The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  The raven-haired number’s friends go to the pool table, chalking their names up on the board for what will probably be the last game of the night. The number looks toward Paul, and Paul makes his move.

  His opening line is banal, but so what? An interesting line would only chase the number away. The guy responds with an equally banal follow-up. It’s all a code anyway, Paul knows, although he’s not always a hundred percent sure he knows what the code is or how exactly it works. They stare at each other, checking out each other’s bodies, chests, crotches, etc. then away again. Paul asks how the number’s drink is (fine!); says it’s slow in the Nest tonight (the number agrees); even goes so far as to compare the number’s shirt to the wreath -an offhand compliment that seems to go down nicely (at least the number doesn’t look startled and instantly move away). But the chemistry between them is off, and they know it.

  So after a few minutes of conversational leads from both ends that go nowhere, the number says ‘See you!’ meaning more than likely never again, and he saunters over to the pool table to his friends. And that’s that. Another connection that never happened.

  Paul splits the place. Not even anyone out on West Street in front of the Nest. Cabs waiting, however. A line of them. They know the place will close in a half an hour. Paul stands for a minute, wondering whether he ought to check out Spike Bar on the next block, or even the Ramrod down in the Village. There’s always the baths, or the Mineshaft: they’ll go on all night, Christmas or not. But it’s not sex Paul wants tonight, it’s companionship. And the chances of finding that in the Tubs or down on his hands and knees on a urine-stained floor aren’t promising.

  He gets into the first cab in the line. He doesn’t even see who the driver is until he’s halfway home, uptown, along deserted Tenth Avenue. That’s when the cabby stops for a red light, slides open the little window separating driver and passenger and says something Paul has to lean forward to make out.

  The driver, he sees, is fiftyish, middle-aged, gone to fat, with a scruffy graying black beard and glasses. Somebody’s father or uncle working a second job for extra income.

  ‘No luck in the Nest?’ the driver asks, in a surprisingly high-pitched voice.

  Now Paul wonders if the cabby may be gay himself, or if not, just making conversation to ensure himself of a tip. ‘No,’ he answers.

  The light goes green, but there’s no other traffic visible coming or going on the avenue. So the cab remains stationary. The driver suddenly flips on the inside lights so Paul can see better, and with one hand, the cabby gestures for Paul to look at something on the front seat. At first Paul doesn’t see anything special. Then he sees: the cabby is holding a fat hard-on he’s taken out his pants, slapping it against the lower rim of the steering wheel.

  ‘Wanna swing on this a while? I’ll pull into a side street.’

  Before Paul completely understands what the driver has said, the cabbie adds, ‘It’ll pay for your ride home.’

  Now Paul understands. And Paul wants to scream. He wants to just let it all out and holler for all he’s worth. Instead he manages to say, ‘No, thanks!’ and falls back, away from the middle window, against the seat. He half wonders if the cabbie is a psycho and should he get right out here, now. But what’s the chances of finding a cab on Tenth Avenue and 49th Street at this hour of the night? So instead, Paul pops the last portion of Quaalude he’s been holding into his mouth, and looks out the side windows.

  When they arrive at Paul’s address, the cabbie says, ‘Hey, man! No hard feelings?’

  ‘No hard feelings!’ Paul echoes him, hurriedly stuffing the fare and a tip into the change box between them.

  ‘I’ll go back down to the Nest now,’ the driver goes on, in what Paul could only call a leering voice. ‘And I’ll find me a taker there tonight. You’ll see. Never fails. Hey! Thanks! Merry Christmas!’

  Paul gets into the building foyer just as the Quaalude really hits him. He gets through the glass doors in time to see the taxi hang a U-turn and drive off. Paul drags himself over to the elevator, spaces out waiting for it to arrive, finally climbs in, gets out at his floor. He manages to fumble his keys into the apartment locks. Entering, he drops his leather coat on the floor, half kicks off his boots, and falls head first onto his bed, more or less fully clothed.

  Better than last year, Paul has a few moments to think. Last Christmas, Paul passed out at an orgy in a complete stranger’s house. Jesus! How he hates the holidays. Maybe with this Q he’ll be able to sleep straight through Christmas Day.

  ‘See what I mean?’ Thom Dodge said. ‘It’s just a fragment. At first I thought it was part of something larger. You know, like a depressing version of that gay book he did.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s your brother’s writing?’ I asked.

  ‘Hell! I don’t know! You’re the expert. I was hoping you’d tell me who wrote it.’

  Instead I hit him with a question. ‘What your brother wrote here, what do you think this means?’

  Thom shrugged.

  ‘Well, you want my opinion?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘I think “LS” is Len Spurgeon. And I think Len Spurgeon wrote this. You ever hear of Len Spurgeon?’ I asked.

  No response.

  ‘Bobbie Bonaventura, Jeff Weber’s executor and girlfriend, told me that Jeff and the other members of the Purple Circle met Len through your brother. Mark knew Len before any of them did.’

  Thom Dodge shrugged again, then he looked out the window. ‘Then maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t send this off to the Timrod Collection. You still want a copy?’

  I told him yes and tried again, ‘Who do you think “LS” is?’

  ‘Damned if I know.’ He got up and went to a big floor-standing model of a photocopy machine from the 1980s. ‘I told you before, I never had anything to do with Mark’s gay … life. And he kept it all away from us. Here you go.’

  Outside the house, kids had gathered. Maybe eight or nine of them. Among them are two of Thom’s that he called indoors as I got back into my Celica and drove off.

  As I approached the long involved highway corridors a mile from the Oakland Bay Bridge, I suddenly flashed on something that had been tugging just below my subconscious for maybe a half-hour since I’d seen what was written on the manuscript. That note on the yellow foolscap pad I found in Von Slyke’s bedside drawer when he had me looking for his lover’s telephone address book, the note Von Slyke had written to Dominic De Petrie. I’d have to check it when I got back to Hollywood, but I was sure Von Slyke was writing about me when he’d written to De Petrie that he thought that I looked like L. Meaning that coming across the lawn toward him, I had reminded Von Slyke of L. In other words, I’d reminded Von Slyke of Len Spurgeon. Something made me feel sure of it. Why was that? Whatever the reason, it meant that Len had to be the key. Bobbie said they all knew Len. How possible was it that Thom hadn’t even heard his name?

  From the wrap-around dining-room windows of the penthouse triplex I could see straight ahead to the Golden Gate Bridge, down and ahead, quarter of a mile away. This early evening it appeared to be less a practically usable traffic span than a gigantic pale pink erector set fantastically floating atop the huge field of mist that filled the strait. The mist completely hid the freeway I knew was down below, as well as the toll station, Fort Point, and the strip of park along the shore. Across, where gigantic stone bulwarks seemed to rest on little but smoke, I could make out a few distant stained-brown splotches representing hints of the opposite shore: Fort Baker and, beyond it, the now brown hills of Golden State National Park.

  This twenty-story condo, consisting of ten- and twelve-room apartments with 180-degree terraces, had been put up at the spot on Lincoln Boulevard where it would provide the most picturesque views in all of what had been the military installation called the Presidio a few years ago. Naturally, Mr and Mrs Bart Vanuzzi had been given their choice before anyone else. Equally naturally, the residence of the quart
erback, the Bay Area’s consistently best, and best-known, since the palmy days of the legendary Joe Montana, had drawn in other celebrities, CEOs and assorted high-rollers.

  The athletic paragon himself was sitting across the glass-topped table, dressed in a pale yellow crew-neck jersey jogging suit delicately picking at his third steak of the meal, only just delivered by the younger of my two sisters, who had then settled herself not at the table with us but instead in front of the silent but lighted sixty-inch TV, chewing on a celery stick, staring not so much at the screen as seemingly anywhere else but: at us; at two magazines spread on the coffee-table and occasionally out at the spectacular combination of deep sunset and fog.

  ‘You ought to eat more meat,’ Bart commanded. Since the day we had met a decade ago, my brother-in-law spoke to me in commands and orders. ‘You need more protein!’ he added.

  ‘So I can grow up big and strong like you?’

  ‘Boys!’ Judy casually warned, used to our quarrels.

  ‘You could do worse than look like me,’ Bart concluded, without vanity. Then, ‘So tell me,’ he asked for the third time, ‘what exactly are you doin’ here?’

  ‘I’m hunting down the authorship of a particular manuscript I found among the papers of the famous author Damon Von Slyke.’

  ‘Yeah, and?’

  ‘Yeah, and,’ I echoed Bart, ‘what I’m finding so far is that there are two well-known and one not at all known possible claimants to the piece. So tomorrow I’m seeing the niece and executor of Mitch Leo’s estate, at Berkeley, in hopes that maybe she can clear it up for me. Or if not, maybe she’ll shed light on this unknown guy.’

  ‘So you’re what,’ Bart asked, ‘a literary detective?’

  Bart was by no means stupid, merely closed to just about everything in the universe but the things that interested him. I was surprised by the new range this question implied.

  ‘You’ve got it!’

  ‘Sounds fascinating!’ Judy said, crunching fiber. Unlike Bart, who did seem to get bigger and stronger and even handsomer every time I saw him in an almost cartoony black-curly-hair, five-o’clock-shadow, generous-featured, dark-eyed, clear-skinned, Sicilian-American way, my sister seemed to become thinner and frailer and more ethereal. She’d been a constant eater as a teen, but had the metabolism of a hummingbird and never gained weight. Now, in her mid-thirties, the freshness of her prettiness was gone, replaced by what to me seemed to be high-style elegance. And while she still seemed to nibble a great deal, it wasn’t ever meals, but rice cakes, carrot sticks, celery stalks, Asian radishes: things that appeared to have limited nutritive value.

  When I’d mentioned this to Dr St George a while back, wondering if hers could possibly be a healthy diet, he’d smiled demurely then suggested, ‘Could it be all that fiber is needed to keep the anal canal healthy, open and well lub-ri-cat-ed?’ We’d both laughed at his imputation, but I knew better. According to what they’d both hinted at over the years, and what I’d seen of an amateur sex video of theirs I’d happened upon the last time I visited, Bart Vanuzzi probably hadn’t screwed his wife since their honeymoon. Their sex was oral, him on his back watching porno movies, she going down on him and masturbating herself, which seemed to satisfy both of them.

  ‘So this is what? A big deal?’ Bart asked.

  ‘Could be.’ When dealing with Vanuzzi, the safest route to avoid withering contempt for anyone not as rich or successful as himself was to downplay it.

  ‘There are people who actually care about this?’ was his next question. See what I meant?

  ‘Boys!’ my sister warned.

  It wasn’t a bad question. ‘Some people do. I care.’

  ‘After hunting around, what’s it worth?’ he tried.

  ‘Can’t say. If it’s what I’m looking for it could be worthwhile. Maybe not so much in financial terms, but it could be the cornerstone of my book about the Purple Circle. That could lead to me getting the chair that’s just opening up at UCLA, tenure, a house in Holmby Hills. You know.’

  ‘The Purple Circle is that group of gay writers?’ Bart asked. So he did listen when I talked. Or had Judy told him?

  ‘Right, the ones who started gay literature. I’m living in one of their houses, getting his papers ready. This big library is buying them. And that’s where I first I found it.’

  He naturally asked, ‘Buying them for how much?’

  ‘I’m not privy to the amount. High six figures.’

  That was sure to impress him. Bart tried another line of attack, ‘So you’re what? Putting out for this old gay?’

  ‘Boys!’ my sister warned again.

  ‘Hey?’ Bart defended himself. ‘It’s a natural question. Young guy all alone in a big house with a famous queer and all. Wha? You think I’d hold it against you?’

  ‘He’s in Europe. Just me and the housekeeper there.’

  ‘That’s different. Honest, Ross, you gotta eat meat!’

  ‘I just ate a six-ounce porterhouse!’

  ‘I saw. I mean, you know, you gotta eat red meat on your own. You can afford it, right?’

  ‘If I can’t, you’ll keep me?’

  ‘I’m not an old gay. If I did keep you, you’d have to put out regularly.’

  ‘Boys!’ my sister warned again.

  ‘C’mon. We’re havin’ fun,’ he said, delicately dissecting the potato with the precision of a brain surgeon. ‘All the people you’re seeing are queer?’ he asked.

  ‘No, and the funny thing is so far no one I’ve met in connection with this is. In fact the guy today, the brother of Mark Dodge …’

  ‘I read Mark Dodge,’ my sister interrupted, then asked, ‘Buffalo Nickel? Did he write that?’

  ‘Sure did.’

  ‘In college,’ she mused. ‘I loved that book.’

  I now addressed her rather than Bart. ‘Well, listen to this: Mark Dodge’s brother is his heir and executor. Lives off the substantial money the books and rights still bring in. Has a big house, a boat, Mercedes. And you know what? He never talked to his brother once he found out he was gay – even though Mark had paid his younger brother’s way through college. The brother kept going on to me about how as kids they had this two-bit roadside stand and how Mark ruined it, and ruined this guy’s life by going off to Princeton to become a famous author. Like that’s an excuse for him being such a bigot. Do you believe that?’

  ‘Older people …’ Judy began. ‘You know, Ross, they’re different.’

  ‘Ross is right,’ Bart unexpectedly piped up, between sips of his wine. ‘If the guy hated his brother for being gay, he shouldn’t take the money. He should give it to charity. Hell, I get gifts and things all the time from people and groups I don’t care for. You know. It all goes directly to charity. Right, Jude?’

  ‘You’re sensible,’ my sister said, and looked at him with that same dumb look of love I’d seen on her face when I was twelve years old and she first brought him home.

  The phone rang and was automatically answered. Neither Mr nor Mrs Bart Vanuzzi had, to my knowledge, personally answered a phone in years, even if they were inches away when it rang, had nothing else to do and were dying to speak to the person on the other end. I had no concept what the source of this affectation might be and no one had ever thought to enlighten me. I listened to their brief message begin and was surprised to hear Thom Dodge’s voice on the other end.

  ‘Speaking of the devil,’ I said, and stood to get it. At the receiver, I looked for some way to intercept his call. The receiver was Swedish, lightweight, all curves, no buttons anywhere, more a piece of sculpture than a usable mechanism. ‘How do I break in?’ I asked. Both of them shrugged. So I let Thom Dodge talk, telling me he had something else, important, to say to me, before he hung up.

  ‘Maybe he’s seen the error of his ways and decided to give you all his brother’s royalties,’ Bart said. For him that constituted sarcasm.

  I took another sip of wine, walked to the suite where I was guesting, the one with
a slightly less fantabulous – if this evening far clearer – view east toward Russian Hill and the Coit Tower – and dialed Thom Dodge back.

  ‘I heard you,’ I explained, ‘I just couldn’t figure out how to break in to speak to you. You said it was important?’

  ‘I’m sorry you drove all the way out here for nothing.’

  ‘It wasn’t for nothing. You told me a great deal about your brother that might be useful,’ I fudged. ‘And you gave me the other manuscript and …’

  ‘Well, I don’t know why I did it,’ he interrupted. ‘Maybe it was because you were right there and all, but … I have to say it, I wasn’t completely forthcoming with you.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, surprised by this turn.

  ‘Remember I told you about having no contact with my brother Mark once he’d gone East? That wasn’t true.’

  I waited for him to say what was evidently very difficult for him to say.

  ‘And remember you asked me about Len Spurgeon and I said I didn’t know who he was. That wasn’t true, either.’

  Now I was waiting eagerly.

  ‘You still there?’ Thom asked.

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘What would you say if I told you there was a letter from Mark?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, go on.’

  ‘Only one letter. No more. And I never answered it. So he never wrote again. I got the letter a few days after I saw him in that coffee shop with that baseball player. It seems that Mark did notice me there after all, and he wrote to say he was hurt that I’d run out on him, as he put it, and not even stopped to meet his friend. He’d thought I’d be thrilled to meet a major leaguer and the only way he could figure it for himself was that I was too ashamed about them being so obviously and so publicly together, which he said he could sympathize with. Mark tried to explain to me what had happened, how it had come about that he and Len had met. I’ve got the letter here. I was too upset about it at the time, because it confirmed everything, and drove the wedge between us deeper. I haven’t looked at it in years. I only did look at it again because of what you said today when you were here. And of course because I wanted to read it over and check the name of the baseball player.’