The River in Winter

by Matt Dean

  "Karen Holmes. A jazz singer-vocalist. One of my favorites." Last night I'd been listening to all of her albums in reverse chronological order, recording them afresh onto cassette. The LP's still stood on the floor, leaning against the subwoofer.

  He touched the volume control, edging it up.

  "My mother took me to see her in New York," I told him. "A couple of years ago. It was a college graduation present, that trip. It was an amazing night."

  An awkward moment passed. How could we get back the chill-driven intimacy of the boathouse?

  "It was at the Algonquin," I said. "We"-that is to say, Tom and I. Having dragged the whole bulk of him into the room on the back of that tiny pronoun, I didn't know how to get him back out again. Spike scratched a bit of smut from the knurls around the circumference of the volume control. "I actually got to meet her, because her son, who was her accompanist for a long time, Patrick-. Patrick Holmes, her son, came to my college to give a lecture."

  Spike's attention seemed to be wandering. He turned to the bookshelves, picked up a book, put it down again, brushed his fingers along the rows of record albums in their motley jackets. Admittedly, the story, just begun, was already convoluted. I waved away the rest of it.

  He said, "Can I pick something else?"

  "Go ahead. I'll be right back."

  I went to the bathroom and softly closed the door. I primped: rolled up my sleeves, washed my sweat-roughened hair with hand soap and tepid water from the tap, gargled with Listerine, smoothed the folds of my shirt, hiked up my jeans.

  I peered into the living room. Spike sat in the easy chair, reading the back of an album sleeve. A dozen others lay in his lap. Mindful of creaking floorboards, I crept to the bedroom, where I stripped the blankets and sheets and remade the bed with starchy new linens. On the way back, I shut the door to the music room, the spare room where I kept towers of music textbooks from college, scores and sketches, and sprawling heaps of staff paper.

  By then Spike had put everything back. He stood sipping his water, staring at the spines of my books. Baudelaire and Verlaine in red boards, Whitman in green, Crane in ten-cent paper covers-they stood in sagging ranks. Karen Holmes sang "Easy to Love."

  "You have a lot of poetry here."

  "I collect it for writing songs-art songs, et cetera, et cetera-." He rolled his eyes. "I'm a composer," I said. But that was too much to claim; my voice faltered. I cleared my throat. "I wanted to be a composer. I studied composition in college."

  His finger had fallen on Cummings-a scruffy Tulips and Chimneys I'd unearthed in a used bookstore. He tipped it forward and slipped it off the shelf. He weighed it in his hands. Over and over he turned it, studying the frayed edges and corners with no apparent intention of opening it.

  "A songwriter first, then a composer."

  He looked at me sidelong. "What are you, then," he said, "if not a songwriter or a composer?"

  "I work for the state legislature. A legislative commission. We're supposed to create a policy that encourages tolerance and eliminates harassment in the workplace."

  "So you're the political correctness police."

  "That's what everyone says." Sitting on the sofa, I untied my sneakers, slipped them off my feet. "There is something I've been working on since college. A longer sort of composition."

  It was called The River. "The Mississippi," I told him. "At first it was going to be a tone poem-like Metamorphoses or M? vlast. That's Smetana. M? vlast was Smetana. That is to say, Smetana wrote M? vlast. It depicts various-various scenes from Bohemia. Not to be confused with La Boh?me or anything." Spike raised an eyebrow. I felt feverish. "He was deaf-Smetana was-like Beethoven."

  "Him I've heard of."

  "That got out of hand, though," I said.

  "Which? Smetana or Beethoven?

  "My thing."

  He grinned. "Your thing is out of hand?" His tongue darted across his crooked front teeth.

  "My tone poem. The River. I thought maybe a symphony, like Beethoven's Ninth. You know, where there's a chorus in the last movement?" I sang a couple of bars of the "Ode to Joy."

  Spike observed me with an avuncular grin. "Fucking redheads," he said. He tossed the book into the easy chair.

  As if he were my Fred and I his Ginger, he held out his hand; when I took it, he drew me toward him. Nuzzling his bare neck, I pulled his shirt free of his jeans. I tucked my hand between his skin and his belt. His arms were iron bands around me. Our lips touched.

  Releasing me, he said in a whisper, "Bedroom?"

  Taking his hand-I was Fred, now-I led him down the hall. I switched on the small, dim light by the bed. When I turned, I saw that he'd spotted the television and the stacks of videotapes. Looking up, he smiled to show that he knew what they contained. Squatting, he pawed through the tapes. The plastic cases clattered and clacked. He chose one and wagged it in the air. I could see that the label was simple black lettering on white, but I couldn't read the title. With a prankish smile, he slipped the tape into the VCR's toothless mouth.

  He was a genius with buttons. He punched just two, and tawdry disco music filled the room. On the screen, two men in leather soul-kissed.

  "This'll do, won't it? Music-wise?" he said, still grinning.

  * * *

  I laid him on the clean sheets. I freed him of flannel and denim. I palmed and stroked his shaggy thighs, smoothed and raked the prodigal black hairs like the nap of a lavish carpet. I pulled off his sweat-damp socks and T-shirt and underwear. His white boxer shorts were old and much-laundered, translucent as vellum. Down the steep insteps of his high-arched feet, fat veins meandered-like the channels and distributaries of a river delta-toward his blunt toes.

  I touched him, exploring planes, mesas, canyons, the whole winter-white landscape of him. Against his cool, pale skin, my hands were hot, my freckles as dark as cinnamon.

  He tugged the hem of my undershirt, pulled it up over my torso and head, tossed it aside. Again, as in the boathouse, he wrapped his hands around my neck. He drew me toward him, drew my mouth to his.

  In one swift motion, he rolled us so that I lay under him. Straddling my thighs, he fumbled with the buttons of my jeans. He stood, yanked at the frayed cuffs. Even before I heard the soft tumble of fabric landing on the floor, his weight again covered me. He licked my chest, nuzzled my armpits. I tasted my own sweat in the air. His hands trapped my hands behind my back. As he settled his weight, my spine cracked against the bones of our wrists and knuckles.

  Blood sang in my ears. Spike moved against me. His hands were on my shoulders. He turned my body beneath him-laid me on my belly-and smoothed the cool of his chest across the heat of my back.

  Spike said, "I love fucking rowers from behind. Your backs are bulked up like all fuck." He said into my ear, "Condoms?"

  There were no condoms. My body went limp. "I don't have any," I told him. I spoke into the sheets. "Tom and I-. My boyfriend-." I hugged a pillow to my chest. "We didn't use them."

  Spike rocked back on his haunches. "Not to worry," he said. "I was a Boy Scout. Always prepared." He dropped to the floor and pawed through our mingled clothing.

  "What are you looking for?"

  "My wallet." It had slipped under the bed.

  "You were a Boy Scout?"

  "Not exactly. Had my share of them, though."

  With one hand he swung his wallet open; with the other he fished out a square of bright yellow cellophane. A vending machine novelty, it looked like-glow-in-the-dark, or a tickler, "ridged for her pleasure." Holding a corner of the packet between his teeth, he tore the cellophane. As he unrolled the condom, he twirled his finger in the air, motioning for me to lie on my belly. Again he straddled my thighs.

  "Damn," he said.

  I lifted, turned. Through a diagonal gash across the rubber's tip, I saw the dark pink of the flesh inside. Peeking from the ruined latex, his cock looked more bare than if it had been actually bare. Spike ripped off the condom, tossed it away.

/>   "I can run to the drugstore," I said. "It's just a block." More than a block. A block, and then an acre or two of parking lot. How long would it take to walk that far? How long would I have to leave him alone in my house?

  "No need," he said. "You prefer it raw, so do I."

  I stared at him. "That wasn't-. I didn't-."

  "I'm clean," he said.

  I said, "So am I," but that wasn't what he wanted to know. He stroked the small of my back, his thick finger trailing downward. With the other hand he stroked the nape of my neck.

  "You want it or not? I think you need it pretty bad."

  My breath caught in my throat. I closed my eyes. I said, "I do."

  * * *

  We moved in counterpoint. On the TV screen, I saw through blurred eyes a title card, white on black, "John and Pete." Then, an apartment or townhouse somewhere-it could be anywhere-hopelessly dated, never exactly fashionable. Two men on a grimy tweed couch. No, one on the couch, the other kneeling on the floor.

  Spike forced my head back and at the same time hunched forward, so that we could kiss. His crooked front tooth snagged my lip.

  He broke the kiss, saying, "Ah. Here it is. Me and Pete."

  I may not yet have been in that place beyond language where two people can go, but this utterance meant nothing to me. My addled brain simply couldn't parse the sentences.

  Spike was looking at the video. I looked with him, and then it all came into focus. The kneeling man had Spike's white skin, the same black-furred thighs. And then his face filled the screen; a younger and thinner face, clean-shaven, but unmistakably Spike's.

  Present-day Spike, in-the-flesh Spike, nuzzled my neck. His whiskers tickled me behind the ear. I bucked against him, crazy to make him stop. He misunderstood, or perhaps my thrashing piqued his desire. In either case, he hunkered down, redoubled his efforts.

  The perfect counterpoint resumed. I buried my face in the sheets, yowling like a dog.

  * * *

  2 - Clean

  I woke in an itchy tangle of sheets and a panic of having been robbed. The fitted sheet had peeled away from two corners of the mattress, and in my brief and fitful sleep I'd wrapped it around me. My cocoon was mine alone; Spike had gone.

  But he hadn't gone far. I found him in the living room. Naked, he lay rod-straight across the length-and then some-of the fat sofa, his tousled head lolling on the cushion of one overstuffed arm, his crossed ankles propped on the other. The original cast recording of Oklahoma! played softly on the stereo-"I Cain't Say No." One of my high school yearbooks lay face down on his belly. As I knelt quietly beside the sofa, his eyes snapped open. He took my hand in his, kissed the palm.

  He sat up. Smiling, he patted a spot next to him. I sat.

  "Who's Beta?" he asked.

  "Beta?"

  He opened the yearbook, pointed at the loopy writing on the endpapers. "'Beta. Good knowing you. Mark.'" He moved his finger down the page to something written sideways along the bottom right corner. "'Beta. Best of luck at Bemidji State. Friends always, Bruce,'" he read. He looked at me. "You went to Bemidji?"

  I shook my head. "It was my second choice, but I got accepted there first. I ended up going to Woodland College." I could see by his blank expression that he'd never heard of it; almost no one ever had. "A little private school in Partridge Lake."

  He nodded and read more: "'BC. Keep singing! Love, Lori.'"

  "That would be me. Beta Carotene, Beta, BC-all me. Stupid nicknames I picked up in junior high. It's a long story. Kind of ugly."

  He was smiling. "You tell me yours, I'll tell you mine."

  "I'm sure it was all in good fun," I said. I wanted to hide in the sofa cushions.

  "Can I call you Beta? It's kind of cute."

  I shrugged. "I guess if I'm Beta, you're Alpha."

  He frowned. He said, "I'm not sure I understand what you see in this music."

  "This was the first cast recording of any musical, made back in nineteen-forty-three. More recent versions sound a bit less dated."

  I stopped the record. Lifting it from the turntable I put it back in its sleeve. I stepped to the bookcase. Third shelf, halfway over, between Oh, Kay! and the nineteen-fifty-five Oklahoma! film soundtrack, a narrow gap marked the spot where the cast album belonged.

  "I'm not in a Rodgers and Hammerstein kind of mood," I said, walking my fingers back along the row. Oh, Brother! Of Thee I Sing. Nine. My Fair Lady. Music Man. Mack and Mabel.

  Spike came up behind me, wrapped his arms around my belly. "It all seems a little too clean and wholesome to me." He bit my earlobe.

  I wandered farther afield: Bitter Sweet, Crazy for You, Here's Love, Pipe Dream. It was useless. Dozens of overtures and interludes and intermezzi, hundreds of ballads and soliloquies and choruses, and nothing capable of chasing out the words swimming like tiger sharks in my head. Clean, and the word it brought with it, dirty. "I'm clean," he'd said, with the implication that he might not be, that-as someone who had, for example, had unprotected sex for money-he might be dirty.

  I turned to face him. "How many have you done?"

  "How many what?"

  "Videos, movies. Porn movies. How many?"

  He stepped away. "A dozen, maybe. It was eleven years ago. I was twenty-two years old."

  Eleven years ago. Nineteen-eighty-one. I would have been thirteen. While I'd been dreading showers in gym class, dodging jocks and bullies out of equal portions of fear and lust, had he spent his days flying from one porn set to another, his nights skulking from the Mineshaft to the Slot?

  I spotted The Very Thought of You among the group of Holmes albums on the floor. I floated the record onto the spindle. I handed him the sleeve.

  "I guess you weren't entirely impressed with Karen earlier, but this is my favorite of them all. It's a tribute to Billie Holiday."

  Spike squinted at the album cover, with its photo of the singer looking for all the world like a Texas oil billionaire's shopping-addicted spouse. "Christ. Bad hair day." He handed back the album cover. "I told you," he said. "I'm clean."

  I said, "Clean." I didn't know what else to say. "Okay. Me, too."

  "Let's hear the record, Beta."

  I turned to look at the stereo. I had put the record on, but hadn't yet started it. I set the needle down on the first note of "I'm a Fool to Want You."

  * * *

  I dropped Spike at his car. Afterward, the day was dry and aimless.

  Over and over I watched the "John and Pete" segment of that old video of Tom's, until the tape began to track oddly from all the rewinding.

  I ate a late lunch or early supper of canned soup, sitting naked in front of the television and drinking Diet Coke straight from a two-liter bottle. I fast-forwarded through some videos I'd rented-The Music Man, Funny Lady, Hello Dolly. The grinding away of frivolous plots and clever dialogue made me anxious and impatient.

  At last I grew weary of moping. It was barely six o'clock, not too early for a Sunday beer bust. I changed the bedding again. I dumped my salt-smelling clothes into the laundry hamper. I showered and shaved.

  On half of a crumpled old grocery store receipt, crosswise over the prices of lettuce and bread and sliced deli meat, Spike had written his name and phone number. He'd stuffed my phone number, scrawled on the other half of the receipt, into his back pocket.

  While I brushed my teeth, I stared at the round digits and rakish dashes of his phone number. The three eights were stacked circles, headless snowmen.

  Naked and still sticky from the steamy damp of the bathroom, I scrounged in cabinets and drawers for notebooks and scrap paper, and copied the number carefully, over and over, and stashed the copies in ten different places, insurance against misplacing the fragment of receipt. I slipped the original into my wallet.

  I dressed in my tightest white T-shirt, my oldest and most faded jeans, and my surplus-store Army boots.

  I called Christa. She picked up on the second ring. I heard water running.

>   "Are you up for some dancing? I hear there's a beer bust at the Nineties tonight."

  "It's buttons," she said.

  "Buttons?"

  "Something I'm trying to get started. It's sewn up, like a button, or done up, like a button. It's a done deal."

  "Why not say pinch pleats, or tab collars?"

  The water stopped. Something clattered-something plastic, it sounded like. She sighed and cursed. "Who drives?"

  "I'll drive," I said in a hurry. Her driving frightened me. "I'll come by and pick you up."

  "Give me thirty minutes."

  * * *

  Ninety-six minutes later, Christa dropped into the passenger's seat of my car. A cloud of billowing fabric settled around her. Meticulously untidy short blond hair, leather jacket, thick-soled shoes, and floral-print chiffon: if ever Agnetha F?ltskog set out to audition for a role in Grease, this was how she would dress. Lips the color of a bruise parted in a smile. Christa kissed my cheek.

  "I have never been so in the mood to dance," she said. "I didn't even know it till you called."

  As I navigated the maze of carport-lined driveways surrounding Christa's apartment complex, she wiped lipstick from my cheek. "I got some on you." Twisting the rearview mirror toward her, she blew elaborate Marilyn Monroe kisses at her reflection. "Do I need to redo?"

  I slapped her hand away from the mirror and righted it. I said, "There was this guy, this morning. At the boathouse."

  We sat, now, at the place where the driveway emptied onto Cleveland Avenue. A half a block to the left, cars clogged the strange spot where Cleveland forked onto Saint Paul. I signaled a left turn. Christa poked my leg. "Go. Go."

  There were cars coming from the right. I pointed to them. "How can I go?"

  "Go right. It'll be faster." I didn't see how, but I obeyed. "So? A guy at the boathouse?"

  It took only a few blocks, until Mississippi River Boulevard, to tell her about Spike, and his mysterious appointment with Michael Walton.

  "Walton?" she said. "Is that his last name?" She pointed right; I turned.

  "He never did explain why they were supposed to meet."

  "Isn't it obvious? He's a male prostitute."

  My face turned hot and itchy. "Michael Walton? A prostitute?" I dodged a blow to my shoulder.

  "Dimwit."

  I paused at a four-way stop. On our left, a city park entrance curved down and away toward the river. On our right, houses stood in the deepening autumn night, their curtained windows glowing creamy yellow. "Should I be turning somewhere along in here?"