“I don’t want you to think twice about that,” Mr Valerian replied. “It’s a disappointment, that’s all. It means more hard work when I would’ve been retiring. But I can deal with that sort of thing. I’ve been doing it all my life.”
“All in the same day … ,” Mark said wonderingly.
“Yes, well …” His father turned away from the window.
They put together a lunch of odds and ends and ate on the porch in front. Here Captain Bird had most seriously contrived to duplicate, on dry land and for the enjoyment of his dwindling days, the unique commanding experience of a ship’s bridge. An end of the porch came around and finished in a circle topped with a pointed cone, like a gazebo jutting from a corner of the house. With the arrangement of a sand dune, a trellis, and the eastern orientation of the house, Captain Bird had created the illusion of being actually at sea, within a wheelhouse. If you sat or stood in a certain spot the horizon stretched three-quarters of the way around, the beach fell below the level of the porch railing, and all land disappeared, leaving the sea. As they ate, a net of diamond shadows fell through the trellis, drifting over their shoulders and across the floor.
“What about George?” Mark said, to stay off It for a while. His father looked up. “What about him?”
“Well, he’s disappointed isn’t he? He’s worked hard on this, for a long time.”
“Yes, he has.” Mr Valerian had thought to learn something about George. Sometimes his children told each other things which then he heard secondhand, as intended. “He’s got his practice to repair. This thing took a lot of his time.”
In conversation, as otherwise, Margaret Valerian had been their connection, the buffer between them—in a way demonstrated by the damage she herself had sustained; by the worry, never clearly stated, that the wrong person being right, the right person wrong—and she herself never sure—not enough had been said or felt for either. Instead she worked hard to make them comfortable, knowing mere comfort was never enough. They seemed only to disagree on principle, the principle of sex. This she held to be impossible, for love alone mattered, not principle. In fitting and tailoring their disparate responses to each other, she managed for years to fend off the implications and disasters of the Filial Wars, saying to one what the other could not. “Your father does not mean what he says. He loves you very much,” and vice versa. So real was the need, any transparent effort worked. After her death the connection devolved through necessities surrounding her funeral and burial— the plot, the monument—for if the beach house meant the survival of her memory and spirit in Mark’s mind, even in her own, in Mr Valerian’s a cemetery was where such things naturally came to rest. To him the beach house was not so much a reminder of his dead wife, or the dying one, as it came to be his sole connection with Mark. Some months after her death, at the change of seasons—when fifty steps to wintering an old mansion on the water suddenly presented themselves—Mark had automatically taken up the job, interpreting this as an extension of his mother’s wishes; while Mr Valerian saw it as an opportunity both practical and wise. Several years into the arrangement, it had become and remained their subject. And now to Mark, being ill, it seemed he might belong there as much as his mother. In every conversation, one or the other of them brought it up.
“How’s the house?” his father said now, sociable over the food.
“That depends,” Mark replied, “on where you look.”
Mr Valerian waved his hand in agreement. It was endlessly expensive, unfinished, yielding to salt air and sea. They were still compensating, thirty years later, for Captain Bird’s economies. “That Bird,” Mr Valerian would say, “had an anchor for brains.” It had been some years before they discovered all the drains simply stopped below grade. All had to be dug up and connected. In his own mind Captain Bird had been constructing a boar. Nothing except her moorings must hold her. She must be free to sail at any moment, in the dead of night or day, straight to sea on the course so carefully drawn through the hearth. Now, Mark thought, the place was locked in—by water main, sewers, gas lines, TV cables, telephone wires, even the thin lightning rod of copper braid twisting from its height off the tallest chimney and down the sides of the house like a package tied with cord.
In Mark’s mind, as opposed to Captain Bird’s, in the moments before setting sail, someone must sever these new connections one by one. Where possible over the years he himself had felt inclined to keep the boat idea in mind. An innovation of his own had been to shape the ocean-side lawn into a bow, with a low, white, chevron bulkhead pointing east into the waves. He thought that if this bow-shaped piece of earth were included, giving her deck space all around, it would be easier to hook the severed connections to a life-support system, all within a clear crystal cube containing the earth’s atmosphere—on a fresh morning, the sun still on the water, or a starry night for sleeping, dreaming—a crystal ship of lights that silently slips her lines and sails away.
THE OUTSIDERS
Dennis Cooper
From Closer, a novel in progress
GEORGE LOOKED AS THOUGH HE WERE SLEEPWALKING, whether he knew it or not. Something was wrong but he “wouldn’t know how to describe it.” At first taking LSD three times a week helped. Then he’d relied on our little talks. Now there was nothing between him and “it,” as he called what he currently felt. “It’s getting worse,” he remarked as we strolled hand in hand through a city park.
I understood what he meant. “It” was as vague as that sentence. In other words, I’d never see it. Saying so wouldn’t help. Friends were just light entertainment at best. I kept my ears open, exaggerated my interest and hoped compassion would strike him as sexy at some point. “Let’s sit,” he sighed when our eyes met.
His hand was cold. Otherwise I might have thought I was walking around with my shadow. One time I turned and examined his eyes on the off chance he’d started ODing. I wanted to read his mind but all I saw was some dry leaves get larger and larger then crush like miniature fireworks beneath his shoes.
“I’m feeling totally weary for one thing,” he said. We’d situated ourselves on a grassy slope. The day had cooled. A light breeze came up from the parking lot. His eyes were so shadowed they looked like dark glasses. His lips were so full and red they
seemed magnified. His chin was balancing atop one knee, his arms wrapped loosely around that particular leg.
“George, stay at my place tonight.” I knew that sounded too matter of fact. I wanted to fuck him. That was my goal but I couldn’t decide how to phrase it. “I can’t, I’m seeing Philippe.” “Oh sure, right, foreigners first,” I huffed and accidentally kicked a small hole in the grass. George was scanning the clouds. “You explain it,” he shrugged, knowing I couldn’t.
I couldn’t even imagine us fucking without a lump in my throat. So every night when I lowered my eyelids I pictured George and his lover instead. It looked a bit like a scene from The Blob, an old sci-fi film I had mixed feelings about. George tripped and, as he fell, a flabby body just swallowed him up. I’d arch my back and come, dazed by the strange combination of lust and petty loss I felt.
Now George was sitting right next to me, staring up at a cloud bank. I couldn’t guess how to get him in bed much less save him from “it.” At least in fantasies I’d had some kind of effect on him, though he would never know how, when, where, what. “I should go home. I’m just boring you.” “No, you’re not,” I whispered. “Well, I’m boring myself.”
“I’ll see you later,” he yelled as he trudged up his front walk. I threw my car into drive and gunned it, searching for him in my rearview mirror. He’d stopped dead in his tracks and was watching me barrel off, arms wrapped around his chest, sure he had pissed me off. “Shit,” I said, gripping the wheel, “no matter what I do …”
I climbed the stairs to my room. My mom had cleaned the house. The air smelled poisonous. I set an old Brian Wisdom LP on the turntable. There was a song on its second side called “Note to No One,” in which th
e deeply depressed singer/song-writer moaned out some personal problems to a dead friend. It was a joke, in particular one couplet.
When it approached I sat forward. “… I’m as made-up as the TV star my lover’s ogling / I feel like an empty exercise in acting …” That was so ludicrous. Why did it make me want to cry? Maybe because he was so out of touch with his thoughts he had to use unbelievably strained images to suggest the extent. I could relate to that kind of approach. Still, every now and then, it helped to brush up.
The phone rang. “It’s George. You’re down on me, aren’t you?” I said I wasn’t. He sounded like he’d been crying. He claimed he hadn’t although he admitted he’d tried. “I want to help you, George.” “Well,” he said and took a breath that sounded more like a hiccup, “you may.” I let him sob for a while. The only words he could manage were, “Maybe it’s … all this … Philippe … stuff.”
I tried to find the right tone. Why not just say it? I thought. But before I could blurt that cliche I’d longed to get in the open for months, I saw his tears as a great opportunity. “I understand you, George. Give me less than a minute to think.” I felt a weird grin spread over my face as I said this.
Once he’d calmed down I suggested a plan. I’d follow him to Philippe’s. I’d hide outside and observe their sex. Afterward we’d go somewhere and I’d give him my honest opinion on what it meant. “Yeah, I guess so,” he sighed, “but you’ll be shocked.” “No,” I said. I grabbed a loose sheet of paper and scribbled down the directions. “Okay, got it.”
I CRAWLED THROUGH SOME BUSHES, careful to keep them from rustling. I found an unshuttered window and rose to my feet. The room was plush, over-furnished in shades of white. Philippe sat on a black sofa. He was ashen-faced, a little gray at the temples and saggy. To his left George was stumbling out of his Jockey shorts. Above their heads hung a charcoal drawing of somewhere that didn’t exist.
I scooped some dirt off the sill and got my balance. Cars driving by couldn’t see me. The lawn was deep, the foliage thick. The room was subtly lit like a case full of perishable objects. I wished I’d brought my old Konica. I could have gotten some great shots of George in the nude. As I’d hoped he was so pale and smooth he looked air-brushed.
He shut his eyes and felt his way through the furniture, stubbing a toe now and then. He ended up by a small air conditioner, turned in slow circles for thirty seconds or so, then lay face down on the rug’s smoky pattern. Philippe rose from his chair and knelt over the body. I thought, Religious, but what happened next made me think of a porn film I d fidgeted through.
The starlet lay on her stomach. A fat man pried her ass open, stuck out his tongue and spread her privates with spit from the blond pubic bush to the small of her back, going over and over the same spots until they reflected the light, appeared monstrous one second, and toylike the next.
Philippe’s tongue had a similar sweep. It climbed the rubble of George’s balls, swabbed the crack and returned to base, again and again. At first that looked too mechanical, then I was struck by their grace. In comparison my fantasies were a scrawl. I nearly blushed at the thought of how close I’d come to subjecting this boy to them.
George got a fierce spanking. Philippe’s arm seemed to move in slow motion, but I heard the slaps, even through plate glass. After a dozen he eased off, smiled down at his handprints and mouthed a few words. The asshole swelled, trembled, then very slowly produced a turd. It rose an inch in the air, toppled onto his waiting palm.
I thought I could make it but halfway down the street I splayed my hands on the nearest tree and threw up. A dog walked over and sniffed my splattered Adidas. “Go fuck yourself,” I moaned. It backed off a few feet and watched me retch for a while with its confusing eyes. Thinking how it might have felt helped get my mind off my misery.
I thought of the first and last time I’d gone horseback riding. Those palominos resembled big dogs to me, with even kinder smiles. Dad helped me onto one’s back whereupon it tore off down the trail. I gripped the reins in a terrified silence the more it snorted and tried to buck me off. Suddenly I lurched face-first toward the earth. The bored dog barked a few times and trotted under a bush.
Somehow I got to my car. Its chilly metal felt perfect. I lay on the hood taking deep, even breaths. After a while I stood up but was still much too shaky to form an opinion of what I’d seen. On the one hand I longed to find some sort of clinic and have my memory flushed. On the other hand I wanted to ring Philippe’s bell, shake his hand and say, “Yeah, right.”
I drove into a Shell station and phoned my friend Alex. He was the most callous, sarcastic person I knew, but we’d been friends since tenth grade. He knew me inside out. “We have to talk.” I gave a quick sketch of what I’d seen. “Rush over here,” he gasped. Ten minutes later I eased past two sleepy-eyed parents and into his bedroom. “So, tell all, Clifford.” I pulled a chair up.
I loved seeing Alex. His face was covered with freckles, ten deep in some places. They camouflaged his quite commonplace features with startling images. I could connect up the dots and see galloping horses, a black man lifting a crate, a map of Oregon … It was the ideal appearance for someone so witty and complex.
Tonight I was too self-absorbed to see anything. I talked. He nodded occasionally. “Whew!” he said once I’d completed my tale, “Little George Miles? I can’t fucking believe it.” He crossed his arms and seemed deep in thought. I must have drifted off because the next thing I saw was a mouth smeared with toothpaste. “Rise and shine, pervert,” it said.
While Alex showered I reached behind his cassette deck. I found the baggie where he hid his grass, rolled a joint, struck a match on my belt buckle. I tried the radio. Out popped Sparks’ “Amateur Hour,” a taut, experimental hit single that sounded best loud. I settled back on the bed, closed my eyes and pressed my thumbs on the lids until I could see pretty patterns wherever I looked.
Alex appeared in the doorway, a towel tied at his waist. Like his face, his chest was cluttered with freckles. Dripping wet it looked like polished stone, some sort of granite to be exact. I thought of a sculpture I’d seen at the County Museum. Untitled Two was gigantic and so brightly lit all I’d seen was the glare on its surface. Alex was like that.
“Sparks?!” He punched off the radio then plucked his joint from my lips. Without great music to structure my thoughts everything in the room became very abstract, not just ideas but objects. The world of George was one miniscule speck in that constellation. It was light brown and set next to a prominent cheekbone. A sarcastic voice boomed from deep inside it. “Cliff, you still with us?”
“Sort of.” I shook my head when Alex held out the joint. I felt—I searched for an adequate word—weird. I had to wake up. “Hey man,” I said, “is there any hot water left?” He grabbed my wrist, yanked me up to my feet and literally pushed me out into the hall. “Come back a new man!” I couldn’t tell if he meant it or not.
I stood in the shower. I saw myself as a waterfall. Hot jet streams pounded my head, splashed my shoulders and upper chest, streaked down my ribs, made my pubic hair droop, spilled off the tip of my cock, exploded around my feet. I watched this chain of events for a half hour, struck by how worn out my thinking was.
I wrapped myself in a towel. When I got back to his room, Alex eyed me suspiciously. “I said come back a nude man.” I was supposed to quip, “You wish”—my usual epithet—but I decided against it. I don’t know why, and this left a small hole in our afternoon. He realized I had caught him at something. I understood what that was, but I wasn’t sure whether he knew that I knew or not.
He plopped himself on the end of the bed, reached out, fiddled with the TV. I knew he was hot for my body. I’d been avoiding the issue for months. Why had I tiptoed around what he couldn’t say? We were so much alike mentally. Surely our bodies would match. I closed my eyes and imagined us making out, then stole a glance at my towel. Guess not, I decided.
As a test I imagined a similar scen
e with George. I locked us in an embrace. But before I could fasten the lips our bodies started to move by themselves. It had the look of ballet, at least the one I d been dragged to. I was so wowed by my own choreography I might have whipped out my cock if a lump in my throat hadn’t woken me up.
I opened my eyes. I saw a pretty actress in a fake-looking bathroom. Her mouth was open inhumanly wide. Her glazed eyes stared at a mirror. It reflected her screaming face and, further back, the burly chest of a beast with a leather hood over its head. It yanked a bloody ax out of her back and was wiping it off on the front of its T-shirt.
They were replaced by a bottle of Windex. Alex glanced over his shoulder. His face was mildly amused again. “This thing is great,” he said. It was his kind of film—that is, it tried to make light of the worst thing in life, inadvertently making death witty and, therefore “great.” Thanks to his lecturing I’d come around as well. “Yeah,” I agreed, “the day’s looking up.”
He changed positions. His eyes came so close to mine I was sure I could see an emotion in them if one was back there. They were pea green with yellow flecks that looked like tiny dead leaves floating slowly around in two bowls of soup. Neat as a pin, I thought. Or as Alex liked to explain how he saw the world, “Tears are beside the point.”
“Yes, may I help you?” “Oh,” I gulped, shifting my gaze to the wall. “I was just spacing out.” Being overly stoned was the perfect excuse. He gave me one of his skeptical glares, but I wouldn’t be tripped up. I even asked for a hit off the joint. “Okay, I guess I believe you,” he snapped and snatched the TV Guide off his alarm clock.
“Young Blood Runs Wild,” he read aloud. “Three adventurous teenaged couples face horror and death at the hands of a half-human monster.” As he spoke, a handsome boy on the TV was pointing his flashlight beam into a cobwebbed room. It found dusty books, a gruesome painting of lap dogs, chairs, overturned table … The jazzy soundtrack swelled-up as the murdered girl’s face reappeared. His mouth opened inhumanly wide. The hooded beast bounded out of a closet.
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