24

I ran into Paul at the top of the stairs leaving the library and heading to the sundeck.

“Join me, man.”

I should not have feared any tension from the intimate night. It was as if it had not happened.

On the sundeck, he went to the bar to fix what would become standard sunning drinks: Cuba libres, ice jiggling in the glasses, frosting them, a sliver of lime perching on each rim. We sat at the bar, under the shade of the canopy, our legs touching, retreating, pressed against each other’s, warm, moist, heated by the sun, darkened brown.

Immediately he launched into a tirade, periodically pausing to savor the cold drink, clinking the ice as if in accompaniment to his racing monologue, and quickly moving on, an entangled web of ideas, abruptly taking form. Curt dismissal of writers he didn’t admire—including some I had mentioned favorably—followed by breathless homages to those he approved of, and arrogant declamations about how I must expand my influences beyond American writers; declamations and denunciations of psychoanalysts, whom he loathed: “They destroy all that might be beautiful—blurring with platitudes the essential considerations of the enigma of evil,” that word “evil” recurring as if floating unattached in his mind, seeking a definite context, then abandoned, just a word. “Evil.” Although I often disagreed with his conclusions and deductions, I seldom interjected my contradictions, fascinated by the jumble of ideas, questions, and suppositions. Increasingly he returned to this: his interrogation about my “sexual life on the streets.” Yet, often, he interrupted himself to launch into one of his long declamations of his beliefs—random at times, illogical, at times contradictory, at times brilliant, at times incomprehensible. Even when he asked a question, he might tumble over an attempted answer himself and resume his litany. He seemed to become high on the flow of his own words, and then he would return to this:

“When you were in what you call a sexual arena—and I like that, man, a battle, a war—when you were in it, how many sexual conquests did you achieve? How many, in one day?” He was speaking fast, as if to gauge it all quickly. “Did you set a goal, for a record?—or did it just compound like in your geometric equation that finally coils about itself, or is it the algebraic one? How many conquests in one day, man, in the arena?”

“Thirty, in one day.”

“Ah.”

In my early teens I had worked as a copyboy with the city newspaper. The number 30 was penciled at the bottom of a news story to indicate the end. In Griffith Park in Los Angeles, a huge park in the heart of the city, a park famous as a “sexual playground” where men gathered for sex along long trails, miles of roads for driving from one place of encounter to another, sex everywhere, in pairs or orgiastic groups, in that park, one day, I set my goal at thirty; but when that was achieved, it was not enough; I needed more victories, more conquests, more “numbers.”

“You came thirty times?” he asked me, sipping from the rum drink.

I laughed. “I don’t think even you could come thirty times, man. I didn’t come at all, just moved from one person to another, being desired, counting.”

“You didn’t respond? Never reciprocated? You were trade.”

I wasn’t surprised he knew the word “trade.” He was seeking—demanding—indifference, and it had been there in my experiences.

“You never desired the other, right?”

“If I did, I pretended not to, in order to retain my pose of indifference. It was a pose I cultivated.”

“Desire depletes—even showing it depletes? Yes! Nothing is more weakening than to desire; yes, I see that, man, I see. All that mattered was your needs, only yours.”

As it had been for him, that night with the two women—was he making that connection?

The heat had abated as we sat on the deck drinking chilled wine Paul had opened during dinner. We had left the sundeck and had shifted from the Cuba libres to the white wine he had chosen. Sonya had been unusually restless, perhaps because, earlier, when she had found me and Paul on the sundeck in deep conversation, she had felt left out when Paul went silent.

“I’m going swimming,” she had said after dinner.

“This late, Sonya?” I asked, concerned.

“Yes.”

“And during those compounded encounters, you felt …?” Paul proceeded.

“Alive while it was all happening—” I started.

“The rush of conquest,” he interrupted, “the exhilarating humiliation of the conquered. Desire drains the power to humiliate.”

“—and I felt dead when it was over,” I finished over his words.

“Alive—dead?” He seemed to be deducing something relevant to himself.

“And sad,” I added.

“Sad!” He turned sideways, as if dismissing the compromising word.

“Yes, feeling at times that I had been cruel—”

“Cruel!”

“Yes, cruel in intimate encounters, from one to another, my partners forgotten, encounters in which I was the only one desired, leaving the other feeling … erased.” Like him, yes; was he listening? The verbalizing of my feelings surprised me. I had not felt that during the sexhunt; those feelings had emerged only now, belated feelings, but I didn’t tell Paul that.

“But, man, before you had sex, did you convey your terms?”

“Yes.” I knew what was coming, which is what he said:

“Willing victims, man, willing victims,” he drew his desired connection.

This was not the time to reject his disturbing deduction; there was more to explore of myself. “Why does all this fascinate you?” I asked him.

He leaned toward me, to add emphasis: “Parallels. Parallels between us, between our lives! Yours and mine. We’re two of a kind, man,” he said.

Whatever else I might feel for him, I did not admire his life, through which coursed a vein of meanness, of unmitigated selfishness, and cruelty. Had such a vein coursed through my own life? I had to reject it. “I don’t think so, Paul, I don’t think we’re two of a kind.”

“Oh, no?” His words, his smile—a startling assumption of knowledgeability about me, his bold stare at me, held along with the goddamned smile—made me turn away.

And then, in a wave of anger, what should have occurred to me much earlier (the answer to the question that I had asked myself over and over about his motivation for inviting me here)—even as I supplied answers that I swept away—was this: He had invited me here, fired up by my narratives of excess—the orgiastic profusion of Mardi Gras amid laughing demonic angels, fleeting intimate connections, indifferent excess—and he, Paul, was fired up too by my accounts of vagrant sexual interludes in downtown Los Angeles in the arena of doomed exiles on the very edge with nothing to lose, rage to exist—asserting from all that the parallels he had drawn (I turned to face him)—and believing that through kindred knowledge, as he saw it, I would set down the facts of his sordid life, connected to my own, juxtaposed—”two of a kind”—much of his life already delivered to me in “chapters,” to be transcribed and reimagined (“by a young writer, his first book”); and along the way—this frightened me—as he explored his life, and as I set it down in intimate detail, I would discover mine, more vividly recalled than when it had occurred, coldly, indifferently, uncaring, cruel—cruel like a sudden memory among others.

(In a bar in Hollywood:

(The man, in his early thirties, ordinary looking, has been buying me drinks, bourbon and water, which I dislike but which at the time seemed an appropriate drink for my pose.

(“Are you hustling?” he asks me, tentatively.

(Not exactly a hustling bar like the ones downtown, but one that provides such a contact occasionally.

(I’ve “read” this man. He doesn’t want a hustler; but, for me, it’s late. I don’t want to go downtown. I had no car—I often hitchhiked and, often, scored that way.

(“No, man.” I say what he wants to hear.

(“Oh, good,” he says. “I don’t need to pay for sex, you know?”

(“You don’t have to.” I tell him what he fished for. “I’m just looking for a good time.”

(“Well …”

(“You got a place, man?”

(“Yes,” he answers eagerly, uncertain. “You want …?”

(“You have a car?”

(“Yes, but we don’t need one. I live just a couple of blocks away.”

(“Let’s go.”

(His house: a neat, careful house in West Hollywood, which is turning into a “gay city”—many gay people, males and females, and older Jewish couples, families, a “good” neighborhood.

(The inside of his house is as pretty as the outside, and it is fussily decorated.

(“I decorated it myself,” he says.

(“Wow, you’re real talented.”

(“Thank you.”

(Later in his bedroom: I lie back, “trade,” which is what he wants—no reciprocation.

(It’s late. After sex, he lies back. I remain beside him—not close—till I’m sure he’s asleep. I get up, not especially quietly, I slip on my Levi’s, put my shirt over my shoulders. I go to where he placed his pants neatly over a chair. I pull out his wallet. I open it. Several bills, tens and twenties. I take them out—and then put back a couple of the bills and take the rest.

(He stirs. “You’re robbing me,” he says.

(“Go back to sleep,” I say in a harsh voice.

(He lies back, crouching in his bed, afraid—which is what I counted on. He begins to weep quietly.

(I pocket the money—I hear his sobs—I get my boots and socks to put on outside. As I walk out, I hear his weeping edging toward the sobs that follow me out.)

Remembered now with Paul, that memory, like bile in my throat, disgusted me only now, not then.

“Two of a kind.” Paul smiled.

In my room, afterward, as I lay unable to sleep, the conclusion I had drawn about Paul’s motivation—a brash, arrogant assignment to record his life with parallels in mine—lost its quick conviction as firmly as it had assumed it, moving, like other assumptions, into the field of speculations. Too easy for such a complex man; and all that remained was this:

Why did this man “summon” me here?

And this remained: the memory of the man I had deliberately frightened in Los Angeles, his sobs still pursuing me. A willing victim, Paul would say; but he would be wrong: The man had wanted to thwart what happened with his question to me, and I had cunningly lied.