“You’re welcome to take any book you want,” Paul told me. “I put some in your room that I thought might interest you.”
The man knew me only through brief exchanges and what he had read by me. A further manifestation of his arrogance. Still, I would probably find his choices enticing—and revealing of him.
There was an equally eclectic collection of records, many left lying on the floor in their covers. I paused to look at some: symphonies, old and modern; operas, many jazz records—I noticed several by Ahmad Jamal—experimental music; rock and roll; Elvis Presley; Maria Callas; Fats Domino; Duke Ellington; Noye’s Fludde; many by Edith Piaf; El Amor Brujo; Mozart; Kurt Weill; a full collection of Billie Holiday. I moved on to another shelf—I was not following Paul as he roamed among the stacks himself, pulling out a book, glancing at it, setting it aside. I was fascinated by the range of his collection. More: Schopenhauer, Dante—and Beauvoir, Sartre, Henry Miller, García Lorca, Beckett’s Malone Dies and Molloy, Norman Mailer, Nietzsche—several volumes, two translations of Beyond Good and Evil. Inviting solitary reading, two small tables and a long one were matched by upholstered chairs. Everything, like the statues now departed from the lawn, suggested a reckless lavishness without design.
On a table, one book had been left open, facedown as if recently consulted, to be returned to. I read the title. The Origin of Evil by V. K. Edelstein, a name I thought I recognized, a book associated with controversy, maybe scandal. I would return to it later when I was alone.
“Island! Island!” The distant call came from the lake.
“Shall I leave you to choose some books?—or would you like to join me and Sonya on the sundeck? They’re through swimming.”
He was responding to the familiar signal. “I’ll just look around the library now, then join you on the sundeck.” My tan must be fading, his was deepening. But I was curious about the book left open on the table. It might be the book he had quoted from when we arrived, something about “evil.”
After he was gone, I walked over to the book. Left open to tantalize me? Paul had known we would be roaming the library. There was a check mark on the margin next to this passage: “Four reflections. What one became, what the other will become, two bolts of lightning, opposites, on opposing sides. Intersecting, a point of explosive synergy where”—
I sensed a presence and turned. How long had Stanty been standing silently at the entrance to the library? I closed the book, turned to one of the shelves, and placed it in an open slot between other books, as if I had merely pulled it out and was now returning it. Why should I feel uncomfortable, as if he had caught me spying, when Paul had made the library available to me? I faced Stanty.
“Good morning, John Rechy,” he smiled. “I was looking for you to ask you to go swimming with all of us.” (Yet he had waited until I reacted to him.) “But maybe you—”
—don’t know how to swim. In my mind I added the words I was sure he was about to say, an accusation.
“—prefer to read,” he finished.
6
After I had left the library, thanking Stanty for his invitation and wishing that I had not withheld the fact that I didn’t swim—a fact I knew would become obvious, if it was not already, and whose withholding, when revealed, would embarrass me—I went to my room to change into trunks.
I joined Paul and Sonya, drying each other after their swim, and, now, lying on pads under the sun.
“Good morning, my dear John.”
I welcomed her ingratiating greeting. “Morning, Sonya.”
“Hey, man.”
“Hi, Paul … man.”
Soon, the sundeck would become a place of congregation for us. For as long as we might abide the fierce heat (occasionally going to the small bar at the end of the deck sheltered there by a canopy and the shade of a large tree, its branches hovering over a demarcation and spilling into the sundeck while we drank water, chilled juice, and eventually Cuba libres, drinking and conversing), we would lie on lounging chairs, or—closer together—on pads, close enough to sense the heat of each other’s body, as I am doing now, lying on a pad next to Sonya, not lying down yet, no, but sitting propped on my elbows to look at our bodies.
Next to me, Sonya is golden. Beside her rests the caftan she wears over her sunning suit when she leaves the sundeck, a veily, almost transparent covering that embraces her body. I can feel my tan darkening—soon surpassing Paul’s, which is brown, the film of fine hairs on his oiled body turning blond. I detect the sweet scent of clean perspiration and mango-tinged tanning oil.
Paul sat up, to reach for a cigarette in the pack next to him. He has a unique way of smoking. He will light the cigarette, cupping it against a breeze even when there is none. He will inhale a few times, flip any ashes away, and quickly stub the cigarette on his palm, an action so quick and expert that he is never burned.
I looked away from him and lay back. I didn’t want him to see me glancing at his body, in competition, not desire, no, only because my eyes, while comparing bodies, had noticed what seemed to indicate the prominence of his endowment. In my adult life, I have concentrated on my whole body as the object of attraction, but I am also secure with my endowment, and always competitive. Still, it annoyed me that Paul seemed to emphasize the bulge between his legs—but then, it was possible that his sunbathing next to Sonya, with the top of her bathing suit removed, accounted for a slight arousal, and therefore a misleading impression.
“I swam there today, all the way!” Stanty shouted as he appeared before us—and I began to think of his entrances as “appearances.” He was dripping wet from swimming as he waited to make sure everyone noticed his presence.
When Sonya saw Stanty, she adjusted the upper part of her suit, covering her breasts, an endearing gesture of discretion.
“My darling, perhaps you rowed there?” Sonya said.
“Maybe. But I could have swum.”
“Of course you could,” said Paul.
“Of course,” echoed Sonya.
It annoyed me that Stanty had interrupted sensual moments with his breathless declamation.
In an unsurprised tone that indicated a familiar reaction toward Stanty’s claims, Paul said, “You went all the way to the island?”
“Yeah, and—” Stanty squatted next to us.
The neighboring island was apparently the basis for an evolving story by him, told and enhanced, to assert his bravery, as if he were the star in his fantasy play. “And—?” I was curious to hear his embellishment.
“I think there’s someone still there,” he said gravely.
“Who do you think it might be?” Paul coaxed out his story.
Stanty shook his head, as if considering the question seriously. “I think—you know.” He pondered. “I don’t know—I think there’s something dangerous about that island.”
“Stanty—” Sonya cautioned, in her kind tone.
Paul said easily: “Maybe you’d better stay away from there.”
Stanty shrugged, ready to close his story on that hint of danger. I was sure that both Paul and Sonya pretended to believe his stories; he himself might not expect to be believed.
He sprang up, moved over to where I lay, and squatted next to me. In an urgent but lowered voice, a whisper that excluded the others, he said: “John Rechy, will you come with me? We’ll row there and check that place out.”
“Sure,” I said, to placate him, “but not now.”
“Okay, then, but soon,” he said and walked away.
Had he wanted to tell me something private?—he had sought me out in the library earlier. I dismissed the thought and gave no credence to his fantasies.
7
Very soon I got to know much about Paul’s life as he told it to me in long, surprising intervals I came to think of as “installments,” not unlike chapters. His candor surprised me—it was exhibitionistic. He withheld nothing that was deeply personal in his “confessions”—no, not confessions, since he regretted nothing in the life h
e conveyed. His narratives might occur, start, or be continued on the deck facing the water, where we were now, after dinner, waiting for evening, drinking chilled wine, whose coolness did nothing to affect the heavy heat.
I noticed signals he gave to Sonya when he wanted to speak to me alone. He would begin talking slowly, then even more slowly, indicating he was rationing his words. She would smile, excuse herself, and leave, as she did now; and then he continued the saga of his life.
He called himself an “entrepreneur”—he pronounced that word with an ironic inflection that made me wonder whether he had assigned the word his own meaning. “And an art collector,” he added, and paused as if waiting for me to ask for embellishment. I did not.
“The painting in your bedroom—you recognize it?” he asked.
“Of course.” I withheld the name of the artist, resenting what seemed to be a test. “And the statues,” I added.
“Beautiful, aren’t they, man?”
“Very—and also ugly in a dark, twisted way, as if the soul has been squeezed out.”
“Oh?”
Then he continued: His first wife—Elizabeth—was the daughter of the famous head of a prestigious law firm. The father’s name came first on its letterhead; his wealth and notable ancestors allowed him entry into the highest social circles in the East—and anywhere else he might want to appear. His wife, Elizabeth’s mother, was an independent woman long before that was widely accepted. She was a proud woman who disappeared periodically—informing her husband that she was in Europe and would return “soon,” a fact that did not disturb the famous man, who was used to what others called her “eccentricities”—and what he referred to as part of her “ineffable charm” that included her refusal to adhere to any boundaries of what, in her elitist but markedly liberal background, was thought proper.
At the time when Paul met Elizabeth at a preferred university (where he had a full scholarship, information that he withheld from others, choosing to be identified as one of the select, attractive, and rich young men in the institution), “I gained a reputation as ‘a young man of high potential and aspirations’”— he mocked the last words, pronouncing them as if they were the title of the story he was now telling me—or possibly a chapter in it: “A Young Man of High Potential and Aspirations.” That contrived reputation and determination allowed him into the stratum of Elizabeth’s parents. As a result, her autocratic father allowed his precious daughter to be courted by him. “He was,” Paul said with malicious delight, “a rich, brilliant son of a bitch. He called my relationship with his daughter ‘a reasonable match,’ and he would add, ‘An interim match,’ not knowing how prophetic his attempted humor was. Later he called the match ‘an abominable mistake based on that vulgar man’s lies.’ That was me, man,” Paul added, laughing.
“I assumed that, man,” I said, pleasing him, I knew, because I now easily used his word of street knowledgeability. “An Abominable Mistake”—that might be another title in the progression of his life.
He married Elizabeth. “She didn’t care when she discovered that I was poor—it excited her to know that I had duped her father; she was rich, and that meant we were both rich,” he said proudly.
After a period of “violent sex,” they sank into “violent boredom.” “It was only then that I got to know the insane woman I had married.”
“Insane? Really insane?”
“You tell me, man. Listen.” She was, he said, made crazy by those two powerful figures who insisted that she must have therapy in order to cope with them “intelligently.” At their insistence, she began to consult a series of “progressive psychiatrists” beginning when she was nine years old. At her private school, she shocked other students and instructors by announcing that, soon, she would be dealing with her “disturbed alter ego,” having acquired, she said, “peace for my own ego.”
I laughed and he joined me, moving on to more.
“Elizabeth changed therapists with such regularity that often she forgot which idiot she would be talking to. Once,” he went on joyfully, “she ran into her mother in the waiting room of that day’s quack.” Elizabeth discovered that distressing fact too late when the mother took the opportunity to tell her that—“because of the marvelous coincidence”—she had, just moments earlier, been discussing whether she and her eminent husband might be justified in “intercepting the marriage of her daughter to a monstrous fraud.”
“That was you?” I interjected.
“Who else?” Paul said. “And if so,” he went on, returning to the pending sentence, “might they be justified in proceeding to put into motion against him whatever extremity might be required, as long as—get this, man, the bitch actually said this and Elizabeth told me happily—as long as whatever they did was discreet and legal.”
“I guess you were relieved to know she was excluding murder,” I said.
“No, no, man. The stupid bitch didn’t think murdering me could be illegal. She was as crazy as Elizabeth and their mutual quack, to whom she explained that all she wanted for her daughter was that she be rid of the monster—”
“You, Paul.”
“Yes, man, yes—and then they would use all their connections to find her a desirable husband.”
“Not you.”
“But wait.” He stopped to light a cigarette in his unusual way (and, I suspected, to create anticipation for his narrative), stubbing it out on the palm of his hand, not wincing. “Elizabeth finally found her ‘savior,’ the one and only Dr. Spitzer, known for his ‘new radical therapy,’ which had to do—listen to this, man—with ‘adjusting one’s psyche to ensure the balance of the universe by reverse interplay.’”
He waited for me to join in his laughter, and I did. “But who doesn’t know all that?” I added to his derision.
“Beauty!” he called out abruptly, apparently having ended this installment of his life, which I titled in my mind “A Desirable Husband.”
As—returning to offer more wine—Sonya bent over to refill Paul’s glass, he raised his hands up to her so that the glass fell and shattered on the floor; both ignored that. Paul—roughly—brought her face down to his and they kissed hungrily, not passionately, but hungrily, their tongues probing, yes, hungrily. This display made me uncomfortable, although in my life I had indulged in public sex with men, in parks, on streets, in movie house balconies, and at times, challenged, in bright daylight; but those displays, mine, did not have what I felt seeing this union between Paul and Sonya: a twitch of fear, yes, fear; that is what I had felt at the violent connection, which, not surprisingly, revealed, when they parted, blood on Sonya’s lips—she had winced in annoyance but did not wipe off the blood, and there remained, too, a smear of it on Paul’s lips.
When the carnal connection had ceased Sonya—ignoring the shards of the broken glass—bent to fill my glass and, for a moment, I thought she would kiss me with the same ferocity, especially because she lingered in that close position, and I could smell the scent of her body and of the wine, and a whiff of something else.
That I was disappointed when she didn’t kiss me, that I had reacted with such anger at their astonishing connection—that bothered me because I couldn’t, at least not now, determine why it was so. An extension of my rivalry with Paul, now growing and spreading in every direction? That was it.
Still angry, I got up, retrieved the pieces of broken glass, and deposited them in Paul’s ashtray on a small table beside him. The gathered shards of glass, their dangerous cutting edges, allowed a good termination to this night.
I lay in bed welcoming a breeze that went away too quickly. To extend its time, I had opened the door slightly to allow an easier flow, and perhaps a belated—but not really expected or desired—good night from Paul. Or Sonya. I sat up in bed, reading the book I had taken earlier from the library, Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives; I was reading “Melanctha,” loving its jazzy prose rhythms.
I found concentrating difficult. The subtle sounds of the island were mes
merizing, as if they were emerging from the lake … murmurs.
I tried to avoid glancing at the painting on the wall; but as I dozed off, I was aware that I was staring at it. It seemed to want to pull me deep into its vortex.
8
Our lives intersected randomly on the island. I say “randomly” although there had emerged a jagged pattern: We—one or another or even all; that is, Paul, Sonya, myself—might meet at breakfast. If I didn’t encounter any of them then, I’d go to the library, reading whatever attracted me. Usually in the morning, Sonya and Paul went swimming, together or singly, or with Stanty. Throughout the day, each might dive into the water. When he was with them, Stanty would break away, swimming alone, far, far, concocting his extravagant stories to narrate later.
In the evening after returning from the sundeck to our rooms to shower, we would have the prepared dinner, together, and then retreat to the deck and face the lake. At any of the familiar locations, whomever we met, wherever we met, might determine whom we would be likely to linger with, and where, although the place often shifted, at times in mid-conversation; we might wander along the lawn, then lie down on towels on the grass…. Increasingly, and intuitively, we learned where each would be and when, and then the connection would occur, still qualifying as random.
I guess I should say that these planned “random meetings” excluded Stanty, who would materialize out of shady places. I imagined him listening, watching, waiting to assault us with excited exaggerations. It bothered me that I had begun to consider whether those tales, contradictory and incongruous as they might be, might not, at least in part, have even a grain of truth; and this consideration of possibility, at times, was followed for the briefest moment by a totally unwarranted apprehension.
If we had needed a reason for the scantiness of our daily clothing, the gasps of heat would have provided it. But, more, I thought, it was the island itself that determined, gradually and at first unnoticed, an intrinsic sense of abandon, a silent command of exposure.