The bus finally came, and Jonathan got on it, wrestling with coins. He had never, in all his thirty-eight years, learned how to count out change quickly. The door whooshed shut; the bus lurched; the driver said nothing, his face blanked out by sunglasses.
Jonathan sat in the back, where he always did. He tried to pretend the bus was full of Munchkins, all of them talking in speeded-up voices. The bus was full of Angelinos instead. Angelinos have never met each other and cannot trust each other. They suspect each other of carrying murder weapons, possibly with some reason. Angelinos sit alone, in silence, no one next to them. As Jonathan was doing.
On the seat in front of him, a very fat man in dirty shorts sat reading the Style section of the Los Angeles Times. The person across the aisle from Jonathan stood up and moved two seats farther back, to be more alone. He was reading People magazine. He was thin and smelly, in what looked like standard-issue Veterans' Hospital couture-a tartan shirt with rolled-up sleeves and khaki trousers. UNITY BY THE SEA, said a passing billboard, JOIN US FOR A LOVING EXPERIENCE.
The bus stopped with a slight squeal of brakes. The squeal came and went with the rhythm of a kiss. An old man got on. He was very thin, very brown. His skin was somehow translucent and splotchy. He stumbled unsteadily toward his seat, and when the bus lurched forward, he fell into it, swinging around one of the support poles. The old man was almost too frail to walk, but he wore a jaunty tracksuit. A yellow plastic Sony Walkman whispered disco music into his ear.
Lighting-fixture shops and banks passed by, with acres of parking in the back. Beside a large drugstore, a sign said PARKING FOR PATRONS ONLY, in lettering that imitated nineteenth-century script. Jonathan loved that word "patrons" and that word "only." An old-time, old-fashioned drugstore with an admissions policy?
At the next stop, a middle-aged woman got on with a boy. Her hair was yellow and she wore black tights that showed how far and loose her hips had spread. The boy was about seventeen and wore long, boxy swim trunks and a vest and a bomber jacket. His upper lip was trying, and failing, to grow a moustache. They sat down just in front of Jonathan. The jacket was shrugged back and the woman began to peel sunburned skin off the boy's back. The windows of the bus were open. Patches of skin were caught up in the wind and were whirled about like snow.
A few moments later, the boy got up and started to ask people for money. "Don't have any, man," said Jonathan, wondering if that was how seventeen-year-olds still spoke. He went back to reading about adult education. If this is what they teach adults, he thought, what are they teaching the kids? He finally found his course in Spanish. It was opposite Hot Air Ballooning.
He got off the bus at Fourteenth Street, and across Wilshire Boulevard there was a billboard, an ad for chocolates. IT'S NEVER TOO LATE it said, TO HAVE A HAPPY CHILDHOOD.
Jonathan lived on Euclid-Thirteenth Street, except that people were too superstitious to call it that. Euclid Avenue was tree-lined and residential and quite pleasant, but it was as if the shrubs and the flowers and the sprinklers and the sunlight and the glimpses of the Santa Monica mountains were all lying. They could bring no real comfort.
Jonathan's property was quite extensive. There were two bungalows in front that he used to rent out in his days of relative penury as an actor. Behind them was his garden, and backing the property, a two-story house for him and Ira. Downstairs were the garage and Ira's office. Upstairs was the house itself. Jonathan trudged wearily up the steps and pulled out his keys.
The key for the house wasn't on it.
What? Jonathan tried to remember what he had done with it. Who could he have given it to? He had his car keys. What could he have done with the key to his house?
It had been happening a lot lately. Forgetting things. Jonathan climbed back down the steps. Well. It was three o'clock. He would just have to wait until Ira got home. He slumped down into his chair, in the garden by the pond.
Jonathan did not want to sit in the garden. It made him feel vulnerable, as if his back were unguarded. He wanted to sit in the house, on the couch just behind the stained-glass window, sheltered in his own little nook, hidden away from people. He wanted to listen to National Public Radio.
Funny the things that kept him going now. NPR saw him through the desolate afternoons like a friend. The music, the features, reassured him that there were other people who thought like him.
Downstairs, outside in the silence, he sat so that no one could see him from the street, and he began to feel a sick and creeping fear crawl up over him. He was going to die, and no sunlight and flowers, no songs, no prayer, could save him. He tried to look at his garden.
He looked at the base of the palm tree. The roots reached down like sinuous worms into the earth. He looked at his ornamental pond and the lilies growing out of a tub under the water, Jonathan remembered. He remembered the party they had held to dig the pond. People had got carried away and dug it so deep that it had to be partially refilled.
What happens to a garden, he wondered, when its owner is gone? Ira had no time for gardening. Would the world, heartless, kill the little blue flowers, the succulent ground cover? Would the dry dead stems haunt Ira, like ghosts? Or would he dig the garden late at night, to keep it going, out of love, for the memory?
Fear was a chill light sweat on Jonathan's forehead. Upstairs the telephone began to ring over and over.
Jonathan remembered the day he had been told he was ill. He had spent an eternal, twisted afternoon waiting for Ira to come home. He had paced the floor, weeping, chewing on his fingers, unable to quell the horrible, quivering animal panic that made him want to run and hide. Then Ira had come, and Jonathan had collapsed against him and told him, and the terror had abated. Ira took the terror away.
"The first thing," Ira had said, "is that we both go into counseling. Did they tell you where to go?"
Jonathan nodded. "They gave me a name. Some hotshot psychiatrist who volunteers."
"Did you get in contact with him? Her?"
Jonathan shook his head. "Not yet. Dr. Podryska had a long talk with me anyway. She gave me some happy pills."
"Did you take them?"
"No. I thought they might be bad for me."
"Stress is bad for you. Take the pills."
"I'm worried about you too, Ira."
Ira sighed and shifted in his smart lawyer working clothes. "It's not your fault. It's not anybody's fault." Ira was puritanically insistent on good behavior.
"You'll have it too."
"Probably," Ira admitted.
"I'll be careful around the house and things." Jonathan meant he would mop up his own blood. He meant they would stop having sex. What he felt was immense relief. Already he knew that Ira was planning to stay with him.
Ira's body jerked with rueful, silent laughter. "You mean you'll eat with a separate knife and fork? Use a different toilet maybe. Maybe I should put some black insulating tape around the handle of your toothbrush. Good thing you have your own electric razor, huh?"
They both looked at each other. Jonathan knew he was in danger of saying something stupid. Stupidity made Ira cross.
"It's a bit late for precautions, Baby," said Ira.
Jonathan retaliated with a practicality. "You should take the test," he said.
"I'm not taking that test," said Ira. They had had arguments about it before.