After the Blue Hour

by John Rechy

  “I never tire of the sunset on the lake,” Sonya said, “especially at its last moments.”

  “It’s the blue hour,” I told her.

  “How beautiful. The blue hour. What is that, John?” she asked.

  “It’s not an hour at all, just a few seconds of blue light between dusk and night,” I said. It was a light I cherished. On the beach in Santa Monica, I would linger on the sand waiting for the start of sunset, an orange spill over the horizon, soon veiled by a blue darkening light. Gulls would fly onto the beach, gathering at the shoreline, beaks pointed at the water. Often, lithe bodies came to perform a dance of tai chi at the edge of the ocean. Their graceful motions seemed to me to acknowledge and confront the night. “Some people claim that’s when everything reveals itself as it is, Sonya.” I was cherishing her rapt attention. “They say everything is both clearest and most obscure—a light that challenges perception, revealing and hiding.”

  “I like that,” Sonya said, “revealing and hiding.”

  Stanty stood up, pressing himself sideways against Sonya, hugging her, trying to distance her from me, I suspected. Sonya laughed softly at his tight embrace, easing him away fondly.

  “Dark and light at the same time!” Stanty said, looking at me. “That’s not possible, is it, Sonya?”

  Sonya said, “It is. Look!” She pointed across the lake. The blue cast was almost gone. “It’s gone,” she said wistfully. “Such mysterious ambiguity.”

  Onto the deck, the soft hypnotic rhythm of Milhaud’s La Creation du Monde wafted through hidden speakers from the lower level of the house. I was amused to notice that Stanty, back on the floor and next to Sonya, now reclining in her chair, had carried away with him from the table the plate of assorted jams, taking a spoonful every so often, a gesture so childish that I wondered how he reconciled it with his posture of maturity.

  Gathering clouds and a frail moon cast a misty shroud over the forsaken, distant island.

  I sat next to Sonya on the other side of Stanty. Facing us, reclining on his chair, Paul shifted into another subject—I would discover later that he might also shift from one subject to another, abandon it, and then resume it exactly where he had ended it, even if on the next day. “And so, man, you write in intimate first person about your own experiences—in order to lie, as you claim?”

  It did please me that he had retained that from our brief conversation earlier today. Today! I had not been here a full day, and yet I felt I had been pulled into this fantastic group. “Yeah,” I answered Paul, not yet able easily to address him as “man,” “because memory writes its own narrative.”

  “All lies, then.” Often, when he asked a question, it became not so much an inquiry as a statement of his own, or a challenge.

  “Only if I claimed they were the absolute truth. The claim of truth is the lie.”

  Paul said, “Good, that’s good, man.”

  I considered protesting his grading me. I decided not to, not this first night.

  “If you wrote about us, what would you say?” Sonya asked, leaning back, her tanned legs emerging out of the hem of her dress. Each time I looked at her, I was struck by her beauty, rare, extreme beauty, her own.

  I welcomed her question, so direct and unambiguous. I sensed the beginning of unique camaraderie. “I would describe you,” I said, “as a most beautiful woman.” When I get to know an exceptional woman like her, I think that if I were not homosexual, she would be a woman I would love.

  Sonya laughed. Sensual laughter consistent with her presentation.

  “But how else would anybody describe you, beauty?” Paul said, and to me: “And if you ever write your autobiography, will you acknowledge that it, too, is a lie?”

  “I would call it ‘Autobiography: A Novel.’ I lost my faith in biographies, and, later, much more, in autobiographies—when I was writing a paper in school about Marie Antoinette.”

  Stanty laughed. “About the guillotined queen? I thought you were raised poor, John Rechy.”

  He had read the brief biography that had accompanied my published stories. “Yeah, I was, but I was still writing about the tragic queen.”

  “That’s”—Stanty paused as if for the exact big word—“incongruous.”

  In a strict sense it was. My interest was aroused when I was a kid and I saw a movie about the doomed queen. During “revival week” one movie theater showed only old movies and great serials, different ones every day. I saw them all, cutting grammar-school classes and sneaking in through a back door I secretly kept unlatched. Like the books I read hungrily, sometimes two or three at once, shifting from one to another, movies were my escape from my father’s violence amid my mother’s gentle love.

  “You saw old movies in El Paso? In Texas?”

  I ignored Paul’s needling. “Yeah, at the Texas Grand Movie Theater … man.” That would placate him.

  “And? About the ‘tragic queen’?” Paul goaded me.

  “I did research, especially in Stefan Zweig’s biography. There was a passage that said that on their wedding night the draperie enclosing the royal bed didn’t sway all night. How the hell could he claim that was true?”

  “Only suggesting what really didn’t go on,” Paul said.

  “But with such authority,” I said. “He was a good liar, he was convincing.”

  Sonya said, “I cried when I saw that old film about her. I saw it again, hoping that by some miracle she would be saved this time.”

  Paul said, “You thought the ending of a film would change to suit your sentimental expectations, beauty?”

  “I was only a child,” she said.

  I resented Paul’s chastising her. I wished that earlier I had described her as beautiful and smart. For now I defended her. “I, too, wished she had been saved.”

  “She drowned,” Stanty said.

  He was staring in the direction of the vacant island now absorbed in the distance by night.

  “She didn’t drown,” I corrected him, although he knew that—he was planning something. “She was killed.”

  Paul’s stare was steady on his son. “Why do you say that, Stanty? You know that she—”

  “Because if they chopped off her head”—Stanty aimed at me—“her head fell into a bucket, and that’s where she drowned.” As if the image he had gleefully conjured did not satisfy him, he rushed more words: “She drowned in a bucket of her own blood.” He dipped into the jar of jam he still held, shiny, red, like coagulated blood, and he ate a large spoonful. “Her head continued to breathe, and she drowned.”

  “How monstrous,” Sonya said.

  I stopped the urge to laugh at his grotesque exaggeration. I didn’t want to halt the conversation he had interrupted.

  Paul astonished me by saying, easily, lazily drawling: “You see, man, Stanty found the truth in lies.”

  Paul’s absurd rebuttal annoyed me. I had the impression that he and Stanty were indulging in a game of their own.

  Lunging back into our conversation, Paul asked me about the novel that had been announced with the excerpts that had led him to invite me here, a novel I had not started but had chosen to claim existed in part, in order to secure publication of my two stories. “It’ll be about the people I met on the streets, hustlers, queens,” I told him, “but I’ll have to overcome a feeling that I’m invading their lives.”

  “Invading!” Paul reacted. “Man, a writer must be a thief of lives.”

  “Maybe … man.” That was all I could think of to counter him.

  “In a world of clamoring clowns and malignant angels, you feel hesitant as a writer?” he asked.

  “Only lies?” Sonya said. “Is it really only lies?”

  I said what I knew she wanted—perhaps needed—to hear. “No, it isn’t all lies.”

  She touched my hand, as if in gratitude. “Paul,” she said, “some more music before I go to bed?”

  Did he sleep with her, or did he only have sex with her?

  Paul turned up the volume o
n a control panel on the wall, playing the same record again.

  “Lovely,” Sonya said. “Do you like Milhaud?” she asked me.

  “I do, yes,” I said, “especially The Creation of the World.” As I followed Stanty’s gaze toward the vacated island on the lake, this occurred to me: His gory interpretation of the queen’s death by drowning—was it possible that what had been on his mind was whatever had occurred on that island? I searched for the distant island from where I sat; but the night had turned so dark that it was invisible, melded into darkness. No—wait. A forlorn house seemed to emerge within my vision, a darker shadow within the hot black night.

  Sonya stood up to retire. Stanty rose with her. She went to Paul to kiss him, a kiss that lasted to the point that I looked away from Paul’s implied exhibitionism.

  When, a few moments later, Sonya walked past me, she kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Stanty hugged Paul and kissed him on the cheek. “Good night, Father,” he said.

  That manifestation of ordinary affection jarred me into realizing this was the same boy who had just spun a violent story about a beheading. He was walking toward me as if about to hug me, perhaps defiantly to kiss me, to test my reaction before Paul and Sonya. I pulled back.

  “You didn’t think I was going to kiss you, did you? Or did you jerk away from me because of what you write about?”

  “Stanty—” Sonya cautioned.

  “And what would that be, Stanty?” Paul said.

  I tried to hide my anger, both at Stanty and at Paul for encouraging him. “Yes, Stanty, what do you mean?” I asked.

  “You know,” he said. “In my school there are two boys who—oh, you know; they’re quee—”

  I blocked his word: “Homosexuals?” I finished for him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Homosexuals, that’s what I meant.”

  He was a boy, a kid, a reckless kid, the son of my host; and I was about to engage him. But I had to react, to check him, here in front of Paul—a message to both son and father. “You seem to have two of everyone in your school,” I said. “Two Mexicans, two homosexuals, two— What next? Two Constantines?”

  Paul and Sonya both laughed with me.

  Stanty winced. “I—” he stammered.

  “That’s enough,” Paul finally cautioned.

  Stanty assumed his commander’s pose. He wasn’t through. He waited.

  There occurred then the terrible stasis in time when the expectation of something disturbing, physical or verbal, holds all in abeyance, and all action is halted.

  Into the mesmerized silence, Stanty laughed, a kid’s delighted laughter approving a move in a game. “I was just joshing with you,” he told me,

  “I knew that,” I said, smiling back to dismiss his remark. The utter strangeness of this event struck me, the abrupt shifts in conversation—and, now, everything seemed placid as if there had been no hint of confrontation: Paul stretching, yawning lazily; Sonya smiling at Stanty as they moved along. It was as if a play had ended, and in the background the cadenced music of Milhaud was fading and there was a sense of surface in the silence, a benign surface over an undercurrent, deep down in the lake, a current that was gathering pressure.

  5

  “Good night, man.”

  “Good night, Paul.”

  Paul walked out after having led me to my room. I assumed he would now join Sonya.

  I took another cold shower, which cooled me briefly.

  In my jockeys, I went to the window. An odd feeling of anticipation, or, more, perhaps something like anxiety, made me stare into the heated night. The vacated island had drowned in darkness.

  I roamed over to the shelf with the books Paul might have chosen for me. I pulled out Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. It had exhilarated me when I was a freshman in college, on a scholarship—the only way I could afford it, and for only two years even then—not caring about a degree, taking only courses in literature and a course in film, bravely supported and taught in the small college by a Harvard professor who had sought El Paso’s tepid weather to nurture his diminishing life. Right after the two years in college, I volunteered to be drafted into the army to obviate the inevitable conscription. From Camus’s book, I had copied the following: “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your act of existence is an act of rebellion.” That still mattered, but would the book excite me now? Better not risk the danger of years-ago impressions recalled. I put it back. Tristram Shandy—I leafed through it, evoking its terrific inventions, especially the creation of an impatient reader as a character.

  It was too hot to read. My eyes kept wandering to the disturbing painting on the wall—the dots and lines seemed to move and swirl. I would have covered it with a towel, but the towel I had used was moist. I lay in bed, which, for a few moments, was notably cool.

  If it continued, I would have to deal with the fact of Stanty’s rudeness. Playful rudeness perhaps, and there were his ready apologies, and Paul had finally checked him. I could leave; Paul had sent return fare to Los Angeles. But I didn’t want to leave.

  I had fled Los Angeles to break all contacts, feeling a need for a respite, a new life—or, rather, a return to an earlier life of reading hungrily, a life which I am already finding here in conversations with Paul. I don’t know why—after leaving the army, asserting my solitary existence even within the imposed camaraderie among soldiers—no, I don’t know why I turned to vagrant wandering and hustling, pretending to be only street-smart like other exiles living from day to day on the precipice of cities, exiles I joined and became one of. Nor do I know why I abandoned my former isolation; perhaps—this must be it—I wanted to slaughter as violently as I could a sense of rotting innocence entrenched, self-imposed, during which I lived mostly through books and movies to escape the reality of a harsh existence, a menacing father not tempered even by the gentleness and wounded love of my mother.

  Paul.

  Paul, a fascinating man whose purpose in inviting me here was still, despite my conjectures, an enigma—and, too, I would stay because I welcomed Sonya’s suggestion of a unique friendship. Yes, I would stay here for now, yes, on this island.

  Lulled by the slapping of the water against this side of the house, I fell asleep, only to be wakened—I thought no more than an hour had passed—by the sound of footsteps approaching along the hallway; that would be Paul returning to his room next to mine. The soft footsteps—bare feet, or slippers—paused outside my door. Was I still asleep? No, I was wide awake. Definitely someone had stopped outside my door.

  Sitting up, I listened. I was sure someone was standing there. Waiting for what? The footsteps had faded, perhaps smothered by the sound of lapping water outside. Of course, it was Paul on his way to his bedroom and pausing to see whether I was asleep, perhaps to say good night again. It would not surprise me to know, as I had suspected, that he did not spend the whole night with Sonya. The footsteps resumed, but now they were retreating, not proceeding to where Paul’s room was, but going away from it—this was a strong impression. Then who had stopped outside my room? Sonya?—to tell me what? Stanty, playing another silly game? Sleepily, I reassured myself. Paul had forgotten something and had gone back to retrieve it. I fell asleep concentrating on the sound of the water outside—but once again I was wakened.

  There was now the sound of the motorboat heading to the house, at first distantly whirling, and then quiet, subdued, as if allowed to coast, becoming invisible on the water.

  In the morning, all my disturbing impressions faded. Not dreams, no—I had definitely been awake—just the accretion of impressions gathered during the brief time I had been here, all blending into the ambiguous sounds and sights of the night. I walked to the window. Despite the bright morning glare—and the unbudging heat—the neighboring island was encased in heavy fog that seemed to have gathered only there.

  I was not surprised to learn that breakfast was an individual event. Every mor
ning there was, and would be with few variations, imported coffee, freshly ground—dark, strong, very strong—fruit or juice, croissants, assorted pastries, French bread. All was prepared, I assumed, by the soundless gray couple.

  After I had coffee and a French roll, I encountered Paul coming in from outside to seek me out. He offered to show me the library.

  He was wearing trunks and a tank top. I had already determined correctly that the form of dress would be casual all day—easily adapted, for them, to plunging into the lake to swim, seemingly on instinct, or lying on the sundeck tanning. I soon wore trunks under my jeans and at times just trunks. Most days I would not bother to wear a shirt.

  Earlier, I had heard the sound of exuberant laughter coming from the lake. That would be Sonya and Stanty, swimming, of course, or rowing, or both—I had seen them jump off the rowboat and swim away, then return to the boat later, perhaps racing.

  Paul led me down the balustered stairway at the end of the main room. Not a basement, it was a full lower level of the house, a lower storey. We went into the library, a large room.

  There were many shelves filled with books, some lying flat, space apparently exhausted. We walked along the aisles. The vast collection of books was not arranged in any discernible order; there were classics mixed with modern novels, some recently published—including one I had just read, William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness. I admired the book and was impressed by the fact that even its title conveyed its ominous tone. Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Conrad, Virginia Woolf. There were works on philosophy along with books on art, children’s books—only those seemed to have been placed together in a neat group. Stanty’s books, it amused me to think. There were reference books; books on religion, magic, witchcraft, history; poetry collections; T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; Hart Crane; Flannery O’Connor, a favorite of mine—I felt that I shared her uproarious angry laughter at horrors. And, in French, Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur and La Jalousie, and other books whose titles I missed in a blur because I was trying to take it all in with hurried glances.