The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  ‘Hey, Per. There’s an orgy-sized hot tub over that way!’ Tappy directed

  ‘Perry! Will you give me a hand in the kitchen?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, Mastuh!’

  Kathy and Danielle found their way down the stairs and outside too.

  ‘Why don’t we stay here?’ Kathy suggested. ‘It’s warm enough outdoors.’

  ‘Mr Ohrenstedt?’ Tappy asked.

  ‘Oh, okay. I’ll go get the others.’ This way we wouldn’t have to troop everything upstairs.

  ‘I’ll go get them,’ Perry offered. Bowing repeatedly at me until I swatted him with a dish towel. I then laid it across one arm like a French waiter, and went out to where Kathy and Danielle had sat at the little table. ‘Zee kitchen, she is open! Your wish?’

  Pamela, I noticed, was still doing slow rotations, her Ginger Rogers being partnered now by Perry and the Samoan.

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ I asked her, ‘your order?’

  ‘Champagne,’ she added, ‘What else?’

  ‘Perry, I thought you were getting Ben-Torres and the others?’

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘Here we are!’ Ben-Torres announced from the kitchen doorway, looking out. With him, Ray Rice, Bev Grigio, and Pamela’s sisters. ‘Uh, we found a wet bar in the living room and helped ourselves. Is that okay?’

  So the party moved into the courtyard.

  Several people besides the linebacker turned out to be interested in the hot tub. And since I’d found the lights for its little niche area, they listened in disbelief as I told them that not only had I not used it, but that I didn’t even know how to use it.

  ‘You’re kidding?’ Tappy declared. ‘This is a babe-attractor supreme!’

  Someone had brought out the little kitchen radio tuner, some ’80s and ’90s oldies station was playing sequential cuts from REM’s ‘Automatic for the People’.

  ‘You press this button,’ Ray Rice showed me, ‘and the pump goes on. Voilà! Then this button and the heater for the hot water goes on.

  Instantly, it began to make noise.

  ‘Have to take the cover off,’ he continued to explain, all the while illustrating his words. ‘Otherwise you may harm yourself when entering.’

  ‘Don’t be such a jerk!’ Cheryl warned.

  The entire tub was now a seething mass of bubbling water. I tried it out with a hand. Still cool.

  ‘Takes a few minutes to warm up,’ Ray said.

  ‘Doesn’t it have to cleaned?’ I asked. ‘The water changed?’

  ‘The water circulates in and out of a filtered pump. It’s self-cleaning.’

  ‘We’ll need towels!’ One of Pamela’s sisters was saying. Tanya or Tonya, I didn’t remember which. ‘In the bedroom?’

  ‘You’re not going in?’ I asked in disbelief.

  ‘Sure am.’

  ‘Me too!’ her sister agreed. As did the Samoan, Ray Rice and Ben-Torres.

  So I had to show them to the two adjoining bedrooms and get them bath towels.

  ‘We’re going naked,’ the Samoan called to the girls in the other room.

  ‘We’re wearing bras and panties,’ one girl declared.

  ‘All right. All right. We’ll keep ours on too.’

  ‘Worse,’ Perry was saying in an exaggeratedly Belgravia accent, ‘than the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And we know what that unfortunate incident led to.’

  ‘Yeah! Hot tubs!’ Tanya Agosian responded. She led them out into the tub. The others followed. Soon there was a happily splashing party there too. When I left them to return to the fountain area, I thought I saw a couple being furtive under the vines of the pergola. Who was it? Oh, to hell with them, I thought. Let them have fun. I’m not playing house mother. I’m going to enjoy myself too.

  Despite the group and the possibilities, it all turned out to be pleasant and well behaved. Pamela found me in the kitchen. ‘Imagine living in a place like this,’ she enthused.

  ‘Actually I do. Or at any rate, I have been.’

  ‘It’s so … old Hollywood! You know? Not the fake new glitter and glamour.’

  ‘But instead, the fake old glitter and glamour?’ I asked.

  She laughed. ‘But it seems more real when it’s older.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’ she asked, sincerely now.

  ‘I suppose. I suppose that’s one of the things that attracts us to the past, to old houses, to classic movies and books. That they’ve somehow withstood the ravages of time and taste and fads and other human silliness. We all wrinkle and sag and get smaller or fatter, and they remain as they were. It’s a sort of perfection. Immortality.’ I caught myself. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to lecture. It’s just been on my mind a lot lately.’

  ‘Thanks a lot, Mr Ohrenstedt. This really crowns my birthday. Oh, and the book. A first edition! It’s fabulous.’

  She leaned over the counter to where I was cutting limes for drinks and bussed my cheek. Smelling of some unknown but musky perfume. For a second it seemed as though she might linger. Then that second was over and she was gone again, in a silvery bluegreen rustle of dress, like a prize carp slipping out of a seine.

  At about one o’clock, people began to leave. I was in the middle of a conversation with Cheryl Taylor and Michelle Tsieh about the early women’s movement, when I became aware of the general dispersal.

  Ten minutes later, I was standing at the circular driveway, watching the last Miata pull out through the gates, then all of them were gone. As I went back through the house, closing and locking doors and opened windows, picking up the odd gum wrapper and emptied glass, turning off lights, going from the living room to the library to the kitchen and courtyard, the place all seemed for the first time since I’d moved in not old and lovely and glamorous, but instead huge and empty and hollow. Friendless. As indeed I was.

  Lying on my bed in my undershorts, I thought about what we’d talked about at the restaurant earlier. The phenomenon of the ghost dance Black Elk had written about, that had swept the northern plains and Rocky Mountain river valleys so long ago. How they’d danced, hundreds of them, thousands of them, all night long, painted white, dressed in white. And how a century later, according to Jeff Weber and Mark Dodge and Axenfeld and De Petrie, thousands of gay men had crowded into dance clubs, also dressed all in white, at ‘White Parties’ celebrating their tribe, themselves, and what else? Their survival, their renascence. A brief one it had turned out to be. Scores of thousands of them dead by AIDS not long after. What must it have been like to be alive then? In 1985? In 1885? To have watched your tribal brothers die? To have watched your gay brothers die? This, I knew, was the key to the Purple Circle. They had not only written of the renascence, they’d not only lived through it, they’d then suffered and died of it, or suffered and survived a new massive die-off of their people: their lovers, their friends, their soulmates. Every one of their biographies therefore was a tragedy, no matter how ultimately triumphant it turned out. Tanya Cull at twenty-four losing her Uncle Mitch and today, decades later, crying, ‘How could this happen to me?’ Reuben Weatherbury’s wry, ironic smile as he told me how very much he had benefited through AIDS: how his entire career and life had been decided because HIV had stalked and claimed Cameron Powers, forever altering their two lives. Death dancing like a partner through all those lives, AIDS like the matching, twisting, other coil of a DNA chain. Dominic De Petrie telling me that the survival of his diaries containing the proof of his past was the worst blow of all. The triumph he had poeticized too soon, so soon over. The past a hot wire in the veins years later.

  Although I’d been exhausted only a few moments before, now I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t even remain flat on my back in bed. I was too restless, had to move around.

  I got up, thinking I’d get a light sedative from the bathroom cabinet. Instead I heard another sound in the garden. Not just the fountain, no, that was now ingrained in the diurnal and nocturnal sound-wave pattern of my life. No, another
sound.

  I searched for its source in the courtyard, but couldn’t … Wait! There it was! The hot tub! Still turned on. I almost shut it off when I thought, wait! Why not try it myself? It’s supposed to be better than a valium for relaxation. I dipped my hand in. It felt good. I dropped my undershorts and stepped in.

  Aaah! Perfect temperature. Perfect everything!

  I leaned back, looked up at the dusky satin-black of the post-mid-night Los Angeles sky through which one or two tiny flickers of starlight sparkled. And I sighed. Then I relaxed completely, chiding myself for never having done this before.

  I don’t know how long I lay there. It was a while, because I’d relaxed pretty completely. I may’ve even nodded off once or twice because suddenly I came to with a start and thought I’d heard an odd sort of gurgling in the surrounding foliage. I listened carefully. There it was again, from within the pergola. After a minute or so of listening, I recognized it as the call of a nightingale. Jug, jug, the poets had imitated it in their work: Keats, Shelley. But they’d either not gotten it accurately, or California nightingales sounded different than those in England and Italy. Or maybe it wasn’t a nightingale at all, but instead a nightjar. What in the hell was a nightjar? I’d have to go look it up in the library. That could wait till later. Right now I wanted to just softly ooze here. Like some sea slug. I was reminded of those incredibly hot vents that deep diving submersibles had located at the bottom of the ocean, boiling and bubbling away, thousands of miles deep in some ever-nightbound trench, surrounded by the most alien-looking life, great tube worms, eyeless bony fish, blinded crabs. Then I thought about Pamela Agosian in her shimmering-scaled fish-like dress tonight, twirling in the bluegreen light of the courtyard, iridescent and covered with fountain spray, twisting out of my arms and slithering outside. No wait, kissing me first, leaning over for that lightest of touches across my cheek, just long enough for the perfume she was wearing to permeate the air all around us in the kitchen, then slipping out of my grip … What the!

  I opened my eyes. Looked into the eye of what? A cat? Or … They were gone now, below the rim of the hot tub opposite me. Was I dreaming? Seeing things?

  With some difficulty, I stood up, moving toward the far end to look over the side of the hot tub.

  A figure leapt up at me from below and lifted me off my feet. What the!

  I fell back in the water, trying to grab at the wooden sides to regain balance and to keep from swallowing water. Suddenly someone or something else was in the tub with me. A pair of hands had my shoulders, and was holding me, half lifting me up, up, out of the water until I was almost on my feet. At the same time a head was sliding along my body, my torso as I rose. Now I could make out a dark head, a head of dark hair. A second later, I felt myself engulfed in warmth and another kind of wetness.

  I’d grabbed hold of both sides of the tub for balance. I let go of the right side and used that hand to jerk up the head to look at the face which had engulfed my penis.

  Ray Rice! I should have known!

  ‘How the hell did you get in?’ I tried sounding angry, not frightened. I was both.

  He released me with his lips, still held me with one hand, slowly pushing me back against and then right into the hot-tub seat.

  ‘I parked behind your car and waited, then jumped over the fence. In the garageway.’ He nodded toward the fence between the motor court and the garden. ‘Don’t be pissed. Anyway, you were already good and stiff before I decided to jump in. Looks like you could use some … C’mon, man, I’m stronger than you are. Might as well let me have what I want.’

  I held his head away. ‘What if I don’t want you to?’

  ‘I’ll do it anyway.’ He kept trying to get nearer me with his mouth. ‘Oh, you’re really mean!’ he said in another tone of voice. ‘I like mean men! Want me to beg for it, huh? Please, sir,’ he mewled. ‘More please, sir, please!’

  ‘If I do let you I’m just encouraging you,’ I argued.

  ‘Too late to discourage me. I’m already a dick sucker!’

  As we’d been talking, he’d managed to get my hand on his head off and now he grabbed at my other hand, the one holding the side of the hot tub. He pushed the two of them down into the water, and held them on either side of my body on the hot-tub seat.

  ‘Haah!’ he said in triumph. ‘Now I’ve got you where I want you.’

  I struggled. But he had me. I tried one last argument: ‘Technically, this could be considered rape, you know!’

  He ran the tip of his tongue alongside of it then looked up as though suddenly distracted. ‘Don’t give me any more ideas, Prof. Okay? I’m settling for dick tonight. Now you gonna get blown or what? Looks like Mr Pecker here is waiting for you to make up your mind. He already knows what he wants!’

  He was right. I felt betrayed by my body. Betrayed and angry. No matter. It seemed to have a life and wishes of its own.

  I didn’t answer. So Ray did what he wanted. I came. When he was done he let go of me and we got out of the hot tub. He climbed into his clothing and before I got out of the bathroom, where I’d gone to wash up with hot water and soap, he was vanished. I went back in and checked for any apparent damage, broken skin, bites, whatever. I found nothing. Now I really was exhausted. Even so I wondered if he’d return and make good his threat. All I could do was make sure all of the windows and doors were locked, although anyone with any strength could have forced them easily enough.

  I fell asleep surprisingly fast and slept surprisingly deeply.

  BOOK SIX

  The Secret of Rowland Etheridge

  What was needed, indeed what absolutely required if they were going to go on at all in any fashion whatsoever, was precisely that brand of honesty he’d spent most of his life eluding. He’d turned the aversion, the avoidance, almost into an art. A minor art, true; or was it merely a craft? Whichever it was, like so much he’d produced it had proven only strong and good enough to ensnare him all the more deeply within his own overweening sensibility.

  Rowland Etheridge,

  On Buzzard’s Bay

  MY LAPTOP’S E-MAIL HAD A MESSAGE from Tanya Cull. She must have left it overnight.

  This Machado person from UCLA keeps bugging me. Who is he anyway? What does he want? Is he really crazed?

  I’ve located Camden Phoenix’s address. You know, the executor and heir of Uncle Frankie McKewen’s estate? Camden moves around a lot, as I told you, but for some reason he always sends me a change of address. This one is 18820 Burbank Blvd. Encino, Ca. 91356. Do you know where it is? A colleague from your area says it’s in the San Fernando Valley. Not far from where you live.

  As I was saving that and looking through Von Slyke’s enormous leather-bound, laminated-page Thomas Guide to the city for the address Tanya had given me, my e-mail flasher came on, telling me I’d just received another piece of mail. I turned to this, hoping it might be Tanya, on-line, and I could warn her of Machado.

  What I read was:

  Mmmm. Slurp. Mmm. Yummmy. Yummy!

  What?

  I typed question marks in response. It was on-line and I got back:

  Mmm! Slurp! Mmm! More please, sir!

  Damn that Ray Rice! How did he get my e-mail address? Probably lied to someone at UCLA for it. Bastard. I typed back:

  Pop quiz tomorrow on everything we read so far!

  And got no smartass answer in return. Show him who’s boss!

  The phone rang and for a second I thought it might be Ray in person. I was letting the machine pick it up when I interfered and grabbed it myself.

  ‘Oh?’ A surprised answer to my rather vehement hello. Then,

  ‘This is … umm. Umm … is this Ross Oh … ren …’

  ‘Ohrenstedt.’ I said. Not Ray but a stranger. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Yes … umm. Ummm … well I’m not sure how to begin.’

  ‘Why not tell me who you are?’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes … umm. Ummm … okay, you won’t know who I am.’
<
br />   ‘Try me.’

  ‘Ummm … ummmm … Chris … tian … To … ber … mann!’

  The last almost spit out. Funny accent too. Unplaceable.

  ‘I hope you won’t be too disappointed,’ I said. ‘But I do know who you are. You are, rather, were – Rowland Etheridge’s life partner.’

  ‘Why that’s rr-rrr-right!’ he sputtered. So he had a stammer.

  ‘How can I help you, Mr Tobermann?’

  ‘Well … ummm. Ummm … Aaron … Axenfeld … he told me that maybe I could help you.’

  ‘Did he? Did Mr Axenfeld tell you that I’m writing my doctoral thesis on the Purple Circle, and that I’m trying to locate the author of certain fragments? Or those fragments themselves?’

  ‘Why, yes … ummm. Ummm … he said maybe I’ve got some … umm. Ummmm you know, among Rowland’s pages and things. Ummm … he said you might want to come look for yourself.’

  ‘I would. Very much so. Thanks. When is convenient?’

  ‘Anytime … umm. Ummm … I don’t work. I’m here a lot.’

  At which point I wondered if he were Australian.

  ‘Mr Axenfeld told you I’d found other fragments. Maybe you’ve got copies. Should I fax them to check if you may have doubles?’

  ‘Umm … no fax.’ Nervously said.

  ‘E-mail?’ I tried. ‘On-line chat?’

  ‘Umm … umm.’ Very agitated now. ‘Nn-o. Nn-one of that! You can drive up. It’s not too far.’

  Three and a half to four hours by car, actually, it would turn out to be. A small beach town just south of San Simeon. He stammered out directions too. Simple ones they seemed to be. Luckily they’d turn out to be. And he really was so insistent that was the only way, I agreed to drive up on Friday.

  Again I checked my e-mail. Then sent back a message to Tanya Cull:

  I’ve found fragment #3 – of Len’s work? It’s terrific.

  I’m seeing Etheridge’s lover. Maybe he’ll have more.

  Thanks for the address. It’s not far away. As for Machado. You’re a big girl now. Do whatever you think. But I’d avoid him.