Skinned Alive (17 page)

“A few frightful poofs do, I suppose,” Ralph drawled, looking offended by the notion. “But why settle for free frights when for ten bucks you can have anyone in town, absolutely anyone including the mayor and his wife, not to mention the odd god on the hoof?”

For a few days Ray held out. Betty, morbidly enough, had made a tape of all the crazy messages George had left on her answering machine during his last year. She’d given Ray the tape just before he’d left and now he sat in his bedroom, wearing gaudy drawstring shorts, and while looking at the harbor lights listened to George’s voice.

Ray remembered a remark someone had once made: “Many people believe in God without loving him, but I love him without believing in him.” Ray didn’t know why the remark popped into his head just now. Did he love George without believing he existed? Ray described himself as a “mystical atheist.” Maybe that was a complicated way of saying he believed George still loved him, or would if God would let him speak.

In his New York gay world, which was as carefully screened from men under twenty-five as from those over sixty, Ray counted as young. That is, some old flame whom Ray had known fifteen years ago—a guy with a mustache gone gray and fanning squint lines but a still-massive chest and thunder thighs under all that good tailoring—would spot Ray at a black-tie gay-rights dinner or health-crisis benefit and come up to him murmuring, “Lookin’ good, kid,” and would pinch his bottom. It was all continuing and Ray knew that despite the way his body had acquired a certain thickness, as though the original Greek statue had been copied by a Roman, he still looked youthful to his contemporaries.

In the first two weeks after George’s death Ray had picked up three different men on the street and dragged them home. Ray had clung to their warm bodies, their air-breathing chests and blood-beating hearts, clung like a vampire to warm himself through transfusions of desire. He and Anna would sniff at these bewildered young men as though nothing could be less likely than a scabbed knee, furred buttocks, an uncollared collarbone or the glamorous confusion of a cast-aside white shirt and silk rep tie. What they, the pickups, wanted, heart-to-heart postcoital chat, appealed to him not at all; all he wanted was to lie facedown beside tonight’s faceup partner and slide on top of him just enough to be literally heart-to-heart. Their carnality had seemed very fragile.

After this brief, irresponsible flaring up of lust, which had followed the sexless year of George’s dying, Ray had gone back to celibacy. He thought it very likely that he was carrying death inside him, that it was ticking inside him like a time bomb but one he couldn’t find because it had been secreted by an unknown terrorist. Even if it was located it couldn’t be defused. Nor did he know when it might explode. He didn’t want to expose anyone to contagion.

He wrote his will as he knew everyone should. That was the adult thing to do. But the paltry list of his possessions reminded him of how little he’d accumulated or accomplished; it was like the shame of moving day, of seeing one’s cigarette-burned upholstery and scarred bureau on the curb under a hot, contemptuous sun. His relatively youthful looks had led him to go on believing in his youthful expectations; his life, he would have said as a philosophy student, was all becoming and no being. All in the future until this death sentence (never pronounced, daily remanded) had been handed down.

Occasionally he jerked off with poppers and dirty magazines. Although he found slaves and masters ludicrous and pathetic, his fantasies had not kept pace with the fashions and were
mired somewhere in 1972, best simulated by the stories and photos in
Drummer.
He would read a hot tale about a violent encounter between two real pigs, sniff his amyl, even mutter a few words (“Give your boy that daddy-dick”) and then find himself, head aching, stomach sticky, heart sinking, erection melting, alone, posthumous. Anna wrinkled her nose and squinted at the fumes. He hoped his executor, who was his lawyer, would be able to bury him next to George as instructed, since he only slept really well when George was beside him. Once in a Philadelphia museum he’d seen the skeletons of a prehistoric man and woman, buried together (he couldn’t remember how they’d come to die at the same time). He was lying on his back, she on her side, her hand placed delicately on his chest.

The days in Crete were big, cloudless hot days, heroic days, noisy with the rasp of insects. They were heroic days as though the sun were a lionhearted hero…. Oh, but hadn’t he just read in his beach book,
The Odyssey
, the words of the dead, lionhearted Achilles: “Do not speak to me soothingly about death, glorious Odysseus; I should prefer, as a slave, to serve another man, even if he had no property and little to live on, than to rule over all these dead who have done with life.” He’d cried on the white-sand beach beside the lapis-lazuli water and looked through his tears, amazed, at a herd of sheep trotting toward him. He stood and waded and waved, smiling, at the old shepherd in black pants with a carved stick in his hand, which itself looked carved; Ray, expensively muscular in his Valentino swim trunks, thought he was probably not much younger than this ancient peasant and suddenly his grief struck him as a costly gewgaw, beyond the means of the grievously hungry and hardworking world. Or maybe it was precisely his grief that joined him to this peasant. Every night he was dreaming about George, and in that book about the Greek death rituals he’d read the words of an old woman: “At death the
soul emerges in its entirety, like a man. It has the shape of a man, only it’s invisible. It has a mouth and hands and eats real food just like we do. When you see someone in your dreams, it’s the soul you see. People in your dreams eat, don’t they? The souls of the dead eat too.” Ray couldn’t remember if George ate in his dreams.

Ralph and Ray rented motor scooters and drove up a narrow road through chasms, past abandoned medieval churches and new cement-block houses, high into the mountains. They chugged slowly up to and away from a goat stretching to reach the lower branches of a tree. They saw a young Orthodox priest in a black soutane out strolling, preceded by a full black beard he seemed to be carrying in front of him as one might carry a salver. He remembered that Orthodox priests can marry and he vaguely thought of that as the reason this one seemed so virile.

The summer drought had dwindled the stream to a brook within its still-green bed. At a certain turn in the road the air turned cool, as though the frozen core of the mountain had tired of holding its breath. In the shepherds’ village where they stopped for lunch a smiling boy was found to speak English with them. He said he’d lived in New Zealand for a year with his aunt and uncle; that was why he knew English. Laughing, he offered them steaks and salads, but it turned out the only food available in the village was a runny sour cheese and bread and olives.

Every day, despite the climate’s invitation to languor, Ray did his complete workout, causing the heavy old wardrobe in his room to creak and throw open its door when he did pushups. Some days, especially around three, a wind would suddenly blow up and he and Ralph would run around battening down the twenty-three windows. At dusk on Sundays a naval band
marched all the way around the harbor to the fortress opposite the lighthouse and played the national anthem (“which was written by a German,” Ralph couldn’t resist throwing in) while the blue-and-white flag was lowered.

Although the days were cheerful—scooter rides to a deserted beach, vegetable and fish marketing, desultory house hunting out beyond the town walls on which the Venetian lion had been emblazoned—the nights were menacing. He and Ralph would dress carefully for the
volta
, Ralph in a dark blue shirt and ironed slacks, Ray in a floating gown of a Japanese designer shirt and enormous one-size-drowns-all lime-green shorts, neon-orange cotton socks, black Adidas and white sunglasses slatted like Venetian blinds angled down (“Perfect for the Saudi matron on the go,” he said).

At least that’s how he got himself up the first few nights until he sensed Ralph’s embarrassment, the crowd’s smiling contempt and his own … what.

Desire?

Every night it was the same. The sun set, neon lights outlined the eaves and arches of the cafés, and an army of strollers, mostly young and male, sauntered slowly along the horseshoe-shaped stone walk beside the harbor. Sometimes it stank of pizza or what was called Kantaki Fried Chicken or of the sea urchins old fishermen had cleaned on the wharf earlier in the day. The walk could be stretched out to twenty minutes if one lingered in conversation with friends, stopped to buy nuts from one vendor and to look at the jewelry sold by Dutch hippies. A drink at an outdoor café—ouzo and hors d’oeuvres
(mezes)—
could while away another forty minutes.

The full hour was always devoted to boy watching. Ray looked, too, at the wonderful black hair, muscular bodies, red cheeks under deep tans, flamboyant mustaches, big noses, transparent arrogance, equally transparent self-doubt, black eyebrows yearning to meet above the nose and often succeeding.
“Of course they need reassurance,” Ralph said. “What actor doesn’t?” These guys had loud voices, carnivorous teeth, strutting walks, big asses, broad shoulders. Ralph explained they were more like American teenage boys than other European youths; they were equally big and loud and physical and sloppy and unveiled in their curiosity and hostility.

One of the sixty-year-old Americans, a classics professor in the States, was an amateur photographer of considerable refinement. He’d persuaded, it seemed, dozens of locals to pose nude for him. He paid them something. He was discreet. He flattered them as best he could in the modern language he’d pieced together out of his complete knowledge of ancient Greek. “Sometimes,” he said, “they say a whole long improbable sentence in English—picked up from an American song or movie, no doubt.”

Among the locals his ministrations to vanity made him popular, his scholarship made him impressive and his hobby risible, but since he always seemed to be laughing at himself in his ancient, elegant prep-school way, his laughter softened theirs. His photographic sessions he dismissed airily but pursued gravely.

Homer (for that was his name, absurdly, “Stranger than epic,” as he said) took a polite but real interest in Ray—but strictly in Ray’s mind. Ray, who expected, invited and resented other men’s sexual attraction to him, found Homer’s sex-free attentiveness unsettling. And appealing. Maybe because Homer was a professor and had a professor’s way of listening—which meant he winced slightly when he disagreed and cleaned his glasses when he deeply disagreed—Ray felt returned, if only for an instant, to his school days. To the days before he’d ever known George. To the days when he’d been not a New York know-it-all, but a midwestern intellectual, someone who took nothing on authority and didn’t even suspect there were such things as fashions in ideas.

This repatriation cheered him. Ralph had made a spaghetti dinner at home (“Enough with the swordfish and feta, already”) and invited Homer. Ray and Homer’s conversation about the categorical imperative, the wager, the cave, the excluded middle astonished Ralph. “You girls are real bluestockings,” he told them, “which is OK for a hen party, but remember men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.” Ralph even seemed disconcerted by their intelligence, if that’s what all this highbrow name-dropping had revealed.

After the wine and the laughter Ray thought it only natural to go on to the bar with his friends, the gay bar where they met with “true love” every night, as Ralph said. On the way along the harbor, Ray told Homer all about his sexual qualms. “I just don’t think I should expose anyone else to this disease in case I’ve got it or in case I’m contagious. And I’m not disciplined enough to stick to safe sex.”

Homer nodded and made the same noncommittal but polite murmur as when earlier they’d discussed the
Nicomachean Ethics.
Then, as though shaking himself awake, he asked, “What
is
safe sex, exactly?”

“Strictly safe is masturbation, no exchange of body fluids. Or if you fuck you can use a rubber. But I’m not worried about myself. The only one in danger where fucking and sucking is involved is the guy who gets the come.”

Silence full of blinking in the dark, blinking with lashes growing longer, darker with mascara, by the second. “But, darling,” Homer finally confided, hilariously woman-to-woman, “then the Greeks are
always
safe. They’re the men; we’re the girls.”

“Call me square,” Ray said, “but that’s old-fashioned role-playing—and I’ve never, never paid—”

Homer interrupted him with a soft old hand on his arm. “Give it a try. After all, it’s your only option.”

The alley leading to the bar was too narrow for cars but
wide enough to accommodate four noisy adolescents walking shoulder to shoulder; one of them stepped drunkenly down into the grass-sprouting ruins and pissed against a jagged wall. The kid had a foolish grin and he seemed to have forgotten how to aim, shake, button up. The others started barking and mewing. Ray found the situation and the hoarse voices exciting. Had these guys come from the bar? Were they gay?

The bar was a low room, a basement grotto, one would have said, except it was on the ground floor. There were several dimly lit alcoves just off the room in which shadowy couples were smoking and drinking. The waiters or “hostesses” were two transvestites: Dmitri, who was chubby and brunette and kept a slightly deformed hand always just out of sight, flickering it behind his back or under a tray or into a pocket; and Adriana, who was slender, with straight, shoulder-length blond hair and who responded to open jeers with a zonked-out grin that never varied, as though she were drugged on her own powerful fantasy of herself, which made her immune. Both were in jeans and T-shirts; Adriana had two small, hormone-induced breasts, but his arms were still muscular and his hips boyishly narrow. Dmitri, the brunette, had less beauty and more vitality, a clown’s vitality; he was the stand-up or run-past comic. He did pratfalls with his tray, twinkled past on point, sat on laps or wriggled deliciously against sailors, always keeping his hand in motion, out of focus. The bar was called Fire Island.