliminal encouragement to her clients to pay their bills. It must have worked because she looked sleeker by the day.
She glanced up at me with dark, ironic eyes. Catherine was a small, fine-boned woman, not quite pretty but beside whom merely pretty women looked overblown. I set the file at the edge of her desk.
“What’s this?” she asked, laying an immaculately manicured finger on the folder.
“Derek asked me to bring it in.”
She smiled. “I didn’t think he was your type.”
“I was on my way in anyway,” I said, dropping into one of her money-colored chairs. “I may need a favor.”
She raised a pencilled eyebrow.
As I told her about Larry’s call the eyebrow fell and the shallow lines across her forehead deepened. When I finished she said, “You can’t really be thinking about taking the case.”
“I’m afraid I really am,” I replied. “Larry wouldn’t have called me if it wasn’t important, much less remind me that I owe him …” I let the sentence trail off.
Catherine filled in the blank. “Your life?”
I shrugged. “My professional life, anyway.”
“Still,” she said dismissively. “Sounds like a slow plea to me.”
“Maybe.”
“What’s the favor?”
“If I take the case I’ll need someone to stand in for me on my cases up here. Just to get continuances.”
“It’ll cost you, Henry,” she warned.
I smiled. “My professional life?”
“We’ll start with lunch,” she replied. “Get me a list of your cases and we’ll discuss them then. Is that it?”
I stood up. “For now. Thanks, Cathy.”
She looked at me. “Don’t you ever get tired of losing, Henry?”
I thought about this for a second. “No,” I said.
It was still raining when I left my office at six to meet Larry’s plane at the San Francisco airport. The wind was up, scattering red and yellow leaves like bright coins into the wet, shiny streets. A stalwart jogger, wrapped in sweats, crossed the street at the light and I felt a twinge of regret. The only kind of running I did these days was between courts. Still, a glance in the mirror reported no significant change in my appearance from my last birthday—my thirty-sixth. The light flashed green and I jostled my Accord forward onto the freeway ramp.
I entered a freeway that was clogged with Friday night traffic. Sitting there, watching the rain come down, gave me time to think. It wasn’t true that I never got tired of losing. Only three years earlier I had been tired enough of it to resign from the P.D.’s office, expecting to abandon law altogether. But I had fallen in love with a man who was murdered. Hugh Paris’s death led me back into law though I took a lot of detours getting there. One of them was through the drunk ward of a local hospital. I might have been there yet had it not been for Larry Ross and the United States Supreme Court.
The summer I entered the drunk ward was the same summer that the Supreme Court, in a case involving Georgia, upheld the right of states to make sodomy—a generic term for every sexual practice but the missionary position—illegal. Within weeks there was a move to reinstate California’s sodomy law, which had been repealed ten years earlier, by a special election. A statewide committee of lawyers was organized to fight the effort. Larry Ross, a hitherto closeted partner in a well-known Los Angeles firm, chaired the committee. He needed a lawyer from northern California to lead the effort up here. After asking around, he found me, or rather, what was left of me.
We went into the campaign with the polls running against us. Larry poured all his energy and a quarter of his net worth—which was considerable—into trying to change the numbers. Halfway through, however, it was plain that we would lose. Since we couldn’t win the election, we decided to try to knock the sodomy initiative off the ballot with a lawsuit. We went directly to the state Supreme Court, arguing that the initiative violated the right to privacy guaranteed by the state constitution.
Two days before the ballot went to the print shop, the court ruled in our favor. It looked like a victory but it wasn’t. We had merely prevented things from getting worse, not improved them. Since then, some part of me had been waiting for the next fight. Maybe Larry had found it in this Pears case.
I pulled into a parking space at the airport and hurried across the street to the terminal. I was nearly twenty minutes late. Coming to the gate I saw Larry in a blue suit, raincoat draped over one arm and a briefcase under the other. He was far away yet I could hardly fail to recognize his spindly stride and the gleaming dome of his head.
Then, coming closer, I thought I had made a mistake. The man who now approached me was a stranger. The flesh of his face was too tight and vaguely green in the bright fluorescent light. But it was Larry. The edges of his mouth turned upward in a smile.
“Henry,” he said embracing me, or rather, pulling me to his chest, which was as far up on him as I came.
I broke the embrace and made myself smile. “Larry.”
He looked at me and the smile faded. I looked away.
It was then I noticed the odor coming off his clothes. It was the smell of death.
— 2 —
TO COVER MY SHOCK at his appearance I asked, “Do you have any luggage?”
“No, I’m catching the red-eye back to L.A. Where are we eating?”
I named a restaurant in the Castro. As we talked, he looked less strange to me, and I thought perhaps it was only exhaustion I saw on his face. He worked achingly long hours in the bizarre vineyard of Hollywood. We talked of small things as I drove into San Francisco. We came over a hill and then, abruptly, the city’s towers rose before us through the mist and rain, glittering stalagmites in the cave of night, and beyond them, sensed rather than seen, the wintry tumble of the ocean.
We rolled through the city on glassy streets shimmering with reflected lights. On Castro, the sidewalks were jammed with men who, in their flak jackets, flannel shirts, tight jeans, wool caps and long scarves, resembled a retreating army. I parked and we walked back down to Nineteenth Street to the restaurant. Inside it was dim a
nd loud. Elegant waiters in threadbare tuxedos raced through the small dining rooms with imperturbable poise. We were seated at a table in the smaller of the two dining rooms in the back with a view of the derelict patio just outside. Menus were placed before us.
“It’s really good to see you,” Larry said, and picked up his menu as if not expecting a response. I ventured one anyway.
“You’ve been working too hard,” I said.
“I suspect you’re right,” he replied.
I dithered with the menu as I tried to decide whether to pursue the subject.
“What you want to say,” Larry said, “is that I look terrible.”
“You look—” I fumbled for a word.
“Different?” he asked, almost mockingly. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke out of the corner of his mouth away from me. I waited for him to continue. Instead, the waiter came and Larry ordered his dinner. When it was my turn I asked for the same.
We sat in nervous silence until our salads were brought to us. The waiter drizzled dressing over the salads. Larry caught my eye and held it. When the waiter departed, Larry picked up his fork, set it down again and relit his discarded cigarette.
“I’m dying, Henry,” he said softly.
“Larry—”
“I was diagnosed eight months ago. I’ve already survived one bout of pneumocystis.” He smiled a little. “Two years ago I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce that word. AIDS has taught me a new vocabulary.” He put out his cigarette.
“I’m so sorry,” I said stupidly.
The waiter came by. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes, fine,” Larry said.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked.
“There was nothing you could have done then,” he said, cutting up a slice of tomato.
“Is there now?”
“Yes. Defend Jim Pears.” He put a forkful of salad in his mouth and chewed gingerly.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m going to die, Henry,” he said slowly. “Not just because of AIDS but also because the lives of queers are expendable. Highly expendable.” He stopped abruptly and stared down at his plate, then continued, more emphatically. “They hate us, Henry, and they’d just as soon we all died. I’m dying. Save Jim Pears’s life for me.”
“Don’t die,” I said, and the words sounded childlike even to my own ears.
“I won’t just yet,” he replied. “But when I do I want it to be my life for Jim’s. That would balance the accounts.”
“But it’s entirely different,” I said.
“It’s the same disease,” he insisted. “Bigotry. It doesn’t matter whether it shows itself in letting people die of AIDS or making it so difficult for them to come out that it’s easier to murder.”
“Then you do think he did it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Not that it makes any difference to me.”
“It will to a jury.”
“You’ll have to persuade them,” he said, “that Jim was justified.”
“Self-defense?”
Larry said, “There might be a problem there. Jim’s P.D. told me Jim doesn’t remember anything about what happened.”
“Doesn’t remember?” I echoed.
“She called it retrograde amnesia.”
The waiter came and took Larry’s salad plate. He cast a baleful glance at my plate from which I had eaten nothing and said, “Sir, shall I leave your salad?”
“Yes, please.”
We were served dinner. Looking at Larry I reflected how quickly we had retreated into talk of Jim Pears’s case as if the subject of Larry’s illness had never been raised.
“I want to talk some more about you,” I said.
Larry compressed his lips into a frown. “I’ve told you all there is to know.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“Henry, I’ve turned myself inside out examining my feelings. It was painful enough the first time without repeating the exercise for you.”
“Sorry.” I addressed myself to the food on my plate, some sort of chicken glistening with gravy. A wave of nausea rose from my stomach to my throat.
Larry was saying, “But I won’t go quietly. Depend on that.”
We got through dinner. Afterwards, we went upstairs to the bar. Sitting at the window seat with glasses of mineral water we watched men passing on the street below us in front of what had been the Jaguar Bookstore.
Abruptly, Larry said, “I wondered at first how I could have been infected. It really puzzled me because I thought AIDS was only transmitted during tawdry little episodes in the back rooms of places like that.” He gestured toward the Jaguar. “All my tawdry little episodes were twenty years in the past, and then there was Ned.” Ned was his lover who had died four years ago.
“Were you monogamous with Ned?”
He smiled grimly. “I was monogamous, yes.”
“But not Ned.”
“You don’t get this from doorknobs, Henry.” He frowned.
“Do you think he knew?”
“He killed himself didn’t he?” Larry snapped. “At least now I know why,” he added, quietly.
“Who have you told?”
“You.”
“That’s all?”
He nodded. “My clients are movie stars. Having a gay lawyer is considered amusing in that set but a leper is a different matter.”
“But—your appearance.”
“You haven’t seen me in, what? A year? And even you were willing to accept the way I look as the result of overwork. It’s not really noticeable from day to day.”
“But you must have been in the hospital?”
“With the flu,” he said. “A virulent, obscure Asian flu with complications brought on by fatigue.”
“People believed that?”
“People are remarkably incurious and besides …” He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to. I knew he was going to say that people preferred not to think about AIDS, much less believe that someone they knew had it. I was struggling with my own disbelief and, at some deeper level, my terror.
“How long can you keep it a secret?”
“Henry, you’re talking to a man who was in the closet for almost thirty-five years. I know from secrets.” He yawned. “I’d like to go for a walk down by the water, then we have to talk some more about Jim Pears.”
It had stopped raining by the time we reached Fisherman’s Wharf but that loud, normally crowded, arcade of tourist traps and overpriced fish restaurants was deserted anyway. We walked around aimlessly, jostling against each other on the narrow walks, stopping to comment on some particularly egregious monstrosity in the shopfront windows. We walked to the edge of the pier where the fishing boats were berthed, creaking in the water like old beds. A rift in the clouds above the Golden Gate revealed a black sky and three faint stars. Larry looked at them and then at me.
“Do you wish on stars, Henry?” he asked.
“Not since I was a kid.”
“I do,” Larry replied. “Wish on stars. Pray. Plead. It doesn’t do any good.” We stood there for a few more minutes until he complained of the cold.
I drove us to Washington Square and we found an espresso bar. Tony Bennett played on the jukebox. We each ordered a caffe latte. Larry brought out a bulky folder from his briefcase and put it on the table between us.
“What is it?” I asked.
“My file on Jim Pears. You’re taking the case, aren’t you?”
I hesitated. “Yes. I’ll fly down on Monday morning. Will I have a chance to talk to Jim before the hearing?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask his P.D. A woman named Sharon Hart.” He paused and sipped his coffee. “She’s not a bad lawyer but something’s not working out between her and Jim.”
“It happens. I’m always running up against the expectations of my clients. You learn to be tactful.”
Larry wasn’t listening. He was looking at his reflection in the window. W
hen he looked back at me, he asked, “Do I seem hysterical to you?”
I shook my head.
“I do to myself sometimes.” He rattled his cup. “I’m so angry, Henry. When I wake up in the morning I think I’ll explode from rage.”
He tightened his jaw and clamped a hand over his mouth.
“Don’t you expect that?” I asked, awkwardly.
He lowered his hand, revealing a faintly hostile smile. “You’ve been reading too much Kubler-Ross,” he said. “There are only two stages to dying, Henry. Being alive and being dead. We treat death like a bad smell. I’m supposed to excuse myself and leave the room.”
His eyes were bright. It was the only time I had ever seen Larry even approach tears and it was frightening.
“Why should you care what other people think? You never have before.”
“Well, that’s not true,” he snapped. “I was the original closet queen, remember?” He expelled a noisy breath, then sipped from his coffee. “I don’t know why I’m taking it out on you.”
“Because I’m here?”
He shook his head. “Because I love you.” He tried to smile but his face wouldn’t cooperate. “I’ll miss you.”
He lowered his face toward the table and I watched the tears slide down his cheeks and splatter on the table top. I reached for his hand and held it. After a moment or two it was over. He looked up, drew a dazzlingly white handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his face.
He glanced at his watch. “It’s the witching hour. You’d better get me back to the airport.”
I pulled up in front of the terminal and helped Larry gather his things. He put his hand on the door handle.
“Wait,” I said.
He looked over at me. I leaned across the seat and kissed him.
“I love you, too,” I said.
“I know.”
A moment later he was gone.
— 3 —
IT WAS NEARLY ONE when I pulled into the carport and parked in my allotted space. It was raining again and a heavy wind rattled the treetops filling my quiet street with creaks and wheezes. I grabbed the bulky folder Larry had given me and made a run for my apartment, stopping only to collect my mail and a soggy edition of the evening paper.