A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (9 page)

Then a young man drove up and parked his car, and I recognized him as my Hawthorn. With a sign of relief I noted that he was good-looking, respectable looking. He gazed at me but did not speak. I gazed at him. He turned away toward the main entrance of the hotel; so I waited a few seconds, from second to second, quiet as a mouse, while he went in and came out; and just as I was about to signal to him, he stepped into his car and drove away. That is to say, it was not he. And so it seemed to me that nothing in the world, no beauty, no monstrosity, could possibly stir me out of my absentmindedness, sense of mysticism, and humiliation. For, said I to myself, I have lived too well; I have loved too truly, which now is all over; and I have thought too much, even in this half hour of Hawthorn’s tardiness.

Then there Hawthorn was, in a more expensive car than the wrong young man’s. There he was, and naturally he recognized me at once: I had forgotten that I am somewhat a celebrity. And he smiled at me and waved to me. I stepped down from the verandah to the curb, and we greeted each other as if we had been acquainted for years. I got in beside him. We drove a little way, then I remembered my valise, and we went after it. The back of his car was full of oil paintings for me to “criticize”: first indication of one of the peculiarities of which Allen had warned me. For a while naturally I wanted to forget about the other peculiarity.

First we went to visit the Marine Museum of Searsport, where I especially admired a ship’s model all carved of the pith of the fig tree. That is the deadest-white substance on earth, whiter than marble, whiter than lard; but there is a slight parallel grain in it, a faintly yellow or flesh colored thread, which shows in the sails, like fairy stitching. In its present homemade showcase it is drying and breaking; a bit of weather gets in; and gradually the tiny alternate storms of humidity and aridity undo the rigging; the tiny companionways all droop. The good gossipy Searsporter who acts as curator said that it could not be mended.

There are also fine antique chests of rosy wood trimmed with sallow brass, all smoothed by more or less intentional caresses of salty chapped hands of sailors dead and gone. There are also a few Oriental “antiques,” including an astrological compass: a saucer of golden lacquer with a thousand minute scribbles on it—a gift to newlyweds, to determine the placement of their new house, the curator informed us. The handsomest object of all was a great pin or plug intended to be thrust into a hole in the gunwale of a whaler and entwined with some tackle: a thing of whittled whalebone, of a lovely flecked color, about the size of a policeman’s club or a unicorn’s horn, and indescribably shapely, perfectly tapering, with delicate flange near the top. Jaris Hawthorn, perhaps a bit proudly hinting at my real reason for being there with him, laughed at me for my admiration of it. But I believe that it did not particularly impress me as phallic; I usually know when I am thus impressed; I have not much subconscious. Apropos of which, he told me that the men of the Maine coast often carry little finely whittled wooden phalli which come in handy as thole-pins, and which they more or less honestly believe will also cause the lascivious opportunity to occur, and augment and safeguard their potency once it has occurred. There is a poem by Robert P. Tristram Coffin about this, entitled, “Pocket-piece.” Jaris promised to discover and make me a present of one.

Then in the various coast towns, Belfast, Camden, Waldeboro, we devoted some time to what I had spoken of as my objective on this journey: the viewing of old domestic architecture, which must be America’s richest heritage of art, and most lamentably unfulfilled tradition. The great residences of shipmaster and lumbermen disappointed me; they show the effect of the intercourse with southern seaports such as Charleston and Savannah, and too much honor has already been done them in the way of servile imitation: post offices, city halls, boarding schools. The small dwellings are the glamorous ones, particularly those of lovely local brick, blocky, with blunt roofs and a minimum of eaves; their austerely cut doors and door-jambs and window-frames set in flush with the ruddy walls, just as in seaman’s chests the brass locks and reinforcements are imbedded in the wood.

The modern architect is inclined to bully his client in the name of aesthetics. Let both of them consider this: everyone’s evident determination in this part of the world a hundred years ago to have his individual habit and habit of mind and even foible respected and embodied in building. Habit forgotten long since, dead and buried; so what does it matter? It matters in that here in the inanimate lumber, the changeless mineral, there still is emotion, physiognomy, personality. This door-jamb still smiles; that lintel looks haughtily important; this or that stairway has a philosophic or a melancholy or a gratified expression. It is a kind of beauty, and a quality of art, that formal aesthetics can never legislate into being.

One house that I particularly liked is in a precipitous street on a very narrow property. There was no ground on which to erect the horse stable except on a level with the second story; therefore the sympathetic builder ran a wide stairway up to it along the outside of the house, parallel to the sidewalk; and the combined effect, through the cheap and small, is as noble as Perugia. These retired mariners, having seen enough weather on their voyages, evidently dreaded getting wet; therefore most of the barns and woodsheds are under the same roof, continuations from the kitchen, which makes for grandeur as well as the beauty of compactness. Think of what a time I should have persuading modern architects Gropius or Lescage to respect my dislike of open doorways, opaque windows, and my light-shyness to boot, to complicate matters; my dread of overhearing the rest of the family in the next room converse, fidget, sigh.

In this part of Maine the true farmers’ barns outside the villages, up on small simple hills, balmy with poor hay, surveying the august and brilliant inlets, are often shingled to the ground like old Long Island houses. In their present shabbiness every shingle catches its bit of light and casts a minute shadow; so they look as if they were bound in sharkskin.

At midday we stopped at an inn of the sort that ladies love, where the classic Maine menu was proudly served us: lobster in milk, hot biscuits, blueberry pie. Somewhat accustomed enough to my companion by that time, I improperly glanced at the antique four poster beds spread with old hand stitched coverlets but fitted, no doubt, with new “beauty rest” mattresses. However, for us two, I felt, there would have been incongruity in that rich and dainty interior. Then with polite hypocrisy I told him a story that I had made up to explain my not returning to Sorrento that evening. With no hypocrisy at all he replied that he desired to spend the night with me. But it was his father’s car that he was driving, and he had promised to be back with it before dinner. If I accompanied him as far as Clamariscassett it would make my return-trip on the bus only a little longer, that was all. So it was decided.

Next he sat me down cross-legged in the grass where the car was parked, and masterfully showed me all the oil paintings he had brought along to show me. And he had an air of profound respect for my opinion, but of difficulty in understanding it, or of determination not to understand it unfavorably. Usual provincial American landscapes; watercolor conceptions executed in oil, and, alas, effortlessly executed, with a pretty bit here and a strange bit there, probably by accident … I kept thinking of Allen—how he must have hated this—with a certain soft hilarity.

Then Hawthorn and I strolled through a shabby meadow and an idyllic little grove, and lay there on the grass, ten or fifteen feet above sea level. The tide was out, leaving a few pools which winked and rippled, and rocks from which the seaweed hung in yellow braids and tangles, and a confetti of shells. The breeze brought up odors of ocean, an odor as herby as pubic hair, an odor as tepid and sweet as saliva … At last I felt at ease enough to stop talking. My Hawthorn lay, less at ease, fairly near me, with a mildly joyous grin now and then, and an occasional caress, not unmanly, not really indecent. His little eyes sparkled with perhaps one idea only, but we talked of this and that. Now it was he who was making me talk, questioning, teasing, which at any rate I preferred to my usual nervous, conscientious improvisation.

He was not beautiful. Yet there was nothing exactly unbeautiful about him except his teeth: they were not quite white, and there was one missing, on the right side of his grin. The line of his lips was indented in exact correspondence to the shape of his nostrils. His hair was coarsely wavy, and when the sun struck it, almost as yellow as the seaweed. I liked his hands which, oddly enough, were less ruddy than his face; good fleshy tapering fingers which were not hot, not cold, and not damp. Perhaps I did not like his eyes, in spite of their excitability. It is in hands and eyes that I particularly expect to observe what is called “sex appeal”; that is to say, whenever they have failed to appeal to me and I have gone ahead anyway, I have had a sudden embarrassing disinclination to cope with myself at some point, or a particularly severe disenchantment at last. So I kept looking at these hands and eyes, questioning, whether to go ahead now or to stop.

One learns by experience that it is fatal to ask one’s self that specific question too soon; and the right moment is infinitesimal; and therefore as a rule one asks it too late. Furthermore, except by the imaginary process of falling in love, how can one tell, how can one even prophesy, whether or not one will enjoy the body of another—until one has undressed it, touched it, tasted it? And apparently I am never to fall in love again, because I have not fallen out of the loves of my early manhood. Also I am the sort of person with whom no one is much inclined to go to bed without having been induced somehow to fall in love somewhat; which makes it all difficult for me, at least necessitates a certain hypocrisy … Now it was too late to try to be sincere. Before I left Sorrento, before I left New York, I had resolved not to stop; it was a matter of principle and a point of honor.

Now and then I withdrew a little distance on the flowery grass in order to take another good look at my man. As his trousers of Palm-Beach cloth were cut, the peculiarity of his physique which so impressed Allen did not appear, and with reference to that I quoted to myself the famous first line of Sterne’s
Sentimental Journey:
“They order, said I, these things better in France”; which amused me. All this, I also thought, was rather reminiscent of Sorrento, Italy, than of Sorrento, Maine; which was pleasant. And the very way my mind worked, immoral or mock-immoral, forever similizing and citing and showing off to itself, pleased me. Hawthorn of course had no notion what my several smiles meant, but replied to each with his little energetic self-conscious grin. I enjoyed lying there, comfortably fatigued and careless; perfectly willing but not at all anxious, not eager. For this I had come half way across the state at the crack of dawn. What an odd mood; and it amounted to an odd attitude to take toward a young man reputed to be phenomenal: the oddest byproduct of my wearisome dangerous passions all summer long …

Now Hawthorn had taken off his Palm-Beach coat and neatly folded it, lest this and that in the pockets disappear in the grass. He wore a loose shirt of silky finished fabric, very dressy in a provincial way. Very tight and bright-colored braces held up his roomy trousers. He lay propped on one elbow, vigilantly watching me, asking rather pointless questions, and giving bits of uninteresting information. I lay flat on my back with one arm up to keep the sun out of my eyes. I pulled blades of grass and chewed the juicy ends, and I teased my own nostrils with the stems of clover which had the plumpest, spiciest heads.

There was magic in the scene, but it was a humorous rather than a poetical or passionate magic. It reminded me of a chromolithograph that I used to have hanging over my desk in Paris; a scene of courtship about 1900, a young man and woman in boating attire on a river bank under a willow tree. He was in his shirt sleeves with bright braces, his hair parted in the middle, his eye lashes wonderful, his mustaches silkily drooping; and she lay flat on her back under a parasol; and he crouched facing her, no doubt with tremors of the mustaches and wonderful winks—to all intents and purposes my father and my mother, I used to think: a kind of epitomization of the mood in which in 1900 I must have been conceived. Monroe did not admire that chromolithograph, and left it behind in the Rue de Conde when he packed up our belongings … But the 1900 young man’s eyes were dreamy, idle, cloudy, like a stallion’s. Whereas my present young man’s just slightly glittered now and then, with a look in the intervals between. Perhaps he as well as I was taking it for granted what deeds of darkness we should do when darkness fell. Yet those glitters were not what I should call sensual glances. His appetite, I gathered, was taking the form of a more and more intense friendliness and admiration. Well, I thought, that would suffice; or perhaps, as Allen had warned me, more than suffice. My appetite, it seemed, was not taking any form at all.

Meanwhile the cool noon sunlight came down the shore at an angle like that of the soft riptide; and hung like spray in the treetops; and rippled on a level with my head through the coarse bloom of the meadow. Down below in the returning water gulls worked or played, conversing a great deal. Their conversation here on the Penobscott, I fancied, was not the same as in Frenchman’s Bay. Up there you might have thought them all in poor health or past their prime, retired from the strenuous and profitable business of the open ocean. They spoke tremulously, and with what was like effortlessly controlled temper, in the way of old ladies in a sanitarium complaining of what diet the nurses have brought them on trays … I told Hawthorn this; and he beamed, he always beamed, as if every utterance of mine were in perfect rhymed couplets. Also, I thought, there was something amorous about those Sorrento gulls, indecently gossiping, undignifiedly bewailing, like aging homosexuals at a cocktail party, comparing notes; but of course I did not mention this to Hawthorn. Instead I described to him the grief-stricken and perhaps crazy gull on the rock under my bedroom window, and I did so maliciously, to make sure of what I suspected: that it did not interest him; he knew nothing of grief, of true love.