Gilbert insisting Jacaranda come over every night, and Jacaranda doing what Gilbert said, because he was so dangerous and there was something mysterious going on that she couldn’t figure out. She’d never have guessed it was just Max.
“I invited Max up for coffee,” Gilbert announced one Sunday morning. Up until this point, it didn’t seem as though she was debauched at all, but the truth was that while she believed in being a washed-up piece of driftwood on the shore, she also believed in bold adventuresses, cigarettes, and suffered from one too many of anything. It was one of those “Oh, no, I couldn’t have” mornings for her again—not that Gilbert ever noticed. (One of the ways Gilbert cramped her style was by not noticing anything.)
“You invited him up for coffee?” Jacaranda asked.
“He wanted to meet you,” Gilbert said.
“Me?” she asked.
“He’s here,” Gilbert said.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She looked a picture of health.
Then she heard him, Max.
MAX WAS A carburetor backfire in the driveway, an old green Jaguar with wooden paneling inside, and a dog named Diogenes. (Jacaranda thought, Diogenes! Really!) He emerged out of the Jaguar like a tall drink of water, like Cooper in Morocco; all he needed was a palm frond and a straw fan and he’d be complete. But he wasn’t in the French Foreign Legion and he, by no means, told the limpid, careless innocent truth the way it was spoken by Gary Cooper (because Cooper was too lazy to do otherwise). Max’s truth was sharpened by the sportsman honing of an artist whittler; like that Balinese carver’s reply to the question about Art, “I just do everything as well as I can,” Max just did truth as well as he could—he turned truth into a game, an art, when most others would just let truth pass by.
He was about six feet three and he had bright golden hair, a golden mustache, and eyes that reminded Jacaranda of those improved postcard skies. His face was lean and his mouth was pale, his teeth were vampiric—a tiny touch too long, but not from age. His neck was a slender Lucas Cranach neck and his body was slender; every move he made was like spring water, clear and salt-free. He wore white tennis shoes, white jeans, a white cotton shirt, and a red bandanna. Max saw her staring at him from inside Gilbert’s window and, with one simple smiling motion, he bowed.
“You’re here! Jacaranda Leven, right?” he drawled. (Oh—but a high-class sort of Savannah drawl from before Georgia was marched through, a drawl hardly extant in this world of redneck sentiments.) “I’ve heard so much about you.”
Jacaranda said, “Oh . . . and I so little of you.”
“Gilbert’s a fine man,” Max said, “but I’m afraid that boy’s a little short on character assessment.”
Jacaranda should have dumped Gilbert’s “character assessment” of Max out the window, but instead she was thinking how sad it was that Max was a “fag” and what a pity it was that she would never be able to seduce him. He was so beautiful and that bow had made her eyes go dry, she’d forgotten to blink for so long. Perhaps what kept Jacaranda thinking Max was a fag was that there could be no other reason but a sexual one, in her opinion, for anyone at all to like Gilbert. He was without redeeming social value except for sex—Gilbert with his mean ash-green eyes and his monosyllabic replies and his rudimentary manly desires to climb Mount Everest and swim the Dardanelles.
Instead of ignoring Gilbert’s “just Max” character assessment, Jacaranda resigned herself to Max being a fag. Maybe it was because she’d never tried to think what being a fag meant and what Gilbert’s idea of a fag could be. Gilbert might regard the whole world as a panorama of worthless rubble, peopled by macabre perverts and Cro-Magnon women, from the way he spoke of them. But once she resigned herself to Max being a fag, she saw Oscar Wilde in every move he made.
Or maybe it was because she had never met a man who was passionate about elegance. What went on between men and women was based on a kind of enraged foundation that to Jacaranda could only be transcended through clashes-by-night sex. One of the things that made her laugh so much around Colman was the ridiculous distance between his grim dislike of his wife (and Jacaranda too) and his feelings that he was a prisoner of sex—and his love of his innocent lust. It was all balance. But then, she already knew that from surfing.
As Max sat there, his eyes occasionally landing on Gilbert, who was talking on the phone by the kitchen, it struck her that Max was fascinated by a death-defier like Gilbert for the same reason she was, out of sheer childlike amazement.
Gilbert’s apartment was furnished by his landlord in cocoa-brown threadbare fifties’ Modern with a cocoa-brown shag rug and stucco walls, which had been swirled into a pattern so life would be more interesting. He had a coffee table with cigarette burns on it and a pile of scripts with dust on top of them. His cast-off clothes were piled up in a high heap by the front door, waiting for him to remember to take them to the laundry. There was no door between the bedroom and the living room. His bed was a twisted torment of sheets, which he’d been meaning to change for two months. A vaseful of dead flowers, roses, stood on the windowsill. It was West Hollywood, all right, and the only thing that really was not indigenous was Max, his long fingers shaking out a match from lighting his and Jacaranda’s cigarettes like some sort of lost art.
“Have you known Gilbert long?” Jacaranda asked, watching their smoke lured out the window by the sun.
“Have you?” he asked. He raised his eyebrows in elegant curiosity with a sort of stillness, an attitude of delight. It was as though at last he’d found her and now they had nothing else to do but spend the rest of their lives discovering the mysteries of each other’s perfection. The joy that came spilling off the way Max’s shoulders drew toward her in rapt attention was the joy she knew they meant by something being “bigger than both of us.”
“I haven’t really known Gilbert that long,” she said, “but I’m real close to his apartment.”
“Gilbert,” Max said, with a brilliant smile, “has the finest instinct for interior decoration in West Hollywood.”
She didn’t feel like laughing exactly, though what rose up in her was glee; she felt if only she and Max could sit this way, their cigarette smoke spiraling forever and Gilbert just inside their sight—well, if only they could.
Gilbert got off the phone. Instead of feeling, as she’d supposed she might feel, that Max would wreck her Sunday and that she’d want him to leave, she felt as though Gilbert were crude and inept. Gilbert’s dangerous face, at that point, looked almost stylized, like a mask.
Once she noticed Max, everything else seemed only half true.
“Who was that?” Max asked. “On the phone?”
“Sandy Ryder,” Gilbert said, pouring himself some more coffee.
“Oh,” Max said, and a look crossed his face that was so sad and polite that one might think he was at a funeral and Sandy Ryder was the body.
“He’s not so bad,” Gilbert said. Jacaranda had never heard Gilbert say that someone wasn’t so bad. She thought it was a trick.
“Not so bad!” Max cried, so excited he stood up and scowled. “Do you know what he said? Last time I saw him he told me: ‘Truth is like old brandy; it should only be brought out late at night among close friends.’”
Max stepped on a ceramic ashtray in his indignation,
