The boy looked across the room and said, “We’ll call an ambulance. When we can’t get a taxi, we can always call an ambulance.”
The old woman selected compacts, eye shadows, blushers. In rows, she arranged her choices on the glass table top. She dropped the others back in the drawer, making clatter. She did not look up from the table.
“How about some lipstick?” she said. “You want some lipstick for your finishing touch?”
The boy drained the bullshot.
Still not looking up, the old woman said, “You can fix that for me. You can go downstairs and fix that drink for me, please.” .
The boy sucked on ice. When he spoke again it was not to the grandmother. With ice in his mouth, he gave the address of the house. He called the second taxi number and was giving the address again when the old woman wheeled herself into the mother’s walk-in closet. Over the wheelchair’s electric whine, the old woman shouted, “Fix it.” Over her shout, the boy spelled the name of the street.
The grandmother came out, folding a nightgown into a shopping bag. The boy saw that it was a bag from a discount furrier. Dialing his third call, he made a face he did not know he was making. He watched the old woman wheel herself back to the dressing table and sweep the rows of makeup into the bag.
“This is for you to take to your mother,” the grandmother said. “She is going to need these things.”
Again on hold, the boy kept looking at the shopping bag.
“She will feel better when she looks better,” the old woman said.
The boy looked around his mother’s room. He looked at the bed that he had made in the middle of the night and at places around the room where the old woman had wheeled herself, reaching down to gather his mother’s clothes from the floor. Together, after the mother had been taken from the house, the boy and the grandmother had cleaned the mother’s room. They had stayed up through the night to do it.
“Do you think so?” he asked. “Do you think a nightgown and some makeup will help?”
The old woman picked up a hairbrush and a hand mirror, a matching silver set. They were the last items on the dressing table. She added them to everything else in the discount furrier bag and ran her hand over the dressing table’s bare glass top.
She said, “Take them anyway.”
The boy looked at the discount furrier bag. “I will feel better,” he said, “if you put those things in some other bag. We must have a bag from someplace else.”
The grandmother gave the boy a blank look that did not stay blank. “Go fix that drink,” she said.
“Get me a bag from someplace else,” the boy said.
THAT NIGHT, OUTSIDE THE LARGE dining room window, the unlit garden was not dark. Light from upstairs, from the grandmother’s room, shone down on the rising steam. The boy sat in his mother’s chair, looking out, drinking champagne that he had put on ice before he left the house. He had chilled two bottles to help him sleep when he came back from the hospital and the wedding, to help put him out at the end of the day. Now he was making do with one bottle, the one that the old woman had not taken up to her room to drink with her massage.
He had not really counted on finding both bottles.
Every night a man came to the house to massage the old woman, while she watched the day’s financial news. Every night, lying on a surgical table, she cried out, and the boy could never tell if it was her flesh or her finances that were killing her.
Tonight, the old woman’s cries traveled down the stairs. They were not for pain or money. The old woman was calling down for the boy to come up.
When he had opened the bottle for himself, out of habit, he had put two more on ice. The habit was left over from his father, who, years ago, had told him that one must always have two of everything. Having two of a thing at all times, his father had told him, was the one way to be certain you will have it, at least one of it, when the time comes that you need it.
His father once had told him about two brothers, one of whom had been infertile. The brother who was fertile donated a testicle, and one year after the transplant both brothers, for the first time, became fathers. His father had said that nature itself is overcautious and abundant.
His father had said this more than once.
The boy looked out into the garden and thought there should be two gardens, two pools. And in a sense, there were. In a sense, he had two gardens, two pools, if he counted the pool and garden at his father’s house. His father had said a man must have two houses, one to live in, one in reserve, the second one for when the first one burns, or when anything else that can happen to it, happens. The second house, the house in reserve, should be ready, his father had said, supplied with everything that the first house had had.
When his father moved out, there had been another house for him to go to, ready for him.
His father’s point, as the boy had made it out, was that there are times when only excess is efficient, when nothing less makes sense. The boy touched his face and wished that he had ordered two jars of the anti-aging cream. He did not believe that his mother’s vitamin E cream helped. But there was always the other side—if he had sent away for two jars, then his mother would have just had twice as much to steal; she just would have looked twice as young when she swallowed his pills.
When the boy had stolen a bottle of champagne from his father’s reception, he had stolen two.
In the pool at his father’s house, the water was kept cold to invigorate the blood.
Opening the chilled bottle was the first thing the boy had done when he came back from his father’s reception. Chilling the two that he had stolen was the second. And after he had looked out into the garden for a while, before he answered his grandmother’s calls, he went to the panel in the pool house that controlled the garden and the pool. He switched on all the lights that were set into the ground, under the jade trees, which came to muted life within the fog of the steam. He switched on every light in the garden, then switched off all the heat in the pool, and began to count the time that the steam would take to stop.
When the boy came upstairs, his grandmother was screaming at the man who was massaging her. She was undressed, covered by a sheet, smoking. The large man wore white trousers and a white sweatshirt with its sleeves cut off at the shoulders. Inside the sweatshirt his chest moved in time with his hands.
The boy was still dressed for his father’s wedding. He stood in the doorway and looked in, unseen. He sipped from his wineglass and divided the man into two halves of white. The man’s top half gripped and pounded at the old woman through the sheet, his bottom half shifted its weight from one large leg to the other.
They were very large legs.
The man pressed down upon the old woman. Now and then he raised his hands from her back to clear away her smoke.
The old woman was looking at the television. It was not tuned to financial news. A black-and-white movie was on, grainy-looking, with the sound turned low. The boy waited for the old woman to scream again at the man. When she did, he said from the doorway, “Mother thanks you for the makeup.”
The old woman and the masseur both looked toward the door. The old woman could only turn her head. Pressing into the old woman, the masseur nodded at the boy.
The boy nodded back. “Hello, Hector,” he said.
“I’m Victor,” the man said.
The boy gave his face a slap. “Of course, you are,” he said. He put his hand in his trouser pocket and slouched in the doorway, elaborately.
“How was she?” the grandmother asked.
“Did you change your name?” the boy asked the man.
“How did she look?” the grandmother asked.
“Like she needed makeup,” the boy said. “Victor, tell me the truth, weren’t you Hector once?”
The grandmother said, “Flirt with Victor on your own time.”
The boy came into the room. He went to a table by the grandmother’s bed and filled his glass from the bottle that was set
on it, set in a bucket of ice. He looked across the room at the television.
“No market news?” the boy asked.
“It’s the weekend,” the grandmother said. “In case you haven’t noticed, it has been the weekend for two days. Nothing happens on weekends. Be a boy and fill my glass.”
The boy came across the room with the bottle. “She may not be coming home soon,” he said. “When I was there she was waiting for a doctor to come look at her eyes.”
“What’s wrong with her eyes?” the grandmother asked.
“It’s the lids,” the boy said. “She says she hates them. She says she’s been hating them for a while.”
“What do her lids have to do with anything?” the grandmother asked.
“She thinks they droop,” the boy said. “She wants to get them done.”
“What do you mean done?” the grandmother said.
The man gripped at the grandmother’s ribs. “He means lifted, don’t you?”
“Victor, please,” the old woman moaned. “Of course, he means lifted. Done always means lifted when you’re talking about eyes. What I want to know is what does she think she’s thinking, talking about getting her eyelids done at a time like this.”
The boy said, “Actually, Victor, yes, I do mean lifted. My mother means lifted. She thinks now’s a good time to get her eyelids lifted, since she’s already in the hospital. Victor, would you mind terribly if I called you Hector?”
The man broke from his work to look up at the boy. “You can call me anything you want,” he said.
“What does she think she can possibly be thinking?” the old woman said. “Where’s my wine?”
The boy filled the grandmother’s glass. He sat in a chair beside her. “When you think about it, Angel Pie, it’s not a bad idea. I mean, as Mother’s ideas go, a lift at this point is not entirely without merit.”
The grandmother reached for her wine. “It’s true,” she said, “her lids do droop.”
“Not really much,” he boy said.
“Enough,” the old woman said.
The boy said, “This is better champagne than they had at the wedding.”
“Oh,” the old woman said, “let’s don’t dwell on the wedding.”
The boy squinted at the television. “Who’s that woman?” he asked.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?” the grandmother asked. “Why are you squinting like that?”
“They’re burned,” the boy answered. “That can happen when you swim in boiling water.”
The man pressed down on the old woman. “I keep telling you, you keep that pool too hot,” he told her. “If it steams, it’s too hot, slows down circulation. Don’t I keep telling you that?”
The man pushed smoke away from his face.
“Yes, Victor, you keep telling me,” the old woman said. “But I like to look outside my window every morning and see that steam. I like to look down at that steam coming up and know every day that the water is hotter than the air, even if it doesn’t need to be, and even if it shouldn’t be. Every day that steam tells me that I’ve lived a long life and can afford to waste fuel. And that’s not because I’ve been lucky, Victor. It’s because I’ve been smart.”
The man pressed down on the old woman’s shoulder, and she screamed.
The boy moved closer to the television. “Who is this woman in the movie?” he asked.
The old woman said, “It’s Loretta Young.”
The man did not look up from his hands. He said, “It’s Irene Dunne.”
“Hector, I think you’re right,” the boy said. “I think Irene Dunne is who it is.” He took a sip. “Is this the one where they’re getting a divorce, and Irene Dunne keeps playing records all the time and thinks about Cary Grant and how happy they used to be, except they couldn’t have children, so they adopt one, and it dies?”
The man blew at the old woman’s smoke. “This is the one where they have an earthquake in Japan,” he said. “They just had it.”
“It’s the same movie then,” the boy said excitedly. “The one where she plays the records all the time has an earthquake in it somewhere. Except I think it’s China, Hector. She’ll start playing the records any minute.”
The boy filled his glass.
“Give me some,” the old woman said.
The boy emptied the bottle into the grandmother’s glass.
“There’s another bottle,” the grandmother said. “I did leave you one bottle.”
“Thank you,” the boy said. “I drank it.”
“All of it?” the grandmother shrieked. “You mean this is it? You mean this is all there is?”
“It would be,” the boy said. “But it’s not. I stole a bottle from the wedding.”
The grandmother reached down and touched the boy’s knee. “Good for you,” she said.
The boy watched the screen and saw a record spinning on an old Victrola. The actress lowered the needle. The boy could not hear the music, but he imagined it to be the kind that, years ago, must have coaxed audiences in theaters to cry.
“Look, Hector,” the boy said, “she’s playing our record.”
The man looked up just as the spinning record on screen dissolved to an image, people in a room.
“It’s Japan,” he said.
BEFORE HE WENT DOWNSTAIRS for more wine the boy told his grandmother about his mother.
“Actually, she didn’t look as bad as she could have,” he said. “Have you ever thought about doing it?”
For a moment, the old woman studied her glass. “This should have more fizz,” she said. “I did a long time ago, but at my age what would be the point? When you’re old as I am, the scars take forever to heal. And if I had my face lifted, what would I do with the rest of my body?”
The boy closed his eyes—the slow first half of a long unfinished blink. He had meant to ask her about what his mother had done, not what she was thinking about doing. “You’ll like Daddy’s champagne,” he said. “Daddy’s champagne is nothing but fizz.”
The boy turned his face toward the man and opened his eyes, finishing the blink. “Hector, will you join us? Will you have some wine?”
The man looked up from the grandmother’s back. He looked up from the sheet and up from his hands. He looked at the boy and did not answer.
“Go ahead, Victor,” the old woman said.
The man nodded at the boy. “What about you?” he asked the boy. “Would you ever do it?”
The boy considered. “I might do it in small doses,” he said, “a bit at a time, so no one could tell. I would not do it all at once.”
“What would be the point of that?” the old woman asked. “The whole point is so people can tell.”
The boy looked up at the man and saw that the man was looking at him.
“You’ll do it when the time comes,” the old woman said.
The boy did not say to his grandmother that there are people who do not do things every time the time comes. He was looking at the man when he said, “After I bring up the wine, I’m going to get out of these clothes and go for a swim.”
The old woman said, “You know, you really don’t look so bad in that getup.”
“But I’ve had it on all day.”
He left the room. On the stairs he stopped where he could see down the entire length of the house, through the dining room window and out into the garden. The light was on the jade trees. They cast blurred forms on the white umbrellas that were set into bleached-wood tables along the far side of the pool. He stood on the stairs looking out through the steam and remembered that his father had stopped him once from swallowing a jade leaf, reaching in with his hand to take it from his mouth. When he had asked his father then if jade trees can kill, his father had answered that one leaf cannot, but that you can get too much of anything. Even water, his father had told him, has some poison in it and will kill you if you drink enough to let its poison work.
The boy looked down, out into the garden. There was still too much
steam, but from where he stood it looked already as though there might be less of it. He was still on the stairs when he heard his grandmother quietly telling the man that when he was finished with his work, if he wanted, he was welcome to a swim.
AYOR
David Leavitt
THE SUMMER I TURNED NINETEEN I took a short, sad, circular trip to the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, in Tennessee, with a friend I was in love with, or would have been in love with, had I known more about him or about myself. His name was Craig Rosen, and he lived down the hall from me freshman year in college. When he suggested taking the trip as a way of passing the interval between the end of school and the beginning of our summer jobs, I said yes in a second. Craig was good-looking, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and I desperately wanted to see him naked. I didn’t know much about him except that he was an Economics major, and sang in the glee club, and spent most of his time with a fellow glee-clubber, a thin-mouthed Japanese girl named Barbara Love. Nevertheless I had certain suspicions, not to mention a rabid eagerness to be seduced which, in the end, was never satisfied. For five nights Craig and I shared a bed in that curry-smelling motel in Gatlinburg, and for five nights we never touched each other—a fact which, in all the years since, we have not talked about once. There is a code which applies here, I think, having to do with friendship and sex and their exclusivity, a code at least as mysterious and hermetic as the code of the Spartacus Guide which led us through Europe a few summers later. But that is jumping ahead of things.
We were, then, nineteen, East Coast college boys, Jews, homosexuals (though this we hadn’t admitted). Gatlinburg, Tennessee, on the fringe of the park, with its sticky candy shops, its Born Again bookstores and hillbilly hayrides, may seem an unlikely place for us to have confronted (as we never did, it turned out) or shared secret sexuality. But I had grown up in amusement parks, glorying in the smell of diesel fuel and cotton candy, in roller coasters, in the wildness of rides which whirled at high speeds, round and round. I had had my first inkling of erotic feeling on those rides, when I was eleven, when the heavy artificial wind of a machine called a Lobster pushed my best friend Eric’s body into mine, so that I couldn’t breathe. Gatlinburg, with Craig, was full of that same erotic heat, that camaraderie of boys which seems always on the verge of dissolving into lust. Like children released from the better advice of our parents, we ate only the junk food which was on sale everywhere in the town—candied apples, wheels of fried dough swirling in vats of grease, gargantuan hamburgers and cheeseburgers. Craig shaved in his underwear, like a man in a television commercial, something I imagined to be a gesture of sexual display. Soon, I hoped, his eyes would meet mine, he would turn away from the mirror in the bathroom, his face still half-covered with shaving cream, and begin walking toward me. But it never happened. Why? I wondered each night, curled into my half of the bedsheets, far away from Craig. It would have been so easy for him to have done me that favor, I thought, and liberated me from my crabbed, frightened little body. And though I have come up, over the years, with many elaborate psychological explanations for why Craig and I didn’t sleep together in Gatlinburg, only recently have I been able to admit the simple truth: we didn’t sleep together because Craig didn’t want to; to put it flatly, he wasn’t in the least attracted to my body. I did not know it yet, but even at nineteen he had already had hundreds of men, including a famous pom star. Sex—for me a quaking, romantic, nearly unimaginable dream— was for him an athletic exercise in alleviating boredom. It was—and this, I think, is the key—a way of determining self-worth; he wanted only the most beautiful, most perfect men not in order to possess them, but because their interest in him, their lust for him, confirmed that he was part of their elite. It was a matter of class, pure and simple; like his father before him, he wanted into a country club. And though it probably gratified him, on some mean level, to see his preening self reflected in my burning eyes in the bathroom mirror, sleeping with me not only wouldn’t have gained him any points, it probably would have lost him some.
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