Skinned Alive (16 page)

Ray didn’t take his own beauty too seriously, though he maintained it as one might conserve a small inheritance for the sake of security. His spell in the gay commune had made him suspicious of all “objectification of the body” and “commodification of sex,” but his years in New York had taught him the importance of precisely these two operations. He was a bit of a star on the deck during tea dance on Fire Island, for his years of training had in point of fact turned him into a physical commodity—but one he was too ironic, too human, to sell to the highest bidder. That George was not at all an obvious candidate, that he was too skinny, too pockmarked, a diligent but unsuccessful dresser, made him all the more appealing to Ray.

George had a ravenous appetite to win, even in the most trivial contests, and that made him both infuriating and appealing. Ray had always been accommodating—too accommodating, he now saw, in view of how little he’d accomplished. He deplored the way George cussed out every incompetent and sent back the wine and at every moment demanded satisfaction.

And yet George’s life was royally satisfying. He drove his Chrysler station wagon to a rented mansion in Water Mill on weekends, he was doing the work he most enjoyed and making a minor fortune and now, to put the final
u
on “parvenu,” he had … Ray.

Until now, Ray had never thought of himself as primarily decorative, but George saw him obviously as a sort of superior home entertainment center—stylish, electric. Ray didn’t like to stare into this reflection, he who’d won the Bellefontaine spelling bee and written one hundred and twenty closely reasoned pages on anomie. He saw that without noticing it he’d drifted into the joking, irresponsible, anguished half-world of the gay sophisticate who always knows what Sondheim has up his sleeve, who might delay his first spring visit to the island until he’s worked on those forearms two more weeks, who feels confident Europe is as extinct as a dead star and all the heat and life for the planet must radiate from New York, who has heard most of his favorite songs from his chronological adolescence resurface fifteen years later in their disco versions, at once a reassurance about human continuity and a dismaying gauge of time’s flight.

Lovers are attracted by opposites and then struggle to turn them into twins. Ray worked to mollify George’s drive to win and George wanted Ray to turn into a winner. “Work hard and play hard” was George’s motto, whereas Ray, without admitting it, wanted lots less work than play and wished both to be not hard but easy. Nevertheless, George, true to form, won. He nudged Ray into a series of well-paying jobs that ended him up at Amalgamated Anodynes. “You must look out for yourself,” George was always saying. He said it over and over: “Look out for yourself.” Ray would sit on his lap and say, “Why should I deprive you of a job you do so well?”

The one thing they’d agreed on from the first was not to be monogamous. Ray’s ideological horror of marriage as a model
and George’s unreflecting appetite for pleasure neatly converged. What wasn’t decided so easily was the terms under which they were to be unfaithful. George, who had a funny face, skinny body and enormous penis, was always a hit at the baths; Ray, whose penis was of average dimensions (“a gay eight,” meaning six inches), was more likely to attract another man for a lifetime than a night. Ray already had love, George’s, but in order to get sex he had to seem to be offering love. When George would see some other beauty, as dark as Ray was fair, melting amorously around Ray, George would break glass, bellow, come crashing through doors, wounded bull in the china shop of Ray’s delicate romantic lust. Of course Ray envied George his simpler, franker asset and wished he could score more efficiently, with fewer complications.

And now, a year after George’s death, here he was learning all the ways in which he had accommodated George and was still doing so, even though George had broken camp. Ray saw how in their tiny group he’d been billed as the looker with the brain, exactly like the starlet whom the studio hypes wearing a mortarboard and specs above her adorable snub nose and bikini—yet he wasn’t in Hollywood but New York City and he realized that he’d fallen way behind, hadn’t read a book in ages or had a new, strenuous thought.

He still had the big showboat body that George had doted on and that Ray was vigorously maintaining in two-hour workouts at the gym, even though personally (as in “If I may speak
personally
about my own life”) he found the results caricatural and the waste of time ludicrous. And yet he was afraid to let go, stop pumping iron and deflate, sag, shrink, because if he was no longer the greatest brain he was at least a body—Some Body in the most concrete, painful sense. He looked around and realized he was still impersonating George’s lover. He was
even still using the same deodorant George had liked; George had had such an insinuating way of sticking his big, cratered nose into the most intimate aspects of Ray’s habits. He’d made Ray switch from Jockey to boxer shorts, from cotton to cashmere stockings, from Pepsi to Coke, from ballpoint to fountain pen; like all people who make their living from publicity, George had believed that products and brand names determine destiny. Ray was still walking around like a doll George had dressed and wound up before taking off.

In the corner bookstore he picked up a remaindered large-format paperback called
The Death Rituals of Rural Greece
, by Loring M. Danforth. He liked the way the widows resented their husbands’ deaths and said, “He wasn’t very kind to me when he left me.” That was closer to the truth than this twilit grief one was supposed to assume. He liked the funeral laments, especially the one in which a mother asks her dead daughter how Death, called Haros, received her. The daughter replies, “I hold him on my knees. He rests against my chest. If he is hungry, he eats from my body, and if he is thirsty, he drinks from my two eyes.”

When he had a midtown lunch with Betty she told him he was having an identity crisis precipitated by George’s death. “But your real problem,” she said, warming unbecomingly to her subject, “is that you’re still seeking an authority, the answer. If you don’t watch out, you’ll find yourself saddled with another dominating lover; it’s your passive Aquarian nature.”

Ray could scarcely believe how much his fur was being rubbed the wrong way, although he felt certain that prize had to go to Betty’s insinuation that he was well rid of George. That night in an old linen jacket he took out of storage he found a joint of Acapulco gold George had rolled him—how long ago? two years—and he smoked it and cried and ordered in Chinese food and sat in bed and watched TV and played
with Anna, who kept wandering over to the lit candle on the floor to sniff the flame. When she felt the heat her eyes would slit shut and she’d thrust her chin up, like a dowager who’s smelled something rude.

Even though George had been a baby, he’d fought death with a winner’s determination but he’d lost anyway. Ray thought that he himself wouldn’t resist it for long. If and when the disease surfaced (for it seemed to him like a creature submerged underwater for an eerily long time but bound eventually to come gasping up for air)—when the disease surfaced he wouldn’t much mind. In a way dying would be easier than figuring out a new way of living.

Betty must have taken it on herself to contact Ralph Brooks and suggest he ask Ray to Greece. Otherwise Ray couldn’t imagine why Ralph should have written him a belated condolence letter that ended with a very warm and specific invitation.

Ray was flattered. After all, Brooks was the celebrated painter. Betty would say that Ray accepted
because
Brooks was the celebrated painter. Not that she ever accused Ray of social climbing. No, she just thought his “passivity” made him seek out authorities, no matter who or of what. Oddly enough, Betty’s nagging, grating Brooklyn accent reassured him, because it was a voice that stylized suffering, domesticated it. Oy, Ray thought when he was with Betty. She wasn’t even Jewish, but she was from Brooklyn, and if he used her accent he could actually say it to himself or to Anna: “Oy.”

Ray welcomed the trip to Greece precisely because it didn’t fit in. George had never been to Greece; Ralph had never met George; Ray himself scarcely knew Ralph. They’d become friendly at the gym and worked out a dozen times together and Ralph had always asked him his bright, general questions that
didn’t seem to anticipate anything so concrete as an answer. Ralph, who’d worked out for years, had a big bearish body that was going to flab—exactly what envious, lazy people always say happens to weightlifters in middle age. His shoulders, chest and biceps were still powerful, but his belly was as big as a bus driver’s. Ralph said he hated the ruin of his looks, but he seemed so relaxed and sure of himself that this self-loathing struck Ray as an attitude he might once have held but had since outgrown without renouncing.

Then again Ray would so gladly have traded in his own prettiness for Ralph’s success that perhaps he couldn’t quite believe in Ralph’s complaints. As for the three weeks in Crete (he found the town, Xania, on the map), it would be all new—new place, new language, no ghosts. He even liked going to the country where people expressed their grief over dying so honestly, so passionately. In that book he liked the way a mother, when she exhumed her daughter’s body after three years of burial, said, “Look what I put in and look what I took out! I put in a partridge, and I took out bones.”

Betty agreed to take care of Anna. “You must look out for yourself,” George had said, and now he was trying.

Ralph had rented a floor of a Venetian palace on a hill overlooking the harbor; at least Ralph called it a “palace” in that hyperbolic way of his. The town had been badly bombed during the war, and empty lots and grass-growing ruins pocked even the most crowded blocks like shocking lapses in an otherwise good memory.

Nothing in town was taller than three stories except two minarets left over from the centuries of Turkish rule and allowed to stand more through indifference than ecumenicism. At first Ray looked for the blazing whitewash and strong geometrical shapes he’d seen in trendy postcards from the Greek
islands, but in Xania everything was crumbling brick, faded paint, mud or pebble alleyways, cement and rusting cement armatures sticking up out of unfinished upper stories, shabby exteriors and immaculate interiors, dusty carved-wood second stories overhanging the street in the Turkish fashion. Along the harbor a chrome-and-plastic disco, booming music and revolving lights as though it had just landed, made chic racket beside shadowy, abandoned arsenals where the Venetians had housed their warships. One of them had a stone balcony high above the harbor and two doors shaped like Gothic flames opening up onto a roofless void and a framed picture of the night sky—the half-waned moon.

Ralph and Ray ate fried squid and a feta cheese salad at a rickety table alongside the brackish-smelling harbor. The table could never quite find its footing. They were waited on by a Buddha-faced boy who smiled with mild amusement every time his few words in English were understood. He couldn’t have been more than nine, but the boy already had a whole kit of skilled frowns, tongue clicks and body gestures, and his grandfather’s way of wiping his forehead with a single swipe of a folded fresh handkerchief as though he were ironing something. Ray found it hard to imagine having accumulated so many mannerisms before the dawn of sex, of the sexual need to please, of the staginess sex encourages.

Ralph, who was shoe-leather brown and so calm he let big gaps of comfortable silence open up in the conversation, was much fatter—all the olive oil and rosé and sticky desserts, no doubt. A cool wind was blowing up off the Aegean and Ray was glad he’d worn a long-sleeved shirt. Ralph had helped him unpack and had clucked over each article of clothing, all of which he found too stylish and outré for Xania. In fact Ralph seemed starved for company and gossip and far less vague than in New York. There he seemed always to be escaping sensory overload through benign nullity, the Andy Warhol strategy of
saying “Oh, great” to everything. Here he took a minute, gossipy interest in the details of everyday life. Ray thought, We each need just the right weight of pettiness to serve as ballast. George’s death had tossed all the sandbags overboard and Ray had been floating higher and higher toward extinction.

Ralph was especially interested in the “locals,” as he called the young men. “Now this is the Black Adonis,” he said of one tall, fair-skinned twenty-year-old strolling past with two younger boys. “He’s in a different shirt every night. And would you look at that razor cut! Pure Frankie Avalon…. Oh, my dear, what fun to have another old-timer from the States with me, no need to explain my references for once.”

Ralph had a nickname for every second young man who walked past in the slow, defiant, sharp-eyed parade beside the harbor. “This is the tailend of the
volta
, as we call the evening
passeggiata,”
Ralph said, typically substituting one incomprehensible word for another. “There’s absolutely nothing to do in this town except cruise. In the hot weather they all stop working at two in the afternoon. Now here comes the Little Tiger—notice the feline tattoo?—a very bad character. He stole my Walkman when I invited him in for a nightcap; Little Tiger, go to the rear of the class. He’s bad because he’s from the next town and he thinks he can get away with it. Stick with the locals; nothing like the high moral power of spying and gossip to make boys behave.”

Ray had always heard of dirty old American men who’d gone to Greece for the summer “phallic cure,” but he’d assumed gay liberation had somehow ended the practice, unshackled both predator and prey. Nevertheless, before they’d left the restaurant two more Americans, both in their sixties, had stopped by their table to recount their most recent adventures. Ray, used to fending off older men, was a bit put out that no one, not even Ralph, was flirting with him. In fact, the assumption, which he resented, was that he too was an old-timer
who’d come here “for the boys” and would be willing to pay for it.

“Aren’t there any Greeks who do it for free?” Ray asked, not getting the smiles he’d anticipated.