Skinned Alive (33 page)

When I was a kid, I was a Buddhist and an atheist, but I kept making bargains with God: if he’d fulfill a particular wish, I’d agree to believe in him. He always came through, but I still withheld my faith, which shows, perhaps, how unreasonable rationality can be.

One of God’s miracles occurred when I was thirteen. I was spending most of that year with my father in Cincinnati; my mother, a psychologist, thought I needed the promixity of a man, even though my father then ignored me and was uninterested in teaching me baseball or tennis, sports in which he excelled. My father and stepmother were going to Mexico for a winter holiday that would not, alas, fall during my Christmas school break, although it was unlikely that he would have invited me even if I had been free, since the divorce agreement specified nothing about winter vacations. One long weekend, I returned to Chicago to see my mother and sister, and fell on my knees beside my bed in the dark and prayed that I’d be
invited to come along anyway. The next morning my mother received a telegram from my father asking me to join him in Cincinnati the following day for a three-week car trip to Acapulco. He’d already obtained advance assignments from my teachers; he would supervise my homework.

My mother had a phobia about speaking to my father, and spent thirty-five years without ever hearing his voice. If vocal communication was forbidden, the exchange of cordial but brief tactical notes or telegrams was acceptable, provided it didn’t occur regularly. My mother’s generation believed in something called
character
, and it was established through self-discipline. Anyway, my mother suggested that I phone my father, since court etiquette prevented her from doing so.

The next day I took the train to Cincinnati; it was the James Whitcomb Riley, named after the Hoosier Poet (“When the frost is on the punkin,” one of his odes begins). At the end of each car, there were not scenes of rural Indiana, as one might have expected, but, instead, large reproductions of French Impressionist paintings—hayricks, water lilies, Notre-Dame, mothers and children
en fleurs
… This train, which I took twice a month to visit my dad when I was living with my mom, or to visit Mom when I was living with Dad, was the great forcing shed of my imagination: no one knew me; I was free to become anyone. I told one startled neighbor that I was English and in America for the first time, affecting an accent so obviously fabricated and snobbish that it eventually provoked a smile. I told another I had leukemia but was in remission. Another time I said that both my parents had just died in a car crash, and I was going to live with a bachelor uncle. Once I chatted up a handsome young farmer, his face stiff under its burn, his T-shirt incapable of containing the black hair sprouting up from under it; he inspired a tragic opera that I started writing the next week; it was called “Orville.”

On this trip, my imagination was busy with a thick guidebook on Mexico I’d checked out of the public library. I read everything I could about Toltecs, Aztecs, and Mayans; but the astrology bored me, as did the bloody attacks and counterattacks, and one century blended into another without a single individual’s emerging out of the plumed hordes—until the tragic Montezuma (a new opera subject, even more heartrending than Orville, whose principal attribute had been a smell of Vitalis hair tonic and, more subtly, of starch and ironing, a quality difficult to render musically).

The year was 1953; my father and stepmother rode in the front of his new, massive Cadillac—shiny pale-blue metal and chrome and, inside, an oiled, dark-blue leather with shag carpet—and I had so much space in the back seat that I could stretch out full length, slightly nauseated from the cigars that my father chain-smoked and his interminable monologues about the difference between stocks and bonds. While in the States, he listened to broadcasts of the news, the stock reports, and sporting events, three forms of impersonal entertainment that I considered to be as tedious as the Toltecs’ battles.

I lay in the back seat, knocking my legs together in an agony of unreleased desire. My head filled with vague daydreams, as randomly rotating as the clouds I could see up above through the back window. In those days, the speed limit was higher than now and the roads were just two-lane meanders; there was no radar and no computers, and if a cop stopped us for speeding my father tucked a five-dollar bill under his license and instantly we were urged on our way with a cheerful wave and a “Y’all come back, yuh heah?” My father then resumed his murderous speed, lunging and turning and braking and swearing, and I hid so I wouldn’t witness, white-knuckled, the near-disasters. As night fell, the same popular song, the
theme song from the film
Moulin Rouge
, was played over and over again on station after station, like a flame being passed feebly from torch to torch in a casual marathon.

We stopped in Austin, Texas, to see my grandfather, who was retired and living alone in a small wooden house he rented. He was famous locally for his “nigger” jokes, which he collected in self-published books with titles such as
Let’s Laugh, Senegambian Sizzles, Folks Are Funny
, and
Chocolate Drops from the South
, and he made fun of me for saying “Cue” Klux Klan instead of “Koo”—an organization he’d once belonged to, and accepted as a harmless if stern fraternity. He was dull, like my father, though my father was different: whereas my grandfather was gregarious but disgustingly self-absorbed, my father was all facts, all business, misanthropic, his racism genial and condescending, though his anti-Semitism was virulent and reeked of hate. He wanted as little contact as possible with other people. And while he liked women, he regarded them as silly and flighty and easy to seduce; they excited men but weren’t themselves sexual, although easily tricked into bed. Men he despised, even boys.

My stepmother, Kay, was “cockeyed and harelipped,” according to my mother, although the truth was she simply had a lazy eye that wandered in and out of focus and an everted upper lip that rose on one side like Judy Garland’s whenever she hit a high note. Kay read constantly, anything at all; she’d put down
Forever Amber
to pick up
War and Peace
, trade in
Désirée
for
Madame Bovary
, but the next day she couldn’t remember a thing about what she’d been reading. My father, who never finished a book, always said, when the subject of literature came up, “You’ll have to ask Kay about that. She’s the reader in this family.” He thought novels were useless,
even corrupting; if he caught me reading he’d find me a chore to do, such as raking the lawn.

My father liked long-legged redheads in high heels and short nighties, if his addiction to
Esquire
and its illustrations was any indication, but my stepmother was short and dumpy, like my mother, though less intelligent. She’d been brought up on a farm in northern Ohio by a scrawny father in bib overalls and a pretty, calm, roundfaced mother from Pennsylvania Dutch country, who said “mind” for “remember.” (“Do you mind that time we went to the caves in Kentucky?”) Kay had done well in elocution class, and even now she could recite mindless doggerel with ringing authority—and with the sort of steely diction and hearty projection that are impossible to tune out. She could paint—watercolors of little Japanese maidens all in a row, or kittens or pretty flowers—and her love of art led her to be a volunteer at the art museum, where she worked three hours a week in the gift shop run by the Ladies’ Auxiliary. Oh, she had lots of activities and belonged to plenty of clubs—the Ladies’ Luncheon Club and the Queen City Club and the Keyboard Club.

Kay had spent her twenties and thirties being a shrewd, feisty office “gal” who let herself be picked up by big bored businessmen out for a few laughs and a roll in the hay with a good sport. She always had a joke or a wisecrack to dish up, she’d learned how to defend herself against a grabby drunk, and she always knew the score. I’m not sure how I acquired this information about her early life. Probably from my mother, who branded Kay a Jezebel, an unattractive woman with secret sexual power, someone like Wallis Simpson. After Kay married my father, however, and moved up a whole lot of social rungs, she pretended to be shocked by the very jokes she used to deliver. She adopted the endearingly dopey manner of the society matron immortalized in Helen E. Hokinson’s
New Yorker
cartoons. Dad gave her an expensive watch that dangled upside down from a brooch (so that only Kay could read it), which she pinned to her lapel: a bow of white and yellow gold studded with beautiful lapis lazuli. Her skirts became longer, her voice softer, her hair grayer, and she replaced her native sassiness with an acquired innocence. She’d always been cunning rather than intelligent, but now she appeared to become naïve as well, which in our milieu was a sign of wealth: only rich women were sheltered; only the overprotected were unworldly. As my real mother learned to fend for herself, my stepmother learned to feign incompetence.

Such astute naïveté, of course, was only for public performance. At home, Kay was as crafty as ever. She speculated out loud about other people’s motives and pieced together highly unflattering scenarios based on the slimmest evidence. Every act of kindness was considered secretly manipulative, any sign of generosity profoundly selfish. She quizzed me for hours about my mother’s finances (turbulent) and love life (usually nonexistent, sometimes disastrous). She was, of course, hoping that Mother would remarry so Dad wouldn’t have to pay out the monthly alimony. My sister was disgusted that I’d betray our mother’s secrets, but Kay bewitched me. We had few entertainments and spent long, tedious hours together in the stifling Cincinnati summer heat, and I’d been so carefully sworn to silence by my mother that, finally, when one thing came out, I told all. I was thrilled to have a promise to break.

Kay and my father fought all the time. She’d pester him to do something or challenge him over a trivial question of fact until he exploded: “God damn it, Kay, shut your goddam mouth, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, and I don’t want to hear one more goddam word out of your mouth! I’m warning you to shut it and shut it now. Got it?”

“Oh, E.V.,” she wailed (his nickname; his middle name was Valentine), “you don’t have to talk to me that way, you’re making me sick, physically sick, my heart is pounding, and, look, I’m sweating freely, I’m soaked right through, my underarms are drenched, and you know—my high
blood
pressure.” Here she’d break off and begin blubbering. She had only to invoke her blood pressure (“Two hundred and fifty over a hundred and ten,” she’d mysteriously confide) in order to win the argument and subdue my red-faced father. I pictured the two of them as thermometers in which the mounting mercury was about to explode through the upper tip. Kay constantly referred to her imminent death, often adding, “Well, I won’t be around much longer to irritate you with my remarks, which you find so
stupid
and
ignorant.”

My father filled his big house with Mahler, and played it throughout the night; he went to sleep at dawn. And the more socially successful Kay became the less she conformed to his hours. They scarcely saw each other. During the hot Cincinnati days, while Daddy slept in his air-conditioned room, Kay and I spent the idle hours talking to each other. I bit my nails; she paid me a dollar a nail to let them grow. When they came in, I decided I wanted them longer and longer and shaped like a woman’s; Kay promised to cut them as I desired, but each time she tricked me and trimmed them short while I whined my feeble protests: “C
’mon.
I want them long and
pointy….
Kay! You
promised!”
I danced for her in my underpants; once I did an elaborate (and very girly) striptease. As I became more and more feminine; she became increasingly masculine. She put one leg up and planted her foot on the chair seat, hugging her knee to her chest as a guy might. I felt I was dancing for a man.

Perhaps she watched me because she was bored and had nothing else to do. Or perhaps she knew these games attached
me to her with thrilling, erotic bonds; in the rivalry with my mother for my affections, she was winning.

Or perhaps she got off on me. I remember that she gave me long massages with baby oil as I lay on the Formica kitchen table in my underpants, and I sprang a boner. Her black maid watched us and smiled benignly. Her name was Naomi and she’d worked for Kay one day a week ironing before Kay married; afterward she moved in as a full-time, live-in employee in my father’s big house. She knew Kay’s earlier incarnation as a roaring girl and no doubt wondered how far she’d go now.

In fact, she went very far. Once when I told her I was constipated she had me mount the Formica table on all fours and administered a hot-water enema out of a blue rubber pear she filled and emptied three times before permitting me to go to the toilet and squirt it out.

My whole family was awash with incestuous desires. When my real mother was drunk (as she was most nights), she’d call out from her bed and beg me to rub her back, then moan with pleasure as I kneaded the cool, sweating dough. My sister was repulsed by our mother’s body, but I once walked in on her and my father in his study in Cincinnati. She must have been fourteen or fifteen. She was sitting in a chair and he stood behind her, brushing her long blond hair and quietly crying. (It was the only time I ever saw him cry.) Later she claimed she and Daddy had made love. She said she and I’d done it in an upper berth on the night train from Chicago to Cincinnati once, but I can’t quite be sure I remember it.

When I was twelve, Kay was out of town once and Daddy took me to dinner at the Gourmet Room, a glass-walled dome on top of the Terrace Hilton. The restaurant had a mural by Miró and French food. Daddy drank a lot of wine and told me I had my mother’s big brown eyes. He said boys my age were rather like girls. He said there wasn’t much difference between
boys and girls my age. I was thrilled. I tried to be warm and intuitive and seductive.

Now, as we approached the Mexican border, Kay started teasing me: “I hope you have on very clean underpants, Eddie, because the Mexican police strip-search every tourist and if they find skid marks in your Jockey shorts they may not let you in.”