“Uh-uh.” Will flinched from the gust of rank, tobacco-laced breath. “I don’t do that.”
He didn’t. Kissing was for fairies. This man’s uncleanness was especially appalling. Yet it was also, inexplicably, hot.
The guy smiled. The leer of a man who said gringo in the movies. But then he laughed and it was all right.
“OK.” When he laughed like this he lit up, his face became more individuated and human, almost sympathetic. “Whatever floats your boat.”
Williams stood up. They could’ve used one of the interior rooms—that’s what they were there for after all—but they didn’t.
“Let’s go someplace a little less comfortable,” Williams said, and led the man toward the door, ignoring the basket of condoms below the Department of Health’s posted warnings.
He liked to fuck outside. Once more, because it was risky, but also—this was the poet in him—because it was close to nature. Even in seedy downtown LA, even in those blocks—so close to the sullen threat of the Greyhound station and the rust-covered railroad yards, that Los Angeles that had ridden on the edge of dereliction ever since the days of John Fante and the bulldozing of Chavez Ravine—even there Williams felt himself “close to nature.” They passed down the narrow stairs together and walked under the street lamps. This would’ve been the riskiest moment. As they were close to places like Dirtbox and Radio where young Hollywood did go, sometimes, where you might run into an assistant or an actor and where it would’ve been tough for Will to explain the presence of an erectile cowboy like this one trailing so close behind him. All clear. They started down Factory Place, which was where Williams had parked, but then the guy turned to him.
“Let’s go to my car.”
“Uh-uh.”
“We gonna take yours?” In the darkness he swayed. His tone was playful, just like Will’s. “You got a truck we can sit in?”
Will watched him. Marnie’s car was unsuitable, even smaller than his own.
“All right,” Will said. “Let’s go to yours.”
The street was black, narrow, edged on one side by three-story lofts and on the other by a corrugated iron fence that ran almost its entire length. This marked off a scrapyard filled with industrial metals, whose value would’ve been puny, no matter what the sum, to Williams III. The lamplight wasn’t enough to lift any of this out of obscurity. The brick, fire-escaped faces on his left; the dull, graffiti-scarred metal on his right. Between these, a heaving patch of asphalt. For a man whose life had been specificity, stars, figures, and deals, his last few breaths in open air were certainly generic. EXT. LOS ANGELES – STREET. A man leads another MAN to his CAR. A moment as vague in its way as the blueprint for a movie.
“Where are we going?” Will said. Wind carried a loud but indefinite sound, the seismic, faraway booming—terrace chants and rattling percussion—of club music. “What exactly are we doing here, honey?”
The moment they crossed Alameda, the man gripped him and pushed him back into a doorway. He clutched Williams’s crotch, not hard, just cupping his cock and balls and kissing him again. This time, Williams allowed it to happen.
“Are you not into this?” The man gripped tighter, feeling Will’s lack of an erection.
“Nah.” Will ground back against him. The excitement always seemed to peak before, and just after. “We’ll be all right.”
They moved up the street. They passed a young girl who stumbled in a jaguar coat, sliding across the cracked pavement opposite. When they reached the end of the block he heard her yip at some friends, behind them.
“The fuck were you guys? I’m so pinned!”
The street grew darker. They were close to that heart of downtown, to Chinatown and the Financial District, the Biltmore and all that, yet here the city still looked abandoned: padlocked warehouses were on either side, their awnings shading metal grates and raised docks. No moving cars, no taxis. Only silence.
“This is yours?” They’d stopped outside a pickup truck. So casually, Williams cocked his head. “I can’t fuck in a cab, sorry.”
“All right.” The guy smiled again. Will could see his yellowing teeth against the street’s featureless dark. “We’ll use a different one.”
Cars were parked all around, many of them black, most of them littered casually at the curb, as if abandoned rather than placed. Several of them were unlocked. Michael leaned against a sleek, German sedan. Williams raised an eyebrow.
“This is your car, huh?”
It was a black BMW, without an alarm. A club kid’s vehicle if ever there was, some luckless parent’s misfortune. Will was being facetious too, smiling, flirting. Michael opened the driver’s side door and they slid in, Williams crawling to the passenger’s seat. He reached below, as Will crawled over, and grabbed Will’s cock, harder this time. Will flipped around and kissed him.
The man reached down again. Will dodged, instead bending down to unbutton the man’s fly. He was ordinary-sized. Will sighed, as he wrapped his fingers around the base. Not that he was a size king, but topping a guy with a big dick was a greater thrill.
Will took it into his mouth. The man’s cock was foul also, rancid and unwashed. He swept the hat off Williams’s head and grabbed his hair. This was all right. Being treated like a whore—well, let’s just say that turnabout was fair play. Will always did like it when things began a little rough. But then the man squeezed the back of his head and pushed him down, hard, choking him with even five inches. Will could’ve bitten it off but instead fought his way up.
“Just relax,” he said. Relaax. “Just do.”
Michael just grunted. They were in another person’s car and the man was careful never to touch anything with his fingers. He kept his fists balled, which might’ve struck Will as a sign of excitement. He pressed them against the upholstery as Williams blew him. When he came, his whole body went soft. Williams spat.
“That was fast.”
“Yeah.” The man seemed irritated. More than men usually were after orgasm. “You’re good, handsome.”
“All right.” Williams sat up. There ought to have been more give-and-take. First give, then take. “It’s all right.”
He reached into his back pocket for a cigarette. Those cigs were for show, but he reached back to take one anyway.
“Wanna smoke?”
The man’s hand shot forward. Williams was smaller, but he was into Muay Thai, tae kwon do, judo, karate. If he had not been off balance, with one palm pinned under his ass-cheek, he’d have caught it easily. Instead the man drove his fist into Williams’s throat, which was such a surprise Will just gagged.
“Hkkkk—”
He reached over and cuffed Williams’s ear. And then—who would imagine a guy so big and doughy could be so fast?—he dove into his pocket and drew something out. It was the only time since they’d entered the car he unclenched his fist. His hand flashed silver. He seized a hank of Williams’s hair, then yanked the knife across his throat with one clean stroke.
All of this took only seconds. I have the suspicion, though I’ll never be able to prove it, that Will let it happen. He was still so swift and powerful, and still faster in his thinking than almost any man alive. But he’d put himself in this position. Sex with strangers was a dangerous game. And no matter what he’d once said to my friend and me, no man gambles, ever, except to lose.
The knife drew across Williams’s throat. The pain, you can’t imagine: the blade sawing through skin, severing tendon and touching bone. Blood spouted against the stranger’s fist. Michael, whoever he was, was strong. And Williams was just conscious enough—I think—to let it really happen. He flew into it like a man.
Will buckled in his seat, his whole body slack. The man just laid his victim’s head forward against the dash, pocketed his weapon, and exhaled. I can imagine that too: the audible breath, the rancid closeness of the car—expensive leather, semen, sweat, and now the smell of Will’s bowels emptying themselves in the seat beside him—the heavy silence o
f the body, settling. The man wiped the door handles with a handkerchief briskly, slid outside, and disappeared. His footsteps quick and hollow, his body bent against the darkness as he scuttled up the street.
He left no evidence: a coating of semen in Williams’s mouth, but this was before DNA testing. There wasn’t anything else. In a sense, though, the man’s identity doesn’t matter. You want to solve a murder? Identify the victim, really identify him under the skin. Williams Farquarsen died in a stranger’s automobile. The wasted kids who discovered him at 5:00 AM flipped out. They ditched the body on the street, then drove home and hosed out the car. Maybe they left the BMW burning on a Malibu bluff, or pushed it over the edge of Mulholland. Who knows? The vehicle too was never found. By the time Will’s corpse was discovered, it really was a John Doe body. The cops had nothing to go on besides a fake driver’s license, which turned out to reference the real social security number of someone who’d died in Modesto five years earlier. They had no illusions about the cause of death: it wasn’t a “mugging,” it was a sex crime fitting a familiar pattern—there’d been several in that area—but without any connection between Will and his killer, how were they supposed to catch anyone? The bouncer, the bartender, the girl in the jaguar coat: none of these people would’ve recognized the man, and the cops never got that far.
By the time they identified the cadaver, and Marnie was informed, it was just a matter of straightening the circumstances into a new set of facts. Why embarrass anybody? Why burden a teenager with the truth? You could call it a lie, or a small mercy. You could call it protection, the maintenance of a myth. Or else it was just storytelling, just that. What it all comes down to, always, in the end.
X
LITTLE WILL TOLD us everything he knew. And by the time he was done, I believed him completely. I might never have been a detective, but I’d committed my own share of crimes.
“Christ,” I muttered. While Severin sat back at his perch on the railing, and Williams stood over by my father’s uncrashed car. His voice was hard when he spoke.
“Does that do it for you?”
I nodded, slowly.
“That’s what you wanted to hear, right?”
Of course it wasn’t. I had the feeling again my friend was restraining violence, that he might’ve pounced on me now in turn. But there’d already been enough of that.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Oh?” At the lip of experience, condolence seemed meaningless. “Are you?”
Severin stood up. He wandered over and placed a palm on each of our chests, like he was going to keep us apart. But there wasn’t a need, neither one of us was ready to go at it. He dropped one arm and left his hand resting against my heart. Nate.
“We are sorry.” He looked at me, though he spoke to Will. “We are.”
He spoke to me too, maybe. He spoke against every secret he’d kept and every transgression, it felt like, every inch of our father’s complicated love he’d ever absorbed. Finally he dropped his hand and cupped the back of my neck, brought my forehead forward to touch his. Williams came over and the three of us huddled like football players for a moment, letting the tension settle.
“How come this never got out?” I said finally, after we’d straightened up.
“Money shuts people up,” Williams said. “When it has to.”
“Some people knew,” I said. “Did Beau?”
Will shook his head. There was a long silence, in which I could hear the Santa Ana again stirring through the trees. I could hear the theme music to some television show, the Mike Post score to a cop drama, drifting faintly from Patricia’s window. The widow was upstairs, alone with her grief.
“He could’ve,” Will said. “He had the opportunity to find out whatever he wanted.”
“What d’you mean?”
Severin stood where he was, arms folded across his chest. He knew this part of the story, apparently.
“He hired a private investigator,” Will said.
“What?”
“Of course he did,” Williams continued. “It was right in the thick of it, when our dads were fighting. You know how those guys were. They thought life was the movies. You wanted to bring someone down, you hired a detective, or an ex-CIA op, or something.”
Severin snorted. Maybe he thought it was funny, or maybe he thought, like I did, that our fathers had it right: life was more like the movies than anyone cared to admit. It was predicated on them, far more than vice versa.
“He hired a guy out there in the Valley. My dad did the same thing. He wanted to dig up what he could on Beau, but what was there? It wasn’t like your father’s problems weren’t all out in the open.”
“Pretty much,” I said.
I pawed the pink brick of the drive with my shoe. What an odd, solid world this was, how inexplicably concrete. My father’s house rose massively behind us, with its rough stucco face and its green painted door. The very weight of his possessions was boggling, their raw physical presence, and yet we still spent our time, almost all of it, among ghosts.
“I think your dad’s investigator found everything,” he said. “My mom told me he did.”
“How did she know?” I said.
Severin stepped away from the railing and came over to me again. “She knew because Dad gave her the file.”
“Why would he do that?” I shook my head. But even as I said it, I almost understood.
“He gave her the file. It was right after Big Will died. Said he didn’t look at it. In the end, he didn’t want to know.”
He didn’t want to betray the man who’d loved him. Who’d sustained him all those many years. I understood that. Severin turned away and I looked past him, to Will.
“Your dad was crazy,” Williams said. “All my father really wanted to do was help him.”
I nodded. I didn’t agree, but my friend had a right, just like me, to his own version of the tale. And this was the best we would ever do, anyway. The meager lattice of fact wasn’t more, in the end, than a springboard for all our dreams, and a scaffold for the imagination. My dad knew this, and so did his, all those years ago when he leaned against a chain-link fence and watched two boys play basketball. He was watching the future, as obsessively as I have the past.
“C’mon,” Severin said after a moment. “Enough, let’s go back to the hotel.” He crossed over to Little Will, whose silhouette loomed, whose body seemed to rock and wobble a bit in the moonlight. “Let’s go have a nightcap. You wanna, Nate?”
A nightcap for us now might’ve been sparkling water. Severin didn’t drink much anymore, and Little Will didn’t touch anything.
“Sure.”
I stayed where I was a moment, though. Because I wanted to watch my brother from afar, the way it has always, also, been my privilege to know him. Perhaps only now could I at last say I knew him up close. I watched them shuffle down the drive toward my car, Sev with his arm around Little Will, the three of us forever changed and yet strangely changeless: companions, relatives, whatever we were to one another now, indivisible all the same.
“You coming, brother?”
Their voices floated back to meet me. And after a moment I pushed off the hood of my father’s car and started after them. The street was otherwise empty, and walking down the sloping drive I heard the soft, surf-like stirring of the leaves, the distant whisper of traffic that sounded almost organic at night. Like the movement of the sea and the breeze, like that rough, tropic disorder that someday will be all that remains.
XI
I WAS MINDING my own business, not long after my father’s death, when someone interrupted me.
“Do I know you?”
I turned and stared at a girl I’d never seen before, who asked me this while I was at a café on Beverly Boulevard, tucked away at a patio table.
“I don’t think so,” I said. Blinking, while my eyes adjusted to the light. Her head was a planet eclipsing the sun beyond the awning. “Why?”
D’you want to k
now how quickly a life can change? Because it does, it does, more inexorably than it can in the movies, where if it happened on-screen, you’d never believe it. You’d think it was too unreal.
I’d been driving earlier through Hancock Park, just cruising along Beverly. A swatch of town that never meant that much to me, between Larchmont Avenue and June Street, a nowhere zone of Italian cypresses and golf club greenery, telephone poles and clustered pigeons. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and something shifted. It might have been the blankness of the sky, the pale gray asphalt, the tapering conifers. This was Los Angeles at its most deglamorized and plain. I had to pull over, I was so happy. I was.
I wasn’t thinking of Beau Rosenwald, or dreaming of the past—I wasn’t thinking about anything, really—and yet I found myself overwhelmed. All my life I had been waiting for something, wanting an extravagant fate. It comes with the territory of growing up in this city, and of being a late-twentieth-century American. I’d wanted not fame exactly—mine is no longer a fame-seeker’s profession—but visibility, an honest recognition. If I’d envied my brother, as I had my entire life, it wasn’t because he was the more loved. It was just because he was the more successful. This was so small I bowed in shame, and when I lifted my head to look at the city—that place I love, as one must one’s special prison—I was in tears. So stirred by its ordinariness, its complete lack of distinction.
I turned the engine over again and headed west. I felt the way I did when I was a child listening to AM radio, the Beach Boys piping out of a white plastic clock or the speaker of Teddy Sanders’s long-finned convertible: so much excitement attaching itself to everything, and to nothing at all. I drove farther down Beverly, and when I reached the more populous part of West Hollywood, by the Pacific Design Center, I pulled over and wandered into a café.
“Do I know you?”
I’d just wanted to kill the afternoon, to breathe and drowse under the palms. A voice at my elbow spoke and I looked up.
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