34
His top lip jibbed out and tucked at the corners by baby fat, lively eyes speculative and fluttery by spells, Kim laughed at Anders’s bashfulness. He was at the bus stop, as they’d agreed, in, as Anders said, the world’s shortest pants, book satchel foolishly balanced on his head, coquettish looks out of the sides of his eyes. Anders slid his bike sideways right to his toes, radiant, breathless. Eyes met, but they said nothing. Kim on the seat holding him by the waist, Anders biked off down the macadam road that went through the woods. Only when they’d reached the beech copse with high ferns and moss clearing did Anders say, And how was school? Just school, Kim said. We’re going to have sensitivity classes, so we’ll be aware of our bodies, and our space, this teacher, she’s a woman, said, I think her name is Miss Pumpkin or Squash or Beanvine. Girls have boney hips, do you know? I’m going to like geography and in Danish we have to learn some kind of dumb poem about Iceland. Are we going to take our pants off? I guess I was feeling my peter through my pants when we were standing around, because teacher frowned and shook her head. Did you jack off last night? But yes, Anders said, and yesterday afternoon, and a long time at both. It’s out here somewhere that Rutger fucks Meg into fits. Have you fucked girls? Kim asked.
35
Well, she said, you’re crazy. Some crazies are a misery to themselves, and some a nuisance to the world, but you’ve figured out a shipshape Calvinist glitch-free craziness in absolute kilter, so that your eyes fly open at six, you hit the floor like an Olympic champion, hard-on and all, jump into a dinky pair of shorts, jog three kilometers, swim ten lengths of the gym pool, nip back here for wheatgerm carrot smush while reading Greek, communing with your charming freckle-nosed kammerat Jesus, shower with unreasonable thoroughness while singing hymns, dress in a French shirt and American tie, English jacket and experienced jeans that show how horsily you’re hung, teach your classes, Latin, gym, and Greek, meet me, pretend you’re interested in what I’ve done while eating me with your eyes, bring me here for wiggling sixtynine on the bed, tongue like an eel, melt my brain, fuck me simpleminded, race off and instruct your Boy Scouts in virtue, knots, and nutritive weeds, sprint back here, fuck me into a fit, teach me English while fixing supper, show me slides of Monet and Montaigne, fuck me again, walk me home, make eyes at Franklin, come back and read two books at once, say your prayers, jack off for an hour, and sleep like a lambkin. It isn’t bright, you know.
36
Gustav, said Mariana on her back in clover and daisies, chewing a leaf of mint, big brown eyes, thatch of hair always washed and feathery. Handful of balls and a stout stubby dick. And Jorgen his buddy, blond as a duckling, long all over, long chin, long forehead, long legs, long peter, big feet. Stammered something horrendous. Gustav finished his sentences for him. We had a rabbit hole of a place, cozy inside under brambles. Crawled in on hands and knees. A snuggery of great privacy, though a bit crowded with the three of us. And from the military academy across the way, Hjalmar, who rammed and grunted and was fitted out like the assistant classics master at NFS Grundtvig, or a horse.
37
In Argentina, Anders said, they arrest people who have read Einstein, torture them with electric shocks through the dick or cunt, and drop them while they’re still alive from a helicopter into a marsh outside Buenos Aires. They’re doing this now, forty years after Buchenwald. A Russian truck driver has just been arrested for owning a copy of the poet Mandelstam printed in the west, and given seven years lard labor in Siberia. Einstein! He was a Jew, you see, and the church tells the fat-necked military that his physics threatens to undermine belief. The USA has enough atomic bombs to blow the planet into orbiting rubble. And all these bullies want to idiotize us into thinking of all affection except that decreed by the state as immoral. Pigs, Kim said. Anders said: Don’t insult pigs.
38
Tom Agernkop, strand of hair across an eye, signaled Anders with a look and confirming nod. So Anders followed him to the far edge of the soccer field. You saw us, Tom said, picking a blade of grass and chewing it, Lemuel and me, hugging in the shower. Anders shrugged. Your business entirely, he said. Who’ve you told? Nobody. What’s to tell? Rutger my roommate, maybe. A mouthbreather, Tom. Meaty upper lip, Greek nose, honest eyes. Look, it’s fine by me, Anders said. Nothing scary about it. You love each other. Tom grunted, squeezed his crotch, flipped his hair out of his eyes, talked. It just happened, he signed. It’s very good, tender, exciting. It’s terrific to be so close to him. We’re each other, you know? And he’s so fucking good-looking and good-natured. We were real dimwits, at first, hot blushes and cold feet. That was dumb. Now, though, we’re out to love each other into feeblemindedness, like maybe they’ll have to carry us limp to a home, with permanent smiles on our faces. You’re giving me ideas, Anders said, and also a hard-on. Gud! Can I tell Lemuel? Who is it? Let me ask him before I tell you, OK? But absolutely, Tom said. Lucky, whoever he is.
39
The housemaster Holger Sigurjonsson with Pascal in tow looked in by way of bedcheck, Rutger towelling his hair, Anders writing in his journal. Pascal, seven-eighths naked and slender as a greyhound, grubbing at the pod of his briefs, broke off his discourse on trilobites and the planet Mars to inspect the girls on Rutger’s wall. How goes it, you two? the housemaster said to give Pascal his fill of the pictures. Tosset! Anders said, standing to thumb down his briefs. Rimbaud in French, Mimnermos in Greek, and gametophytes in botany. What’s this girl doing? Pascal asked. O the infants around this place! Rutger said. She’s whiffling her kildrer and coming like Beethoven’s niende. What did you think she was doing? Got me, Pascal said, I’m cryptogonadal still. Iceland, Middelhavet, and Bornholm, he said of three maps on Anders’s wall, and you, Anders, stark naked. Is that your blue grizzly tent? Hej! that’s Kim Eglund with you. He’s neat. Fellow baby, said Rutger. Who are these kids with their peepees standing out? Swedes, Anders said, riffling Pascal’s hayrick hair. With it, the housemaster said. Come on, Pascal. OK, Boss, Pascal said, trying to read a bit of Anders’s journal while being herded out by Rutger.
40
The disk of the Medusae is as truly an abactinal structure as the calyx of the Crinoids. As in all Discophorae, the substance of the disk is a gelatinous mass, consisting of immense cells, the caudate prolongations of which traverse it in different directions, assuming the appearance of flat muscular fibres. But this appearance is deceptive, and the substance of the disk does not, in reality, contain distinct muscles, though it is highly contractile, especially in the thinner part of the margin. Its movements are owing to the structure of the lower floor. The amount of water contained in the tissue of the disk is truly extraordinary. A specimen, weighing thirty-five pounds, exposed to evaporation, left a viscous mass, chiefly composed of common salt, showing the water to be common seawater. The salt having been washed out with fresh water, and the organic substance dried simply in the sun, weighed less than an ounce. For all its pellucid grace and unearthly subtlety of curtained tentacles and hyaline genitalia in radial clusters on a cincture, the Cyanea jellyfish is little more than organized water.
41
Owl call low and clear after bedcheck and lights out. Rutger said, There’s your boyo. Quit looking like a calf that’s lost its mama and haul him in through the window. Skinned a knee, Kim whispered after he’d been hugged hard and was shucking his briefs, but the rope works fine. He stripped in moonlight, Anders lifting the sheet for him to skittle into bed. Let’s see the knee, Rutger said. I’ve got iodine. A hard-on already. That’s the spirit. Yeeouch! Like don’t pour the whole bottle on, Rutger friend, huh? Keep the bedclothes over you, Rutger said, tucking them in and mussing Kim’s hair, so that I don’t get ideas or a skeet of sperm in my eye. Love good. Did you, Kim asked, do it with Meg this afternoon? Twice, Rutger said. With our jeans under her butt in the ferns, after the foreplay of the century, talk about fine tuning. I hear snurfling, I hear Kim sighing. We love you too, Rutger, Kim said.
42
&n
bsp; So, said Hugo, Tom. Come in: timing’s perfect. I’ve come at a bad time. Tom said with a robin’s hop of blinks and rueful smile. Not a bit of it, Hugo said pulling on denim shorts and combing his hair with his fingers. My Mariana and I were just getting out of the sack when you knocked. Hi! said Mariana shoving her arms into Hugo’s shirt, modern times and all that. You’ve seen scads of stitchless girls before, and maybe one or two in hr. Tvemunding’s bed. I couldn’t be the first. Tom, uneasy but boldly shy, sheep snarls in the silkfloss hanks of his rascal hair, his scruffy shirt parting at the shoulder seams, tail out in one side, shuffled, forced his big hands into the pockets of his jeans shorts, looked hacked, and sat with a bounce when Hugo pushed him into a chair. Here, said Mariana, pariser leftbank intellectual coffee with four sugarcubes in it, did I guess right? Mange tak, said Tom. So? Hugo said, you look demented. When, said Tom, can I come back? Right now, Hugo said. Frøken Landarbejder, besides being the soul of discretion, will probably understand you better than I. If that’s the way you want it, hr. Tvemunding, Tom said, miffed. Tom! Hugo said, relax eh? We’re all friends. Some of us, Lemuel and I and a few more, want to start a club for friends who love each other, and we need a faculty sponsor with balls and a very broad mind, Tom said. Our part in the Revolution, you know. Revolution, Hugo said, ah yes, the Revolution. Sounds wild, Mariana said. Explain it all.
43
Anders had sat cockminded through the dullest English class of the century, besotted with Kim’s grubby sneakers that made his feet too big, like a puppy’s outsized paws, socks, dinky short pants, net brief with their narrow mid-seamed cotton panel in front, his toes, legs, the celts of his knees, his springy supple peter growing like a weed. Gym, its perfunctions. Lunch, raisin pudding yet again. A wink from Tom. Kim, brash devil, scrunched the crotch of his snippety jeans shorts as Anders reached the bus stop on his bike. The high ferns, spackle light and green shadow through the beeches, Kim tumbling down his briefs and into Anders’s hug, they breathed in the same measure, rubbing noses, grazing lips, touching tonguetips. You’re crazy, you know, Kim whispered, but you’ve got to stay crazy. I know, Anders said. Even before lights out last night, I began jacking off, to keep our afternoon yesterday in my head, some of which I told Rutger, and kept it up, and didn’t see any point in quitting. So it rained sperm all night on my side of the room. I got a second wind toward sunrise, a fever in my dick, my balls sore, but your eyes looking sideways, like now, kept me going. Toes, smile, knees.
44
Quick, Rutger said, standing to slip off his briefs. Our keeper and Chipmunk. Check, said Anders, whippering his dick to a lolling halfminded erection. Pok pok pok! Pascal was saying as he spun in, turning on his heels, the explorer craft from outer space, swoosh, has come to bed check, where are we? Ah yes, Rutger and Anders. Commander Sigurjonsson! Hi boys, said the housemaster. O wow! said Pascal, new pictures. On Rutger’s wall an athletic youngster fucking a deliciously shapely girl whose enthusiasm was unqualified, on Ander’s a towheaded skyblue-eyed summerbronzed naked adolescent with a lucky penis and plump scrotum. Pascal flicking his fingers on his ribs, inspected both. The housemaster sighed. Rutger leaned in a long stretch from his chair, caught Pascal by the hips, turned him around, and yanked down his piffling underpants. Just looking, he said. I’m slow, Pascal said. You should help it along, Rutger said, forefinger and thumb. In moderation, the housemaster said, looking troubled. Show me, said Pascal. You have the highest IQ in all of NFS Grundtvig, Rutger said, and don’t know how to play with your peter? It’s retarded, Pascal said.
45
What I didn’t know, stor Hugo, Mariana said, was what a hideaway from the world your place is. Freedom itself, Hugo said, nidge away, sweet girl. She’d turned up bushed, with Franklin, pitched her jeans across the room, flopped into the big reading chair, nudged down her flimsy underpants, and begun to quiddle her kildrer, to jolt off the kicker she’d been playing toward all day. Woke up horny, she said, worked it to a buzz, and then off and on, two minutes here and five there, a sweet shiver and a tickly ripple. Franklin, Hugo’s scout hat over his ears and eyes, was trying to crack limbs for kindling over his knee like Hugo, who was laying a fire before which they were to eat. Sitting on the floor, Franklin said with approval, all beside each other, sandwiches and milk and pickles. But first, Spejder Franklin, I must hug and kiss Mariana awhile, and get hugged and kissed. Why don’t you see how much more firewood you can pick up over beyond the soccer field? Can I wear your hat? Absolutely, Hugo said. Let me tighten the strap and tie your shoe.
46
OK, said Franklin, two armloads of firewood. Admirable spadger, Hugo said. Your smart generous pretty sexy sweet sister says we can fall upon our supper, soon as I light the fire and lay things out, or you can have your dink jiggled to your heart’s content, so you won’t feel left out, jo? Franklin, Mariana said, is the only little brother in the world who can fake a blush and say honest? with such innocence. What he means, Hugo said pulling on a sweater and hooking his briefs off the floor with a toe, is that he chooses to grub by the fire. Not really, Franklin said. O yes, but really, Mariana said, throwing cushions toward the hearth. Nothing like both, Hugo said. Fire’s catching good. Mariana laying out plates and glasses, Hugo fetching eats. Franklin wriggled down his pants, which would not then go over his shoes. Hugo obligingly unlaced them, pried them off socks and all, and made a neat stack of shoes, socks, pants, and underpants beside Franklin. Nice pinkish-brown peter, he said. As soon as Franklin comes, Mariana said, he starts over. Mouth full of pressed veal and orange slices, Franklin grumped contentedly, stripped his foreskin back, and drank deep from his milk. Plop him between us, Mariana said, and we’ll take time about. Did you fuck good? Franklin asked politely. Mariana leaned around and kissed him on the nose, which wrinkled.
47
This place, Meg said, could use a broom driven by a strong and busy elbow, and a mop, and all the windows open the whole of a breezy day. What it really needs, Rutger said, is two mattresses lifted in the old Danish manner from the supply room. My knees survived the sand last summer, and forest-floor grit, moss, sticks, and boulder rubble, but these pine planks are going to sandpaper them raw. They’d unfolded and laid out a sail, the area of which brought them chummily together, so that Meg, thoroughly fucked and wrung limp by a whalloping sweet orgasm, could reach over and muss Kim’s hair and tickle the back of his neck. Modesty, she’d said when they were undressing, sort of has to be dispensed with, jo? Kim, pulling his jersey over his head with his back to her while Anders untied his sneakers and slid down his briefs, did a military about-face, with eyes shut and a broad smile. O what a charming pink blush! she said, pulling him into a hug. Timidly he hugged back, and then hugged warmly, with a kiss for her nose. She returned the kiss on his navel, and gave him up to Anders’s claiming arms.
48
If you put it that way, Hugo said, then yes I was a fool. But it pleased me to be a fool. In the dark you learn by bumping into things. But, Mariana said, he knew what you would bump into. He knew what would hurt you. I taught him, all unknowing, Hugo said, how to hurt me. That turned out to be his style: to listen in silence and a mask of charming innocence, and lay in wait. Because that’s all he had: the power to hurt. Don’t ask me why. It’s a gratuitous meanness that’s everywhere nowadays. In people without character, it’s a passive vindictiveness. They are too lazy and unmotivated to be evil actively, that’s too much trouble for the drifting will. But if opportunity puts anything alive in their path, they kill it, for the idle sport of it. To care about anything is a threat to their slothful passivity, so carelessness becomes the only plan you can see in their liquid will. If you encounter a flower bed, trample it. It’s the casualness of their hate that’s so discouraging. No, Mariana said, it’s the difference. What you say is true, but what makes you hurt inside is how different this trashy kid is from everything that’s familiar to you. You give people things, and this kid smilingly accepted what you gave him and smashed it
with his foot before your eyes.
49
What we have, Hugo said, is an unfinished room with good proportions and pleasant light once we wash these windows as clean and bright as Perrier water, no other NFS Grundtvig clubroom will be half so spiffy modern. We can sandpaper the floor to a plain Shakerish natural finish. Composition boards for walls. Let’s paint everything white overhead except the rafters, which want to be Mondriaan Red, jo? on the uprights and Sailor Suit Blue on the beams. What else do we want? No chairs, Tom said, but maybe a table? A bookshelf, posters, slogans painted right onto the composition board. Danish Spartan it all needs to be. OK, Hugo said, let’s see it with work, then. Lemuel’ll be here in a bit, Tom said, and Kim and Anders later. Composition board to be delivered tomorrow. So let’s sweep and scrub and haul junk out and cancel cobwebs. We want the outside stairs painted, too, and the door. Danish Blue. Light bulbs, a journal for minutes, paint, sandpaper, Windex, rags, detergent, a pail, hard brushes, hammers, nails, a roll of white gummed stripping. Ho, Anders! Ho, Kim! With brooms. And Rutger! I like cleaning things Rutger said. Don’t get ideas. I’m here as an enemy of dust and a lover of straight lines and clean surfaces.
50
God knew exactly where he lived. In among all those warehouses and dock-side pubs. The school had his mother’s address only, and she had no phone. My feelings were hurt, I suppose: snubbed. But that was an afterthought. I was anxious, befuddled. What I discovered two days later was that he had simply forgotten. He’d run into an old friend that Wednesday afternoon that he was to move in, when I was to make the effort to do something about him, give him a home, feed him, make a close friend of him. When I finally saw him, he grinned nonchalantly. He was, he said, thinking about my offer to take him in. Why had he not called or signalled for two days? I said, Look. People don’t act like this. O I’m a shit, he said. Besides, your kind of structured middleclass life is not mine. It’s against my Buddhist principles to live on a schedule. Your Buddhist principles! These, it turned out, he’d acquired from McTaggart’s Transcendental Meditation Group, which he’d twice attended. McTaggart is one of the English masters, and has his group. He talks a lot of bilge which, because of its gaseous vagueness, appeals to the feebleminded, ladies from town, slobs, prigs, and nonstarters of all sorts. A free spirit, said my Bicycle Rider, blows about like a leaf in the wind.
The Death of Picasso Page 32