Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  “Who was that?”

  “He was a very nice old man who bought my bus ticket back to Michigan and sent you a blue blanket when you were born. I went to work at the Victory Grill, the truckstop where I met Dale.”

  “And why’d you marry him?”

  “He was kind to me, bought me cigarettes, and didn’t mind that I already had a baby. What choices did I have?”

  I had by this time only a vague memory of the man she married instead of my real father; the thickness of his hair, the shape of his nose, the kind of clothes he wore. We saw him only when he was moving us from one place to another, dark basement apartments in marginal neighborhoods, or those war-built housing developments in factor}’ towns that spread during the baby boom like measles among school children. Dale had been one of the first of the successful truck drivers in the years when highways were replacing the railroads, but my mother and I were dependent upon bags of groceries from neighbors, upon landlords who would wait for their rent check while Dale was on the road for weeks at a time. So my memory of him was like an allergy you don’t get until you are older, and suddenly your head fills up, your eyes bum, or skin breaks out in reaction to something you’ve been eating all your life.

  “Why did you give me these letters?” I asked her.

  “In case you wanted to go looking for Joe he couldn’t deny who you are.”

  “These are your letters,” I said to her, meaning I did not want them.

  The tone of her voice bottomed out. “But I saved them for you!”

  “Where is he now?” I asked, for she must have wanted me to, although it seemed as if I knew all this already without knowing how. It’s hard to remember.

  “He moved back to Michigan after the Korean War and got married. I was going to give you his letters on your sixteenth birthday, but you never seemed much interested, and it was about that time when Esther called to tell me—she used to tell me whenever she saw him—that Joe’s two little girls had been found molested and murdered in a vineyard behind their house. They’ couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old. No one ever found out who did it, not even a clue. Esther sent me the clippings from the papers, even the Detroit ones. I saved all of them for you too, just in case you ever wanted them.”

  There was a long pause, then she asked, “Are you mad at me for not telling you sooner?”

  “No, Mom,” I murmured. “How could I be mad?”

  “Do you ever think about writing him? You have a right to, you know,” he said, his hand on my stomach, envious of how tightly my body held to its youth. He was a man old enough to be my father.

  “A right to?” I repeated. “No, really, I never thought of it as something I was entitled to do. Other people find the idea of reaching him more intriguing than I do.”

  “If you were my son I would want to hear from you,” he said.

  “If I were your son? Me, you mean? Not someone else?”

  He placed one leg through both of mine and pulled me up close to him, back to chest, and said, “When we’re in bed together like this I like to imagine that you are.”

  We had met when he was looking for someone to take care of his cats while he was in Miami conducting a Broadway-bound musical, and while I was looking for an apartment. I was in New York where I had been hired at an advertising agency. I did well from the start and got the campaign for a toothpaste I had been using all my life. His show closed before I found a place of my own. Although our living arrangement was meant to be only temporary, this confession allowed me to think that he wanted me to stay.

  Also, his life opened up to accommodate mine, as if such a space had been held in reserve for me. It never occurred to me at the time that that space may have had an occupant before me, and I had slipped into it like a possessionless tenant into a furnished room. He would be cooking when I came home from work. We would have a drink while I set the table and listened to the news. Before the weather changed, I built a redwood deck for the terrace of this penthouse apartment, and we ate out there till November. After dinner, he would work some more at the piano, and I did the dishes and read business magazines. Later I would join him at the piano, where we played a game we had stumbled upon by accident. Once he had been orchestrating a song for a nightclub act. The music seemed familiar to me, and after he finished the verse, I suddenly opened my mouth and essayed the chorus in my uncertain tenor. I found myself singing the lyrics to “All the Things You Are” without even knowing its tide.

  “How does someone your age know the words to that old song?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe my mother liked it.”

  “You have a nice voice,” he said. “It’s small but sweet. Like Blossom Dearie.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked, turning away to look out the window, over the terrace, at the skyline of Manhattan.

  “You’re blushing,” he said.

  “I’ve never blushed in my life,” I said. At that moment, everything felt exact and right and comfortable, the way you might have felt in grade school when your teacher told you to put away your books and to fold your hands on the desk because she was going to tell you a story.

  “So much the better,” he said. Then, turning everything into a game, he asked, “Do you know this one by Kern?” When he began the verse of yet another song, I sang the chorus.

  Sometimes I watched him shave—naked and framed by the doorway and the length of the hall—in the same attitude that I might consider a painting, and I experienced that same kind of rewarding detachment. With his classical proportions, his was the kind of body that art teachers find for their students to sketch, not muscular but manly. From the bathroom he would walk down the hall and smile at me. Space seemed sentient, and measured by the way he filled it. Watching him like this once, I knew that there was nothing more serious than the desire of one man for another, and that what we don’t understand we underestimate.

  I came up behind him in the bedroom. He was examining his own body in the mirror behind the closet door. I put my hands on his waist. He looked at me in the mirror.

  “That’s fat,” he said. “If I didn’t have it I’d be perfect.”

  “If you didn’t have it,“ I said, “you’d be my age.”

  He laughed abruptly at that, and as abruptly, he stopped. “You’re good,” he said, “very good. And you don’t know how good you are.”

  Later that night we were looking at pictures that he kept in a box. There was a studio portrait of a beautiful woman, his mother, and from her expression one could easily assume that she had chosen the autumnal backdrop herself from the photographer’s selections. In front of it she posed dark and dolorous, looking over her shoulder at the photographer as if to say that she had never been happy on this earth and doubted if any of us were meant to be.

  “It’s such a wonderful photograph to keep in a box,” I said to him. “Anyone else would have it framed and sitting on the piano.”

  “I’ve considered it,” he said, “but I don’t think my mother ever liked me much.” Then something in his face gave way. He cocked his head away from me. His chest dropped slightly and I saw him swallow. When he looked at me again it was as if to see how I had tricked him into saying that and then in another moment, as if to look in a mirror to see what lines betrayed his age.

  I knelt in front of him and put my head in his lap. We were both wearing bathrobes and I could feel the warmth of him against the skin of my lips.

  “How I care for you,” I said. This did not say what I wanted to say, but love was not a word we used between us. Even so, I willed some impulse in him to reach out and touch my head. This did not happen.

  Then one night he rolled away from me in bed. I could not sleep after that and went into the other room. Flipping through a guidebook to Rome, where we were to have gone together, I heard him stir in his sleep, I heard his sigh of resolution, then his bare feet on the parquet. Next he was facing me on the couch.

  “Here’s a place where t
he Italians line up to have their shoes shined,” I said. His eyebrows raised and dropped. I said, “You probably want me to move out.”

  He nodded. “There’s no hurry,” he said, smiling like a psychoanalyst.

  “I could move into a hotel tomorrow.”

  “That wouldn’t be nice for you.”

  “It wouldn’t be for long.”

  “I don’t want you to hate me,” he said.

  “If anything, I’ll hate myself.”

  He seemed to understand that. “Will you look for an apartment in this area?”

  “I know all the shopkeepers.”

  “Then you’ll stay in the neighborhood.”

  “If I can find an apartment.”

  He considered that for a moment, was satisfied, then placed his palms on his thighs, nodded, and went back to bed.

  I REMAINED IN THE MISSION-STYLE rocker that he had bought for a song in graduate school, wondering if there were such bargains still to be had, and where I might find one for myself. There were the dark-stained parquet floors, the brass pen trays, the Weller vases, the Italian sofa, the oil painting that had increased in value a hundred times since its purchase. In the hallway there were autographs of great composers, in his bedroom a portrait of him by a now famous painter of the New York School. The kitchen was well-shelved, well-stocked, machined: copper pans, sponge-glazed bowls, Mexican tiles, bean pot, an urn of spoons and spatulas, a counter’s length of cookbooks. All of it bought in the pursuit of that balance between the domestic and the sensual, and all of it a strong statement to me that I had nothing to do with the exclusive moment that any of it was purchased, the meaning it had without me, what happened before me and was happening—still. I had failed to endure, maybe not domestic, maybe not sensual enough. And even the apartment building had history: movies had been made here that showed up in revival houses; Steiglitz had done studies on the stairwell.

  It was occurring to me, like a sensation that has not yet turned to pain, that detachment from all this would not be without its own kind of terror. I poured myself some of the expensive cognac that he had introduced me to but I had bought, and lit one of the cigars he had encouraged me to smoke. Then I sat down with his box of photographs. One of his cats jumped onto the couch then and tried to climb into the box. I knocked her down somewhat too violently. She stood sideways considering my behavior, then arched her back and hissed, bolting away. The half-feral cat with the extra toes looked down on me from the bookshelf, and blinked, watching everything over the inside membrane of its eyelids.

  I soon found what I was looking for: an 8½-by-11 glossy of him when he would have been about ten years older than I was at that very moment. He was holding a saxophone in one hand, an instrument he did not play, and a cigarette in the other, although he never smoked. The cigarette smoke rose in a straight column in front of his black T-shirt. There was nothing on his face but a show of anger, part of the pose, I assumed, and predictions of how his face was going to age, predictions that came true. But I found myself pulled to him, drawn to him by the gravity of the photograph, the weight of its sensuality. With equal force I felt the sheer shove of time between the moment that the photograph had been taken and the moment that I was seeing it. From that moment on I would be looking at him from some distance, over an enormous gap that my heart leapt to cross, beat after beat, but could never, not to save my life.

  I had never known this side of desire, this longing for health one recalls from childhood illnesses that modem medicine has all but eradicated, those dark miasmic fevers and the pain we asked our mothers to explain. Only out of this fever the question is one we know better than to ask, “Why can’t you love me?”

  I put the box of photographs on the shelf where I had found it, and read a while longer, knowing that would be an excuse to fall asleep in the chair.

  NOT LONG BEFORE I MOVED OUT, I saw him leaving our apartment building with someone closer to my age than to his. They were leaning close together, as if listening to a mutually loved passage of music.

  On the mail tray inside the apartment, there was a note to me. It said that he was spending the night and the next day in Atlantic City and would I please give Gershwin, the half-feral cat, the homeopathic medicine he himself had prescribed for it.

  Next to the pewter dish was a carton of slides. The date stamped on them told me they were about five years old. Naturally, I slid the carton open and held the slides to the light. He was in a variety of standard poses in each of them, except that he was naked, and smiling as if for a passport photo that would assure the customs man—“I am normal, let me into your country.” This, I thought, is a man afraid of death and even more so of aging. I had to wonder: What mixture of vanity and urgency had prompted these photos? Had he shown them to anyone? Who was the photographer? Do they remain on intimate terms? Is there something I should be doing that I am not? I felt as if I were looking for clues on the white-edges of these transparencies, as they are called, where there were none. I was looking for ways to reach this man, and I had never been one to consider motive before.

  It was very warm for May. The subways were already absorbing the heat, and the passengers looked, or did not look at one another, as if blaming themselves for this spring-less year. I needed a shower before I could go out again in search of an apartment.

  As I had seen him do, I watched myself in the large round oceanliner mirror through his transparent shower curtain. An older man at my office gym had suggested that were it not for my moustache, my hairy chest, I would have the body of a sixteen-year-old athlete. The man I lived with had smiled at this, obviously having the same thought himself, but suggested nothing. With his shaving brush I lathered my entire torso, and with the straight-edge razor he taught me to use, I shaved my chest from breastplate to navel, watching the anticipated result in the huge and elegant mirror.

  Looking very much indeed like a sixteen-year-old athlete, I felt a sudden tender generosity toward the world and myself, unfocused, neither self-centered nor self-exempting. Sun angled into the bathroom window and made the room and my body shimmer. I put his old silk bathrobe on. Then I went to the oversized dictionary where I kept my father’s letters.

  Each had a three-cent stamp on it. I blew into the end that my mother had tom open and shook the letter out of the envelope. With it fell a picture-booth snapshot face down to the desk. On it was written, “Hi, honey. What do you think of me now?” I turned the picture over. There was a soldier, and he had my eyes, my ears. Our cheekbones were the same height, our noses were identical, his smile was more certain but similar. The snapshot was blurry around the soldier’s hat and temples, but there was fine detail and surprising depth in the open collar and the shadow on his neck.

  The letter I read was written in pencil on unlined paper. I held the snapshot in one hand and read, “Honey, I look at your picture every night. Your eyes seem to dance and sparkle, and your sweet lips seem to keep saying I love you. Sweetheart, there isn’t a morning that goes by that I don’t think of you when I wake up. Your voice seems to go through my dreams as clear and as sweet as the stars in the sky and the sweet smell of flowers here on camp. I seem to be able to reach out and touch you, then you come to me and place your arms around my neck and I go almost wild with love for you. Darling, I laid in bed last night and thought of how we acted the last time I was with you. I can almost feel your arms around me and it makes me feel like coming to you right now. I get so involved thinking about you that the night flies by. I could never prove my love to you, honey, it’s just beyond words.

  “There’s a beautiful moon out tonight, honey, just like the one we used to park under. It seems to look at me and smile. It says to me, Don’t you worry, Joe, she’s thinking of you and she loves you as much as you love her. You’ll be with her soon and speak the words of love that are being stored in your lonesome heart. Oh, darling, how can a guy like me deserve your love, you’re so wonderful in every way. I love all the things you are, Lorraine. I love you
more than words or actions could ever explain. My love for you will never die, Lorraine, it will never die. We’ll always be together, won’t we?”

  THE NEXT DAY I WENT TO the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found it. On one shelf in the large reading room was a row of telephone books for the entire country. In the book for Northeast Michigan, I found my father’s address in the city where I was born. I went back to my office and wrote him what I thought was a wonderful letter. There was nothing incriminating in it at all. I told him what I thought he wanted to hear: that I was a success at what I wanted to be doing, that I expected nothing from him, and that if he didn’t want to write me back I would understand.

  The same evening when I got home there was something from my mother on the mail tray in the hall.

  “Is that a birthday card?”

  I looked up. He was sitting at the kitchen counter watching television while he ate. I was made hopeful by two things: he remembered that my birthday was at the end of the week, and this was the first time he had spoken to me first in two weeks.

  “No,” I said to him after I’d opened the envelope. “It’s something I have to sign to make me executor of her estate when she dies.”

  We both smiled at the irony of thinking it had been a birthday card. I thought that my mouth felt like his, that my smile had taken on the shape of his.

  “That shouldn’t be too much to handle,” he said.

  “No,” I said, and managed to laugh. “It won’t be at that, although she writes that she just sold her half of the house to my—her ex-husband for fifteen thousand.”

  “What’s she going to do with the money?”

  “Buy a car, for one thing.”

  “That’s the problem with these bourgeois,” he said. “They get a little money and they spend it.”