Orgasms come in all shapes and sizes, sometimes mechanical as a jack-in-the-box—an obsessive little tune, tension, pop goes the weasel—other times they brim with meaning. And other times, like now, they are the complimentary close that signals the end of a lengthy exchange. I recall a memorable climax, a terrific taste of existence in the summer of 73. I was with Ed; we weren’t doing anything special but the orgasm started clearly with the fluttering of my prostate, usually a distant gland, sending icy waves to my extremities. Then a hot rush carried my torso up into an arc and just before I came a ball bearing of energy ping-ponged up and down my spine.
Brian and I curled into each other. Our semen smelled faintly of chlorine. Sunlight glittered off or was accepted by the domestic surfaces. On our way to falling asleep we exchanged dreams.
BOB: I dreamt that an alligator lives in my kitchen wall; it cries brokenheartedly on the weekends. A cannibal rabbit with sharp teeth lives there too. A pathetic shabby man who looks like Genet keeps beckoning to me, appearing at a distance everywhere, even on the Greyhound bus I take to escape him, standing up the aisle and beckoning. These characters fill me with dread. I know they can’t hurt me in themselves—they are intensely defeated, already claimed by death to such an extent that I writhe backward rather than associate with them.
BRIAN: I dreamt this while I was nuts. A group of nuns in black and white floated on the surface of a foreign planet. They were only heads, like that creature in the space movie. In their hands they carried candles that vibrated colors and gold. Everything on the nuns’ side was gray and dead, but where the candles were, the light created moving patterns of color and electricity.
BOB: One day Denise, following a recipe of mine, made baked apples in wine. But something went awry and they turned out hard and sour. That night I dreamt there was a new kind of elephant called an Applederm, and its babies were called Apples.
BRIAN: I was at a party with my father. Our hosts—a family —were noticeably absent, which made me angrier and angrier. I followed my father into the dining room to placate myself with some food and as I looked up I realized it was my parents’ apartment. There was laughter from the other room and someone said, “All our hearts are the same here.”
BOB: I dreamt this around puberty. I was making love with my little sister on her bed but the springs squeaked and I was anxious because my family in the next room might hear us. So we became bumblebees and hovered above the bed, buzzing and buzzing, and when we touched stingers I came. (I never told anyone my bumblebee dream, had forgotten it for years. I felt that now Brian could know me in one piece—what wasn’t in the dream he could extrapolate.)
BRIAN: I stood in a room that was all black and white and because the dream was in color it was beautifully vivid. Black and white tiled floor, white walls, black and white solid drapes. As I looked around the room I saw a black bed from classical Greece, white sheets and in the bed a boy, sun-tanned with platinum blond hair. The contrast between him and the black and white setting filled me with joy; I moved closer passing through veils of black and white (remember duality?) and as I kissed him I awoke with the overwhelming erection that only dreams can provide.
Brian and I sometimes exchange letters. In the latest, Brian told me he is moving in with a lover. I felt a pang that I had no right to turn into any claim—the pain augmented by the fact that Sterling moved out of my life without leaving a forwarding address. I had been curious about the story Brian painted from his mother’s childhood. He answered:
“The image was based on one of my mother’s frequent outings with my grandmother, my great aunt Kate and her uncle Ollie. Kate’s husband, Hugo, died young and on weekends my grandmother and Kate would pack a picnic and make a day of visiting Hugo. I’m not sure why this is so peculiar to me. Maybe because that’s my mother’s impression of it. More likely it’s that Be-Be (our name for my grandmother) and Kate were so unaware of the irony of taking children to play in a cemetery. I made my mother the embracer and my uncle the observer. Later, Katie was institutionalized along with both her daughters, who somehow were not in on these trips. I met Katie when I was six and she would definitely win the most terrifying-person-I-ever-met award. She had straight black hair cut severely across with straight long bangs. She sat hostilely on my grandmother’s sofa, barely acknowledging our family’s presence. She also scared the shit out of my father. She eventually died in a hospital singing Irish lullabies to herself.
“My grandmother held her own in the strange department. In her sixties she had to have one of her eyes—including the lid—removed. Instead of wearing a patch, Be-Be opted for glasses with a large plastic artificial eye attached to one of the lenses. It had a bizarre effect, particularly when she napped. What can I say about riding the subway with her —that people stared? that I got angry? It made me dislike the world and love her. She would call and invite me to lunch. ‘We’ll go out!’ she’d say expansively, as if The Acorn on Oak were the world. I gave her a feather boa one Christmas and we were thick as thieves after that. She loved to dance, drink. She would come out of the bathroom with hair she had just bleached platinum, make a 20s pout in the mirror, say, ‘Your mother and I are both blondes,’ and giggle. She was great.
“When Be-Be died, she presented a unique problem to the undertaker. My mother insisted that the coffin be open in the Irish tradition. The undertakers were perplexed—should they put Be-Be’s glasses on her and create the disconcerting effect of a corpse with one eye open? In the end that’s exactly what they did, and dressed in her favorite red beaded gown, Be-Be said goodbye.
“Moody in her earlier years, Be-Be became senile later. I’d go to her apartment and cook dinner. I loved her very much. In the hospital she suddenly became lucid and rose to the occasion of her death. She said, ‘You always learn something. Now I’m learning about tenses. How long is this going to take?’ Then she removed her rings, one by one, and placed them on the nightstand for my mother.”
SECOND SON
Robert Ferro
From Second Son, a novel in progress
AFTER SOME TIME HE REALIZED the house was speaking to whomever might be listening: this was Mark. He heard it in the wind through the porch, in the boom at the end when a door slammed, in the whine of the furnace when first engaged; sounds that held images the house reminded him not to forget, images of moments fractured in air as when, turning at the bannister at the top of the stairs, he saw his young niece tilt her head to listen to her vanity and adjust a gypsy earring—a languorous, emblematic moment of her magic childhood, in an older safer world. The house made this possible. He could see it still in the air.
—Images also, besides his family, of the two strangers who long ago had built the house and lived in it and died upstairs: the Birds. Captain Bird, it appeared. The childless Birds had never struck such chords, while the numerous Valerians, occupying every room, adding others, had changed the house into something alive and hovering, a huge pet that engulfed them, vitally interested in the goings-on. Captain Bird however had seen to it that everything about the place was nautically and astronomically sound. It faced exactly East, on a line drawn up the middle, like a keel, that passed through the center of the hearth and out the bay window into the heart of the sea with the sudden precision of the speed of light. The sea, visible from every room, was in some rooms a wall; in others a picture on the wall. From the upper windows it seemed you were on a riverboat, and in winter, with the furnace, as if the whole place was under way, moving through a delta perhaps; approximately. From the long deck over the porch, leaning into the wind, he could see the sharp edge of the planet he was on.
Mark was ill, dying perhaps; say no more. He stood at the window7 downstairs—the window toward the pond, as opposed to the one toward the ocean, or toward the lighthouse. Its view contained a w edge of sea on the right, high after a storm and figuratively rushing across a bight of beach as if to flood the house. A man with a metal detector was invisibly weaving a herringbone pattern a
cross the sand, feathering back and forth along the beach, now and then scooping up small amounts of sand with a long-armed basket. Within the ranging intimacy of his binoculars Mark could almost hear the electronic ping of the metal detector as the man suddenly stopped.
This small drama: the man drops to a crouch. After two or three diggings in the sand, the little metal scoop proves inadequate. Only the human hand will do. The man is young, distantly handsome. Through his binoculars Mark can see the cold, downlike glow on his cheek. Fingers touch something which then is held up. It glints. Again the young man takes up the scoop and detector, glances for an instant up at the house, perhaps sees Mark in the window, and resumes the inferred pattern along the beach.
Mark’s heart is thumping. What had he seen? Someone searching for valuables on the beach. His beach. Taking a deep breath he calmed himself. His sister Vita, had she been present, would have an explanation. An obvious metaphor, she would say, considering his illness, but useful. Mark might feel that much of his life lay buried on the beach—things of no consequence to anyone else—to be found and pocketed indifferently. This could be it, he thought. Or was it that the man with the metal detector was handsome? Perhaps Mark, being alone and frightened, merely wanted company—to talk—but wanted it as a pale vestige, in all its dimmer configurations, of the desire to make love.
Like the Birds before her, Mark’s mother had died upstairs, eclipsing those two earlier, less-felt deaths, and claiming the house at last and utterly from its builders. Their two transparent shades faded further and Mrs Valerian’s presence took over, as had been her intention. Her death, from a series of hemorrhagic strokes, had overlapped in an ironic but intentional way with an extensive restoration of the house—two processes sharing themes and schedules along similar though reversed lines: an Egyptian way of death, in which a place for the abiding comfort of the spirit is prepared. Mrs Valerian had theorized that the house would bind its occupants—her family—to her after she was gone. She had concluded that she herself would be similarly bound, an intention to be evoked with her name and memory by whoever entered the house.
Restoration had required a lot of money, thousands every week for months. This was regarded as a medical expense by Mr Valerian, who on the surface appeared to be rich, and who on the surface was, and he willingly gave whatever was needed because doing so assuaged his helplessness and grief. You could do nothing about a stroke, but the roof could be changed, and even the roof-line. On the ocean side windows could be cut to improve the views and lighten the interiors, with the immediate effect of liberation, as if something trapped inside the house, the Birds themselves, were at last released. Ten rooms of curtains, a dozen new rugs, every stick of furniture restored—the house emptied into a huge van and hauled to a penitentiary in New York State for refinishing. This had been arranged by Mr Valerian, a person not averse to pursuing a bargain across state lines. Mark asked if this meant their furniture would be stripped by convicts with guns held at their backs—the sort of question his father found surprising. Outside, the garden was also reconsidered, spaces around the house pushed back so that new sweeps of lawn were created where sea-rose and masses of creeper and honeysuckle had stolen up over the years nearly to the porch. A different curve was cut for the drive, as if Margaret Valerian, in her imagination, had flown up above the house and looked down to see at a glance the ideal line. These improvements went on all at once with a number of different crews and loud machines. After the broad strokes came the smaller, meaningful ones—with outside the new garden, a dozen trees, a fence —all corresponding to the different phases of Mrs Valerian’s decline, in which every day some new deficiency appeared or matured. As she deteriorated she rested her ruined mind on the new stability of the house, its lovely air of completion and bounty. Each day she went in a wheelchair room to room to see everything in its place, fixed by rules of association and design. Beyond regular use of the wheelchair, she lay propped on clouds of pillows, regarding the sea through the big window in her room. On the best and dwindling days Mark read to her from a pile of cookbooks—recipes like short plotted stories, with twists, nuance, surprises, and uncertain endings, success by no means assured. To these details she listened closely, as to the chronicle of mysterious events. And when finally she died, it was with everyone around her, after a long and decorous farewell commensurate with the many months of the other sort of preparation. Light played over her face. Mark kissed her cheek and felt her spirit swirl into an angle of the ceiling, like perfume seeping through the house, a faintness of scent relative to its distance from her room—all of it lingering behind as planned.
HE COULD NOT THEN AGREE, precipitously, to a plan to sell the house. Odd that all her labors and intentions, her clearly expressed wishes, should now be used against her. For no one could bear the accomplishment: that she permeated the place. For months everyone but Mark avoided it. And the expense, coupled with an obvious enhancement of the site, made its sale an ongoing temptation that grew. Someone approached Mr Valerian with a blank check, willing to pay anything, anything at all. Here would be life’s financial truncation of the dilemma. To mitigate the issue further with a suggestion of the practical, Mr Valerian offered to divide the proceeds among his four children. The house, their legacy, would thus be converted to the means for a still easier life. To counter this, Mark threw his mother’s memory in their faces. What weight, now that she was gone, did she have over such decisions, when in the past—with a glance—her least whim would have carried? The house, he protested, was the legacy; not the money but the house.
“I say sell it,” his sister Vita announced suddenly—hers being, for various reasons, the pivotal vote. Betrayed, in speechless amazement, Mark fled the room.
At forty-three, Vita Valerian was three years older than Mark, similar enough to understand his reactions to any event but not enough to share them. Vita was more objective about life and held back her feelings in favor of a cool look at circumstance, while Mark surrendered immediately to an emotional response, believing this to be the natural way through difficulty. Cumulatively, in the end, these two systems had worked in Vita’s favor and to Mark’s detriment—for a practical approach is invariably rewarded, while the emotional often fails and only leads down. Beginning from the same point, Vita constantly adapted and would survive, while Mark plunged through life like a pet in jeopardy.
Some weeks later Vita met him at the beach house. On a late fall morning, the same as a summer day but for a faded difference in the light, they sat with coffee on the enormous porch. Up and down, the beach lay empty for miles. Boats in the offing, gulls and the changing light, the blue-hammered sparkle, the broad planes of sea and sky—these bright pictures were framed by the porch supports. Vita spoke first. Given the weight of his feelings she had changed her mind: she would not now agree to sell the house. For this was the most important thing, that if a person felt strongly about an issue in life, it mustn’t be ignored by others; for if it was, everything subsequent to it would turn out badly, even though there should seem to be no direct connection.
“Then why did you say you would sell?” he asked. “Because I was tired of Pop’s games,” she replied. “He thinks we’re beyond his control down here.” Mr Valerian, since being widowered, had not again set foot in the house. “I think,” she said, “he believes that if it’s sold we’ll all spend more time with him.”
In the morning light, regarding the female version of his own face, he said, “Is it as simple as that?”
“In a way. But even without your objections they couldn’t sell it now.” They meant the two Georges, father and brother. “Until other things are settled nothing will be done.”
George junior, the oldest, was forty-six. As the first to encounter their father, he had in many ways responded predictably. Three or four years of unallayed approval and praise had set him tip as a prince of expectation, and by the time Vita, Mark and Tessa arrived, he was obviously indomitable. They always meant George and his
father because the two of them, far from being merely similar, were each other’s invention. Neither could have been what he was without the other, except that now George Jr might easily go on being what he was, unassisted. Their relationship formed the new axis of the family.
Tessa, the youngest, had seemed from the beginning to respond to them all, and to Mark in particular, as a person to be protected—not simply as a helpless baby-girl creature of great beauty, which she had been, but as an idea: that she was the youngest, smallest and last, and in her doll-like beauty somehow the least. This idea had served her personally through her first fifteen or twenty years; after which, Tessa suddenly saw, it had been everlastingly transmuted into a liability. As the youngest she never felt a sense of protection so much as a feeling of standing fourth back in line, as if buffered, with three other people between her and life. And now, also in near middle-age, she found herself still fixed within an order of precedence established at birth. Only to Tessa did this seem entirely unnatural.
Their father, George Valerian, was the wild card. His life had brought him as from one planet to another. His own siblings —who all lived in New York City—hardly knew him for what he had become, a kind of magnate, rich and apart. To these sisters and brothers George Valerian represented all that seldom occurs in life, or that occurs only to other people. Here, in him —and their view of him was greatly exaggerated—they were themselves lightly touched by success. Dreams of extrication from want, of the glamour of finery and excess, of fearlessness in restaurants and flight to sunny beaches, they associated with him. They envied him, seeing him as richer and happier than he was. He in turn remembered them as what he had left behind, witnesses and proof of what he thought he had done and become.
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