It was Mark Dodge’s voice Thom was speaking in, the big broad steady baritone with its inflections like curled-up edges you can hear in the few tapes Mark made of chapters from Buffalo Nickel and the talking book of We All Drive Fords. As for looks, well, as Thom Dodge would say, ‘Hell, they might as well be twins.’ Had he lived to the age of fifty-five, which is what I guessed Thom to be, Mark might have been slimmer; he’d still be wide-shouldered and thicknecked, with a long torso and flat hips, well-muscled arms and Sequoia trunk legs. At thirty-two, Mark had been six foot one, weighed 190 pounds, had thick dandelion-yellow hair that whitened in strong sun. He’d probably lighten up along the sides with sketches of gray like Thom had, lose hair at the brow but more at the temples, so the central shock formed a widow’s peak. Being gay, Mark would have avoided his brother’s beer-gut. But his eyebrows would have shagged up like these, his nose thickened, his skin developed freckles, his brow furrowed twice horizontally, webs of crow’s feet detailed his eyes, vertical cuts guarded his thin upper and full lower lip.
Mark Dodge’s eyes had been blue, so dark they read black in photos: ‘Magnetic, dangerous, enameled eyes,’ De Petrie had written in his journals, ‘like lakes brooding in the shell of a not quite extinct volcano, so cool, and so capable of being turned into flaming steam at any second’. At the end of their brief affair, De Petrie had written of Mark Dodge’s ‘Olympian fury’ and how Dominic had to put his hands in front of his face so as not to be ‘burned to the soul by the electrocuting Dodge eyes’. Mark’s younger brother’s eyes were brown, but I guessed they could become equally hard.
‘Queen Elizabeth,’ Thom Dodge said, identifying the variety, a close-fitted purple-red flower, as he passed a pot on the trestle table between us. He’d knock the side of each ceramic pot with the trowel to loosen soil, grab the plant where it entered the dirt, pull it onto the table, vigorously shake dirt off its roots, inspect it, then, satisfied, twist it with a gloved index finger and drive it into an awaiting pot, refill it with dirt, soak with water, move to the next. He did this a dozen times while we talked.
‘Now, I don’t know you, except what you’ve told me about yourself. And you don’t know me, except about what I’ve told you,’ Thom Dodge began. I nodded agreement, although I knew a lot about him from books about his brother I’d read. ‘So don’t be offended by anything I say. You with me?’
Not knowing where he was going, I said sure.
‘You have brothers? No? I had two. And I was youngest. Peter and Mark and Thomas. The three apostles they called us in Sunday School. Two years apart. Enough years to lead separate lives. Yet close enough to do everything together. That’s how it was, growing up. Not far from here, by the way. Elizabeth Taylor,’ he interrupted himself to identify the tiny amethyst bloom, the same hue as the septuagenarian movie star’s eyes. ‘We did everything, went through everything a child or teenage boy could, if not together, then almost together. School, illnesses, fights, drinking, sports, drugs, sex, girls. Grandpa Dodge used to say we pissed in a row. Pete was the boss, Mark was the brains, I was the baby.’
‘Baron Girod de l’Ain,’ he identified the next plant, which had large blood-red flowers with white edging. ‘Our folks had a farm. But it was a big place, with paid help. So while we had chores, they didn’t mean for us to be farmers. They encouraged us in school to aim for college and the professions. Pete was going to be a doctor, Mark a lawyer, me an Indian chief – businessman.
‘By the time Pete was fourteen, Mark twelve, me ten, it was clear we needed more spending money than we got for farm chores. It was Mark’s idea to pool our money and go into business. We unofficially formed Dodge Brothers Inc. Eleven dollars started our first enterprise, selling pumpkins. We bought a patch our neighbor Howell was planning to feed to hogs but mostly let rot. Pure profit for him. We put ’em all in two wheelbarrows and dragged them out to where Highway 80 met San Pablo Avenue on a Saturday morning two weeks before Hallowe’en and put up a big sign, “Pumpkins Ten Cents a Pound”. With Dad’s borrowed scale. Made twenty-five dollars that weekend. Thirty the next. And fifteen more the two school week evenings before the holiday.
‘Seventy bucks!’ Thom Dodge exclaimed. ‘Big money to a ten-year-old in 1960 I can tell you. We put aside half and spent the rest on crap. This is French too, Charm of Paris,’ he identified the next plant, its petals flat yet tightly budded, pale pink streaked white. ‘Day after Thanksgiving, Mark looks at Pete and me and says, “Christmas Trees”! This time we gotta go chop ’em down, even though they cost nothing. Then we have to get a truck. We rent one of our Dad’s for five dollars, give a sixteen-year-old neighbor five dollars to drive it back and forth to a better corner of the crossroads than before, and set up. Big sign, “Xmas Trees Five and Ten Dollars”. We make 300 dollars that Christmas.
‘And so it goes. We sell lilies for Easter, assorted flowers at Mother’s Day. We sell watermelons throughout summer and tomato plants in July. Then Hallowe’en and pumpkins, Christmas and trees, and we cycle all over again. By the time I’m thirteen years old, Dodge Brothers Inc. has earned maybe six grand. Pete’s got one more year in high school and thinks maybe he shouldn’t go to the local state college but stay around the farm and turn Dodge Brothers Inc. into a real business. I’m all for it. But Mark, who’s fifteen and, let’s face it, the brains of the business and does the accounting and pricing and banking, he says no.
‘No!’ Thom Dodge repeats, showing me a deep-carmine, small, close-petaled flower with lilac fragrance. ‘Another Frenchy, called Gloire de Ducher,’ he says. ‘No!’ he repeats yet again. ‘And why not? Because Mark has discovered a book. One of a score or so books hanging around in our family’s parlor bookshelf – no one ever really figured how they’d been put there, whether as gifts or merely hand-me-downs from our parents and their siblings. Most of the books we know fairly well, as they are typical children’s books, The Jungle Book, The Arabian Nights’ Tales, Black Beauty, Tom Sawyer, Swiss Family Robinson. But a few are grown-up books, about medicine, sewing patterns, cooking receipts, farm animal husbandry and agricultural machinery. Naturally there’s a big old Bible. And then a half-dozen or so Reader’s Digest condensed novels my mother had picked up in an auction and likes to reread on winter’s nights.
‘But this one’s different. This one is oversized with sharp-edged binding in swirling dark blues and blacks, and inside it are dark and brilliant watercolored illustrations we’re fascinated by and at the same time we can hardly figure them out. Intriguing sure, but from the opening paragraph it doesn’t draw you in, but pushes you away again, since it contains so many long, incomprehensible words, words it would take me another dozen years to understand, but which somehow Mark already knows or is curious enough to look up. He tells us about the book, me and Pete, on more than one occasion, since he reads it again and again. Not for the story, he tells us, but for what he calls the power of the story-telling: the craft and art of the writing. The book is all about sailors and a great storm at sea. It’s not until years later that I finally am able to get to it and read it through and I enjoy it, I suppose. But I never see what Mark sees in that book. By the way, it was Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon. What I read between those two covers is just a sea story. But Mark, he reads his future in that book. And as a result of that book, he’s decided he’s not going to be a lawyer, or a businessman. He’s going to be a writer. He’s going to college, but not up to Sacramento or even San Francisco. No, Mark is planning to go East, to some school in New Jersey or Massachusetts. Jasper’s Mixed,’ he identifies the next one, moving faster now that he’s all het up.
‘So Dodge Brothers Inc. has only a few more years in business. Our best ever. Pete goes up to State U. Mark and I do the fall and spring part of it, while Pete helps us in the summertime and at Christmas holidays. It turns out Pete’s not nuts about college or his possibilities after college. So he’s supporting me in trying to convince Mark to stay nearby and keep the firm going. For a while we think our arguments are
working.
‘Madame X,’ he identifies the next, svelte purple-black rose, almost more bud than flower. ‘We’ve already made about ten grand by now. But something else happens. One day Mark comes home from school and says at dinner that he’s not only been selected most popular of the senior class, and Prom King, and Most Likely to Succeed, which we all sort of expected, but on top of that a teacher has sent a photo of him to someone she knows at that fancy clothing store in San Francisco, Wilkes-Bashford, and they want Mark to come down to Union Square and be photographed for their next catalogue. He’ll be modeling four hours a day for two weeks and earn – are you ready? – 8,000 dollars! Clearly Dodge Brothers Inc. is doomed!
‘Picasso,’ he somewhat dejectedly identifies the next bloom, an open-hearted scarlet flower with pale yellow at the sepal. ‘What we haven’t noticed, not any of us in the family is that while we weren’t looking, our regular-as-all-hell brother has become special: he’s now something none of us could have ever expected. Cathy Grinstead confirms this next day in school when I tell her about Mark’s offer from Wilkes. “Oh! Every girl in the county knows your brother,” she tells me. “The beautiful Mark Dodge.” Up till then I thought only women could be beautiful. And when I look at Mark, he’s, well, he’s just Mark. But a few months later, when I’m looking at that Wilkes-Bashford catalogue, there he is, my brother Mark, on every other page, wearing tuxedos and bathing suits and you know what? They’re right, he’s beautiful! He’s fucking beautiful!’
Thom is almost in tears. ‘Double Delight,’ he identifies a white-petaled rose within a carmine one. ‘From that minute on, my brother’s lost to me, lost to us, lost to himself, I don’t know … Maybe the word I’m looking for is cursed, if that isn’t melodramatic. It gets worse. It turns out that not only is my brother a successful model, he’s also a talented writer. All that scribbling he’s been doing up in his room when we’re trying to drag him out for fun pays off big. He gets offers from Harvard and Yale and in fact every school he’s ever dreamed of applying to, not based on his grades, which were a little better than average, but on the basis of the stories and the essays he’s already published in the school magazine and local newspaper.
‘One day Mark is there, the next he’s gone, really gone, physically gone. Dodge Brothers Inc. is nearly over. For one more winter and spring I keep it going alone. When Mark finishes college that first year, he doesn’t come home to us for the summer to help me and Pete out. Mark stays on, taking extra-credit summer courses. Same thing the following year, and the following. It gets so we see him at Christmas and Fourth of July, Ma’s birthday. Then he’s graduated from college and now we see Mark in clothing catalogues, in full-page magazine ads, and finally on sportswear billboards when we’re in some big town. He’s already published two short stories in real magazines by the time he’s out of college, and won some literary award, and a year later he’s living in Manhattan and has a book contract.
‘Ice Berg,’ he identifies the large, loose-petaled white rose. ‘Mark sends a check covering my first year’s college tuition and expenses. And the second year’s worth too. But the next time I actually lay eyes on my brother, it’s years later. Not on the farm, but in San Francisco. In a coffee shop in North Beach. I’m indoors with some schoolfriends, and there’s a commotion outside, then these two guys come in with their arms around each other. One of them is this Giants pitcher whose photo was just in the sports section of all the papers because he’d relieved and saved the season opener and the other is this famous young author in town on a book tour for his best-selling novel. And they’re handsome, and happy together, glowing, and everybody wants to meet them, and be with them, and know them. Everyone but me. I hide so they won’t see me. When our group decides to leave, I go out the back way.
‘Saint Patrick.’ Its flowers thickly clustered, satiny yellow, with a strong perfume. ‘It wasn’t that I was ashamed of him so much, you understand, though I could never for the life of me figure out how Mark could have become homosexual with girls crawling over him. Pete and I shook our heads over that for years, asking each other, did he ever touch you? No. Did you see that coming? No! Did you? But, hell, it didn’t mean our brother was some pansy. I mean, he was going out with athletes, guys we rooted for at Candlestick Park.
‘No, the reason I didn’t let him see me then – or in fact ever again – is more that I was afraid that if I claimed any kind of relationship to Mark he’d have to somehow explain me. And what could he possibly say? That he used to help me do my division problems and teach me how to brush my teeth the “Army way”? That we’d talk in bed for hours on end as kids those long sweaty August nights when the three of us couldn’t get to sleep. Or that we’d hold belching contests, and he’d crack his toebones a half-hour at a time ’cause he knew I hated the sound and that he’d steal my blankets in the winter and try to frighten me by jumping out at me from behind rocks and bushes and bedroom doors? Once my brother left to go to San Francisco to become a model, it was as though he’d stepped onto a different planet, or maybe a better way to put it is into a different dimension, parallel to ours, touching it at a few points, but nothing more. He never really ever came back. Not even when he was stuffed in that coffin on that Amtrak baggage car.’
Thom starts repotting the last rose bush. ‘At any rate, that’s what I wanted to say. To say to someone who’d understand. There’s no one around here who … I had a hunch you might … Mischief!’ Thom identifies the last sexy, perfectly shaped, pink-red rose cutting as he puts it aside, and cleans off his gloves and takes off his apron. ‘Now I guess you want to look at those manuscripts.’
The first thing I noticed about the ten-page manuscript was that it had been typed on a different machine than what I found in Von Slyke’s house, and different than the IBM Selectric Elite of Jeff Weber’s. This typeface was square, sans-serif, so the lower case g and q were dropped halflines, not curved tails.
‘It looks like a foreign typewriter was used,’ I said.
‘Mark’s electric Olivetti,’ Thom Dodge confirms. ‘He bought it with money from that first modeling job. I still have it around here somewhere. He replaced it with a computer a year before he died. Virtually everything he wrote except the final draft of We All Drive Fords was done on that Olivetti. It was low and flat, and pale green, the color of olives they put in Martinis. Only other time I saw a machine like his was in some museum: “Masterpieces of Modern Design” was the exhibit. Leave it to Mark to be in style!’
We had moved indoors, to an office on the lower floor of the house open to backyard and rose garden, but apart from the three-car garage by what used to be called a ‘mud room’, which was where Thom kept rain gear and garden clothing. In the back of a large, well-framed, amateurish painting of (what else?) a rose garden was a sizable wall safe, and within that, in a metal box, Thom kept copies of his brother’s published manuscripts, as well as originals of what he’d not sent off to the collection.
This latter consisted, Thom informed me, of personal letters to the family, manuscripts of Mark’s early local writing, and less than a handful of short fragments Thom had found in the boxes of his brother’s clothing and household goods that had been shipped from his Manhattan apartment after he’d died. All the other stories Mark had written and published were eventually put into his novels, of which they had formed an inextricable part, naturally enough given how ‘organically’ Dodge wrote.
Across the manuscript top, it read ‘For LS’.
Before my mind could take the next leap to whom ‘LS’ might be, I looked over the first manuscript, which word for word followed the piece about the two kids in the car I’d read before. Then, without a break, on the very next page, the following:
The deep electric blue of the jukebox is the same flashing cobalt of spotlighted metallic wreath hanging over the head of the bartender at the Eagle’s Nest. It is also the same deep neon blue of the tight-fitting T-shirt on the raven-haired number Paul has been cruising for the last
hour and a half. It’s three-fifteen a.m., Christmas Eve, and Paul does not want to go home alone.
It doesn’t seem as though the number is ready to leave, however. Now he’s talking to friends who’ve just come into the Nest. The bar is otherwise pretty empty: or just as bad as empty as far as Paul is concerned, since he’s either balled with, rejected, or been rejected by everyone else in the place who even vaguely interests him. Paul’s a little high from the six Budweisers he’s put down since his arrival – with help from two quarters of a Quaalude in between to keep his act calm.
Paul is twenty-six years old and has been living in New York City for two years. He works for a paperback reprint house where he’s employed in what’s called ‘middle management’, doing market research – a job he doesn’t like and was not hired for originally back in Sacramento. There, when he signed a contract with the employment scout for the publishing house, he thought he’d finally be getting to do something his university studies had prepared him for: editing new books.
Like everything else in his recent life, the job turned out to be delusory and disappointing. Paul’s found it hard meeting men in New York; found it equally hard making friends, found it especially difficult getting used to the high-energy activity level and inbred elitist social life of the gays he’s met so far. But here at the Eagle’s Nest – at least – he can be more himself, more relaxed, slower, more mellow, even if he has to calm down with a Q now and then. Not that it seems to be helping much tonight.
The Book of Lies Page 16