The Death of Friends

by Michael Nava

  I put my arm around her and marveled, in my twenty-three-year-old way, at the irony of the situation.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  I finished my tea and went inside. Bay and Chris were married eight months later at a church in Pasadena. They wrote their own service and she asked me to help her find a poem to read. I gave her some lines from Whitman:

  I give you my love more precious than money,

  I give you myself before preaching or law;

  Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?

  Shall we stick together as long as we live?

  9

  THE NEXT MORNING, BEFORE I left for Bay’s, I called Sam Bligh’s number. The man who answered was not Zack Bowen, but I recognized the voice, deep and mellifluous, as the same one condemning censorship as unAmerican on Asshole Buddies.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Mr. Bligh?” I guessed.

  “That’s right. Can I help you?”

  “My name is Henry Rios. I need to talk to Zack Bowen.”

  A pause. “I’m afraid Zack’s not here.”

  “He was yesterday,” I said. “I spoke to him. He was supposed to meet me last night, but he didn’t show. Maybe you can tell me why.”

  “No,” he said, in his deep rumble, “I don’t think I can help you, Mr. Rios.”

  “Mr. Bligh, I’m a criminal defense lawyer. Zack is in a lot of trouble, but I assume he’s already told you that. The police have already been around to see me once, but I fended them off. I can’t continue to do that if he won’t talk to me.”

  “I see,” he said. “What did the police want with Zack?”

  “I think you know that, too. Let’s stop playing games.”

  “You’d better come around then,” he said.

  “I have another appointment this morning. I could come after that. Where are you?”

  He gave me an address. “Let’s say one-thirty,” he said.

  I agreed and hung up.

  As I drove to Bay’s, I wondered how much McBeth had told her about Chris’s arrest fifteen years earlier. I had only the vaguest recollection of the arrest report, but I remembered in great detail the night he’d called me from jail. It had happened five years after Chris and Bay were married. I was working in the Public Defender’s office in Palo Alto. I had only seen Chris and Bay a couple of times after their marriage, but Bay wrote once or twice a year. She always enclosed pictures of Joey, who’d been born a year after they’d married. She seemed unhappy, and I thought I discerned the effects of alcohol in her long, rambling letters. I scribbled postcards in return. From Chris I heard nothing until that night.

  It was a little after three in the morning. I picked up the phone and mumbled, “Hello.”

  Even before the caller spoke, I knew from the background noises—clanging metal, shouted commands—that I was being called from a jail.

  “Henry,” a man said. “It’s Chris Chandler. I’m in the San Francisco jail. Can you get me out?”

  His voice drove the fog from my head. “Chris? What happened?”

  “We can talk about that later,” he said brusquely.

  I sat up in bed. “I’m not asking out of idle curiosity,” I said. “It’s relevant to whether I can get you out.”

  “Lewd conduct,” he answered. “Are you coming?”

  “Don’t talk to anyone until I get there,” I said. “I’m going to make a few calls and see if I can’t get you out on your own recognizance. If they release you before I arrive, wait for me outside. Got that?”

  “Thanks,” he said, in the same short-tempered tone. “I’ll wait for you.”

  I called a D.A. acquaintance in the city. He roused a judge, who agreed to let Chris out O.R. As soon as I heard back from Mike, I got dressed and drove to the jail. Chris was waiting outside beneath a street lamp. I pulled up to the curb and opened the passenger door. He came toward me walking like a barefoot man across a bed of broken glass. He got into the car and slammed the door shut.

  “Are you okay?”

  He was disheveled and his eyes were bloodshot. He smelled of liquor.

  “Fuck,” he said, pounding his fist against the dashboard. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Then he began to sob.

  I put my arm around his shoulders and he buried his face in my chest. When the sobbing eased up, I asked him, “Where are you staying?”

  “The St. Francis,” he said, sitting up and wiping his face on his sleeves. “Thanks for coming, Henry.”

  “No problem,” I replied, and started up the car.

  An hour later we were sitting at a table in Chris’s suite, plates of untouched food between us. A window looked down on Union Square where flocks of pigeons peppered the faded winter grass. Chris had showered and changed, but still looked awful.

  “Eat something,” I told him.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said. He reached for a cigarette from the pack on the table. The ashtray was already overflowing. “I guess you want to know what happened.”

  “I can’t help you unless you tell me.”

  He exhaled a snake of smoke. “It’s funny being the client instead of the lawyer.” I said nothing, waiting for him to gather his courage. “Yeah, okay. Yesterday I was in deposition from nine in the morning to six at night. After that I had dinner with the client, who screamed at me for two solid hours about our bills. Then I came back here and called Bay and we had a fight over Joey’s bedwetting.” He drew on the cigarette. “She wants to take him to a shrink. The kid’s only six.”

  “Tell me about the arrest.”

  He smirked. “Just the facts, right, counsel? Okay. After I hung up on Bay I went down to Polk Street to the P.S. and got drunk. I haven’t been to a gay bar in five years, but I went just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Didn’t even stop to think about it. As I was sitting at the bar, a blow job began to seem like a really good idea. I didn’t want to pick up anyone there. I didn’t want conversation. I remembered that park, the Buena Vista. There was always a lot of action in the bushes. You been?”

  “It’s not my scene, Chris.”

  “No, of course not,” he said. “Anyway, I drove to the park and started walking around. This guy stepped out from some tall bushes playing with himself. I went over and helped him out and then two other guys came out of nowhere and threw me on the ground. I thought I was being mugged. Then one of them said, ‘You’re under arrest, faggot.’ They handcuffed me and put me in a police car with a couple of other guys. They took us to the jail and booked us. After that, I called you.”

  “When the first guy, the cop who came out of the bushes, when he approached you, was his penis out of his pants?”

  “His penis? Henry, he was jerking himself off.”

  “What was the conversation?”

  Chris looked away. “He said, ‘Looks good, doesn’t it.’ Then I said, ‘Looks good enough to eat.’”

  “And did he say anything else?”

  Chris looked back at me. “He said, ‘Go ahead.’ That’s when I touched him.” He drank some water. “That’s it.”

  “There’re the makings of a very good entrapment defense here.”

  “Are you crazy? I can’t go to trial. I’m up for partner in my father-in-law’s firm. I’ve got a kid. There’s Bay.”

  “Are you willing to plead guilty?”

  “I can’t do that, either.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You don’t want to go to trial, but you don’t want to plead straight up. So here’s your only other option—bargain the charge down to something innocuous, like disturbing the peace, and cop to that. It’ll stay on your record, but you can lie about it. One more lie won’t hurt you.”

  “Don’t be so fucking sanctimonious.”

  “I noticed you didn’t call your father-in-law to get you out of jail.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re like those closet fags who keep a gay doctor in reserve for when they pick up the clap at the bathhouse. Y
ou called me because you assumed I’d keep your secret.”

  He glared at me. “That’s so easy for you to say. What do you know about my life? It doesn’t matter to you that I’ve been a good husband and a good father. Well, fuck you, Henry. My wife loves me, my boy loves me, and I’ve earned that love. I don’t deserve your contempt because I made a mistake.” He stubbed out his cigarette, making a mess of it because his hands were shaking. “Until last night, I haven’t gone out on Bay since we got married,” he said. “Most of the time I think I’m over it and then I’ll see someone and I’ll feel this intense sadness.” He drew a deep breath. “I still think about you. I still wonder what it might have been for us. Maybe that’s why I called you last night. I don’t care if you don’t believe me.”

  After a moment, I said, “I believe you, Chris. I’m sorry if I was out of line.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder about us?”

  “There’s nothing to be gained by it.”

  “No,” he said, thoughtfully. “I guess not. You probably have a lover.”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t. You were right about that, Chris. It’s not so easy to find someone, not for more than sex, I mean.”

  “It doesn’t sound like being out of the closet is much better than being in it,” he said.

  “That’s what you never understood,” I said. “I didn’t come out to improve my chances of finding a boyfriend. I came out because I had to.”

  “Would you change who you are if you could?”

  “Have you?” I asked him.

  He avoided my eyes. “Can you get the charge reduced, Henry? Will you do that for me?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  In the end, Chris pled to disturbing the peace in front of a fierce old judge named Atlas Angeloni who called him a pervert after he read the arrest report. It must have been the most humiliating day of his life. I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get a thank-you note.

  The Chandlers lived in Pasadena on a winding, tree-lined road of quiet affluence. It was the kind of neighborhood that didn’t have sidewalks and employed private armed security patrols. At the corner was a bus stop where a bus came twice a day to deliver and remove the maids. The big, rambling houses combined elements of Spanish Mission and English Tudor in a bland melange of white stucco and exposed beams, lapped by deep lawns the color of money. They reminded me of the opening lines from Yeats’s poem about the Irish Civil War: “Surely among the rich man’s flowering lawns,/Amid the rustle of his planted hills,/Life overflows without ambitious pain…” I thought of neighborhoods in the city, blighted by drugs, poverty and violence, the houses more like bunkers than habitations. The houses to which the maids returned. The ugly, cheap apartment buildings in the valley, like the one that had collapsed in the earthquake across the street from where Zack Bowen lived. Life overflowed there, too, but it was more sewage than rainwater. A slow-motion civil war was taking place all over the city; it needed only a spark to combust. Some of the people who lived in these great houses were aware of that, Chris and Bay among them, and they did what they could. Me, too, for that matter. The ones who were honest about it knew it wasn’t enough.

  I pulled into the driveway at the Chandlers’ house behind a black Jeep Cherokee, went up to the door and rang the bell. The door opened and Joey Chandler stood looking at me with his father’s pale eyes. The resemblance didn’t end there. At twenty, he was Chris in miniature, having inherited his father’s features, but not his height, being no more than five-eight. In the last couple of years, he had taken up weight lifting and built himself a heavy, hyperbolic body that he inhabited without grace.

  Joey had always been an anxious and difficult boy. As a child he’d been given to sudden, destructive rages. While these had abated when he reached adolescence, he still gave the impression of deep and abiding fury. Bay blamed his emotional disorders on her drinking when he was a child. Maybe that was true, but I sometimes wondered if Joey hadn’t also absorbed some of his closeted father’s ambivalence, because Chris worked at fatherhood with an intensity that seemed driven by guilt. When I’d once said something like this to Chris, it was as if I’d accused him of being a child molester and I never mentioned it again.

  Whatever the cause, Joey was not a likable boy.

  “Hi, Joey,” I said. “I’m so sorry about your father.”

  He glanced at me indifferently and said, “She’s in the kitchen.”

  Before I could respond, he turned and walked away.

  I stepped into an octagonal foyer. There was an Oriental carpet of deep red on the parquet floor, and in the center of it a rosewood table on which a big blue vase held white carnations. An archway opened to a wide hall. At the end was a grand staircase. The faint spicy smell of the carnations pervaded the still air. I remembered Chris’s pride the first time he had shown me through the house, as if it was a museum to his success, while Bay, who had grown up rich, had been quietly but distinctly embarrassed.

  I made my way through the richly furnished rooms to the kitchen, where I found Bay on the phone. She saw me and smiled sourly. Her face was pale and she wore no makeup. There were tight lines across her forehead and around her mouth. She had long ago dieted and exercised away her schoolgirl fat, achieving a society-lady thinness that was accentuated rather than hidden by the baggy jeans and loose white tee shirt she wore. There was, in fact, little left of the boozy college girl with whom I’d once danced in the gay dives of mid-’70s San Francisco. This woman radiated a hard-won self-assurance. I poured myself a cup of coffee from the silver thermos on the marble-topped island in the center of the bright kitchen and walked to the French doors at the end of the room. They opened out to the garden and the swimming pool, where Joey sat, his massive back to me, staring at the water.

  Bay finished her conversation and hung up the phone.

  “Hello, Henry,” she said, coolly.

  I walked back to her and kissed her cheek. “Hello, Bay. How are you doing with all this?”

  She lit a cigarette from the pack on the counter, exhaled a furious cloud of smoke and said, “You bastard.”

  10

  “YOU WANT TO EXPLAIN that?” I asked after a moment.

  “How long did you know about Chris?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “That he was gay? Is that what you mean, Bay?”

  She stubbed out her cigarette. “I trusted you,” she said. “I confided in you, and all this time you lied to me. How do you think it felt when that policewoman told me that Chris had been arrested in the bushes with another man? You knew about that, you knew about this other thing, this fling of his. How many others were there, Henry?” Her hands shook. “What kind of friend are you?”

  “It wasn’t my place to tell you,” I said.

  She flushed, her face tight as a mask. “But you knew,” she said sharply.

  “It was never that simple,” I replied. “What Chris told me about his sexuality changed over the years, but I know he was always committed to your marriage.”

  “Until he left me,” she said bitterly.

  “I didn’t find out about that until a couple of days ago,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s the truth, Bay. As far as I knew, Chris was faithful to you except for that one incident in San Francisco.”

  “When married men cheat on their wives, it’s usually with another woman,” she said. “Why did he go into that park? Why did he call you?”

  “He told me he knew he was gay from the time he was fourteen,” I told her, “but he didn’t want to be. He wanted a family, stability, a career, things he didn’t think he could have if he was gay. He also loved you. That’s why he married you. He made a choice, Bay, a conscious, deliberate choice. I didn’t think I had the right to interfere.”

  “You could have warned me.”

  “Warned you about what, that someday he might leave you for someone else? Isn’t that a risk that everyon
e assumes when they live with someone else?”

  “It’s not the same,” she said. “If he’d left me for another woman, he would’ve still been the same person, but when he left me for this other man, it was as if I’d never known him.”

  “Man or woman, I don’t see the difference.”

  “Do you know what he told me?” she said, the bitterness creeping back into her voice. “He said he needed to be loved by that person in that way. I was so angry, I could have killed him myself.”

  “And then someone did,” I said.

  She caught her breath. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Have you told the police that Chris left you?”

  She avoided my eyes. “No.”

  “I didn’t think so,” I said. “McBeth, the homicide detective who talked to me, didn’t seem to know. Why didn’t you tell her, Bay?”

  She fumbled for a cigarette. “It’s humiliating,” she said. “It’s not something I want people to know.”

  “These aren’t just people,” I said. “These are the police. It’s just a matter of time before they find out. They’re already searching for Chris’s friend. It won’t look good when they find out that you withheld that information from them.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, nervously raising the cigarette to her mouth.

  “Chris left you, and shortly afterwards someone killed him. There’s a motive there.”

  She stared at me aghast. “You think I…”

  “I’m only telling you what it’s going to look like to the police.”

  She shook her head violently. “That’s absurd. If anyone had a motive to kill Chris, it was that man.”

  “Zack Bowen? Why?”

  “Chris left him money,” she said, angrily. “He changed his will and made him a beneficiary.”

  That made me pause a moment. I hadn’t been able to see Zack killing Chris in a fit of passion. But money made everybody do foolish things.

  “Did you tell the police?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know until after they talked to me,” she said. She glanced out toward the pool. Joey had got up and was walking toward the house. “You’re right, Henry, it was a mistake for me not to have told the police that Chris had left me. I’ll call them today. I’m sure they’ll be interested to know about the will, too.”