“You must, you know”—the pained rage had disappeared from Sonya’s face—“learn to swim, John. It’s essential when you’re living on an island. Surrounded by water.”
12
Night had brought no relief from the heat. The night was sweating. A mass of lightning-punctured clouds gathered on the horizon, promising rain but bringing only moisture and the rumbling of thunder.
It seemed to me—now acutely but only at times—that the island existed only for us, the three of us: no, the four of us. We would separate at times, only to come together again, as if powerfully drawn back. Stanty often disappeared into dark clusters of trees, under which, I imagined, he slept, stroked by shadows, imagining—what?
The gray couple drifted about as if they did not exist.
Paul and I sat on the back deck, drinking the chilled wine he had just opened. He had remarked cursorily that he had not seen me all day—he had just returned from the village, where, still, no electric fans were available. I told him Sonya and I had taken a walk on the island. I did not perceive that he was suspicious or angry at our being together; he seemed to welcome it. “Good,” he said. Of course, there was nothing to suspect.
He had returned to his account of the turbulence between him and Elizabeth, leaving Corina on display under a golden spill of light in the notorious club in Constantinople. It continued to be startling, the way he so easily delivered—and slipped into—the intimate aspects of his relationships. “Elizabeth was like a dog in heat,” he said. “Before we married, she was prim—pretending, of course; she claimed she was a virgin, she kept her legs crossed tightly even when we were at dinner. But she changed into a dog in heat. She devoured me—”
“And you—?”
“Loved it, of course, and devoured her back.” He was smoking—indulging in more puffs than usual; the smoke floated out gray toward the water.
“Dear Paul,” Sonya said, overhearing, “it’s you who fuck like a fantastic dog in heat, my beautiful beloved”—and she laughed.
Paul looked up at her, not laughing. In trunks as usual, he stretched his long, tanned legs out as if to display them.
I turned away from what seemed to me to be an exhibition. Shirtless, I tensed my body.
That was the first time I had heard Sonya even jokingly rebut Paul, although she had tempered her words—“a fantastic dog.” Perhaps, after our long talk on the grass when she had revealed her apprehensions, she had become emboldened to challenge him. Or to warn him with hyperbole—“beautiful beloved”—of her own capacity for anger. It pleased me to believe that I might have had something to do with her reaction.
She leaned back, her head tilted up, and—more like a wolf than a dog—“Is this how she sounded, Paul?” She brayed: “Awoooooo, awoooooo.”
“Stop that, bitch,” Paul said, “Stanty will think you’re calling him.”
I laughed at that; so did Sonya. Of course, Stanty might suspect the wolf’s call was a call to him. Paul had not laughed.
“What’s funny, beauty?” He turned to Sonya.
I answered for her and myself: “Stanty,” I said; “you calling him a wolf. I’d be careful if I were you, man—with his imagination he might start claiming to be one.” No laughter, best to leave it there. Still laughing, Sonya had gone back into the house.
And there he was, Stanty appearing on the deck asking whether he had missed the blue hour. (I chose not to ask whether the “wolf call” had summoned him.) “You did ask me, you know,” he addressed me. “You told me. Remember, John Rechy?” he said. “You told me to tell you when it was the blue hour.”
A few nights ago I had told him that. “Well, you already did.”
He leaned over the railing—a bluish darkness was creeping over the lake. He was determined to assert his assumed role as announcer. He whipped around. “You lied, John Rechy.”
Paul did not move, did not look up, remained impassive in his chair.
“How?” I said.
“When you said that the blue hour revealed the truth about lies. It hasn’t, it doesn’t. It’s just a damn silly story you told. Nothing different has happened.” Then, in the same strange pleading voice I had heard before, he said to Paul, softly: “Has it, Father?—just a silly story?” He waited, expectant.
I, too, waited for Paul to answer the urgent question—and to rebut the accusation that I had lied.
But all he said was, “Oh?”
Stanty stood in front of me, demanding an answer.
“I guess you have to wait for that to happen,” I said, to mollify him; “not right away, not every time, and you did come up with a game—I believe you called it ‘playing secrets.’”
“I saw you!” he said to me.
Paul sat up.
“Saw me what?” I asked Stanty.
“With Sonya! On the grass.” He turned to Paul. “They didn’t know I could see them. Father, he kept pushing himself against her, on the grass, he wouldn’t let her go, she kept pushing him away—and he kept on, and then he even—”
“You’re a fucken liar!” I stood in front of him. I looked at Paul to gauge his reaction.
He was smiling, amused! “And how did that make you feel, Stanty?”
Even Stanty seemed bewildered by the question. “It—I—”
“You know that isn’t true, Stanty.” It was Sonya—overhearing—and she had spoken to him gently, with nothing harsh in her tone. She walked over to him and touched him briefly on his arm.
“I wonder how it would feel, Stanty,” Paul said, reclining back in his chair, “to apologize to … John Rechy?”
Stanty smiled, a broad smile. “Just joshing with you, John Rechy. You knew that all along, didn’t you? You did, didn’t you, Father, know I was joshing, didn’t you, Father?”
“I did, yes, I did.”
“And I bet Sonya knew that, too.”
“Of course I did,” she said, smiling back.
“John Rechy, you knew that, too, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” he insisted.
I sat back in my chair, looking at him. He was smiling at me as if indeed he had been only “joshing,” and once again he was the playful kid. I did not answer him. I wondered how far his tales might take him, and at what point they might be believed.
13
Elizabeth and he were bound by “passionate hatred,” Paul explained the next day, still abandoning Corina under a stunning light in a notorious bar. We are sitting at the big dining table, where we have just had breakfast, feasting now on purple grapes. “If we separated, we wouldn’t be able to torture each other so easily. We were not yet through.”
“Still in Constantinople?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, and went on with what Elizabeth had told him: “‘If you killed me,’ she proposed, ‘I would die ecstatic.’ I did not ask her why; she was eager to tell me: ‘Because I would know that you would be sent to prison, probably for life, and forced to wear a drab uniform, probably striped, and made to live in a cramped disgusting cell,’ she said, licking her lips, as if she could taste the pleasure that would bring her. ‘Or’—she went on, inspired—’perhaps, you would be executed in the electric chair.’ She made a hissing sound in my ear, imagining the electric current that would sizzle through my body. I said to her, ‘I’ll be sure never to kill you. But, then, Elizabeth’—this had occurred to me and I was excited to say it, to trap her—’how would you balance the universe if I were to kill you? It would remain askew, chaotic. I’m sure that Dr. Spitzer would agree and be outraged. The only way to retain the balance of the universe—which is your noble goal and Dr. Spitzer’s, isn’t it?—would be for you, then, to kill me and you would go to prison, forced to wear an ugly uniform, probably striped, and live in a cramped, disgusting cell. But that wouldn’t be possible, would it?—since I had already killed you.’ I had upset her stupid game; I knew she would be discussing it at length with her quack doctor, the author, believe me, of his second self-published book, A Radical Theory 2: Permanently Retaining
the Psychic Balance.” He laughed raucously.
I laughed, too, at the absurd situation he had delineated with contempt—and, too, at the trap Elizabeth had set for herself in the proposed entertainment.
“Elizabeth and I celebrated our separation.” Paul picked up his account when we were sipping wine on the deck after dinner. “‘No, no,’ she said, ‘not with champagne. With cheap whiskey, that’s what our marriage calls for—the cheapest whiskey’—and that’s what we drank.”
Later than usual, Sonya and Stanty had gone swimming, attempting to cool off from the hovering heat. I envied their exuberant shouts and laughter, which I listened for.
“But, man,” I ventured, “out of all that, what finally made you leave Elizabeth?”
He looked at me as if befuddled by an obvious question. “Because,” he said emphatically, “she was.” His frown eased. “Because she existed, that’s all.”
He was so fucking sure of himself and everything he said. (He had located himself so that his angular profile was etched against the dim moonlight, which struggled out of sudden dark clouds.) “But you fell in love again, with Corina?” I thought that would annoy him, the assumption that he could “fall in love,” as much as he must detest that phrase.
Instead: “Yes, deeply,” he said, perhaps because he had figured out my intention. “I fell in love with her when I first saw her.”
“In the notorious club where she was standing under a display of light,” I furnished the rest.
He said, thoughtfully: “I did fall in love with Corina. No.” He backed off. “I fell in love with her beauty. I loved her fucken beauty—”
“—and her wealth,” I said.
“Of course, man,” he said, unperturbed.
Would he soon move on to deride Sonya? I had seen hints of her rebellion. I was becoming apprehensive when he insulted his wives so brashly, because I didn’t want to hear anything like that about Sonya.
Yet despite my recurrent trepidation of where his anger might lead him in his ranting—we were drinking the same white wine we had at dinner—I was feeling, this hot night, the camaraderie that occurs between people drinking together, feeling that camaraderie, and quite as powerfully rejecting it.
I heard a vague stirring at the dark edge of the deck. It would be Stanty—back from his swimming with Sonya and eager to irritate us in some way. He would have been hiding, listening—as he had been when he saw me and Sonya lying on the grass. No, it was the sound of a boat on the lake. A startling breeze had swept onto the deck accompanied by the sound of water stirring, a coolness soon banished by an ambush of heat.
With my silence, I encouraged Paul to continue his saga, and he did, but still without any reference to Stanty’s birth although his narrative was departing from Constantinople.
Corina, the beautiful young heiress, claimed to be superb at betting on new artists before they were “discovered widely,” Paul said. “She told me she was ‘collecting tomorrow’s great art.’ What she was actually collecting was today’s fake art. She had a refined talent for buying bad but expensive forgeries. I guided her away from her reckless purchases; I advised her carefully because I knew that eventually I would claim all the art as mine.”
“What a cunning son of a bitch you are.”
He was pleased: “Yes, I lived by my wits—like you, man.”
I added to my conjectures about his motive in inviting me: he was “collecting” artists—a “promising” young writer—and courting an allegiance to him.
“Throughout all your sexual encounters, man, did you ever steal?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I answered truthfully.
“Then you, too, are a son of a bitch,” he drew his equation.
I resented the connection he was trying to establish between us. There had been again an intimation of judgement—for him, a welcome cherished judgement, a celebration of his cunning. But his self-approving judgement had once again stirred another judgement, a powerful one, on myself. I would have to extricate myself from any overlapping of our lives, an overlap he seemed determined to assert.
“How did you feel after you stole?” he asked.
“Sometimes … guilty,” I said. The word had come easily in answer to his question; but as it echoed—and it did echo in my mind—I knew I had lied. In all those fleeting encounters, I had felt a sense of triumph to be desired on my terms, nothing else.
“Guilty!” Paul rejected. “For stealing from willing victims?”
Willing victims—again. His claim jolted me anew. Later, I would explore my feelings about what he had deduced, what I had really felt about guilt and non-guilt, and why I felt either. Or neither.
“Your turn,” he said.
Did he imagine he would go slumming through my memories of hustling turfs? His silence awaited a response. But I didn’t want to explore what he was asking for. I said I preferred that he continue with his narrative.
“Your turn, man,” he insisted. “The streets, the alleys, the sex …”
It was my turn, yes—my turn to match his maneuver of extending interest by delivering installments left pending at a dramatic high, the inception of a crisis.
“I was arrested once for—” I halted. “You go on, man,” I said.
14
Often, Paul plays music on the hidden stereo—the music is his choice and unpredictable, although he sometimes asks for requests. Music floats over the island through speakers onto the back deck after dinner and onto the sundeck, where he and I are reclining on mats, sweating, although we came out early attempting futilely to stave off the heat. Today’s invisible music is from Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, Lotte Lenya rasping out Brecht’s lyrics. I know from their pursuing laughter that Stanty and Sonya are rowing and now and then diving into the water to swim.
The Threepenny Opera ends, and Paul says, “I enjoyed fucking Corina’s millions.”
“You really did that, man? Fucked her millions?” I taunted.
“Yes. Listen, man. I took all the bills she had with her—she carried hundreds—and I scattered them over her naked body; yeah, I even stuffed some between her legs. I straddled her and jerked off over her and her money. She rubbed my cum and her money all over herself and laughed, ‘Filthy, filthy.’”
Regretting my question, I turned over on my stomach, to tan my back. A fine film of perspiration and oil glistened on my body and his.
“My cum all over her fucken money—her filthy money.”
A bastard, a fucking bragging bastard. Yet—this baffled me, and disturbed me—I “liked” him. I couldn’t think of another word as he continued recounting his excesses. I was fascinated by his heated recollections, even though at times they angered me—and at other times baffled me, like now when he said:
“Once, man, I tested her about how filthy her money was. We were in Italy. There were beggars on the street, tattered men and women, and dirty, ragged children. I dug into her purse and scattered money on the street. They all scrambled for the money, but—get this—the merchants in the shops rushed out, pushing the vagrants away, snatching the money from them, knocking down the children. Your clowning demonic angels at their best, man, fighting for filthy beads!”
Not beads. Money. I had recognized a similarity between his story and mine in “Mardi Gras”—the costumed revelers I had depicted scrounging for beads; and I had detected sudden anger in his voice as he recalled the ugly scene. Anger at whom? Not the beggars, surely. At Corina? The shop owners? Or at himself for flaunting money to prove his disgust with it all? “And what did Corina do?” I said.
“What else, man? She laughed drunkenly. She was always drunk.” As if to wipe away the street image he had evoked—and perhaps his startling anger—he shifted his position, facing me, and I shifted mine to face him, both leaning on our elbows.
“What were you arrested for?”
“Hustling. I was inexperienced. A vice cop offered me money and then busted me.”
“You went to jail?”
br /> “A friend bailed me out the same night, and I went home with him and hustled for the bail.”
“Good, man, good,” he approved.
He was disappointed, as I had suspected when I tantalized him about that event. He would have preferred a long prison term and a harrowing account of depravity. The reality of it was as grim, but I didn’t want to remember it. The island seemed to negate concerns beyond its perimeter. No, I did not tell him about the raids on gay bars; cops invading private homes to arrest men having sex, the sexual act being illegal; entrapment, lying, aroused cops, years-long prison terms, suicides, violence. I had been the exception in the quagmire of depraved laws—which ironically allowed a powerful attorney “with high connections” hired by my friend to get me off with two years in prison, suspended; and probation for the suspended time, probation I ignored in defiance of the rotten laws.
“But—” I tried sarcastically to assuage Paul’s heated anticipation—“that one night in jail, man, whew; I can’t even talk about it.” I left it there for his imagination.
Taking two puffs from a cigarette, waving away an intrusive wisp of smoke, he said: “As I read what you wrote, I didn’t realize until later that you shifted from past to present tense in the same sentence. What effect were you after?”
Following the confounding story he had told about the scattered money—and it would haunt me and I would try to decipher its meaning for him—and following the embittering memory of my arrest, I welcomed the new conversation. “I wanted to dismiss the separation between past and present, and, yes, the future, to assert an even level of time; and this, too … man”—I softened my too-passionate defense—“there’s no demarcation between time in memory, is there? And aren’t there memories that push into the present, so powerfully that they become a part of the present? That’s what I’m trying for in some shifts, and—and—” I waited for him to respond, agreeing or dismissing.
“I get that, man,” he said finally, with what I chose to believe was a touch of enthusiasm. “But”—I anticipated some rebuttal—“the infrequent capitalization?”