Bell came in then, followed by a young man. I knew I wouldn’t speak to him. He was intimidating, even stellar. At first I thought the young man was Kevin, but he was one of Bell’s old lovers. Kevin was older now, and besides he lived in Los Angeles and was getting married soon. On closer look, the man was tiny, not young. He had red hair and a quick satyric way of moving.
Bell looked exhausted, hallowed and light, almost weightless. They sat at a far table, the little man toward me and Bell in profile. I couldn’t hear what they said, but it was easy enough to see their faces, though they couldn’t see mine. I read their expressions as if I were reading the ingredients of a bottle of poison I swallowed by mistake. Bell’s concentration and ease made me shiver. It reminded me of our first dreamy months, when he teased me playfully without malice, when our moral structure seemed identical. But these same gestures were ominous now. And there was a growing leisure to his movements that made him seem disinterested in whatever the little man was saying. He was acting, as he always did, resistant, withholding. In bed Bell would lean his bare shoulders up against the wall, always waiting for me to come to him. The little man talked with his mouth wide open and gesticulated with his chin. After every statement he stopped and looked intensely into Bell’s face.
Bell gazed off, blew long indifferent tendrils of smoke. This discourse was beginning to look like an interrogation. Bell rebuked, and I knew that then he spoke about his latest idea, that no one ever had an original idea, any notion was a confluence of news, former ideas, history, music, and you were just one of many who pulled it down out of the air. The little man was chastised, cast his eyes down, then grabbed Bell’s wrist. He twisted it back and said something urgent.
Bell loosened the little man’s arm, lit a cigarette and walked to the door. He looked my way though he didn’t see me. I could tell by his insular expression that he thought of me and would soon be coming home.
The little man ordered another drink, he kept looking at the door and silently moving his lips. I thought of comforting him, explaining that Bell was always like that, you couldn’t expect him to listen to logic, he was a surrealist. I’d tell him about the strange still lifes I sometimes woke to, a single black high heel, a brown egg, long thick nails scattered around, and how he worked out formulas. I’d seen the calculations: a smiley face plus a unicorn equaled a chainsaw, an apple and a penis equaled a heart. But I felt stupid for thinking the little man was my comrade and I left him shredding his bar napkin.
I decided to sit in the park above Bush Street. I knew Bell would try to make me feel crazy. He rearranged his experience, cut out days and nights, tried to weld a nonlinear narrative. He told me once that he refused to be terrorized by time. He lied, forgot, wandered. He often told stories, like the one about meeting a trapeze artist in a bar, that I didn’t think could be true. But then in the mail there would be an envelope with a circus insignia. He thought that when he left me I froze, and when he slipped back he set my life moving again, and the thing I hated most was that lately this was true.
I walked up California Street. It was lined with large Victorians, ornate as jewelry boxes. The houses were set back with small yards and as I passed one I saw two lovers in a slender alley. They were similarly dressed, with longish hair. One was standing behind the other so I couldn’t tell if they were two men or two women or one of each. At first they seemed to be gazing at the moon, but then I saw their eyes were closed and I knew that one way or another they were making love.
The park was an oasis among the stone buildings and asphalt of Nob Hill. It was arranged European-style with plots of calla lilies and fountains. There were benches with horny-toelizard legs and marble statues, one of young girls, bougainvillea grown over them. In the middle were reclining stone soldiers; their hard muscular demeanor reminded me of the leather monsters.
I sat in a far corner under a eucalyptus tree. The dye aroma had faded and the bourbon was just a warm sensation in my forehead. With my head in my hands, my features felt self-consciously delicate. But with my dyed hair I wasn’t delicate. Now I resembled a certain kind of heartbreaking whore. She came to me: cheap handbag, lively hips and, linked to her, another picture—a makeshift suspension bridge swinging dangerously.
Bell wanted a disciple, someone who agreed that he was a new person, defining modern ways of living that had nothing to do with conventional commitment, someone capable of emotional toughness and moral vacuity. Sometimes I felt his ideas on relationships were brutal, more the outcome of a rough childhood and shaky adolescence than some inevitable futuristic truth. But other times there was a creeping anxiety that reminded me of Darwinism, made me wonder if I shouldn’t listen if I wanted, as I did, to crush out the weak parts of myself.
Who was that little man? It would be easier if it were Kevin. Then there would be logical reasons for his growing preoccupation and moodiness. But his obsession with Kevin, his first love, was from a time ten years before, for a boy Bell admitted no longer existed. Sometimes I think I’ve fallen in love with Kevin along with other parts of Bell’s past. What is love but a nostalgia for someone’s history? Their boyhood haunts and sullen adolescence, their teenage trips cross-country and fights with their fathers and especially their old lovers? Sometimes I think I’m more interested in Bell’s old lovers than I am in Bell. When I met him he was seeing a woman. And though I never said it, her description was enough like Marilyn’s that I would think of her that way. Once I called her, the answering machine revealed a disembodied voice, low and secure, that made me feel stupid. But Bell only longs for Kevin, and sometimes, lately, I feel myself longing for him too.
Bell told me Kevin was dark with a tight hairless chest and a cock that was lipstick pink and slightly bowed to the left. He had intelligent eyes and a way of leaning toward you when he made a point. When I thought of Kevin he was surrounded with pale sunlight like Jesus. Sometimes he seemed to smile at me and I’d feel myself being pulled through my head into Bell’s pearlish chain of memories. But once there, it was frustrating, like watching from the window as your beautiful young neighbors made love.
I thought of Bell yesterday, how he had satirized female cooing sounds, made his features dreamy, threw his head back in burlesque of a female orgasm. The mocking tone of his voice, “You take off that,” when he stretched the material of the teddy then let the elastic edge snap against my skin. He is bad for me. This idea startled me and for a while I watched the fountain water splash between the figurines. A strong wind juggled the eucalyptus leaves. Nature is most beautiful in its movement: wind, water, the sinking sun. And it was just then that I saw a woman striding carelessly into the park.
She leaned on the edge of the fountain, letting her long hair brush the water, dressed in a paisley mini-dress and platform shoes. Wind rattled the lilies. She unbuckled her shoes and in one practiced movement pulled her dress over her head, and stepped into the fountain. I was startled, heard my breathing change like with sex. She was nude and so pale that the marble seemed sooty in comparison. When she looked my way her eyes caught light and burned red. If she saw me, she didn’t seem to care. Her wide features were set smoothly, but it could just as easily have been the calm of the insane as true tranquillity. Quickly, she washed her feet, squatted, splashed water between her legs and over her breasts. Standing, she put her head between the thighs of a marble soldier and was encased for a moment in a pillar of foaming water. Sitting on the edge of the pool, she wrung her hair out and skimmed water from her body with flat open palms. There was a frail power about her, not dangerous, but resilient, as if she’d be hard to kill. I admired her absence of fear. The woman pulled on her dress, held her wet hair back as she strapped her platform shoes, then turned toward the milky lights of the Tenderloin.
I stood and watched her descent. The water seemed to absolve her. She held her shoulders regally and didn’t look back, though I wanted her to turn and see me standing small against the trees. I felt better . . . maybe it was just that I knew Bell was meandering back to our apartment, past the Bacchus Kirk and the Malaysian bar on the corner. Or maybe the woman was a talisman, one that would help me in whatever came next.
Opening the apartment door, I thought the leopard’s lit eyes were two cigarette tips, but then felt the empty space and knew Bell was still not home. I didn’t turn on the light. Whenever he left a place it was like he had never been there. I went around the