Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  It was that year Brenda found an open notebook on his desk in which he’d written out pages of new names for himself, first and last, a parade of loathing.

  And worse, because she was worried, she saw too much. She noticed that her mother’s closet door would often be closed when her mother—who always left it open—was out for an afternoon and Nat alone. It was their stale family joke, her mother and closets, cabinets, drawers.

  “Yes,” her father would growl. “Let everything in the breadbox see what’s happening in the kitchen they shouldn’t feel lonely.”

  At first she thought that Nat was just snooping in that rich confusion, as she had done years before. But then, allowing herself no vision of what she suspected, Brenda set little traps for him: a purse hung just so, a dress belt folded under. And she learned that Nat did something with Mom’s clothes—put them on, pretended he was beautiful, like her? What did plucking earrings from the shiny madness in her mother’s jewel box mean to him?

  Before these discoveries, Nat had been annoying to her, or unimportant, or sometimes, unexpectedly cute. Suddenly, he was dangerous, unknown. In the next years she’d wait for Nat’s oddities to burst from the neutral box of his silence like trick paper snakes, but he was only more sullen, blighting family dinners like the suspicion of a pitiless disease. Her father gave up cursing and her mother shrugged, as if Nat were a strange country she’d never been able to find on a globe. When her mother did talk about Nat, she had the brisk bored sound of a librarian stating facts that anyone could check.

  “He doesn’t have wet dreams,” her mother announced, folding laundry in the basement.

  Brenda, nineteen then, tried to think of something adequate to her surprise.

  “I’ve checked his sheets, Bren.”

  And when Nat was in high school: “Why doesn’t he date more? I think he’s afraid of sex. Your father said he blushed when they talked about condoms.”

  “WAIT TILL ELEVEN,” a man on the other side was saying now. “We always wait.”

  “Forget it.” That was Nat. “I called this week and no one’s in town.” He listed all his calls.

  She knew that Nat was right; the Orthodox minyan drew on a very small group of Jews, strangers rarely joined them.

  The women behind her stirred the pages of their prayerbooks as if scanning merchandise in a dull catalog. They were mostly the bleak girlfriends of men who ran the minyan, wearing artless, dowdy plain clothes and talking after services about movies or food. She imagined they would welcome marriage and the children who would release them from regular attendance. She thought of them as The Widows because though in their mid-twenties they already seemed isolated, like the survivors of a historic loss.

  Around her, the heat, spread by a weak ceiling fan, settled like a film of soot or car exhaust; her light dress, sandals, and short hair didn’t help her feel cool.

  “Brenda, you look very nice today.”

  Clark, the law student who looked like Al Pacino and thought he was Bruce Springsteen hung over the mehitzah. From Bloomfield Hills, he always talked to her with the smugness she remembered in adolescent cliques, as if his good looks and hers bound them in undeniable complicity.

  Before she could say anything, Nat was back at the door, bleating, “Gut shabbos!”

  At the chipped bookcase with the prayerbooks and Bibles, stood a tall tanned man who looked thirty to her, blue-eyed, with thick close-trimmed mustache and beard that seemed very black above the tan summer suit and white shirt. He slipped a prayer shawl from the wooden stand, covered his head with it as he said the blessing, and found a seat up near the front of the men’s side, shaking hands, nodding. After finding out the man’s Hebrew name, Nat marched up to the lectern.

  It was a blessing to be the tenth man, she thought, as services continued with unexpected excitement. They sang and chanted like forty people, not fourteen. When there wasn’t a minyan and the Torah stayed in its plainly curtained ark, she felt a fierce longing to see it borne around the shul to be touched with prayerbooks, prayer shawl fringes, or kissed like a bride as some of the men did.

  When the stranger, Moshe Leib ben Shimon haCohen, Mark, was called to the Torah for the first blessing, he loomed over the lectern like a dark memorial in a way that dried her throat; his back seemed broad and forbidding. But his voice was sweet, smooth, rising and falling with the self-indulgent sadness of a Russian folk song. He sight read the first portion without a mistake. They were all impressed.

  Nat, always well-prepared, read badly today. He made mistakes even she could catch and it was painful watching him struggle with easy words. The silver pointer in his hand usually paced serenely along each squarish path of Hebrew, but now it was as listless as an uninspired divining rod. She looked away from him, from her Bible. Nat would probably tell people after services that he was tired and because he never read poorly no one would doubt him.

  She hoped.

  What did people say about him? Could they tell?

  “He should date more”—his mother’s verdict. Mrs. Stern was often mentioning friends’ daughters to Nat at holiday dinners as if genially passing a liqueur, but to Brenda she had recently said:

  “Is he gay?”

  “No!”

  “You’re sure—”

  “Mom.”

  Her father said nothing directly or indirectly to Brenda; if it concerned him that Nat hardly dated, he probably classed that with Nat’s habitual stubbornness Besides, she imagined her father sneering, “With that punim, that face, who would want him?”

  For Brenda Nat was Coronado discovering the Seven Cities of El Dorado everywhere—in the pumping bare thighs of bikers on campus, the ripe curves of jeans-tight asses, the heavy twin arcs of runners’ chests under cool molding cotton—flash after flash of heaven-sent gold in hundreds of men around town. But he was a Coronado without armor, without guides, troops, provisions, maps, or even a commission. He had only his hunger.

  She never spoke about this with Nat, never asked about dates or parties, had no idea what his life was like. Nat lived in his dorm and she in her apartment in town with the huge ecstatically landscaped campus between them like the florid alibi for a crime. They lunched sometimes, she phoned him, they met at services and occasionally drove home to Southfield together, but she seldom mentioned that her brother was “up at school.” She was afraid for him.

  She was ashamed.

  In her freshman year at Madison, on her coed floor, there had been a lovely dark-haired boy named Tom who did up his single room with Japanese fans, silk scarves, and other gentle souvenirs of summers abroad. Cool, quiet, musical, literate, he was the eye of a storm: doors banged, voices hushed and growled, or cracked with laughter, and the jocks on their floor simmered like guard dogs on maddening chains. One morning a camping ax was found buried in Tom’s door, the handle chalked, for clarity, “Faggot Die.” Tom moved off campus, and that was what she feared—violence in the night, a scandal.

  Having drifted away during the Torah reading she didn’t reenter the service, but stood and sat with everyone and prayed aloud mechanically as if she were in an educational filmstrip, each action large and stiff. Mark, the stranger, had asked to do the last part of the service, and his Hebrew was fluent in the thick summer air.

  On the way out after the last hymn, Mark wished her Shabbat

  Shalom.

  “You read well,” she said as they milled at the table set with kiddush wine and cakes in the little social hall.

  And then Nat was there, grinning, his pale face splattered with excitement. After blessing the wine, Nat pulled Mark aside to talk about the next week’s Torah portion.

  Helen, Clark’s cousin, bore down on Brenda. With her thin ugly legs, heavy shifting hips and rear she resembled to Brenda a pack mule struggling up a hill.

  “Gut Shabbos,” Helen murmured, round face doleful, as if she were passing on unpleasant gossip. “Isn’t he terrific?”

  “Mark?”

  “Uh-h
uh. What a spa.”

  “Spa …”

  “Sure, he works out—look at his chest, those shoulders. Yum.”

  Brenda watched them, Mark with the cool, one-dimensional beauty of a brass rubbing, Nat grasping him with a sickly smile. She ate a dry piece of pound cake.

  THERE WERE AT LEAST a thousand Jewish students on campus but hardly any came to the Orthodox minyan, which was a mix of graduate students, one or two shabby faculty members, and several University staffers. Mark’s arrival was exciting, she knew, because he could take much of the burden of running services from Clark and Nat and the others who sometimes felt like prisoners of their obligations. An assistant to the Registrar, Mark spoke little about himself, but seemed to have for Nat the impact of an analyst whose silence and concern at last permit an entrance to oneself. Nat talked about his acting, his Russian and French classes, his desire to enter the Foreign Service, about everything, like a child dragging pretty treasures from pockets, under the bed, from drawers, to entertain, attract, possess a fascinating friend.

  Brenda saw in Nat, for the first time, a resemblance to their mother. Generally their mother was like an antiques dealer displaying a find—herself—with chic reverence. She was slim, wide-eyed, fashionable even in a bathrobe, especially in a bathrobe whose rough folds set her off like a pretty girl’s plain companion. But sometimes her mother emerged from this haze of self-absorption to talk to strangers or her children’s “little friends” with merciless charm. She asked them endless unimportant questions until they found themselves like flood victims forced onto the roof of their self-possession, praying for the waters to subside.

  Brenda saw Nat talking like this to Mark one Sunday afternoon, two weeks after that first Shabbat, at a restaurant in town, saw him through the wide front window, face twisted and alive, fingers plucking at a sugar packet. Mark sat deeply back from him, sky-blue tennis shirt open at a dense-haired throat, heavy fine arms crossed, a smile, some kind of smile nestled in the mustache and the beard. Mark was not just passively beautiful, she realized as she hurried on to buy her Times at the chain bookstore down the block, not a man to merely watch, admire, but warm, receptive, inviting. It was the lush curves of shoulders, chest, the gleaming hair and beard, the hard-lined nose and high cheekbones, the paintable mouth.

  Not her type at all, too dramatic, too intense. The men she dated were at most “cute,” and their ideas about third world debt or Euro-Communism gave them more color than the way they walked or dressed or were.

  “They don’t scare you,” Nat had concluded, and it was too obvious for her to deny.

  Mark and Nat started running together at the high school track near her apartment, like a boy and his puppy that was eager to show off how fast it moved. Mark’s legs were hairy and dark, strong admonitions to the pale, weak.

  They’d stop at her place afterwards for water, to towel off, talking about the weather and their wind, old injuries. Mark spoke even then as if emerging from a past that wasn’t his but something he had learned, borrowed details of a spy. He sat on the floor, back against her gray-green sofa bed, legs out, relaxed, holding the tumbler to his face and neck. Nat looked wild and flustered, as if he couldn’t decide whether to yell or leap or cry.

  In July, when the whole state settled into a heat wave that seemed as inexorable as lava sweeping down a barren slope, Nat made an announcement to her one Friday afternoon.

  “Mark has the use of a place on the Lake, near Saugatuck, and he invited me to go next Saturday night after Shabbat and spend a day or two at the beach.” Nat’s face was so surly that she saw him as a boy again, daring their parents with his refusal to eat beans, or wash his hair, or turn from the television.

  “Does he know you’re in love with him?”

  Nat gave her a liar’s grin, stalling. “What?”

  She looked down at her cool plate of deviled eggs, potato salad, tabbouli, as if the food were an exhibit in a museum case, proof of customs stranger than one’s own.

  “What?”

  She felt guilty now, tight-eyed. “If he’s not gay he’s being very cruel.”

  Watching Nat lean away as if the sprigged tablecloth were dangerous somehow, she understood how strong soft people really were—they could retreat across vast plains of silence, disappear.

  “I wrote him a poem,” Nat brought out heavily, a pauper facing his last, most precious coin. And when he turned away she jerked up from her chair to crouch by her brother, hold him and ease the ugliness of tears.

  Mark called after Nat was gone, to invite himself over that evening. From Nat she’d learned that he and Mark had spent many nights together since the first Shabbat in June, at Mark’s apartment in a nearby town.

  Mark wore white jeans, Top-Siders, and a white Lacoste shirt as if to show her he was normal, American, no threat. But sitting in her small, crammed living room he looked like a model posed in an unlikely spot to throw his beauty into high relief.

  They drank coffee.

  “I was married,” Mark offered. “Nat didn’t say? In New Haven. We split up two years ago, I moved to Philadelphia, then here.” He nodded like an old man in a rocker whose every motion confirms a memory.

  “Children?”

  “We couldn’t.”

  She wished, in the quiet, for a clock that chimed, a noisy refrigerator, dogs outside, something to ease the tension in her neck and hands. She imagined her parents there, Dad scornful, incensed, Mom peering at Mark with distaste, curious, purring, “But he’s handsome, don’t you think?” Closing her eyes, Brenda saw the ax saying “Faggot Die” like the afterimage of a too-bright bulb.

  Nat had pursued Mark, she knew, so there was no blame for her to spatter on the canvas of his silence.

  “What about AIDS?” she asked.

  “I’ve been tested, I’m okay. And Nat was a virgin.”

  “What about people seeing you at the lake, or in town?”

  “It’s not a secret for me being gay.”

  “But Nat’s only twenty-one.” She rose to bring the coffee pot to them. “It could destroy him.”

  Mark shrugged.

  She asked about the house on Lake Michigan two hours away and Mark described the drive there, the beach. While he spoke, a thought crossed her mind with brazen clarity: even though she felt warmer to Nat after his crying, she didn’t love him, still, and feared what people would say about her more than what might happen to Nat. I’m like Mom, she thought. Cold.

  The “weekend” was fabulous, Nat raved, returning with color, some new clothes, and a haircut that made him subtly more attractive.

  “He wants to take me to Paris next year!” Nat crowed.

  “On his salary?”

  “He has friends there.”

  Friends, she thought.

  At services Nat sat next to Mark, the fringes of their prayer shawls touching, perhaps, beneath their chairs. Nat had coolly talked about Mark’s divorce to most people there, had reported it with enough vagueness and somber gaps to make it seem a tragedy of some kind, a wound too open to discuss. “That’s why he came to Michigan,” Nat would conclude, delighted with his subterfuge. He could’ve been a child pretending there were dragons in the dark that only he could slay.

  “Mark doesn’t like my talking like that,” Nat smirked.

  Did she? Did she like any of it? When she wasn’t plowing through the book list for her first comprehensive in September, she wondered what she felt. Mark was apparently kind to Nat, and luckily not one of those bitchy homosexuals whose standards were as vigilant and high as satellites, but he was real, and puzzling.

  “What do you see in Nat?” she asked one noon in town where she’d come across Mark waiting to cross a street to campus. He frowned and she felt exposed, her lack of understanding, her contempt as clear to him as diamonds on blue velvet.

  “He’s very sad,” Mark said. “I like to make him smile.”

  She remembered Nat years ago, little, ill, awash in bedclothes, small eyes tight with
disapproval as their mother brought tea, sat on the edge of the bed holding the saucer in one hand, bringing the cup to his lips and back in a steady hypnotic beat, meanwhile telling him a complicated silly story to get him to smile.

  Mark and Nat started spending less time with her after she asked Mark that question, as if she, a bumbling parent, had mortified a group of teens by trying to be sincere. Mark was busy helping Nat prepare for Tishe B’Av, the Ninth of Av fast, teaching him Lamentations. She didn’t like the fast or memorializing the Temple’s destruction, which reading Josephus’s Jewish Wars had made more awful to her. The slaughter, the terrible thirst, starvation, and ruin were all too real for her, too historic, harbingers of camps and numbered arms. At least Mark and Nat, leading the services, would have something to do to keep them from falling into the past—or so she felt.

  Her parents were even less sympathetic to Tishe B’Av—they liked the more decorative holidays, like Passover and Chanukah, and suffered through the High Holy Days as if paying stiffly for their pleasure later in the year.

  A week or so before Tishe B’Av, Helen’s grocery cart pulled up next to hers at one of the mammoth vegetable counters in the town’s largest market.

  “Is your brother a fag?” Helen shot, and the two women feeling tomatoes nearby glared up at them. “Because I saw him coming out of Bangles downtown last Saturday night and, honey, he was drunk. And Mark too—what a waste.”

  Rigid, Brenda imagined a dump truck dropping tons of potatoes on Helen, sealing her forever.

  Helen grinned, looking like a grotesque carnival target. With more strength than she knew was in her legs and arms, Brenda moved her cart away and down the aisle, then left as if the metal burned, and hurried out to her car. Getting in, she thought of flight, retreat—no one would ever find her, hear from her again. But starting the Chevette seemed to drain the panic through her hand into the key and she drove out along the Interstate to Mark’s apartment complex ten minutes away.