6.3 ‘It’s interesting about its social patterns,’ Peter mused. ‘There I am, working at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis three days a week, interviewing people with AIDS every day, and yet I don’t know anyone in my personal circle who’s come down with it. On the other hand, I know of people who have eight, nine, ten friends who have it.’ White wine stood in three cut crystal glasses. A fringed cloth covered the round oak table. ‘The thing you have to remember with AIDS is that all these statistics about the average number of sexual contacts a year for the average person with AIDS—sixty a year, three hundred a year—are very skewed. And the range those averages are drawn from is immense. There’re guys with it who claim only one or two contacts for a lifetime, the last of which was a couple of years before they came down with it. And there’re some who claim truly astronomical numbers of contacts, three or four thousand per year. And with a subject as touchy as this, both could be exaggerating in either direction for any number of reasons.’ It’s July 1983. Peter has been doing volunteer work for AIDS in New York City for six months now.
‘Peter,’ I said, ‘you know what three hundred contacts a year can mean.’ I said: ‘You go out to the right movie theater with some action in the back balcony for an hour and a half on Tuesday night, and on your way home from work Friday you stop into the right public John for twenty minutes. You can easily have three contacts involving semen in each. With only two hours a week devoted to it, that’s six contacts a week; and that’s three hundred and twelve for the year. You know as well as I do, you can keep up an eight-hour-a-day job, an active social life, have your three hundred contacts, and not even be late for dinner. Thousands of men in this city live that way.’ (I pondered the dozen-plus years I did it myself, with a wife who was agreeable to it, which is how I managed to combine married life and a child with an active gay life that continues more than half a dozen years after our divorce.) ‘And that’s without ever going to the baths or a bar with a back room—where you can up that by a factor of two, three, or more without really trying. The fact is, the straight people who’re dealing with AIDS—say the ones in the media—simply have no notion of the amount of sexual activity that’s available to a gay male in this city!’ I said: ‘Most straights, Peter, don’t realize, when they’re putting together these statistics, that a moderately good looking gay man in his twenties or thirties can have too or three contacts while he’s in the subway on his way to the doctor’s to see if he has AIDS…’ I was surprised at my outburst. I think the two other people at the table were too.
Peter said: ‘We also know that there’re many, many gay people—probably many more thousands—who can count the number of sexual contacts they have a year on one or two hands, Chip.’ (That’s my nickname that replaced ‘Sam’ when I was ten.) ‘Still, the people with AIDS I’ve been working with—’ He speared a fried potato from his plate and held it a moment on his fork—‘have really been living life in the fast lane. But we still don’t have any reliable statistical prototype for sexual behavior. In my own experience, I see a leaning toward IV-needles and passive anal. But that’s what they’re calling anecdotal evidence, these days. And everyone’s got some, and it’s all different.’
Slightly pinkened, reflecting from the stained-glass window, open this July morning, sunlight gouged slivers in the stainless-steel-ware.
6.31 In Nevèrÿon there is, of course, a model for the outbreak of the disease: some years before, an epidemic struck the outlying Ulvayn Islands, during which the empress, whose reign has been, on occasion, both caring and compassionate, sent ships and physicians to help evacuate those who were still healthy and who wished to come to the mainland.
The leaders of Nevèrÿon’s capital and port, Kolhari—most modern, most sophisticated, most progressive of primitive cities—, have some sense of the conservative nature of the Artaudian plague, even if, without Artaud’s text, they carry that sense on a more primitive level than we do. Thanks to reports from the islands, they know that that is what their city must never come to look like.
6.4 Once, that night, Pheron, who was twenty-four (a fact that, several times in the midst of all this, had astonished him), woke in darkness, feeling better. Well, that had happened before; he did not consider miraculous cures.
Lying on soft straw and under a cover he had given its luminous oranges and ceruleans, he turned to his side (his lower back throbbed, distracting him from the queasiness pulsing in his throat), thought about his father, and smiled.
He had been seventeen, working out at the tanning troughs.
His father had been laboring at the construction site of the New Market.
One day in every twelve his father had off, coming home late that night and sleeping far into the next morning.
Pheron had two days off in every ten.
His third off-time coincided with one of his father’s, to both their surprise; the evening before, they sat in the dark room with the lamp on the table Pheron had lit from the cook-fire coals.
His father leaned his arm in front of his bowl. Lamplight doubled the number of hairs over the blocky forearm strung with high veins, putting a shadow hair beside each real one on the brown skin.
The lamp flame wavered.
Half the hairs moved.
With a wooden paddle in his other hand, his father ate noisily from the grain, peppers, and fat Pheron had stewed together. ‘Maybe then, tomorrow,’ his father said, ‘we’ll go someplace. You and me.’ He gestured with the paddle. ‘Together.’
‘Sure,’ Pheron said, unsure what he meant.
Then both went to bed, Pheron sleeping with his heel wedged back between the big toe and the toe over of his other foot, fists curled in straw by his face, fingers smelling of garlic and the new barbaric spice, cinnamon (one of his recent enthusiasms his father put up with), and the acid from the bark that soaked in the stone troughs, their tides and ripplings littoral to his day.
Lingering at the mouth of the Bridge of Lost Desire, his father pulled at his earlobe, where gray hairs grew, with heavy workman’s fingers and said in flat tones that signed a kind of nervousness (as a boy, Pheron had feared those tones because often they presaged punishment): ‘You ever come here before…?’
Certainly Pheron had crossed the bridge to the Old Market. As certainly, he knew that that was not what his father meant. But ‘No’ would be easy and appeasing.
Perhaps because the tanning work meant he was grown, or because being grown meant you stayed tired enough that the appeasements you’d once indulged you didn’t have the energy for now, he said, anyway: ‘No…’ Then, louder: ‘I mean, yes. I’ve been here. Yes. Before.’
His father smiled a little. ‘I thought it was about time I took you to get yourself a woman. After your mother died, I came here enough—more than I should have. I don’t too much now. But we may still meet some lady who remembers me.’ His father rubbed his ear again. ‘Only now you tell me you’ve already beat me. That means, I guess, I do neglect you—more than a father should. Well, then, you know how it’s done.’
With the veil of exhaustion that lay, these days, over both working and nonworking time, blatant confession seemed as out of keeping as blatant denial. ‘Why don’t you find yourself a woman,’ Pheron said, ‘and I’ll meet you back here in a few hours?’
‘No,’ his father said. ‘Come on. We’ll go together, you and me. Besides, if we both use the same room, it’ll be cheaper.’
They began to walk across.
‘Go on,’ his father said. ‘Tell me which ones you like the most.’
A strangeness in it all—it was his father—made him want to smile. And, very deeply, dark discomfort streamed through. The strangest thing, however, was how ordinary it all—humor and discomfort—seemed. Father and son? he thought. Two workmen, an older and a younger, come to the bridge for sex? It was a pattern someone must have fit in the very stones of the bridge itself. ‘I guess…’ Pheron shrugged. ‘Well, that one’s cute—’
‘Ah, you lik
e them young!’ His father chuckled. ‘Not me! Even when I was your age. I always thought the older ones would give me a better time. And I’m right, too. Your mother was four years older than I was—and if she’d been fourteen years older, it wouldn’t have been so bad.’
‘Father,’ Pheron said, suddenly, recklessly: ‘I don’t want a woman.’ Then: ‘If I was going to buy anyone here, it would be a man. And besides: when I come here, men pay me!’ And added: ‘Sometimes.’ Because he’d only done that three times anyway, and that at the instigation of an outrageous friend he didn’t see much of now.
He walked with his father half a dozen more steps. He felt lightheaded, silly, brave. (He imagined some tangle of shuttle and warp quickly, aggressively, finally unknotted.) Yes, his heart was beating faster. But the tiredness was gone. The soles of his feet tingled in his sandals; so did his palms.
His father stopped.
The sky was clear. Under Pheron’s jaw and on the back of his arm, where sun did not touch, were cool. Across the walkway, a redheaded boy herded ahead half a dozen goats. They lifted bearded muzzles to glance about, yellow eyes slit with black, bleating and bleating. One raised a short tail, spilling black pellets from a puckered sphincter, only to get pushed on by three others. Two older women at the far wall laughed—though whether at the goats or the goatherd, Pheron couldn’t tell. A donkey cart passed in the opposite direction.
‘Then your mother was right,’ his father said, finally.
Pheron thought, He must be furious, and waited for the loud words, for the recriminations, for the distance glimmering between them to be struck away by anger.
‘I suppose I knew she was. But I always said it was something you’d grow out of. Now, there! See, maybe you will grow out of it.’
‘I’m seventeen, father. It’s just the way I am. I don’t…’ He shrugged. I don’t want to grow out of it!’
His father started walking again; so Pheron walked too.
His father said: ‘You should try a woman. You might be surprised. You can find nice ones, here. I don’t mean just pretty. I mean ones who’re fun, even kind. Someone like you, you see: you need one who’s kind, patient—that’s because you’re sensitive, young, unsure of yourself. I should have brought you here before. I know that, now.’
‘I’ve tried it,’ Pheron said. ‘Before. With a few women.’ Well, one, he thought. And there’d been another boy with them. ‘I didn’t like it that much. Not like with men. That’s better. For me, I mean…’ His father was getting ahead, so Pheron hurried. You like women. Suppose someone told you to grow out of that?’
‘Ha!’ his father said. ‘No. No, I guess there’s not much chance of that!’
Pheron laughed. ‘Then what do you want to do? You get a woman, I’ll get a man?’ (For some reason, that morning there were no male hustlers in sight, though there were many girls and women about.) ‘And we’ll both share a room? Maybe you should try a man!’ He laughed again, feeling nervous. Not his father’s nervousness, either. It was all his. ‘Men are cheaper than women, here. Did you know that? It’s true. Some people go with either. If you were one of those who could do that, you could save yourself some money—’
‘Oh, no!’ his father said, still a step ahead. He waved his hand behind. ‘No—’
Then he stopped again.
The sound he made was not a shout:
‘Ahhhii—!’
A grown man might make it at sudden pain: a sigh with much too much voice to it, perhaps a quarter of the sound a full shout might carry.
Pheron stopped too.
His father looked back. You don’t want this? With me? Go on then!’
‘Maybe—’
‘Go on home,’ his father said. ‘You don’t need to be here with me, for this. Go on, I say!’ He looked back. ‘What do I want you here with me for? Get out of here—now!’
Ahead, goats bleated.
Their arms around each other’s shoulders, two prostitutes walked by with a third chattering after them.
Pheron turned back toward the bridge mouth. By the time he came off, he was trembling and angry. Halfway home, wrestling the anger silently, he felt the tiredness again. He walked half a dozen streets he wouldn’t have ordinarily taken—a long route home. When he reached the door to their dark rooms, set back in the shoulderwide alley between the stable and the brickyard, he was mumbling: ‘I’m too tired to be angry. I’m too tired…’ It was something his mother had occasionally said. Usually she hadn’t meant it either.
Under his bed frame was a handloom. When he got inside he pulled it out and sat in front of it cross-legged on the earthen floor. The strip he’d been weaving was wide as the length of his forearm laid across it. The finished material was rolled in a bundle on the loom’s back bar. Currently he was in the midst of a ten shuttle pattern, at least for this part, for he’d varied his design along the three meters he’d done so far, now using yarns of different thicknesses, now of different colors, now varying the pattern itself, sometimes using a knotted weave, sometimes a plain one, the whole an endless experiment.
He wove furiously till the window dimmed.
Then he got out the jar of good oil and filled and lit three lamps from the banked coals under the ashes in the fireplace. He set two lamps on the corners of the table and one down on the floor at his side—waiting for the moon.
A running argument with his father went: ‘If you’re going to work after dark, Pheron, don’t waste expensive oil. Take it up on the roof and work by moonlight!’ which Pheron always said he would do, only—I’m just using the lamps till the moon comes out, anyway, father.’ But often, once started, he would weave by lamplight half the night, while the full moon came, went away again, and he, refilling the lamps half a dozen times, never even looked out the window to see. ‘Pheron, I told you—’
He wove again.
He got up and went to look out the window; for the moon should be full or near so. But it wasn’t out yet. So he sat back down on the floor.
He wove some more.
The hanging across the door whispered. He heard his father push through and didn’t look up.
His father moved around the room and, after a while, said:
‘Here. You like this stuff.’
So he glanced over.
‘I got you something.’
The yarn bundles dropped on the table. One rolled between the lamps and fell to the floor, spinning in the air on dark string.
By the lamplight, he could only make out the brighter hues.
‘Oh.’ He put the shuttles down. ‘Hey…!’ He pushed himself up to his knees.
‘In the Old Market,’ his father said. He stood by the table, beard all under-lit, his arms still bent with the ghost of their gift. ‘I don’t know whether they’re colors you want. But I figured, you could use them. For something.’ He reached up to pull his ear. ‘Some of that stuff is expensive, you know?’ Now he picked up one and another of the skeins, frowning. ‘I just thought…’
Pheron stood, his back stiff, his thighs aching from crouching so long on the floor. ‘Thanks…’ He tried to think of something else to say. ‘You want something to eat? I’ll stop and fix some—’
‘No,’ his father said. ‘No, I ate. You fix for yourself if you want. Not me. I got something while I was out.’
His father, Pheron realized, was slightly drunk.
‘Is this stuff something you can use? You like it?’
‘Yeah,’ Pheron said. ‘Yes. Thanks. Thanks a lot.’
‘You go on,’ his father said. ‘You go on working. I just thought you might like, might use…some of these.’
‘No,’ Pheron said. ‘I’ll stop for a little.’ Then he asked, because there just didn’t seem any way not to: ‘Did you find a woman?’
His father pretended not to have heard.
The two of them sat at the table together awhile.
Some of the skeins had come undone.
Several times his father buried the fingers of
one hand in the yarns to lift a tangle from the table in the lamplight, blinking through the strands as if to determine the color in the inadequate glow.
His father said, finally: ‘I didn’t get a woman. I didn’t want one. I got you this. See? Instead.’
Pheron thought: This isn’t the kind of apology I wanted. I wanted him to have his woman and I wanted him to say, too, ‘I thought about it, Pheron, and I was wrong. I’m sorry. You’re my son. And I want you to be my son any way you are. Any way. You have your way. I have mine. But whoever you are, it’s fine with me. Do you forgive me?’ (How many times while he’d woven had he rehearsed what his father should tell him?) But, as he leaned his elbows on the table, he thought: That’s just not who he is. That’s just not what he can give. And I’m too tired to ask for it, or even—he realized after a while—to want it that much.
Through raised strands, his father blinked. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ He put his tangled hand down.
Sitting back on the bench, Pheron rubbed his wet eyes with two forefingers which were growing rougher with each day at the troughs. Nothing.’
‘The moon’s out,’ his father said. ‘You want to work, I know. Take it up to the roof. So you don’t waste good oil.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I…Well—yeah. Maybe. All right.’ He stood up, looking at the dark yarn piled on the table. ‘Thanks for all this stuff. Thanks.’ He picked one of the skeins to take with him, though he wasn’t sure what color it was.
His father grunted.
Pheron turned and picked up his handloom. Shuttles swung and clicked. ‘You all right?’ he asked.