After the Blue Hour

by John Rechy

  “Queer! Whore! My father told me everything about you, dirty things, ugly things—everything! Dozens of dirty men you had sex with and you knew it was all filthy. And cruel!”

  Cruel! A borrowed word, not his. Borrowed from whom? This sinister creature, standing there obscenely—his filthy words roiled within me. Cruel—the uncanny accusation that he knew would wound me.

  Dizzy with rage, sweat stinging my eyes, I realized only now—feeling it—that a heated breeze had swept along the darkening lake and the boat was drifting, as if it were on its own leading us somewhere unwanted, somewhere as shadowed and decayed and monstrous as this creature before me, the boat floating toward that stagnant island.

  “Your father told you all those things about me?” I asked as he stood with his legs spread, balancing himself expertly on the boat and shifting it slightly from left to right, right to left.

  “Yeah!—and more!”

  “You’re lying, Constantine!”

  Nothing I had experienced with Paul allowed me to believe this accusatory monster before me.

  “I’m not lying!” And he shifted his legs, swaying the boat, right, left, left, right.

  “You lie all the time.” Cruel—that incongruous word he had pitched so knowingly into an accusation. Where other than from Paul—or Sonya! No. He had heard it from me! I had said that to Paul—and this demonic creature had listened, lurking, to a word I had spoken in regret, in sadness.

  Sheer hatred—that was all I felt now, hatred and rage.

  He was rocking the boat faster, left, right, left, right, tilting it right and left farther toward the water each time.

  “Stop that, you bastard!”

  He rocked it harder, fiercely, faster, harder, faster, jumping from side to side, laughing, the water swirling about the boat, the boat slanting.

  “You can’t swim, can you?” he taunted. “Can you, Juan? That’s why you’re scared. I’m going to make the boat turn over!” he said, and he was jumping up, down, left, right, the boat swaying, tilting. “And you can’t swim, can you? You’ll drown!”

  Struggling to keep my balance, I lunged at him, to grab him, to stop him.

  In one flashing movement he thrust his body against mine—bare flesh, naked flesh, bodies clasped briefer than a moment, longer than the dying day.

  With all the force of my rage, I thrust him away. He struggled to regain his stance. I pushed him into the water. I threw his trunks after him. I thought I saw his hands grasping. I grabbed the oars, rowing away, faster than I thought I could. I was aware only of the sound of the disturbed water—and the heat, the impossible heat, the goddamned heat.

  “I’m hurt, I hit something!” he shouted urgently from somewhere in the watery darkness.

  I heard flailing in the water.

  “I’m bleeding! Lift me up with an oar, hurry!”

  I wouldn’t believe him. He was an expert swimmer. And a cunning liar.

  “I cut myself on something sharp! My leg—I can’t swim.”

  In our struggle or afterward, had he hit himself, become injured?

  I rowed toward where he would be. He was faking! If I extended the oar to him, he would drag me down into the angered water.

  “Island! Isl—!” The last word he attempted to shout was drowned in silence. More silence, only a fading sound of gurgling water.

  Was he tangled in something dangerous, was he really hurt, finally unable to swim? I waited.

  I saw a hand—his hand—rise out of the water—I saw it, I see it, I know I saw it, I see it grasping for help—no, reaching for the oar to pull me into the deadly depth. As quickly as it had emerged—I saw it, I know I saw it, I see it—the hand sank back into the water.

  Suddenly I was afraid for him. The water was black and ominous as the day expired, leaving only a smirch of blemished light, fading. He had disappeared into the dead darkness. I started to row faster to look around for any trace of him. I stopped.

  I rowed back to the island. I would tell the others that Stanty was—

  Laughing!

  He emerged onto the dock wearing the trunks I had thrown at him.

  I made my way out of the boat.

  “That was fun, wasn’t it, John Rechy? I enjoyed that. Did you?”

  27

  I wondered feverishly as I made my way to my room that night: what will he claim happened on the lake? If he was capable of what he had done, he would be capable of conjuring something else as monstrous, that I attacked him, that I ignored his cry for help, that I—

  Paul and Sonya were back, I heard their voices coming from the deck. Was Stanty there already, venting his poison? I went to my room, shaking with anger, trying to devise a plan to deal with whatever he might say. Whatever he claimed, I would face him, challenge his lies.

  It was impossible to sleep, even to rest in bed. How had it come to this? In Paul’s letter to me, might I find the trajectory that had led me to the boat on the lake with a strange boy on a strange island; I tried to remember Paul’s first words to me, in his letter, to find some answer in the beginning: a retrospective inevitability, a detour not taken? I had read his letter several times to the point that I had almost memorized it: “You have opened the door into a world that few people know exists, and you have revealed it with all its exuberance and its hellishness, which you describe in one place as dominated by—I admire this very much—demonic clowning angels.”

  Sitting under the exposed swirls of liquid colors in the painting over the desk—the towel had fallen—I typed:

  I wandered about the island, a section of which in its verdure resembled a jungle. Then, the sense of isolation that the island created by its very nature was intensified, a silence wound into the heat of days, a sense of invited isolation, and I remembered, “Island! Island!”—a mantra between him and Stanty, a sense of owning and ruling over their own world, my role still undefined. The heat, the silence, the oppressive verdure, the placid lake that seemed at times to contain buried tensions—yes, and the vacated island entangled in shadows—it was all that which made me afraid.

  I woke up in a bed of sweat. I was not ready, not prepared yet, to face anyone. I would stay in my room, keep the door closed. Restless, I got up and looked out the window when I heard voices. I saw Sonya walking with Stanty along the edge of the lake, her morning stroll, usually alone. What was he telling her? Even from this distance, she seemed serious, attentive.

  I tried again to read. The words floated in my mind, incomprehensible. I heard a soft knock on the door. Sonya? I remained quiet, pretending to be asleep, and soon I did fall asleep again, black, oppressive sleep.

  At dinner, Sonya was the first to ask where I had been all day; “I worried that you might be sick,” she said. Paul greeted me as usual, a smile, a few muffled words, “man.” Stanty sat at his usual place—again eating scoops of jam.

  I looked away from him. The explosive silence melded with the heat and the ineffective whirring of the new electric fan.

  On the deck …

  Sonya looked perturbed, perhaps only because I had not answered her knocking, if it had been she who knocked. I hadn’t spoken much since I had joined them. Now Paul and Sonya were talking, something about the village; and I responded automatically, faking attention. Paul was lounging in his deck chair—waiting? Sonya sat next to him, smoking at intervals from his cigarette. I tried to discern some signal of what they, either of them, might know. No clue in the heated silence.

  Constantine—I wanted to think of him only as that, the name he detested—leaned against the railing facing the deepening hue. The sight of him, the memory of his body pressed against mine for seconds, revolted me to the point that I could not even glance at him. Was it possible that he had revealed nothing yet?—all dormant within unbudging silence.

  Which was about to explode.

  Stanty had turned to face us all, I knew from the sudden attention of the others.

  He said: “Look! It’s the blue hour. We sure—surely—have i
gnored it a lot, haven’t we?—the time when everything is revealed. Isn’t that so, John Rechy?”

  I had only seconds to prepare for what was coming. He had waited for the blue hour, to use as his own against me.

  I waited; alerted silence waits.

  Stanty said to Paul, “I wanted to teach John Rechy how to row, but Sonya taught him already, and real good—well.”

  “Did you enjoy rowing with Stanty, man?” Paul asked me.

  “Of course he did,” Sonya said.

  If I were to write about what followed after the violence on the lake, I would change it because what did happen, what is happening now, is too challenging for fiction.

  Nothing happened.

  The next morning, in the library, Stanty greeted me as usual.

  “Good morning, John Rechy.”

  Those ordinary words, spoken by him, assumed a malignancy that pitched me back into the mixture of feelings he had aroused, all coalescing into hatred. I didn’t move. Could I become like the others on the island—like him, ignore the horrendous event, everything forgotten, everything resuming as before, all unmentioned, left abandoned, an unspoken code on this island?

  I walked out without acknowledging him. I returned to my room, and wrote:

  Constantine—I wanted to think of him only as that, the name he detested—leaned against the railing facing the deepening hue. Was it possible that he had revealed nothing yet?—all dormant within an explosive silence.

  Then:

  He turned to face us all.

  I had only seconds to prepare for what was coming. He had waited for the blue hour, to use as his own against me.

  If I were to write about what happened on the lake and what followed, I would change it all, because what did happen is too challenging for fiction.

  Angrily, furious, I wrote this:

  I had only seconds to prepare for what was coming. He had waited for the blue hour, to use as his own against me.

  He said, “We were rowing, John Rechy and me—I—and all at once he—”

  I interrupted him, facing him. “What he’s about to tell you is a goddamned lie, like so many others he tells and you pretend to believe him. The dirty little bastard tried to drown me—”

  Even in the dark, I saw Paul’s face contort in anger as he stood up to face—

  I yanked the piece of paper out of the typewriter and I ripped it into pieces.

  Paul and I sat alone on the deck drinking wine. Beyond, nebulous forms twisted on the lake, misty silhouettes like ghosts ushering in the night. It was after dinner. Sonya, just joining us, had cooked something—I don’t remember what. I had not seen Stanty since our latest intersection in the library. I considered that he might be avoiding me, and I hoped that he was.

  Paul had resumed his accusations of Elizabeth, so overtly, so relentlessly accusatory and ridiculing that I wondered what had occurred now to incite his renewed assault, at times blurted out, phrases, unfinished sentences, a composite judgement against the first woman he had married, words tumbling over words as he drank his favorite wine—which he held out to Sonya, his glass, to sip from.

  “Elizabeth’s life was a series of ‘consultations,’ devoted to unhappiness, hers and everyone else’s, a lover of psy-cho-anal-y-sis”—always chopping the word to express his contempt—”an expert analysand, trekking from fraud to fraud, until she found the superfraud, the idiotic Dr. Spitzer, who introduced her to his”—adopting an odd accent I couldn’t identify—”Radical Theory of a Psycho-Balanced Universe Through ‘Reverse Interplay,’ as propounded in his self-published book, and that would ‘purge away’ all that chafed in her life since she was not responsible for anything, nothing!” He paused breathless in his asseveration. “Or something like that,” he added, and rushed on gleefully:

  “She grew fond of all the dredged-up rot, bragged about it, came to love it—listen to this, man—and all of that was what she presented to me as her credentials, like a gift, to show that she was worthy of me, and”—he laughed, terrible laughter, and sipped the rest of the wine in his glass, handing it over to Sonya for her to fill again and she did, and filled mine—”and—and—and—grasp this, man—with all her malignancy, she did prove she was worthy of me. And so I married her.”

  His lashing of Elizabeth extended into the following afternoon when we—he and I and Sonya—were on the sundeck, sitting on stools at the bar under the shadow of the tree lurking outside and over the vine-draped wall enclosing the deck.

  “We were the perfect couple, everyone said so; Paul and Elizabeth, what a lovely rotten couple, made for each other. Have I told you about the emotional slaughter we conspired to bring about, like happy devastating children?”

  “You have told us that,” Sonya said with a forced smile. Rising from her stool—she was wearing a red bathing suit that seemed to embrace her—she touched her lips, lightly, a motion that suggested she had heard enough and would contribute nothing. With a slight nod toward Paul, another toward me, she left.

  “Did I tell you, man, that I matched Elizabeth, then surpassed her—?”

  “At dangerous games?”

  “Yes; and I matched her in meanness—your word, no, man?”

  “Yes, man—my word—and you did tell me.”

  “That she was selfish and greedy—”

  “Like you, yes.”

  “—a mad puppet manipulated by her equally insane parents?”—ignoring my words, or not having heard them, and jiggling the ice in his second Cuba libre (I had only one)—he went on to ravage her family: “She was faithful to a family tradition: Her father, who became an ambassador to somewhere, specialized in creating crises so he could get credit for solving them; her mother took up painting—miniatures, of course, all she could grasp, tiny ugly things, like their brains. Two monsters churned in grinding copulation to produce another monster whom they named Elizabeth.”

  I said, angered by his tirade: “Since you saw what made her a monster, is she still a monster?” I wanted to yank him away from his self-appreciated “meanness,” a word he annoyingly kept attributing to me.

  “Of course she still is, man—what the hell? Surely you understand all this,” he said, “since you witnessed the reign of clowning angels fighting for beads on a filthy street—and you saw that so fucken clearly.” His unexpected laughter was so raucous that he—untypically—spewed out what he had been drinking, a stream of liquor that drizzled on my oiled body and slid off. The sharp gray shadow slicing the sunlight had done little to reduce the heat, but at that moment a breeze glided over us and alerted me that I was sitting close enough to feel the heat radiating off Paul’s body. Remembering Stanty’s accusations, I swung my bar stool away, and then the same anger, increasing with remembered bile, pulled me back, closer.

  “During all those terrible, long years, man, when did you finally decide to fucken leave her?” I asked him, feeling angrier now at him.

  He shook his head. “Man? What? Oh, of course, when I met Corina and her filthy millions, that’s when I left Elizabeth. It was time.”

  The audacious declaration, the bragging, the self-affection, the vaunted coldness, the scheming, and, yes, the meanness, the absurdity—I blurted out the laughter I had been withholding at his rant. He joined me easily as if he, too, had considered it all amusing, and then he was quiet, listening.

  I was aware of the sound of the motorboat in the distance, approaching. It would be the gray couple, leaving or returning, but at an unusual time. The sound stopped.

  Sonya entered the sundeck. She stood for a few moments, as if to gain our full attention.

  “Elizabeth is here,” she said.

  28

  At the top of the slope, before the front entrance to the house, stood Elizabeth.

  This was the monster Paul had described: an elegant woman, tall, slender, wearing slacks and a loose thin blouse, expensive clothes—I will determine that later, since now Sonya and I are approaching her from a distance—which she displayed perfect
ly. She might have been beautiful—I saw this as we came closer to her—had she not underplayed that aspect of herself. Subtle makeup—this became apparent when we reached her—seemed faintly drawn to emphasize high cheekbones, a face framed by dark hair. She is looking about the landscape, her head tilted quizzically, like a queen surveying new territory. Even the long shadow she casts before her asserts command, a woman sure of her imposing appearance, and entirely composed.

  She is smiling.

  This, then, was the reason for Paul’s reiteration of charges against her: He had known she was coming; he had alerted the gray ghosts, the gray couple; and he had, with all the vitriol he had enunciated against her, prepared the atmosphere for her arrival, spreading to all of us his welcome.

  Earlier on the sundeck, Paul had stood up when Sonya made her announcement; he wiped himself with a fresh towel, and without a word he walked away. Sonya had remained with me on the deck—I had stood up to join her.

  “She did come,” she said quietly, as if determined to be at ease. “Do you suppose the other wife will come?”

  I shrugged, wondering the same.

  Stanty’s voice called out, urgent, loud, untypical: “Father, Elizabeth is here.” His voice, remembered from the deadly night, made me turn away from its direction.

  Smiling—preparing a smile—Sonya put on her hat. Steadily she lit a cigarette—unusual for her—from the pack abandoned by Paul. She inhaled, puffed out the smoke in one single plume, stubbed out the cigarette on her hand, like Paul—and she flipped it angrily away.

  I readied myself to offer what I could to assuage her, whatever would occur. I put my arm about her waist. She touched my hand and smiled. “She’s going to love you, like I do.”

  “I’m not concerned about her,” I said as we left the sundeck, “and I love you, too.” Declarations not of love but of allegiance.

  Stanty was standing a distance away from the woman at the entrance to the house. The male of the gray couple was carrying a small suitcase; the female followed him into the house.