Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  What light, what clarity of moment and talk. Sander tells me how much Grietje longs to have a child. The Volkskrant review of drawings pleases him more than he will admit. He savors the huggermugger of ducking all interviews, all appearances, of remaining invisible.

  He wants to do scenes from Fourier, the little bands and hordes on ponies and quaggas. Queries things I wrote in the catalogue to the painting show. Archaic eyesight. Innocence of irony and despair. All I’m doing, Adriaan, is what I know how to do. I don’t know what it means.

  Grietje is beautiful, so I paint her. Moths are beautiful, bicycles are sexy. Do you really think people are going to buy these things and I can make a living at it? I would be the luckiest bastard in the whole world, and the goofily happiest, ja nu! Dat geloof ik!

  From time to time, voices as the wind plays tricks with sounds over the white ground of the sea wash, the hush of the afternoon. A yipe, spates of uncadenced chatter, windborne gibberish, laughter, long silences with only my and Sander’s voices vibrant against the ocean.

  Against the lurch and tumble of the waves. After the good part of an hour, Sander bellowed for the boys, striding off in the direction of their babble and scurry. I strolled behind, my mind rich with apprehension and curiosity. Already? Hans was saying, diddle daddle drat.

  Are you cool enough, Sander said, to pretend I’m not here drawing? They were, sweet nippers, lying on red larchfall in citrony mellow light head to foot, holding each other’s erections, and each, when I rolled up, staring with vague eyes at the sky. Hello, scamps, nobody’s here.

  That’s not Sander sprinting from the cabin with drawing pad and pencils. You’re beautiful. Feels beautiful, too, Hans said to the sky. Feels great, Jan said, taking up his stroke. Sander drew, sitting crosslegged before his pad. I sat beside him, watching, mouse quiet.

  For a while they kept to fiddling and coddling, and then, accepting us as company, put their hearts and some style into it. Sander drew with wonderful skill, study after study, changing his angle of vision. Jan skeeted first, an opalescent sprinkle that stippled his brown tummy.

  He sighed and whinnied. Nice, Sander commented, and you’re making my balls snuggle together. Jan raised himself onto his arms to get a better purchase on Hans, who shot a creditable squirt. They compared ejacula, Jan attributing his superior amount to assiduous practice.

  Sander asked for, and got, poses: the two sitting, arms around each other’s waists, Jan’s head affectionately on Hansje’s shoulder. Standing cock to cock, hands on each other’s butts. Facing, on hands and knees, looking into each other’s eyes. Jacking each other, sitting.

  A triumphant drawing, in colored pencils, of Jan standing, his long hair in disarray. Hans sat and watched Sander draw, his arm around his shoulder. When Hans posed alone, in a wide-legged stance and pulling his peter in a lazy rhythm, Jan came and sat beside me, leaning for a hug.

  You’re very broadminded, do you know? he said in an honest, chummy way, nuzzling into my hug. He was as warm as bedclothes and his hair smelled of hay and clean dog. Sander’s a beautiful person, don’t you think so? he asked. He makes me blush. That’s only natural, I say.

  Sander thanked them courteously for posing, and they went off, arms around each other, not to be heard or seen until they turned up while Sander and I were making supper and having a Campari on the porch. Leaf trash in their hair and stuck to their bodies, knees smutched.

  Hansje’s right cheek was daubed with woodsearth, and Jan’s back was crisscrossed with pine needles. Smears of forest muck on their legs and chests. Their eyes gleamed. Two happier, nastier boys I’ve never seen. Ah! said Sander, passion. Cold beef sandwiches, cheese, pickles.

  Cold blond beer from the spring. Neither boy had had a whole glass of beer before. They ate like wolves. With coffee Sander hefted Jan onto his lap and methodically picked leaf trash off him. Hans went to help and got hauled up and scrunched in beside Jan. You two! said Sander.

  You two are wildly in love with each other, he said, tweaking their dicks, a lovely thing to be, and you’re as filthy as sewer rats, fine by me, and Adriaan couldn’t care less, except that you’re to sleep, if that’s the word, in our bedroll, which will look like a badger sett.

  So off for a bath in the sea before it’s too cold and too dark. Besides, you’re giving me a hard on, and it’s not me you’re in love with. I made a fire the meanwhile. Sander came back later with a leggy boy on each hip, a subject the Greek sculptors missed, or the world lost.

  23 THERMIDOR

  Friendly conversation with Jan, who had strayed back to the cabin from an outing. Hansje’s and Sander’s shouts and hoots sounded like a zoo down the way. Jan wambling to show he’d had enough of chinning limbs, sit ups, push ups, sprints around the island, all Sander’s idea.

  Honeybrown in underpants of negligible modesty hanked down at the waist, held on more by the poke of his genitals than the low relief of his behind. Asked him how he got so richly tan. On a camping trip with his parents and sister, in Sicily. Wore nothing for weeks, he said.

  Onverschillig, after breakfast, he and Hans had stood just beyond the porch, not five meters away, and brushed lips, as if nectaring, while pushing down each other’s briefs, brushing balls with fingertips, meddling with foreskins, making my stomach flutter and a seep of saliva.

  Thumped Sander on the shoulder, who clucked his tongue and whistled. O them! They’re under each other’s skin something wonderful. Nothing for it but to put up with their poppenkast, though they’re making my balls run a fever. Whereupon, defiantly, they kissed, tongue and all.

  And now Jan wore a great seriousness in his green eyes. Zaadsmet on the pouch of his briefs. Heer Hovendaal, he said, Hansje’s mother when we were leaving said to Heer Floris, to Sander I mean, that Hans and I were to be allowed to do anything. You and Sander are very liberal.

  Hans and I think that you are wonderfully nice, even with your making a little fun of us, that’s one of your ways of showing affection, isn’t it, but what I want to ask is do you think Mevrouw Keirinckx meant that Hansje and I can make love? You are, I said, aren’t you?

  You’re as loving, dear Jan, as frolicsome puppies licking and chewing on each other. He winced. I mean, he said, swallowing awkwardly, making love. Not just playing around. I remembered Sander’s despair, once, of adult understanding, and answered with an insouciant shrug.

  I’ve known Hans’ mother, I said, since she was a teenager, and his father too. They are, as you say of me and Sander, wonderfully liberal and contemporary. But your own parents? Oh that’s in orde, he said. They showed me and Jenny how to masturbate when we were kleuters.

  I have at home, he said, the book De Seksueele Bevrijding van Kinderen, which they’ve seen in my desk, because I heard them talking about it, and they haven’t thrown it away, as they once did some other things, and it has pictures in it of boys Hansje’s and my age making love.

  Does Hans want to? O yes. Akkoord, I said, with a tweak for his dick through his briefs to show that I understood. We then talked about Sicily, Sander’s drawing, what kind of book I’m writing, his interest in history, the planets. Hans and Sander turned up shining with sweat.

  24 THERMIDOR

  The boys washing socks, underpants, jerseys under Sander’s demanding supervision. A swim. In radiant late afternoon sun on the porch of the cabin, coffee for me and Sander. In jeans, Sander, with the fly left unzipped, characteristically, his signature, the boys naked.

  They, who had been blatantly smooching and daring mischievous salacities since our talk, calling it twaalfjaaroud bevrijding, soon colloquialized to Badger Liberation, were mucking about with their dicks in front of us, full of themselves, unblushing and eager-eyed.

  Hans sat in a canvas folding chair sipping a jelly glass of beer, picking his nose. Jan sat crosslegged between his knees, jacking Hansje’s dick in a bike-pedaling rhythm, occasionally grazing the inside of his thighs with the flat of his cheek. Friendship! said Sander.

  Nothing
like it. Absolutely, said Hansje, and is it ever good. If only, said Sander reaching for his drawing pad, Dokter Tomas could be here now. Who, said Jan making his pulls up taller and his downstrokes deeper, is this Dokter Tomas? Hans, drumming his heels, asked who cared.

  The boffin, said Sander, who when I went berserk as a teenager, gave me to Adriaan to help build the cabin here, and to get me back into the mainstream of Dutch middleclass normality, like being here now at an orgy in a Greek gymnasium drawing amorous spadgers jacking off.

  Jan added his other hand, caressing Hansje’s balls, which had drawn up tight as a quince. And then, making me and Sander trade stares, Jan, squiggle-eyed as he leaned and cupped the head of Hansje’s dick in his mouth, shoved onto it cross-eyed, forcing it in with sliding nods.

  Een derde, drie vierde, het geheel in elf opsicht. Hans, boggled and blushing, was utterly, seriously silent, staring at what was happening. Nose mashed against Hansje’s pubic down, drawing back with a slick slow drag to the acorn, Jan slogged through a brave cadence before he kecked.

  Eyes watered, gasping, he scambled up, jiggeting his foreskin, for Hansje’s turn. Who, holding Jan by the butt, ran his kiss on full glut, gagged, tried again less impetuously, made a go of it for three slippery thrusts, stood beaming to crush Jan in a hug, and went back to it.

  You little buggers! Sander bellowed. I can’t stand it. We’re going for a walk, Adriaan and I, out of temptation’s way. He mussed their hair, kissed them both, mouth, navel, and dick, and strode off. Make it good, I added, and followed Sander to the other end of the island.

  He walked with barefoot Choctaw tread through the larches and pines, silent for a long while. Kaatje and Bruno won’t mind? I said I didn’t think so. Jan was a best friend, a bright, just, affectionate boy. Affectionate! Sander shouted. He could seduce a Calvinist archbishop.

  He’s back there loving sweet Hansje into an orgasm that will start with a supersonic tickle in his grubby pink toes, zing up his pretty brown legs, wiggle through his spine, dance in his heart, slosh out the top of his head, and ripple and buzz out to his fingertips.

  That’s, of course, only the buildup. Then it will scrunch in to hum around in his balls and trill and jump in his trim little dick. He flexed his knees and hauled his out of his open fly, and walked on with it flopping. Watch, he said, this one come all by itself.

  And Jan, the scalawag, a della Robbia angel, a lamb, a Poussin jonge Johannes de Doper, as you’ve said, and look at him, hot as a sailor. O his heart and his seasick knackers! Lucky little charmer. I remarked that Sander was overrating their sexual play as far too Beethovenesque.

  Nyah, said Sander. Not those two. They’ve studied carefully more Danish magazines than you and I have ever seen. Anyway, they’ve unhinged me and trashed my calm. We came to our favorite flat rock, the talking place, the tag end of the afternoon lying silver out across the sea.

  I sat, Sander stood, poking things, a moss clump, my foot, with his toe. Under a fidget of fingers his cock distended and snubbed up. A silly Sander glance, the transparency of which I met with a laugh. I’m being awful, he said, as awful as I’ve always been, always will be.

  The jumbling sea heard, the solemn rocks, and my wondering ears. A plattegrond Sander calls it, a scheme for my consideration, evolved in his handsome brain from hunches of his and Grietje’s, always lucky, from things I’ve told him about the stapelgek philosopher Fourier.

  Item, that he and I buy Roseknop’s De Stijl house on the Spiegelgracht and live in it with Grietje. Its top floor, half the roof of which is skylight, would be his studio. Next floor down, mine. It has more space and airiness than my apartment on the Suze Groeneweglaan.

  Extensive bookshelves. He and Grietje will have the first floor. Every painting, every drawing he sells will go into paying for his part of the house until it is all wonderfully ours. The place is in the hands of some national trust, which wants somebody to buy it and live in it.

  Item, that he and Grietje want children, lots of children, and have already dispensed with precautions. They are not afraid that it will be a sweet and lovable idioot, as it will be nephew or niece as well as son or daughter, but genetics are genetics. Bound to be beautiful.

  Item, it would improve the little bastard’s chances by half if I put myself in the way, alongside, as it were, Sander, of being its father. I am Hansje’s real father, am I not? I don’t know, don’t need to know. He has Kaatje’s beauty, but no telling resemblance to me or Bruno.

  Item, that Grietje with female bloodymindedness says this will also get us into each other’s pants. She says you’re shy. There’s a vrouwenbeweging trollop she had been to bed with, for the fun of it, just a silly frump of a tomboyish girl who comes for hours.

  Groot God! They can squeeze out orgasms all of an afternoon and part of a night, having convulsions the whole time. Anyway, we’ll be close in her. Not in goedgezindheit, and we know you’re not shockable or preuts or puriteins. You don’t want to believe that I love you.

  The three of us would make books and paintings and children as fine as Hans and Saartje. All of our days will be charmed and sexy. We won’t let anybody in. Never answer the doorbell. The rest of the world can go gibber as it will, shut out, in rage. Just us inside.

  Except for Bruno and Kaatje, and Max and Margareta, and Grietje’s wildzang with the outsized talented clit, and Hans and Jan, we’ll make them a corner somewhere for as long as they’re liberated badgers, before they wise up to girls, and your spooky professor friends, natch.

  O yes, my models. But nobody else. It will be an island, like this, but in Amsterdam. What did I think? What did I think! First, that it’s a knot of unsolvable problems, each reinforcing the other, and like all knots has stability. Adriaan, he said, there are tears in your eyes.

  25 THERMIDOR

  Samenstelling. Table on porch, big camp coffee pot, archaic Japanese blue vase, the gift of Minoru Hara, with buttony yellow summer meadow flowers, sharp green of fragrance, coffee mugs, solid Dutch plates with crumbs of rolls, marmalade and kipper wreck. My pipe.

  Two pairs of briefs, Jan’s and Hansje’s, one white with blue band, pucked and dimpled along the elastic, the other a pale Greek blue with white band. Wet towels over the backs of chairs, Sander’s docked jeans. Summer morning sun through pines. Flat green, the sea.

  On the bed, well beyond credence and probably beyond human capacity, Sander remarks, our champions of mutual esteem intently and devotedly at it. Back from a dip, he looked in, slapped his forehead, and came onto the porch with one thumb in his mouth, the other jabbed over his shoulder.

  I looked. Tousled mops of heads held deep between brown, narrow, shifting thighs, a working of sharp shoulder blades, traveling of hands from pert butts along ribby flanks to virginal napes, a voluptuary of restless caresses, hips hunched in slow and exact pulsings.

  They were thus negen en zestig on the bed when we got back last evening from the flat rock, causing Sander to spin on his heel and raddle his hair. We made supper, noisily, to which they were a while in coming, hand in hand, with shiny wet dicks and chins, brazenly.

  Sander marched them by the ears to the sea, hoisting them on the way to smatch a kiss onto a midriff, a navel, a thigh. They splashed and washed each other. I followed with a towel, as there was a nip in the air. Began to see what talents Sander has for being a father.

  We dressed Hans in my Finnish sweater: it came to his knees and his head was half swallowed by the high neck. Jan asked to have Sander’s jersey, which fitted him like socks on a rooster. Neither seemed the least flustered or unbalanced by their homemade orgy. Integendeel.

  They wore their excitement openly and happily. Is, said Sander with a mouth full of corned beef, Badger Liberation all that your salty hearts expected? Jan, at whose age with such a question I would have been at a loss, welcomed the question. I’m hooked for good, he said.

  Me too, added Hans. Slyboots looks at each other as they answered. Amor meliores facet. So they laid the fire, wa
shed up after supper, brought coffee, looking very Little Hordes in the outsized sweater and jersey. Love makes their eyes brilliant and alert. And soft.

  Zaad, Jan offers, tastes like celery. Like soda, Hans said, sort of. We wanted you to see us all wiggly and drooling, but you went away. I got Jan to yipping and mooing a lot, and then we did it together on the bed, both at once, you know, and it got better and better.

  Sander put his head in his hands. We’re going to do it all night, Jan said. Is it all right to kiss? O God, Sander moaned. Hans was puzzled by Sander. Jan saw through him. Kissing, I said, is what you’re doing. I suppose it is, at that, Jan said. Sander’s going crazy.

  Why? asked Hans. Because, said Sander, never mind why. Because, I said, he’s younger than both of you and feels left out. He’s like an eight-year-old who wants to play with the big boys. But, said Hans, Sander’s peter is 25 cm long, gossie mijne! And it’s girls he fucks.

  I fuck everything, Sander said, though I’ve never had an eye for goslings, not before today. I didn’t know you were such sexpots. Sander’s pulling your leg, I said, he wouldn’t remain interested over an hour in something as wet behind the ears and pure of heart as a boy.

  When we’re older, Jan asked, we’ll have more zaad, won’t we? Scads, said Sander, glad to have the subject changed. He heaved Hans onto his lap, hugged him, and said, you come more the more you come. And this fellow will get longer the more you love each other into fits.

  Look it, said Jan, that’s mine. They went early to their slaapzak, to discover that the one with his head deep inside tended to smother. Sander suggested they have a good hug and go to sleep, heads side by side, both breathing. No way! they said together. Sex is too good.

  I suggested the bed until Sander and I turned in. Afterwards they could be in front of the fire in tall socks and sweaters for as long as passion raged. This they did, so that when we went to bed it was warm and redolent of boy. We talked quietly a long while before sleep.

  Sander calmly assuaged his concupiscence while we talked about the plan to buy and live in the Roseknop house. When I woke deep in the night, the boys by the fire seemed to be some eight-limbed insectoid creature in a spasm of contractions, part caterpillar, part cricket.