Sacrament

  Today, when Rafael (who had apparently recanted and come home) escorted Will into the living room he found Patrick sitting at the window dressed in a baggy T-shirt and drawstring linen pants. He looked well. His hair was cropped to a graying crew cut, and he wasn’t as beefy as he’d been, but his embrace was as powerful as ever.

  “Lord, look at you,” he said, standing back from Will to appreciate him. “You’re finally starting to look like your photograph.” (This was a back-handed compliment, and an on-going joke, begun when Will had chosen an unflattering jacket photograph for his second book on the grounds that it made him look more authoritative.)

  “Come and sit down,” he said, gesturing to the chair that had been put opposite, his in the window. “Where the hell’s Rafael gone? You want some tea?”

  “No, I’m fine. Is he looking after you okay?”

  “We’re doing better,” Patrick said, easing back into his own chair. Only now, in the tentativeness of this maneuver, did Will get a sense of his delicacy. “We argue, you know—”

  “So I heard.”

  “From Adrianna?”

  “Yeah, she said—”

  “I just tell her the juicy bits,” Patrick said. “She doesn’t get to hear about what a sweetheart he is most of the time. Anyway, I have so many angels watching over me it’s embarrassing.” Will looked back down the length of the room. “You’ve got some new things,” he said.

  “I inherited some heirlooms from dead queens,” he said.

  “Though most of it doesn’t mean much if you don’t know the story that goes with it, which is kind of sad, because when I’m gone, nobody will know.”

  “Rafael isn’t interested?”

  Patrick shook his head. “It’s old men’s talk as far as he’s concerned. That little table’s got the strangest origins. It was made by Chris Powell. You remember Chris?”

  “The fix-it man with the beautiful butt.”

  “Yeah. He died last year, and when they went in his garage they found he’d been doing all this carpentry. Making chairs and tables and rocking horses.”

  “Commissions?”

  “Apparently not. He was just making them in his spare time, for his own satisfaction.”

  “And keeping them?”

  “Yeah. Designing them, carving them, painting them, and leaving them all locked up in his garage.”

  “Did he have a lover?”

  “A blue-collar honey like that, are ya kidding? He’d had hundreds.” Before Will could protest, Patrick said, “I know what you’re asking and, no, he didn’t have anyone permanent. It was his sister found all this beautiful work when she was cleaning out his house. Anyway, she asked me around to see if I wanted something to remember him by, and of course I said yes. I really wanted a rocking horse, but I didn’t have the balls to ask. She was a rather prim little soul, from somewhere in Idaho. Obviously the last thing she wanted to be doing was going through her cute fag brother’s belongings. God knows what she found under the bed. Can you imagine?” He gazed out toward the cityscape. “I’ve heard it happen so often now. Parents coming to see where their baby ran away to live, because now he’s dying, and of course they find Queer City, the only surviving phallocracy.” He mused a moment. “What must it be like for those people? I mean we do stuff in broad daylight here they haven’t even invented in Idaho.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, you think back to Manchester, or, what was the place in Yorkshire?”

  “Burnt Yarley?”

  “Wonderful. Yeah. Burnt Yarley. You were the only queer in Burnt Yarley right? And you left as soon as you could. We all leave. We could so we can feel at home.”

  “Do you feel at home?”

  “Right from the very first day. I walked along Folsom and I thought: This is where I want to be. Then I went into the Slot and got picked up by Jack Fisher.”

  “You did not,” Will said. “You met Jack Fisher with me, at that art show in Berkeley.”

  “Shit! I can’t lie to you, can I?”

  “No, you can lie,” Will said magnanimously, “I just won’t believe you. Which reminds me, Adrianna thought your father—”

  “Was dead. Yeah. Yeah. She gave me hell. Thanks very much.” He pursed his lips. “I’m beginning to have second thoughts about this party,” he groused. “If you’re going to go around telling the truth to everyone I’m going to have a shit time, and I know the party’s for you, but if I’m not having fun then nobody’s going to have fun—”

  “Oh we can’t have that. How about I promise not to contradict anything you’ve said to anybody as long as it’s not a personal defamation?”

  “Will, I could never defame you,” Patrick said, with heavily feigned sincerity, “I might tell everyone you’re a no-good egotistic sonofabitch who walked out on me. But defame you, the love of my life? Perish the thought.” Performance over, he leaned forward and laid his hands on Will’s knees. “We went through this phase, remember? Well at least I did—when we thought we were going to be the first queers in history never to get old? No, that’s not true. Maybe we’d get old, but very, very slowly so that by the time we were sixty we could still pass for thirty-two in a good light? It’s all in the bones, that’s what Jack says. But black guys look good any age so he doesn’t count.”

  “Do you have a point?” Will smiled.

  “Yes. Us. Sitting here looking like two guys the world has not used kindly.”

  “I never—”

  “I know what you’re going to say: You never think about it. Well you wait till you go out cruising. You’re going to find a lot of little muscle-boys wanting to call you Daddy. I speak from experience. I think it must be a gay rite of passage. Straights feel old when they send their kids off to college. Queens feel old when one of those college kids comes up to them in a bar and tells them he wants to be spanked. Speaking of which—”

  “Spanking or college boys?”

  “Straights.”

  “Oh.”

  “Adrianna’s going to bring Glenn on Saturday, and you mustn’t laugh but he’s had his ears pinned back surgically, and it makes him look weird. I never noticed before, but he’s got a kind of pointy head. I think the protruding ears were a distraction. So, no laughing.”

  “I won’t laugh,” Will assured him, perfectly certain Patrick was only telling him for mischief’s sake. “Is there anything you want me to do for Saturday?”

  “Just turn up and be yourself.”

  “That I can do,” he said. “Okay. I’m on my way.” He leaned over and kissed Patrick lightly on the lips.

  “You can see yourself out?”

  “Blindfolded.”

  “Will you tell Rafael it’s pill time? He’ll be in his bedroom on the telephone.”

  Patrick had it right. Rafael was sprawled on his bed with the telephone glued to his ear, talking in Spanish. Seeing Will at the door. He sat upright, blushing.

  “Sorry,” Will said, “the door was open.”

  “Yeah, yeah, it was just a friend, you know?” Rafael said.

  “Patrick said it’s pill time.”

  “I know,” Rafael replied. “I’m coming. I just got to finish with my friend.”

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” Will said. Before he’d even closed the door Will heard Rafael picking up the thread of his sex talk while it was still warm. Will went back to the living room to tell Patrick the message had been delivered, but in the minute or so since his departure Patrick had fallen asleep and was snoring softly in his chair. The wash of late afternoon light softened his features, but there was no erasing the toll of years and grief and sickness. If being called Daddy was a rite of passage, Will thought, so’s this: looking in on a man I fell in love with in another life and knowing that there was love there still, as plentiful as ever, but changed by time and circumstance into something more elusive.

  He would gladly have watched Patrick a while longer, calmed by the familiarity of his face, but he didn’t want to be hanging a
round when Rafael emerged, so he left the sleeper to his slumbers and headed off out of the apartment, down the stairs and into the street.

  Why, he wondered, when there’d probably been more literary ink spilled on the subject of love than any other—including freedom, death, and God Almighty—could he not begin to grasp the complexities of what he felt for Patrick? There were many scars there, on both sides, cruel things said and done in anger and frustration. There were petty betrayals and desertions, again, on both sides. There were shared memories of wild sex and domestic high jinks and times of loving lucidity, when a glance or a touch or a certain song had been nirvana. And then there was now, feelings extricated from the past, but being woven into patterns neither of them had anticipated. Oh, they’d known they’d grow old, whatever Patrick remembered. They’d talked, half jokingly, about withering into happy alcoholics in Key West or moving to Tuscany and owning an olive grove. What they’d never talked about, because it had not seemed likely, was that they would be in here, in the middle of their lives, and talking like old men: Remembering their dead peers and watching the clock until it was time for pills.

  V

  i

  “Did you meet the mystical Bethlynn Reichle?” Adrianna wanted to know when Will told her about Patrick. They were brunching at Café Flore on Market Street the following day: spinach frittatas, home fries, and coffee. Will told her no, there’d been neither sight nor mention of the woman.

  “According to Jack, he sees her practically every other day. Jack thinks it’s all pretty phony. And of course she charges a for-tune for an hour of her precious time.”

  “I can’t imagine Pat falling for anything too airy-fairy.”

  “I don’t know. He’s got that fey Irish streak in him.

  Anyway, she’s given him these chants he has to repeat four times a day, which Jack swears are Zulu.”

  “What the fuck does Jack know about Zulu? He was born and bred in Detroit.”

  “He says it’s a race memory.” Will made a despairing face.

  “Glenn’s got a great new word, by the way, which is kind of appropriate. Lucidiots. That’s what he calls people who talk too fast, seem to be perfectly lucid—”

  “And are, in fact, idiots. I like that. Where’d he get it from?”

  “It’s his. He made it up. Words beget words. That’s the cri du jour”

  “Lucidiots,” Will said again, most entertained. “And she’s one of them, huh?”

  “Bethlynn? For sure. I haven’t met her, but she’s gotta be. Oh, now . . . I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Pat asked me if it’d be in appalling taste if he ordered a cake for the party shaped like a polar bear.”

  “To which you said?”

  “Yes. It would be in appalling taste.”

  “To which he said: Good.”

  “Right.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  ii

  That night, around eleven or so, he decided to forgo a sleeping pill and go out for a drink. It was Friday, so the streets were alive and kicking and, on the five-minute walk up Sanchez to Sixteenth, he met the appreciative eyes of enough guys to be certain he could get lucky tonight if the urge took him. Some of that cockiness was knocked out of him, however, when he stepped into Gestalt, a bar that, according to Jack (whom he’d called for the inside scoop), had opened two months before and was the hot place for the summer. It was filled to near capacity, some of the customers locals here for a casual beer with friends, but many more geared up and wired for the weekend. In the old days there had been certain tribal divisions in the Castro: leather men had their watering holes, drug aficionados, theirs; the preppie boys had gathered in a different spot; the hustlers, and the queens, especially the older guys, would never have been seen in a black bar, or vice versa. Here, however, there were representatives of every one of those clans, and more. Was that a man in a rubber suit, leaning against the bar sipping bourbon? Yes it was.

  And the guy waiting his turn at the pool table, his nose pierced and his hair carved in concentric circles, was he the lover of the Latino man in the well-cut suit who was making a beeline for him? To judge by their smiles and kisses, yes. There was even a good proportion of women in the throng; a few, Will thought, straight girls come to ogle the queers with their boyfriends (this was a risky business; any boyfriend who agreed to the trip was probably half-hoping to be gang-banged on the pool table), the rest lesbians (again, of every variation, from the kittenish to the mustached). Though he was a little intimidated at the sheer exuberance of the scene, he was too much of a voyeur to leave. He eased his way through the crowd to the bar and found a niche at the far end where he had a wide-angle view of the room. With two beers in him, he started to feel a little more mellow.

  Excepting a few glances cast his way nobody took much notice of him, which was fine, he told himself, just fine. And then, as he was ordering a third beer (his last for the night, he’d decided) somebody stepped up to the bar beside him and said, “I’ll have the same. No I won’t. I’ll have a tequila straight up. And he’s paying.”

  “I am?” said Will, looking around at a man maybe five years his junior, whose present hapless expression he vaguely knew.

  Narrowed brown eyes watched him under upturned brows, a smile, with dimples, waited in readiness for when Will said—

  “Drew?”

  “Shit! I shoulda taken the bet. I was with this guy.” He glanced back down the bar at a husky fellow in a leather jacket; the guy waved, obviously chomping at the bit for an invitation to join them. Drew looked back at Will, “He said you wouldn’t recognize me after all this time. I said betcha. And you did.”

  “It took a moment.”

  “Yeah. Well . . . the hairline’s not what it used to be,” Drew said. A decade and a half before, when they’d had their fling, Drew had sported a curly clump of golden brown hair that hung over his forehead, its most ambitious curls tickling the bridge of his nose. Now it was gone. “You don’t mind?” he said. “The tequila, I mean? I wasn’t even sure it was you at first. I mean I heard well, you know what you hear. I don’t know half the time what to believe and what not to believe.”

  “You heard I was dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” said Will, clinking his beer can against Drew’s brimming glass of tequila. “I’m not.”

  “Good,” Drew said, clinking back. “Are you still living in the city?”

  “I just returned.”

  “You bought a house on Sanchez, right?” Their affair had preceded the purchase, and upon its cooling they’d not remained friends. “Still got it?”

  “Still got it.”

  “I dated somebody on Sanchez, and he pointed it out to me.

  ‘That’s where the famous photographer lives.’ ” Drew’s eyes widened at the quoted description. “Of course, I didn’t know who. Then he told me and I said—”

  “Oh, him.”

  “No, I was really proud,” Drew said, with sweet sincerity.

  “I don’t keep up with art stuff, you know, so I hadn’t really put two and two together. I mean, I knew you took pictures, but I just remembered seals.”

  Will roared with laughter. “Christ, the seals!”

  “You remember? We went to Pier Thirty-nine together? I thought we were going to get buzzed and watch the ocean, but you got obsessed with the seals. I was so pissed off.” He emptied half his tequila glass in one draw. “Funny, the things that stick in your head.”

  “Your buddy’s waving at you, by the way,” Will said.

  “Oh, Lord. It’s a sad case. I had one date with him and now every time I come in here he’s all over me.”

  “Do you need to get back to him?”

  “Absolutely not. Unless you want to be on your own? I mean, you’ve got the pick of the crowd here.”

  “I wish.”

  “You’re still in great shape,” Drew said. “I’m kinda running to seed here.” He looked down at a belly that was no longer the wash
board it had been. “It took me an hour to put these jeans on, and it’ll take me twice as long to get ’em off.” He glanced up at Will. “Without help, that is,” he said. He patted his stomach.

  “You took some pictures of me, do you remember?” Will remembered: a sticky afternoon of beefcake and baby oil. Drew had been quite the muscle-boy back then, competition standards, and proud of it. A little too proud perhaps. They’d broken up on Halloween Night, when he’d found Drew stark naked and painted gold from head to foot, standing in the back-yard of a house on Hancock like an ithyphallic idol surrounded by devotees.

  “Have you still got those pictures?” Drew asked.

  “Oh, I’m sure. Somewhere.”

  “I’d love to see ’em . . . sometime.” He shrugged, as though when was of no consequence, though both of them had known two minutes before, when he’d mentioned his jeans, that Will would be helping him out of them tonight.

  As they made their way back to the house Will wondered if perhaps he’d made a mistake. Drew kept up a virtually unbroken monologue, none of it particularly enlightening, about his job selling advertising space at the Chronicle, about the unwanted attentions of Al, and the adventures of his ineptly neutered cat.

  A few yards from the door, however, he stopped in mid-flow and said: “I’m running off at the mouth, aren’t I? Sorry. I’m just nervous I guess.”

  “If it’s any comfort,” Will said, “so am I.”