Which is only my too self-centered manner of saying, I suppose, that, in my different ways, I really do value you both and know you value me.
Yes, I suppose I too am surprised you haven’t seen him before. But then, your lives and concerns have really been quite different, don’t you think? After all, you are a prince, a teacher, a philosopher—while he’s little more than a thief.
Indeed, I’m sure you’re right: many people wouldn’t be surprised in the least.
Tell you more about him? Well, all right.
2
NO DOUBT THAT STOLID man you saw today came to the city as a boy like many—to the bridge, where such boys come—with the dream of selling his sexual services to some fabulously connected countess, who would take him off to her private rooms at the High Court, where he’d be presented to various nobles at various intimate but elegant suppers. His rough, country charms would be made much of as he amused the lords and ladies with his anecdotes of common life, for he was seldom more than three beers away from being a good, comic raconteur: he had that fine sense of self-mockery that is the social point from which we begin all later self-criticism, without which none survives long on our very bumpy road. No doubt in the palace his rough, if scarred, good looks would cause (he dreamed) a few noble ladies to catch their breath; and perhaps even once, at some great party, into which he’d wandered only by accident, he’d exchange a few lines of banter with the Child Empress herself, whose reign is glittering and glorious, causing waves of jealousy and ire among the lords gathered at the affair, so that, after a month or six of such dalliance, his patroness (who, by this time, hopefully, would have taken up another lover, perhaps a young nobleman whose arrogant ways would make her fondly recall her nights and noons with him) would finally secure him an officer’s commission in the Imperial Army, at some fascinating outpost in some exotic hold, sending him on to who-knows-what great and gainful adventures…
But with what seemed then, even to him as he looked back on it after only a few months, idiot slowness, he soon accepted in practice if not in theory that such dreams were as insubstantial as moon-flicker on the shallows down below the bridge rail.
In his first days on the Bridge of Lost Desire, so he told me later with a laugh, one man took him home to make love to a perfumed, sultry woman he claimed was his new, young wife. As such work went, he liked that a lot. But it didn’t happen again for another three months: next time an older man picked him up, describing his handsome, noble-born mistress, who, he said, was forty—my age, incidentally, when I met him.
Well, he’d always been partial to older women. But when they arrived at the gentleman’s large and well-appointed mansion, the woman was out. They waited, sipping cider together and talking for several hours. Then the man apologized to him, paid him half the agreed-on fee, and sent him back.
These two incidents exhausted his professional contacts with women during those first months.
What he actually did when he looked up from the garbage-clotted shallows—what he’d done in the few days before the first of these encounters, what he did in the many days between them, and what he did daily after—was to sell his services, often for distressingly little money and more times than not simply for a meal and a place to sleep, to a succession of artisans and clerks and laborers and merchants and army officers and market vendors and wagon drivers and still others who did not want anyone to know what they did, all of them men.
Though very occasionally they passed across it, with their parasols and paramours, their secretaries and serving maids, in search of some rare item rumored by an acquaintance to have been sighted in the market beyond, titled ladies did not, as a rule, stop on the bridge to purchase pleasures—not in this part of Nevèrÿon.
I had been with the traveling troop here only a few years, and you probably recall that, in those days before my current comic eminence, mostly I played for the other dancers and actors who worked on our portable platform, coaching them in rehearsals and helping to devise the skits.
Our actual meeting?
No doubt as I passed across the bridge from the Spur to the more commercial neighborhoods of the city, I’d seen him among the loiterers of both sexes, now sharing beer with one of the other boys, now calling to one of the women: ‘—Hey, little gillyflower, I see how you’re looking at me!’
And I’d thought what a man, such as I was, would likely think (of him and, indeed, many others): One time I would find him rather attractive in a vulgar sort of way. (Should I approach him…) At another, I’d decided: No, he was not my type at all…It would be silly even to smile. And at least once I saw an elderly grain-seller stop to talk with him, and heard him call the man ‘Papa.’
Clearly he had gone with that mercantile gentleman before; though if ‘Papa’ were a nickname of his own devising or part of his client’s previous personal instruction, I never did have the temerity to ask—though at that moment I convinced myself I had really been about to speak, that given my preferences he was, certainly, the most attractive young man on the bridge. What a fool I’d been, my momentary jealousy told me, to hesitate this long in making my interest known!
Those who never browse in the commercial markets of sex assume that we, who do, shop there in order to escape the wounds, self-recriminations, and hurts to the soul associated with timidity, opportunities missed through hesitation, and the simple pains from rejection that plague those who limit sex purely to the results of social encounter. They feel a moral superiority through the sufferings that they have agreed to bear and which they are sure we avoid by barter, convinced their social courtship agonies chasten them in ways we can never know and—like youngsters’ plunges into cold mountain streams—harden them to life. They do not know commercial possibilities in no way abolish such pains and hurts, but rather add to them a certain sting that, if anything, makes them the more excruciating, the more gnawing. The commercial only multiplies the opportunities to risk such hurts again.
Oh, yes! A day after I saw him with his gray-haired old man, I passed him once more, only to realize that it was he when I was a step beyond—by now my mind was that deeply on other things!
But one evening when the clouds were high and yellow and the sun was like a copper gong half-hidden among them—for some reason, there were only a third as many people out on the bridge as usual—as I was crossing I saw him, naked, leaning back against the wall, an elbow either side of him on the ledge, a drinking skin on the stone beside him, one foot up on the wall below.
I looked.
He smiled.
I thought to look away and didn’t.
As I passed, still looking, suddenly he thrust out his hard farm laborer’s hand to me and said, simply:
—Hello! How you doing?
We shook.
I stayed to tell him; to ask him the same, while he took his skin down and offered me warm beer; and I, who markedly prefer cider, accepted.
Oh, first there was a bit of small talk as we leaned together against the wall. I know now he did not think himself handsome and took a boyish delight when anyone stopped for him at all. But the sexual worker who can evince sincere pleasure at the coming of a client seasons his or her fare with a rare spice. Five or ten sentences into our exchange, and I brought out some frank and specific questions as to money and positions. (If I were taken at all, I wanted to be taken as a serious customer.) About both he gave reasonable, frank, and specific answers.
That settled, I offered to refill his skin with drink.
About that he was grateful.
Since then I have known boys years younger, soliciting years longer, who merely wanted to do the deed, take their pay, and go. Today, I would not fault them. But the fact is, a mere five years before that warm afternoon, I would have sworn to anyone who asked that I would never pay for sex! In my own way I was as new to buying as he was to selling. Oh, we had both bought and sold before. That is not the level of innocence I am trying to establish. The surprise to me now, however, wa
s that he was not so experienced that he took my offer of a little sociability mixed in with our transaction as a sign of what, eventually, we would both learn it was: in terms of any continuing monetary relation, I would be a rather poor-paying customer.
But perhaps another observer, knowledgeable in the ways of sexual commerce, might say that our friendship, if I can call it that, began with a little more promise than most. I’d recently gotten a small windfall; from what private party, where I’d performed brilliantly, I no longer remember—was it yours?
Now, at that point it would have to have been. Ah, you must be right! I’d completely forgotten.
I’m embarrassed to go on and let you know where the moneys your uncle so generously—
Oh, of course! Of course, I understand—after all this time, how could it mean anything to you?
Well, then! From your family’s most generous fees I not only brought him his few mugs of beer that evening and fed him, but I gave him some coins for himself and paid a week’s rent on a cheap room where I let him stay.
After I’d enjoyed him, I returned to pass the rest of the night in the wagon.
Mornings I would show up at his door and knock. Sleepily he would call me in. There, sitting on the bed, we would talk.
Or I would talk—for the morning hours were not his most communicative, though he was always certain to make me promise to come see him again the next day, as if the simple sound of my running on about this and that, if not the physical exchange between us, comforted him. He would listen to me or, at any rate, pretend to listen.
And the truth was, whatever he thought of our sex, he liked me: it was the first time in months he’d slept three nights running under the same roof.
I brought him to visit our wagons. To give you some idea how provincial he was: though he knew the bridge to twenty meters around it at each end, until he came to see us perform he’d never walked farther than the fountain at the middle of the market. He did not even know that on the other side of the square we have traditionally set up our wagons since we began to call at this city!
Once I let him watch our skits from the privacy of the prop cart.
Ah, and after that he talked!
At some point during the performance, he’d glanced aside to see one of our dragons leering at him from the clutter—like the one you’re sitting under…?
Oh, it startled him!
Well, with his great grin, if he told me about it once, he told me about it twenty times over the next week.
—What a fool I am, he’d say, to be scared by such a toy. But from his smile as he said it, you knew he’d never known a happier fright.
I often asked him about his sexual history—indeed, I told him tales of mine. Yes, he had his own sexual quirks. I believe it was summer women with—
But then I have my quirks too, about which he was always obliging. (—No, come on. You like it. You said so. Do it! You, see, I want you to have a good time! I did not know then just how rarely I might expect to hear that from such a young man, and so, in my way, I took him for granted quite as much as he took me.) Also there were several times when I was sure my particular peculiarities had become common knowledge from one end of the bridge to the other, thanks to his banter with the other boys—only to discover it had never even occurred to him to mention them, from nothing more than a natural reticence which would have done honor to someone far more nobly born. Therefore I see no need to detail the particularities of his tastes. Suffice it to say, they were harmless, even charming, and I was touched that he chose to confide them to me.
At the time, you understand, he’d only gone to bed with seven women in his life—the first six of whom were sundry country lasses and ladies, and the last of whom had been the wife of that early customer on the bridge. When we were talking of this in his room one morning, I declared:
—What a coincidence! That’s the same number of women I my self have bedded in my forty-odd years! And here I’m more than twice your age.
Like so many youths who drift from country to city, when not thinking of some titled lady (or lord) to keep him in lackadaisical luxury, he would daydream, now and again, of a son and a wife—in that order—and perhaps several adoring daughters with them. That, he would explain, is what he needed to settle down. All of them would live together on some small farm that he would manage to own, a miniature, I finally came to believe, of the one on which he’d lived and labored so thanklessly before he’d come to Kolhari. At which point I would quip:
—Add to that a job that will take you away from it at least eight months of the year; and all your problems’ll be solved.
He would laugh. But I wonder if, later, with his country widow, he remembered my advice; for certainly, those many years on, he seemed to have taken it.
Oh, in those days with me he had his bouts of homesickness. They troubled him greatly; I listened as sympathetically as a man with other concerns could, till finally I suggested:
Then why not simply go home? At least for a visit.
Oh, no. My home is much too far away. It took me four days of steady walking to come from there to the city.
How would he ever cross such a distance again?
I pointed out that what one can walk in four days, one can ride in an oxcart in a day and a half. Also, though I had never visited his village, I’d heard its name before and knew that it simply was not that far off. If it had taken him four days to walk, that was because he’d probably been lost at least a third of the time. But supporting him for a week, I was beginning to feel responsible for him, a feeling that, first, I did not enjoy and, second (not to slight your uncle’s occasional early munificence), I could not afford on my ordinary mummer’s earnings from spectators’ donations at our day-to-day fare.
On the night before his week’s rent was to run out, therefore, I proposed to call for him before sunup next day, take him to the market end of the Bridge of Lost Desire, find a wagoner finished with his morning deliveries who was returning west, and pay an iron coin or so for his day-and-a-half’s ride home. Just to show you how naïve he was, he hadn’t even known you could do that. Today, of course, it’s an established institution, but at the time I don’t believe the empress had yet set up the passenger shelter that’s been rebuilt twice in the last decade. You just had to go and ask around till you found a wagon going where you wanted—though enough folks did it, anyway.
Anyway.
The next dawn I got myself up from my cluttered bed, went to his room, rolled him sleepily out, and we walked to the market. The second driver I asked pointed us to a third, who hailed us heartily as we strolled up. A pleasant and blustery fellow, in my memory, he was then the spit of my erstwhile friend today. Sure, he’d take the young man to his village. His journey passed right by it.
Good, I said, as my friend climbed up into the cart to grip the back and sides, blinking about at the market square still dim in the summer dawn. You’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon, I called as I handed two coins to the driver.
Tomorrow? the driver demanded. We’ll be there by tonight! and returned me a coin. You’ve overpaid me, and I’m a good and honest laborer! It made me smile and I wondered how this further confirmation of the physical nearness of his home struck my young friend, who blinked, still red-eyed, in the back of the wagon, as they rolled off by the fountain where the first of the stalls was only then being set out.
His room, of course, was paid for till sundown and supper that day—a custom I miss in these times when innkeepers expect you out and off by noon. If I recall, I was back there an hour later with another…friend. This one was a little older, a little more experienced. At the time I thought myself far more attached to him than the young man I’d just sent off to the country. We carried on lubriciously till I realized I was late for my performance—a sin I have committed only three times in my life. And today, though I have tried many times, I cannot recall the name—much less the face—for whom, then, I committed it.
3
/> HE WAS GONE SOME three or four weeks. However or whenever he came back I’m not sure, for he had the tact and good sense not to look me up immediately on his return. He had interpreted my sending him off, however friendly I’d been about it, in the terminal sense I’d intended it, a sensitivity, I confess, I admired him for, and which no doubt eventually influenced me to see him again. Was it a month later that I glimpsed with some surprise someone I thought was he turning onto the bridge? A day or two after that, as I was crossing, I nearly bumped into him—though he was deep in conversation with a barbarian youngster and an older man who, no doubt, wanted them both; he didn’t see me, or pretended he didn’t.
I thought it politic not to interrupt.
A few days later, I was on my way to join my fellow mummers at a street carnival in another neighborhood where we were to perform. Some had left with the wagons in the morning to set up. I was to join them that afternoon. I recall, I didn’t have to cross the Bridge of Lost Desire to get there; I could have gone the few streets north to the perfectly unexceptional overpass that leads to those ethnic enclaves in the city where, on carnival days, our theatrical talents are so in demand. It was just habit, sedimented no doubt by past pleasures, that took me over the bridge.
He was leaning there in what I’d come to think of as His Spot.
We smiled; and while I was wondering if I should stop to talk, I found myself slowing.
—Hello! How you doing?
For a moment I wondered if he actually remembered me:
—Fine. How did your trip go?
—Fine. Fine…! It was great! Fine!
He’d seen his aunt. Yes, he knew who I was. No, his mother hadn’t been as pleased to see him as he’d hoped. There’d been some problems before he’d left that, though he’d mentioned some of them to me before, he’d all but forgotten till, really, the cart had pulled up by those familiar fields. Still, he’d had a couple of good, or at least interesting, evenings with his village friends. But as he talked, every now and again he would glance at me curiously. Did we discuss it that afternoon, or did I only have the strong feeling that it was now known? Today I couldn’t say for sure. But from somewhere I gained the conviction that it was clear to him that the vast distance to his home over which he had tramped for four aimless days to reach Kolhari was not that of stade after stade; rather it was a distance of mind, of temperament, created by his urban education even in so vulgar a version as he had received it during his handful of months on the bridge. And that was far vaster than the one he’d imagined he’d crossed by foot or by wagon. In comparison, save by some machinations of the unnamed gods beyond both his powers and mine to conceive, the true distance could not be retraversed.