by Ann Beattie
Hopper’s background was quite different. He’d grown up in different times, and in a different world from Randy. He graduated from Hollywood High and was raised by an independently wealthy father who spent his life working on screenplays that were never made into movies, although he made a good profit from his hobby; he sold the vintage motorcycles he refurbished to some of Hollywood’s finest, Steve McQueen among them. Harper was his given name; Hopper was his nickname, for “all hopped up,” because even by the standards of Hollywood High, he smoked so much pot. He quit cold turkey, though, during the period when he studied Scientology, and by the time he’d quit both drugs, he was twenty years old, a moderately talented surfer and photographer with the requisite tragic vision—meaning that he took intensely close-up photographs of bums in Santa Monica, which he cropped so that their ravaged faces seemed to be abstract relief maps. These he showed to girls to lure them into sex with a man who was both hard-boiled and sensitive (a persona he’d picked up as an impressionable youth from watching the movies of Steve McQueen). He met Carwell Bowman when he valet-parked his car at an L.A. restaurant. The car was a rented BMW convertible. It started to rain just as Carwell picked up the car, but he had no idea how to get the top to latch. Hopper stuck his hand through the window and latched one side, then moved to the passenger’s side and sat to latch the other. He saw that Car-well’s finger was bleeding. He saw this because Carwell was staring at his own finger, transfixed. “I can’t stand my life,” Car-well said to him—or something close to that. Hopper took off the bandanna he wore around his neck—the lucky bandanna that had once served as an ex-girlfriend’s hamster’s hammock—and wrapped it quickly around the bleeding finger. “But where is La Cienega?” Carwell had said. “Where is fucking anything?” The other carhop honked; the couple who had just gotten into the Cadillac behind them didn’t want to have to pull around them to pull away. “Where is one moment of common courtesy?” Carwell asked. When the occupants of the Cadillac honked again, Carwell sprang from the car, a fierce frown on his face, wrapped finger pointed like a gun, whereupon he was set upon by the other carhop, who jumped on his back and brought him to his knees. This all happened in seconds. There was a sudden pileup of bodies on the sidewalk, and the woman had gotten out of the Cadillac and was screaming—standing there in her white miniskirt and go-go boots and her little silvery jacket, screaming. Somehow, out of those few disastrous minutes, it had been decided that Hopper would drive Carwell back to his hotel, and subsequently that he would serve as his savior, flight arranger, phone answerer, and general handyman. Girls flocked around Carwell; it was no longer a problem to attract girls, because Carwell filtered them down to Hopper. This was in the not-so-distant past when girls were girls, and not women. They didn’t want to be women; they wanted to be girls, looked out for like kids, tolerated like kids if they needed cab fare to get home, if they had to be bought new earrings because they’d lost one of a pair and they were so, so sorry. It was like they wanted their hymens back, Hopper had said to Carwell. Carwell considered Hopper a creative thinker. He had not hired just any assistant, he told people proudly: don’t just look at his accomplishments; wait until you hear the way this young man expresses himself.
And then flip forward fifteen years to the time when Hopper started to be cold. He never turned on the ceiling fan in Key West, even on summer nights. Sweaters, extra shirts . . . nothing kept him warm. The tropical breezes were no longer refreshing, they were icy. At first it was a joke. He had a broken thermostat. But alone, worried, he would sit on the side of his bed and rest his head in his hands, and some nights his fingers would tingle, but he made a distinction between that sensation and being able to feel. He heard something about mosquitoes—maybe not mosquitoes, exactly, but some tropical insect that stung you with numbing aftereffects. Then he heard that the effects lasted a day or two. Maybe three. A year later, things began to waver and to go out of focus. At first it took one or two blinks to bring the world back. Soon it took not seconds, but minutes—and blinking didn’t speed things up. He went to an eye doctor and said nothing about the visual distortions; he said only that his long-distance vision didn’t seem to be as clear as it used to be. The doctor examined his eyes and gave him a prescription for glasses, and he was so relieved, he almost hugged the doctor. He listened attentively: he would not need the glasses for driving unless that made him feel more secure; he might find it convenient to use the glasses on days when there was excessive glare; the glasses were not very strong, but he should find that they helped. He found that even with the glasses on—he filled the prescription that day, and never took them off, even to sleep—the world looked, increasingly, the way air looks as it rises out of a heat grate. A year later, he couldn’t open a jar. Actually, he sometimes succeeded, but one time the effort took the skin off the pads of his fingers and—full circle, in an odd way—he didn’t know his hand was bleeding until he saw the glistening red streaks around the top of the pickle jar.
Even though they had been friends most of their adult lives, Carwell and Modello had grown closer as they increasingly extended themselves, altering their own plans to accommodate the shocking and unexpected limitations of their friends— Hopper and Randy had become their friends long before their health failed. Who knew what Carwell and Modello really said to each other. Who knew whether they cried on each other’s shoulder on those forays to South Beach, or whether they were the silly, lighthearted trips Carwell and Modello presented them as. Who knew whether they might not be covertly inquiring about alternate arrangements for that time when things might get worse. Yet who was going to face them down and demand to know what they really, truly thought—especially when they were so heartbreakingly upbeat (“Well, it’s time I learned how to open my own pickle jars!”). For years Hopper and Randy had gratefully accepted their continued employment—if that was what it was. They made a pact not to suffer bouts of excessive self-pity in the older men’s presence, and to the extent that they were able, they still did whatever they could around the houses. Telephone answering machines had taken some of the heat off long before they became sick—that is (thank you, rehab witch), physically challenged—and Randy could still cook, those nights he wasn’t too exhausted from getting through the day. Hopper could still shake Carwell out of a funk by making acerbic remarks. Each had also had a hand in selecting and training his replacement: in Hopper’s case, a young woman named Doris who had grown up in a family of six brothers, who prided herself in carpentry and plumbing repairs; in Randy’s case—being the Gemini he was—he had decided on two people: a Cuban chef/launderer/gardener, plus a former New York City model named Lisa Lee who had relocated to the Keys to be with her girlfriend, who worked at a lumberyard. Lisa Lee had great organizational skills and functioned in Mañana Land as if she were still in New York City, which surprised enough of the people enough of the time that they came through for her: she procured impossible-to-get plane reservations; last-minute bookings in fancy restaurants; out-of-print books. Her beauty neutralized her assertiveness, and people genuinely liked her. Randy was quite smitten, himself, but Lisa was interested only in her girlfriend—and the girlfriend proved invaluable in locating difficult-to-find wood.
Right now, Randy is back in the hot tub, humming a little song. Hopper is looking through a copy of Entertainment Weekly, checking the movie reviews. There is almost enough breeze, if he holds the magazine right, to turn the pages for him. Today is Friday the thirteenth of December. They are in the yard behind Carwell and Modello’s houses, the yard with the enormous kapok tree the Clara Barton preschool children are taken on annual trips to see, waiting for the arrival of the Famous Poet. The Famous Poet will be picked up at the airport by Lisa and transported to his good friend Modello’s house, where they will all enjoy a late dinner of Cuban-style paella. “Just wait until I stumble in on my last legs, and you bring up the rear in your wheelchair,” Randy says. “The last time he saw me, I was doing fifty chin-ups and a hundred push-ups a day, an
d we got drunk and he told me he’d always felt he had to overcompensate because so many men assumed he was gay because he was a poet—that until recently he’d lifted weights and run twenty miles a week, but that lately all he wanted to do was to find people who were gay, so the heat would be off and he could just drink with them. Then he got all upset because he was worried he’d somehow offended me—God knows how, unless he was thinking that I thought he’d implied I was gay. . . . In any case, I got out the cognac and we went at it, and as I recall, we both got very sentimental about the dog. He’s always been so proud of giving Giles as a gift to Modello. He started to feel sad because Giles was getting old, and he should be given a very special Christmas. This was December, so that did make some sense. Anyway: we started imagining T-bone steaks for Giles, and then slow-running cats, cats that couldn’t get away. . . . I don’t know why it seemed so funny, but we woke Giles up to tell him all about the slow cat Santa would be bringing him, and the Famous Poet was down on all fours, meowing and pretending to barely move at all—just inching forward and meowing over his shoulder. Modello had gone to bed hours before. But suddenly there he was. We’d made too much noise, obviously. Suddenly he was standing there in that monogrammed blue silk robe of his, and those awful terry-cloth slippers he won’t get rid of. And through clenched teeth, he said—he almost spat it!—he said: “This is not a good environment for the dog.”
“Oh, man, I can hear him,” Hopper says. “That same archness Carwell has. That ’Where is one moment of common courtesy?’ mode I told you about. I think they caught it from each other, like measles, and they reinfect each other all their lives, so when they least expect it, they’re standing around in a silk robe, fretting like old queens.”
“You miserable monster!” the old woman next door screams at her cat. She throws something and goes inside, slamming her door. Carwell and Modello are eagerly awaiting the death of this neighbor, so they can buy the adjacent property and expand their compound. Hopper and Randy look briefly toward the fence. There is a small peephole, about the size of a marble, that the Cuban drilled, which Carwell subsequently painted around, transforming it into a bullet hole through the forehead of Andy Warhol’s blue Mao.
“I’m worried about what will happen when he comes,” Randy says. “I asked Modello what he’d told the Famous Poet about me, and he said, ‘Nothing.’ I think he meant it. I have such a pallor, and I look like I’m years older than Modello, now. You’d think he would have prepared him.”
“Oh, he’ll just feel even sorrier for you,” Hopper says. “Let me give you some coaching on how that goes. The person gives you a pitying look, but not too much of one, and you return the look with an expression that has to communicate, in less than three seconds: yes, I’m ruined, but I’m valiant, and things will get worse before they get better, though in my own case, since I don’t believe in an afterlife, things really won’t get better, and PS. I don’t believe in reincarnation, and don’t even think of talking to me about vitamin supplements, let alone acupuncture, which should be left to porcupines defending themselves in the wilderness.”
“That look takes five seconds,” Randy says.
“Practice makes perfect,” Hopper says. “We have the rest of our lives to work on this.”
“But you wouldn’t rather be dead, would you?” Randy says.
“What makes you ask that? It always shocks me when you say something plaintive.”
“‘Plaintive,’” Randy says. “I wouldn’t have known that word when I met Modello. I think it was part of my charm that I barely knew the English language.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. He was attracted to your looks. You could have been a thesaurus, or you could have been mute.”
“He didn’t intentionally employ the handicapped,” Randy says.
“I can assure you of that.”
“No, I know he didn’t,” Hopper says, “but did you ever wonder what both of them were doing hiring straight guys? Don’t you think maybe they wanted to torture themselves, just a little? And that this is the way it boomeranged on them?”
“You’re in a hell of a mood,” Randy says. “For one thing, they’re two very different people. I’ve admitted to you that for a brief period, more years ago than I can really remember, Modello thought he could wear me down. But it wasn’t like he chased me around the house, you know. Sex was never an issue. I mean, it was, but that was because he was pretending to be so relentlessly heterosexual. All those women. Those lovely women wearing his pajama tops as nightgowns, using champagne flutes as bathroom glasses.”
“It was sort of decadent, wasn’t it?” Hopper says. “Their bisexual period, I mean. I’d find the girls’ panties under the pillow after they’d gone, as if the sex fairy, instead of the tooth fairy, had left a token of appreciation.”
“They’ve gotten older,” Randy says. “Now when women come they don’t bother to pretend. And when men come, they’re just friends—people from the past. Do you think they’ve both given up sex so we won’t feel left out?”
“No,” Hopper says. “I think they got tired. Tired, and worried.”
“Maybe the Famous Poet will shake things up. He still magnetizes women, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know. But he wrote a letter saying that what he most wanted was a quiet couple of days,” Hopper says. “I asked whether I should take some WD-40 to my squeaking back wheel—just joking, but Carwell seized on it; said it was my house and that I shouldn’t feel in any way inhibited. That the Famous Poet was just a visitor.”
“So what are the plans?” Randy says. “All I’ve heard about is tonight’s dinner. Something must have been set up. I should have asked Lisa.”
“Lisa told me that the guy’s reputation precedes him, and she wants as little to do with him as possible.”
“That was the thing about us,” Randy says. “Totally non-judgmental.”
“Well, you can’t be getting a free ride on the roller coaster and suddenly say, Excuse me: I don’t think this ride is what it’s advertised as, at all; I think it’s House of Horrors.”
“Did you feel that way?” Randy says, moving a small white plastic boat around in the bubbling water. “I never thought any of it was scary. I thought it was all sort of chaotic but tame.”
“Well, you must admit, some of the parties got out of control. And some of the street trash the guests would bring home could be a little frightening. But you have to admire them: through it all, they were working.”
“They still do work all the time, though it seems like a lot of the fun is gone. That now all they’re doing is quoting themselves,” Randy says.
“What do you mean, ‘quoting themselves’?”
“Their style. Things get repeated. They’ve gotten locked into it. That, or they have to concoct something that isn’t heartfelt, just so it will be new.”
“Like a painter doing a painting in which another painter’s painting is hung on the wall in the background,” Hopper says.
“Sort of like taking a picture for your Christmas card, in which you’re holding up last year’s Christmas card and smiling,” Randy says. He swishes his hands around in the water. He smiles up at Hopper: “All those jokes, being sent out to friends’ refrigerators.”
“Listen to us,” Hopper says. “Here we go down memory lane. One of us staggers, and the other rolls his squeaky wheelchair.”
“Well, now, those aren’t our only distinguishing characteristics.” When the little boat bobs close to Randy, he pushes it away with his nose.
“I guess it’s the holidays. I’m feeling sorry for myself because Christmas is coming.”
“Christmas always made you unhappy. It used to irritate me that you’d have nothing to do with the annual party. You’d do all that work, and then when the big night came, you’d go to the 801 and drink.”
“Like I would have been the life of the party,” Hopper says. “Witness the fact that I’m all but forgotten. He thinks that if he sits me out in the yard, I�
�m suddenly uplifted. Dazzled by nature. To say nothing of providing upbeat talk to entertain a person about a hundred times more sophisticated than I am, who’s probably turning into a prune rather than leave me sitting here alone.”
“Not so,” Randy says.
“I take that as a compliment. But what, exactly, are you doing, bubbling up to your neck, by the hour?”
“Avoiding Felix. He acts like every mollusk he steams open contains a pearl.”
“The Famous Poet requested paella, I hear.”
“You know what they’re doing? They’re fattening him up for the kill. Since he got that fancy award, they’ve both been eyeing the possibility that he might want to go in on that real estate deal with them.”
“An ulterior motive? You could believe of our distinguished employers that they might not be operating with the purest intentions?”
“It is their mutual intention to prosper,” Randy says.
The back door of Mark Modello’s house opens, and Giles the dog skitters out, under fire from a barrage of Spanish.
“Come here, Giles,” Randy says, bumping through the water to the rim of the hot tub. Randy’s voice is all concern. “Did that nasty Felix yell at you?” The dog runs in a wide circle around the hot tub, then catches the scent of something in the breeze and looks up.
