There they were: a wide stretch of the stream narrowed and cut a channel between two huge, canted boulders with flat tops. It tumbled into a clear waterfall that dropped ten feet into a deep and clear hole below before it flowed around a sharp bend and disappeared down the valley. The walls rose a hundred feet on either side, thick with both the common deciduous foliage and a few slender eastern pines, glowing with that arboreal light, a daylight cathedral, bright in the shade and the color of something other than only sunlight. It smelled of the passage of water over stone.
“You see,” said Isaac, who’d sensed that they’d begun to doubt him and hammed up his bushwhacking certainty for effect.
“It’s really lovely,” said Isabel. Then: “How did you find this place?”
“I had a vision,” he said.
“Really?”
“Ha. Wut? No. I’m just fucking with you. I was on acid with Jake. I actually don’t know how we ever found it.”
The precise nature of Isaac’s relationship with Jake remained unclear to Isabel, who, although she should have known better, imagined that Isaac fucking men other than the one that he lived with must be more complicated than it was. Also, Jake read as straight to her, even if he did follow Isaac around The Gamelands like a young man in something like love. It didn’t occur to her that she didn’t read him as gay because he was black and plainly athletic and casually masculine; if it had occurred to her, she’d have been ashamed of herself. That it didn’t occur to her was ironically even more shameful, yet immaterial to her self-conception.
She was mildly unsettled by all Isaac’s lewd hinting around—if even half of it were true, even a third. Isabel imagined him submitting—she knew this was the wrong, at least, the incorrect word, but thought it anyway—to all of those men. She knew that it was absurd, obviously absurd, for her, as a woman, to think of this fact alone as degrading, to hear her own mind using an expression like, the passive role. As soon as she thought it, she could hear Isaac clucking about her internalization of gender norms in her presumption that the traditionally female sexual role was a position of inherent inferiority or submission in the power dynamic. He would have said it just like that, and she would have agreed as if he were enlightening her. But she’d also have told herself that she’d been hanging around gay guys for as long as Isaac had been alive. They were, if anything, even more stubborn in their embrace of these top/bottom, active/passive, boy/girl dichotomies than straight people. Either way, she couldn’t help but consider the whole situation as if Isaac were a girl sneaking off to service a bunch of boys, a scenario so girded by exploitation and overlaid by the subtle threat of violence that it made her feel squeamish and motherly and irredeemably conventional. When she did eventually bring it up with Isaac, he rolled his eyes and launched into a lecture: a lot of specious, over-general nonsense about the ugliness of straight pornography (Isabel agreed with him there) versus the fundamental role parity among young men who slept with other men. “Because the patriarchy exists,” he sniffed, “all heterosexual relationships are effectively coercive. No woman can ever truly give consent. Only gay sex can be legitimate.”
“Thank you, Adrienne Rich,” Isabel replied. (Isaac was, for all the modern mess of the rest of his life, the suicidal cultivation of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, a fastidious, almost fussy poet who could recite the lyrics of Donne and Shakespeare and Auden, who read the New Formalists, and who himself preferred to write metrical verse. His mother viewed his art with both sad pride and loving terror, as if in her own son she saw the ghost of her lost brother. Abbie considered it a kind of challenge or usurpation.)
They sat on the rocks for a while watching birds and insects move through the shaded forest and listening to the water tumble over the rocks and into the pool below—a sound that was somehow interrogative, pitched as a low, repeating question in a form of language even older and further from human speech than the calls of animals. Then Isaac said, “I’m going to swim,” and took off his clothes. Isabel was already used to his casual nudity, which she interpreted as a shallow but forgivable impulse to épater la bourgeoisie. She was wearing a bathing suit under her hiking clothes, but she’d put a bare foot into the water and found it much too cold to even think about getting in. Isaac was shucking his tight underwear, and Isabel was trying not to look at his dick while simultaneously trying not to look like she was trying not to look. He’d undoubtedly notice and make fun of her for being a prude. Eli, who was lounging on the rock on the other side of the stream, caught her eyes briefly, rolled his own, then closed them again and laid his head on his crossed arms.
Isaac’s abandoned passion for cycling, like his poetry, belied his embrace of destructive excess. His body showed all the evidence of all those miles in the saddle on the rolling roads of Pennsylvania, a body that could have been a tangle of knotweed, all reeds and knobs. Had he been a swimmer or a runner, he’d have been unspeakably beautiful, shoulders grown wide and hips narrowed, but as he was, he had instead the kind of alluring ugliness that accrues to living things that have adapted and evolved to one particular environment or manner of being: a desert plant, a nocturnal predator, one of the bioluminescent monsters that live in the dayless and nightless depths of the ocean. His chest was nearly concave and his belly, although taut, was slightly protuberant. His face and his forearms and his legs below the knees were the color of darkly stained wood; the rest of his body was so pale that it seemed to glow around the edges where the sun seemingly passed right through him. He fondled himself idly.
“The nice thing about a small dick,” he said, “is that you don’t have to worry about it shrinking in cold water.” Isabel didn’t think his dick was especially small—perhaps a bit below her own experienced average, but within a standard deviation of the mean. He took two long strides and launched himself from the ledge into the pool. The water was clear, and she watched him through its weird foreshortening lens as he sank and rose. She thought of that Millay poem. He broke the surface with a squeal. “My God!” he yelped. “It’s cold!”
“Is this typical?” She asked Eli, who’d turned toward her and was leaning on one elbow. His tee-shirt drew tight across his chest.
“I couldn’t say. I’m not usually invited.”
“Not even as a chauffeur?” She smiled.
“I am the handyman.” He gestured with his free hand. It was one of those ambiguous Southern European expressions that means everything.
“How did you end up as the handyman anyway?”
“First, I am very handy. Second, Abbie was not well, even then.”
“What do you mean not well?”
But Isaac, who had dipped beneath the surface again and frog-kicked away from them, came up again and turned back. He called up: “You should come in!”
“Too cold,” Isabel said.
“You get used to it,” he replied. “Anyway, it’s bracing. You can feel your heart trying to escape your chest.”
She told him she liked her heart right where it was.
“Yes,” said Eli. “Our hearts will remain here on this cliff.”
“Suit yourselves,” he replied. “I won’t try to convince you.” He made some desultory motions of swimming around for a few minutes more, then swam to the shore, waded out, and did an ungainly nude scramble back up to where Isabel lay. He rolled his tee-shirt into a pillow and sprawled out on a sunny part of the rock with his arms behind his head. The cold water had shrunk his dick, and now it did look comically small. He’d affected to close his eyes, but he hadn’t, really, and he caught Isabel looking. “I know,” he said. He giggled. “But one makes do with what God gives him, no?”
“Or her,” Isabel offered.
“Indeed,” Eli said. “She has a point.”
“Yes,” Isaac said, rolling to face her, “but your endowments are just erotic accessories. Accoutrements. Except for babies, I suppose, who don’t care about the aesthetics or architecture.”
“Dicks are accessories, too,” she told hi
m.
“This is very enlightening,” said Eli.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” she said, and then she bit her lip and wondered why she’d said it.
Isaac sighed. “Would that it were so.” He rolled onto his back again. “Alas, while being smooth is one of the youth-preserving traits that men find erotic, a small dick is a small dick is a small dick. Even having a smooth ass is a decreasing currency. All the hipsters and fashion boys are a little hairy these days.”
“You don’t have a small dick,” Isabel told him. (And she blushed. Idiot. She was being motherly again. She might as well have assured him that he was pretty, that people would like him just for being himself.)
“Oh, please.” He rolled once more onto his side and propped his head on one hand. “One time I was fucking this guy, and he told me that he couldn’t go down on me because it made him feel weird. You know, like a child molester. I mean, that didn’t stop him from fucking my ass. Anyway, you don’t need to reassure me. I’m not the sort of boy who frets about his body. I am what I am and that’s all that I am, you know, et cetera. I don’t really like getting sucked off anyway. But in general, the point is that I’ve got bigger problems, no pun intended.”
“What problems are those?” Isabel found herself wanting a cigarette, though she hadn’t smoked one in years, and she wondered if Isaac had any in the bag. She didn’t ask.
“Jesus, I don’t know. I’m not in school at the moment. I have no prospects for a job, really. I always sort of assumed I’d just live off my trust, but I get the distinct feeling that my father is better at getting rich than at staying rich—he’s been one hand ahead of the house for too long now. I just get the general sense that whatever blessed sign he’s been living under is about to enter a retrograde period. Call it a vision, la la la. Besides which, of course, there’s my mother.”
“What’s wrong with your mother?”
“What isn’t wrong with my mother?”
“I don’t know,” Isabel said. “She seems fine to me.” This was not strictly true, but she was no more capable of telling him otherwise than she was of agreeing with him about his cock. The two most precious things a boy had, she thought, smiling at her cheap Freud. She looked to Eli, but he had chosen this moment to lie down again and stare through the high branches. He was pretending not to pay attention.
“Oh, please,” Isaac repeated, and he rolled over and closed his eyes.
It was true that there was something off about Sarah, and not only in the colloquial, figurative sense. No one ever seemed to encounter her but to stumble upon her; she was always just somewhere—sitting in a chair in some nook in the house, standing in a plot of the garden, leaning on a counter in the kitchen—with a serene expression and eyes unfocused and pointed in the direction of nothing in particular. It was as if she were an android or avatar, lolling without power or animal spirits until some distant operator picked up the remote and turned her on. But she did flick on when she noticed someone. Her conversation had a certain cubist quality to it; it was a picture of something familiar rendered in a perspective all its own. But in a family of eccentrics, a family where one man purported to see divine visions, what was any one other eccentric, more or less?
“Really,” Isabel said. “She’s a bit . . . she’s unique, I guess. But in a family of eccentrics, what’s one more eccentric, more or less?”
“God, I wish I had some smokes. Or some weed. I can’t believe I didn’t bring any. Ugh. I’m so bad at preparing. Anyway, she spends half her time having out of body experiences and half her time sleeping and the rest of it in the process of becoming drunk. Do you know that last year she had to have a part of her tongue cut off? It wasn’t cancer or anything. It was just, you know, all used up. Cooked. Like when you leave a piece of meat in a marinade for too long.” Isabel squinted at him. How does that happen, she wanted to ask. But he was still talking: “That’s why she sounds like a homeless person even when she isn’t complètement beurrée. It’s because my dad had an affair back in New York before they moved out here. She made him move in some sort of hysterical attempt to keep him for herself.”
“I thought,” Isabel said, although it was hard to keep her voice flat, hard not to betray her piqued interest, “that they came here in pursuit off, you know, his dream. To build The Gamelands. To get away.”
“Yeah, whatever sells his books and books his speaking gigs. Mom may be nuts, but she likes money, too. If playing along with Abbie the Prophet falls to the bottom line, well, no sense in belaboring it. But no, the affair, I’m pretty sure. No one ever said anything, obvi, but I can just tell. Then I came along. Which is some kind of miracle—like an actual miracle—because they could never have kids before. At least, that’s what they told me. But, you know, you can’t be a literalist. The stories”—he sighed—“the myths are only meant to instruct.”
Abbie might have said the same thing. Despite all their differences, despite Isaac’s superficial cultivation of an attitude of weary condescension toward his father (which mirrored Abbie’s attitude of weary condescension toward everyone else), there was a very porous border between father and son—they had the quality of certain twins.
“I still don’t know,” Isabel said. “Your mom must be pretty committed to Abbie’s work.” She did not add to live out here, but Isaac knew it was what she meant.
“What work?” Isaac laughed and stretched from fingers to toes like a cat that’s either rising from or about to go to sleep.
“Come on,” she said. “Your dad is like one of the most important architects of the last fifty years. I mean, I know he isn’t known outside of the profession, really, and I know he’s never gonna win a Pritzker or whatever, but, I mean, he basically invented green building. And before you say it, yes, I also know that I’m revealing my own professional prejudices and green is just a buzzword like organic or sustainable anymore, but shit, Isaac, it’s still a really big deal—the underlying concepts, I mean, even if in practice it’s a little . . . I don’t know, corrupted by reality.”
“Corrupted by Reality would be the title of his biography,” Isaac replied, annoyed. He didn’t like to be contradicted, and he hated when anyone defended his parents. Then he sighed again and giggled his disarming giggle and said, “Anyway, my father is hardly an architect. I know he still gives that talk from time to time. LA is going to break off into the ocean. Florida is going to drown. New York is going to drown. Phoenix is going to dry up and blow away. We’re all gonna die!” He pressed his hands to his cheeks and made a cartoon expression of matinee shock. Isabel laughed. “We’re all gonna die,” he repeated. He sat up and hugged his knees. “Abbie’s a fucking real estate developer. Please, you think he built The Gamelands with the proceeds of commencement speeches and one coffee table book? You do know how he made all that money, don’t you?”
“I assumed . . .” Isabel began, but she realized that she didn’t know what she assumed. She remembered Isaac blabbing about a highway back when they’d come down to Fayette County together for the first time. It was a weakness, contagious and endemic to anyone who spent too much time around people with a lot of money: they forget to wonder how or why or from where anyone got it all to begin with.
Isaac smiled—he had this rare, broad, utterly delighted smile where his mouth broke open and he touched the tip of his curled tongue to his top front teeth, which he deployed when he felt like he was winning something. “Assume nothing,” he said.
“Well, then,” Isabel said, “how did he make all that money?”
“Abbie made his money on a fucking highway.”
“A highway,” she repeated.
“Between you, me, God, PennDOT, and Uncle Sam,” Isaac told her. “The crookedest bunch of land deals since we stole America from the Indians. You didn’t know? I thought everyone knew.”
“No,” she said.
“Not strictly a highway,” Eli said in a sleepy voice. He didn’t move.
“Right. Not strictly
a highway. Like I think I told you before, he really got rich shilling for Arthur Imlak. Like your boss.”
“Barry isn’t rich,” Isabel told him. And she nearly asked him, right there, if Arthur was really his father, but, of course, she didn’t.
“Please. Don’t you ever read your own 990s?”
“No. I’m not a finance person.”
“No shit you’re not. Anyway, to find out how much your bosses make. You know, your key and highest-paid employees.”
“No,” she said.
“Barry cleared four-fifty in 2013. Out of a three-and-change million dollar operating budget. That ain’t bad. That was the most recent year. You weren’t on there yet. Although I can guess.”
“That isn’t rich.”
“Oh my God,” Isaac screwed up his face. “You are ridiculous if you think that.”
“Says a kid with a trust.”
He giggled. “You have to learn to recognize your own class. Otherwise, you’ll figure out too late that they’re coming with the guillotines.”
“Well, I don’t make that much.”
“I put you right around eighty-five, ninety.”
“Wrong,” she said, but he was right.
“My dad sees signs and portents and thinks the world is going to end any day now in the fire or in the flood, but we’re all just as likely to have our heads chopped off by some sans-culottes first. Et après, le déluge. The thing is, to get back to the topic at hand, Abbie never really gave a shit about green anything. He could’ve just as easily become a right-wing radio host. Abbie just sniffed which way the wind was blowing.”
The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Page 20