—The secret article, Jos said. Oh yes, well, Holger then.
—I like that.
—We’re talking crisscross, I think, Sir. I mean, Holger. It wouldn’t bother me in the least if you loved me. I’m broad-minded that way.
—You’re a good boy, Jos.
—And charming. By subjective prerogative. I’ve got to know what that means.
—Subjective, in the privacy of my mind. Prerogative, that what I think is my own business. Our apologies are symmetrical: both for a disrespect.
—Where’s the disrespect in my subjective prerogative charm? Love those words!
—You’re supposed to resent it, I think.
—Not me! Who says?
—Something called the world.
—The world can stuff it.
A double rap on the door: Pascal spinning in on his heel.
—Oh wow! he said. Big Jos, and in his nappies.
—Hi, squirt, Jos said.
PASCAL’S BRITCHES
—Iceland, Pascal said, is a nest of volcanoes, like the Galapagos Islands. The bases of the volcanoes flowed together, like chocolate sauce in a banana split, to make a plateau. In Iceland the plateau is above, the Galapagos, below sea level. Where you have meadows and sheep and Lutherans in Iceland, you have the ocean between hilltops in the Galapagos, that is, between islands.
After a victory celebration of banana splits with Holger and Jos, Pascal chose as more reward to spend the night with Franklin, at Hugo’s. But, Pascal insisted, not to tell about the article’s acceptance, for which he would choose his own good time. Jos agreed.
—A good secret is something sweet up the sleeve.
Franklin met them at the door wearing a gray sweatshirt and white gym socks, otherwise naked, his lizardy stripe of a penis poking straight out over a roundly solid scrotum.
—Hi, Holger, he said. Hi, Pascal.
—The ingenuous state of nature in which Franklin greets you, Hugo said, was devised by its exemplar soon after you called.
While Holger made his devoirs to Mariana, who was sewing buttons on shirts, and to Hugo, who was writing in a bound notebook with gridded pages, Pascal with studied unconcern doffed first his short pants and briefs, which he folded pedantically as he talked about the subglacial and undersea lavas of Iceland, and placed with Franklin’s clothes in an oblong wicker basket, and then sat to untie his shoes. Franklin helped.
Above the basket, on a shelf, was a triangular Cub Scout neckerchief, its blue border punctuated with chevrons, wolf face, and fleur de lys in a square, a blue beanie, the German magazine Philius, an aluminum canteen in a canvas jacket, with strap. Above the shelf, Hugo’s painting of Tom Agernkop.
—Nested order, Holger said.
—I’ll buy the nested part, Mariana remarked, biting thread.
Pascal, pulling on a T-shirt, said:
—I don’t go around the dorm like this. Exactly the opposite, interestingly enough. This is my and Franklin’s uniform over here.
—Who’s your roommate at the dorm? Mariana asked.
—I’m the only Grundtvigger, Pascal said, with a room to myself.
—Because, Holger explained, by age he’s lower school, but academically upper.
—And if, Hugo said archly, somebody who’s presently inspecting his virile member as if he’d never seen if before and is wondering what it’s for, gets his grade average up, not your v.m. but your grades, he can move in with Pascal, and Mariana and I won’t hear mouse squeaks, squishy slurps, and puppy yelps half the night.
—You’ve scandalized Holger, Mariana said, and he’s leaving.
—Can’t be away any longer from the dorm, Holger said. Jos is in charge, but his authority runs thin.
—Wait! Pascal said, turning Holger around to hug him.
A whisper from Mariana, and Franklin scrambled up from the floor and added his hug.
Hugo walked Holger back to the dorm, talking about Aramaic phrasing discernible in New Testament Greek.
PASCAL’S UNDERPANTS
Delay of iodine in kelp, rondure of acorn, fit of cup, flex of mouse, nod of helve, tilted pileus mushroom warp, tangle of floss, musk of straw, dent of cowrie, attar of olives, nubby scammony nuchal pink warm under spun cotton knit fine.
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Jos in a dingy workout shirt foxy with sweat and parting at the shoulders, slim jeans, and scruffy sneakers, asked Holger in the hallway, between classes, if he could have a quick word with him, please.
—I need, he said, to cut German and English, which I’m up on and fluent in, anyway, and gym, which Hugo will have my butt for, though I work out more than anybody in this dump. I got through chemistry, but I’d like to catch some sleep. Would it be too much to ask if I could sack out on your floor for an hour or two?
—If you need to, Holger said. You aren’t into narcotics, are you, Jos?
—Oh Lord, no! Jos said.
—The apartment’s been cleaned for the day, Holger said, shutting the door.
Nobody will bother you. Insomnia?
—Well, no, Jos said. Night before last, we won’t go into that, I skipped lots of sleep, and didn’t sleep at all last night, and it has caught up with me. If I could stretch out on the carpet here, with maybe that thingummy across the back of that chair for a pillow?
—You’ll be more comfortable in bed, Holger said. Clean sheets, even.
—You’re a brick, Jos said, undoing the brass buttons of his jeans. Fact is, he added with a rueful look, I jacked off all fucking night. Decidedly retarded, and not recommended by the Boy Scout handbook, but there we are. Sorry, no underbritches.
—Lend you pyjamas, Holger said.
—Mna. Maybe a top? This sweatshirt smells like the zoo.
MAX BILL
Horizontal blue, diagonal red, vertical green.
45
—In the bedroom, Holger said to Pascal when he twirled in, we have Jos, who said he was dead for sleep, and whom I’ve let snooze through dinner.
—Crazy, Pascal said. Jos in your sack. So we start bed check here.
—Let’s see, Holger said, if he isn’t ready to get up. We can make him a snack.
One arm over his head, the other out straight, Jos, smiling awake, peeped at Holger and Pascal from narrow eyelids.
—Where am I? he asked. What time is it, and who am I?
—A long boy name of Jos, Holger said, with a pair of handsome eyes, feathery eyelashes, and wrecked hair. The rest of him is rather operatically twisted into the covers.
—And, Jos said, is this The Buttermilk Elf?
—Hello, Jos, Pascal said. You’re wearing Holger’s jammies.
—Only the top, Jos said, kicking loose from sheet and eiderdown, swiveling out of bed to stand on his toes, stretch, and yawn.
—Like a lion, Pascal said.
—Be nice to me, friend Pascal, as nice as Holger’s been. I’m feeling sort of unreal and discontinuous.
—Scramble you some eggs? Holger asked. Toast, marmalade, a sausage or two? You’ve dreamed right through dinner, where your absence was commented on, imaginatively.
—I’ll have some of the marmalade and toast, too, Pascal said. I know where everything is, and can do the eggs. You run them around in the pan with a fork, right? Lots of butter. It there a spring in your dick, Jos, that makes it bounce like that when you walk?
—Somebody, Jos said, is not as undescended of balls as he used to be, and probably has high-octane hormones squishing around inside him, wouldn’t you say, hr. Sigurjonsson? Holger, I mean. Feels good, doesn’t it, Grasshopper? Was it getting taken for a senior academician with beard and dandruff, one soon to be published in a magazine big as a phonebook, that made the sap rise from your pink toes, upward, and upward?
Pascal danced a tricky step, grinning and snapping his fingers.
—I like you to kid me, Jos. It gives you such pleasure.
—Easy on the salt, Pascal, Holger said.
—Why, Pascal asked, did you sack out
here all afternoon, as long as we’re being personal?
—Because, Mushrump, I didn’t sleep for two nights in a row, one given generously to guarding Rutger and Meg while they did it more or less all night, whimpering and sighing with approval of each other’s anatomy, that’s quite a story, and then last night I practiced self-abuse, as they say, from beddy-bye until I heard birds twittering. Thought my mind had gone, but they were real birds, and it was daylight, and my bold fellow here, who, yes, does have a spring inside to make him waggle like this, was still ranting to make a baby. Nature’s awful, you know. No regard for decency or model behavior.
—Whether we’re to believe this, Holger said, is up to us, isn’t it, Pascal?
—I’m jealous, Pascal said. I can say that, can’t I, Holger?
—Ha, Jos said, you have a room all to yourself. Asgar slept through it all, but woke up, all eyes, for the last gusher, which was as sweet as deep up a girl, and called me a pervert and a maniac. Not, you understand, for jacking off, as he was careful to explain, but for when I was jacking off, before breakfast. You did good with those scrumpled eggs, Professor Raskvinge, and is there more milk?
STUDIO
Jos’s eyes, lakeblue discs in eyelashes like the outline of an elmleaf drawn with a drenched Chinese brush, stared in so short a focus at Holger’s they seemed slightly crossed.
—Do I really look like that?
—It’s a splendid likeness, Holger said. Yes, you look like that.
—It’s still only a study, Hugo said. Can’t call it a painting when it’s just Jos with his wrists crossed on top of his head, weight on both feet.
—And my eyes look like that?
—Yes, Hugo said.
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—What Iceland has that’s really wild, Pascal said, is volcanoes erupting under glaciers.
—Crazy, Franklin said.
—Blows hunks of glacier into the air, melts the glacier, boils the glacier into steam. Drowns Lutherans for kilometers around.
THE PRESENT IS ANOTHER COUNTRY
—Well, Jos said, so he does have bits of eggshell still sticking to his curls. That’s all the niftier.
Holger had walked Pascal to Hugo and Mariana’s after bed check, had visited awhile, and on his return to his rooms found Jos sitting against the door, knees up, cricket cap on backward, in his low-waisted sweatpants, lumpy white socks, and gymnast’s tank top.
—Can I come in? he said, sliding his hand from inside his pants, tying the drawstring, and getting up with a nimble bounce.
—Absolutely, Holger said. I was just seeing Pascal over to spend the night with Franklin Landarbejder. One of our modern improvements on the past. They snuggle, I suppose, in a sleeping bag.
—Over where Franklin’s clothes are, in the wicker basket, Jos said, and his scouting gear, next to me in paint on Hugo’s easel, and with Hugo and Mariana making the bed creak and jiggle.
Holger shrugged.
—Cocoa, milk? Even beer, which I’m not supposed to offer you.
—I won’t snitch, Jos said. I need to talk a bit. Pascal would want me to have a beer, the sweet little nipper.
—In which case, Holger said, we’ll follow Pascal’s wishes.
—What I want to talk about is sort of raunchy, so I might as well throw in, to see how you’re going to take this, that I think you and Pascal being pals is a good thing.
—Am I supposed to know, Holger asked, what you’re talking about, Jos?
—Well, Jos said, so he does have bits of eggshell still sticking to his curls.
That’s all the niftier.
—My question remains the same.
—OK, Jos said, smiling amiably and sitting on the floor, knees up, his back against a chair occupied by books, new botanical and geographical journals, a rolled map, a soccer jersey, and a musette bag.
—Let me clear the chair for you, Holger said. You don’t have to sit on the floor.
—Prefer it, Jos said. Good beer. And you’re a good man.
Holger sat in his leather reading chair across from him, having shuttered the venetian blinds, replacing his shoes with bedroom slippers.
—I’ll blurt it all out, Jos said. I don’t know, maybe you can tell me why I want you to know all this, but I do. A kind of sharing, as you’ll see. It’s nothing scary, and not a problem. About two weeks back I fucked Meg. Not made love to or slept with, those stupid words, but fucked. That is, Rutger and I fucked Meg. He’s fucked her just about every day since he’s been here, and they’d been doing it well before, wholly into each other.
—As the whole school knows, Holger said, with the possible exception of the Master and fru Eglund, McTaggart, and the kitchen cat.
—Well, Jos said, I’ve never been what you would call buddies with Rutger, as friendships go, though we’ve gotten lots closer this term, and I’ve sort of fallen in with him and Meg together. Three friends are different from two friends, you know? Why the smile?
—Thinking of something else, Holger said. Go on.
—Got to piss. Your bathroom’s down the hall, isn’t it?
—On the left.
—Your rooms are like a comfortable house, Jos said over his loud midbowl stream. It’s good to get away from my Spartan jail cell. I’ll leave in a bit, huh?
—It’s early, Holger said. I’ve nothing I have to do before bedtime. Your beer’s where you were sitting.
When Jos came back to the sitting room his sweatpants were rolled into a wad which he tossed onto the chair.
—Very becoming, Holger said, undershirt and socks.
—Wasn’t wearing briefs. You don’t mind? You come and watch Hugo paint me in Fanny fuck all, though my weewee is in its hang position there. It has, however, come within a hair of standing straight up. There was the afternoon Mariana came in with groceries, and kept saying how handsome I am. It gave a jump, and nodded, which she saw, and let me know with a sweet wink. Which made him jump again. And I keep having the feeling that Hugo, if I gave him a little encouragement, would haul me on his shoulder over the bed and love me until we both passed out. Holger, what are those two books over there, Growth and Form?
—D’Arcy Thompson, a British scholar, on the laws governing natural structures. It’s a book to know. Pascal has read it twice, I believe, and it’s one of our favorite books to talk about.
Jos took the books down and opened them in the pool of lamplight on the carpet by Holger’s chair.
—Do you know R. Buckminster Fuller’s work? Holger asked.
—Geodesic buildings, Jos said. Sticks held in suspension by wires. A new kind of solid geometry. And a world map in triangles. Pascal has one on his wall.
—And Klee’s notebooks? Holger asked.
—No. You have them here?
Holger fetched them, and sat with Jos on the floor.
—The Botany Club, he said, is going to start a project in which I take them through Leonardo, Fibonacci, and Klee.
Jos pointed to the framed Klee on the wall.
—Hugo and Mariana admired that the evening of the battle Adam and Franklin had down the corridor. They took it, I’m afraid, as evidence of my appreciation of the fine arts, but it’s there for its accuracy of botanical forms.
—Show me, Jos said.
THE BLIND FOLKSINGER
A steady clatter of rain on the skylight accompanied a Bach partita on Hugo’s phonograph.
—Earliest memories, Hugo said, are problematic. They can be constructed from later information, from family folklore.
—Not this, Holger said. What I remember is a sunny room, vivid colors as of cloth, greens and blues, and a window brilliant with the light of an Icelandic spring. In this scene I am in a woman’s lap, perhaps my nurse, perhaps my mother. I had just been bathed. The oval porcelain tub is nearby. A clean fluffy towel and the odor of talcum are part of the memory. And this woman played with my penis, bouncing it with the flat of her hand. It is a very happy memory, you understand.
—Was she, Hugo
asked, perhaps only drying under the foreskin, which can be a tight fit in a baby, and you were enjoying it?
—The odd thing is that I see this memory as if I were a third person, looking on, yet enjoying the pleasure of having my penis fondled.
—You’re remembering a mirror, Hugo said. A woman would sit with a charming baby so that she could see herself in a bedroom mirror. Our culture has conditioned us to dwell on the image of a happy mother and winsome infant. How old were you?
—Not more than two, as I figure.
—Does this come in a dream?
—No. It’s a waking memory, but it visits regularly, as in Proust. Shaving, bathing, or in a sunny room.
—The psychological weather.
—Yes. But what I’ve got up the courage to narrate is not this, but an event much later, when I was ten or eleven. Saturday is always a fateful day, and this was a Saturday. I remember the clothes I was wearing, because they were new, bought for the beginning of the school term: a blue wool sweater. I was vain of the fit, and of its quality. It was of heavy wool, with flecks of red and gray in its strong Icelandic blue. And I had new long corduroy trousers, which swished. And all of this finery fitted in with an outing my favorite uncle had arranged. We drove into the country, to see a man my uncle had met years before, and wanted to see again. My uncle was a schoolteacher and keen on Icelandic folkways, legends and ballads, that sort of thing. A ride in an automobile was exciting enough, over country roads, but to be going to a farm was even more exciting. But I mustn’t draw this out.
—As you will, Holger. But I gather this is for my ears only, and Mariana will be along, and Franklin with his double.
—The essentials, then, and we can deal with the implications in good time. The blind folksinger my uncle wanted me to meet, and hear, lived with his sister and her husband on a farm about as remote as you can get. Dingy sheep with black legs, ponies, green hills all around. A very old white stone house, with barns and pens and sties also of stone. Dogs barked us in for half a kilometer, and I remember rings of hawks in a cloudy sky. The people were simple country folk but with those deep traditions which contain respect for scholarship and a familiarity with the Bible. There was a radio, I remember, which picked up Reykjavik. The interior was purest Ibsen, reeking of the past. Why are you smiling?
The Death of Picasso Page 39