A Brief History of Male Nudes in America

by Dianne Nelson

  When my relatives clear a table for the night, they do so carefully. They cover the food and wipe the table down. They leave the sugar bowl out, and fill the salt and pepper. Each small act is a gesture of confidence that there will absolutely be a tomorrow and tomorrow.

  In Kansas the night surrounds a house; it does not swallow the house, it does not turn the house to stone starting from the inside out, as sometimes happens in California. You can think of the Kansas night as a hand covering a flame. You can imagine the dusk as a fine, dark cloth being laid in a line over Mayetta and west toward Wamego and farther west toward Abilene and Great Bend.

  Though it is a sweeping, dramatic darkness, it is not black. In fact, I can see Katie sitting in the dark under the yellow and white canopy and I can already make out the strong line of her jaw and her thin, hairpin wrists. Like Katie, I am unable to properly name these bones.

  In Kansas in the dark, my sister is all softness and memory as she sits there rehearsing the silence that will steadily grow around her. Katie—the riddle of woods, the renderless garden. Not far away, I am looking at her, thinking of her. I am listening to the crickets shape and reshape this fierce world.

  Chocolate

  I remember a birthday when there was hardly anything for me—a pair of blue mittens wrapped in a Husted’s Dry Cleaning sack, brown twine tied in a lopsided bow around it all. With her eyebrow pencil, Libby, my mother, had written on the package: To Janice, Our Angel. I sat with my arms folded and refused to move. I didn’t want to turn nine that year in the dull, beat-up world of Idaho and welfare.

  Besides pretending that it was ribbon fit for an angel, Libby used the brown twine to secure the lampshade on the lamp and also to tie the back door shut, which had no lock. “You want the whole world coming in?” she’d ask, her small chapped hands struggling to tie a box knot over the doorknob, but in fact, if burglars had ever come to our house, they would have looked around, pulled the stocking caps off their faces, and laughed. A chenille bedspread at our front window for drapes. An empty orange crate painted red as an end table.

  I was miserable when my mother laid that birthday package on the table, the dry cleaning label face-up and taunting me, but then my father, Noel, arrived with chocolate. Not a box, but a sack with the assorted specialties from Selfaggio’s—Twin Falls’ best gift and confection shop, though Noel always said it “gift and affection.”

  We did not talk. We sat back with chocolate melting on our tongues and fell into the sugary comas that often mark the lives of the poor. My little sisters folded their hands in their laps and swung their feet—scuffed saddle shoes, penny loafers with the stitching popped, high-topped leather baby boots not fit for learning the art of walking in. Despite our outward circumstances, my parents believed that we were cultured, in a sense—could distinguish German from Swiss chocolate, a good hazelnut from a bad. They taught us how to savor, how to close our eyes and be romanced in the thick language of taste.

  Later that night I opened my gift. “Next year,” Libby said to Noel for my benefit, “don’t you think Janice will be ready for a bike next year?” For me, it was not that dangling promise which never came true, but the dark, rivery liqueur centers of the candy that made nine seem possible and, at least for a moment, even good.

  My past, in the most simple terms, was a series of awkward, shameful gifts, starting with those mittens, starting when the Twin Falls Mill closed and my parents discovered that they liked the shabby life of leisure. One year there was a pair of men’s scruffy, used downhill skiis for me. I never got boots or poles to go with them, was never once taken to a ski resort. Noel, I later learned, had taken them as payment on a bet he’d won. At first he refused them, but then remembered that my birthday had passed uneventfully two days before, so he loaded them in the junkpile Pinto he drove.

  In Idaho on welfare, skiing lessons were not possible; ballet classes were totally out of the question. There was black and white TV if the electricity had been paid. There was a deck of cards with naked women on the backs which could be used if Libby was not enrapt in solitaire. And, of course, from time to time there was chocolate.

  One year it came from Ghiardelli’s, shipped to us in a discreet brown package, the chocolate wrapped in soft insulated foil. It was a five-pound block, and Noel slowly unwrapped it much like I thought other fathers might unwrap a bowling trophy or a beautiful Father’s Day tie. By slivers, we ate that block of chocolate, tasting how the bitter and the sweet were suspended together, which was the lesson of life in windy Idaho, where the snow or the dust was always blowing—either “salt or pepper,” we always said.

  I remember not wanting to turn eleven, not wanting to turn twelve, and then not wanting Christmas. Under the tree there was a huge toad in a cracked glass aquarium for my sister Marnie. She was six and terrified of the dazed thing that kept jumping against the glass until it finally and forever lay still. A used crock pot for Libby that had the faint odor of someone’s burned chili still in it. We maneuvered through that Christmas and its gifts like, I suppose, you tip-toe through land mines. Relief and wet underarms when it was all through.

  The impossible darkness of turning sixteen took hold of me, and honestly I can’t say what it was that birthday that Libby and Noel dreamed up: a garage-sale coat, somebody’s worn-out flute with a six-pack of loose sheet music which, of course, I wouldn’t have been able to read. By then I was so full of wanting that I couldn’t see straight.

  It took the next twenty years to get beyond all that. Cordell Murphy, my husband, paid for me to forget. Massage, long afternoons of counseling, three weeks in the Alps in total silence. Finally discouraged with my slow progress, he took me to the side of our house one Fourth of July and hit my head twice against the shake shingles. I kicked back and then it was over—the foul taste of powdered milk. My irrational yearning for silk, for trinkets, for shoes, for socks. The gruesome details of chocolate.

  Paperweight

  If it weren’t for my body, I could fly, I could go anywhere, I could be anything. I learned this fact long ago, and yes, there was regret and suffering from it, there were nights I cried, there were whole summers spent in an upstairs bedroom where I surrounded myself with ladies’ magazines and poetry and my brother’s borrowed Penthouse. Lying across the bed or spread on the parquet floor, I was the tall, sad witness to myself: arms and legs and all the rest of me that I wouldn’t have given fifty cents for.

  When I think of my body, I usually see Martin Heffler trying to pull open the stage curtains for our fifth grade’s rendition of How the West Was Won. Martin was only a fourth grader, and maybe that had something to do with it, but really, it was the curtains that wouldn’t budge—gold brocaded velvet, beautiful to look at, but ponderous as a ton of wet laundry. At the far right of the stage Martin was up there grunting, actually grunting. He was red-faced and the curtains weren’t going anywhere. Cruelty, inattention—I don’t know what it was, but the teachers just let poor Martin struggle for a while, which was wrong because they basically understood the laws of physics. The curtains were a rock and Martin was a pebble.

  How the West Was Won turned out to be more an assignment than an artistic creation. The pioneers were deadpan and the Indians communicated only with timid war whoops. By far, it was Martin Heffler who had stolen the show and lent me this image of my body as something heavier than night and beyond the laws of physics: the cumbersome gold curtains behind which Emily Mills, dressed as the state of California, waited to be discovered.

  It goes back that far, to grade school, to Martin raging against those curtains and me sitting in the audience with the first realization of being trapped head-on, my body a hopeless house with the doors all locked. I wasn’t sure at the end of the play if I could stand up. I felt as if I had melted into my chair. The fourth graders were all shuffling around me, and the big sixth graders seemed awkward and pinned in their clothes.

  That was the start of a physical disorientation that would visit my life agai
n and again. One night in St. Louis in 1976, Prentice Dorn left his post at the bar and delivered his body to me, tall and dark-haired, a man whose hands are more committed to my memory than his face, not because he was unattractive, but simply that his hands moved so smoothly. They were like water as it edges around something big, as it pools and cuts until everything is surrendered without a sound.

  Prentice had already finished cleaning the bar and was following me around. It was after closing and I’d only had the job at Fiddler’s for three weeks. Prentice had worked there for over two years. He was telling me how Walter, the maître d’, had fouled up some reservations that evening and how a furious party of six had been left sitting in the lobby for over a half hour. Walter had given them a round of complimentary cocktails and humbled himself in a slew of perfected apologies, then taken it all out on the two nearest waiters. And if Nick was too stupid to notice that the busboys were stealing his tips, Prentice maintained, then he deserved it.

  This was stuff I liked to hear about, everything I couldn’t see from the kitchen, though I didn’t envy those who worked the dining room, who stepped lightly among the tables of St. Louis socialites in the half-dark elegance that was as imagined as real. A waterfall of blue-green lights, potted fig trees and magnolias—it was a strange place to work, an old establishment that soothed and charmed the public. There was constant bickering among the cooks—what could be served with what, who threw out the last can of peppercorns. Back by the coffee station, the busboys hung out and watched the plates as they were taken from tables. Leftovers were up for grabs, the good stuff: the practically untouched prime rib or lobster or the Wellington. Nobody went away from this place hungry. John, one of the waiters, would leave quietly after midnight with cake or eclairs for his little girls. Even the cats survived by prowling the garbage cans out back. It was the way that city fed itself, and no one thought of it as stealing.

  I knew, as he followed me into the pantry and back out to the prep station, that Prentice was sizing me up. He had watched me like this for three nights, following me out to my car where he stood complicating the darkness, talking about St. Louis’s water system and his father’s bowling alley and a host of trivia that, though meaningless to me, was tender.

  So on this the fourth night, when I reached up to slide a five-pound can of olives onto the shelf and felt Prentice close behind me, his arms around my waist, I was not surprised. In fact, I leaned into him the way a person leans into a storm, a little off balance perhaps, but determined to keep going, despite the wind and the rain. It was an awkward moment, Prentice kissing my hair because he couldn’t get to my face. I couldn’t get to anything on Prentice, so I leaned back farther into his arms, into his chest, to the place where his heart became the same pounding as Walter’s fist on the outside door. He had locked himself out and wanted to know why it took so long for us to get there.

  That was the fourth night, April, when Prentice took two bottles of the house Zinfandel and we left Fiddler’s, though we were unable to make it all the way up the stairs to his apartment. We had to stop out there on his porch to taste each other, mouth and neck and shoulders, everything unwinding into the black shoal of night that is St. Louis in summer. If I could, this is where I would have stopped it, on the porch where desire was still blind, where it was only a sound—the whining first gear of a car or dogs barking in the distance. But Prentice unlocked the door, he opened the wine with a deep, resounding pop, and the next eight years began to take shape.

  Later that night in Prentice’s bed I started at his foot and dreamed my way up his leg in the old way, like the pioneers scratching at the dirt, looking for signs, for smoke, for California. Prentice moaned a little. It was the kind of sound that’s hard to distinguish. Sometimes it’s pain; sometimes it’s heaven and there’s no word, there’s just this sound that comes out into the room, all breath and feeling. Side by side, caught on warm sheets, our arms were too heavy to let each other go.

  “Do you want coffee?” Prentice asked me in the morning.

  “Yeah. Always,” I told him.

  It wasn’t a test, though to watch a man moving around in his own kitchen is a kind of revelation. Prentice had a specific cabinet for cups. Things were looking good.

  Prentice in the morning in his boxer shorts. Why is the world that kind of place, happiness and sadness converging, the smell of coffee making everything new?

  There is a moment when I look down at myself and the consequences of life are made real. Ankle and skin and bone, the long curve of the arm, a patch of hair. When I step from the shower, my skin sings and there is nothing I can do about it.

  With clay, you get to feel what the body is really like. I’m just a part-time sculptor, but even I know that the hands are incredible. There are twenty-seven bones in them, and then the wrists turn in, delicate as stems, frustrating you, making you cry. Once I worked on a foot for a whole month. I made all my visitors take off their shoes when they came into the house so I could study their feet, and still my foot, if I had to tell the truth, was mediocre. At Christmas, as a joke, I sculpted Allen’s balls, but they cracked when I fired them. They’re on my desk now, paperweights, a sad reminder of Allen, my first love, at the AmTrak station when I gave him two apples and a box of Jujubes and told him that love shouldn’t feel like despair. Dressed in coats and mufflers, our hands feeling old but unprepared, we said good-bye, waving for what seemed like hours.

  Fiddler’s wasn’t four stars, but it definitely had a reputation. The service was good, the food hot, and the frilly garnishes oftentimes breath-taking. Even though Walter had lived in St. Louis for over twenty years, he played up his Algerian accent, and the customers were delighted. In the safe confines of the kitchen, though, he returned to his everyday slang, to name-calling and cracking the whip, to pointing out that all busboys were born with their heads up their asses.

  From six until ten I was a slave, then the dinner rush died, I got myself a drink and started cleanup. The front doors were locked at twelve and on good nights I was out of there by one.

  Theft is a harsh word, but it’s the word Ron Mayfield used when he spoke to the night shift one Friday before we went to work. Even though he was one of the owners, we didn’t see him that often because he lived in Frankfort, so when he walked in, his gray Saab parked in the loading zone, we stiffened a little, and Nick, who was about to throw a loaf of French bread rocket-style across the room and onto the counter, gracefully put his arm down and strode across the kitchen like, hey, it was just work as usual.

  Mayfield had a way of making it seem all very vague: inventories and loss statements. He avoided being accusatory. If I had been a jury and looked out into their faces, I wouldn’t have seen anything, not from the cooks or the busboys or the waiters or anybody. Simply put: nobody here had stolen a thing. Mayfield was having a business problem; that’s what it was, and maybe we even sympathized with him a little.

  Nothing really changed. Oh, one night Walter saw John leaving with a couple of slices of raspberry torte, and he told John to put them in take-out containers, but that was it.

  I told Prentice, who was still wiping down the bar when John left, what Walter had done.

  “Yeah, he’s O.K.,” Prentice said.

  I sat down on one of the stools. The lights in the dining room behind us were already out, and for some reason Prentice was moving slowly that night, taking his time with the glasses and carefully folding every dishrag. In another month he was due to start an internship with a local architect and he planned to cut down on his hours at the restaurant then. I had been thinking of that, of the fact that I would be seeing him less.

  Prentice was beautiful at his work. No, he was beautiful doing anything. I saw him mowing his father’s yard once. He had to stop and empty the grass catcher every couple of times around the yard. His shirt was off and the air was sweet with St. Augustine and there seemed nothing better than this small, raw world. His father came out on the porch and I could see the res
emblance and I thought: whatever happens, I’ll be better for this.

  “Prentice,” I said, bending a straw in half, “do you think it’s stealing?” It wasn’t a test; it was a question, though I admit there was a lot in it. Prentice covered a bowl of cut limes and looked up at me. He was tired, he was running late, but he paused thoughtfully and then he said, “Dee, everything is stealing.”

  It was a really bad year for Martin Heffler—a year of bad luck and misunderstanding and letting the hammer fall. Besides the humiliation suffered in those few minutes before Mrs. Gallagher’s sixth graders claimed the West, Martin underwent the trauma of being accused of stealing. Birdy Watson, a melancholic redhead who clung to the cyclone fence at recess, stood up just before lunch and yelled that his lunch ticket was gone, and several other students discovered theirs missing also. Through a long process that involved a desk search, conferences, an anonymous note, and a lecture on the importance of truth and honor, Martin’s name was arrived at. No formal punishment was dealt out as far as we knew, but Martin was a small boy, and if anything, he lost weight that year. He took to folding his homework into tiny squares the size of quarters, and later on he stopped riding the bus.

  So when Prentice told me that everything was stealing, I remembered Martin and the Zinfandel and Walter turning his head and the cats slinking up the alley. I saw Allen with the apples and my heart, and I saw myself turning to Prentice in the night, throwing the covers back and easing onto him, telling him there and there.

  The most I ever took from Fiddler’s was a cherry cream pie. I was having lunch guests the next day and Estelle, the pastry chef, said to go ahead, in another day or so it was going to be stale anyway. It was a whole pie, eight pieces, with crème de glacé and everything. I served it on these little bone china plates, and all I had were salad forks, but I used them and it didn’t matter.