by Adam Klein
He opens the closet door where the keys to each room are mounted. He brushes against them when he stretches up to bring down a tray of coins. We walk toward the television and I take my place on the rug beside his chair. He sighs as he settles back into it. His sexiness is lost to his generosity, to the benign mystery of the coins he offers me.
“Where does this one come from?” I ask, feigning interest the way I used to with his son. I’m grateful when he doesn’t answer; it suggests he may not want to move to put them back. I put one like a monocle to my eye and turn to face him. I contrive it, something his son had once done. For a moment he looks down at me, shakes his head at the antic, and returns his attention to the set. I imagine Randy’s impatience, and feel it for Abdallah, whose kindness seems oafish suddenly. Like Sonia, he doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t recognize his part in predation.
“I’ll put this back,” I say.
“You can’t reach it can you?” he asks, not turning as I carry it to the closet.
“Of course I can,” I say, my eyes scanning the keys, the room numbers written over the many hooks on the whitewashed board. I take her key the instant I find it, and, still holding the tray, reach up to put it on the shelf. Keys are more powerful than coins; I think at that moment, perhaps I’ll collect them. He turns just as I pocket it in my shorts. He looks suspiciously at me. “I hope if you’re borrowing a coin you’ll bring it back tomorrow.”
“No,” I answer, “I’m not borrowing anything.” I turn my pockets out and dangle the key before him. “Just my room key.”
He turns back toward the TV. “Don’t stay out too late.”
“I can’t believe you,” Randy said, as I put the key into his hand. He put his arm around my neck, the key in his fist. “I’ll creep in there and give her what she’s asking for,” he tightened his rein on my neck, his lips almost brushing my ear. “Let’s go get that alcohol I promised.”
I am not jealous of the woman, or worried for her.
We walked from the hotel, and while still quite a distance from the beach, could hear the sound of waves along the seawall.
We walked toward a market, almost like a shack with a portable generated sign boasting “Liquors.” Beside Randy I felt part of a gang, as though he had the crowding power of that roomful of Cuban boys. The stretch of road was empty, and I thought, here comes the hurricane, everyone stay inside. He left me while he went inside the store. I listened to the ocean crash against the wall.
We headed down toward the sound, Randy drinking beside me. He handed the flask-shaped bottle to me, challenged me. He tossed the empty bottle in the sand and opened another. “Whisky’ll keep you warm out here,” he said, walking backward along the surf. He climbed up on a rock, put his hands behind his head and stretched himself out over it, looking up at a black sky pricked with stars. Suddenly he began to howl and I noticed then the moon, remote, allowing the tides to go out of control. I started to feel uneasy as his howling grew louder, but when I made a turn to move away from him, he gripped my arm.
“What about your swim?” he asked. His laugh was as loud as the roar of waves. I was so drunk I felt my knees buckle. I remembered Tom with those crabs clinging to him. I couldn’t get that foolish dance out of my head.
“What about it?” he asked, amused by something he wasn’t sharing. “Go ahead, I’ll watch you.”
“I didn’t bring a bathing suit,” I answered, my voice lost to the wind and the crash of waves.
“Take your clothes off,” he said, “you know you want to.”
I took my shirt and shoes off and put them on the rock beside him. I took off my shorts and underwear next. My body, covered with goose bumps, disappointed me. It was just a kid’s body, shriveled with cold, and clumsy with so little alcohol.
“Go on,” he said. “See if you can swim out to that ship.” He pointed to what looked like a tanker not far from the horizon, a ghost ship.
Under his scrutiny, I walked to the waves and stopped quickly at the first feel of icy water on my toes. I felt the sand breaking up beneath my feet, dissolving. I awkwardly took my first steps into the water, my hands out before me as though I was walking into a place without light. I drew in a deep breath and bent into the water. Under the surface, my arms and legs were fighting in slow motion. I was withdrawing from the shore, just my head moving out over the huge cresting waves. I was exhilarated but exhausted, too, and just let myself rise and fall with the waves. I stretched out my toes as though I expected to feel the undertow my parents had always warned me of, pulling at each of my toes, one at a time, before sucking me under suddenly.
I stayed out for some time, until my bobbing became effortless. But the water got cold again without my effort against it, as though it was charged with memories of another me altogether, wordless, out on the playing field behind my school. I called out to Randy, to lure him in. “There is no undertow.” That’s how drunk I was, because I kept shouting it even as I watched him walking up the beach and disappearing out onto the main road.
The Medicine Burns
I see my pitted skin reflected in the tinted window of the airport limousine. Outside, the flat, white fields appear endless; my reflection is an overlay of holes. The landscape has other blemishes, dead trees here and there, an old farmhouse half sunk in the snow. Beneath the snow, I can just make out the dead, wiry stalks of corn combed back across the land, parted, it seems, like frozen hair.
We enter town as the lights of Old Capital are turned on. I see its gold dome from a distance. The driver points out the English and Philosophy building from his window. It is an old brownstone and unlike anything I’ve known in Miami. We drive up to the front of Stonecourt Apartments, and I am overwhelmed with disappointment. The building is far from the campus, off the side of the highway. It looks like a dorm - less attractive than the dorms he’d pointed out on the way over here. I want to ask him to keep driving.
There’s an information area near the banks of elevators. The attendant greets me eagerly, as though he’s hemmed in by the counter.
“You’re very lucky,” he tells me as he slides the rental agreement over the counter. “The tenant before you mirrored one of his walls so you have the only different apartment in the building.”
As I sign my name to several sheets of paper, he leans over and whispers, “The guy who lived there was kind of kinky, I think.”
I look at him, disinterested, and return the papers to him. There is nothing outstanding about his face; it is as common as the faces coming off the elevators. I find it both pathetic and enviable. Some people look like they belong, even in places like this.
“I live here, too,” he says, and I notice his braces for the first time. They don’t surprise me on children, but on him they’re shocking.
“Maybe I’ll check up on you later,” he warns, “just to I make sure you’ve got everything you need.”
The mirrors are cheap tiles affixed to the wall next to the bed. My first instinct is to pull the bed away from the wall. I can’t imagine rolling over in the morning and seeing myself right away.
I turn away from the mirrors as I make my way around the foot of the bed, but I detect an image from the corner of my eye a presence I can never completely obliterate, hunched over, almost hiding, and wearing a blue shirt.
I meet Lawrence on the first day of class. He’s smoking in the hallway, dressed beautifully, sure of himself. I ask him if this is where Theory and History of the Avant Garde will be taught. He nods. I look out the window at the slick walkways and I can feel his eyes on me.
“Is this your first semester?” he asks, more curious than the question permits. My face can do that sometimes, encourage curiosity. He has the striking beauty of a face you see in a magazine, looks, I am sure, that enable him to have whatever he wants.
We sit together in class, in the last row so we can talk while the professor shows slides. He asks me where I’m staying and when I mention the Stonecourt Apartments he whispers, “I’m
sorry. There’s a suicide there every winter.” Then, “If I had to live there, I’d jump too, but from the penthouse.”
When the lights are off, he seems relieved and leans back in his seat. He leans in toward me and whispers, “Brancusi’s The New Born.” The projected sculpture is perfectly smooth. The professor extracts a long, silver pointer from what looks like a pen. He cannot resist its surface and absently traces it while he lectures.
“He’s passionate about his subject,” Lawrence says, sounding ironic, jealous even of that work of art.
“You must have had him before?” I ask.
“Oh, yes,” he says, “too often.”
I look closely at the professor. He is thin but distinguished with a shock of gray hair at the front of his part, which someone, my mother probably, told me had to do with kidney dysfunction. Between him and Lawrence, I begin to suspect a conspiracy of elegant, wealthy men sprinkled throughout the general population of students, but the function of this secret fraternity is difficult to discern.
On the break, Lawrence tells me his full name, Lawrence Coolidge III. He must be joking, but I don’t question it there is something about him that makes me think, cynically, of the word breeding. He tells me that he is a painter and that his family lives in Chicago. He has been a student here in Iowa for two years. I’ve never been to Chicago. All my images of it are derived from Sister Carrie.
“I’m in the English Department,” I mention. I decide not to tell him about my own failed attempts at painting. Even simple figure or perspective drawing is profoundly difficult for me. I don’t trust my eye enough; I am always embellishing.
Maybe the secret club of beautiful men casts light on the ugly ones. I can imagine Lawrence and the professor shrunk down and in a glowing halo at the corner of my room watching me slide out of bed after I’d attempted sex with the information-booth attendant.
He looks so haggard under the standing lamp near my bed. He sits on the edge of my bed in discolored underwear and nylon socks, his brittle yellow body slumped with a shame I cannot rid him of.
I suppose that is what I am trying to do. I continue to disgrace myself in making him feel wanted. I’ll often beg him to deliver his tongue to me through his wired mouth. He obliges me with a power he is unaware of. He is even more powerful when he doesn’t oblige.
He is a codeine addict, and I’ve spent the afternoon driving around with him filling forged cough medicine prescriptions. There are three sticky bottles in the garbage can, one half-full on the night table. When I look at the red ring on the table, I can practically feel it on my skin. It feels like his presence, but though I’d like to be rid of him, I have my own addictions.
He flicks off the light, and until my eyes adjust, there is only the sound of him scratching his skin. He does this obsessively. My only relief is not seeing it.
“I wish you’d let me play my Hank Williams, Jr. record for you,” he says sleepily. “I think you’d like it.”
“How many times have I told you I hate country music and country people?” I am rigid in the dark.
I see his hand sliding from the side of the bed, searching out his guitar lying on the floor. The first two nights he spent with me, I had mistakenly told him I liked his playing. He told me he liked to sing me to sleep, and so I’d pretended with my eyes closed. But he could go on singing for an hour at least.
I grab his hand and twist it until I hear him whimpering. “No playing tonight,” I say through clenched teeth.
He finally falls asleep while I sit propped against the opposite wall. I’m so tense I can’t sleep. I concentrate on matching my breathing to his so that I can forget he’s there.
I vow that I won’t sleep with him again, and stretch out on the floor without cover or pillow. But my vow does not dispel my closet of skeletons - ugly burdensome men I’ve broken every taboo to meet. They hang there, as patient without me as they were with me. I am a bad medicine, I think. I do not heal them, and they discard me even when they are terminal cases and there’s nothing else.
They hang there: the old ones, the amputees, the mentally retarded. I’d like to cut their ropes so they could fall with all the suicides of this building. I imagine them in a sordid heap at the lobby doors of the Stonecourt Apartments, their bodies like a barricade against the doors.
Lawrence invites me to his apartment which is a large one-bedroom in a wooded area behind the campus. It’s a quaint setting with a wooden bridge which crosses a landscaped ravine. We stop for a moment on the bridge, and look down at the thin brook trickling over black stones.
“Almost like wilderness,” he says, “but they can trip floodlights and light up the whole set.” He points out some of the lights, discreetly positioned behind trees. “A woman was raped here a few years ago. Now the place is like a laid trap.”
“I’ll watch where I step,” I assure him.
I distrust the moonlight that makes his features take on the strange, alien quality of the man-made brook. It makes the thought of touching him seem odd and cold.
He opens the door to his apartment and ushers me inside. There is an awkward feeling as we stand, hesitant, in the doorway, as though he were housesitting with instructions not to bring in guests. He takes my coat and the warmth of the room envelops me.
“Have a seat,” he says, aware of my awkwardness. I sit down on an elegant, forest green couch. He tells me he’ll get coffee and turns the radio on before he leaves the room. It’s the classical music station playing softly Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia On A Theme.”
“Do you know this piece?” I ask him.
“No,” he calls out from the kitchen. “I don’t really like classical music.”
This is the apartment of someone established, I think, not a student. The room is rosy and wood-rich, too designed, too considered even for a student with wealthy parents. When he returns with coffee, I can’t help but admire the way he moves around the place so comfortably, like an impostor.
“There’s a man I’ve been seeing since I first moved here. He pays the rent on this place. I had him over last weekend. This is the radio station he likes to listen to. I don’t listen to the radio when I’m here alone,” he says nonchalantly. I notice, though, that he seems to be looking for a response, either shock or forgiveness.
For a moment, I don’t know what I feel. Maybe envy.
“Do you love him?” I ask.
Lawrence looks at me as though I’m insane. Then his eyes soften a little. “I respect him,” he says.
Lawrence insists on taking me by his studio. “It’s on your way home.” He gathers his coat.
He is one of the few students with his own studio in the painting building. The others stand in a large, open area at easels.
There is a padlock on the door and his initials, minus the III, painted on the wall. Inside, the space is crowded with canvases. Two of them are hanging on the wall, illuminated by a clamp light. I walk up close to them, surprised both by their accuracy and their beauty. They are self-portraits, simply and elegantly rendered. In one of the portraits he is looking into a mirror the way I never could, searching it as though it held the truth.
I turn to him. “They’re beautiful,” I tell him, and it’s easier than admitting he is.
I stand at the center of my apartment in disbelief. Practically nothing has been opened or arranged. I begin cutting the tape on an earlier life comprehensively packed and already musty smelling and foreign.
I am uncomfortable putting out the books and records and posters. They seem frighteningly self-conscious now, as though I had gone out of my way to compensate, by way of taste, for a lack in appearance. The whole life is made up. I’m afraid that Lawrence will see through my obsession with the grotesque in film, my collections of criticism and philosophy. He will see just an ugly person filling in the holes.
I leave the boxes packed, the clothes neatly folded. I stand before the mirror tiles, stretching out my skin until it looks almost smooth. My hands move section
by section over my face; I cover it all except for my eyes, peering out between my fingers.
I remember when I couldn’t touch my face. It was two years after I had discontinued a violent dermatological therapy. My face was so red and disturbed I had grown afraid to touch it. The last doctor I saw, at the tearful request of my mother, was an old, Jewish hunchback who had an office in downtown Miami.
He took me into the bathroom and stood behind me and taught me how to wash my face. He held onto my hands and gently guided them over my cheeks and forehead. All along, I made him promise not to inject anything into my skin, not to use chemical peels. He stood behind me whispering, “Only pills, no pain.”
In my room, the ghosts rise from the boxes like dust. I feel my parents’ hands on my throat and feet. They, too, are pleading.
“Can’t you do something about your face?” my mother asks disdainfully. “Wash it again,” she insists, “you’ve got time.”
“But I have washed it.” I want her to notice that I’m wearing my new blazer and tie. But she only sees my face, stinging and burning from the medicine that puts holes in the pillowcase.
I close the boxes and start to pack them away in the closet. I sit down with the last box, though. It’s packed with books. I draw one out and open it on my lap. It is a poem by Rupert Brooke, and I begin to recite it quietly to myself.
And I knew
That this was the hour of knowing,
And the night and the woods and you
Were one together, and I should find
Soon in the silence the hidden key
Of all that had hurt and puzzled me—
Why you were you, and the night was kind,
And the woods were part of the heart of me.
And there I waited breathlessly,
Alone; and slowly the holy three,
The three that I loved, together grew
One, in the hour of knowing,
Night, and the woods, and you—
Lawrence is at the door. I tell him to come in quickly, fearful the attendant might be loitering in the hall.
