A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (19 page)

“Gotta keep your strength up on this trip,” Wade reminded his son when he saw him fidgeting and the fries untouched. “We're going to be in high gear,” he said. “We're going to be seeing everything there is to see in this town.”

Wade arrives in a new place—Tucson, Tennessee, wherever—with all the spirit of an invading general. He carries guidebooks and maps and has a hit list of places to definitely see. For months before his vacation, he falls asleep on the sofa each night with a Fodor's travel book opened on his chest, and it is as if, during those naps, he absorbs the intricacies of a given place—falls in love with the names of unseen streets and rivers and mountains.

During lunch at Denny's, Ellen had her legs crossed, her right foot sticking out from under the table. Rocky had never really noticed a foot before, let alone fallen in love with one. Her painted toenails made him feel inexplainably happy. Across each, she had pasted a glittery gold
zig-zag
so that every toe ended in a tiny bolt of lightning. A sizzle. A pop. He noticed that her foot was clean and tanned, that her toes curled or pointed up when she laughed or leaned forward
to make some teasing remark to Wade. The arch was high and white, a secret place. Her small bare ankle bone pushing up under the skin made him sigh, which in turn caused Wade and Ellen to look up from their plates at him.

“What?” his father asked him.

Uncomfortable, Rocky shrugged and scratched his ear.

In what seemed like a minute to Rocky, Ellen's melba plate was gone and there was only a smoky green lettuce leaf left on the thick white china. She looked at her watch and tapped its face. “Hey guys,” she said, “are we going to spend all day eating lunch?”

While she waited for Wade and Rocky to finish, she reached up and behind her and examined a heavy woven valance hanging in the window. Ellen is a drapery consultant and says she is in love with the feel of things—burlap, sateen, canvas. A good brocade makes her dizzy. Silk—good silk—she says you won't find in this country. Wherever they go, she has her hand out in front of her and opened, like a blind person who is searching a path, but instead she is registering the thread weight and gauge of chairs and curtains, anything covered in fabric that comes her way.

Rocky is not at the point where he can actually look at Ellen's face and listen to her. Looking at the door to the Denny's rest room, however, was safe. Looking out the window was momentarily calming. The windows were tinted, but even so, he had never seen sunlight that savage.

When the three of them were almost out the restaurant door, Rocky had a flash, did a quick backtrack to their table, snagged the lettuce leaf from Ellen's plate, and put it in his pocket.

In a sky-blue rented Mustang with the top down, Rocky's father drives faster than he probably should. Rocky sees cactus and palo verde zip by, long adobe walls, and the vast brown plate of the desert. In the
wind that hits his face and batters his hair, he smells sun and exhaust and the brown coyote smell of dirt. He can't see the speedometer from where he's sitting in the back seat—slumped in the left corner, sitting on one crushed leg, leaning into the plush upholstery for strength.

In the front seat, Wade has placed one hand casually on Ellen's neck. Slowly his index finger moves up and down across the skin just below her ear, making a tiny but suggestive path. Rocky homes in on the hand and can't let go. His shoulders tighten and he can clearly taste the spicy composition of last night's food.

The three of them are headed for a movie set west of Tucson. Wade leans his head to the right and half-yells back at Rocky. “Isn't this great? Getting to see a movie being made and everything?”

Ellen swivels toward the stick shift. “Yeah,” she says into the wind. “We're just too lucky, aren't we?”

Rocky can't quite make out what either of them is saying. It's not just the speed and rushing air that distort their voices, but the fact that Rocky's ears are half-plugged. He sees their mouths move. He hears a droning. Every few seconds, an understandable word flies, comet-like, at him: “everything,” “lucky.” Like a foreigner, he scrambles to patch together the conversation.

For the first time in his whole life, his father's hand bothers Rocky, actually repulses him. Up until now, it has mostly been a good hand—generous, caring, luminous in the dark. Now, it seems to Rocky, the knuckles are too big; the nails, squared-off and thick and almost yellow. He wishes Ellen would say something about it, would complain that the hand is too hot and heavy, would squirm in her bucket seat until she cast his father off and he had two hands on the steering wheel again. Rocky thinks that for once his father should be concerned with safety.

About ten miles out of town where a graveled road takes off from the highway, Wade makes the turn to the movie set a little too sharp and the three of them lurch toward the right. Ellen and Wade laugh as if a car and a roller coaster are supposed to have something in
common. Rocky, irritated, hunkers down lower in his corner, trying to keep from sliding across the seat.

When the car finally stops in the dusty parking lot and Rocky tries to stand, he finds that the folded leg he has sat on is numb. Ellen and Wade hurry across the dirt lot and into a huge, abandoned machine shop where the movie is being made. Rocky follows more slowly, slightly limping, trying to shake the pins and needles loose.

The film is not yet titled. In it, an alien of unknown origin—masterminded by two special effects men—confronts a woman at an old rundown desert motel. On the set, there's a bright pink neon sign rigged up—Tumble Inn—buzzing and half-lit. Portable lights are set up everywhere, creating a sharp blue-white halo that appears thick as cigarette smoke. A man wearing a cap with horns sprouting out the sides is being raised up above the set on a noisy black crane. He is obviously unhappy—yelling and pointing and shaking his head. “Fuck you, Louie, just fuck you,” he hollers from about twelve feet up.

Ellen can't believe how skinny the actress is. “You can't tell me that's attractive,” she says quietly, standing on her toes for a better view. She turns to Wade. “Is that attractive?”

Wade shakes his head no and puts his arm around her shoulder. Ellen smiles and settles herself into the tan muscled groove of his bicep. At home in Denver, he and Rocky share a Joe Weider weight set, and Wade has been making good progress, though Rocky finds the weights boring. He'd rather lift one of the wrought-iron kitchen chairs over his head, spin it like the people from the Moscow Circus who could make a whole ladder of spinning chairs, or he'd rather see, with just one leg, how far he can push the bulky gray sofa. Besides, Rocky lately finds his muscles ungovernable. Right in the midst of flag football, for instance, or a neighborhood game of catch, a leg cramp rivets him to the ground where he clutches the grass embarrassingly.

At the movie set Rocky watches the show of affection between his father and Ellen—pats and rubs and long full-body presses, the quick birdlike kisses of the newly in love—and at the same time he some-how
watches the filming. He can see both up and down, far left and far right. It is as if his field of vision has quadrupled. His brown eyes flick and rotate, finding both the obvious and the hidden: a star-shaped mole on a woman's neck, a hole in the sleeve of a cameraman's shirt. When Rocky can't stand it anymore—the lights, the swirling movement, the actress's face being dabbed with sponges, his father pulling Ellen closer and closer—he heads for a portable Coke stand back by the entrance.

He gets in line and starts to dig in his pockets for change. His left hand comes up and in it is shredded paper, a button, a few twists of lettuce and orange peel. He stares at the contents of his pocket, confused. The line keeps shortening until there is only one man in front of him. Rocky hurriedly feels for coins in his right pocket, but everything there is vague and unfamiliar, the warm dark terrain of someone else's clothes. The man in front of him is reaching up onto the counter now for a red and white paper cup. The girl selling Cokes brushes hair from her eyes and starts to look back in the line.

Rocky feels the pressure of the moment as a huge bubble that works its way up from the bottom of his stomach and lodges in his throat, threatening as a chicken bone. Even if he had the money resting coolly in his hand, he knows he couldn't say a word. The Coke girl, tired and bored, would lean forward, waiting for his order, the mounds of her small earthy breasts rejoicing momentarily from the top of her halter.

Rocky slips out of line and shoulders his way to the rest room. The one sink in there has been torn inches away from the wall and a chipped green welder's tank temporarily props it up. A silvery stream of water snakes down the wall from a joint in the plumbing. Rocky pulls the water lever on and dunks his head, and when he finally straightens back up the water runs down his neck and soaks the top of his shirt. Drowns him. Saves him. In four days, he hasn't felt this good.

Wade is browsing at the souvenir stand—a wooden cart loaded
with T-shirts and cactus highball glasses—and when he sees Rocky standing over by the extras, wet almost to the waist with his dark woolly hair slicked back, he stops and looks again. “Criminy,” he says when he's standing at Rocky's side, “I almost didn't know you. What happened?”

Rocky doesn't know how to explain much of anything. Ellen strolls up behind Wade, and Rocky certainly doesn't know how to explain this feeling he gets when she's near: his arms and legs become weighted, his throat tightens to the width of a string. The bare blue heat intensifies between his legs. Yesterday his shoes would not stay tied in her presence, and if it had not been for the egg-frying heat of the concrete, he would have thrown them away.

Ellen looks sleepily around the movie set and says that, all in all, she's disappointed. “To tell you the truth,” she says, “I'd rather go to a theater and watch a movie than see it being made.”

Wade raises his hand in agreement, votes yes for Ellen.

They look at Rocky, but his answer has darted completely away from him, slippery and unreliable, and when his lips open, when he tries to coax it out, a small low-pitched belch is all he can muster.

Ellen giggles and Rocky thinks it's the sound of glass and silver and sunlight falling.

Wade rubs Rocky's head and smiles, and instantly, with a fierce and nauseating instinct he's never felt before, Rocky's hand closes tight at his side, as if he were grabbing onto and then raising a two-by-four against his father.

Just before they leave for the Sonora Desert Museum, Wade discovers his credit card gone. He hits the side of his head a couple of times like he's just come out of a swimming pool and needs to empty an ear. “Now where in the hell would I have left that?” he asks himself. He's mad and worried, which Rocky finds a strangely satisfying combination.

Ellen starts to work their way backwards for him. “Let's see. We were in the hotel cafe for breakfast this morning. And last night. . .”

In Rocky's room, behind the swivel stand of a 21-inch color TV, back where no right-minded maid would ever clean, there is a collection of valuables. Wade's sunglasses and electric razor. Now the credit card. Rocky knows that he should feel ashamed, but that's a feeling he can't get inside of and wear anymore. It's like last year's T-shirts—too small, too tight at the neck.

Wade calls and puts a stop on the credit card, and then, not to be deterred, they drive to the desert museum.

Ellen is dressed in green—green shorts, green top. If she were any more green or beautiful, Rocky knows that it would drive him mad, that he would climb the thick cyclone fence and join the pack of gray wire-haired javelinas they are watching. Actually, there's not that much to watch. The javelinas are woven among the boulders of a gray concrete wall. They are facedown in cool dirt, sleeping in deep ovals of shade.

“They've got the right idea,” Ellen says.