Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  None of it had ever changed, as none of it ever does. The weather of their lives swirled around them randomly; and it seemed that if you could go from the beginning to the end, you would find innumerable distractions and surprises along the way but ultimately nothing in any of them that had not been there from the start, in a way, fixed and waiting. George Valerian had gone as far as altering the name by which the world knew him: Giorgio Valeriani. And even this had not mattered, except to be considered good advice by a business superior in the Forties. Mark—named for his maternal grandfather—thought the name euphonious; he felt that Marco Valeriani showed through like pentimento, which it did. It meant the world took them for one thing while they were quite another—not wasplike and cool, but beelike and quick to anger and perhaps unpleasantness. When he lost his temper or suddenly fell flights into depression, he thought this is my blood which can’t be changed.

  After Mrs Valerian’s death, alone in the beach house, Mark moved into her room and slept in her bed. This felt peculiar only on the first night. Margaret Valerian’s room, with its large bay window on the ocean, was long and handsome, running the width of the house, with fine views up and down the coast. It was blue and white, with white taffeta curtains, Indian rugs and white lacquer furniture. Through the line of windows the horizon stretched around like the true walls of the room, making it immense, bringing in the sea and the sky with all its light. It was a room to wake up in. At sunrise the lemon, red and orange colors of the sun revolved over the white curtains like flame, drifting down the wall as the sun rose, as in a stateroom on an enormous slowly listing ship. Outside the sea slapped the beach resolutely, but he would be awakened by the clamorous light. Next to the blue room was a green room, and then a pink—no longer pink but referred to as such after so many years. The green room had been Mark’s. Now he slept in the blue.

  He felt that nothing was more important to him than this house, now that he had saved it, and since no one else stood in this relation to it, they would not have understood the degree to which, day by day, the obsession grew. Having blocked its sale, he saw himself as its custodian and protector, its Mrs Danvers, the connection coining through the blue room, ‘… the loveliest room in the bouse, the loveliest room you’ve ever seen. ’ Like Mrs Danvers he was proud to show it to anyone who called, though callers were not likely to be interested; alluding in a fond, crazy gaze over objects and views to a special, mysterious, nostalgic association with the past, never specified. Mrs Warden, a neighbor passing by, had been brought into it on a bright sunny morning, when all the white and blue seemed edible, and had said excitedly that if this were her room she would never leave it. Exactly, Mark thought; a woman skilled in noisemaking. And in fact his mother had never left. Sometimes it seemed he might suddenly turn and catch a wispy glimpse.

  But the others did not love the house in these terms; why should he so care?

  Its beauty, no doubt; its canopic aspects regarding his mother, and now regarding him; the memory of thirty years there together. This, while enough, overwhelmingly enough for Mark, was insufficient to them, to whom it remained a pretty house by the sea with associations. They might say to him and to all this emotion: why and so what? Were it not for Mark, things would be different—simply the profit really, instead of the expense and upkeep. He had no firm answer for himself or them, for whom beauty and recollection—like danger, glamour, greed, hunger (everything but disappointment and desire)— were concepts belonging to other people. In fact, he thought, they might not see themselves for what they were, since what Mark saw and what they saw were not the same—when they should have been. House and mother had belonged to all. All had been children here; he and Tessa practically the same age, Vita just three years older, only George very grown at fifteen.

  They had peered in at the misted, dusty windows. To one side Mark saw the dead, startled Birds withdraw backward through a doorway. His father signalled disapproval by keeping his hands in his pockets. Furniture lay in the middle of the vast room before a bulky fieldstone fireplace, stacked like expensive fuel. Mark had dreamed the room many times, though of course never in such a state: the same overlooked, nearly but not quite forgotten room, off a corridor of his mind—dusty, unrealized, unlooked at. He stood and turned toward the sea, which tilted over him at a slant like a picture, the line of the horizon that day blurring higher into the sky than might seem normal—it was all so important. “Only on the ocean,” Mrs Valerian had instructed the realtor. Downstairs the ancient furnace spread itself across the cellar like the roots of a banyan tree, funneling huge fat limbs along the ceiling and up through the house. Mr Valerian shook his head, Margaret shuddered. She wanted to see the bedrooms.

  He was ten, Tessa nine, the first summer, living like the Birds. Mr Valerian was not yet so rich and they camped out at first. It was necessary to replace all the windows right away. They were fake. Margaret Valerian repeated this unbelievingly. How could they be fake? The cost of sixty windows was thus added to the mortgage. The air then blew through it—as long ago Captain Bird, besides saving money, had feared the sea might someday enter at the portholes—and the long front room behind the porch became a deeper verandah in itself, open to the cool blue breeze. On the dune beside the house Mark built a network of sand channels down the incline, encouraging a pink rubber ball to travel from up there to down here as if under its own power, to fall with a satisfying plop into a pit at the end: the top, center and bottom; the beginning, middle and end; up coming down, from there to here. As a metaphor it seemed to fit for a long time. Most things in life, including life itself, seemed to have sections, discreet and separate and straightforward.

  Now when he entered a room or suddenly turned he encountered himself and his family, his siblings and nieces and parents, as if he had been mistaken in thinking them gone and himself alone. How could he be alone there again, except for a few moments at a time? It had become, besides, actually the sort of house that attracted people to it, in a daily ration of deliveries, the maid, plumber, carpenter, furnace man, the painter who never finished and seemed to work on his own; the alarm man, the gardeners. Mark would hear them on the gravel, or the too-loud bell would ring and he would see again the futility of thinking it was a house to be alone in. The others asked what he did with himself, knowing to themselves that he did, simply, everything and was endlessly busy. It was large, with every nook of it developed into something to be maintained. He would sit for a moment and realize the hatch at the top of the tower was ajar; when it was open the covers of magazines on the table by the fireplace, three floors below, lifted and gently settled on the coil of updraft swirling through the rooms. Or some quadrant of the lawn was being watered, or a storm the day before has misted the north-facing windows to a blur that must be squee-geed; or a drain at the back was loose, or moss had begun in the outdoor shower, as it did every year, a furry lime-green that called to mind the baroque grottos of overachieved Italian villas. He was half-inclined, scrubbing it away, to let it this year take hold.

  With his mother gone the house, far from being ever empty or complete or perfectly in order, was, beyond being a house, a place and monument. This is what the others did not see except in the passion with which he explained the undertaking of yet some new repair or project. For it was big enough never to be finished, and everything that was done to it—had been done to it—seemed to call up in him a progression of further things, as if it now itself kept a list for itself, a list far more deeply ambitious than his own. When he tried to explain this to Vita, she characteristically voiced her opinion: that he liked to think this was true, yet of necessity you would have to say it did not come from the house. “These are your standards and ideals,” she said. “Within the process, you decide.” She was no doubt right. Her field. But the impulse she described in him was met by something in the house as palpable as its present shape: the shape it would have in the future. When Mark looked at it in a particular way, he saw it suddenly as it eventually would look. H
e said to Vita, “It’s not imagination. I imagine different features and improvements all the time. They don’t occur. But sometimes I see something already done, all its details at once, and after that it’s a matter not of imagination but of recollection of the actual thing.”

  Vita shook her head, willing though temporarily unable to follow. “You mean the imposition of your will …” she suggested. But he had meant that with the warp of experience folding back on itself, as did time, it was all on a great tape—racial memory, the Collective Unconscious her colleagues had been talking about for so long—history itself, the future, the larger flavorsome bits: the house had a soul, it had a history.

  “But not a destiny,” she interrupted. “It could be sold tomorrow, and then who would interpret these—visions? Who would have them?”

  This was precisely the point, he pointed out. No one would. That was his department. She did not doubt the potency of the scheme, as it inspired him, as it affected them all. Four or five weeks a year she basked in this perfection like Princess Grace in the Monaco of her dreams. The rest of the year, with her children and their commitments, with her job and career, it was as with the others, a question of the odd weekend. They might have held on to the house because the original investment was so eternally dwarfed by modern value—this was the Monaco of everyone’s dreams—or now because of Mark; but without him keeping track none of it would have worked. Mrs Valerian had managed it alone for thirty years. Now he did, in his own way. They all saw his reasons overlapped with their own in letting him.

  Odd that four such people should turn up in the same family; or odd that he should be among them, it being himself who made the collection strange, who set the curve with his inverted sexuality, sensitivities and thin skin, his standards and thoughts from some other, different place. While they seemed or were strange only in these comparisons with him, which threw them to the opposite ends of all these spectra—George Jr, practical and cunning; Vita, evolved and cool; Tessa the winning, excitable wife and mother, still young, steeped in the details of her children’s lives—all so different from Mark and now abundantly clear, after years when it had seemed otherwise. The gallant struggle to convince themselves and the world that Mark was merely another sort of Valerian—rather like Mrs Valerian, whose instincts in all of this had been unwavering—this struggle in the end had been incorporated into the great Filial Wars, pitched battles between Mark and his father which had dragged on for a decade, and in which the heaviest losses had seemed as usual to be innocent civilians: the family itself. It seemed to him his mother had given her life as part of this prolonged struggle, the only evidence at first of how deadly such things became if not settled early and wisely through ambassadors. They, he now supposed, were the ambassadors. He felt the exhausted truce lately reached between his father and himself represented the world’s last opportunity to avoid catastrophe. It was, as Vita said, a question of not denying something vitally important to someone else. If you did, it more than harmed you; it destroyed you and your world to the extent it was itself destroyed. Now his mother was dead, his father already old, and he himself apparently dying, although you could never, he had learned, be sure who would die before whom.

  Vita did not in the least cavil, or hesitate. Like many of his conclusions this came out in conversation with her. She thought the force of Mark’s will, being thwarted by this immovable object—his father—had been turned back on himself with devastating results, and that evidence of this effect would subsequently pull his father down.

  They were making a turn around Rittenhouse Square, within a stream of joggers all fleeing a devastation to which only they remained obdurately oblivious. “You must cure yourself,” Vita said, going right to the payoff—these were not office hours with a stranger, he thought. Meaning that if he could turn the process off he might neutralize its effects in time, and so at least slow the disease, or convert or divert it elsewhere. This was the idea, to buy time.

  The stupendous news of his illness abruptly ended the Filial Wars, like a smothered blaze. In the driveway of the beach house, where Mr Valerian came to discuss it and see for himself, they embraced and wept. It no longer meant a great deal that Mr Valerian could weep, although there had been an era—most of their lives—when the idea itself represented a kind of doom not to be envisioned; while Mark had been, in compensation, always a person to weep as easily and effortlessly as an actor. Together they wept in each other’s arms in a way that might have obviated all unpleasantness, if only, if only; the unfortunate misapprehension of one person, meaning well but getting it wrong, by another; he and his father weeping beside the gleaming automobile that now, a moment later, slid across the white gravel and carried his father away.

  PARENTS FEEL THAT IN THE HUGE unnaturalness of the world the most unnatural thing is the death of a child; which is to say death out of order. In Mr Valerian’s mind his son’s illness sat at the top of a pile of problems that appeared to constitute this last segment of his own life. It took stepping back, but from his point of view it seemed, as he would presently say to Mark, that if they could only change places all this nonsense would be resolved, beginning with the medical thing which, of everything, was most beyond his control. The other great problem in the pile concerned the collapse at the last moment of the greatest deal of his long and profitable business career—the sale of Marval Products itself, Mr Valerian’s life work, to Court Industries. This collapse, coming only hours after he learned of his son’s illness, had transpired with equal force, like a second bomb dropped on rubble. In a long moment of realization Mr Valerian had thought the two events to be in some way connected (as subsequently did Mark) beyond the usual compounded coincidences of life; as if, had you thought in astrological terms, which Mr Valerian did not, you might find that on this day and at this hour several planetary masses had aligned themselves toward his specific ruination.

  But that it should happen now, and so quickly, in this mad, last-minute upheaval of his life; that here at the top of the monument you found not a statue, not the figure of Victory poised for flight, but instead pigeon shit and disappointment—Mr Valerian’s disgust at this was less effective as a demonstration against life than it had been against his mortified children over the years. He was a man who had always intimidated people. He looked at them and dealt with them until he saw a light of defiance go out in their eyes. He kept on until he saw it— minutes or years. At last, in the driveway of the beach house, he saw it in Mark’s eyes. Help me, they said: it was all Mr Valerian had ever wanted to hear.

  Strength is what he told himself he’d always had; strength is what would sec them through. But here, at the age of seventy-five, at the end of his life, here now were larger problems than he had ever faced—with the exception of his first great insoluble: his wife’s death—more problems than even he could see his way, decently, to solving. It made his unhappiness resonate with loneliness but he was glad Margaret had missed this. How little, now he saw, it had taken to make her sicken and die. The most important distinction between them was that he had coped so easily and expertly with forces that had quickly done her in. To Mr Valerian it seemed she had died just when everything was about to come together for the stretch; and perhaps, had she lived, it would have—instead of this. But then surely this would have killed her, if that hadn’t.

  With something extra in her voice, due to the fact she was discussing her own father clinically, but also for what she considered the endless resourcefulness of the subject, Vita described Mr Valerian as “very heavily defended.” The fortress of their father’s mind, Mark thought, thinking of something rocky and impregnable by Baldasare Peruzzi. “If such a structure collapses, it comes down all at once,” she said. “At the end the mind is ruined. Much better if somehow it holds together.”

  Mark’s opinion of his father in these later years had thus been based, he felt, on this other resident expert—for what was Vita but court psychologist, the best money could buy, right there in the fam
ily? rather like the best legal advice from their brother. Bolstered by the respect he felt for Vita’s mind, Mark applied these opinions to his own situation: the Filial Wars. It was from Vita he realized he would never convince his father of the legitimacy of his cause; quite simply because Mr. Valerian saw homosexuality in religious terms—as a sin—which then threatened the great buttress of his own defense system: religion. The top third of all widowers, Vita reported, meaning in health and adjustment, survived with the help of strong religious beliefs. Thus the establishment of Mark’s orientation as a viable mode ran in conflict with his father’s own concept of survival. Not simply a question of live and let live, Mark saw with dismay. It meant he must think of his father’s generation as entrenched and lost—as of course they all thought of his.

  For he was different from them—from his own father and sisters, especially different from his brother. He had something of his mother in him but this was because he realized that in the end only her love was unconditional, and in gratitude he had emulated her. Only that much of this appropriation did not sit as gracefully on him, the strapping male, as it had on her. And perhaps he had chosen some of her more problematic traits—the tendency to catastrophe for instance, of immediately expecting the worst in an unpleasant situation, hardly important but negative, and which seldom turned out as badly as she expected. He heard a variant of this in himself and recognized it as surely as an old piece of clothing that fitted him but belonged to someone else: his mother’s sense of catastrophe. This had stuck.

  Ah, the victim. This too she had allowed, had encouraged in herself until too late. She had proved to him that the victim creates and perpetuates himself. This was the embarrassing part of being ill. The metaphor here was also too tellingly clear: the homosexual as victim. Unfair perhaps to pin it on his mother, who would be indignant to be thought of in these terms. But it was Vita’s point that this was the cycle to be interrupted if he would break the pattern and save himself.