A Brief History of Male Nudes in America

by Dianne Nelson

  You use your head, though—step off the distance from the park to the high school and see if it isn’t damn near impossible to do on your hands and knees. All that gravel and rotten pavement. Dixon would have been hamburger. Supposedly Jenner saw him on the side of the road, stopped and tried to get him into the car, but Dixon’s eyes were glazed over, he stunk like catfish bait, and he was not to be reasoned with.

  Funny how the truth gets twisted, because the fact is, Dixon was a supremely reasonable man. He thought things out. He would look at a broken vacuum cleaner and step by step he would take it apart, clean it up, and make it work again, the suction so strong you’d best not get it near your feet. When Hawk Lewis was determined to cut down a hundred-year-old oak on his side property and all the neighbors had given up convincing him otherwise, it was Dixon who walked down to his house one night with a couple of root beers and somehow got him to fall in love with that tree again. It was a huge, beautiful oak loaded with magpies and starlings, and the one thing Dixon said he told Hawk was that trees could indeed feel pain, and how would Hawk like a chain saw in his side?

  The crazy thing is, Dixon did have a twin, an unnamed baby boy who never even went home from the hospital. In fact, he was never named because he lived less than two hours. “He just wasn’t ready to breathe” is what my mother told us.

  Someone has to be pretty bored to take that little sadness from so long ago, mix it up, and throw in a baby killer like Gordon Jenner has done. A smart guy would have chosen somebody else to tell that story about, because if you traced Dixon back to a kid you’d see someone with the little teaspoon face of an angel, and you’d know that Dixon’s instincts and nature were as clear and harmless as water from his very start.

  I’m not saying he was perfect, but right down to his bones Dixon was good. Once, as kids, I tried to get him to steal candy with me, and as soon as I’d told him the plan, his hands were paralyzed—he said he felt ice all through his fingers. Years later, when Francine Johnson put the moves on him one night, he just didn’t have the heart to tell her to go bark at someone else. All the bad genes of three generations of Johnsons had settled in Francine—in her face, to be exact. Dixon took her home that night, which amazed me because he had an epic appeal to women—he could be wearing a baseball cap and dirty levis and in ten minutes he’d have some exotic female rooted deep as a mulberry right next to him. “So why Francine Johnson?” I asked him.

  He shrugged and put his feet up on the dashboard of my car. “In the dark,” he said, “with the lights off, everything evens out.”

  Some people don’t know when to shut up. “Diarrhea of the mouth,” my mother calls it, but I think it can signal something much worse—a bitter heart no bigger or better than a turnip.

  What Jenner has to be bitter about, I don’t know. There are no easy windows by which to look into another person’s life, so I judge it from the outside—what he does and says, if he has a dog and feeds it, how he treats his mate.

  I was good to my ex-husband, but good doesn’t necessarily mean close or bonded, it doesn’t mean you sleep cradled like two spoons at night, or that your future can stretch scary as hell like a suspension bridge out in front of you and as long as the two of you are together it doesn’t matter. Although he never settled to just one woman, Dixon knew all about couples and he warned me about Armand. “Love him or lose him,” he said, and he was right.

  If I had a dollar for every time Dixon was right . . . well. The one time he was wrong, though, he was seriously wrong. That was when he took off for Santa Fe, thinking his life here had stalled. He could walk it, he said—hell, cancer patients and paraplegics were crisscrossing the continent and he could do it, too. Adventure and bullheadedness always flowed together in Dixon like one muddy river. The fact that he started out on that trip with only a few dollars didn’t scare him. Dixon believed you could build your life up out of nothing—just like a fence—a brick at a time.

  On an Oklahoma two-way road in the oil-colored twilight is where it ended for my brother when a semi came up over a rise and could not distinguish Dixon from the shadows. His hair was dark. He wore an old brown corduroy jacket that became even browner after he rolled more than fifty feet in the dirt. I went down there to identify him, which after an accident like that is just a loose term, because the person I saw only vaguely resembled my brother.

  Dixon robbed the bank when he got his looks. He was big and lean, had a square jaw and a natural kind of abandoned grace when he moved. I’ll admit that I got the deep-water eyes in the family, but Dixon got the hair—thick and wavy, the kind you want to run your hand through for good luck. More than once, he was mistaken for the Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, and sometimes, good-naturedly, he’d play along and say that going for the gold isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  It was only natural that people at his funeral were shocked when they saw Dixon. For a while I heard the stuff about the whole top of his head having to be sewn back on, but the worst was about his ears—plastic imitations that would surely outlast the rest of him. I know how it went on from there—how he was flying on LSD and ran straight toward the lights of that truck—you know, the old moth to the flame. How my mother tried to climb into the coffin with her only son when she first walked into the memorial service. How the big heart-shaped arrangement of tulips was secretly from the fire chief’s wife. The problem is, if you were mining any of that for the truth, you’d be digging all the way to China.

  Tony Ramirez told us one day that it is an endless path, this karate. I didn’t have forever, though, so I asked him if I could double up on classes—take two a week. He shrugged and said, “Take three a week, but it may not happen any faster.”

  I had been his student for several months, and I knew his whole lecture about the most formidable opponent being ourselves, but that did not change what happened in Kentucky Fried Chicken last Friday night. I was waiting for a 15-piece bucket when Jenner walked in—a pair of dusty Dingo boots and a big moth-eaten suede hat—that’s how I saw him. He didn’t acknowledge me in any way, just kept looking at the menu board as if this was the biggest decision of his life. I hated that he wouldn’t look at me.

  People don’t get to choose when things happen, and if you ask me, real talent is taking events as they occur and making them count. Luck would have had me running into Jenner in a couple of months, but happenstance put the two of us right there that night with a big black and red picture of the Colonel smiling down at us. The counter girl delivered my bucket of chicken, and as I turned to head toward the door I said “hey” to Jenner. He looked down, kind of startled, and what I did next surprised even me. I walked over to the straw dispenser, not much more than a wooden box, and I gave it an edge-of-hand strike and the box splintered and a few straws rolled down onto the floor. Just a few plastic straws, but God, they were beautiful to me. I stared over at Jenner, didn’t say a word, actually couldn’t. I was gritting my teeth against the white hot pain in my hand, but he didn’t know that. All he knew—and I could tell this from his big fool blue eyes—was that Heaven and Earth were on their way.

  Tony Ramirez looked at my hand and this week he’s making me practice with the twelve- and thirteen-year-old beginners, but I don’t care. There is a certain satisfaction I get in towering over all of my classmates. And my karate shout is the strongest one in this class.

  I’m not like some of the people in this town who have grown radar ears, but I do hear things. Eleanor Goodway, one of my mother’s oldest friends, came into my insurance office the other day. I was surprised because she has both term and whole life policies up to her ears, but she was there for a different reason. “Hillary,” she said, bending over my desk, lowering her voice as if this was privileged information, “chicken is nothing to lose your head over. I know these fast food places gyp you every once in a while—more legs than breasts, or the biscuits are a day old—but to break a plate-glass window over ten dollars worth of food . . .” She shook her head at me the way s
he’s been shaking her head at this whole town for the last fifty years. She took a handkerchief out and dabbed at her nose and the smell of her lilac water drifted through the State Farm office. I didn’t have to ask her who she had been talking to.

  Jenner is one thing; he’s in the category of fleas and ticks. Dixon is another. If he had been in Vietnam, as the story goes, I’m sure he would have been a hero. He would have somehow saved a child or woman in that junkyard jungle or at a point when everything was blown bare he would have stooped down and cradled a man’s cantalouped head in a dying moment.

  Dixon left me with all these what-if’s, and for the most part, I’ll warn you, brothers are like that. They’ll live and laugh and make it so dreams won’t come near your house, won’t even park on your street.

  Simple Yellow Cloth

  My eyes open and quickly the water of my sleep clears. It’s Thursday night. At first I’m angry because it’s past one and I have to go to work the next day. Daria is out there in the hallway and she’s humming something that I can’t name, and maybe it’s because I’ve just been awakened suddenly, but the vague familiarity of that song is driving me crazy. There’s a formula for remembering things; it’s like walking backwards. It’s based on the premise that every movement and thought is connected, and that by being methodical we can find anything: our shoes, our keys, our very lives. At night, however, I am not prone to reason or formula, though if there were an easy way to get my daughter back into bed right now, I’d use it.

  “Daria,” I call, and I know she hears me but she doesn’t answer, which is a kind of formula itself: a tiny fist that opens with nothing in it. I move to the other side of the bed and sit up. From there, I can see her sitting by the night light, her legs crossed, her arms folded, a winter child who is completely of my own making. Not that I brag about it. It’s something I usually keep to myself. And mind you, it has no religious significance. Daria is a child created purely from my own desire, the repetition of my dreams, and the leftover Christmas candles I burned every night. Not magic, but will.

  Don’t misunderstand. I like men. I like how they puff their cheeks out when they shave, and how they walk, and how they are really unable to lie effectively. In a given room on a given night I can turn and be totally undone by the sight of a man as he reaches for a drink. For me, the line that his arm makes as he reaches out is the very line between all passion and restraint. I’ve been in love twice and either of those men could have been Daria’s father, but neither is.

  “Daria,” I call again, and this time she looks up, and I swear, being childless was a curse. The first time I held her, there was a stone thrown into a pool and I knelt in the cattail and reeds, alive, attentive. Between us, a life exists on its own, something with heart and claws, a thing still kneeling at the pool. “Please go back to bed,” I tell her, at which point she increases the volume of her song and turns away from me. That’s what she’s like. That’s how calm and undisturbed she is in the middle of the night. It makes me flinch a little, for my daughter in the hallway has a voice that unfolds like paper, words that make sense only because she says them with such confidence. I’m sleepy and yet I marvel at her.

  Don’t think this has all been a joy, though. My pregnancy was long and troublesome, which I attribute to the fact that Daria’s conception was a bit out of the ordinary. For over two months I worked at it. The concentration it took was intense and I started losing weight. My mother would come by and ask what was up, I looked so pale, was that jerk David bothering me again?

  I had to think of objects repeatedly, things that have meaning: Chopin’s back at the piano as the rain slowly destroyed the midsummer holiday. The glow-in-the-dark stars I pasted on my ceiling above the bed like a piece of the night sky Lo Fen-Lang had bought for a concubine before his dynasty crumbled. At my bedside, the Christmas candles burned hot and true. By the twelfth of May I knew I was pregnant.

  I’m determined to wait her out tonight. “Children learn by watching you,” my mother has explained. “Be calm and let her see what you want her to do.”

  Daria knows I don’t allow her to sleep with me, so she’s been making her way to the hall in the middle of the night where she sings and plays until she gets sleepy again. She always wakes me up when she’s out there, and sometimes I feel guilty letting her fall asleep on the floor, but I think the alternatives are worse.

  I tell her good night and lie back down, but if I move my feet to the side I can still see her: yellow nightgown, hair loose and wild from the braid she wore today.

  Sitting there in the hallway, Daria is the promise that the world will be all right. When she plays store, she uses Milk Duds for money. I hear her counting “eight, twenty, one hundred” to her customers. I tell her to stay off the sofa, chocolate makes a mess, and she listens to me. Already there is such possibility in our lives.

  That Daria has no father is a fact that should engage us in an interesting conversation some day. I’ll simply tell her what I know: that any law can be bent, that what is certainly freakish to some has been a moment of confounding beauty to another. I’ll cook something like a salmon and have it open on the table, red and inviting, with cut lemon and mint.

  And slowly Daria’s song wavers. For a minute I almost think I can make out “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” but then I realize she couldn’t possibly know all of that song with its web of verses. Daria stretches out and becomes simple yellow cloth or the yellow birds on my grandmother’s clothesline in the fall when the afternoon sun subdues everything in its warmth. When I’m sure she’s asleep, I carry her into her own bed.

  I check the time when I come back to my room. It’s almost two. Sometimes I get too worried about sleep, how I’ll feel the next day. Some people do fine on four or five hours, but I need seven or eight if I’m going to think. I start to get into bed, then stand back up and pull my nightshirt off. I walk around to the right side of the bed, the side that usually stays perfectly made, and I draw the covers back and get in. I look up at Lo Fen-Lang’s stars that in the desert sky must seem like cut foil or nickel, a blister’s flame. When I close my eyes, there is only darkness, which, in itself, is a concert of sleep and dreams. This time I’m working on a boy.

  Wintercourse

  Lorna came to us in the first big snow at the end of November, flushed up as strays often are in the sudden cold. Dogs, cats—anything old, nearsighted, or temporarily lame. They look for a garage or a warm light or even a fleece-lined boot that’s been left out overnight. Under our back deck near the steamy underside of our hot tub, Bruce and I found a small, sickly bear eating scavenged pizza from a half-crushed box early one morning, the peppery smell of sausage drifting up from beneath the wood planks. In no time, Fish and Game was here—eight men in heavy coats trying to decide what to do, while the bear simply rolled over, stretched out like an old shaggy rug, and fell into the depths of a garlicky sleep.

  Like most of those storms, the big one that November began as ordinary gray sky settling in just above the treetops and then letting loose with the clean, white powder that this stretch of Colorado is known for—Hermosa north to Silverton, with Purgatory looming between, a place we try to stay away from. Everything outside was silent, frozen—postcard pretty but raw and staggering when the wind came up.

  The snow, already up to the windowsills, had finally slowed when Lorna rang our doorbell and stood out there trembling, the Sysco truck and grinning driver she had hitched a ride with creeping backward down our long drive. Slouched and unperturbed, she looked like someone who intimately knows the in’s and out’s of bus depots everywhere. There were dark circles around her eyes: either twoday-old mascara or late nights and tension. In one of the packs she carried—though we didn’t find this out for a while—was a midnight special, so cold and gray and unreal looking that when I finally saw it I thought it was a toy or one of those crazy cigarette lighters. Her hair had been cut close to the scalp, and from the looks of her bony figure she had almost used herse
lf up in El Paso. Before that, it had been Atlanta, and before that, an unsuccessful stay at the University of Florida where two security guards had removed her bodily from a chemistry lab.

  At first when Bruce, her father, saw her standing on our doorstep—a thin, smiling savage with the snow lightly whirling around her—he went momentarily blank. “All of a sudden she was standing there looking like she’d been living on the streets and I couldn’t get my breath, Eileen,” he told me later, running his hand through his hair, which is what he does when things just don’t add up or make him nervous.

  Unfortunately I missed that moment—the long-lost daughter greeting her weak-kneed dad. Actually I was upstairs on a ladder painting mine and Bruce’s bedroom a soft erotic blue—two shades lighter than the color of water. I had the salesman at the paint store mix it special for me. The woman behind me in the checkout line—a Broncos cap and a very thin cigarette is what I remember of her—asked what I was painting, and when I told her my bedroom and she saw the sample color on the lid, she understood. She winked at me and blew on her fingernails. “Whoa. Watch out,” she told me, and we smiled, not knowing each other, but knowing the same things about how the world works, what colors lead to love and beyond.

  I had left the store happy that day with two gallons of flat acrylic, navigating the ice and slush and cars of the busy parking lot. To my left, the passenger door of a station wagon tolerated the weight of a woman’s dangling body, her feet flying back and forth, crablike, as she tried to find a foothold on the glazed asphalt. The knife-edged north wind had caught the hem of her long skirt and ballooned it into a colorful awning, revealing, beneath, a chewed-up black slip and mismatched socks. A heavy man scurried from the other side of the car to help her. He bent and offered her his arm and the thick ham of his shoulder. “Come on,” he yelled, “get up,” while she scrambled and groaned. I held my breath for her.