“You have no sympathy for animals. She will suffer terribly when we go away.”
“She’ll recover. Cats are much stronger than people.”
He kept his eyes closed. He felt Yves turn to look down at him.
“Why are you so troubled about going to New York?”
“New York’s a very troubling place.”
“I am not afraid of trouble.” He touched Eric lightly on the chest and Eric opened his eyes. He stared up into Yves’ grave, brown, affectionate face. “But you are. You are afraid of trouble in New York. Why?”
“I’m not afraid, Yves. But I have had a lot of trouble there.”
“We have had much trouble here, too,” said Yves, with his abrupt and always rather shocking gravity, “and we have always come out of it and now we are better than ever, I think, no?”
“Yes,” said Eric, slowly, and watched Yves’ face.
“Well, then, what use is there to worry?” He pushed Eric’s hair back from his forehead. “Your head is hot. You have been in the sun too long.”
Eric grabbed his hand. The kitten leapt away. “Jesus. I’m going to miss you.”
“It is for so short a time. You will he busy, I will be in New York before you know we have been apart.” He grinned and put his chin on Eric’s chest. “Tell me about New York. You have many friends there? Many famous friends?”
Eric laughed. “Not many famous friends, no. I don’t know if I have any friends there now, I’ve been away so long.”
“Who were your friends when you left?” He grinned again and rubbed his cheek against Eric’s. “Boys like me?”
“There are no boys like you. Thank God.”
“You mean not so pretty as I? Or not so warm?”
He put his hands on Yves’ salty, sandy shoulders. He heard the children’s voices from the sea and the buzzing and booming in the garden. “No. Not so impossible.”
“Naturally, now that you are about to leave, you find me impossible. And from what point of view?”
He drew Yves closer. “From every point of view.”
“C’est dommage. Moi, je t’aime bien.”
These words were whispered against his ear, and they lay still for a few moments. Eric wanted to ask, Is that true? but he knew that it was true. Perhaps he did not know what it meant, but, there, Yves could not help him. Only time might help, time which surrendered all secrets but only on the inexorable condition, as far as he could tell, that the secret could no longer be used.
He put his lips to Yves’ shoulder and tasted the Mediterranean salt. He thought of his friends— what friends? He was not sure that he had ever really been friends with Vivaldo or Richard or Cass; and Rufus was dead. He was not certain who, long, long after the event, had sent him the news— he had the feeling that it had to be Cass. It could scarcely have been Vivaldo, who was made too uneasy by what he knew of Eric’s relation to Rufus— knew without being willing to admit that he knew; and it would certainly not have been Richard. No one, in any case, had written very often; he had not really wanted to know what was happening among the people he had fled; and he felt that they had always protected themselves against any knowledge of what was happening in him. No, Rufus had been his only friend among them. Rufus had made him suffer, but Rufus had dared to know him. And when Eric’s pain had faded, and Rufus was far away, Eric remembered only the joy that they had sometimes shared, and the timbre of Rufus’ voice, his half-beat, loping, cocky walk, his smile, the way he held a cigarette, the way he threw back his head when he laughed. And there was something in Yves which reminded him of Rufus— something in his trusting smile and his brave, tough vulnerability.
It was a Thursday when the news came. It was pouring down rain, all of Paris was wavering and gray. He had no money at all that day, was waiting for a check which was mysteriously entangled in one of the bureaucratic webs of the French cinema industry. He and Yves had just divided the last of their cigarettes and Yves had gone off to try and borrow money from an Egyptian banker who had once been fond of him. Eric had then lived on the Rue de la Montagne Ste. Geneviève, and he labored up this hill, in the flood, bareheaded, with water dripping down his nose and eyelashes and behind his ears and down his back and soaking through his trench-coat pocket, where he had unwisely placed the cigarettes. He could practically feel them disintegrating in the moist, unclean darkness of his pocket, not at all protected by his slippery hand. He was in a kind of numb despair and intended simply to get home and take off his clothes and stay in bed until help came; help would probably be Yves, with the money for sandwiches; it would be just enough help to enable them to get through yet another ghastly day.
He traversed the great courtyard and started up the steps of his building; and behind him, near the porte-cochère, the bell of the concierge’s loge sounded, and she called his name.
He went back, hoping that she was not going to ask him about his rent. She stood in her door, with a letter in her hand.
“This just came,” she said. “I thought it might be important.”
“Thank you,” he said.
She, too, hoped that it might be the money he was waiting for, but she closed her door behind her. It was nearly suppertime and she was cooking; in fact, the entire street seemed to be cooking, and his legs threatened to give way beneath him.
He did not look carefully at the outside of the envelope because his mind was entirely occupied by the recalcitrant check, and he was not expecting a check from America, which was where the letter came from; and he crumpled it up, unread, in his trench-coat pocket and crossed the courtyard and went upstairs to his room. There, he put the letter on the table, dried himself, and undressed and got under the covers. Then he lay the cigarettes out to dry, lit the driest one, and looked at the letter again. It seemed a very ordinary letter, until the paragraph beginning We were all very fond of him, and I know that you were, too— yes, it must have been Cass who wrote. Rufus was dead, and by his own hand. Rufus was dead.
Boys like me? Yves had teased. How could he tell the boy who lay beside him now anything about Rufus? It had taken him a long while to realize that one of the reasons Yves had so stirred his heart, stirred it in a way he had almost forgotten it could be stirred, was because he reminded him, somehow, somewhere, of Rufus. And it had taken him almost until this very moment, on the eve of his departure, to begin to recognize that part of Rufus’ great power over him had to do with the past which Eric had buried in some deep, dark place; was connected with himself, in Alabama, when I wasn’t nothing but a child; with the cold white people and the warm, black people, warm at least for him, and as necessary as the sun which bathed the bodies of himself and his lover now. Lying in this garden now, so warm, covered, and apprehensive, he saw them on the angular, blazing streets of his childhood, and in the shuttered houses, and in the fields. They laughed differently from other people, so it had seemed to him, and moved with more beauty and violence, and they smelled like good things in the oven.
But had he ever loved Rufus? Or had it simply been rage and nostalgia and guilt? and shame? Was it the body of Rufus to which he had clung, or the bodies of dark men, seen briefly, somewhere, in a garden or a clearing, long ago, sweat running down their chocolate chests and shoulders, their voices ringing out, the white of their jock-straps beautiful against their skin, one with his head tilted back before a dipper— and the water splashing, sparkling, singing down!— one with his arm raised, laying an axe to the base of a tree? Certainly he had never succeeded in making Rufus believe he loved him. Perhaps Rufus had looked into his eyes and seen those dark men Eric saw, and hated him for it.
He lay very still, feeling Yves’ unmoving, trusting weight, feeling the sun.
“Yves—?”
Oui, mon chou?”
“Let’s go inside. I think, maybe, I’d like to take a shower and have a drink. I’m beginning to feel sticky.”
“Ah, les américains avec leur drinks! I will surely become an alcoholic in New York.” But he
raised his head and kissed Eric swiftly on the tip of his nose and stood up.
He stood between Eric and the sun; his hair very bright, his face in shadow. He looked down at Eric and grinned.
“Alors to es toujours prêt, toi, d’après ce que je vois.”
Eric laughed. “Et toi, salaud?”
“Mais moi, je suis français, mon cher, je suis pas puritain, fort heureusement. T’aura du to rendre compte d’ailleurs.” He pulled Eric to his feet and slapped him on the buttocks with the red bikini. “Viens. Take your shower. I think we have almost nothing left to drink, I will bicycle down to the village. What shall I get?”
“Some whiskey?”
“Naturally, since that is the most expensive. Are we eating in or out?”
They started into the house, with their arms around each other.
“Try to get Madame Belet to come and cook something for us.”
“What do you want to eat?”
“I don’t care. Whatever you want.”
The house was long and low, built of stone, and very cool and dark after the heat and brightness of the kitchen. The kitten had followed them in and now murmured insistently at their feet.
“Perhaps I will feed her before I go. It will only take a minute.”
“She can’t be hungry yet, she eats all the time,” said Eric. But Yves had already begun preparing the kitten’s food.
They had entered through the kitchen and Eric walked through it and through the dining salon, into their bedroom, and threw himself down on the bed. The bedroom also had an entrance on the garden. The mimosas pressed against the window, and beyond these were two or three orange trees, holding hard, small oranges, like Christmas balls. There were olive trees in the garden, too, but they had been long untended; it was not worth anyone’s while to pick the olives.
The script of the new play was on the plain wooden table which, along with the fireplace in the dining room, had persuaded them to rent the house; on the table, too, were a few books, Yves’ copies of Blaise Cendrars and Jean Genet and Marcel Proust, Eric’s copies of An Actor Prepares and The Wings of the Dove and Native Son. Yves’ sketch pad was on the the floor. So were his tennis shoes and his socks and his underwear, all of these embracing Eric’s sport shirts and sandals and bathing trunks— less explicit and more somber than Yves’ bikini, these last, as Eric himself was less explicit and more sombre.
Yves clattered into the bedroom.
“Are you going to take that shower or not?”
“Yes. Right away.”
“Well, start. I am leaving now, I will be back in a moment.”
“I know your moments. Try not to get too drunk with the natives.” He grinned and stood up.
Yves picked up a pair of socks from the floor, put them on, and put on his tennis shoes, and a faded blue pullover. “Ah. Celui-tàje to jure.” He took a comb from his pocket and pulled it through his hair, with the result that it stood up more wildly than ever.
“I’ll put you on your bicycle.”
They walked past the mimosas. “Hurry back,” said Eric; smiling, staring at Yves.
Yves picked up his bicycle. “I will be back before you are dry.” He rolled the bicycle through the gate and onto the road. Eric stood in the garden, watching him. The light was still very bright but, in the mysterious way of southern light, was gathering itself together and would soon be gone. Already, the sea looked darker.
Once past the gate, Yves did not look back. Eric turned into the house.
He stepped into the shower, which was off the bedroom. He fumbled with the knobs, and the water came crashing over him, first too cold, but he forced himself to take it, then too hot; he fumbled with the knobs until the water became more bearable. He soaped himself, wondering if he were really getting fat. His belly seemed firm enough, but he had always had a tendency to be chunky and square; it was just as well that he would soon, in New York, be going again to the gym. And the thought of the gym, while the water fell down over him, he was alone with his body and the water, caused many painful and buried things to stir in him. Now that his flight was so rigorously approaching its end, a light appeared, a backward light, throwing his terrors into relief.
And what were these terrors? They were buried beneath the impossible language of the time, lived underground where nearly all of the time’s true feeling spitefully and incessantly fermented. Precisely, therefore, to the extent that they were inexpressible, were these terrors mighty; precisely because they lived in the dark were their shapes obscene. And because the taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate, he had nearly perished in the basement of his private life. Or, more precisely, his fantasies.
These fantasies began as fantasies of love and soured imperceptibly into fantasies of violence and humiliation. When he was little he had been very much alone, for his mother was a civic leader, always busy with clubs and banquets and speeches and proposals and manifestoes, aloft forever on a sea of flowered hats; and his father, rather submerged by this glittering and resounding tide, made his home in the bank and on the golf course, in hunting lodges, and at poker tables. There seemed to be very little between his father and his mother, very little, that is, beyond habit and courtesy and coercion; and perhaps each had loved him, but this was never real to him, since they so clearly did not love each other. He had loved the cook, a black woman named Grace, who fed him and spanked him and scolded and coddled him, and dried the tears which scarcely anyone else in the household ever saw. But, even more than he had loved Grace, he had loved her husband, Henry.
Henry was younger, or seemed younger, than his wife. He was a trial to Grace, and probably to them all, because he drank too much. He was the handyman and one of his duties was the care of the furnace. Eric still remembered the look and the smell of the glaring furnace room, the red shadows from the furnace playing along the walls, and the sticky-sweet smell of Henry’s breath. They had spent many hours together there, Eric on a box at Henry’s knee, Henry with his hand on Eric’s neck or shoulder. His voice fell over Eric like waves of safety. He was full of stories. He told the story of how he had met Grace, and how he had seduced her, and how (as he supposed) he had persuaded her to marry him; told stories of preachers and gamblers in his part of town— they seemed, in his part of town, to have much in common, and, often, to be the same people— how he had outwitted this one and that one, and how, once, he had managed to escape being put on the chain gang. (And he had explained to Eric what a chain gang was.) Once, Eric had walked into the furnace room where Henry sat alone; when he spoke, Henry did not answer; and when he approached him, putting his hand on Henry’s knee, the man’s tears scalded the back of his hand. Eric no longer remembered the cause of Henry’s tears, but he would never forget the wonder with which he then touched Henry’s face, or what the shaking of Henry’s body had caused him to feel. He had thrown himself into Henry’s arms, almost sobbing himself, and yet somehow wise enough to hold his own tears back. He was filled with an unutterably painful rage against whatever it was that had hurt Henry. It was the first time he had felt a man’s arms around him, the first time he had felt the chest and belly of a man; he had been ten or eleven years old. He had been terribly frightened, obscurely and profoundly frightened, but he had not, as the years were to prove, been frightened enough. He knew that what he felt was somehow wrong, and must be kept a secret; but he thought that it was wrong because Henry was a grown man, and colored, and he was a little boy, and white.
Henry and Grace were eventually banished, due to some lapse or offense on Henry’s part. Since Eric’s parents had never approved of those sessions in the furnace room, Eric always suspected this as the reason for Henry’s banishment, which made his opposition to his parents more bitter than ever. In any case, he lived his life far from them, at school by day and before his mirror by night, dressed up in his mother’s old clothes or in whatever colorful scraps he had been able to collect, posturing and, in a whisper, declaiming.
He knew that this was wrong, too, though he could not have said why. But by this time he knew that everything he did was wrong in the eyes of his parents, and in the eyes of the world, and that, therefore, everything must be lived in secret.
The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp. How could Eric have known that his fantasies, however unreadable they were for him, were inscribed in every one of his gestures, were betrayed in every inflection of his voice, and lived in his eyes with all the brilliance and beauty and terror of desire? He had always been a heavy, healthy boy, had played like other children, and fought as they did, made friends and enemies and secret pacts and grandiose plans. And yet none of his playmates, after all, had ever sat with Henry in the furnace room, or ever kissed Henry on his salty face. They did not, weighed down with discarded hats, gowns, bags, sashes, earrings, capes, and necklaces, turn themselves into make-believe characters after everyone in their house was asleep. Nor could they possibly, at their most extended, have conceived of the people he, in the privacy of night, became: his mother’s friends, or his mother— his mother as he conceived her to have been when she was young, his mother’s friends as his mother was now; the heroines and heroes of the novels he read, and the movies he saw; or people he simply put together out of his fantasies and the available rags. No doubt, at school, the boy with whom he was wrestling failed to feel the curious stabs of terror and pleasure that Eric felt, as they grappled with each other, as one boy pinned the other to the ground; and if Eric saw the girls at all, he saw mainly their clothes and their hair; they were not, for him, as were the boys, creatures in a hierarchy, to be adored or feared or despised. None of them looked on each other as he looked on all of them. His dreams were different— subtly and cruelly and criminally-different: this was not known yet, but it was felt. He was menaced in a way that they were not, and it was perhaps this sense, and the instinct which compels people to move away from the doomed, which accounted for the invincible distance, increasing with the years, which stretched between himself and his contemporaries.
Another Country Page 20