by John Rechy
There was this, too, that I was ready to welcome: For long stretches of time, on the streets, I had pretended that I was not smart, only street-smart; that was widely preferred by those who picked up a type of hustler that I represented, which included an emphatic, even strained, masculinity. I had played that role, while often missing the part of myself that was smart, that welcomed intelligent conversation. This brief interlude with Paul had already released me from that restrictive role.
I stared at the neighboring island, now even more shadowed as the setting sun withdrew more light. Yet even in its drabness, it seemed dormant, as if waiting for a new tenant to resurrect it, or entirely destroy it.
“You come here every summer?”
“Yes. I come here with Stanty, and now Sonya, and, now, you.”
We reached the dock. I got out and heaved my duffel bag over my shoulder while he fixed the boat in place. He smiled, a friendly smile. “Welcome to the island,” he said.
Island, island! I thought. That exclamation remained echoing, curious despite Paul’s explanation. It sounded more like the urgent exclamation of a drowning man.
2
As we walked toward the house, the green thickness of trees parted onto a rolling lawn of grass, a lawn on which—
I stopped, startled by the spectacle.
—a lawn on which had been arranged several sculptures. At a glance, I took in six—separated from each other so that each was stark, isolated, tall—perhaps four feet high; dark iron figures, corrugated, with extremely thin erect bodies, grotesque yet elegant, solemn.
Paul identified the artist in an ordinary tone. “They’ve been on loan to the museum. I take them out when I’m here.”
I still had not moved. The statues, incongruous on the lawn, were like somber sentinels. I had recognized the name of the artist, a famous one in modern art.
A boy, a young man, came running to meet us—no, not running, but sauntering like someone attempting, not entirely successfully, to ration a display of anticipation. He stood before us as if to assure himself that he had our full attention. He was a good-looking boy, already resembling his father. His hair, longish, streaked blond by the sun, was still wet—like his trunks; probably he had been swimming when Paul called out their signal from the shore. His body—with dots of water glistening on his deep tan—already suggested that of a swimmer, like his father’s. I decided that he was too young to arouse my sense of competition.
“My son,” Paul identified. “Stanty, this is John Rechy.” He rubbed the boy’s head playfully.
The boy dodged the gesture. “I’m too grown-up for that, Father,” he protested, although he did not entirely pull away from the gesture of affection and then tilted his head to allow it. Resuming a commanding pose, and with rigid formality, he held out his hand for me to take.
“Hello, John Rechy,” he said. “I’m Stanty.”
“Stanty,” I said, and reached for his hand, which he quickly withdrew, laughing—suddenly a boy playing a familiar trick. But quickly he was an adult again, firmly shaking my hand. “Actually—can you believe this?—the real name they gave me is—” He looked up at his father with exaggerated accusation, waiting for him to supply the banished name.
“Constantine,” Paul announced.
“Can you believe it?” Stanty said, shaking his head wildly in agitation, then delightedly sprinkling dots of water—a playful, exuberant kid again.
“It’s an elegant name—Constantine,” I said.
“You see?” Paul nudged him.
“It’s ugly,” the boy dismissed. “Please call me Stanty,” he addressed me as we moved up the slight slope of the grounds toward the house.
His note of command added to the annoyance I was beginning to feel that Paul was allowing him to take over—although the feeling of annoyance lessened as he turned to me with the ingratiating smile of a boy welcoming a new friendship.
“Did you ever have another name, John Rechy?” he startled me by asking, drawing my attention away from the blunt display of statuary, an exorbitant exhibition of a collector’s possessions.
“John Rechy, did you ever—?” Stanty seemed annoyed that he had to repeat his question. Now he was irritating me by linking my names for whatever purpose of his own.
“Yes, my real name is Juan,” I told him, thinking that would please him.
“If you will forgive my asking: Why did you change it?”
He seemed to flex before us, straining to show off budding muscles. I laughed unintentionally.
Paul looked quickly at his son.
“You laughed at me,” the boy said to me in a small voice, as if he had been profoundly wounded. He turned to Paul: “Father?” he asked, as if seeking guidance.
“I’m sure he wasn’t laughing at you,” Paul told him.
“Then at who—whom?”
“At myself, Stanty.” I saw an opportunity to adjust the matter. “I laughed at the memory of how my own name was changed. See”—my backing off was working—“I didn’t change my name”—the boy was looking at me with anticipation—“a grammar-school teacher couldn’t pronounce it—it’s Spanish. Mexican,” I clarified. “She changed it to John.” Actually Johnny, though I didn’t tell him. And that was true.
The boy walked a few feet ahead. Stopping before us so that we had to halt facing him, he said, “Why didn’t you change it back, then? Was it because you don’t look like a Mexican and didn’t want to be?”
He had struck meanly. Paul, who remained silent, seemed to be waiting with curiosity for what might follow between me and the boy.
As I remained quiet, gauging the insult, Paul finally interceded: “Stanty, I think our guest might misinterpret your question.”
“Oh, then, it’s easy to apologize. I’m sorry.” The boy turned to me, smiling broadly: “I didn’t mean an insult. There were two Spanish boys—Mexican boys—in my school, and they kept saying they were Spanish. I didn’t understand why, because they were very smart, like you.”
I had prepared a harsh answer to his rude question, but I abandoned it because of Paul’s cautioning reaction toward Stanty—even if late, and mellow—and because of the boy’s apology and unabashed compliment.
But without knowing it, although perhaps suspecting it, he had questioned me in a disturbing way that echoed a judgement. In El Paso, Texas, where I was born, people of Mexican descent would sometimes claim to be “Spanish,” attempting to overcome pervasive, and still at times lingering, prejudice against Mexicans. My father was born in Mexico of Scottish descent, and I had inherited a fair complexion and “Anglo” features, especially since my mother, who was Mexican, was also fair.
Despite his apology, I felt the need to alert this boy—and to do so in front of his father—that I would not accept his rude comportment, to check it. Remembering her tone of displeasure, I said: “A waitress in town asked about you.”
“That gossipy old strumpet?” Stanty said angrily.
“Strumpet?”
“That’s an old English word for a whore,” he said.
I succeeded in withholding my laughter.
As if to halt the subject, he took my hand and Paul’s and led us—this time running and unsuccessfully coaxing us to run—to the house, shifting again, whooping joyously. “Sonya! Sonya!” he called out to a woman standing at the main entrance to the house.
Her astonishing figure looked naked, only a burnished silhouette in the sunset. When we approached her more closely—Stanty still holding our hands and leading us ahead—I saw that she was wearing a pale saffron-colored bathing suit and a wide hat, the same color, a beach hat. Under it, her dark, long hair fell to her shoulders. She wore large round glittery silver earrings. Because of the hat shading her face, I could not make out her features, though I saw more of her sensational body.
“Sonya, this is John Rechy,” Paul introduced me.
“Hello, John,” Sonya said, with a slight French accent.
Stanty said, “His real name i
s Juan, isn’t it?”
I had not answered the woman; so it was easy to ignore him, although he tilted his head, waiting.
“Hello, Sonya,” I said. Stanty’s mother? No, too young, in her mid-twenties.
“Sonya isn’t my mother,” Stanty clarified my first thought. “I bet that’s what you were wondering. She’s my father’s mistress.”
Now that she had moved out of the shadows, I could gauge her expression: not the slightest frown at Stanty’s blunt designation of her. Instead, she reached out to touch his bare shoulder, a gentle acknowledgement of his presence.
Laughing at Stanty’s boldness, Paul leaned down and again mussed the boy’s hair.
This time the boy easily accepted the gesture. He rushed on, addressing me, then Paul: “My mother will be here soon. Won’t she, Father?”
Paul nodded. “I believe so.”
“Which one, Father?” Stanty asked. “Elizabeth or Corina?”
Which mother? Certainly that hadn’t been what he meant.
“Perhaps both of them,” Paul answered, easily conversational.
One Paul’s ex-wife, another the current one? Whatever relationships were involved—and with Sonya?—those three women would be bound by their closeness to Paul. What would be my place in all this? What role was I expected to play? My conjectures about Paul’s motives for inviting me shifted into new questions. I marveled at his smooth tone throughout what might have been an uncomfortable matter.
“Isn’t Sonya beautiful?” Stanty asked me.
As if to confirm the boy’s words, Sonya removed her hat and shook her hair free—moist from swimming.
“Yes, she is,” I said. “Very beautiful.” And she was. Her face matched the beauty of her body. She was somewhat dark-skinned, or perhaps only deeply tanned. Her breasts, exposed against the tautness of her bathing suit, formed perfect crescents. Her eyes were so dark they appeared black, truly black. She had full lips, scarlet with lipstick, the only makeup that I could detect.
Paul said to her, “Did you hear that, beauty? Our guest is already in your clutches.”
“But he’s—” Stanty pushed himself into the conversation, then stopped, about to say what?
“I’m glad you’re here, John. We’ll be friends,” Sonya said, as if sensing an uncomfortable potential in what Stanty was about to say.
She took my hand and resumed guiding me into the house.
“I am, too, John Rechy.” Stanty clutched her free hand. “I’m glad, too, and we’ll be friends.”
There was urgency in his declamation. “I think we are, aren’t we?” I said.
3
The house, the inside as well as the outside, had an elegant rustic quality. Large beams spanned the ceiling. Spare furnishings, wood and leather, provided a spacious appearance. Its two wings extended outward. The main room parted into a large dining room, which was already set with white plates, wineglasses. Two candles, unlit, stood poised in silver holders. Balustered steps at one side of the room led to a lower floor. A wide sliding glass door, somewhat incongruous in the rustic setting, opened onto a spanning deck that faced the lake, silver under the light of the ending day.
As Sonya and Stanty moved away, together, to prepare for dinner—“I’ll accompany Sonya to her room,” Stanty said in his alternating quaint way—Paul led me to a bedroom in the wing opposite the one where Sonya and Stanty had gone.
The bedroom—my bedroom—like the rest of the house, was sparsely furnished, the bed, a desk, a bookshelf, two lamps, all suggesting an expensive quality. A large window framed the lake—I could hear the murmuring of the water.
“I’ve brought your duffel bag in,” Paul said. “If you need anything, my room is next to yours.”
“I’m sure everything’s fine,” I responded, and thought: with one exception, a large painting.
It hung on a wall over the desk, a painting of dizzying colors—an excellent reproduction—scrambled dots, writhing streaks twisting and turning within the frame, like mobiles, a painting I was familiar with and didn’t like.
“I’ll see you at dinner,” Paul said, and added what had become his word of camaraderie: “… man.”
I thanked him … man. As he walked out, I felt again a pang of competition. No doubt about it, he was a handsome man, and the fact that his mistress was so beautiful added to that impression, especially because he had reacted to her as if she was on exhibition.
I looked out the window. The deserted island was visible from here, an outline, blurred by a layer of gray clouds that dissipated a short distance from it into the darkening sky.
I did not expect that anyone would dress for dinner. The casualness of Paul’s clothes—and the others’—suggested informality. I had brought few clothes with me, only what fitted, crushed, in my duffel bag; that was what I did on leaving a city—what didn’t fit, I left behind. I had kept a pair of khaki pants and a shirt from my time in the army. On the army shirt I had left the single stripe sewn onto one shoulder; it indicated that I had left the army as a private first class, the second-lowest rank. I had never been promoted, because of minor infractions—reading in formation (Freud on dreams), smoking in ranks, late for reveille. I had also kept a pair of olive-green fatigue pants. To the duffel bag, I had added two pairs of Levi’s, socks, jockey shorts, T-shirts, two pairs of bathing trunks, and a white shirt (wrapped carefully in a plastic bag) in case I needed one.
After showering—the cool water turned into steamy heat on my skin when I left the shower—I put on the khaki pants and the shirt with one stripe. Although they were wrinkled, the hot moisture from the lake might press them. I checked myself in the long mirror against the bathroom door. Stiff. I rolled up the shirtsleeves and opened two buttons, a defiant distortion of the army’s rigorous code of dress.
(Only minutes before being discharged from the army, still on the campgrounds in Kentucky, I readjust the uniform, twisting the tie over an open button, cocking the required cap. I feel free. I’m stopped by a military policeman in a jeep.
(“Hey, soldier, I can court-martial you for being out of uniform. Are you drunk?”
(“No, sir.” So near to my release—despising having to say that and do this—I adjust the uniform.
(The pacified MP drives away in a snarl of dust.
(I assert my freedom again, distort the fucken uniform.)
I glanced about the room.
On top of the bookshelf lay a book, André Gide’s The Counterfeiters. Arrogant of Paul to suggest what I might want to read out of several other books that filled the shelves. Still, this book, which I had read and admired, added to the sense of welcome departure from my street life. Maybe Paul intended us to discuss that book.
I walked over to the print on the wall.
It was not a print. It was the famous painting.
Just as I had anticipated, no one had dressed for dinner. Sonya wore a pale-blue, almost diaphanous dress that embraced the curves of her body. Paul was also in khakis, and a tan shirt open in a long V—ironically, we were similarly dressed. Stanty wore baggy shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt.
Now lit, the candles on the table cast a soft, benign glow. It was not, nor would it be in the days that would follow, a fussy dinner—I wondered who had prepared it—cold roast meats, a crisp cool salad, French bread, fresh vegetables, fruit and cheese, and expensive wine. There was also an incongruous plate with small jars of various flavors of jam, clearly—and this amused me—for Stanty, who slathered his bread generously with one or another at every bite.
The conversation was ordinary, mostly casual inquiries about my trip here from Los Angeles. Then it turned to the exceptional heat. Paul said he would drive into the village for electric fans. “The heat started last night,” he explained, “and it hasn’t relented. That’s unusual because of the lake.”
Stanty turned to me: “We’ll go swimming; the water is real—very—cool.”
I assumed he was still trying to make up for his earlier remark. Although I
nodded, of course I would not go; but I was embarrassed to say I didn’t know how to swim.
“The water was only a bit warm today, wonderful,” Sonya said.
“Just for you, beauty, just for you,” Paul said and leaned over to kiss her, a long kiss.
I heard a motorboat approaching, distant, closer, and then the sound became muffled. It stopped, near. No one else seemed to heed it, a familiar sound at this time of the evening, I supposed. After a few minutes, a gaunt man and a gaunt woman—like twin shadows—entered the house, soundlessly carrying the statues in from the garden. After they had brought all of them in, and lined them up, the silent couple, each with a single statue, one by one, and with extreme care, descended the stairway into the depths of the house. After a short time, the two gray figures emerged. I had turned away from them to answer some question; and when I looked back, the two had left as soundlessly as they had appeared, as if they had vanished. Servants, of course. It occurred to me that they resembled the statues they had secured downstairs.
That added to a momentary sense of something unreal in this house that floated on a private island miles away from the nearest village.
4
After dinner we sat on the deck in cushioned wooden chairs whose backs could be lowered like those on beach chairs. The deck extended partially over the lake, at the edge of which the sun had left behind hints of the blue radiance soon to come.
We lingered, drinking a cool wine Paul had just opened, different from the one that had accompanied dinner. Evening had brought no respite from the heat. Paul had served the wine—carefully less for Stanty, a fact he surprisingly accepted; he sat cross-legged on the floor next to the chair Sonya had occupied.
Standing, I stared out toward the horizon, Sonya next to me. All that remained of the sunlight was a golden arc already fading as a thin veil of darkness glided over it. A deep blue glow loomed over the water.
