Skinned Alive (20 page)

After Marco had run down the steps, the thuds rattling the whole house, Ray was alone. Definitely alone. He walked to
the balcony and looked down at the harbor, most of its lights extinguished, the last waiters hosing down the boardwalk. He put on his headphones and listened to George’s telephone messages to Betty. “Hi, doll, this is Darleen, now a stylishly anorexic 135 pounds. The Duchess of Windsor was wrong. You can be too thin.” Oh yes, four months before the end. “Hi, doll, I know you’re there with the machine on watching
The Guiding Light.
Can you believe that bitch Vanessa? Hi!” And a sudden happy duet of overlapping voices, since just then Betty picked up and confessed she had indeed been pigging out on the soaps and a pound of chocolates.

Ray snapped it off. “You must look out for yourself,” George had said, and just now the best way seemed to be to forget George, at least for a while, to forget the atmosphere of dread, the midnight visits to the hospital, the horrifying outbreak of disease after disease—fungus in the throat, a bug in the brain, bleeding in the gut, herpes ringing the ass, every inch of the dwindling body explored by fiber optics, brain scanner, X rays, the final agonies buried under blankets of morphine.

Ray received a call from Helen, his boss, and her tinny, crackling tirade sounded as remote as the final, angry emission from a dead star. He had no desire to leave Xania. With Homer as his translator he looked at a house for sale in the Turkish quarter and had a nearly plausible daydream of converting it into a guest house that he and Marco would run.

He started writing a story about Marco—his first story in fifteen years. He wondered if he could support himself by his pen. He talked to an Irish guy who made a meager living by teaching English at the prison nearby in their rehabilitation program. If he sold George’s half-million-dollar loft (George’s sole possession and only legacy) he could afford to live in Greece
several years without working. He could even finance that guest house.

When he’d first arrived in Crete he’d had the vague feeling that this holiday was merely a detour and that when he rejoined his path George would be waiting for him. George or thoughts of George or the life George had custom-built for him, he wasn’t quite sure which he meant. And yet now there was a real possibility that he might escape, start something new or transpose his old boyhood goals and values into a new key, the Dorian mode, say. Everything here seemed to be conspiring to reorient him, repatriate him, even the way he’d become in Greece the pursuer rather than the pursued.

One hot, sticky afternoon as he sat in a café with a milky ouzo and a dozing cat for company, a blond foreigner—a man about twenty-five, in shorts and shirtless, barefoot—came walking along beside the harbor playing a soprano recorder. A chubby girl in a muumuu and with microscopic freckles dusted over her well-padded cheeks was following this ringleted Pan and staring at him devotedly.

Ray hated the guy’s evident self-love and the way his head drooped to one side, and he hated the complicity of the woman, hated even more that a grown-up man should still be pushing such an overripe version of the eternal boy. He really did look overripe. Even his lips, puckered for the recorder, looked too pulpy. Ray realized that he himself had played the boy for years and years. To be sure not when he’d chronologically been a boy, for then he’d been too studious for such posturing. But later, in his twenties and thirties. He saw that all those years of self-absorption had confused him. He had always been looking around to discover if older men were noticing him and he’d been distressed if they were or weren’t. He hadn’t read or written anything because he hadn’t had the calm to submit to other people’s thoughts or to summon his own. George had
urged him to buy more and more clothes, always in the latest youthful style, and he’d fussed over Ray’s workout, dentistry, haircut, even the state of his fingernails. When they’d dozed in the sun on Fire Island, hour after hour George would stroke Ray’s oiled back or legs. Ray had been the sultan’s favorite. Now he’d changed. Now he was like a straight man. He was the one who admired someone else. He wooed, he paid. At the same time he was the kneeling handmaiden to the Cretan youth, who was the slim-waisted matador. This funny complication suited him.

A journalist came down from Athens to Xania to interview Ralph for an Athens art magazine or maybe it was a paper. Since he was gay, spoke English and was congenial, Ralph invited him to stay on for the weekend. The day before Ray was due to fly back to New York, he asked the journalist to translate a letter for him into Greek, something he could give Marco along with the gold necklace he’d bought him, the sort of sleazy bauble all the kids here were wearing. Delighted to be part of the adventure and impressed by the ardor of the letter, the journalist readily accepted the commission. Ralph arranged to be away for a couple of hours on Ray’s last night and insisted he bring Marco up to the palace for a farewell between sheets. Covering his friendliness with queenliness, Ralph said, “How else can you hold on to your nickname, La Grande Horizontale?”

In the palace bedroom that night, just as Marco was about to untie his laces and get down to work, Ray handed him the package and the letter. Before opening the package, Marco read the letter. It said: “I’ve asked a visitor from Athens to translate this for me because I have to tell you several things. Tomorrow I’m going back to New York, but I hope to sell my belongings there quickly. I’ll be back in Xania within a month. I’ve already found a house I’d like to buy on Theotocopoulos
Street. Perhaps you and I could live there someday or fix it up and run it as a guest house.

“I don’t know what you feel for me if anything. For my part, I feel something very deep for you. Nor is it just sexual; the only reason we have so much sex is because we can’t speak to each other. But don’t worry. When I come back I’ll study Greek and, if you like, I’ll teach you English.

“Here’s a present. If you don’t like it you can exchange it.”

After Marco finished reading the letter (he was sitting on the edge of the bed and Ray had snapped on the overhead light), he hung his head for a full minute. Ray had no idea what he’d say, but the very silence, the full stop, awed him. Then Marco looked at Ray and said in English, in a very quiet voice, “I know you love me and I love you. But Xania is no good for you. Too small. Do not rest here. You must go.”

Although Ray felt so dizzy he sank into a chair, he summoned up the wit to ask, “And you? Will you leave Xania one day?”—for he was already imagining their life together in New York.

“Yes, one day.” Marco handed the unopened package back to Ray. “I won’t see you again. You must look out for yourself.” And then he stood, left the room, thudded down the front steps, causing the whole house to rattle, and let himself out the front door.

Ray felt blown back in a wind tunnel of grief and joy. He felt his hair streaming, his face pressed back, the fabric of his pants fluttering. In pop-song phrases he thought this guy had walked out on him, done him wrong, broken his heart—a heart he was happy to feel thumping again with sharp, wounded life. He was blown back onto the bed and he smiled and cried as he’d never yet allowed himself to cry over George, who’d just spoken to him once again through the least likely oracle.

A novel I’d written, which had flopped in America, was about to come out in France, and I was racing around vainly trying to assure its success in translation. French critics seldom give nasty reviews to books, but they often ignore a novel altogether, especially one by a foreign writer, even one who like me lives in Paris.

In the midst of these professional duties I suddenly received a phone call. A stifled baritone voice with a midwestern accent asked if I was Eddie. No one had called me Eddie since my childhood. “It’s Jim Grady. Your mother gave me your number.”

I hadn’t seen him in almost forty years, not since I was fourteen and he twenty, but I could still taste the Luckies and Budweiser on his lips, feel his powerful arms closing around me, remember the deliberate way he’d folded his trousers on the crease rather than throwing them on the floor in romantic haste as I had done.

I met Jim through our parents. My mother was dating his father, an arrangement she’d been falling back on intermittently for years although she mildly despised him. She went out with him when there was no one better around. She was in her fifties, fat, highly sexed, hardworking, by turns bitter and wildly optimistic (now I’m all those things, so I feel no hesitation in describing her in those terms, especially since she was to change for the better in old age). My father and she had divorced seven years earlier, and she’d gone to work partly out of necessity but partly to make something of herself. Her Texas relations expected great things from her and their ambitions had shaped hers. Before the divorce she’d studied psychology, and now she worked in the public schools of suburban Chicago, traveling from one to another, systematically testing all the slow learners, problem cases and “exceptional” children (“exceptional” meant either unusually intelligent or retarded). She put great stock in making an attractive, even stunning, appearance at those smelly cinderblock schools and rose early in the morning to apply her makeup, struggle into her girdle and don dresses or suits that followed the fashions better than the contours of her stubby body.

In the gray, frozen dawns of Chicago winters she would drive her new Buick to remote schools, where the assistant principal would install her in an empty classroom and bring her one child after another. Shy, dirty, suspicious kids would eye her warily, wag their legs together in a lackluster parody of sex, fall into dumb trances or microscopically assay the hard, black riches they’d mined from their nostrils, but nothing could dim my mother’s glittering determination to be cheerful.

She never merely went through the motions or let depression muffle her performance. She always had the highly colored, fatuously alert look of someone who is listening to compliments. Perhaps she looked that way because she was continually reciting her own praises to herself as a sort of protective mantra.
Most people, I suspect, are given a part in which the dialogue keeps running out, a supporting role for which the lazy playwright has scribbled in “Improvise background chatter” or “Crowd noises off.” But my mother’s lines had been fully scored for her (no matter that she’d written them herself), and she couldn’t rehearse them often enough. Every night she came home, kicked off her very high heels and wriggled out of her orthopedically strong girdle, shrinking and filling out and sighing “Whooee!”—something her Ranger, Texas, mother would exclaim after feeding the chickens or rustling up some grub in the summer heat.

Then my mother would pour herself a stiff bourbon and water, first of the many highballs she’d need to fuel her through the evening. “I saw fifteen patients today: twelve Stanford-Binets, one Wechsler, one House-Tree-Person. I even gave a Rorschach to a beautiful little epileptic with high potential.” On my mother’s lips “beautiful” meant not a pretty face but a case of grimly classic textbook orthodoxy. “The children loved me. Several of them were afraid of me—I guess they’d never seen such a pretty, stylish lady all smiling and perfumed and bangled. But I put them right at ease. I know how to handle those backward children, they’re just putty in my hands.”

She thought for a moment, regarding her hands, then became animated. “The assistant principal was so grateful to me for my fine work. I guess she’d never had such an efficient, skilled state psychologist visit her poor little school before. She accompanied me to my automobile, and boy, you should have seen her eyes light up when she realized I was driving a fine Buick.” Mother slung her stocking feet over the arm of the upholstered chair. “She grabbed my hand and looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Who
are
you?’” This was part of the litany I always hated because it was obviously a lie. “ ‘Why, whatever do you mean?’ I asked her. ‘You’re no ordinary psychologist,’ she said. ‘I can see by your fine automobile and your
beautiful clothes and your fine mind and lovely manners that you are a real lady.’” It was the phrase “fine automobile” that tipped me off, since only southerners like my mother said that. Chicagoans said “nice car.” Anyway I’d never heard any mid-westerner praise another in such a gratifying way; only in my mother’s scenarios were such heady exchanges a regular feature.

As the night wore on and my sister and I would sit down to do our homework on the cleared dining-room table, as the winter pipes would knock hypnotically and the lingering smell of fried meat would get into our hair and heavy clothes, our mother would pour herself a fourth highball and put on her glasses to grade the tests she’d administered that day or to write up her reports in her round hand, but she’d interrupt her work and ours to say, “Funny, that woman simply couldn’t get over how a fine lady like me could be battling the Skokie slush to come out to see those pitiful children.”

The note of pity was introduced only after the fourth drink, and it was, I imagine, something she felt less for her patients than for herself as the telephone stubbornly refused to ring.

At that time in my mother’s life she had few friends. Going out with other unmarried women struck her as a disgrace and defeat. She was convinced couples looked down on her as a divorcée and those single men who might want to date a chubby, penniless, middle-aged woman with two brats hanging around her neck were, as she’d say, scarce as hen’s teeth.

That’s where Mr. Grady came in. He was forty-five going on sixty, overweight and utterly passive. He too liked his drinks, although in his case they were Manhattans; he fished the maraschino cherries out with his fingers. He didn’t have false teeth, but there was something weak and sunken around his mouth as he mumbled his chemically bright cherries. His hairless hands were liver-spotted, and the nails were flaky, bluish and unusually flat, which my mother, drawing on her
fragmentary medical knowledge, called “spatulate,” although I forget which malady this symptom was supposed to indicate. His wife had left him for another man, much richer, but she considerately sent Mr. Grady cash presents from time to time. He needed them: he lived reasonably well and he didn’t earn much. He worked on the city desk of a major Chicago daily, but he’d been there for nearly twenty years, and in that era, before the Newspaper Guild grew strong, American journalists were badly paid unless they were flashy, opinionated columnists.