A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (6 page)

It goes back that far, to grade school, to Martin raging against those curtains and me sitting in the audience with the first realization of being trapped head-on, my body a hopeless house with the doors all locked. I wasn't sure at the end of the play if I could stand up. I felt as if I had melted into my chair. The fourth graders were all shuffling around me, and the big sixth graders seemed awkward and pinned in their clothes.

That was the start of a physical disorientation that would visit my life again and again. One night in St. Louis in 1976, Prentice Dorn left his post at the bar and delivered his body to me, tall and dark-haired, a man whose hands are more committed to my memory than his face, not because he was unattractive, but simply that his hands moved so smoothly. They were like water as it edges around something big, as it pools and cuts until everything is surrendered without a sound.

Prentice had already finished cleaning the bar and was following me around. It was after closing and I'd only had the job at Fiddler's for three weeks. Prentice had worked there for over two years. He was telling me how Walter, the maître d', had fouled up some reservations that evening and how a furious party of six had been left sitting in the lobby for over a half hour. Walter had given them a round of complimentary cocktails and humbled himself in a slew of perfected
apologies, then taken it all out on the two nearest waiters. And if Nick was too stupid to notice that the busboys were stealing his tips, Prentice maintained, then he deserved it.

This was stuff I liked to hear about, everything I couldn't see from the kitchen, though I didn't envy those who worked the dining room, who stepped lightly among the tables of St. Louis socialites in the half-dark elegance that was as imagined as real. A waterfall of blue-green lights, potted fig trees and magnolias—it was a strange place to work, an old establishment that soothed and charmed the public. There was constant bickering among the cooks—what could be served with what, who threw out the last can of peppercorns. Back by the coffee station, the busboys hung out and watched the plates as they were taken from tables. Leftovers were up for grabs, the good stuff: the practically untouched prime rib or lobster or the Wellington. Nobody went away from this place hungry. John, one of the waiters, would leave quietly after midnight with cake or eclairs for his little girls. Even the cats survived by prowling the garbage cans out back. It was the way that city fed itself, and no one thought of it as stealing.

I knew, as he followed me into the pantry and back out to the prep station, that Prentice was sizing me up. He had watched me like this for three nights, following me out to my car where he stood complicating the darkness, talking about St. Louis's water system and his father's bowling alley and a host of trivia that, though meaningless to me, was tender.

So on this the fourth night, when I reached up to slide a five-pound can of olives onto the shelf and felt Prentice close behind me, his arms around my waist, I was not surprised. In fact, I leaned into him the way a person leans into a storm, a little off balance perhaps, but determined to keep going, despite the wind and the rain. It was an awkward moment, Prentice kissing my hair because he couldn't get to my face. I couldn't get to anything on Prentice, so I leaned back farther into his arms, into his chest, to the place where his heart became the same pounding as Walter's fist on the outside door. He had
locked himself out and wanted to know why it took so long for us to get there.

That was the fourth night, April, when Prentice took two bottles of the house Zinfandel and we left Fiddler's, though we were unable to make it all the way up the stairs to his apartment. We had to stop out there on his porch to taste each other, mouth and neck and shoulders, everything unwinding into the black shoal of night that is St. Louis in summer. If I could, this is where I would have stopped it, on the porch where desire was still blind, where it was only a sound—the whining first gear of a car or dogs barking in the distance. But Prentice unlocked the door, he opened the wine with a deep, resounding pop, and the next eight years began to take shape.

Later that night in Prentice's bed I started at his foot and dreamed my way up his leg in the old way, like the pioneers scratching at the dirt, looking for signs, for smoke, for California. Prentice moaned a little. It was the kind of sound that's hard to distinguish. Sometimes it's pain; sometimes it's heaven and there's no word, there's just this sound that comes out into the room, all breath and feeling. Side by side, caught on warm sheets, our arms were too heavy to let each other go.

“Do you want coffee?” Prentice asked me in the morning.

“Yeah. Always,” I told him.

It wasn't a test, though to watch a man moving around in his own kitchen is a kind of revelation. Prentice had a specific cabinet for cups. Things were looking good.

Prentice in the morning in his boxer shorts. Why is the world that kind of place, happiness and sadness converging, the smell of coffee making everything new?

There is a moment when I look down at myself and the consequences of life are made real. Ankle and skin and bone, the long curve of the
arm, a patch of hair. When I step from the shower, my skin sings and there is nothing I can do about it.

With clay, you get to feel what the body is really like. I'm just a part-time sculptor, but even I know that the hands are incredible. There are twenty-seven bones in them, and then the wrists turn in, delicate as stems, frustrating you, making you cry. Once I worked on a foot for a whole month. I made all my visitors take off their shoes when they came into the house so I could study their feet, and still my foot, if I had to tell the truth, was mediocre. At Christmas, as a joke, I sculpted Allen's balls, but they cracked when I fired them. They're on my desk now, paperweights, a sad reminder of Allen, my first love, at the AmTrak station when I gave him two apples and a box of Jujubes and told him that love shouldn't feel like despair. Dressed in coats and mufflers, our hands feeling old but unprepared, we said good-bye, waving for what seemed like hours.

Fiddler's wasn't four stars, but it definitely had a reputation. The service was good, the food hot, and the frilly garnishes oftentimes breath-taking. Even though Walter had lived in St. Louis for over twenty years, he played up his Algerian accent, and the customers were delighted. In the safe confines of the kitchen, though, he returned to his everyday slang, to name-calling and cracking the whip, to pointing out that all busboys were born with their heads up their asses.

From six until ten I was a slave, then the dinner rush died, I got myself a drink and started cleanup. The front doors were locked at twelve and on good nights I was out of there by one.

Theft is a harsh word, but it's the word Ron Mayfield used when he spoke to the night shift one Friday before we went to work. Even though he was one of the owners, we didn't see him that often because he lived in Frankfort, so when he walked in, his gray Saab parked in the loading zone, we stiffened a little, and Nick, who was
about to throw a loaf of French bread rocket-style across the room and onto the counter, gracefully put his arm down and strode across the kitchen like, hey, it was just work as usual.

Mayfield had a way of making it seem all very vague: inventories and loss statements. He avoided being accusatory. If I had been a jury and looked out into their faces, I wouldn't have seen anything, not from the cooks or the busboys or the waiters or anybody. Simply put: nobody here had stolen a thing. Mayfield was having a business problem; that's what it was, and maybe we even sympathized with him a little.

Nothing really changed. Oh, one night Walter saw John leaving with a couple of slices of raspberry torte, and he told John to put them in take-out containers, but that was it.

I told Prentice, who was still wiping down the bar when John left, what Walter had done.

“Yeah, he's O.K.,” Prentice said.

I sat down on one of the stools. The lights in the dining room behind us were already out, and for some reason Prentice was moving slowly that night, taking his time with the glasses and carefully folding every dishrag. In another month he was due to start an internship with a local architect and he planned to cut down on his hours at the restaurant then. I had been thinking of that, of the fact that I would be seeing him less.

Prentice was beautiful at his work. No, he was beautiful doing anything. I saw him mowing his father's yard once. He had to stop and empty the grass catcher every couple of times around the yard. His shirt was off and the air was sweet with St. Augustine and there seemed nothing better than this small, raw world. His father came out on the porch and I could see the resemblance and I thought: whatever happens, I'll be better for this.

“Prentice,” I said, bending a straw in half, “do you think it's stealing?” It wasn't a test; it was a question, though I admit there was a lot in it. Prentice covered a bowl of cut limes and looked up at me. He
was tired, he was running late, but he paused thoughtfully and then he said, “Dee, everything is stealing.”

It was a really bad year for Martin Heffler—a year of bad luck and misunderstanding and letting the hammer fall. Besides the humiliation suffered in those few minutes before Mrs. Gallagher's sixth graders claimed the West, Martin underwent the trauma of being accused of stealing. Birdy Watson, a melancholic redhead who clung to the cyclone fence at recess, stood up just before lunch and yelled that his lunch ticket was gone, and several other students discovered theirs missing also. Through a long process that involved a desk search, conferences, an anonymous note, and a lecture on the importance of truth and honor, Martin's name was arrived at. No formal punishment was dealt out as far as we knew, but Martin was a small boy, and if anything, he lost weight that year. He took to folding his homework into tiny squares the size of quarters, and later on he stopped riding the bus.

So when Prentice told me that everything was stealing, I remembered Martin and the Zinfandel and Walter turning his head and the cats slinking up the alley. I saw Allen with the apples and my heart, and I saw myself turning to Prentice in the night, throwing the covers back and easing onto him, telling him there and there.

The most I ever took from Fiddler's was a cherry cream pie. I was having lunch guests the next day and Estelle, the pastry chef, said to go ahead, in another day or so it was going to be stale anyway. It was a whole pie, eight pieces, with crème de glacé and everything. I served it on these little bone china plates, and all I had were salad forks, but I used them and it didn't matter.

Prentice was even less a thief than I. On occasion he helped himself to what he wanted, but this was excusable because he was never paid for all the work he did. Constantly he'd be in there on his day off
or before his shift. In an emergency, Prentice was always there, like when the pipes burst or when they needed someone to pick up new kitchen equipment from Cleveland.

Prentice was a real asset. Prentice was the man who bought me three rings and moved me twice. After his internship with Signature One Consultants, they hired him full time, and then he only came into Fiddler's with clients or sometimes alone for a nightcap.