Authors: Dale Peck
IN A REVEALING moment—and Martin has many of these, but I mean the ones when he is speaking—Martin admitted to me that he’s terrified of the world. “Why?” I asked. He said he would live, if he could, with his back pressed up against the farthest corner of everything so that he could see someone coming for him and run. “Why?” I asked again. He turned his face from me and mumbled something about not liking to talk about it. We sat on the thick carpet in an alcove of the long tunnel of the living room, our backs pressed against the plush of the couch, amber-tinted sunlight wrapping itself around our unclothed bodies. Steam from mugs of tea made our brows damp; with a hand warmed from the porcelain I touched him on the shoulder, cheek, lips, as if my heat could thaw him, open his mouth, let him release himself. “Why?” I asked a third time. In an almost violent flood, he turned to me and said, “The world only needs to hit you once and you’ll never trust it again.”
I sat back, asked him what he meant. He turned his open body to me. I touched it, experimentally. His reddening skin
was like rubber under my fingers and didn’t respond. “When I was much younger, we lived in Maine,” he said. “My father was still alive, and he’d married my stepmother by then. We lived at the Park.” His eyes went wide, and I saw him remember the place. His ancestral home, he’s called it: palatial, marble, cold, gray, hemmed in all around by severely clipped green-black boxwood hedges. “I came home with a new haircut once—I was fifteen or sixteen—and my father got very upset. He decried it practically, as though it were bad diplomacy on my part. He called it hippie, womanly, fag-gotty.” Martin drew his arms and legs in close, as though it were cold in the room. I stretched him out again silently, as though to say, Feel the air: in here, it’s always warm. “But then he began insulting me with things that didn’t offend me but him as well. Profanity, like I’d never heard him use, for hours on end. Shithead, mother—” “No.” I stopped him. “You don’t have to use his words.” Cut off, he looked at me. The cold was only in his eyes by then, which were stretched open, the lids almost propped apart beyond their means. “Finally I escaped to bed. But late in the night he dragged me to the living room. Beatrice was there, sitting in a leather chair, wearing a sequined gown, holding a glass by the tips of her fingernails. She looked like an ice cube in rum. My father was drunk but steady on his feet. She just watched. He smacked me open-palmed, so the noise was like hands clapping, and he went on and on about my insolence, audaciousness, and disrespect for his parental authority, and his slaps sounded like
an audience cheering him on. I was so stunned I didn’t react, and then my father punched me, hard, again and again, in the face and body. I would fall and he’d wait for me to stand up, and hit me down again. I didn’t say anything. I remember seeing for the first time blood on my face in the mirror over the fireplace.” I imagined him: so caught up in the image that he lost his father, forgot the beating, saw only the red spilling over newly formed dark stubble on his chin, sliding quickly down his black pajamas. I could see him as a teenager as I held him then, trying to warm him, nine years later: his body blossoming with late adolescence, with his first pangs of sexual desire, with the blood like a wave of heat washing over him, warming even his feet on the cold stone floor. “And then I heard my father scream, and it seemed to me he’d left reality”—but I know: the scream was the real world—“I’ll teach you to ignore me! I saw it first, swinging like a bat toward my head. A log taken from beside the fireplace, a pine branch that still had some dried pale green needles on it, even one tiny pinecone. I remember thinking, We burn pine so the resin in it will pop and explode in golden fountains of sparks and make the fire even more beautiful. And then my head exploded, and I was knocked unconscious.”
How far away, I thought, are these stretched-out limbs from those of the boy years ago? His left leg twitched, and I quieted it with my hand, waiting for him to finish. “Even at the hospital there was no solace. My stepmother volunteered there, my father gave money. No one questioned their story. I
was mugged, they said, and my jaw was wired shut so I couldn’t contradict them, even though I wanted to. Then we rode home, and in the limo my father told me: This could happen anytime, if I didn’t pay him heed.” As warm as we were then, in the little sheltered cove of his living room, I could still see him. Huddled on the long seat in the stifling black pod of the limousine, perhaps some blood still slipping out between barely opened lips, cold wire poking his cheek. And his father’s warning: This would happen anytime, anytime. “And the thing is,” Martin explained to me, “it doesn’t have to happen over and over. My father never hit me again, and he apologized profusely for months afterward. It doesn’t have to be a horror story. It only has to happen once.” He trembled when he finished, and I thought, Once, only once? “No, Martin,” I said aloud. “Not only once.” But his body begged to be held like a baby’s; he couldn’t speak, so we held each other, like twins.
YESTERDAY MARTIN AND I attended a funeral. Though my first, it was just another in a progression for the other men; for a few, it was a brief encounter with their own. We were, in a way, lucky, because there was no grieving lover, no one to lose control and offer useless bargains with death and, worse, to feel the undeserved guilt of a murderer or the unknowing betrayal of the murdered. There was none of that there, just friends to stand in for the last vigil in somber clothing. They
were silent; by now they had become inured to words, even their own. At such moments they have strength only to wait for this to pass, in whatever manner it chooses. Martin had sent over a vanload of flowers, and they spilled in wreaths over the naked pile of clay soil with the light unemotional colors of sympathy. The softly painted flowers of Martin’s tie, almost lost inside his black suit, seemed the only thing about him that resisted the despair I know he felt. We are young, he and I, just out of college and secure in our private world because of his money, our love, and our health. Sometimes I think we have been betrayed by our safe lifestyles, and have missed a time of easy, base, pure love, the period of our greatest freedom. Other times I feel like a bird that has just succeeded in its struggle to break from the white blindness of its shell and confronts for the first time the overwhelming red plumage of its father and the first shadows of night, and wants only to crawl back.
TONIGHT MARTIN AND I go to the opera. We sit in our finery with all the gentlemen and ladies; I’m astonished at their beauty, at the opulence of the gilded theater. When the opera comes on I don’t understand any of it—it’s not my background as it is Martin’s. But that’s good because I can make of it what I wish—just as Martin anthropomorphizes his flowers in his journal, just as I try, and fail, to re-create the city with my pictures. In this way the cumbersome stage presences
of the singers and their overwrought surroundings are overcome: I close my eyes and just listen. Hours, days, years later, we leave, and outside the theater the night sounds have gained their own music in my altered ears. We forgo a taxi to the Village, choosing to stroll through the Upper West Side. For a time, as we walk with arms linked, silent, the worlds of surreality and reality blur like the change of seasons, and it is easy to believe that it is still summer long after the cold has swept in.
Still far from home, we stop outside a flower shop and look through its rose-tinted windows. The flowers, some dried, some freshly cut, others still growing, lie heaped in naked abandon in vases, in baskets, strewn on the window shelf. “Aren’t they beautiful?” is all I can think of to say, and I feel close at hand an understanding of why I love Martin. My reflection in the window reminds me of a time earlier tonight, when I’d said to Martin’s image in the dressing room, “You love me because you’ve turned me into part of your world.” In the mirror I saw Martin’s hand twitch, and a long red streak of makeup glazed my cheek. He paused then, grabbed a rag, and scrubbed the mark from my face. “Sshh,” he said, “you’re going to make us late.” Beside me now, he doesn’t speak, but gazes with his rapturous child’s eyes. I point to some and say, “What are those?” They are many-colored and full as an aroused nipple, made up of thousands of tiny protruding needle-like petals. “Those are poppies,” he says, “flower of sleep, and dreams, and death. Of unreality.” There
is a sound behind us, and even as we turn I see the reflection of three men in the window, over the poppies, dulling their charm. Facing them, I see they are even dirtier than their reflection in the glass, and one carries in his hand a lead pipe, long and jagged at its end and devoid, in this light, of any color. “Money,” they say, “faggots.” On my arm, I feel Martin’s hand vibrate wildly; with his other he reaches for his wallet slowly, pulls it out, hands it to them. They come in closer and push at us, pull us apart, steal from my wrist the gold watch Martin had given me, take its mate from him also. But as they reach to pull a ring from his finger Martin croaks hoarsely and lashes at one of the muggers. I turn to him and don’t recognize his contorted face. He doesn’t notice me as he strikes out again. I hear an unintelligible siren, then realize it’s his voice, a scream of both fury and terror. His arms flail, his feet kick out blindly. I look to Martin’s eyes, narrowed to slits, searching for something. I don’t know what sign I’m looking for, but I know it’s not there, and that terrifies me. All three are fighting him now, and I stand stunned, helpless, watching, thinking, This isn’t real, this can’t be happening. It’s too crowded for the man with the pipe to use it, and Martin, in his rage, seems to be holding his own. But then the other two fall back, and the third steps in and raises his pipe. I see a hand as it strikes the window of the shop, hear seconds later the blaring alarm announcing the pain of glass splintering into the hand, and I feel the wind of the blurred arc of red as the hand flies. The wedge of glass slices through the neck
of the man with the pipe, and then the glass drops to the ground, shattering into useless, diamond-bright fragments. The mugger stands there stupidly for a moment, pipe raised like an icon above his head, and then his neck belches blood all over Martin, himself, and me, staining our dark tuxedos red. I can’t hear the pipe as it falls to the ground because of the alarm crying from the florist’s shop, and then the man, his round mouth open like a startled child’s, crumples in silence.
All I can hear, as though it were the illusory sea of a conch in my ear, is Martin’s raspy breathing. All I see is him standing wilted, blind, and old inside his bloodstained suit. “Martin?” I stutter. He heaves a breath, screams at me, “Shut up, John, just shut up!” I look at him, don’t know him: I have never known him. Inside the florist’s window poppies, roses, and even other flowers lie scattered, the destroyed remnants of Martin’s chain. Then, from a distance, there is a policeman’s plain, loud, insistent voice, demanding, “Who’s hurt, is anybody hurt? What happened here?”
Water was draining from Martin’s bath, and threads of mist hung in the air. I’d just finished shaving. I was almost ready to help him from the tub when a long fart bubbled out of the water, filling the bathroom with sound and smell. Didn’t know you still had it in you, I said without turning, and I washed the shaving cream off my face. Then I heard flesh slide in the tub, followed by a thump and the sound of splashing water. Quietly, Martin said my name. The word hung in the damp smelly air before falling on my shoulders, and something, some unexpected weight, made me study my face in the mirror before I responded to him, as if this would be the last time I’d ever see it. I suppose it looks the same now as it did then—my hair is still brown and straight and fine, my eyebrows are full, my eyes light blue. My nose is a little too big, my jawline’s not as strong as it could be.
With an effort, I can harden the curves in my face, turn them into angles, give my face a definition. But left alone it’s just
round, a blob, and when I heard Martin try to stand again, and then fall again, when he said John again, more insistent but with less strength, everything went slack and my face fell apart. Behind me, water slapped the tub’s sides, and when I turned, Martin was looking at it slosh between his legs. He didn’t see my face, and I made an effort to pull it together. Martin’s back was bowed, the notches of his vertebrae stood out like walnuts, his legs splayed like those of a baby who’s just fallen, and the weight of his chin pressed on the catheter that poked from his chest. He was looking at a thick red and brown stream that leaked from his anus and ran between his legs down the center of the tub to the drain. Though it wavered some, it still went straight to the drain and disappeared. One of my hands reached out to Martin then, but the other, faster, found the doorknob behind me and turned it. Though our bathroom was small, it was not so small I could have one hand on the doorknob and touch Martin with the other, and I clung to the doorknob. Then Martin’s head raised as if pulled by a puppeteer’s string, his eyes rolled up and fastened themselves to mine, and his left hand jumped from its place on his leg like a white frog and landed on the edge of the tub. No, he said, and I realized that what my face looked like meant nothing to him, but still, I made the effort, I kept it tight.
The doorknob slipped through my sweaty fingers, and when the latch popped behind me, I knew that opening it was useless. I stepped forward then and bent down to Martin and gave him my right hand. He took it, squeezed it, under the skin his bones
moved. Just stay here, he whispered, and then his hand went slack in mine and he rested his head on his chest again. Purple clots slipped out of him now, small turds rolled in the current. When nearly all the water was gone, I turned on the shower to keep the shit and blood from pooling in the bottom of the tub. The water fell on the back of Martin’s head and on the tub, diluting but not obscuring the red and brown path carved against the white enamel as Martin’s life slipped out the drain. Martin’s hair was long then, the water’s weight pulled it around his face in dark ragged lines. With the fingers of my free hand I combed it back, the water pulled it down again and I combed it back again, and as I did this I saw my face without aid of a mirror, felt it—hanging jaw and drooping eyelids, nose shapeless as a balloon—and I realized that I’d let go again, that even if Martin managed to raise his head and look at me, I couldn’t save myself, not even to save him.