The Little Death (7 page)

“He
poisoned my childhood,” Hugh said, ignoring me, “and I looked for causes, not
knowing they didn’t exist, believing that I deserved his abuse.”

Something
in his tone made me ask, “What kind of abuse, Hugh?”

“He
said I was too pretty to be a boy,” Hugh replied, his eyes bright with defiance
and shame. Slowly, I understood.

“He
assaulted you — sexually?”

“The
joke is that I already knew I was gay. Knew I was different, anyway. What took
me years to learn is that it didn’t have — “ he paused, searching for words — “to
be so demeaning.”

“What
did he tell you?”

“That
I led him on, that I wanted it.” He smiled, bitterly. “I was the seductive
twelve year old. A few weeks after it happened he sent me to a prep school in
the east. Eighteen years ago. I can count on my fingers the times I’ve seen him
since.”

“Why
have you come back?”

“I’m
living on my anger, Henry. It’s the only life I’ve got left in me, and I’ve
come back to confront him. But I need to be strong when I see him, and I’m not
strong yet.”

“In
the meantime, you brood and destroy yourself.”

“I
thought, in the meantime, you and I could become friends.” I heard the ghost of
seduction in his voice, yet it was not meant seductively. It was a plea for
help. “If only I had met you — even five years ago.”

“What’s
wrong with now?” I asked and drew him close.

*
* * * *

The
next morning I woke to find Hugh standing perfectly still in a wide sunny space
near the window, facing the wall above my head, wearing only a pair of faded
red sweatpants. He held his hands at his side, fingers splayed, but not
stiffly. He breathed, slowly, deeply. His breath filled his entire torso with
quivery tension as he inhaled, bringing his chest and abdominal muscles into
sharp relief. As he exhaled, his chest fell with delicate control. The color
of his skin darkened as the blood rushed in a torrent beneath the skin. Each
muscle of his body was elegantly delineated, like an ancient statue that time
had rendered human.

He
lifted his chin a little, drew his shoulders even straighter and parted his
legs, one forward and one back. I watched as he sank to the floor, raising his
arms at his side until he was fully extended in a split. There was the
slightest tremor in his fingertips giving away the effort but no other part of
his body moved. He pulled his back straighter, closed his eyes and held the
position until the tremor in his fingers died. Then, he carefully brought his
back leg forward in a wide arc, lowering his arms at the same time, until he
was sitting. He opened his eyes.

“That
was amazing,” I said.

“I
was so much better once,” he replied, shaking his head vigorously, scattering
drops of sweat from his hair. “I studied dance in college.”

“Where?”

“Where?”
he repeated, smiling. “I was at Yale for a couple of years, and N.Y.U. for a
semester or two and Vanderbilt for a few months. I moved around.”

“Without
ever graduating?”

“I
never did, no.” He stood up, crossed over to the bed, a mattress laid against
a corner, and extended his hand. “Get up and I’ll take you to breakfast.”

I
let him pull me out of bed and our bodies tangled. He was flushed and a little
sweaty and his hair brushed against the side of my face like a warm wind as we
drew each other close.

An
hour later we were sitting at a table in a dark, smoky corner of a coffeehouse
on Castro. The waiter cleared our breakfast plates and poured more coffee.

“So
you still consider yourself a hype?” I asked, pursuing our conversation.

“Of
course. I’m addicted whether I use or not because being high is normal for me
and how I function best. When I’m not using, I’m anxious.”

“I’m
pretty anxious myself, sometimes, but I’ve never felt the desire to obliterate
myself.”

“It’s
not just the sedative effect a hype craves. It’s also the rush, and the rush is
so intense, like coming without sex.”

“I’ve
heard that before from my clients. One of them said it was like a little death.”

Hugh
looked at me curiously and asked, “Do you know what that means?”

“I
imagine he meant you lose yourself.”

“Exactly.
La petite mort — that’s what the French called orgasm. They believed that semen
is sort of concentrated blood so that each time a man came he shortened his
life a little by spilling blood that couldn’t be replenished.”

“And
women?”

“Then,
as now, men didn’t much concern themselves with how women felt.” He finished
his coffee. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Walking
down Castro toward Market, Hugh reached over and took my hand.
Self-consciously, I left it there. It perplexed me how sex with other men
seemed natural to me but not the small physical gestures of affection and
concern. What I remembered most clearly from my first sex with another man was
the unexpected tenderness. It disturbed me — disoriented me, I guess. I had
expected homosexuality to be dark and furtive, but it wasn’t. It was shattering
but liberating to come out and it ended a lot of doubts that had been eroding
my self-confidence. I remember thinking, back then, so this is it, one of the
worst things I can imagine happening has happened. And life goes on.

As
we rounded the corner of Castro and crossed over to Market, he gently let go of
my hand. We were out of the ghetto. I reached over and put my hand back into
his. He looked over at me, startled, then tightened his grip. And life went on.

*
* * * *

There
were three messages from Aaron Gold on my answering machine when I got to my
apartment, each a little more frantic than the last. I couldn’t blame him. I
had gone to San Francisco

for
a day and stayed a week. Finally, tired of wearing Hugh’s clothes and needing a
little time away from the intensity of our developing relationship, I drove
home to pick up the mail and for a change of clothes.

I
called Gold’s office. His first words were, “Are you all right? I was ready to
start calling the hospitals.”

“I’m
fine. Why are you so alarmed?”

“We
were supposed to have dinner on Monday night. It is now Friday.”

“Jesus,
Aaron. I completely forgot. I should’ve called from the city.”

“The
city? Is that where you’ve been?”

“Yes,
at Hugh Paris’s.”

“He
lives there? Where?”

“Why?”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “Aaron, are you still
there?”

“Are
you going back up?”

“Tonight,”
I said.

“I
need to see you before you go,” he said in a strange voice.

“Sure.
When?”

“I’ll
meet you in an hour at Barney’s,” he said.

He
was already at the bar when I got there, staring, a bit morosely over a tall
drink with a lot of fruit jammed into the glass.

“You
look like you’ve lost your best friend,” I said, sitting down. Touching his
glass, I said, “What’s that you’re drinking? A Pink Lady?” He said nothing. I
added, to provoke him, “Jews really don’t have the hang of ordering alcohol.’’

“You’re
pretty chipper,” he said, sourly. The waitress came over and I ordered a
Mexican beer.

“I’m
happy, Aaron.”

“Hugh
Paris?” he asked, with almost a sneer in his voice. “Tell me, what do you
really know about him?”

“I’m
not sure I understand what you mean.”

He
waited until I had my drink, then said, “You’ve heard of Grover Linden.”

“In
this town,” I said, “you might as well ask me if I know who my father is.”

“Great-great-grandfather,”
he said. “That’s his relation to Hugh Paris.”

“You’re
not serious.”

Gold
merely nodded.

The
first time I heard Grover Linden’s name I was a fourth- grade student in
Marysville. His picture appeared in my social studies book and the caption
beneath it identified the broad-faced bearded man as the man who built the
railroad. The railroad that connected the west and the east, I learned in high
school, took ten years to construct and cost the lives of hundreds as an army
of Chinese coolies worked feverishly to break through the Sierras during three
of the coldest winters in the nineteenth-century. It was the railroad that
raised San Francisco from a backwater village to an international city. It was
the railroad from which Grover Linden, who began his adult life as a
blacksmith in Utica, derived the wealth that made him the richest man in
America.

Linden
rose to become a United States senator and bought the Democratic nomination to
the presidency. He lost that election, too opulent and corrupt even for that
opulent and corrupt era, the Gilded Age. Popular opinion turned against him and
he was forced to divest himself of his railroad in a decision by the Supreme
Court that I read in my law school anti-trust course. He died in 1920, having
nearly lived a century, leaving an immense personal fortune. Almost
incidentally, he donated a vast tract of land on the San Francisco peninsula to
found the university that bore his name. The first president of the school,
Jeremiah Smith, Linden’s son-in-law, raided the Ivy League luring entire
faculties to California with the promise of unlimited wealth to support their
research. In less than a century, Linden University had acquired an
international reputation as one of the country’s great private schools. The
year Gold and I graduated from the law school, the commencement speaker, a
United States Supreme Court justice, addressed a distinguished audience that
included half the California Supreme Court as well as the sitting governors of
three states, all of them alumns. And Linden, statues and paintings of whom
were everywhere,

lay
entombed on the grounds of the school in a marble mausoleum along with his
wife, daughter and son-in-law.

“Hugh
hasn’t told you who his family is?” Gold asked.

“No,
not really. I mean — he mentioned money, but I had no idea.”

“He
didn’t tell you his grandfather was Judge Paris?”

“Robert
Paris, you mean?”

Gold
nodded.

“He
told me that, but it’s a far cry from someone named Robert Paris to Grover
Linden.”

“It’s
complicated,” Aaron said. He pulled the slightly soggy cocktail napkin from
beneath his drink and got out his pen. “Look,” he said. “This is Linden’s
family tree.”

At
the top of the tree were Linden and his wife, Sarah. The next generation
consisted of their daughter, Allison, who married Jeremiah Smith.

“Then,”
Gold said, “there were two kids, John Smith and Christina Smith, Linden’s
grandchildren. Christina married Robert Paris.”

“John
Smith never married?”

“No,”
he shrugged. “Linden’s descendants aren’t prolific. Christina and Robert Paris
had two sons, Jeremy and Nicholas.” He traced the tree down into that
generation. “Nicholas married Katherine Seaton. Hugh is their son.”

He
tucked his pen back into his coat pocket. I studied the napkin.

“Hugh’s
the last living descendant of Grover Linden?”

“No,
John Smith is very much alive. He controls the Linden Trust,” Gold said,
referring to the megafund, the income of which supported the university’s
research which ranged from cancer cures to bigger and deadlier nuclear bombs,
with the emphasis on the latter.

“John
Smith,” I repeated, and, suddenly, it came to me. “He bailed Hugh out of jail.”

Gold
lifted an eyebrow but said nothing.

“Are
there any other descendants?”

“Hugh’s
father, Nicholas.” “Hugh told me his father was dead.”

“He
might as well be,” Gold said. “Nicholas is locked up in an asylum. A basket
case.”