Steve says, "I didn't have shoes. All I had time to do was buy a suit so I didn't have shoes that would go with it. So I had to borrow my friend's shoes. We just swapped them on the cliff. For the pictures."
The VCR in their living room breaks, so they're watching Steve's skateboard videos on the bedroom television, and Juliette says, "When I first saw his skateboarding videos, I welled up in tears. First of all, the music is so beautiful, and he chose the music, the piano. It is so aesthetic to me, his gliding and jumping and defying the physical universe. Because that's not supposed to be done. You don't take an object with wheels, and jump off a structure. It's a defiance. It was the first time I was able to be awed by a partner in this way."
Upstairs, looking at a framed photo of Marilyn Monroe, Juliette says, "People have reduced Marilyn to a sex symbol, but the reason she had so much power is she made people light up. She had a joy. When she's smiling in a picture, she's a blend. She's in a female body, this beautiful woman form, but she has that child-love shining through, this kind of child-light that makes other people light up, too. I think that's what's special about her.
"There's a word for it in Scientology. What's common to children is they give off… how they're able to uplift, their joy, it's called 'theta. It's what's innate to a spirit. So in Scientology, a spirit is called a thetan, and what a spirit would give off is theta. It's what I would call magic."
Reading from her list of questions left over from that long-ago romance, she says: "Do you feel that we are all potentially Christlike?"
She says: "Do you have hope for humanity? And if not, how can you honestly keep on going in the face of that hopelessness?"
She stresses, "There are no right answers to these."
POSTSCRIPT: Halfway to Juliette's house, the man who was driving me got a call. Apparently the magazine's credit card wouldn't authorize payment, and the dispatcher told the driver to "obtain payment from the passenger." Payment for half a day's driving was about $700. The week before this, a hotel gave me the same story about another magazine's credit card, then billed both my credit card and the magazine's. I felt pretty cagey about the double-billing issue, and told him no way. He told me I was a thief. I told him to let me out at the next stoplight. He locked the doors and said, no, and my bag was still in the trunk. I started calling the magazine in New York, but by then everyone had gone home. For the next two hours, we drove around the Hollywood Hills with the doors locked, the driver shouting that I was responsible. I was a thief. I shouldn't use a service I can't pay for.
I'm telling him how the magazine made all the arrangements. And I keep calling New York. Still, I'm thinking, Wow, I'm a limo hostage. This is so cool!
Eventually, I call 911 and say I'm being kidnapped. A minute later the driver throws me and my bag out in the gutter in front of Juliette's house.
I never told her what happened. I just went up and rang the doorbell. She and Steve probably still think I'm always this shaky, sweaty mess.
Turns out the magazine's credit card was just fine…
Why Isn't He Budging?
"I [Andrew Sullivan] was born in 1963 in a small, actually very small town in southern England, grew up in another small town not far away in southern England, got a scholarship to Oxford, then I went and got another scholarship to go to grad school in Harvard in 84, and did a public administration degree at the Kennedy School and then realized that I couldn't cope with the sort of regression analysis of welfare reform and moved into philosophy, mainly political philosophy, and then did a Ph.D. in political science, mainly political theory, in the next few years, and while I was doing that I sort of moonlighted by going down to Washington and interning at the New Republic, and then going back and being a junior editor and then becoming editor of the New Republic, I guess, in 1991, and doing that through 96, and then putting an end to that and sort of getting my life together."
"I had a… I hated my family life. I hated it. I had a very visceral hostility to the circumstances in which I found myself growing up, and I think I detached quite early… I didn't enjoy it when my parents were fighting at all. I was horrified and traumatized by it… To some extent you get used to it. My mother was incredibly frank and direct about everything, and it was all very-raw. My father was always slamming doors and yelling and screaming and getting drunk and playing rugby, and my mother was always complaining and yelling. I mean, this was on and on and on, and I think a part of me just sort of withdrew from all of that and saw it as a spectator sport, but part of me was also extremely traumatized by it. But whether you're traumatized or not, it's where you're at home. Even if it's a horrible trauma, this is what the therapists tell you, and I think it makes a lot of sense. Even if it's deep unhappiness, it's your unhappiness."
"Well, maybe that does follow that one seeks out relationships that replicate that…"
"I was confirmed in Arundel Cathedral in Sussex. I come from Sussex. My family doesn't. They come from some bog in Ireland somewhere. But Sussex was a very English Catholic county and many English martyrs came from there and that was part of my identity as a kid."
"My confirmation saint was Saint Thomas More… I was an English Catholic boy, and I guess it was a way of affirming a particular kind of identity and resistance to England, to all of its anti-Catholic trappings, and also More has always completely fascinated me. He's an intensely fascinating man for all the obvious reasons, the attempt to be in the world/not be in the world. Be knee-deep in politics. Be even deeper into his spiritual life. He brings together all sorts of questions about what integrity is, loyalty."
"The one area that really interests me is sanctity. I'm interested in what saints are. Because it's… I don't know what they are, and I should, really. I think we all should have a better grip on what that's all about, what a human being who is a human being and yet somehow holy, somehow in touch with something else more profoundly than anybody else… And there are several saints that sort of fascinate me, and I would love to figure out some more about. Saint Francis is one. Saint John the Beloved is another…"
"There's something appealing about the figure who-and I'm sure I sort of project onto this on some level-who's standing by himself. Who's just there and won't budge. You ask yourself, 'Why isn't he budging? What's going on? Why? Why? Why?»
"I used to be envious of people who were positive [for HIV]. Because I felt like they were living in some enhanced way that I had not yet been able to achieve. This is where sanctity comes in. The whole definition of a saint is somebody who lives as if they're going to die tonight. A saint is so in touch with reality, which is of course our mortality, that he's able to live at a different level of intensity… I found myself falling in love with people who were positive… A couple people I'm thinking of, I think they really were quite remarkable in how they tackled their disease and lived with it and overcame it and shone with it even as they died. There is something particularly attractive about it, just as we're attracted to martyrs, and we're fascinated by suicide bombers… None of those people wanted to be in the situation they were in, but they had a certain impatience with stupidity and ephemera."
"Without getting into any details, I've just had this very very very tempestuous and short-lived relationship that I bumped into in San Francisco. I just bumped into him on Saturday night… Our last contact was just sort of a very peremptory and vicious email, and I saw him and talked to him and we didn't raise our voices or anything. We were talking, and my friends pointed out that they noticed two things. One, they noticed that obviously we were angry but that there was an incredible intensity about the relationship.