“Which is about three hundred too much.”
“ Fuck the money,” he snapped, standing. “I came here because I’m frightened. I’m scared for him. And you think-”
“So convince me otherwise.” I was still in my chair.
He started to pace. “What do you think I’m going to do? Take the money and live happily ever after? Finance a new career? Start over somewhere?” He waved an arm, and the flyer skittered out of his hand like an aeronautically challenged paper plane and crash-landed on my dreadful carpet. “Who do you think you’re talking to, Methuselah?”
“Okay, then tell me what you’re afraid of.”
“I’m afraid one of them is going to kill him, that’s what I’m afraid of.”
“But,” I said, just trying it on, “he can see the future.”
“Yeah, sure. About everyone but himself. The first time he saw me, he knew I was sick. He knew it before I did, but about him, he doesn’t know whether the paper will come in the morning.”
“And he took you in,” I said, “knowing.”
He started to say something and then he blinked rapidly and turned it into a long exhalation. “He took me in,” he said.
“And you.”
“I love him.” There was nothing dramatic about it.
I loved somebody, too, but Christopher was apparently better at it than I was. “I don’t know what you think I can do,” I said, “but I’ll go see him.”
2 ~ Blue Sky
“You’re the boy Christy sent.” Max Grover looked down at me through the screen door.
“That’s me,” I said, junking my mental image of the man Christy wanted to protect. I hadn’t figured he’d be six feet six or something, nor had I expected the trimmed, cloud-white beard and sky-blue eyes, a color scheme he was keeping intact by wearing a loose, long blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up and creased, spotless white trousers. He was tanned, broad-shouldered, and barefoot, and he had one long brown hand wrapped around a large lemon.
“I must say, you don’t look very dangerous.” The eyes were not a fool’s eyes. They were, if anything, amused.
“Yeah, well you’re not what I imagined, either.”
“A psychic should be more… elfin,” he suggested, watching me. “Small-boned and bigheaded, like the aliens people keep showing pictures of to Robert Stack.” He snapped the screen with his forefinger, making a little cloud of dust. “Are you disappointed?”
“I’m not much of anything,” I said.
He closed his eyelids for a moment and then reopened them and peered at me a little more closely. The amusement had dipped beneath the blue surface. “The danger is there, though,” he said. “It runs through your veins, like a heavier blood. I wonder what brings it to the surface.”
This was not going as I’d planned.
He must have seen something in my face, because he said, “Control is an illusion. You must know that by now.”
“I gave up on control years ago. Now I settle for not being bewildered.”
“Can I help?” It was a serious question.
A car passed behind me on the street, Flores Street in West Hollywood, dragging a wake of heat behind it. “Well, you can tell me why you have a lemon in your hand.”
He looked down at it and then showed me a row of straight teeth that looked white even in the white beard. “Come in,” he said. “Have some lemonade.”
He led me through a perfectly restored craftsman’s bungalow, circa 1918-high ceilings, white walls, bleached oak floors, and broad arches leading from one room to another. I’d once heard a real-estate agent say that a house had “flow.” Max Grover’s house flowed like the Mississippi.
I waited in a small book-lined room while he squeezed lemons in the kitchen. He’d never laid eyes on me before, but he trusted me alone in his house. A cut-crystal bowl filled with antique roses scented the room, Mozart’s concerto for flute and harpsichord cooled the air, and I indulged a private vice: I absolutely cannot be left in someone’s library without checking out the titles. Max Grover had assembled a serious trove of religion and metaphysics: three biographies of the Buddha, a translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Book of Urantia, whatever that was, the complete guesses of Edgar Cayce, several feet of baseless speculation on the pyramids, Robin Lane Fox debunking the Bible, a well-thumbed copy of The Book of Mormon, and at least two thousand more. I was leafing through Dore’s illustrations of Dante, hunting for the popes in hell, when Max said: “Here we are, then. Find anything you like?”
I turned. “Robin Lane Fox, in a pinch.”
“A cynic. But you’d have to be, wouldn’t you? With your job.” He was carrying a white wicker tray with two tall glasses of lemonade on it.
“But which came first?” I asked. “The cynicism or the job?” I didn’t get many chances to talk to psychics. Especially not for free.
“Our primary characteristics preexist us,” he said, as matter-of-factly as someone else might have said, “Hot, isn’t it?” and lowered the tray on a small wooden table. “But you’re the kind of cynic who develops it late in life, who grows-or rather, shrinks-into it. The better kind of cynic.”
“Which is?”
“A disappointed romantic, of course. You knew the answer to that. Have a seat. Take the soft one, the one nearer the window. At my age, it’s wise to keep the back straight.”
I sat on, or partway through, an old leather armchair that threatened briefly to let me sink all the way to the floor. Max Grover lowered himself precisely onto a wooden chair with a high, slatted back and combed clean fingers through his beard. Closer up, the skin around his eyes was deeply lined, slices of white cut into the tan of his face. He wore three ornate rings on his right hand: two turquoise in silver and a snake’s-eye agate.
“Christy is excitable,” he offered, putting an end to the preliminaries. “It goes with youth.”
“He feels you’re in danger.”
“We’re all in danger.”
“I had something a little less cosmic in mind.” The lemonade was tart and heart-clutchingly cold.
He shrugged and turned the sky-blue eyes on me. “While there are homosexuals-and heterosexuals, too, of course-who derive sexual excitement from danger, I’m not one of them. I don’t think it matters how we die, do you?”
“For a couple of minutes, it might.”
“After seventy-seven years on this earth, I’m not going to worry about a couple of minutes. Old age, according to Charles de Gaulle, is a shipwreck. After you’ve been through a shipwreck it’s hard to hang on to your worries.”
I thought about all the intensely worried old people I knew, people who tiptoed from room to room behind locked doors and lowered blinds, people afraid to go to the supermarket, worried about the young strong ones who might snatch their empty purses and break their brittle arms. Tall, lithe, ramrod-straight, and trusting, Max Grover wasn’t much of a fit.
I sipped my lemonade. “He says you’re picking up trash.”
“Trash.” He laughed. “A vivid word, but just a word, and it means whatever Christy wants it to mean. Words are so useless when things matter, as I’m sure you’ve discovered in your investigations. We’ve debased them so. The plumbing in my bathroom is called Ideal Standard. Now surely that’s an oxymoron. Unless it’s a tautology. Meaninglessness isn’t one of my fields. And anyway, trash is such a southern notion, don’t you think? Christy brought it with him from Arkansas. Remember ‘white trash’? And he’s forgetting that he was trash himself not so long ago.”
“Was he?”
“Christy was not above the occasional sugar daddy, and he stole from them in exactly the way he accuses my young visitors of doing. Did it twice, in fact.”
“And you knew that when you-” Something moved somewhere in the house. “When you, um…”
Grover was looking straight at me, but part of his attention was directed toward the noise. “Brought him home. Certainly. Christy’s previous, ah, flame introduced him to me, right after he bailed him out.”