by John Rechy
She gave herself to him, to another of the violent kisses that I preferred not to witness, resenting his brazen performance. I stared away. When I turned around, Sonya had retreated from Paul and was lying next to me.
I was glad Stanty wasn’t here to see my avoidance; he would misinterpret my intent. He was probably secretly nearby, ready to spring out …
Like now. “Does anybody know I’m here?”
Sonya said, “How could anyone possibly miss knowing that you’re here, my darling?”
I never would be able to predict Stanty’s reactions. He laughed. “That’s good, Sonya; that was really funny.”
I had cooled off his obsessive, possessive desire to announce the “blue hour,” and there would be no such interval tonight, I knew, as we sat on the deck after dinner. A jagged layer of dark clouds had settled like a ripped shroud over the end of the lake, turning the night deeply dark.
Stanty stood staring ahead at the silent water and the unchanging light, waiting as if something precious that belonged to him had been seized away; and he said—whispered, and only I heard him—he said:
“I wish …”
18
In the library, I no longer looked for the book that had attracted me and had disappeared. On a small table near the stairs there was, I had noticed, a portable typewriter. I would ask Paul whether I might keep it in my room. (I did ask him, and he, of course, said yes.)
Along the hallway, there was another door into what I thought might be used as a storage room. I had expected it to be locked, but it wasn’t. Looking around, I found some paper on one of several shelves. I noticed a black metallic box, like a large, tall safe. Where the statues had been secured that first night? Where the gun Sonya had referred to was kept locked?
I took the paper and the typewriter to my room. Covering with a dry towel, at least for now, the dizzy painting, I sat down; rolled paper into the typewriter, which was surprisingly new; and I wrote:
A letter came through the offices of Grove Press in New York, forwarded to me in Los Angeles, where I lived in a room in a downtown hotel on Hope Street. The letter was from a man responding in admiration to two stories I had written, recently published. “Mardi Gras” had recounted, as closely as I could remember out of the fog of hallucination, what I thought of now as my season in hell, when, during the Mardi Gras carnival in New Orleans, drunk and drugged and sleepless for sex-driven nights and days, I saw leering clowns on gaudy floats tossing cheap necklaces to grasping hands that clutched and grabbed and tore them, spilling beads; and revelers crawled on littered streets, wrestling for them, bleeding for them—and beads fell on spattered blood like dirty tears—and I saw costumed revelers turn into angels, angels into demons, demons into clowning angels; and in a flashing moment the night split open into a deeper, darker chasm out of which soared demonic clowning angels laughing.
During the purging of Ash Wednesday, as the mourning bells of St. Louis Cathedral tolled, the withering grass of Jackson Square nearby became a battleground of bodies, of men and women besotted with liquor and pills and drugs, passed out like corpses under a frozen white sun; and I fled the hellish city.
I pulled the page out and started to crumple it. I had no intention of continuing what I had begun to write—even the memory pitched me back into those hellish days.
I put the typed sheet under my clothes in a drawer.
After a brief interval of moderate surcease from the heat—a layer of clouds had intercepted the ferocious sun—the heat returned more intense as if it had withdrawn to gain more power.
Overnight, two or three large electric fans had appeared in the house, one in the library, another in the large living room. I assumed they had been picked up in the village by the somber gray couple.
In the library now, even the insistent whirring of the fan was welcome, proof that the heat was in relative check.
I was relieved, when I entered the library, to find that Stanty was not there, and glad when Paul followed me in. We sat at the long table surrounded by shelves of books.
I had adhered to my determination not to prod him to continue where he had left off his account of his marriage to Corina and his cunning guarantee of his fortune.
“And among your more literary influences?”
He hoarded subjects, readied in his mind to be continued without a break. I wouldn’t indicate that he still startled me. I’d move on to challenge him, past his sarcasm about “literary” influences, and I would confound him by mentioning three writers, all women, one of whom I was sure he would not recognize—and I relied on that.
The easy one. “Djuna Barnes.”
“A dark jungle of words,” he identified her, approving. “And—?”
“Kathleen Winsor.”
“Her trash influenced you?”
I sensed an ambush on my intention to baffle him with a name unfamiliar to him, but I also felt annoyance at his reference to Forever Amber as trash. I had learned about that novel in El Paso after dutiful Sunday Mass in the Church of the Immaculate Conception when I was fourteen. The sickly priest led the congregation in a vow never to read books forbidden by the Church. Most emphatically he mentioned Forever Amber—”an affront to all morality, a base, lurid exhibition that flies in the face of our Lord.” I stole it from a book and record shop, carrying it out among my schoolbooks. (The owner of the shop later told me she’d seen me take it but ignored the theft because she had been thrilled to see a boy stealing a book.)
“No, man, not trash at all,” I defended that favorite book. “It’s written in Technicolor prose, and I learned that’s good sometimes, and other times only black-and-white prose, like in Kafka, no colors.” That was true; in my description of the Mardi Gras carnival I had attempted such effects—the garish carnival, the somber cemetery of drunk revelers.
“Who else?”
I’d catch him on this one. “—Aphra Behn.”
“A spy and a writer—sixteen-hundreds, no? She influenced you?”
Son of a bitch. “Yes,” I said. In college I had encountered her and had been attracted to her melodramatic and suggestive novels of intrigue; she used some of the same plots Shakespeare dramatized—with entirely different results.
“Sartre, Aphra Behn, Camus, and Winsor and, of course, Shakespeare?” Paul listed. “A formidable group of influences. Of course,” he added in a voice that alerted me to a taunt, “Camus exists only until you reach—what age?—puberty?”
“What a fucken cliché, Paul. Where’d you hear that? I’m sure you’ll add that Sartre takes over.”
“Sartre does.”
He angered me with his implicit dismissal of a favorite book. “The Stranger—”
“Because—?” He interrupted me.
“In plain prose, it affirms the banality of fate.” Okay, if that sounded stilted.
“Of course. In enumerating your influences”—he was determined—”I omitted algebraic progressions in dogged pursuit of that evasive mysterious X.”
I corrected him: “Algebraic equations.”
His strategy shifted: “You use real people as your characters?” Again avoiding the obvious, a possible reference to himself as a subject.
I met his stare. “Yeah, reflections of them, my view, as fairly as possible.”
“Do you include yourself in that epic sweep of fairness?” He smiled at his own sarcasm, which I ignored.
“As an imitation, with some similarities. It’s tempting to paint even that imitation in flattering hues. I resist that to the point of inventing some terrible things so I’ll be praised for my honesty.” I didn’t wait for him to slice into that. “And your influences, Paul?”
“No one, nothing,” he said.
Although he seemed serious, I said, “Come on, man, that’s bullshit.”
“All right, one,” he bartered. “Can you guess?”
“Ayn Rand.” I held my breath. I had intended to bait him, reduce some of his thinking to its most superficial, the very least, a
parody of thinking—but if he said yes?
“That dumb creature? Come on, you can’t believe—”
“No, I didn’t,” I confessed, in relief.
“Writers whose lives or works explore—even champion—violence,” he said, “and who redefine good and evil: Genet, Beckett, Baudelaire, Mishima. Violence as purification: Nietzsche, and—yes—Swift, and Henry Miller—”
“Whom I dislike,” I interjected.
“Miller’s libertarian—libertine—philosophy?—you dislike? Surely not.”
“I dislike his dirty sexuality.”
“You?” he accused.
“Yeah. Sex in Henry Miller is dirty because the participants are ugly and dirty.” I would try to deflect what I suspected might have been coming, a further dissertation on the purgative of violence and evil. “You know what makes a really hot, sexy scene in a book, man?”
“Yes?”
“At least one of the participants in any sexual configuration—at least one of the players, or of course more, or, best, all of them—must be beautiful and sexy.” If I was to divert what I had interrupted, I might be bolder: I might court his vanity. “If I ever write about this island—”
“Yes?” I was succeeding; he was interested. “And—?”
“I’ll describe everyone as beautiful: Sonya—”
“That’s easy. And Stanty. My son is beautiful. And?”
I waited, silent. I thought I heard footsteps—Stanty, lurking—but it was a sound that came from the whirling fan.
“And?”
“Of course, you, man. You’ll be—”
“Sensational? Like you,” he guaranteed the compliment by extending it to me. He stretched his body—that recurring tendency goaded by justifiable vanity.
We were lying on mats on the sundeck, drinking the chilly Cuba libres that he had just made at the bar and which he had become especially fond of. We had left the library when gray clouds ambushed the harsh sun, a signal that the sundeck was a viable location now, in filtered light.
“Céline, Sade—” he resumed. “The ‘saints’ of our time, the demons, the heroes of all who look into the maw of existence and see only corruption and ugliness.”
“I don’t understand you, Paul,” I ventured. “You contradict yourself constantly, and sometimes when you talk, what you say sounds really good—deep, man—but it doesn’t make sense.” My anger surprised me.
It didn’t displease him. “In a world full of contradictions, is that all you don’t understand? Me?”
“That’s pretty arrogant, to assume you’re the only object of mystery.”
“You like to solve mysteries?”
“Some mysteries shouldn’t be solved; they should be left mysterious. I’d bet this didn’t happen, that it’s apocryphal—and I prefer apocryphal claims—”
“Because—?”
“An anecdote waits to find the proper person to attach to—like that Alice Toklas asked Gertrude Stein—at Stein’s deathbed, no less—asked her: ‘What is the answer?’ and Stein answered, ‘What is the question?’ And, man, that was her answer, man; the perfectly understood question is the answer.” I paused. I was breathless, like a damn student, damn it—okay, a bright student.
I anticipated a readied rebuttal.
“It’s so damn hot,” he said.
“You’re a son of a bitch, man,” I said, smarting at being dismissed so rudely.
“Anyone else you don’t understand?” he asked.
“Yeah. Stanty. You seem to encourage him to be—” This was my opportunity to trump him with ridicule.
“To be?” His voice was serious.
I would do it, shift his interest to absurdity, yet leave the actual matter of the puzzling relationship pending. “You seem to encourage him to be—”
“Yes?”
“—naughty.”
“Naughty!” He threw his head back and laughed. “Stanty? Naughty? I won’t even conjecture what he would do if he thought anyone had called him ‘naughty.’”
“I’d tell him I was … joshing.”
“Good, man, good.” He was grading our repartee, a draw.
But I had entered mined territory. “You seem to be studying Stanty.”
As if to organize his thoughts, he reached for the pack of cigarettes he still carried. He patted the package, allowing the filter of a cigarette to protrude. He put the chosen cigarette between his lips. He returned it to the pack. “My son,” he said in a soft voice, each word pronounced clearly. “Stanty—” He was not looking at me. “My son Stanty—I’m in awe of him, I watch him becoming what I—who he will be.” He shook his head as if negating what he had allowed. He pulled the rejected cigarette out, lit it, and puffed deeply, holding the smoke. He exhaled, long. “Stanty,” he said, and surprised me: “Constantine.”
“I don’t understand what you said.”
“I didn’t intend you to.”
Yet what he had said—I would try to remember it, find clues in the scrambled words. I tried to resume: “I understand Sonya.”
“What if she surprises you?” he added, with grave seriousness. “What if under the extravagant beauty there’s someone you don’t know at all, cunning under the facade of beauty? Perhaps an undecided conspirator?”
He was attempting to taint my feelings for Sonya. Implying that she and he might be secret allies? Not Sonya, not Sonya, who had balked at showing Stanty how to shoot.
He moved closer to me as we lay on the lawn on the towels we had carried from the sundeck; he leaned toward me as if to convey something of enormous gravity that must be kept close, and quiet, delivered softly, something perhaps read and memorized.
“The only way to conquer cruelty is with more cruelty, not with what is called ‘good.’ No, only two equally powerful forces, not a weak one against a powerful one—no contest. Not good against evil—no contest—but evil against evil.” He paused as if to gauge his own words. His tone changed: “I’ll be surprised if you don’t agree, man,” he said, “since you see a world ruled by your clowning angels, groveling for tossed glass beads or filthy money on dirty streets.”
An image he had retained from my story; a connection made to his.
Through his tirades—we were sitting on the deck drinking wine and staring into a starless steamy night—I listened, even at times when what he said, or implied, repelled me. Though blurred—his recurring deliberate camouflage?—what he had said might evolve into a frightening philosophy. At times he lost me in a crush of words, words mouthed for effect, to challenge, never intending to act on their implications. Despite those probationary deductions, I felt angry now at the contempt he expressed, the justification of all he did. I rummaged to rebut him, but all I can come up with is this withheld question about his motives: “In your marriages … Paul … did anything definite trigger your angry separations?”
He looked at me as if baffled that an answer so obvious should have been questioned. He shrugged and said: “It was time.”
“Have you ever felt cruel, Paul?”
“No.”
19
Paul, Sonya, and I are sitting on stools at the bar on the sundeck under the shade of the canopy, which does little to check the heat. I glance down at our intertwined bare legs, Sonya’s—she’s in the middle—are smooth, lighter-dark, curling toward Paul’s, much darker, and then, turning on the stool to brush against mine, darker still, exposed flesh that darkens or lightens and glows with our shifting motions.
Sonya had removed the top of her suit, displaying bold nipples glistening with drops of perspiration that lingered until—this is happening now—Paul leans over and dabs them away with one flick of his tongue on each.
I relish the physical resplendence on the island: When Sonya wanders moodily about the lawn—which has miraculously survived the scorching sun—she looks like a golden ghost, lost within the shifting shade of trees. Paul, darker every day—I note this now—is leaner, more defined, his long muscles carved into his body. (In a
glance, I notice that his trunks—sweat nestling at his groin—reveal his endowment, but, then, he just licked Sonya’s breasts. I won’t allow him to note my competition; I put on my sunglasses, and face away.) I am more muscular than he, more defined than when I first arrived. (I work out in a section of the boathouse that I converted into an adequate gym, with chairs and bracing bars; I caught Stanty there one day, working out. “Good,” I said; that was all.) I have succeeded in turning darker than Paul by going to the sundeck alone when they’re all swimming. I can’t honestly avoid Stanty in my evaluation. His hair has turned streaked blond, his flesh is coffee-colored—I notice that as he runs onto the sundeck.
“Sonya wanted to swim to the other island today,” he announced.
Sonya protested, in her warm tone, “It was you who suggested it, my darling, and I said it was too far to swim, remember?” She had quickly covered her breasts when Stanty burst in.
We are still at the bar sipping Paul’s refreshed Cuba libres.
Stanty dismissed, “I forgot…. You know, John Rechy, I’m the only one who’s ever been even near the other island. Ask my father, he’ll tell you.”
“That’s right,” Paul said—acquiesced, I thought.
“I swam there today,” Stanty announced.
Sonya corrected him gently: “You didn’t swim there, my sweet—”
“I did, I—”
“—you rowed there,” Sonya said.
“Same thing. I could have swum.” He grabbed a handful of ice and pushed it into his mouth. When it had melted, he went on breathlessly: “Listen to this, everyone: There was a man at an upstairs window in the house on that island, he yelled something angry at me. I couldn’t hear him, he was too far away.”
The house I thought I had discerned—was it really there? I anticipated Stanty’s fearful twists, which came:
“He said if I ever came around, he’d shoot me.”
No reaction of alarm from Sonya or Paul.
“But you said you couldn’t hear him,” I said.
“This is how it happened: When the man was at the window, he knew I couldn’t hear him; so he shouted at me, and that’s when I was able to hear him. That’s when he threatened to kill anyone he caught there, and he meant it.” Having delivered his fearful news, and as if to avoid any further interrogation, he walked away.
