The Short History of a Prince (19 page)

DECEMBER
1972

W
hen Walter first loved Mitch, he loved without the claptrap of words. Music filled his head, fragments of concertos and sonatas and even show tunes, but the melodies generally came without lyrics. A few months into his devotion he tried to write poetry, but the long, florid lines seemed to fix and abbreviate what to him was fluid and fathomless. He felt, looking at his verse, that he had trapped some great rare bird, that he’d stuffed it in a pint container, his hand smacked over the top. Never having been farther away from home than Wisconsin, he had written that his own heart was like the echoing nave of Saint Peter’s Basilica, that the love itself was as ornate as the Forbidden City, as hortatory as a Beethoven symphony. Wishing for his original wordless rapture, disgusted with his efforts, he ripped the pages out of the notebook and shredded the paper. Years later, when he was a chaperone for the Otten High Prom, he thought that the gym, gussied up in streamers and little white lights in potted trees, was actually a fair representation of his teenage idea of love. The baskets at either end of the court were wound with crepe paper and tinsel, and the balloons and tissue flowers strung from the ceiling were as lush as tropical vegetation.

At fourteen, Walter wanted more than anything to believe in grandeur. He had no use for his mother’s on-again, off-again stab at
becoming a Unitarian, saw no reason to put his faith in a faceless guiding principle. The Greeks and Norsemen had surely been better off with their temperamental gods, gigantic men who wore magic belts, who had teeth of pure gold and threw red-hot hammers, who ate greedily in a realm where the food was more varied than loaves and fishes. Walter decided that if he was going to worship anything, it would not be the milksoppy emotion that was God’s love but rather the extravagant and occasionally tormented feelings that roiled within the breasts of the happy-ending heroines in his favorite Victorian novels. He was certain he loved in each moment, that not a beat passed by when he did not know that he loved. His was a pure love in the beginning, a love without the paraphernalia of hope and expectation. He might just as well have said
Mitch
to mean the word
love
. It was girlish behavior, perhaps, to give up the rest of the language, to seize on his name. He didn’t care. He whispered “Mitch” into his pillow; he opened his closet and said it louder; he sang it softly in the shower; he filled a few notebook pages with it in different scripts. When he moved about the house he felt as if there were two Walters, the one in front who talked and ate and played the piano in the dream life of every day, and the other, who hovered, guarding, always guarding what was real, what was true.

He no longer knew to eat or sleep or brush his teeth. He had lost any instinct that might guide him. He would have skipped off a cliff if his beloved had beckoned him across the abyss. That first spring of his adoration Walter walked from his house to Mitch’s, down alley after alley, lilacs, wet after the rain, dripping over the back fences. He made his way without narration, without phrases or sentences running through his head. There were snowball bushes in the yards, syringa, honeysuckle. And a few tulip petals drifted along the pavement, stripped by one gust from their long straight stalks. Soon the fluff from the cottonwood trees would blow down into the grass, into the shrubs, the sandboxes, the gutters, the screens, onto the car windshields and under the wipers. Walter smelled neither the blossoms nor the garbage in the ribbed galvanized cans. He could not have said what sort of day it was, what he’d had in his lunch, what he’d seen on television. He felt the privilege of walking the alleyways as if they were private, as if he were riding the dumbwaiter up to the king’s bedroom.
He walked and walked, thinking only of Mitch and Walter in various indoor and outdoor settings: Mitch and Walter dancing bare-chested, in an empty room, high ceilings, a silver fixture, tall double-hung windows, the morning light falling across the floor. No sound but their breathing. Or Mitch and Walter in the forest, the dank loamy smell of woods, Walter running without shoes, but over the softest moss, streaking through the underbrush, Mitch fleeting over the ground, behind, trying to catch him.

It had begun on what seemed to be an unexceptional day in the September of Walter’s freshman year in high school. Walter was sitting on the floor in the waiting room at the Kentons’, as he always did before class, his legs spread, looking up periodically, watching for Susan to come and stand before the mothers and wind her hair into her twin buns. He was naturally stiff, not much suppleness anywhere along his rigid spine. He was straining, bending to his toes. It was painful to watch him grope for his shoes, and the mothers avoided turning his way.

He was struggling to lay his cheek to his knee when the boys’ dressing-room door clicked open. He saw Mitch’s feet, the short thick feet packed into the worn leather slippers. He glanced up the legs, the calves, the thighs, his eyes resting farther, on the bulge, beautifully packaged because of the dance belt Mitch had recently decided to wear. The smell of him, the sharp boy odor went up Walter’s nostrils, oh how good it was, the sweetness of Right Guard, the sour dance clothes, the talcum powder inside his shoes, his hair, his hands, the fresh face.
Mitch
. All at once the fine poems and songs Walter had learned through the years left him.
Mitch
. He inhaled, held his breath, closed his eyes. Nothing to say, nothing to breathe or understand or look at, nothing except Mitch. One name. That single word.

He put his head back and he let the pinky glare of the fluorescent lights shine down upon him, and it was as if the long white tubes were burning, as if they had the heat of the sun. The warmth, and the word, were in him, and he felt even then that the syllable would hold him through the length of any siege. He did not know how much time passed before Mr. Kenton walked from the office, clapping his hands, his cigarette hanging from his lips. Mitch was holding on to a chair, slowly sinking into a full plié, slowly working through his leg muscles
to pull back up to a taut first position. Susan had fixed her hair and was at the sink with the heel of her shoe under the water, to make it mold to her foot. She had stood in front of Walter, braiding her hair, and he had not seen her. The waiting students all followed Mr. Kenton, crowding like sheep through the door into the studio. Walter got himself up, smoothed his hands down his legs.
Mitchell Dylan Anderson
. The full name. He didn’t see the mothers, the sofas, the photographs on the wall, Mrs. Manka coming to get more coffee. He had always loved Mitch. It wasn’t something that had just happened. He had loved without knowing, without identifying the feeling. That meant he was something like the retard on his block, Billy Wexler, who had no nerve endings in two fingers and was always getting them cut and blackened by twig fires without registering pain. Walter stumbled into the studio. It was so simple! What he wanted to do, what he really wanted to do, right away, right before class, was fill huge balloons with paint, good paint, expensive paint, and drop them out the window. The balloons would burst on the cement twelve stories below; they’d burst, spattering amber, spattering liquid gold and silver all down Michigan Avenue. The swift drop, the break, the color—all of it would reveal how he felt.

It was enough for quite some time to be in Mitch’s presence, to say, with every plié, every battement,
I love you, I love you, Mitch
. If the boy’s jacket or a book was left behind at Walter’s house, he smelled the thing, he tasted it, he ran it across his cheek, he held it against his clavicle in sleep. When they were alone, without the distraction of Susan, there was a quality about their friendship that now and then made him tremble, that brought him happiness. Walter sat on his bed and Mitch sprawled on the floor, running his fingers through his own hair. They talked idly of the Kentons, of the girls in class, their teachers at school. And they talked in earnest, too, about the dangers of adult life, about corruption, cynicism, fakery. How they hoped they would be strong enough to stick to their principles and not sell out, not end up doing chorus numbers in some saccharine Broadway musical.

They argued over the merits and flaws of Ivan Nagy, Erik Bruhn, Nureyev, Edward Villella, Anthony Dowell, Peter Martins. To make his point, Walter sometimes imitated the dancers so that of course
Mitch laughed. Walter had him then, and he knew so well to build the comedy slowly, to let Mitch chuckle for a while before he pulled out the stops, before he gave in to slapstick. Poor Mitch rocked back and forth on the floor, howling, holding his stomach. In a quieter mood, they listened to music sitting side by side, against the bed, so close, Tchaikovsky flooding the room. They opened Sue Rawson’s coffee-table books on ballet and pored over the photographs, feeling the other’s rhythm, knowing when to turn, on to the next page.

There was no formal declaration when Susan and Mitch took up together in January, in the middle of their freshman year. The friends had been a threesome from the beginning of their dancing careers. There was no prologue, no portent of fracture. They were riding the train one day and Walter was looking out the window. He turned, about to say, I wonder if Mrs. or Mr. K. will teach class today. He got as far as, “I—” They were holding hands. Mitch and Susan. He had to stare at the fingers, his, hers, mixed up in the clasp. “I—” he said again. He had to think why they might be touching each other in such a manner. He followed Mitch’s hand, to his arm, to his neck, up to the taunting smile.

“You—” Mitch said. “You what?”

“I didn’t know.” Walter managed to say that much. He looked back out the window. If they were holding hands they must at some point have made declarations of love to each other. Without him they had sat together, said clever and suggestive things, gazed moonily and groped around in the dark for who knew what all. He felt as if he might not make it to the journey’s end. When he glanced again at the twosome, Susan had her rippling head of hair on Mitch’s shoulder. There was nothing he could do but sit and wait for the ride to be over, nothing to do but hold the horror inside, smile and nod, smile and nod.

Privately he called them Mr. and Mrs. Mitch Anderson. Bitterly he referred to them as S&M. It became their habit to kiss at length in front of Walter. Theirs were long, elaborate kisses, with murmurs and saliva glistening on their mouths when they paused for purposes of respiration. Walter remembered that he used to wish for drama, for tragedy, a little torture, and here it was, the wish fulfilled. He didn’t know if their necking was supposed to be a tribute to him, if they meant to include him in their intimacy, or if they were showing him
how comfortable they were in his presence. He didn’t know then that telling a third party is essential for most lovers, that after a while the couple needs to see itself, to admire itself, through another set of eyes. They intimated that they’d been up in Mitch’s attic, and Susan said something, through her giggles, about the creaking of the grandmother’s pine bed. How then could Walter keep from putting them through their paces in a number of different positions? He envisioned their slender firm bodies naked under a musty quilt; he could hear Susan’s petite yelps; he could see Mitch going faster and harder, so pleased with himself, with his performance. It occurred to Walter that after the momentous release they’d think of him. They’d think of his picturing them and they’d go at it again, with more gusto. They wanted, after all, to imagine just how it was that Walter saw them; it was for Walter that they moaned and called for God, for Walter that Susan lifted her hips to meet Mitch’s thrust.

He supposed he might be paranoid or deluded or crazy. It would never have occurred to him to tell anyone about his feelings for Mitch, and so the impulse to chronicle and reveal was a mystery to him. He used his strength to hide his love, to protect it. It was possible that there was nothing complicated about the display, that the two of them couldn’t help it, or they were only bragging as they kissed, waving their wealth and their wares right in front of his face. Walter watched them because he couldn’t do otherwise. Susan, always, after the kiss had been going on for a while, put her palms to Mitch’s cheeks. It was a gesture Walter waited for, as if she had to keep Mitch at bay before he overwhelmed her. That first day on the el when they held hands, Walter began to imagine that he could slip inside Susan, zip himself into her skin. It became a preoccupation, fantasizing that he was one with her, both his and her hand petting Mitch’s soft cheek, both of them in effect putting their lips to his singular mouth.

When they were grown, Walter often told Susan that he no longer remembered much about his high school career. She took him at his word. What came to mind, he said, was the travel, back and forth, on the el or riding in the car with his mother, day after day, to Rockford.
And also, day after day, his mother’s urging Daniel to eat, to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. Walter’s epicurean friends in New York believed that food had been invented for entertainment, and in their galley kitchens they spent the weekends simmering liquids, making sauces and syrupy reductions. Walter always felt that eating was in part duty, and he often heard his mother’s pleading voice, as if it were a grace, when he sat before his dinner. She once broke down and wept over Daniel’s TV tray.