Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Yes, Vita, but how? And for a long time—most of his life, and often even now—he’d thought of this difference between himself and his family as evidence of their failings, not his. Was not the absence of beauty the ugliest thing in life? (Vita would say no.) In the general scheme of things among the Valerians he often felt that wrong choices won out over right—wrong ideas, wrong directions, wrong fears. From an early age he had spoken up, feeling that in this small crowd was room—the dimensions—for more than one opinion; or even two. After all a family might advance, as in certain quiz programs on TV in which a whole generation, sometimes two or three, put their heads together to define reality, and for their efforts won a car. It seemed the diversity he offered might be of use to them as a family, if they could only see it that way. In this his mother half the time had been his ally; half the time, with a gimlet eye, not. In matters of taste at least—of form, aesthetics: the usual homosexual metier—they had long since looked to him for quasi-professional guidance; so that George Jr was legal, Vita psychological, Mark … artistic—though it might be argued that this end of things lay otherwise vacant of opinion for cultural, sexist reasons.

  —Different too in that he was alone. This was it. Each of them had a unit of their own, while Mark clung to an order that had outgrown itself, whose vestigial remains could be found only in his father and himself, and in a ghost of the enmity between them, now laid to rest by … by It. The occasions on which the five of them might collude had been reduced to those of state—the meeting about selling the house for instance—or perhaps when Tessa, whose instincts, though less developed, ran along similar lines, might suggest a public lunch on Father’s Day—just them—which however George Jr would be too busy and overworked to attend.

  It was not that they thought any less of the idea than Mark; if anything they thought more. Simply that family meant their own brood and not the abstract enshrinement, as if in retrospect, of the Valerians as they one day might have been but were no more—something in Mark’s imagination. He might make every effort to impose this vision on them—the fight for the beach house had been one such effort—of a caring, interlocked group of siblings. But the exigencies of their own broods made this unavailing, except at intervals, or when a flare of need went up over the life of one of them. It was not that it didn’t exist, this idea of family, but that it did not seem to exist always, and never as Mark saw it; or if it did, which he saw it did, it was really only among each of them and for their very own.

  Meaning that he was not a member, in each case, of their very own. Here we had musical families, like musical chairs— life was nothing but quiz programs and time-passing competitions—and when the music stopped he alone stood in the circle of upturned, satisfied faces. None could feel this sense of estrangement, apartness, because all of life’s institutions had seen to it that they didn’t. Mates, children, parents and other siblings all fitted into arrangements laid out for this specific accomplishment: to belong. So much easier, he thought, for them to go along—unnatural for them not to—because for them it was stupefyingly enjoyable, one small triumph of legitimacy after another.

  He had slept with women but not many; or again with the one woman with whom he might have fathered children of his own (a luscious of his own)-, for that’s how it had been with the others. He liked the children to whom he was related, loved them; was tolerant or not of others, but suspicious. Nothing was so unpleasant as the sound of young people having a good time; nothing so haunting as the same sound from your own people. He did not want children, except perhaps impossibly those of a certain age, when the sensibility either was there or not; then yes he would want them, for his own; but after the rapids of parentage. In their infrequency of visits, in the intensity of rituals, they all took on mysterious outlines of themselves in which they assembled and arranged their own imaginings.

  But did he really expect family life to be arranged around the requirements of spinster aunts and bachelor uncles? Freud would say Grow up. The burden of neurosis added to the weight of history was too great. Darwin would call Mark’s kind a mad biological experiment teetering on the edge of extinction and doomed to failure. Both privately would shake their heads, though Freud, being Jewish, would wonder. Vita, their avatar and spokesperson, who contrarily considered, among others, the twenty-six million Americans extrapolated from Kinsey to be homosexual—one in ten—would say that some people slipped through history without ever reaping its rewards.

  It did not do to complain, but to understand. The analogy was in this case the primeval tree of primitive man. Mark knew it as a two-story tree house he had built at an early age with Donny and Brock. It popped so immediately into mind that he knew she was right.

  “But can we not provide some other service? Is it all just the timely impregnation of females?” he asked indignantly.

  “You may of course sound the alarm,” Vita replied. “But life is not that simple, and sometimes sounding the alarm only arouses passions and causes trouble. In the commotion branches are broken, people fall and hurt themselves. The leopard grabs one of them …”

  “But without the alarm …” Mark said weakly. He would never be convinced.

  In these conversations Mark was aware of this same weight of respect coming across the line from his sister. What was it in him that held her interest? Creativity, he thought; the position engendered by a combination of male egotism—the inculcation of centuries—and feminine passivity, rarely mixed in those days, openly; or at least in her Philadelphia suburb. Only later did he see she had realized her professional luck in finding, in her own family, a fine, pure example of something they were alluding to at school: Freud’s obsessional neurotic. She of course made no effort to inform him of this conclusion, and he went on thinking she saw in him, at least potentially, the artist he wished to be. In any event, it would be one or the other; this was perhaps a matter of opinion, and too soon to say. Art, he thought too, was nothing but obsessional and neurotic. And what might have alarmed the sibling of another shrink seemed, to him, to be evidence of some sort of artistic progress not otherwise obvious.

  He was less different from Vita, perhaps because they had in their own way each been made to follow their brother George, with Mark’s version matching hers in certain cross-gender ways; as if their parents, the Valerians, having thought just so far, had put everything into their first child, and made do with the remnants of parentage for the other three. George and Tessa were easier—not that they were similar—for being obviously the first and the last. But Vita and Mark, appearing as if unbidden or at random, seemed to share the burden of catching their parents unawares, unprepared or bereft, even though never in her marriage had Mrs Valerian made love without the thought of conceiving a child. How for instance did a little girl differ from a little boy? Why then was this second son, who had come from the same people and in the same way, so shockingly different? The Valerians, smug, oblivious and proud, did the best they knew how, making an awful mess, Vita thought; Mark thought. But then in those days, who hadn’t?

  TESSA COULD NOT BE SIMPLY DEFINED, even in part—like George, by his superb professionalism; or Vita, by her lift from inadequacy into something like personal power; or Mark, by his existence within the hyperbole of an artistic temperament. Tessa herself had each of these things—the professionalism, force of character, the hyperbole—but she had them without their objects: a profession, a firm idea of herself, or art. Perhaps she was an emulsion of all of them. Mark didn’t know. She didn’t know. She seemed after her mother’s death to be more like Mrs Valerian, as by an effort as conscious as the revival and preparation of Mrs Valerian’s favorite recipes, or the use of a favored nail color; measures matched by others too subtle or obscure to recognize. Perhaps the strongest instinct enhanced in her was that of motherhood itself, and only a year after Mrs Valerian’s death Tessa gave birth to a third child, hardly anticipated but made welcome nonetheless, yet another little girl; and the devolving questions of her life,
reemerging as her original two children had grown, fell back again, receding before the flooding instincts, the revived priorities of motherhood.

  When artists die the value of their work increases, perhaps because a scope of talent is established, perhaps because that’s the end of it. This same thing happened to Mrs Valerian. With no more mothering, what was remembered was emulated in any way appropriate. Such was the fate of Tessa’s little girl, to be reconstituted along all the precepts and philosophies Tessa could recall, in the way that we allow ourselves to remember without actually recollecting, by instinct, guess and impulse. She did several things differently from the beginning with this pregnancy, including the luxury, some would say the indulgence, of gaining fifty or sixty pounds; until, on his weekly visits, Mark sensed a kind of insulation gained both for herself and her fetus by the manly, the piggish intake of food. He heard his mother say, Eat. And Tessa ate. Being so near in age they were, with each other, unencumbered by what had transpired before their arrivals. Perhaps this was why they always ate in each other’s company, as if—as at six months and older—that’s habitually what they had done together.

  Within one of several overlapping first memories, Mark held Tessa’s hand at the water’s edge. They had a photograph of this, at four and three—as young as it is possible for a child consciously to hold another’s hand, and only thus is catastrophe averted, of the watery kind, before which even the gorgeous lifeguards must be unavailingly, distantly helpless: protection in the abstract. Tessa had been of a delicacy to inspire this feeling in all living creatures. Now her grown son was himself a lifeguard, forming the chief reason for her pride in the matter— that her son had grown to be a lifeguard on the spot where Mark had held her hand at the water’s edge. This symmetry pleased both in the same way, and represented perhaps their strongest bond. It had been added to over the years, and elaborated on most especially after Mrs Valerian’s death—that much more to divvy up between them—but this early memory lay at the center of the way they saw each other.

  Regarding the concept of protection, the irony of Mark’s illness might have caught Tessa unaware, were it not that in puberty and thereafter they had changed places. Tessa reached several given points before him, had in fact taught him to smoke cigarettes at fifteen; dated first—although the delay in Mark’s case was compounded. For years a single year’s difference in their ages was more than canceled by her feminine precociousness, a faculty of worldly sense that often eluded him, if as often not; so that they were able with almost equal opportunity now to draw each other up short. In many situations they might predict each other’s feelings. “Mark is not going to like this,” she often reported herself, rightly, as saying. Or if they did not agree at the beginning of something, they did at the end. Without her, as much as without Vita, he would not have been able to save the beach house.

  Tessa had felt at a loss for something to do. It had been her children, she always said. And now this last child meant more for coming after her own mother’s death. Into this devotional object she would both pour and find a superb professionalism— motherhood; a power—over life and death; the power also of the art of exaggerating emotions, the hyperbole of being alive. And when someone said they thought it ironic that Margaret Valerian, a famous grandmother, knew nothing of this subsequent, tenth, final grandchild, Tessa smiled her ironic smile and said, “She knows.”

  Because they knew, she and Mark. Together they built a nursery that involved the addition of an entire second floor to Tessa’s otherwise modest house, thereby doubling its size, with the baby arriving the day after the curtains went up. If Mrs Valerian had left the world from the liner-like luxury of a Cape May beach house, little Margaret came down into a delicate confection of nursery allusions, not one lacking, and all executed in tiny Laura Ashley-ese: sprigs, rose buds, two different patterns and a stripe, the deep protective rug, little lamps—the miniature boudoir of a miniature princess, ready just in time.

  MR VALERIAN STEPPED FROM THE CAR and shaded his eyes from the sun. Perhaps he had been weeping on the drive down. Expecting him to the minute and hearing tires on the gravel, Mark came slowly out the door and through the garden, hands in his pockets, footprints blazing up behind him in tiny, sickle-shaped fires: his pockets spiritually picked, his life up in flames. Flowers in the border flashed dots of color at his feet, drifting by in focus within a long green blur. As he approached his father, they each wore the same ripening expression, of remorse and reproach, of colossal disappointment; this overlapping response paired their display—a sad caving-in of their feelings—and like two fine dynamos reaching tandem, they embraced. Mr Valerian pounded once, twice, on Mark’s shoulder in an excess not of tenderness but anguish. He said into Mark’s ear, “Believe me if I could change places with you I’d do it in a second.” It was what on the drive down he had decided to begin by saying. Holding his son by the shoulders, and at last seeing all defiance gone, he added, “We’re going to go through this together, and there’s nothing we can’t do if we want.” This sent them back into the vortex. Mark felt infantile, helpless. He was ill: some-

  thing between the two of them had shifted into something manifest on its own, against which both were helpless; a third, evil thing set loose. Now an alliance of his own resolve coupled with his father’s was meant to bear some force against—this, which coming from within, must be pursued from within; though it appeared now, even in the abstract, beyond spiritual, intellectual, even emotional measures. Perhaps only the medical remained. Strength of intention his father meant to give him, not realism or facts but something to use in the coming fight, something abstract to fight something real, against which as yet no real weapons existed.

  They came through the house into the sitting room. Being alone, Mark had ordered it with the precision and flair of a photo stylist. The vast blue plane of sea stretched around. Mark could almost feel the little hop his father’s heart took, of pride, recognition and pain at the purity of sudden association with Margaret. Mr Valerian looked out over the beach, nodded his head, but sat in a chair with his back to the view—a gesture that meant here again were reasons why, with one thing and another, he was unable to enjoy this house further. They sat quietly. The waves squandered themselves. Two brown rabbits appeared on the lawn to feed, ears ruby sunlight. Mark watched them over his father’s shoulder.

  “Well,” Mr Valerian began. “Tell me about this … Tell me what the doctors said, what—y’know—what you know about it.”

  Put me in the picture, Mark thought his father had with a certain delicacy refrained from saying. The terminology of a business meeting seemed appropriate to the situation, certainly automatic. He saw that sometime in the next few minutes he himself would say, “ The bottom line is that there’s no cure.”

  “Look,” his father exclaimed when in fact this remark had been delivered, “that’s where you’re wrong. It’s not the bottom line. You mustn’t think that way. They’ll find a cure. They’re all looking …”

  “Utter bullshit,” Mark interrupted. “It’s not a cure they’re looking for, it’s a vaccine. Protect the healthy, let the sick die off.”

  “But Mark … Mr Valerian protested, shaking his head.

  “It’s what they did with polio, and they were children.”

  “Well, you’ve got to think of yourself,” his father said. “You’ve got to be positive. You’ll beat it one way or another. Either they’ll find something or something will happen.”

  They regarded each other.

  “And,” his father went on—these are the things he had driven here to say—“I have a feeling this is a light case.”

  “A feeling?” Mark said.

  “I just don’t think it’s as bad as you think.”

  “Dad, it’s not what I think.”

  “… And there’s experimental things,” he went on. “I read yesterday there’s a guy in California immune to everything. They’re studying his blood …”

  “I don’t think t
his is something we’ll be able to buy.”

  “Why the hell not?” Mr Valerian demanded, then sat forward and went on in a fresh tone. “But you see, Mark, this is what I mean. You mustn’t say, ‘No, no, I can’t, I can’t, this is impossible, it won’t work and I’m going to die …’ You’ve got to think something will happen. Some goddamn clever Swede or Frog will find the answer … And you’ll see, it’s not as bad as you think—in your case.”

  “You say that only because you can’t face it.”

  “Then what the hell are you going to do!” his father snapped, “lay down and die? Is that it?”

  “I’m not going to kid myself because you want to hear it.”

  “And that’s where you’re wrong, my friend,” Mr Valerian said derisively. “Why not a miracle? Open yourself up to the idea that anything can happen, and you’re going to get through this in one piece.”

  “ … Faith,” Mark said quietly.

  “Faith,” Mr Valerian repeated, adding a slight though unmistakable measure of reverence.

  Mr Valerian turned and they looked out the window together, each backing away from the idea just raised—Mark because he wished to avoid an argument about religion; Mr Valerian because, while relieved to have hit on something tangible, he was not prepared to pursue it further. He knew prayer and hard work were the answer—had already begun his own program along these lines—but not until you came to it yourself. And Mark thought it time to say something about his father’s other great problem: the collapse of the deal to sell Marval.

  “George told me,” he began—out to sea two small sailboats took different tacks on the same wind, sails pinned to the opposite reach, the one crossing the other’s wake. Mark thought of the currents as invisible streets—“… about the rest of your day. I’m sorry this happened all at once.”