Allan Stein

by Matthew Stadler

  "Né en 1895?"

  "Mmm-hmm."

  "His face is very ugly as a man."

  Talk is screwy, like machine welds that tack a sheet of metal to a frame. Per and Serge drank kir in the kitchen, knee-to-knee on stools beside the stove. Serge peeled beets and smoked. Steam from the boiling kettle of artichokes threw up a scrim between us. Thelonious Monk kept me from hearing anything but their murmured laughter. The boy scrawled a great ugly brute on a horse in the box above 1914. I peered over his shoulder, letting my arm rest on his back, and admired the poor draftsmanship. "What dates have you marked?"

  "The birthday, then Paris 1903, the painting of Picasso 1906 when he is a boy, the École Alsacienne beginning 1907, and then the World War in 1914, when he is still eighteen years old."

  "What about his teenage years before the war?"

  The boy frowned at me. "He was in school, you have said, which is very boring."

  "You might include their trips to America and Italy." Stéphane glared at my suggestion. "In 1906 and 1910 he and his parents went to San Francisco. For six months after the great earthquake, and for almost a year in 1910." The boy wiped his nose again but made no note of what I'd said. "And they went to Italy every summer between these trips."

  He raised his eyebrow at my trivia. "This is not important for a time line. I do not include vacations."

  The artichokes, by the way, were delicious, plump and slightly braised on the outside, soft as butter in the middle, where Serge had stuffed them with walnuts and goose liver; the beets were exceptional, boiled and then caramelized (plus, also, the usual excellent wines), so that I got lost in the details again, especially the metal tang of the second wine, like running my tongue over a sheet of steel, and the sweet dissolution of burnt sugar in my mouth with the flesh of the ruddy beet, a great red doll's head, forked and maneuvered toward my teeth. The boy stared at me over the lip of his watered-down wine with no intent. I glared back, fixing my gaze on his collarbone, where the stretched neck of his oversized T-shirt left a glimpse of skin visible. It sometimes bored me, this constant awareness of the boy, his body, and the possibility of sex with him (a monotony equaled only by Stéphane's perpetual unawareness, his complete disregard for the scenarios tumbling in my head), but there we stared, I through him and he through me, while the conversation burbled on around us.

  "Apparently, there are no birds."

  "Now or ever?"

  "Ever, at least that Lévi-Strauss noticed. I mean, that's not really forever, but there is no record of birds."

  "Of course not, he had no interest in them."

  "Listen."

  We paused and watched Per listen—the hum of the refrigerator, sibilant traffic and rain, Miriam's indigestion, the cold dropping down from the clouds (so cold, frost had begun to frame the win-dowpanes). The sky streamed high above us, black or invisible, breaking up into daylight somewhere above the ocean, between here and Herbert and Jimmy and Dogan on the far edge of the next continent, where it was still morning, Dogan struggling from sleep, Herbert swimming laps in the pool. I listened, hearing them, and no one spoke at the table until the boy asked if we were done and could he leave.

  The sky was so interesting then, in the days before Stéphane and I left Paris. It broadcast conflicting reports—one day a languid summer haze dispersed by a wall of freezing air, and the next angry winter storm clouds dissolving into a muggy, cloying afternoon. The city and its parks became leafy, billowing green even while morning frost clung to the windows. A lazy stroll in the warm sun of the Jardin turned bleak and forbidding upon crossing into the narrow treeless streets around it.

  Sandblasting spread from the Parc Montsouris to the graffitied walls of the Cité Universitaire, where Stéphane led me through a labyrinth of fences and gates to an empty concrete basketball court perched beside a glade of chestnuts. I sat on a stone bench admiring the view while the boy trotted up and down the court, practicing his fast breaks. I did my part, watching. The boy seemed to glisten and swell, held in my sights. His skin was wet with sweat and his cheeks blushed red. Below the court and the trees a half-dozen women raced around an oval track in the cold sun, passing batons and clearing hurdles. The wind or air or distance made them inaudible, so the race became melancholy, like scarred footage of boats unloading soldiers from the Great War. Around and around and around as the sun disappeared into thick clouds and then trees and then the horizon.

  It began to rain again. Stéphane continued, and we both became soaked. The women left when the rain broke, slowing down to a jog, hands on their wide hips as they gathered and stretched by the track before leaving. They were gone, everyone was gone, and finally the boy stopped, having reached a hundred.

  "You don't need to stretch?" I had no idea. Stéphane ignored my sentence and led us through the gates. "I could massage you." Again, nothing. Car traffic was grim and slow, lurching along the wet boulevard, and we simply walked through it to the park. It was night. At the mouth of the metro, commuters filled the sidewalk.

  The boy spoke. "Do you know Nostalgie, the film of Tarkovsky?" He stopped at the bright lit news kiosk to buy a comic book that I paid for.

  "Is he French? I saw a movie called Passion, but that was in Japanese."

  "You will see it with me, if you want." We joined the rope of commuters trailing into the park.

  "Tonight?"

  "This week after my school. Tonight I sleep."

  "Right after dinner?"

  "There is not dinner. No one is home."

  In the dark house Stéphane hurdled upstairs to the shower. I laid my wet clothes on a rack in my room and stretched out in bed beside the drainpipe. The soapy water flowed on and on and on, warm and cascading over him, and I listened until it stopped; then I put my boxers on and lay back down.

  I supposed he would sleep but he knocked on my door and I said come in. There he was, bundled in fresh cotton, a big white T-shirt, corduroy pants, and thick socks, wet hair brushed and tied back, plus a guitar in his big clean hands.

  "I have learned the Pink Floyd."

  "Sit here."

  "It is very difficult."

  "I'll listen." I lay back, drowsy, mostly naked, as he arranged himself on the bed by my feet. The curve of his back as he bent over the instrument, thinly clad in the white cotton shirt, was exact, religious, nearly Pythagorean.

  "I play."

  Stéphane played the Pink Floyd song. When he made a mistake he would stop and begin again. I moved my leg so it pressed against his hip. The pressure there and the movement of muscles in his hip made a sweet sensation in me. My heart began to race, and I breathed more deeply, like a dreaming sleeper. We were together, alone. The room's warm air touched me along my nipples, my bare stomach and thighs. It seemed to breathe under the elastic hem of my boxers, shifting the hem against my skin. My cock grew so that it brushed the loose cotton, turning itself around as it pulsed, and the head pushed against the elastic. Stéphane watched me. He'd begun repeating one phrase of the song over and over.

  He twisted toward me, still playing, and stared at my belly, the hollow under my arm, my chest and sternum, then down the line of hair to my navel and past it. His look slipped along the frayed hem of my shorts into the shifting folds of cotton, and I pressed my leg harder against his hip. Stéphane kept plucking at the strings. The touch of his look brought the blood through my back and legs, pulsing in my balls, which I felt fatten and become sweet. The hem of my shorts was pushed from my skin and my erection swelled so the sewn cotton slipped down off the head and along an inch of the shaft before stopping. Stéphane watched, hitting a few notes. It was slow like this, and detailed, marked by the diminishing music, so that these few minutes had the measured exactness and clarity of a paragraph. I closed my eyes, and the world became nothing but the force of the boy's gaze. He was hitting just one string now.

  The air on the swollen head of my cock made it feel sweet, and I worked the pulse of it so the hem slipped farther like a dry tongue runn
ing slowly down my erection. The boy's hand struck a constant note and the weight of his body fell on his elbow by my side. Was that the air or his breath across my belly? The air, or a hand? It touched me, roughly, and the light felt substantial, raking across the shaft so strong a broad hollow sensation gathered suddenly in my balls, and then it burst through me and cum leapt out into the air. It was a miracle, like a wooden saint that sheds tears on Easter. It fell, warm and liquid on my belly, and I smiled and gasped once for breath. Cum pulsed again, over the glans, and dribbled in runs down the shaft. I could feel the weight of the boy's body pressing down on the bed beside me. His face was near my belly and he leaned on one elbow. I felt his breath, which was irregular, like mine. He'd stopped playing.

  Stéphane put his hand on my erection and let it rest there, brushing a few fingers through the cum. I didn't move or speak, but enjoyed the warmth of his hand. We lay there like this until my cock had become small and Stéphane took his hand away. He rose from the bed and I opened my eyes.

  "Come to my room again," I said, "and I'll do anything you want." Stéphane did not answer but just walked away and left me.

  The next morning I followed him. I hadn't planned on doing it, but at seven-thirty the sound of the boy's leaving rattled me awake and I sprang from bed, dunked my head in a sink of cold water, and got out the door, so that suddenly I found I was tailing him. The pleasure of it surprised me. This gap became charged, like the slim space between magnets, as when I'd tailed Louise. Stéphane set out while I was still maneuvering my bike from its place in the hallway. The morning was misty and cold. Miriam watched me leave but said nothing. She stood in the casement window above the garden, tired and unattractive, and watched me wrestle with the gate. A lurching green Fiat got in my way, a boxy little car whose driver tried pulling around stalled traffic and forced me to the wall while he passed. It put some distance between me and the boy. I mounted the pedals again and got the bike up to speed. The boy was purposeful. He came into sight, crouched low over his bike, aiming it through traffic. Where gaps opened, he traversed them. At the stoplights he kept ready, bent over like a stalking cat, and then he sprang when the light turned green. He was even less interesting to track than Louise, whose aimlessness had at least been unpredictable. The boy cared only for speed and economy, and we arrived at the rue Saint-Jacques within a few minutes.

  I'd never known the streets were so crowded in the morning. At the corner of the rue Royer-Collard, Stéphane rolled through a crowd of boys and chained his bike to a battered metal rack. He swatted the hands of a few friends and stood with them in the cold. His self-involvement and the strung-out knots of walkers streaming between us kept him from seeing me. I stood with my bike, twenty or so yards away, watching. Why were these boys locked out? More arrived, girls too, but the gates remained closed. Stéphane had his spot by the bikes, and it appeared he would stay there awhile.

  From a café on the corner I could watch. A table came free by the window and I left my bike outside and went in the café and sat. I had sweated from the ride and felt clammy. There was a rack of newspapers and I took one, a French paper I didn't read. Even from this distance the boy was elegant and remarkable. He occupied a center around which his friends spun like minor satellites. His posture alone held them, that pliant slouch I'd seen in the garden, communicating his ease, his native superiority, even through two shirts, a sweater, and a thick parka. His friends puffed nervously on cigarettes, jostling around him, but he didn't smoke. I thought they all must want to suck his cock, but I'm sure that wasn't true. It seemed inconceivable that anyone could stand near him, near to the battered pucker of his fly, and not be overwhelmed by the gravity, the transcendence, of this need. Every one of them stood swallowing the wet morning air in great greedy mouthfuls, hungry for the life of it, and to me the boy's cock was exactly the same. How could they not reach for it?

  A woman at the next table asked me a question. She gestured to the newspaper and I gave it to her. Cars moved past, blurred in a uniform light that seemed to issue from nowhere. Colors bled in the mist, which had become brighter. The school's concierge, a tall young man with a great ring of keys, shuffled from a small booth and undid the lock, and the sidewalk emptied of kids. They drained through the gate and into school. Within minutes they were gone and the gate was closed.

  The trees of the Luxembourg Garden billowed in the cold air only fifty yards away, and I could see the mist breaking up beyond them. The sun would be out soon and the day would be warm again. The café was pleasant, so I caught the waiter's attention and asked for more bread and some Camembert to spread on it. The hours passed. My attentions drifted, and then I left, circuiting the boulevards on Serge's bike until it was afternoon and I could return to the same table at the same café and watch the school let out again. The interval had been flat and featureless. Birds shook from the fences and made a blur across the sky, that part of the sky I could see. A man at a table near me also watched the school. He'd been nursing a coffee—letting it go cold, rather— and the pages of the magazine he'd propped on the table went unturned while he stared across the street. I thought he might be some kind of predator, lurking near the lycée to victimize kids and lure them into films. My school back home was in a constant uproar about this kind of threat and had organized a block watch of parents and staff to harass every unknown man who lingered near the school. Any man who paused, or was not in some kind of uniform, would at once be assaulted by a concerned and furious den mother shooing him away, which is why it was so handy to actually be a teacher there.

  Dismissal time came, and the children flooded out the gate and filled the street. Traffic was closed where they loitered, and this gave room for the boys to swagger and pose. A lot of them ran around screaming, and some got their knapsacks tugged until they fell to their knees. Stéphane was nowhere to be seen. The man near me waved through the glass, then went outside and kissed a boy, a boy Stéphane's age, and they walked away together holding hands. The children dispersed until the street was nearly empty and then at last, as if in a coda to this brief symphony, Stéphane reappeared. He had been sitting in the booth with the concierge and they emerged now, still arguing over the plastic-sleeved cards they had exchanged. He looked up and grinned. He saw me.

  What was I doing here? The boy shook hands briskly with his uniformed pal, then trotted across the street to the café smiling, though not so broadly as to look foolish. We also shook hands and he dropped into the chair opposite, knapsack squashed between the chair back and his parka.

  "You will come to my basketball?" he asked, drumming the tabletop.

  "How strange to see you here."

  "It is my school, right there." He pointed out the window. "I thought you had come for my basketball."

  "No, I'm just here. Your school team is playing?"

  "The school has no teams. My basketball club is playing, very soon. We are at the École Normale, in their gymnasium." The boy pushed his parka sleeve up over the ample hump of a lovely watch (my watch) and gazed at the scratched glass. "It is one-half hour, and then we play against the club team of Boulevard Kellermann."

  "I'm afraid—one-half hour—I think I cannot. There are meetings this afternoon." I gazed at his rabbit teeth and dissembled. "It's my last week, and the meetings are becoming so much more important now. Where is this École?"

  The boy frowned his disgust and snorted succinctly. He reached into his parka for a pen. "It is very near. If your meetings do not prevent you." He drew a map and left it with me.

  I let him go, feeling foolish because I hadn't simply said Yes, I've come for your sports match. My surveillance was supposed to be clandestine. When he saw me, I was caught and I quite naturally tried to hide my mission. He trotted—sauntered, I guess—to the café door and out onto the crowded sidewalk. I was left alone with just my crumbs and cold coffee. As I watched Stéphane disappear down the rue Saint Jacques a terrible sadness welled up, and this abruptly gave way to bright contentment when I
realized that now that he was gone it was possible to follow him again. Anyone looking at me would've thought I had terrible gas, so swift was this transformation from puzzled distress to surprised relief. I took the napkin with its scribbled directions and went to the toilet. No point tagging along too closely. I already knew his destination.

  The boy's map was economical, featuring only three streets and a great smudged star to mark the École. I got there easily, but the building was neither star-shaped nor obvious in its design. A woman in the concierge booth received my repeated question "Le gymnase?" with a hard, flat stare and her own repeated "La salle du gym?" "Le basket" I finally tried, mimicking the postures of basketball. She simply pointed. Nothing looked like a gym, no boxy freestanding structures, no great aluminum-sided wing sporting plastic windows around its top, no arched I-beams or grossly enlarged Quonset huts. The École was just a great sprawling stone building with windows and doors. I went in one, sniffing for sweat or the diesel smell of gym towels. Talk and some music drifted in the halls, but nowhere the echoing ping-ping-ping of the ball against the hardwood floor.

  I wandered downward; these places are so often subterranean. A helpful girl pointed me along a musty hallway of iron plumbing and stored boxes. I found the lockers and then a room of toilets and showers. The boys of the Boulevard Kellermann walked by with their kits, dangerously close. I stepped into a dressing room and then a toilet stall and closed the door. It was a tiny stall with just the toilet and a very few inches of air between the door and the ceiling, and this gap looked out on benches and lockers. I squatted on the seat.

  I'm not the sort of person who generally does this, so it was difficult to actually look out at anything. The room was silent—or, rather, it hummed with all the hidden machinery sealed inside the walls. Then voices, a voice, his voice, emerged from the dull rumble of the building's hallway and the door opened and slammed repeatedly. They were here, my boy's club team, shouting and swatting, unzipping kits and coats, parkas and pants (excepting those with steel buttons to be pried loose). I quivered on my perch, gleaning clues from the air—the rustle of a dropped pant, belt buckles clanging to the tiles, the snap of elastic pulled off or on, fabric shimmying against fabric, or the click of a joint bending to let a tight sleeve slip off. Boys babbled in French and there were song lyrics and accusations, and then one voice came to the fore, a strutting shout, boastful, answered by some needling question that was murmured into submission. A long silence. A prolonged silence broken finally by a whoop, scuffling and laughter, ripping cloth, and bodies banging against the empty metal lockers. Blind, crouching, overwhelmed, I cobbled together a million scenarios. The stall door shook as a boy caromed off it, and then everything settled. I could smell them through the gap, sweaty and breathing, tangled on the floor, my head full of X-ray visions.