Allan Stein (10 page)

"Voila, monsieur, the Stein you were looking for." She handed it to me and smiled tightly at Per. "Now surely Monsieur Per has something more interesting he is looking for, something of rare value?" Per recited his list of Ann Rule titles, and I held the fat Stein like a fetish, feeling its broad edges and heft. I didn't dare ask the price. Beyond the book's rarity, it seemed clear I would be made to pay for the struggle Madame had just enjoyed. Cold air rolled in with two noisy kids, waist high, and then the door slammed shut. Their coats smelled of snow, despite the clear air outside. I stepped to the window, craned my head sideways, and made out a narrow strip of blue sky. Still spring, I gathered, somewhere. Stéphane , maybe, just then, shot baskets at the Jardin, beneath the great green chestnut trees, lurching and leaping with the rude boys. Bikes parked outside, cool hand slaps, tennis
pop-pop-pup
across the gravel path. The air must be marvelous and warm there, soft on billowed T-shirts and skin. I missed my dear dear Dogan terribly, even as I painstakingly erased him.

Per finished and we left. Evidently my rancor had been a hit with Madame. We walked down the lane and turned the tight cold corner into a great burst of sun. It shone from the west (my house visible again beyond the earth's curve), the sun so broad and low the whole happy street turned Aztec, cobbled in gold. Nervous scurriers relaxed, became droll strollers. I recall the same sun glimmering off Louise, astride the low diving board at Desolation Lake car-campground, after the glamour of an "atom burger" at Tiny's nearby snack stand made us halt and stay there rather than pushing on to the trailhead for a hike and two days of dreaded backcountry tenting. God bless you, Tiny.

"Isn't the sunshine pretty?" Per.

"Marvelous."

"The rue du Four is where our car broke down." Solid well-kept buildings curved toward the lowering sun. I looked behind us, as if through a door, at the bleak winter along the shop's narrow alley, then turned forward again.

"When you met Serge?"

"Yes. I was thirteen. It was our first car vacation, which for me was a very glamorous thing."

"Where did you go?" Dog shit, old and new, littered the pavement, brown blossoms, and I stepped in some.

"Only Paris, it turned out. We were going to drive to Colmars, where I had an uncle, but the car was difficult to fix." I scraped my foot behind me like a lame man, leaving trails of the shit along the walk. "Serge's family took a great liking to us, and we stayed for more than a month, then drove back to Copenhagen."

"You stayed with Serge?"

"I did. My family took rooms in a cheap hotel—you'll see it up here in a minute—but I stayed with Serge at his house. Do you know Colmars?"

"Is it German?"

"No. Colmars is a fortified hill town in the Basses-Alpes, near Digne. Are you all right?"

"What?"

"You're dragging your leg."

"It's just a cramp, go on." Per halted, concerned. We'd come upon a great boulevard, and the sidewalk was thick with pedestrians.

"I could massage the muscle, or, if you don't mind it, I will show you a pressure point to make it relax."

"No, thank you. It feels a lot better actually. Actually, it's fine."

"We'll stop. I'm a little hungry." Per pointed to a cafe, then led me by the hand. "Well, this fortified town of Colmars is very very old and spectacular, and my uncle had a small house where we
were going to spend the summer, but the car broke and we spent it with the Dupaignes instead. I was very happy." Patterned iron, painted pale green, framed the curved glass of this corner cafe, and Per maneuvered us to a tiny table by the door. "Serge and I went to Colmars by train later, the next summer, to stay with him, and it was terrific. A great place for boys, with the mountains and the river and everything so primitive." Per ordered lemonade and sausage, and we watched the street become busy and the sky go dark. We sat so long the school was closed when we walked there.

T
he Stein "novel" was dense and impenetrable: great wobbling ropes of words, "hims" and "hers" and "theirs" with nary a name or proper place in sight. I lay down before dinner to read it, and this was part of my exhaustion. The book was worn, its spine broken but still holding on, and no price had been written inside. The writing was strangely familiar, like an internal voice that had been overheard, an awkward, private voice. On page 604 (I browsed to get there), for instance, this:

"Loving being, I am filled just now quite full of loving being in myself and in a number of men and women. Loving is to me just now an interesting, a delightful a quite completely realized thing. I have loving being in me more than I knew I could have in me. It was a surprising thing to find it so completely in me. I am realizing loving being in quite a number now of men and women, completely realizing for them, completely realizing in them loving being. I am loving just now beautiful loving, I am loving nice loving, I am loving just now every kind of loving. I am realizing just now very much and quite some kinds of loving. I am thinking now that it is a difficult thing to be knowing without very careful waiting and then a little more waiting besides the waiting that was pretty nearly enough waiting how much any one is, what kind there is in any one of loving. A very great many have very many prejudices concerning lov
ing, more perhaps even than about drinking and eating. This is very common. Not very many are very well pleased with other people's ways of having loving in them. Some are very much pleased with some ways of having loving and not with other ways of having loving. Some are wanting people to be very nice in having loving being in them. Some are pretty well ready to let most people do the kind of loving they have naturally in them but are not ready to let all people do the loving the way loving naturally comes to be in them. A very considerable number of men and women have different ways of having loving in them. I have different ways of having loving feeling in me I am certain; I am loving just now very much all loving. I am realizing just now with lightness and delight and conviction and acquiescing and curious feeling all the ways anybody can be having loving feeling. I have always all along been telling a little about ways of loving in different kinds in men and women. I will tell now a little more about specific loving in some specific men and women."

L
ouise and I had twin racing bikes at a time when that style of bike, with its ram-horn handlebars and thin, penetrating seat, was novel and sought after. Ours were from Sears, which made them less exotic. I was fourteen. At home I rolled mine downstairs to the cavelike laundry room, stood it upside down on the clothes-folding counter, and "customized" it. With blue house paint I erased the blocky markings of the Sears corporation, and then with decals and stickers I covered up my poor paint job—the red and blue oval of STP, Bardhall's black and yellow checkered flag. I got carried away with the stickers. It became the sort of bike one finds falling over in rows at the drafty back loading dock of a charity thrift store, next to the great tangled pile of a hundred or so beige bed frames.

It was summer, and we rode to the ferry dock to bicycle to our meadow on the other side and come back before it got dark. Louise
had packed a picnic in her knapsack, bread and cheese and chocolate and tuna-fish salad sandwiches, plus a bottle of white wine ("white because it's fish") and two or three sodas for me (Dr. Pepper, another badge of my independence). She tied the bundle onto her bike rack so her shoulders could tan while we rode. I brought a set of elegant metal tools, tiny fist-sized tools, mostly picks and hammers, which I'd found in one of Louise's boxes downstairs. They were for archaeology. Margaret Chang-Sagerty had given them to Louise in grad school when she was still planning on a career.

I think I mentioned summer before, summer where I come from. It occupies two weeks of the year and is glorious: bright warm days with dolorous evenings that bleed slowly into long sunsets and then turn black and cold about 10 P.M.; crystal-clear nights thick with stars that disappear in a brilliant dawn sometime around five in the morning. The mountains to the west, across the open salty sea (a mere arm of the sea plied by ferries like the one that took us that morning on our bikes), are sharper, taller, and more jagged during these weeks. They receive the sun at dawn and stand out in such relief before noon one can almost make out the elk and goats that scramble up their rocky flanks. These mountains grow larger as the ferry approaches until, disembarking, one stands at the water's edge in a thin strip of forest, pinioned to the shore by their encroaching steep face.

We bicycled north along this shore until the peninsula abruptly turned and the road bent west and we followed it. Bicycling made my legs ache, especially the fronts of my thighs, and I liked watching the muscles there as I pushed down on the pedals. These muscles were well enough defined to be someone else's, some man's, so that as I watched them working a few feet from my face I had the strange perception that my legs were not mine, that some man was attached to me there. We had our sandwiches on a great bare rock that jutted from a hillside by the road. The sun warmed the rock and I could have slept there, but Louise wanted to get to the meadow and we
pushed on, a long winding climb that exhausted me but was forgotten in the euphoria of arriving.

The meadow was heavenly. Deep grass filled its bowl, thick and shimmering where the breeze made it shift in the sun. Patches by the tarn had been eaten bare, but the meadow was so rich with grasses and wildflowers most of it remained untouched by the animals who fed there. I had taken my shirt off bicycling up the hill and now I ran into the meadow whooping, whipping my shirt around like a helicopter blade, and collapsed into the grass. It was unusual for me to be so loud and demonstrative, but I was dizzy from the ride and no one was there to see me but Louise.

She unpacked the rest of our food and put the drinks in a cold stream, and I scrambled over the tarn to the small lake to swim. This was our routine. I knew Louise was resting. She lay in the sun by the wine with her eyes closed and was gone. I climbed over the low ridge, dazzled by the blue sky, then hopped from rock to rock down into the windless hollow that held the lake. It was hot there, and dusty, and the glare off the water was blinding. I stripped my shoes and socks off, pulled my cutoffs and underpants to the ground with a few tugs, then stepped from them and stood naked on the rocks.

I took a single plunge and then climbed from the water onto a flat rock in the sun, numb, clean, and exhausted. The water was unbearably cold. I swam just long enough to wash away the sweat and dirt, to have my skin chilled into goose bumps, and to make my bones ache before climbing out to lie on the hot, smooth rock. The sun was too bright for open eyes. The parts of me that weren't usually naked felt especially good. My belly, the stretch of it from my navel down, presented a series of dazzling sensations. The hollow divot of my chest experienced moods. I was all muscle and skin. My heart raced and I tried to lick my armpit; then I turned over onto my face and lay flat on the rock. Scree tumbled from the ridge, foot
steps that frightened me, and I scrambled to sit up, cross-legged, grabbing my cutoffs and squinting into the sun.

"Louise?" She was not supposed to do this. If she did this I wasn't supposed to know, or let her know I knew.

"Hello." A man. A man in our meadow. I was just as mortified as if it had been Louise. I turned my back to him and struggled into the shorts. My underpants lay in a bundle by my socks and shoes, bright white in the sun.

"I was swimming," I said, turning back again.

"Don't be embarrassed," he said. "I'm not looking." I couldn't see him because of the bright sun. His voice came from the top of the rocks. "Tell me when you're ready, and then I'll come down."

"I'm ready," I said. "I mean, I don't mind. The water's really cold."

He appeared, jumping down from rock to rock so the sun no longer obscured him. This man wore shorts with a lot of pockets and some kind of equipment, clamps and spikes. His knapsack was big and nearly empty. "I was just going to have a swim myself," he announced. I pulled my shirt on and tried covering my underpants with the shoes.

"Did Louise see you?" I asked.

"The woman by the bikes?" He took his shirt off and undid his belt. "I think she's sleeping."

"I'll go tell her you're here." I slipped my shoes on, stuffed my underpants and socks in my pockets, and scrambled up the ridge, not looking back.

Louise was not asleep. She was watching the ridge, and when I came to the top of it she waved at me. "There's a man here," I said, calling down to her. She shrugged. "There's a man here," I shouted, a little louder.

"That's okay." Louise's voice was very clear. "He's not bothering you, is he?"

"No."

Louise waved me away with both hands then lay back down. I looked toward the lake and saw the man splashing around as if this were a regular old lake you could actually enjoy. His butt was bright white in the water. I stood for a while and then went to where our bikes lay in the grass and unpacked my little tools. Louise was prone, maybe sleeping. I took a soda from the creek where she'd put them, gathered my shirt and tools then climbed back up the ridge.

The tools were a complete mystery to me. One brass pick was very sharp, and I used it to pry at some loose shale. The heaviest tool was a wedge that could be hammered and I tried this too, making a pile of fragments that I picked through. I had no idea what to look for, but the soda tasted good and this spot on the ridge seemed to be the right place for me. I could see both the man and Louise from here, and I could disappear from the sight of either one in just a few steps if I wanted to.

Louise had opened the wine and was wandering around the meadow with the bottle and a half sandwich. I knew the man was done swimming but I didn't look until I heard some rocks tumble. He was climbing toward me, with his shorts on, thank goodness, and he'd dipped his shirt in the water then wrapped it around his head like a kerchief, which looked very cool. I turned back to the shale and crouched beside it, inspecting the rocks deliberately.