He waited for nearly an hour that afternoon, moving back and forth from the rotunda to the bright sidewalk outside. Finally the right kind of man approached, a middle-aged man with the last bits of an ice cream sandwich pinched in his fingers. He wore a faded gray work shirt and dark trousers with loose, fallen cuffs. When he took the last bite of his ice cream sandwich, he threw the wrapper to the ground behind his heel and wiped his hand on his hip. He eyed Kenneth indifferently as he stepped inside the building, then stood for a moment at the metal wheel, his back turned, one hand in the back pocket of his pants.
On the nape of the man’s neck, above the collar, were thick creases that looked almost like scars. Kenneth stood watching while the man casually spun the wheel, watching the rotating images, then moved farther back into the rotunda. It was only when he had reached the far wall that he looked over his shoulder at Kenneth, then turned again, his hands crossed in front of his waist so that his elbows could be seen beneath his rolled-up sleeves. He said nothing, which was the only clue Kenneth had to go on.
To the right, against the back wall, there was a small alcove that led to the toilets. That was where the man went next. Kenneth stood outside the beige door for a moment, no longer knowing what he expected. His mouth was dry and he put his hand flat on the dimpled surface of the door and stared for a moment at the shifting cloud of red light behind his closed eyelids.
Inside, the man was leaning with his back against the sink, his ankles crossed. He was examining his curled fingertips, then he looked up at Kenneth, his image flattened by the dim brownish light.
His hair was a reddish gray bristle. He had a narrow face with close-set eyes, two arched dimples between the brows. He started nodding his head, his tongue poking at the side of his mouth. Then he stood away from the sink and moved back toward the stalls, and Kenneth followed him, his face unconsciously mimicking the clipped purposefulness of the man’s.
“I thought so,” the man said, turning.
Kenneth raised his chin, his nostrils flaring.
“Right away, I thought so,” said the man.
In one sudden motion, he grabbed Kenneth by the shoulder and with his other hand gripped his waist. Kenneth couldn’t see his face now, could only smell the tang of his perspiration. The man held him upright and pressed his body against his own. He held him with a kind of paternal restraint, breathing a little heavily through his nose, as if carefully choosing his moment. Kenneth’s eyes were closed. All he could see was the vague red light, faintly throbbing like the membrane of a cell illuminated on the stage of a microscope.
“Go ahead,” the man said. “What did you come here for?”
He took Kenneth’s hand and placed it on the inside of his thigh. Through the coarse fabric, Kenneth’s fingers gathered in the length and presence of the man’s erection, the delicately curved head poking up at an angle above the elastic band of his underpants. Then the man put his hand on top of Kenneth’s and pulled it away.
“Go ahead now,” he said. “Kneel. Get down on your knees.”
His belt buckle jangled at his waist. Kenneth pulled the man’s stiff briefs down to reveal the muscles of his upper thighs. He was almost hairless, only a tight clump of red fuzz above the bland shock of his erection. It was pale and smooth, almost colorless. When he guided it carefully into Kenneth’s mouth, cupping Kenneth’s chin in his hand, it tasted faintly of milk, or like the faintly sour smell of milk when you first open the carton. It probed his mouth like a bodiless thumb.
The man took a step back for some reason. He inhaled deeply through his nose, his eyes half-shut. His cock jutted out to the left, faintly glistening with the thin coating of Kenneth’s saliva. He shook his head as if to clear it.
He wedged his stiff penis back beneath the waistband of his underpants. Then he hoisted up his pants, working them from side to side over his hips, softly grunting with the effort. “That’s what I thought,” he said, looking down at Kenneth. He buckled his belt. Then he told Kenneth that he was under arrest.
The creases between his close-set eyes were almost sarcastic. Kenneth was still kneeling, then he sat back on the floor, his eyes on the row of urinals to his left. The man’s taste was still in his mouth, stale like the pages of a long unopened book. Then the man said, “Let’s go,” and Kenneth felt the jagged grip just above his elbow, pulling him upright, and he moved sightlessly forward, letting out little rabbity breaths of something like laughter.
There was another cop — in uniform — waiting up the road in a marked sedan pulled up to the sidewalk, the same path Kenneth had seen in mirror image on the white table of the camera obscura. It was chalk-bright in the sunlight now. The second cop cuffed Kenneth’s hands behind his back. A pair of teenage girls rode by on a tandem bicycle, a smear of yellow and green that gave way to the raised, violet-budded arms of a coral tree.
They took him to jail. There were actual bars, like in the movies, but nothing had prepared him for the full-color gloom of the chipped tile floor, stained and crusted with lime, and the dented black drain with its orange scabs of rust. When his father arrived, distracted and out of context, the office was still in his face. He stood up in the precinct lounge with his hat on, his hands in the pockets of his baggy suit, as they led Kenneth in from the cell with the cuffs still on. His voice was flat, faintly sardonic, as he spoke to the cop. “All right,” he said. “That’s fine.” Then he looked at Kenneth, his mouth tight, and without saying a word turned toward the door.
They didn’t speak on the ride home. His father drove aggressively, then absentmindedly, refusing to look at Kenneth, whose wrists were scored pink from the handcuffs. His father would only nod his head occasionally, as if working his way back through the past to the various clues.
At dinner, he was still wearing his suit and tie, though he had spent the intervening hours working in the garage. He helped himself to bread, setting three slices on his plate and methodically smearing them with butter, then making a stack. He asked Kenneth’s mother how her bridge game was. Then he asked Kenneth if the food was all right, if it was refined enough for his delicate tastes.
“Will,” said Kenneth’s mother.
“Well, we can’t help coddling him now, can we?” he went on.
“Will, please.”
“I understand,” he said. “You don’t want to embarrass him. Kenneth, would you like some cottage cheese? A salad?”
He imagined an appropriate response: violently overturning the table, or slamming down his fork and knife and storming out the door. But he wasn’t doing any of these things. He wondered why he was just sitting there, eyes averted, slowly breathing.
The war had ended. In Santa Monica, there was a new coalescence of gay life, infused by the hordes of returned sailors, newly freed. There were vague farm boys willing to experiment, and aesthetes who hosted parties by the pool, but it wasn’t what interested Kenneth. He was the sparrowlike boy who seemed to be starving himself, who could sometimes be seen lurking outside of bars in black jeans, his unwashed hair falling in blades over his forehead. He was silent to the point of hostility. Everyone wanted to save him.
He spent most of that next year in a tiny basement apartment in West Hollywood. Its barred windows looked out on a neglected patio where the landlady grew herbs and fed a pack of cats with cubes of stale bread. On the bare wall, he would project his films. He would gather old newspapers and food wrappers and catalogues and tear out the words and pictures and paste them to sheets of butcher paper, then at night carefully burn their edges over the flame on the kitchen range. He made a kind of shrine out of one of these collages, which he preserved on the wall above his bed. At its center was a picture of a bare-chested sailor flexing his biceps. Then there were images of cars, particularly German cars, one of them a long black Mercedes with Nazi regalia on the hood and above the headlights. In the background, a kind of two-dimensional altarpiece was constructed out of flowers, guns, superheroes, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. Over this, he painted a pentagram in red fingernail polish, smearing it thinly with an edge of cardboard. Then he wrote the words “Ted Drake” in tiny cursive script, over and over again, filling in each blank space with the letters of his name.