The Little Death by Michael Nava Page A

forgetting to eat?”
    “As
always. You look — very well, Grant.”
    Aloud
he said, “Thank you,” but he was thinking something else. Bad feelings have a
life of their own.
    I
wanted desperately to say something that would wipe away the stain from our
last, angry conversation four years earlier but for me that was all history. I
had lost the scent of the emotions that led to the breakup. I had almost
forgotten that I was the one who stopped returning calls. I could only think of
how well he looked and how it was good to see him.
    He
sat on the floor, cross-legged. Candlelight blazed through his hair.
Theatrical, I thought, but effective. I lowered myself to the floor until we
were face to face. “I wanted to ask you about Hugh,” I began, tentatively.
    “Yes,
of course.”
    “What
did you know about him?”
    He
shrugged. “The Paris family is peninsula and seldom ventures up to the city. I
didn’t really know Hugh until we were undergrads at Yale. He was younger than I
by a couple of years and I took him under my wing.” He looked into his wine glass.
“I was in love with him,” he added simply.
    “What
happened?”
    “Hugh
was eighteen and not out of the closet. Neither was I, for that matter. He was
tactful enough to overlook my infatuation. We behaved toward each other,” he
said, suddenly bitter, “like perfect young gentlemen. And at night I lay in bed
praying to God to make me different or kill me or, preferable to either, put
Hugh beside me.”
    “You
never told me any of this.”
    “It
was ancient history by the time I met you and, besides, I hadn’t seen or heard
from Hugh in years. Not until about six months ago when I ran into him on the
streets. He saw me and tried to slip by but I stopped him. He wasn’t
particularly friendly but he agreed to have a drink with me that night.”
    “And
did you?”
    “Yes,
and he spent the night here.” A twinge of jealousy constricted my chest for a
second. “It was nothing like I’d imagined it would be when I was nineteen,”
Grant added. “It wasn’t memorable and yet—” he poured wine into his glass from
the bottle beside him — “I’ve thought of him almost every day since then. He’s
one of those people who live less in your memory than your imagination. Like a
symbol.”
    “Of
what?” I asked.
    “I
suppose it’s different for everyone who knew him,” Grant replied. “For me, he
was a symbol of being young and unknowing.”
    “I’ve
never thought that was an enviable state.”
    “No?
Then maybe life has spared you some of the things I know about.”
    “I
don’t think I’ve been spared much of life’s nastiness,” I said, “but I don’t
take it personally. And as for Hugh, I preferred the flesh-and-blood human to
the symbol. Tell me, what do you know about the judge?”
    “What
does anyone know about Robert Paris? The poor boy who made good by marrying
into the right family. My father thinks he’s the ultimate nouveau riche, but no
one denies that he’s a brilliant and ruthless man. Of course, that was before
the stroke. Now I hear he’s half-dead but he hasn’t actually been seen in town
for months.”
    “What
stroke?”
    “He
had a series of strokes about a year ago. Since then, he’s stayed up on the
Linden estate in Portola Valley. He sees no one, and no one sees him.”
    “What
about a man named John Smith?” I asked.
    “Are
we going to explore every branch of the Linden family tree?” Grant asked
mockingly.
    “Hugh
saw him the day he was killed.”
    “Well,
he is Hugh’s great-uncle,” Grant replied. “So surely there’s nothing unusual
about Hugh having seen him.”
    “I
don’t know. Is there? What kind of man is John Smith?”
    “He’s
a stuffy old zillionaire,” Grant said, “nominally a banker but only in the
sense that he owns banks. He’s Robert Paris’s brother-in-law and controls the
other half of the Linden fortune. He and the judge don’t get along.”
    “Really?
Do you know that