by J. D. Landis
“Well,” he says, “Clive Bell was in love with Virginia. His sister-in-law. They had an affair. And Virginia was in love with Vanessa. Her sister. And Vanessa encouraged Clive and Virginia in their passion. But they never actually made love.”
“Vanessa and Virginia?”
“Virginia and Clive Bell.”
I love these stories he tells me. Where do they come from. I wonder if a mind can hold all these things and still have room for me.
Slave Chain
Johnny freaked when he unfolded his new quilt.
“It’s a swastika!” he screamed. “We can’t put this on the wall!”
“Why not?”
“A swastika? What will people say!”
“What people? Nobody ever comes in here except Elspeth and delivery boys.”
“I wasn’t referring to other people. I meant ourselves.”
It is so like Johnny to make the world out of nobody but us. Is it any wonder I feel so safe with him.
“Help me hang it,” I said.
He did. And while we hung it, I told him all about it. That it was made in the 1890s and was an Indian symbol and was supposed to signify good luck. All it is is a cross with arms, but it was a shape that went back far earlier than the time of Christ. It has appeared in many cultures. Quilts like this go by many names. The Chinese 10000 Perfections. The Battle Axe of Thor. Wind Power of the Osages. Favorite of the Peruvians. (When I mentioned that one he said that his favorite of the Peruvians is our little man with the big dick) The Pure Symbol of Right Doctrine. Even Heart’s Seal, whatever that may be, the best or worst of things, depending on when you seal it.
“How do you feel about it now?” I asked him when we got it up on the wall and adjusted the lights.
“Confused.”
“Good.”
I wanted him to know that pictures can be like words and destroy their own meaning.
He’s not the only one here who longs for something stable.
Devil’s Claws
It’s funny how you can be married to a guy and live with him sleep with him eat with him talk with him laugh with him cry with him joke with him shop with him drink with him drive with him suck him off in the shower and you still don’t know who he is.
Thank goodness.
Base Ball
We went up to the Cloisters today. It’s still his favorite museum in the city. I tell him that’s because after I’ve been dragging him around to every art museum big and small in the city for the past 2 years so he can learn how to look at art what he still likes to do most is lie down on the grass and neck and how many museums in the city can you do that at. (Outside the Egyptian Room at the Met is one place!) But he told me today that the reason he likes to go to the Cloisters is because it has his favorite work of art.
“And what might that be?” I ask him.
“St. Jerome Tempted By Visions Of Maidens,” he answers.
It was done in the early 15th century and looks a little like the Cloisters with its arches and columns. St. Jerome is a narrow-eyed man with women’s hands. The maidens are in the “city” (in other words the place of sin) and wear beautiful dresses low on their tits and tight on their hips. One of them is looking at another one like a woman about to get it on with a woman (St. Jerome was not very original with his visions!) And the second one is looking right at old Jerome, P. F. as we used to say in junior high (“Pussy Forward”). I point this out to Johnny. “That’s called lordosis,” he says. “You mean it’s something religious,” I answer. He laughs. “Not precisely. Lordosis is the name for the pushing forward of the genitals, the offering up of one’s edea, one’s sex to a desired partner.” “So it is religious” is what I offer. “Not to St. Jerome,” says Johnny.
We neck on the grass.
Buggy Wheel
This is the first time we’re reading the same writer at the same time. I’m reading The Stranger. He’s reading The Notebooks. The day we met he quoted Camus to me. I wonder if he remembers. I do. I also remember that one of my first boyfriends in New York read Camus. In French. I loved the way those books looked. They were white paperbacks with black and red printing. I used to borrow them and pretend to read them on the bus. It was a good way to meet other boys but only on certain buses. Fifth Avenue practically anywhere. Lexington but only around Hunter. Broadway near Lincoln Center and then up around Columbia. And the crosstown buses through Central Park, always the crosstown buses, except you had to work a lot faster than you did on the avenues.
This boy Daniel said that in 1981, which is when we were going out together, nobody came up with ideas any more. Nobody made you feel they understood you by telling you that life was pushing a huge rock up a giant hill and when you got to the top the rock rolled back down and so you pushed it up again, and that’s all you did your entire life over and over until you were dead. Daniel’s favorite phrase was “no exit.” He loved to make out with me. He never gave me any trouble about my demands. He even took credit. He said, “You have to separate yourself from things to see them.” He still didn’t like looking at my vagina. I think it was the first one he’d ever seen. But he loved to watch his hand on his dick. He could hypnotize both of us with that motion. He could go on forever. And he never came. I think he was afraid his penis was too small and he didn’t want either one of us to see it unerect. But to me having sex and not coming is exactly like pushing a boulder up a mountain over and over.
Johnny read to me tonight. He usually does that only with Nietzsche. It’s never more than a sentence or two. An idea. “Listen to this,” he’ll say. But he won’t read to me until I look at him.
“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.”
That’s what made me remember Daniel. Daniel read Camus to me too. Whole long passages. Then he went and killed himself. He hanged himself in his dark little bedroom on Morningside Drive.
The person who told me said he was wearing a beret. I try to remember Daniel without the hat. But I can’t.
He died in vain.
Just the way he would have wanted it.
I wonder what he’s trying to tell me. Johnny I mean.
Whig’s Delight
When I got to the shop this morning I read in the Times that Ike died of aids. There was no picture of him. As if he’d never existed. I should write a letter to the editor.
It was a tiny obituary. Isaac Labrovitz, Gallery Owner. Represented several artists of immortal inconsequence. No immediate survivors. No companion. I wonder if that was my fault.
I haven’t seen him in 8 years. Not since the day he fired me. But I have seen him in my mind. I see him taking off his suit. I see his body. It’s the most perfect body … God, Johnny would kill me for that … the grammar, not what I said … but it is, the most perfect body I’ve ever seen. It’s not more beautiful than Johnny’s, but Johnny’s is mine, Johnny’s gets so close it disappears from sight, Johnny’s gets buried inside me. Ike’s was like a work of art. I could stare at it for hours. So could he. I mean he could stare at me staring at him. He told me I was like a mirror. He could look at me and see himself. He once joked we were the opposite of Galatea and Pygmalion because I’d taken a living being and turned him into a statue. “Just a maquette,” I kidded him. “I trust you’re not referring to my cock,” says Ike.
He was the most important man in my life before Johnny. Not just because he gave me the money to start my business. Which I paid back to his lawyer Barry Weiss and still didn’t hear from Ike. Because he was my greatest lover. He was my ideal man. I was never so safe in my life. I could close my eyes with his eyes on me and know that no one would touch me but me. I could lie there in my little studio apartment with him on my tiny twin bed and me draped across my wonderful old wing chair and sink deeper and deeper into myself until I came and exploded back into the world. And there he’d be. Kind of aghast, I guess. He told me my orgasms lasted longer than The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boy
s.
After he fired me I didn’t do what some girls do I guess and what I would have thought I’d do. I didn’t find more men. I didn’t bury my sorrow in the oblivion of vengeful dick gathering. Instead I started to have fantasies about men actually fucking me. And I learned how to make my fingers numb so that way I could be completely alone and yet have someone with me. Watching me. Watching over me. Isn’t that what girls want? Someone to watch over me. A father. A husband. But Ike was the best.
I went 4 years between Ike and Johnny without seeing a man’s body.
Now I’ve been 4 years with Johnny without seeing a man’s body. When he holds me, I am reborn.
I don’t know why I haven’t told Johnny about Ike. He’s the only man I’d bother talking about. Besides my father. Andy was just a boy. And Ike brings no shame. But I love my secrets. I mean, I love having them. I don’t want to tell them. I want them to be found out. I want to be spied on. I want it illicit. I want a sin to be committed.
I wonder if I’ll be stoned if I go to Ike’s funeral.
Blindman’s Fancy
Where are you Monica???
I should never have waited a week to call her. I guess I wanted her to call me. By the time I did, her phone was disconnected.
I got Mr. Labrovitz to let me take the checks to her apartment. He was going to mail them. Or so he said.
I went there after work today. She lives on Lispenard Street. Or she used to. Somebody answered her bell and said she moved out. She didn’t know to where.
She’s the only friend I ever had here. I told her all my secrets. It’s like this city just chews people up and swallows them.
Horn of Plenty
I have this fantasy that I take Johnny home and introduce him to my parents.
He isn’t what they expect. He doesn’t look like the men who grow out of the boys in the Valley of the Moon.
“Is he a professor?” they ask me. “A lawyer?”
“No.”
“Well, what does he do then?”
“Nothing.”
“A ne’er do well,” says my father.
“More like a ne’er do anything,” I tell them.
They don’t get my joke. They look at me like it’s a pity I didn’t have the sense to marry a local grape grower.
“He’s the only person I’ve ever met who’s in harmony with the world. He doesn’t have to do anything. He’s kind of like an ecological miracle in the realm of the spirit.” (That’s how they talk in California) “He takes nothing and he contaminates nothing. He’s pure. On top of that he loves me to complete distraction.”
Now my mother understands. She nods. She smiles. If a man loves you he could be a mass murderer for all she cares.
Then she says, “Perhaps he’d like to see photographs of you when you were younger.”
I’m about to scream No! when I realize Johnny would like to see nothing more. The only thing he mourns is his absence in my past.
I look at my parents. They’re frozen in time. It’s 1979. The year I left. My father is 38. My mother is 36. Now they’re both in their 50s. If they’re even still alive. But I see them like me and Johnny. And I begin to understand those pictures. I was 15. They’d been married since just before I was born. I am the evidence of their teenage lust. Who better to inspire them.
So we all sit around looking at pictures of me.
“Isn’t she beautiful,” says my father to my husband. “Look at what her hair does to the light.”
“And what a nice little figure,” says my mother.
“Well we know where she gets that,” says my father to my mother.
“Oh you make me blush.” To distract attention from her own embarrassment my mother turns it back to me. “Look how nicely she holds that boy’s penis in her hand. How reverential.”
“Do you recognize him?” my father asks me.
“Oh, sure. That’s Billy Zellerbach.”
“How about this one?” My father shows us all a photo of me with my eyes closed and my lips kissing the tip of a very long, very narrow dick. (It wasn’t until Andy that I actually put one in my mouth. Or all of one anyway)
“That’s Stan MacIver.”
“Wasn’t he on the basketball team?” says my mother.
“No. He only looks tall.”
Everybody laughs.
“And this? Jeez, that must have been fast film!”
The camera has captured what must have been the first shot of semen out of the thick dick I had in my hand. It looks like the white of an eye at the top of an arc. “Frank Bagnani.”
“Looks Italian,” says my mother.
“How would you know?” says my father.
They both start to laugh. And while they’re laughing they face each other grasping hands in front of them, fingers interlocked in fingers.
“Stop it you love birds,” I say, but I’m very happy for them.
Johnny must be impatient, because he turns over the next picture. I’m holding a supple dick against my cheek. My lips are glazed with come. “Johnny Agoston.”
“He’s dead, you know,” says my mother, who’s still looking into my father’s eyes.
“What!” It’s hard to make the jump from junior high to death, especially when you’re looking at the handsome cock and silky come, alive with sex. “I can’t believe it. Can I have this picture?”
My parents look at Johnny. “Do you mind?” I ask him.
I know what he’s going to say before he says it. “Of course not.” Then he adds, “I thought you never knew another Johnny.”
“I lied,” I say.
My mother turns the photo over and hands it to me upside down. Then she quickly flips another picture up. She looks at it and her eyes go wide. “My God what an enormous pecker! I forgot we had this, Carl.”
“So did I.” I am turned to as the expert. “Who is this?”
“Timmy Wetzel.”
“That’s Timmy Wetzel!” My mother takes a closer look. “But he’s so …”
“What?” asks my father.
“Nondescript,” answers my mother.
“Not any more,” says my father.
“Of course he’s gotten quite fat,” says my mother.
“Ain’t that a shame.” My father smiles with relief.
We go through the pictures one by one. I know every boy by sight.
“Isn’t she amazing,” my father says to Johnny.
“A prodigy,” adds my mother.
“She’s positively eidetic,” Johnny tells them.
“If you say so,” my father says to him.
“You are a strange man,” my mother says to him.
My wifely instincts kick right in. “Not compared to you two.”
“Why would you say a thing like that?” says my mother.
“I think she finds us quaint,” my father tells her. “We’re a long way from New York here, Lillian. She’s traveled far from where she was born and raised.”
I don’t want to argue with them, so I change the subject. “Do you have any pictures of Andy?”
“I don’t know one boy from the next,” says my father. “You’re the expert. You tell us.”
He hands me what’s left of the pictures. I throw them aside one after the other until I come to one I know is him. All you can see is my head, my hair, with his graceful fingers arched within it. I start to cry.
My parents both together gently take the picture from my hand. They look at it. They shake their heads.
“He loved my hair,” I say. “He loved my hair.”
“Not as much as I did,” says my father.
“His picture of it won a prize,” my mother tells Johnny.
“Claret,” says my father. “Isn’t that what I always called it, Carla? Claret.”
Johnny, who’d been wiping away my tears with the soft sides of his huge hands, stops and says, “Don’t your own parents even know your name.”
I take his hands and hold them against the sides of my face. “
There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, Johnny …”
Storm at Sea
Tonight we had another baby discussion. I’m still afraid to tell him the truth. If I tell him how much I love him will he turn against me. I am betraying you every minute of every day, beloved husband.
We were lying around after dinner. He was reading. I was reading. The tip of his tie was wet from doing the dishes. Music was playing. He told me what it was but I’ve forgotten. Vocal. 4 Last Songs. 7 Last Words. (But definitely not 8 Days A Week or Sweet Little 16 or 19th Nervous Breakdown) We can both read with music on. It doesn’t seem to disturb the silence. The way a television would. We don’t own one. We are probably the only 2 adults who ever met and got married and neither one of us had ever owned a TV. My parents used to watch it all the time. I don’t think Johnny’s did. He says he’s never seen TV, except when he was walking by one. He’s never actually watched it. It frightens him. He says it doesn’t bring the world to you. It takes it away.
I was reading a novel by Milan Kundera. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite customers. She comes in once a year and buys a quilt. She makes me dictate into her little micro-cassette tape recorder everything I know about the quilt she’s chosen. But only after she’s chosen it. She says it’s very important to fall in love with something or somebody before you know anything about their past. But once it’s yours, no matter what it is or who it is, you have to discover everything you can, everything there is, good or bad, the truth. She’s a particular fan of Graveyard quilts.
Johnny never reads fiction, ever. He says it disturbs him too much. Because he believes it. He told me he was born without the ability to tell fiction from fact. “I receive everything as the truth,” he said, “so I avoid the imaginary. Of course the truth turns out to be notional anyway.”