Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Where is he in this house, this memory of a house, already burned to the ground and replaced? At seven I sat at his desk trying to conjure him up, rolling the blotter pad again and again over papers by then twenty years dry. I sorted the stamps before stuffing them back in their jar. I tried to smell, in the old woolen blankets and cotton sheets and cedar drawers of his dresser, the child he had been, before the man he became wrapped a cloak around himself and disappeared. He had been, as a child, a magician. Once I found his magic bag in a chest in the attic, deep folds of crimson velvet, along with a dried-out violin from the days when my uncle still had both his arms. The magic bag that was my father’s made things disappear, silk handkerchiefs, watches, combs, a little red ball, or even a flower. Long after I had found it and he’d shown me how to use it, twisting the handle subtly while distracting people’s attention, he took it along to a birthday party. He had bought his friend a cheap, garish tie, and for a joke took it back a moment, cut it up, to everyone’s horror, into little bits, and dropped it into the bag where it should have transformed, come back together, or else disappeared entirely. When he dumped it out again the tie was still cut up. This was the joke. A good tie, a silk tie in conservative colors, was still wrapped up in his pocket. But although some of his friends laughed, not all of them laughed. This was the same year he left us.

  The first man I loved was a lawyer like my father, a curly-haired, handsome thirty year old at a time when for me thirty was still far away. He turned me over in the dark and without a word, showed me silently what he wanted, as if the admission would be fatal to speak, shameful at least, to himself anyway; as if, having desired him, I had already given up any further right to shape or share in the event. You want it, his silent rhythm and stony face seemed always to be saying, you got it. And his sweaty defeat as well, rolling off me afterwards with his back to me at once: you wanted it, shameless member of a shameful tribe, you got it. One thing he did say was that he did it with boys to get back at his own father. I returned the favor only once, and he lay there mute, motionless, buttocks clenched but guiltily willing, indeed needing someone to reciprocate at last in vengeance and in love. When I left him, to go home to college and the rest of my life, he cried. “How can you do this to me?” he asked, helping me to pack my suitcase. “Do what?” I asked him back, and through his tears he said, “Make a person love you, and then disappear.”

  Once, at a ballet opening where Jackie Onassis had brushed past me on her way to her box, we sat, by pure chance, just across the balcony from my father and his wife of that time. He sat in the last box, we sat nearby at the balcony comer, and until the intermission we kept staring back and forth into our similar eyes, smiling, unbelieving. There was my father, there was his son who looked like him, arm inextricably close however to another strong arm, irrefutably a man’s. What did my friend’s strength make me seem, I wondered, submitting to him even just by being smaller; what, to my father, did this very manly-looking man make me, since I loved him? And what, finally, would my father say, when eventually we found each other between acts, now that he had seen the flesh I loved, the eyes and lips and fingers and muscles that were not his, that loved me?

  THIS IS A STRANGE SUMMER here. All up and down the coast the dolphins are dying. Every day scientists come to wrap up a new corpse and haul it away in the back of a truck, while people in bathing suits stand around shaking their heads, mourning because dolphins have always been a sign of hope, and never cease with that sentient smile even when they are dead. South of the city, in New Jersey, the tides have washed up wave after wave of pure garbage, ruining most of the beaches. There was sewage in the water, and medical refuse, old hypodermic needles and bloody bandages and, evidently, worse. A garbage ship could not find a place to dump, and wandered the Atlantic for a month before returning here to bum its cargo. And just down the beach a huge old whale died in the surf, attracting thousands of sharks. They’ve buried it, and the beaches are open again, but the locals say it seeps out from the sand, what’s left of a carcass, and you don’t bury a whale onshore, and the sharks will be back.

  On this beach, we have our own problems. Everyone you meet has probably slept with someone who slept with someone who slept with someone who died. And what do you do with that? You can close yourself up, choose stoic patience over intimacy and risk. How much is it worth to you? Or you can find yourself a love, and because life is dear, risk everything for that love, through hurt and perseverance and frustration, even when the breezes blow attractively elsewhere, anywhere but here. Or else, until that love comes, you can step out on this beach looking for it, waiting for it, hoping for it, trying to be prudent but knowing that everything going on here, all the connections and pleasures and meetings and excitement and disappointment are just a few swift steps anyway from that unknowable darkness already lapping into high tide.

  “Hey there,” someone says. “What’re you doing?”

  “Looking at the stars,” I say.

  “I’m looking at you.”

  I nod, and smile, keep looking at the stars. He comes closer to me, puts his hand against my cheek.

  “How you doing, tonight?”

  “Fine,” I say.

  He puts his arm around me, bites my ear and then wets it with his tongue. I am still standing, and if asked what I am doing, would still say looking at the stars. He is maybe fifty-five, my father’s age, sufficiently handsome—at least at night—and confident with liquor. I let him almost kiss me, then pull away.

  “You want to go back there?” he says, nodding toward the dunes.

  I shake my head, but not emphatically enough, and he touches me until I touch him back. I can hear my dog nearby, the muted clanking of her tags. Of course I am being watched, that’s why I’m doing it. This is where my love has been; where I am now. Whose fault has it been? Mine? His? We are swept away sometimes, together, powerless.

  “I want to be with you. All night.”

  “I’m with a friend,” I say.

  “Can’t you tell your friend to go home?”

  “No, I promised him.”

  “You like this?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know you like this. I like this too. I could be with you all night, doing this.”

  He could, too, no doubt. But I am bored before we begin, because already I have been seen, this has been recorded between us, and I have reclaimed something, some pride perhaps, or perhaps now I have given it up. I have given something else up, too, larger, irretrievable, but don’t yet know what, being so much in the middle all the time, so blinded by the wind of now, now, now. Soon it is finished, and I walk away, back toward my life, my love, and my dog.

  “What were you doing?” he asks.

  “Same as you,” I say. A foolish retribution, I can see that already. A stupid way to say come back to me. But perhaps, given this, given his own insecurity, he will come back now. He calls me to him, my name a slight whine on his voice, perhaps a welcome beginning of regret. But all he asks is this:

  “Why did you leave me with the dog?”

  I wonder if I will ever hold him again? Out on the beach, where the stars light up the night sky but leave us in darkness, he is far away even so close to me, sitting just above the surf, the sand beneath us still warm from the day. How did we come to this? When did a few feet become so far, so impossible to traverse? We met as children, it seems now, conjured up and clinging to each other like gravity, a new home, a safe place we could finally trust because it would not crumble, or disappear. “I think,” I said that first time—and his eyes, panicked, said Must you leave me? “I think,” I continued, “we should see each other again. And again.” Now we are looking at each other, and what do we see? Two bodies merely small and vulnerable beneath all this expanse, hardly home to each other, hardly salvation, but still despite everything we are here, and perhaps the small gesture may sufficiently imply the rest, cupped hands holding water enough to drink. I move closer, a foot or two. I want to say I ho
pe the moon will rise, and show a path along the water, tempting but unreal. Will he know what I mean? Will he answer? Together still, at least until the tide comes in, we listen to the waves one more time, and say nothing.

  I remember one day long ago at another beach, I was lying with my father under the umbrella, surrounded by the whole family and a beachful of other families. My arm was thrown over his chest, while with my head I nuzzled for a hollow space on his shoulder. Sometime then, as I struggled to find the right spot, I realized what he must be feeling, why he had stiffened suddenly, his body unaccommodating and comfortless; it was too late for this, now, he must have decided; our time was over; I was too big. To the world, and to him then as well, we were unbelievably two men lying there like that, suspicious, shameless, shocking—no longer simply man and child, no more father and son.

  “WHERE IS HE?” WE ASKED, meaning our father, who had disappeared from his seat at the main table in the center of the field. Hamburgers and hot dogs were still sizzling on the grill, and an old uncle was speaking into the microphone. Still, from the children’s table we had noticed him leave, and before long we had to run inside after him. Sarah, my grandmother’s helper, was the only one we found. She shrugged in front of the sink, didn’t answer for a while, and finally said, “In the basement, most likely,” assuming, probably, we had meant our grandfather, who often disappeared down there. She could not understand him and had long ago stopped trying—with her he pretended he was deaf, ignoring questions, calls to dinner, phone calls in her presence, and after a while she must have believed him. We had often watched our grandfather there in the basement, sitting silently at his workbench among jars of nails and frightening saws and drills and coils of colorful wire, and everything from the house that had ever broken or rusted or come unglued: a cuckoo clock, the bird unwilling to come out; a silver pitcher without a handle; a picture frame with shattered glass. He had fled the picnic just before our father, as he had fled much of his married years, escaping the shame of not being loved. His wife tolerated him at best, though they never by that time voiced a quarrel. Her rich father was his boss, and the whole family, it seems, had been quickly unimpressed. A quiet man, a cheerful man with a round face and a mirthless grin, he had sat mostly silent through this family picnic as he did every meal, smiling when the sarcasms, even by his sons and wife, even in company, would imply his stupidity, his weakness, the embarrassment of his presence. Once, as a joke, his elder sons had stripped a turkey carcass of every scrap of meat, and for his dinner passed him only the dry pile of bones. He didn’t look up from his plate, didn’t look for ridicule or mocking or even more food, but in good faith merely set to work with his knife and fork, looking there still for sustenance.

  We knew the basement, what it looked like, what the staircase looked like in the somber light of its one exposed, transparent bulb. But we could never remember where it began, where the door was that led down to that quiet world, where our father and his own father had evidently taken refuge. And Sarah had turned back to the sink, finished most definitely with our questions. We did remember, however, my father’s constant answer whenever we asked him where the basement was. “Downstairs,” he would say, pointing down. “You get there through here.” He would lean over into a huge red Chinese vase standing against the wall, shiny and fragile and taller than either my brother or myself, on which fishermen had been enameled, casting their nets, and a small boat sailed along the horizon. We could only hold on to the white ceramic lip and stretch up to see the blackness contained inside that pot. The bottom was invisible to us, and so we believed my father somehow, although at its neck the vase was very narrow, and could not have held even a child in its wider but inaccessible belly. Still we knew that as children we could not understand everything, and because this was a mystery, and because we tried to peer down into it every time we passed it, hoping we had grown up enough finally to see, we never forgot. It was to this vase we wandered again now, knowing we still would not understand what my father had meant about getting to the basement this way, and that it was perhaps untrue, or half true, or true somehow only to him.

  My brother, somewhat taller, leaned over, and called down “Hello in there! Anybody home?” We heard the hum of an echo, enough of an answer to continue. “Come back!” I yelled, not tall enough to shout into the vase; there was no echo. So I shouted again, this time jumping up for an instant above that ceramic mouth, as if it were a water fountain up there, and I might reach the spigot just long enough for a sip. This time my own high voice made the vase hum for a second with life. “Dad!” we yelled, taking turns jumping up, because by now the thing itself was a game, a pleasure between us, and whether or not we believed he would hear us, we could not stop. The vase began to rock, toward me when it was my turn, away from me when it was my brother’s. “Dad!” during my brother’s turn became suddenly “Don’t!” but I was too excited by then to stop—he had let go and I would get two turns in a row. “Dad!” I yelled again, squealing by now with pleasure, and took my second turn before my brother could stop me. And as I yelled again, still trusting my weight against my brother’s, the vase suddenly slipped across the smooth oak of the floor, fell down on top of me, and like the eggshell of a chick just hatched, cracked and shattered around me into pieces big and small, liberated but useless.

  Later, when I was perhaps twelve instead of six, I had forgotten the beginning of this story, seeing our father leave the table, chasing after him inside, hunting for him, wondering where he had gone. I remembered only the shame, as I lay there, of the aftermath, the arrival first of my father and brother, and then other people, my mother and grandmother, who lifted me up but cried, and relatives who shook their heads in anger and regret, having hoped perhaps to inherit that perished vase someday themselves. I remembered most of all my father standing there, rubbing his own forehead, unaware that I had hurt myself, or that I’d been looking for him and now had found him, angry no doubt but also unwilling to admit, even through punishing me, that I was his. All he could say, grimacing and shaking his head, was “How?”

  By twelve I understood and even accepted this contempt, which might have been undeserved, I considered, but at least kept us connected, his raised lip a real response to something about me, even something unknowable I could not yet see.

  HE EMBRACED ME ONLY ONCE. To assuage some trouble between my parents we had taken a family trip, and in a tourist shop there was a trinket I could not resist, though I knew it was too foolish a thing to ask for—a tiny moonshine jug with a kernel of com inside. So I slipped it in my pocket, and my father, all the way down the aisle, must have seen me. Near the door he approached, smiling too widely, arms extended as though he wanted to hug me, but really he only wanted to catch me out. His embrace was too emphatic, too tight and exploratory, his hands reaching where they had never reached. In helpless agony I returned his caress, holding on, even knowing he would find on my person what he knew was there already, that guilt, and shame and love, though it was only the trinket he wanted.

  Still, somehow, he had been the first to arrive after that crash in which I fell to the floor, hit my head and shattered that priceless vase. As soon as I fell, I remembered at once where the real door to the basement was, revealed clearly now by my brother’s frantic steps afterwards against the wooden floors, through the hall, back into the kitchen, and into the dark pantry, where a door should not have been but was. Just across the wall I heard him open that door, race down the stairs, and suddenly stop. There was no conversation, no frantic report, even no movement that I could hear, and I could not imagine what my brother saw that made him suddenly stop, and not speak.

  Now I can. My father’s father is sitting on the high stool at his bench, pliers in hand, twisting wires round and round a nail. My own father sits on a bottom step silently watching him as long before he used to watch him, waiting for him to turn around and speak. My brother, halfway down, stops in his flight because neither the crash upstairs nor even the trou
bled pounding of his feet this close has distracted them, caused them even to look up, or turn, or speak, as if perhaps by concentrating harder, by not responding, by working just another minute they might still succeed at whatever invention it was, and for everything before them, broken, misused, or forgotten, it would not yet be too late.

  THE BOYS IN THE BARS

  Christopher Davis

  1

  WHILE WE CLUSTERED AROUND THE END of the bar, behind us, in the light August dusk, a thin man was screaming in our direction from across the street. I could not hear what he was saying through the window but I could hear the melodic rising and falling of his voice, punctuated with an occasional sudden roar, and I turned to watch, missing, for a few moments, the conversation around me. The man wore a long wool coat that reached his ankles and as he screamed he clutched the sides of his coat tightly and bent toward us.