“Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” The young man was saying over and over again.
“The car’s stopped. Are you hurt?”
He looked at Victor, utterly appalled.
“It’s okay. You’re okay!” Victor assured him.
“Jesus!”
“It’s all over. The car is stopped and shut off. You’re okay.”
“Jesus! I thought it was just going to keep turning round and round all the way down the hill till it fell over or—!”
He’d begun to tremble. He was going into shock.
“You’re okay. Get out of the car. C’mon! Out!”
He half-stumbled, letting Victor half-pull him out, and leaned against the car. That immediately began to move. He quickly pulled away, frightened anew. The head and tail lights were still on.
“Come with me!” Victor commanded and grabbed at his jacket. The young man was taller than him and, even though the jacket, muscular. “Come!”
Victor led him to his own parked car, not sure what to do.
An elderly couple just then came out of the house where he’d so precipitously parked. They looked worried.
“Can we come in for a minute?” Victor asked. “I think he’s in shock.”
By now the other driver was shivering. Victor pulled him up the few stairs and indoors. The woman sat them down on an enclosed porch sofa and gave him a heavily crocheted blanket, which Victor arranged around the young man’s chest and shoulders while he continued to try and failed to speak through his intense shivering, the words coming out broken, but similar to what he’d first said.
After a few minutes, he stopped shivering. He was extremely handsome, even in extremis. Young. Maybe twenty five. Looked like a kid. Thick butterscotch hair. Wonderful bone structure.
The woman was there with a cup of hot coffee.
Victor held it to him and the young man was able to sip as long as Victor held it to his lips. He looked up at Victor in horror. Pale gray eyes. Gorgeously flecked with green, blue, brown. He had just had a new thought.
“It’s just sitting in the middle of the road. What if . . .“
Victor held the keys in his hand.
“If you want, I’ll go move it.”
“Be careful. Jesus! You saw what happened.” He began telling the woman, “It just kept going around and around and I couldn’t stop it no matter what I did.”
Outside, down the hill, the SUV was where they’d left it.
Victor started it up and easily drove it across the now much decreased flow of water. He parked it alongside the house.
The woman met him at the door.
“I think he’s a little better now. He’s had a terrible shock.”
The young man was on his cell phone, explaining something. His hand and the phone were still shaking.
“Two years ago,” she added, conspiratorially, “a car did the same thing and then went over onto its roof and continued sliding down the road. It was this same kind of downpour. The girl inside became completely hysterical. We needed an ambulance to come get her.”
The young driver was off the phone. Victor handed him the keys.
“Your car’s okay. It’s right here. But . . . look . . . how far do you have to go?”
“I just postponed it. I was going to an appointment in Beverly Hills.”
“You live there? Or here?”
He pointed up the hill. “Twenty-six fourteen.”
A house or so away from Victor’s.
“Your car is fine parked here. Why don’t I drive you home? You can pick it up later, when you feel a little . . . calmer. Okay?”
“You’re in no shape to drive,” the man of the couple assured the young man.
Ten minutes later in Victor’s front passenger seat, the young man still seemed shaken. He couldn’t leave it alone. “You saw the whole thing, didn’t you?”
“I did. I saw the whole thing.”
“I thought, Don, your life is all over. All over with, right here and now! And it would have been—if you hadn’t moved your car . . . Why did you do that?”
“I saw you couldn’t stop. Look, Don, is it? Take a little nap. Your car’s fine there. Go get it later. Or tomorrow. Okay?”
Don clutched at him suddenly. “Dude! You saved my life.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Victor laughed as he pried Don’s hand off his arm.
“Both our lives,” Don added.
It was as the very handsome, muscular young man shook his hand that Victor discovered his full name was Don Wright. He watched until Don got inside his house, waved, and closed the door.
“Done Right, huh!” Victor said to himself as he drove the seventy or so feet on to his own driveway. “I’ll say. For once, Miss God, you seem to have made something completely right!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-eight
“Well, if it’s cold and rainy there, why not just come on out to the desert? It’s perfectly dry and warm here,” Andy Grant said, adding, “And it’s midseason. Bathing suit weather. January is when everyone is here and when everything and I mean everything is happening.”
He then mentioned half a dozen names of chantoozies so utterly over-the-hill that Victor had to restrain himself from asking, “You mean she’s still alive? And her? And her too?” Obviously they were all alive and most of them were appearing at one desert boite or another, luckily in the weeks to come and not immediately, so Victor didn’t have to actually commit to joining his childhood friend night after night as Andy idolized them from the front row, where loose neck-skin and drooping, over-cosmetized eyelids were sure to be the order of the day, no matter how good the voices still might be.
“It’s been years since I’ve been to Palm Springs,” Victor mused aloud.
“It’s only a two hour-or-so drive. Given the variable traffic, of course. You can come during the day, which is best. C’mon down. It’ll be fun. Lassiter Smith is here. And Alliger Munday. Everyone’s down here, really.”
Victor had no idea who the second person was. He did recall Lassiter: one of Andy’s best buds, and, unexpectedly, a man from the previous generation, and according to Andy, a laid-back, semi-genius at tickling the ivories and singing Hoagy and Irving and George Gee slightly hoarsely. Until a few months before, he had lived high (in all ways) in an architectural marvel of wood, glass, stonework, and waterfalls(!) in a canyonette just off Wonderland Road in Laurel Canyon, not far from where Victor now resided.
There had been one particular dinner party at Lassiter’s Laurel Canyon home during the December holidays a few seasons back. Food was served alfresco until the winds suddenly rose. Inside, first Lassiter, and then even more surprisingly, Andy (who knew he had a voice?) and Lassiter together had regaled the guests with solos and duets from the 1930’s in as effortless a manner as Victor assumed those standards had first been sung: usually back then by slender, high-Irish-tenors wearing bow ties and four-button suits in little nightclub dance floors on Wilshire Boulevard. That was a great memory, even if one of the tunes, Noel Coward’s “You’re the Top,” had reminded Victor so bitterly of Mark Chastain, now gone, what was it, three years already?
That had kind of been Mark and Victor’s song at the beginning of their love affair once they’d returned to Manhattan. Each of them would say to the other at any time of day out of nowhere, “You’re the Mona Lisa,” or “You’re Garbo’s salary,” or the ultimate compliment from the song, “You’re Cellophane!” Any time of day, any place at all, including the Intensive Care Unit at the very, very end.
“Get a pen,” Andy now commanded, “I’m giving you the simplest possible directions.” He then went on to do anything but, saying that the house was in “The Movie Colony,” wherever that was, and just around the corner from Lucille Ball’s old estate, “the one with Desi; you know, before the divorce,” which was when and where, exactly? And other really unhelpful tips for someone who’d been in Palm Springs exactly once in his life and that maybe
fifteen years previously.
All of it naturally uttered by Andy in his newly minted, totally throwaway, soigne tone of voice (hinting to anyone listening that he’d lived, darling, lived!), demanding that surely Victor had to know these places, since simply everyone did. Even so, Victor managed to get down the street name and the number and he guessed he would figure out where it was even if he had to go to the library and look it up on a street map. Palm Springs couldn’t be that difficult anyway. Highway 111 ran down through it to the next town, and there were maybe ten perpendicular roads of note crossing the 111. Everything lay in a grid, even though some recalcitrant residential streets at times curved around and around, even looping.
From an earlier conversation with Andy, he’d gathered that Lassiter was in the desert because he had nowhere else to go. The fellow he had lived with for decades in the fabou house in the Aitch-Wood Hills had inconveniently upped and died. Andy was never too clear about what Lass’s relationship to the man had been based on to begin with. Certainly it wasn’t in any way “legal,” and that was all that now seemed to count. The heir or heirs or their attorneys had eventually kicked Lass out on his proverbial piano-bench ass. Where was he to live? Surely not in that Sixty-Nine Seafoam-Green Thunderbird, which while stylish, could just about hold all his tuxedos and cummerbunds.
So Andy had drawn Lass down to the desert to Rancho Mirage, where he was house-sitting in some luxury for a friend of a friend of Andy’s for a few months, surrounded by ex-U.S. Presidents, their henchmen, mistresses, and wives, until Andy could figure out what to do with him. Lass had never paid into Social Security, Andy explained, and at 75 years old or more (That old! Victor found himself thinking. Gosh, large amounts of gin actually did pickle one marvelously), Lass had lived off what he made tinkling the keys at parties and at a few San Fernando Valley bars two nights a week. Most of his pay arrived in the form of strong martinis placed within easy grasp upon the piano during the night. He didn’t require money anyway: what for? To pay for the cup of black coffee and the ham-on-rye sandwich per day he ingested to keep reed-slim?
Meanwhile, from what Victor could make out, Andy was renting, sharing a place with another older fellow, one Tobey Hatch, who, according to Andy had “done hair on stage and in film, most recently, of course for his dear old friend, Ginger Rogers.” Thus Victor could well believe that the place where Andy was living was “biggish” with a pool and multi-purpose outdoor decks as well as having several bedroom suites, one of which presumably he would stay in for the weekend. Since Andy hadn’t referred to Tobey at all, Victor further guessed that the owner would be away all the time. Which would be great.
Why Andy was there and no longer in Topanga Canyon he did not explain. Why he was renting and sharing also went unexplained. Could IBM’s stock, his legacy after all, have fallen so drastically? How would Victor know anyway? He had several mutual funds, an I.R.A., and a tax shelter. He was utterly naïve when it came to Modern Money: How to Make it Grow and How to Lose It a topic which seemed to utterly obsess the other four gay men his age he knew who were still alive.
The location info at last released into the telephone-atmosphere, Andy now began to moan and sigh, to whine and gripe about his life in minute, if strangely telling, detail, filled as it was with the most glamorous kinds of non-problematic problemas mostly concerning pool-drain-people and gardeners, fountain contractors and other such types: nothing Victor could take in any way seriously. All of which he nevertheless listened to mock-seriously and responded to at least sensibly: his apparent role these days in Andy’s eternally turbulent life, filled as it seemed to be lately and especially in the Desert with theater people who were long on panache if rather short on practical solutions—“I know! We’ll put on a show, and save the ranch that way!”—although Victor had a feeling that most ranches were long past saving.
Fifteen hours later, Victor was driving along what seemed to him a very much expanded Santa Monica Freeway, replete with cloverleafs several football fields in length connecting to other freeways whose numbers he’d never heard of. He barreled past one development after another, adobe and red tile roofed developments on either side, no matter how far he looked. The exit signs spoke of Cherry Avenues and Walnut Boulevards, of Citrus Streets and Lemon Grove Lanes and Mountain Forest Vistas, but like the freeway construction men, those once salient local attributes were long vanished. Too bad; he well recalled and had looked forward to once more seeing fogged-in fields of green onions stretching to the edges of the brown hills, and to peering backward as the car climbed the high road up to Redlands. He could even now recall the ghost of an orange flower attar filling the sunset air from square miles of valley orchards hidden under low mists below.
Just as he’d begun to feel peckish and was barely holding his small Rice-Rocket onto the tarmac along the high-wind corridor of the San Gorgonio Pass, he came upon a good-sized shopping mall, evidently new, and sure to contain a food area. It was windswept, breezy, and even somewhat cold, but amazingly desert-dry and thus really quite tonic after all that humidity he’d suffered through for the past few months.
Victor sipped his caffeinated pick-me-up and then even cruised the Armani F/X and Calvin Klein shops for ten minutes each. Somehow, looking through an amplitude of high-quality, overpriced, well-tailored leathers, silks, and wools, none of which he needed nor wanted, cheered Victor immeasurably.
A half hour later he was driving into Palm Springs town itself, and his library atlas directions proved perfect.
Of course it was impossible to tell if he’d actually arrived at the address given, except by painted numbers along the low curbstone, since every street was graced with ten-foot-high Oleander hedges out of which soared from behind an occasional, name-bestowing Washingtonia filiara, as well as huge fan palms, mixed in with tumbling cascades in impossibly pastel hues of bougainvillea, all but hiding the wrought-iron gateways. Block after block looked like nearly solid hedges, or like large, dull, identical green sculpture. Until at last you stopped, got out of your by now flaming-hot-metal-fender car and peered in closely to what had to be an entrance.
At the number he’d been given, he did this and was immediately greeted by the sharp yipping of several small Sheltie dogs, instantly followed by the voice of a very bored Andy Grant drawling “Shut up Cassius! Portia, knock it off.”
Seconds later, Andy’s face appeared between matching, perfectly cone-shaped, boxwood hedges. Or at least Victor assumed it was Andy, he looked so different: So thin, so clean shaven, and—let’s be bone-breakingly honest—so old and gray!
“Oh! It is you.” Andy’s voice at least was still sixteen years old. “I thought for sure you’d driven further on to Sunny Dunes Road and been abducted by horny old queers there who’d dipped you in honey and eaten you whole.”
Victor checked his watch which said he was maybe four minutes late.
“Don’t linger on the street like a fifty-dollar-a-night hooker,” Andy instructed. “Come on in! Do you have a lot of luggage? I’ll just bet you do. I’m sure this one,” hefting a bag filled with CDs and books Victor had dropped on the first paving stone inside the gate, “is simply brimming with unguents and potions, with face-masks and creams and lotions! How else would you look so good, given what I know of your Decades of Deep Trampitude? Follow me! Cassius! Portia! Stop barking! Or I’ll feed you to Ricardo the Pool Man.”
The Shelties fled, yipping in terror, leading their cortege along the long, paved path into the ajar silvered ten-foot-high double doors of the entry.
If it was burning white hot outside, once indoors it was crepuscular and virtually frigid, an effect enhanced by the over-liberal use of reflective surfaces including entire wall-sized mirrors, while smaller looking-glasses hung at all levels as well as leaned along the floor boards, amid paintings so deeply set in glass one could barely make out the subject, all set against the highest gloss obtainable of silver, brass, gold, and copper paint on all the main living area walls.
Those lambent surfaces were further enlightened by varied water-features ranging from small, gurgling fountains indoors and out, to sofa-length, waist-high, rough-stone fish pools behind each of the two matching matte-silver couches, all of it leading to and starring, ta da!, the ten by eighteen foot wall of the dining room: entirely aquarium, in which only silver, gold and otherwise iridescent fish glided and swirled.
In the days of his visit to come, Victor would never enter these rooms by day or night without having to quickly grasp something solid so as to retain any inner-ear balance at all. Mal de mer was always a possibility. At times his arms automatically flew into the positions needed for doing the Australian Crawl.
“Tobey’s a big believer in Feng Shui,” Andy said, noticing Victor gawping about, and in a not quite sufficiently explanatory gesture, he added, “He’s not having the easiest time lately and so he’s dispersing bad Chi like mad.”
Andy’s flip-flops made an inordinate amount of rattling, as though they were made of slatted wood, as he led Victor past these various aquatic features. Suddenly they were in a differently decorated hallway, wall-papered in lattices and hatching, as though it was a jungle cottage with a tiny forest of Okapi horns along the crown molding, all simply dripping ferns.
“The bedroom suites,” Andy quick-walked them past two closed doorways, adding, “The Master suite, and the Mistress suite,” and thence into another corridor, this one all mirrors again. “And since I know you’ll have sex every night you’re here and scream like a stuck pig while doing so, I’m putting you way over here, where you can’t possibly bother anyone.”
He opened a door into a small, entirely carmine-painted room, cheerful with white accents: window shutters, Swiss-dotted curtains, polka-dotted leatherette bed headboard, painted little wooden desk, slatted matching desk chair, and even a white wicker faux-Windsor chair with red pillows piped in white, and, capping it all, set upon a white wicker lamp table late of some Alpine chalet, a monstrosity of a white wicker lamp maybe four feet high.
Justify My Sins Page 24
