by John Rechy
Sonya roamed about the island in her misty creations like a beautiful dark butterfly. The erotic seminudity we adopted had not disturbed me; it pleased me—I was proud of my body, and so were Paul and Sonya of theirs.
Stanty—
—always in trunks or cutoffs. It was as if he was preparing to compete with me, with his developing body, as if he thought he was already the man he would eventually become, a man like his father. He swam endlessly or went rowing far away along the lake until he disappears.
At times, he would descend into the lower floor to the library, where eventually I would expect to encounter him—always with a brief greeting from him, returned. Our meetings are not entirely coincidental, since he must know the library is where I spend part of my time.
This morning is muggy. Dark clouds continued to promise rain but instead they floated across the sky and massed against the horizon, pasted there.
Earlier I had heard Sonya’s and Paul’s laughter—and Stanty’s childish hooting. I would be alone in the house.
Shirtless, my trunks under my Levi’s in case I decided to go later to the sundeck, I descended downstairs to the library, the coolest location on the island. I roamed about the rich collection of Paul’s books. There was a beautifully bound set of Remembrance of Things Past next to a historical novel by Frank Yerby, a writer whose identity was kept secret because he was black and wrote pulsing romantic novels of the Old South. Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, along with a volume by Sade, and, next to that, Das Kapital and Crime and Punishment. I intended to choose a book, maybe one I had not finished, and sit at the long table to read. I pulled out a favorite from my teen years, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., whose literary tricks and unconventional punctuation I had enjoyed. Not for today. There was Joyce’s Ulysses—which, when young, I had doggedly read, every word of it, hardly understanding it until I reached Molly’s unabashed “soliloquy,” which elated me so much that I started the book again.
On that moody gray, hot day in Paul’s library, I had been putting off my real reason for being there—to retrieve the book The Origin of Evil, which I had inserted between two other books that I marked in my mind.
The book was gone.
Paul had probably been reading it—after all, it was likely that this book was the one he had quoted from on the shore. He had returned for it and taken it to his room.
I continued along the shelves, looking for a book that would take my mind off the annoying absence. I pulled out Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to reread. As a freshman in college in El Paso, I had chosen to write a required book report on it. When the prim instructor interrogated me privately about my approach, I told her I felt sympathetic to Gray. She denied that choice but agreed to my second one: Paradise Lost. She returned the finished paper without a comment, without a grade. I had made the case (not an original case, I learned later) that Milton was on the side of the rebellious angels, and I added that God was a frustrated tyrant secretly in love with Lucifer.
Stanty.
Here he was now, with a towel wrapped about his trunks and still wet from swimming. He nodded to me in salutation, as if conforming to the rules of silence in a public library. I nodded back and moved to another aisle, only to encounter him again after a few minutes of wandering.
He sat at the long table, reading one of two or three books he had chosen. I was curious to see what he was reading; but with his lone silent presence in this room, I felt uncomfortable, oddly trapped.
As I moved past him, intending to leave, he looked up from his earnest reading and asked me, “Have you read Rimbaud, John Rechy?”
Rimbaud! “Yes.”
“Une Saison en Enfer,” he said. “L’aimez-vous?”
“Yes, I admire him”—though really not that much. I was more intrigued with the poet’s short life and his affair with Verlaine, which was viewed so differently by each. “Do you?” I asked Stanty. I would not comment on his showy use of French.
“No, I don’t,” he said firmly, as if he had caught me at something he disapproved of. “Guess who—whom—I prefer?”
I wanted to be sarcastic, to mention a children’s book, maybe Winnie-the-Pooh, but that was a favorite of mine. I couldn’t think of anything else. “Who—whom?” I imitated his pretension.
“Baudelaire—Les Fleurs du Mal—he’s much … starker.”
“Starker?”
“You know—stark,” he responded nervously to my deliberate frown. “Rimbaud is so much more … is … lighter.” He was looking at me as if to challenge me to question him, surely aware he hadn’t chosen the words he intended.
“Oh. Lighter. Rimbaud is lighter. Baudelaire is stark.”
Annoyed by my response, he slid two books aside. He reached for another book near him on the table. “Is this the book you were looking for?”
He held it up. The Origin of Evil.
“No,” I said, “it’s not. I was looking for another book and picked that one by mistake because it was on the table.” I moved away from him.
Here he was again, but leaving. “Guess what, John Rechy? Sonya said she’s going to make hamburgers.” He rushed out, dragging the moist towel after him. He did not have any book with him.
It was not on the table. I searched the shelves nearby. Nowhere. Had he left it open the other day? His markings?
I stopped looking for it. I refused to be puzzled by a kid’s odd game.
9
“We went to Constantinople,” Paul continued, “trying to spike our lives with changing scenery, but Elizabeth continued to talk—endlessly—about her precious neuroses and her frightening insights.”
We were lying on the sundeck under the violent glare of a white sun. It was a few days after Paul had delivered what I thought of as the first installment of his life—more to come. In a metaphoric rendering of that installment, “The Evening of the Shattered Glass” might be its title. Sonya had just left the sundeck—“to plunge into the water, cool water,” she said. I had looked up at her, standing before us. The oil on her body had turned her into a perfect sculpture of burnished gold. Catching me staring at her, she had leaned over and kissed me on the lips.
“Sonya, Sonya!”
It was Stanty calling out to her, waiting to go swimming with her, and she left.
(I had learned from her that Stanty’s bedroom was on the same wing as Paul’s and mine, at the end of the corridor that connected us all. “At times, though,” she said when I encountered her alone in the dining room at breakfast, “when he feels afraid, he stays with me until he falls asleep and I wake him.”
(“Stanty? Afraid?”
(“Shhhh,” she cautioned me. “He must never know I said that. Of course he’s never afraid. Not Stanty. Never.”
(She had retracted too quickly, assertively.
(“But isn’t he a little old to—?”
(“No,” she said emphatically, “not yet, not yet; and he stays with me—lying on a couch,” she emphasized—“and only until he’s falling asleep.”
(“But when Paul—?”
(“Paul waits and sometimes carries him to his bed,” she said, and added, as if I might consider her quick rebuttal angered: “I am so happy that you’re here.”)
Alone with me on the sundeck now, Paul had closed his eyes as if organizing his delivery. Lying next to him, I avoided looking at his body, or, rather, letting him notice me looking at it, still in comparison, a growing sense of competition. I had arrived at this acceptable deduction: I had developed muscles that indicated—not obtrusively—that I worked out with weights, whereas his body suggested his constant swimming. We were, therefore, even in our chosen body types. Still, there continued to be this: the ambiguous size of his endowment, which under his trunks—when Sonya was not there for me to attribute this to her sensual presence near him—was assertive. In Los Angeles, some homosexual men stuffed their groins under their tight pants; but since that was meant to attract others, I wondered how the impression was sustained w
hen—if—they ended up in bed together.
“Our relationship entered another phase, necessarily. If we were to stay together any longer—though I don’t know why we thought that was necessary—we would have to take extreme measures; we began ‘playing games.’” Paul’s laughter at stirred memories invited me to laugh, too, although I did not anticipate anything humorous.
We had left the sundeck sometime back when Stanty and Sonya had interrupted Paul’s documentation of his and Elizabeth’s games. We were now on the deck, waiting for sundown. I knew that Stanty would eventually burst in. He had an uncanny way of melding into whatever shadows had gathered, then springing out, like a piece of a shadow.
He was here now, on the deck. Did he wait—if he had all along been present and unseen—to interrupt at a chosen point?
“Is this the blue hour?” he asked me. That surprised me—his question, rendered pleasantly—because I remembered his disbelief about the existence of light and dark together when the subject of ambiguous dusk had first come up. He had arrogated that unique hour as something that was his own and, therefore, his to announce, and implicitly share at will.
“Not yet,” I said. “When you detect it, will you tell us?” I did resent his interruptions when Paul had reached a point in his narrative where, like now, it seemed to me that something essential would be revealed. That was not only as a result of the intrinsic fascination his life invited; it was that, in his narration, I had felt all along that I would find a clue as to how he viewed me, how he had viewed me on his first contact with my writing, and especially why he had invited me here.
“I will,” Stanty said, and stared ahead at the horizon to await the melding of lights, shifting his gaze intermittently, I noticed, to stare at the other side of the lake, where nightly the vacated island disappeared into darkness, an impression of tangled shadows.
His presence ended this evening’s revelations; Paul and Elizabeth were once again left in Constantinople, an interruption that I suspected was greeted by Paul as an opportunity to retain suspense about the “games.”
But that narrative was not kept in abeyance for long; only until the next day when we, Paul and I, were walking along the island before evening, in the late afternoon. Scattered about were wrought-iron benches located under thick branches of trees; at times, like now, we sat on one of the benches before continuing our walk.
Paul had resumed his narrative as if no time had elapsed between accounts, as if he were following the chapters of a book, in sequence, to be gone back to later where they had been left off. It was even, at times, as if he was finishing a sentence earlier left pending:
“—games that would provide new diversions in our ragged marriage.” The last words were delivered with derisive disgust.
“She joined in the games,” I said to indicate that, despite the elapsed time, his long asseverations, and the often loopy delivery that assumed its own order, I was following him.
As shadows lengthened along the lawn, I prepared myself for what I would soon hear as we resumed our walk.
“I had left our hotel to meet a woman who had introduced herself to both of us in a café.”
“In Constantinople?” I said.
“There, yes, man. Elizabeth and I had competed for her for what would be a sexual liaison. I won.”
“Of course,” I said, emphasizing sarcasm.
“I went with the woman—a whore on her day off. Elizabeth would have done the same if the woman had chosen her. Before I left, Elizabeth and I kissed to double the sensual anticipation of a new encounter, bearing on our lips the taste of each other to be shared with the vagrant partner, and that, too, later shared by both of us. When I returned to the hotel to meet Elizabeth, I didn’t see her for long moments, until, with a shrill screech like that of a siren sustained, she rushed at me out of somewhere with a knife. After moments of struggling I disarmed her—and she laughed. ‘A new game,’ she said. ‘But there has to be more,’ I said. ‘There is,’ she agreed. She held the knife out. I grasped it from her and we grappled and fought over it until she succeeded in allowing the knife to cut into her arm—”
“She succeeded, man?”
“It was a scuffle, man; who the hell knows who did what? She held her arm up, letting a streak of dark red blood trickle on herself. She did that, man, she did that,” he laughed.
But I couldn’t laugh. “You allowed that?”
“Of course, man. Now we were both playing. I fucked her on the floor, while she held up her breasts to my lips for me to lick the drops of blood that had dripped on her white, beautiful breasts like rubies on her silky flesh.”
At times like this, Paul repels me—not Paul, his life. I want to assault his seeming indifferent cruelty, if that is what it is—I have yet to determine what it really is. I can’t deny my growing fascination with him—with his life, that is. Even as he recounts intimate details, he remains a mystery waiting to reveal himself, if at all. And I have no doubt that he will reveal himself at the right moment; and as I learned more about him, I knew that moment—the accretion of all he had revealed—would come, perhaps in silent violence, silent because as he was about to shift to convey another development, his voice might descend into a murmur, a whisper that became like a shout, delivered in a flood of angry words:
“Afterward, the fucken cunt said that what we had actually been involved in was ‘reverse interplay’—she said that, man, she said it—and that we had achieved ‘a psychic balance, exchanging guilt into extinction.’ The fucken bitch said that, man; and I’m sure you recognize that she was shoving into the game the lunatic blathering of that crank Spitzer.”
From the beginning of his narratives, I had wondered how accurately he was repeating words spoken to him and how much he was infusing them with his own contemptuous emphasis, although, often, he carefully attributed borrowed information to a possible and reliable witness. Whatever means he used, he narrated it all with staunch conviction, and I believed it.
“This is an excellent wine, don’t you agree?” he asked me as we sat on the deck watching the darkness crawl over the lake.
“Yes, I do,” I answered. “You have impeccable taste, man.” I underplayed my compliment by adding “man.”
When shadows had begun to stretch over the lawn, and we knew there would be no surcease from the heat this evening, we had returned from our walk to dinner with Sonya and Stanty. Dinner over, Sonya, having inferred that Paul wanted to converse with me—indeed, was eager to resume the pending installment of “Dangerous Games”—had asked Stanty to “escort” her to her quarters.
“Eventually, we traveled separately to augment the distance between us. But we returned to each other. That’s when we met Corina in a club notorious for such meetings. In Constantinople.” He smiled wryly, an indication that there was more to his emphasis than just the ancient name of a modern city of Istanbul.
“In Constantinople?” I goaded him to break his silence.
“Yes. Elizabeth’s mother insisted on that name, Constantinople, where she went often. ‘A city of surpassing grandeur and endurance against barbarity,’ she insisted”—and he mimicked what was meant to be her exalted tone— “and she passed that insistence to Elizabeth; and so, man, it pleased the hell out of me when I discovered the notorious bar for the very wealthy to find any desired partner or partners in that very city. And that is where we met Corina.”
“Of course.” That was all I could think to contribute to his clear sense of delight at his discovery of such a place in the fabled city.
“Corina,” he said. He paused as if to grant her a full entry into his narrative. “Corina, a beautiful woman who found money ‘trashy’ and was only too eager to squander it contemptuously.”
“On you?” I said.
As if my question needed no answer, he turned over on the sundeck—where we had met the next morning, earlier than usual—his broad back as dark, I had to admit, as my chest. I remained facing up, feeling the sun licking my body,
and, I supposed, his.
I had been anticipating an account of Stanty’s birth or conception before Paul moved his narrative away from the place that had provided his son’s hated name; and I waited, too, for a reference to the woman who bore him. But I would not commit myself to questioning Paul because I was sure that when he chose the right time to move there—if he did—the revelation would uncover the reason for the strange ambiguity about Stanty’s mother, and I did not want to delve into turbulent waters.
“Elizabeth saw her first, standing in a light she had chosen, as she always did,” he had continued. “‘You first,’ I told Elizabeth. She went to the woman. I saw the two from the distance. I was sure they would leave together. But Elizabeth came back and said, ‘She wants you.’ I had recognized the woman; she was notorious for her beauty and for her father’s ‘trashy’ wealth. Have you noticed, man, that wealth augments beauty? And notoriety augments both.”
“And you succeeded in your conquest of both?”
“You tell me.”
“Yes, you succeeded. And you eventually married her, beauty and wealth.”
“I succeeded,” he said.
He was using his technique of smoking in order to keep his narrative in abeyance. I took the opportunity to thwart that technique. I had waited long enough. “Why have you been telling me all this?”
He rolled over, propping himself up on one elbow to look at me. I opened my eyes, removed my sunglasses, and faced him.
“So that you will tell me as much about your own life.”
“And that’s the only reason?”
“Why else do you suppose, man?”
I could smell his lotion-tinged perspiration. “Okay, then, I’ll tell you about my life … man. I was born in El Paso, Texas.” I adopted an easy rote tone. “My mother was Mexican; my father was Scottish; he—”