White Leather and Flawed Pearls

by Susan Altstatt

  “I was remembering,” I said, eyes shut, “the other time when you were here. How we sat that day and talked. And finally I asked you. About Harlan—” (I choked on the name as always) “—And you gave me that long story, how you were nineteen and playing in the street for a living, and after hours in this club, and how this gorgeous person started showing up each night to listen, and got you scared he was a ghost or something you’d dreamed up from being lonely.

  “And how, one night afterward he came with a guitar and played this stuff that he’d written to fancy up your pieces, and wound up coming to your room, and you gave him your bed and slept on the floor, and then he just stayed and you were sleeping on the floor, and you were ashamed to touch him.

  “And then he was showing you something, playing four-handed guitar one afternoon, and he kissed you. You kissed him back, but he got scared and you had this awful fight, and wound up, and wound up—”

  “Look,” he said, “I know how we wound up; you don’t have to—”

  “—And you had to go downstairs and play, and when you came back the lights were off. And you were scared he’d split. But he was asleep. And you just got in with him.”

  No answer but the birdsong, and the wind. The bass mumble of gigantic striped bees, bending each chosen flower nearly to the ground with the weight of their attentions.

  “I was wondering,” I said, “what went on next morning.”

  “What for?”

  Pausing to check us out for edibility, a dragonfly balanced on cellophane wings.

  “Comparison’s sake?”

  All around, a flotilla of its kind rowed the breeze, tiny aerial pirate galleys, just above the grasses.

  “God! I don’t want to talk to you about—any more than—Well why would you think—”

  “You started it.”

  “Would I know you’d be thinking about that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Nothing happened, anyway.”

  He’d turned away from me. His breathing steadied, grew long and slow. End of story, I thought. Refuge in sleep. The sky was warm and humid, full of slow clouds. It lay on the blooming meadow like a kind lover. But I was wrong.

  “Well, I woke the next morning,” he said to the grass, “and there was his head on my pillow with me. I was looking him in the face. I never saw a girl was half so beautiful.

  “All hot and damp from his sleep. Skin like an ivory rose with dew on it. And his beard beginning to come through. Ivory with black glitter on it. To show he wasn’t any girl at all. I must have lain and looked for hours.

  “Then his eyes came open. It was my part to say something: he was waking up naked in my bed. I couldn’t think of anything right. At last I said, ‘If you were a bottle of champagne, I’d want to drink it all.’”

  I managed a whisper, “Was that right?” Somebody’s simple sleepy nakedness had excelled all luxuries.

  “I guess it was. It must have been. He cried.”

  I was crying too; I wished I hadn’t asked. I would want it forever now: somebody else’s very great praise.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “what happened after that. Well I don’t! What d’y’think, I have total recall or something? ‘What happened after that?’ We got on with the rest of our lives, that’s what happened: learning to live together, learning to play the fucking instruments, learning to keep our faces fed—”

  Wait! Roll over, sit up. So I’m crying, so what? So is he. I’m naked. So is he. In the middle of someone else’s praise, I think I’ve just heard my thing go by.

  “Would you like your face fed?”

  I’d hit upon a very potent commonality. We’d had an almond croissant, two cups of coffee, and half a bottle of champagne each since this time yesterday. He’d taken a big breath, but no more words came out. He had tears on his cheek and a startled expression. “You mean—food?” Clearly a dim word from a distant past.

  I bundled up the comforter. It wasn’t really damaged. He walked in naked from the meadow as slender and gaudy and shameless as the flowers that brushed his legs.

  Tuesday, August 19

  Aside from the obvious, this is how he meant to use his time. Have me drive an indicated six miles, and flag the place. Bring the car home. Put on his Walkman with one day’s tape of the hundred-mile jig. Dance his twelve miles worth of music, out to the flag and back. I could jog with him or drive behind. He wanted me close, in case. He’d done the same, he said, every day of the tour that wasn’t concert prep, a concert, or a travel day.

  Having learned my lesson, I wondered, but didn’t ask, if Harlan jogged with him. I jogged with him.

  But he danced by himself, through future crowds and English afternoons. He knew that whole road in his mind: the factories, villages, grimy housing projects, the woods and heaths and desolate country places. He knew where each band was. You could see him pass from white boy’s rock to black boy’s reggae, and never need to hear the music.

  This is what he’d learned to do: run up trees.

  He’d be bopping along, and pass a big tree. A sudden acceleration toward it, he’d leap, dig his heel into the bark, take another long stride up the trunk and kick away, arching into a back flip, or straight up, rocket fashion. Far out in the road he’d make a gymnast’s rebound and keep on dancing.

  Usually the Walkman stayed on.

  “How can you be sure of a tree in just that spot?”

  “Rather sure there isn’t,” he shouted back. “It’s a bloody village High Street. Got to do something for distraction.” He did another splendid aerial off a fir tree. This time the Walkman parted company. He let me listen: a kids’ god-awful metal band called Copper Shrift.

  “Well, it works on walls if they’re rough,” he said. “Works on cars too, but the paint suffers.”

  Sometimes he carried the fiddle on his arm, and played his own tune like an old-time dancing master. When our way was through the clear-cut places, he looked, and thought, but didn’t ask. I guessed he’d learned his lesson too.

  After his daily miles, while I was wrestling with his supper, he sat out in the meadow lost in grass, singing and playing to himself. Then the range cattle that graze loose in the forest around Pardee would wander in, bells dinging and donging, and listen in a circle all around him.

  ———

  Discoveries.

  Submitting was not, in fact, the only thing I could do to him. There was a seemingly limitless number of other things, and he vastly enjoyed almost all of them.

  Everything I was taught in school, almost everything my peers whispered, almost (but not quite) everything I ever fantasized concerning sex was wrong. Almost (but not quite) everything I’d gathered off Tom’s records was real.

  The books in that much-hyped sex-ed class said, “If you don’t enjoy it the first time: don’t worry dear, You’re normal.” If you looked in the back of those books, you found they were funded and published by the companies that make sanitary napkins. Sex takes a little stretching out, but so does any other brand of athletics. And I haven’t coveted normalcy since the third grade.

  Sex is not mind blowing. We are talking natural function here, pleasant. Pleasant like fine food and long unhurried sleep. Tom was just a very natural, bodily person.

  He did it in bed.

  He did it in the barn.

  He did it in the bathtub.

  He did it in the living room.

  He did it in the car.

  He did it in the meadow.

  He did it behind trees.

  He did it on top of huge, sunny boulders.

  He did it in the road (as in the song, no one watching).

  He did it on sleek granite just above the foaming, ice-green runs of Bright’s Creek. And some people came out on the rocky bluff above us. Well, he’d promised me public procreation; why be surprised to find him good as his word? Like: Land of Many Uses! Enjoy your National Forest! And you don’t need spark arresters. I think they went away.

  He tried doin
g it in the creek. That was too cold for even him to get it up. So we dried off, severally danced and jogged the miles back home to Pardee, and started over in the bed. We were each other’s sweet amusement park: we went on all the rides.

  Thought: if he goes on so enthusiastically fitting him and his into me and mine, in the end I might contain him all. I would be his outside then, his garment, his cloak of invisibility.

  One kind of little birds in Pardee meadow: the male is gaudy and bright orange, and he sings from the tips of willows. The female doesn’t sing a note. What’s more, she’s brown. She watches. But inside their little bodies is one flesh and bone. Their desire is for each other.

  Wednesday, August 20

  Tom’s birthday.

  As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,

  so is my beloved among the sons.

  I sat down under his shadow with great delight,

  and his fruit was sweet to my taste

  He brought me to the banqueting house,

  and his banner over me was love—

  (Thus far the Song of Songs.)

  Thursday, August 21

  Learning was about the shape of it: to live together, to play the instruments, to keep our faces fed. Shyly going through each other’s stuff. His suitcase said a lot about him. The clothes were neat, even the well-worn ones, as things bought new from the store.

  The man lived in a pair of Levi’s. I never would have guessed. Split across the knees seam to seam, and across both thighs in back. I remember sexy shameless guys at school who used to wear the butt-split jeans. You’d see the pockets hanging down inside, never any underwear. That’s why they did it, so you’d sit and puzzle if they wore any. Always that nice expanse of sinewy male thigh, discreetly furry. Tom had very little body hair, but the back of his thigh was a downy Hawaiian sunset. And the rips were just right for a lover’s hand to slide in when he kissed them. Didn’t he know.

  But the Levis were clean to the point of sterile. So were the two pair of super-expensive marathoner’s shoes he alternated for his jig, the white briefs, white socks, white cotton sweats, and white Lycra running tights.

  Under the clothes was the music for the hundred-mile jig. Eighteen tapes, two a day: three songs from each band, one for his approach, which they’d play until cued that he’d come in range, then the song he’d chosen for his pass-by, and a third for his retreat. I listened to nearly half. Some were famous bands (as he said), some splendid songs I’d known for years. And some were just sweet kids, earnestly awful.

  Underneath the music were the pillboxes. A rainbow of pills: red, blue, yellow, green. Clear gold gelatin footballs, two-tones, lots of different whites. No way to tell what any one was for, parceled out in daily dose containers.

  What could they all be? Health supplements, vitamins, that kind of thing? Stuff to keep him off drugs? Medications? Was he sick and lying to me? He was dosing himself up like a heart transplant.

  Maybe they were drugs, and he was lying to me. One item in the neat utility of his suitcase, a flat white plastic jug, still wore its prescription under tape. Three pieces of significant info: the name of a London chemist, Tom’s name, and PABA. He caught me looking.

  “Came back the time before all-over freckles. Old Harlan didn’t like that.” I got the quick apologetic bob that went with Harlan’s name. Getting quicker (and less apologetic) every time. “Well, I can’t take the sun. Back when we were playing in the street, I’d go all red. He made me get this stuff. Never gone without it since, except for that one time.” Now it was the old shy-grin-and-flaming-blush trick. It made my heart swell up and pop, as ever.

  “Prescription sunscreen?”

  “Unscented.”

  “You don’t like perfume?”

  (My observation: most men don’t. It’s the women who mythologize their body parts with perfume; and guys at best ignore the stuff. At worst they’re like Papa, who’ll come into some perfumed presence with an enormous rhino sniff, and the query,“What stinks?”)

  Tom said, “Like to choose the ones I live with, anyway.”

  His shampoo was a botanical with hardly any scent. His soap was Turkish: it smelled like sunny green-gold virgin olive oil in the bath, and on his skin like nothing.

  But the sunscreen made fascinating business. He wanted it frequently, all over (“Sun comes through cloth, y’know,”), and he wanted help smoothing it on. Helping him was risky.

  Times were, we never made it out into the sun at all.

  It occurred to me to wonder whether Harlan wore it too.

  Friday, August 22

  He hadn’t ever said how long he meant to stay. A week would give us till next Monday. I’d hoped somehow it might be forever. But he began to look restless.

  “What else is around here?”

  “Just more of the same.”

  He wasn’t a big eater, that’s for sure. Most of the steak stayed frozen. Some of the salad drooped. What he did like: fried egg sandwiches with bacon and lots of Dijon mustard. He also drank me out of milk. The closest place to buy more was the “lodge,” at the far side of the dam.

  I took him to the lodge. Dusty little place: flat spots for trailers, a boat launch, and a log cabin store with flush toilets, video games, a telephone, a coin-op laundry, and a hair salon. All the domestic female-type comforts.

  Some weekends in summer, a local western band gigs on the front steps. Izzy and me and friends would have fished and gone swimming on our side of the lake. When evening fell and the bats came out, we’d float the dark waters in a rubber boat and listen to the night-music, the whump-bumpa thumpa-bump electric bass and twangy country voices drifting over from the lodge.

  ———

  Always lots of kids around the lodge.

  Tom stood at the counter with my eggs and milk; the girls behind him had a raft of diet sodas. The woman rang Tom up; he handed her a hundred-dollar bill.

  “Nothing smaller than this on ya?”

  “Not that I go flashing around.”

  It was the way he said it. One six-pack of sodas hit the floor. Tom got his wad of change, and turned. Girls ringed him, silent as a pack of wolves. Tank tops and tube tops, French cut T-shirts saying, “Where the hell is Panther Creek Reservoir?” Wide open mouths, wide open eyes. Levis and feathered hair. Another six-pack dropped.

  He didn’t quite run, just a long flat lope. I ran. I barely cleared the door ahead of them; he was at the car. Now I had it started. They were massed outside his window.

  I banged it into reverse. “Lock your door!” I flung it backwards, past their toes. “Roll up your window!” I saw the mischief flash across his face, and thought about fireworks on a summer night. He rolled his window down.

  “Actually,” he said, “I’m not a thing like him.”

  I could see them in the rear-view mirror, pelting along in our dust till I turned the bend onto the dam.

  He was silent for the rest of the ride.

  I switched it off. We sat there in the car, at the top of the path that leads down to the cabin, as close as you can get and miss the sand.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t need to be.”

  “Try to understand, your place here means health to me. There’ve been some black times when it was all the health I could remember. I wanted to come back; see that I hadn’t imagined it.” I looked at him sitting there. He was still holding the eggs and milk. “It’s just that, like—this—” he indicated Pardee Camp, meadow, cabin, barn, with one long finger, “—would be your fancy private clinic. But I’m half well. Patient can’t take the clinic home with him.”

  “Ah, vhat you vant, Herr Rhymer, is outpatient health.”

  He giggled in spite of himself. “Let me tell you,” he said, “about Real Life. Place I quite dread to take you. One hotel room’s like another if you keep the shade drawn. Dressing rooms are all alike. Same things go on in the back of this limo as did in the last one. And the airplanes, and the stages, they all look alike.
The kids all look alike. Those girls back there are a big part of my life. I knew them faster than they knew me. And if I’m to make you part of my life, I must go home, and fit you in among the other pieces.” He shook his head sadly. “Y’know, it’s not going to be easy.”

  “I didn’t think it would.”

  “If you want me—” he said.

  “I want you.”

  “—Please take me home.”

  “Okay.”

  He grinned at me. “Amador County.”

  “Right.”

  “I do remember some things.”

  “Yeah.”

  So we did it in the front seat of the bus.

  ———

  Amazing how “unlike” a treasure in the hand can look from one approaching, a kind of psychological Doppler Shift. Imagine being on a quest, a lifetime struggle, years and years, to reach that pinnacle where Dulcinea holds the magic treasure, the Grail of Love—whatever—in keeping.

  And you make it. Sure enough you do. But when you get there, Dulcinea is changed before your eyes into a sweet human lover stuck on his own unlikely quest. That pinnacle was a slight rise in the ground. Its only treasure is this view: another wide, empty valley, and the real heights dimly visible beyond. On the road again. Moving right along. Only this time, Dulcinea’s going with me.

  ———

  Highway 88. Waterloo. The cheapo gas station got torn down a year ago, and with it the Holy Phone Booth where Tom once called to see if Harlan was alive. An incredibly garish McDonald’s stands in its place.

  The new phone hangs in a little plastic hood outside; no privacy of any kind. Tom had his arms around me; we could feel my heart hammering. It’s my call this time.

  Mama answered.

  “Hey.”

  Silence.

  “Andy?”

  “That’s my name.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Relax. I’ll be right home.”

  “Wait. Before you say anything, listen.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your father has ideas that are—what’s the word—”

  “Set-in-cement?”

  Tom choked quietly.