Skinned Alive (5 page)

Luke learned generosity, too, as easily as he’d mastered snails. The ingredient he added to the package, the personal ingredient, was gratitude. He was grateful to rich people. He was grateful to almost everyone. The gratitude was the humble reverse side of the family’s taste for Schadenfreude. Luke could express his gratitude in such an earnest, simple way, in his caressing tenor voice with the baritone beginnings and endings of sentences, that no one took it for cringing—no one except Luke himself, who kept seeing his father, hat in hand, talking to the district supervisor.

Luke had left the abjection and exaltation of Dempster and found work as a translator. Working alone was less engrossing than playing Father Luke, but the thrill of wielding power or submitting to it at school had finally sickened him. As a kid he’d managed to escape from his family through studies; he’d stayed in school to consolidate that gain, but now he wanted to be alone, wanted to work alone into the night, listening to the radio, fine-tuning English sentences. Luckily he’d had a rent-controlled apartment on Cornelia Street in Manhattan,
and luckily an older gay man, the king of the translators, had taken him under his wing. He became a translator, joining an honest if underpaid profession.

By subletting this apartment for four times what he paid, Luke had had enough money to live in Paris in a Montmartre hotel on a steep street near Picasso’s old studio, a hotel of just eighteen rooms where the proprietor, a hearty woman from the Périgord, watched them as they ate the meals she prepared and urged them to pour wine into their emptied soup bowls and knock it back.
“Chabrol! Chabrol!”
she’d say, which was both an order and a toast. She’d point at them unsmilingly if they weren’t drinking. She liked it when everyone was slightly tipsy and making conversation from table to table.

He’d never enjoyed gay life as such. At least New York clones had never struck him as sexy. In turn they hadn’t liked his look—wire-rim glasses, baggy tweeds, shiny policeman’s shoes—or his looks. He was small, his eyes mocking or hostilely attentive or wet and grateful, his nose a red beak, his slim body featureless under the loose pants and outsize jackets but smooth and well-built when stripped, the pale, sweated body of a featherweight high school wrestler, but clones had had to work to get to see it.

Luke had sought out sex with working men, straight men or close approximations of that ideal. He’d haunted building sites, suburban weightlifting gyms, the bar next to the fire-house, the bowling alley across from the police station, the run-down Queens theater that specialized in kung-fu movies. He liked guys who didn’t kiss, who had beer bellies, who wore T-shirts that showed through their Dacron short-sleeved shirts, who watched football games, who shook their heads in frustration and muttered “Women!” He liked becoming pals with guys who, because they were too boring or too rough or not romantic or cultured enough, had lost their girlfriends.

In Paris he’d befriended a Moroccan boxer down on his
luck. But very little of his time was devoted to Ali. He spent his mornings alone in bed, surrounded by his dictionaries, and listened to the rain and translated. He ate the same
salade Auvergnate
every lunch at the same neighborhood café. In the afternoons he often went to the Cluny museum. Luke liked medieval culture. He knew everything about Romanesque fortified churches and dreamed of meeting someone with a car who could take him on a tour of them.

At night he’d haunt the run-down movie palaces near Barbès-Rochechouart, the Arab quarter, or in good weather cruise the steps below Sacré-Coeur—that was where you met his type: men-without-women, chumps too broke or too dumb to get chicks, guys with girlie calendars tacked on the inner side of the closet doors, guys who practiced karate chops as they talked on the telephone to their mothers.

He didn’t want to impersonate that missing girlfriend for them. No, Luke wanted to be a pal, a sidekick, and more than once he’d lain in the arms of a CRS (a French cop) who’d drawn on his Gitane
blonde
and told Luke he was
un vrai copain
, a real pal.

That was why he’d been surprised when he of all people had become ill. It was a gay disease and he scarcely thought of himself as gay. In fact, earlier on he’d once talked it over with an Irish teacher of English who lived in his hotel, a pedophile who couldn’t get it up for anyone over sixteen. They’d agreed that neither of them counted as gay.

For him, the worst immediate effect of the disease was that it sapped his confidence. He felt he’d always lived on nerve. He should have lived the dim life of his brothers and sisters—one a welfare mother, another a secretary in a lumberyard, two brothers in the air-conditioning business, another one an exterminator, two unemployed boys, another (the family success) an army officer who’d taken early retirement to run a sporting-goods store with an ex-football star. He had another
brother, Jeff, an iron worker who’d dropped out of the union, who lived in Milwaukee with his girl and traveled as far away as New York State to bend steel and put up the frames of buildings. Jeff was a guy who grew his hair long and partied with women executives in their early forties fed up with (or neglected by) their white-collar male contemporaries. The last thing Luke had heard, Jeff had broken up with his girl because she’d spent fifty of his bucks hiring a limo to ferry her and two of her girlfriends around Milwaukee just for the fun of it.

Luke had sprung the family trap. He’d eaten oysters with rich socialists, worried over the right slang equivalents in English to French obscenities—he’d even resisted the temptation to strive to become the headmaster of Dempster Country Day. As the runt of his family, he’d always had to fight when he was a kid to get enough to eat, but even so as an adult he’d chosen freelance insecurity over a dull future with a future.

But all that had taken confidence and now he didn’t have any. The translation he was working on would be his last. Translating required a hundred small dares per page in the constant trade-off between fidelity and fluency, and Luke couldn’t find the necessary authority.

He never stopped worrying about money. He’d lie in bed working up imaginary budgets. When he returned to New York, Dempster Country Day might refer students to him for coaching in French, but would the parents worry that their children would be infected? He’d read of the hysteria in America. If his doctor decided he should go on AZT, how would he ever find the twelve thousand dollars a year to pay for it?

When he landed in Dallas his favorite cousin, Beth, was there. Growing up he’d called her Elizabeth. Now he was training himself to call her Beth, as she preferred. She hadn’t been told he was ill and he looked for a sign that his appearance
shocked her, but all she said was “My goodness, you’ll have to go to Weight Watchers with me before long.” If she’d known how hard he’d worked for every ounce on his bones, she wouldn’t joke about it; his paunch, however, he knew, was bloated from the cytomegalovirus in his gut and the bottle of Pepto-Bismol he had to swallow every morning to control his diarrhea.

Beth’s husband, Greg, had just died of an early heart attack. She’d mailed Luke a cassette of the funeral, but he’d never listened to it because he hadn’t been able to lay his hands on a tape recorder—not a problem that would have occurred to her, she who had a ranch house stocked with self-cleaning ovens, a microwave, two Dustbusters, three TVs, dishwasher, washer and dryer and Lord knew what else. So he just patted her back and said, “It was a beautiful service. I hope you’re surviving.”

“I’m doing fine, Luke, just fine.” There was something hard and determined about her that he admired. Beth’s bright Texas smile came as a comfort. He told her he’d never seen her in such pretty dark shades of blue.

“Well, thank you, Luke. I had my colors done. It was one of the last presents Greg gave me. Have you had yours done yet?”

“No, what is it?”

“You go to this lady, she measures you in all sorts of scientific ways, skin tones and all, and then she gives you your fan. I have mine here in my purse, I always carry it, ’cause don’t you know I’ll see a pretty blouse and pick it up but when I get home with it it doesn’t look right at
all
and when I check it out it won’t be one of my hues. It will be
close
but not exact.”

Beth snapped open a paper fan. Each segment was painted a different shade. “Now the dark blue is my strong color. If I wear it, I always get compliments. You complimented me, you see!”

And she laughed and let her smiling blue eyes dazzle him, as they always had. Her face made him think of Hollywood starlets of the past, as did her slight chubbiness and smile, which looked as though it were shot through gauze.

Her little speech about colors had been an act of courage, at once a pledge she was going to be cheerful as well as a subtle blend of flirting with him (as she would have flirted with any man) and giving him a beauty tip (as she might have done with another woman). She didn’t know any other gay men; she wanted to be nice; she’d found this way to welcome him.

He’d been the ring-bearer at her wedding to Greg. They’d been the ideal couple, she a Texas Bluebonnet, he a football star, she small and blond, he dark and massive. Now she was just forty-five and already a widow with two sons nearly out of college, both eager to be cattlemen.

“For a while Houston was planning to be a missionary,” Beth was saying, “but now he thinks he can serve the Lord just by leading a Christian life, and we know there’s nothing wrong with that, don’t we?” She added an emphatic “No sirree Bob,” so he wouldn’t have to reply.

Since Luke belonged to the disgraced Catholic side of the family, Beth was careful usually not to mention religion. Texans were brought up not to discuss religion or politics, the cause of so many gunfights just two generations ago, but Baptists were encouraged to proselytize. Beth was even about to set off on a Baptist mission to England, she said, and she asked Luke for tips about getting along with what she called “the locals.” Luke tried to picture her with her carefully streaked permanent, fan-selected colors from Neiman-Marcus, black-leather shoulder-strap Chanel bag and diamond earrings ringing the bell of a lady in a twinset and pearls in a twee village in the Cotswolds: “Howdy, are you ready to take the Lord into your heart?” Today she was holding her urge to convert in check. She didn’t want to alienate him. She loved family, and
he was family, even if he was a sinner—lost, indeed damned, for he’d told her ten years ago about his vice.

The program was they were to visit relatives in East Texas and then drive over to Lubbock, where Luke would stay with his parents for a week before flying home to New York. He was worried he might become critically ill while in Lubbock and have to remain there. He felt very uprooted, but New York—scary, expensive—was the closest thing to home. He was eager to consult the doctor awaiting him in New York.

Unlike some of his friends, who’d become resigned and either philosophical or depressed, Luke had taken his own case on and put himself in charge of finding a cure. In Paris he’d worked as a volunteer for the hot line, answering anxious questions and in return finding out the latest information and meeting the best specialists. He had a contact in Sweden who was keeping him abreast of an experiment going on there; through the French he knew the latest results in Zaire. He’d memorized the list of drugs and their side effects; he knew that the side effects of trimethoprim for the pneumonia were kidney damage, depression, loss of appetite, abdominal pain, hepatitis, diarrhea, headache, neuritis, insomnia, apathy, fever chills, anemia, rash, light sensitivity, mouth pain, nausea and vomiting—and those were just the results of a treatment.

The father of one of his former students at Dempster had promised to pay Luke’s bills “until he got better.” Luke felt getting well was a full-time job; he’d even seen all the quacks, swallowed tiny white homeopathic doses, meditated and “imaged” healthy cells engulfing foul ones, been massaged on mystic pressure points, done yoga, eaten nothing but brown rice and slimy or pickled vegetables arranged on the plate according to wind and rain principles. The one thing he couldn’t bring himself to do was meet in a group with other people who were ill.

They drove in Beth’s new beige Cadillac on the beltway
skirting Fort Worth and Dallas and headed the hundred miles south to Hershell, where Beth had just buried Greg and where their great-aunts Ruby and Pearl were waiting for them. Once they were out of the city and onto a two-lane road, the Texas he remembered came drifting back—the wildflowers, especially the Indian blanket and bluebells covering the grassy slopes, the men with the thick tan necks and off-white straw cowboy hats driving the pickup trucks, the smell of heat and dampness lifting off the fields.

Hershell was just a flyspeck on the road. There were two churches, one Baptist and one Church of Christ, a hardware store where they still sold kerosene lamps and barbed-wire stretchers, a saddle shop where a cousin of theirs by marriage worked the leather as he sipped cold coffee and smoked Luckies, a post office, a grocery store with nearly empty shelves and the “new” grade school built of red brick in the 1950s.

Ruby’s house was a yellow-brick single story with a double garage and a ceiling fan that shook the whole house when it was turned on, as though preparing for liftoff. The paintings—flowers, fruits, fields—had been done long ago by one of her aunts. Luke was given a bedroom with a double bed covered with a handsome thick white chenille bedspread—“chenille” was a word he’d always said as a child, but only now did he connect it with the French word for “caterpillar.” Beth was given a room across the street with Pearl.

Pearl’s house had been her parents’. The house was nothing but additions. Her folks had built a one-room cabin and then added rooms on each side as they had the money and inclination to do so. She showed them pictures of their great-grandparents and their twelve children—one of the pale-eyed, square-jawed boys, named Culley, was handsome enough to step out toward them away from his plump, crazed-looking siblings. Pearl’s Hershell high school diploma was on the wall. When Luke
asked her what the musical notes on it meant, she said, “Be sharp, be natural but never be flat.”