Chapter 1

Sunday, August 17

It’s 10:45 a.m. and twenty-seven seconds. I begin my final approach.

Fifteen minutes finds me wedging the VW bus between delivery vans in the alley behind the Hotel Montor. Five more minutes has me edging through the crush of warm bodies at the main desk, praying, as Saint Stephen did just before the mob stoned him—

In manus tuas Domine commendo spritum meum.

Redemisti nos Domine Deus veritatis,

(Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit,

You have paid us out of hock, Lord God of truth)

—thinking what he probably thought, too: “Like everything else in this world, good or bad, it’ll be over soon. And I can stop guessing.”

Check my purse. Still in it: your ordinary slick gray British mailing-paper envelope. I say “ordinary.” Three years ago the premiere arrival of such was like the first breath of life, an extraordinary heart-busting shock. But breathing itself grows ordinary. So I learned to depend on them.

In this last were tucked two others: a narrow, colored envelope such as concert tickets come in (now holding last night’s stub of happy memory)—and a heavy, creamy-crisp expensive envelope, such as wedding invitations come in. An engraved invitation certainly, complete with wispy tissue insert to keep it nice, but what it said was:

Mr. Thomas Peter Rhymer

requests the company

of

Miss Miranda Dolores Falconer

At her earliest convenience

after the hour of 11:00 a.m.

Sunday,

the Seventeenth of August,

Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Six.

Admission by invitation only,

to be presented

at the main desk

of

The Hotel Montor

San Francisco, California

USA

It looked so real. This was no fill-in-the-blanks; my little name was all engraved, one piece with the rest of it. And nothing said about R.S.V.P. Look at the desk now. That’s what I’m doing. Soft lights and efficient people behind a glowing sculptured brass and stainless steel façade. The people might as well be brass and stainless too; eighteen-and-female has small chance of snaring their attention.

And there’s my contact: How could I miss him? Short wide man in glitzy suit, Belshangles badge prominent on the pocket. The hair on his head has failed him; in retaliation, sideburns overrun his big round cheeks in Babylonian profusion. He waits there at the far side of the desk for me, the chick with the matching glass slipper.

No good, man. Look me over, around and through, you’ll never spot me in a million years; I look like this terrorist type who’s hijacked a stewardess for her clothes, and spoiled the effect by sleeping in ’em.

Mama’s blue-check Pendleton suit was liberated to my closet days ago. Under that is my white Esprit mini dress, which can double as a blouse and a change of clothes. I’m skinny, so the blue skirt doesn’t sausage out over it.

Clever, think I.

Only while combining them in early morning stealth do I realize: the little white purse and little white flats I expected to complete the outfit are, in fact, my filthy little white purse and worn out little white flats. As insignia of a grown-up woman, a grubby purse with ink stains doesn’t cut it. And now I can’t escape myself: this hotel is walled in mirrors.

Look around.

A massively trendy hotel with a world-class rock band staying, holed up on, one might almost say occupying (in the military sense) the thirty-second floor. The lobby crawls with kids, gray faces, makeup smeared from yesterday’s concert madness and a sleepless night. Others wear camera-bag wreaths around their necks: freelance photographers, not tourists; no Hawaiian shirts on these babies. And there’s hotel security, discreetly squelching deals in bootleg Belshangles photos, etc., etc., while S.F.’s Finest maintain a walky-talkied presence near the revolving doors.

You can almost hear it, lust and love and hope and greed, despair and exaltation, wild curiosity and the promise of wilder pleasures radiating from that unseen point source high above, like sweet loud pulsing music.

“May I help you?”

Saint Stephen’s first stone, right on target.

“I’ve been told to pre—pre-se—pre-sent this uh, at the desk and—I mean—”

Brief ordeal. The steel-and-cashmere Valkyrie behind the desk glances disdainfully from me down to my invitation, then back to me with different eyes entirely. “You’re Ms. Falconer?”

“Yes.”

“One moment, please.”

Stepping behind her fellows, Desk Person conveys my invitation half-a-dozen yards to Bulky Man, he of the Belshangles badge and the burgeoning sideburns, who listens, brightens, turns, spots and comes for me, behind a kid’s grin and an outstretched hand. The hand jammed suddenly into mine wears a big gold ring and lots of curly fur on the back.

“Well, Miss Falconer! Glad to meecha. Sim Garfein! Yeah! How’ya doin’?”

“Fine.”

“Mr. Rhymer’s been lookin’ forward to this! I mean he’s up, y’know?”

We wade the crowd together, toward the long glowing brass bank of elevators. I can feel the avid eyes and ears of the more observant Belshangles fans following.

Whizz.

Elevator doors switch off the white noise of the lobby.

“How long has ah—Yeah.” Maybe Garfein always squirms that way, but I don’t think so. I see somebody else having trouble with his mouth: not me, this time. “—How long have you—How long have you and Mr. Rhymer ah—hm.”

“Three years.”

“Ya don’say.”

———

Cliché has it, that the really heavy secrets are forever clawing and digging to get out. In fact, that they will out, no matter what you do. My experience is the contrary.

I think, the bigger the secret, the farther down inside your mind it burrows like a mole, builds itself a house and pulls you in to live with it. And soon you go out less, and talk less, and eat less. And need less. All your personal pleasure is piled up there, inside that secret.

Tommi Rhymer told me to rent a post office box when I was fourteen years old.

Lots of kids spend years concealing drugs or liquor from their parents. What I hid were little packs of peanuts off airlines I’d never flown on, exotic bars of soap from luxury hotels around the world. That the Belshangles posters I collected weren’t marketed in the U.S., and the Belshangles photos and memorabilia in the manila folder on my desk couldn’t have come from Movie Memories, those were the secret “highs” I hid.

I sent him things, too. My school grades. Stuff that amused me from the local papers. Kid stuff, bits of my life, just as he sent me bits of his. We never wrote letters, exactly. In ways unexpected, he was a very cautious man.

———

We’re almost at the top, when Garfein gets the gall to re-format his question: “Well how did you ah—ah—”

“I took a thorn out of his paw one time.”

Whizz.

The obligatory big mirror, facing the elevators on the top floor. This one is gilded art deco, with a little table built into the front, and a beefy Belshangles guard lounging back on it, elbows planted behind him, jacket hiked to free the holster underneath. When he saw me on Garfein’s arm, he grinned. When we trucked off down the hall, he followed.

The high-water mark of last night’s partying remained in corners, a damp sea wrack of paper plates and napkins, orphan beer bottles in plastic cups. Behind closed doors someone of indeterminate sex (male maybe) was vocalizing, a bawdy operatic soprano shifting by stages into vigorous screams.

Other doors slammed open just ahead, and a man came out in his boxers: a state in which I’d never seen Belshangles drummer Rollo McInery; I knew who it was just the same.

Spotting us, he said one word: sounded like “Wotcher.”

A rangy young woman in a bright blue teddy materialized behind his shoulder.

Whiffs of grass, taped music, and two bearded dudes in Levi’s and Belshangles T-shirts drifted out the next door; a naked toddler with an older brother in pursuit fell out the next.

It reminded me of—well, I knew what exactly.

My mother is a circus nut. Every summer, sure as Ringling Brothers makes its rounds, Mama’s got tickets. All the summers of my childhood, front-row seats, right down where you can smell the tiger pee and dodge the elephants.

She used to get ’em for Oakland or S.F.: Ringling always gigs on both sides of the Bay. One year she bought too late, and could only get Cow Palace tickets, way around the end where she’d never have chosen. Then we found, to reach those seats, you went along a section of the concourse the performers used also, between the arena and their trailers in the exhibit barns.

You could stand right next to those death-defying demigods of sequins and sawdust and admire them shyly. They didn’t seem to mind. They laughed and went around in bathrobes and smelled of greasepaint and garlic and talked a torrent of Bulgarian.

Afterwards she never bought seats anywhere but there.

Like that now. Except that circus, however glittered up, is for children of all ages, sexless. And rock bands were designed for adolescents, to be the furthest opposite there is.

Like touring the halls with a fife and drum, the rate we’re gathering volunteers. McInery’s pal is still among the frontrunners: she’s popped a T-shirt over the teddy, the chest reads “Love is Blind; Lust Doesn’t Give a Good Goddamn.” We reached the side corridor at last, and a door at the end. The same as three years earlier? Memory crazes current events, an untrusty kaleidoscope. Same or not, Garfein coaxed it open with a key, and, ushering me through, rounded on our little mob of spectators. “Now look ’ere!”

———

All I heard, because the door swung shut. That may have left me on the inside; but not, I discovered, alone.

Harlan Parr. Nemesis in a black silk dressing gown: sunk deep on the back of his neck in the sofa across the room. Black hair spreading on the sofa back. Black inscrutable glasses fixed on the door, and me. Neat impeccably expensive shoes cocked up on the coffee table. The soles were that peachy virgin-leather color. They had never been off a carpet. Indescribably erotic somehow: the sweet glazed unmarred paleness of the soles of his new shoes.

Harlan got up, made me the smallest formal bow, and vanished down the hall. What I can imagine: the carpet smoking under his exquisite little feet.

Lord God, Father Almighty who made me—

Have mercy on me—

What I can feel building up inside, a good loud scream.

I am a latter-day Don Quixote, happy in my private landscape of windmills. Tom Rhymer is my Dulcinea; I have no intention of being put off, put down, or put out of the running by the extraordinary, any more than I have of letting some nice young ordinary guy come along and help me to forget him. I have no intention of forgetting him! He still fills my measure of “Beauty Incarnate”!

And it’s not that I don’t really know the worst about him; I remember the contents of my crash course in “Thomas Peter Rhymer, Human Being” very well. He laid it squarely on my head himself: into every drug in sight, designer and generic; into everybody too, male and female—What was it but the classic tale of woe that goes with his profession? I was fourteen years old. All it did was shift my emphasis, from the “beauty” part to the “incarnate.” My hero had feet of clay, a great unexpected relief, and far as I knew, the material all human feet are made of. His were still the prettiest feet of clay around.

And the only person he’d ever loved—for sure loved—

———

So here I am, standing in Their Room. Thinking. About the May ’86 cover of Time I pinned to the wall above my bed.

The caption: Tommi Rhymer, Harlan Parr: Charity Rocks On. A gaudy artist’s rendition of those two launching into their act, hitting the stage in a pool of white light, glued so close together back to front, the wonder was how Tommi kept his butt out of Harlan’s guitar pickup.

Could be Harlan’s down the hall crying his eyes out even now. Could be that’s why he had the shades on. My stomach is beginning to churn. Harlan has the face of a Renaissance angel. Botticelli would have chased him down the street to use him for a model. How awful in the end, if all that beauty couldn’t guarantee him endless love.

Lord Jesus Christ,

Who takes away the sins of the world

Have mercy on me—

Pretty soon, a second little niggling, giggling inner voice beside my prayer begins to chant, “I fought the windmills, an’ the windmills won!”

Stop that! Deal with it. Look around.

Pray harder.

It is the same suite as before, and maid service hasn’t gotten to it yet. I see pieces of clothing, the morning’s newspapers with scissored columns, stray cocktail napkins, used olives and toothpicks in the ashtrays. Not garbaged out, but certainly the lived-in look. Lived in by Them. Time was, I would’ve ripped off tidbits of their trash and treasured it. Even now I feel the urge. After high school, one does not do such things. Eighteen is a woman, however green.

The room has a sweet scent. Subtle. Warm. Not pot smoke, but mind-bending. A scent out of imagination: drowsy sun on the King’s strange garden. It gives me an unsettled head and heavy eyes.

A scrunch of keys in the door: Garfein again, nearly bashing me in the back, reconnoitering the emptiness.

“Nobody here?”

“Except Harlan. And he left.”

“Aw Christ,” he says, and lumbers off distracted toward the bedrooms. Down the hall, where Harlan went.

Bittersweet scent. Illusive. Playful. Clear fountains in blue tile courtyards. Plates of dried fruit. Lemon trees and water lilies.

But oh, talk about Earthly Paradise—on the table lately graced by Harlan’s heels, between the coffee cups, sits a real one of those fancy, tiny mixing-and-dubbing decks musician mags all advertise (“Fits in your lap; carries on; do your composing on the plane—”) plugged into a headset and a quarter-size sparkling white guitar. Harlan’s toys.

Midway of the rug, I realize I’m moving.

Nearly to the couch now: it’s the plushy, sink-in-to-your-hip-bones kind. Where Harlan had been sitting left a dent. I consider sitting in it. I consider sitting next to it.

God help me, and I’ve only just begun! It’s much too soon to get depressed!

I sit in Harlan’s dent. It is noticeably body-warm.

Actually, I’m not depressed. I’m scared shitless.

So damn easy to think up a vilest possible contingency, then a worse, like Dr. Seuss’s “Glunk”—nearly impossible to “un­thunk” once the old mind spewed it out. I don’t think I’m about to die a horrible death—he might be into S&M, and kill me making “snuff movies,” deep-six my body in the bay—that kind of thing. Nobody knows where I was going. I don’t even think he’d throw me to his roadies and watch them tie me down and stuff beer bottles up me, like you read about in trashy rock mags. The Tommi I remember is a battered child-man with a gentle heart.

Lord Jesus Christ,

Who was once a human child

Have mercy on me—

But what if—what if he’s just polite? That’s the kind of possibilities my reason refused to unthunk. Polite. Invite me down to coffee. Say, “Gee, how awfully nice to see you. Let me take this opportunity to thank you; what’s more, my lover thanks you. Now, what are your plans for college? You must fill me in on how you’re doing, the next time we tour through.”

Lord God, Holy Spirit, Comforter—

Have mercy on me,

Take away my pain.

I shut my eyes. Put my hands over them. Let the room get truly dark now, make it go away. (I either know a lot about answered prayer or even more about self-deception.) I wait while all the sparks and lightning flashes fade, and nothing shows but pure rich dark. Then I open them. Tom Rhymer is watching me from the end of the hallway.

White cotton shirt with no tie. Cloth shoes. Cream cotton wash pants. Ordinary clothes, right? Not on him.

I am thinking: what an insupportable, terrible tragic loss, if, in some dry season, my instant knee-jerk to this man should ever stop being “Grab fast! Ask questions afterwards!” and a mental memory dump of all the love poetry I ever was exposed to—this time, fittingly:

My Beloved is white and ruddy,

the chiefest among ten thousand—

(Ten thousand is like nothing. There’ll be some beautiful kid in any high school who’s chiefest among ten thousand. Ten million, and you might be getting there—)

His head is as the most fine gold, his

locks are bushy, and black as a raven—

But his aren’t; Harlan’s are.

Now I’m standing up. I shot up when I realized he was there. Not proper. Not grown-up in the least, or ladylike, or liberated, or—

—His hands are as gold rings set with Beryl:

his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphire,

His legs are as pillars of marble,

set in sockets of fine gold:

His mouth is most sweet:

yea, he is altogether lovely:

This is my beloved, and this is my friend,

O daughters of Jerusalem—

Oh shit, and he’s laughing at me, too: exactly the funny almost-lover I remember, under cover of the Song of Songs.

“Well,” the man says, head on one side, “You didn’t turn out half bad.”

“You’re no old bag yourself.” Now we’re both laughing.

“Where to?” I said finally.

“Y’want to talk about it?”

“Can we talk here?”

He thought. Glanced back down the hall. “Coffee shop.”

(Now here’s the place for my nightmare to begin—the “I thank you, my lover thanks you; now where will you be going to college” one—)

“Okay.”

“Moment; I’ll phone up the lads.”

Tom loped to the bedroom. I listened open-mouthed. Phone dialing. What he said was short, and much too low to catch. (What “lads?”)

But he came back with a smile and took my arm, and his hands were warm as—hands are as (Oh God, here we go)—

—gold rings set with beryl—legs are as

pillars of marble—mouth is most sweet—

yeah man, altogether lovely—this is my—this is my—

Out in the hall now. Not a soul in sight.

Until we rounded a corner and came to the elevators. Two black guys were standing there: two hundred fifty pounds apiece, and they weren’t fat either; they were six-and-a-half feet tall. They were dressed in a colorful West African sort of way, and I noticed as we got closer, one had gold rings on his left hand and a gold earring in his left ear. The other’s rings and earring were on the right. Apart from that, they were exactly alike. Mirror images. Tom grinned. “Hussein,” he said pointing at left earring, and at right, “Hassan.”

I bobbed and mouthed “How d’you do?” and regretted it.

They both made silent little flourishing salutes, right-hand fingers to the heart, the lips, the brow, and finally to me. They could have been the Sultan’s deaf-mute eunuchs out of the Arabian Nights. They could have been genies out of lamps. Tom was a porcelain miniature between them.

Two elevator doors whizzed open: one on a fat old couple who gaped at Tom and his demon guardians in horrified awe. We got into the other. Nobody spoke. Hassan hit the down button. Tom leaned across, after the doors came shut, and kissed me, kindly, meticulously, and briefly, on the mouth.

He said, “Y’don’t smoke, either.”

“Is that bad?”

“Good: saves you the trouble of quitting. Never could abide the taste, myself.”

Of cigarettes? Or smokers’ musty mouths? I knew without being told. I felt all down my back pop out in a fine slither of sweat, my pulse keep rising and rising.

Across the wide brass-and-glass lobby with its indoor trees and flowering carpet, small groups of girls were keeping watch for Tom. They let off a kind of silent shrilling when he came in view, like supersonic burglar alarms. To the trained ear. Mine is infinitely trained. Look, you Daughters of Oakland, San Jose, wherever, I can relate: you’ve kept vigil, all night maybe, for your Idol, your Icon of Desire. Now, mid-morning, he finally appears, escorting some dumb chick in a suit. I half expect them to school Piranha-fashion and rush him, teeth gnashing.

But we’re safely past them, Tom moving fast and me on his arm, the two huge Blacks in wing formation. Past the flower shop, past the Ticketron, homing in now on the dark mouth of the coffee shop, and the coffee shop hostess standing there, immaculate stack of menus on her arm. Latest lacquered hair, lacquered makeup, lacquered linen dress, a long slim shoulder-padded number divided diagonally, hem to shoulder, “smoke” and “champagne.” No wrinkles across the crotch of that dress; being judicious, she has never tried to sit in it.

She doesn’t see us yet.

Now she does. Her whole face comes apart in looks which have no place there: “Why me, Lord?” panic. Human awkwardness. Undisguisable terminal yearning.

I hear her whisper, “Oh, Mr. Rhymer—”

And we’re past her too, into the shop, all tile and stainless ’30s chic—headed full-throttle for a roped-off section of tables. The clip-clip-clip of her embarrassed little heels is loud as she scurries to reach the velvet ropes ahead of us and get them down. Tom spurns her immaculate menus, and salves her with a shy smile as immaculate. “Just coffee, love, be kind: it’s the middle of the night for me.”

He takes his seat in the very middle of the unused section, at least one row of empty tables between us and the world on every side. The “lads” have vanished, if anything that large aspires to vanishing, to a table on the full side.

All food-and-conversation noise in the place was squelched by our arrival. You can honestly identify the Mood Muzac, an early Belshangles tune blandly rearranged, disarmed.

Tom looked up at me. Dark red forelock, dark red lashes, pale, pale eyes. “I didn’t ask if y’wanted more than coffee.”

“No problem. Coffee’s wonderful.”

He waited for the noise level to rebuild, for Muzac to spin its next, with only the bass line audible.

“And are y’still virgin?”

“Uh-huh.”

“All right. So what do you want from me?”

I opened my mouth; I thought about men like trees walking, and almost said “Ut videam.”

He laughed, and shut his eyes, put the tips of his long fingers together. “Let’s start by saying, I owe you. Look at me: can you imagine? I’ve fans who write to say I look too healthy? I find that a bitter kind of love.

“—I’ve even come through without a bottle of Jack Daniel’s growing to one hand, unlike some people I could mention. I don’t drink at all. I’m wealthy, and perhaps a bit wiser than you saw me last. Lot of things to be said, maybe, for going through life radically anesthetized; but holding on to your money is not one of ’em. And if it wasn’t for that little stunt you pulled on me, I’d be—well, I wouldn’t be any of those things.”

I guess I laughed.

“What?”

“Radically anesthetized. Only other place I’ve heard that was Greenpeace. The guys who skin seals admitted clubbing ’em first might not exactly kill, but left ’em—well, what you said.”

“Listen, the way I was when we first met, y’could’ve had my skin off, and I might not’ve noticed for an hour or two—”

A man loomed over him, dressed in black so grand he had to be the maître d’ from the nouvelle cuisine enclave across the lobby. The little hostess’s immaculate stack reposed now on his arm. “Good morning, Mr. Rhymer, it’s shortly before noon; would you prefer the luncheon or the breakfast menu?”

“I’d prefer my coffee, if y’don’t mind; I never take food at this time of night.”

“Very well, sir, as you wish.” He bowed.

Tom gave him a little rock-royal wave of dismissal. He bowed again. Tom waved. He bowed. Tom waved. And when he was gone:

“—Say it was accident I finally crashed while you were watching: not somebody else. Say it was coincidence y’had your place to take me, and the means and the guts to take me there. Say it was pure beginner’s luck I didn’t die in your friend’s car, and fool’s luck of some kind I didn’t kill myself, or you, or somebody, before I cleaned up.

“’Cause I’ve tried saying all that to myself, and more. Just too many fucking coincidences in one place, girl, if you ask me. There’s got to be a purpose in it somewhere.”

I remember every moment of it.

A very strange two weeks spent in his company, him getting cold-turkey detoxified, me staying cold-feet virgin. It was how I lost an Icon of Desire and gained a pen pal. Say rather, traded a false idol for the real old thing.

“—So, you have your free week that I promised you, three years back. Thomas Peter Rhymer, at your service. What do y’want me for?”

A really vast percentage of young girls survive their early years in love with horses. Then they discover boys, and the horses languish. Boys of a similar stripe pack their juvenile libidos into cars and motorcycles. Most withdraw enough in time to marry the erstwhile horsey girls. But some stick with the cars.

Boys of a certain other kind love heavy metal rock stars and read Soldier of Fortune. Most grow up, but a few go off to die in Africa. And girls of certain kinds love rock stars too. (Usually different rock stars.) When they get out of school they marry someone else.

Then one or two—much like their counterparts who really do make mercenary soldiers—one or two marry rock stars. A statistical necessity after all, since rock stars marry.

He snickered. “Bet that’s y’mother’s wool suit, too.”

“Right. Let’s drive up to Reno and get married.” He was my enchanted prince, after all. If you rescue the prince, I’ve never read of more than one traditional reward.

The red brows arched. I’d agonized for three whole years, thought of every last contingency, and a telling comeback to each last thing he might say: each thing in fact but what he did say: “Y’asked me that three years ago.”

“I did not! Well, not in those words!”

“I got it.”

“I noticed you didn’t say yes.”

“Something else y’might have noticed.”

“What?”

“Didn’t say no.”

“I noticed.”

“Hey! I don’t get serious proposals often as y’might think! Well, proposals, sure—but I mean, the kind that I might—well, y’know.”

The coffee came. It was a guy who brought it, that was all I noticed, a white starched sleeve and male hand moving past my ear. But when the hand and cup came past Tom’s ear I saw his pale eyes track it; once the cup was safely on the tablecloth Tom caught the hand before it got away. It belonged to a thin young guy, black hair, black eyes. Tom leaned back against his front, and smiled up at him.

“Lead or rhythm?”

The kid was practically gagging on his load of terror and shy desire. He managed to whisper, “Lead.”

“Are y’any good?” A painful shrug. Tom still kept his hand, fingering it appreciatively. “Won’t do, love, you mustn’t give that answer. Are you any good?”

“Sure I’m good.”

“Better. Bet that hard spot in your pocket is a tape, huh? Say ‘Hendrix was a spastic’ and we’ll have a listen.” He’d made him laugh, but given him the hiccups.

“Hendrix was a (hic) spas(hic).”

“Send it to the room.”

He let him get away, turning back to his coffee, and me. “Fingers hard as a bone pick, and the tendons bowed right out across the knuckles. Only way you get hands like that’s playing guitar ten hours a day. Y’look at Harlan’s sometime.”

I didn’t want to look at Harlan’s hands, or any other part of him. I didn’t want to think about Harlan. His name vanished into my thoughts like a stone in deep water.

“Sure y’know what you’re saying?”

“Uh-huh.”

“A hot week at your cabin wouldn’t do?”

“A hot month makes the barest start on what I want.”

Tom inspected the bowl of packaged sugars and creamers with great care. He looked up. Think about the white tiger at the S.F. Zoo: young male, one of only fifty-two on earth. He looks up from his meat with the same sterling silver eyes, and gravely lethal innocence.

“Is there nothing else y’want to ask me?”

“Unh-unh.”

“Such as, did I go to the doctor and have my balls reconnected? That seemed of some importance to you at one time.” He waved a long finger at me. “What would y’say, if I told you I’d not gone? Would y’still be offering to marry me?”

“I wouldn’t be too happy, but I’d still want you. What if I’d told you I wasn’t still virgin?”

He chuckled ruefully, licked the finger, and made a score mark for me on the air.

The fact that I was virgin didn’t make virginity “my trip.” Nobody ever explained to my satisfaction the supernatural virtues of the state: It was just a new womb, like that other place the Gospel mentions: “A new tomb, in which no one had yet been laid.” I don’t see dedicating my reproductive system to God by not using it, any more than dedicating my brain to God by not using it. But I saw a lot of sense in saving it, like the new tomb, for a proper occupant.

Every functioning instinct said this one was proper, proper, proper, from his head down to his feet. Beside the rank desirability of him, any drawbacks he might have were very small stuff. Papa always said, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Now Tom was looking across the coffee shop in a deliberate sort of way. I followed his gaze, and saw a waitress being reeled in at the end of it, like a marlin on a 100-pound line. This woman was middle-aged, stylish, and fixy, but she wore the identical sleepwalking wounded look as any kid lurking in the potted palms.

Taking her hand when it came in range, Tom leaned back into her, the same small intimacy he’d used to waste the young guitar player. “Say, could I have milk for this instead of the non-dairy slop? It doesn’t sit too well with me.”

“Of course, dear,” whispered the waitress. “I know exactly what you mean.”

He watched her go.

“What if I said, ‘We tried, and it couldn’t be done’?”

“Same.”

Yet another waitress brought his glass of milk. With her, a young woman in expensive meet-the-public clothes (the stainless warrior maiden off the front desk, in fact) brought a full candle glass, replacement for the nearly full one burning on our table.

I began to get the picture: a shock of ripples running through the hotel staff every time Tom left his room. Quick sprints down backstairs, whisperings, in-house phone calls: “Tommi’s in the coffee shop. Run run run. Quick, grab the girls, find the guys, say, “Love walks visible among us—”

Build me a tower, forty feet high,

So I can see you, as you ride by.

As you ride by, dear, as you ride by,

So I can see you, as you ride by—

What an awful burden for any mortal shoulders, and his not the widest. He was a naughty little kid playing fantasy hero in one of the most beguiling suits of flesh-and-blood dress-up ever issued by a witty God. He waited patiently each time until they finished ministering to him.

“Well, I did go,” he said when they were out of earshot. “Swiss clinic. The whole guided trip through the marvels of modern medicine.” He looked down at the table.

“They wanted a biopsy to see if I was still good, but I didn’t like the thought of that. I said, ‘Hook it up, and I’ll pay for it, no matter.’ Then they wanted to do one side and the other later, but I saw no sense in being sore twice. And I had to heal up for six weeks.

“When I came back, they went through the whole story about the only mark of success being a sperm count. Which all came down to me having to do it in my hand, so he could look under a microscope.

“He left me kicking my heels in an examination room for an inordinately fucking long time. Couldn’t tell a thing from his face when he came back, either: some bedside manner that was. Then he said, ‘What I have to tell you Herr Rhymer is, not only have you the sperm count, it is already in the normal range—’”

“More coffee?”

A dippy little girl in a bellhop’s monkey suit was bending over him. Her hair was half as red as his own.

“Thank you love, but that’s all, now. My time’s gone.” We waited while she poured, and poured, and backed off smiling.

“So how many paternity suits have you settled so far?”

“God! What d’y’think I am? It’s only been three months! If I’d gone out and banged half of Geneva the first night, it still takes nine!”

“Did you?”

He giggled. “Hardly. Old Harlan’s been almost happy with me.”

“Are you—still—” “Lovers” can be a hard—next to impossible—word to say.

The pastry cart, also, was hard to ignore in its approach as a siege engine trundling toward the walls. The girl behind it was so tall. Lean, athletic. Long honey hair around a gentle stately face. Her bellhop outfit said more “Queen’s Own Guard” than “monkey suit.”

She eyed Tom soberly. He didn’t crave sweets; she knew he didn’t. He looked at her and saw that she knew. Put myself in her place, that cart of sugar crud my only link to Tommi Rhymer, one he didn’t want. I had to look away, down at the tall girl’s shoes. I don’t get fooled about a person’s sex very often, but the feet are the real giveaway. Those were a guy’s feet, in a guy’s big generous black shoes.

“Almond tart.” A young guy’s soft, unassuming voice.

“You make it?” asked Tom in a voice that matched.

That put him on the spot. He thought long. Downcast eyes. “Wish I had.”

“I wish you had too.” The answer was yes. Yes, yes, yes, I knew it was. And not just to the almond tarts. “You recommend?”

Now the boy had to raise his eyes. Sweet blue eyes. Thick, honey lashes. “Fine stuff,” he said.

“Okay.”

“All right!”

Tom, pointing to me: “She wants one too.”

“All right!”

Simple as that. A man wooed by forwardness, and won by innocence. Wooed and wooed and won and won. Picture this sudden vivid vista of a life spent in his orbit, beating back a nonstop stream of earnest forward innocents. With a bat.

Lord God Holy Spirit

Who teaches me to pray

Have mercy on me.

The boy with the cart had left; Tom was looking at me gravely. I couldn’t remember where our own talk stopped.

He said, “Harlan.”

That was it, all right.

“If I could walk away from him, I would be nothing you might want. I could walk away from you, ten times as easy. I’m not that changeable. May be good for you I’m not. Very old-fashioned, in my way. My grandparents’ marriage was arranged, I’m told. It lasted fifty years, and they died within the month of one another.

“So I don’t see why, if I should put my mind to it, I couldn’t call you my own dear love, and not be lying. Now, y’gave me to understand that you’ve got some religion. I’ve imagined y’were Roman, but I may be just imagining.”

“You’re not.”

He had taken a bite of almond tart. He chewed and swallowed it in slow silence. Then he said, “Fortunate.”

“Like not smoking.”

“Right.

“I was raised that way too. And my head is Roman in funny places, though you might not think it. Can’t be too sure what they teach these days, ’specially in America. But the Church taught me; the only right reason for marrying, is what they used to call the ‘procreation of children.’ Now I find that very sensible.”

Another pretty person brought the check, black, this one, with Michael Jackson California Curls, and almost certainly a guy; he had a little moustache.

“Wait, love.” He didn’t look at the check; he put two twenty-dollar bills on top of it. “Never mind the change, we haven’t time.

“—My idea would be, that if I should marry you, anyone who sees us should feel satisfied that we just got it on. And I don’t intend appearances to deceive. I mean to be quite shameless in my marital bliss. If, say, that embarrasses you, better back off now.”

“Foot of the Nelson Monument.”

“You bet. I’ll do it on the BBC if they give me an hour show. I’ve got my public to consider, after all. Wouldn’t want them to think that Rhymer’s faded. Just that he’s all grown up and taken out a public license. Also. I have had my lifetime’s fill up to here,” he gestured, “with birth control. When you said years ago that what you’d wanted out of me was a house full of redheaded kids—remember that?—you don’t know what you touched.”

“I sort of hoped it was your heart.”

He choked on his coffee. His face went scarlet with laughter, and he hid it, though he stole a glance at me.

A water glass appeared at his hand, fast enough for a magic act. I didn’t look to see what brought it: I didn’t care, so long as it got away and let him finish.

“Why Reno?”

“It’s in Nevada. No waiting to get married. Every place else, it takes two weeks.”

“You mean, married before a judge?”

“I guess I do.”

His silence lasted. Finally he said, “I suppose what I’m wondering is, if you come from religious people, why you’re not after getting married in a church.”

“I am very much after being married in the Church. I just want to sew you up first, so I get the chance.”

He was laughing and shaking his head. “You’re too damn smart.”

“I hope that’s why you’re marrying me.”

“I hope so too,” he said. “What d’y’think I’ll need?”

“ID. Passport, I guess. Clothes for a week. The cabin’s halfway between Reno and here. We can be back there married by this evening.”

“You got your own car?”

“My mother’s.” No use lying to him. Just brazen it out. “You know. Like the suit.”

“Does your mother know you’re here?”

“No way.”

“Do I take it that y’don’t get on?”

“I love my mother; she loves me.”

He looked away. Bit his lip. Looked back. Looked away again. “—Have to think about that one.” His change came anyway, on a stainless art-deco salver.

“—Hey,” I said, “years ago, the last thing you asked of me, the very last, was to give you proof that I could keep your secrets. I’ve done it all the way.”

He started to snicker. “Wouldn’t be too fair, I suppose, to start wondering, if you’re that close keeping secrets for me, just how you’d be at keeping ’em from me, once we were—”

“No. It wouldn’t be very fair at all.”

“Didn’t think it would.”

A wallet came out of his inside pocket, and a roll of bills came out of that. He started to peel off tens. He made a little circle of them on the table, ten in all, like the spokes of a wheel with the candleholder for a hub. “Good service,” he said, “appeals to me.”