* * *
After leisurely strolling the half-mile to his favorite deli, standing in line to be served, and gathering his purchases, Paul discovered at the check-out that he had forgotten to bring his wallet. Leaving his bags with the cashier, he returned home. As he entered the penthouse, he sensed an unusual quiet.
He called. There was no answer. He walked through the living room and the kitchen and down the corridor. He looked in at the bathroom. All were empty. He noticed the door to the bedroom was closed. At first he hesitated, and then, soundlessly, he opened it.
The blinds were drawn, the room was darkened. Like an anchor, the low bulk of the bed weighted the room. There was a feeling of a dense medium, like being under water. A sparse light had crystallized on the antique mirror. Paul didn't stir from the door. He was aware, first, of the silence, then of a shuttered, low, regular breathing. The spread lay rumpled at the end of the bed. Part of the sheet was flung back over it. He discerned another shape there. He approached; his step was soft.
He stood away, his hands clasped behind his back. It seemed to him the white sheet made an aura around Bryce, and he was the one in shadow. Bryce lay on his side, facing him, but his eyes were closed, his chin tucked into his chest. He lay curled around the source of himself which rose, engorged with blood, from the base of his body. His hand ran over it in a rapid stroke; he broke the silence with a moan.
Discerning Bryce, Paul felt hushed, as if he had walked in a wood and stumbled, unbeknownst, on an enactment of an ancient rite, for he perceived a mystery in Bryce's blind obeisance, his passion, and his power. Paul saw Bryce's features smoothed out, as if he had been asleep. He thought that his lover, so completely absorbed in himself, looked innocent, even pure. His face was as sealed as a dreaming infant's.
Paul felt a questioning dissolve within himself, a dislocation with the ordinary, as if it had turned inside out and showed him its strangeness. He was attracted, but was it by love? he wondered.
He could neither stay, nor leave Bryce. He had to approach, though it seemed, as his hand stretched over the white sheet, as if he encroached on a sacred ground. But the touch was fated; it fell in the soft hollow under Bryce's right shoulder.
Bryce opened his eyes. They were wide and very dark. "I thought you had gone," he said.
"Don't stop," said Paul.
Paul caressed Bryce's side. Bryce watched him. His own hand was still, then moved, then was still again.
"I don't think I can now with you here."
"Why not? It's nothing we haven't done together."
"That's why. We've always done it together. But this time I was alone."
In response, Paul knelt by the low bed, and he was closer. "I don't think the distinction really matters. Don't think of me as a watcher," he said. "Think of me as a participant." He rubbed his cheek against Bryce's thigh and against his hip. He hid his face in Bryce's chest. His lips traced a trail through this hair to the fluffier, springier hair below. He moved Bryce's hand away and put his own mouth there. His clinging lips were smooth and wet. His tongue caught a drop of clear moisture at the tip.
But Paul did not lie down beside Bryce or loosen his own clothes. He waited until Bryce relaxed back into his rhythmic swoon, and then he let go, and with his hand put Bryce's hand back where it had been.
"Don't be afraid," Paul said, "I want you to."
Bryce looked up at Paul crouching just beyond the faint rim of light cast around the bed. Even in that dark, Paul was a fair shape, but indistinct: a light, hovering figure. Then Paul's face came close again, and Bryce felt its clear, very searching look. He shuddered, and drew back. He wondered why Paul had tantalized him with the promise of love, and then had withdrawn it.
Paul leaned towards him again, and laid his cheek against Bryce's chest attentively, seriously, as if he were listening to Bryce's body. He was thinking of how strange it was that this had never happened before in their year and a half of living together. It seemed to him that the discovery was almost involuntary. Before he had opened the bedroom door, he had anticipated what he would find behind it.
He wondered if he ought to feel sorry for Bryce. But pity had not been in his mind when he stood in the doorway and stepped silently into the room.
He moved his mouth to Bryce's ear. "I want to be absorbed in you," he whispered, "Think of me as part of your sensation."
Bryce closed his eyes. He imagined himself being delivered up to Paul as a sacrifice, shamelessly exposed. It was a relief to let go like this, he discovered. He was able to do as Paul wished. Paul's touch fluttered, but only Bryce's was necessary. A vein pulsed at the base of Bryce's groin, but Paul, though his head was up, did not see it. He was gazing at Bryce's face. How long he watched it he could not say: first Bryce looked as when Paul had found him, his expression blank and smooth as if turned inward. Then his face contorted, his jaw clenched, and his lips pulled back, baring his teeth. His forehead wrinkled, and his eyelids were hidden except for the lashes, curled, thick, dark. He seemed entirely oblivious, obedient. Paul felt Bryce's desire for his conclusion as if it had grown within himself. It pained Paul as it thrilled him to see the effort revealed in the grimace on Bryce's face, and to recognize the release, at first just visible and then inevitable, that then gripped Bryce and purged him and left him at peace.
Bryce lay in a lucid calm, his eyes half-closed, Paul's firm weight against him. He looked up and saw, through Paul's woven summer shirt, the swell of his back and the strong, straight column of his spine. The beauty of Paul's body awed him, and, while he loved it, it also made him feel envious and sad.
Very early in their friendship, and as surely as he'd seen Paul's beauty, Bryce had recognized that Paul did not despise him. Bryce was happier in their life together than he had been alone. The knowledge of Paul's presence had been in his every sensation.
He wanted Paul to speak to him, but Paul looked away. Bryce sensed his isolation then, and he thought he could hate Paul for his influence.
Paul did not want to meet Bryce's openness with his own. He had abjured the role of watcher, but, he wondered, what else was he? He felt he ought to console Bryce, and yet he shrank from it.
After he averted his face, he was ashamed of himself, and he turned back when Bryce touched him tentatively, questioningly, on the elbow, as if he had never hesitated at all. He drew up the sheet around Bryce's waist. His ministrations were gentle but abrupt. He left the room and came back bearing two glasses of iced tea, a sugar bowl, and two long spoons. Bryce drank his tea in bed, while Paul sat across from him in a high-backed Shaker chair, rocking and sipping.
Paul found a temporary refuge in domesticity, and before his tea was half-finished, he had set it down and was going around the room, gathering up things and putting them away, opening drawers and dropping things in, placing things on shelves. While Paul was moving about restlessly, Bryce lay calmly back on the pillows, sipped his tea, and watched. To him, Paul's motions seemed like a dream. Interspersed between what was actual, he thought he glimpsed an earlier Paul, a Paul when Paul was new to him, before they had ever lived together. That Paul had not been domestic by any regard.
Chapter 11
After his return from Block Island in September, Paul found himself reinstated in solitude. Though he was lonely, he was unwilling to disturb his isolation. The two modern dance companies he was currently appearing with were not yet in rehearsal, and he kept to himself. In the middle of the month he had a vivid dream.
In his dream, it was also night and he was outside on his own rooftop in New York, cleared for once of its usual furnishings and covered with a gleaming, sparkling, crystalline whiteness. Poised standing up in this gleaming substance, for as far as he could see, were well-worn pairs of satin toe shoes. They were of all colors and discolored, frayed, split and restitched by amateur hands. In stillness they balanced, trailing their ribbons over the snow.
And yet it wasn't snow; it wasn't even cold. In an artificial wind provided by a po
rtable fan, it blew into little piles and drifts around the shoes, which began to move. Some of the pairs spiralled around each other and gently toppled, others skidded and sank, or fell right over, or stayed just as they were as the glittering whiteness filled and buried them. The fan accelerated, a gust of the tiny particles flew up and stung Paul in the face. The stuff was gritty, like sand, and just as dry. When he touched his tongue to his lip, however, what he tasted was sweet sugar, not of the ordinary texture but grained superfine.
He stepped back so as to see better: in the swirling eddies of sugar, insubstantial sequins gleamed, diamonds in the air that settled to dust. There was more than one fan, he noted now; like the four winds the gusts came from the corners of the roof, but in this world they differed in that they blew simultaneously, and the shoes spun up and revolved in higher, wilder, more exuberant turns.
First Paul heard the tinkling of small bells; then he looked up and saw them looped and quivering on several strings over his head. They had a gay, crystalline peal, and yet it seemed to him that that silvery sound fractured the night. The sugar was an enshrouding, dazzling mist in which these discarded toe shoes appeared to have come to life.
Opening his eyes, Paul was so startled to see the pallid moonlight stark on the white pillow next to him that he wondered if it had awakened him. He strained to keep the magical atmosphere of his dream, but it was already gone. A performance where I was the only audience, he thought, and he gave it a name, The Toe Shoes’ Finale. It seemed to him an absurd, beautiful dream, and he wanted it back, to see how the dance would end. He tossed and turned, but it was no use; he was wide awake. Though the bedroom wasn't cold, he shivered under the sheet, blanket, and spread, and he got up for a second blanket.
On his way to the linen closet, Paul impulsively detoured into the kitchen and selected a nectarine from the wicker basket piled with fruit. He bit into it immediately, without bothering to rinse off the skin. He let the juice trickle under his tongue. The texture was even better than the taste.
It’s a bad habit to eat at night; it will spoil my stomach for breakfast, Paul thought, even as he reached for a plum to take back to bed with him. Slowly he began to walk, eating the luscious fruit. He listened to the sounds of the house: random clicks and rustles, he decided, that probably didn’t mean anything. From far below he heard the muffled thunder of a night delivery truck rolling over a pothole in the street.
He extracted the nectarine stone from his mouth and tossed it in the air, intending to catch it, but he missed. He heard it hit the wooden floor of the hall and slide away from him. He turned on the light to find it, but it was nowhere in sight. He got down on his hands and knees to look for it, and that was how he discovered Bryce’s lost letter next to it on the dusty floor under the bookcase.
He tore open the envelope and read Bryce’s plaintive note. It was not dated, but he looked at the postmark and discovered that it had been mailed over two weeks ago. Bryce’s request, long overdue, was for a phone call. Glancing at the wall clock, Paul calculated that it was past two in the morning in Mississippi.
It’s way too late to phone, he thought, and he realized that he was relieved. I’ll call Bryce tomorrow, he told himself without conviction. Deep down he knew that he wouldn’t call, and he knew that it was cruel of him. Yet he wasn’t ready to explain to Bryce where he’d been. He told himself that he wasn’t willing to fabricate a lie. Although he felt guilty for not contacting Bryce while he continued to live at his expense, he dreaded a confrontation. The mournful tone of Bryce’s note made him feel ashamed of himself even as he began to make a practice of neglect. What he didn’t admit to himself was that he actually was afraid.
He went back to bed with another blanket and lay under its added weight, willing sleep to come. But it would not. He thought of times as a boy when he had lain in bed and felt almost weightless, as if he were suspended above the earth. If he could reach that sensation again, he thought, then perhaps he'd be able to sleep. He lay listening to his own breathing in the darkness, as the moonlight crept from his room.
Another memory came back to him of a summer Sunday when he was five or six. His father had taken him to a nearby lake for a canoe outing—just the two of them. But Paul had gotten sunburned, and, after they had beached and eaten sandwiches at lunchtime, his father had taken the old sheet they had been sitting on, soaked it in lake water, and wrung it out. Then he removed Paul's swimming trunks and wrapped the little boy in the wet sheet like a mummy. Saying he'd be back soon, he had left his son lying on the sand while he paddled out in the canoe again.
Paul recalled lying partly on his back and his side, his arms strapped close to his body under the sheet but with one hand free to hold the binoculars through which he'd seen his father grow smaller and then come back. He remembered the short shape of his father kneeling in the longer shape of the canoe, how he had darkened with distance, and then how the separate features had come clear again. "I never once let you get out of my sight," he had boasted as his father unwound him. Unlike his son, Paul's father tanned. In the evening Paul's skin was pink but hardly painful.
"An Indian cure," his father had proclaimed predictably. He ascribed most home remedies to indigenous practice, as if this honored them. It was one of his jokes, like that of finding arrowheads in common chips of stone. "We'll go out again sometime when you're used to the sun," his dad had said, patting Paul on the back for being a good sport and so agreeably lingering to let his father have his fun. Paul could not have explained that he liked watching his father in the private, magnified ring of the binoculars more than he had liked paddling with him, that he'd even enjoyed his own immobility and the coolness of the sheet between his bare skin and the warm sand. But when two older, already bronzed boys had happened by and laughed at him, he'd felt ashamed. He realized how silly he must look to them.
As an innocent, he had let other people's opinions influence his; later he didn't care. For Paul, as he eventually came to see it, was probably born aberrant. Early on, he understood that other people didn't get the thrills he did from the same things, and he knew enough not to try to make them understand him if he wanted his peace of mind and his pleasure, too. He altered his activities with his age and discovered equivalent delights, even intenser ones. He had even modified his mummy memory for a dance once, when he'd played the part of a prince put under a spell. Immobility was a requirement of the performance, and so he had remembered the time his father imprisoned him naked in a sheet on the beach.
In retrospect it was terrible that he'd lain there, almost a dummy except for his hand and his curious gaze gratified by the binoculars, waiting for his father to come and unwind him. It was terrible to be at the mercy of anyone, terrible to be a helpless child helped by an adult. And yet, with his eyes magnified and trained on the man in the canoe, the child Paul had felt privy to his father's most secret wishes, his unsaid, unfledged hopes, to whatever made the man go out by himself and come back for his son. Something was shared through separation, even if Paul couldn't confirm what it was or put it into words.
Over the years that image of his father which he had so diligently kept in focus increased in importance for Paul until it even seemed to him to stand for something. He thought his father probably wouldn't remember the incident, one of many summer Sundays. With the passing of time the event became wholly his, with the glass trained on the child as well as the adult, in anticipation of that moment of surprise when Paul had looked at that lank, dark hair waving in a lake breeze across the canoeist's forehead and had seen in an instant, as if it were a vision, his father grown unfamiliar, with the still young, almost beautiful face of a total stranger.
Now Paul mused, In frailty are born our greatest moments. The world didn't often approve of him, he thought, yet it liked to watch him. When he had danced the solo that followed the prince's release from his spell, he had almost been taken in by the fantasy. In front of a painted backdrop, he had leapt across space while the hot lights shone o
n him, and in his mind they might have been the sun.
Sometimes his body felt like a costume which, while gorgeous indeed, pinned him so close he couldn't peel it back to see his other skin. "It's a difficult and beautiful puzzle: in the body, around the body, and between two bodies"—as he lay in bed, Paul recalled this quote from a dance program. It implied for him all he could muster of a sensitivity to touch, balance, momentum, and center of gravity. He strove for a personal dynamics that would be fluid and not formless, that would urge the creation of shapes on those who watched even as it diverted them. For Paul was a witness of himself, though he could never act as his own audience. Sometimes, when his reward for it all seemed no more than an utter, bone-prostrating exhaustion and he felt he was a sacrifice offered up on the stage, he surprised himself by discovering even in that final state some useful resource.
For he'd had other evenings onstage also, when even from the wings he'd sensed excitement, expectation stirring in the audience and thought, They are feeling this for me, they are waiting for me to arrive. And Paul experienced an authentic awe, a happy reverence that he had inspired this thing which was greater than himself. When his cue came, he'd scarcely dared to look out in the darkness. "I danced my damnedest not to disappoint them," he had said later with the modesty allowed those who succeed; for Paul had had a share of triumph on the stage, though it hadn't made him rich as yet.
Leaving a theater after a performance, he would stand for a moment on the sidewalk, inhaling the atmosphere of the late, still active night, as if he were assuring himself of where and what he was. So full was he of the emotion he'd enacted that it sometimes seemed that he didn't so much walk as glide, and he would be all the way down the street before he knew it.
If the love Paul bore his audience was for his own image reflected in their eyes, would he be damned for that? So much in the world enchanted him, persuaded him to meet it, hold it, merge with it, be it. Yet now, as he lay sleepless in bed, he realized that he had come back to himself.
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