Skinned Alive (22 page)

Emboldened by beer, Jim called my mother by her first name, which I’m sure she found flattering, since it suggested he saw her as a woman rather than as a parent. She drank one of her many highballs with him, sitting beside him on the couch, and for an instant I coldly appraised my own mother as a potential rival, but she lost interest in him when he dared to shush her during a bit of the singer’s studied patter. In those days before the veneration of pop culture, unimaginative highbrows such as my mother and I swooned over opera, foreign films of any sort and “problem plays” such as
The Immoralist
and
Tea and Sympathy
, but in spite of ourselves we were guiltily drawn to television with a mindless, vegetable-like tropism best named by the vogue word of the period, “apathy.” And yet we certainly thought it beneath us to
study
mere entertainment.

Jim was so masculine in the way he held a Lucky cupped between his thumb and middle finger and kept another unlit behind his ear, he was so inexpressive, so devoid of all gesture, that when he stood up to go, shook his head like a wet dog and said, “Damn! I’ve had one too many for the road,” he was utterly convincing. My mother said, “Do you want me to drive you home?” Jim laughed insultingly and said, “I think you’re feeling no pain yourself. I’d better stay over, Delilah, if you have an extra bed.”

My mother was much more reluctant to put Jim up than I’d anticipated. “I don’t know, I could put my girdle back on….” Had she picked up the faint sex signal winking back and forth between Jim and her son? Perhaps she worried how it might look to Mr. Grady: drunk son spends night in Delilah’s apartment—and such a son, the human species at its peak of physical fitness, mouth open, eyes shifting, Adam’s apple working.

At last we were alone, and operatically I shed my clothes in
a puddle at my feet, but Jim, undressing methodically, whispered, “You should hang your clothes up or your mother might think we were up to some sort of monkey business.” Hot tears sprang to my eyes, but they dried as I looked at the long torso being revealed, with its small, turned waist and the wispy hairs around the tiny brown nipples. His legs were pale because he’d worn jeans on the construction site, but he must have worn them low. For an instant he sat down to pull off his heavy white socks, and his shoulder muscles played under the overhead light with all the demonic action of a Swiss music box, the big kind with its works under glass.

He lay back with a heavy-lidded, cool expression I suspected was patterned on Como’s, but I didn’t care, I was even pleased he wanted to impress me as I scaled his body, felt his great warm arms around me, tasted the Luckies and Bud on his lips, saw the sharp focus in his eyes fade into a blur. “Hey,” he whispered, and he smiled at me as his hands cupped my twenty-six-inch waist and my hot penis planted its flag on the stony land of his perfect body. “Hey,” he said, hitching me higher and deeper into his presence.

Soon after that I came down with mononucleosis, the much-discussed “kissing disease” of the time, although I’d kissed almost no one but Jim. I was tired and depressed. I dragged myself with difficulty from couch to bed, but at the same time I was so lonely and frustrated that I looked down from the window at every man or boy walking past and willed him to look up, see me, join me, but the will was weak.

Jim called one afternoon, and we figured out he could come by the next evening when my mother was going somewhere with my sister. I warned him he could catch mono if he kissed me, but I was proud after all he did kiss me long and deep. Until now the people I’d had sex with were boys at camp who pretended to hypnotize each other or married men who cruised the Howard Street Elevated toilets and drove me down to the
beach in station wagons filled with their children’s toys. Jim was the first man who took off his clothes, held me in his arms, looked me in the eye and said, “Hey.”

I was bursting with my secret, all the more so because mononucleosis had reduced my world to the size of our apartment and the books I was almost too weak to hold (that afternoon it had been Oscar Wilde’s
Lady Windermere’s Fan).
In the evening my mother was washing dishes and I was drying, but I kept sitting down to rest. She said, “Mr. Grady and I are thinking of getting married.” The words just popped out of my mouth: “Then it will have to be a double wedding.” My brilliant repartee provoked not a laugh but an inquisition, which had many consequences for me over the years, both good and bad. The whole story of my homosexual adventures came out, my father was alerted, I was sent off to boarding school and a psychiatrist—my entire life changed.

My mother called up Jim Grady and boozily denounced him as a pervert and child molester, although I’d assured her I’d been the one to seduce him. I did not see him again until almost forty years later in Paris. My mother, who’d become tiny, wise and sober with age, had had several decades to get used to the idea of my homosexuality (and my sister’s, as it turned out). She had run into Jim Grady twice in the last three years and warned me he’d become maniacally stingy, so much so he’d wriggle out of a drinks date if he thought he’d have to pay.

And yet when he rang me up from London, where he was attending a medical conference, he didn’t object when I proposed to book him into the pricey hotel next door to me on the Ile Saint-Louis.

He called from his hotel room, and I rushed over. He was nearly sixty years old, with thin gray hair, glasses with clear frames he’d mended with black electrician’s tape, ancient Corfam shoes, an open mouth, a stifled voice. We shook hands,
but a moment later he pulled me into his arms. He said he knew, from a magazine interview I’d given, that this time I was infected with a virus far more dangerous than mononucleosis, but he kissed me long and deep, and a moment later we were undressed.

Over the next four days I had time to learn all about his life. He hadn’t become a gynecologist after all but a sports doctor for a Catholic boys’ school, and he spent his days bandaging the bruised and broken bodies of teenage athletes. His best friend was a fat priest nicknamed “the Whale,” and they frequently got drunk with one of Jim’s soldier friends who’d married a real honey, a great little Chinese gal. Jim owned his own house. He’d always lived alone and seemed never to have had a lover. His father had died from an early heart attack, but Jim felt nothing but scorn for him and his spendthrift ways. Jim himself had a tricky heart, and he was trying to give a shape to his life. He was about to retire.

It was true he’d become a miser. He bought his acrylic shirts and socks in packs of ten. His glasses came from Public Welfare. At home he went to bed at sunset to save on electricity. We spent hours looking for prints that cost less than five dollars as presents for the Whale, the army buddy and the great little Chinese gal. He wouldn’t even let me invite him to a good restaurant. We were condemned to splitting the bill and eating at the Maubert Self, a cafeteria, or nibbling on cheese and apples we’d bought at the basement supermarket next to the Métro Saint Paul. He explained his economies to me in detail. Proudly he told me that he was a millionaire several times over and that he was leaving his fortune to the Catholic Church, although he was an atheist.

I took him with me to my literary parties and introduced him as my cousin. He sat stolidly by like an old faithful dog as people said brilliant, cutting things in French, a language he did not know. He sent every hostess who received us a
thank-you letter, which in America was once so common it’s still known as a “bread-and-butter note” although in France it was always sufficiently rare as to be called a
lettre de château.
The same women who’d ignored him when he sat at their tables were retrospectively impressed by his New World courtliness.

On his trip to Paris I slept with him just that first time in his hotel room; as we kissed, he removed his smudged, taped welfare glasses and revealed his darting young blue eyes. He undressed my sagging body and embraced my thirty-six-inch waist and bared his own body, considerably slimmer but just as much a ruin with its warts and wattles and long white hair. And yet, when he hitched me into his embrace and said, “Hey,” I felt fourteen again. “You were a moron to tell your mom everything about us,” he said. “You made us lose a lot of time.”

And if we had spent a life together, I wondered, would we each be a bit less deformed now?

As his hands stroked my arms and belly and buttocks, everything the years had worn down or undone, I could hear an accelerating drum and see, floating just above the rented bed, our young, feverish bodies rejoicing or lamenting, one couldn’t be sure which. The time he’d come over when I had mono, my hot body had ached and shivered beside his. Now each time I touched him I could hear music, as though a jolt had started the clockwork after so many years. We watched the toothed cylinder turn under the glass and strum the long silver notes.

to Maxine Groffsky

They came to Paris from New York as lovers, although they hadn’t slept together in a year. Of course they kept sleeping in the same bed, and of course they would never have admitted the shameful secret of their chastity. If other people had known they weren’t having sex together, they would have undervalued their love, which was growing at once more detailed and more unified every day, like an epic poem bristling with events and characters all held together through a mysterious system of balanced echoes.

Their poem, however, was more a nursery rhyme, since they had a stuffed bear they named Mr. Peters and they called each other Peters or Pete or Petes and were generally silly to the point of rapture, endlessly shouting their love from room to room. One of them would sing out, “Do you still like me, Peters?” The other would reply, “Petes, I
love
you.”

The truth was they were both so insecure that the ordinary discretion between lovers would never have suited them. They
were willing to trade in thrice-weekly sex for hourly affirmations of love. “You’re going to leave me, I know it,” one of them would suddenly announce with mock fear to disguise the real fear. “I’ll
never
leave you, Peters,” the other one would swear with mock solemnity to take the embarrassing edge off the real solemnity.

There was almost a twenty-year age difference between them, but when they were horsing around in the apartment they scarcely noticed it. The older one, Mark, had always been considered immature back in New York because the things he liked—going out every night, disco dancing, sexual conquests, smoking dope and screaming and sobbing through pop-music concerts—were the things wild, affluent kids had liked in the 1970s. Although Ned, the younger one, liked to drink, he did everything else in moderation and even when drunk he was always the one in the group who remembered where the car was parked or could explain things clearly and politely to an enraged policeman.

Living it up had been a way of making a living for Mark. He was the president of the Bunyonettes, a gay travel agency that arranged all-male tours. Forty gay guys would float down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor, impressing the Egyptians with their muscles and mustaches and shocking them with their pink short shorts and filmy, drawstring
après-piscine
harem pants. Or Mark would charter a small liner that would cruise the Caribbean and surprise the port town of Curaçao, where two hundred fellows, stocky, cheerful and guiltless, would ransack the outdoor clothes market looking for bits of female finery to wear to the Carmen Miranda Ball scheduled for the high seas tomorrow night.

A computerized dating service, a rental agency for Key West and Rio, a caterer that put its waiters in shorts, T-shirts and, to emphasize those powerful calves, orange work boots and sagging knee socks—these were just a few of the satrapies in
Mark’s empire. Actually the whole business was run by Manuela, a tough Puerto Rican everyone assumed must be a dyke, though after two rotten marriages she wasn’t into anything but money and good times. She did the accounting, hired and fired the staff, organized the trips. Mark was just there to socialize, to “circulate,” as his hostessy Virginia mother put it.

When things fell apart in ’81 Mark couldn’t face it. An old roommate came down with the disease, and Mark wrote on his desk calendar nearly every week “Visit Jason,” but he never got over to St. Vincent’s until it was too late. At the bars, discos and gay restaurants between rounds of rusty nails, he’d look up to see the starved, yellow face of an old playmate. The short hair and mustache made him ashamed for some reason, as though God had contrived a rebuke of their past fashions. Of course the worst rebuke to the fashion-conscious is to be no longer in style, and these eyes ringed in dark and these sallow cheeks looked like daguerreotypes of what they’d represented in full living color just a year ago.

Of course Mark went through the motions. He was a sort of community leader. Although he knew plague talk was bad for business, that no one wanted to take a cruise on a death ship, he quickly put aside such mercenary thoughts. He organized safe-sex jerk-off parties, thought up themes for benefits, signed petitions for money and against bigotry, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was a good-time Charlie and the times had soured.

And he felt guilty.

He wondered if he’d set a bad example. So often he’d trusted excess. He’d tripped out on acid every night in Water Island that summer of 1978, tempering the speediness with rusty nails and Valium. He cheerfully visited his cheerful doctor almost once a week all though the 1970s for clap in the throat, dick or bum, for anal warts, for two different kinds of hepatitis, for the syph (a night of fever and shakes after the first massive
dose of antibiotics). He saw every ailment as a badge of courage in the good fight against puritanism.

He knew he was charismatic owing to his Virginia drawl, his shiny straight hair, his blue eyes under scribbled-in, black-black brows, and especially owing to his way of respecting men for their successes while never losing sight of their vulnerability, which for most of them constituted their sexuality. “OK, Harold, we know you’re the world’s greatest ichthyologist but that doesn’t mean your ass ain’t as cute as a twelve-year-old’s and how about parking it here”—he pointed to his knee—“right here.”