Goodbye, Bob

Bob drifted into our lives one day through the door of a small beachside bar called the Malibu Cottage, where I spent an occasional afternoon drinking beer and shooting pool. The Cottage flashed a few signals of sophistication and sometimes small lights from the Malibu colony wandered in, but it was essentially a beer bar.

I found myself talking to Bob without quite understanding how the conversation had started. He had little to say beyond what was common to this particular afternoon, but I was slightly drunk, feeling mellow, and we exchanged prosaic conversational tiles--the quality of the surf, the performance of the Dodgers--in a mindless barter. I bought him a drink. He bought me a drink. He was drinking rusty nails and he talked me into trying one.

Bob was tall, very thin, probably in his early 30s, though he sometimes seemed much younger, and there was a small-town quality to him that he would probably never lose. He wore suntans and a T-shirt, like a delivery-boy, and his hair, once brush cut, was overgrown now like an untidy lawn. His eyes were plain, often eager, always nice.

I gathered he had been hanging out here for a day or two, because he told me how he had tried to get a woman at the other end of the bar to go to bed with him. She was a deeply tanned, middle-aged woman with unlikely yellow hair and a tough, unhappy expression.

"She's some kind of English noblewoman, " Bob told me with a solemnity that gauged the degree to which such titles impressed him. "Her husband has her watched constantly, trying to scrape together some kind of divorce action, so she has a hard time just getting laid. I asked her to go to a motel with me, but she said that would be dreary. She (continued on page 148)Goodbye, Bob(continued from page 95) said if I rented a cottage she might go there."

"So why not rent a cottage?" I asked.

He shrugged without much energy. "That was last night. I'm just kind of moving it around."

The woman, with that eerie sensitivity some have, seemed to understand we were talking about her and her eyes met mine briefly. I sensed little but fatigue and wondered why Bob had bothered to pursue her.

I drank two more rusty nails--they were strong and sweet--before Pat dropped by, looking for me. She had been to Santa Monica on some errand and was back with dinner, a cut of meat large enough for a platoon. I introduced her to Bob and he looked at her with shy appreciation. She wore shorts and a brief halter and, in the dim bar light, her skin seemed rich and warm as honey. She wasn't in any ordinary sense a pretty woman, but she seemed to reflect male appreciation--the more appreciation, the more reflection. On a whim, I asked Bob to have dinner with us, and he accepted readily. He followed us home in his own car, a two-year-old Buick.

"You don't mind?" I asked Pat.

"Of course not."

"I don't mean to make free with your house----" I was going to add and your food, but I bit this off, because I heard myself say it and it sounded abject.

She took her hand from the wheel to caress the inside of my leg. "You should know by now, I don't care."

"Perhaps it's because I would care."

She laughed and took her hand away. "Don't confuse the two of us."

From the forest of bottles behind Pat's bar, I was able to construct my own rusty nails--part Scotch and part Drambuie--and Bob switched to Canadian Club. He drank it as if it were lemonade, but there was almost a gallon. We sat on the deck and watched the gulls fishing the waves while Bob told me about a business, laying carpet, he had managed in Long Beach. Dinner was rib roast and green salad. Pat and I were both big eaters, but Bob hardly touched the food. I realized again how thin he was. He was broad across the chest, but there was no depth to him. We pressed food on him, thinking he was simply shy, but he shook his head and asked for another drink.

Even before I finished eating, I was sick. I had pushed too hard and too fast with the thick, sweet drinks and moved to the verge of nausea. I excused myself hastily and went into the bedroom to lie down. For a moment, the cool, crisp pillow eased me and I lay listening to the waves breaking against the pilings below, and then the room began to sway in the same rhythm.

• • •

When I awoke, Pat was in bed with me, curled off to her own side, and the windows were a dirty gray. My head ached and my mouth was foul. I had no reason to want to be awake, and I tried to ignore consciousness and immediately lose myself in some reverie that would slip me back into sleep. But this was too good an opportunity to kick my ass because I wasn't working as hard as I thought I should, because I was living on Pat's money and lying around in the sun. My ancestral kin massed in the back of my mind, people of the frozen lochs and the bitter northern plains, saying: It can't last, it never does, and even if it could, it would ruin you, thin your blood and boil you in your own sick fat. You stage these tiny shows in your own sensations, feelies, and each production is a recapitulation of those that have gone before, except; except each time you are able to generate just a little less energy. I heard it all. All the smug folk wisdom of the penny-wise. It was all true.

I got up, taking care not to disturb Pat, and went to the bathroom. I cleaned my mouth and took some aspirin. On my way back, I glanced into the living room. Someone was asleep on the couch. It was Bob. His mouth was half open and a small bubble of saliva trembled on his lower lip. In sleep, he seemed about 17.

I went back to bed and squeezed close to Pat. Her back was to me and I warmed myself on her ass until I slid half into her. She murmured, still seemingly in sleep, and I began to pump gently, getting higher and higher on it, until I was jamming at her and there was no question but that she was awake. She shifted her hips, so delicately, no more than half an inch, an intimate gesture of offering, and she was open to me and I was riding it into her. I wrapped my arms around her, cupping her tits, and she seized my wrists with her hands.

Afterward, she looked at me with clear eyes and said, "I didn't fuck him, but I do have something to tell you."

I waited in a mood of quiet wariness.

"He's dying."

"Shit, we're all dying."

"But he has leukemia. He's been months in the hospital, but apparently his condition is hopeless and they've put him on outpatient status until he has to go back." She smiled sadly. "He's just been wandering."

I lay back, trying to cope with the polar quality of this information, but it was too much. I said, "The poor guy," and wondered how long it would be before he woke up and we could give him breakfast and be rid of him.

He didn't eat breakfast. He took coffee and about half a piece of toast. In the morning, hung over, he seemed even more fragile and youthful. It was now apparent that he had, at one time, been much heavier. His suntan pants flopped on him and his arms stuck like laths from his T-shirt.

After breakfast, we sat quietly, waiting for the next thing. Bob still had about a quarter inch of coffee in his second cup and occasionally he lifted this to his mouth and moistened his lips. Finally, I broke and said, "I'm going swimming. Who wants to come along?"

Bob brightened. "I've a suit in my car."

He had a lot of clothes stuffed into the trunk of his Buick, and I stood and watched as he went through them, looking for his bathing suit. He held a sports jacket out to me, saying, "This was nice. I used to look real sharp in this." He caught my eye for a moment, then continued, "Did Pat tell you about me?"

I nodded. I could think of nothing to say.

"Don't worry about it. I carry a card; if anything happens, someone will call the hospital."

I had a brief vision of Bob writhing blue-faced on the sand while I tried to find the card, but I didn't ask him where he carried it. I didn't want to become entangled in his illness or share, to any degree, his death. I have little sympathy for the ill and hospitals make me profoundly uneasy.

Bob was good in the water and his flat thinness made him an excellent body surfer. We caught some lovely waves. But he tired with frightening rapidity, turned pale, began to breathe heavily and went to throw himself face down in the sand. When I came out of the water and sat down beside him, hugging my knees, he turned to look up at me and I saw that he had been crying.

"I have no steam anymore," he said.

Again I said nothing. We stretched out in the fall sun until noon and then went up to the house to eat lunch. Pat had made steak sandwiches and some slaw. She talked Bob into eating a small plateful. He had it with a drink. After lunch, still spurred by my early-morning attack of anxiety, I went out onto the deck to work. When I went in to take a leak, Bob was lying on the couch, drinking Canadian Club and reading a comic book. He looked up to smile sadly.

Before Pat went shopping, she came out to talk to me. I had been staring at the waves, watching the patterns in the foam as they broke. She glanced at the half-filled page in the typewriter, but she had no real interest in what I was doing. Nor did I expect it. Sometimes I wondered at my own interest. He said. She said. His mouth thinned willfully. Her eyes narrowed. And the sun moved behind a cloud.

"How's it going?" she asked.

"OK."

"Listen, Art, do you mind if he stays awhile?"

"It's your house."

(continued on page 152)Goodbye, Bob(continued from page 148)

"Don't give me that shit. I'm not interested in him. It's just that----"

"I know. And I don't mind."

And, surprisingly, I didn't. I had made no true connection with Bob--his condition remained an abstraction; I couldn't grasp the idea of a terminal failure lurking somewhere in his chemistry--but it was clear that I should care, otherwise we were only lizards basking for these few moments on a hot rock.

When I had finished for the afternoon, Bob and I went to the Malibu Cottage to drink beer and shoot pool. His eye was excellent and he beat me several times. That made me feel better. At one point, he bought me a beer and came up with a wrinkled and torn dollar bill. He smoothed it on the bar, as if ashamed of its appearance, and turned to ask if I wanted to buy some sweaters.

"They're good sweaters. Cashmere."

"Are they yours?"

"Sure."

"Well, I'm a little heavier than you."

He touched his upper arm lightly. "I wasn't always this thin. I think they'll fit you."

I looked away, embarrassed by my clumsy observation. "Maybe I can use them."

Bob was relentless. "I'd like to give them to you, but I could use some money."

"It's OK. I understand."

On the way back to the house, we stopped at the Buick and Bob opened the trunk. They were nice sweaters, but they were cardigans, not my style, and I knew I wouldn't wear them. There were three of them and, after some evident hesitation, he asked for ten dollars.

"They're worth more," I said.

"Oh, I don't know. Old clothes are old clothes. I won't need them and I can use the ten. Anyway, I'd like you to have them. Here's something else."

He took some papers from the glove compartment and handed them to me. "If there's anything here you can use, you can have it if you pay the drayage. When my illness was diagnosed, my wife killed herself. I sold our house and put our things in storage."

I must have been staring at him as if he were Job, because he looked away and said firmly, "That was almost a year ago. Water over the dam. When you're ... like me, you find you feel differently. It's over, if you know what I mean."

The papers contained a manifest listing rugs, tables, chairs, boxes of linens, a piano, a phonograph, a lawn mower and crates of dishes and utensils. The things everyone collected. Things I had never had. The drayage charge was $325.

"I have no use for these things, Bob, but I'm sure someone will want them."

"You could put the piano next to the bar. I think it needs to be tuned, but it's a pretty good piano."

I smiled. "I don't live here. I'm just passing through, the same as you."

He gestured at me, then at the house. "Aren't you two together?"

"For the moment."

"She's a nice girl."

"That's true."

• • •

John and Mary arrived during dinner and, after the introductions, John caught my eye and frowned meaningfully at Bob. I knew what was in his mind. He thought Pat was doing one of her numbers. I shook my head slightly and looked away. Pat asked John and Mary if they wanted to eat, but Mary said they had stopped at a hamburger stand on the way out. "The Waste King couldn't wait."

As soon as the chance came, I pulled John out to the deck and told him about Bob. I couldn't read his eyes in the near darkness, but when I paused, he said, "It sounds like a scam."

"I wish it were, but he's got papers from a hospital in Long Beach. He checks with them periodically to see if they've turned up some miracle cure. Otherwise, he's just drifting and waiting for the bomb. When he can't make it around anymore, he has to go back."

John turned to look through the glass door. Over his shoulder, I saw Bob in there, talking to Pat and Mary, swirling the ice in his glass and flashing that young farmer's smile. John drove his fist into his palm and said, "Look at him! The bastard's a fucking tiger!"

"He's handling it about as well as it could be handled."

"Fucking A. He's a tiger."

We spent the night drinking and smoking some weed John had. Bob passed out early and we put him to bed on the couch and went on talking, automatically lowering our voices.

"I saw Whitey the other day," John said.

"Yeah?" I asked. "Was he walking on his hands?"

"He's doing OK. He's still riding tall for Warner's. It's funny. We spent an afternoon together, just fucking around, and I came away liking him. He's a smart fucker, but I'll tell you something, he's wrestling hard with the White Lady and I don't think he can win."

Mary said, "I told you he was shooting up when I first met him, and that was over two years ago."

"Whitey's a bear," I said. "If anyone can handle it, I'd bet on him."

John shook his head with heavy and stubborn emphasis. "No one can handle it."

"That's bullshit," I said.

"No, that's what God loves. You have to believe there are things you can't handle. Things no one can handle. That's an important part of remaining sane. You can get up every morning and jump out and bench-press three hundred pounds, but the morning's coming when you won't be able to hack it. Once you know that, you don't have to worry anymore." He gestured to where Bob was sleeping so quietly he might already have been dead. "Like him, he doesn't have to worry anymore."

"That's bullshit," I said again.

"Sure, it's bullshit--it's all bullshit."

"And that's some more of it."

Pat broke in to say, "I don't know who you think's going to clean up all this bullshit."

We laughed and fell into one of those silences that go with smoking weed. One thing is over and the next not yet imagined. It was like drifting through a tunnel in an amusement park. When a tableau lit, I gave it my total attention. It alone was real. When it faded, I simply drifted until the next thing appeared.

Pat engineered the next thing by beginning to rub John's neck. When she caught my eye, she winked slowly and I immediately looked at Mary. Mary was also watching Pat's hands, her eyes half closed, her mouth soft. I turned to John and he was lying back, watching me. I laughed, but the laughter sounded forced.

John said, "Shall we see if we can fuck up our friendship?"

"Why not?" I said. It was one of the catch phrases that year. We said Why not? to everything.

"I don't know," Mary said with some uncertainty. Pat and John were kissing, so I moved to Mary and said:

"What is there to know?"

"Oh, I don't know." She looked up at me. "I'm just here, aren't I?"

She was rich and soon we were alive to each other. We all went into the bedroom and no one turned on the light. We ended up on Pat's big bed, one couple toward the foot, the other toward the head, in some remnant of privacy, and Mary came, shaking her head and winning, as if she resented her own response. John galloped at Pat, pulling her ass and murmuring, "Come on, come on." I felt, for a while, as if I were everyone in the bed, but then the feeling faded and I was just lying there. When John and Pat reached a pause, we switched, and that was one more thing. I thought of taking Mary down to the beach with a blanket, but that was what you didn't do. That was romance. This was plain fucking. I noticed, however, that as excited as we became, both John and I were careful not to touch each other.

In a lull, John said, "Mary, you should wake that poor bastard out there and give him some pussy."

"Oh, John."

"Why not? Why the fuck not?"

"I don't know. I don't want to."

"Poor son of a bitch."

• • •

The next morning was fair again and John and Bob and I went swimming. The night before was far away, and only Mary seemed subdued. The breakers were towering, pounding in from some storm deep at sea, and John was afraid of them. He watched while Bob and I body surfed. and, as the day before, Bob tired quickly and he went up to lie down beside John. When I joined them ten minutes later, Bob's breath was still labored. He and John had been talking and I went up to hear John say: "We're all going. You've just got a better idea when."

I felt a moment's irritation at John's heavy hand, but his attitude was much the same as my own. He simply said what I thought but wouldn't, or couldn't, put into words. Still, for Bob it must have been a sharply bitter contrast to be forced to deal with his imminent death beneath the warm sun in an atmosphere so richly suggestive of life's pleasures. I had a brief vision of Bob driving down to the beach as a teenager--a fragment of a tall, shy boy with a white towel around his neck.

One hundred feet below our beach, three girls in bright, brief suits ran along the edge of the surf. Their laughter carried clearly. "Young stuff," John said. "Their piss doesn't even taste salty."

Bob laughed and asked me, "Do you know them?"

"No. They're just around."

I lay back and covered my eyes with my forearm. I listened to the surf. I felt Bob touch me lightly on the shoulder. "Art, I want to talk to you."

"Yes," I said uneasily.

"I don't want to go back to the hospital. I know I don't have a chance--you know? There isn't going to be no miracle, but I don't want to lay somewhere among strangers and just peter out. Somehow that's the awful part. Do you know what I mean?"

I thought I did, but in my own apprehension of that terminal moment I felt everyone, even the dearest, would be a stranger. We are finally and necessarily separate from each other and we live our lives alone. I looked away, down the beach toward the girls. They were in the water, their hair streaming behind them.

"I want to go now," Bob was saying. "I haven't the strength to keep myself together much longer. I'd like to hit myself with something and just go that way."

I turned back to meet his earnest eyes. "What do you want me to do?"

"Get me something. I don't have any money, but I'll sign my car over to you."

I shook my head.

"It's a good car," Bob added.

"I can see that. I don't want your car."

"Why not?" John asked. "He's not going to need it."

"I have no one to leave it to."

I had an idea. I sat up. "Listen, Bob, why don't you sell the car? A dealer'd give you a thousand cash. Take the money and check into the Beverly Wilshire. Eat the best food, drink everything in sight, buy yourself some pussy, and when the money's gone, you go off the roof. You're truly free, you know? You can do anything you want and they have no way to make you pay."

Bob shook his head sadly. "I still think about it. I guess I want it, but somehow"--he thought a moment--"it doesn't seem right. I have no energy--you know what I mean?--and it isn't exactly that. I like you, I like your girls, maybe I wouldn't feel quite so alone. I thought of doing something like that months ago. Hell. I thought I might run wild. I'm only thirty-one, you know? I thought, shit, why me? I hated to see anyone laugh. Now, I don't know. I could swim straight out there until I couldn't swim any farther, and I know I'd never get back, but I don't want to be alone with my thoughts. If I jumped off a building, what would I think about as I fell? With some heroin, I could just go to sleep. I could come out here on the beach--you know?--somewhere away from the house, and find a nice place, and that would be it."

He fell silent. I looked at John and John shrugged and said, "Whitey."

• • •

Whitey was fascinated by the story. I'm sure his writer's mind was busy turning it for yield even as we told it. We sat in the huge living room, each of us ten feet from the other. Whitey looked calm and heavy. His eyes were slow but clear.

"Do you want to get into this?" he asked me.

"Why not?"

"You're not the average square John, much as you try to play the part."

I laughed. "I'm not waiting around, getting ready to be a father."

"You heard that?"

"Do you imagine Joanna would keep it a secret?"

He shrugged equitably. "I like kids."

He agreed to get Bob a certain overjolt for $60, and John and I each gave him $30, which left me with nickels and dimes. Then he wanted to meet Bob.

Whitey shook Bob's hand with a show of heartiness and told him the "medicine" would be taken care of.

"Thank you," Bob said.

"You've the right idea. Take the bastard by the horn."

• • •

Pat decided to give a send-off party for Bob, and, after the bizarreness of the notion faded, it seemed a decent idea. We would gather to eat and drink and dance and make out and Whitey would bring Bob's "cure." Then Bob would go out to a tiny cove we had discovered, where a patch of sand was hemmed with rocks, and there he would die while the rest of us continued to celebrate his passage.

However, when I went in to the Back Room to pass the invitation, I caught some flak. Most thought I was Bob's sponsor and had, along with John and Whitey, put him up to this. Al Hoagland, in particular, was angry.

"You guys," he said, meaning Whitey and me, "have been pushing yourselves as special cases. You're outlaws, right? And we're the little puddle you play big frog in; but you're going too far on this one. You're going to big-shot this poor bastard out of his life, just so you can give some kinky party."

"Al, you have it wrong."

He studied me with his quick brown eyes. If his nose had been half its size, he would have been a handsome man. "I don't think so," he said slowly.

Larry Reynolds came over to ask me if what he had heard was true. Reynolds was one of the men in the Marlboro advertisement. Not the one up front, on the horse, holding out the pack, the other, the one standing back in the doorway of the cabin. He was handsome, unhappily cynical, and every time I saw him, he was with a different young girl. As he was beginning to grow older, the girls were no longer quite so fresh.

"I don't care what comes down," Reynolds was saying, "I just want to see it. I'm not saying I don't think he's going to do it, I just want to see."

Al listened to this with quiet distaste.

• • •

The day of the party, Jimmy Follette came early and almost sober to spend the afternoon making watermelon punch. He didn't talk to Bob beyond saying hello--Bob was lying on the couch, drinking Canadian Club and resting--but I noticed Jimmy studying him with interest and some sympathy.

As the afternoon crested, Bob got up and took his glass out onto the deck. I could see him looking over the water. After a while, he called to me and I went out and stood beside him.

"I want to thank you and Pat for doing this."

"It's nothing."

"There was no one after Dodie died, and I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't found you people."

He took out his wallet and removed a pink slip, a certificate of vehicle ownership in California, and went to the table where I worked and used one of my pens to sign his car over to me. "The storage manifest is in the glove compartment. Maybe you'll run into someone who can use those things."

I took the pink slip uneasily and with some embarrassment, but I took it, nonetheless. I wanted the car, it would increase my freedom, and I was going through some dreary rationalization to the effect that if I didn't take it, someone else would or the highway patrol would tow it away and, in time, it would be junked or sold at auction, or some trooper would grab it. If I hadn't wanted it so much, it would have been easier to accept.

• • •

The party filled early. No one wanted to miss any of it. Four cars came up from the Back Room, full of invited and uninvited, and we made them all welcome. The more people, the thinner the responsibility was spread. Surprisingly, Al Hoagland came and brought a tall, blonde girl somewhere in her early 30s. He introduced her as Lucy and said she was an ex-schoolteacher.

Lucy made a face, a moue of self-conscious dismissal. "That's a little like being an ex--fry cook," she said.

"Why ex?" I asked pleasantly.

"Oh, it's stupid. I quit to get married, and that was an instant bust. But I didn't really have the vocation." On "vocation" she made another face. "Al tells me you're a writer." It was my turn to make a face. She pressed it. "What do you write?"

"Nothing much."

The punch was fiery and we all began to feel it very quickly. Larry Reynolds came up to me to say, "I'm still waiting." There was a strong part of me that wanted to take this as Larry was taking it, just one more phenomenon, but I also felt irritation.

"No one's going to see anything, Larry. He's going down to the beach alone."

Larry smiled. "So in the morning you'll have a dead soldier on your beach front. It's something else. You can't say it isn't."

"Bob's the one who's going to commit the crime, and if they want to, they can arrest him for it."

"You think giving him smack isn't a crime?"

The truth is, I hadn't considered it. I experienced a flash of cold. There were a lot of people, a great number, who saw things very differently from the way we did. For a moment, I viewed all this as it would be summed up in the language of the police in a newspaper story, that other reality, then managed to dismiss my anxiety as only the product of this momentary focus.

To my surprise, Joanna showed up alone at the wheel of her old MG. She didn't look pregnant, but she had put on enough weight to seem chubby. "Where's Whitey?" I asked her.

"He'll be out later, and I don't appreciate your involving him in this. He has responsibilities now."

"Is that why he charged us three times what this errand's worth?"

"I don't care about that. It gave him another excuse to go around to those people and, just incidentally, break his promise to me."

She suddenly looked sad and vulnerable, and I wondered again if she were really pregnant. It didn't seem to matter. She was struggling for life as it had been presented to her in the only way she knew how. First she auctioned her ass to the best bidder--didn't we all?--and then tried to seal the deal with a child. She had hardly designed the society where such tactics appeared to work. I put my arms around her, holding her loosely. "I'm sorry about all that shit that came down."

She looked up, finally without a hint of flirtation, and said, "So am I. I always liked you. How are you and Pat?"

"Hanging out. We have our tender moments. Would you like some punch?"

She touched her stomach. "I can't drink. Every time I take a drink, I get sick. The baby's a puritan, I guess."

"How long will Whitey be?"

"I don't know. He was at his office, waiting there. As soon as he scores, he'll be out."

I remembered that Whitey had always resisted driving to the beach. "I hope he puts it together soon. This party isn't going anywhere else."

That was true. It looked like any other party we might have decided to throw. Most of the same people were here, with a few riders, and we said and did most of the same things, but there was a line of tension and an absence of ease that told constantly. Bob, one of the least compelling people here, formed the epicenter, held always between us by invisible lines of force. At first, hardly anyone spoke to him. No one knew what to say. Then Lucy, Al's date, engaged him and I was happy to see him smiling.

I moved to overhear and discovered Lucy was arguing against suicide. My instant impulse was to tell her to mind her own business, but then I realized it was none of mine. Bob was listening. Her argument was solemn and familiar, ringed with barrier words such as responsibility and respect for life, but if she could cause him to waver, then his purpose wasn't clear. But she annoyed me. Her certainty annoyed me. How could she imagine she knew? She was using Bob as the casual instrument of her own convictions, and using him in such a way that she held herself above the argument.

Jimmy Follette had been nipping at his own punch most of the afternoon and, as usual, he was stupefied, his face crimson, his eyes numb. He blundered from cluster to cluster, trying to make talk. He found Bob, debating Lucy, and after listening a moment, he grabbed Bob's arm clumsily and shook him. "Don't listen to these pukes. You've got the right idea. Only sensible thing to do. I'd join you, only I keep waiting for the subject to change. Funny how you wait for that, isn't it?"

"I guess so," Bob said.

"You're all right, boy," Jimmy said.

John pulled Jimmy off. "Leave him alone, Jimmy; he's got a lot on his mind."

Lucy watched with disgust as Jimmy backed away unsteadily and tried to execute a salute. "Right, right. Leave them all alone," he said. He straightened with effort and spoke to Bob again. "I leave you, then, in articulo mortis."

John turned to me and asked, "Where the fuck's Whitey?"

"He'll be along."

Pat came by and put her arm around my waist. "How are you?"

"Sober."

"Are you worried?"

"Not really."

Several hours went by, during which the moon moved out over the water, turning everything a rich purple, touched with silver, and some more people arrived, including some we didn't know at all. There are single men who drive up and down the miles of beach houses and when they spot a party, they park and angle their way in somehow. They eat and drink and try to score a girl. One kid in bare feet, cut-offs and a tank top came up to ask me, "I hear some guy's going to blow himself away."

I heard a note of some excitement or eagerness and I answered grudgingly, "That's the talk."

"That's heavy. That's really heavy. Who is it?"

"I don't know, but if I were you, I wouldn't ask around."

Pat had told everyone to bring suits for a moonlight swim, and she talked this up. People began to change and drift down to the beach. I saw Al and Lucy in suits. Lucy's legs were thin and white and I noticed a large bruise on the inside of her thigh. Jimmy Follette passed out and I helped Pat make him comfortable. Then I made myself another drink and went out onto the deck, where Larry Reynolds and his girl were standing, looking down at the swimmers. Despite the moon, it was too dark to see clearly.

"He's down there," Reynolds said.

"He swims."

"He's dressed."

"I don't know, Larry. This is turning into a bummer, anyway."

There was some confusion down by the surf. Several people shouted and, as I strained to see, a close-knit group started up the bluff toward the house. As they drew closer and came into the circle of the deck lights, I saw that Al and Lucy were supporting Bob, who stumbled between them. I ran down. Bob was soaked.

"What happened?"

Al snapped at me. "Art, you're a goddamn fool."

"He swam out and started to drown," Lucy said. "I saved him."

"What?"

"That's right," she told me fiercely.

"He cried out," Al said. "Lucy went after him. She's a trained lifeguard."

I held myself with effort and helped them muscle Bob into the house. We pulled him across the living room and I was aware that everyone was staring. As soon as we closed the bedroom door, their voices rose. Lucy wouldn't leave.

"Do you think I'm going to cut his throat?" I demanded angrily.

"He needs help."

"You're the one who needs help."

Bob appeared to be in shock. I stripped off his clothes and he lay like an infant in my arms. His small white cock hung limply over his balls.

I grabbed a towel from the bathroom and handed it to Lucy. "Rub him dry. I'll get some other clothes." I still had the keys to the Buick, so I ran out to rummage through Bob's things. When I returned, Al was shouting at Lucy.

"What kind of game do you call that?"

Lucy looked drunk and smug, somehow swollen. "I want to show him how nice it can be to be alive."

I glanced at Bob. His eyes were open but not quite aware, and he had a partial erection. I looked back at Lucy and she was still staring willfully at Al. "You don't own me," she said.

Al started to hit her but pulled the blow and shoved her instead. "He's sick, you crazy bitch. The man's got a terminal illness. He needs to forget, not remember."

At that point, John shoved his way in and shouted for everyone to get out and go home. He was trembling with the force of his fury. "The party's over. I'm sorry, but this is a fuck-up."

A lot of the people had already gone and the rest were ready to leave. Al pulled Lucy away, still arguing bitterly, and we managed to load Jimmy Follette onto Larry Reynolds, who was trying to hang around. John told him, "Split, or I'll bust you up."

John was full of anger, a lot of anger, straining at his control. "This is some real shit, Art. Can you imagine it?"

He was trembling and I made a calming gesture, but he brushed me aside and went back into the bedroom. Pat and Mary had dressed Bob, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed with a drink in his hand. He looked up and caught my eye, and his expression was distraught and somehow humble.

"It's so cold out there," he said.

"Listen to me," John said, sitting down beside Bob. He held one of his fists inches from Bob's face, not as a threat but as a form of extreme emphasis. "Do you want to die?"

"Yes."

"Say it!"

"I want to die."

"All right. All right, I'm going to help you. I'm going to put my ass on the line and help you. There's a cliff about a mile up the road. The water's deep. I'm going to send you off there. They'll think you jumped. OK?"

"OK."

Bob looked around until he found Pat, leaning against the jamb of the closet door. "Do you have anything?" he asked.

"What do you want?"

"Something. Sleeping pills."

Pat shook down her medicine chest and found a Doriden, two Nembutals and a number of tranquilizers. She gave everything to Bob with a glass of water and he began to take the pills two at a time, steadily, as if loading a gun. Once he choked, coughed and a red capsule slid out of his mouth and fell to the floor. He picked it up and swallowed it.

John insisted he take Bob alone. "We've had enough floorshow shit. This isn't some stunt. If we get caught, it isn't going to matter that Bob wanted to go."

He was right. I thought about the Buick. Tomorrow Bob would be found washed up on the beach and I would be driving his car, carrying his pink slip, and he would no longer be able to straighten out the confusion. Al Hoagland was right. I had been playing the fool.

After they left, we sat quietly, drinking reflexively. I hadn't said farewell to Bob--goodbye, safe passage, thank you, nothing. The little I had promised to do had been shit on by Whitey, and Bob was going into the water, where he hadn't wanted to die. I hoped the pills would warm him and make it easy to slip away.

• • •

John was back in half an hour, carrying Bob over his shoulder. They were both wet. John dumped Bob onto the couch and he lay with his head hanging down. Mary ran to put a pillow under Bob's head and I asked, "Now what happened?"

"I put him in, but he began to struggle down there and cry out for me to save him. I tried to walk away, but I couldn't do it." He began to shake violently. "That water's a motherfucker. I didn't think I was coming out of it." He walked over to look down at Bob. "I don't know about this guy, Art."

I said slowly, "He may die anyway. He's full of downers, tranks and booze. He's been in the water twice and he's not strong."

"I don't want him dead here," Pat said flatly.

John bent over and raised one of Bob's eyelids. "He's gone for a while. What should we do, rent him a motel room?"

"No, if he dies, we could be tied to him," I said. "Let's put him in his car. I don't want it."

We changed his clothes again. All he had left in the car trunk was a dress outfit, jacket and slacks. When we had him naked, I could see the grains of sand gathered in the wrinkles of his flesh. When we hoisted him up to move him, he came to briefly and looked down at his clothes. "These don't match," he said and passed out again.

I drove him a mile down the road, John following in his own car, and parked in a scenic overlook. I put the pink slip in his billfold and tried to make him comfortable. Pat had found an old blanket to cover him with. I suppose I touched his forehead and said, "Take it easy." John drove me back and we moved toward bed in a mood of fitful exhaustion.

• • •

In the morning, we found Bob asleep on the doorstep. He had a violent cold and we carried him in and put him to bed. Pat fixed a drink of hot whiskey, sugar and lemon, and, as he sipped it, he looked up at me to say, "I guess we don't always know what it is we want to do."

"Take it easy," I said pointlessly. I meant he didn't owe me an explanation. He finished the drink and went back to sleep.

John and I drove to Hollywood to see Whitey. We found him at home, sitting in his living room, still in his pajamas. Gene was with him and also a young chicano, who looked like he was strung out and running hard. They all watched us uneasily.

"I got burned," Whitey said quickly. "The people never showed." He looked at Gene and Gene nodded.

The chicano said, "A bad burn, man. No way to call it."

"I waited most of the night," Whitey said. "Here, let me show you." He went to a drawer and took out a very large hypo. "I was going to load this. He would have been dead before he could have got the needle out of his arm."

I looked at John. Whitey was obviously afraid, even with his two friends there to back him, and I thought John might move, but he said quietly, "It was pretty rough out there last night."

"I know. Joanna told me."

"It got worse."

"There was nothing I could do. Look, it happens sometimes. You can never be sure."

I knew it was bullshit. I didn't sort it out standing there, but I knew. I knew Whitey would never put out money unless he had it strongly tied, and I knew people didn't burn up customers over $60 worth of smack. But I also sensed he had intended to deliver, but the stuff had come and they had decided to have a little of it, and then they had felt too good to drive 40 miles to the beach, and then they had had a little more, and then it had been too late. You can't move with a head full of smack.

• • •

That afternoon, I took Bob to see a doctor. He didn't want to go, but his cold had him hard by the throat and I insisted. I had started to feel responsible for Bob and this was a burden I wanted to share.

The doctor practiced just outside the Malibu colony and it was apparent Bob wasn't the kind of patient he was used to, but he examined him with a remote and dispassionate kindliness, communicating mostly with me, as if he were a vet and Bob were my dog. He drew a blood sample and took an X ray. And, while Bob was pulling on his shirt, I took the doctor aside and gave him the medical bills Bob had carried in the glove compartment of the Buick. They were from Long Beach General and I said, "They should have a work-up on him." The doctor nodded patiently. He gave Bob some caps for his cold and told me to see that he stayed in bed.

Bob was better the next day. He had finally worked through Pat's Canadian Club and, after some hesitation, he began on the Jim Beam. John and Mary were hanging around, catching the last of the season. The four of us were sleeping together. Once the novelty wore off, it was much like two of us sleeping together, except the bed was crowded. Mary enjoyed all the sex, but it didn't make her any happier. She could sigh in her great-hearted way, climax with fierce pleasure, then, moments later, start nitpicking. I began to think of us as castaways, sharing one another and sharing our raft with a dying man.

One afternoon, we sat around and talked about a party trip to San Francisco. We felt we owed Bob something because his party had turned into such a downer, and we decided to take off, but, before we left, I stopped by to see the doctor.

"Your friend's not well," the doctor said.

"I know. How long has he got?"

"Well, if he quits drinking...." He paused, studying my face. "You did know he was an alcoholic?"

I immediately saw how it all went together, and I half smiled as I said, "No, he told me he had leukemia."

"Ah," the doctor said with morose satisfaction. "It was his wife who had leukemia. I talked to one of the doctors at Long Beach. His wife killed herself about a year ago. He's been out of control and drifting ever since."

• • •

Clearly, Bob still deserved our sympathy, he was a man in genuine trouble, but the delicious point of his story and our party was a lie, we all looked foolish and we had had enough of him. Still, no one could bring himself to say so, and Bob, taking no hints, hung on desperately.

As it finally happened, we abandoned him on the roadside. We had started out for San Francisco in two cars. A mile out of Malibu, Bob's Buick broke down. It was, we thought, the fuel pump, and Bob said he'd walk back to Malibu and bring a mechanic.

As soon as Bob was out of sight, John said, "This is it. Let's go." I nodded but insisted we leave five on the front seat.

When we got back to Malibu, a few days later, Bob had disappeared. Maybe having polished his act on us, he was now performing in a new house for new friends. Maybe he had actually walked out through the surf to drown. And maybe he had pulled himself together, stopped drinking and gone back to work. However it was, we never knew.