The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Tanya went on. ‘But of course I gave in and said yes, and we prepared and I signed all the papers in front of a notary public. Another six or eight months go by and I’ve begun to follow the illness in the papers and magazines and I’m sure that with all the research a cure will be found or at least some treatment. That’s when Frankie is hospitalized. Mitch moves into the Manhattan hospice-care unit with him at some posh East Side place. I see Frankie once: he’s totally out of it, hallucinating from the pneumonia’s ridiculously high fever. Then Frankie’s dead and we’re burying him and we’re all going to a memorial service for him. Jesus! Despite all the construction, this bridge gets worse every week.

  ‘After that I make sure to talk to Mitch every day. But he’s disappearing on me more and more. After two months, he can’t take care of himself and he moves to the big house in Montclair and one afternoon, waiting in his old bedroom for the maid to bring a bowl of chicken soup, he dies. Sitting up. Just like that. My life is perfect. And they’re both dead! Mitch and Frankie. My parents. How could this happen?’

  Tears are rolling down Tanya’s cheeks as she gets ready to move two lanes to get off the bridge and head south.

  ‘So you can understand how it’s been very, very difficult for me to be Mitch’s executor. At the same time, it’s been an enormous honor. The very least I could do. I still haven’t gotten over the shock of it. What is it? Eighteen years? I don’t think I ever will. Every once in a while, I’ll look at my dad or my cousin Richie and I can see Mitch in the way they roll their eyes, in an unconscious gesture they make, some expression they use. Mitch and Frankie were my first loves. Unattainable, beyond me, as first loves should be. Lovers and teachers. I can never ever forget them until the day I also die. I still hear their words in my mind. Phrases. Comments. Jokes they told. I didn’t mind my mother’s death as much when that happened.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Tanya moans as we exit the bridge, ‘this traffic is a mess. I’m looking for what? The 101?’

  ‘The 101 South,’ I said. ‘Watch out. The road splits.’

  An hour later, we were headed back to Berkeley. Tanya meanwhile had been a mother whose first child is leaving home, probably for good: part mother hen, part resigned to it. Coming back she continued talking about Mitch and Frankie with such gusto and in such detail that I suggested she write up a memoir. To which she replied, ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I’d read it,’ I say. And she took my hand across the space between us and said, ‘He would have liked you. Mitch. He liked people who were direct and positive. Also’ – one eyebrow raised – ‘he would have liked your looks.’ She released my hand. ‘So who is it you’re searching for?’

  ‘Len Spurgeon. He’s mentioned three times in Mitch’s letters. Twice in 1981, then once in a long, unsent letter to Aaron Axenfeld a few years later.’

  ‘I remember that letter,’ Tanya said and her voice was suddenly much smaller. ‘I did call Mr. Axenfeld and ask if he’d ever received it. I suspected it would be a great bother to him to look for it …’

  I remembered Axenfeld talking to me about his Fibber McGee room of manuscripts. I’ll bet it was hard to locate.

  ‘I sent him the letter, finally. Didn’t get back a peep. That one really plays it close to the vest.’

  ‘I’ve found him to be both forthcoming and off-putting. But so far not gloomy.’

  ‘Gloomy Gus!’ we both said. Then Tanya was a little girl again. ‘Oooh ooh!’ She put out a crooked pinky and I did the same and we made a wish.

  ‘“World peace?” Mitch once asked about wishes,’ Tanya said, ‘“Or the ability to sustain an erection until death? That is the question!”’

  We laughed. Relaxed, I went on probing. ‘So, did Cummings or Fleming ever read that unsent letter?’

  ‘Possible but unlikely. They looked through the mess. The letters weren’t keyboarded then and by no means as closely indexed and filed when the two of them were working on their books. I’m still in process, actually. The two scholars concentrated on various years anyway. So … who was this Len Spurgeon, anyway?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. He was involved with Jeff Weber and Mark Dodge, sexually and romantically. Possibly with Etheridge and maybe even more of the Purple Circle. He was a major league baseball player a few years here in the Bay Area. Who knows what else? There may be a manuscript of his scattered among the Purples’ papers. You’ve not come across anything of Mitch’s that doesn’t fit or that might be part of Len Spurgeon’s story?’

  ‘No. But I’m not sure I have everything, you know.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but I thought I was also Uncle Frankie’s executor. I was surprised to discover I wasn’t. This guy … Camden Phoenix he calls himself … I’m not even clear what his relationship to Frankie was … Well, after Mitch died, everything of Frankie’s went to him. He’s been unfriendly, difficult to contact, he moves around a great deal, and seems not to be able to settle. Luckily, the collection got its hands on Frankie’s major stuff. And a lot of minor stuff too. Cost them plenty. I purposely held off Mitch’s stuff and kept my price low so Phoenix would sell as much as possible of Frankie’s papers. But he’s – I don’t even know how to describe him – only peripherally in literature, and who knows what he may still have. Or if any of it’s Mitch’s. He’s down near you, in one of the beach cities. Torrance? Manhattan Beach? At least, he was six months ago. Now, who knows?’ She paused. ‘So, this Len. Is his stuff any good?’

  ‘It’s autobiographical. And I’ve got two chunks. Don’t know what it is. But if he is a link among the Purples, you know, a personal link, then he might be a major influence.’

  ‘You mean in addition to the creation of gay literature as a genre, they also would share experiences with him?’

  ‘Intense experiences. For good or bad,’ I clarified. ‘Maybe Spurgeon’s Zelda to their nine F. Scott Fitzgeralds.’

  ‘Great thesis if it works!’ she admitted. Coming from someone in her position, it half amounted to a blessing.

  ‘That’s what Dr St George thinks.’

  She raised the eyebrow again. ‘Irian St George. Well, you don’t fool around, do you?’

  When we parted near the college a few blocks away from Telegraph Avenue, where I’d earlier, finally, located a parking spot. I felt we’d come close enough for us to hug. So did Tanya. She was as tall as I was. And almost as solid.

  ‘Next time I need moving help,’ she joked, ‘I’ll call.’

  I was at the door of my rented car when I realized she was walking back to me. ‘By the way, I got this e-mail from someone in your department. I thought maybe he knew you were up here seeing me and was trying to locate you. No message, really, only a name. He wants me to get back to him. Do you know who it is?’ She was looking in her pockets, and finally located a shred of pink paper. ‘Here it is.’

  All the paper held was the name Waterford Machado. And his e-mail address.

  What did he want? No way he’d know I was here. He was just trying to get at Tanya for his own reasons. Well, I’d put a stop to that. I took the paper from her hand and crumpled it up. ‘He’s no one important,’ I said. ‘In fact, he’s something of a crank. I’d avoid him in the future if he contacts you again.’

  We smiled and parted. But my stomach had already begun to turn as I got into the car seat, fastened the double seat belt, snapped on the air-bag buttons, turned off the anti-theft device and the electronic locator and finally was able to start the ignition.

  BOOK FIVE

  The Short, Happy, Posthumous Life of Cameron Powers III, Esq.

  The Capitoline air was streaked with invisible bars of heat and cold. Coolness flowed out of shadowed doorways, and at every transverse street the sun breathed down fiercely. It was like walking through the ghost of a zebra, he thought. Three beautiful young men passed him, talking and laughing together. Like laughing flowers, like deer, like little hor
ses. He smiled to himself thinking how deliriously he’d tricked them.

  Tricked them all.

  Cameron Powers,

  ‘Miss Thing’ and the ’41 Bugatti

  ‘OKAY, WE’VE DISCUSSED RACISM AND THE Civil War era and twentieth-century Southern American ideals and ideas, let’s move on to form. What’s the first thing you noticed when you read Faulkner’s Go Down Moses? Ms Tranh?’

  It was a gray misty morning, the night before the so-called ‘Coastal Eddy’ had dove deep into the Los Angeles basin, bringing along with its cold marine layer a heavier than usual summer-night-early-morning fog. Even more odd, it hadn’t yet dissipated by the time this class met at eleven a.m. I’d driven to work in mist, which thickened along Sunset Boulevard, turning into a real headlights-on-go-ten-miles-an-hour pea soup from the Beverly Hills Hotel on west. Two drivers hadn’t been respectful enough of how rapidly fog could sweep down the furling four-lane road at Stone Canyon. The vehicles were a twisted mass at the southwest corner of Beverly Glen Boulevard, which shouldn’t have affected the traffic on the other side going west, but of course did severely, as it allowed Angelenos to indulge in a favorite pastime: slowly driving by and completely checking out exactly what happened to the other guy’s car. Traffic flowed at the rate of old polenta. I just made it to the English Department office by minutes before class. Several students were evidently also caught in the traffic as they were late for class, filtering in for a half-hour, which let me notice that all the jocks were unusually garbed in light sweaters, sweatshirts, slacks and denims: very few tank tops and shorts.

  ‘The first thing I noticed,’ Kathy Tranh began in her precise alto voice, ‘was that the book is in seven unequal parts. And the second thing is that they aren’t exactly chapters, nor are they exactly independent stories.’

  ‘Good! Anyone else? Mr Rice? As there’s no louche sexuality in this volume, I trust you read it.’

  He’d come into the class on time, looking sleepy, his thick head of jet hair tousled, clothing seemingly thrown on, soiled, ripped denims, thong sandals, a parka-like shirt-sweater, as though he’d spent the night on the beach.

  ‘Well?’ I asked. ‘What did you notice about it?’

  ‘The same as Kathy did. It’s all in pieces. As though Faulkner didn’t mean for us to exactly figure out who all the characters were and what their relationships to each other were.’

  ‘That was exactly his intention. Anything else?’

  ‘Yeah. The time-frame of the book is all freaked out.’ Ray Rice uncharacteristically went on, ‘At the beginning Ike McCaslin is old. Faulkner says he’s almost eighty years old. But a few stories later he’s a young man. And in the middle of the book, in “The Bear”, he’s a boy. In another place he’s not yet born, and in another he’s already dead.’

  ‘You all read this book.’ I didn’t hide how astonished I was, and pleased. ‘Not only did you read it, but you seem to have understood what Faulkner was aiming for. Can anyone sum up Faulkner’s formal achievement here? Ms Agosian?’

  But it was Ray Rice who had his hand up and that was so extraordinary, I said, ‘Mr Rice? You have something else to offer?’

  ‘Time.’ He simply said. And for a moment I was thrown off kilter. Did he mean the time was up? I peeked a look at my watch. No, not yet. Then Rice spoke yet again. ‘Time’s Faulkner’s subject in this book. How flexible time can be depending upon where you happen to be standing relative to some particular incident or to some other person. That’s why it’s put together the way it is.’

  ‘I couldn’t have said it better than Mr Rice did. Let’s all recall that Albert Einstein’s world-shattering Special Theory of Relativity was new during the years Faulkner was a young man. The effect of that theory upon not only science but upon the philosophy and art of the era was profound. Every thinker, every writer of the period, was somewhat shaken. Ms Agosian?’

  Pamela had tied her golden tresses in a double braid and tossed it over one shoulder today. She was wearing a surprisingly deep-purple school sweatshirt, the first dark-colored piece of clothing I’d seen on her so far.

  ‘Wasn’t Einstein’s theory already in the air in the arts before he published it? I’m thinking of the work of Proust and his search for lost time?’

  ‘Yes. Henri Bergson, a French philosopher was writing about the subjectivity of time in France, as had Nietzsche in Germany a few decades earlier, and of course at this time Lyell in geology was coming up with his own theory of Deep Time to explain such major anomalies of nature as the Grand Canyon and the cliffs of Dover. Time as a theme becomes the pre-eminent subject of the most widely read authors of the first half of the twentieth century. How time flows, if indeed it does flow, if indeed it actually does exist, and if not then the question of how it actually does move and especially how it affects our lives.’

  ‘But –’ This time it was Ben-Torres amazing me by speaking for the first time aloud in class. ‘But don’t other writers do this before? I remember Miss Havisham, in that Dickens book Great Expectations. She’s lives at the moment the clock struck when she was left at the altar. She’s stuck in the past.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I agreed. ‘While the protagonist of that book, Pip, lives entirely in the future. In fact a future that will never become what he hopes.’

  Just then the bell rang and I looked at my watch. It had stopped. Now I could see why. The watch crystal appeared to be shattered and a small piece pushed in, touching the face, keeping the minute hand from moving. When had I done that? In my sleep? So, Ray Rice had been warning me about class time. I looked at him for confirmation. But his head of dark hair was angled down, as he searched through his backpack.

  ‘I want you all to think about this topic when you’re reading the next title on our list Black Elk Speaks. This book was published in 1929, at the same time as Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald were putting out their best-known work. Think about that fact for our next class.’

  As they were leaving the room, Kathy Tranh was at my desk. She looked around and then said, ‘We’re having this sort of birthday party for Pamela in a few days. Nothing big really, just a dinner at an inexpensive Thai place in Hollywood. We wondered if … well, you know, because I think Pamela would be pleased and we’d sort of like it too …’

  I kept waiting for the subject of her question. It was like hearing someone imperfectly speaking German, the many qualifications of noun and adverb waiting for the damned verb to arrive at the end of the sentence.

  ‘You’re inviting me, I take it?’

  ‘I mean, I know it’s unusual for students to … and all?’

  ‘Fine. Thanks. I’d be happy to. When? Where?’

  Surprise on her face, which would have been even more attractively Eurasian without the yellow-tinted dreadlocks and bubblegum-pink lipstick that was so trendy. ‘You’ll come? I didn’t think you would. Danielle said you would. Wow! Pam will be thrilled, I think. Well, okay then, day after tomorrow and …’ She pulled out a brightly neon-colored invitation with place and time on it for a ‘Pamelicious Birthday Dude and Dudettes Night’.

  She all but floated out of the classroom. Outside, the mist had broken very little. I was dreading another bumper to bumper drive home. Maybe I’d hang out in the faculty dining hall for a while. Or go to the Armand Hammer on Wilshire. A big photo show titled ‘Big Bad Fags, Tiny Sincere Dykes and Crazed Hetero Perverts’ opened last week: 1970s to 1990s artists, consisting of photos by those dethroned giants Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe, but with Joel Peter Witkin work I was dying to see.

  Out the English Department office windows, which unlike my classroom faced east, I could see the fog was almost totally shredded toward Hollywood and Downtown. It might last all day here. I could go home and work. The photos could wait.

  Irian St George had left a note in my mail-box telling me to drop by his office sometime today. I’d already tried to beard him in his den earlier, though I’d only had a few minutes before my class. He’d been in c
onference.

  We’d not spoken since I’d returned from my trip to the Bay Area, not since I’d come back with the second piece of ‘unknown’ manuscript in hand. He’d have a surprise coming his way. The new MS, Mark Dodge’s letter detailing his passion for Len Spurgeon, as well as Mitchell Leo’s never-sent letter to Aaron Axenfeld.

  All growing proof not only of the existence and importance of Len Spurgeon to the Purple Circle members, but also of something else, I wasn’t quite certain yet what. I had to remind myself I was way ahead of St George on all this material. He was still at the point where he thought the piece I’d discovered in Von Slyke’s papers could be his – an experiment, juvenilia. Or by another Purple. I knew he was secretly hoping its author was De Petrie.

  How could I forget St George’s wounded admission over our tofu burgers and quesadillas at Hamburger Hamlet: ‘He keeps things from me!’? Things, including, one had to assume from his tone of voice, manuscripts. It had been several years since De Petrie had published his memoir, Death and Art in Greenwich Village, a volume with such an autumnal, valedictory atmosphere to it, such a feeling not so much of ‘summing up’ as ‘letting go’, that I was by no means the only reader to feel it would be wiser to expect nothing more to emerge from De Petrie’s study while he lived. And with that foreboding, at least among my peers whenever we discussed De Petrie, was another, less definable feeling: a sense that the author was consciously holding back something. Some large, wondrous, absolutely crucial book that lay finished (perhaps long finished) in a library drawer, in a manuscript box long ago sealed and addressed to his agent or publisher. We didn’t say what form it would take, whether epic poem or Gothic novel trilogy – De Petrie seemed to master genre so easily, to throw off whatever he wished, whenever he wished, however he wished. But we had no doubt that whatever its form, it would be the book that would complete the great edifice he’d built – sometimes slapdashedly, sometimes carefully – over three decades; complete it, crown it and polish that crown with a flourish.