Skinned Alive (4 page)

Howard was afraid he was going crazy. Danny hadn’t made a single sign that he was attempting to seduce Howard in order to denounce him and destroy his friendship with Otis. Danny might have his problems with Otis and he might naturally welcome an ally, but where was the slightest piece of evidence that he had any darker or more devious schemes? Perhaps Danny would welcome a handjob or blowjob, but that didn’t seem likely. After all, Howard was the one with the hard-on, not Danny. Danny’s penis (it was big) lay there peacefully beside a scrotum made large and shiny by the heat, like a serpent dozing and curled around its two eggs.

When they returned the canoe and tent to the outfitter’s there were still a few hours left before dark and they drove into Ely, Minnesota, and took a motel room, then cruised the streets and smoked cigarettes—Luckies this time since they’d finished the carton of Parliaments, and Luckies went better with their beards and tans. Howard looked forward to being alone again soon with Otis; together they could push off from the shore of reality and float on their dreams even if in separate
boats, twin beds. In the motel bathroom Howard had been gratified to see how golden tan he was and how his beard, scrappy though it might be, still made him look older and more manly. But he wondered if looking more virile wouldn’t actually make him less attractive to Danny.

Otis said he was horny for some pussy and told Danny to drive slowly to the curb while he trolled for it. He asked two really young girls who were maybe in junior high school if they wanted a ride home and they just giggled and ran. One older woman scowled and said nothing and Howard was afraid she’d report them to the cops.

Danny was laughing like a banshee and drumming the steering wheel with pleasure. Maybe Otis was following Howard’s advice to play the fuck-up and cast Danny in the more responsible role, even if it was too late for that. Anyway, since they’d turned in the canoe Danny had reverted to his old personality, become nicer, more reasonable and well spoken. For a second Howard considered the possibility that Danny had felt an attraction for him and had been fending it off by playing dumb and dirty.

Otis changed his technique with the next girl. He said, “We’re nice guys. You can see that, can’t you, miss? We’re just lonely backwoodsmen. You’ve heard of the voyageurs?”

She laughed and said, “You’re not even from around here. You have Illinois license plates.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re not lonely. Ride with us for a few blocks, miss. We’ll buy you a beer. No harm being nice to three lonely guys, is there?”

Howard braced himself for her outrage but suddenly she smiled and said, “OK,” and slipped in beside him in the back seat.

They all introduced themselves. Her name was Sue. “Sue Helen, if you must know,” she said. She was wearing an adult
beehive hairdo perched imposingly over a small heart-shaped face with tiny features. On the street, in her heels and tight skirt and beehive she’d looked like an adult in her early twenties, even a young mother, but now Howard could see it was all just pretense and she was only sixteen or seventeen, like them.

Soon they were in a bar, peering into a jukebox bubbling warmly and brilliantly under their red hands as they studied its magic charts and made their choices. Sue Helen sat with them in the highbacked booth and told them her sad story, how her mother had remarried and her stepdad was an Adventist who thought she was a sinner and a slut and how she had a job as a door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman but she couldn’t sell anything, the women in Ely were all too poor and overworked and they wore cheap housedresses and curlers and had big butts and didn’t even use any makeup. Sue Helen said, “You guys are so … different. You’re so kind and speak so educated. I’d love to go to Chicago. People say it’s different.”

Soon Otis was dancing with Sue Helen to a slow tune sung by Brenda Lee. Danny had shrunk back inside himself. His smile had faded. He’d looked at Otis with admiration. Maybe Danny had been attracted to Otis but had been afraid to show it, so he’d turned to Howard instead, as a substitute. Of course Howard had no evidence to go on; he continued building these castles with matchsticks but they kept tottering and collapsing.

Howard already missed the sweet hot pulp of blueberries the day they’d found a patch and eaten them just as fast as they could pick them. He knew the woods would start filling up with snow in just six or seven weeks. Soon there’d be no paradise to regain. He could hear the lonely laughter of the loons. He could picture Danny’s naked body twisting and turning that one hot night as he moaned in his sleep, goaded by mosquitoes.

After all that time in the wilderness the lights almost hurt and people’s voices seemed unbearably loud. Sue Helen looked minuscule in Otis’s arms. His eyes were closed as they slow danced but when he turned her around Howard could see hers were wide open.

On the charter flight from Paris to New York Luke sat on the aisle. Next to him, in the center seat, was a man in his mid-twenties from the French Alps, where his parents owned a small hotel for skiers. He said he cooked all winter in the hotel and then took quite a long vacation every spring. This year it was the States, since the dollar was so low.

“Not
that
low,” Luke said when Sylvain mentioned he had only a hundred dollars with him for a five-week stay.

They were speaking French, since Sylvain confessed he couldn’t get through even one sentence in English. Sylvain smiled and Luke envied him his looks, his health, even his youth, although that was absurd, since Luke himself was barely twenty-nine.

Next to Sylvain, by the window, sat a nun with an eager, intelligent face. Soon she had joined in the conversation. She was Sister Julia, an American, though a member of a French convent for a reason she never explained, despite their nonstop
chatter for the seven and a half hours they were in the air. Her French was excellent, much better than Luke’s. He noticed that Sylvain talked to her with all the grace notes kept in, whereas with Luke he simplified down to the main melody.

It turned out Luke and Sister Julia had both been in France for four years. Of course a convent was a “total immersion,” undreamed of even by Berlitz. Nevertheless Luke was embarrassed to admit to his seat partners that he was a translator. From French to English, to be sure. It was pointless to explain to this handsome, confident Sylvain that a translator must be better in the “into language” than in the “out-of language,” that a translator must be a stylist in his own tongue.

Sylvain was, in any event, more intrigued by Sister Julia’s vows than by Luke’s linguistic competence. He asked her right off how a pretty girl like her could give up sex.

“But I’m not a girl,” she said. “I’m forty-six. This wimple is very handy,” she said with a trace of coquetry, “for covering up gray hair.”

She was not at all like the stern, bushy-eyebrowed, downy-chinned nuns who’d taught Luke all the way through high school. When Sylvain asked her if she didn’t regret having never known a man—and here he even raised his muscular arms, smiled and stretched—she said quite simply, “But I was married. I know all about men.”

She told them her father had been a composer, she’d grown up an Episcopalian in Providence, Rhode Island, she’d taught music theory at Brown and built harpsichords. Her religious vocation had descended on her swiftly, but she didn’t provide them with the conversion scene; she had little sense of the dramatic possibilities her life provided, or perhaps flattening out her own narrative was a penance for her. Nor was her theology orthodox. She believed in reincarnation. “Do you?” she asked them.

“I’m an atheist,” Luke said. He’d never said that to a nun
before, and he enjoyed saying it, even though Sister Julia wasn’t the sort to be shocked or even saddened by someone else’s lack of faith—she was blessed by the convert’s egotism. There was nothing dogmatic about her clear, fresh face, her pretty gray eyes, her way of leaning into the conversation and drinking it up nor her quick nods, sometimes at variance with the crease of doubt across her forehead. When she nodded and frowned at the same time, he felt she was disagreeing with his opinions but affirming him as a person.

Sylvain appeared to be enjoying his two Americans. Luke and Sister Julia kept giving him the names and addresses of friends in the States to look up. “If you’re ever in Martha’s Vineyard, you must stay with Lucy. She’s just lost a lot of weight and hasn’t realized yet she’s become very beautiful,” the nun said. Luke gave him the names of two gay friends without mentioning they were gay—one in Boston, another in San Francisco. Of course Sylvain was heterosexual, that was obvious, but Luke knew his friends would get a kick out of putting up a handsome foreigner, the sort of blond who’s always slightly tan, the sort of man who looks at his own crotch when he’s listening and frames it with his hands when he’s replying. Certainly both Luke and the nun couldn’t resist overresponding even to Sylvain’s most casual remarks.

When the flight attendant served them lunch, Sylvain asked her in his funny English where she was from. Then he asked, “Are all zee womens in Floride as charming like you?”

She pursed her lips in smiling mock reproach as though he were being a naughty darling and said, “It’s a real nice state. France is nice, too. I’m going to learn French next. I studied Latin in high school.”

Sister Julia said to Sylvain, “If you can speak English like that you won’t need more than a hundred dollars.”

When they all said good-bye at the airport Luke was disappointed. He’d expected something more. Well, he had Sylvains
address, and if someday Luke returned to France he’d look him up. Ill as he was, Luke couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing France again, which suddenly seemed synonymous with some future rendezvous with Sylvain.

Luke changed money and planes—this time for Dallas. He was getting pretty ill. He could feel it in the heaviness of his bones, in his extreme tiredness, and he almost asked a porter to carry his bags. He had just two hundred dollars with him—he was half as optimistic as Sylvain. He’d never had enough money, and now he worried he’d end up a charity case or, even worse, dependent on his family. He was terrified of having to call on the mercy of his family.

He’d grown up as the eighth of ten children, all of them small if wiry and agile. His mother was a Chicana, but no one ever took her for Mexican—she didn’t appear to have much Indian blood and her mother prided herself on being “Castillan.” His father was a mean little man with a tweezered mustache who’d worked his whole life as the janitor in a Lubbock, Texas, high school. He’d converted to Catholicism to please his wife and enrage his Baptist kin (Lubbock proudly called itself “the buckle on the Bible Belt”). Luke’s father and brothers and sisters all shared a glee he’d learned to name only years later—Schadenfreude, the taking of malicious pleasure in someone else’s pain. Spite and envy were their ruling sentiments. If someone fell and hurt himself, they’d howl with glee. Their father would regale them with hissing, venomous accounts of the misfortunes of superiors at school. The one sure way to win the family’s attention was to act out the humiliation that had befallen Mrs. Rodriguez after mass last Sunday or Mr. Brown, the principal, during the last PTA meeting. Luke’s father grumbled at the TV, mocked the commercials, challenged the newscasters, jeered at the politicians. “Look at him, he thinks he’s so great, but he’ll look like he’s smelled a fart when he sees the final vote.” Everyone would
laugh except Luke’s mother, who went about her work gravely, like a paid employee eager to finish up and leave.

In high school—not the public high school where his father worked, but the much smaller parochial school—Luke had emerged as the nuns’ favorite. He’d been a brilliant student. Now that his brain was usually fuzzy—becoming like overcooked minestrone during the toxoplasmosis crisis, all swimming and steamy with shreds and lumps rising only to sink again—he regarded his former intelligence with respect. He’d once known how to use the ablative absolute. He’d once read the
Symposium
in Greek without understanding the references to love between men.

Perhaps because of his miserable, mocking family, Luke had always felt unsure of himself. Nevertheless he’d done everything expected of him, everything. He’d been a cross-country champ, he’d stayed entirely virginal, avoiding even masturbation except for rare lapses, he’d won the statewide
Prix d’honneur
in French, he’d once correctly and even humorously translated on the spot an entire
Time
magazine article into Latin, though the page had been handed to him only seconds before by the judge of the Cicero Club contest.

In another era he would have grown up to be one of those priests who play basketball in a soutane and whose students complain when he beats them at arm wrestling (“Jeez, Father Luke …”).

He’d only narrowly escaped that fate. He’d found a job in a liberal, primarily Jewish private school just outside New York, and though he’d grown a beard and spouted Saint-Simonism, he hadn’t been able to resist becoming the best beloved, most energetic teacher in the history of Dempster Country Day. The kids worshiped him, called him Luke, and phoned him in the middle of the night to discuss their abortions, college-entrance exams and parents’ pending divorces. Several of them had invited him to their mansions, where Luke, the gung-ho
jock and brain—nose always burned from the soccer field and tweed-jacket pocket always misshapen from carrying around Horace’s
Odes
—had had to study his own students to discover how to wield an escargot clamp and use a finger bowl.

What was harder was to keep up that ceaseless, bouncy energy that is always the hallmark of rich people who are also “social.” Whereas Luke’s father had beguiled his brutal brood with tales of other people’s folly and chagrin, the Lords of Long Island looked at you with distrust the instant you criticized anyone—especially a superior. Envy proved your own inferiority. Since the parents of Luke’s students were usually at the top of their profession or industry, they interpreted carping and quibbles as envy. They usually sided with the object of any attack. With them generosity—like stoicism and pep—had become signs of good breeding.