Read Online Maybe the Moon by Armistead Maupin - Free Book Online Page B

midget.
    We’ve been buddies since then, off and on. Jeff’s most recent lover died of AIDS two years ago next October. Ned was an older guy in his mid-fifties, a no-nonsense sort of person and a real source of stability for Jeff, I think. Since his death, Jeff has become increasingly prone to creative remembering. I don’t mean that he lies; he just arranges the facts more artfully than anyone I’ve ever known. In life, as in his work, he’s not so much a writer as a rewriter, endlessly shuffling the facts to give them form and function. I’ve learned to take his memories, as well as his projections, with a few zillion grains of salt.
    He called me that morning from his house in Silver Lake.
    “Is it too late for brunch at Gloria’s?”
    I asked him what was up.
    “I’ve just had the strangest thing happen to me.”
    “Oh, yeah?” I tried not to sound too jaded.
    “I need your advice about it.”
    “ My advice?”
    “You’re gonna love it, too, if it’s what I think. And if it’s not, we’ll have a nice lunch anyway.”
    “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me now.”
    “Of course not,” he said.
    I knew Renee was heading into Beverly Hills on a forage for shoes, so I decided to bum a ride with her. I hadn’t seen Jeff for ages, and I was aching for a change of scenery, especially one that didn’t involve pounding the malls. I asked him if he could drive me home.
    “Whenever you want.”
    “Let’s do it, then.”
    “Great. We can hang out at my house after brunch.”
    “You aren’t gonna read to me, are you?”
    He laughed at that, but a little uncomfortably, so I told him I was just kidding.
    “I thought you enjoyed that,” he said.
    “I did. I do. I said I was kidding.”
    Well, mostly kidding. The last time we hung out at his house, he read to me at length from his autobiography. It was fairly interesting stuff, especially if you knew Jeff, but it went on about an hour too long. His sixth-grade seduction in the pea-sorting shed—or wherever it was—could have been trimmed by half. Plus he puts everything in the present tense, insisting that it sounds more literary. It may be, for all I know, but it can get sort of grating at times.
    “Don’t worry,” Jeff said grumpily. “That wasn’t what I had in mind.”
    “Now don’t make it sound like that. I’m your biggest fan. Aren’t I the one who called you the gay Saroyan?”
    He grunted.
    “I’ll give you your strokes at lunch,” I said breezily. “You’re buying, aren’t you?” There was more urgency in this question than I cared to betray. These days, every meal that isn’t a Cher shake counts as a major extravagance.
    “Of course,” said Jeff, still a little pissed at me. “I invited you, didn’t I?”
     
    Since it was to be a laid-back Silver Lake kind of Sunday, I wore an aqua T-shirt, dolling it up with a string of pop beads and my pink rhinestone silence-equals-death pin. When I’m not in costume or evening clothes, I’m almost always in T-shirts, since they’re comfortable and inexpensive and you can accessorize the hell out of them. For a while I used to belt them with various bright and spangled things, but I gave up the effort several years ago. When you’re builtlike I am, there’s not much point in pretending to have a waistline.
    Renee was chirpy all the way through the canyon. She could hardly wait to buy oil paints, she said, because she’d been watching a guy on TV who showed you how to paint snowy peaks with Christmas trees on them, just by stubbing the brush against the canvas. He wasn’t that cute, she said—in fact, he was kind of old—but he had this deep, velvety voice that made you feel so calm , even if you weren’t painting. Already I have a creepy image of future nights at home: me on my pillow with this diary, and Renee at her easel, stubbing out snowy peaks in perpetuity under the weird spell of some bearded guy in a cardigan. She pumped me about Neil again too. She hasn’t asked me to