Benediction Page 2

  He clicked me off hold, and I stopped Net surfing on the World Trade Center attack.

  “Mr. Schmidt? Mr. Schmidt, what a horrible day,” he said.

  “No kidding. Hope you’re not going to make it any worse with this call, Ken.”

  He was progressive and liked it when patients called him by his first name. I thought I heard some papers shuffling, like a smallish bird beating its wings against my ear.

  “One of the tests we did when you were here for your physical came back…elevated, so we need to run some more…tests.”

  The president was about to address the nation. I wondered whether he’d be able to put a coherent sentence together.

  “Which test?”

  “It’s the PSA, prostate antigen. Normal range is under 4; yours came back 17.9, so it’s…mmm, high. I’m referring you to Dr. Kim, one of our ranking urologists out at Presidio.”

  Suddenly, the images of exploding buildings and planes crashing and angry words in large bold type all melded together in my head and made no sense at all.

  Focus, Ben, focus.

  “Mr. Schmidt? You there, Mr. Schmidt?”

  “What does all that mean?”

  I knew what it meant. I wanted him to say it.

  “It’s a really high PSA for someone like you, someone so…young. Kim’s going to want to do a biopsy of your prostate.” He cleared his throat. “We have to test for cancer.”

  There. He said the C-word, and I no longer could remember that he was this AIDS visionary, revered by the entire medical establishment and an intercontinental gay überconsciousness. Today Ken was a chubby, middle-aged guy with glasses and a wart on his neck telling me I might have prostate cancer.

  The other line rang. Caller ID told me it was Glenda Bourne, and the urgency with which the red numbers flashed reminded me that she was pissed.

  “See, you did make the day worse, Ken,” I said. “I’ve got to go; another call here, and the staff didn’t show up today.”

  “Wait. Kim’s office will call you later today to set it all up.” He paused. “You OK?”

  “Yes, thank you.” I hung up on him and clicked Glenda.

  “Asshole, didn’t I tell you to call me back?” She was her usual cheery self.

  I didn’t say anything. I was scrolling through Web pages on the disaster, but thinking…celebrities with cancer. Hadn’t Frank Zappa died of prostate cancer at a relatively young age? For sure.

  “Goddamn movie’s not working again,” she said. “I don’t know why you picked that fucking idiot to play Steve.”

  “He’s not a fucking idiot; he’s a damn good actor, and you know it.”

  Even though she was right, I hated it when Glenda trashed the movie, which happened constantly.

  Karen always said, “Patience, dear, patience. She’s a great editor; that’s why you chose her, not for her disposition.”

  Karen was correct—again—but I had little patience with demonstrative people, especially those with zero chance of ever being my sexual partner, even in some highly deranged dream state.

  “This isn’t particularly helpful,” I said, furiously typing Bill Bixby’s name into the search engine. “This your way of telling me I should stop by there after work?”

  “For a fag you’re smarter than you look. See you at six?”

  “Earlier—not a hell of a lot going on here. You might try turning on your TV.”

  Yes, Bixby had died of prostate cancer as well, way too young, a sunny sixth-generation Californian who always seemed so cheerful.

  Don’t project, I told myself. You don’t know anything yet, and often doctors are wrong. They just are. Besides, I’d always been one to ace tests.

  * * *

  Even the ’Loin was unsettlingly quiet that afternoon, as if its usual denizens had taken up a siesta tradition overnight. On Glenda’s block, just off Ellis, normally one had to duck past real crack whores in the storefronts. They must’ve figured out I was gay, as they always asked for cash only, never a date. I found this somewhat disappointing and blamed it on style rather than orientation. Apparently, I gave the impression I didn’t have enough money for a cheap blow job.

  Like everyone else, the girls were gone. As I climbed up the stairs of Glenda’s tenement, I heard the muffled soundtrack of Hell for the Holidays. It was somewhat surreal, being an airplane scene, which opened the film. Steve, Warren and their two adopted kids are about to land in a flat, brown, unidentified midwestern city, and Steve is unhappy about this. The kids are crabby, and Warren is the put-upon spouse.

  The way the actors’ lines were repeated, over and over, while I climbed those stairs and walked down that hall of peeling paint, used syringes and dried vomit, made me certain that Glenda had decided it was not going to work.

  If she was right, that would be a problem. The airplane set was where we’d really spent what little money we’d raised. It had been constructed in an old shed near the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory out past Dublin, next to a cow pasture.

  We’d struggled to get the lighting right. Even on a dedicated set like that, making it believable as a real fuselage interior was no small chore. I thought it “passed.” Less successful was our choice for one of the two lead actors who played the gay couple. The character Steve was ostensibly the film’s star and probably most transparent as my alter ego, since I wrote the piece and was directing it, too. Steve was played by Ron Frankhauser, who had answered our cattle call.

  Ron had done a bit of community theater in Marin, following a less-than-stellar acting career spent playing nonfeatured roles in musicals at Healdsburg College. (He was tall, so they put him at the back, where you really couldn’t see him dancing.)

  He was graying, good-looking and present enough to memorize his lines. Most important, he was cool with the twenty-five-dollar honorarium for the nonunion work. To Karen and me, this meant star.

  To Glenda, this meant problems.

  Her door was open, and I walked in.

  “Hey, Glenda. Aren’t you afraid criminals will just walk right in?”

  Her face was eerily lit from below by computer monitors. She’d entered her own horror movie.

  “They’re afraid of me,” she said, without looking up. “Pull up a chair, sport; you didn’t get coverage on this scene.”

  Shit! My stomach turned. This was the climactic moment of the setup. It had to be perfect.

  “I took your advice and looked at the telly for a bit. So I don’t have it in me to raise my voice and tell you exactly what I think of your filmmaking talent today.”

  I sat down. “We may not have the ideal coverage, but I know you have a solution.”

  She looked at me in a way that made me wish I hadn’t said that. “Chalk this up to experience and go make a real movie?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer. My eyes were fixed on her screen, the actors frozen midword, Ron’s pixellated mouth hanging wide open. He really was a guy from the suburbs, those teeth betraying a lifetime of expensive dental work.

  Glenda pressed a key on her computer, and the characters came to life again. She showed me how the scene was constructed back and forth, and how there wasn’t enough footage in what we’d shot for the actors to react to each other.

  “You can cut this one out and still hold your narrative, such as it is,” she said. “One or two lines in the car scene and everyone will get that these two are at each others’ throats.”

  For the first time, she looked right at me. “What do you…?”

  My eyes were filled with tears that hadn’t yet spilled over.

  “Jesus, Ben. What’s wrong?”

  I closed my eyes tight and felt the wetness on my cheeks. I was crying in front of Glenda fucking Bourne.

  “Do it both ways—your suggestion and also following the script. Just pretend the coverage is there,” I said. “I’ll look at both versions tomorrow.”

  I got up and nearly tripped over Somerset, the requisite lesbian’s cat, lying on the wooden floor n
ext to me. I didn’t hear whether Glenda responded as I hurried down the stairs and out onto the street.

  Jake should be home by now. It was still possible he’d make the day all right.

  2

  Jake Brosseau lay on top of me, his face pressed into my neck, nuzzling my morning sandpaper. I never told him, but this simple movement sent chills through me and tingled everything deserving of tingling. His breath in my ear was comfortably reassuring in its steadiness. When he covered me like this, I felt protected.

  We met the day I’d moved into my little apartment at street level. He occupied, by himself, the grand flat on the top floor—which had been transformed into something remarkable. Each room was in and of itself a completed statement, showing his evolution as an artist and his mood at the time. A sensuously color-washed parlor facing west to the sun gave way to an austere study of white walls and craftsman-hard edges looking north. Specific touches, such as the ominous collection of 1930s southwestern pottery in his dining room and the riot of Central African fabrics in his bedroom, I attributed to a seductive excess.

  Additionally, he cultivated an amazing below-street-level secret garden laid out with an ex-boyfriend. Several years later, the rain and constant cool temperatures rewarded our building with this retreat, even if it was usually too cold to actually sit in it. On each side of a curved walkway—which had studiously been planted with moss between the bricks—were versions of exotic Southern Hemisphere plants Jake had come to know from travels in South America.

  He was domestic in the kind of way I never could be. If my apartment was cleaned once a month I felt smug. Even the hardiest philodendrons given to me as throwaway office gifts had their days numbered.

  Early in my tenancy, once the morning latte was made, I’d secretly watch him tend his garden from the safety of my kitchen window. He’d take great care with his plants, as if he had a special friendship with each and every one, which, of course, he did. The luminosity of his green eyes against his tanned, unshaven face, combined with the soft tuft of black chest hair spilling out from the top of a threadbare T-shirt, made me realize I was watching something right up in the Top Ten Most Beautiful Things I’d Ever Seen.

  The practical side of me had warned very strongly of starting an affair with someone in my building, but this time my libido had won out decisively. I didn’t regret the decision.

  * * *

  “I know you’re not asleep,” he whispered.

  I wanted to lie there for a few minutes more and pretend that nothing from the previous week had really happened. There’d been no terrorist attack, there was no probable cause for cancer, and my movie would surely be an Oscar contender.

  “Don’t know how I ever tolerated boyfriends without leg hair,” I said, hugging him tighter and wrapping my legs around his.

  * * *

  Lancer’s was a nice restaurant on Castro Street with a hidden dining patio out back. It was a place where, if you were a gay man of a certain age, you would take your younger boyfriend absolutely no earlier than eleven a.m. on Sundays to show him off to the community.

  This was very important at a certain point in one’s life—that point at which most of your closest friends (a) had died, (b) had moved, or (c) were hopelessly married in suburbs you couldn’t even find, at which point you found yourself at that point of no compromise:

  Either you still have it or you don’t, and if you don’t, you risk descending into permanent, irreversible trollhood.

  If you do still have it, you take the young man to Lancer’s.

  As it was Friday and I’d taken the day off for the biopsy later on, I did the mental math about my own safe years till I had to do the Brunch Shuffle. Jake rubbed my shin with his bare foot.

  “You’re so quiet this morning,” he said.

  Just looking into those green eyes was enough to harden any soft tissue I had. The rubbing foot made me sweat.

  I glanced around. “There’s no one here. It’s weird.”

  “Doubt Lancer’s a terrorist target, but hey, you never know,” he said.

  He picked up a roll and his knife sliced through some butter. This was a man who loved carbs and was not afraid to show it. He was midchew when I blurted out, “I have to have a biopsy ’cause the doctor thinks I have cancer.”

  He choked, then quickly gulped back some of the lemony ice water.

  “Huh?”

  I’m not sure what I said next. It all just kind of came out, in fits and pauses, sometimes making sense, more often not. Jake had now moved his leg solidly against mine, a pillar to lean on.

  The irritated waiter returned three times to get our order.

  The phrases elevated PSA, the Valley Girl guy, and Eddie’s Father were part of this conversation, which ended when I blew my nose into Lancer’s starched linen napkin. Jake nabbed another one from an adjacent table.

  My appetite gone, the pancakes sat in their purple syrup and flies circled, a persistent little dance. Jake, on the other hand, was clearly hungry and ate his healthy choices with characteristic gusto. He peppered me with questions between mouthfuls:

  “You really don’t know, do you, so why borrow trouble?”

  “Prostate cancer is kind of a nonissue, right? I mean, so slow growing that it’s way down there on Big C list?”

  And then, finally, the one I knew was coming:

  “I’ve been through fifteen years of HIV therapies, and believe me, prostate cancer’s nothing like that. You’re lucky to have something they can cure. I mean—if indeed you even have it.”

  I’d been brought up with good manners. Otherwise, HIV or not, Jake would have worn the pancake—blueberry syrup congeal home. To his credit, he let me alone the rest of the day, though he stayed close by.

  I did some preliminary prostate cancer research online using his computer. Quickly, it became a contraindicated procedure in and of itself. The worst things you can imagine popped up right after the pages that explained it was no problem at all, next to the pages that described easy Mexican herbal cures, following the pages that warned of total erectile dysfunction and permanent incontinence.

  That is, if the cancer didn’t metastasize and kill you first.

  * * *

  I’d spoken to Karen again on September 11, and we’d gone through the ritual polite convention demanded:

  “I’m sorry I yelled at you. It was just so awful. Can’t believe it.”

  “I can’t believe human beings could be so cruel.”

  “We have to believe it—it happened.”

  And so on. It often amazed me, as empathetic as one would like to be, or as selfless, how quickly our concerns turned back to—

  “Well, how are you—otherwise?” Karen asked.

  “Pretty good, you know, work’s driving me crazy; Sutcliffe’s still on the warpath. I don’t know what the fuck his problem is. What about you?”

  “I think Dennis might be having an affair,” she said.

  “No. Who with? Come on, cough up,” I said. It was hard to imagine her husband had found someone to screw on the side, but all things are possible—especially when you’re rich.

  * * *

  I didn’t see Dennis Carstens much, or hear lots about him; she kept that part of her life compartmentalized, away from her dealings with me. I did know he was chasing the IPO sweepstakes and had held several jobs at different San Francisco dot-coms, always eschewing salary for stock options. A small trust fund from the family, something in food processing in rural Texas, allowed this. I was insanely resentful at this easy access to money.

  Karen’s day job was at the San Francisco Public Library, where she directed people to reference materials and dispensed facts. At least half her clientele were the homeless who lived in the area surrounding city hall and the Tenderloin.

  She had that compassionate side of her personality to balance out the producer bossiness—Karen considered many of her library patrons to be like extended family members who needed information. She’d gotten to kn
ow many on a first-name basis, and often the only difference between them and the other, more “normal” patrons was that the homeless couldn’t usually get a library card since they had no address. They could, however, read to their hearts’ content inside the library, which gave Karen a whole world of unplanned satisfaction.

  Finally, in my fifth decade, I’d found a straight woman who had become my confidante, and I hers. Prior to Karen, the world of women had seemed closed to me—mysterious, scary—and somewhat irritating, too. A world inhabited by my mother, my sister and various coworkers, bosses or neighbors. The partners of otherwise stable men. A few comforting nurses.

  Karen was my rock, with her steady, all-knowing, understanding, comforting yet bossy demeanor. I liked it. About the same age, we’d met at a class on independent film production management. She took to the line producer’s job as if the job god had come right to her door with a signed contract. She loved the minutiae, the contact with marginal purveyors of obscure items. She adored coming up with the perfect location for this shot or that interview and then being praised for it. She’d found a niche that worked perfectly for her.

  * * *

  “Glenda’s got a new cut; we can see it Sunday afternoon,” she said. “Meet you at her place at two?”

  “Sure.” I looked up at Jake, who was now massaging my shoulders, trying to eavesdrop.

  She hung up and I put the phone back in my pocket. He leaned down to kiss me. He wouldn’t let go. I felt some wetness from his eyes on the back of my neck.

  * * *

  I tried to concentrate on the upcoming screening as I propped myself up on all fours on a cold exam table in Dr. Irving Kim’s office in the Outer Sunset. They made me wear a print cotton hospital gown, the kind with the opening in the back, which in this instance was absolutely convenient. My ass was tilted up toward the ceiling, as if I was about to get royally fucked. But I wasn’t. Someone was going to be sticking something in there, but it wasn’t going to be warm and loving and well lubricated.