Australian Love Stories (19 page)

First, he was taking the Boxster up to some park above Sunset.
The Pop Luck Club
. Gays in their low-cut G-Star jeans, fussing about a sandpit, blender babies whingeing in their thousand dollar carriages. Next came the photo of the foundling called Marvel from El Salvador. A little scrunched-up thing. The gaze. I wondered if it might not be a tad
Downsy
, the slightly hooded eyes, but I didn't dare ask if the mother was elderly. I just envisaged the fecal alcohol syndrome. I mean foetal.

But Arthur was adopting regardless, just to be passiveaggressive: he was already off to the airport with Ali the limousine driver, the way Arabs drive Jews to the airport in town cars. Flying to Tegucigalpa, which is in Honduras, even I know that. Apparently the bambino's parents were refugees.

‘We're all refugees,' I told Arthur. And anyway, who would flee
to
Honduras?

I didn't go with him, just reminded him he'd already spent $80,000. ‘
I
could have had a baby for that,' I told him. Adopting an unsuspecting infant as a conduit, like buying a Jack Russell to keep things alive!

Still, I can't pretend I don't understand his yearning. I just know how to avoid it.

I have Orion. He's twenty-two. I hear what you're thinking, but twenty-two isn't thirteen. He's nearly twenty-three.

Downtown I went in
Sinbad,
my old Subaru, the wind in my hair, to see
Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture,
but I didn't care for the likeness between ball-gown and lampshade. I ended up at the
Patinette
. Now that's real art—Orion waiting tables, my dark sylph, twists and braided seventies' headband. Give me your Jennifer Beals. On his feet all afternoon, serving and wiping, the fortitude. He smiled at me
en passant,
a moment that felt like a year.

His narrow pants and those dancer's feet, worn out tap shoes. His movement slightly uneven, which at first I found so seductive, then realized he'd lost a sole.

I told him too soon I'm a writer, published here and there,
in translation
. Reeling the limping boy in.

I should have felt guilty, I should have. Arthur's salmon mornay left for me on the Viking, Marvel's bedroom painted blue. Arthur on the plane south, playing fetch.

But then Orion mentioned he was a writer too. A poet. Another money-spinner!
A half-scholarship to
USC
. A muse.

The shouting in my head as he shared the endurances of his island childhood—black hippie parents on a pineapple farm on Oahu. His mother once ‘in the movement'
;
now she's three hundred pounds and barely moves at all. His old man (
old man
!
My darling
.
Don't say that
) was once a 49er, then a Black Panther, then he played bongos for
Earth, Wind & Fire
.

And now they've run out of pineapple money.

I couldn't help wonder if that's where I might come in.

Should I give him the tuition cheque right there and then? My heart felt embezzled already.

Marta, my
therapista
, thinks I have the symptoms of a chicken hawk; a radar for boys between eighteen and twenty-three. Better than a sparrow hawk, I told her, but she always ignores my interjections, advises how grandiosity masks my low self esteem.

‘Have you ever read
Lolita
?' she asked. A parting shot.

I wanted to tell her she dresses like Stevie Nicks.

‘I don't read Nabokov,' I told her. ‘He disturbs me.' I left her a cheque for eighty instead of a hundred and twenty.

I imagine escorting Orion to this tragic affair, having him draped over my arm like a stole. I'd be the rich one then; I'd
do the bidding. The signed print of Rosa Parks that everyone's ignoring—a young bespectacled woman perched on a shiny leather bus seat. I look into her eyes behind the glasses. She's had enough too. No one's even bid on her.

Only a few faces of colour in
this
crowd—they all go to
Divas Simply Singing
to see if Chaka Khan might actually show, so no one's left here to care because Rosa isn't Judy Garland. She didn't drink herself to death, just changed the bloody face of history.

Arthur herds me into the theatre with the pack of fairy penguins, threading down front to the seats with the other heavy hitters. He reaches to hold my hand and I blanch. He knows I don't do public displays of groping, well not with him. I only do that with those I don't know, in the shrubs near the tennis courts in Griffith Park, where I can at least feel at home. What else can I do? Arthur getting so thick about the middle, won't go to the gym. I, myself,
can't
go to the gym. It isn't safe. I end up backstage in the showers for hours, wondering if I shouldn't just stay there forever, have my mail forwarded.

Anyway, why Arthur gives thousands to this business I can't imagine. When women are being circumcised in Uganda, eleven-year-old boys in tribal armies. My own pittance sent each month to Amalia from Manila. Lagoon eyes and a slightly snotty nose.
Save the Christians
probably added the snot for the photo. Maybe they have a special makeup person. ‘Perhaps a little scab about her mouth. There we go. Perfect.'

Judith Light looks like a drag queen on stage, presenting Jennifer Aniston with the Vanguard Award for service to the
GLBT
community.
Really? Jennifer Aniston? A Vanguard?
I can't stand it.

‘Give it to Gore Vidal,' I shout. I get up to push my way along the row, bumping knees. Then I remember poor bloody Gore just died.

‘Or at least Billie Jean King.'

‘She won it last year,' says a voice from behind me.

Glancing back, I catch sight of Arthur about to erupt from his tux, raising his bidding paddle at me as if there might be potential in that. He'll bid on some auctioned crap onstage. Hand-scribed Sondheim lyrics in frame, poor old Barbara Cook being piped in:
You said you loved me…or were you just being kind? Or…am I losing my mind?

Yes, I'm losing my fucking mind.

When Marta asked me about my favourite book I said
The Little Prince
, and she smiled too knowingly. ‘Antoine de Saint Exupéry died young,' she said, ‘in a plane crash.' I waited for the other shoe. ‘Yours is going down,' she said. ‘Your plane.'

‘What kind of therapy is this?'

‘Jungian,' she said.

I was afraid she'd say something clever like that. She told me Saint Exupéry led a provisional life, dreaded being bound to the earth. Then the floodgates opened. ‘You have the typical disturbances, homosexuality and Don Juanism.' She pulled out a book with underlinings, pictures of the boa constrictor digesting the elephant, the sheep in a box. ‘Such men die young.'

‘I don't partake of dangerous sports,' I said.

‘You're intoxicated by this boy. This new wounded bird. You're only trying to save yourself.'

Luckily her time was up. I told her I'd given all my money to educating young Hawaiians, that I'd leave her a cheque but it would bounce. She eyed me with such cruel compassion.

Out in the foyer, there's air and virtually no one except the androgynous auction attendant, toupeed and silent, suspicious. Rosa Parks gazes out from her print, the yearning still in her eyes. William Winchell, that dinge queen donut heir with the donut hair, has bid $600. I want to scratch it out, but I'm spared by the sight of my lesbian writer friend Bette sneaking a smoke under the long and winding stairs.

‘You can go to jail for that in
LA
,' I say. I take the end from her and suck on it. ‘What the hell are you doing here?'

‘Oh, I'm dating this femme top power chick,' she explains. ‘She's on the Board.'

Bette's vaguely bipolar in a subversive downtown beatnik sort of way, her hair a tangled mess. Really from some
bourgie
family in Santa Barbara but she'd never admit it.

‘Does this mean we've made it?' I ask. ‘Being here?'

‘Guess so,' she says, taking her cigarette back, the Santa Barbara in the squareness of her jaw.

‘I wish you were a guy,' I say.

‘Me, too,' she says. ‘How's your Hawaiian project?'

‘
Disparu
,' I say dejectedly. ‘Son of a pineapple farmer.' We laugh, and then I stop, look into her eyes for something. ‘I think I gave him the creeps,' I say.

‘Well, you are kind of creepy,' she says.