We heard the commotion at the front door. We ignored it until the knocking shifted from the front to the glass doors onto the patio. There was a thud, then the high sparkle of glass shattering. I rushed out, naked, and saw the man from the bar, the man who had laughed with his hand in August’s belt.
“No,” he said, looking around me to find August. He held out his hands, a gesture of supplication. Blood rilled onto the floor. Blood pooled in the crooks of his arms, glittering here and there with bits of glass. I walked forward to help him. He swung at me, his fist only half closed, because of the glass. Blood curved from his arms across me like a red sash as he swung. He said “No,” again, stumbling as he saw the blood, the shock glazing his eyes. I said, “Let me help you.”
He swung again, weakly, the blood-swath dropping on the rug at his feet. I was afraid he was dying. I jumped, hit him twice. He slumped to the floor.
August stood at the end of the hall with a blanket gathered in front of himself. It was too dark to see the expression on his face. I was angry because he stood there while I fought his fight, but angry too as if I had seen in his indifference to the cut man the end of us.
Goddammit, I said.
August dropped the blanket and picked up the phone. The cut man was nearly unconscious, but he reached out and touched August’s ankle as he dialed. I would have hated had August pulled away, and he didn’t. The man’s voice grew strange. I thought he was dying.
August misdialed twice before he finally snapped on the light. Wind blew through the shattered patio door, billowing the curtain over red splatters on the rug and wall. I vised the man’s upper arms, trying to staunch the blood. I was drenched with it, and an observer would not know who was the wounded one. One arm seemed to be clotting all right, so I freed one hand to pick the larger slivers of glass out, as each time he moved they dug in deeper. August brought towels and bedclothes to press on the wounds, then dressed and went to wait out front for the ambulance. My feet and knees opened on the glass, and the man and I bled together into the rug. When they arrived, the medics appeared not to notice I was stark naked. Curious lights burned in neighboring apartments by then, and whatever watchers there were saw me hold the door for the stretcher, bloody and bare to the starlight.
August wore a speckle of blood across his chest from one of the man’s swings. I stood scarlet from breast-bone down. We stepped into the shower. Ruby water whirled for a moment at our ankles. All the towels were soaked with blood, so we dried each other with the bathroom curtains.
We returned to the rumpled bed, took up where we left off. During a lull I said, “Who was he?”
“Who?”
“That guy.”
Silence in darkness for a moment. August said he didn’t know his name. He began to laugh.
SOME NIGHTS ARE FOR DANCING. I wear what I can sweat in without looking too gross: red T-shirt, denims, leather flight jacket against the chill, and because it makes me feel tough and sexy. I go out singing. I turn my collar to the night. Leather. A bulwark.
I love love, the heat, the hunt, the rough-and-tumble. I smile at anyone who smiles at me. Strangers offer me money. No one knows if I am a hustler or not, not the cops, not even August sometimes, I am so full of love. Some nights I am so beautiful you have to be drunk to talk to me. But I am furthermore in love, a thing altogether different and better. It is like a fruit both bitter and sweet, so you can’t tell whether you like it, but you keep biting, harder, deeper. August likes when I am in heat. All homage and seduction returns to him at last, whom alone I love.
Thursday nights at the Bunkhouse: hotter than other week nights, mellower than weekends when the queens and hustlers and golden-agers totter in to try their luck. Sometimes it’s harsh and sour, the queens in the blacklight spitting “girl” this and “Mary” that until the soul goes to sleep. Sometimes fights break out, the opposites so drunk they don’t know where they’ve been hit, nor by whom. They flail in the dim, connecting, striking wild, in fury whipping short bright knives from their boots. But mostly, it’s glad and innocent. Men sit with their elbows on the bar, laughing. Whores come off Warren Street to warm up or throw the cops from the scent. Glum machos yearn in the comers, pin-ball lights glinting from their studs.
I come early to talk with my friends. I keep my back to the door so August can make an entrance. I know when he enters from the hiss of welcome ascending from the queens. They adored him first, look on me with a sense of bemusement, like court ladies thrown over for a goatherd. I pretend to notice nothing. I don’t turn to the door. I move my finger along the mist of my glass. August makes his way toward me. The crowd parts, closes back. He presses his chest against my back.
August wears costumes sometimes, bringing it off even at the borders of absurdity. Tonight it’s Gucci cowboy: high boots, stetson, silk shirt ruffled and open Byronically to his waist. CD he says. I turn and kiss him. He’s been drinking. I like the smell of beer on his breath; it’s sexy. I’ve nagged him out of the habit of street make-up, but tonight a dab of mascara around his eyes has smeared in sweat or tears. The cloudy dark makes his eyes supernaturally bright in the bar light, makes his body seem spent and haggard in comparison. I suppose that’s sexy to me too. Once again it is the first night. Always. I hold him and the room is reduced to two. If I were a metaphysical poet I would tie us in a true love’s-knot; I’d refine us to an alloy, electrum, gold and silver, the incorruptible and the precious corruption. I’d sing of a Silver Age, whose only grief is time.
AUGUST FEARED ME SOMETIMES. I was violent. I was more than I appeared to be. The gentlemen he was used to went gently behind their magnificent and magnifying exteriors. He lacked the talent to be either steadfast or cruel. He lacked the power to either lose or to seize control. Those powers in me dismayed him. I took the power and used it, always thinking it was what he wanted. My greatest power over him I didn’t understand then, but exercised nevertheless: the power of my uncertainty, that looked to the world like indifference. Did we argue? I would win by turning away. I could seduce him with a change of stance at the bar rail, he followed me with blazing eyes. I hurt him, used him, worked his terror of the clock. He could have used a hundred weapons against me had he ever tried. I would have shown him what they were. I would have put them in his hand.
If I had my way it would still be Thursday night, I tilting my head back from his chest to see his eyes glitter in the dark, hand intertwined with hand so I did not know which was mine, before a word was said between us, all the world balanced between one delight and the thousand uncertainties. They say Eden fades. I say it is stolen.
He says “Dance?” and we trot to the floor. We circle, getting used to the music, deciding how our bodies move tonight. The jock sees me and through the seamless shimmer of disco blasts old-time thunder-rock, green, salty, a beat like the falling of an ace. I kick the floor so you can hear it over the music. THUM-pa THUM-pa. When we get cooking the other dancers stop, draw to the sides, cheer in rhythm go go go, shaking their fists at the ceiling. The medallion, the moon of silver leaps on his chest. I close my eyes to dance. He scans the room, to watch them watching. You watch him dance but it’s me you want to dance with. Together we are a unity, a sphere, a diamond rough and brilliant in the bar light. Nobody is like us.
I come with August tugging my arm, pulling me back toward the bar. We glitter with sweat, August’s black hair plastered to his temples. I jam my fingers into what I hope is my glass for an ice cube. August moves against me, heat at the places where we touch. And there I stand, sucking ice, thinking how beautiful I am, we are, probing the room to see if there is anybody like us, and there isn’t. I could turn where I stand and kiss the hollow of his throat and that would be the end of wanting.
One of the queens puts the moves on me. I play macho monosyllable, because they love that. August hears every word. The queen says how handsome I am, what a dancer. She leans in on her spikes and hisses, “But get rid of that one, sweetie. We’re, how do you say?, over
the hill. I mean, can we talk? We’re talking Medicare.” She holds her rhinestones to her mouth as though astonished by her own boldness. I laugh, thinking August will think it’s funny too. But he shakes behind his luminous eyes. August admits to ten years older than I. I think it’s more, but it has never mattered. I see, for the first time, horror in a human face. I say,
“Look, don’t take that old queen seriously.”
“Why not?” my love answers. “You do.”
I sprint home. I pretend to be angry, but the stars are broad as platters, the nighthawks airy above the roofs, and I run in exultation. I hear his voice behind me, calling my name. I run on, knowing he can never catch me.
Each time it was I who turned my back, maybe expecting him to, maybe wanting to strike first. I said, “Leave me in peace,” wanting not peace but a sweeter turmoil.
And tonight I sit home saying Christ forgive me over and over, not knowing where August is, nor how to say it to him.
I ASK AUGUST WHAT IT WAS LIKE to love me. He says, “Like metal, somehow, beaten at a forge and drawn out.”
“Gold?”
“No, silver, something corruptible. An age of silver.”
I thought time would pass quickly to lovers, but our days were heavy—golden I said, though he would not—slow, endless. Good endless, light folding into light until you wondered how you had acquired such a store of grace. I ask him again at the end of the day, “How does it feel to love me?” I want to know. He says, “Weariness, CD, it makes me weary. Let’s go to sleep.”
“That’s worse than the age of silver.”
August says nothing. I vow to stay awake to watch him sleep, but I sleep first, he holding me from behind, his face buried in the back of my head so he may read my dream.
August says he knew me from before, at the bars or someplace, but I don’t think so. Neither of us possesses the gift of unobtrusiveness. But I know what he means. Life seems filled with him in retrospect.
I AM WALKING AT SEA’S EDGE. There’s a man in the water, bent, looking at something in the wavelets at his feet. I approach. He welcomes me with his hand briefly on the back of my neck. He puts his fingers to his lips in a hush gesture and points to the water. There are miraculous white birds no bigger than my hand. They nest underwater, breathing that green like fish. I have never seen such birds again, but the man is August.
I am very small and lost in a sea of grass. If I were six inches taller perhaps I could see over. The grass is beautiful, silvery green, but I am not in the mood to adore it. I want to cry, but as that seems purposeless, I walk forward, parting the silver barrier with my hands. Over the familiar meadow smell I catch a different scent, perfume, exotic, like a broken spice tree. I follow it. I come to an open space in the grass, a circle trampled down by dancing. I see the dancer. He is very7 beautiful. He motions me to come dance with him. I enter a cloud of spice.
A midnight Dancer, a wild god, dances through my comer of the forest. I want to go with him. I say, “Wait, I cannot find my friend. I can’t find August.” The god laughs and dances on. I have time to join or time to wait. I must decide.
The man who crashed through August’s door sits beside me in the Bunkhouse. He’s healed, but for scars like whip marks on his arms and under his right ear. I think there is going to be a scene, but he doesn’t recognize me.
“August has a lover,” he says.
“Do I know August?” I reply, overdoing it.
He shrugs. My experiences are immaterial. He has a story to tell. “A hustler,” he says. “His new lover is a hustler. Somebody said anyway.”
“What’s he like?”
“Mean. You know. He cut me like this.”
I nodded. Oh, I knew. The man drank a little of his drink, then moved down a few stools and said to his new neighbor, “August has a lover.”
I ASK MYSELF, “What do I need from August?” The answer is, nothing. It is the answer I want. How wonderful it is to love for nothing at all. I would tell August, but I cannot say it right, cannot say it so he would think it a triumph rather than a concession.
WARREN STREET WELCOMED US with open arms. When we walked into the Bunkerhouse the disc jockey put on a foot-stomping country rock that he knew I favored. Even if we were tired or not in the mood, we’d dance a little, like visiting royalty honoring a local custom, the men shouting go go go, fists raised in the air. At Ryan’s the jock slipped on the satiny disco that made August shine. At Cissy’s, where there was no dancing and one went to talk, they brought my vodka tonic and August his almondy concoction without being asked. At Cissy’s we sat in a booth with a green flowered glass shade over the light. That was courageous of August, for green was his worst color.
August has begun to call me College Boy. I retaliate with “Gramps,” but my heart isn’t in it. Each time one of his old friends calls him “girl” or “she” I feel my hand clench under the table.
SOME LOVERS SPEAK OF IDENTITY so great that they know what the other will say or do, know his moods and desires as though one mind drove all their limbs. Not so for August and CD. We are a far country. We are perpetual surprise, confusion, exhaustion. Night after night I touch his skin, bury my face in the black-silver of his hair, kiss the body as it sleeps. Along its shoulders, throat, wherever I can go without jostling its sleep. And still I do not understand. I wake to find August’s eyes staring into mine, rapt and uncomprehending, steady as a cat’s. We follow each other to a dead bright end. We hurt and enflame each other. It is always the first night.
I WATCH ONE OF MY SCHOOL FRIENDS as we shoot baskets in the gym. He looks goofy and happy in his New York State Fair T-shirt, sweat plastering hair to his forehead. Not pretty like the boys at the bar, I guess. He’ll be bald before he’s thirty. A little gut, although only someone like me would notice. When he passes the reflecting windows of the press box he doesn’t look to see himself, the way I would, the way we all do. He doesn’t care. Everybody he wants to love him already does. He sees me watching him and shouts, “Heads up,” bulleting the ball to me as though that’s what I wanted. I feel the sting on my hands. I launch into the air too far from the basket, hot-dogging to keep my thoughts going for a second, to compare his simplicity, his wholeness, his sweet unconsciousness to August and to me. We come off second best.
The ball drops through the hoop without touching anything. He whallops my back and whoops Goddam.
I realized at that instant that if I did not love August I wouldn’t like him very much. The thought horrifies me; like adultery, but without even the candor of a deed. My friend beat me by seven baskets and told me to get my mind on my game. But I ran downtown to buy August a gift, to make up for the horror of an abandonment he never knew he had undergone.
To give it, I invited him formally to supper at Phoebe’s Garden Cafe, where the waiters wear tight green T-shirts and know the dirt. At Phoebe’s you sit in a glass terrace and watch the Genesee Street derelicts puke into the gutter. You peer at fellow diners around palms, and cheekboney women sailing in from the theater in their opals. Phoebe’s was already a concession on my part, for the worst of August’s old coterie haunted it, smoking clove cigarettes and dishing in their sibilants so the sound from their tables was an everlasting low hiss. August warned the queens who fluttered over to dish that I would not be in the mood, his mouth pressed to their ears as though I were a child so easily to be patronized. Like a great lady holding court, I would think with momentary revulsion. August never sent them away, never stopped them when they called me she or Arty—Arty being R. T., which meant “rough trade”—but nodded at their advice and complaint like a prince at the counsel of courtiers he knows to be at once monsters and necessities. If I didn’t love him, would I like him? High faggotry was ever in him a potential, and that was repellent to me. Perhaps part of my love was the belief that I could keep him from that, that I could keep him a man. I felt the gift in my pocket. It would be atonement.
August can’t resist a little dishing with the theat
er wardrobe mistress. He pats my hand and says, “You don’t mind.” That one time I don’t. While he’s gone I set a package beside his water glass. It’s a silver medallion on a silver chain. Silver, his corruptible metal. I had it inscribed and wrapped in a sea-blue box. When he returns, the blue box waits.
He isn’t sure what to do. “CD,” he says. “Should I open it?” “Sure.”
He unwraps. I don’t know why I haven’t done this before, his face shines so with expectancy and surprise. He lifts out the medallion, the silver glittering on the tablecloth.
“It’s in Latin,” he says.
“Yes.”
He leans over so I can put the chain around his neck. “It’s beautiful, CD. I’ll never take it off.”
I’m glad he chose to let the inscription go untranslated. It’s not something to be spoken over Cointreau and amaretto cookies. Silver, corruptible, but rub it in a thousand years. It shines again. I’ll know him. I’ll whisper the words and we’ll wake. The inscription is what God said to Saint Teresa as He stabbed her over and over with the barb of His love. He said, Nisi coelum creassem ob te solam crearem. “If I hadn’t already created heaven, I would create it for you alone.”
LIFE SUCKS,
OR ERNEST HEMINGWAY NEVER SLEPT HERE
Tim Barrus
ERNEST HEMINGWAY LIVED DIRECTLY ACROSS the street from my island house. If I look out my front window, I can see the inevitable line of polyestered festive souls—tourists—waiting their turn for the guided tour of Hemingway’s old digs. The tour costs three bucks. The inside of Ernest Hemingway’s house is fascinating because what it gives you is a glimpse of what existed inside Ernest Hemingway’s semi-manic more than slightly remorseful head. Literary necrophilia. Hemingway had a thing for felines, and the neighborhood still crawls with the arrogant descendants of the alley cats Hemingway brought here years ago. At last count the Hemingway house itself had over ninety cats. For an island only twelve city blocks long ninety felines in any one place is ninety too many.
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