The Little Death by Michael Nava Read Free Book Online Page B

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