Shockproof Sydney Skate
Marijane Meaker also known as M. E. Kerr
For Nelson and Deb
One
SHOCKPROOF
Shockproof’s mother was talking in code again. This time the code was not for his benefit. Home from work with flu, M. E. Shepley Skate was in her room, across the hall from Shockproof’s, talking on the phone.
The code was for the benefit of the Francher Publishing switchboard, and any of Judy Ewen’s colleagues at Francher who might be within earshot.
M. E. Shepley Skate said, “Elliot’s moving out tonight and Ann’s a mess.”
It was a very simple code which Shockproof had broken some nine years ago when he was eight.
Elliot was Ellie of Ellie and Ann. Ellie was leaving Ann.
Much of the code went roughly this way:
Carl was Corita of Judy and Corita, if the discussion was about Judy and Corita. But if the discussion was about Judy and Judy’s drinking, Judy could become Judd, as in the sentence “I had a hell of a time getting Judd out of the Running Footman last night.”
George was Gloria of Gloria and Liz, but Liz could easily become Lew if they weren’t talking about Gloria and were discussing Liz’s old affair with the wife of a famous politician.
Conversely:
Edie was Eddie of Eddie and Leonard.
Mary was Martin of Martin and Ralph.
Vicki was Victor of Victor and Paul.
But if it were Eddie, Martin or Victor talking, Leonard, Ralph and Paul could quickly become Laura, Ruth and Pauline.
On and on.
Shockproof’s nickname for himself—and he was the only one to know he called himself Shockproof—had been inspired by the fact he had known about his mother for as long as he could remember, unbeknownst to M. E. Shepley Skate herself.
Even as early as his third year he had shown an uncanny appreciation of the fact something was radically wrong with his home life: he locked in any male delivery man who happened by with groceries, drugs or cleaning.
Shortly after this phase, he met his father, Harold Skate, for the first time. Subsequently, he spent three or four weeks out of every year with him.
A few months ago he had written to tell his father he was considering skipping Cornell, where in the fall he was to begin the study of zoology and veterinary medicine, and starting then and there in the swimming pool business—Skate & Son of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He would forgo his college education for an equal partnership with his father commencing 1 July. He had figured out an advertising campaign built around the slogan “Swim with Skates,” and saw no reason why they couldn’t double the company revenue minimum in six months’ time.
On and on.
All people write letters very late at night they wish they’d never written, but Shockproof regularly wrote such letters during the daytime, and the one detailing the future of Skate & Son was one of them. It was due to another Estelle Kelly rejection at Easter vacation.
He could make the most careful, sensitive and gentle love to Estelle Kelly, and no matter how he played it the next morning, even if he managed to remember to put on his shorts so she did not wake up and see it first thing, he was treated as though at some point in the night he had defecated on her.
That Easter Sunday of the letter-writing to his father, he had been beaten down by her again. Walking away from East End Avenue, sex smells all over his mouth and hands, since an Estelle Kelly Morning After Frost shattered any notion of taking the time to use the toilet for anything but the toilet, Shockproof had passed churches and heard hallelujahs and decided the only place he would ever be the recipient of any normal love was off in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where no one spoke in code and life was simple.
“What’s this about writing your father you’re not going on to college?” his mother had said while they were having a fast one at Kennedy, the morning she met his plane. That was three weeks ago. He had just graduated from a prep school in Staunton, Virginia. His mother had not attended the ceremonies, because his stepmother refused to be present where she was, and Harold Skate had insisted on seeing his son receive his diploma, since he had contributed to its cost. Pointed out by H. Skate in an angry mid-May exchange between H. Skate and M.E.
“What’s all what about that letter?” Shockproof shrugged.
“No thought goes unwritten, does it, ducks?”
“Oh, some do.”
“You ought to know better than to get him all revved up. He thought he’d finally convinced you to chuck the whole zoo scene, to sell swimming pools with him! Skate & Son.” She smiled and sighed and took a jolt of her double Old Forester on the rocks.
Shockproof gave a guffaw and said, “No way,” and played the game with himself that the others in the airport lounge suspected she was his older woman.
M. E. Shepley Skate was the casting director of a large ad agency. She had long light-brown hair and bright green eyes, and that morning she was all in white, with a green, yellow and blue scarf stamped YSL, smelling of some great scent that usually poured out of the ventilators in the stores near Fifty-seventh and Fifth.
That was when she told him, “I bought you a graduation gift, a ’57 T-bird.”
Shockproof was Colette’s Cheri, the boy lover, spoiled by the woman whose pearls he played with on her silk chaise. He proceeded with his fantasy at such a pace he was incapable of appreciating the fact that at last he had his own car. He imagined all eyes were slyly watching, ears straining to hear him say, “You bought me a Thunderbird?”
“You know the model with the porthole windows?”
He nodded, affected an effete expression for his audience.
M.E. said, “But the owner won’t let you have it for three weeks.”
“Thank you. Really,” he said, and she gave him a quick, curious glance, which made him wonder if she guessed how often he slipped in and out of his little roles.
She shrugged. “I’m saving wear and tear on my Mercedes.”
Instantly the fantasy dissolved. He was an aimless snob. “You have the Mercedes?” he exclaimed, his voice and face back to normal medium cool, bordering on warm. It took time for him to feel like himself again, after he was separated from her the months he was away at school; he was coming around. “Did you drive it out?”
“I did. Lovely.”
“What color?”
“Why would I be all in white? White.”
They had another fast one. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching them. No one was. “Thanks,” he said, sounding like his old self. “That’s a great graduation gift—a T-bird.”
He was home.
Driving in from the airport, sitting so he could study her in profile chain-smoking her Gauloises, he wondered if he felt anything for her at all. When he was six through ten and a half, the inevitable four and one half years of his mother’s domestic relationships, he remembered fearing she would die, so badly some nights he stayed awake and worried over it. What he feared was that he wouldn’t cry at her funeral, and then Lenore Cappenquill would be proven right at last. Cappy always said he didn’t care a damn about his mother, not a damn—just about one person: Sydney Skate.
He was always pondering the notion that this was highly possible, when he was not reminding himself that it was Voltaire who said of self-love: it is necessary to us, it is dear to us, it gives pleasure, and we must conceal it.
Of all the women his mother had ever been with, Cappy was the most formidable. She was an architect, with the offbeat habit for an architect of reading novels the way someone over three hundred pounds ate. That is: Cappy read anything, everything, indiscriminately, from Grace Metalious to Lawrence Durrell—set any book befo
re her, and Lenore Cappenquill devoured it.
From her, Shockproof had acquired his compulsion to read everything on the best-seller list, anything plugged on radio and TV, and whatever was stocked by the rental libraries. He used to compete with Cappy, try to read more than she did and trap her in the mornings at breakfast with a reference to one she hadn’t read. He was seldom successful. He was a slow reader, for one thing; for another, he was caught up with an irresistible impulse to memorize long scenes and passages in an effort to embarrass Cappy, who rarely even remembered the names of characters. Cappy called this making wall-to-wall carpeting out of a throw rug, but the truth of the remark did nothing to change his reading habits.
Today was his day off. He had a summer job at Zappy Zoo Land, on Fourteenth Street, Wednesdays off because he worked on Saturdays. Mr. Leogrande, who owned Zappy Zoo, often left it for him to feed some of the animals after six—those which required special care in quiet circumstances—and Shockproof accepted this encroachment uncomplainingly, walking down from Gramercy Park those evenings, and letting himself in to check on things. He was like a Jewish mother with the animals, on the lookout for slobbers in the rabbits, signs of Ichthyophthirius in the aquarium, parrot fever, puppy worms, feline hairballs; Wednesdays he worried that in his absence Zappy Zoo would sell one of its snakes to Lorna Dune, an exotic dancer, who regularly taped them at both ends before her performance, often forgot to untape them afterward, and then reappeared to purchase new ones.
Shockproof, on this day off, was reading The Life of Insects by V. B. Wigglesworth, Siam Miami, and Love Machine.… He was also trying to compose a letter to Estelle Kelly, due home from boarding school any day.
Shockproof’s mother was finished talking with Judy alias Judd Ewen, and was now calling her office.
The whole agency was in a flap over who to get to succeed Celeste Skinner McRee as the next Chew-zee girl. High society endorsing gum, not an easy persuasion, though M.E. had already delivered two others from the Social Register.
M.E. wanted a client’s memo on the subject sent to her by messenger. The client was complaining about the Wasp tone of the commercials. “What do you mean, he wants more color? That old bone again!” she was shouting. “Send the memo down to me!… What do you mean, it’s too late? If you know where it’s at, ducky, you’ll have someone here with that memo a half an hour ago!”
Shockproof was writing:
… simply not going to take your mouth anymore, Estelle. What kind of an impression do you think you make on someone when you say things like “Aw, let’s get pissed and get into the hay”? It is just that sort of thing that disgusts…
He wadded up the letter and started over.
Dearest. Listen. Carefully.
No. That was his mother at the start of things.
He was at the end of things with Estelle Kelly. Why would he want to continue with someone who had her mouth? In four years at Virginia Preparatory School, he had not come across one boy whose mouth was a match for Estelle Kelly’s.
My dear Estelle,
In evaluating our relationship, I have grown to appreciate the fact you are a very unusual person who has been hurt so deeply, your obscenities are a cover-up for certain feelings. I don’t even mind your obscenities. You, in turn, should not mind a male’s naked body and his normal desire to hear an occasional term of endearment, or his wish to be reassured that you…
It was pathetic and he could not humiliate himself that way.
He added it to the others in the wastebasket and began once more.
Estelle,
Allowing me to do whatever I want to do in bed with you is not sufficient for my satisfaction, but then, ducky, if you’d known what was sufficient for my satisfaction, you’d have…
He gave up. He tried Love Machine, then The hawkmoth Deilephia can distinguish the blue-violet-purple colors of the flowers on which it feeds…
He could not concentrate. The pandemonium being created in the opposite room over a potential Chew-zee candidate was unsettling. He had a fantasy of seducing Carter Burden’s wife, Ba, and persuading her to endorse Gun Gum, while his mother stood by on the qui vive to the whole thing, smiling out of the side of her mouth, shaking her head and murmuring: “Incroyable!”
He toyed with the idea of writing a poem to Estelle Kelly. The trouble was he was not in any frame of mind to write poetry.… If he did not come up with something fast in the way of a letter or a poem, something, he was not going to have any kind of sexual summer.
He grabbed his Viking edition of Leonard Cohen and flipped through it until he found his favorite Cohen. It was called “MARITA.”
Marita
Please find me
I am almost 30
He changed the thirty to twenty in his mind, and took advantage of the fact his mother was temporarily off the phone and in the bathroom. He asked the operator for Western Union, and waited the inevitable seven minutes for the call to be answered. Then he explained about placing the message on three separate lines, knowing the telegram would probably come out all on one line, and that anyway Western Union would likely ignore his request to deliver the wire, and phone it to Estelle.
He had to take the chance that she had never come across Leonard Cohen, but he took it optimistically, since Estelle looked down on poetry unless it was the superficial sort in the middle of some fantasy musical like The Fantasticks, where she could not be accused of being serious about it. Then she would weep uncontrollably, and later slap her knees laughing and making loud jokes about its being a tearjerker and the buckets she’d wept.
Still, Shockproof perceived her intense vulnerability, and persisted in storming the fortress. “Another of Sydney’s mystifying compulsions,” Cappy would say, “obsessed by insignificance.”
Being in bed with Estelle Kelly was like being in an elevator with a stranger. No eye contact; no talking.
One of the various peculiarities of his attachment to Estelle Kelly was that he was not very physically attracted to her. She was small-breasted, which he could have suffered, but the most difficult obstacle for him to overcome was her frequent reluctance to shave her legs or armpits.
He was familiar with the idea that many Europeans preferred their women in this hirsute condition. It was Iolanthe, the Greek prostitute in Durrell’s Tunc, who believed that men were aroused by an ape swatch under each arm, yet like Felix Charlock, that novel’s hero, Shockproof begged Estelle to shave. Before bed, and in bed, he would often have to think of things and do things to himself to make sex possible, and at times it wasn’t possible, but away from her and remembering her, he could feel a physical stirring that shook through him and ended with a sick trembling in the tips of his fingers, and a distant thumping in his innards.
There were two other possibilities why he was in this condition over someone like Estelle Kelly, beyond the possibility he had, in his mother’s idiom, “crash-landed in Masochists’ Gulch.” One was that, like Estelle, he was green-eyed, redheaded, and freckled. They could be mistaken for brother and sister.
Would you rather be a masochist or a narcissist?
Another was that Estelle Kelly was the first female over whom he had ever towered.
“She was 5’ 3½”.
He was 5’ 6”.
Once when he had undressed her on a white leather Milo Baughman couch in her father’s living room, holding his hand out to take her with him into the bedroom, he had said, “Come along, little doll.” It was something he had never said to anyone before, something it would have been an impossibility to have said. Little Anything. He often stood with girls whose chins were at his eye level.
Estelle had responded by rolling her eyes back in anguish and snapping. “I didn’t hear that, Sydney Skate!”
Shockproof’s mother was back on the phone, back on code.
She was spreading the word about Ellie and Ann, and he felt sad for a moment. He had been at their home in Westport often in the summer, swimming in their pool, arching
down by the river with Ellie, and feeding their ducks. He wondered who it was Ellie was running off with, if it was someone he knew. Periodically there would be a reshuffle. Susan would come for Christmas drinks with Linda, instead of Francine. Francine would appear some months after with the one Linda had lived with in Maine three years ago. He had once overheard his mother remark that gay life was like musical chairs, only you lived for a few years with what you stood in front of when the music stopped, instead of sitting on it.
When the doorbell rang, his mother was too involved with the gossip to answer it.
“Will you get that, Sydney?” M. E. Shepley Skate called out to him. “That’s the messenger I’m expecting.”
It was not the messenger.
It was Victor of Victor and Paul. They lived one block away on Gramercy Park South. Victor was a freelance photographer. M.E. had given him the assignment to shoot the Chew-zee girls.
“No one is going to believe this,” Victor said, walking past Shockproof. “Where’s your mother, Sydney?”
Before Shockproof answered, Victor continued. “She’s on the phone. I’ve been trying to call. Tell her to get off the phone. This is an emergency. A hairy, heaven-sent emergency, and don’t you leave my sight, Sydney.”
“Victor?” M.E. hollered from the bedroom. “Do I hear Victor?”
Shockproof started to reply when Victor hurried back to M. E. Shepley Skate’s bedroom, chattering away that nobody was going to believe a thing he had to say, but would Shep get off the phone!
Shockproof followed along behind Victor, discreetly hanging back a bit, from practice.
“What is it, Victor?”
“It’s a reptile.”
“What?”
“A reptile. Don’t ask any questions. Please. I am very nearly hysterical. Alison Arnstein Gray. Does that name register, Shep?”
“I know the Arnstein Gray family.”
“Alison Arnstein Gray needs a favor. She needs a favor and you need a favor. You need someone to endorse Gun Gum. You need a beautiful, filthy-rich, respectable, non-Wasp for the Chew-zee commercial, isn’t that what you’ve been telling me? And wait—wait—and Alison Arnstein Gray needs someone to remove the most enormous viper anyone has ever seen, outside of Kenya, from her bathtub. Sydney, are you standing by?”
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