"Or give them away. I was very small and the boxes were heavy. The dog cart never left Colmars. I stopped by the river on one trip to sit on my box and rest and I fell asleep there in the sun. Serge and Armand didn't notice I was gone until they stopped for lunch."
"You were how old?"
"Fourteen. Serge was much stronger than I. I called him the squirrel, because he was very slim and wiry, and you could see his heart racing and racing for many minutes when we'd get out of the river and lie on the rocks to dry. We were so brown from the sun. The altitude is very high, and everything we did was exhausting."
"I want to take Stéphane there," I announced, crushing an egg. "I want to take him to Agay."
"Agay?" Miriam asked. "Is it near Colmars?" Denis stared at me, smiling; he took the damaged egg and rescued what he could of it.
"I don't know. I think so."
"He'd like it," Per said. "It's a little early, but the valley leading to Colmars is stunning."
"Agay is on the coast."
"It's only a few hours," Per guessed. "The train goes to Nice, and from there it's very near."
"I want to go Friday." My resolve startled me, but it was a perfectly plain suggestion, like taking the boy to soccer, and they treated it this way.
"Not Friday," Denis objected. "George has arranged Friday dinner with the widow, Herbert. It will be very posh and it is already arranged. You cannot disappoint her."
"Saturday. We'll go in the morning."
"He'll miss school."
"Only a few days," Per said. "It's very generous of you to ask, Herbert, I think he would love it." Miriam left the table and went downstairs, and when she came back up she said yes the boy would like it very much, and yes she thought it would be fine, and I took it all as a kind of blanket permission. I was taking the boy.
Per retrieved a brown cylinder from the freezer, some kind of bottle that was icy and looked like it would be effective as a pipe bomb. On a white label in red, obscured by frost: OUDE JENEVER. Four shot glasses came from the freezer with it and Per filled each of them to the lip.
"Prost," Miriam said, rolling the r and lifting her glass to me.
"Prost."
It got late. The others went to bed drunk. Alone in the darkened alcove, I phoned Herbert. He had the cell phone in Jimmy's garden, where he'd fallen asleep.
"What time is it?" he asked.
"God, two in the morning, three?"
"But it's still light out."
"I meant here."
"The sun is just gorgeous. You know those huge hills behind Jimmy's? They're absolutely golden right now."
"Mmm."
"You're not coming home, are you."
"Herbert."
"You're fucking that boy every morning, noon, and night."
"Don't be ridiculous."
"I don't care. Better that you do it in France than here."
"Herbert, I'm coming back. I'll just be a few days late."
"Monday at the museum should be interesting. Did Hank call you?"
"Why would Hank call?"
"I don't know. He left a message at work; he said he'd try calling me in Paris, which is fine since apparently I'm never leaving Paris."
"I'm leaving the Dupaignes' Saturday. You'll be gone on time, officially. I'll fly back home next Wednesday."
"It doesn't matter. How's your dear friend the widow?"
"Of course it matters. I'm trying to be decent about all this."
"Thank you very much."
"I'm seeing the widow Friday; with any luck she'll have the drawings."
"Where are you meeting her?"
"I don't know, someone's house."
"Is it her house? Find out what else she's got."
"I don't think it's her house."
"She must have a million little treasures. Don't say anything, just smile a lot and laugh at her bon mots."
"I'll be charming."
"Uh-huh. What is that boy's name, anyway?"
"Stéphane . Stéphane Dupaigne."
"Mmm."
"I'm not doing anything with him. It's all fantasy, you know how I am."
"Not really."
"I'm leaving in a few days, why would I want to get involved at all?"
"Mmm."
"There's no point in it. He'll be five thousand miles away."
"Mmm-hmm."
"I've got to get out of here, Herbert. I can't wait to get home. Save Wednesday for me. We'll go somewhere."
Things fell apart. It was Friday. My resolve either collapsed or it accelerated to the point where events overtook me. At a time when I should have been supremely relaxed, on the verge of leaving with the boy, the nearness of it made me panicked and impatient. I strained to look bored. We ate caviar d'aubergine at his favorite snack stand and I said to him, Why don't we go to the park? In the pinched margin of this last day my mind had got stuck on the Elysian court, with its glittering promise of sweat and spilled blood.
The rain kept all the players away, except for one small boy with his multicolored shoes. He dashed around the puddles and made inexpert layups as the late-afternoon sun broke through and the court steamed where it shone. I joined this little boy, which looked predatory and awkward, but the inequity of it forced Stéphane onto the court. Clearly he and I were a more proper match. The kid gladly yielded his ball to the tall boy with the catlike shoes and his American friend, and he was content watching. We had scored only a few baskets when I took Stéphane by the waist and dumped him into a large puddle. It was almost dusk now, and the sun illuminated the trees, casting long shadows across us. The boy was soaked, and mud stained his prized T-shirt and pants. He was livid. He swore in both languages and slammed the ball to the ground before storming away. I could barely keep up with him and was lucky to board the same train in the metro station. At the Parc Montsouris, where night had fallen, he kept his silence and his pace. He wouldn't look at me. At home, he slammed the front door shut and went straight to his room and the shower.
I could barely keep myself still. I listened to the water run for two or three minutes and then took off my clothes and went upstairs in the dark. Steam billowed from the white tile bathroom, and I reached in and shut the light off. The boy swore again. "Who is it?" he said, in English because he knew who it was. The steam tingled all over my bare skin. I felt my way past the sink, parted the plastic curtain, and stepped into the shower beside him. Water poured over us. He said nothing, and I ran my hand down the center of his slim chest to his navel and then to the wet tuft of hair below that. The boy stood still. I paused, then he pushed my hand down farther until I found his cock, like a slug under a rain spout, and I squeezed it in my hand so it fattened and moved against me. Stéphane had his hands on my shoulders now. Water splashed off his back and arms. I worked my fist over the shaft of his cock, which had become quite large, stroking it as he pushed me against the tiles. There was a certain mindless symmetry to the beautiful gap of his open mouth and the great fleshy head of his cock that kept emerging from my fist. I stumbled backwards and he didn't catch me but pushed me down farther so I was flat on my back in the tub. I held on to his erection, pulling it down as the boy stood straddling me. Water haloed around him, spraying the curtain and the tile wall, running to where I lay in his shadow. He wasn't smiling. The boy stuck his foot on my crotch and rubbed it up and down my cock and then he knelt, his knees in my armpits, and started fucking me in the mouth. He was still angry, and he fucked me that way. The boy grabbed my head and pushed it back and forth onto him, driving his body into me as hard as he could. He grunted and squealed like a pig or a dog rooting out bones and became more furious until he came in my mouth and collapsed in the water beside me.
It wasn't the kind of sex I had imagined. If he'd been a weapon he might have killed me. Obviously there was nothing to say. I don't think his impulse was violent, but rather the territory of our exchange was lawless and immoderate, unspeakable. Our bodies were dumb, irreversible. We lay there for a long ti
me, folded over on each other, until I felt his erection stir again and move against my leg, and then he got out of the shower and went to his room. I don't know what connects anyone to anyone. My body felt like an accident, a wrong turn.
I lay in the dark for a while; then I turned the shower off. Music drifted from below, Per's jazz, muted by the walls. I dried myself, pulling on my dick a lot, which was still very hard. What was tonight? Denis's dinner? He might be here already. Anything could have happened while we showered. I dropped the towel and went to the boy's door and walked through the beads. Streetlights from outside showed his scattered clothes, his guitar and comic books, and then the boy himself, still wet, lying on the bed with his hands behind his head, watching me. His cock lay up against his belly and sometimes lifted from it. It breathed like some sea creature that draws great streams of ocean water through itself, heaving a sigh and dropping back down again. His torso was pale and luminous, marked by the slim divot of his navel and the twin blisters of his soft nipples. I got on the bed and knelt over him, then lowered myself down like a man doing push-ups. I slid back and forth over him. My cock felt ticklish, driving through his soft thatch of hair, and my chest and belly grazed his. Stéphane wrapped his hand around our paired erections and I spit there. While he played with this twin-headed dick, rolling it around in both hands and inspecting it, I ran my fingers over his chest, pinching his nipples and then soothing them with my thumbs. I traced his collarbone, cupped his shoulders in my palms, ran my fingers over his wet lips, and then dipped them in his mouth and traced spit along his throat. I pushed the head of my dick against each nipple, blessing them, and then the hollow in the middle of his chest, which fit nicely. I inched up and touched the head to his lips and then his eyes, so the shaft rolled over his face, pressing down first on one cheek, then the other, and he let his mouth open and licked me. He put his lips in a round, tentative O and took the head of my cock in so his teeth tickled along its underside. I pulled back and sat on his hips, and simply stared for a while at his beautiful puzzled face. Leaning down, I kissed him on the chin and left his room to dress.
♦14 ♦
Denis wore a iet-black iacket of some thin elegant fabric, like rayon, only it had none of the brassy sheen of rayon. lt drifted and lay limp on his racklike frame so that one might have taken photos of him lounging in the chrome chair to advertise almost anything: cigarettes, automobiles, real estate, liquor, the new Europe, anything at all. His skin was luscious and smooth, like hard milk chocolate, and his mood was gay.
"The widow, Herbert," he exclaimed, grinning when I came in. "The widow at last." Per was naked, retrieving a bowl of ice from the freezer, and he rushed past me to the stairs with just a quick smile.
"It’s very exciting, Denis." I'd chosen a soft white shirt and khaki pants, very plain and undistinguished but redeemed, I thought, by the peculiar gray-check jacket I wore with them.
"We are due at eight, which is the time now, Herbert." Denis was in no hurry. He slouched farther into the chair and sipped the small glass of scotch Serge had poured him. I didn't want a drink. My body was all undone, like a deboned hen under the découpeur's knives. So much had been undone. I sat on the edge of the couch, perched with my weight settled on the twin bones of my butt. I smiled weakly at Denis, and he smiled back. ‘You are looking very smart."
"Thank you, Denis."
"Dinner is at the apartment of Harry Pym-Gardner, a very rich Englishman who collects nice things."
"Will there be many people?"
"George, of course, and Sir Harry. One or two others. Do not fear, Herbert, you and I will sit together, with the widow between us."
We caught a cab because there was no point trying to park on the Quai Bourbon where Sir Harry lived. The Ile St. Louis was an impossible place, its narrow streets clogged with tourists and taxis and the occasional car circling eternally, scouting for a place to park. There were none. The cars simply had to be abandoned, driven into the river, left in the street, given up to thieves, or taken to another district and parked there. Our cabby nosed across the crowded Pont Sully and traversed the island, depositing us at Sir Harry's door.
Denis performed a series of codes which got us through a battered wooden door into a great stone courtyard. "Harry will like you, Herbert. He's always hungry for new people."
"That's sweet of him."
"George is constantly supplying them, like a pusher of drugs." Denis pressed a button at the elevator's gate. "He finds young men at the clubs, I mean well-bred young men, and brings them to Harry's for dinner."
A butler arrived in a glass elevator as tight as a phone booth, shut us in, and launched it, then walked the stairs, spiraling around the box, keeping pace so that he seemed to be circling like some grim creature of the desert until he passed the elevator door a fifth time, as we stopped, and let us out.
Denis pointed and there was our host, some distance away, surrounded by his "nice things"—paintings, statuettes, antiquities, and a drinks cart. Sir Harry might have been a stage actor, with features as huge and exaggerated as his frame, so that one could read the slyness of his grin, a twitch of the mouth, even across the great distance of his living room. He was a little drunk and sat waiting for us, patting a small shampooed lapdog.
"Scotch? Pimm's?" Harry offered. "Bombay? Denis tells me you like gin." We had still not made it halfway to him. "You're looking fit, Denis, spending all your time in that gymnasium, aren't you? You must be strong as a colossus by now, with all that iron you keep pumping and pumping."
"I am weak with pleasure, Harry. It makes me dizzy just to walk so far."
"You didn't walk here, did you? It's a madhouse, you could've been killed." The dog started yapping when we arrived, and Harry swatted it on the head and it stopped.
"Harry Pym-Gardner. You can call me Harry."
"Herbert Widener." The name had gone a little sour in my mouth, so that I offered it in a mumble. I used it less and less now. At the park or in libraries, anywhere that Herbert's business didn't have to be mentioned, I simply went nameless rather than producing this token I'd prized so greedily. It was like a Christmas toy that falls apart before New Year's. I had used it cavalierly and for everything, banging it around on the airplane and the bus, in conversation with strangers, cabdrivers, clerks, and with every acquaintance I'd made, so that it finally just broke and became depressing.
"Herbert," Harry repeated, still holding my hand. "George has told me so much. Where is that awful man? He treats me like dirt."
"He treats everyone like dirt," Denis assured him. "That is why we're so fond of George."
Harry walked us around the room, giving the inventory of his nice things, while the dog yapped at our ankles. Small torsos and heads on metal rods were antiquities and I enjoyed them, but didn't appreciate their rarity as Herbert would have. The paintings were famous. I knew the names but could not have distinguished one from another. They were minor works by great painters, except for a broad swath of shriveled birds nailed to the wall in a sort of grid, each one sporting a tiny knit muff or sweater. "It's a Mensonger," Harry told us. "Pepper Mensonger. George had it installed today." He scooped up the dog. "They look like dried vomit to me, but George says she's very important." The view out was exquisite, looking out over the sluggish river and rooftops to the dirty walls of the Hotel de Ville, brilliantly carved from the night by the klieg lights of passing tour boats.
The dog sprang from Harry's lap as the elevator arrived again, replete with George, the widow, looking awfully young and spry, plus a very old man. "Ariel," Harry scolded, "No bite, no bite," even while the dog nipped at the new guests and the widow kicked him away without breaking stride. Who was the old man? "You're late, George. Obviously you know Denis and Herbert." The trio labored their way across the great expanse. Harry stared at the implacable woman on George's arm as if she were a mere appendage of this unfavored friend. "And who is this you've brought me?"
"Mrs. Stein." I stepped in. "It is my great
pleasure to meet you at last. George has said so much—"
"Harry Pym-Gardner," George interrupted, "I'd like you to meet Pepper Mensonger. Pepper, this is Harry. I'm sure he won't mind in the least if you call him Harry."
"Charmed," our host whispered. Pepper cast her glance proudly, possessively, over the freshly nailed birds.
The silent old man was Le Géranium, scholar of the École Alsacienne, and he looked older than I had ever imagined, more frail and distracted, and with both feet already out of this world. He was well over eighty. "He was hell-bent on meeting you, Herb," George said. "Six is fine for dinner, right, Harry?"
"George, I would give you anything. He speaks English, doesn't he? L'anglais c'est la langue de la maison, non?
"Yes, of course."
Was he named for a flower? I caught George's elbow on the way to the dining room and scolded him. "I've stayed an extra week to meet the widow, George. Where is she?"
"The widow?" Harry asked. He had Ariel in his arms now and was kissing the dog on its exposed teeth. "Matchmaking again, George?"
"The Stein widow, Harry. It's business. She wants to meet us later at Boy."
"After dinner?"
"After dinner." George squeezed out a little turd of a smile. "Boy's a fabulous club, Herb, you'll love it. She has some Picassos Herbert wants."
"Why didn't you tell me this, George? You know I would just die to have some of her Picassos. Or were they all snapped up ages ago, I mean before you tried to pick me up at that horrible bar?"
"She's not selling, Harry. Herb's just having a little look-see. And I did not try to pick you up."
"I recall Picasso," Le Géranium whispered. "When my father and I called to visit in Montrouge." No one seemed to hear him.
Harry got us all seated except Pepper, who was unhappy about being placed next to me and hovered, going on about the widow. "Everyone wants her Picassos, but in fact she has none." In the attentive silence this bold claim triggered, Pepper gestured to George to give up his seat and she took it. She brushed some imaginary crumbs from the chair and settled beside Denis. "She sold them all, years ago."
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