by Robert Ferro
THE LIFESIZE DRAWING OF THE MONUMENT, so large, white and flat, seemed a little bizarre to begin with—a camel when you were expecting a horse—the artist’s idea of their ideas. Robin and Max made the obvious changes, widening the flutes, pruning the exuberant incised flowers that bordered the apse, lowering this, raising that. Over the apse, which contained the urn, just DESIR on the stone, with Marie’s name and dates to be on a separate footstone. No one suggested they have coffee.
Mary Kay was angry over John’s negative influence on her life. She said Jack was already overworked. She said how dare he assume Jack would take over for him while he discovered God—although he did and he had and Jack would. She could never have been so frank while Marie was alive. Without Marie the consequences of such a scene—John left before dinner—were greatly reduced. Everybody concerned thought, We’ve been through that, this is nothing; and pressed on. The next time they met, like Max and John after the fall of the House of Pancakes, it was as if nothing had happened.
Jack alternated between being timid at the prospect of running Mara Products, and confident he could do it. He said to Max, I have clients who run six companies. I’m forty-four; we run the world. Max said he thought Jack and John were inventing each other and that it had always been that way.
Mary Kay did not want, as Jack’s wife, to inherit Marie’s mantle. Robin and Penny, in any event, seemed to divide that between them. Robin assumed Marie’s moral authority in everyone’s eyes and Penny incorporated or, at least, let bloom an array of attitudes directly linked to her mother. They both also allowed themselves somehow to look more like her. Robin now occasionally wore lipstick, which Max had seldom seen her do since her marriage, and Penny suddenly revealed, through the simple act of applying a certain color nail polish, that she had her mother’s hands.
John now had two months to arrrange his affairs. For this to be accomplished he needed Jack, principally to run the company. After a lifetime of competition between them, it was more than a business deal they were working out, especially to Jack. On the phone to Max he said, Why am I doing this? My kids never see me as it is. But he knew this was it, and thought that afterward, perhaps, things would be different between him and his father.
In January John would begin a trial period of six months at St Mark’s; this to be followed by a year-long novitiate and the taking of his first vows, including poverty. After eighteen months he would begin three years of school in Toledo. Then he would be a monk, like a priest except he couldn’t say Mass.
MAX HAD BEEN TRYING FOR MONTHS to break it off with Clive, for reasons he did not completely understand. They saw each other every eight or ten days, sometimes less. Max said, You’re wasting your time with me. I already have a lover.
You’re what I want, Clive said. It was a wall that continually gave way, no matter where he pressed. At times he was angry that Clive enjoyed the luxury of strong emotions while he teetered between boredom and lust. He waited for an excuse to burn the place down and it came in the form of an unintentional sexual mistake on Clive’s part that caused Max considerable if momentary pain. This time he threw on his clothes and was out the door in a flash. The elevators would not arrive and rather than be caught in the hall he made a dizzying descent on the staircase, drilling downward as if deep into the ground. When Clive telephoned, Max said he didn’t want to hear from him for a month and hung up. This brief exchange was repeated several times. A few days later the doorbell rang and within the seconds it took for Max to answer it, Clive disappeared, leaving behind a red envelope tied with white string. Inside were joints, two sticks of incense, a small box of chocolates and a card.
I will wait the rest of the time. I only want to say I’m sorry. This is for your head. For the rest of you, it’s here when you want it.
Clive
It’s here when you want it was a generous statement with a hook in it. It meant take it or leave it. When the month was up he allowed himself to be invited out. They met in the web of a sexual vibration, nearest to a swoon, in which Max perceived himself and Clive as hanging from each other’s neck from a height, looking into each other’s eyes from the calm center of their swirling nerves; and Max said, This is it. This is what we can give to each other. Afterward, whenever he made some move to bolt, or threatened Clive with his attachment to Nick, it did not appear that Clive completely believed him.
It must be something, he said, or you wouldn’t bother with me. You wouldn’t keep coming around.
Why did he bother? He was not sure he understood the reasons, or would admit to all of them. It might begin with the fact that in retrospect he could chart his thirty-third and thirty-fourth years as the peak of his physical existence. Up to that point he had grown into himself as a matter of course. His sexuality, after a late and uncertain start, was nevertheless similar enough to that of his friends and acquaintances to show that, in this regard, he was something of an athlete, something of a free spirit. At thirty-five, toward the end of summer, he had awakened one morning to see his face as it would appear five years hence. This vision was gone by the time he splashed water on his face and brushed his teeth. At thirty-six and then thirty-seven, parts of the vision did not wash away. He now saw five years into his future every morning. He continually fought back an incipient softness in his muscles and flesh, like Capability Brown spotting weeds in some perfect garden. How dare they? He thought the difference lately was a flagging interest in this constant vigil.
His body had changed slowly and gradually from one thing into another in about five years, although you would have had to have photographic studies of both to perceive the subtle changes that had taken place. He was longer, thinner, as if he had been hoisted up an inch by the knobs of his collarbone. At the same time his shoulders had rolled forward slightly, ruining the drape of his chest. These disappointments, plus others, comprising a whole attitude of aging, troubled him even though no one noticed anything different or diminished about him. But if they did not see it, he did; and he thought that soon they would see it too.
Besides the agreeable convenience of his arrangement with Clive, he no longer enjoyed the pressures and risks of parading himself through bars and discos or up and down the hallways of bathhouses. The threat of disease was frightening, the free sexuality of unattached men a medical disaster. His desire for sex now lacked the simplicity, the unthinking force of his youth. It was accompanied by the worry that somehow, and rather as a matter of luck, if he struck out in some new direction it would not go well. Clive spared him that.
He had made some effort to explain the existing complications of his life. He wanted Clive to understand that when they were together it must all be different— simple, light, without thought or anxiety. Nothing mattered except the achievement of bliss. That his mother was dying, and then that she had died; that he hated working for a caterer, where everyone was in an earlier stage of his life but doing the same thing—preparing food and shoveling it down people’s throats; that the enormous difference between the.way he lived and the way his family lived weighed on him constantly; that his father was apparently going soft in the head over Jesus; that it felt as if he, Max, had lost not one parent but two; that the contortions of his father’s grief found expression in oppressive ways—secrecy, abandonment and retreat. He gave Clive these headlines, reporting them with considerable bias. But he could see that Clive had only awe for the loss of large amounts of money at the gambling tables, and respect for a rush to Jesus. To Clive, Mr Desir’s conflict was not obvious so much as pure. It was the measure of his grief. Family life was complicated. Max shouldn’t take so much of it on himself.
Beyond that, Jesus Himself had recently been wed to Santa Barbara Africanna, in a ceremony that culminated in the addition of a picture of the Sacred Heart—Christ with a slight scratch—to the little altar in Clive’s living room. The Black Madonna had needed a husband. This had occurred during the recent misunderstanding with Max. It was a double wedding; across the room, Freida had
become Mrs St Anthony. Where else but to the flesh or to the saints could those in sorrow retreat?
What Max couldn’t say to Clive or Nick was that sometimes, on the point of coming, the floor opened and the image of his mother flew up at him. Death, he thought. Not sexy, he thought. The image did not linger and he forgot it afterward. When it happened again he stopped and looked. A connection was to be made and he would examine the image and make it; then perhaps it wouldn’t return. She was dead. She was wearing a wig and a ruffled collar like Elizabeth I. The image seemed actual, like a theatrical production. Her eyes were closed. They remained closed. She did not suddenly sit upright and leer. Then it all fell back through the floor.
CLIVE TOOK HIM TO SEE A HAITIAN WOMAN in the West Nineties. They sat around a kitchen table—Clive, Max, the woman and her nephew. The woman spoke only patois. She poured whiskey on the floor. She gave Max a white candle to roll in his hands while he thought of the question, which anyway he was to keep to himself. She took up a few dozen playing cards, lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke between the cards. She lighted the candle, dripped wax on the table, stood the candle in the wax. She gave him the cards to cut, three times to the left with the left hand. Closed her eyes, which then rolled back under the lids. Slight tremors in the exposed, fruit-like upper arms. Opened her eyes, looked around, said Bon jour in a small high voice like a child’s and shook everyone’s hand.
She lay down the cards, first three, three more and three more.
l ’ a quelque choix. Deux hommes … Une bébé. The rest was lost.
The nephew translated. Geddé says there is nothing bad. He sees the man you are living with. You are bringing down his luck. The father. Your father is going somewhere?
Away, yes, Max confirmed.
He’ll be gone two months, but he’ll be back. Geddé is feeling sweet today. He likes you. He says deux femmes, two women protect you. He sees your spirit. You are a good spirit. Your luck is bad just now. You must take a good luck bath. You must think to yourself that things will get better. In the meantime, some delay. A woman in your family is going to have a baby.
CLIVE TOOK HIM HOME AND BATHED HIM three times according to the woman’s minute instructions, using a fresh bar of Ivory soap, starting with the hair and working downward. Max stood in the tub for this cleansing, presenting each section of his body in turn as Clive methodically, clinically scrubbed his way south; with, occasionally, an extra caress—the nurse in love—top to bottom, ending with ten little tugs on the toes, followed by a liberal dousing of Florida water and a sprinkling of fresh rose petals. He was not permitted to dry himself with a towel. In Haiti one was at this point supposed to walk naked along the beach to dry, preferably at sunset. Nor was he to bathe, shave, or have sex for three days. Clive put the soap, some of the petals and three pennies in a white plastic bag and tied it shut.
Drop this in the middle of an intersection on your way home, he said.
This seemed extreme. That’s a fifty dollar fine, Max informed him.
No one will see you. The streets make a cross. Clive crossed his arms.
Max dropped the bag out the window of the car at Sixty-fourth and Park, as if in the transept of an enormous church, far enough away from any of his friends, he hoped, to spare them his wretched luck. Anyone who happened to see the bag and pick it up would find the three pennies and know immediately that they had in their hands a bag of genuine spiritual shit. If, out of greed, they still kept the pennies, it was their problem.
Nick was dubious but sympathetic, and unaware of the more ceremonial aspects of the ritual. He said Max smelled like a slaughterhouse. On the third day Max threw himself into the shower as if over Victoria Falls. A film of dirt had become an itchy crust all over his body. His hair had turned to cardboard, yet was looking no worse, he imagined, than his tattered spirit. He often thought his hair reflected the exact condition of his innermost feelings. He reminded himself that Geddé had said he must think that things would now get better.
JOHN, ROBIN AND MAX MET ONE MORE TIME at National Monument and approved the lifesize drawing of the tombstone. The drawing was then mailed to a small quarry town in Vermont. Subsequently a block of white granite was cut and hewn to the specifications of the drawing, but then, through circumstances never made clear, the drawing was mislaid. It would be necessary for John and Max to fly to Vermont for the day, to fill in certain details all over again.
He dreaded the trip. Since the scene in the Pancake House he had seen John only with others and briefly. Now they must spend a full day together.
John picked him up one morning at seven—precisely on time as was strictly expected by both of them—in John’s current Cadillac, of a not completely pleasant green color. The enormous car, the ounce-of-gold ring Marie had given him, the watch, the fine suit, the hat slightly reduced in size like the vestigial remains of the forties—John wore all these things easily, even negligently, and today he was in every way the successful man recently widowered. He had come directly from early Mass at St Jude’s and his eyes were red. They pleaded with Max as he got into the car; behave, they said. Don’t give me any crap today. Let’s just do this properly for your mother.
They drove to the airport, left the car in the lot, and had breakfast after checking in. A man behind the counter in the coffee shop was one of the most beautiful Max had ever seen. It was implausible that such a being had not conquered films, Seventh Avenue, or the Sultan of Oman, but was instead breaking eggs at La Guardia Marine. John did not notice. The man smiled back at Max. His was a body reserved for the transubstantiation of visiting angels, with the same perfect evenness, proportion and symmetry found in the beautiful face; a body the angel occupies for an hour, when it becomes necessary to come to Earth, to feel, and in which, in that hour, is found the peak of perfect health and well-being.
The coffee shop was nearly empty. Two businessmen sat in the comer over Danish and the day’s campaign, one a short bald man explaining to the other the dazzling nuances of salesmanship that by nightfall would bring them to the attention of their superiors. While Max ate his breakfast John read the paper. The counterman had arranged the bacon on Max’s plate in the shape of a question mark. He would have liked to ask someone for confirmation of this. He ate the question. He heard the short bald man say … Got to keep hammering at them, day in and day out. John looked up from his newspaper and raised his eyebrows. A few minutes later they boarded a small turboprop through its tail and settled into its narrow sprung seats.
It was in fact too noisy for conversation. John finished the newspaper and napped. Max gazed out the window. They flew low and into clear weather, presently over a section of wooded land slashed here and there with roads. A number of lakes slid by. A long white thread of highway, perfectly straight, cut through the trees for miles and miles and in the middle of nowhere transformed itself into a drab little dirt road. He had flown infrequently enough to be subject still to the transcendental qualities of the experience. Looking out of the plane he saw momentarily through the windows of past flights, particularly his first trip to Europe—enormously high, cold tundras of clouds rolled on for thousands of miles, lit by a shifting, giant sun; or the descent, rather like today, into the miniaturized simplicity of a totally convincing model railroad town, perhaps twenty feet across, which he remembered from his friend Scott’s opulent playroom.
A Mr Reese met them at the tiny air terminal. He wore a wedding ring, was Max’s age but older. John sat in the front seat, Max in the back. John began the interview as soon as Mr Reese inserted the key in the ignition. Assistant to Mr Dowd; two children; twenty-two miles; Carter was making a mess; less than four hundred thousand people in all of Vermont; a little town with three working quarries; word one about the lost drawing.
The same few winded villagers ran about, reappearing periodically to wave at them as they drove by. The scenery had been cunningly faked. Reese announced the exact moment of the appearance of Mount Blaze, which rolled ponderously
onstage jiggling slightly. Did they ski? It was a comment on Mr Reese’s respect for the sport and the mountain that an answer in the negative from both of them caused him to lose heart completely and be silent the rest of the way.
Mr Dowd deeply regretted the inconvenience. He was paying someone six dollars an hour to do nothing but look for the lost drawing. The stone, as they knew, had already been cut. It was the details they needed—the apse, the incised flowers, the flutes, the lettering. He said the stone was presently on the other side of town, ready for carving. They would see it after lunch. In the meantime he could show them the base, the urn, and something of the factory.
He brought them into a cavernous room, piled nearly to the dusty skylight with blocks of marble and granite, and gave them each a white surgical mask. The din of a high-speed saw cutting through a wide slab of granite prevented Mr Dowd from pointing out that over the past hundred years, eighty-five of their employees had died of lung cancer. Marble lung, the union was calling it. The air was saturated with white dust that caught the light and made it part of a suspension well on its way to becoming a gray, luminous talc. The huge blocks of stone, surrounded by smaller, odder shapes in different colors, were without shadows in the diffuse, nacreous light. Momentarily the power saw ran down and the sound of running water filled the air, punctuated by the delicate chink of a chisel. Mr Dowd showed them the urn—a graceful, egglike shape in white granite, eighteen inches high—and the base, rough-hewn, eight feet long, three feet wide; another sort of coffin, Max thought, touching it. His mother seemed already to be in these objects.
