by Paul Monette
Driving home, he let Sam go, convinced he couldn’t do much till Monday, and tried to think straight about Peter and Rita. They were what he was going to do about Sam, and the rest was just a phone call, another packet of hundreds, and—what the hell—maybe a new MG and really end it. Funny, though. He could feel his cock shift with a will of its own from first to second at the thought of Sam. There hadn’t been a peep out of it for anyone but Peter in well over a week. He didn’t still want a piece, did he? Let go, he thought, let go. He’d come too far, he told himself, letting the fantasy go on for a bit but turning the lights out on it, to make it faceless. Nobody else would ever be quite so right for the cowboy’s ride as Sam, but he’d make do. He knew now what the problem was. Allowing himself to get too well-known, he’d begun to see in Sam’s eyes, instead of a wild idea, a zeroing in on who Nick really was. As if Sam couldn’t sustain the fantasy. Not his fault—a lot of static and interference from God knew where, like men who couldn’t keep it hard. Maybe because he was a hustler and had to be bookkeeping all the time. But it was a dead end for Nick. Peter was the only one he wanted to look at him for real. And now Rita. Sam was nobody compared with them, and Nick understood for the first time who was riding away from whom. Sam wasn’t the cowboy stud at all. He was.
Peter and Rita and I are just three friends, he thought, and yet, since none of us has ever gone in much for friends, that’s more than we’re used to. And I’m the luckiest, he had to admit, with a lover among them and someone old and someone new. Peter and Rita had had each other so long, they were already well-connected when Rita arrived—were each other in certain moods and certain seasons, certain public places. They could take it for granted. Peter, of course, had Nick the way Nick had Peter, but not really, for the field that drew Nick like a magnet to ripe naked men left a space like a blank in a film that Peter had to grapple with. Rita had old and new, but she was the one without a lover in the group, which made her more alone, even if she wanted it that way. No, he thought as he went under the arch of the East Gate and into Bel-Air, they don’t have it as easy as I do. We all have the three of us, but I have more. As with the money, of course, the pots of gold at the end of every arc he traveled, having so much was the very thing that threw him. It made him lose track of what it was for. In the end, it sent him scavenging for men with nothing, men like Sam.
He took the curves and wound his way among the islands and half-acre kingdoms of people doing well. The midday air at the end of winter was as clean as they were going to get in LA, and the noon sun, he saw, had brought the Bel-Air villagers out to their pools and paddle tennis courts to go through another round of staying alive. Everyone meant to survive who made it here, which is why they put tomato juice in their Saturday drinks—a vitamin is a vitamin, no matter what company it keeps. The houses, Rusty Varda’s and some few others excepted, weren’t there fifty years ago and wouldn’t be, what with the fires and the Palmdale bulge, fifty years hence. So no one survived by monuments. It was your body or nothing, three-score-and-ten with a shot at a century. And if it means I’m cynical to think so, he thought, then cynics are not as black as they’re painted. He loved his checkered neighbors in the hills, for all their ironies and lunacies, not in spite of the gimlets gulped before and after the perfunctory swim but because of it. Consenting adults wherever he looked. And we can be just three friends, he decided, without a lot of scrutiny and fitting in boxes. No big deal.
Rita’s car wasn’t there, and Peter’s car wasn’t back. I’m first, he thought contentedly, leaping down the steps as if to get things ready and surprise them. Set them a gingham picnic by the pool, perhaps. He put the key in the lock, but the door gave only a couple of inches when he pushed, because the chain was up. “What the …,” he said. He poked at the doorbell till it rang like chimes. He could hear Hey apologize from several rooms away. But he got more and more incoherent the closer he got, running through the living room and up the spiral stair. He squinted out and saw Nick pressed against the door like an invading soldier.
“Oh, what are we going to do!” he cried. “The parrot’s gone.”
“Let me in first,” Nick said with deliberate calm. He stood back while Hey closed the door and then opened it wide. He was stricken.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice all ashes, though a moment before he was shrieking. He was like two different characters, now up, now down. “You can open all the doors and windows now. I thought he was just loose in the house. But he’s out there.” And he looked over Nick’s shoulder at the outside world as if it trembled with death like a jungle.
“Tell me what happened,” Nick said quietly, summoning up the proper attitude. He and Peter hated the parrot, gritting their teeth whenever they thought of him on his nightly spin in the kitchen. He wasn’t pretty to look at, and his jaundiced eye and his weathered beak appeared to be spotted with tropical fevers. But he and Hey went together as if they captained a sailing ship between them. They had been housemates during the lonely years of litigation after Varda’s death, and the parrot was a fixture by the time Nick and Peter came.
“I was cleaning the cage,” Hey said. Nick guided him into the elevator and kept his arm around Hey’s shoulder as they started down. “I never bother to close the door to the dining room, because he knows it’s just for a few minutes. He always waits on the towel rack. But I turned around, and he was gone. I ran all over and closed the house up, but I knew it was no use.” Then he raised his voice again, in a tone of lament he must have carried in his genes. “Oh, Christ!. Why does it have to happen now?” He could take it, he seemed to say, but he had his hands full just lately, with Linda swooping in out of the blue to put him on like a coat.
“He’ll come back,” Nick said, and they stepped out into the living room. He could tell the house was sealed. It seemed under pressure and somehow far too still, as if they’d been away on a long trip. “As soon as he’s hungry. Besides, he knows he can’t do without you. He’s just like us.”
“That’s very sweet of you to say, Nick. But if I were him, I’d be halfway to San Diego by now. Compared to flying,” he said, looking about distractedly, “all of this is shit.” He started to cry, with tears welling out of his eyes and a gathering heave in his shoulders. It was the sound of someone homeless.
“You go lie down and take an aspirin,” Nick said. It was on the tip of his tongue to say they’d get another one, but he saw it would be insensitive. Besides, he didn’t want another one. He wanted a dog.
“I don’t know how I’m going to get through this fucking party,” Hey said brokenly, and Nick led him through to the kitchen and told him not to think about it. Hey’s room had a separate entrance off the kitchen garden, so they had to pass by the empty cage, its barred door ajar and the floor all freshly papered and covered with gravel. Hey went into a full sob. Nick put him to bed, gave him a Valium, and said it was aspirin. He sat on the bed until Hey stopped crying and closed his eyes. Then he went around and opened things up. All the sliding doors to the garden and, one after another, the casements, locking them open at different angles to catch the slightest breezes. It was his imagination, but he seemed to smell bird shit in every room, and he aired them all out, once and for all. Good riddance, he thought. Now maybe they could get a Lab or a collie, both of which Peter thought mawkish, too dog-like. Peter wanted something nobody else had, a Rolls-Royce of a dog, he didn’t care what. Hey wouldn’t hear of it, either way. He said he had his hands full with the bird. And listen to you, Nick berated himself, it’s all you think about, what you want. Like a saint keeping points on his out-of-church acts, he dropped the dog and thought kind thoughts about Hey, who’d lost his other half.
When he got to Rita’s room, he realized he’d been saving it till last so as not to compromise her privacy. He half hoped she’d come home while he was at the upstairs windows, and then she could open up her own. But at last he propelled himself over the threshold, if only because he didn’t want to be making excepti
ons and getting too courtly. It was hot as a sauna. She had the whole row of casements along the garden side, and when they caught the high point of the sun in spring and summer, the light lit it up like a stage in the middle of the day. There were clothes thrown over everything as if they’d all floated down out of the sky, as if she had to have them all in plain sight to know where to start. New things still in their boxes, tumbling out of the tissue. A storm of magazines all around the bed. Nick felt giddy with affection. There ought to be at least one room in Crook House, he thought, set aside for chaos. He had been hanging his own clothes up the minute he took them off for as long as he could recall, as a hedge against the letting go that went with being broke. The terminal house he grew up in was full of things that fell where they may as if they’d given up. He disentangled a scarf from the clump on the end of the bed and threw it like a streamer, and it lilted in the air and settled slowly in a splash of red and gold. Nick laughed out loud. It rang in the cluttered room like a cheer or a whoop as he turned to go.
But a sound like the clatter of poker chips made him stop. It was coming from the walk-in closet across the room, and where he might have thought mice at any other time, he knew without looking that he’d tracked down the wayward bird. Damn it, he thought as he skirted his way among the clothes, you’re supposed to be in San Diego. He had an urge to go get it, tuck it under his arm, and fling it out one of Rita’s windows. But with his luck, he thought, putting his head around the closet door and peering in, it would settle itself in the garden and wait for Hey and be forevermore out for Nick’s blood. He snapped on the light, and there it was, sashaying back and forth along the clothes bar that ran the length of one side.
“Hello, you little fungus,” he said, advancing into the closet and standing eye to eye with it. “Have you crapped all over Rita’s clothes?”
“Machu Picchu,” said the bird. He skittered away to the left and out of Nick’s range. He stretched both wings in front of him, as if he were adjusting a chieftain’s cape, then folded them back along his body and stood up straight and still. Nick had been dismissed. The parrot’s forward gaze took on such a spiritual air, he could have been posing for Audubon.
So there’s someone for everyone, Nick thought wryly, even the lowliest, and the parrot had Hey, who was more than he deserved. Nick decided he’d bring the cage to the bird and not the other way around, since he couldn’t picture the parrot perched on his forefinger all the way back to the kitchen. Better yet, he’d wait till Hey woke up. There didn’t seem to be any violence or mess, and anyway, the closet was practically empty. A few things hung on hangers, but most of Rita’s clothes appeared to be strewn about in the outer room, as if she were saving the closet for something else. It was because he couldn’t do anything yet that Nick took such a long look around. He was keeping an eye on things. And the packing box on the floor was pretty conspicuous, even with a sheet thrown over it. Even then, he only meant to lift it at one corner, to get an idea. But what was it? The first, fast glimpse only tantalized him, and before he knew it, he’d snapped the sheet off like a real magician.
There in the box, propped on a bed of shredded newsprint, was a girl’s two hands in marble, holding a ball. The rest of her was left behind a couple of thousand years ago. Nick bent down and lifted out a folded paper that lay alongside. It was notes, in Rita’s hand, but too disconnected to follow out the train of thought. “Found at a dig at Cnidus, August 1921,” it said at the top. And then a lot of comparing it to other things, but that was all too technical for Nick. “200 B. C.” he understood. But “stolen at site” didn’t make much sense because, if it was stolen, what was it doing here? “Who needs it? British Museum?” Well, how was he supposed to know. He folded up the paper and put it back exactly right. He chided himself too late for overstepping on Rita’s ground, and he sagged inside with a variety of guilt which threw him, since he was an expert only in the sexual kind. Nick didn’t know a thing about art, he always said. He didn’t even know what he liked. He left all that to Peter and went his way, and part of the reason he wasn’t a curious or gossipy sort was that he didn’t much register the price of people’s knickknacks. But even he had ideas about the British Museum—big bucks and no bullshit. So Rita had a sideline, good for Rita, he thought, trying to be jaunty. But he couldn’t get it out of his head that he’d had the kind of accident that he and Peter and Rita were going to be a long time recovering from. Even if he kept it a secret.
“It’s all your fault, you know,” he snarled at the parrot, bringing his hand up menacingly, as if to cuff it. The parrot scooted further away along the bar, blinked once, and went back into his trance.
And then, more or less, the sky caved in. He heard a rustle of packages out in the bedroom and knew he’d been caught red-handed. He had no choice. He held his breath, glared as if to say the parrot was a plucked chicken if he squawked, and determined to wait it out. She didn’t use the closet, after all. In a minute she’d probably go out to the pool or something, because it was so hot in her room. Or if she’d just go in the bathroom and take a pee, he thought, he could sneak out easily. Though now he was almost reluctant to go. It was cool in here, and he had to admit, he wanted to hold the hands—because they were old, not because they were art. If she’d only go, he thought. But the next sound let him know how little he knew. She was shutting the windows. One by one, he could hear the casements bang and the locks turn. He knew precisely how long it would take, since he’d done the very same thing ten minutes before, going the other way. He should have known then it was all over. But did he really have no choice? Couldn’t he have walked on out the moment he heard her and pointed inanely at the parrot on his shoulder? He would never know now. But he probably would have said, given time, that his hiding was a reflex, and it had to do with leaving Rita alone. He had no right to be there at all, to poke around among the ruins, to involve himself with her in any way. As if he weren’t involved already. I don’t have to know your secrets to love you, he would have liked to say to Rita. Whatever she told him was all he needed. And if that is how he would have put it, then he must have felt much more than she how well they had made it work in the last two weeks, being together so much. We did it without getting involved, he must have thought. What did he think they were instead? Like brother and sister, maybe?
It didn’t matter. When she shut the eighth and final window it began to happen very fast. She must have flown across the room to the closet, because she was standing in front of him, the door slammed behind her, the lock locked, before he could change his tune or whistle a warning. They looked into each other’s eyes for an instant, long enough for Nick to see she was feeling caught, just like him. How will we ever get out of this? he wondered. But all in a split second, because the mirror swung open, too, the moment Rita shut them in. The two of them turned at once and stared into the dark, as if someone might step out and save them. Then, when Nick looked back, he saw how her eye was caught by the uncovered box. She studied it wistfully, not as if she regretted its betraying her, but as if the marble hands might be the best way to begin. If she was angry or even surprised, it didn’t show. She accepted the new situation as fast as it happened—she and Nick had gone on to the next step, whatever it might turn out to be.
“Where’s Cnidus?” Nick asked casually, trying to let her know he’d gotten the lesson by heart, trying to give her a cue.
“I don’t really know,” Rita said. “A city, I think. Sacred to Demeter, the goddess of crops and marriages.”
“Is that whose hands they are?” He was so interested. They might have been picking each other up in a museum.
“No. That’s Aphrodite,” she said with something like awe, as if the whole goddess were there in front of them, all curves and waves like a Botticelli.
“She plays tennis, I see.” Why, Nick thought, am I trying to make jokes? Perhaps because Rita was still as sad as when they’d split up a couple of hours before. And not about anything here, he didn’t think.
“It’s an apple,” she said, looking up at last, and smiling at him now as if she’d been longing to show him around and he’d dropped in right on time. “That’s how they know. Paris had to judge three goddesses, to choose the fairest, and each of them offered a bribe. Aphrodite won. He gave her the apple of discord.”
“What did she promise him?”
“The most beautiful woman in the world.” Something, Rita seemed to say, that neither of them had any use for. Aphrodite wouldn’t have had a prayer if it had been up to Nick and Rita. “Unfortunately for all of them, that turned out to be Helen of Troy.”
“Can I pick it up?”
“Sure.” And when he did, the look on his face as blank as sleep, she said, “You can see the stem end of the apple—see?—between her finger and thumb.”
The hands were heavier than he thought they’d be, as if time were part of the weight, and the surface was slightly rough from the wearing away. The features—fingernail lines and knucklebones and veins—were faint. He hadn’t noticed before, but the little finger on the right hand was missing. He flinched when he saw it, he didn’t know why. After all, she was missing ninety percent.
