“What would you read?”
“Lord, I don’t know. Something in hard cover. I suppose I’d begin with the classics. One usually does. Then the neoclassics. I’d like to work my way through the German romantics. I know Mother would endorse that. She dotes on the Germans.”
Glenway was probably fifty-two years old. I didn’t know for sure whether he was gay, straight, or what. A lot of men are just so gracious and urbane and impeccably turned out and physically glossy, and have such a fatigued, drawling, high-strung kind of wit and such beautiful manners, that a little neon tube goes on in your head and you think nobody like this can possibly be straight because only homosexual men take such time and care with their clothes and appearance, and lavish such attention on their overall bodies, and have such a glossy, high-strung style about them, whether it’s a shaved head or a cigarette lighter that belongs in some Swedish crafts exhibit, and then you find out it’s a Wall Street heterosexual you’ve been talking to all this time, and you wonder what’s wrong with him, being so well mannered and urbane and handsomely turned out.
Glenway told me all about Shalizar. Magnolia and honeysuckle and groves of swamp cypresses. A big, Greek-revival main house, a working water mill, a little, swampy, abandoned parish church etc. etc. He called it reliving the past in good taste.
“That’s an unusual name, Shalizar, for a place in Georgia,” I said. “Is there a story in that?”
“A small story,” he said, looking at me with those pale, cool, lake-blue eyes. “It’s the name of a lost city in some desert in ancient Persia. Mother found it in a book I gave her as a gift some years ago, and she wasted no time, let me tell you, changing the name of the place from Grouse Hollow to Shalizar.”
He laughed that light, clear, metallic laugh.
“A book by a romantic German?”
“Lord, no, a book by a mystical North African.”
“Called what?”
“The Barefoot Rose.”
I sipped my filtered coffee. I paused. I raised my eyes to look at him.
“By Wadi Assad,” I said.
Glenway stared at me.
“I thought I was one of the few. The very, very few.”
“You are,” I said. “And so am I.”
“I thought no one else knew his work. I never mention his name, for fear he’ll suddenly come into vogue. Even the smallest attention would diminish his luster. He is a private pleasure. This is remarkable, Cleo.”
I figured I wouldn’t tell him that most of the Rangers were reading Wadi Assad and about half the NHL. I didn’t want to be responsible for diminishing his luster in Glenway’s eyes. I was pretty sure Glenway had mixed feelings about this thing. He was probably convinced that he, his mother, and a handful of desert monks were the only people who knew these books.
“You continue to amaze me,” he said. “Why don’t we take brandy at my place?”
For a second there, I thought we were supposed to pick up two glasses of brandy, walk out the door, and take them to his apartment in a taxi. I was kind of intrigued by the idea of brandy at Glenway’s place, no matter how it got there. An older person. Eskimo-husky eyes. Beautifully dressed and groomed. High-strung and glossy, with a plantation. Not that I especially wanted to see Shalizar, or meet his mother, who was probably alcoholic and creepy. It was just the idea. So different, so far removed from New York or apartment-dwelling or Madison Square Garden. Let’s be honest, Shaver Stevens walking around the house in his boxer shorts, as much as I loved the guy, was a far cry from Glenway Packer at Shalizar. It was like a magazine article about a famous person in his isolated retreat. Glenway Packer at Shalizar. He’d probably turn up all in white with snappy creases in his pants despite the heat.
He paid the bill and helped me on with my coat, glidingly and with no wasted motion, so that I barely knew he was there behind me. His own coat was impeccably tailored and had a fur collar. He had nothing for his head.
His apartment was in a brownstone in the east, east fifties. I was surprised at the size. It was quite little. But it was also flawless, and I figured he was after a certain effect. The place was almost bare, but being small it did not give the visitor a sense of empty space so much as order and near perfection. The furniture, what little there was of it, was low and kind of angled into corners.
“I thought the space had possibilities, so I took it,” he said. “It’s a cunning space. It’s very deft. What I’m after is a kind of minimalism.”
He took my coat and bag, and I sat on a little Formica cube. The place looked more like a photo of an apartment in some decorating magazine than like a place where someone really lives. It was all light and shadow, all geometry. The colors were shades of white and shades of gray. All well and good. It had a character all its own, and as a neutral observer I was glad I’d seen it. It was the kind of place you were glad you’d seen, like Edwards Air Force Base, just to know you’d seen it.
Glenway came back with our brandy.
“I was after a realized look,” he said.
“I think you’ve realized it, Glenway.”
“It was a space which I felt spoke to my own needs and predilections. I spent fortunes on it. Floss hates the place. She took one look and ran right out. An eighth of a second and she was out the door.”
He laughed, his head well back—a gay, delightful sound.
“She went running back to her Venetian museum,” he said. “Lord, I hope she’s well. Dear, sweet woman. Don’t put the glass there, Cleo, please.”
“Where can I put it?”
“It just doesn’t go there. You see what I’m after.”
“What about this table?”
“Nothing can go on that table. It took me the better part of a year to find that table. It’s the perfect table for that quadrant of space, and nothing can go on top of it.”
“What can I do with my glass, then, Glenway?”
“Can’t you just hold it in your hand, as you’ve been doing?”
“I guess so.”
“You see what I’m after.”
“I do see what you’re after, yes. I wouldn’t leave the glass there, Glenway. I would just put it there for a moment while I went to the bathroom.”
“Can’t you take it with you?”
“If I went to the bathroom. I’m not actually going. If I felt pains in my chest and a stiffening in both arms, with loss of breath.”
“You’re a very attractive woman. But I suppose you know that. One doesn’t overlook something like that.”
“Great body, subpar face.”
“I like your face,” he said. “It speaks to something missing in the American landscape these past decades. It gives me a whole new sense of things. It could be big.”
“What could be big?”
“Your face,” he said. “Once the Kelloid campaign hits the home screen, it could explode. You know how trends work. People could be ready for a hometown look. Nothing’s too crazy, Cleo. There is a great deal of crazy out there. We make our living on crazy. Every time I pick up the phone, I hear crazy, I speak crazy, I deal in crazy.”
“Well, I like my face, too, but it misses greatness, and there’s no such thing as near great when it comes to faces.”
He dismissed greatness with a heightening of the brows and a little motion of the head.
“Everything misses greatness,” he said. “Nothing has been great since Bette Davis in Deception. If we saw greatness today, we wouldn’t recognize it. I like your face. We may be ready for something just like it.”
“I like your eyes, Glenway.”
He threw back his head and laughed—a tinkling, high-strung sound.
“Cleo, is this a seduction?”
We both laughed. He sipped his brandy, not taking his eyes off me, which wasn’t easy because the brandy was in a giant snifter that he had to peer around with one eye.
He reached over and pressed a button, and music poured softly from
some hidden system. Dry, elegant music. Flutes, oboes etc. Probably composed by some nineteenth-century master known only to musicologists and a few others.
I had a picture of myself slipping and sliding all over Glen-way’s shaved head. His shaved head between my thighs. I was feeling half-horny, thanks to the wine and brandy. It was the kind of mood where you don’t really want to know the fellow very well. Maybe you know him to say hello, but that’s it. You want a type, that’s what you want. A tousle-haired poet. A Jewish furrier. A Jehovah’s Witness knocking on your door with his copies of The Watchtower. Glenway was a type. He was a shaved head. He was a shaved head with a plantation who might be homosexual. A whole new type. A prototype, I believe is the word for Glenway Packer in the kind of mood I was halfway in.
He got up and went quietly out of the room. He more or less slipped out of the room. Despite the softness and the gliding quality of his exit, there was a sense of purpose, I felt, in the way he moved, so smoothly and effortlessly. No wasted motion.
Seduction was in the air, all right. I wasn’t sure who was doing it to whom, but that didn’t matter. The feeling alone was worth sitting on a Formica cube for. What I’m saying is how rare this feeling was in my life. The sense of enticement, allurement, temptation. A performance, with little rules and rituals. I guess that’s why I’d come to Glenway’s place. It had to be different from knocking heads with Shaver, or dragging Archie Brewster down the hall on a rug, or practically wearing myself out trying to get Sanders Meade in an erectile state.
What we had here was a cunning space, dimly lighted, with shadows and angles, and two people sipping brandy out of expensive snifters, and this wonderfully soft-toned, elegant music flowing out of a perfect sound system. And the two people didn’t know each other very well, and were different types completely, and had normal curiosity about what it would be like, speaking for myself, hopping into bed with a prototype, to oboes.
Atmosphere, mood, lighting. The sense of being led slightly astray. These things were both new to me and somehow strangely familiar, as though some deep female memory was functioning down below my personal fund of experience. A soft, throbbing memory. Pleasant tensions, silky anticipations. Music, lighting, mood.
I looked up from my memory pool to see Glenway Packer standing eight feet away, naked except for a loincloth.
This was not an underwear, I don’t think. It wasn’t something a person Like Glenway would wear under his pants. This was for occasions, and I guess this was the kind of occasion it was for.
He looked as though he’d just invented nudity. He stood there more or less posing, there’s no other word for it, and the whole thing was so studied and realized and statuesque, if you can say that about a man, that he didn’t even glance my way to see what kind of effect it was having.
I was fascinated by the loincloth. The loincloth knocked me out. This was no abbreviated underwear, believe me. With all the locker-room time I have logged in my life, I’ve seen the male undergarment in all its contours, guises, and appearances, from crotch-bulging Jockey shorts (that’s why they wear them), to ballooning, big-seated trunks, to trim boxer shorts with little slits on the sides, to woolly long Johns with sagging ass-sections, to the bright, snug, plunging bikini, to some poor kid in Hershey, Pa., when I played there, who had to wear hand-me-downs that were floppy, white cotton things with buttons on the sides.
This loincloth of Glenway’s was definitely for occasions. It was briefer than Tarzan’s. It was almost square, I’d say, a little more long than wide, and it was attached to him by a string that circled his body a couple of inches below the hipbone.
At first I thought the loincloth was solid black, as if to blend with the other colors in the apartment, yet be bolder, a little stronger, a natural focal point. Then I noticed some tiny gray lettering in the upper right corner. Just for fun, I duck-walked over on my knees and read what it said, which was Bill Blass Breechcloth. I went back to my cube.
Glenway, ever the sophisticate, was in no special hurry to get the sex part of the seduction off to a rousing start. He stretched his long frame out on the floor, propped on an elbow, facing me. Gracefully, without mishap, he sipped his brandy, and if you think that’s easy with your head at an angle, it’s anything but, and only someone with Glenway’s quota of poise should even try it.
Two funny things about his body. First, there was no hair in sight except for his eyebrows and eyelashes. His chest, belly, legs, and so on were smooth and white. We already know about his head.
Second, his nipples stuck straight out of his chest. By that I mean they didn’t rest on mounds. There was no sign of pectoral muscles. His chest was white and flat, and the nipples jutted directly from this utter flatness. It was stranger than you might imagine. These little brown rubbery things seemed to be a mistake in all that white space. And they were long nipples. They weren’t conelike at all. They were long and pointy.
“There’s something I want you to know,” he said. “You ought to know this about me. It’s only right and proper that people communicate these things to each other in moments such as this.”
“What is it, Glenway?”
“I’m afraid to be tender,” he said.
The music grew more elegant.
“In my early affairs, I showed a great deal of tenderness and sensitivity. This was no more than natural to me. In the South, manliness has always been tempered by a soft, bruised, fragile, delicate quality. But I’ve been hurt, and hurt again, and hurt yet again. I don’t ever want to be tender, or sensitive, or vulnerable anymore. I no longer believe in these things. Sex is hardware. It is stimulus and response. I believe in gratification now.”
The music leaped and soared, but in a bare, dry, reedy way, which was all the more appropriate to the setting. Music, mood, brandy, atmosphere, lighting.
“Glenway,” I said, “why don’t you show me to the bedroom? We’ll stimulus and response each other.”
“There is no bedroom, Cleo.”
“You went somewhere to change.”
“That was the bathroom,” he said.
“All right, where’s the bed then? Show me to the bed.”
“There is no bed. I don’t have a bed. I could never countenance a bed in a space like this. A bed is like a major appliance except that it doesn’t do anything. It does nothing to streamline the way we live. A bed is like soft plumbing. It intrudes, it doesn’t belong, it isn’t minimalist. I’m after something minimal, Cleo. A bed would be shattering. Really, I think the whole concept of beds and bedding needs rethinking. The best new designers have no use for beds. I use a pallet. I think a pallet is so right for this space.”
He got up and went over to a little seating unit and reached down under it. The pallet was concealed under there like a life jacket under an airplane seat. Glenway got it out and unrolled it, his back to me for the first time since he’d changed. Except for the string that went across his upper buttocks, he was visually bare-ass. Still no hair in sight. Not a strand, not a bristle.
I stepped out of my shoes and took off my shirt. Glenway turned to look, but only briefly and glimpsingly, although not without a flash of mature appreciation as those cool, blue eyes moved across my Badger Beagles T-shirt.
I took off my blue suede overalls. The phone rang. I didn’t see any phone, but the sound was unmistakable. Glenway lifted the flat ultramodern receiver out of a small compartment in a wall unit. The phone device was designed to offer the least possible resistance to air flow as you moved it to and from your head.
Glenway talked softly for a moment. The phone had come out of the lower part of the wall so that he had to bend way over to talk into it, and he didn’t seem to have any second thoughts about flaunting his ass to the room at large.
He turned and extended the receiver.
“For you,” he said, a trifle piqued.
“Impossible. No one knows where I am. Not a single, living soul.”
“The man sa
id Cleo Birdwell.”
I took the phone.
“I thought it was about time I talked to my favorite niece.”
“Uncle Billy!” I said.
Phone in hand, I got down on the floor in a modified lotus position, ready for a lengthy chat, and at the same time I whispered over to Glenway, who was stretched across the pallet with his head at that sharp angle, sipping brandy: “It’s my Uncle Billy.”
“Where are you?” I said into the phone.
“Caracas.”
“Any word from Aunt Glad?”
“She turned up at my hotel in Colombo, in Sri Lanka. There was a message at the desk. I hightailed it right out of there. I went to Hong Kong. The next morning, I went down to breakfast and who do I see checking in at the desk but our own Floss Penrose? She looked like The Last Days of Pompeii. I hid behind a potted palm and eventually made my way to Caracas, where I’m entered in a major tourney. Of course. Floss knows this, and any minute now her plane is due to land and she’s going to come sweeping into the lobby of the Hilton, wearing those poison rings and darting wild, frightened looks in every direction. She’s the only person I’ve ever known who frightens people by being frightened.”
“You realize you are being a bastard about this. Uncle Billy has his bastardly side and I think we are seeing it in action.”
“Cleo, what can I do? We’d agreed it was over. We’d agreed I would never be an adult as long as I had an Aunt Glad to play Monopoly with. Now here she is, chasing me to the ends of the earth. She uses her fear to frighten.”
“All right, I understand your wanting to get free and clear. But you mustn’t hurt Aunt Glad. She is a decent person under all those layers of neurosis and fear.”
“Well, I know that. Don’t you think I know that? That’s what makes it so difficult. That and the fact that I’ve been emotionally locked in to this Monopoly game with her. It is an unbelievably sexy thing.”
“Better than incest. She told me.”
Glenway arched a brow.
“What are you doing there anyway?” Archie said.
“Going over contracts. I’m signing to do a junk food saturation campaign on TV.”
Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League Page 14
