by Rager, Bob
“You’ve done real work, I see,” he said, “You don’t have that inflated look that comes from playing around at the gym.”
“Please, won’t you show me your hands?”
He brought his hands forward, the palms up.
“These lines are deep and you have most interesting callouses here at the bases of your fingers as if you have been gripping something quite hard, like a, oh, I don’t know, I’m just guessing, my little game: a tennis racket?”
He looked away quickly to avoid gentleman’s eyes, really masculine men don’t play court games, and then he said, “Nah, holding a wrench.” This was true that holding and using tools makes callouses, but not these.
“Would you like more sherry? Or perhaps something stronger? Scotch I think…scotch whiskey. I have a bottle over there on that side board. Could you trouble yourself?” Gentleman once again raised a small arm and scratched the air to show where.
“Here, let me do the honors,” Gentleman said. “For you,” he paused, then, “I’ll join you too.”
Gentleman glanced at the doorway. “He doesn’t like me to drink anything stronger than sherry. He says it’s bad for the heart,” Gentleman sipped the whiskey with closed eyes. When he opened his eyes again, they glowed like dark opals.
“That’s better,” Gentleman said with a low growl.
“I have another favor to ask you. Please, you must think my requests are endless, but I assure, I won’t ask much more, not tonight, anyway,” gentleman said and cast him a coy glance.
“But please, could you take your shirt off?”
“Why not?” was the answer, “Why else am I here?” That seemed the right carefree tone to set this frail little man at ease. He turned his back while he pulled his t-shirt up over his head, knowing this would display his waist then his back, and finally his shoulders and bare his upper arms. When he turned around, gentleman was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes bright, and his lips slightly parted.
“Ahh,” Gentleman said, the sound slowly escaping, a sound from a place deep within him.
Then, with a furrowed brow Gentleman’s eyes travelled across the bare torso until he said, “But my dear friend, you have been wounded,” very gravely. “You look as if you’ve been in a war.” Then with a note of wonder, he said, “As if you’ve seen combat.”
Again he looked away to avoid gentleman’s searching eyes. “I can understand if you don’t want to talk about it. Oh no, you don’t have to cover yourself up, not just now. I didn’t mean that you had anything to hide, on the contrary you should be proud.”
“This town is full of frightened little assistant deputies of something or other who are playing their part in the make believe they call our government. But you, you,” gentleman paused to find a word, “why you’re the real thing.”
Gentleman leaned back in his chair to gather himself. “Please, if you could come and stand here for me,” he dangled his hand beside his wheelchair.
“You don’t mind coming closer, do you? Oh that’s perfect, you see and I can rest my head just so…”
He looked down at gentleman’s up-turned face, the glowing stet changing the colors of his eyes, the marble smoothness of his skin; but it was the mouth that held his fascination, for the gentleman’s lips were shaped in a cupid’s bow of soft, gentle curves, small like a child’s mouth. Had he been this way as a child early and young in life?
And as gentleman moved his mouth against his male parts, he wondered if this was what a little boy feels like, thoughts that came to him with alarm and that he tried to bat away like a swarm of biting insects and then warmth mounted inside him becoming an irresistible flood.
“…You’ve been a most welcome surprise, many men your…” Gentleman paused, “…associate sends over are not in your league, not at all.”
“Over there on that table you’ll find cab fare,” he said with a part smile, part pout.
“Let’s not say good-bye! I hate good-byes, let us say auf wiedersehen. The Germans hate good-byes too, they prefer to say until we meet again. So touching, don’t you think? Everyone says Germans are cool and aloof, but in my experience a German boy can be quite emotional.
“Oh, where was I?” he said, and shook his head as if to help things fall into place. “Oh yes, until we meet again,” he coughed. “Can you come back tomorrow?
“You see, I have no shame, no façade behind which to hide. At this time in my life I have little time to waste on empty courtesies, and I am most grateful for your giving me a most sincere courtesy.”
Gentleman looked up with his burning eyes as his guest wordlessly put on his motorcycle jacket and walked to the door and opened the door to find the nurse standing there, his hands folded and resting on his stomach. Somehow, despite being almost a foot shorter, nurse managed to look down in disdain at the departing figure.
Calling to him, Gentleman said, “Don’t forget about tomorrow, I’ll be waiting,” were the last words he heard as the thick fortress like door closed with a heavy thud.
The black cars’ headlights flashed on and off. He felt the envelope with its “cab fare” crumpled into his pocket as he climbed in and sat down.
What had he meant by “German boys could be so emotional?” and had he meant boys as small male children or boys as in men or little value or important like the pool boy or yard boy or houseboy?
And what was Gentleman’s type anyway? He was like a small boy himself, the small hands, the face with its delicate features, the phrases spoken by someone playing grownup.
Chapter 24
He stood. When his phone rang, he didn’t recognize the number and let it go to voicemail.
“Hello,” the voice said, “It’s me, I was delighted with our visit today and it’s simply absolutely necessary we meet again tomorrow.” Gentleman’s words came in bursts of surprising power, mixed with a slurry of mumbling. “I know you’ll come, I can trust you,” followed by a click.
Nurse stood at the door to the library without opening it. His small dark eyes narrowed to slits. “He’ll get bored with you,” nurse hissed in his mincing rhythm, “You’ll see, he always does,” and with that, he pushed the door open and quickly stepped aside to avoid contamination by contact.
“Ah, I knew you would come. I knew I could depend on you. After what you told me, how could I doubt you?” Gentleman said in one long rush of words that crashed into silence when he stopped to catch his breath.
They both looked at the door closing with a heavy click.
Gentleman looked at the door a moment, then said, “Oh, don’t pay any attention to him. He’s very…” he paused to find a word, “he’s very protective. That’s what he is.”
Watched by Gentleman he walked carefully around the paintings and drawings under the eyes of these lost men. Their faces were benign, though no one was smiling. They looked out with expressions of detachment, their eyes alert yet accepting. He had seen Nurses’ eyes burning with hatred only moments ago and he could understand Gentleman’s befriending of these half-naked sailors and foolish men of pleasure.
“Yes, they’re here too; they’re here all the time. They are a great comfort to me,” said Gentleman in a low quite voice as he looked down at the floor. “They’ll never leave me.”
“Still, it’s not quite the same thing as having,” Gentleman paused, then said, “as having you here!” His hands came up and his fingers burst open in punctuation. Gentleman laughed and brought his hands together in his lap, a very polite boy enjoying glee, having forgotten for a moment the dark ages that had come with growing up.
Gentleman looked down at his crooked fingers, at the knobby wrists. “I wasn’t always like this,” he said and gestured with both hands as if he might wave off the disappointing appendages.
“I was once very skilled with my hands, you see,” Gentleman said, then he lowered his voice and leaned forward to whisper.
“You see, I invented certain things for the government…certain, ah, devices, for keeping s
ecrets. I liked using my hands. I can see that now, now after…after what happened. But they wanted me to invent more, to use my mind in new ways and so I invented codes, ciphers, ways to cloak words, and documents to make them travel incognito like spies themselves. I made up disguises to hide cables and transmissions for the government, to make them travel invisibly everywhere, anywhere.
“Making something invisible come naturally to me I had been hiding things my entire life, I’ve spent a lifetime keeping secrets so it was only second nature to go to work to make more secrets,” he said.
“Unlike my friends here,” Gentleman looked around the room and nodded in acknowledgement, “each face, each figure, they are exactly as you see them. They have nothing to hide.” He looked at the faces around them smiling as he went from one to the next to another, nodding at each one the way old friends do when they have grown past the formula of rote greetings.
Gentleman took in a long, deep breath as if waking up from a night of heavy sleep and then he said, “I had learned to cover-up most of my life ever so long that helping the government cover up its secrets was instinct for me.
“And there was so much to cover up. The government is afraid to let the people know what is going on. The shock might undo them all, who knows, they may be right. People are so fickle, going from one fad to another,” and here Gentleman shuddered.
“Not that I’m old-fashioned,” he resumed in his breathless rush, “I have a cell phone; I called you and left a message for you, didn’t I? But I prefer the reality of your flesh and blood presence, none of this virtual nonsense. Everyone pursuing each other with emails and texts and avatars; they’ve become virtual people, they just exist on each other’s screens; they play golf without ever planting their feet on grass; they raise and feed pets by tapping away at a keyboard. They have virtual lives, these virtual people.”
“He thinks I’m growing softhead because of my friends.”
He? Nurse, of course.
“But each one of them was real flesh, real blood, they threw off real heat and lived real lives, big, sloppy, lives!” Gentleman sunk in his chair.
“And they were so generous with me, I so unlike them. Well, in some ways unlike them,” he said with a half-smile. He dug his hands again into his lap almost squirming, dreaming, once again the young man befriended by models, handbag designers, the fashionable, the sailors and soldiers and policeman that crowded the streets of a city not so long ago.
“But you must again forgive me for my bad manners,” said Gentleman, his voice taking on the timbre of a man of middle age. “This evening is all about you because you see I’m making a history about my world, a world I covered up for so long that I lost my way in it but no longer. I found what I had to do after The Accident, and that’s to show my friends the light of the Truth that comes out from hiding. And so when you tell me your story, where you were born and how you have lived, I will pass it along to the next.” Gentleman paused waiting for words to come to him, “to the next boy and the next so all our lives can help the next boy find his way.”
“Well, well… you say an army base like so many here; I believe the children of soldiers are called … no, what is it? Yes, that’s it! Brats! Such a cruel term for such beautiful children, such brave children to share their father… was it your father? I want to be correct now that we have so many women soldiers marching their high heels down the halls of the Pentagon… and so you offered your father and your childhood up to our nation.” Gentleman shook his head slowly from side to side. “And your mother?” he asked “oh, but that explains your exquisite handsome face, the blend of our solid American Middle West… which is not so West as it is middle… and the Far East.
“Yours is a classic story. A young man, a patriot from the Heartland fights to save his country and the world from Evil. He sees terrible things, horrible noisy places crowded with the enemy and miraculously he… he’s washed up on the shore of a tropical island and, again another miracle, he meets a maiden of the South Seas, a gentle shy creature with large brilliant eyes like… topazes!
“Oh I can see it now… native dancers, chaste glances, stolen kisses; your father so smart and dashing in his uniform, your mother in an exotic garment, a flower behind her ear. Oh I see a bon fire on the beach, the waves slapping again and again at the shore, the flames and embers whirling into the sky of a thousand twinkling stars, the ocean murmuring and chanting, casting a magic spell.”
Gentleman sighed. “It’s all so beautiful the way I tell it… be kind to me and say it was so.” His eyes glistened as he blinked away a tear.
“But look at you, how… well-formed you are! I can see just by looking at you how it had to be as I imagined it and I can add your story to my other boys. I call them boys but they are… men. Oh it’s true they’re big, healthy and strong but deep inside there is a boy in each of them. I don’t mean a weakness or fear although I have seen that too. No: a brave little boy who faces the world all alone,” his voice trailed off.
“But I’m a naughty boy myself!” his voice came back in a loud boom. “I want to hear all about you… where did you grow up?… Oh of course, everywhere… everywhere is a big place. Could you help your dear friend with just a name or two? In army bases, Texas, the Carolinas, Germany too!? I do detect a prince’s tone no doubt acquired during your time in Bavaria…
“And school no no no! Don’t be ashamed… I only ask to help me frame your story for the others…
“The West Virginia Reformatory for Boys? My dear lad, is there such a place? Well of course in West Virginia there would… And then the military and war where you received such terrible wounds! Please just a moment” Gentleman said. He reached into the shadows to an end table at his arm. He felt around a thicket of photographs in frames, sea shells, a malachite cigarette box, a small bronze of a Greek youth and plucked out a black bound album, the kind used for sketching.
“I make notes, to help me remember my boys and their stories. Would you mind?” Gentleman said.
The visitor knew to rise again from the chair opposite Gentleman and, turning his back to pull his t-shirt over his head. He carefully arranged the shirt over the back of the gilt chain and turned around.
Lines formed an x above the bridge of Gentleman’s nose and with a gentle shake of his head from side to side Gentleman made marks in the book as it lay across his lap.
“It seems that I can still draw after my Accident; as strange as it may sound. It seems strange to me,” he said as his right hand danced around the open pages.
“I’m not able to draw a straight line when I want to nor am I able to draw diagrams or prepare blueprints.” He looked up and studied what he saw before him.
“But the doctors… my dear boy there were so many, one after another; my superiors were so eager… So desperate! To put me back together again. But the doctors said I had a kind of palsy… they didn’t actually use that word, so 18th Century and doctors want to be so modern. They said I had… oh abracadabra… well not that either an apraxia, that’s their word. It seems that if I want to make a plan or what we call in my trade a schematic, my hands just fall apart, not matter how hard I try or how desperate I want to, my hands can’t draw a straight line or any of the symbols and ciphers that once came from my fingertips, like water flowing from a tap.” Gentleman held his hands in front of his face and stared at them, the strange and unfamiliar fingers of betrayal.
He put them down and returned to making marks with his right hand, his face, his quick searching mouth, his knotted brow relaxing into the calm of his concentration.
When he looked up again, he said “I see better this way; so strange in these days when photographs are everywhere, with cameras built into telephones, into buildings, above doorways and at street corners.
“You know what I see? A mystery,” Gentleman said. His eyes gleamed, blinking.
“You have terrible scars on your body and that long one across your stomach,” Gentleman paused and shuddered before saying
“but your face is unlined, untroubled by the assaults on your body, unmarked by the dangers of time. Truly a mystery. As if you’ve been enchanted, a spell cast over you that spared your face the insults that your body so clearly knows. Ah the vagaries of Fate, the kindness that Fate can bestow to spare your face in an explosion.”
Gentleman fell silent again making marks across the page.
“Beauty is its own Truth, makes its own Rules. But surely you must know that… oh yes your military upbringing must have taught you modesty, so refreshing. But surely you understand why you are here, why you are still here?
“I was as you are right now, a face that drew second glances, long hard frank stares. So first I thought I was a freak, something mutant but a young woman who thought she was to be my wife… another story another life ago… explained that a man could be beautiful, handsome yes but also beautiful…” Gentleman sat a moment in silence. “It all seems so long ago now but I remember that moment of her revelation the place… a cave like bar off campus and the lovely girl as she explained myself to me and eased my fears.
“And with her explanation came a clue to what had happened even earlier in my life, of something that had happened when I was a boy, something so terrible that I could not even talk about it to my parents: I didn’t have the words you see, I couldn’t talk of something without words to describe it.
“Not like today when small children know all kinds of words, know of all kinds of unspeakable things,” and again Gentleman gave a delicate, brief shudder.
“Someone said that Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth… they said something else too… oh it will come to me later, I can’t remember now.
“But you see I look for Truth in the faces of the boys that come to me…” Gentleman said, his eyes large and unblinking.
“And when I understood the gift I had, the truth that came to me as a revelation, I was set free again just as people say “The Truth Shall Set You Free!”