Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Last week Bradley brought me the recorder into which I’m dictating these remarks. He delivered it in his usual flat, hostile way. “Here, Morley, you can yap into the microphone and you won’t have to drive everybody crazy.” He deposited it on my lap, making his usual joke about Morley the Trombone. My last name is Trumbull and it’s a joke I don’t much appreciate. I scowl but he sits on the foot of my bed and pretends not to notice. Still, I can see the familiar expression on his face. Kind of tight and squinched up, as if he’d just swallowed a turd. I call it Bradley’s Hating Look. Yes, hate is the dominant emotion between us, though I like to think it’s more on his side than mine. And why shouldn’t we hate each other? Two old men who know too much. Who know all the necessary truths, in fact. Trust no one. Resist dependency. Love is a fiction. Violence lurks everywhere.

  And yet we go on—don’t ask me why. Bradley returns each day—he’s very spry, heredity, I guess—and sits on my bed. He tries, unsuccessfully, to disguise his squinched-up look and we discuss the future. Where we will live when I am discharged from the Happy Village. What kind of careers we are to have. How to manage the changes that lie ahead of us.

  I have a vague idea of what I want to do, but I don’t mention it to Bradley. Only trouble will come of that. It’s something I have to hold inside, allow to unfold in solitude. He’s too full of hate to let me have it happily.

  It has to do with the theater. Yes, the stage. I have felt faint stirrings at night, when I lie in my bed and listen to the snores of my roommate, old Harbison. I want to make something beautiful of my life. I want to make it an emblem of a better world. And one night I had a vision that convinced me my choice was right. I saw myself in tights, magenta tights that showed off my handsome legs. (No director would ever have to put me in boots!) As I paced the stage, handsome as a god, embracing a whole series of heroines—Juliet, Mary Stuart, Saint Joan, Millamant—the audience roared with admiration and delight. Morley Trumbull, the handsomest pair of legs in show business!

  How Bradley would scoff if he knew. (“It might help if you could act instead of showing off your calves.”) But of course, his real emotion would be jealousy. Watching him as he sits on the foot of my bed, talking about companionship, I know that his deepest fear is that I might succeed where he fails. He needs my ailments, my inadequacies. They make him feel strong.

  And yet, we go on. We both know there is no alternative. It will be Bradley and Morley for the foreseeable future, as if each of us were softened, molded, to receive the imprint of the other. And—to be honest—I need his weaknesses too. His impracticality, his impulsiveness, his ready anger. I want to be cool for both of us. And so we interlock at all levels, good and bad.

  My discharge has come through! I am to leave next Tuesday. Bradley helped engineer it—he has found us a little house in Pacific Acres—and the authorities believe I can manage. For the first time since my arrival, this place seems attractive, almost appealing. I can wake up, cat, walk, use the potty, sleep—all without the slightest effort. Everything is done for me. Why must I try for more? What is the urge that makes me light out for the greater world?

  The night before my departure I have a terrible dream, more hurtful than any I can remember. It was quite simple—merely a conversation with the grass. But it comes back to me, insisting, as I pack in the morning. “Listen,” the tiny green spears whisper as they wave in a long sweep, “listen.” And then a sigh runs along that emerald harp and they cry, “Every centimeter of new green costs us an agony beyond measure.” The message shudders along my spine as I snap my bag: The grass does not want to grow.

  By the time Bradley and I reach our new home, that message is forgotten, thank goodness. More important things come up— how we are to furnish this little house of weathered shakes, what rooms we will choose for this and that, who our neighbors are.

  He has begun to question me about my plans too. Several times I almost let it out—my secret dream of a career onstage. But each time I catch myself. It will come in time but I want to be sure, first. I don’t want Bradley destroying it from the very beginning.

  I’ve chosen an attic room for myself. Bradley sleeps on the second floor. There’s a skylight right over my bed, so I can see the clouds wandering—wisps of gauze that change color every hour. I love to lie flat and stare at them as they cross my little square of glass. I prefer that to reading or listening to the radio. Bradley, by the way, is a fierce reader. He buys several books a day—books on the most diverse, arcane subjects. I don’t believe he’ll get around to reading all of them for years.

  We’re a little awkward with each other. There seems to be so much to protect against—as if behind our sharp bones and scored flesh, contoured like relief maps, there were other, sharper dangers. We know too much. We were born that way. But sometimes, when the clouds above me are particularly soft, when I imagine I am in a glass-bottomed boat turned upside down on the sea of the sky, I wonder if we really know too much or if we merely know the wrong things.

  Sometimes at night I can hear Bradley turn over in his bed just below me. His groans strike me as the saddest human sound there is—the charges leveled by the flesh against gravity or God. One night, after hearing him groan, I got up and went downstairs to look at him. Even though I tiptoed, the stairs gave off little squeaks of alarm, like an emperor’s canaries. Something was pulling me down—something I hadn’t felt in the six months I’d been in the house. I stood over his bed for a long time. I saw a grim little man, peeled down to bone, his hands balled into angry fists by his head. But even as I stood there, something trembled in me. I felt—what? Not desire, exactly, but the hint of it. A brief image of how that skin will smooth out, the muscles expand, the endoskeleton flex into postures of grace. Another night, during my secret visit, he woke up. Perhaps he heard the stirring, the trembling, in me. “Are you spying on me, Morley?” he hissed, sitting up suddenly, eyes aflame. I left, murmuring apologies. I was guilty, confused. What did I really have in mind? Suddenly it seemed better to stay in my attic bedroom, not to explore our future, not to change. The grass does not want to grow.

  Bradley has slipped and broken a small bone in his ankle. He is immobilized in a cast for six weeks. This happened early in the second year of our life together. I had made my first attempt at a career—acting class with an excellent teacher downtown— and had to tell Bradley. He seemed to take it well, perhaps because he was launched on his own training as a librarian. It seemed both of us had found pursuits that satisfied us. But his fall, his broken bone, changed the status quo somewhat. We had remained as before—I in my attic scanning the sky, Bradley holed up in bed, staving off the world with tight fists and angry groans—but now I had to bestir myself. Carry food, help him to the bathroom, find new books and magazines.

  One day, bringing him a washcloth, I suggest I wash his back for him. Our eyes meet—his a delicate hazel, the color of aspens in fall—and I feel a slight gap in the hatred between us. A hint that better times, better feelings, might lie ahead. It seemed that we might expand our list of necessary truths—not yet, but soon. It was only an instant, and we didn’t talk about it, but as I washed his back (skin so white, tendons so long and fine), I thought that we did not have to keep faith with what we had learned so far.

  But after drying him, sensing his withdrawal—almost a physical shrinking of his skin under my fingertips—I put away the thought. Men hate more steadily than they love, I reminded myself. Why should Bradley and I be any different? Besides, hatred is as strong a bond as love. I shouldn’t complain, after all. Don’t we have each other’s company? Don’t we have this little nest under the visiting clouds? What more can I expect?

  My career has taken a turn for the better. John Hauser, director of the Neighborhood Thespis League, has offered me a nice part in an upcoming production. No magenta tights, alas, but a very nice scene with a dragon sister-in-law. John heard, or saw, something in my audition (I did a soliloquy from Richard II) that excited him enough to c
ast me. His instincts are very sound because Another Language couldn’t be more different from Shakespeare. Absolutely plain, no fancy language, no breastbeating or melodramatics.

  I give a lot of thought to breaking the news to Bradley. At last, after an especially delicious breakfast of sausage and French toast (his favorite), I let it drop casually. “John is thinking of casting me in Another Language.” Not much reaction—an encouraging sign—and I continue. “A small part, not too taxing.” A hypocritical sigh follows. “I guess I’ll find out whether I have it or not.”

  I know perfectly well that I have it in spades, but I’m not about to announce it to Bradley. My speech floats around the sunlit kitchen and lands on the sugar bowl like a fly. He nods and continues reading the newspaper. A little gust of relief goes through me, compounded with disgust. Why do we circle each other like this, stepping around our pettiness and egotism? Why don’t we take pride and pleasure in each other’s efforts?

  A useless thought. I choke it off by getting up and washing the dishes.

  Bradley came to the opening. I willed him out of my mind, blocking the thought that he was in the audience, as I went into my big scene with the monstrous sister-in-law and was rewarded with the best hand of the evening. If I had thought about Bradley I’d never have been able to get out a word. Of course, I am instantly at the height of my powers.

  He came to the green room afterwards. “You were good, Morley,” he said in his flattest, most uninflected voice. I looked at him. We had both changed in the years we had been living together but his alterations were suddenly very visible. His head was straighter, prouder, on the column of his neck, his chest was fuller and thicker, his hands were free of the speckles of age. Middle age was settling on him with a massive grace. But did he mean it when he said I was good? I peer into his eyes. No information there. A wave of guilt sweeps over me—quite unwarranted, I know. Has my success diminished Bradley? Have I failed him in some way? He seems to be scrutinizing me angrily. Will I ever know what goes on behind those stern features, those eyes the color of fallen aspen leaves?

  Two nights later I’m awakened suddenly. The moon is down. Bradley is standing over me. My first reaction is pleasure, but when I hear his voice I freeze. “Damn you, Morley, damn you.” He seems to be speaking automatically, from some blind, dead part of himself. I whisper something reassuring, try to plead with him—as if I’d done something wrong!—but my words are puny against the wall of his anger. And then I see the gun, blue-black in the haze of the descended moon. “Bradley!” I scramble back, clutching the blankets as if they were armor. But it isn’t physical fear that destroys me. No, it’s the realization that we are both weapons pointed at each other, living affronts, avengers. I hear a click. The safety is released. A vast passivity seizes me. So this is the way it ends.

  The next minute there’s a strangled sob and the sound of steel clattering. I see his form bending under the eaves as he moves off. He goes downstairs quickly. A moment later I retrieve the gun. It is heavy with hatred.

  The next morning Bradley comes down with a raging fever. The doctor can’t help, nor penicillin or mycin. He is in the grip of some vast, incoherent malady. For two weeks he lies on the couch in the living room. At last, pale and thin, he rallies.

  Bradley’s brain fever—that’s what it was—seems to have cleared the air. No mention of his visit to the attic. I’ve dropped the gun in the Bay. And then, to my surprise, a month after recovering, he urges me to audition for another part, a bigger one. “You can do it, Morley, you’re better than any of them.” I can hardly believe my ears. Or my eyes. Because Bradley is looking at me with something like humor. He puts out his hand and rubs my arm. Not long, not hard, but enough so that a new necessary truth pops into my head: the true lover says yes. An absurd notion, but it comes again in expanded form: the true lover says yes over the noisiness of your own no.

  Is our solitude, our shared loneliness, about to end? Is our hatred exhausted—a hatred bred in brittle bones and scored skins and disillusion like a grey sheet drawn over the face of the world? My arm still tingles where he rubbed me.

  Bradley stands up suddenly, as if he too were perturbed by this new possibility. He says he’s going out for a walk. I sit silently, my hand on my arm. I feel lost amid a sea of books. Our living room is awash in volumes, the detritus of Bradley’s endless curiosity. And then, picking up one of them, I realize what has fed my attraction to Bradley. It is that he knows things. Knows why the sea is salt, what keeps an airplane up and why computers remember things. Knows the names of the stars and the roadside weeds and how all that naming started. The power, the sexiness of knowledge! The realization bursts through the surface of my mind and I am aware of a new lustfulness. Not the placid desire, tinged with melancholy, which has filled me until now but something fiercer, more dangerous. I imagine Bradley’s body as it might look under my sky-window, crossed by shadows of clouds. The world, our customary world, seems to recede slightly. New bodies, new hopes.

  But old habits don’t die easily. After my next show, in which I get to wear tights, though of a somber black, I find Bradley’s sullenness has returned. Maybe we are moving too fast. Several nights I sneak down to his room and stand over him, only to find him watching me through slitted eyes. What do we want? What do we expect? A midnight visit to his bed no longer brings an accusation of spying, thank heavens, but there is still fear.

  And then one night, climbing back to my attic, I realize that we prefer the ill will, the discomfort, to newer and stranger feelings. To explore is to cast off, to be swept away. Who wouldn’t cling to shore? And so Bradley’s sullenness seems a signal of home, and I stop my midnight visits.

  But our evenings have taken on new excitement. Bradley talks to me of scientific marvels and the wonders of the ancient world and the habits of birds. I forget where I am, in the delight of that learned recital. And then, after a few months, my seducible heart starts to buzz again and I feel my veins sizzle and bulge. Once again I know there is no escape—not for Bradley, not for me. We are imprinted on each other, each visage the one behind the many. Bradley has told me about Plato and I think that clever Greek might have been right about the Ideal, though I can never think about it too long or I get muddled. I never had a head for abstractions. Detail is what I love—the whorl of a petal, the brush of an eyelash, the gleam of a saucer. If I stare into space too long my head fills up with the emptiness of great ideas. Still, as Bradley expounds Plato and I watch his face, fuller now, burgeoning with a hint of youthfulness, it seems that there is a grand design, a single plan, and that Plato knew it before anyone else.

  And then one night it happens. After a cast party for an Ibsen play. We’d been drinking but that wasn’t the real reason. In point of fact, we were ready.

  We got home after midnight, but instead of separating as usual we moved to the kitchen. I had just suggested a cup of tea when Bradley moved toward me. Suddenly he was hunkered down in front, his arms around my waist, his head on my lap. I touched his hair—no longer grey and crinkled but a soft chestnut glinting here and there with gold.

  And then it came to me how little we had said over the years. Silence had enclosed us, broken now and then by some trivial remark. Nothing important seemed worth the bother of putting into words. What difference would they make? How could they possibly bridge the gap between us? But now, with Bradley’s lustrous mop under my fingertips, I am possessed by the desire to talk, to tell him everything. How I love his nighttime lectures, how I am terrified of a certain emptiness, how the mystery of the world can be parsed, explained, solved. Why did I ever believe such sentences were useless?

  And so I start to say the things I’d never bothered with before. Bradley raises his head and looks at me. He is, I know, seeing me anew. Seeing past my smooth skin and clear face into an interior which he did not know existed. His hazel eyes lose their focus. He is forgetful of self as he listens and I know we have passed some old barrier for good.

 
At last he puts his mouth to mine. His tongue is fierce against my lips. We pull back, breathing hard. “Let’s go inside, Morley.” He motions toward his bedroom, where I have passed so many midnights trying to read our future in the twists of his torso, his balled fists, his groans.

  A moment later we’re peeling off our clothes, blood pounding, eyes starting with new sights (when had he sprouted all that chest hair?) and a new necessary truth pops into my head: trust somebody. As we tumble onto the bed I say it out loud: trust somebody. He doesn’t hear me and it doesn’t matter.

  We’re new at this but there’s a natural order that asserts itself. Why did God give us parts if not to use them? As we experiment, we go off into giggles. Who would have thought we could discover so many wonderful fits? Bodies are full of interlocking parts. At last the giggles subside and we help each other to the high plateau where, I am suddenly convinced, we will spend the rest of our lives.

  As we settle down for sleep, neither wanting to leave the other for the night, I marvel at the fact that this happened only after so much waiting. Why had I believed in the end of things before I saw their beginning? Why had I thought we would be strangers forever when I had only to reach out and touch? Feeling Bradley’s body nestled into mine I can only wonder at the partial vision which obscures each stage of life, at the truths which appear to be necessary but may only be convenient.

  And so a new existence begins. Bradley has forgiven me—or decided to overlook—my professional success. At the same time he is having great success of his own. Some of his free lectures at the library—given to growing crowds of admirers—have attracted the attention of publishers. He is invited to write some books. An encyclopedia board offers him a chair. A TV crew comes to town; he will appear on a game show called Information Bowl.