Allan Stein

by Matthew Stadler

  "I'm fine. The family is lovely as can be, and they've even got a young son who's a bit of a distraction."

  "How young?"

  "Oh, I don't know."

  "Of course you know. How young is he?"

  "Fifteen, I think. Maybe he's sixteen."

  "Mmm. You're not doing anything, are you? Because you know I wouldn't, and it's me who's staying there, on the museum's tab no less, so obviously doing anything is out of the question. He must be gorgeous."

  "Oh, completely. Of course I'm not doing anything."

  "I'm worried about you."

  "Sweet."

  "Maybe you should come home, come to Jimmy's."

  "I couldn't."

  "The weather is absolutely stunning. I haven't left the compound since getting here."

  "I really couldn't. The drawings have got me very busy already. I've set up something with the widow, Allan Stein's widow."

  "Jimmy's got Vicodin, I mean bottles of it.

  "I don't like Vicodin, and anyway, Herbert, I'm enjoying myself here. It's a great relief having something to do for a change. You may have been overworked for months but I've just been sitting in my room. The last thing in the world I need now is to be idle, even at Jimmy's, which I'm sure must be heaven."

  "You don't like Vicodin?"

  "I loathe Vicodin. I'm probably going to have those drawings in hand by the end of the week."

  "You really should write to Allan's son, he's got an address in Paris."

  "Allan Stein's son?"

  "Yes, hold on, I'll get it for you."

  "Why didn't you give it to me before I left?"

  "Oh, I don't know. I never thought you'd take these drawings so seriously. Hold on a second." Herbert rummaged for a while, and when he returned he recited the address and sighed. "The end of the week?"

  "Probably. I mean, between the widow and the son I can't imagine I'll have any problems."

  "Then you're coming home?"

  "Of course I am."

  The phone call left me torn apart, as if Herbert's kindness had obliged me to span the distance which separated us, so that now I felt dispersed, like an aerosol spray. I wanted to occupy myself and so I wrote to the son straightaway, asking for his help and signing the letter with my usual flourish. It was almost one, and I was still completely out of focus. Swimming seemed like a good idea.

  According to Herbert's antique guidebook (Baedecker, 1907), an artesian well fed a bath for indigents on the Butte aux Cailles, just a short walk up the rue Bobillot from home. Une station balnéaire (avec piscine, buvettes, etc.), curiously located on the summit of a butte, was promised, though no hours or fees were listed. I packed two towels, my baggy trunks, stale bread and cheese, and left a note promising my four P.M. return (school's end). Dazed by the bright sunshine, I stopped for a coffee at the Café Bobillot. A woman with a purse and a purse-sized dog spooned her way up to the bar beside me and propped the dog sidearm so that his tiny clean butthole was poised exactly at the lip of my petit crème. Good Parisian, I pretended it wasn't there. With the broad windowed walls pulled open to the street, the café became littered with blown trash, shouted French, and car-horn honks in the billowy air. I enjoyed another petit crème, plus a baguette smashed with camembert and butter. Time wafted away with the odor of this pungent bread and cheese, and I got lost in it, delirious with ammonia and cream and the grim resistance of the chewy bread.

  This part of the Thirteenth District was plain and quotidian beside the Paris I remembered from my trip with Louise. I was sixteen then, and we stayed in a small hotel near the Place Saint-Denis, where it seemed like every street at every hour was loud and crowded, decorated with the come-hither blandishments of tourism. Card shops and overpriced cafés punctuated this twisting labyrinth of streets in every direction, and I loved it, thinking this was just like TV, which it was: a constant jumbled stream of pumped-up sensations that left us exhausted and irritable, so irritable that Louise and I decided, for the first time in any place, traveling or at home, to go our separate ways for great chunks of time. We set up rendezvous for certain meals back at the hotel and spent the next ten days like strangers who have met each other abroad, get along well, and agree to share a few dates in the course of their separate vacations. It is clear to me now that Louise, progressive mother that she was, had decided it was time I began having some independence, some kind of adventure, and where better for a handsome young boy to start than Paris? I know that now, but at the time of our trip what I had figured out was exactly the reverse. In Paris, thrust onto my own by my mother's eagerness to "explore" (as she put it), I reasoned that she was pursuing sex, or at least romance, and wanted to get rid of me. I was hurt by it, and suspicious. My forced independence became an affliction, and I spent most of the time paranoid and morose, staying close to the hotel so I could monitor her comings and goings as closely as possible.

  Our rooms were separate but they shared a thin wall, and I always knew if she was in, and what she was doing when she was. Typically we had breakfast at the hotel and discussed our plans for the day. I improvised elaborate fictions, long walking tours of great swaths of the city that I never actually carried out, pinioned as I was to my surveillance of Louise. Always I had maps and guidebooks to lay over the small table, covering the coffee and stale pastries, as I explained my ambitious tours. Louise was attentive to all this bluster, but it was clear she wished I would just calm down and enjoy myself. Usually she had no plans except to go somewhere in another neighborhood and sit for a while in a café, and, as I discovered, that's exactly what she did. She always invited me to come along, but since my "new independence" was the great victory of this vacation, accepting Louise's offer would clearly have been a defeat, disappointing to both of us. No, I always said, thanks, but I must get ready and be off. In my room I waited, silent, for Louise to return to her room, then I scrambled out the door to an awful Formica café across from the hotel's front entrance, where I had a Gini soda (in a can, no glass, so I could take it with me the moment I had to leave). I waited, hidden behind a mirrored pillar, for my mother to emerge, and then I followed her.

  Louise was not a very interesting traveler. She peered in windows but rarely went inside to shop. She stopped randomly (I suppose it was usually warm sunshine that stopped her), and stood like a homeless woman for long moments doing nothing. If I lost her, which was often, it was usually in the metro, where I couldn't risk sitting in the same car and had to lean out at the stops to watch the platform, hoping I would spot her when she got off. I visited a great deal of Paris getting off at the wrong stop and following some other brown head through a crowd, surging along the narrow tunnels and out into the street. Stalingrad, Place de Clichy, Gare de l'Est, Mou-ton Duvernet, and on one morning of endless mistaken tailings through three train changes, the Porte de Bagnolet, where I was too exhausted to return home and spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in a sandwich shop reading a British sport newspaper. Having lost her, my usual strategy was to return to the Place Saint-Michel and sit in that same Formica café with a soda until I saw her come back to the hotel.

  In a way I was beginning an adventure, as I now believe Louise had hoped; my new habit of surveillance was tremendously exciting to me, making my face flush with nervous energy, my heart race, and my body become electric with that blood rush of Eros that seems to drift so haphazardly over the hodgepodge days of adolescence— petty dinner-table arguments raising fat erections; orgasms poked, midafternoon, into television-room couch cushions, the cat or dog licking in a backyard hollow, licking just an arm, but nevertheless— and now this top-secret trailing through the streets of Paris, my erection pressed flat against my jeans, until later each afternoon in my room when I beat off. I never thought of Louise, but of trailing her. In fact I thought mostly of myself, and, while I worked my fist up and down in the dim gauze light of the hotel room, what I imagined was me on the subway train, unzipping and doing it there, Louise in the next car clueless while I perform
ed gloriously, naked for all the men and women and children in the bright enamel subway compartment to admire.

  Before I could allow myself this pleasure I sat, sometimes for hours, in the café, hoping to catch her return. The man or men I thought she must be chasing never materialized, with the notable exception of one extremely handsome thirty- or fourty-year-old Frenchman who had befriended both of us in the first days of our stay. His name was Frank (which sounded lovely in French with the soft "a"), and it was obvious to me he wanted to have sex with Louise. What gave him away—beyond the touch, the attention, the body language, the great and constant amplitude of joy and strained humor, the wine, always, which he brought to our table asking could he join us—was him palling it up with me, as if we could be great buddies. He would show me all of Paris, everything a boy should see. In short, he employed the trick of most men I'd seen showing interest in Louise: buddy up to the son to get Mom. We enjoyed him as we would a fireworks display, dazzled and amused but also very distant. He joined us for dinner three or four times and at the end of each evening, when at last Frank had withdrawn, Louise and I would just look at each other and laugh, not derisively but in amazement.

  Frank had appeared twice at cafés where my mother sat but nothing ever happened. "Appeared" is unfair; in fact, Louise told me on both mornings that she was going to meet Frank, who had called, and wouldn't I like to come too? "Frank asked specifically for you to come; really, he'll be very disappointed to see it's just this old woman, and I don't know that I'll enjoy it much without an escort, oh please!" But no, Mother, I absolutely cannot, I have the whole Buttes Chaumont to see today, not to mention the zoo of the Bois de Vincennes, which Le Guide Bleu insists should not be missed, so that both times Louise did go alone and I followed with extra vigilance, hoping something would at last happen. Nothing ever did. Frank seemed bored, distracted in a way quite unknown at our dinners together, and they drank their coffees, chatted for less than an hour, kissed cheek-cheek, and I returned to the hotel to jerk off.

  On the seventh day, at last, something happened. I had lost her one morning in the metro going north from Saint-Michel and returned to the tacky café, where I found an American newspaper and parked myself in the best spot, facing a mirrored wall that caught the hotel entrance in its greasy panorama. I could read and watch at the same time from there. I was only mildly bored, halfway through a canned Gini, when I spotted Frank standing by the hotel door looking at his watch. So, it had come to this: clandestine rendezvous while the boy hiked the Canal de l'Ourq. All the dreary hours spent in this bright orange café, scraping the flimsy feet of my plastic chair across the tiles, all of my week in Paris spent day after day in this ugly hole waiting, suddenly became worthwhile, like hot bread in the hands of a starving man. I dropped the paper and tore ravenously out the clattering glass door, Gini in hand, to intercept this desirous paramour before he could have his way with my mother.

  "Hey!" I called, feigning enthusiasm, rushing up to Frank.

  "Oh, hello." From him a flash of distress, with a smile propped up quickly in its wake. "What a great surprise."

  "Waiting for someone?" I managed to say, not coy at all, as I sipped the Gini.

  "I'm not sure. I mean, I have no appointment with anyone, if that's what you ask. I'm awfully glad to see you."

  Uh-huh. "Yeah, what a coincidence."

  "Not so much of one, really, I know this is your hotel." Horribly, I thought he might try to confide their rendezvous to me, the man-to-man ploy, demanding my confederacy, and I forestalled him with a quick invitation.

  "Come up to my room, Frank. I mean, you haven't seen it yet, have you?" If I could get him there for long enough, Louise wouldn't find him and would leave.

  "If you want to," he answered ambiguously. I was silent, petulant, and impatient to get us out of there.

  "Whatever," I said, hurrying into the lobby, drawing him along with my sheer momentum. "Come on." Frank looked around anxiously, a last scan for dear late Louise; then he followed me inside.

  The charm came back on. Frank smiled now, positively aglow once we got in the elevator. He really could turn it on, and I supposed he was revving the engines to get this whole distraction up and running quick enough to catch his date, but as it turned out that wasn't the case at all. Frank put his hand on my shoulder as I jiggled the key, and when we pushed through the door he slammed it closed behind us and pinned me to the wall of the tiny room. He pulled the buttons of my shirt undone one by one while kissing me flat on the mouth. His tongue found my lips, parted in complete surprise, before pushing past them. My mind fled while my body went straight toward Frank. I pressed myself against him and my erection pushed at the metal buttons of my jeans. Frank pried them undone and pulled my pants down my legs while pushing me onto the bed. Was I beautiful? What boy is not beautiful? He dragged my underpants off, a dirty frayed pair, grabbing and tugging so I got burns along my hips, and then he fell on me. I felt the day come rushing down through the top of my head, raging along my spine, and then, after a span in which he bit me and pinched my nipples until they were sore and raw, it all burst out my middle and into his mouth. And then I slapped him, hard across the face, which amazed and delighted me. I don't know if or when Louise returned, I don't think she did until after dinner, but Frank and I had sex every day for the next three days, and then I left Paris. Sex was terrific, but Frank never acted very affectionate before or after it, and that was fine. It meant I didn't fall in love at all. After we left I hardly thought about him, except when I jerked off and would replay the scene in the hotel room. I still do. It's one of my favorite scenes.

  As I say, the Thirteenth District was nothing like that gaudy area of Paris where so much had happened to me, and as I walked through it to the Butte aux Cailles I saw only locals, Arabs, and Asians among the European French, shopping and drifting through their day-to-day pleasures and chores. It was spring, really and finally, I thought, with mild air and so much fragrance from the trees and turned dirt, the car exhaust faded for whole blocks behind the day's fresh breeze. The street rose toward the Place Verlaine. A flock of screaming back-satcheled kids flooded the sidewalk in their haste past me, and beyond them a steamy-glassed brick building held the piscine. No artesian well or buvettes in sight, just the clank and suck of metal drains, pleasant repetition of laps, wavelets splashing, minor adjustments of steamed goggles, the hothouse air. I felt like a great and weeping orchid going in and a flat drained field coming back out again. I swam until exhausted, showered, dressed, then drifted home along the boulevards. A paper schedule, gratis from the pinched concierge, told me that evening at the pool would be an ouverture spéciale featuring reduced admission for teens and sporting play with hoops and balls. Voilà! The boy and I could return for a night of wet fun together. I praised this kind universe that turned its wheels so. And oh, the air felt lovely as the clocks tolled four above the great city. I unlocked the garden door and hurried in to be sure I had not missed the boy's arrival.

  No one home. Sweet birdsong from the garden and courtyard, starlings. The mail had arrived and with it a postcard from California: two hideously oversized artichokes whose color was off. Dear Herbert! (What a coincidence.) Thinking of you gallivanting all over gai Paris. Jimmy and I are exhausted: the sun, the hills, the pool. No sign of Tristan, alas. Looking forward to seeing you here, you bon vivant!

  Where was that boy? We'd have to stop at the GoSport! for a proper cache-sexe (the sort required by the Minister of Bathing, or whomever). Perhaps we'd get a bite along the way. (Why bother Serge with early meal plans?) Arriving for the 8 P.M. pool playtime seemed easy enough, and, prone athwart the cushions, I anticipated the fun. God, he would be so interesting; that is, interested in the sight of me. Clatter, slam! It was the boy, click-click-click-clicking his bicycle along the hall, and I rose from bed, eager to announce my grand plan before his usual exodus to basketball. The telephone rang, loud and final as a school bell. I ignored it, but the boy did not, and in a flas
h he yelled my name, singsong, down the landing: "Herbert," all air and baihhrr, with that soft guttural ending I loved so much.

  "Got it." I picked up. "Hello?"

  "Allô , Herbert?" French.

  "Oui, c 'est Herbert."

  "Ah, it is Denis, I am happy to hear you again after our wonderful night." The boy could be heard, scuttling his drawers.

  "Yes, Denis, a marvelous evening."

  "I have done so much today, chasing the Steins for you, I have wanted—"

  "I'm sorry Denis, just a second." The house had gone silent, like an empty fridge, so I listened more closely, trolling the air for any clues to his movement. "Water boiling. I just had to take it off the burner."

  "Of course, it is your teatime."

  "More like cocktails."

  "Yes, I am thinking exactly this, if you please. You will be interested with the action on the Steins I have taken today." Probably the boy was in his bathroom, having a quick scrub before setting off to sport. Nothing was very clear anymore, and an annoying car horn honking outside made it worse. These rhythmic tuneless blats echoed in the telephone, all doubled up and tinny. "Excuse me, Herbert, I am just saying hello."

  "Yes, Denis, and I am saying hello back." A shout sounded from the upstairs window, the boy, disturbed by the car horn, no doubt.

  "No, no, to someone else. I would enjoy this cocktail with you now."

  "That's thrilling, Denis, we must make a plan for sometime soon." The phone was wired on a three-foot cord to the wall by the bed, so that I was like a watery-eyed mole trapped inside its cave, pressed into a corner, blind and listening: a soft rumble, like a boy's heavy tread on the stair steps, sounded, and then the telltale click-click, severed from its familiar series by Denis's voice.

  "A very good time is right now, if you are free."

  "I—ouch."

  "Are you hurt, Herbert?"

  "I'm sorry, Denis, this cord; it's the boy, you see."

  "He is startling, isn't he? In two years a Casanova, you will see."