A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (11 page)

I have always settled the conflicts in my life with the easiest, most accommodating methods I know of—whatever that says about me. When Armand, my ex-husband, and I parted company, he wanted to take the new Ethan Allen living room set with him to Atlanta and I wanted it to stay, so I took a quarter from my purse, flipped it,
and told him to call. He paid two neighborhood boys to help him load it into the U-Haul, although Armand was an exercise nut, and as it turned out, he was able to lift the sectional into the van himself. He wore an old pair of cutoffs that day, and when I saw him bend over and haul up that furniture, his legs hard and muscled as a ropewalker's, everything in me wanted him to stay, and if it hadn't been for my pride, which disguises itself as indigestion, I would have walked out there, kissed him, and asked him to extend my credit. He drove off that night, even though the second gear of the U-Haul was whining like a sick cat, and then two years later Dixon was dead and it seemed to me that my losses were mounting in a reckless way.

I don't know how to measure the empty place that those two left in me—meteor crater or the bottomless, black sinkhole my father scared us with when we were kids at bedtime. If it's true that Armand stole my heart, then Dixon took some other vital organ, because I swear, the world around me just does not feel the same. Nothing smells as good as it once did: the sweet hickory of a summer barbecue, the soap on a man's skin that used to haunt me for days. It's all gone, vanished. Just a puff of black smoke, and then the piercing white light of an empty room.

The word
karate
would have never interested me. It was the telephone number 588-KICK that kept running through my head. I heard it on the radio about fifty times a day—a major ad campaign, I guess, and it worked. When I called, I expected an Oriental voice to answer—a Shing Lu or a Chan Chung—but it was Tony Ramirez—owner, master, fifth-degree black belt—who said, “Tuesday is when you begin.”

Certainly I was naive. Definitely I was grasping at straws. I did not have the total scheme laid out in my mind, but I knew that I needed to equip myself in some way to bring Gordon Jenner to the silence that seemed ripe and waiting for him.

And then, too, the stakes had been upped when my mother made a scene in a local Safeway. She spotted Jenner's wife on the produce aisle, and when Mom could get no response from her as to what her husband had against Dixon, she started chasing the other woman through the store, imploring her to tell what she knew. There they were, each pushing those big unwieldy carts, running up and down the aisles until my mother banked her cart into a canned goods display and had her forehead engraved with a 16-ounce can of green beans.

Tony Ramirez, my karate instructor, would have given Mom this advice: “The goal is not to look where you're going, but to see.” In the first weeks of class I had no idea what he meant by that, and he never gave any explanations, just told me to repeat the basic forms again and again. I'd stand over at the side of the bare classroom and complete twenty high blocks, then twenty low ones, and then I'd combine them. If I was lucky, he would nod his head at me and tell me to give it another round. There was no sport or art to Ramirez's way of thinking; it was all discipline. Once he made me stand in a corner of the classroom and practice my karate shout, the
kiai
. “Listen to yourself,” he said. “Get used to that sound.” At first I was somewhat embarrassed to stand in the corner and yell at myself—the “uts” and “huhs” supposedly coming up from the diaphragm—but finally some layer of self-consciousness fell away and the shouting felt good, invigorating.

Dixon was never embarrassed by anything that I knew of, though maybe he should have been. Standing up in front of the church as best man at his friend's wedding, Dixon—after too much preceremony champagne—let out a horrendous belch, and then he just looked up at the ceiling, like maybe the rafters were slightly shifting or a thunderstorm was threatening the day.

My brother did not, I repeat, did not moon the bride's mother later during the reception, and whatever charges were filed for indecent exposure at that celebration had nothing to do with Dixon. All I will say about that incident was that the bride's mother was a
Joan Crawford look-alike who presided like an old witch over the hot hors d'oeuvre table, but quite honestly Dixon was passed out in the coat room by then, peaceful with a couple of big synthetic fur coats wrapped around him.

I would have been a lot more comfortable at Dixon's funeral if someone had laid a couple of those fur coats around him in his coffin, made him look like he was just sleeping through another party. I think everybody we ever knew was at that funeral. Misty Waters was there, poured into a little black dress no bigger than a glove. If she would have had to bend over for anything, I guarantee that no seam in that dress could have possibly survived. Dixon would have enjoyed that kind of spectacle—a flash of surprise and then a lot of bare skin. I asked him once if Misty Waters was her real name, and he said he didn't know, but he thought it fit her perfectly. Names didn't mean much to him.

They didn't mean much to Tony Ramirez either, who walked slowly around the classroom and observed his students with a cold trigger eye. He addressed all individuals as “you,” and though it sounds as if he was distant and intimidating, that impression of him instantly vanished when he demonstrated his tournament style. Ramirez moved with nothing but pure love of each moment: the cat stance, the shoulder grab, a rousing roundhouse kick. Ramirez didn't fight; he stalked. His balance and speed were hypnotic. He could kick and pivot like a dancer, the only difference being that his kick could and would break your ribs. When he showed us his Heaven and Earth, a series of blocks and punches punctuated by shouts, I knew that I had come to the right place. I could see then that what Gordon Jenner needed more than anything else was to feel Heaven and Earth descending on him.

The one I heard the other night—it came to me in pieces, a little from Pete Myers and some from Dorothy Carter—is how Dixon crawled all the way from Pioneer Park down to Preston High School, baying like a moon-crazed dog and slobbering all down his shirt, dark frothy spit that looked like he'd been eating dirt. That's a real Jenner touch—the dirt—something to get you gagging.

You use your head, though—step off the distance from the park to the high school and see if it isn't damn near impossible to do on your hands and knees. All that gravel and rotten pavement. Dixon would have been hamburger. Supposedly Jenner saw him on the side of the road, stopped and tried to get him into the car, but Dixon's eyes were glazed over, he stunk like catfish bait, and he was not to be reasoned with.

Funny how the truth gets twisted, because the fact is, Dixon was a supremely reasonable man. He thought things out. He would look at a broken vacuum cleaner and step by step he would take it apart, clean it up, and make it work again, the suction so strong you'd best not get it near your feet. When Hawk Lewis was determined to cut down a hundred-year-old oak on his side property and all the neighbors had given up convincing him otherwise, it was Dixon who walked down to his house one night with a couple of root beers and somehow got him to fall in love with that tree again. It was a huge, beautiful oak loaded with magpies and starlings, and the one thing Dixon said he told Hawk was that trees could indeed feel pain, and how would Hawk like a chain saw in his side?

The crazy thing is, Dixon did have a twin, an unnamed baby boy who never even went home from the hospital. In fact, he was never named because he lived less than two hours. “He just wasn't ready to breathe” is what my mother told us.

Someone has to be pretty bored to take that little sadness from so long ago, mix it up, and throw in a baby killer like Gordon Jenner has
done. A smart guy would have chosen somebody else to tell that story about, because if you traced Dixon back to a kid you'd see someone with the little teaspoon face of an angel, and you'd know that Dixon's instincts and nature were as clear and harmless as water from his very start.

I'm not saying he was perfect, but right down to his bones Dixon was good. Once, as kids, I tried to get him to steal candy with me, and as soon as I'd told him the plan, his hands were paralyzed—he said he felt ice all through his fingers. Years later, when Francine Johnson put the moves on him one night, he just didn't have the heart to tell her to go bark at someone else. All the bad genes of three generations of Johnsons had settled in Francine—in her face, to be exact. Dixon took her home that night, which amazed me because he had an epic appeal to women—he could be wearing a baseball cap and dirty levis and in ten minutes he'd have some exotic female rooted deep as a mulberry right next to him. “So why Francine Johnson?” I asked him.

He shrugged and put his feet up on the dashboard of my car. “In the dark,” he said, “with the lights off, everything evens out.”

Some people don't know when to shut up. “Diarrhea of the mouth,” my mother calls it, but I think it can signal something much worse—a bitter heart no bigger or better than a turnip.

What Jenner has to be bitter about, I don't know. There are no easy windows by which to look into another person's life, so I judge it from the outside—what he does and says, if he has a dog and feeds it, how he treats his mate.

I was good to my ex-husband, but good doesn't necessarily mean close or bonded, it doesn't mean you sleep cradled like two spoons at night, or that your future can stretch scary as hell like a suspension bridge out in front of you and as long as the two of you are together it doesn't matter. Although he never settled to just one woman, Dixon
knew all about couples and he warned me about Armand. “Love him or lose him,” he said, and he was right.

If I had a dollar for every time Dixon was right . . . well. The one time he was wrong, though, he was seriously wrong. That was when he took off for Santa Fe, thinking his life here had stalled. He could walk it, he said—hell, cancer patients and paraplegics were crisscrossing the continent and he could do it, too. Adventure and bullheadedness always flowed together in Dixon like one muddy river. The fact that he started out on that trip with only a few dollars didn't scare him. Dixon believed you could build your life up out of nothing—just like a fence—a brick at a time.

On an Oklahoma two-way road in the oil-colored twilight is where it ended for my brother when a semi came up over a rise and could not distinguish Dixon from the shadows. His hair was dark. He wore an old brown corduroy jacket that became even browner after he rolled more than fifty feet in the dirt. I went down there to
identify
him, which after an accident like that is just a loose term, because the person I saw only vaguely resembled my brother.

Dixon robbed the bank when he got his looks. He was big and lean, had a square jaw and a natural kind of abandoned grace when he moved. I'll admit that I got the deep-water eyes in the family, but Dixon got the hair—thick and wavy, the kind you want to run your hand through for good luck. More than once, he was mistaken for the Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, and sometimes, good-naturedly, he'd play along and say that going for the gold isn't all it's cracked up to be.