Bud Hively, the real one, was among Maynard's friends gathered at the ICU lounge outside the George Washington University Hospital unit where, by one o'clock Monday afternoon, Maynard was awake and answering yes-and-no questions by blinking. He had a black tube down his throat that looked like a creature from Alien emerging from his gullet, and so he was unable to speak.
Only immediate family members were allowed into Maynard's room, two at a time, but Edwin Sudbury told the nurse in charge that we were all Maynard's siblings. "We're farmers," he said. "Big family." The nurse looked as if she had heard this many times before and did not find it clever, but she let us go in.
A District of Columbia police officer was seated on a desk chair that had been wheeled over to the entrance to Maynard's room. He gave each of us who entered the room a quick onceover, but he made no body search and failed to conduct even perfunctory interrogations of Maynard's visitors. Were Maynard to be finished off by a visitor, the cop would be good for a vague description, I guessed, but not much more.
Timmy and I went into the room together for a brief stay. Timmy spoke reassuring and affectionate words to Maynard, who stared up at us weakly, quizzically. He obviously had questions but no way of asking them. When Timmy asked him if he'd like an explanation as to why he was lying badly wounded in a hospital bed, Maynard blinked furiously, yes, yes. Timmy gave him a quick rundown of the shooting and the confusing aftermath. Maynard shook his head in amazement at Timmy's story. Then, apparently exhausted by his attempt to make sense of what had happened to him, he drifted off again. We gazed at Maynard a moment longer, outraged and sickened all over again at what had happened to our friend.
Back in the ICU lounge, Timmy and I managed to maneuver Bud Hively, the Blade writer, and Dana Mosel, the Post reporter, into a corner and then brought the conversation around to Jim Suter and the mysterious quilt panel. Hively was interested in Suter's fate because he knew him, and Mosel had managed to wangle an assignment from the Post metro editor to follow up on the odd panel and the just-as-peculiar act of vandalism.
"I talked to a woman at the Names Project in San Francisco," Mosel said, "and she gave me the name and address of the man in D.C. who submitted the panel last May. But there's no record of a David Phipps in or around the District.
The phone number, which I called, is a fake, and the address is at a Capitol Hill Mailboxes, Etcetera. It would take a court order to find out who actually rented the box. Those private outfits contract with the Postal Service and they're subject to the same federal privacy laws that a post office has to observe."
Mosel, a slender, pretty, auburn-haired woman in a linen suit and a pair of well-worn tennis shoes, had her notebook out and flipped through it in search of additional details she thought might interest us. She had told Timmy earlier that she'd been in the Peace Corps in Malawi in the midsixties, and she'd gotten to know Maynard through the former-Peace-Corps-volunteer writers' network. This was a web of several hundred people whose reach into U.S. journalism and letters seemed to resemble, as Mosel had described it, Pat Robertson's idea of the grip of the II-luminati on eighteenth-century Europe.
"Amy Chavez, the Names Project staffer," Mosel went on, "was as mystified as everybody else by the Suter panel, and she said a lot of their people are unnerved by this thing. But they've never asked for death certificates or other documentation in the past, and she doubts they'll start doing it now. This type of weirdness just hasn't been a problem."
Bud Hively said, "There's a respect for the quilt-a reverence almost-that's felt even by most of the people who think it absorbs angry emotions that should be fueling political action instead. There's one panel made by a dead man's friends who wrote on the panel, 'He hated this quilt and so do we.' But they're still part of it, even if they think it's wrong, and I don't think they would play games with the quilt or desecrate it."
"No," Timmy said, "that would feel like an insult not to the quilt project but to all the people whose names are there."
Hively, a muscular, pug-nosed man with a shaved head and a mustache the color and shape of the pyramid at Chichen Itza, said he thought whoever had sent in the panel memorializing a man who'd been alive when the panel was submitted must have been consumed with bitterness. Hively said, "He must have hated Jim deeply to do a thing like that. And I guess he must have hated the quilt, too, to have used it so selfishly."
I said, "Do you know people who disliked Suter? Is he a man who makes enemies?"
Hively smiled knowingly and a little sheepishly. "Jim Suter broke a lot of hearts in gay Washington over the years."
"Yours included?" Mosel said. She still had her notebook out and added, "This is all on background, of course."
"Yeah," Hively said, and laughed uneasily. "I had a fling with Jim ten or twelve years ago. He was-to put it mildly-one of the most attractive men in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia back then. Really one of the most dazzling-looking men I'd ever seen. He still is, in fact-or was the last time I saw him. Jim was also smart, sexy, energetic, and he knew everybody and everything that went on in this town. And he wasn't shy about letting you know how popular he was either. I spent a night with him one time, and I wandered into Jim's kitchen around ten on a Sunday morning. He was there fixing breakfast while he was dishing the dirt on the speakerphone with-guess who? Nancy Reagan."
Timmy said, "God."
I said, "I don't suppose Suter is as wired into the Clinton White House as he was back in the Reagan era, or is he?"
"No, the Clinton gay mob-a large, moody, disappointed bunch of nice people, by and large-don't care much for Jim. His most intimate nonromantic ties have all been with Republicans," Hively said. "They knew he was gay, of course, but that didn't matter much to the Reagan crowd. These were Hollywood people. The Bush White House was stuffier, but even there Jim had his admirers."
"And his enemies?" I said.
Hively looked at me a little sadly now. "The people I know who didn't like Jim and some of them loathed him deeply- were not political or professional or social enemies. They were all men who had fallen in love with him-which is the easiest, most natural thing in the world-and whom he had led on, and taken into his arms for a time, and then abruptly dumped. Jim seemed to take a kind of sadistic pleasure in doing that. Over the past twenty years, a lot-I mean a platoon, a battalion, a small army-of men have gone gaga over Jim Suter, and there were very few-only the dregs of the dregs really-that he ever turned away.
"But then, after a week or two, that was it. He wasn't a one-night-stand-then-never-again man, he was a two-week-stand-Ihen-never-again man, a very, very cruel thing to be. It was always a week or two of bliss, then suddenly nothing. You are among the disappeared. He doesn't return your calls, he ignores you in public. And I am speaking to you not just from hearsay- although that's plentiful-but from grim experience. I'm over it now, I think. But for years I despised Jim Suter because he did lo me what he always does to men. He wrecked my head and then he broke my heart."
Mosel said, "Doesn't word get around that guys should avoid this shithead?"
"Sure," Hively said, "but in a transient town like D.C. there are always new heads arriving to be turned. And Jim has always been such a hunk that even men who know what they're in for often can't resist him. And even some who've heard of his rotten habit have to see for themselves what the big attraction is, and the repulsion, too."
Timmy said, "Maynard doesn't seem all that bitter about his affair with Suter. He said it didn't work out because he didn't like Suter's politics and he thought Suter was emotionally erratic. But it sounded as if it was a mutual parting of the ways and that was all."
"Maynard was a special case for Jim," Hively said. "Maynard is so self-confident and self-contained that as soon as Suter turned distant, Maynard just let it go.
He once told me that he began to lose interest in Jim as soon as Jim started ignoring his calls. Maynard said that in Southern Illinois people just don't treat each other that way. It's rude, he told me. But then Jim turned around and started pursuing Maynard again. He always had to be the one doing the rejecting. So Maynard came back for a while, and then Jim backed off again, and soon afterwards, that was that. They both saw the game that was being played, and soon they'd both had enough of it."
"It sounds," I said, "as if Maynard came away from his affair with Suter uncharacteristically unscathed. So, who among Jim's long list of boyfriends that you know of was permanently embittered, even traumatized?"
Mosel still had her notebook on her lap, and when Hively glanced at it apprehensively, Mosel said, "I'm just listening."
"I hope so," he said. "If anybody asks, none of what I'm about to tell you came from me. I could probably name fifty gay men, if I really thought about it, who have been shit on by Jim Suter over the past twenty years. And most of them, if I asked them about it today, would probably chalk it up to experience and let it go at that. They'd just laugh it off and say, yeah, they had their own heartbreaker of a Jim Suter story, too. But four or five people that I know of were devastated by the way Suter treated them and are very, very angry. And one of them might still be mad enough to play a macabre joke on Jim, such as sending a panel to the AIDS quilt with Jim's name on it."
Mosel had shut her notebook, but now she was flipping its cover up and down absently. Hively's refusal to be used as a source for anything he had told her was plainly driving Mosel nuts. She blurted out, "Oh, come on, Bud. Let me have the names. I promise I'll keep you out of it and I can check them out discreetly."
"You can? I doubt that that's possible." "All right, so maybe it wouldn't be so discreet. But I won't mention your name. I can just call these guys up and say,
'I heard you dated Jim Suter and it ended unhappily, and do you have any idea how a panel with Suter's name on it made its way into the AIDS quilt?' Maybe I won't find anybody who'll admit it, but I might come across a Suter hater who knows who did do it, and who's mad at that guy, too, and who'll rat on him to the Post."
I said, "That sounds like a promising approach to me."
Hively slowly massaged his hairless head, as if to stimulate the cells responsible for decision making. "We can't be sure, of course, even that it was one of Jim's wounded lovers who sent in the quilt panel. The quilt stunt could be totally unrelated. And if it was an old boyfriend who did it, why would he and somebody else then vandalize the panel at the D.C. display?"
"To call attention to it," Timmy said. "So nobody in Washington would miss the act of revenge."
Hively let loose with a little sigh and said, "I guess you might as well go ahead.
I'll give you the names. Just don't tell anybody the names came from me."
"Agreed," Mosel said. "I'm wondering something, Bud. Is there any particular reason, other than mere privacy, why you don't want these guys to know it was you who ID-ed them as former Suter boyfriends?"
Hively laughed. "It's not the ex-lovers I'm worried about. The problem is, I already gave the names to the Blade reporter covering the quilt display, and I don't want her to find out I also turned the names over to the Post."
"I guess I'm going to have to work fast," Mosel said dryly.
"Anyway, thanks."
Hively grew serious and said, "I'm telling you because I want to do everything I can to help expose the person who used the quilt in such a shabby way. I've got too many friends on there not to care a lot about this. I know that in the big picture the quilt is indestructible, and what it means is indestructible. But this was a miserable, selfish stunt, and it just hurts. I'm sure an awful lot of people have been sickened by it."
"I think so, too," Mosel said, "and so does my editor. That's why it's news."
As Bud Hively described the five men whose detestation of Jim Suter was, Hively believed, abiding and even potentially violent, Mosel took notes on-and I carefully memorized-the sketches of Jim Suter's attenuated love affairs with Martin Dormer, Graham Houston, Jason Leibowicz, Bill Walker, and Peter Vicknicki.
As Hively spoke, I listened for any biographical suggestion that any of these men might be connected, however slightly, to Betty or Nelson Krumfutz, to Maynard, or to Mexico. I didn't hear any. But I picked up plenty of data to serve as a conversational icebreaker with Jim Suter, well-known Washington writer, heart-throb, and-the word that came to mind was an oddly old-fashioned one cad.