The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

‘You must think me both impertinent and very vain.’

  ‘Not impertinent. And as you’re very handsome, vanity seems only natural. If you weren’t vain, I’d think you weren’t being forthright. But if you were even more vain, well, then you’d even more resemble him!’

  He closed the oversized umbrella, gathered the beach gear, and, ignoring my offers of assistance, stowed it under one arm while we trod back though the sands. All but the magazine was abandoned upon the backyard flagstones. We went to the front of the house, where he looked over my rented car.

  ‘Dom said he knew I’d been irretrievably suburbanized when I began checking out people’s cars,’ Axenfeld half snorted as he laughed at himself. ‘And worse, when I began talking about them. This is a Tiburon convertible? That midnight-purple paint!’

  ‘At night, it looks almost black.’ I repeated what the youth at the airport car rental desk had told me.

  Axenfeld gathered mail from the post box and threw it onto an already mail-strewn telephone table in the foyer. Indoors the house was as middlebrow as out, overfurnished with forty-year-old living-and dining-room ‘sets’ his parents evidently purchased, which he’d done much in the way of wood care to keep up.

  ‘Why not get your bags?’ Axenfeld suggested. ‘You’re staying over, of course. Don’t protest. I’ve got extra room and you can’t stay in any of the local fleabags. My cooking is drab, but you’ll survive.’

  The dining-room table was covered with folders of what looked to be official papers. He pushed them into two neat files, brushing the table surface. I was made to sit while he served lemonade out of a classic Kool Aid carafe into tall glasses. He put plates, a bowlful of taut-skinned Valencia oranges and a salver of store-bought pecan sandies upon a paper napkin.

  I found I was hungry and thirsty. I wolfed down the cookies and drank the lemonade like someone left to die in the Gobi. I was smearily eating the juice-spurting orange, trying without success to keep my face from being a mess, aware that by making myself look unkempt I was making myself younger and more vulnerable, hoping to bring down Axenfeld’s guard, when he suddenly said, ‘This reminds me of that telling scene about Potiphar’s wife from Thomas Mann’s Joseph tetralogy. You don’t know it? It’s marvelous. She invites over for an afternoon party the cream of Egyptian high-society women. They disdain her because by now her admiration for the young Hebrew slave Joseph has become the very essence of court gossip. Yet because of her husband’s position and power, they daren’t refuse her invitation. While they are sitting around the garden, she has the beautiful Joseph in his scantiest outfit go to each of the women, serving ripe fruit and sharp little knives. In minutes all the distracted women are cut and bleeding. When they hold out their lacerated fingers and mutilated hands complaining to Potiphar’s wife, she sends them home, saying, ‘Now perhaps you’ll understand how I bleed every day of my unhappy life.’

  We were both silent. I said something stupid like, ‘Wonderful!’

  He seemed to ignore me, then uttered, as though alone in the room, speaking to himself, ‘Joseph may be the first man in the Old Testament to be called beautiful. I wonder what the original word is? For that matter, he’s the first person in history or literature to be called beautiful. We don’t have a clue what Adam looked like, or Gilgamesh or Noah, or Abraham and Isaac. Never mind the women. We’re not told that Joseph’s mother, Rachel, was beautiful, only that Jacob loved her much more than Leah and took fourteen years’ servitude to win her. We assume she was beautiful because her son was. I don’t think women are called beautiful in the Bible – or indeed in literature – until after the beauty of men has been established. Is Bathsheba the first? In the story of David? Possibly. In Homer, there are few beautiful mortal women. Helen. Not Andromache or even Penelope. While most of the men are, including the dishonorable and deceitful ones, all ‘godlike’, i.e. hunks. So the question is, what happened to consciousness around 1500 bce that people began to discriminate in terms of comeliness? And why were men recognized first as being good-looking?’

  ‘Perhaps because women were considered inferior.’

  ‘Yes. But you see this is such a change of awareness that it must go beyond mere social standards.’

  ‘Maybe the women were veiled. As they are in the Middle East today.’

  ‘That could be it,’ he agreed. ‘It still doesn’t explain …’

  ‘Maybe people became better-looking. Maybe because of the agricultural revolution they were able to settle down, live more comfortably, eat meat and milk and bread more regularly. Even nomads would benefit via trade. As a result, they’d get larger, more muscular, have better complexions. Literally look better.’

  ‘Aren’t you clever!’ he said. ‘That must be it!’

  We returned to munching oranges and pecan sandies. At last, I ventured, ‘By the way, I’m expecting a long fax. I asked to have it sent here. I hope I wasn’t presumptuous.’ When he said no, and his intelligent gray eyes slid left toward the window, as though it were no concern of his, I felt compelled to add, ‘The fax is from Camden Phoenix.’

  His ears perked up. ‘The young fellow who spoke at Frankie’s memorial?’

  ‘Frankie’s boyfriend. Only not young anymore. Still in pretty good shape.’ I went on to speak of him a bit more, looking for any sign of Axenfeld’s interest. When none seemed forthcoming, I added, ‘The fax I’m expecting is a large fragment of the Len Spurgeon work. Or at least I’m hoping that’s what it will prove to be.’ Still nothing. ‘You weren’t able to find anything else here? In your Fibber McGee room? Not that I don’t appreciate “The Flamingos”, of course.’

  ‘I haven’t looked,’ he admitted.

  The phone rang, saving us from ensuing awkwardness.

  Axenfeld took it and dragged it via its long cord into a far room so I couldn’t hear him. I looked around. Clerestory windows above the longest dining-room wall and part of the parlor-room wall let in dappled sunlight, I supposed from the attached sunporch I’d noticed when I headed to the beach. Axenfeld was back, previous blankness replaced by minor irritation.

  ‘My up the street neighbor. Actually a fairly nice man. I swear, these queens who try to be do-it-your-selfers! I’m always bailing him out of one fix or another.’

  ‘You think I’m out of my mind, don’t you?’ I asked him. ‘Chasing after all of this material.’

  Axenfeld’s mouth fell open and he stared at me. This was the visual correlative to his long phone silences.

  ‘You probably think I have no life myself and I’m trying to live through the members of the Purple Circle,’ I went on.

  ‘Why would you choose to do that? The real question, one I never get, although patient Dame and Dom often try to explain, is why anyone would spend that much time on our stupid gatherings of so long ago. On us.’

  ‘We’re scholars. We study great writers of the past.’

  A sudden intake of breath through his nearly closed teeth.

  ‘Of the present too,’ I added. ‘But it’s accomplishments in the past, your solid achievements, that make it viable.’

  ‘But you see, dear boy, that’s precisely where I run headlong into the wall of your assumption. It’s not as though we consciously set out to do anything. We were just writing what we could and …’

  ‘I don’t mean to contradict you, Mr Axenfeld. But facts defy that. It’s precisely because you, out of many other homosexual writers, actually did set out to do something organized and with goals that we do study you. Perhaps you, yourself, weren’t particularly activist, but others most definitely were. That letter of Mr De Petrie to Mark Dodge after the vicious Washington Post Book World review of Von Slyke’s Instigations, for example, where he quotes Benjamin Franklin, saying, “We must all hang together, or we will certainly all be hanged separately.” If that isn’t a conscious act of revolution, what is?’ Before he could respond, I went on, ‘You did all hang together. You and Dodge, and De Petrie and Rowland Etheridge signed a letter of protest to the paper. F
ollowed it up with attacks on literary homophobia in a half-dozen mainstream and gay magazines and newspapers. That concerted action does constitute a movement. The way you came together at conferences and began giving bookstore readings all over the country. No one had read fiction since the Beats. You were the first in decades.’ He’d begun to say something, but I held him back. ‘The proof of your activism is that you inspired others to emulate you and attack you. People saw you as a group with a point of focus. Straights, closeted gays and open gays. They recognized you nine as an active, often an effective force.’

  ‘All that may be so. It doesn’t count if the work isn’t good.’ As soon as he said it, Axenfeld closed his mouth. ‘I didn’t mean to sound immodest.’

  ‘That’s just it, the work was good. Not all. But enough to still be in print decades later, when most of your contemporaries are kaput, bibliographic history. It’s the love of those books that drives us. I won’t embarrass you personally, but if Instigations and Keep Frozen and The Adventures of Marty aren’t masterpieces, then no books of the past fifty years are. That’s what pulls in people like me in the first place. We stick around hoping to learn more, to find out what’s hidden. In my own case, not only what but also who may have been inadvertently hidden.’

  ‘Your theorem, if I have it correct, is what? That Len Spurgeon was someone who has been hidden. Someone important? Crucial?’

  ‘Is your character Laurence Grace in From the Icelandic Len Spurgeon?’ I asked. ‘Based on him? Something like him? A homage to him?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue how to answer that,’ Axenfeld said.

  ‘That’s why I’m here. To find out for myself. Not because you’re consciously hiding the fact. But because you may not know. Mr Von Slyke does know. Bobbie Bonaventura and Thomas Dodge and a few others do know Len was crucial to their particular Purple Circle member’s life. They may not understand how exactly. They may be way off …’

  He considered. ‘I’ll grant you Len never stepped into a room but he didn’t cause some kind of stir … Unless he chose not to.’ Axenfeld stood. ‘For the rest … I don’t know. I’d better get over to McCadden’s. Let me show you your room.’

  He walked me into an L-shaped corridor. One open door led to a television room, five closed doors he said were his bedroom, a bath, two linen closets, and the room in which I would sleep. I joined him outside. While I pulled my bag and laptop out of the car trunk, he fooled around with a large toolchest and cabinet on one side of the carport. He put on a beaked painter’s cap, industrial-looking gloves, and was wielding a handful of wrenches when he called out that I should make myself comfortable. He loped down the path toward his neighbor’s house.

  I went in, dropped my bags on the bed. I was alone in Axenfeld’s house.

  I was alone in Axenfeld’s house. Alone for how long I couldn’t tell. I opened my bag, hung a few pieces of my clothing in the closet, put away a few pieces in the drawer he’d marked with a yellow Post-it note saying ‘Use these’. It was warm and muggy, so I put on shorts and a guinea-T.

  The bedroom doubtless had originally been master bedroom in the house, where Axenfeld’s father lay ill many months, where before that his mother and father had slept. The furniture was blond, of some wood I couldn’t determine; the bed covering a finely made aged chenille, yellow-white like clotted cream, with a beigebrown, lightweight, waffle-weave blanket beneath it, and faded canary yellow sheets in a rose and thorn pattern. A blond-wood armchair and small bedtable gave a surprising amount of space, so unlike the overfurnished outer rooms I was convinced others once jostled each other on these ecru tile floors but had been removed after one, maybe the second parent’s death. The small woodenframed watercolors hung on wood paneling seemed a smidgen more accomplished than amateur, but not by much. Possibly done by a relative or friend of the family. They hadn’t been hung to compete with the many-hued blue-green prospect of the gulf waters through the triptych of windows opposite the double bed.

  Framed photos of Axenfeld’s parents, separate and together, existed, deep within shelves of the commanding dining-room cabinet. Among them were photos of young Aaron receiving confirmation, young Aaron graduating from high school and college, and a slightly older Aaron with two female friends, all three in beach togs, wielding oars twice as tall as they, joshing next to a beached canoe at what might have been a prelude to a clambake. Another snapshot of prom night instantly dated Axenfeld by fashions of formal wear and haircuts. It also signaled the viewer that he and the red-haired girl in pale blue chiffon were pals not sweethearts, friends who shared books, music, even crushes on class jocks. The photos contained no other young men, no siblings; though there were a few older women who might be aunts. I could only find one photo of Axenfeld Senior solo, out of doors, in the stern of an outboard fishing yacht, half standing at a chair-like console, wrangling some off-camara colossal fish. The Axenfelds had been a small, tight-knit family.

  Where was his Fibber McGee room? The television room/study was more sparsely furnished than the master bedroom. The only other room in the house was Axenfeld’s bedroom. I stood on the door sill, disinclined to enter, peering in; the same blond-wood furnishings. The bed was a single with yellow-green curtains, peppermint-creme chenille spread, a motley of darker greens in an oval rag rug. One chiffonier’s mirror was blocked from reflection by tiers of books stacked in front of its glass, most oversized paperbacks, a small number of hardcover biographies. Was this Axenfeld’s entire library? I didn’t find a doorway leading to a downstairs. Few Florida homes possessed basements, never mind cottages on islands. I did locate the furnace and air-conditioning units behind a clever swing-out cupboard built into the larger linen closet. Could the Fibber McGee room be outside? Beyond the carport? Behind that plywood toolshed kept secured by a giant padlock?

  I had another worry. Where in the hell were the promised pages from Camden Phoenix? The money had been wired to his bank account yesterday. What if he didn’t send them? What if he stiffed me? What would be my recourse? Did I have anything legal to stand on? My brother-in-law Bart Vanuzzi would know. But even though he was less than an hour away on the mainland, in a team-owned condo somewhere in North Fort Myers, and I had his phone number, I was reluctant to use it unless I absolutely had to, despite what my sister said about how much he respected me.

  I checked Axenfeld’s quiescent fax machine once again, then thought the hell with it, grabbed the beachiest-looking large towel I could find and a few magazines I’d retrieved from atop the old Trinitron, changed into my bathing suit and headed out to soak up rays. The light was strong, despite the sun’s descending angle, but ameliorating gulf breezes seemed concentrated upon a square yard of flagstones directly in front of the louvered sunroom, so that’s where I settled, in the half-chair Axenfeld used on the beach earlier. After a while, the combination of hot sun and cooling breeze was so seductive, I dropped my magazine and simply stared, gape-mouthed ahead.

  Of all the Purple Circle members, Aaron Axenfeld remained the most enigmatic, his life, even his work, mysterious. Yet, when one investigated what was written about the group, it was all there: his ordinary origins, his humdrum central Ohio upbringing, his unremarkable early life, except perhaps for a certain curiosity about other people’s more gratifying life stories which led him briefly, unspectacularly, to become cub reporter for his high-school newspaper, dabbling in interviews of senior classmates. His reliable though not top-notch grades and these extracurricular activities probably conspired with his father’s high income in getting him accepted into an Ivy League college. He passed an undistinguished four years, stamped only by his late, sudden preoccupation with the college’s mediocre literary quarterly, for which he began to write fiction and non-fiction, and which he ended up editing in his senior year, thereby elevating both it and its on-campus reputation. Despite this marked literary interest, and despite his acceptance at the Iowa Writers’ School, Axenfeld remained at the college and the following year entered a pre-med course,
and the following year the first year of medical school. He remained barely a year. While he didn’t exactly flunk out, he did leave with less than stellar grades and it was evident he’d found the course unsympathetic, his professors and fellow students too vulgarly competitive for his own unassuming tastes and manner.

  Axenfeld next surfaced a decade later, laboring for the midtown insurance firm within which he’d early on located a well-sheltered niche where he might lick his wounds after his flight from medical school. Of all the Purple Circle scholars, Fleming delved most into this prolonged occupation, yet even he failed to bring forth much beyond the mundane. The job supplied Axenfeld with enough income to live comfortably, sharing a small apartment south of Murray Hill. Presumably, his salary rose by larger increments over those years than his controlled rent so he could take vacations, as well as joining those earliest of all-gay-owned private dance clubs in Lower Manhattan and regularly frequenting the local gay bathhouses. The latter two sites became the focus of three seasons of his urban life. As his income rose, Axenfeld also began to assemble with other young men sharing summer-long beach houses at Fire Island Pines. Along with the baths and discos, this became not only the social center of his life but also the locus around which he would inscribe the life of all the characters in his startlingly successful first published novel.

  Weatherbury, in his intro to the first Reader, characterized Axenfeld’s 1978 novel, Second Star from the Right, as ‘a comet in the literary firmament, totally unheralded, brilliantly generative, astonishingly liberating to an entire generation in its effect’. The book, with its delightfully high style and its detailed depiction of life in the brand-new mid-1970s gay ‘fast lane’ of discotheques and bathhouses, beach resorts and penthouse parties, theatre openings and vernissages, received a highly unusual auspicious review in the Sunday Times book supplement. This in an era where the more standard procedure for that ambivalent review organ was to hire closeted gay writers to rough up any book daring enough to be positively gay-themed. Before this remarkable review, however, both Mark Dodge and Dominic De Petrie had already befriended the first-time author. They’d received bound galleys for pre-publication quotes, read the explosive new novel and highly endorsed it. Within weeks, the two had introduced him to their own literary circles, which by that time already included Rowland Etheridge and Jeff Weber.