Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Then the light changed, releasing us into another country. The station wagon sailed down boulevards of Chinese elms and flowering Bradford pears, through hot, dense streets where black families sat on wooden chairs at curbs, along old streetcar tracks that caused the tires to shimmy and the car to swerve, onto Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House, encircled by its fence of iron spears, and down 14th Street, past the Treasury Building, until at last we reached the Neptune Room, a cocktail lounge in the basement of a shabbily elegant hotel.

  Inside, the Neptune Room’s walls were painted with garish mermaids reclining seductively on underwater rocks, and human frogmen who stared longingly through their diving helmets’ glass masks at a loveliness they could not possess on dry earth. On stage, leaning against the baby grand piano, a chanteuse (as my mother called her) was singing of her grief, her wrists weighted with rhinestone bracelets, a single blue spotlight making her seem like one who lived, as did the mermaids, underwater.

  I was transfixed. I clutched my Roy Rogers cocktail (the same as a Shirley Temple, but without the cheerful, girlish grenadine) tight in my fist. In the middle of “The Man I Love” I stood and struggled toward the stage.

  I strayed into the spotlight’s soft-blue underwater world. Close up, from within the light, the singer was a boozy, plump peroxide blonde in a tight black cocktail dress; but these indiscretions made her yet more lovely, for they showed what she had lost, just as her songs seemed to carry her backward into endless regret. When I got close to her, she extended one hand—red nails, a huge glass ring—and seized one of mine.

  “Why, what kind of little sailor have we got here?” she asked the audience.

  I stared through the border of blue light and into the room, where I saw my parents gesturing, although whether they were telling me to step closer to her microphone or to step farther away, I could not tell. The whole club was staring.

  “Maybe he knows a song!” a man shouted from the back.

  “Sing with me,” she whispered. “What can you sing?”

  I wanted to lift her microphone from its stand and bow deeply from the waist, as Judy Garland did on her weekly TV show. But I could not. As she began to sing, I stood voiceless, pressed against the protection of her black dress; or, more accurately, I stood beside her, silently lip-synching to myself. I do not recall what she sang, although I do recall a quick, farcical ending in which she falsettoed, like Betty Boop, “Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh?” and brushed my forehead with pursed red lips.

  That summer, humidity enveloping the landfill subdivision, Denny, “the new kid,” stood on the boundaries, while we neighborhood boys played War, a game in which someone stood on Stanley Allen’s front porch and machine-gunned the rest of us, who one by one clutched our bellies, coughed as if choking on blood, and rolled in exquisite death throes down the grassy hill. When Stanley’s father came up the walk from work, he ducked imaginary bullets. “Hi, Dad,” Stanley would call, rising from the dead to greet him. Then we began the game again: whoever died best in the last round got to kill in the next. Later, after dusk, we’d smear the wings of balsa planes with glue, ignite them, and send them flaming through the dark on kamikaze missions. Long after the streets were deserted, we children sprawled beneath the comer streetlamp, praying our mothers would not call us—“Time to come in!”—back to our oven-like houses; and then sometimes Bucky, hoping to scare the elementary school kids, would lead his solemn procession of junior high “hoods” down the block, their penises hanging from their unzipped trousers.

  Denny and I began to play together, first in secret, then visiting each other’s houses almost daily, and by the end of the summer I imagined him to be my best friend. Our friendship was sealed by our shared dread of junior high school. Davis, who had just finished seventh grade, brought back reports of corridors so long that one could get lost in them, of gangs who fought to control the lunchroom and the bathrooms. The only safe place seemed to be the Health Room, where a pretty nurse let you lie down on a cot behind a folding screen. Denny told me about a movie he’d seen in which the children, all girls, did not have to go to school at all but were taught at home by a beautiful governess, who, upon coming to their rooms each morning, threw open their shutters so that sunlight fell like bolts of satin across their beds, whispered their pet names while kissing them, and combed their long hair with a silver brush. “She never got mad,” said Denny, beating his fingers up and down through the air as though striking a keyboard, “except once when some old man told the girls they could never play piano again.”

  With my father at work in the Pentagon and my mother off driving the two-tone Welcome Wagon Chevy to new subdivisions, Denny and I spent whole days in the gloom of my living room, the picture window’s Venetian blinds closed against an August sun so fierce that it bleached the design from the carpet. Dreaming of fabulous prizes—sets of matching Samsonite luggage, French Provincial bedroom suites, Corvettes, jet flights to Hawaii—we watched Jan Murray’s Treasure Hunt and Bob Barker’s Truth or Consequences (a name that seemed strangely threatening). We watched The Loretta Young Show, worshipping yet critiquing her elaborate gowns. When The Early Show came on, we watched old Bette Davis, Gene Tierney, and Joan Crawford movies—Dark Victory, Leave Her to Heaven, A Woman’s Face. Hoping to become their pen pals, we wrote long letters to fading movie stars, who in turn sent us autographed photos we traded between ourselves. We searched the house for secrets, like contraceptives, Kotex, and my mother’s hidden supply of Hershey bars. And finally, Denny and I, running to the front window every few minutes to make sure no one was coming unexpectedly up the sidewalk, inspected the secrets of my mother’s dresser: her satin nightgowns and padded brassieres, folded atop pink drawer liners and scattered with loose sachet; her black mantilla, pressed inside a shroud of lilac tissue paper; her heart-shaped candy box, a flapper doll strapped to its lid with a ribbon, from which spilled galaxies of cocktail rings and cultured pearls. Small shrines to deeper intentions, private grottoes of yearning: her triangular cloisonne earrings, her brooch of enameled butterfly wings.

  Because beauty’s source was longing, it was infused with romantic sorrow; because beauty was defined as “feminine,” and therefore as “other,” it became hopelessly confused with my mother: Mother, who quickly sorted through new batches of photographs, throwing unflattering shots of herself directly into the fire before they could be seen. Mother, who dramatized herself, telling us and our playmates, “My name is Maria Dolores; in Spanish, that mean ‘Mother of Sorrows.’ ” Mother who had once wished to be a writer and who said, looking up briefly from whatever she was reading, “Books are my best friends.” Mother, who read aloud from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Hight with a voice so grave I could not tell the difference between them. Mother, who lifted cut-glass vases and antique clocks from her obsessively dusted curio shelves to ask, “If this could talk, what story would it tell?”

  And more, always more, for she was the only woman in our house, a “people-watcher,” a “talker,” a woman whose mysteries and moods seemed endless: Our Mother of the White Silk Gloves; Our Mother of the Veiled Hats; Our Mother of the Paper Lilacs; Our Mother of the Sighs and Heartaches; Our Mother of the Gorgeous Gypsy Earrings; Our Mother of the Late Movies and the Cigarettes; Our Mother whom I adored and who, in adoring, I ran from, knowing it “wrong” for a son to wish to be like his mother; Our Mother who wished to influence us, passing the best of herself along, yet who held the fear common to that era, the fear that by loving a son too intensely she would render him unfit—“Momma’s boy,” “tied to apron strings”—and who therefore alternately drew us close and sent us away, believing a son needed “male influence” in large doses, that female influence was pernicious except as a final finishing, like manners; Our Mother of the Mixed Messages; Our Mother of Sudden Attentiveness; Our Mother of Sudden Distances; Our Mother of Anger; Our Mother of Apology. The simplest objects of her life, objects scattered acc
identally about the house, became my shrines to beauty, my grottoes of romantic sorrow: her Revlon lipstick tubes, “Cherries in the Snow”; her Art Nouveau atomizers on the blue mirror top of her vanity; her pastel silk scarves knotted to a wire hanger in her closet; her white handkerchiefs blotted with red mouths. Voiceless objects; silences. The world halved with a cleaver: “masculine,” “feminine.” In these ways was the plainest ordinary love made complicated and grotesque. And in these ways was beauty, already confused with the “feminine,” also confused with shame, for all these longings were secret, and to control me all my brother had to do was to threaten to expose that Denny and I were dressing ourselves in my mother’s clothes.

  DENNY CHOSE MY MOTHER’S drabbest outfits, as though he were ruled by the deepest of modesties, or by his family’s austere Methodism: a pink wraparound skirt from which the color had been laundered, its hem almost to his ankles; a sleeveless white cotton blouse with a Peter Pan collar; a small straw summer clutch. But he seemed to challenge his own primness, as though he dared it with his “effects”: an undershirt worn over his head to approximate cascading hair; gummed holepunch reinforcements pasted to his fingernails so that his hands, palms up, might look like a woman’s—flimsy crescent moons waxing above his fingertips.

  He dressed slowly, hesitantly, but once dressed, he was a manic Proteus metamorphosizing into contradictory, half-realized forms, throwing his “long hair” back and balling it violently into a French twist; tapping his paper nails on the glass-topped vanity as though he were an important woman kept waiting at a cosmetics counter; stabbing his nails into the air as though he were an angry teacher assigning an hour of detention; touching his temple as though he were a shy schoolgirl tucking back a wisp of stray hair; resting his fingertips on the rim of his glass of Kool-Aid as though he were an actress seated over an ornamental cocktail—a Pink Lady, say, or a Silver Slipper. Sometimes, in an orgy of jerky movement, his gestures overtaking him with greater and greater force, a dynamo of theatricality unleashed, he would hurl himself across the room like a mad girl having a fit, or like one possessed; or he would snatch the chenille spread from my parents’ bed and drape it over his head to fashion for himself the long train of a bride. “Do you like it?” he’d ask anxiously, making me his mirror. “Does it look real?” He wanted, as did I, to become something he’d neither yet seen nor dreamed of, something he’d recognize the moment he saw it: himself. Yet he was constantly confounded, for no matter how much he adorned himself with scarves and jewelry, he could not understand that this was himself, as was also and at the same time the boy in overalls and Keds. He was split in two pieces—as who was not?—the blond wave cresting rigidly above his close-cropped hair.

  “He makes me nervous,” I heard my father tell my mother one night as I lay in bed. They were speaking about me. That morning I’d stood awkwardly on the front lawn—“Maybe you should go help your father,” my mother had said—while he propped an extension ladder against the house, climbed up through the power lines he separated with his bare hands, and staggered across the pitched roof he was reshingling. When his hammer slid down the incline, catching on the gutter, I screamed, “You’re falling!” Startled, he almost fell.

  “He needs to spend more time with you,” I heard my mother say.

  I couldn’t sleep. Out in the distance a mother was calling her child home. A screen door slammed. I heard cicadas, their chorus as steady and loud as the hum of a power line. He needs to spend more time with you. Didn’t she know? Saturday mornings, when he stood in his rubber hip boots fishing off the shore of Triadelphia Reservoir, I was afraid of the slimy bottom and could not wade after him; for whatever reasons of his own—something as simple as shyness, perhaps—he could not come to get me. I sat in the parking lot drinking Tru-Ade and reading Betty and Veronica, wondering if Denny had walked alone to Wheaton Plaza, where the weekend manager of Port-o’-Call allowed us to Windex the illuminated glass shelves that held Lladro figurines, the porcelain ballerina’s hands so realistic one could see tiny life and heart lines etched into her palms. He needs to spend more time with you. Was she planning to discontinue the long summer afternoons that she and I spent together when there were no new families for her to greet in her Welcome Wagon car? “I don’t feel like being alone today,” she’d say, inviting me to sit on their chenille bedspread and watch her model new clothes in her mirror. Behind her an oscillating fan fluttered nylons and scarves she’d heaped, discarded, on a chair. “Should I wear the red belt with this dress or the black one?” she’d ask, turning suddenly toward me and cinching her waist with her hands.

  Afterward we would sit together at the rattan table on the screened-in porch, holding cocktail napkins around sweaty glasses of iced Russian tea and listening to big-band music on the Zenith.

  “You look so pretty,” I’d say. Sometimes she wore outfits I’d selected for her from her closet—pastel chiffon dresses, an apricot blouse with real mother-of-pearl buttons.

  One afternoon she leaned over suddenly and shut off the radio. “You know you’re going to leave me one day,” she said. When I put my arms around her, smelling the dry carnation talc she wore in hot weather, she stood up and marched out of the room. When she returned, she was wearing Bermuda shorts and a plain cotton blouse. “Let’s wait for your father on the stoop,” she said.

  Late that summer—the summer before he died—my father took me with him to Fort Benjamin Harrison, near Indianapolis, where, as a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves, he did his annual tour of duty. On the propjet he drank bourbon and read newspapers while I made a souvenir packet for Denny: an airsickness bag, into which I placed the Chiclets given me by the stewardess to help pop my ears during take-off, and the laminated white card that showed the location of emergency exits. Fort Benjamin Harrison looked like Carroll Knolls: hundreds of acres of concrete and sun-scorched shrubbery inside a cyclone fence. Daytimes I waited for my father in the dining mess with the sons of other officers, drinking chocolate milk that came from a silver machine, and desultorily setting fires in ashtrays. When he came to collect me, I walked behind him— gold braid hung from his epaulets—while enlisted men saluted us and opened doors. At night, sitting in our BOQ room, he asked me questions about myself: “Are you looking forward to seventh grade?” “What do you think you’ll want to be?” When these topics faltered—I stammered what I hoped were right answers—we watched TV, trying to pre-guess lines of dialogue on reruns of his favorite shows, The Untouchables and Rawhide. “That Della Street,” he said as we watched Perry Mason, “is almost as pretty as your mother.” On the last day, eager to make the trip memorable, he brought me a gift: a glassine envelope filled with punched IBM cards that told me my life story as his secretary had typed it into the office computer. Card One: You live at 10406 Lillians Mill Court. Silver Spring. Maryland. Card Two: You are entering seventh grade. Card Three: Last year your teacher was Mrs. Dillard. Card Four: Your favorite color is blue. Card Five: You love the Kingston Trio. Card Six: You love basketball and football. Card Seven: Your favorite sport is swimming.

  Whose son did these cards describe? The address was correct, as was the teacher’s name and the favorite color; and he’d remembered that one morning during breakfast I’d put a dime in the jukebox and played the Kingston Trio’s song about “the man who never returned.” But whose fiction was the rest? Had I, who played no sport other than kickball and Kitty-Kitty-Kick-the-Can, lied to him when he asked me about myself? Had he not heard from my mother the outcome of the previous summer’s swim lessons? At the swim club a young man in black trunks had taught us, as we held hands, to dunk ourselves in water, surface, and then go down. When he had told her to let go of me, I had thrashed across the surface, violently afraid I’d sink. But perhaps I had not lied to him; perhaps he merely did not wish to see. It was my job, I felt, to reassure him that I was the son he imagined me to be, perhaps because the role of reassurer gave me power. In any case, I thanked him for the computer cards. I thanked him
the way a father thanks a child for a well-intentioned gift he’ll never use—a set of handkerchiefs, say, on which the embroidered swirls construct a monogram of no particular initial, and which thus might be used by anyone.

  AS FOR ME, WHEN I DRESSED in my mother’s clothes, I seldom moved at all: I held myself rigid before the mirror. The kind of beauty I’d seen practiced in movies and in fashion magazines was beauty attained by lacquered stasis, beauty attained by fixed poses—“ladylike stillness,” the stillness of mannequins, the stillness of models “caught” in mid-gesture, the stillness of the passive moon around which active meteors orbited and burst. My costume was of the greatest solemnity: I dressed like the chanteuse in the Neptune Room, carefully shimmying my mother’s black slip over my head so as not to stain it with Brylcreem, draping her black mantilla over my bare shoulders, clipping her rhinestone dangles to my ears. Had I at that time already seen the movie in which French women who had fraternized with German soldiers were made to shave their heads and walk through the streets, jeered by their fellow villagers? And if so, did I imagine myself to be one of the collaborators, or one of the villagers, taunting her from the curb? I ask because no matter how elaborate my costume, I made no effort to camouflage my crew cut or my male body.

  How did I perceive myself in my mother’s triple-mirrored vanity, its endless repetitions? I saw myself as doubled—both an image and he who studied it. I saw myself as beautiful, and guilty: the lipstick made my mouth seem the ripest rose, or a wound; the small rose on the black slip opened like my mother’s heart disclosed, or like the Sacred Heart of Mary, aflame and pierced by arrows; the mantilla transformed me into a Mexican penitent or a Latin movie star, like Dolores Del Rio. The mirror was a silvery stream: on the far side, in a clearing, stood the woman who was icily immune from the boy’s terror and contempt; on the close side, in the bedroom, stood the boy who feared and yet longed after her inviolability. (Perhaps, it occurs to me now, this doubleness is the source of drag queens’ vulnerable ferocity.) Sometimes, when I saw that person in the mirror, I felt as though I had at last been lifted from that dull, locked room, with its mahogany bedroom suite and chalky blue walls. But other times, particularly when I saw Denny and me together, so that his reality shattered my fantasies, we seemed merely ludicrous and sadly comic, as though we were dressed in the garments of another species, like dogs in human clothes. I became aware of my spatulate hands, my scarred knees, my large feet; I became aware of the drooping, unfilled bodice of my slip. Like Denny, I could neither dispense with images nor take their flexibility as pleasure, for the idea of self I had learned and was learning still was that one was constructed by one’s images—“When boys cross their legs, they cross one ankle atop the knee”—so that one finally sought the protection of believing in one’s own image and, in believing in it as reality, condemned oneself to its poverty.