Later, when room service brought up our lunch, I attempted to give him his first instructions in how to be a waiter. He had had enough experience with Arcaty’s cafes to know what waitresses do, and a waiter was simply a waitress in pants. He did an admirable job of keeping a fresh linen napkin draped over his crooked arm. He had some difficulty on his first attempt at using a corkscrew, but he got the hang of it and managed, by holding the bottle between his legs, to get the cork out, and he was very quick to understand my explanation of why he should proffer me the cork to sniff and then pour my wineglass only a taste pending my approval.
All that was lacking was suitable attire for my waiter/houseboy. Arcaty didn’t have a real department store, or even a men’s shop, as such, but there were some specialty shops on Spring Street that carried some clothing and shoes he could wear, and before the afternoon was over we had assembled a fairly decent wardrobe for him, although nothing really fit him well because of his skinniness and his height.
On the way home I asked if he didn’t have any belongings, anywhere, that he would want to bring with him to the Halfmoon. “It’ll take me just a secont,” he said, and disappeared up some alley off Spring Street and was gone for more than a second, more like five minutes, while I stood and waited for him, having dreadful thoughts that he had changed his mind and had disappeared for good.
But eventually he returned to me, bringing a little red bandanna (“snotrag,” he inelegantly called it) into which he had wrapped all his former earthly possessions, having kept the bundle stashed away in the crevice of a rock wall off Spring Street.
Back at our lodgings, he revealed the contents of the bandanna: a frayed toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, an extra pair of socks, a broken black comb with teeth missing, some kind of shiny rock, a creased black-and-white photo of a homely young girl presumed to be his mother, a fishing lure, two nickels, three lumps of hard candy, four bottle caps from Dr. Pepper and Grapette, an arrowhead, a much-chewed pencil, a feather, a blue hair ribbon, a school report card with bad grades except in reading, some rubber bands and lengths of string, and an eight-times folded page from Holiday magazine depicting a pastoral valley of the Bodarks.
I suggested that before serving our dinner he might want to run up for a shower and change clothes.
“How come my privy’s a two-holer?” he wanted to know, after his shower.
I didn’t understand him. “I’m sorry?” I said.
“There’s two toilets side by side in my bathroom,” he pointed out. “Only somebody took the seat offn one of ’em.”
“That one,” I said, “isn’t a toilet. It’s a bidet. It’s for washing, not elimination.”
“Washing what?” he wanted to know.
“Your bottom,” I said.
He blushed. “I never heared tell of no sech a thang in all my life,” he said. And it seemed I could hear the distant echo of the accents of his Aunt Fannie in his words.
At dinner he was neatly dressed. When he’d finished serving me, once again, as I’d done at lunch, I invited him to sit across from me and eat his own dinner (and sample the wine, too, if he desired, and he did), although I explained that, as a houseboy, he wouldn’t always be invited to join me at meals. He giggled and remarked, “Back up home, in the old days, the womenfolks used to have to wait till the men was all done eatin before they could set at the table theirselfs. You’re turnin it around, aint ye?”
“Right,” I said. “In Svanetia, where I came from, the same custom prevailed, in olden times. The women never ate until the men had finished, but stood behind the men’s chairs, waiting and starving.”
“Tell me everthing about Svanetia,” he requested, and I was pleased and flattered that he’d ask, but I didn’t know where to begin. He prompted, “Does everbody got them bee-days in their house?”
“No, I never saw a bidet in Svanetia. I never saw one until I got to Paris. In Svanetia, they have privies that are just wooden shacks built around deep holes in the ground, out away from the houses, quite similar to the outhouses in Stick Around.”
His face lit up, and his mouth dropped open. “Do you know Stick Around?”
“I lived there while I wrote most of my novel, Georgie Boy.”
He resumed scratching his head.
IV
Why did it take me so long to investigate the real reason that Travis kept scratching his head? Quite possibly I knew from the beginning but was not willing to confirm my suspicion. Later that first night I reached the point—or rather, the two of us reached the point—of easiness, familiarity, and closeness where I felt I had to confirm my suspicion, even if it cost me repugnance toward this ideal youth.
But getting him to let me have a close examination of his scalp was almost as difficult as persuading a shy boy to take off his pants. I had to use subterfuge: It was easy enough to entice him into sitting at the grand checkerboard table in the chess nook and playing with the large ivory and ebony pieces (I let him have white for his maiden try). He was genuinely eager to learn the rudiments of the game. He had never even seen a chess set before, but he had read about the game in several books, including a biography of Bobby Fischer that had enthralled him. He “misdoubted,” he said, that he would be able to make a match for me “for a good long spell,” but that first night he tried his best to learn the basic rules and concepts, although the unusual license given to the movements of knights was very difficult for him to grasp, and under pretext of needing to guide his placement of his knight, I came around to his side of the table and bent over him. From long experience, I was able to “read” the board from his side as easily as from mine, and we continued the game that way, with me behind him, sometimes resting one hand on his shoulder while reaching out with the other hand to show him where and how to move his knight, or to move one of my own pieces in response.
The hand I laid on his shoulder became restless and curious: I let it slip down inside his shirt, over his chest, which I stroked. When my fingertip touched his nipple, he shuddered, shivered, lightly gasped. I ran my fingertip circularly around that nipple, then shifted to the other nipple, which was already swollen. I spoke quietly into his ear, “Does this bother you?”
His voice dropped a register to reply hoarsely, “Naw, that feels right good, but I aint gonna be able to concentrate on the next place my horsey wants to go.”
I misunderstood, for a while, that what he meant by “horsey” was simply his knight. I unbuttoned his shirt so that I could slip my hand farther down the front of him. While doing so, however, my face rested against the top of his head, and my eyes were startled to discover in his hair a number of the nits of lice.
Excusing myself to go to the bathroom, I privately phoned a still-open local pharmacy, inquired about the best medications for lice, and had an assortment of solutions and soaps and salves sent up to the Halfmoon’s desk, from where Bob the porter would bring them up to my floor. When I resumed playing chess with Travis, I returned to my own side of the board, and I concluded in a few moves our second game, checkmating him more savagely than I’d intended.
“Wooo, you creamed me!” he said, and I needed a moment to determine which of the slang meanings of that verb he intended: that I’d simply beaten him badly. Then he studied me quizzically and said, “It’s okay if you wanter feel me. Why did you stop?”
I was spared replying by the porter’s knock at the door, which I answered, taking the package from the pharmacy and tipping Bob a dollar.
“Who was that?” he asked, as I returned from answering the porter’s knock.
“Do you like chess so far?” I asked. “Tomorrow we will play several games. But now, dear, I would like to ask you to take this special soap and wash your hair very thoroughly with it, and then I will put some of this stuff on it.”
He blushed scarlet and hung his head. “Just don’t call me ‘dear,’ okay?” was all he could say. But he reached out and took the package of soap and headed for his quarters.
I called after
him, “You can just wear your new bathrobe.”
And when he returned to me later, his wet hair plastered to his head and his whole young body smelling of the medicated soap, he was wearing only the bathrobe, a fancy velour of emerald green that complemented and complimented his red freckles, and on his cute feet a new pair of what he called “flip-flops,” made of rubber.
But alluring as he was, whatever powerful attraction I had for him that night was canceled by the thought of his lice. I arranged him sitting on the floor with his back to me, his body between my legs, while I applied the solution and then spent several minutes combing it into his hair, each stroke of the comb bringing out a dozen or so of the nits.
Having him between my legs like that aroused me greatly, but whatever lust I was feeling for him was spoiled by the unpleasant task of grooming him.
It was just as well I didn’t feel inclined to seduce him that night. Looking back, I think I came eventually to appreciate how gradual our relationship was, how my seduction of him, if that was what it was, did not occur rashly and hastily. That first night, when I’d finished applying the medicine to his head and combing his hair, after he’d dutifully asked if there was anything he could get for me or do for me, and I’d declined his offer to brush my hair (for fear I’d catch a few of the nits off his hands), he went off to bed and put out his light, but with the door to his quarters ajar, at my request, in case there was anything I needed to have my houseboy do in the middle of the night.
Much later, after I’d had my vodka nightcap and was doing some reading in Sam Clemens, I heard him crying. It seemed so uncharacteristic of him that I had to listen for a good while before I convinced myself that indeed the sounds were of a twelve-year-old boy crying.
I got up and went in unto him, and I sat beside him and rested my hand on top of his head as if my touch itself could cure him. “What’s the matter, Tray-vis?” I asked softly.
“I guess I been lousy all my life,” he said. And then, intelligent enough to catch the double meaning of the adjective, he made a kind of chuckling laugh and said, “I mean, infested with louses.”
“Lice,” I gently corrected him. “But we’re going to get rid of them. Wait and see if we don’t.”
He sniffled. “Still and all, you won’t never want me to sleep with you.”
“Do you want to sleep with me?”
“I need for you to like me,” he said. “I wanter do whatever you want me to, just so’s you’ll always like me.”
“I like you very much, Tray-vis,” I assured him. “Your lice don’t bother me. And I don’t ever want you to feel you have to sleep with me.”
“But I want to,” he declared.
And oh! the way he said that, sincerely and with feeling, gave me a powerful urge to take him into my bed despite his lice. I knew that if I did, I’d have to wash and rewash the sheets, but that wasn’t really the problem. There was something about the intensity of his wish that made me ask, paraphrasing my earlier question to him, “Have you ever slept with a girl?”
It is too bad that my verbal modesty prevented me from coming right out and asking him if he’d ever had sex with a female before. When he said, “No, I aint,” he was truthfully declaring that he had never drifted off to sleep in the company of a female.
21
I
So he did not sleep with me that night. Nor the next. According to my journal, Travis Coe, whose bed hopping in Hollywood has become legendary, did not enter my bed until his tenth night under my roof. It took nearly that long for him to banish the lice from his hair.
We developed some daily routines. Each morning, the alarm clock in his room would rouse him at 7:00; he would shower, apply his dose of hair medicine, dress, open a can of 9-Lives for Morris (of whom he was grudgingly accepting, although the cat did not return the feeling), run down to the desk to get the morning’s copy of the Gazette, the one decent daily published in the entire state, and a bouquet of fresh flowers left by the local florist, then chat (and possibly flirt) with Lurline, the cute desk clerk who had replaced Sharon and who, despite being a staunch Jehovah’s Witness, “tolerated” my employment of Travis because she was under orders from the management to “do whatever that lady wants.” He was back in my kitchen by 7:45.
Travis had volunteered to prepare breakfast, and it took him only a few mornings to learn how many seconds to leave the egg cooker running, and how many seconds the toaster required, and the exact amount of mocha Java to scoop into the Mr. Coffee machine.
At 8:00 on the dot, he would turn on the Harman Kardon system, flooding all three floors of the apartment with something by Beethoven, a quartet or a sonata, the Appassionata, perhaps, then bring up to my bedroom, and present me with, a bed tray upon which were the breakfast, the flowers, and the newspaper. He would return at 8:30 to collect the dishes and ask if I needed anything further, then he would run my bath; it took a good half hour for the enormous sunken tub to fill with water and bubbles.
Once I was in my “soak,” as he called it, he would be free to do what he liked, usually curling up on his own sofa with a book—Wah’kon-tah, which took him only two mornings to finish, and then, with my permission, Georgie Boy, which took him three or four. After my bath (and I must confess that I had discovered quickly how easily the vigorous jets of water coming out of the Jacuzzi were capable of arousing me, so that I had to restrain myself from summoning my houseboy to get into the water with me), I went to work: In lieu of any genuinely creative employment (for a good second-book idea still eluded me), I was busily attempting to read and correct the proofs of the French edition of my novel, Le Garçon Georges. I’d had a few years of French in college and had used it much during my visit to my aunt and namesake in Paris, and I thought I was capable, with the help of a Cassell’s French Dictionary purchased at the Gazebo and some real or imagined promptings from the spirit of Daniel Lyam Montross, of spotting a number of misrenderings and malentendus in Claude Voleur’s generally excellent translation, which in a few more months would become the number-one best-seller in France.
After lunch (I refused Travis’s request to let him prepare it himself, not because I mistrusted his abilities but because in this off-season the Halfmoon’s kitchen needed some excuse for staying open), we would digest our meals together in the chess nook, where I would introduce him to openings, the Ruy Lopez and the Benko Gambit particularly, and I would resist the temptation further to hover behind his back and feel up his chest.
Then we would go for a walk. The early March weather was often sunny, almost balmy, and while nothing was blooming other than tulips and daffodils I was able to predict, in our rambles along the woodland paths on the slopes of Halfmoon Mountain, the places where the first mushrooms would appear in April. “Just wait and see,” I would say to him. “Right there will spring up a cluster of Secotium agaricoides next month. It looks like what you call ‘puffball,’ but it has a fleshy central stem like other mushrooms, just concealed.” He said he would come back here next month and see if I was wrong.
But mostly our hikes took us not off into forest footpaths but down among the man-built erections of Arcaty: There are fifty-four miles of limestone retaining walls, built without mortar, lining the sidewalks of the streets, as well as the back streets and alleys, which spill and twist all over the knolls and ravines of that precipitous village (such is the meandering of the town’s steep streets that none of them ever intersect). Walking between the looming blocks of limestone (Travis and I were the only pedestrians) gave us a snug, protected feeling, almost as if our walkways were ramparted. Behind the retaining walls, usually, are the quaint Victorian gingerbread cottages and mansions that are the town’s major tourist attraction, since the springs themselves are no longer potable or even functional—but we would visit them too: Grotto Spring and Cave Spring, with their picturesque limestone formations; and the springs of Spring Street, beginning with the dramatic Halfmoon Spring itself, dry but enshrouded in a pergola-pagoda-gazebo within t
he crescent-shaped limestone ledge that gave the name of its shape to the spring and thus to the hotel; followed just down the street by Harington Spring, with its benches for resting; and Sweet (or Sweetheart) Spring, surrounded and surmounted by the steep climbing stairs.
The “shortcut” to get from one street to another in Arcaty is often not the conventional sidewalk but a steep flight of steps, of native limestone, or of old poured cement, or of iron or even of wood: stairs plunging and turning up and down the embankments of limestone, often flanked by steep cement gutters for storm drainage, and often, or always, flanked by iron or steel handrails. Soon after my arrival in Arcaty, I recognized these labyrinths of staircases as the earthly embodiment of those seen continually in my old familiar dreams of climbing and descending an endless sequence of stone steps, concrete steps, iron steps, and wooden steps, staircases that led up or down to significant places whose significance had always eluded me, and, once I’d seen the mazes of inclines in reality, I stopped dreaming about them. Now Travis and I spent a lot of time going up and down the great variety of stairways that link the pathways of the town. Although I had lived in Arcaty for over two years and had done much steep walking there, Travis seemed more familiar than I with the routes or destinations, if any, of these steps. One of these stairways, almost hidden beside a shop where Main Street meets Spring Street, led us up to the grotto or cavern wherein were the remains of an old rock house purportedly built by the Osage Indians but actually erected by the white man who displaced them: Dr. Alvah Jackson, the discoverer of Halfmoon Spring and its magic properties. The rock house is open to the elements, uninhabited, secluded; and I was somehow reminded, climbing up to it, of going with Kenny Elmore up to his rooftop astronomical observatory. I would have enjoyed using the rock house as a symbolic site for taking Travis’s virginity…except that on the March afternoon we visited it the sunless grotto was chilly and even damp, and Travis, having finished Wah’kon-tah, wanted to talk about the “spirit” of the Osages that he sensed in the grotto. We talked a lot and never touched.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 28