by John Rechy
I shoved away a feeling that he had been about to grade me. I wouldn’t let that intrude on our conversation; I was basking in it. “I was trying out visual effects on the page like, I believe, in some editions of Winnie-the-Pooh.”
He laughed. “You mentioned that book before and you were serious?”
“Why should a writer limit his influences? I’ve been influenced by movies, good and bad: the abrupt shifts in location, dialogue like a voice-over along with shifting scenery—special effects in narrative, man. Look how Buñuel slides from realism to surrealism with only gradual clues of that shift; and I like to listen to music before I write, like Fats Domino and then Mozart, something like Eisenstein’s montage, in music, juxtaposing opposites, tension, and—”
We’re lying on towels on the grass of the expansive, expensive lawn under the shade of a tree allowing the impression of coolness. We left the sundeck when the heat became violent.
“—movie serials influenced me a lot, like pushing a character into a trap that seems impossible to escape and than letting him spring out, like Flash Gordon—and comic books, their exclamatory prose. Batman—I never cared for the boy Robin. I loved Saturday-morning movie serials, man, learning about suspense, adding details to deepen a mystery, not just withholding.” I was rushing on, breathless, excited, as if to make up for the years when I had separated myself into another world, where I played someone else, only street-smart. “—and take the power of suggestion in Val Lewton’s great B movies, and look at Cat People—an ominous shadow on the pool wall, growing darker, larger as it seems to approach the woman swimming, the water shimmers like shards of glass, which are always good for arousing tension, like in Persona, the broken glass and the actress walking past it, missing it—”
“—like Hitchcock letting the viewer in on danger the character doesn’t perceive, no?”
I liked his apparent agreement, but I didn’t like his arrogating my direction. “That’s an easy deduction,” I dismissed his remark, and aimed at him: “—and I picked up on the use of gestures as characterization, like the way you smoke, Paul, the way you—”
“Oh?”
That irritating “Oh.” “—snuff out a cigarette as if you—”
“Yes?”
I’d leave it there, taunting him. “Mathematics, too, a big influence. In high school, I—”
“Mathematics?”
“—was fascinated by the shape of algebraic equations plotted on a graph, the intersection of lines makes an X, man, and that’s the solution to the equation. It’s like two narrative currents that intersect at a point of possible reconciliation—the mysterious X, and—”
“You’re breathless, and you’re not making sense.”
“—then splitting apart.” I had leaped over his insult. I caught up with it, angered: “Fuck if I’m breathless, fuck if I’m not making sense.”
He laughed. I joined him. “Okay, man, I’m convinced,” he said. “You’re good, man.”
What can I say to this man who has, correctly—almost correctly—understood my intentions and is responding in admiration? Yes, what can I say, except what I do say, which is:
“Thank you, Paul.”
He fell back into the stream of his life:
“Corina was frigid.”
15
“Fuck you, man. You bragged that you fucked and fucked—your words, man.”
“The fucken bitch was a liar. She told me I was the only man who could ‘tame her heat.’ So she possessed me with desire, and, yes, we fucked and fucked, and she trembled and groaned. Then one time after hundreds—she fell back, exhausted, crying. She formed a fist and she struck her cunt with it, over and over. ‘A piece of dead meat! Cold, frigid!’ she screamed between sobs.”
I felt pity for the woman I had never met. He, too, must have felt her sadness, her pain—I waited to hear him say how he had pacified her. I waited.
He lit a cigarette. He inhaled, exhaled, three puffs this time, studying the wisp of smoke that drifted into the shaded heat. “With the revelation of her lie, I knew that if I was to acquire her wealth when I divorced her, I would have to thaw—to crack—the locked, frozen cunt. Nothing else would guarantee my success.”
The harsh vulgarity of his delivery about the woman he had married jarred me. It was as if his sexual relations required a different language, a degrading language of their own. That, and the indifference with which he described his selfish motives, at times repelled me. And yet my desire to hear more—my fascination—was growing, as it did now with an awareness of his body next to mine.
“You didn’t feel anything for her?” I asked.
“Oh?” He lay back, leaning forward to assess his body, stretching, tensing; and he glanced over at me, a long glance, up and down. I was sure I had seen him do that. I stretched my own body to outmatch his exhibition.
“Of course, my alimony, which I earned, was guaranteed,” he went on; “the art I had coached her to buy, the best. I had helped her triple her wealth, beyond what the old titan gave her—he kept her a stupid child.” As if this would be an inconsequential occurrence, he said, “She may come to the island this season; I never know where she is. I think in Brazil.”
Heat rained down on us. It burst through the thickness of the trees—the sun had pursued us even when we had moved from the sundeck to the lawn, lying down in a shaded patch already invaded by the sun.
“If you ever choose to write about any of this, how will you present it?” he shifted. He had asked that casually as if not committing himself to a suggestion, as if the question was not allowed by his vanity. But he had exposed himself to this:
“If I did, ever, choose to do so—and, really, I doubt it”—I was aiming at his compromised vanity—“do you mean how would I depict you?”
“Of course that’s what I meant,” he said, smiling at being caught in an unexpected evasion.
What an opportunity I had to aim at him, to bring him down. “I think I might cast you as a kind of ‘Daemon’ who invites guests into his lair.”
“As asserted by the old horror movies you must have seen and admired, right?—at the Texas Grand Movie Theater in El Paso?” he taunted me. “And the guests accept—”
“Yes.” And I knew what was coming.
“—willingly?”
The son of a bitch had cornered me.
“And here you are.”
“Yeah, here I am, but in the horror movies that I learned everything from, there was always at least one person who comes to—”
“Confront?”
“Yeah, that. You must have seen the same horror movies I did, man.” It was a draw. But his words had stung. I regretted this incursion, regretted his easy rebuttals, his challenging, ironic remarks.
“The subject of evil—does it fascinate you?”
“Yes, and it does you,” I said. “I saw the book you left open in the library, and quoted from.”
He frowned. “The book—?”
“The Origin of Evil. On the library table—with passages marked—the first day you showed me the library.”
“I didn’t leave any book open. That breaks the spine.”
Darkness had thickened. Nebulous forms twisted on the lake, jagged misty silhouettes as we sat on the deck drinking wine, having returned from the lawn to shower and eat a hasty dinner.
He continued where we had left off: “The guest who accepts an invitation in order to confront, would that be you?” he asked. “Or Sonya?” he added when he saw her approaching us.
“Confront what?” Sonya asked. She had walked onto the deck. She was wearing the lightest purple caftan. Occasional gusts of humid wind pasted the material to her body so that she was a nude apparition in the twilight.
“To confront evil,” Paul said. “Isn’t that what you meant, John?”
“What else … man? I learned that from the movies that taught me all I know about writing.”
“If you ever write about us”—Sonya joined us, echoing Pau
l’s question—”please, John”—drinking from a glass of wine she had been sipping—”if you do”—until Paul reached up and took it from her, exchanging his for hers, toasting toward the lake—”please don’t make me a victim.”
“But you are a victim, beauty,” Paul said, reaching out to her, drawing her roughly to him.
“I am not. How would you make me that, Paul? How?” She didn’t wrest herself away from him, as I had hoped she would.
“Oh, beauty, aren’t you, really, that already?” he persisted.
“No.” She still did not pull away from him. He drew her face against his, to kiss—no, to—
“Don’t!” Sonya protested. He did not release her, until she turned her face away from him sharply. She touched her neck, looked at her hand, licked a finger. “You bit me,” she said angrily.
He let her go. “I was in the thrall of my earlier conversation with John—and of course always in the thrall of your glorious beauty.”
She moved toward me.
“And, beauty, have you forgotten that you told me that on that runway when I first saw you—and felt the pull of your power”—he pretended to shiver at the memory—”you said, you told me, beauty, that you felt that I had bought you at an auction?”
“I do remember, Paul. My dear beautiful, cruel man, I remember everything.” Mimicking his emphatic tone, she added, “Yes, I remember everything.”
“And me? Me!” Stanty shouted, running in from the dark edge of the deck. He took the glass of wine from Paul and tipped it, but it was now empty. “What about me, John Rechy, what would you write about me?”
“I’d have to wait and see. Maybe you’ll do something exceptional that I can write about.”
“He will,” said Paul.
16
Yesterday—or the day before; it might have been two, even three, days ago, or longer; time drifts by without demarcation—Paul had left off his narrative at an especially tantalizing point. He had bragged that I might not believe how he had overcome what he saw as the most powerful barrier to his ensuring that he would become a rich man—”a very rich man”—when he divorced Corina, “which is what I had planned when I married her.”
“You bastard,” I said.
“Yes,” he accepted that as a compliment. He continued: “I had to leave her grateful—she had to be my ally, forcefully, against her tyrannical father. Otherwise he’d pursue me through the courts. And beyond.”
We were sitting at the large table in the dining room, having breakfast, eating fresh fruit—he, a reddish fig he was carefully peeling, holding out a piece of it to me on the tip of his knife, and I took it. Would the son of a bitch leave the story there, yet again?—in order to force me to reveal my interest in it? Or was he coaxing me to break the silence and tell him about my own life in the area—the arena—that aroused his interest, my life on the streets? I wouldn’t budge, either way. He served himself a bowl of assorted chilled fruit, blueberries, and strawberries dripping their scarlet juice like drops of pale blood on the table. Even the narrating of our lives had become competitive. His tactic to engage me at his will angered me, and I wanted to let him know that. I stood up. “I’ll see you later, Paul.” Just that, leaving him at the dining table, alone, and looking—I was glad to note—surprised.
His sudden laughter—at himself, I hoped—followed me out.
Outside, I stood looking about the vast lawn. Noon—it was now noon—had come so quickly, retaining the barest coolness that I knew would not last. I could detect no movement on the other island—I found myself looking toward it, against my intentions. No signal that it was for sale; it was left to the shadows that were crawling over it—that impression survived even though it was a bright, heated day now. Only Stanty claimed to have gone near that island. Had he spread that in the village? The woman there had asked whether “the kid” was still here, “talking stuff.”
Each time I sought out the desolate island—from different directions, as I was doing now—it seemed to shun the light. That looming specter of an island, a cold, black presence under the hot livid sun, created in me an insistent sense that violence was buried there.
I cherished my hours in the library, each time marveling at the breadth of Paul’s collection of books. I had decided that I would not attempt to read any book I had not read before. The island did not invite commitment to a new book. The involvement with the others on the island was demanding. I would pick out a book that I had read, and would reread favorite passages, or new ones that I came upon.
How quickly and dramatically my life had changed: from the hustling and cruising streets and bars of Los Angeles to this private island, where I could return to an earlier phase in my life, when I would often read two books at once. An invitation and an airplane ticket had accomplished that astonishing change back to that earlier time.
Leaving the library with the book I had chosen to reread in my room, Melville’s Billy Budd—about a boy’s destructive innocence—I ran into one of the gray couple, the woman. Waiting for her, the man was a slice of a shadow against the shaft of light at the top of the stairway. I said, “Good morning” to the woman and received only a disguised nod in response. She hurried up the steps to join the man. He has an odd way of seeming to be hiding or protecting something in one hand, which he keeps somewhat behind him or in his pocket. I would assume that both the man and the woman are mute except that I heard them talking to each other, whispery voices.
I’ve determined that they tend to the house, although I’ve never seen them performing any of the various chores which the house requires and are fulfilled. The two might disappear into the night in a motorboat, and reappear invisibly. They might live away from the island or have quarters in this large house. Wherever they dwell, they are like figures created by the shadows in the garden, or like the iron statues that had greeted me my first day on the island, as if those twisted forms had come to life.
17
In my room to leave the book I had chosen before joining whoever would be on the sundeck, I heard the usual bantering and laughter from the lake. Stanty and Sonya swimming, racing each other in the water. I heard Stanty shouting, “I won, I won!” Of course, Sonya would let him claim victory.
Out of one of the speakers situated about the island came waves of music: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, whose cacophonous strains pursued me across the lawn and onto the sundeck, where I joined Paul and Sonya, she still wet from her swim and drinking rum and Coca-Cola—a “Cuba libre,” Paul said—fixed by him, refreshed with ice from the bar at the rear of the sundeck. He fixed another of the icy drinks and handed it to me.
Before I could lie on my own pad, Paul sprang up without a word and rushed back toward the house. The music was throttled; it shrieked in protest as if severed with a knife.
“It was too loud,” Paul said, lying back down on the deck beside Sonya. “I wouldn’t be able to hear Stanty if he called. Yesterday, he got a cramp in his leg when we were swimming. Of course, he’s in superb shape, and he kept on going. Sometimes he overexerts himself.”
Difficult to think of Stanty hurting. He was always swimming or rowing, and if alone, far, far off, supposedly toward the unoccupied island—to return with a new exaggeration.
Under the glare of the sun, our bodies were bronzed and shimmering, sensual flesh splayed out together.
Sonya had been moodily recalling a time when she was a girl and her town was constantly in political and violent turmoil. “My father was so afraid for me and my sisters that he taught us how to fire a gun. I hated that time.”
I was startled. So much intimacy on this island, and yet I knew so little about her. “I hated the time when I was a soldier, in the infantry,” I said, trying to lessen her mood by sharing it.
Paul said to Sonya, “But, beauty, you never know—do you?—when such knowledge might be appropriate. After all, we are on an island, largely unprotected, and there’s the other island, and you are, you know, delicious bait.”
&nbs
p; Though inappropriately jocular—no real menace suggested—he had once again voiced the intimation of something terrible having occurred on the neighboring island.
“Besides, beauty,” Paul went on, “you did agree to teach Stanty how to fire a weapon and he—”
“I did not,” Sonya interrupted. “I told him I didn’t even have a gun. He said that you did.” There was a note of disapproval in her voice.
“Oh,” Paul said, his punctuation to end a subject.
Sonya got up with Paul’s glass and hers to replenish them at the bar. I followed to help her while Paul remained lying down, his eyes shielded by dark sunglasses.
At the bar, as I scooped ice for the glasses, Sonya continued, this time about being “discovered” by the notorious fashion designer Arvayon.
“In the line on the runway. I went to the highest bidder.”
She had surprised me by having raised her voice, this time emphatically for Paul to hear. Without sitting up, without removing his sunglasses, Paul called out:
“There was no competition at all.”
Silent moments stirred my apprehension of what might be said next, and by whom.
It was Paul:
“Beauty, will you ever regret my choice?” came the voice of the man behind the sunglasses.
And then Sonya:
“I will not. But will you, Paul, ever? Will you ever regret your choice?”
“Oh, beauty.”
As if the earlier matter had been festering, Sonya persisted: “I don’t know why Stanty would ask me to teach him to fire a weapon when he might have asked you, an expert.”
“Of course,” Paul refused to be engaged.
“You teach him if you want him to learn.”
“Of course, beauty. Yes.” He sat up. “Beauty, come here,” he ordered Sonya when we returned to our pads, the drinks spilling. “I’m craving you, beauty.”