Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  When he scratched my back, rocking there in the chair until I could fall asleep, his fingers like an unsettled animal would lightly brush my skin, his thoughts and desires somewhere else, sleeping perhaps, the rounded, manicured nails never too sharp or too deep, though sometimes his attention would leave entirely and if I did not wake him his hand, skipping back again and again like a song trapped in a broken record, would grate deeper and deeper into irritation. If some curve or patch of skin, however, needed him intensely, some itch gaping to be scratched, I might lightly moan or arch my back as his fingers trailed by accidently—never tell him outright, though, never correct or direct him there, because once he was awakened, that playful animal brushing against me would be gone, and his hand, too quick and hard now, though still warm and polished and powerful, would return from its small and innocent dream self, an untamed creature suddenly impatient, trapped beneath the cotton of my shirt, anxious to wriggle out and be free.

  Once when he came home there seemed to be a sheep or a lamb bleating inside his coat. He shrugged at our surprise, said he couldn’t hear it. “Yes!” we said, “there it is again!” As he turned upstairs the sheep bleated again, and we chased after him, squealing already with the knowledge that somewhere, sometime soon he would divulge his wonderful secret. Together with us he looked under the pillows in his bedroom (where we had heard the sheep again), we looked among the tasseled shoes and dark suits in his closet, where the animal seemed to have fled, we gave up during dinner and then heard it outside, when he had stepped out to the door to look there. Even when finally, before we went to bed, he took out that small box which if you turned it upside down would bleat like a sheep (and another time it would moo like a cow, and once it laughed hysterically within its velvet pouch—a laughing box, he called it), our delight was not diminished but neither, entirely, was our confusion. That box was too small to contain all his mystery. Along with us he had looked for those creatures and now, even when the answer had been revealed and was shown to be simple, the mystery remained: something we had searched for with him, that together, the next day or the next, we still might find.

  There were jokes, there were sight gags, there were long stories about people who never existed, which would end at last with either a funny answer or else an outrageous impossibility— shoes and sneakers grew from trees until they were the right size; snow snakes would reach up from the snow to bite our sleds as we raced headlong down the hill—at which point one of us would have to complain away our excitement and disbelief. Then he would smile, preserving the pleasure of his silence as we clung to him, climbed all over him, clamoring still to get inside somehow, inside his knowledge, inside his head, his embrace, all the time begging for the truth.

  But that was what he could not give; my father would not tell us the truth, much as he liked to teach us, much as he liked to show that behind every misspoken sentence of ours he knew the grammar, behind every equation he knew the math; indeed behind every game he played, checkers and hangman and tic-tac-toe, secretly he knew all the answers. “Brothers and sisters,” he would say, looking up from his newspaper to see if we were still waiting for his attention. We stopped our arguments, put down our forks and our glasses, ready for this familiar riddle we could never solve, we waited for him to continue. “Brothers and sisters, I have none,” he would say, smiling at his own conundrum. “But that man’s father”—and he would point across the table, close but not exactly to where I was sitting—“that man’s father, is my father’s son. Now who is that man?”

  IN NORTH JERSEY, where we lived among my mother’s family— cousins everywhere down the block, doors opening all over town like secret clubs—the neighborhoods were still called by the names of the farms they had displaced—Butterworth Fields, Linsley Acres, Franklin Orchard. The hills swelled up intimately to contain them, giving over, on their far sides, to farms as yet unsubsumed, open country of old orchards and wild meadows not yet plowed under into highways and condominiums. The road to where my father’s family still lived wound along those hills through farmlands and orchards toward the flat, sandy south of the state, finally cutting a straight ribbon through the low forest of the Pine Barrens, which at that time separated Philadelphia from Atlantic City. There were untillable marshes, dense, half brown but still thriving stands of pine and scrub oak, and dark, uncharted canals winding toward the sea, small rivers visible sometimes, unexpectedly, always surprisingly, from the road as the car sped through. Each time, I always promised myself, I would ask my father to stop there with me someday in the future, when we could camp out in the Pine Barrens together, and paddle quietly along those secret canals.

  When we sped past, however, we were always late, my father driving quickly and nervously toward his family home, resentful usually because my mother had taken too much time dressing us, cleaning us, reminding us to go to the bathroom, spreading, cutting and wrapping sandwiches for the two-hour trip, packing our clothes, her clothes and my father’s clothes, and finally standing beside the dog until he too had relieved himself. I never found the right moment to ask my father, he never got the idea himself to take me camping in that place, and now the marsh has been drained, the trees uprooted, and the canals, if they still flow along somewhere, must run beneath concrete and macadam, unknown and unperceived by the children of modem neighborhoods.

  Every year, for the Fourth of July, we hurried south, already late for the family picnic, which had grown to such proportions that all over the state even the family of family was invited, expected to come, missed and cajoled later if one year they were absent, and when present were seated by intricate priorities at metal tables unfolded in the large mown field behind the house. All my father’s family came, rich cousins from Philadelphia, poor cousins from Atlantic City, unrelated people from as far south as Maryland. From the North, where the accents tilted toward New York rather than Philadelphia, there was only us—my mother’s family. Her parents came as well, and her brother and sister too packed up their own families for the morning’s drive; “a long way to go for a hot dog,” my brother complained, and every year we quoted him. There is still no easy way to get there, although now that old road, patched and potholed and transforming for a stoplight or two into small town main streets, has been cut up by the highways, shadowed by overpasses and stripped of its scenery. By Madison, the town just beyond our own, bananas had emerged from my mother’s bag; by Princeton there were no more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches left, and by New Brunswick we were racing toward the nearest gas station, my mother, in her modest whisper, urging my father’s weight on the pedal. When eventually we emerged from the Pine Barrens, there were peach orchards, scrubby blueberry farms, wild azalea hedges, and we knew we were close. “When will we get there?” one of us always asked, not from petulance or impatience, but for the half-desired frustration elicited by my father’s annual response: “Just as soon as we finish this poem. But you can’t interrupt me.” And he would clear his throat several times before beginning:

  Jack in the beanstalk, itty-bitty boo,

  I love Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, Grandpa,

  Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Debbie, Uncle Marty …

  and the list would continue, including our fish, our hamsters, and the iguana my father had been hand-feeding for years with mealworms, until one of us in the back would say, “Come on, Dad!” Then he would say we had interrupted, and we had to start all over, waiting a second time while again he cleared his throat. Finally, however, despite the whining and some real tears of frustration, old trees began to shade the road, reaching out from either side until they had closed the gap of summer sky, a rich canopy of moving green enclosing us, welcoming us into town. There, each time, with a final, satisfied, attentuated cadence, my father always just finished his list of the people we loved.

  Somewhere in this town, I always knew, I would find him. He had . grown up here, had fished and boated and planted gardens with his own father, had urinated in a patch of poison ivy and, to the howlin
g delight of his family, had infected his penis. He had been a schoolboy here; had spoken his bar mitzvah portion across the street in the synagogue his parents had built for the town’s few Jews; had kissed someone for the first time, no doubt; had studied, applied to the state university, and before leaving home seen his brother come back from the war missing two limbs—in a basket, the story went; it was that that killed the grandparents. I had never fished or boated or planted gardens with my father, but I watched him as he did these things alone, sometimes with us in attendance: cast into the surf with his heavy rod, the tip bending from the weight of squid and clam chunks, or plastic lures; hunt under rocks and logs and among muddy stream bottoms for salamanders and crayfish, or net tadpoles from the banks of a pond; pull up crabs from their trap at the bottom of a bay, leaning out over his reflection on the jumping surface of the water. I escaped once from a baseball game to come to him in his garden, just visible through the school fence at the end of the field. He did not look up from his planting, but neither did he quite ask me to leave, go back to the game, or continue home where I would be welcome. Silently he dusted his tomatoes, harvested his beans, pulled up a stone from the soft earth. Silently and alone he fed his iguana; trained the dog; identified constellations from a circular map of the sky.

  Still I knew the stories; my mother had told them, instilling us as best she could with a sense of his past, his personality, all that he must have possessed but could not share. By the time he was born his brothers had grown up; alone, he learned to catch frogs and keep rabbits, not to make up plays or argue the score of ballgames. He made up stories, but they were told to his dog, hunting woodchucks in the field. At his college play, when The Shadow was finally unmasked onstage, he appeared at an open window in a second Shadow costume, mystifying the audience, infuriating the cast. “Why?” we asked, delighted by his lonesome perversity, but he only shrugged, suppressing a smile.

  With him our questions went unanswered, until they were redirected to my mother. The imbalance was not in the least stable; naturally our curiosity drifted north, to where we ourselves were born and lived, where we saw every day the characters from my mother’s stories, if not in person then in the persons of their old houses, their old streets, or their children, grown up by that time with children of their own. And my mother had frustrations of her own; “Why does red mean stop, Dad?” I asked one day from the backseat, when both of them were sitting there, staring ahead. After a moment, in which there was no answer, I asked again. “Dad, why does red mean stop?” I thought he would make up an answer, a fantasy law of nature, or else chuckle deeply and slowly without turning around, saying as he often did, without explanation, “Only the Shadow knows!” But the next pause was as empty as the first, if denser with refusal. “Mom,” I asked, addressing her then instead, “Why does red mean stop?”

  “Ask your father!” she shouted, her face, as she turned around, by then red as the light. To this day that question remains unanswered.

  But as the car neared my father’s childhood home, he was full of information, turning around often while he drove to see our faces, pointing out the farm where he had learned to drive a tractor, the lake where he had fished and hunted turtles with his father, and where even still there were bicycle boats to rent which his father, he said, had invented, for the use of the County Park. It was a wonderful but natural thing, that one’s grandfather had invented something so widespread and famous as bicycle boats. Perhaps he really did invent them, as he sat on the high stool in his basement workshop, hiding from his wife’s card parties. Even today I am proud when I see a bicycle boat anywhere at all: on the lake at Como, at Lugano, in California, even in a picture of a great lake in Japan. Maybe this pride is deep and instinctual, wiser in fact than my more modest skepticism; maybe, in his way, loving what was necessary if not real, recreating by need and desire what was not available, my father was telling us the truth after all.

  “Hey.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Not that again.”

  “Where have you been?” I ask him, just to hear it.

  “Just looking around,” he says. “I think I saw your father. What are you doing?”

  “Just thinking about some things.”

  “Does it matter if no one’s listening?”

  “Someone was.”

  “But you didn’t know that.”

  I tell him, going too far, “I had my suspicions.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. I’m just saying things. I’m lonely.”

  “I’m here with you now.”

  “How do I know when you’ll go off again?”

  “Well,” he says—and I should appreciate the truth—“I don’t know that you can. But I’m here now. Isn’t that enough? How come you won’t answer? Come on, I want to hear more. Is that what you love about me, that I’m like your father?”

  “You’re nothing like my father,” I tell him, realizing already I am wrong.

  “But you wish I was.”

  “Maybe. No, you’re not at all. That’s why I love you.”

  “No,” he says, “I think I am. There’s something you want from us both.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well,” he says, putting his arm around me in a strange way, affected, comfortless. “That’s what I want to find out. That’s why I was looking for him too. Your father.”

  “You mean that guy in the car? Let’s go look at the stars.”

  “I am looking,” he says.

  “No, I mean, really look at them. Tonight they’re amazing.”

  “I guess they just look like stars to me. You always want me to see something I can’t.”

  “You can. You won’t.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t think I can.”

  “Ah ha! You see,” I tell him. “You’re nothing like him.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “You might be surprised.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  All of a sudden he is serious, and shakes my hand as if that will help me understand. “Maybe you want what you can’t have,” he says. “From both of us. Don’t you see what I mean?”

  I do not see.

  “What happened after you got there? To the picnic.”

  “Oh, that!” I say, quickly returning to what’s safe. As if time could go sideways, filling out always with alternatives instead of falling so swiftly down. “That’s where he disappears. The whole thing, really, is looking for him.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, then you take the dog,” I tell him, handing her over. “That way I know you’ll stay.”

  “I’m just going over there a minute. I’ll be right back.” .

  HE SAYS HE’LL BE BACK, but everyone thinks that. It makes going away easier, pretending every kiss is not the last kiss, that every desperate caress and kindness, as usual, will be returned again and again, uncountable. I don’t know for sure. We do need to stretch away sometimes, I’ve felt it myself, stretch and stretch until the fibers of our love strain into visibility, and we can feel secure again, give ourselves up to it, exercized, satisfied and peaceful. But it’s dangerous. The roots can pull up, and then you’re holding on to nothing, held back by nothing, still reaching toward some stiff breeze that’s as flippant as any, up close. Love can’t show itself, all flaccid and tangled. There seems, in fact, no connection, a kite flopping on the beach far away; and new roots take hold unexpectedly. The old thing, too long in the sand, rots.

  RUSHED AS WE ALWAYS WERE during our trip, there was never a rush once we had arrived. Inside the house was calm as if hardly anyone at all lived there, in its dark cool rooms, its silent hallways and wide creaking stairs. It might have been a mansion. Set just off the road behind a stand of old oaks, the front steps swept grandly up to a plantation veranda, transformed, by the time we ever saw it, into real rooms, with a desk, an Oriental rug, and a light that turned itself on at dusk, or when we made a shadow over i
t with our hands. My father would disappear with the luggage and the dog, my mother would continue in to find my grandparents, expecting us to follow, while we ourselves ran from treasured object to treasured object, forgetting to follow, forgetting even to notice our parents had gone. Instead there was a lava lamp, which boiled and then blossomed with orange wax; there was a telephone with a lighted dial on the bottom; a dancing ballerina trapped, with music, in a bottle; cigarette lighters in heavy golden metal in the shape of boats and dragons; and windows around three sides, louvers with gray metal handles which opened unexpected panels of glass all up and down the wall, so that even inside that room the world outside seemed very close.

  Downstairs was large and elegant, a world where adults were well dressed and quietly reading that attracted us very little with its crystal chandeliers, its thick Oriental rugs, its little tables too small to rely on in any way, except to hold the undiminishing plates of taffy and smokey candies wrapped in wax paper. Upstairs, however, high up beyond the wide but steep staircase that creaked too much ever to allow an escape, a part of my father still seemed to live, that part of him which I could never see and never know: his young self, perhaps, but also the person, young or old, who was scared sometimes, and excited, and happy, who collected stamps and studied for tests and looked in the mirror, hoping the future would be wonderful. There were three bedrooms for three sons, and although which of them lived where once upon a time was always ambiguous—they seemed to have moved around—one of the rooms was called my father’s, and it was there we slept, my brother and I. On his desk were still the tools from his childhood, old fountain pens and blotters and a crystal inkwell, [minted postcards, an ivory letter opener and a green cloisonne amp with a matching jar, where all the foreign stamps he had saved were still stuffed and unsorted, stamps from his brothers in the war, all around the Pacific and in Europe. The front bedrooms were bigger, looking onto the street and the traffic, but this small back bedroom for the youngest son looked onto trees and a grape arbor and the old field where his rabbit hutch still tottered on three rotting legs. It was here he had dreamed—of being a man, we thought, of having sons like us, of the bogeymen that might any minute come through the window, moaning in the wind, or when an airplane droned across the sky—and so we loved to be left there at night, waiting for those same dreams to come to us.