"Actually, Denis, a boy's cock can be quite enormous. You'd be surprised."
Kind Denis smiled, then turned to answer George. "Yes, in fact I've seen this at the Hermitage and the material is horrible, like pieces of garbage."
"It's a nude boy, and interestingly enough it's exactly the same pallet and materials as the Stein portrait. It could be from the same sitting. I'm sure Picasso smelled money from the Steins and agreed to the portrait, then scraped whatever he could find off the floor of the studio—he was dirt poor then, they all were— cheap old gouache and cardboard he'd probably been standing on for a year."
"Is it falling apart?"
"Oh, they both are, though I think the portrait is being taken care of. This nude is in awful shape."
"Mmm."
The découpeur arrived at our table with the roast bird, severing its meat from the nest of bones with the rapid application of his knives. He did not pause, so the serial slashes became a single extended gesture, like a plier, performed on the bird, which wilted when the knives withdrew. The waiter placed it on Denis's plate. I had the pork medaillons and George the cold sliced tongue.
"These missing drawings look like a good bit of fun." George slipped a nib of tongue into his mouth with some wine and swallowed it all at once. "Denny said there's a bill of lading that describes them as studies for Allan's portrait."
"That's right. I can get you a copy."
"So then, why do you think they're nude studies?" I had no idea. Why did Herbert say these might be nude studies?
"I think it is Herbert's wish, George." A smile with a great draught of wine; then Denis turned to me. "Is Allan Stein erotic for you, Herbert, I mean in the way a boy like Stéphane or your Turk can be?"
"Got to use the loo," George offered. Leaving must have become attractive for a number of reasons. Denis smiled, watching him go, then grasped my hand where it lay by the wine bottle. He squeezed my fingers complicitly. "I am wondering if the dead boy is interesting to you like the living one who might talk and be touched."
"Why?"
"For example, if you think of him in that moment, standing nude, watched by the painter."
I poured some wine. "Denis, I can't help but wonder what it is you're after." He shrugged, then shrugged again. "I do have a kind of longing."
"It is erotic?"
"Allan is erotic, but there's no scenario involved. There's no sex."
"What happens?"
"He's just standing very near and he's silent, staring at me— like in a photo, actually. The proximity is all that 'happens,' so I could touch him, though I never do. He's always poised there, but then nothing . . . proceeds." Part of Allan's appeal was his complete indifference to me. I liked the way he stared and stared, neither resisting nor responding to anything. In this way the dead are doubly fascinating. While the capture of them is impossible, they are also unable to defend themselves against our efforts to try, which means the delight of the struggle will go on forever, if that's what one wants. The fantasies I have pursued with the dead are inviolable; they can neither be realized nor resisted.
Denis leaned closer. "I have this too, with my father, a photo of him that I look at. He's standing, staring, but he can't move. His distance is permanent, 'poised,' as you say." I picked food absently from my plate and listened. Something like this was the case with Louise; I mean, even when she was with me, there was an impossible intimacy she promised that I could never have, and this fact presented itself over and over in the incompleteness of holding her, like trying to hold a torn-open body closed. "When the boy's cock is in you," Denis asked, "have you cried?"
The atmosphere was so unstable, the night air—that is, the cold which had pushed down from the sky (perhaps the heating elements in the stone were turned off)—that I shivered and pressed my legs together. A chill rose up my back and drew my eyes to the stars, like certain painted saints who gaze upward. This circumstance made tears in my eyes, and that answer was all Denis needed.
He squeezed my hand and laughed, recognition, not derision, and I laughed too, but the cold air had gotten in me and the laugh felt like wind from the river, which had laved between buildings and naves, cradling the grotesque statuary, the gargoyles, and, spreading wide above the roofs, come to us in small downward gusts that blew through me and then whispered away into our silence. It's odd, describing this exchange, for the more meaningful it became, the less there was Denis and I had to say, and the less we spoke the more powerfully the night ruptured, so that the billowing places where, for example, Allan or Stéphane came rushing in—that is, the idea of Allan or Stéphane (for they dwelt equally in these uncharted interstices between the pleasantries of conversation, those silences and sighs where crushed thoughts could breathe and become huge)— these opened up, and we had only to be still and courteous to allow them to inhabit us or be inhabited. This is not a critique of language. I could have recorded every idea that was said or implied. It is a critique of "normal conversation," that pinched and narrow grid in which we take refuge every day. George desired it, "a decent conversation," as a barrier to our monstrous desires and all the deranged echoes their articulation might bring. What a gift, by contrast, to find Denis, whose appetite for this peculiar vertigo was generous and keen.
George returned and what was there to say? We laughed, which he took as a private joke, and now, as the evening ended, he sulked and I was at ease. Denis produced a fat cigar. We had had our way with the food, and now the sweet and bitter froth of a rich mousse was all that was left congealing on our plates. Amidst empty porcelain cups, laced with the tan filigree of dried espresso foam, and three snifters of prune, Denis puffed great sickly clouds of smoke into the air. The widow's "secretary" (Denis's word) had left a garbled message with Denis's friend at the Musee Picasso. This was the phone call at the café. The Allan Stein drawings might be available, though the attendant wasn't at all sure which drawings these were. The widow was nevertheless interested in finding out more, and if the American, Monsieur Widener, wanted these mysteries, and they belonged to her, of course she would entertain any reasonable offers. How swift and clear and pleasing everything seemed to be just then, as, in the chilly black night, Allan Stein wavered and grew, emerging from the folds of someone else's history.
♦10 ♦
Allan Stein's family left Paris every summer, usually to go to Florence, where they shared their vacation with Gertrude and Alice. The summer of 1913 they were going to Agay, a small fishing village on the French Mediterranean, and Sylvia Salinger was going with them. Sylvia and her friend Harriet Levy had taken an apartment by the Jardin du Luxembourg, just one block from the Steins. Allan saw them three or four times in a week, but always in the midst of exams and papers, boxing and tennis-—everything about Allan's life in Paris showed Sylvia that Allan was still a schoolboy. He did what he could, acting as Sylvia's tour guide, impressing her with his French and his riding, but next to her tea and shopping and concerts and shows, Allan's school-boy concerns were a constant reminder of the gap that kept them in separate worlds. In Agay there would be no gap. Sylvia and Allan became part of "the group," a self-absorbed crowd of young Americans, four women and Allan (with Mike and Sarah Stein to take care of them). That summer at the Hotel d'Agay was like an episode from the pages of some early Henry James novel. Sylvia recorded it in her letters:
"The trip down was delightful—we felt like regular Cook's tours—Mr. Stein kept the tickets, reserved the rooms at Marseilles, where we stayed ovemight—did all the tipping—just everything-that's what I call traveling! And he is so nice to everybody that they do anything for him. Even the conductor on the train helped with the luggage when we changed at St.-Raphael. We got into Marseilles too late to see anything there, so we are going to stop over on our way back, for a couple of days.
"The Mediterranean is blue—just like it tells about in all the books—we go in swimming every morning about ten, and spend the rest of the time up till lunch swimming and drying in the s
un. I have arms that are as red as coals, and I tried awful hard to be careful. The water is the kind that is so salty it just holds you up whether you want to stay up or not. You can float for hours, I am sure. The whole place is wonderfully like Carmel, only so much nicer. The food is wonderful—everything so well cooked—and all fresh— vegetables, fruit of all sorts—such peaches—fish—everything raised right here.
"The climate is perfect—just warm enough, and not too warm! The rocks are all kinds of red and beautiful, and most important of all, we eat on the verandah over-looking the sea. When we take walks in the woods we get the most delicious odors imaginable— all kinds of wonderful smelly flowers and pine trees and things. And yesterday I heard my first nightingale—the woods are full of them, and how they sing! I don't remember of ever having had such a feeling of perfect calm as you get here—there isn't one thing to complain of, not one. We have a little store just across the road, where we can buy all the regular country things, the maids are all pretty and sweet—everything is spick-span clean, and all the washing is done by the Italian women, in a river about a block from the hotel. I am trying to tell you all the details, but they seem to be slipping away."
In Agay, Allan bloomed. Photos show him content, sprawled on the lawn, surrounded by the four women of "the group." They depended on him for his French, his muscle, his constant joy and initiative, while Allan thrived on pampering them. He organized day hikes, bicycle tours, tennis tournaments on the one weed-infested court, taught them to swim, and tutored them on the peculiarities of the food and drink. There is little romance in Sylvia's letters home, despite the fact that Allan had fallen completely in love with her.
Sylvia was a good sport all summer, taking pride in a kind of tomboy fortitude Allan demanded and the other girls could not muster. When they toured she rode her bicycle with Allan and Mike, while the other girls took a carriage. On hikes, she walked the extra miles with Allan to fetch wine and food from the nearest village. She was physical and brash in a very American way, and she was becoming cosmopolitan:
"We have discovered something new about making our bathing comfortable. I have a big heavy bathrobe which I put over me, after taking off my wet suit, and sit in the sun. It feels so good, all the difference in the world; then we don't have to bring our wet suits up into our rooms at all. We just take them off down at the bathhouse and hang them on the line."
Notably, Allan never took time to write that summer. The letters he had habitually sent to Gertrude whenever his family took him away stopped in Agay. The earnest little boy who'd written long letters to his dearest Auntie Gertrude, bragging of his prowess as a reader and a boxer and a sportsman, had no time for that now. His life had begun to become his own. The formation of his pleasures, his satisfactions, became private and autonomous, unavailable to the adults who had treasured him.
His perfect summer went on and on, drifting toward its end.
In the early morning the boy stood in the garden again, shirtless, shoeless, his attention drifting from the warm blossoms to his small yellow pad of paper. He wore the torn khaki shorts. The wooden toilet seat was cool and smooth against my knees, and I rested my elbows on the dusty windowsill, staring out at him. Was it homework? He was making lists, that much I could see, but what he saw or listed was swallowed in the clear morning air. Maybe it was flowers, or feelings for some awful creative writing class. (No, that would be an American affliction.) No one else was awake at that hour when he emerged, and I wouldn't have been either, except the soft shifting stairs he crept down past my door squealed, so that I woke these mornings to pee when he woke.
Sleepy, wearing just boxers, I ambled toward the door. The boy turned in the sun and smiled at me. Deep pleasure, the sunshine on my body warm so my nipples lay soft and flat, armpits a little dank with sweat, knees weak. I smiled too and was quiet, shuffling barefoot along the short stone path to stand by him. Really I wanted nothing more than this just now. The intensity of my pleasure was so great it required this silence, this spaciousness of intent, to even be bearable at all. His pad had names of birds, and we listened for a while without speaking. We heard a call so that he wrote another name down. We watched the trees of the park shift in the slight breeze beyond the garden's brick wall. The shadow by the wall was damp and cool, so the turned earth there gave out an odor that twined about the garden path, vaporous, and lifted to our nostrils with the warmth of the morning.
"The birds," he whispered. "I list them." He lifted the pad and smiled, and I said nothing but touched the pad with my hand, and then his shoulder, where I left my hand cupping the round of his muscle in my palm.
It wasn't long, two days, before a letter from Allan's son dropped through the slot with the junk by the toilet. It was addressed to me. I mean to say it was not addressed to Herbert Widener, as it should have been, but to me, using my real name, so suddenly I knew that in a flash of sloth and carelessness I had signed my given name to the initial letter. Allan's son wrote to me to say:
"Thank you for your letter relating to your current research about Allan Stein.
"My father died when I was barely twelve. He had been ill, and our relationship had been—to use a euphemism—very limited and infinitely remote from the Steins' artistic and literary splendor I have only heard of in books.
"I have no document about my father beside some correspondence relating to his service in the U.S. Army during World War I. If you are interested, I'll try to find it and mail a copy to you.
"I regret admitting there is absolutely nothing else I can contribute to your investigations.
"I believe, however, my half-brother Daniel may have some pertinent items or recollections.
"Sorry to be of no help. I am sure I have everything to learn from your publication.
"Best wishes for the completion of your work."
The letter was bleak and discouraging. It read like a bloodstain showing the last known location of the missing body. Had Allan disappeared so completely? The sad trajectory of his life from a charmed boyhood into grim dissolution—an adulthood his family despised and turned their eyes from—became disturbingly complete. If his own son could tell me nothing, what trace could there be? I wrote a second letter, asking again for anything, and signed my given name, a little nervously.
I have said I tend to become what others think I am, I gravitate toward their vision of me, and this happened again in the stalled languor of the days after dining with Denis and George. Denis's questions about my "love" for Allan Stein had resonated, growing louder and louder, like a great struck bell that sets the rest of the carillon to ringing in its particular tone. His interrogation gave shape to a set of desires that had been, until then, somewhat haphazard. I don't mean that love or erotics had never been at issue with Allan. I mean that when Denis asked was Allan erotic to me, the neatness of the question resolved every aspect of my interest into this thrilling and singular tone. It set an eroticism (nascent in every aspect of my pursuit of Allan) humming. This wasn't new per se, obviously Allan had aroused me, but now it became powerful.
Equally, the name Herbert was beginning to sink in, like a garment I'd worn so long it had shaped me. "Herbert" was a mask that trapped me at the same time as it made me visible, so that I felt a little like the bubble boy (my first boyhood crush), who could only interact with others from behind the complete shield of his enclosure. "Herbert" was the shield that let me get near the boy, where I wanted to be. Every flasher needs a trench coat, and mine was "Herbert." When I was fourteen, I would sometimes get out of bed at night, very late, and sneak through the apartment tugging on my dick, arriving at the open door to Louise's bedroom, where I trembled in the doorway, naked and pulling on my dick, banging the carpet softly with my foot, wondering what would be enough to wake her. I was a kept bird in a cage of hallways and bedrooms, my heart racing like a sparrow. I'd keep pulling and pounding, a little harder with each beat until the instant when the nightstand light came on and bathed me for a single pulse, and I
ran, naked and almost coming, to my bed to hide. I flourished in the moment of her regard. And I think it is the same for Allan, as it is for me, or for Stéphane. It is the fate equally of the boy, the character, and the dead to blossom in the instant of our apprehension, in the moment of being seen, and in the next instant to disappear. Pinned to this flickering edge where there is the possibility neither of merging nor of giving up, we are all unreachable. Allan, dead, begs to be watched. He stands just out of reach, frozen at the entrance to the bedroom, unwilling to run until we wake and see him. The house is not his. Art or death trapped him here in a foreign architecture that has fashioned him one position: poised. He can neither disappear nor ever step forward to join us.
♦11 ♦
Miriam and I went shopping in the district east of here, on a morning when the sun was still pleasant, ruling brightly in a violent sky of wild gusts and great towering white clouds. lt seemed unlikely that now, more than a week into my masquerade, any of them could believe I was a scholar or cura- tor at all. No one cared that I made no progress with the Steins, nor that my methods were so lame and haphazard. Not that it was any of their business, but we had taken an interest in each other's busi- ness from the first. I suppose Denis let them believe it was his doing; he was a very protective and giving helper.
Miriam brought canvas carrying bags, hung from the handle-bars of our bikes, and I was happy to find she lounged on her bicycle, rather than racing like Stéphane. She had a marvelous dex- terity and performed a near decathlon of unrelated tasks as we rode east along the rue Brillat-Savarin, toward “Chinatown.” She might have been sitting in the living room rather than traffic, given the ease with which she changed batteries in her small camera, snapped a shot of me, then rolled a cigarette and smoked it, all the while pedaling and keeping up her end of the conversation.
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