©Copyright-Yves Rubin http://www.pbase.com/rubinphoto
1. Left Panel
Summer on Oak Street in Laguna Beach. I’m vacationing a month in Jay’s apartment while he occupies mine in San Francisco. Brendan lives next door. We share a thin wall. Outside, the air shimmers, not quite a breeze. Scattered in patches like weeds in the backyard, golden poppies glow iridescently. Fuchsias and camellias bloom. Dangling from rooftops, fences, and trellises, bougainvillea blooms. Pearl, amber, ruby, and honey-colored roses bloom. Scotch broom, daisies, calla lilies, brilliant scarlet salvia, hollyhocks, and nasturtiums all bloom. A sprinkler skirts the fence that borders the backyard and sprays the lawn, languorously opening and closing like a fan. Stripped to the waist, Brendan paints a table, his beauty, despite its profusion, more furtive than his flowers. Noticing my stare, without smiling he waves.
I throw the sheets off me, walk to the door shivering, slide it open, and wander outside. A scrub jay caws in the orange tree. A lizard scurries across the patio. Perched in the fir, two warblers wheezily sing. Brendan is lying on a blanket stark naked, face up, eyes open, panting. I lie down next to him, wrap an arm over his chest, tuck my hand under his back. He brushes the hair out of my eyes, then rolls away, rubbing his forehead before he lights a cigarette, tugs on his shorts, and leaves. I watch him saunter down Oak Street toward the ocean where he’ll run on the beach past noon.
Brendan mops his forehead with his shirt sleeve and stares out toward the horizon where a flat black sky meets the Pacific’s graying blue. He pinches his biceps and with his eyes explores the southern sky where the lights, like those from the beach cities northward, master the dark, the two points of the bay’s crescent flashing like a sharpened scimitar. He’s lounging in a rattan chair on the deck’s edge, waiting for the grass to kick in before he leaves alone for the Boom Boom Room or Dante’s by the coast highway. When he returns, trick in tow, I’ll have to listen through the wall to their sighs and groans.
We jog together. A tailless lizard darts out from a rock and slithers into the grass. Brendan stops to pick up a clump of clay to toss. A puff of smoke explodes where it lands. Losing his balance, he rolls backward down a barren patch of the hill, falling twenty feet before he catches himself on a clump of manzanita. He’s scratched his face and opened a wound across his palm, but brushes himself off and clambers up to where he’d been standing when he fell. We run to the peak where the grassless earth crumbles under our feet. Along the horizon, a filament of light burns between ocean and sky. Scrambling as fast as he can to the fire road, he stumbles twice, picks himself back up, and reaches the end of our course without breaking stride. Under the shelter of trees, he slows to a trot. A blond, skinny teenager glides past us, his streams of golden hair glimmering. Brendan runs after him. I’ll go to a boat, hidden in a dark cove where tides ruffle the shore and surfers wait to ride the waves.
The night air smells like an old demolished building, rotten timber, cement dust, broken bricks, shattered plaster. In back, dogs howl or keen. To coax me out of the car, Brendan kisses me on the lips. Inside, he leaves me for the rest of the night. I watch him check himself out in the mirror down the hall. The party lasts much too long. It’s almost breakfast time when we go, Brendan with his slightly drunk number in tow, his second trick that night.
We’re standing by a cliff above the beach where the sparse bushes bend eastward because of the winds and the rocks dislodge themselves easily into the sea. Brendan’s flying high. People are often kind to their children, he says. The sky is dark at night because the universe is expanding. If love has a beginning, it must have an end. But it never begins or ends anything. Green is the wrong color for me. Look at that sunset, the sun exactly where it ought to be in a luminous rose sky, earthworm, lizard, cedar, tile roof, tip of that telephone pole, wires, clouds the same orange-red for which there’s no one word to describe, is there? I hated the ham and lima beans last night but loved the date nut bread with cream cheese you fixed for me this morning. Maybe the most beautiful sight in the world is that schooner skimming the horizon there in the fog where the sky is sunless and slate gray. Or the curve in the back of the boy I laid earlier today. Only rough trade, mean dogs running loose in packs, fires burning out of control in the canyons, and death scare me. Death scares me shitless, he says, taking another toke.
His father was killed on Iwo two seconds into his assault. His favorite movie’s Battle Cry which he saw for the first time when he was a pubescent twelve and fell in love with Tab Hunter because his eyes always looked darker than they were, shy and anxiously sad and a little feral, like those of a half broken filly being saddled or a stray dog Brendan had found in an alley behind his family’s duplex in Philadelphia and begged to adopt. But his mother insisted he get rid of it. Seeing Tab on the big screen or on TV always makes him cry, he tells me in bed as we watch, because he thinks of how he had to hit that poor dog with his fist to force him to beat it.
When I was little, Brendan says, I’d hoped someone would open a door for me someday and there would be the world. And now the door is open. But this is not the world I waited for.
I’m putting out the lights you inadvertently turned on. I’m closing the door.
2. Right Panel
My day’s tour guide to campus when I visited in May, dapper, mannerly, nattily clean-cut, sweetly soft spoken, Ross bemoaned the Yankee winter weather and the Yankee spirit and had transferred to Sewanee before I began Hamilton in the fall. Twelve years later, walking past the plate glass window of the Savoy Tivioli in North Beach, I saw him sitting on a stool at the bar. He didn’t remember me but agreed to a night in the sack at my place. When he needed a fourth for bridge he’d call and ask if I’d fill in for one of the regulars, though I had no right to play in his league. He kept his hot tub always turned on. Sex was improvisation, a routine he worked out on the spot. He didn’t care what got him off. The last time we slept together, we used only our fists and a healthy irony instead of our hearts. He was already sick by then, though nobody knew for sure.
Prodded by friends, at the baths he’d sit on men’s pricks much too large for him just to prove he could, showing off–like a kid climbing a rope dangling from the gym roof hand over hand until he touched the beam, then sliding down too fast, burning his fists by gripping the hemp too tightly, yet still happily bowing to the mock applause of the other boys ignoring the coach’s whistle and frown.
Cutting all the pieces and meticulously fitting them into the pattern he’d drawn, he created five stained glass windows for his living room. They told the story of a boy seeking his lover in a journey through thick woods from flower to flower until it ended in a rose bed whose petals he’d depicted like the heads of cocks. The garden around his hot tub he left unweeded, a backyard jungle for the vodka martini orgies he gave there, everyone sitting naked neck high in scalding water. He claimed his plants thrived because of his neglect, like his love for Steve or Larry or Alexander that allowed for only a grope in the tub or on the sofa. Ross moved from man to man, job to job, whether in Saudi Arabia or on a Navy ship, in the South China Sea or northern France. But he’d always return to his bridge foursome at home. He thought himself the only one honest enough to keep score, though bored by how easily he could predict each trumped trick. He knew, too, just who in that steadfast crew of witty cheats and loyal friends would die first from the disease each assumed the others had contracted first.
Isolated, quarantined, he asked me to visit his hospital room earlier than he should. A nurse ordered me to wear a mask. He took his off to talk. Such pain, he said, like a torturer slowly slicing his gut and lighting each piece he tore off with a match that stuck to his bowels like burning wax. Or like a rabid cat, scratching out his eyes. Last night, he’d dreamed God had forced him down on a rock, pulled out a knife, and circumcised him. All morning, he’d been pissing blood.
Letting no one know where he was, Ross died on his couch at home, screaming into his telephone words not even Larry could bear to hear. He’d set his receiver down on a night stand next to his bed and lay stiffly supine under a heavy sheet that muffled Ross’s voice to the buzzing white hum of an untuned radio. Grief-stricken, Larry brought the phone to his ear again, hoping some words of comfort might occur to him, failed priest, near unbeliever. But he heard only Ross’s feral cries and ghastly ululations, like the howls of a coyote caught thirty years earlier in a neighbor’s claw trap whose suffering, his daddy had said, would end only after it had gnawed off its own leg and crawled to whatever shade it could find to die. Unless Larry took the rifle he’d been given for his birthday and shot the poor beast as his father had taught him. Yet he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t put the creature out of his misery and had to wait for his father to do it, the shot followed by a brutal silence like Ross’s on the phone.
3. Middle Panel
In L.A., the sun, like God, is love. Or so says David, smiling, who’s admiring himself in the mirror over the bar at The Breakers. On the drive up the coast highway, lights from a police van and ambulance swirl red and blue round a wreck, its hood crumpled, side smashed, windshield shattered. One body, shrouded. Night’s scary, David says, like death. Or the rainy season. He laughs. At a diner, we eat omelets, watch dawn come, tinting poster palms, broad glass façades, cars on La Cienega an apple jelly gold. At his place, the bedroom’s bright, a bleached sun blazing in through open shutter slats where gnats swarm over oranges on a sill.
A furry creature, like something new to nature, crawls across a woolly rug. Far off, the sea’s banded pewter, polished silver, pearl. Tattered clouds scatter in a powder blue sky. Scotch broom scents both canyons. A radio reports no fires still burn in Riverside. A jet’s cattail trails above pelicans flying in a line parallel to the horizon. More light spills from a bulging sun.
Pulp from a lime I squeeze, oozing out the rind, spots the floor. A squirrel scampers up a pepper tree. David’s sheets smell hot, sweaty like him, like L.A., wild for embraces, for love, for the bliss of this white morning.
Peter Weltner was raised in North Carolina and graduated from Hamilton College and Indiana University. He taught at San Francisco State University for thirty six years. He has published five works of fiction: Beachside Entries/Specific Ghosts (short short stories), Identity and Difference (a novel), In a Time of Combat for the Angel (three short novels), The Risk of HIs Music (seven long stories), and How the Body Prays (a novel). His stories have appeared in several anthologies, including two O. Henry Collections (1993 and 1998). He lives a hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean.
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