Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  "Do they get turned on when they get turned on?"

  Without thinking, I reached for my genitals. My cock had swelled and lifted until it thrust out at a right angle from me, but I didn't know it until I gripped it around and felt a leap of delight. I was surprised, because I usually knew what it was doing. I usually told it what to do.

  "I don't think so," I said. "I think they leave the body far behind."

  "Well, I don't want to be a mystic until I'm old, then. They see the forest all right, but they lose track of the trees. Let's not be mystics." He had been chewing the leaf stem all the while, and now he took it in his hand and dropped it. It floated down, and I caught it with one hand while the other now cupped my balls.

  "Rick, look!" he said, as if he couldn't seem to get my attention. I felt the feather touch of the leaf and looked up, and he was pointing off to my right. I turned, thinking I would see an animal or a seabird, some cousin of the deer who had long ago eluded me at Sea Island. There was water a stone’s throw away. I could see now that we had arrived at the angle from which the two ridges sprang toward the sea. This high up in the woods, the hill just seemed to unfold, to open on a hinge like a box or a book. The pool in the crook of the two ridges was faced by steep, sheer walls of rock that went straight up and down and looked as if cut by a jeweler. The pool was twenty feet across. I walked over to it, out of the sun, and I could feel David walking above me. At the edge, I saw that its banks were all solid rock. I couldn't place the natural force, what sort of tempest or ice age had scooped it so perfectly out of bedrock.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "It's a quarry," David said. "They hauled granite here, but then they hit a spring, and it filled up, so they went somewhere else."

  "How do you know?"

  "I figured it out."

  It was deep, and it looked cold. I stared down at myself in the water and then saw David reflected from the top of the wall, higher than he had been, perhaps twelve feet. When he jumped, I saw him suspended for an instant like a dancer in the blue surface of the pool. He knifed in, feet first, and I felt the explosion of it in the water that broke on me. Darts of cold hit me on the legs and belly, and my muscles clenched. Then there was just time to see the pool's surface flashing in a million pieces before he shot up in the center and again took over the scene. He swam in a couple of strokes to the edge where I was standing, then heaved himself out and came to his feet in front of me. He hugged his shoulders, smiling through chattering teeth. I put my arms around him and shivered at the coolness of him.

  "You know what?" he asked, his voice as clear as a boy's in the aftermath of his leap.

  "What?"

  "You're all covered with salt, and I'm all clean."

  I kissed his cold and dripping hair. As I ran my tongue along the side of his neck and across his cheek, I licked the water from him. His open mouth met mine, and the heat of it smacked like whiskey. I held him around the shoulders and didn't move, as if too much motion would awaken us and dissolve us like a dream. But David's hands whirled between us. He stroked the hair on my chest with his open palms and then squeezed my nipples between his fingers until they throbbed. We were both already hard. He took our two cocks in his right hand and kneaded them. With his other hand, he massaged the small of my back, at last trailing one finger lightly along the crack of my ass.

  I brought my own hands up to cradle his head. Our tongues came apart as I drew his head back and looked into his face. Spit glistened around his mouth, and his eyes were shut. The thought flashed once in my mind that I would love to go over and over with him the approach to this moment. In the tower. He would tell me everything he thought and wanted from the instant the gardener came inside him. The head of my cock tingled in David's grasp at the mere idea. But I knew I was, as David kept trying to tell me, here. I could have come in seconds, just as we stood by the water, but I figured we had a way to go yet.

  "What do you want to do?"

  "Lie down," he said.

  "And do what?"

  "You mean, which of the acts of darkness do we perform? I don't care. I want you to stop thinking about it. We don't have to do a fucking thing."

  He took my hand and brought me to the ground with him. We stretched in the pine needles, side by side, and he studied my face. It was a stepping backward from the brink, I suppose, to hold off both the fiercer pleasure of coming and the declarations that welled up in my throat like tears. Our hands grazed one another's skin more slowly. We drew back from the center, and yet the pressure in my groin did not diminish. It gathered to a greater spasm as we groped like sleepers with our hands and held each other's open eyes like hypnotists. What do you see, I used to wonder long ago when David stared at me. I didn't think to ask now. I saw the same thing he did.

  When we finally moved, it was as if we both assented silently to the same desire. He turned me over onto my back. He leaned over and took the tip of my cock between his lips, his tongue vibrating against the opening. I began to roll my hips to the rhythm of it as he straddled me and braced himself on his hands and knees. He rocked back and forth as he sucked. His genitals brushed across my face, and before I took him in my mouth, I let my tongue play loosely against him, lapping at his balls and burying my face in the swirl of hair on his thighs and in his groin. We fed like animals, furiously. We gauged each other, closer and closer to bursting, working for the shared instant. He was riding deep into my throat when he began to come, and at the same time he seemed to swallow me entirely. I spilled over in a great rush that about broke me in half, while my mouth filled with jet after jet of David's heat. The stream ran out of me, and then, wed to a perfect cycle, it streamed in again.

  He collapsed on top of me, and the grip of his legs loosened at my head. But we both held each other in our mouths, breathing through the nose until we were soft. Then he drew back his mouth and let my limp cock fall back between my legs. He folded his arms across my abdomen, laying his head on them as if he were going to take a nap. I stared up at the sky through David's thighs. Now how do we get out of it, I thought. I didn't think it all that anxiously, and part of me thought it gleefully. By this point in the past, after all, I would have had my daily dose of post-coital tristesse—"PCT," David came to call it, since he had occasion to observe it so often. Instead I was getting giddy, and I wasn't sorry to be pinned down on the tiny earth. I might have floated off otherwise. Get out of it, Rick, I dared myself.

  "Are you having a mystical experience?" David asked from my waist.

  "No. I have not left the body far behind."

  "How are you?"

  "Thirsty," I said. "I just took in a lot of seawater."

  He lifted off me and leaned in a crouch over the edge of the pool. He scooped up water and splashed his face, then bent way over and drank at the surface. Though he was only an arm's length away from me, he was still as beautiful as the boy who lived in the film shot from the upstairs window. That said something about beauty, if not about me. As he swung around, I saw that his cheeks were bulging with a gulp of water. He held his face above mine. I opened my mouth. The water drizzled down all over my lips and teeth, and I held my tongue out to catch what I could.

  "Yum yum."

  "Don't mention it," he said, and he didn't move. His face was still only inches from mine.

  "David, what did Madeleine whisper to you?"

  "She said you'd be horny once you'd signed your name." He smiled and kissed me lightly on the lips. "She said I'd better be ready."

  THERE IS A TIME in midsummer when every day seems more what you mean by summer, when to wake up to the sun is a relief because it proves it is not just in your head. This hasn't anything to do with the light, which has after all peaked weeks before. But different people reckon their summers by different certainties. Mrs. Carroll was such a broken-hearted type, for instance, that she said it was all downhill after June twenty-first. She said the winter had not unlocked her bones before the longest day was past, and so there was a sting
that the year never lost. For me it all comes true in the middle of July. It is not possible for it to be too hot for my taste, and when the humidity pressure-cooks the city, I like it even more. The people I don't understand in New England are the ones who complain about winter and summer both, about the cold and the heat. I don't understand what they want.

  But I think the weather is all right in Boston. I like July best of all, but I don't need it all year long. David says he does. He is all right from the Fourth of July until Labor Day, and thus he thought he would have been a happy Carroll child at the turn of the century, in and out of the water all day while his nanny sat guard in her puffed uniform next to a pile of white linen towels. The sea upset him the rest of the time, chill with winter coming or winter going. He and Mrs. Carroll had pinpointed it about their differences one night over claret and Gitanes. David told me all this about the weather as if I had never heard him talk about it before, when in fact I remembered whole days in Boston when he talked about nothing else. He used to brood and piss until we had a fight.

  "Do we have to talk about the weather?" I asked him now. "I know the winter brings you down, but why don't you just enjoy today?"

  I was a regular little Pollyanna. We were lying side by side, covered with oil, on the high roof terrace where Phidias had first argued out the plan with Madeleine. The oil was called Tahiti Gold, and Aldo, who had bought it on a South Seas trip last winter, swore by it. He said it would turn us the color of chocolate in no time.

  "It isn't just the weather" David said pettishly. "It's a theory I'm coming up with about how you're born with specific climate needs. It's genetic or something."

  "You're way ahead of your time, David. Most of us are still struggling with astrology."

  "Nietzsche," he said, rolling out the name like a college kid, "says we all have to Mediterraneanize ourselves."

  "Where does he say that?"

  "I don't know. Someone told it to me on the beach in Miami."

  "I don't think Nietzsche was talking about Miami. Or the beach." I squinted over at him, but he lay face up without moving, a slice of cucumber on either eyelid. Another of Aldo's sun tips. "I think the weather is just an excuse. It's something people talk about when the television isn't on."

  "The thing is, Rick," he said, leveling his voice, "whenever you ask me what have I done since I left you, I know you're really asking why did I leave."

  "I am?"

  "Yes. And I know you don't believe me that I left because of the weather, but I did. When I finally decided, I didn't even think about you."

  I sat up and faced away from the sun and out to the sea through the dark green railing. Is that what we're talking about, I thought. How bizarre of him, to suppose it would comfort me to learn that I didn't come into it at all when he ran from me. He was right about one thing, though. All I cared about now was why he went, because I didn't want it to happen again. I would let the past be all my fault if only he could convince me exactly what it was, so I could change it.

  "No," I said, "I don't believe you."

  "That's why I'm telling you. When you hear the whole theory, you'll understand." Then, without a pause, because gay men sitting in the sun never talk about anything for long, he said: "We have to buy some stuff for our lips. Aldo says it's lip cancer that everyone gets in Palm Springs. Skin cancer is just a scare."

  "David, if we're going to talk, do you think you could take the garnish off your eyes?"

  He peeled off the cucumbers and looked up at me, squinting only a little in the sun, as if nothing in him, not even his naked eyes, shrank from it. I didn't mind our changing subjects. And really, I had lied about the weather. There wasn't anything we didn't have to talk about.

  "Aldo was telling me about the Shalimar gardens," he said. "He says the air is so wet it's like swimming, but nobody minds because they wear silk. Maybe that's where I should live."

  "It doesn't matter where you live. Tell me about Neil Macdonald."

  It is difficult for me now, as summer draws to a close, to recapture the scatter-shot quality of mid-July, but I swear that every conversation David and I fell into went all over the place. It is more difficult still to describe the mood I was in. They were two weeks of shipboard romance that had the advantage of not confining us to a ship's artificial routines. It was instinctive in me to cast about for a way not to lose him again, and the process brought me inevitably back to the past and its question of what went wrong. But I say shipboard romance because something in me knew it was doomed. It would end when we had arrived at our destination, wherever it was. That is how I assumed we were defining the freedom which let us be lovers again. No rules meant no future. And so we were very free to talk. There was no reason not to say everything, since we would soon enough be on our way. My mood was such that the more I talked, the more I thought I would get somewhere when the lull of July was over and we had split. I wasn't going back to Boston, no matter what.

  I sound so sure. But the tone in which I harbor no illusions is just my Sam Spade act. Since I walked into it this time with my eyes wide open, I had to tell myself it wasn't going to last. More important, I had to promise not to get hurt when it happened. It was a mood that hit me like the memory of an errand I hadn't done, where I might have to lie to gain time. It shivered through me that day on the roof terrace when David said, "I know you're really asking why did I leave." Don't count on anything, I said to myself.

  I am reluctant, I see, to say that I was happy as well. Because the gods are perverse, I don't favor talking and knocking on wood at the same time. It gets their attention. And I think that if I just say I was happy and leave it at that, I will look slow-witted and unsubtle. I will seem to deserve the complexity that rains down on me for being so simple. I am afraid, if I say it, that people will ask me why and I won't know. But all right, I was happy. I was a lover again, for one thing. I woke up in the morning twitching with desire. David and I climbed all over each other, still only half-awake, as if this morning passion were another level of our dreams. By nightfall on a given day we spoke about love as if we knew the whole truth about it at last. And we did not get locked into roles. His first entrance into me cracked like a gunshot, but the pain was dazed by a wave of pleasure. From that moment, the baton passed back and forth between us like relay runners on a racecourse, and we were the equal lovers we wanted to be.

  "Neil worked in a bar when I met him," David said tentatively, not sure what I was after. "He had a string of sugar daddies starting when he was eighteen, but they always threw him out because he got into trouble."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  "Street trash. He brought home people who mugged him and robbed his daddies' apartments. They don't like it when their Chinese bronzes are ripped off, no matter how pretty you are. Why do you want to know about this?"

  I stood up and stretched. I felt a buzz in my head from so much sun, and I wanted to swim. I had no clothes on, and it occurs to me now that I took off my clothes in mid-July at the slightest provocation. David was wearing a pair of black racing trunks. He could have gone naked on the roof terrace too, but then he wouldn't have had a white line to measure his tan by.

  "I don't. I want to know about the two of you."

  "Oh that," he said, flipping over onto his stomach, to even out the color. "I was in love with him because he was a bastard. I tried to take care of him, and he treated me like shit. So what's new?"

  "Was he good in bed?"

  "You mean, is that why I put up with him? No. As a matter of fact, he couldn't get it up most of the time. I think I stayed because it was like a job. Do you know that I've never had a job longer than a year?"

  "I've never had a job at all," I said.

  "You don't need one. You have money. I mean it, Rick. I've never had Blue Cross, and I'm not on a pension plan or anything, and I have about a hundred dollars in the bank in Florida."

  He was suddenly tense, but I don't think he even knew himself what he was trying to say. I real
ized that I couldn't give him a word of advice about the business of being secure. Partly, I think, he was articulating the panicky moment in gay life when you see that you have given over your youth to the body and that the body is going to be less and less a negotiable asset. David had always worked until he had enough money to get by or move on. It used to make him feel terrific. His string of one-horse jobs gave him the air of a man who could go on indefinitely being part troubleshooter and part Peter Pan. And though he loved Gucci shoes and Turnbull & Asser shirts when he got them, in fact he seemed to get by on a change of Levi's and T-shirts and tennis shoes. He went on as if I had spoken aloud, the pout still rising in his voice.

  "Everything I own fits in two suitcases. I don't even have a TV. I bet even hobos have TVs."

  "Some people would say you're lucky."

  "Some people," he said, turning onto his back again and reaching for his cucumbers, "are full of shit. Some people do it with chickens."

  We talked all over the place in those two weeks, coming back by turns to things we couldn't solve by talking. We made glancing blows at bewildering issues and then abandoned them in a sentence or two, and yet I think we came nearer to telling the truth than we did in the old days, when we worked by overkill and beat things into the ground. During all that time, I don't remember a single day when it rained. My memory of midsummer is lush with noon colors and the peak of the sun. But it is not as if I had nothing else on my mind. I was determined to undermine Madeleine's children's hour, and I began by grilling Phidias. I assumed he would be on my side. Knowing Mrs. Carroll's children as well as he did, he would be more convincing to Madeleine that it wouldn't work. But he seemed not to take it in. Watching for him from the tower, I went down one morning and intercepted him as he walked down the road from the dairy to make his daily inspection of the house. I remember we stood talking under an apple tree, because I kept looking up to see how far along the apples were.