That was why he was back.
—Where you going, today? he asked as I was about to leave.
I explained about the street fair.
Take me with you? he asked. After all (and he stepped from the wall to look down at himself, naked on the bridge flags in the warm autumn evening), how long can I hang around here, shaking this old turkey neck, hoping some guy with bad breath and no teeth is hungry enough to buy my turkey milk.
I have work to do there.
Oh, come on, he said. Take me. I won’t be in the way.
Well, I suppose you can come. But I made it clear to him there would be nothing monetary in it. He made it equally clear; he’d heard of the various Kolhari festivals since before he’d come to the city, but he’d been afraid to go to any of them himself. If he went with a friend, like me, he wouldn’t be scared. And he couldn’t pass up a chance to go with someone actually part of the festivities.
As he fell in beside me, he called to a stranger a little way down from us: another young man, I realized, working the bridge.
—Hey, give us a swig of your beer?
At which the youngster pulled his drinking skin from the wall, beat it against his thigh, and (to my surprise) stalked angrily off! I raised an eyebrow to ask my friend what that was about. Grinning, he explained:
—Oh, I stole an old man of his this morning, who always comes around here looking for him. Only today, I was here first! When I came back, I told him about it—about how much money I’d been given. (He nudged my arm, his grin gone broader.) I lied…about the price, I mean. Nobody gives that much. But I tell a good story. And now he thinks anyone who walks by and talks to me was really going to talk to him first.
I began to protest, but he went on:
—It doesn’t matter. Last week, every time someone came near me, he was in my face, with his dumb smile and his stupid boasts about how much he can do and how long he can do it. I’m just getting him back.
He ended with a scalding insult to his rival’s breeding, homeland, and defecatory practices, which, in its country vulgarity, I actually found shocking here in the city—at any rate worrisome:
His rival just happened to have been—most visibly—of the same ethnic origins as the inhabitants of the neighborhood in which our festival was to take place.
When we reached the crowded streets with their colorful revelers, the grills set out on the corners with their spitted lambs, the drunken singers, the arguing parents, the racing children, the colored hangings roped below the windows, he stayed very close to me. The neighborhood (to him) was full of foreigners; and foreigners were what, at home, he’d been taught most to fear.
Once we reached our wagons, for the first minutes he simply stood by the back corner, blinking and staring a lot. Of course there was still more setting up to do, and I turned to lend a hand. Minutes later, I looked up to see him suddenly let go of the wheel whose rim he stood clutching and throw himself into our preparations as if he were one of our troop, now asking some groom, now one of the propmen, what he could carry here or there, what he might fetch, what he might hold, and even the Leading Lady if there was anything he might go bring her—with a blown kiss she sent him running off after something or other, which, in only a little longer than one might have assumed, he returned with.
I admit I was somewhat wary of all this, but the others seemed to take to him, and soon they were sending him there and here, with this load or that.
His labors clearly left him braver. Now, as the day wore on, he would actually go off by himself for a while, and an hour later I would see him, from the platform, as I played my gongs and cymbals, threading through the crowd, munching on this or that bit of carnival fare, given him by whom or pilfered from where, I would not presume to guess.
Eating, watching, grinning, he would wink at me.
And, indeed, I would grin down at him—and go on playing.
That night when the flares burned low and it was time to dismantle the platform and take down the lamps and lanterns, again he threw himself in with our work. Once I saw him nearly slip with a plank of wood balanced on his shoulder. A little later, I saw him unsteady with a load of masks in his arms. Somehow in the course of the evening he had managed to get satisfactorily drunk—but then, in such conviviality where strangers offer you drink practically at every corner, that was not surprising. And it certainly had not dampened his energy.
He stayed with me that night in my wagon, the two little dancers with whom I then shared it having found some sailors after the performance who wanted to take them to see their ship on the waterfront by the moon. (They didn’t get back till two days later and received quite a dressing down from the Director.) We had rather drunken sex in the littered dark. One or the other of us, I suspect, fell asleep in the midst of it.
Once, in the wagon, he woke up, somewhat disoriented, and made me lead him, unsteadily, outside into the surprising moonlight. He kept on repeating, still drunk, that he’d heard something. Then, with his head down, his feet wide, and his hand against the crumbling daub of some dilapidated wall, he began to urinate—in amazing quantities, with astonishing force—wetting his feet, my feet, splattering his knees, soaking his own hands, making almost as much of a mess of himself as if he had never left the bed.
The next morning he was up, however, standing out in the quiet morning, only a little squint-eyed.
We saw the wagons off, on their way back to the market. Then we walked together, the long way, toward the bridge. Halfway across I told him:
I must cut you loose here. It’s been fun. And I don’t have too much of a headache.
I do. He grinned at me, his young beard, unbrushed that morning, looking as grizzled below his rough cheeks as one of his elderly client’s. I’m going down under the bridge and sleep for a while in the shade, he told me. (I was planning to crawl right into bed as soon as I reached the wagons back in the market square.) Hey, how about letting me hold a couple of coins? Oh, I don’t mean for last night. I wouldn’t charge you for that. That’s free. But just for all the work I did? For you, and everybody?
What could I say?
—We get together soon? he called after me, as I left him, standing there with the iron in his hand. The bridge was quiet that morning, and I had the momentary feeling that his voice, with its all too expected proposition, echoed not only from end to end but throughout the entire city.
—Yes, of course!
I believe I also called back some tentative time for meeting him the next day (—I’ll see you at about…), an appointment that one or the other of us didn’t keep.
Of course.
And whose party was it a week later? No, not yours that time—because I recall distinctly I rehearsed with that marvelous, messy woman who composed the wonderful music that made me, finally, decide to give up tootling to become a serious mimic. And we never performed together in your gardens. Yes, that’s right. It was for your friend, the baronine. You were present at that elegant afternoon affair? Well, that’s certainly possible.
At any rate, it was probably that same evening, when I was returning from Neveryóna to the market, over the bridge:
—Hello! How you doing?
A few more beers. A few more coins. Another room. In another inn, which another boy had told me was somewhat cheaper. And as I sat at the edge of his bed over the next few days, our conversations ranged back over pretty much the same topics as they had the last time.
The son.
The wife.
The farm…
—I was married, I decided to tell him one evening. Once. For al most eight years, actually. Before I became a mummer. Or, at least be fore I permanently joined the troop. I had two sons and a daughter. Ah, what a good father I was! I’ve never worked harder at any role in my life. Well, that’s finished with now, and though it may be my finest performance, I wouldn’t give a minute more to it, that I tell you.
He laughed with me; but he was curious:
What abou
t your fooling around? Did you do it back then? With men, I mean?
Certainly. Probably a good deal more than I do now. After all, I was young. About your age, actually. At least when I married her.
Did she know? I mean about you and…men?
Of course!
You told her?
Well before we were married. What sane man would ally himself with a woman and not let her know something about him as important as that?
How did she feel about it?
At first it rather excited her. (From the way he grinned, I knew that even with his seven women he’d already learned that anomalous truth about the complex engine of sexual interaction.) After the children came, I suspect the topic began to bore her.
Did the kids know?
Toward the unnecessarily ugly end, the two who were old enough must have suspected. A lot of things were yelled that had nothing to do with anything save how deeply they could wound. You know, my wife was quite talented herself. Still lives out in Yenla’h. At least I think she does; it’s not on our summer itinerary. Oh, she could make anything: houses, pots, stage sets. Also, she was rather an adventurous, if moody, woman. But I was fond of her; and most of the time I treated her as such. With me, that involves a certain amount of honesty. I suspect it does with most.
Then why aren’t you together?
The most difficult part to understand for him, I think, was that the reasons for our separation (Oh, final happiness!) were simply those that split any pair who each finds that the company and habits of the other reduces her or him to a sniveling, furious, pitiable, and paralyzed beast no longer capable of acting like anyone’s notion of a reasonable man or woman as the gods first formed and crafted us.
—How many women have you been to bed with? he asked.
And before I could answer, he began to tell me a clearly preposterous story about a sexual triumph he’d had with a beautiful woman he’d slipped off with for a while that night at the carnival. He hadn’t told me before, you see, for fear I might be jealous. But he hadn’t drunk that much, yet. So of course once he’d gotten her down in a pile of leaves behind some old shack away from the merry-makers, he’d come too fast and—In the middle of his tale, however, it was as if he suddenly remembered we too had entered into a certain arena of honesty, and he halted. Well, actually, he said, he’d seen a woman in passing, older than he, ordinary enough in other respects, but with a certain…Well, she was just against a wall and eating from a netted sack of fruit at one of the crowded corners. Standing across the busy way from her, he’d considered going up and trying to talk, hoping possibly to bring her to the wagon, where he’d intended to ask me to let them fuck while I stood guard outside!
That’s why he’d come back and worked so hard.
He had left her and returned to look at her several times. She’d apparently stood there quite a while, as though she were waiting for something. (—Almost as though she were listening for something, I believe is what he said with a moment of poetry to his pensive look that now and again would illuminate his most work-a-day accountings.) But still he had not been able to bring himself to speak. Eventually, on the fifth or sixth time he returned, she was gone—alone or off with someone else, he did not know.
—Like the fool I am, he told me, shaking his head, I couldn’t say anything.
For both of us, then, the answer was still seven.
I don’t remember which of us asked the next obvious question: Well, how many men have you slept with? (Oh, it must have been me!) We sat on his bed in the tiny room with the bare walls and sloping thatch, trying to figure. Twenty-five? Fifty? (Did I throw such absurdly low numbers out only to tease?) Well, he’d come to Kolhari with half a dozen from his childhood play on the farm, and he’d seen a hundred go by months ago: he remembered passing the twenty-five mark in his first week on the bridge.
Laughing, we agreed that for both of us it was certainly high in the hundreds. I was forty. He was not yet twenty. I wonder why I felt obliged to tease:
Well, then, you’re just like me. Obviously you like men’s bodies better than you like women’s. I certainly do! Always have. Always will.
No! he protested. I like women’s bodies far more than I like men’s. Men’s bodies? That’s only a kind of play. I don’t take them seriously. I only go with them when women aren’t around. And I want to get paid for it when I do.
Well! and I had to laugh. I thought such things once myself, though I never really felt them. When I sleep with a woman, it’s only thinking about a man that allows me to enjoy myself. Which thinking I did very well, thank you, twice a week for eight years. Of course, too often when one does go to bed with a man, one has to think of another man. Really, it does go on. What do you think about when you sleep with a woman? Or a man—me—for that matter?
Nothing, he said a little wonderingly.
To be sure, I said. He doesn’t think of anything.
Well, sometimes, he admitted at last, a man and a woman doing it together…but while you were married, you still did it with men?
Who do you think I was thinking about that let me enjoy my wife? My young friend, I say it, and I mean it: I like men’s bodies for the inspiration, stimulation, and relief of lust far more than I like women’s. And going through the proper nuptial rituals with a woman, as your village prescribes them, will not change that if that is, indeed, your case. Also (and here I frowned askance at him with one lowered brow), for two who feel so differently, don’t think it’s odd that what we’ve done is so much the same?
That only made him protest the more. Indeed, as he argued with me over the next quarter hour he got quite angry. Now and again he actually threatened me. I only pooh-poohed him the more. Finally, I declared:
—Well, whatever you do, and like, and feel, and think, you must learn to accept them all and live with whatever contradictions between them the nameless gods have overlooked in your making, like cracks in an imperfect bit of ceramic still pleasing in its overall shape. Certain strains, certain tasks, certain uses one does not impose upon such pieces. But everyone has them. Learning what they are is, no doubt, why we were put here.
Though by now I suppose I had a somewhat worried look, for he’d already overturned the bed during one outburst and had several times struck the wall with his fist.
—That’s the only thing that matters, I went on. Calm down, now. Our wagons leave the city tomorrow. Let me buy you a farewell meal tonight.
I took him to eat at a waterfront inn where tables were set on finely broken shells and lamps hung from the poles overhead and you could look down the docks at men walking through the evening, some holding up flares, some rolling barrows in from the side streets, some loading bales off the boats:
Have you ever been here before?
No…! His eyes were big with the waterside wonders, and he clutched his mug in both hands.
Then, it’s about time!
We ate a meal and drank a lot. It was the first in all his time here he’d even seen the docks—in our port so famous for its waterfront. The ships and the confusion around us scared him a bit, I think; and excited him; and made him grin.
The argument earlier, back at the inn, seemed forgotten. Everything here spoke of travel, with its commercial support not so vividly contaminated by lust and madness as it was in his own neighborhood. It gave the waterfront an excitement, a purity he’d never known in the infamous quarter that had been till now, for him, almost all of Kolhari. In some ways, however, I’m sure that realization of the greater vastness to this city, which had already educated him well beyond anything he’d even dreamed of knowing on his village farm, deeply unsettled him.
That night in his room he was as drunk as I’d ever seen him.
That, and perhaps something unsettling I felt myself, put all thoughts of any farewell intimacies from my mind; although, for a moment, I think, as he swayed in his dark chamber, demonic in the light from the clay lamp I had just set on the rickety corner table, blinking and
bleary-eyed, he expected or even wanted them (do I flatter myself?)—before he closed his eyes, slowly, to collapse, half on the floor and half on the bed, where I gave him a few tugs to straighten him.
I blew out the lamp and left.
The next day, of course, our parti-colored wagons rattled away from the city. He was certainly not up to see us off. With the kind of hangover such a drunk leaves, I’m sure he spent that day sick in his room. The day after that, his rent ran out at the inn. So he must have returned to the bridge.
But somewhere between the time I left him and the time he was back on that walled stone walk above the water, so I learned later, my friend went mad.
Yes, just like that.
It was a quiet, inward sort of madness. Most of the first day he ambled from one end of the bridge to the other and back. The only way his actions differed from before was that, now, when the other boys spoke to him, to call hello, or to suggest they go there or here together on this or that mildly questionable pursuit, he walked by them, not speaking, sometimes with an angry, startled look. When men glanced at him, he did not grin and step up to begin talking with a hand on their shoulder, nor stop to lean beside them at the wall, with a comment about a passing whore. He walked to the end of the bridge.
The Complete Series Page 102
