Like People in History (28 page)

"If the staff of New York's premier fag mag doesn't know about his sex life, he probably doesn't have one. But I'd bet that other one has a beer-can dick. Look at the way it bulges athwart the inseam in those shorts!"

"Which one?" I asked.

"The half-handsome, half-prissy one in the madras shirt and cream-colored shorts. He's a little stouter than I like as a rule..."

"He's a lawyer, Luis told me. From the city. Staying at P-Town with Ian and Phillip."

"He's got something swinging in there! Probably one of those big, fat, East-European..." Alistair all but hugged himself. "Just what the doctor ordered."

"Didn't know yon were ailing, Miss Scarlett."

"Duh vapors, chile. Duh vapors. Nuthin' but a li'l horse meat won't cure! Let's get a little closer so lean better check out his basket. Mother really doesn't care to be unpleasantly surprised
ce soir."

Matt looked up from where he'd been intently speaking to Al and Muffy Weisberg and closed one glamorously lashed eye in a wink, provoking an immediate smile from me. I brushed his back surreptitiously as I walked past. Alistair's hand was down by his side, gesturing me closer to the little group where Luis was just finishing a description of Nils Adlersson's book by saying, "It's really fabulous!"

"Really?" Phillip asked. "As good as
The Persian Boy?"

"Oh, honey! That book's trash," Ian quickly put in. "You'll have to forgive Lip," he explained to the attorney and Nils.

"What do you mean trash! I thought
The Persian Boy
was wonderful!" Phillip insisted. "I read it twice and cried both times!"

"He also thinks Belva Plain should get the Nobel Prize," Ian sneered. "Lip simply can't understand why all those Third World Wogs keep getting it."

Phillip was holding his ground. "What do you think, Anny?" he asked the attorney Alistair had expressed interest in.

"I never read novels. Fiction is... Well, it's not fact, is it?"

Nils's face set suddenly, but his mouth formed a crooked little smile.

Phillip and Luis looked to Nils for contradiction and, seeing they weren't going to get it, began to sputter—"Oh, Anatole, you're just saying that! You can't mean it."

"I do mean it! Lord knows I read plenty of nonfiction books. Perhaps twenty or thirty a year. Mostly history and biography. Then there's magazines. Aside from what I use for work, I've got subscriptions to [naming you can guess which eight of them]... You can't say I'm not up on everything. And after all, what's the point of reading fiction?"

"To discover other points of view!" Alistair spoke up, moving closer to Anatole. "To find out how other people live. What they experience. What they think about what they experience. How they feel about what they think they've experienced. I'd assume that richness of detail and roundedness of experience would be
invaluable
to an attorney."

Everyone had turned to Alistair.

Who concluded his eloquent yet seductively presented speech by adding to no one in particular,
"N'est-ce pas?"

"I never thought of it that way," Anatole said, looking thoughtful.

"Perhaps you were exposed to the wrong novels as a young lad," Alistair explicated in that same seductive tone of voice, as he quietly sidled between Phillip and Nils so he was at Anatole's side. "Perhaps you'll tell me
exactly
what you did read as a lad and I could..."

The VIP lounge door loudly clanked open, shattering my reverie. Anatole stood arms akimbo, challenging me. The door clanked shut behind him.

"Wally says the party at Alistair's was over an hour ago! And he says you were both there earlier."

I sat up.

"Are you going to tell me what is going on?" Anatole demanded.

"Didn't Wally tell you? Is he out there?"

"He's out there. And no, he didn't
'tell me'!
'Tell me' what?"

I looked at my options and compared them to what I knew or suspected I knew of Anatole's humanity or lack thereof.

"Alistair's sick." I let it out.

Anatole was about to ask sick how and stopped himself. "Go on."

"I thought in his condition, Alistair might be depressed being all alone after everyone left, so I said I'd return."

For a minute I wondered if Anatole was going to buy it, or if I was going to have to spill the beans.

"Not just diagnosed but sick," he clarified for himself. "How sick?" Exactly the right question.

"He's been hospitalized twice." Then, to punch it home: "He weighs about a hundred and twenty."

Anatole's comprehension and anger were immediate. His face darkened and reddened and clamped shut. "Doesn't he have anyone there?"

"Always. But you know how close we've been. Since we were nine."

Without losing a bit of his anger or ruddiness or clenched visage, Anatole relented.

"I'll do what I can to get you out tonight."

"Is Wally angry with me?"

Anatole shrugged.

"He is angry with me, I know. We fought earlier."

Anatole turned and began banging for the guard to come.

I went over to him. "Anny, how do I explain to Wally?"

"Explain what, about Alistair's illness?"

"No! He's asking all about Matt. What do I tell him, Anny?"

Anatole got suddenly flustered. "How should I know?" He banged even harder. Then he said in an oddly calm tone of voice, "You know, when I first saw Matt Loguidice I thought he wasn't real. I never thought anyone could be that beautiful."

"Even with his leg!" I added.

"Even so. He was so beautiful... I wondered how you dared to make love with him," Anatole said, his face reddening as he looked away to some stashed memory vision. "I thought anyone who would even
touch
... someone like him must end up... I don't know, struck down by a bolt from the heavens or..."

As he spoke, Anatole looked at me closely, as though assessing something in me he'd never considered before.

I had no idea at first how to answer him. Then the turnkey arrived, and Anatole grabbed my shoulder hard, wordlessly consoling me or urging me on or... something! before he turned to leave.

I found my voice. "Wasn't I struck by heaven, Anny? Weren't we
all?"

Left alone, and even though I didn't want to, I was forced to remember Matt.

"I've got it!" Calvin said. "We'll recommend
Agnes von Hohenstaufen."

"Agnes von
who?" I asked. Where was that catalog? There it was! The little bugger! Under everything else. I grabbed it, opened it, began going through its pages. Slim pickings.

"You mean you've never heard of
Agnes von Hohenstaufen
by Gasparo Spontini?" Calvin asked, delighting in his one-upping me. I knew he was at his office, not ten blocks away, over on Sutter Street. Even so, our Bell West connection made him sound like he was in the Antipodes, or Oakland! It could be worse. Last week we didn't have phones two entire afternoons. Would they ever finish building BART and screwing around Market Street?

We were discussing the new opera production the director of the San Francisco Opera company was looking for. He'd come to us for suggestions, as we were the staff of the most knowledgeable magazine, local fan club, and general opera-going claque in town. Each of about a dozen of us was to come up with a suggestion for something different and wonderful and present it to him at a staff meeting in a few weeks. He promised to mount a production of one of our choices. I was only a part-time staff writer for the rag, but even so, through my friendship with Calvin Ritchie, its new editor and general factotum, I was as deeply involved in this selection as anyone else.

"Never heard of it," I was forced to admit.

"It was
only
Spontini's greatest success," Calvin emphasized. "You know Spontini's
La Vestale,
of course."

"Naturally," I said, half lying: I'd heard of it, not heard it.

"Agnes
was the biggest hit of that year. Seventy performances! Bellini was said to have wept at the Parma premiere. The young Verdi, still a student, pawned his score of the
Missa Solemnis
to attend."

"Miss Ritchie!" I warned in my best schoolmarm voice. "If you're making this all up, you shall be se-vere-ly chas-tis-ed."

I slid over that catalog and went to the next. I was myself at work, at Pozzuoli's, San Francisco's most chi-chi bookstore and art gallery, cultural emporium really, located on two breathtakingly expensive and overdecorated floors of the primest real estate in downtown's newest hotel, with one entrance out on the Embarcadero, the other indoors, facing a sixty-foot rectangular bank of calla lilies growing inside the thirty-floor open lobby. It was late July 1974, and the
Chronicle's
national headlines were all about Judge Sirica and Senator Sam Ervin, and the shit finally hitting the Nixon Administration fan. Even Patty Hearst and the SLA were second-sectioned for the new dirt. We'd already just

bypassed two admitted Constitutional Crises, and now it all seemed to be in the hands of those Fates that rise out of the mist and soil in the prelude of
Götterdämmerung
—of which, by the way, everyone agreed there hadn't been a decent production in this town since the days of Schorr, Flagstad, and Karen Branzell.

Meanwhile, local news was spotlighting and thus busily pumping up the "Downtown Renaissance"—which is to say the construction mess from City Hall, the Opera House, and the rest of the so-called Civic Center building on lower Van Ness Avenue, and the subway extension along Market Street right to the Sausalito ferry—with an occasional editorial nod at the upcoming municipal election, sure to bring in an old Machine pol named Moscone as mayor, and our first gay city supervisor, some guy named Harvey no one really knew.

Directly across from my little open-air balcony office at Pozzuoli, I noted a pair of scrumptiously garbed Japanese women looking at Monika's little shelf of bibelots. Their dresses were cut modern—Chanel? Saint Laurent? it was
someone
French—but used native fabrics: great pink peonies on a field of ashy silver for one, white-and-gray storks flying against a midnight-blue sky for the other. Industrialists' wives. They moved with the small-step shuffling, semi-awkward grace of geisha hostesses.

"You'd love
Agnes.
So would Miss Thing over at the Opera," Calvin said. "It's simply spectacular! Set during the Hundred Years' War in Swabia, with scenes in the Alps and the Black Forest. There's an emasculated version, natch, but the original's in five acts, needs two, count 'em
two,
coloratura sopranos, each of whom has a great
scena,
and together a trio with the contralto. Oh, and there's also a light soprano trousers role. The male parts are equally juicy, with great arias and duets for—get this, Flora!—a pair each of tenors and bassos. And it has an all-baritone chorus in the... I think it's the third act."

"Is there a full score of this unknown masterpiece in existence?" I asked, sweeping that book catalog off my desk and onto a chair, and moving on to the next one—a few more titles, but Holly would have to look at it later. She knew more about art books than I would in a lifetime, despite my title.

"Not only a fall score," Calvin said, "but, Divina Angel Cake, a recording!"

"Leontyne!" I gushed back. "One
is
impressed!"

Monika had arrived to help the Japanese women. They looked like serious buyers. Good. My reign at Pozzuoli's had already been marked by profits. It allowed me to get away with setting my own hours, my own style of management, and quite a bit else.

"In fact," Calvin went on, "I've heard a reel-to-reel tape!"

"No! I've just made jizz stains all over my chinos!"

"Wait'll you hear it! Pirated off a radio program by some ditzy French number: the ORTF direct from the Aix-en-Provence Festival. It was a Franco-Italo production, put together by the great impresario de Bailhac in 1936. And, Margery Daw, get this cast: Ebe Stignani and Germaine Cernay; Fedora Barbieri with Hina Spani in the role of the messenger; Lauri-Volpi
and
Georges Thill parted against Pinza
and
Marcel Journet! Have your feet left the ground yet?"