“I do—I do have fun. And I’m going to have fun tomorrow. We’re going to have fabulous fun on Aurora’s birthday.”
“You know what I mean, Dusty.”
She grew serious. “To introduce someone… to bring someone into my life—my life is so crazy, Jeremy. I mean, this is what I do. This is who I am. This is my life. And it’s not very sexy.”
“But you are.”
“Aw, you’re sweet.”
“You know that I’m not. Okay — just tell me this. What’s the harm in testing the waters? You don’t know who you’ll meet until you’re out there. And you might just find that incredibly brilliant, incredibly hot lady who’s okay with your ‘crazy’ life. Which, by the way, isn’t crazy, it’s actually amazing and spiritual and beyond. And filled with love and devotion. You might just find that certain someone who’s completely blown away by that, blown away by you, and who wants to be with you not just for your amazing jacked and rock-hard body but because she loves you and does not give a shit because she loves all of you. Someone who’s great with Allegra—”
“Aurora.”
“—great with Aurora. And the whole nine fucking yards.”
“Tell me more about how sexy my body is, you… silver-tongued faggot. You child-bearing, woman-fucking queen.”
He’d forgotten how funny she was when she was high. She’d say anything.
“You can’t just… cut that part of your life out. I mean, you’re totally in your prime—”
“What about you? Have you found this perfect person? This perfect man, boy, woman, whatever?”
“I’m looking. But at least I’m out there.”
“Oh you’re out there, all right.”
“You’re out there — outta your frickin’ mind. Well, I gave you my two cents—”
“And I gave you mine.”
“—go join the world again. Renew your membership. If all else fails, get the village idiot to go down on you.”
“My lifeain’t sexy and it ain’t gonna change. So put that in your cock and smoke it. Or wank it. Or stick it in some broad you met in a park. Or whatever other nasty things you do with it.”
—
He lay in bed, enshrouded in the ghostliness of that old, shared L.A. life. Its recentness astonished. How long had it been since he and Allegra rapturously visited the midwife? Four years? Not even. And Tristen, dead and buried! And Wyatt… The march of time passed through cities of rubble, cities of gold, cities on fire. Cities gone mad from the light of the heavens.
Dusty’s innocent query led him back to Devi. His mood grew elegiac. Jeremy missed the mother of his child and wondered if she might have come to a bad end. (At least her guru wouldn’t be able to murder her, though it really did seem like he already had.) It was a shock when he learned that MacKlatchie died not two days after his coffee-shop confessions — but inestimably more so when, shortly after their son’s birth, Devi announced she’d be leaving him and Wyatt for good. They had been living together in Nichols Canyon, and while Jeremy hadn’t given much thought to future scenarios, he had been wrong to presume the baby to be an unconditional hedge against her going — a guarantee that she’d always somehow be in their lives.
He asked himself if he was in love with her but the question bewildered, which alone made Jeremy feel it was true. She was the wiliest, weirdest, most willful, barbarously charming, dangerously sane and erotic creature he had ever met, and proved herself much looser, warmer, and goofier than she came across in those historic, soliloquizing first encounters. More important was the added, irresistible detail of their fatedness, the sense that a supreme destiny, random and divine, was mysteriously at play in their having found one another — a rare and fragile thing, a privilege he’d never remotely experienced with another human being. (Except maybe for Tristen, but they were never going to have a baby together, they could never have created life.) A further complication was that he had grown to love her body. Throughout his life, Jeremy had had more encounters with women than he let on — turbulent, sexual, deeply emotional attachments. They were atypical but no less intense than male-to-male combat.
He understood that by advising Dusty it was time to explore, he was being hypocritical… because just like she, Jeremy wasn’t feelin’ it. He took the arrival of his son as an evolutionary marker — emblem of the commutation of a life sentence of perversion and promiscuity, a symbol of escape from the prison of bodies and enslavement of flesh. The age-old question watered his musings like a soft rain: What does it all mean? The cock goes here, the mouth there, the proprietary heart and obsessive thoughts follow with the predictability of blind donkeys descending into the recesses of a spectacular, spectacularly meaningless canyon. In his twenties, he was in love with a hermaphrodite (they called them “intersex” now) who had a vagina with a swarthy nub of cock dangling above it like a boutonniere. How perfect that shemale was for him, how he loved that being! What a cruel, lusciously asinine farce was the game of love, desire, and need! With no escape other than the false exit of celibacy… and what was celibacy but a smug entr’acte in a dead-end, compulsory burlesque?
Summoning Devi again, he could smell that meadow of spring flowers that seemed to live on her nape (inexplicably on one side only). Their time of domesticity, measured in months, was surreal. He never said a word about her to friends or colleagues, which only served to heighten the phantasmal aspect. When he came home at the end of a workday there she was, sometimes barefoot, always pregnant, in the kitchen, cooking, like the beatific, soon-to-be-slain wife in a film noir. She’d been curiously dispassionate in telling him she had found her guru dead on the bathroom floor of the beach house, as if all was prefigured. After that last lunch with MacKlatchie, Jeremy Googled Killer, Longtime Fugitive, Dead in Malibu, but there was nothing… though he had found a rather obscure article which may or may not have been the spur that goaded Frank to return to Minnesota for his second-attempt helping of “just desserts.” The homicides occurred in the winter of ’83… Yet even after Devi told him Sir had died—“gone ahead” was how she put it — Jeremy never brought it up. He doubted if she knew her teacher had murdered his family but decided it unlikely, as Franklin would have shielded the woman he had loved from the beginning against a thing so unsavory; Jeremy didn’t feel it was his place to disabuse her. Another caveat of MacKlatchie’s might have been that such knowledge on Devi’s part may not only have challenged the “energetically incontestable” beliefs he had so carefully imposed and inspired but made her criminally complicit in harboring him. In the same vein, there had been a few moments, before and after MacKlatchie’s passing, when Jeremy pondered reaching out to the police to report what he knew.