Significant Others Page 8

  “Well, that’s really nice, but …”

  “Just remember it, that’s all. When Thack calls.”

  “If, Charlie.”

  Michael’s Call Waiting beeped.

  “There,” said Charlie. “Right on cue.”

  “Hang up,” said Michael.

  “No way. I want a report.”

  Michael sighed and tapped the button on his receiver. “Hello.”

  “Hi, it’s Brian.”

  Against all reason, Michael’s heart sank a little. “Oh, hi. Mrs. Madrigal said you came by.”

  “Yeah. I kinda wanted to talk.”

  “Oh … well, sure.”

  “Is this a good time?”

  “Now? On the phone?”

  “No. Could I come down?” Brian’s solemn tone suggested urgency. Another fight with Mary Ann, no doubt.

  “Uh … sure. Come on down.” The phrase sounded faintly ridiculous, like an instruction to game show contestants, but he’d used it a lot since his friends had moved to The Summit.

  “Thanks,” said Brian.

  Michael hit the button again. “It wasn’t him,” he told Charlie.

  “Damn.”

  “I’ve gotta go now.”

  “Keep me posted,” said Charlie.

  Brian’s smoky green eyes darted about the room, never lighting anywhere for long. His crow’s feet seemed more plentiful than ever (McCartney’s syndrome, Michael had once dubbed it), though they hardly detracted from his amazing chestnut curls and the twin-mounded rise of his sandpaper chin.

  “How ‘bout some coffee or something?” Michael asked.

  Brian took a seat on the sofa. “No, thanks.”

  “I have decaffeinated … and Red Zinger.”

  “Michael … I’m in big trouble.”

  Michael pulled up his mission oak footstool and straddled it in front of Brian’s chair. “What’s the matter?”

  Brian hesitated. “Remember Geordie Davies?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “The woman I met at the Serramonte Mall?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “She’s got AIDS.”

  “What?”

  “She’s got AIDS, man. I saw her yesterday. She’s really sick.”

  Michael was dumbfounded. “How did she get it?”

  “I dunno. Her lover’s a junkie or something.”

  “Oh …”

  “What the fuck am I gonna tell Mary Ann?”

  Michael thought for a moment. “How often did you … see her?”

  Brian shrugged. “Six or seven times. Eight, tops.”

  “I thought you told me …”

  “O.K. I saw her more than once. It was no big deal. Neither one of us wanted a big deal.” He chewed on a knuckle. “What am I gonna tell her?”

  “Geordie?”

  “Mary Ann, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Don’t yell,” said Michael calmly.

  “We did anal stuff. Does that … you know …?”

  “You and Mary Ann?”

  “No!” Brian’s eyes blazed indignantly. “Me and Geordie.”

  “You mean … you fucked her?”

  “No.”

  Michael drew back a little. “She fucked you?”

  “Really funny, man! Really goddamn funny!”

  “Well, I don’t get it.”

  “She had these beads, O.K.?”

  “Oh.”

  Brian paused, looking down at his feet. “They weren’t very … big or anything.”

  Michael did his damnedest not to smile. “Brian … it’s not that easy for a woman to give it to a man.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. We’ll get you tested. I know a guy at the clinic in the Castro. I’ll make an appointment for you.”

  “You can’t give them my name,” said Brian.

  “It’s just a number. Don’t worry.”

  “What sort of number?”

  “Just a number you make up.” He reached across and shook Brian’s knee. “You’ve felt O.K., haven’t you?”

  “Yeah. Mostly. I felt kind of funky a few days ago, but it seemed like the flu.”

  “Then it probably was.” Brian nodded.

  “You’re gonna be all right.”

  “I’ve never been so damn scared….”

  “I know. I’ve been through this, remember?”

  “Yeah, but … this is different.”

  “Why?”

  “Michael, there are innocents involved here.”

  “What?”

  “Mary Ann … Shawna, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Innocents, huh? Not like me. Not like Jon. Not like the fags.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Well, lay off that innocent shit. It’s a virus. Everybody is innocent.” He tried to collect himself. “I’ll call the clinic.”

  “I’m sorry if I …”

  “Forget it.”

  “I didn’t know who else to talk to.”

  “You’ll be all right,” said Michael.

  Brian looked him squarely in the eye. “I loved Jon too, you know.”

  “I know,” said Michael.

  These Friendly Trees

  LIKE BOOTER, MOST BOHEMIANS ARRIVED AT THE GROVE by car from the city. The press in its endless fascination with money and power grossly exaggerated the number of Lear and Lockheed jets that landed at the Santa Rosa airport during the July encampment. Many of the members—well, some of them, anyway—were uncomplicated fellows with ordinary, workaday jobs in the city.

  They came to the Grove for release from their lives, not to plan mergers, plot takeovers or wage war. So what if the A-bomb had been brainstormed there back in 1942? That, Booter knew for a fact, had been in mid-September, almost two months after the encampment had shut down.

  The real function of the Grove was escape, pure and simple. It provided a secret haven where captains of industry and pillars of government could let down their guard and indulge in the luxury of first-name-only camaraderie.

  Escape was certainly what Booter had in mind as he sped north on the freeway, away from Frannie and the city and the cruel vagaries of a career in aluminum honeycomb.

  After an hour’s drive, he left the freeway and headed west on the road to Guerneville, where sunlit vineyards and gnarly orchards alternated abruptly with tunnels of green gloom. When the river appeared, glinting cool and golden through the trees, so too did the ragtag resort cabins, the rusting trailers, the neon cocktail glasses beckoning luridly from the roadside.

  He drove straight through Guerneville, doing his best to ignore the pimply teenagers and blatant homosexuals who prowled the tawdry main street. He had liked this town better in the fifties, before its resurgence, when it was still essentially a ruin from the thirties.

  In Monte Rio he turned left, crossing the river on the old steel bridge. Another left took him along a winding road past junked cars and blackberry thickets and poison oak pushing to the very edge of the asphalt.

  At the end of this road lay the big wooden gates to the Grove and the vine-entangled sign that invariably caused his heart to beat faster:

  PRIVATE PROPERTY. MEMBERS AND GUESTS ONLY.

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

  He drove through the gates and past the gray-frame commissary buildings, coming to a stop in front of the luggage dock and check-in station. Climbing out of the car, he adjusted his tie, brushed the wrinkles out of his suit, and inhaled the resinous incense of the great woodland cathedral that awaited him.

  The familiar cast of characters was already assembled: the jubilant new arrivals, the blue-jeaned college boys who did the valet parking, the leathery rent-a-cops with their cowboy hats and huge bellies and belt buckles the size of license plates.

  Sweating a little, he opened the trunk and hauled his two suitcases to the luggage dock marked “River Road.” He was filled with inexplicable glee as he grabbed a stubby golf pencil and inscribed two old-fashioned steamer trunk labels with the word
s Manigault and Hillbillies. Why did this feel so much like coming home?

  After relinquishing his BMW to a valet parker, he spotted Farley Stuart and Jimmy Chappell and sauntered up behind them. “Damn,” he said, “we’re in trouble now!”

  Both men hooted jovially, clapping him on the back. Jimmy looked a little withered after his bypass operation, but his spirit seemed as spunky as ever. Farley, heading for the shuttle bus, turned and aimed a finger at Booter. “Come for fizzes tomorrow morning. Up at Aviary.”

  Aviary was the chorus camp. Farley was a valued baritone, an “associate” member whose talent alone had qualified him for a bunk in Bohemia. He wasn’t an aristocrat by any stretch of the imagination, but he was a nice fellow just the same.

  Booter pointed back at him and said: “You got a deal.”

  He knew already that he wouldn’t go (he expected an invitation to fizzes up at Mandalay), but his burgeoning spirit of brotherhood made saying no a virtual impossibility.

  He was amused, as always, when the guard at the check-in station punched him in, using a conventional industrial time clock. This, he’d been told, had largely to do with billing for food, as members were charged for any meals that occurred during their time at the Grove, regardless of whether or not they chose to eat.

  The guard was one he liked, which comforted him, since this was the fellow who would know the most about his comings and goings.

  When he was done, he found Jimmy and Farley holding the shuttle bus for him. He decided to walk, flagging them on—a joint decision, really, between a vain old man proud of his endurance and a wide-eyed boy ready to explore.

  Somewhere up ahead, someone was playing a banjo.

  The ceremonial gates, the ones meant to welcome rather than repulse, were a boy’s own daydream, a rustic Tom Swiftian portal built of oversized Lincoln Logs. As Booter passed through them, a blue jay swept low over his shoulder, cackling furiously, and his welcome seemed complete.

  He strode briskly, following the road into a forest so thoroughly primeval that some of it had been here when Genghis Khan began his march across Asia. Something indescribable always happened at this point, some soothing realignment of boundaries which contracted his world and made it manageable for the first time all year.

  Sky and trees and river notwithstanding, the Grove was not the great outdoors at all; it was a room away from things, a cavernous temple of brotherhood, locked to the rest of humanity. There was order here, and a palpable absence of anarchy. No wonder it made him so happy.

  He whistled as he passed the post office, the grocery store, the barbershop, the museum, the telegraph office, the phone bank, the hospital, the fire station. Other members, already anonymous in comfortable old clothes, moved past him in jocular clumps, brandishing whiskey in plastic glasses, calling his name from time to time.

  At the height of the encampment, over two thousand men would be assembled at the Grove in one hundred twenty-six different camps. As Booter understood it, this made for a population density greater than that of Chinatown in San Francisco.

  As he approached the Campfire Circle, he stopped to read the posters tacked to the trees—each a work of art, really—heralding gala nights and concerts, costume dramas and Lakeside Talks. His own address was somewhat drably listed as: Roger Manigault: Aluminum Honeycomb and the Future of the Strategic Nuclear Defense Initiative.

  Another shuttle bus—this one labeled “The Old Guard”—bumped past him as he skirted the lake. Henry McKittrick was seated in the back, red-faced and solemn in his sweaty seersuckers. Booter gave him a thumbs-up sign, but Henry merely nodded, obviously still sore about the contract with Consolidated.

  He headed down the River Road toward Hillbillies, immersing himself in the sights and sounds of the frontier community coming to life beneath the giant trees. The very name of the camps triggered half a lifetime of memories: Dog House, Toyland, Pig ‘n’ Whistle, Sons of Toil …

  Someone was playing a piano—“These Foolish Things”—on the ridge to the left. To the right was a Dixieland band and a chorus practicing a classical number he didn’t recognize. Their voices trailed heavenward, hovering like woodsmoke in the slanting afternoon light.

  As night fell, he assembled with the others at the Owl Shrine for the Cremation of Care. The already drunken crowd fell silent as the lakeside organist began to play the dirge and the High Priest summoned his acolytes. Then the barge materialized, poled silently across the lake, bearing the palled figure of Care.

  When the barge reached the shrine, two acolytes removed the pall, revealing the macabre effigy with its papier-mâché mask. The effigy was dutifully placed upon the pyre, but its incineration was halted, as always, by sinister, electronically enhanced laughter from the hillside.

  All eyes turned toward the ridge as a puff of smoke and a flash of light revealed the presence of the ghostly white Tree of Care. From deep inside the tree thundered the voice of Care itself:

  “Fools, fools, fools, when will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? Year after year ye burn me in this Grove, lifting your silly shouts of triumph to the pitying stars. But when ye turn your feet again to the marketplace, am I not waiting for you as of old? Fools, fools, to dream you conquer Care!”

  The High Priest answered:

  “Year after year, within this happy Grove, our fellowship has damned thee for a space, and thy malevolence that would pursue us has lost its power beneath these friendly trees. So shall we burn thee once again this night, and in the flames that eat thine effigy we’ll read the sign that, once again, midsummer sets us free.”

  Then, after lighting their torches at the gas-jet altar fire, the acolytes descended upon the pyre and set Care aflame, piercing the night with shouts of ecstasy. The band broke into “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

  Booter smiled, feeling the old magic, then withdrew into the darkness as fireworks burst in the trees above the lake. When he reached the phone bank, he was relieved to see that no one else was there. He placed a local call.

  “Yello,” said Wren Douglas.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Just making sure you’re comfortable.”

  “Sittin’ pretty,” she said.

  “Good. I’ll be up there tonight.”

  “No problem,” she replied.

  Mary Ann’s Good News

  THE CLINIC WAS AN L-SHAPED CONCRETE-BLOCK BUILDING on Seventeenth Street between Noe and Sanchez. Behind a row of ragged palms lay two distinct entrances: one for people taking the test, the other for people getting their results. Inside, while Michael waited in the car, Brian was shown a videotape about T-cells and helper cells and the true meaning of HTLV-III.

  Then they drew his blood, and sent him on his way.

  “Damn,” he said to Michael, climbing into the VW. “You didn’t tell me it took ten days.”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “Why would I know that?”

  “Well, I took it, remember?”

  “Oh …” Brian gazed absently out the window, weighing his options. He’d counted on coming home with a clean bill of health, a note from his doctor to soften the blow when he told Mary Ann about Geordie. But now …

  “It’s the lab procedure,” said Michael. “Apparently it takes that long.”

  “Ten fucking days.”

  Michael smiled at him wanly, turning on the engine. “Ten non-fucking days.”

  “It won’t work,” said Brian.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she’ll know something’s up.” He gave Michael an admonitory look. “Don’t make a pun out of that.”

  “You’ve never gone for ten days without doing it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m impressed.”

  Brian didn’t laugh. Michael’s flip tone was beginning to get on his nerves.

  “What about rubbers?” asked Michael.

  “We never use them,” said Brian.

  “Well, start. Tell her you think they’re a safer form of bi
rth control.”

  “Michael,” he said, faintly annoyed. “I’m sterile, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry.” Michael seemed to ponder this for a while before slipping into a reasonable facsimile of Dr. Ruth’s Teutonic twitter. “Well … what about something in a nice decorative model … with whirligigs on the end?”

  Brian laughed in spite of himself. “You bastard.”

  “Tell her,” said Michael.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Sooner or later you’re gonna have to. Sooner is always better than later.”

  “No it isn’t. Why should she suffer for the next ten days?”

  “Because you’re suffering. And she’s your wife.”

  Michael’s logic annoyed him. “And I’ve been a great husband, haven’t I?”

  “Look, Brian … if you don’t tell her now …”

  “Forget it, all right? I have to do this my way.”

  “Fine,” said Michael.

  Twenty minutes later, Michael dropped him off in front of The Summit. The doorman fired off a friendly “Yo,” but Brian scarcely heard him as he made his wooden way to the elevator.

  Could he fake it for ten days? Carry on his life as if nothing were wrong?

  Making his ascent, he stood stock still and tried to read his body’s signals. There was a heaviness in his limbs which may or may not have been there earlier. Some of the soreness seemed localized, a dim ember of pain lodged in a corner of his gut.

  This could be anything, of course. Indigestion or a flare-up of his old gastritis. Hell, maybe it was the flu, after all. His headache seemed to have gone away.

  The elevator opened at the twenty-third floor. He stepped out into the foyer to confront the insufferable Cap Sorenson, his face plastered with a shit-eating grin. “How’s it hanging, Hawkins?”

  “Pretty good,” he said, adopting a similar hail-fellow tone. “Pretty good.”

  They changed places, Cap holding the door to get in the final word. “I closed that deal I told you about.”

  “Great.”

  “Forget great,” said Cap. “We’re talking megabucks this time.”

  Brian nodded. The elevator had its own way at last, obliterating Cap’s idiot smirk.

  He let himself into the apartment, moving to the window like someone walking underwater. The sun had swooped in low from the west, turning white buildings to gold: shimmering ingots against the blue. Far beneath him, the tangled foliage of Barbary Lane cast dusty purple shadows across the bricks of Mrs. Madrigal’s courtyard.