FIVE DAYS LATER. BACK ON MY AIR MATTRESS.
I should tell you a little about Jeff Kassabian, my friend of almost a decade, since we had brunch together on Sunday and he spun me the most preposterous yarn ever. This is part of what makes Jeff lovable, I suppose, but there was also something a little sad about it, given his current state of mind. It’s only natural for him to be lonely sometimes, but I wish he wouldn’t cope with it by weaving something rich and mysterious out of a perfectly conventional set of circumstances. Conventional for him, at any rate.
Jeff is a writer, about my age. He ekes out a living as an office temp, but his real energy goes into his work-in-progress, a rambling autobiographical novel about growing up gay and Armenian in the Central Valley. This is his second book. His first was about a Caucasian boy who falls in love with a Japanese boy at a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War. He won some sort of gay writing award for it and sold about two thousand copies. I went to his one and only book signing—at A Different Light in Silver Lake—and ended up behind the table with him, sipping white wine from a paper bag and flirting with his customers.
When I met Jeff at a video bar in West Hollywood, I knew next to nothing about homosexuality, though my nineteen years of being myself in Baker had prepared me thoroughly for the company of fags and dykes. I could sit on a beer crate in a gay bar and amuse myself for hours, drinking and laughing and doing ’Ludes, and never once feel like a Martian. The most beautiful boy starlets in town would duck to the floor to talk to me and say the most extraordinary things. All I can remember about that first meeting with Jeff was how elated I was when he referred to a good friend of his as a “size queen” and how long it took me to realize he wasn’t talking about a gay midget.
We’ve been buddies since then, off and on. Jeff’s most recent lover died of AIDS two years ago next October. Ned was an older guy in his mid-fifties, a no-nonsense sort of person and a real source of stability for Jeff, I think. Since his death, Jeff has become increasingly prone to creative remembering. I don’t mean that he lies; he just arranges the facts more artfully than anyone I’ve ever known. In life, as in his work, he’s not so much a writer as a rewriter, endlessly shuffling the facts to give them form and function. I’ve learned to take his memories, as well as his projections, with a few zillion grains of salt.
He called me that morning from his house in Silver Lake.
“Is it too late for brunch at Gloria’s?”
I asked him what was up.
“I’ve just had the strangest thing happen to me.”
“Oh, yeah?” I tried not to sound too jaded.
“I need your advice about it.”
“My advice?”
“You’re gonna love it, too, if it’s what I think. And if it’s not, we’ll have a nice lunch anyway.”
“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me now.”
“Of course not,” he said.
I knew Renee was heading into Beverly Hills on a forage for shoes, so I decided to bum a ride with her. I hadn’t seen Jeff for ages, and I was aching for a change of scenery, especially one that didn’t involve pounding the malls. I asked him if he could drive me home.
“Whenever you want.”
“Let’s do it, then.”
“Great. We can hang out at my house after brunch.”
“You aren’t gonna read to me, are you?”
He laughed at that, but a little uncomfortably, so I told him I was just kidding.
“I thought you enjoyed that,” he said.
“I did. I do. I said I was kidding.”
Well, mostly kidding. The last time we hung out at his house, he read to me at length from his autobiography. It was fairly interesting stuff, especially if you knew Jeff, but it went on about an hour too long. His sixth-grade seduction in the pea-sorting shed—or wherever it was—could have been trimmed by half. Plus he puts everything in the present tense, insisting that it sounds more literary. It may be, for all I know, but it can get sort of grating at times.
“Don’t worry,” Jeff said grumpily. “That wasn’t what I had in mind.”
“Now don’t make it sound like that. I’m your biggest fan. Aren’t I the one who called you the gay Saroyan?”
He grunted.
“I’ll give you your strokes at lunch,” I said breezily. “You’re buying, aren’t you?” There was more urgency in this question than I cared to betray. These days, every meal that isn’t a Cher shake counts as a major extravagance.
“Of course,” said Jeff, still a little pissed at me. “I invited you, didn’t I?”
Since it was to be a laid-back Silver Lake kind of Sunday, I wore an aqua T-shirt, dolling it up with a string of pop beads and my pink rhinestone silence-equals-death pin. When I’m not in costume or evening clothes, I’m almost always in T-shirts, since they’re comfortable and inexpensive and you can accessorize the hell out of them. For a while I used to belt them with various bright and spangled things, but I gave up the effort several years ago. When you’re built like I am, there’s not much point in pretending to have a waistline.
Renee was chirpy all the way through the canyon. She could hardly wait to buy oil paints, she said, because she’d been watching a guy on TV who showed you how to paint snowy peaks with Christmas trees on them, just by stubbing the brush against the canvas. He wasn’t that cute, she said—in fact, he was kind of old—but he had this deep, velvety voice that made you feel so calm, even if you weren’t painting. Already I have a creepy image of future nights at home: me on my pillow with this diary, and Renee at her easel, stubbing out snowy peaks in perpetuity under the weird spell of some bearded guy in a cardigan. She pumped me about Neil again too. She hasn’t asked me to negotiate a date with him, but I think she’s on the verge. I’d be more than happy to oblige, if Neil weren’t my employer and I didn’t know Renee as well as I do. Neil and I have a nice uncomplicated professional relationship, and I think it’s wise to keep it that way.
When we got to Gloria’s, I gave Renee directions to the nearest art supply store and sent her on her way, making my entrance on my own. The restaurant was packed, so I forged a path through a forest of legs, most of which were sheathed in the trousers du jour: those neon-print muscle pants that make gay boys look straight and vice versa. Halfway in, I made eye contact with a gap-toothed boy in peacock-green bicycle shorts. He smiled and said: “Hi, Cady,” so I smiled back, though I couldn’t place him. His groin hovered above me like a dirigible, iridescent as a butterfly’s wing in the morning light.
“Over here.” Jeff signaled me from a table. Behind him loomed a trellis of white bougainvillea, through which I could catch the angry blur of traffic on Sunset. “I brought you a pillow,” he said, lifting me into a chair.
“You didn’t.” It was a paisley pillow, wide and flat enough and suitably firm, exactly what I needed. I settled into it and rearranged my T-shirt, then surveyed the room. “Now I suppose you expect me to tell your fortune.”
Jeff chuckled.
I bounced a little on my new throne. “You brought this from home? Really?”
“Not far.”
“You’re sick.” I gave him a quick once-over, reacquainting myself with that generous, dark-eyed face, the slate-blue shadow on his jaw, even at noon. His eyelashes have always been his best feature, and somehow they seemed lusher than ever, as if in compensation for his thinning hair. He wore green corduroy slacks and a plain white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. If memory serves, that’s how he was dressed the night I met him at the Blue Parrot, so many years ago. It’s his uniform for being a writer.
“I ordered us margaritas,” he said.
I told him he could have mine, since I was on a diet.
“Have one.”
“Do I have to be drunk to hear this?”
He smiled. “No.”
“You look nice,” I told him.
“Thanks. You too.”
“So…if you’re not gonna read to me, I hope it’s about sex.”
He chuckled.
“Last night?”
He nodded.
“Was it bigger than a bread box?”
“Don’t jump ahead.”
“Tell,” I said. I folded my arms across my chest and waited.
“Well, I went running in Griffith Park yesterday afternoon. I parked in my regular lot and saw this kid leaning against a car.”
“Description, please.”
“Oh…about twenty, twenty-one. Sandy hair, dressed like he’d just come from a class at UCLA.”
“Cute?”
“Very.”
“Go on.”
“So I just headed up the path on my run, since that’s what I came there for…”
“Of course.”
“…and I ran for half an hour, nearly killed myself, and came back to the lot, and there was the kid, still leaning against his car.”
“Uh oh.”
“What?”
“He wasn’t a cop, was he?”
“No. Just be quiet and let me finish.”
“Sorry.”
“So I started to get in my car, and he sort of…you know, headed over toward me, and made this really clumsy effort at conversation. Sort of hesitant and scared, but completely charged with lust. It was the oddest thing, like stepping back in time somehow. He reminded me of me back when I was first trying to be a homo. It was touching, almost.”
I nodded. I wasn’t about to get smart with him while he was waxing rhapsodic.
“So I kind of took charge—like I wish somebody had done with me. I told him I had a place we could go to, and he knew what I meant, so he followed me back to my house in his car, and we had the most amazing sex. It wasn’t that exotic or anything, your basic vanilla, really, but he was so young and appreciative, and he kissed like an angel.”
I fanned myself with my napkin.
He laughed. “He had the prettiest dick, too.”
“Big?”
“Pretty, I said.”
“Did he stay for the night?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Did you read to him?”
“No,” he said flatly, “and fuck you.”
“Yes you did. You made that poor child listen to the next chapter.” I could see the whole thing: Jeff propped against the headboard, yellow legal pad in hand; the tangle-haired kid snuggled cozily, postcoitally, against his side. I could even hear Jeff laughing at his own jokes, sighing extravagantly at his own poignant prose.
He doled out his words slowly, ominously. “So help me…I am…never…ever…”
“Oh, lighten up. Are you gonna see him again?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “I gave him my number, but he wouldn’t give me his.”
“Where does he live, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was his name?”
“Bob, he said. But who knows?”
“Is that the whole story?”
“Not exactly. He took off this morning, early, while I was still asleep. He left a note on my dresser that said ‘Thanks, take care’ and just slipped out. I haven’t tricked like that for about a hundred years, and I felt so…I dunno…abandoned suddenly, dumb as that sounds. I thought we might go to a movie today or something. At least have breakfast.”
“Sure.”
“But…he was gone, so I made some coffee and worked on the book for a while and then walked down here to return a few videos that were overdue, and when I walked into the store, they had this big display for Mr. Woods. Have you seen that thing yet, by the way?”
I told him I’d heard about it.
“Well, it moves, you know, and it’s got a big picture of Mr. Woods and…the little boy. I couldn’t remember his name.”
“Callum Duff.”
“In the movie, I mean.”
“Oh…Jeremy.”
“Right. Of course.”
He seemed lost in thought for a moment, so I said: “And?”
“And…I just stood there, glued to the spot, having the weirdest feeling all of a sudden, because I realized it was him.”
“Realized who was him?”
“Bob, the guy I slept with last night.”
“Was who?”
“Was Callum Duff.”
I squinched up my face at him. I could grasp the concept, wiggly as it was; I just couldn’t pin it to the cardboard. “You mean he looked like him?”
“I think it was him, Cadence. He was just what the grownup would look like.”
“C’mon.”
“Well…”
“Callum lives in Maine,” I said.
“He does?”
“Yeah. For years.”
“Oh.” He looked terribly deflated.
“His parents took him home after we wrapped. Mr. Woods was the only movie he ever made. He came back for the Oscars, and that was it.”
I remembered that long-ago night of nights. Callum onstage with Sigourney Weaver, copresenting some boring technical award, the childish “damn” that tumbled from his lips when he flubbed a big word on the TelePrompTer. The whole world was captivated by the only moment of true spontaneity to arise from an otherwise packaged event. Callum left the stage to thunderous applause, those freckles converging in a blush you could see even on black-and-white TV. The town was his on a platter, but all he wanted was to go back home to Rockport, to see his friends again, to study hard and be a lawyer like his dad. Or so he told the press at the time.
Jeff just wouldn’t let it go. “Maybe he came back.”
“I think I would’ve heard,” I said gently.
“You still know him, you mean?”
“Well, no. Not anymore. But Leonard would’ve told me if he were back.”
“Who’s Leonard?”
“My agent. Leonard Lord.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“He’s Callum’s agent too. Or was. That’s how I got him. During Mr. Woods. I know I must’ve told you this.”
Jeff nodded listlessly, drained of his dream.
“The likeness was that strong, huh?”
“Maybe not,” he said.
“He sounds nice, though. The note was really sweet.”
“Yeah.”
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. This was the first guy he’d even told me about since Ned’s death. “It makes a great story,” I said feebly. “You should do something with it.”
Our margaritas arrived, so we ordered lunch—grilled chicken sandwich for him, fruit plate for me. To pull him out of his funk, I told him about my new job, leaning heavily on my cute boss to keep it interesting.
“Is this guy married?” Jeff asked.
I shook my head. “Divorced. With a seven-year-old kid. The kid lives in Tarzana with the ex-wife.”
“Mmm.”
“What does that mean?”
“Sounds like he’s ready, that’s all.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “He’s my boss, Jeff.” I could see how much he wanted to build a case for me and Neil, but I wasn’t about to let him. He’s already mythologized my sex life to the point of absurdity. It delights him no end to paint me as some rabid little horndog, humping her way around Tinseltown. I told him once that many little people are offended, much in the way that gay and black people are, by the commonly held notion that they’re oversexed. He wasn’t fazed a bit. He said he’d never considered that an insult and that I shouldn’t, either.
The fact remains: I’m no Jezebel. The last time I had sex with anybody was over five years ago. The guy’s name was Henry something, and he was an old friend of Jeff’s, someone he’d known at UC-Davis, visiting from Kentucky. He was sort of a hippie, skinny and goofy-looking, but nice enough. One afternoon at Jeff’s house, while Jeff was out shopping for dinner, Henry gave me a massage, using cedar oil he carried in an embossed leather case. When his fingers strayed accidentally—and how could they not, on this body?—I responded with a not-so-subtle moan of appreciation. After that we were off and running.
And, yes, penetration was achieved. I know that’s your first question, so let’s just get it out of the way. I’m a dwarf, remember, not a midget, which means that certain parts of me are closer to average size than others. That may be a little hard to picture, but trust me; I wouldn’t lie to you about this. At any rate, poor Henry seemed even more surprised than I was, fretting a lot afterwards about whether he’d taken advantage of me. I assured him he hadn’t, but he was a wreck for the rest of his visit.
The following December he wrote me a long, earnest Christmas card from Bowling Green, apparently to determine whether I’d been permanently traumatized by the experience. He hadn’t told Jeff about it, he said, and swore he never would, as if that would somehow protect my honor. Jeff already knew everything, of course, since I’d spilled the beans as soon as we dropped Henry off at the airport. Ever since then, Jeff has tended to exaggerate my sexual potential the way he exaggerates everything else.
While we’re on the subject: I haven’t had much luck with men my own size. There aren’t a lot of them, in the first place, and the ones I’ve met just haven’t turned me on. Mom tried on several occasions to fix me up with men she met at LPA meetings, but I found them ridiculously macho and unappealing. Some people would say that this apparent inability to eroticize my own kind reflects serious self-loathing on my part. Maybe they’re right. Or maybe I just like big guys. God knows, other women aren’t required to apologize for their taste in men.
For a while in the early eighties I did all right in the sex department. Nice men propositioned me in the weirdest places, and I became a sort of serial slut, though not without occasional misgivings. Sometimes, in my darkest moments, I wondered if they really wanted me, Cadence Roth, or were just being kinky. Then I realized how thoroughly I’d been victimized by the semantics of the larger world. If sex with a little person was kinky by its very definition, I had no choice but to embrace kink when it found me and be damned grateful for its existence. When long legs and big tits worked for other women, why shouldn’t my body work for me? And if the guy laughed with his buddies about it later and never called me again, I would cope with that too, like any other modern woman. It was a question of perception, I decided, and taking control of my own destiny.
These days, the pickings are pretty slim. My sex life revolves largely around Big Ed, an industrial-strength marital aid I bought at The Pleasure Chest last year. This marvelous device and a good Keanu Reeves movie have been known to make my evening while Renee is out on a date. Which, frankly, is one of the reasons I’m worried about her landscape-painting scheme, since it would mean a significant loss of privacy. I could always put a TV in my room, I guess, but Big Ed is about as quiet as a Stealth bomber.
After lunch Jeff insisted we stop by the video store so I could see the new Mr. Woods display, complete with moving arm on the beloved elf. He stared at the figure of Callum for a long time but made no attempt to resurrect his theory. He was still harboring it, though, I could tell.
“Why don’t we rent it?” he said.
I made a face.
“C’mon, why not?”
“Well, for starters, it doesn’t work on me.”
“When was the last time you watched it?”
“Three years ago,” I told him, “when Renee moved in.”
“Well, I haven’t seen it since it came out, and I’d love to see it with you. You can annotate.”
I groaned softly.
“It’s not about…that guy,” he said. “I’m over that.”
I told him it was the movie that bothered me.
“C’mon, then,” he said. “I’ll get you stoned.”
“Jeff.”
“Please…”
Note to the set designer:
Jeff is not overly concerned about his surroundings. The bungalow he rents up the hill from Gloria’s is painted a puky mustard color and is flaking badly. There’s a balding palm in the front yard and a row of ratty hollyhocks along the driveway. On this particular day an abandoned toilet greeted us rudely from the sidewalk, left there for pickup by one of the neighbors. (Angelenos, I figure, must renovate their bathrooms more often than anyone else in the world; you can’t turn a corner in this city without seeing somebody’s no-longer-stylish crapper sitting on the curb.)
Jeff justifies the house by seeing it as something out of Nathanael West, but that won’t cut it for the rest of us. If it weren’t for the wind chimes on the front porch and the rainbow flag serving as a curtain at the bedroom window, you’d think an ax murderer lived there. The inside is even worse: stacks of unread newspapers, dirty clothes everywhere, dozens of anemic houseplants pleading to be released from their misery.
Jeff rolled a joint and made a big pitcher of iced tea before we watched the movie. I hadn’t been high for months, so I got silly fast, giggling uncontrollably as soon as the credits rolled. Jeff shushed me like a librarian, totally consumed by the mission at hand. When Callum made his first appearance on the screen, pedaling his bike home from school, Jeff’s eyes narrowed in rapt concentration.
“What’s the verdict?” I asked.
“Who knows?” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
After that we talked only about my performance or the technical wizardry involved. As expected, I found it utterly impossible to surrender to the film. All it evoked for me was heat and boredom, the pulse of my own dead breath against wet rubber, the needling pinball sounds of the circuitry encasing my head. That heartrending sound track didn’t work on me, either, since I had lived in the core of the fantasy, the emotionless eye of the hurricane. I may be the only person in the world with a good reason not to feel something from that movie.
Toward the end, during the scene when Jeremy and Mr. Woods say goodbye, Jeff knelt before the VCR and froze the frame on a close-up of the boy’s face. I wondered what he was looking for. The color of the eyes? A particular expression? A telltale constellation of freckles? He just sat there, though, saying nothing, bathed in the pearly blue light of the box, his face in dramatic silhouette against Callum’s. I felt almost as if I were intruding.
“Maybe not,” he said finally.
I mourned his loss with a murmur.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Hey.”
“I could’ve sworn.”
“I’m just glad you got laid,” I said.
To do my bit, though, I called Leonard’s office first thing Monday morning. His secretary said he was in a meeting, so I asked her to have him call me “regarding Callum Duff,” knowing damn well he wouldn’t phone back if he thought it was just about me. He didn’t return the call until yesterday, and even then he sounded peeved that I’d managed to command his attention twice in the same month. I said I hated to bother him, but a friend of mine thought he’d seen Callum in town, and I’d appreciate his phone number if it was available.
Leonard said he had no such number. He hadn’t represented Callum for years, and as far as he knew, Callum was still attending “some college back East.”
I haven’t had the heart to tell Jeff.