The Fisher Boy

by Stephen Anable

  Edward used the full howitzers of his charm. “He’s napping now. He’s having a new security system installed. They’re coming this afternoon from Plymouth. But I’d love to go.”

  Without waiting for my response, he gathered some beach things, Arthur’s things, from a closet, then grabbed a hardback book from the sofa. Arthur had bought Edward the clothes he was wearing, the ice-blue gym shorts and a polo shirt in a color catalogues that year called “mango.” “I think we’ll both feel better once the alarm system gets installed.”

  My taking him to the beach alone had ulterior motives, of course: I could ask him about his background. Would he answer?

  The upholstery in the car seared my thighs, even though it was only mid-morning. Edward was all coy silence, the silence of a withholder, as we drove slowly through this prettiest section of Provincetown. White picket fences separated lawns and gardens from the street. Many of the houses, barn-red, white, or cedar worn to a twig-like November-brown, were older than the country, older than the United States of America. They were overwhelmed by the greenery surrounding them, tunnels of sycamores and silver maples, of wisteria, rhododendrons, and masses of bridal wreath in their last vigor before drought finally sapped them.

  Edward was ignoring the scenery, examining my car, grinning at the odometer and gas gauge as if they were tricks. He even had the audacity to open my glove compartment, to thumb through the Volvo owner’s manual.

  “I don’t believe you’ve mentioned where you’re from.”

  “Oh, we moved a lot. I don’t think about the past. I’m really sort of concentrating on my future.”

  “Are you here just for the summer?”

  “I’m not really sure.” He crammed the owner’s manual back in its place, then shut the glove compartment a bit too forcefully, as if to shut off my line of personal questions. His silences had an edge; he had a way of making you feel responsible for his share of conversation. “…Have you ever owned a Jaguar?” he said at last. “It’s been my lifelong ambition. Owning a Jaguar.”

  He pronounced it “Jag-you-are” like British actors do in their commercials, but he was some sort of New Englander because he dropped his R’s and revved up his A’s.

  “That’s beyond my budget, a Jaguar.”

  “I thought all you preppies had big bucks.” He was grinning.

  We’d come to the beginning of Commercial Street, where it meets the shore road. On the left stood the big hotel, the one that really belong in Hyannis; on the right were some houses, bleached wood, all Danish Modern angles. In front of us were the tidal flats and the granite breakwater snaking through them, and, in the distance, the dunes of the National Seashore, buff-colored humps like a lost piece of Arabia.

  I took a right onto the shore road so that the lushness and history of the West End became just nature. We drove past salt marshes, ponds green with winking coverings of scum, and miniature pines draped with southern-seeming silvery-gray moss.

  Edward was talking, but about Formula One racing. “Well, you follow the Grand Prix, don’t you? You’ve heard of Monte Carlo, haven’t you?” He began quoting statistics, about drivers and races and circuits, about Ferrari and McLaren and Maserati, all while running his hands over the luminous, icy fabric of his running shorts. He was doing everything he could to make his small talk as small as possible.

  “This is our lucky day,” I said. I was gliding into a just-vacated space in the parking lot at Herring Cove Beach. In retrospect, that was stupidest remark I’ve made in my life. If I’d been the least bit psychic, I’d never have said that, never gone to Cape Cod that summer. We parked near the beige-wood-and-cinder-block snack bar so that we could smell hot dogs and relish cutting through the fragrance of salt and roses. Wild roses thrived along the parking lot fence, their loose pink petals trembling in what little breeze braved the heat.

  “I hope you don’t mind a walk,” I said to Edward. “I thought we’d try the nude section.”

  I thought that might get some sort of reaction. Since everyone assumed he was hustling Arthur’s money and that his brain was locked on all things carnal, I thought he’d play the prude and insist we stay here. Instead, he clasped my arm with the authority of someone older, taller, and stronger. He said, “Arthur says you’re an okay guy, so that’s enough for me.” As though he were the one who’d shared a prep school with Arthur, who’d toasted New Year’s Eve in front of his fireplace on Beacon Street.

  There are just two buildings at Herring Cove Beach, the snack bar and the bath house, then sand and water. The beach is just a succession of sand and dunes that empties of people the farther you walk, except for the men’s nude section. The water that day was almost tropical blue, bursting into breakers that were the exaggerated white of shaving cream.

  It was a hot, half-hour walk to the nude beach. The sand, gravelly and coarse at the water’s edge, sucked at our heels. It was littered with all sorts of gifts from the tides, the things that I’d collected as a child; tangles of kelp, like the combings of some sea god’s hair; clamshells with purple streaks the Indians had cut to trade as wampum; wet pebbles veined with greenstone that could almost pass as jade.

  Continuing to do his best to avoid real conversation, Edward strode along just ahead of me, keeping enough distance so that we couldn’t be perceived as being together. I should say right now that I don’t break any mirrors. That summer I was twenty-nine, “considered good-looking” as the personals ads would say, 5’10”, slender, with reddish-brown hair cut as fashionably as Newbury Street could manage. Nothing for Edward to be ashamed of.

  We passed the women’s section, then the clothed men’s section, then a Foreign Legion’s worth of empty sand, scorching and seemingly endless. Edward apparently knew his way because he accelerated his pace until at last we reached our goal. It was actually marked, this oasis, but not by date palms or some bubbling spring. Instead, two huge branches of driftwood had been screwed into the sand to form a fork, like the whalebone arches sea captains built for their gardens throughout nineteenth-century Cape Cod. Draped from one of these branches was a fading rainbow flag, along with countless strands of Mardi Gras beads—silver, lavender, gold—glittering in the still, blazing air.

  Seeing no one I knew, I felt relieved in spite of myself. “Make yourself at home,” I called to Edward, who’d already begun settling in. He unfurled a towel Arthur had swiped from a hotel at Cap d’Antibes, then propped up a gauzy collapsible tent. Finally, with all eyes upon him—there were thirty or more men in the vicinity—he began disrobing, without the slightest hint of stage fright, until he stood stripped, desired, and unobtainable. You could see the effect in other men’s reactions: the lovers nudging each other to look, a middle-aged man putting down his Foucault just to stare. They saw what compensated for rent at Arthur’s—a chest with a delicate play of muscles, and a penis, that, liberated from his underwear, was large and seemingly moist, almost erect, bobbing as Edward rubbed his body with tanning oil.

  “Need some help with your back?” a handsome black man was reckless enough to ask. A smile flashed then died on Edward’s lips when he answered, “Thanks just the same, but I’m fine.”

  His body language was all about exclusion. I didn’t have the confidence to sit close to him, and he didn’t invite me, so I claimed a spot about fifteen feet away. He spent much of his time in the tent he’d borrowed, something Arthur had bought for his sister when she’d developed skin cancer. My lunch, fake crabmeat and a package of oatmeal cookies, decidedly downscale compared to some of my neighbors’ fare, was half eaten when I saw him and lost my appetite. Ian, of course. Ian Drummond. The cause of my disgrace, the reason I was alone.

  He was with his crowd, gay Republicans with summer houses in the vicinity, including Barton Daggett. Ian was using his hoarse, bearish laugh, often unleashed at someone else’s expense. I turned away, wishing I could hide in Edward’s tent. Then Ian and his friends filed up into the dunes flanking the back of the beach.

&nb
sp; It was gorgeous weather, hot, with a sky hard and blue as tile. The sun was burning; you could feel your shoulders cooking like sirloin. Don’t think of Ian, I told myself, don’t think of anything but this day. I swam every hour or so. The water was clear close to the shore, then aquamarine farther out, with a gem-like coldness that seemed to stop your heart when you dove in. It gave you a blade-like awareness of your body the first few minutes, then, once you swam in the slow, clear swells, it was marvelous, especially naked, with everything floating and free.

  But most of the men stayed on shore, marking crossword puzzles, getting peeved at the grit in their sandwiches, and cruising Edward. There was little interaction between the groups on the beach; they sat on their towels, in close proximity but with vague distrust, like Italian city-states during the Middle Ages. Several times, as soon as I emerged from the water, Edward went strolling languidly toward it, always naked, always smiling as he passed me. To follow him back into the Atlantic would be an open act of shameless desperation, so I didn’t dare.

  As the day wound down and the sun completed its arc across the sky, people began leaving the beach—Barton Daggett and his friends, the black man Edward had refused. But not Ian. Couples shook sand from their blankets and folded them as crisply as soldiers folding the flag at a military funeral. Guys wiggled back into sneakers, pressed fingers into reddening flesh to confirm they’d “picked up a little color.” They stuffed favorite beach stones into pockets to join guest house keys on long plastic lozenges, and began the trek back across the breakwater to town, or to the Herring Cove parking lot, full of all sorts of cars from all sorts of states with the same Celebrate Diversity stickers on their bumpers.

  By late afternoon, only three people remained in sight: myself, Edward, and an Asian boy. The Asian appeared to be in his late teens, with spiky hair and studs in his ears that looked like droplets of mercury. He wore a black Lycra thong, and his dusky skin suggested he could be Cambodian.

  Somehow his presence here felt validating, as though the bumper stickers about diversity were at last becoming true, and that war, emigration, and his parents’ prayers to a thousand joss sticks couldn’t prevent him coming here and being himself, on this beach at the edge of America. Finally, he too made gestures to leave, swigging the last of his Evian water, standing, brushing the sand from his tawny thighs, all the while glancing invitingly in Edward’s direction but getting no reaction whatsoever. Edward had emerged from his tent, but was absorbed with reading the bulky hardback book he’d snatched from the sofa at Arthur’s.

  Then the Asian boy peeled off his thong, wrung the seawater from it, and walked across the sand, the DMZ separating him from Edward. I could hear snatches of their conversation, like the words, ragged with static, of broadcasts from Winnipeg and Calgary fading in and out on my late-night car radio.

  Whatever the Asian’s line, it failed. He stepped indignantly into his briefs and jeans, then came marching in my direction. He was breaking through the erotic wall of silence that separates naked men at this beach, so I felt a little self-conscious.

  “What’s with him, anyway?” The Asian had a chili-thick Texas drawl. “Talk about mixed messages, the way he parades around! You should’ve seen him carrying on while you were in the water!” Then he was off, late for tea dance.

  I was shaking out my deck shoes when Edward approached, saying, “You’ve been awfully quiet this afternoon.”

  Don’t psychiatrists call that “projection”? “It comes with the territory,” I said.

  He was holding the book he’d gotten from Arthur’s sofa. “Arthur says you’re interested in this guy.” The book’s title was spelled out in gilt Gothic lettering: A Prince Among Painters: The Art of Thomas Royall. It was mostly plates, and contained little information. The one Royall biography was something rare published in the Fifties.

  “He painted The Fisher Boy,” Edward said. “It’s in the museum back in town.”

  He was kneeling now, exuding the scent of warm skin and tanning butter, flipping through Arthur’s book with his beach-greasy, damaging fingers. “They’re having a retrospective on Thomas Royall at the museum. Here in Provincetown.”

  He actually seemed eager to talk, but, having been slighted the entire day, I felt less than flattered being the center of attention now that the beach was empty except for gulls, sandpipers, and some tiny figures in the distance by the bath house.

  “Would you like to borrow it?”

  He doesn’t want to carry it back, I thought. He wants me to lug this heavy book back to the parking lot, then drive him to Arthur’s.

  “I’ll take a rain check.” A joke that year, what with the drought.

  “Are you leaving now?”

  “Actually, I’m not.” I’d been ready to go for more than an hour.

  “I’ve got to get back to Arthur’s.” Suddenly Edward was all responsibility. “I mean, those security people will be leaving pretty soon, and he won’t want to be all alone.”

  He knew there was a shuttle between the bath house and town, costing all of one dollar.

  “Hey,” he said, giving me his widest smile, “thanks for the ride to the beach.” Then he quickly dressed and packed up his things, Arthur’s things, and walked away.

  I was picking the icing from an oatmeal cookie, worrying that my shins had gotten sun-burnt, when I heard someone call my name. It couldn’t be Edward, he was already miniature, far down the beach toward the parking lot.

  “The other way!” the voice shouted.

  Looking back toward Long Point, I saw Ian Drummond in the dunes.

  “C’mere!” he called as dread flooded my system.

  He was kneeling, his body hidden by the dunes and clumps of beach grass, that coarse grass that cuts your legs and stays green like conifers all winter. I hesitated, knowing I should yank on my pants, but if I did that, I’d just leave, head for the parking lot and ignore him. Exactly what most people would have done in my circumstances. After what had happened, after what he’d done.

  “Come as you are,” Ian shouted, as if reading my mind.

  He’d been drinking but didn’t sound completely polluted, the way he had the night of our show. He exerted a pull, not entirely due to his saving me in Gloucester. We were equals here on this naked sand and had unfinished business with each other that only we, alone, could conclude. This time there was no one to referee us, and Ian owed me contrition, an apology, for insulting my mother in public. As I walked across the sand that separated us—one of the longest walks of my life, even though it was two hundred feet or less—I actually wondered if this were some sort of ambush. Ian, after all, was the ambushing type.

  “Mark, my man, welcome to my world.” He was as naked as I was, sitting on a towel in one of those hollows in the dunes that look like sand traps on golf courses. Hidden from the National Park rangers who sometimes patrolled the flat parts of the beach.

  We hadn’t been naked together since prep school, in our pungent old gymnasium. For all his athleticism, for all his money and the ease it gave him, Ian had always been modest about his body, but it seemed that had changed now that he’d pumped himself up.

  His chest was muscular in an exaggerated way, like some idealized ditch digger or dock worker in a WPA mural. He’d crossed his legs so that I couldn’t see whether he was aroused, but I confirmed my suspicion that he’d been drinking. A bottle of Russian vodka with St. Basil’s Cathedral on its label was propped against a wicker picnic hamper. Ian’s latest reading was an oversized paperback, Chorus Against Fascism: The Greek Resistance During World War Two, by Stavros Zarefes.

  “Still reading about war?” I asked breezily, then regretted it. War was a poor opener, given our recent fight.

  “It isn’t very good. He makes the Germans all but sub-human. The author obviously has an axe to grind. His uncle died being interrogated by German troops.”

  Leave it to Ian to worry about demonizing Nazis.

  “Have a seat. Don’t stand there on vi
ew for the Decency Patrol.”

  I didn’t want to, not really, not my rational side. I kept remembering what he’d said that awful night of the performance at Quahog. His lip was still split, daubed with mercurochrome. Did that make us “even”? Could I ever be even with one of the Drummonds?

  He pulled a peach, cold as a snowball, from his hamper. “Care for a fruit?”

  “Thanks.” Saying that made it easier to sit on his towel.

  I refused a Swiss Army knife to peel the peach.

  “You’re buffed,” I said. Ian was tanning a caramel color, and shaving his chest; he was much less hairy than I’d remembered. He was handsome in a blond, heavy-jawed way, much more adult than, say, Edward. You can’t help but notice beauty, even in your enemies.

  He inspected my groin. The wind sent granules of sand stinging against my body. Because I was conscious of him evaluating me, I was determined not to reciprocate. He uncrossed his legs, showcasing himself. He said, “It’s always good to get a rise out of people.”

  He was going to play games. Very much in character.

  “I saw you chatting up Arthur’s little protégé, his bit of beachcombing.” Then Ian crossed his legs, again censoring himself, again confusing me. His features tightened. “I haven’t been very nice to you, Mark.” He sighed while thrusting the vodka bottle in my direction. “I haven’t been nice to you since way back when. At St. Harold’s and in Gloucester, when we were kids.”

  Feeling vindicated but slightly embarrassed, I took a slug of vodka.

  “I’m sorry, man.” He never usually used “man” or other dated hipster slang, so perhaps this apology was equally bogus. He clapped his hands onto my shoulders so that he forced me to look directly into his face. He looked fatigued, gray around the eyes.

  He squeezed my shoulders in a quick, confiding way, then drew me toward him so that our chests were touching. He licked at my ear and I could feel his hot breath as he nibbled my earlobe.