Skinned Alive

ACCLAIM FOR
Edmund White’s
SKINNED ALIVE

Howard slid in beside Otis in Otis’s old Lincoln four-door, and then they went to pick up Danny where he lived with his mother, not the best part of town. The morning was still cool but Howard knew the full heat of mid-August in Chicago wasn’t far behind, like pain as soon as the anesthetic wears off. It was just six in the morning.

Before they got on the highway heading north they bought coffee and jelly-filled sugar donuts called Bismarcks. They rode with all four windows down and the radio blaring, but despite the noise they couldn’t stop talking.

The way they were seated—Howard riding up front with Otis, and Danny in the rear—said it all. Otis and Howard were best friends, which dated way back, all the way back to eighth grade. Danny was just one of Otis’s new friends.

Otis had brought along a carton of Parliaments, which he said was for all of them. He had a good summer job and was eager to spend some of the money he’d earned. Howard liked
the taste of these cigarettes and the feel of the slightly recessed filter when he explored it with his tongue. Danny made a face and said, “Eeyou, it’s like smoking something through Kotex.” Otis’s eyes went dead and a little laugh forced its way out of him.

Howard was worried by how handsome Danny was. Howard was afraid he’d start staring, lose the thread of the conversation, leave his tongue hanging out. Danny was lean and muscly with very black eyebrows, brown oily hair sun-bleached on top, suntanned skin glinting with gold hairs, and he had wonderfully white teeth and one gold tooth, far back in his mouth, not a whole tooth, just a gold crown glimpsed as a bar of brilliance between two sharp white teeth. He was good in all sports but a champion swimmer though he didn’t get along with his teammates, they gave him a pain in the ass, he said. Otis had warned Howard that Danny didn’t know how to control his moods and could become fighting mad over an imagined slight, yet he was a basically good guy. Howard liked Danny’s eyebrows which almost met in the center and the intelligence—or was it wariness?—in his pale brown eyes flecked unevenly with gold, anyway not the sort of intelligence Howard understood or could easily play up to. Danny’s eyes looked like old costume jewelry in which the gold backing is flaking off. Even when Howard looked straight ahead he could feel Danny seated behind him; not a restlessness but a pent-up energy like that of the crouched swimmer on the edge of the pool.

After they got out into the country they didn’t talk so much, they just looked at the fences and barns and fields of corn soon to be harvested. They smoked their Parliaments and Howard touched the notched mouthpiece with his tongue, then licked one finger clean of raspberry jelly that had been inside his Bismarck. Every time Howard looked back at Danny, Danny smiled, which Howard was grateful for but puzzled by, since
he didn’t think he merited it. After all Howard wasn’t really popular and not at all athletic, he was just Otis’s best friend.

Danny’s smile dazzled Howard. Was Danny eager to show right off the bat he was a terrifically friendly, open guy in order to dispel any rumors about his bad temper? After all, they were going to be spending the next ten days together in a canoe. Or was he just flashing that smile as an old angry dog automatically bares its teeth while concentrating on something else entirely, something hateful? Or here, in this car, did he think his athletic prowess counted for nothing and it was just as though he were starting out all over again in a new school, this was his first day, and he had to win new people over from scratch?

The radio blared and they patted the hot metal sides of the car in time to the music. For Howard, who’d lived in a strict boarding school for the last few years, riding in a car with two other fellows felt great, real free and independent. He knew Otis was used to tooling around in his car wherever and whenever he wanted and had probably even made out with dozens of girls on this very seat. He was the golden boy of his whole glamorous North Shore teen world, a world of picking up girls anywhere along the endless miles and miles of white beach beside Lake Michigan, of sharing a beer with some wild girl whose loud laugh was designed to attract a boy’s attention, a girl who despite her laugh and vulgar way of chewing gum would turn out to live in a twenty-room mansion half-hidden from the street by old trees, the front door opened by a uniformed maid. On his vacations back in Evanston, Howard would catch glimpses of these kids, some with expensive sports cars, all of them with tennis-trained bodies, the same faded Bermuda shorts, penny loafers and no socks, the boys with dull, flat intonations, the girls with voices overflowing with worked-up excitement and forced hilarity.

Once the parents of some girl in Lake Forest had gone away and she had thrown a huge beer blast. It was a sultry August
night and the dark lane outside her low-gabled fieldstone house was brilliant with gathering car lights and the night quaked with boys’ loud voices and girls’ shrieking laughter. There was even a threat of a rumble but nothing came of it. Howard was a bit in shock that all these kids knew each other, that they’d grown older and now had wheels and could buy kegs and they’d each had sex with three or four lovers or so Otis said. Boys in boarding school were complete innocents next to these womanizing, brawling Evanston guys. He and Otis stood outside in the dark. Howard looked in through the polished windows at all those boys and girls laughing or necking and felt he’d died and was looking down at the lights from the dark hilltop cemetery.

Howard had tried for years to be popular in Evanston, but his only achievement had been winning over Otis. Now Otis’s popularity in Evanston was of no use to Howard, since Howard was no longer running in this particular race. What was left, however, was something that would endure forever, their marvelous friendship, which felt as old and tested as a good marriage.

It was a sacred thing, all the more so because it was so peculiar. Who would ever have guessed that Howard, a sissy, a brain, anything but a jock, someone other guys whispered acted like a pansy, would become best friends with someone so well liked that if he wasn’t class president it was only because the Crowd thought public office was just for nerds? Otis’s father was a locally famous judge and even he was too refined, come to think of it, to pass for a regular guy. Otis’s parents had Welsh corgis, the small, bulky, short-legged dogs beloved by the Queen of England. The parents had commissioned oil portraits of their four children, which hung in the stairwell. Howard felt he could have advised the artist on how better to portray Otis’s mouth and eyes, since he, Howard, had spent so many sleepless nights studying him. Otis had asked Howard
to spend the night over once—oh, years back—and in the morning, reassured that Howard hadn’t made a lunge for him, said, “Well, that went without a hitch. I don’t see why you can’t stay over whenever you want.” It was the only time Otis ever said anything about all that; Otis seemed pleased that he’d been confirmed in his hunch that nothing weird would happen. Howard was shocked that Otis had set up that first night as a test. Howard thought friendship should not be submitted to tests. Also Howard hadn’t quite believed until now that he had anything quite so solid as a reputation for being a fruit, the way bad girls have reputations for being sluts.

And yet Howard had taken Otis up on the invitation as often as possible, dozens of times over the years. Howard had gone on to have real sex with a few guys, including one guy at boarding school who was a lot cuter than even Otis.

But nothing could replace their love or friendship or whatever you wanted to call it. They liked to bullshit for hours about life and love and God and folk music. Sometimes Howard suspected Otis felt a little sorry for him because he, Howard, was screwed up sexually and probably would never get married or have kids or anything. Sometimes Howard thought Otis considered him a proof of how liberal he was, sort of like he was dating a Negro girl or something. But that didn’t bother Howard. In a world where most people believed fruits were either sick sex fiends who should be deballed or pathetic clowns like Liberace, it was terrific someone as popular as Otis believed they should be pitied or tolerated.

But all that came up if at all only when other people were around. Otis and Howard spent most of their time—hours and hours—alone. If they had only one cigarette left they’d pass it back and forth in the dark from one twin bed to the other and talk and talk so late that getting up just three or four hours later on a winter morning when it was still dark and glitteringly cold outside seemed to run perversely against the life rhythms
in their bodies. It was like an act of contrition or of spiritual devotion. But two or three nights later they’d be back at it, lying in T-shirts and underpants, sipping beer or pop and talking about ideas or friends or the future or hypothetical, farcical possibilities or just the dumb details of everyday life like how to get a term paper typed by next Monday. Usually Howard typed it, even wrote it, for Otis.

Howard was something of a seducer in the sense that he was in love and Otis wasn’t. Howard wanted to become more and more intimate, that was an actual goal, whereas Otis probably didn’t plan out their friendship at all. It was just like the air he breathed. But if they did get close he probably thought it was something that had just happened and he was probably pleased. They really did love each other. Otis was very strong and manly but when Howard would be heading back to his boarding school Otis would go down to the train station and shake his hand hard and look deep into his eyes. Silence gathered around them.

Otis wasn’t good at school, in fact he was a terrible fuck-up, but he was good at everything else—playing tennis, talking to women, driving a car. He had a common touch and could work among working men on a summer job without riling them. But like a prince who passes time with wastrels and roisterers before being called to battle or the throne, he never forgot who he was going to be. His adolescence wasn’t a preparation for later life but a vacation from it.

“How fast can this buggy go?” Danny asked, interrupting Howard’s reverie.