“John!” says Sebastian. “One wondered whether one would see you tonight—or whether the park would have swallowed you!”
Whether or not he said that only humorously, Johnny felt a chill: That’s exactly what he escaped from; that was the alternative—being swallowed—if he hadn’t won. He’s anxious to announce his victory. He’ll wait, though, until there’s a lull. Now Paul is explaining Emory’s lamentable predicament.
Tony says mothers can be such a bore, can’t they?
They’ve hardly sat about the rectangular table when Sebastian says to Johnny: “Now tell us about the park!”
Tony: “I’m absolutely agog with interest.”
Guy swallows his fresh martini, serves himself another, and refills Johnny’s glass. Paul serves the others. They wait in silent expectation for Johnny to answer.
He’s about to announce his victory when they all hear a car parking, a door slam.
It’s Emory—here after all.
“Oh, the simply maddening horror of mothers!” he tells everyone. “She just descended upon me from the air—not by broomstick, by airplane—but only because that’s faster! And she insists on staying with me, though I’ve offered to put her up at the Luxury Palms Hotel in Bel Air. In the presidential suite if that will keep her away! . . . Love!” he calls meltingly to Johnny, nodding coolly to Guy after kissing the others. “I do honestly believe she’s here to spy on me in order to blackmail me—her own son! (She always did want a daughter!) . . . And on top of that!” he goes on documenting his woes: “The script of The Night the Sea Exploded (yes!—they’ve changed the title of When the Swans Come Home to Roost) is undergoing simply major, ravishing revisions: The leader of the revolution is a woman now—to avoid controversy. And that alters simply everything, unless they let me make her a Lesbian! . . . In the meantime: Oh, do let me drown in one of these!” he says, reaching for a martini.
After everyone has commiserated with Emory (“We’ve all had mothers, Emory dear,” Paul empathized), Sebastian reminds them that he had just asked Johnny about the Park. But before Johnny can tell them of his victory, Sebastian surprises him by asking: “But tell me first, John: did you ever work on a newspaper?”
Bewildered by the seemingly irrelevant question, Johnny answers, “Yes—when I was a kid—I was a copy boy—for a while. Why?”
“And you must have looked absolutely darling in one of those cute vizored caps,” says Emory.
“I think only editors wear them,” Tony points out.
“Well, he looked darling no matter what he wore!” Emory insists.
“Because of your . . . goal—30,” Sebastian clarifies his question. “It occurred to me later—and I told Tony—30 is a printer’s term for The End.”
Of course. Johnny should have remembered that. But there was the real way he arrived at 30—the hurried multiplication and division that gave him the “numbers” to be accumulated in ten days.
“Oh, isn’t that terribly significant!” says Emory. “But please, dear, dear Sebastian, I absolutely forbid you to be morbid and boring about it.”
“Have you reached it yet—30?” Guy asks. As on the other night, he’s been drinking steadily—and refilling Johnny’s glass.
And now it comes. Johnny tries to sound casual; but his breathing increases, choking his voice slightly. “Yes. The game I was playing—and I was playing a game—it’s over. I won over the Park.” Now the victory has, in effect, been recorded; the announcement made where the winning score was stated—even if not understood, then. But because their reaction isn’t what he wanted, he clarifies: “That means I’ll never go back to the Park.” Even so, they don’t seem to respond. “And I’m all packed and ready to leave tomorrow before noon,” he flounders before the mute reaction.
Something clearly went wrong. His announcement didn’t have the impact he expected. Not at all. Perhaps because they don’t know how very strongly he relies on symbols: difficult for them to realize that it took that symbolic goal, that symbolic victory over the Park to liberate him from the world of rampant sex. Not understanding any of this, perhaps they don’t even sense yet how firmly he means it all—how completely certain he is of his victory.
“I’m simply crushed that you’re leaving so soon again,” Emory breaks the silence. “But do tell us much, much more about the numbers and the park.”
But Johnny won’t discuss the Park in detail. The numbers belong to him. And to his past. “I reached the goal, and the game is over,” is all he says.
“And how many days did the 30 take you?” Tony wants to know.
They’re interested, yes—but they don’t understand. “Ten,” Johnny answers. But that’s the official number, he reminds himself. Actually it took less than that. His mind counts automatically: I got here Friday. . . . (The strange suicidal birds outside of Phoenix, dazed.) But I didn’t mess around that night. . . . (Tom—and the shadow he made against the lighted door. . . . And: My Room.) And Saturday? . . . (Tina’s kid—the sad, blue, lost eyes.) It began Saturday night . . . . (The yellow light floating in the darkness of the balcony, the beginning of the numbers.) And it continued Sunday. . . . (The black, loveless parks.) And Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. . . . (The Park: the Arena . . . the Grotto . . . the Nest. The mouths.) Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday: five days. Not Thursday. . . . (The Fear.) And then again Friday and Saturday and this afternoon. . . . (Thirty! . . . The three last . . . numbers. . . . The Negro woman. Is she there?) “No—eight days, actually,” he corrects himself aloud.
“Were you there today?” Guy asks. There’s a spark of the excited tone that flamed last time as he fired the intimate questions at Johnny.
“Yes,” Johnny answers, remembering—vividly—the three he was with today. Already, he feels the liquor—but not so much the liquor, he tells himself, as the headiness of victory.
Guy fills his own glass again, swallows. “And what is the grand total?” he asked immediately, as if the liquor had made the question possible. “I mean, like, there were many, many before you started counting this time, right?” His fascination with Johnny’s scene is once again roaring, obviously—perhaps deliberately—fueled by the liquor.
Paul cuts in quickly: “Guy, I do think—. . .”
But Guy doesn’t even look at him. “How many would you say, John?” he insists. “Hundreds?”
Paul blanches visibly. A vein trembles nervously at the side of his nek, like a worm pinned there squirming.
“Over a thousand?” Guy persists excitedly.
“Yes,” Johnny answers quietly, saddened as on that other night, at Sebastian’s, by Guy’s burning interest in that sad, lonesome, anonymous world.
Guy, obsessively: “And will you go for three?—four?—five thousand?—or have you already reached that?”
“The game’s over,” Johnny Rio reminds him.
“Of course it is,” says Paul quickly.
“But how intriguing to conjecture,” Tony says. “If— just a wild ‘if—if you had continued—if you hadn’t—as you say . . . won—. . . The numbers simply accumulating until—. . . What?”
Sebastian, somberly: “Until the other 30—The End. . . . Of course,” he went on gravely, “one could make it 31—beyond death; but then, 32 and 33 would be even further away—but never far enough—. . . Always, really, closer.”
“Oh, how maddeningly boring and morbid—and—and—well, serious!” Emory said snippily. “You’re simply obsessed with death, Sebastian. I’m absolutely convinced you should go out and have more fun. . . . Even if John hadn’t . . . won, as he so charmingly puts it—couldn’t you think of a divinely romantic ending for our sweet John Rio and his numbers?”
At dinner the conversation was as before—aphorisms and theorems concerning homosexual life—all presented for ready approval over glasses of wine. But when they returned to sit about the rectangular table in the living room, the conversation shifted back to the numbers.
“And so do you think
it’s all over now, John—just like that?” Sebastian asked.
Tony: “Like giving up smoking—all you do is stop?”
“Does that mean you won’t have any homosexual contact—at all? None?” Emory asks. “If so, oh, what a loss!”
His black hair rumpled and over his forehead as on that other night, his eyes half-lidded, the liquor taking effect, Guy looks steadily at Johnny.
Even more strongly than before, Johnny has the impression they don’t understand at all about the game—nor how exactly he won it—nor what it is he won. This impression is so disconcerting that suddenly he wants to rush to the corner of 7th and Broadway. She’d understand! he thinks crazily, feeling the liquor even more. Instead, he decides to explain the matter of the numbers and his victory: carefully and clearly like this:
“I’d probably be lying if I said, no, I’d never make it with a man again. I guess maybe all my life I’ll need that contact. But not in the Park—. . . nor in any other park.”
Sebastian: “You’re sure of that? Never again?”
Johnny, with emphatic certainty: “I’m sure. Never, never again. Not in the Park, nor in any other park, nor in movie balconies. It’ll be only with people with identity—men or women—people I know, not people without names—not just ‘numbers.’ That was the spooky part; that’s what the Park was all about . . . and the numbers. Losing control and losing identity. But I’m in control again, and that’s what I won. I won’t even have to keep myself alone like I did in Laredo these last three years—because now I can stay in control. No, I’ll never accumulate ‘numbers.’ Not again. That’s what 30 meant. See, the Park, it was beginning to pull me down—under—until I set a goal after which I could walk away, free. If I had stayed—. . . If I went back—. . . It would have won, and I—. . . Well, I’d lose control.”
From their silence, Johnny can’t tell whether they’ve understood him or not; but for those moments at least, they seemed to sense the seriousness of the furious struggle he had waged.
And then, with kindness, Sebastian says: “But you still haven’t explored . . . a further country, dear John. And until you do, you’ll never know if that is it: yes, what could, just possibly could, make you happy. Until you do, you simply can’t be completely—truly—free of a world you’ve explored only in part—and I do know you yearn, truly, to be free within yourself.”
“What further country?” Johnny asks, knowing the answer.
“The country of sharing mutually of course, one for one,” Sebastian answers. “And—perhaps—of finding one . . . number.”
And so again the recurrent echo: the unexplored country.
“But haven’t we gotten somber!” Emory says.
“And we should have celebrated John’s . . . victory,” Tony says.
“A victory is its own celebration,” Sebastian says. “Besides!—it’s late: and we must be going.”
They all stand up. Emory decides to leave too.
“Goodbye for now, John—and good luck,” Sebastian says seriously.
“And do come back again before three years pass this time,” says Tony.
From Emory: a sudden, tight hug and an almost teary farewell.
Paul sees the three to the door.
Guy pours another drink for Johnny and another for himself. From his pocket he brings out two pills, which Johnny instantly recognizes as benzedrine. They swallow both liquor and pills quickly as if anxious for their effect—and to seal a silent pact.
Now the fantastic will once again become the expected in Johnny’s strange life.
Guy says: “We’ll have to make it tonight, man, okay? Together—tonight—okay?” And there it was—the tone of urgency, an urgency that, whatever its source, hints of that deep sense of desolation, of doom, of the despair and desolation which Johnny intercepted that earlier night.
“Okay,” Johnny Rio says.
“After you say goodbye to Paul, just wait outside for me—okay?”
“Okay,” Johnny repeats.
Returning—and seeing Johnny and Guy standing close together—Paul immediately understands. His face has the look of someone who insists, “This isn’t happening”—while he sees it happen.
Johnny says, “Paul, goodnight—I’m leaving—. . .”
“No, wait!” Guy calls out urgently to him, as if not sure Johnny will wait for him outside.
Johnny stops.
Guy says to Paul, “Paul, I got to.”
Paul looks at both of them in wild hurt, and then he disappears into another part of the house.
“I got to, Paul,” Guy whispers.
Outside.
They walk up steps leading along trees to a terrace—very dark, invisible from the bottom—halfway between Paul’s house and another many many feet above, on a higher level of the canyon. Trees are like black lace against the dark gray of the Cloud, which, after the bright, triumphant day, has returned to obscure the stars.
Johnny and Guy climb into that darkness: along that terrace—like the darkness of movie balconies, the seclusion of hunting parks—into the darkness where the darkness suffocates itself and ceases to exist: but, also: toward a further, symbolic country whose outskirts Johnny Rio knows intimately but whose interior he has left unexplored.
Guy leans toward Johnny. Their lips touch.
Drunk, swaying—the pill that was meant to nullify the effects of the liquor not yet having acted—they take off their clothes.
Smothered by the night, the Cloud, they spread their shirts and pants on the moist ground. Now, in the dissolving darkness, they study each other’s nakedness—Guy, Johnny’s tightly muscular body; Johnny, Guy’s slender and flat body like a boy’s.
Again they kiss. But this time their lips open, their tongues thrust in and back, into and out of each other’s mouths—as if both are alternately hesitant and anxious to enter a depth beyond themselves.
Instantly aroused, cock erect, Guy reaches for Johnny’s prick, which is soft—not even hardening.
Caught in a trembling wave of dark, to avoid falling they lie on their clothes, side by side, clinging to the contact of their lips; their bodies—shivering in the moist air and straining—pressed tightly as if to touch as closely as their lips.
Shifting his body around, Guy takes Johnny’s soft prick in his mouth, and after long moments—quickly—Johnny takes Guy’s in his. And Johnny doesn’t know what he feels, no, not at all—although they remain like that, sucking each other—quite clumsily—for long moments: until Johnny turns his head away, and Guy shifts his body again, pressing sideways, his prick against Johnny’s buttocks as if to enter him; and Johnny allows just that much only because he knows that he won’t let the actual act of penetration occur; knows instinctively that this is a perfunctory action required by Guy before he’ll allow Johnny to enter him.
And Johnny is right. Immediately after Johnny twists around to end the gratuitous, barely implied act, Guy turns over on his stomach, his body stretched waiting, his legs an inverted V. Still soft, Johnny mounts him.
It’s as if they were involved in a ritualistic battle in which each must at least have attempted to pierce the other—like combatants in a symbolic mutual slaughter—although: In that position—Johnny pressing his soft prick against the opening at Guy’s buttocks—they kiss again: Guy turning his head sideways to meet Johnny’s mouth with his.
Wanting very much to penetrate him—but his prick refusing to harden—Johnny remains straddling Guy, and he tries—wants—to insert it—even soft. Giving up, he merely lies on top of Guy.
After a long time, Guy turns over. They lie sideways again, again very close, still kissing: thighs to thighs, chest to chest, mouth to mouth—Guy’s hard prick against Johnny’s still-soft one.
Their bodies parting barely enough to allow the action, Guy attempts to jerk both off simultaneously. Then Johnny tries it, holding both cocks; but his prick refuses to harden. Now Guy, aroused to the point where he must come, is pulling himself off, his free hand ex
ploring Johnny’s body.
Determined to come with him, Johnny stands over Guy—and they stare at each other as if to remember indelibly—and Johnny is trying very hard to work his own cock up, to come when Guy will; but he still can’t, and Guy comes before him, lying there almost motionless afterwards while Johnny strains to make it.
Long, long moments later—straddling Guy, Johnny Rio came, too—at last. Came on Guy’s chest. And came still soft. As if even then his cock refused to commit itself.
Then he lay down beside Guy, and they kissed gently. And with finality. As if kissing something away: knowing that nothing further is possible, ever, between them, that each has acquired what he sought needfully in the other: Guy, vicariously, the total, in Johnny, of all Johnny’s numbers. And Johnny, an intimate knowledge of that further country. They remained lying there side by side for what may have been a long time or only moments—almost sleeping, drawing warmth from each other; and then they roused themselves.
Crushed leaves cling to their clothes as they dress.
They went down the steps without a word.
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
In his car, the world spins in a dark vortex for Johnny. He waits for the whirling to stop.
A light goes on in the upper story of Paul’s house. Framed by the window, two shadows confront each other.
As Johnny drives into the Cloud, which has now descended as turbid black fog, he thinks or says drunkenly:
That other—that further country . . . I just . . . explored it. And . . . it isn’t mine.
Nauseated, he stops the car; and he vomits convulsively out the window.
That country—. . . he thinks. It wasn’t mine.
FIFTEEN
THAT WASN’T IT! That wasn’t it! That’s not my world, and it never will be! He thinks that for the hundreth time since leaving the canyon many hours ago—and it was his first thought after waking. He neither exults nor regrets—he merely took a journey with Guy and discovered the explored territory is not his. . . . Already Guy’s face is fading in johnny’s mind.