FIVE DAYS SINCE THE BIG LUNCH, AND STILL NO WORD FROM ANYBODY.
Renee is back at work, so I’m rattling around alone in my suburban cage.
Jeff came by this morning, misery in quest of company. Three days ago, over a grimly efficient little dinner at Musso & Frank’s, he and Callum called it quits.
Jeff sprawled on the floor next to me and waved an obese joint in my face.
I rolled my eyes at him. “At ten o’clock in the morning?”
He looked at me blankly for a moment, then lit the joint with a Bic, sucking in smoke, holding it, letting it go, handing the joint to me. “You’d have an excellent point, if your period weren’t coming on.”
I gave him an irritated look, my slowest burn, then took a few tokes.
“I gather no one called,” he said.
I shook my head.
“What do you think that means?”
I told him I didn’t know anymore, and left it at that. I couldn’t put words to my darkest doubts. I’m prepared to face them like a big girl, but not yet, not officially. Part of me still hopes against hope that Leonard is just dragging his feet again. I’m small potatoes in his client stew, after all. He could be tied up in negotiations for someone more important than I, maybe even someone who’s wanted for the same musical.
“You know,” said Jeff, “I could call Callum and ask him what he knows.”
This threw me. “You parted that amicably?”
“Well, no. But I don’t mind calling.”
I told him that was sweet, but I wouldn’t think of imposing. Frankly, I was worried that Jeff’s failed romance might rub off on my fledgling deal, screwing it up for good. I wasn’t sure I could trust him to stay cool about it.
He took another toke, staring contemplatively at the ceiling, then pinched off the roach and deposited it in the pocket of his jeans jacket. “You know what pisses me off?”
“What?”
“Ned warned me about this. He described the whole thing.”
“Described what?”
He shrugged. “How it would feel.”
“How what would feel?”
“Sleeping with a movie star…a closet case.”
“Well, I guess Ned would know.”
“Too bad I wasn’t listening.”
“What did he say?”
“He said it could start a million different ways. But you always ended up feeling like a mistress.”
I studied his face to see how seriously he expected to be taken. “Is that how you feel?”
He nodded. “More or less.”
“Get any nice lingerie out of it?”
“Hell, no.” He laughed ruefully. “Nothing.”
“Well, fuck that.”
“Exactly.”
“When did Ned say this?”
“Right after we met. When he told me about living with Rock. I used to quote it to everybody for years, and then I met Callum, and the whole thing just flew out of my head.”
“Yeah, well…a pretty dick is like a melody.”
“Just shut up, OK?”
“OK.”
My docile response amazed him. “When did you get to be so easy?”
“Since you anesthetized me.”
Jeff smiled and was silent for a moment. Then he said: “You know…I never met anybody on that movie.”
“Really?”
“Not one soul. I never even met anyone he knew.”
I shook my head sympathetically.
“What was it like?” he asked. “You never told me.”
“The movie?”
“Yeah. Did it seem homophobic?”
I told him the killer seemed queer, but I didn’t see that much of it.
“They’re gonna picket it, you know.”
“Who?”
“GLAAD.”
I giggled. “The sandwich wrap people?”
He wasn’t amused. “The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“This shit’s gotta stop sometime.”
I asked him if he had plans to picket.
“I dunno. It’s too early to tell.”
I hate to admit it, but I was thinking about myself again, wondering if Jeff’s politics would alienate Leonard and if Leonard would take it out on me. “Does Callum know about the GLAAD protest?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s what started the last fight. I told him about it, and I said I thought it was valid. He said I was being a hothead just for the sake of it, because my lover had died and I had no place to vent my anger. So I told him I felt this way long before Ned died and that I was sick and tired of pricks like him who were willing to live a lie in exchange for stardom. He called me a fascist and accused me of trying to sabotage his career, and I told him so be it, if the career is corrupt to begin with. Why should I give a shit about a system that keeps insisting I don’t exist? This isn’t my fantasy.”
I flashed on that day in the commissary and Callum’s clumsy salacious remark about Bridget Fonda. “Do you think he might be bi?” I asked Jeff.
“Is that what he told you?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Well, he’s not, however he said it.”
I nodded.
“Trust me.”
I smiled at him faintly. “I do.”
“He is definitely a member of the greatest show on earth.”
“Too bad it wasn’t enough.”
“Well…there are all kinds of queers.”
“Mmm.”
“Just because you suck cock doesn’t mean you’re perfect.”
“That’s my motto.”
“I bet it is,” he said.
We both started giggling, rolling on the floor like puppies. Jeff’s seizure was more purgative, though, lasting longer than mine and playing itself out in a resonant sigh.
“You’ll get over it,” I told him.
“I know.”
“Did you leave him…or vice versa?”
He thought a moment. “Both, really.”
“How does that work?”
“Well…I told him it was over, and he looked relieved.”
“I see.”
“He looked very relieved.”
I hesitated before asking: “You think there’s somebody else?”
“Oh, hell no,” he said, and then thought about it and smirked. “Unless you count Billy Ivy.”
“Who’s that?”
“This porn star, a local kid. He plays college boys in skin flicks…wrestles in jockstraps, gets fucked with a tie on, that sort of thing.”
“Of course.”
“Callum’s obsessed with him. Back in Maine, he used to jerk off to him in Honcho. Then he moved back here and got the video, which, I swear, never left his VCR at the Chateau Marmont.”
“You watched it together?”
He nodded. “I got off on it the first time, but it turned into a real thing with Callum. After a while he never had sex with me at all without Billy Ivy’s preppie butt on the screen. It got to be almost insulting. Then one night Callum came to Silver Lake—the only time he ever did—and flipped through one of my Advocates and found out that Billy Ivy has his own eight hundred number for outcalls in L.A.”
“Phone sex, you mean?”
“No. The real thing. If you’re tired of his movies, you can call up and order him.”
I smiled at him. “You think Callum did?”
“I know he did. He says he didn’t, but he did.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It bothers me that he lied.”
“Nothing else?”
“No. I’m a sex-positive person.”
I gave him a dubious look.
“OK,” he said, “it bothers me a little.”
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t why we split, though. He just panicked because I told him he should come out.”
“Ah.”
“I didn’t bully him or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.”
“I was really gentle about it. I told him just to think it over…how much more peaceful he’d be, how much it would mean to millions of gay kids who’re still struggling with it.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t. The blood just drained out of his face, and he changed the subject.” Jeff traced a pattern on the carpet with his forefinger. “That was it. I became the enemy after that.”
He seemed so filled with sadness that I refrained from comment.
“You know,” he added, “I thought I could fix him.”
“Yeah.”
“My first mistake, right?”
“Maybe not.”
“Yeah. It was. Nothing ever changes here, and you can’t do shit about it. That kid is twenty years old, and he might as well be Rock in 1949. They just keep making ’em.”
“Someday it’ll change.”
“Right,” he said. “In the meantime, Ned would be laughing his ass off.” He stroked the carpet slowly, soothingly, as a form of punctuation. There were tears blurring his eyes, but whether they were for Callum or some dim, resurfacing memory of Ned was far beyond my powers of observation.