Boulevard (19 page)

Newell, close, said something, but Mark was deaf. Newell's lips were moving but no sound came out, and Mark grabbed Newell by the shirt and pulled him close and stroked him till he calmed down, lips at Newell's ear close enough to touch. “I want to fuck you. Take me home. I'll be good.”

Sounds from all sides were fluttering as if passing through a fan. Mark waited for the moment to pass. They were both leaning against a wall, cars passing in the street.

“You're crazy.”

“I know. Take me home.”

Newell unfastened the collar, took it off. Mark laughed.

They fucked on a bed with wire springs like rock 'em sock 'em robots, waves rushing over Mark's skin, rushes and ripples of sparks. It shouldn't be so easy to get hard like this with so much drug running through his head, but he was a steady drill sergeant, he was ready. He was fucking like the Marquis de Sade in the shithole the place of exhale; he was fucking against nature, against god. With
his body jerking and him barking hoarsely in somebody's ear, in the ear of this guy named Newell, who said, “Jesus, you know how to do this.”

“I'm wired for motion.”

“That hurts,” Newell said, when Mark reached around to pinch his nipples, and then they were silent and licking each other and Mark jumped off the bed.

“Do you go to college?” Mark asked.

“Nope.”

“Do you go to high school?”

“Nope. I finished. Then I moved here.”

“From where?”

“Alabama.”

“Do you know Leigh?”

Newell furrowed his brows and laughed. “You sure are on something, aren't you.”

“I'm tripping. On the same acid Charley Manson likes. You know who he is?”

“Sure. He killed Sharon Tate.”

“Killed her like the Marquis de Sade.” Mark laughed.

Newell rolled off the bed, went to the bathroom. Mark stood in the door to watch him pee, to smell it. The warmth of the scent, the slight hint of some spice he could not name, and he walked outside, onto the front gallery, took a breath of the chilling air.

Leigh. He had finally done what she wanted. She had been asking for the longest time. And he had finally done it.

There was a story in Mark's family, too old to know if
it were true. The first Duval to leave France for America, the one whose accidents of sperm led to Mark's eventual existence, found he could no longer remain in his home country during the years of the Terror. Aldonse Duval, to shorten the name to its republican form. On his last evening in Paris he walked aimlessly through the chaos, the dirty ragged faces of the poor, the squalid filth of the neighborhoods. Hungry himself, having eaten little but bread for days, he walked to forget his belly. He would be leaving the country very soon, he already knew it, so his walk must have been tinged with the certainty that soon he would be far away from Paris and likely would never see the city again. He had been walking since before dawn, and his route took him near the Bastille just as the sun was rising. Guards were forcing a prisoner from the gatehouse to a closed carriage—a fat, white-skinned man the color of a moth. He was dressed in a nightshirt that clung to the back of his gelid thighs and carried nothing at all in splayed hands, his fingers moving like the legs of a dying spider. Face frightened, flushed. He walked unevenly and weakly, as though he were unaccustomed to bearing his own weight. When the guards had shoved his bulk into the carriage, Aldonse asked one of them, “Who is this man? Where are you taking him?”

The guard, one-eyed, scarred down the cheek by an old cut, spat green mucus onto the cobblestones. “This is the Marquis de Sade, a famous madman, and we're taking him to the nuthouse where he belongs.”

Peering out from the carriage were the frightened, dark eyes, the white face like a moon. Even Aldonse Duval had heard of Sade, who had poisoned prostitutes or sliced them in the ass with a knife for his jollies or maybe had killed some girl by torture. All this from such a fat, frightened man.

Nearly dawn when Aldonse watched the carriage pull away. He stood in the shadow of the prison, the stink of the streets beginning to rise in the morning light. He could see shadows moving on top of the prison towers, activity in the gatehouse. Movement in the streets, sounds that began to frighten him. That morning he began his travels, heading by hired carriage to Marseilles and embarking from there a month later on a ship bound for Mobile, though he would find himself restless there, and would finally settle in New Orleans.

He tried to tell that story to Newell with his pale white hands, his shapely thighs, and sturdy shoulders. But each time, as Mark tried, the story itself dissolved; and by then they were touching, starting to have sex again, and Mark asked Newell to slap him across the ass with the flat of his hand, sharp smacks that Newell was eager to give, Mark feeling the rush of the stinging pain on his bare cheeks and noting Newell's sharpened gaze, his curl of the lip.

“You don't know anything about history.”

“No. What the fuck do I care about that for, now?” Newell on top this time, sinuous as a snake.

“You should know about things.”

“Then teach me, you stupid son of a bitch.”

The fullness, that unbelievable nut of Mark over which Newell was riding, Mark feeling as if he were compacting only to explode. The sheets already damp from the last time.

“You never did that before, did you?” Mark asked, when they were done, lying on the bed.

“No.”

Mark slid to the edge of the bed, headed to the bathroom, a dingy place, the claw-footed tub, old fixtures, the silence of the room ringing in his head, the sound of water running distant in the pipes of the house, the sound of traffic, Newell humming, Mark frozen in mid-step looking down at the tub. He had been thinking about a bath. About soaking in the water. Now the water was running into the tub, filling it, and Mark could feel the heat.

“You are so fucked up. Do you do this a lot?”

“Every chance I get.”

“Well.” Newell leaned over, adjusted the water, felt for the hot, adjusted again.

Mark shivered and looked down at the young man's shoulder, hearing the country lilt in his voice. Newell had become Leigh, Mark could see her bending down like this, filling a tub with water, stepping into it. Leigh letting down her hair, before, when she had long hair and kept it in a twist at the back of her head.

Water in the tub, Newell in the tub, pulling Mark there too, the men sitting face to face, legs wherever they would fit. The grimy tub under his butt, the gray cast to the light
in the room. For a moment Leigh had been here, and Mark lay back and closed his eyes.

“What are you thinking?”

“You don't know Leigh,” Mark said.

“No, I don't. Who is that?”

“A woman. She's kin to me, some way. She was in the Court of Comus a few years ago.”

“What is Comus?”

Mark closed his eyes and felt the shimmering, the shivering world, ringing in his ears, the pressure on his ribs, the water. Breathe, breathe. “The queen of Mardi Gras. Leigh's from an old family. I don't even know why I'm talking about her.”

“Because you're fucked up and talking about all kinds of things.”

“That's right. That's why.”

“What kind of drug are you on? LSD or something?”

Mark giggled. “LSD. LSD. Shit. Oh shit.”

“That stuff is supposed to mess up your chromosomes.”

“Who knows what the chromosomes bring?” Mark asked. “Nobody knows.”

“And you have flashbacks.”

“You don't have them enough, you have to take more acid to get the good ones.”

“Acid.”

“That's what it is. L-something, lysergic something. I don't know. You want some?”

Silence for a moment.

“Sure.”

“Then we have to go to Prilla's.” Mark stood in the tub, swayed and slipped but caught himself, and Newell helped brace Mark till he could step out of the tub and reach for a towel. He rubbed it over his hairy legs, his arms; he admired his own body very much. Soap on his skin, but he couldn't remember washing. Newell standing too, drying with the other towel.

After a while something occurred to Mark, and he turned. “You don't even know who Prilla is.”

Newell giggled. “Well, no, I don't.”

“You don't even know who I am.”

“You're Mark.”

Mark was trying to find his clothes, to dress, but he kept getting tired. He found his underwear and lost his energy and sat on the edge of the bed holding the briefs. The floor had begun to ripple and wave again, the whole world was waving and rippling in every direction. A horn sounded, a ship passing on the river, a long, low, moaning horn that made him shiver up the spine. “Put on your underwear,” Newell said, and Mark obeyed quickly without thinking about it.

Step by step. Mark would stop upon completing a gesture, fixed on something new, a miracle the way light fell from the open bathroom door, spilling across the dark room, making long shadows of everything, but nothing holding still, nothing solid.

“We have to go,” Newell said, and held out Mark's shirt.

“You're in love with me.”

“That's right. Put your arm in there.”

“You like this.”

“Nothing else like it in the world,” Newell said, but by then Mark had forgotten what he meant. They walked out the door and down the back gallery through the loggia. A cool interior courtyard. On the way to the street they heard the voice of a girl and a woman,
You don't need to treat me like a baby
, the girl was saying.
Then don't act like one
, the woman was saying.
I'm so tired of how you act, well I'm so tired of how you act
. Back and forth like that, till the sound faded to nothing. Nothing else like it in the world.

“Where are we going?”

“I don't know. You were the one who said we had to go.”

“To Prilla's. That's right. Say it.”

“To Prilla's.”

“In case I forget again.”

“Who's Prilla?”

“My aunt.” Though this was false. Prilla was not part of his family. “She's not there right now. On Governor Nicholls.”

In the brisk night air he was feeling more like himself, more capable, the world less runny and squirmy than indoors. The sensation of wind on his cheek felt like the most tender kiss.

Times like now when he was tripping he could see ghosts on every side in every window, some in midair
suspended behind windows that no longer existed, echoes of past houses that had burned down or fallen down or been torn down. By now he had become convinced the ghosts were real. He always saw them, though he was never frightened—as if he had become assured of their distance. Echoes down the long corridor of the past, images that remained impressed on the air itself. When Mark was very young someone told him the story of Aldonse Duval who met the wicked Sade on the way out of Paris, but no one would tell him anything about Sade except that he liked to eat children. From then on he had gathered family stuff in his head. His study of history had begun from a suspicion that the story might be fiction. That same Duval married a girl who was raised by the Ursuline nuns, Emilie Aimée Beauchantesse, and he built a house for her on St. Ann. Emilie was an orphan whose parents had died in the fire of 1788 and who had inherited a large tract of property in
le carré de la ville
. The nuns gave Emilie to be married to Aldonse in exchange for what? A woman was a valuable commodity, especially a pure heiress raised in chastity by religious sisters. Mark was sure that if he walked along St. Ann near the corner of Dauphine he would see the outline of the windows of the old house, which had burned in a later fire; but tonight the house would be there, Emilie in one window and Aldonse in another, him with a glass of whiskey. Aldonse liked his liquor, liked other substances as well, like the opium that sometimes made its way to the port. He liked good food and grew quite fat. He invested his
money well in brickworks, real estate ventures around the city, and at one point owned a sugar plantation and two dozen slaves upriver near Germantown. He had four sons and no daughters by his wife and two daughters by his mistress, whom he kept in a little house in the Marigny fauborg. She had been his slave when she mothered the girls, though he freed her when he died, in his will leaving her the ownership of her own daughters as slaves. So many facts in Mark's head, so many papers to turn over in his fingers.

“Why are you trying to tell me this?” Newell asked, and Mark realized that he must have been talking this whole time.

“It would help me if I understood where I came from.”

“Do you go to college?” Newell asked.

“I did.”

“Where?”

“Right here. Tulane. I studied history.”

“Are you some kind of teacher or something?”

“I might start teaching one of these days.”

“Well, I still don't understand why you're trying to tell me about this guy who ate babies.”

“Turn here. This is Governor Nicholls.”

Smells coming from all sides, vomit and piss, spilt liquor, spices from somebody's cooking. “I just wonder if the story is true,” Mark said, fumbling in his pocket for a key to the courtyard gate. Even he was no longer certain if that was the reason, however, and he simply looked at Newell.

The main floor of the house was Prilla's apartment. Cool, calm rooms painted in pinks and yellows, tastefully furnished in the style of an uptown decorator. Somebody Father had hired. Four rooms, a back gallery with cabinets on either side, and stairs in one of the cabinets leading to the attic, where Mark led Newell.

Mark's room was there, neat as a pin, and the sense of order made him happy. He had kept a room at Prilla's house ever since he finished graduate school, and he stayed here more often than he stayed at home. He sprawled across his bed and stared up, the room spinning.