Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  Four masterful sanguine sketches in an hour, Jan on right thigh, Hans on left. So many shins in one area! Sander wailed. Hans across my lap, Jan standing with my arm around him. Things were less than serene from time to time, such as a seizure of giggles quelled by Sander’s threat to throw us all out and use other models, and Hans impishly fitching around with his peter, causing Jan’s to stand, at which Sander grinned with idiotic good nature.

  9 THERMIDOR

  Le Nouveau monde amoureux, page 114.

  Dialogue entre ZEUXIPPOS, DIOGENES, et DAPHNEUS sur l’amour des mâsles.

  Should read Zeuxippos, Protogenes, and Daphnaios. Pysias should be Pisias.

  PISIAS scène: tu aimeras les enfants jusqu’à ce que le voile [] la face, leur douce haleine et cuisses chérissant [passage haché et presque tout à fait illisible]

  This is Daphnaios in Plutarch (The Dialogue on Love, Moralia IX) quoting Solon:

  ἒσθ’ ἢβης ἐρατσιν ἐπ’ νθєσι παιδοφιλήσηι μηρν ίμєίρων κα γλυκєρο στόματος.

  jusqu’à le voile [d’une barbe couvre] la face: conjecture. PISIAS s’écrie: O hercule, bannis le Dieu amour des parcs publics où l’on va à la chasse aux garçons. Solon a écrit ces vers étant encore jeune et plein de semence, dit Platon, mais au contraire il écrivit ceux-ci étant déjà sur son age

  Dame Vénus est près mon déduit

  et de Bacchus le breuvage medust

  après qu’il ait retire sa vie [] comme d’une tourmente et tempête de l’amour des mâsles et une tranquillité calme du loyal mariage.

  plein de sentence: σπρματος πολλο μЄστός

  Solon’s couplet:

  ἒργα δ Κυπρογєνος νν μοι φίλα κα Διονσου κα Μουσων τίθησ’ νδράσιν єφροσύνας.

  10 THERMIDOR

  The apple, as you can taste, is of the family Rose.

  Crossing to the island, the sea dirty and tumultuous in an unseasonable fitfulness, the wind contrary, fog scudding in, we got drenched to the knackers. Cabin cold, dark, musty. Lamps lit, a good fire started, Grietje and Sander into dry shirts, a blanket around them, we had coffee and brandy on the hearth. Grietje full of herself, having discovered on the train and waiting to cross in the boat that she could ask questions. To rejoin some of the shattered pieces of de Verlichting, to find structures deeper in the articulateness of things than we had suspected, to observe with waking rather than sleeping eyes, I answered her question as to what in the world a philosopher does.

  To look for evidences of our qualifications for the Harmony.

  The place itself! Grietje said of the cabin. Lamplight, firelight, books, the worktable, the one bed. And we’re not drowned in the North Sea. Nachtmerrie! Rain nattering on the windows, wind whomping on the roof. Sander looking like een engel. It’s all so crazily wonderful! To be here, as I’ve longed, where Sander got to come when he was seeing things, and the cat had his tongue as if he were three again, and when he did talk it was so ghastly that psychiatrists wrote it down in articles on raving teenagers. But listen to the rain, listen to the sea.

  Supper of tinned ham, cheese, bread, pickles, and chocolate biscuits in front of the fire. Grietje beside herself happy, butting Sander, pummeling him on the shoulders, looking at Sander and me with bolting eyes until he said, he’s huggable, try it, as she did, and a sweet armful of girl she is. Middle age, a second adolescence. Sander’s not yet wholly civilized, I said to her of his inviting her to feel my tummy through all that hair, it’s hard as a Lutheran head, which didn’t stop her from doing it. The thing about Adriaan, zusje lieveling, is that he’s backward shy touchy, not up with the times. Oh, he’s way out ahead of the burgermannetjen with cubes for noggins, out ahead of psychiatrists and the police, but still very wat zal de wereld ervan zeggen, absolutely World War II about all sorts of things. You’ll see.

  Sander’s reading of our kameraadschap is that in exchange for my finding him in the muckmidden he’d dug himself into he has given me Erewhonian citizenship. Your kindse grijsaard Fourier, he says, was one of us.

  Only, says Sander holding his feet and rocking on his bare butt between me and Grietje around the fire, great heroes can sleep together like Adriaan and me. I know the limits of his nature, or enough to behave myself, and despite his tactless remarks about my manners, cold feet, the stiffness and cumbersome size of my dick, he thinks I’m handsome, which is true. So he hugs back when I can’t help hugging him, he doesn’t think sex is scary or nasty, though his mind wanders. You can be hard as a broom handle with lovingkindness, balls tight as a grapefruit, he’ll play along, but just when you’re feeling like a stallion half a meter up a mare he’ll start talking about Rietveld’s eye. O ja, says Grietje, Rietveld’s eye.

  11 THERMIDOR

  Grietje fries bananas in the skillet, saying they’ll taste of woodsmoke. They do. Sander, having brought estovers and water from the spring, helps himself to a puff of my pipe, hacks, and falls down dead before Grietje, who trills fingers along his mesoventral hair up under his jersey and down into his underpants, bringing him back alive to be fed a slice of banana, kiss her, kiss me, and do the danse salade of Isidore de haasje, singing what he says is a Frisian catch about fucking all night in a cabbage cart. My brother, says Grietje to the skillet, is an idiot.

  Sander’s resourcefully, mischievously determined bec et ongle to impress Grietje with the originality and scope of our friendship. She takes it all in, as so much teasing, and so much big brother’s boasting, and foils him by saying that she’d taken it all for granted all along. Out, the three of us, in the early morning, for the splendor of the freshness, Grietje in jeans and Sander’s jersey, which she said smells of skunk underarm but of wet sheep otherwise, I in Sander’s jeans and cardigan, he in my Finnish sweater, and, to shock Grietje, my briefs, the lug of the pouch making the waistband slight his hips and scant his behind. He took them off me when, dressing for our walk, I had just put them on, causing Grietje to whistle a sigh. So, onderbroekloos, I tugged on Sander’s jeans, their 10 cm zipper a vexation of scrunching into scrimped quarters. Floc of fog yet in the pines, dull glare on the sea, the air smelling of iodine and resin. Sander, Grietje said sweetly, has goose pimples on his sexy thighs because he must show off, hoping to fluster us this time of morning, what a goof. Well, says Sander, you’ve got on my soccer shirt when you have a wicked tight sweater you could be wearing, because you’re sex dippy and like to whiff your goatish big brother even when he isn’t whinnying in your arms. But of course, she said, stepping on his foot and getting flicked on the butt for it. But then you’re queer for Adriaan’s sweater and underpants because you’re trying to magic him into loving you even more than he does. Grote genade! He straightens you out when you’re so fucked-up you don’t know what planet you’re on, he makes a human being, sort of, out of you, the neat trick of the century, finds out what God intended you to be, a painter, rents you a studio, buys you canvases and paints and brushes, feeds you, feeds us, encourages you, arranges for a show of your work at the poshest gallery in Amsterdam, writes the catalogue for it, loves you as much as I do, loves us both, so that we cavort in a porno comicbook fantasy that the nuttiest writer wouldn’t ask anybody to believe, out of our minds happy, and you, Alexander Brouwer, you want more. Damned right, he said.

  Apple is to pear as butterfly is to moth.

  Bee is kin to apple as wasp is to pear.

  12 THERMIDOR

  Contiguities chime. Grietje asks about the fifteen volumes of Thoreau’s Journal, and while telling her about them and as she looked through them and read passages aloud, I saw how I distinguish between books brought to the island and books in Amsterdam. Slocum’s voyage, Robinson Crusoe, Amiel, Pausanias, Doughty. Women’s curiosity leaps at patterns. She asks about book after book, making her theory grow. She listens with bright eyes when I tell her about the autumn I spent here reading all of Thoreau’s journals, underlining, making note
s, and about the summer reading Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta in a deck chair under the big larch, and how, in a way that rarely happens, I was Thoreau for an autumn and Doughty for a summer. The here and now became secondary, but more wonderfully interesting because of the imaginary worlds I could go into for so long. Doughty’s desert made the sunlight on the cabin’s walls and floor have a quality different and richer, and the island became Walden when I was reading Thoreau. I want to feel that, she said. I see what you mean. I see it, I see it. Sander said: When Adriaan writes, he’s here, alert to everything, but when he reads he is somewhere else. And when he has been reading for hours, he is only interested in putting everything shipshape, and scrubbing and polishing and dusting. After writing he’s lickerish and will squeeze you breathless and kiss you in unreasonable places. Waarom? asks Grietje. When Sander paints, his balls plump up tight as an apple and you might as well have your knickers off, your butt on a pillow, and your legs spread when he starts washing the brushes. And, says Sander, the better the painting has gone, the sweeter the fuck. Old Matisse, I’ve heard, ended every posing session on top of the model.

  Poor Dokter Tomas! Sander said, sighing. At bedtime Grietje said the sleeping bag and pallet were for her, an adventure, like being a padvindster again, here by the fire. Us, said Sander, for the bed, zipping down my fly. It was then that he sighed for good Dokter Tomas. Back and forth, said Grietje. Perhaps we can between us wear it out or at least tame it. Besides, I’m sore from this afternoon. Sander can be rather like a ram his first season in the paddock with the ewes, tongue hanging down to here, ballocks about to pop, humping on the trot, and sprinkling the daisies with the overflow. Sander stripped her and put her into his flannel shirt for a nightgown. Kissed her standing, a hand kneading her sex, the other her butt for an impressively long time. Then he kissed her all down the tummy and between the legs. I tweaked her nose and gave her a chaste kiss on the lips. Sander tucked her in with more kisses, put wood on the fire, and stripped, as I, for bed. Neither of us shaved, Sander said loudly, as if for ships at sea, and it’s like two hedgehogs here in bed! This set Grietje to laughing. Quit it! she said. I can’t concentrate, and it’s so lovely and warm and cozy. A warm hug, a comradely kiss in the vicinity of the ear.

  13 THERMIDOR

  Fireside. Sander drawing Grietje, telling her more of the summer, as much to acknowledge it as a kind of present of recollection for me as to impart it to her, I think. Tell, I dare you, I said, about the incredible zaaddoorbrenger day when you broke all records among reasonably normal adolescents for self-esteem and handwrought orgasms. Sounds awfully like my Sander, Grietje said. Een niets, Sander shrugged. I was simply happy. Adriaan, de drommel, had turned me loose from all my hangups, had untied all my knots, and I got up that juicy day risen, with my mannetje feeling important, all 23 cm from voorhuid to balsak tight as an orange, proud to the touch, with palpitations and jiggets fluttering around inside. O lyrische puberteit! I said, and Grietje remarked that all this sounded strangely familiar. I’m telling this, Sander persisted. I’d been petting the pining fellow and giving him a pull or two while we got the fire and coffee going and it was between sips that I put it to my friend Adriaan here that, to shoo away disliking myself, to advance sexiness in the world, to collaborate with the universe, to oblige a brace of prosperous balls, to chivvy away the mulligrims, to promote benevolence on our island, to perfect my style, I was going to joggle a raving agreeableness and thumping lovingkindness into my peester, with true pitch and doff, with delicious modulations from pomposo to allegro, and slog away at it until I passed out or idiocy stayed my friendly hand. You only get a hiked eyebrow out of Adriaan when you say something like that to him. He buttered my roll and otherwise helped me with my one-handed breakfast, reminding me wickedly that it was my morning to wash up. Wash up I did, with a deft left hand, and swept the floor, learning that you don’t need two hands for a broom. And then, as innocently as a lamb going baa, my friend Adriaan said that we had to wash the windows, which we did together, with Windex and rag, and by the time we were halfway around I had the neb and niddick of the real and essential Sander so slick that they snecked on the draw stroke and slurped on the up. Om godswil, Grietje said, mannenslijm, keurig. Windows gleaming, the boss couldn’t think of anything more for the moment, and I got to sit and concentrate on my handenarbeid. And Adriaan, from whom as you know you learn something new every quarter hour on a slow day, brought out his everlasting notebook and the coffee pot and sat across from me, with a philosophical glance ever so often to see how I was doing, scribbling away, heartless as a psychiatrist. What I discovered was that, though I was building up to a ball-jolting spouter, a crazy shyness kept me from coming. So I built up and built up, and the tone of it got agreeabler and agreeabler, and my balls swelled and scrunched. Looks nice, Oud Ijsberg across from me would say, or O jongensachtigheid! or something equally idiotic. And after a while, in that friendly way that had befuddled me before, because, dat zweer ik, I didn’t know how friendly the sweet bastard was, he said, make it last. Make it last! Gringles along the top of my head, the dry tickles in my mouth, my eyes going goofy, and me beginning to gasp on every pull, and he says make it last. This, Grietje asked, is the famous friendship I’ve heard so much about? But, oh innocent dumb sister, Sander boomed, tapping her on the knee with his pencil, he knew what he was doing, believe me. So I slogged on, sighing. My brain disintegrated, the head of my dick was slubbered over and ringed with froth, every loving whap was slipping smoother and tighter than the one before, and all the kindness for a 100 km around met and danced in Alexander Brouwer’s silly testikels. The demon Adriaan somehow knew that this funny bashfulness was holding me in, and played me like a game. Invited me to a dip in the sea, which was jolly, and a wander around the island, along which, after a speculative tug or two, I started all over, thriving on resolve. The filosoof here, our friend, lectured on the weeds and sticks around us, the trees and bushes. I was sprawled propped against a pine warm with the sun, legs wide, niddling along and sighing, a moronic smile from ear to ear, and it was then that he decided to lecture on the intimate lives of everybody in the encyclopedia. I remember most lecherously some German poet who did it with his sister but felt awful about it and went crazy, and the painter Schiele who when he was 16 fucked his little sister for three days straight the first time in, and Simenon whom Adriaan reads all the time, for years and years he screwed two different women every morning, and two every afternoon, in anticipation of bouncing a bed half the night with Number Five, Victor Hugo, Picasso, Gide who was hale as a plank at seventy and keeping a contented smile on the faces of a half dozen boys a day, and Byron with boys and girls and sister, and Leonardo with his Florentine striplings and good old Michelangelo with his older boys, codpieces out to here and with innertube muscles in their arms, and Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen, and Boswell, and horrible Kernel Ataturk who was never happier than with a bedful of nutbrown wolf-eyed eight-year-old boys, and even Max Keirinckx, who fucked all of his models, all ages and flavors, one of them being Bruno’s mummy, who didn’t want any sort of baby, but Max made her have it, and raised the little tyke himself with the come-and-go forty or so mothers available to him. Adriaan here, along with Max when he noticed, more or less raised him, which is why Bruno is one of the nicest people in Amsterdam, and Kaatje too, who was also one of Adriaan’s strays, but about that, about Bruno and Kaatje I mean, you have to piece things together here and there. And through all of this history I jogged and whimpered, especially as a philosopher’s behulpzaam hand began to smooth the inside of my thighs and graze across a teelsak so touchy that I purred and grunted to have it fooled around with. Also, het was hoog tijd, came. The first long jet jumped high and splatted from nose to navel. The second spattered on my chest. The third was only a fat spurt that lobbed into my bush and ran down to my balls. More: a spate of glops throbbed out before a last keen kick and squirt ended the romp. For the nonce. I’m not imagining, Grietje said, p
oking Sander’s crotch with her toe, that a salty story about Alexander’s manmoedigheid ends with one overstroming. I want to know what he dares do around, with, and to Adriaan. Coming up, said Sander. A swim, some grub, and some unnecessary prompting from our local skeptic here, and project and measures engaged again, resourcefully, generously, unstinting. There was a flute accompaniment for awhile, much good crazy talk, some hugging, frisking, and a spelling of my jogging fist, unsparingly and with style, from time to time. Well, darling Grietje, Grietje sweet, by late afternoon the island from the rocky end to the sandy tip had been spattered and sprinkled, the cabin and the trees, Adriaan and the bed. I’m taking all of this for the truth, Grietje said, though you probably aren’t telling the half. Dusk, and my trusty fellow was sprained, chafed, and wrecked. He was also, as I crowed after supper, feeling sweetly spunky. Adriaan didn’t believe me. Even when it stood up as springy as a rib to his grip, and drooled at the nozzle, and jumped when he slid back its sheath. It had to be done tenderly, with slow strokes and a soft hold, taking turns. Our Sander’s brain, I said, was a syntectic mush, judgment wholly deteriorated, his happy smile somewhere between daffy and pissed. Don’t quit, he kept babbling, even if I lose consciousness or go out of my mind. Which he did: the lout went to sleep. All I remember, Sander said, is that toward the last I was feeling nothing but a delirium of cock, luscious slick, jam rich, and piggishly carnal. I remember coming feverishly and keeping on, and an arm slipped under my head and a hand taking over, my dick only half hard and a gummy slurpy mess but feeling absolutely wonderfully lovely, and then everything melted away. You went to sleep, sighing and grunting, I said, and I kept on for as long as you glubbed and siffled, a good twenty minutes or so. You see? Sander said. Friends! Hemelse goedheid, ja! Sander even as a child, Grietje said, had a wild goat’s capacity for serial orgasms, scandalizing everybody, and can outcome any lover I’ve been in bed with. When the recherche takes us away in handcuffs, I’ll plead that, love aside and handsomeness aside, he’s simply the best fuck in de Nederlanden.