“No? Well, I try to stay outraged and that keeps me from being afraid. But-” I put my hand on his leg, “-I don’t think that’s going to work with how I feel about you.”
He put his hand on mine. “You’re not afraid of me.”
“Not of you,” I replied, “for you. I can’t stand the idea that anyone or anything might hurt you.”
He smiled and seemed, suddenly, older, quite my equal. “Don’t think of me as a job, Henry. You don’t need a reason to love me.”
Just as I got to the door of Larry’s house, it opened and I found myself face-to-face with a young woman carrying a clipboard.
“Excuse me,” she said, and stepped aside to let me pass. Larry was standing behind her with two mugs in his hand. “Goodbye, Larry,” she told him. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Thanks Cindy.”
“Goodbye,” she said to me in a pleasant tone.
“Goodbye,” I answered, puzzled. When she left I asked Larry who she was.
“My travel agent,” he said, heading into the kitchen. I followed him. “Where have you been?”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“My question gets priority,” he replied, rinsing the mugs in the sink and setting them in the dish rack. In his Levis and black turtleneck he looked spectrally thin.
“It’s sort of a long story.”
“Tell me while I fix myself something to eat. Do you want anything?”
Mrs. Mandel’s ponderous breakfast was sitting in my stomach. “No.”
I told Larry about the previous night’s proceedings while he constructed an omelet. He brought it to the table where I joined him. Before he ate, he swallowed a fistful of vitamins, washing them down with cranberry juice. He cut an edge of the egg and ate it, chewing slowly but without much apparent pleasure.
“Josh sounds like a very smart boy,” he said when I related
Josh’s parting comment to me.
“Don’t say boy. It makes me feel like a child molester.”
Larry smiled. “Twenty-two is several years past the age of consent,” he replied. “And you should stop thinking of yourself as an old man.’’
“I suppose. Anyway, I’m relieved that Josh didn’t have anything to do with Brian Fox’s murder.’’
Larry set down his fork. “You’re still thinking about that?’’
“Do you remember the night Jim Pears tried to kill himself?” I asked.
“How could I forget,” he replied, grimly.
“The phone rang three times. The first time it was a drunk who told me that Jim was innocent. The second time it was the jail. The third time the caller hung up before I could answer.” I poured myself a cup of coffee from the pot on the table. “I thought that the first caller was Josh.’’
“Why?” Larry asked, finishing his meal.
“I’d talked to him earlier and it was clear he wasn’t telling the truth about where he’d been when Brian was killed. I just thought, I don’t know, that he was trying to relieve his guilty conscience, but — ‘‘ I sipped the coffee, “ — this guy flirted with me.”
“Really?” Larry asked, amused.
“It was strange in the context. But I still thought it was Josh. Well, Josh did call that night, but he was the third caller, the one who hung up before I could answer the phone.”
Larry’s eyebrow arched above his eye. “Do you know who the first caller was?”
“I think it was Tony Good,” I replied.
Larry looked at me closely and said, “Why?”
“Something he said at the Zanes’ party as you were leaving with him. Some words he used were the same words the first caller used,” I said, remembering that on both occasions Good had said, You’re kind of cute, Henry. You gotta lover! “And the way he insisted that I take his number. What I don’t understand, though, is why Tony Good would know anything about Brian Fox’s murder.”
Larry lit a cigarette. He squinted slightly as the smoke rose into his eyes and said, “It was Tony.”
“How do you know that?”
“He called again that night,” Larry replied, tapping an ash into his plate.
“Why didn’t you tell me then?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t know he’d called before,” he said, “and I wouldn’t have had any reason to think he’d be calling you.”
“But he would call you?” I asked.
Larry nodded. “I’ve known Tony for a long time,” he said, smiling without humor. “And in many capacities. A drunken call in the middle of the night is about par for the course.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Nothing,” Larry said. “I mean nothing about you or Jim Pears. We just talked.” He looked at me guiltily.
“You’re sure?”
“Believe me, Henry, I had no idea.” He pushed his plate away. “I told him I was sick.” He shrugged. “That’s what we talked about.” He paused. “He went on a crying jag, but I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it.”
“You didn’t answer my question about whether you’re taking a trip.”
He picked up his plate and took it to the sink. “As a matter of fact,” he said, sticking his cigarette beneath the tap, “I’m going to Paris on Friday.”
“Day after tomorrow?”
He nodded, his back still turned to me.
“Why?”
“To check myself in at an AIDS clinic,” he replied, coming back to the table.
“Isn’t this kind of precipitous?”
He rolled up one sleeve of his turtleneck and held his arm out. There was what appeared to be a purple welt on his forearm, but it wasn’t a welt. It was a lesion. I stared at it.
“Kaposi?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he said. “The first one appeared two weeks ago.”
He covered his arm and slumped into a chair.
21
The kitchen clock had rattled off a full minute before I spoke. “Why Paris?”
“Anonymity,” Larry answered, resting his chin on his hands. “And for treatment, of course. It’s one of the centers of AIDS research.”
“Then why anonymity?”
He rubbed a patch of dry skin at the comer of his mouth. “That’s just my way,” he said. “I’ve always done things in secret.”
“But you’re out,” I replied. “You’ve been out for five years.”
He looked at me with a helpless expression. “Henry,” he said, “you don’t understand. This has nothing to do with being out. This is about dying.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t understand. Everyone who loves you is here.”
“In this room,” he replied, and looked at me. “You’re all there is. Ned is dead. My family…” he shrugged dismissively. “My dying would be grist for the gossip mill but no one would really care. I couldn’t stand it, Henry. Not the curiosity-seekers.” His lips tightened. “Not to be an object lesson. I want some privacy for this. Some dignity.”
“By crawling back into the closet to die?”
He winced.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay. I didn’t expect you to understand. You’re young and healthy and in love.”
I felt as if I’d been cursed.
“Don’t go,” I pleaded.
“I’m afraid I-” The phone rang. Larry reached around and picked up the receiver. A moment later he said, “It’s for you.”
I took it from him. He got up and lit another cigarette.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hi, handsome.” It was Tony Good, returning the message I’d left on his machine.
We made arrangements to meet that night at ten at a bar in West Hollywood. I got up from the table and put the phone back. Larry was in his study, going through a pile of papers. Watching him, it occurred to me that I hardly knew him at all. It was as if all these years I’d been seeing him in profile and now that he turned his face to me, it was the face of a stranger.
“I have a million things to do before I leave,” he said. “Some of them I’m going to ask you to finish for me once I’m gone.”
“Sure. Of course.”
He sat down behind his desk. “Don’t take all this so hard.”
“We’re friends,” I replied.
He didn’t answer but picked up a folder, flipped through its pages, and withdrew a sheaf of papers.
“This is a copy of my will,” he said, handing me the papers. “You’re my executor. Take it, Henry.”