Chapter 5

Monday, August 25. 9:00 a.m.

A maritime sun sheds salty light and little warmth, while wind and trash and seagulls whip around the corners. It makes a body feel like running, but we walk, half a mile down Second from the rented car (parked under a Bay Bridge on-ramp), to the corner of Market and the building, great gaunt futuristic overwhelmer, stainless steel, black tile, glass as black as Darth Vader’s goggles: a sci-fi locale for social injustice. Things get marginally more humane above the escalators.

There is a photo place; we pass it. I already have mine.

School pics were handy for turning into manifestos, about the only fun I ever saw in the whole exercise. For senior yearbook all the rah-rahs hire their own photographers to take these glamour shots. So I went to the school hack with the rest of the guys, wearing one of Papa’s shirts, loose tie, big hair and a truculent expression, like some lanky little deathrock person dressed up too civilly for his convictions. Not very satisfactory at the time; it turned out much too normal. Just (in fact) like a passport photo.

But imagine our entrance now, Harlan in his tweeds, hair neatly minimized, me in my black Levi’s, black Nikes, and dead-black Pendleton with the holey elbows, into that office: into a compacted jam of third-world bodies, a winding queue, a human Wall of China, confined by vinyl ropes on weighted stainless stands. At the tail of the dragon, a pushy red-lozenge sign demands, Enter Here. Another reads,

U.S. Passport Fees:

All minors under 18 must use

DSP 11. Fee is $27.

15 year validity.

All adults using DSP 11

fee is $42. 10 year validity.

Adults qualified to use

DSP 82, fee is $35.

So I fill out my DSP 11, growing aware meanwhile of certain stock dialogues happening at the head of the line:

“Do you have a departure date in mind, sir?”

“Oh, I don’t know yet, how long does it take?”

“Two to three weeks—”

“Are you sure you don’t have a certified copy? How about your parents? This was Xeroxed from a certified original, I can see the seal—”

“Do I sign this?”

“No, you sign in front of an agent. Have a seat.”

“How long is the wait?”

“I’d say about forty minutes—”

“Where is the original of this, from Florida?”

“That’s it. That’s all they send you.”

“When were you leaving?”

“Friday!”

“The agent on the other side will probably request you get it certified—”

“Okay, your passport should come to you in the mail in about four weeks.”

“I’ll send you over to the agents to see if they’ll accept this for identity. Take a seat, please. You are number ninety-four.”

I am not a number. I am a free man.

Above the agents’ desk, on the far side of the room, an electric sign shows the number being served: 28. While I’m looking, it lets out a buzz, and goes to 29. Buzz, 30.

Harlan doesn’t have to stand through this whole line with me. I don’t plan to need his services; I can fill in blanks as well as anybody. He is doing it anyway. Outside the plate glass is a view of canyon streets: parking garage signs, double-parked delivery vans, jointed buses crawling centipede-like between them. The street sign I can see says, Battery. Do Not Enter. So the one I can’t reads, Market. What fun if it said Assault, instead, and this was the corner of Assault and Battery? At the end of Battery a mid-air segment of Embarcadero Freeway cuts across blue sky. More wind, more seagulls, San Francisco Bay.

The two ahead of me have reached the counter now, a dark Hispanic type in turquoise rings, and a very tall girl, skin as pretty as café au lait.

DARK MAN: “I have lost my naturalization papers.”

MAN BEHIND COUNTER TO TALL GIRL: “This birth certificate is not valid.”

WOMAN BEHIND COUNTER TO DARK MAN: “Where were you naturalized?”

TALL GIRL: “It’s the only one I have!”

DARK MAN: “Here, in San Francisco.”

MAN BEHIND COUNTER: “This is a Xerox copy, it isn’t certified.”

WOMAN BEHIND COUNTER: “Go to the District Court on such-and-such street, floor such-and-such, obtain a certified copy of your naturalization records, bring it with two photographs—”

TALL GIRL (now wailing): “It’s the only one I have!”

WOMAN B.C.: “Next, please.” (That’s me.)

MAN B.C.: “Then you must obtain a certified copy—”

I hand the woman my DSP 11, driver’s license, and birth certificate, familiar items from all those years I had to prove my age at track meets. I fingered the Santa Clara County seal chomped into it to show that it was certified.

TALL GIRL: “I haven’t a faintest idea how to do that!”

WOMAN B.C.: “Is this your identification? Your form is filled out in a different name.”

“I was married last week.”

WOMAN B.C.: “Then we’ll need a certified copy of your marriage certificate.”

“My husband has the only copy, he’s a British citizen, he’s in London; I’m trying to join him—”

WOMAN B.C.: Then you must obtain a certified copy. Were you married in the State of California?”

And I stand there, remembering Tom’s hurt at little things, remembering, through a haze of sleep, the endless time it took the wedding chapel woman to write out that certificate, “The Pretty One” she’d called it (from the minute bit of gold illumination): “Now this one isn’t certified,” she said, “It has to be filed and recorded, and they won’t be open till Monday, then your official copy will be mailed to you, it may take as long as twelve weeks—”

Tom’s mailing address was London.

HARLAN: “Pardon me, but Mrs. Rhymer’s husband is my business partner. Would my statement under oath—”

WOMAN B.C.: That might be allowable under certain requirements: you must be an American citizen, of legal age, and present at the event witnessed. Of course (back to me), you can always make the application in your maiden name. Is time important?”

———

I wrote my letter to Carson City on hotel stationery and mailed it from the lobby. Harlan had nothing, nothing, nothing to say. Upstairs he traded his tweeds for jeans and a turtleneck, and selecting a guitar from a corner of the strangely lifeless living room, sat down to play.

So, I’d been put to the test when I hadn’t expected it; and, like your ordinary teenage dumb-ass, I’d fucked up. I glowered at his self-absorbed and unresponsive back in blind frustration. Directionless fury. Directed fury.

What an uncompromising little back, slender and muscular as an otter’s, a likeness his silk turtleneck did nothing to diminish, glossing him wrist to shoulder, chin to waist in rich black sheen. And the jeans artistically ripped fore and aft, very much like Tom’s. Only on Harlan, no skin showed.

Black silk long johns to match the shirt.

He had me toying with a kid’s story, half-remembered, witches or aliens who looked okay because they wore these indistinguishable masks, but when the masks came off, the faces underneath weren’t human. Suppose the silk was his skin, sleek black pelt all over. The hands were gloves and the face an ivory mask. If you yanked it off, underneath would be darkness. He’d been playing guitar for almost an hour.

“So damn it, what should I have done?”

“When?” (playing on)

“Back there. It was a toss-up between joining him with my maiden name on, or waiting here till I could prove I had a right to his—and I could just see him—if my passport for the next ten years had got my maiden name on it because he’d gone off with the marriage certificate, like he hadn’t known how to care for me or something—I could just see him freaking out—”

“Oh,” he said, “especially—since, as far as you’re concerned—after what you did to him before—he remains so abnormally—trusting. You’re the little miracle worker.”

I stared at him in utter amazement. He went on playing. It was too much for me. “So what are you suggesting that I did to him?”

He played a bluesy phrase, acid and simple, it repeated, and repeated—“Isolation—” he said. Now the phrase acquired a slow disconsolate variation. “Loss of familiar environment—” The original phrase sunk to a lower register while the broken-hearted variation lived on above it, a uniquely ornamented life of its own. “Weakened physical condition—induced emotional dependency on the captor—the Stockholm Syndrome. A classic case. What else would you call it?” He continued to play.

“Well I didn’t do it on purpose!”

“Surely,” he said, the fingers never stopping their slow, elaborate progress on the strings, “even you have lived long enough to realize—the thousands of degrees or grades of ‘on purpose’ possible to human behavior: some of us act with malice aforethought—some merely have our predator instincts still intact—”

“Look, what are you trying to prove?”

He shrugged blandly and got up. “Proof is irrelevant.” He began to look around in corners. The room was really lined with guitars, propped against things in their cases. More seemed to have come while Tom and I were at the cabin, and now that Tom was gone, even more had mushroomed out of the carpet.

Those jeans weren’t very much like Tom’s; they were exactly like Tom’s. Maybe he’d been cute and torn his to match. But no, he had the bottoms rolled, and the tears and white patches were worn there by longer knees. They weren’t exactly like Tom’s. They were Tom’s.

So what’s he doing, daring me to notice?

He’d found what he wanted: a spacey evil-looking black graphite bass. He plugged it in, began to tune it up.

“Nicki’s?”

“Mine. I believe you play.”

“That’s more than I do.” Don’t know why: it never occurred to me that Harlan owned a bass. If it had, I might’ve taken up drums.

He wriggled impatiently. “Tom says that you play.”

“Tom’s never heard me.”

He handed me the bass. “Well, I’d like to. Come play with me?”

My mind fractured. Part went off trying to recall what age exactly kids get too old to ask their friends to “play” (unless they’re talking dirty or mean instruments):

Say, say, oh playmate,

won’t you come play with me,

and bring your dollies three?

Climb up my apple tree,

splash in my rain barrel,

slide down my cellar door,

and we’ll be jolly friends

forever more?

Not bloody likely. But what the fuck was I going to do? (That was the other part.) Plod and mangle through my pitiful bag of Belshangles tunes, things this little darkness maybe wrote? Out of the inside of his head? What a heavenly, delicious, wish fulfillment opportunity. And be damned if I will. Be damned damned damned damned.

I said “‘Louie Louie.’”

“Mm. Easy out.”

“Or ‘Wild Thing.’”

“Well, they’re quite the same, aren’t they? Your part at least. Probably the first you learned to play.”

Not so. My first was “Just Good Friends” off the Steel Tears album, and I can hear the hump and slide of that bass line in my mind, the part that goes

—White hot immaculate

Noontime pleasure,

Cool black and sumptuous

Midnight treasure,

And nobody says—

What nobody sees—

’Cause they never could see

the forest for the trees—

But if he thinks I’m going to admit that, he’s got another think coming. “My teacher claimed it’s the one song you can be too drunk to fuck and still get through.”

“Having never been too drunk to fuck,” he said, “I wouldn’t know.”

We Louie-Louied, not so badly. I was sweating like a horse, but I had a wool shirt on. Maybe it didn’t show.

“Right enough,” he said. “This time, stand up.”

“No.”

“What?”

“No.”

“I said, stand up.”

“I heard you.”

“So do it.”

“Can’t.”

“Why ever not?”

“Guess I can’t do two things at once.”

“That’s absurd; do you breathe while you run?”

“That’s different from holding up the instrument and—”

“It has a strap to it.”

“—And managing my hands, and managing my feet, and remembering the music, and—”

“Why?”

“I guess because I’m no damn good!”

He clicked his tongue. “Don’t slag yourself; you’ll find others better qualified to do it for you.”

I know when I’m stuck; just when I thought I’d got my self slag off perfected, a kind of mental firewall against the inroads of the better qualified, I am utterly stuck, staring up slack-jawed at a man whose music (say nothing of his person) I have nearly (at times) worshiped.

He is staring back.

Long black hair, long black lashes. Gold leaf eyes in a white face. Not milk white: almonds and honey, the marzipan of mythology. He is enough to scare the socks off anybody.

So which is it to be?

Subservience for life to the Marzipan Martinet? Cave in to him just once, it sets a precedent. Or: “Fuck off, you’re not my mother; you can’t make me!” A precedent for lifetime enmity with Harlan Parr. God, I really didn’t want that. I’d rather cast him as the bad guy than me. I put the strap around my neck. I stood up.

All he said was “One free measure?”

We started “Louie Louie.”

Harlan was embarrassingly easy to follow: minimal motion, but he still conducted with his whole body. After several measures though, he turned it into “Wild Thing.” Well okay. My part truly was the same. I thumped along. By a kind of relentless crystal logic, “Wild Thing” turned to “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” And either I was too distracted to notice, or I wasn’t messing up. A moral or immoral victory for somebody, as “Eine Kleine” gathered to itself melodic bits of “Get Off of My Cloud,” “The Sloop John B,” “The Star-Spangled Banner.”—Then came to the solo. Jimi Hendrix versus “The William Tell Overture.” And it was close, but Jimmi won.

The last power chord popped his hands right off the strings as if they’d shocked him. He raised his eyes.

I thought I’d try a small shrug of my own. “The Kingsmen it wasn’t.”

“Was it supposed to be?”

Hendrix jogged my memory. “By the way, the kid from the coffee shop: was he any good?”

“Who?”

“The one Tom invited up. ‘Hendrix was a spastic.’ You know, the guitarist kid with the tapes?”

Harlan pouted. Slowly shook his head.

“He did come up?”

Shake turned to nod.

“Pity.”

He gave me a long, strange look.

I said, “Tom hoped he’d be good.”

“Thomas was charmed. Thomas charms easily. Pity, I agree, but charming doesn’t necessarily play guitar (as his own came off over his head), any more than long practice necessarily makes perfect. So,” he yawned, “take me out.” A contained, luxurious small-animal stretch. “Entertain me.”

“Where do you wanta go?” New trial. At least a change of venue. He had the guitar neatly away. I handed him the bass.

“Anywhere. Ah, except for Castro Street. I refuse to do the Castro again. Everyone who’s shown me San Francisco has, in some misguided assessment, deposited me there. I find ghettos unacceptable, and am repelled by clones.”

I couldn’t see him lining up on the bleachers with his popcorn and his beer for “Dynasty Night” at your friendly neighborhood gay bar, that’s for sure.

“—Would you believe, I actually owned a Cuir Noir jacket at one time? I fear it haunts the hind parts of my wardrobe still. Once I’m home, I will donate it to OXFAM. Promptly. Unless some more—imaginative—disposal can be thought up for it.”

At last, an opener for a plain old conversation. “I was at Anarchy Bookstore once,” I said, (a hesitant opener), “when these like, real doctrinaire-type punks walked in: the shredded denims, and the tartans, and the holocaust hair, the whole post-nuclear tribal trip. And one of them had honestly just found a biker jacket in the street. They all got talking: what was the baddest thing he could do with it. What he decided was, slit the leather up all over, and pull through strips of plaid from the inside—”

“Like German mercenaries in the Hundred Years’ War?” He looked amazingly relieved and enthusiastic. “You know the story goes,” he went on brightly, “under their combat rags they put on silk shirts looted from enemy officers, and teased out little puffs through all the tatters; it set the cultivated style for half a century.” A pregnant moment passed. “Anarchy Bookstore?”

I said, “Haight Street.”

“As in Ashbury?”

“Uh-huh.”

“As in the ‘Summer of Love’?”

“Only different. You haven’t been anywhere, have you?”

“That,” he said, “is what I hoped I had made plain.”

So we went there.

After all that jazz about Cuir Noir, Harlan wore his black leopard fur jacket over the Levi’s, and a haze of beetle-wing green shadow around his eyes. “Don’t worry,” he purred. “I’m safe on the street.”

Harlan had never encountered Zippy the Pinhead. He was openly delighted. He bought all the Zippy books they had, and a Zippy “Yow! I’m having fun!” pin, which he fastened through a belt loop on the front of his jeans. Tom’s jeans. We ate piroshki from a place down the block; we laughed and walked in the sun, eyed the vintage clothes and records.

Hard to help eyeing him (covertly). He didn’t look like a gay. He looked like a guitar wizard. Line him up between, well, say, Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen—anyone with eyes would recognize three masters of the same far-out arcana.

Generic gays look light years straighter and more up to date than that: neat, conformist sporty clothes, trim non-threatening hair. Manly little moustaches. The hairy lip trip may be declining, but for the longest time, if I were gay and wanted to be sure no one suspected, the first thing I’d have done was shave the moustache.

Harlan was just an order of magnitude prettier, is all. Eddie Van Halen, hang your head. Jimmy Page, eat your heart out. In that same Anthology of English Verse which yielded me Bermudas was another little piece. Straight, as written, it didn’t show me much. Ah, but sex change it:

He walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies,

And all that’s best of dark and light

Meet in his aspect and in his eyes—

I could never make it dry-eyed past the first four lines.

———

Dinner: pretentious, meager, and overpriced, in the farthest confidential nook of the nouvelle trendy hotel restaurant. Harlan curled a polite lip at his mesquite-broiled sturgeon in sorrel sauce, and poked the last of it in circles ’round his plate.

He’d gotten a mental hammerlock on the wine steward, twenty minutes of esoteric vintage notes, and what must have been the finest bottle of California Chardonnay in the hotel cellar. Even I could appreciate. I was raised on good wine, just never too much of it at once.

A glass for him and a glass for me. Another glass for him. Regret. I said, “No more for me, thanks.” Harlan and the steward glared. I stonewalled. Getting all sloshy and moth-happy under Harlan’s acid scrutiny fit my every last criterion for risky business.

So Harlan passed on the dessert and doggy-bagged the Chardonnay. As he unlocked our door, the phone was ringing. Without a word, he was on it. After a while he started to giggle and bop like a kid with hot rock on his Walkman.

“Sorry, love,” he murmured at length. “Not that easy. No, No. Nothing fatal. Bit of hardship establishing her identity, that’s all. Oh, Christ, no. You have the only papers proving her right to your name. Yes. No. No, don’t. I take it the ones you have aren’t certified. Fear not; wheels are in motion. Certainly. We’ll keep busy. Well what did you expect? Building her a wardrobe. She’s nothing at all. A wedding dress for her to marry in? Having her hair done, her face done, her nails done—”

I wanted to poke him. I would have poked him, if I could’ve done it without touching him.

He mouthed, “There’s an extension in the kitchenette.”

I flew at it. Tom, on the far end, said “—have her looking like you before you’re finished—”

Harlan stiffened. “Is there something wrong with the way I look?”

“Yeah, you’re better at it. I got one of you already. Her hair’s straight now; you leave it alone. You’ll only make her look all older, and I don’t want that—”

“How old do you want her to look?”

“Fourteen.”

“What?”

“Well? I took to her the first I saw her; does she have to look so different? I happen to like young girls.”

Harlan giggled. “Pervert.”

“Oh! Oh you! Six thousand miles away, you think you’re safe!”

Harlan said, “I’m counting on it.” He giggled again. “Child molester.”

“So you want me on the next available to San Francisco? I’ll child molest you!”

“Is that a threat or a promise? Thomas, you can’t come here. You have your jig to organize: five hundred randy bands, five thousand London bobbies, the Department of Public Works, ten thousand famine relief volunteers—”

“—And a partridge in a fucking pear tree,” said Tom.

“Exactly. So you can’t get at me, really. And I can’t—quite—get at you. Do you truly want this child to look fourteen?”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “Fourteen. And forward in her ways.”

“Define your terms.”

“Get her to do it for you.”

“Can I put a word in here? What’s wrong with Levi’s? The stuff I ordinarily wear?”

“Nothing.” Harlan looked up mildly: “If you want the London media to eat you whole. And doting Thomas with you.”

I could hear Tom on the other end going, “What’d she say? Harlan, what’d she say?”

“Levi’s.”

“So make it Levi’s and a hockey mask. Levi’s and chain mail. Levi’s and lizard skin boots. C’mon, you two can figure it out. For that matter what do I get married in? Ha? What about me? Have you thought about me at all?”

Harlan laughed. “What can I say?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking.”

“You want me to play arbiter elegantiae and list your options for you?”

“How you usually do, ain’t it?”

“Well.” Harlan considered. “You could go the morning coat and striped trews route. The old school uniform.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“People’d say I’d sold out.”

“All right then: rock soigné, lavender tailcoat, lavender ruffled shirt, lavender—”

“Turning myself into a Duran clone is not what I signed up for. Now don’t bother telling me to do it naked and dipped in orange glitter either. I’m not into mocking the sacrament of matrimony, I’m only trying to contract it in public, according to my lights.”

“And you want my judgment.”

“If I’d wanted somebody else’s, I’d’ve asked.”

“Then I think you should wear the 1830s frock coat and breeches from the Andy video. They’re in your wardrobe and will cost you nothing, time or money. And they’re certainly according to your lights. Suitable in every way.”

I thought he’d been disconnected.

“Are you suggesting I should wear white to my wedding?”

“Yes,” said Harlan, a calm little French aristocrat before the guillotine. “Assuming that I’ve understood the rationale behind your grand display of identical engagement rings and wedding bands, I quite believe you should.”

Tom said, “Thank you.”

I set down the phone, and got away from it.

Harlan was back to laughing. Listening and laughing, turning rosy. “Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, oh oh, it washes out. It really does.” The giggle turned into a tune under his breath, sung to little wordless syllables. I hungered to pick up the phone again, to hear if Tom was singing harmony, to hear if his half had the words, to try and figure what it was—an old shared joke in melody, and I didn’t know the punch line.

Maybe I ought to leave the room. Go down the elevator, down the street, and not come back. It was Harlan’s room. And it wasn’t just fear on my part, but certain knowledge: Tom was the medicine of life to him, body and soul.

Harlan held the receiver in the air.

“Here,” he said. “He wants you.”

Instead of picking up the phone under my hand, I saw myself go, trancelike, to the one offered. “How’s the child bride?” said the far side of the world.

“Just fine.”

Harlan trailed off contentedly into the kitchen. I saw him pour a nightcap of the Chardonnay, hesitate, and pour the last of it into a second glass.

“Y’know, I miss you.”

I said, “I miss you.”

“I’m used to having all the company I care to keep. Now I get married, I’m in bed by myself. Not the way it was to work out, was it?”

“I’m sorry.”

“My fault, mostly.”

“I love you.”

“I love you. But please come soon.”

“Okay.”

“G’night.”

“I thought it was morning where you are.”

“I got the curtains drawn. C’mon love, tell me good night.”

“G’night.”

I listened to the dial tone for a long time after he was gone, wondering what it was that washes out. After that, I collected the glass of Chardonnay Harlan had poured me from the counter end, and went to bed.

———

So we were in the restaurant at Needless Markup, Union Square, recuperating from the wedding salon. The place doesn’t call itself Needless Markup: Papa and his friends do, relentlessly, consistently. It was years before I knew it was Neiman Marcus, or there was any joke at all.

You don’t buy a wedding dress off a hanger at Needless Markup. The wedding salon has no hangers. It has soft lights, a little stage, an elegant desk for the wedding consultant, and sink-in-to-your-hip-bones chairs. The wedding consultant has albums of fashion design photos, fabric swatches bound in sumptuous books, and compendious catalogs of laces and embroideries.

Back at my craziest (age thirteen or so), Mama had, in a fit of terminal frustration, tacked a quote from Revelation to a bare spot on my wall between the Belshangles posters. Such unauthorized additions got torn down and garbaged usually. But this was rather different and it stayed:

I saw the holy city New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband—

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold the dwelling of God with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and he himself shall be their God.

And he shall wipe away all the tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death nor sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.

And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I am making all things new.

She thought the key phrase was the bit about the tears.

But that’s what I knew—basically, all I knew—about the adorning of brides. Now here I was, standing in the Needless Markup wedding salon, with my jaw hanging. It was like special ordering a car from the factory. For exactly the dress, with all your options added to the sticker price, racking up a $10,000 total was easy. A girl was in there with her mother, doing it.

At some point, I turned around very fast, before anyone could ask me what I wanted, and bolted. Head on into Harlan standing quietly behind me.

Harlan smells.

It was his scent that filled the hotel room when I first came there: never cheap or overpowering, delectable. Until you began to suspect it was hallucinogenic, and he was your hallucination. Like Moorish palaces: musk and bitter herbs and incense resins, blended with some kind of very subtle excellent sweet food.

Running into him produced a good giddy OD; I retreated to the restaurant. Harlan ordered lunch.

I was beginning to get a fix on him.

All his days began the same. On the bar in our suite stood his electric coffee grinder, his electric orange juicer, and his French filter coffee pot. In its refrigerator was a giant sack of oranges and a small one of Arabian Mocha coffee beans, the real old $20-a-pound kind Mama never bought because they cost too much.

Harlan’s Arabian Mocha could have powered a Saturn rocket. His fresh orange juice wasn’t any slouch either. He’d handed me mine this morning with an announcement: we were shopping for a wedding dress.

I said, “I have a wedding dress.”

When he realized I meant the white cotton knit mini, his scorn was total and mirthless. I explained its special qualities carefully, how it was one of the very few dresses I’d ever really liked, how I’d personally pulled it from the bottom of the five-dollar bargain bin at the Esprit factory outlet store, where they toss all the damaged stuff, the ugly stuff that didn’t sell, and the occasional nifty one-of-a-kind sample; further, it was sanctified. I’d gotten married in it once already.

He countered: it was hideously out of keeping with Tom’s white damask 1830s frock coat.

It was still my wedding dress. My piece of the real.

He asked if I thought Esprit might replicate it for me in finer fabric and full length.

So I took him to the factory outlet, right down in the warehouse district on the edge of the windy, skittering bay. He saw my point at once. The place is a supermarket. Nothing wrong with that, the clothes are fun: its just no place to look for individual service. All their stuff is Fabriqué à Hong Kong anyway.

And the Muzak at Esprit is select solid vicious rock (with the Belshangles admixture prominent), played non-stop loud enough to cook the brain. The effect on teen female better judgment is very dependable: buying frenzy, like a feeding frenzy of sharks. It never worked that way on me; it made me mad: like the songs were being whored with and I was being bribed. I loved the music so much better than the clothes.

So we wound up back at Union Square.

First at Gump’s. Their street-level boutique had a special on furs. Black ranch mink. Half price, only $6000. Almost out the door, I saw the bomber jacket: white ermine with the little black tails on, flippety-floppety, one to a fur. That was a proper giggle, and I almost took to it: traditional royal drag transmogrified. The quintessential rude girl thing. And I’ve got no qualms about fur; I eat meat too, and I wear leather shoes. But the tag said $3000.

Then at Sak’s. The clothes were 100% rayon, and they all had shoulder pads. I don’t need shoulder pads. I have shoulders.

Then at Needless Markup, first the wedding salon, then in the restaurant, empty handed. Doing what the Stones’ song said: “sitting, drinking (mediocre Chardonnay for him, ice tea for me), superficially thinking—” If I could tell Harlan all about the Holy City New Jerusalem, and the tears wiped away from the eyes, might he possibly understand?

Did he have any religion?

Maybe he didn’t, and that was the problem.

Maybe he did, and that was the problem.

How much did I know about him, anyway? His father was an Anglican priest, a bishop’s confessor. Wow. As stunning an argument as I could think of for the celibacy of the clergy.

Oh, and I’m so deadly tired of watching him order food he doesn’t enjoy.

At last he said, “You know, you have three thousand dollars. You have thirty thousand dollars.” So that was what was on his mind. The ermine jacket. No rude girl thing is worth three thousand dollars; it’s a contradiction in terms.

“Look,” I said, “I’m the kid whose belt buckle always slid around under one arm, whose blouse was out of her skirt, whose nails broke off, whose socks came down, whose hair was parted crooked, and whose shoes had horseshit on ’em. There’s only so much you can do.”

His look of honest frustration, fierce and innocently rumpled like some big black-feathered bird of prey, is more appealing than I care to admit.

I said, “Did you ever dress up a kitten?”

“What?”

“A kitten. A baby cat. In doll clothes.

“Whatever for?”

“Cause you were a kid and didn’t know any better. They turn out silly, stuffed, lumpy, frumpy, scared, mad, smelly, undignified, and shaped wrong!”

“Well none of this morning’s exercise was my idea!” (His lashes are black kohl smears below his wide gold eyes; you want to wipe ’em off, only they aren’t mascara) “I call the whole of it a thundering, provincial snore: if that’s the all your San Francisco has to offer—”

Now he’s hit me where I live. What could he have been doing here while Tom and I were in the mountains, hanging by his heels from his hotel ceiling like a bat?

“If it wasn’t your idea, whose was it?”

“I’m following you, as per instruction.”

“I wouldn’t be caught dead buying clothes in this place!”

“Nor elsewhere, by the look.”

“This is ridiculous. I like thrift shops,” I said, “and vintage clothes shops—”

“So do I. We dressed from them for years: they give one at least a chance to substitute intelligence for money.”

“—I like weird old things there never were too many of, and now there’s only one!” I flopped my hand and rings smartly on the table. Day-Glo orange diamonds, half a weird old thing there’s only one of. The other half’s in London.

“Although,” he said, “given my head, in your case I might proceed quite differently—”

“Such as?”

“Mm—trot you ’round to Hermes of Paris, say, and have them dress you out.”

“Harlan, ‘dressing out’ is what you do to game you’ve shot—”

Didn’t he know. He was the utter mischief, and I’d called him by his proper name. Damn. A first. It just slipped out. He grinned at me sideways, and his hair fell in his eyes. Tom’s gesture. He had it down exactly.

Wednesday, August 27

Trouble is—

Sex is addictive.

After only One Week’s Free Trial Offer, something awful is happening to me. I’m losing my grip on fantasy. Love has left me dreamless. I pulled the extra pillows off my closet shelf last night, and made a pillow husband for my bed. Tom was my hinge pin and pivot of all dreams anyway; now he’s gone and gotten real. Absent lovers, absent lovers.

I could dream myself in Harlan’s place once. He’s real too. I think. I don’t know what Harlan’s place is anymore. Stuck with me, incognito in San Francisco? God. Okay, I’ll humor him. We had our mocha and orange juice; we had our guitar session. I started out standing up:

da dump, da dump, da-da-da

da-da-da-da dump, da dump

da doodi dadi doodi da—

doo wah, doo wah

doo wah doo waah, do wa-a-ah!

Don’ wanna be your sla-ave!

(da dump, da dump),

Don’ wanna be your sla-ave!

I didn’t bellyache and he didn’t comment.

Suppose he knows anybody here? Lots of music types around San Francisco. Huey Lewis, The Tubes, The Grateful Dead. I’m sure he knows Bill Graham. Suppose he’d ever introduce me? People call him on the phone and make him laugh. Except for Tom, I don’t know who they are, or where they are. Tom’s the only one who makes him sing. And if he has any amorous night visitors in that bedroom next to mine, they’re supernaturally quiet ones.

Wonder if he makes pillow lovers in his bed.

I took him to Britex on Geary street, which displays more fabric per cubic inch than any other store on earth. That’s what he’d determined we were after, a rare exotic legendary white silk: and we’d have some local extrapolate an upscale copy of my dress.

Just to look helpful, I wore the dress. He wore a black velvet three-piece suit, and looked like nothing earthly.

Britex’s back door lets out onto Maiden Lane, and the silks are next to it. And they were all for dated little Chinese cast iron yuppie-matron cocktail dresses: the kind they wear to high school awards night when their sons win first in everything. Nothing legendary. Prim pale damasks, with peonies on ’em.

Nah. I can’t afford to look disappointed.

We wandered on down Geary. There is another little shop, advertising “Unusual Fabrics.” And they sure were, in the Cyndi Lauper sense. Being weird is not enough.

It wasn’t precisely that I didn’t believe in Santa Claus. Hell, I even believe in faeries. I was embarrassed. I didn’t believe in me. That was all there was to it. I didn’t pray for anything at all. And if Harlan had his own list of Tings 2 Pray 4, I didn’t want to know about it.

Of course, the Psalm says, “I prayed: because You answered.” Answers prove the prayer exists. They’re all that does. So the real world must be crowded, jammed, and littered, in fact, made up of the interlocking artifacts of other people’s prayers. I don’t think I’m alone. Do I? Like the old joke about the guided tour of Heaven, and the quarter the tour bus has to cross in total silence ’cause it’s where the Roman Catholics are, and they think they’re the only ones there.

Here I am, poking idly through bolts of synthetic glitz and fringe, of eyelash acetate and Lurex leopard skin, a Holy Lonely Roman Catatonic Church of one, socked in by spiritual fog of my own making, while—

“May we use your phone?”

—Salesperson, fortyish, sharp, and Asian, is saying to Harlan, “I don’t promise—” She checks her privacy, and writes on a slip of paper she first tears from the pad, “—but it should be entertaining.” (In come two young guys with moustaches.) “You’ll find a pay phone, I believe, in the lobby next door. Good day, sirs, may I help you?”

———

Harlan stuck the receiver between my ear and his: the phone booth was too small for comfort, and smelled of Moorish palaces. A little surge of gagging panic came and went as his dark hair swept my cheek.

Steady. Look at the paper in his hands.

Look at his hands. Look at the muscles in his fingers, the way the cords rise across his knuckles. God, I don’ wanna look at his hands!

Above the number on the paper in his hands is written “How Sam Wah, Silk Merchant.”

Business hum and traffic noise. A brisk man’s voice (abandoning the middle of another conversation) chirps, “Sam’s. C’n’I help you?”

“I am calling a Mr. How Sam Wah, is this—”

“Moment sir, put y’on’nother line, c’n’y’hold? Thanks.”

My eyes are shut, so I can’t see his hands. On the wall outside the booth was this big red-black-and-white poster for an AIDS support group: testing, lectures, counseling hotlines. A new tomb, and more getting laid in it daily. An entire city crying with Tom’s voice, “I don’t want to die of that stupid, goddamn ignominious disease! I don’t want to die at all!” I kept the eyes shut, and prayed that Harlan wouldn’t notice.

At least there was no canned music. Don’t think I could stomach “Greensleeves.” Or “Moon River.”

The other line, responding, bore an accent, rich, female, quiet as luxury: a Chinese plum sauce voice.

I whipped across the street, ultimately glad to be delivered from that phone booth, and bought a map. We’re looking for 17b Dalton. Dalton is an alley not so far away, tributary to Grant. The darkest heart of Chinatown. Our appointment with the silk merchant, if the woman with the voice, and we, have understood each other (neither certain), is at two o’clock.

Harlan’s watch says 12:33.

Just off Union Square is a place that makes real, true sandwiches, sandwiches which are. Avocado, bacon, and sprout sandwiches on thick sweet slabs of fresh-made bread. With an hour to kill, and a sudden heartfelt need to see Harlan eat California and like it, I ordered for us both.

Delight. He ate his with a look of quiet wonder. He picked the last sprout and bacon crumb out of his plate. He even asked about dessert. I tried to get him on sliced pears and yogurt, but he shuddered politely. Back outside.

We had to pass a street entertainer on the downhill corner of the Square, a kid getting out of chains, padlocks, and ropes he bullied his crowd into fastening on him. A crew of friends passed the cap and managed to wring out three collections while he strutted, bragged, claimed he was starring in a movie on Houdini, and showed himself off naked to the waist. Brassy and skinny and limber as a snake.

At last all possible pigeons were milked; his bondage was firmly in place. He raised one shoulder high, dropped the other past the limits of anatomy and started to shimmy. Chains began to hit the sidewalk. He moved exactly like Tom. Sandy-haired. Tawny. Fifteen years younger.

As we left, Harlan tossed a small green spindle into the cap. Maybe, I thought, he’d stuck his name and phone inside the money, like the bold chicks do at concerts.

Half a block later I’d guilt tripped myself into a vigorous stomachache. Ow. Harlan’s watch said 1:45. We hiked up Grant street. Ow ow. Lower than stomach. A sharp pang, like runner’s cramp. Guilty-gut ulcers, the worst kind. I was the one who’d thought the kid was sexy. Me. Harlan only gave him money. He and Tom had worked street corners for a living once.

Crowded shops and Chinese hustle pass me in a haze. Off Grant, the crowds thin out. One-room factories make fortune cookies; strange trash ferments in gutters, and steep old stairways go to joss house temples on the second floor. One more turn leads into damp, pungent solitude.

17b is a door with nothing on it but the number. 17a was bricked up in the last century. It’s plastered now with old concert bills (one for the Belshangles tour), old politicians, old agitprop, and most recently, the AIDS support group poster. In Chinese.

Harlan leaned on the buzzer. It sounded (if at all) so far inside, no rumor reached the street.

No “Greensleeves.” No “Moon River.”

Trouble is (ow), sex is addictive. Eighteen years I’ve done without. Eight days, and it seems like the real old natural order, indispensable. OW ow ow.

Somebody unbolts the door, one of those perfectly sleek young Asian women who’s about four inches at her thickest, front to rear. Her dress is tiny black silk, slit at the sides and fastened on her shoulder with curled black satin frogs.

The glimmer of her flawless nylons and dainty black silk heels precedes us up a dark, canted staircase, along a hall, through a door. Inside, a buzzing office full of skinny little men at desks are answering phones, typing, keeping ledgers. Across the room, a jagged hole is kicked out of the wall, four feet tall by four wide, maybe. I can fantasize Godzilla’s big green toes protruding through it. Now, I didn’t pray for this. I’ve never thought of anything remotely similar. But at last and at least, here is my city: not Act III of the Masque of the Red Death, and not a thundering provincial snore.

Our guide glides on between the desks. No one glances from his work. She dips and bows through the hole in the wall like a Chinese dancer, and we have to follow, around three sides of a balcony or mezzanine above some industrial operation (old-fashioned looms? or presses?) clattering away a floor below.

Down a second dark, sagging staircase. Down a hall. Into an exquisite little office, with a deep blue carpet, low chairs, and lacquer tables, and sliding doors to a garden (stone lions on boulders above a dry stone stream), laid out with wit and nerve in the strip of shadowy waste, six feet narrow, between one warehouse and the next.

There is an old man at the far desk, black dressed, black-eyed and moth fragile. The girl introduces How Sam Wah the Silk Merchant, in the voice we heard on the phone.

And Harlan starts to talk.

He takes about ten minutes explaining who he is, who Tom is, who I am, where London is, why we’re here not there, and exactly the sort of silk (white fantastic) we need (He needs? I need?) for a wedding dress.

The girl listens, dutifully dazed, and turning, makes Chinese of it for the old man, in about half the time. It did occur to me, they both might understand quite well; she might be saying something else. He replied, about a sentence worth: a voice as soft as caterpillars in the mulberry leaves.

She turned to us. “He says, no white.”

“What?” said Harlan.

“He says, in China is the color of—how we say.” She made small puzzled shapely gestures. “The dead are in white, and those who—”

“Mourning?” said Harlan.

“Yes.” (relieved) “Is color of mourning.”

The old man spoke.

“Also, he says, is only the rough, the raw silk: is not the fine silk used for mourning.”

“Well, scratch this plan,” I said.

Harlan shook his head, an almost imperceptible “no.”

“Do you deal exclusively in China silk? What about silk from Japan, or Thailand, or—”

The girl had already begun her translation.

“He tells us, is all same. In all part of Asia, white for the dead.” She smiled helpfully and said, “Color of mourning?”

Back where I started. A new tomb in which no one had been laid. White for purity. White for deprivation. I would feel a lot more comforted if I knew what the difference was. Harlan is still talking, about comparative symbolisms of color. And I have paranoied myself into a stomachache bordering nausea.

At the old man’s ring, waiters come with steaming pots of jasmine tea, and cups and plates and trays of Dim Sum. Egg rolls. Pearl balls. Tiny little pork buns.

Personally, I prefer my pork buns large.

Harlan has hobbit blood. Harlan has a hollow leg. Dude, he’s barely finished one big lunch; I’m having to defend my territory, or he’ll get all the pearl balls.

Harlan can be an awful bore.

I guess enough exposure to anyone’ll demonstrate they aren’t the Fourth Person of the Blessed Trinity after all, but now he’s arguing philosophy of art or something: about synthetics, and why they can’t ever be esthetically pleasing as natural fiber, as if these people even knew the words: what a crock—And the tea was all poured—and the food was all gone—

Even Motormouth Parr appeared to have run down. The silence grew embarrassing. Then painful. Nobody moved.

The old man spoke.

“He asks, if still you wish to view the silk rooms.”

Wearily, warily, Harlan tucked his head and smiled.

———

It was a huge room, cellar-dark. Each length of silk lay loosely wound between fat lacquer poles in horizontal racks so no crease formed. As Harlan and the old man passed, the girl put out one lamp, switched on the next, over colors and colors, like the exotic moth collection of some grand museum.

There’s nothing at all like what we want. They know it, I know it, Harlan knows it.

Harlan missed his calling; Harlan was cut out to be a Southern Senator. He’s on his second wind now, rapping on in that exquisite, intolerant little voice about the French silk industry’s decline since the war, about the annual fabric collections at IdeoComo, about sportsmen’s thermal underwear, and antique parachutes, and Papal vestments—

I wandered away.

Closed doors are a challenge. The first I opened was a janitor’s closet: concrete sink, mops, buckets. The second was a toilet.

The third was pay dirt.

Chinese carpets rose toward the dark center of the room in heaped-up, layered luxury like a dragon’s horde. Around the walls stood tall cabinets, wardrobes of the sort you climb through into Narnia. All the light came in the door, one dim shaft with my head in the middle of it, picking out a cabinet on the far wall. Gleams of colored lacquer and moon-pale carved stone.

I tiptoed up across the rugs; it wasn’t locked.

Fright of a lifetime. I didn’t quite run screaming. Somebody in there: a mannequin in gold brocade court robes and headdress, escapee from Chinese Narnia. Faint cold sweetness flooded out, like Harlan’s perfume only far older, more forbidding. I shut the door on it.

Most of the cabinets were dead dark. But the first on the right—was visible enough—to make out three fat poles of horizontal fabric. The top one, black as Harlan’s hair, melted into shadow. The bottom one was red as Tom’s, no shadow disguised that. I drew an end of the middle stuff out to the light; white raw silk, rough and plain.

Something fell back glittering underneath.

———

First, they said there was no other room. Then, that it was all antiquities, no silk. Then they said the antique silks were for museums, not for wearing; fourth (of course) there was no white; fifth, it wasn’t what we wanted. Sixth, she led us in, switching on the crystal chandeliers.

Two white fabrics housed in that cabinet, on a single pole with the raw silk outside, like a peasant handmaid set to guard a royal mistress with her body and her life.

“This is death silk for an Emperor’s concubine.”

Harlan’s face was a classic study.

“But surely—the last ruler of China was a woman?”

The old man spoke.

“He says, the gentleman is well read. Tzu Hsi, the great Empress Dowager died in 1909, but the last of the Emperors is Henry Pu Yi, who lived yet but few years in the People’s Republic. He lived yet, 1927, in the Forbidden City when treasure houses were burned by palace eunuch who wished to conceal crimes; many many treasures stolen and sold over the world, many sold here.”

“Ah.”

I elbowed him.

“Plausible,” he murmured. “I’ve worn older silks than that, and this piece appears never to have been cut, or even left in the light.”

A buzzer brought silent men, who unrolled it on a table in the silk room, one piece and perfect. And the pattern, what was that? Some places swirled, nebulous, thick textured; were they clouds? Places were almost sheer, twined with sinewy satin flows, what were those? A river course half hidden in mists? A huge scaly body too vast to comprehend? But in between it all, an emblem shone recurrent, like a great sign in the heavens. “What does that say?”

“The Dragon’s blessing, it means ‘Ten Thousand Years.’”

“How much?” said Harlan.

“Ten thousand.”

“No. What is the price?”

The old man spoke.

“He says, is not what you wish. Is for the dead.”

“But is for sale?” Harlan persisted.

“It is three hundred dollars for the yard; thirty yard; he does not cut.”

“That’s nine thousand dollars?”

The old man spoke.

“Plus tax,” said the girl, smiling.

“Will you accept my check?”

I saw it for sure this time, the glitter of satisfaction flash across behind the old black silk eyes. But the girl still translated. He replied. She said, “Cash.”