White People

by Allan Gurganus

  AS WE LEFT the office building, the Dodge owner explained he’d been delivering insurance papers that needed signing—flood coverage on his mother’s country property. “You can never be too safe. That’s Mother’s motto.” I asked if they lived in town; I was only trying to get him talking, relaxed. If I knew his family, I might have to change my plans.

  “Mom died,” he said, looking down. “A year come March. She left me everything. Sure burned my sisters up, I can tell you. But they’re both in Florida. Where were they when she was so sick? She appreciated it. She said she’d remember me. And Mom did, too.” Then he got quiet, maybe regretting how much he’d told.

  We walked two blocks. Some people spoke to me, they gave my companion a mild look as if thinking, What does Dave want with him?

  HE CHOSE the bar. It was called The Arms, but whatever word had been arched between the “The” and the “Arms”—six Old English golden letters—had been stolen; you could see where glue had held them to the bricks. He introduced himself by his first name: Barker. Palms flat on the bar, he ordered beers without asking. Then he turned to me, embarrassed. “Mind reader,” I assured him, smiling and—for a second—cupped my hand over the bristled back of his, but quick. He didn’t seem to notice or much mind.

  My chair faced the street. His aimed my way, toward the bar’s murky back. Bathrooms were marked KINGS and QUEENS. Some boy played a noisy video game that sounded like a jungle bird in electronic trouble.

  Barker’s head and shoulders were framed by a window. June baked each surface on the main street. Everything out there (passersby included) looked planned, shiny and kind of ceramic. I couldn’t see Barker’s face that clearly. Sun turned his ears a healthy wax red. Sun enjoyed his cheekbones, found highlights waiting in the wavy old-fashioned hair I decided he must oil. Barker himself wasn’t so beautiful—a knotty wiry kid—only his pale face was. It seemed an inheritance he hadn’t noticed yet.

  Barker sitting still was a Barker almost suave. He wasn’t spilling anything (our beer hadn’t been brought yet). The kid’s face looked, back-lit, negotiable as gems. Everything he said to me was heartfelt. Talking about his mom put him in a memory-lane kind of mood. “Yeah,” he said. “When I was a kid …” and he told me about a ditch that he and his sisters would wade in, building dams and making camps. Playing doctor. Then the city landfill chose the site. No more ditch. Watching it bulldozed, the kids had cried, holding onto one another.

  Our barman brought us a huge pitcher. I just sipped; Barker knocked four mugs back fast. Foam made half a white mustache over his sweet slack mouth; I didn’t mention it. He said he was twenty-nine but still felt about twelve, except for winters. He said after his mother’s death, he’d joined the Air Force but got booted out.

  “What for?”

  “Lack of dignity.” He downed a fifth mug.

  “You mean … ‘lack of discipline’?”

  He nodded. “What’d I say?”—I told him.

  “‘Dignity,’ ‘discipline,’” he shrugged to show they meant the same thing. The sadder he seemed the better I liked it, the nicer Barker looked.

  Women passing on the street (he couldn’t see them) wore sundresses. How pretty their pastel straps, the freckled shoulders; some walked beside their teenaged sons; they looked good too. I saw folks I knew. Nobody’d think to check for me in here.

  Only human, under the table, my knee touched Barker’s, lingered a second, shifted. He didn’t flinch. He hadn’t asked about my job or home life. I got the subject around to things erotic. With a guy as forthright as Barker, you didn’t need posthypnotic suggestion to manage it. He’d told me where he lived. I asked wasn’t that out by Adult Art Film and Book. “You go in there much?”

  He gave me a mock-innocent look, touched a fingertip to his sternum, mouthed Who, me? Then he scanned around to make sure nobody’d hear. “I guess it’s me that keeps old Adult Art open. Don’t tell, but I can’t help it, I just love that stuff.—You too?”

  I nodded.

  “What kind?”

  I appeared bashful, one knuckle rerouting sweat beads on my beer mug. “I like all types, I guess. You know, boy/girl, girl/girl, boy/boy, girl/dog, dog/dog.” Barker laughed, shaking his fine head side to side. “Dog/dog,” he repeated. “That’s a good one. Dog/dog!”

  He was not the most brilliantly intelligent person I’d ever met. I loved him for it.

  WE WENT in my car. I didn’t care to chance his driving. Halfway to Adult Art, sirens and red lights swarmed behind my station wagon. This is it, I thought. Then the white Mercedes (already mud-splattered, a fender dented, doing a hundred and ten in a thirty-five zone) screeched past. Both city patrol cars gave chase, having an excellent time.

  We parked around behind; there were twelve or fourteen vehicles jammed back of Adult Art’s single dumpster; seven phone-repair trucks had lined up like a fleet. Adult’s front asphalt lot, plainly visible from US 301 Business, provided room for forty cars but sat empty. This is a small town, Falls. Everybody sees everything, almost. So, when you do get away with something, you know it; it just means more. Some people will tell you Sin is old hat. Not for me. If, once it starts, it’s not going to be naughty, then it’s not worth wasting a whole afternoon to set up. Sin is bad. Sex is good. Sex is too good not to have a whole lot of bad in it. I say, Let’s keep it a little smutty, you know?

  Barker called the clerk by name. Barker charged two films—slightly discounted because they’d been used in the booths—those and about thirty bucks in magazines. No money changed hands; he had an account. The section marked LITERATURE milled with phone linemen wearing their elaborate suspension belts. One man, his pelvis ajangle with wrenches and hooks, held up a picture book, called to friends, “Catch her, guys. She has got to be your foxiest fox so far.” Under his heavy silver gear, I couldn’t but notice on this hearty husband and father, jammed up against workpants, the same old famous worldwide pet and problem poking.

  I DROVE BARKER to his place; he invited me in for a viewing. I’d hoped he would. “World premiere,” he smiled, eyes alive as they hadn’t been before. “First show on Lake Drive anyways.”

  The neighborhood, like Barker’s looks, had been the rage forty years ago. I figured he must rent rooms in this big mullioned place, but he owned it. The foyer clock showed I might not make it home in time for supper. Lately I’d overused the excuse of working late; even as Superintendent of Schools there’re limits on how much extra time you can devote to your job.

  I didn’t want to miff a terrific wife.

  I figured I’d have a good hour and a half; a lot can happen in an hour and a half. We were now safe inside a private place.

  The house had been furnished expensively but some years back. Mission stuff. The Oriental rugs were coated with dust or fur; thick hair hid half their patterns. By accident, I kicked a chewed rubber mouse. The cat toy jingled under a couch, scaring me.

  In Barker’s kitchen, a crockpot bubbled. Juice hissed out under a Pyrex lid that didn’t quite fit. The room smelled of decent beef stew. His counter was layered with fast-food takeout cartons. From among this litter, in a clay pot, one beautiful amaryllis lily—orange, its mouth wider than the throat of a trombone, startled me. It reminded you of something from science fiction, straining like one serious muscle toward daylight.

  In the dark adjacent room, Barker kept humming, knocking things over. I heard the clank of movie reels. “Didn’t expect company, Dave,” he called. “Just clear off a chair and make yourself at home. Momma was a cleaner-upper. Me … less. I don’t see the junk till I get somebody to … till somebody drops over, you know?”

  I grunted agreement, strolled into his pantry. Here were cans so old you could sell them for the labels. Here was a 1950s tin of vichyssoise I wouldn’t have eaten at gunpoint. I slipped along the hall, wandered upstairs. An archive of National Geographics rose in yellow columns to the ceiling. “Dave?” he was hollering. “Just settle in or whatever. It’ll only take a sec. See, they
cut the leaders off both our movies. I’ll just do a little splice.—I’m fast, though.”

  “Great.”

  ON THE FAR WALL of one large room (windows smothered by outside ivy) a calendar from 1959, compliments of a now-defunct savings and loan. Nearby, two Kotex cartons filled with excelsior and stuffed, I saw on closer inspection, with valuable brown and white Wedgwood place settings for forty maybe. He really should sell them—I was already mothering Barker. I’d tell him which local dealer would give top dollar.

  In one corner, a hooked rug showed a Scottie terrier chasing one red ball downhill. I stepped on it, three hundred moths sputtered up, I backed off, arms flailing before me. Leaning in the doorway, waiting to be called downstairs for movietime, still wearing my business clothes, I suddenly felt a bit uneasy, worried by a famous thought: What are you doing here, Dave?

  Well, Barker brought me home with him, is what. And, as far back as my memory made it, I’d only wanted just such guys to ask me over. Only they held my interest, my full sympathy.

  The kid with the terrible slouch but (for me) an excellent smile, the kid who kept pencils in a plastic see-through satchel that clamped into his looseleaf notebook. The boy whose Mom—even when the guy’d turned fourteen—made him use his second-grade Roy Rogers/Dale Evans lunchbox showing them astride their horses, Trigger and Buttermilk. He was the kid other kids didn’t bother mocking because—through twelve years of schooling side by side—they’d never noticed him.

  Of course I could tell, there were other boys, like me, studying the other boys. But they all looked toward the pink and blond Stephens and Andrews: big-jawed athletic office holders, guys with shoulders like baby couches, kids whose legs looked turned on lathes, solid newels—calves that summer sports stained mahogany brown, hair coiling over them, bleached by overly chlorinated pools and an admiring sun: yellow-white-gold. But while others’ eyes stayed locked on them, I was off admiring finer qualities of some clubfooted Wendell, a kindly bespectacled Theodore. I longed to stoop and tie their dragging shoestrings, ones unfastened so long that the plastic tips had worn to frayed cotton tufts. Math geniuses who forgot to zip up: I wanted to give them dating hints. I’d help them find the right barber. I dreamed of assisting their undressing—me, bathing them with stern brotherly care, me, putting them to bed (poor guys hadn’t yet guessed that my interest went past buddyhood). While they slept (I didn’t want to cost them any shut-eye), I’d just reach under their covers (always blue) and find that though the world considered these fellows minor minor, they oftentimes proved more major than the muscled boys who frolicked, unashamed, well-known, pink-and-white in gym showers.

  What was I doing here? Well, my major was art history. I was busy being a collector, is what. And not just someone who can spot (in a museum with a guide to lead him) any old famous masterpiece. No, I was a detective off in the odd corner of a side street thrift shop. I was uncovering (on sale for the price of the frame!) a little etching by Wyndham Lewis—futuristic dwarves, or a golden cow by Cuyp, one of Vuillard’s shuttered parlors painted on a shirt cardboard.

  Maybe this very collector’s zeal had drawn me to Carol, had led me to fatherhood, to the underrated joys of community. See, I wanted everything—even to be legit. Nothing was so obvious or subtle that I wouldn’t try it once. I prided myself on knowing what I liked, and going shamelessly after it. Everybody notices grace. But appreciating perfect clumsiness, that requires the real skill.

  “Won’t be long now!” I heard Barker call.

  “All right,” I hollered, exactly as my sons would.

  I EASED into a messy office upstairs and, among framed documents and pictures, recognized Barker’s grandfather. He looked just like Barker but fattened up and given lessons. During the Fifties, the granddad served as mayor of our nearby capital city. Back then, such collar-ad looks were still admired, voted into office.

  A framed news photo showed the mayor, hair oiled, presenting horse-topped trophies to young girls in jodhpurs. They blinked up at him, four fans, giggling. Over the wide loud tie, his grin showed an actor’s worked-at innocence. He’d been a decent mayor—fair to all, paving streets in the black district, making parks of vacant lots. Good till he got nabbed with his hand in the till. Like Barker’s, this was a face almost too pure to trust. When you observed the eyes of young Barker downstairs—it was like looking at a National Geographic close-up of some exotic Asian deer—you could admire the image forever, it wouldn’t notice or resist your admiration. It had the static beauty of an angel. Designed. That unaffected and willing to serve. His character was like an angel’s own—the perfect go-fer.

  I heard Barker humming Broadway ballads, knocking around ice trays. I opened every door on this hall. Why not? The worse the housekeeping got, the better I liked it. The tenderer I felt about the guy downstairs. One room had seven floor lamps in it, two standing, five resting on their sides, one plugged in. Shades were snare-drum shaped, the delicate linings frayed and split like fabric from old negligées.

  I closed all doors. I heard him mixing drinks. I felt that buzz and ringing you learn to recognize as the sweet warning sign of a sure thing. Still, I have been wrong.

  I checked my watch. “Ready,” he called, “when you are.” I passed the bathroom. I bet Barker hadn’t done a load of laundry since last March or April. A thigh-high pile made a moat around the tub. I lifted some boxer shorts. (Boxers show low self-esteem, bodywise; my kind of guy always wears them and assumes that every other man on earth wears boxers, too.) These particular shorts were pin-striped and had little red New York Yankee logos rashed everywhere. They surely needed some serious bleaching.

  THERE HE STOOD, grinning. He’d been busy stirring instant iced tea, two tall glasses with maps of Ohio stenciled on them. I didn’t ask, Why Ohio? Barker seemed pleased, quicker moving, the host. He’d rolled up his sleeves, the skin as fine as sanded ashwood. The icebox freezer was a white glacier dangling roots like a molar’s. From one tiny hole in it, Barker fished a gin bottle; he held the opened pint to one tea glass and smiled. “Suit you?”

  “Gin and iced tea? Sure.” Seducers/seducees must remain flexible.

  “Say when, pal.” I said so. Barker appeared full of antsy mischief.

  For him, I saw, this was still his mother’s house. With her dead, he could do as he liked; having an illicit guest here pleased him. Barker cultivated the place’s warehouse look. He let cat hair coat his mom’s prized rugs; it felt daring to leave the stag-movie projector and screen set up in the den full-time, just to shock his Florida sisters.

  I couldn’t help myself. “Hey, buddy, where is this cat?” I nodded toward the hallway’s gray fluff balls.

  “Hunh? Oh. There’s six. Two mother ones and four kid ones. All super-shy but each one’s really different. Good company.”

  He carried our tea glasses on a deco chrome tray; the film-viewing room was just ten feet from the kitchen. Dark in here. Ivy vines eclipsed the sunset; leaf green made our couch feel underwater. I slumped deep into its dated scalloped cushions.

  Sipping, we leaned back. It seemed that we were waiting for a signal: Start. I didn’t want to watch a movie. But, also, I did. I longed to hear this nice fellow tell me something, a story, anything, but I worried: talking could spoil whatever else might happen. I only half knew what I hoped for. I felt scared Barker might not understand my particular kind of tenderness. Still, I was readier and readier to find out, to risk making a total fool of myself. Everything worthwhile requires that, right?

  I needed to say something next.

  “So,” is what I said. “Tell me. So, tell me something … about yourself. Something I should know, Barker.” And I added that, Oh, I really appreciated his hospitality. It was nothing, he shrugged then pressed back. He made a throaty sound like a story starting. “Well. Something plain, Dave? Or something … kind of spicy?”

  “Both,” I said. Education does pay off. I know to at least ask for everything.

  “OKAY.” His voice
dipped half an octave. The idea of telling had relaxed Barker. I could see it. Listening to him relax relaxed me.

  —“SEE, they sent my granddad to jail. For something. I won’t say what. He did do it, still, we couldn’t picture prison—for him. My mom and sisters were so ashamed that, at first, they wouldn’t drive out to see him. I wanted to. Nobody’d take me. I called up Prison to ask about visiting hours. I made myself sound real deep, like a man, so they’d tell me. I was eleven. So when the prison guy gave me the times, he goes, ‘Well, thank you for calling, ma’am.’ I had to laugh.

  They’d put him in that state pen out on the highway, the work farm. It’s halfway to Tarboro and I rode my bike clear out there. It was busy, a Saturday. I had to keep to the edge of the Interstate. Teenagers in two convertibles threw beer cans at me. Finally when I got to the prison, men said I couldn’t come in, being a minor and all. Maybe they smelled the beer those hoods’d chucked at my back.

  I wondered what my granddad would do in the same spot (he’d been pretty well known around here), and so I started mentioning my rights, loud. The men said ‘okay okay’ and told me to pipe down. They let me in. He sat behind heavy-gauge chicken wire. He looked good, about the same. All the uniforms were gray but his was pressed and perfect on him—like he’d got to pick the color of everybody else’s outfit. You couldn’t even hold hands with him. Was like going to the zoo except it was your granddaddy. Right off, he thanks me for coming and he tells me where the key is hid. Key to a shack he owned at the back side of the fairgrounds. You know, out by the pine trees where kids go park at night and do you-know-what?

  He owned this cottage, but, seeing as how he couldn’t use it—for six to ten—he wanted me to hang out there. Granddad said I should use it whenever I needed to hide or slack off or anything. He said I could keep pets or have a club, whatever I liked.