A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (7 page)

“Prentice, are you happy?” I asked him.

“Happy,” he answered, but it was the kind of response I could never trust.

I told him to explain, that there were all kinds of happy, that we should know each other's mind.

“O.K.,” he said, pretending concentration, eyes closed tight, hand on his forehead. “Tell me what I'm thinking.”

What I'm thinking is that you can never leave a body until the very end, like that moment in
Ripley's Believe It or Not
when they show a man and his body finally separating from each other. It's an old photograph and the authenticity is questionable, but the idea itself is wonderful, how you get up and walk across the room and just leave your body lying there.

It's not bitterness that makes me say this. It's simply how much my body possesses me, how Prentice would stand in a doorway and I'd be unable to think clearly. In the mornings, how the warm sunlight could tie me to the ground or how I could shiver and ache—almost like the flu—for one good kiss.

One night I thought I lost my body in the main branch of the St. Louis Public Library, but if so, it hadn't gone far. I'd been reading an oversized reference book,
Twelve Moons of the Year
, and it was closing time, and when I stood to leave I was thinking of the final illustration in the book—a landscape, winter-brilliant, the stars caught in the
high, barren treetops. It wasn't until I was in my car and five blocks away that I looked down, and like a tired swimmer come back to the shore, it was there, all of it, my knees and breasts and the small of my back, which later that night Prentice moved to and kissed twice: once cold and light, then a second that lingered.

I gave up doing hair and there was only one kind of eyebrow I was any good at. Prentice came in and saw the mess, saw my face smeared with dried clay and just smiled.

“No, I can't get studio space at the junior college,” I told him.

“I didn't say anything. Relax.” And he made his way to the kitchen.

In '80 we went to Minneapolis to visit his mother and a couple of years after that we camped in the Ozarks, which later Prentice admitted was not all that restful as a vacation. The trails were poor and the season unusually wet.

From the other side of the room, Prentice watched me so often. What he saw was probably no different than clay: an impasse, a collarbone. The small features of children that, when set in marble, seem no more than strokes or petals. His hands knew these things as well as mine.

The best present that I ever gave Prentice was on the occasion of his going-away party from Fiddler's. He was kind of embarrassed with everyone standing around in the lounge in their street clothes, but he appeared cool and gracious nonetheless. I let him open the gift in the car, and he was surprised, if not also confused. It was a three-foot porcelain platter shaped like a fish. The scales were in detail, shimmering, and the eye, an oval of gold leaf. I had found it in an Oriental market, and the only time Prentice took it off his coffee table was the Thanksgiving we tried to serve the turkey on it, but it was all wrong. Prentice was always slightly overwhelmed with gifts. He'd look at them closely, amazed, and he'd thank you ten times.

When I think of my body next to Prentice, I see how time is a ritual, a complicated working out of who will reach over and turn the lamp off at night, of how things will finally be said and done.

“Dee, it's not too late for med school,” my mother offered long-distance from Boulder, but Prentice and I were still together. She had no idea what it was like, this body, walking downtown and smelling rain, to be taut and wingless and waiting in a crowd for the bus with this bag of tricks, with this body, with wet hair.

St. Louis is an old place, but it had attempted to modernize itself. There was a pretty successful renovation project downtown, though there were still the rattraps and walk-ups that could be had cheap. It was a city that didn't demand much. It could be traversed easily, the neighborhood sidewalks were wide, and its economy was moderate but growing. I wouldn't consider going back there, though it's a place that I'm glad I lived in for a while.

In St. Louis on my thirtieth birthday Prentice gave me a ring, a garnet: a black-red stone set in a gold band. I couldn't ask him what it meant. Anyway, what could he have said? There were twenty-seven bones in Prentice's hand when he touched me, when he laid back the flesh, there and there, and found only a sparrow's black-red heart.

After all of that, after eight years in St. Louis, I ended up going to Boulder, though I warned my mother that medical school was out. No questions. I took my time getting there: three days during which I often stopped to read the map, checking the way Interstate 40 bulldozed through Illinois and Missouri and Kansas, then, outside of Denver, how it burst into spider lines going everywhere. On the third day I had to stop to repack something I'd hastily arranged in the back seat. The ironing board was hitting the TV screen every time I braked. It was just past Salina, a rest stop from which the great American prairie rolled westward, not exactly as the fifth graders had made it
out to be, but lonely all the same. The wind was blowing as it usually does there, cool and unpredictable. If you could have stood there by my car and felt it, you'd know why California is such a happy place and why the settlers cried into the soil, feeling the full weight of their bodies.

M
y mother and I ran away only one time, on a sunny May morning when the world was about to end. She didn't know where we were running to, but my mother Lorraine was smart and she would have figured something out, a place for us to go—Cedar City or Tonopah. For a while after she met my father and married him, my mother said that she only thought between her legs, but time had passed and I'd come along and life had resumed its normal colors and she was trying to think with her head again. Lewis and Elly Barlow, our nearest neighbors, lived almost four miles away on a dirt road that cut through sagebrush and scruffy cedar, and since my mother was on foot and I was in a stroller, their house was the first stop on our way to somewhere, to any place without movie stars.

We had left my father back at the house sitting sullenly on a kitchen chair, and even then he looked a little too much like Tony Curtis to my mother's way of thinking. Black slick hair, a face that you remembered as cheekbones and clear eyes. He was all shoulders and tight
waist and he had a raw sleepy sexiness that he knew nothing about. That morning, though, his arms were folded over his chest and he sat in the chair tipped back on its two legs and he was staring at the wall, tired and angry. He said my mother didn't understand him.

The breakfast dishes had just been washed—cups and bowls and plates stacked into the small artful piles that women can make of ordinary things. My mother had dried her hands, stepped over me on the floor where I had balled the rug up around me, and gone to my father's side. “This is what I understand,” she said, her voice rising, straining, finally sending Lowry, our big nearsighted collie, slinking from the room. “You'd rather go off and play than stay here with your wife and daughter.”

My father had no response to that—sometimes he was tongue-tied; sometimes he needed to filter things and kick some dirt before clarity rushed him—but it didn't matter because my mother spun around, walked back to the bedroom, and began to collect the odds and ends that would compose our survival kit: a hairbrush, a silver baby spoon, a Sears and Roebuck catalog, talcum powder, an eyebrow pencil, diapers. She threw them into a water-stained overnight case and she did it loudly so that my father could hear in the next room, but he didn't budge. They were at one of those impasses where husbands and wives sometimes find themselves—exhausted, speechless, the reckless fear that things will never be the same growing larger and more distinct by the second.

My mother didn't say good-bye. She just walked out into the kitchen with me on her hip and we stood there like a last photograph for my father. He never looked away from the green and white wallpaper checks on the kitchen wall. I drooled and gurgled and reached for him, my mother tells me, my hands round and fat as little pincushions, but he didn't move. He had a point to make and he was serious about it, the chair tipped back, his silence stretching beyond the movies, beyond all the dark-haired leading men into our early morning reality.

My mother was in every way his match. She gathered our things like the slender tornado she could be. Gracefully she walked down the front steps of the house with all the future she could carry—me and an overloaded suitcase and a wobbly baby stroller—and when we were out in the yard she put the suitcase down, wrestled the stroller with one hand, locked the legs into place, and slipped me in.

I was a year old, just a small flowing river of sounds, words that spun unrecognizable, but my mother and I had complete conversations anyway. She says that she had been waiting her whole life for me. When I arrived, there was a lot for us to talk about.

With the suitcase in one hand and the stroller handle in the other, she pushed and explained. “Everything is going to be all right, sweetheart. These things just happen. Your dad has some silly idea stuck in his head and he can't get rid of it.”

I reached up with one hand and batted the endless blue sky and jabbered a hundred things back to my mother, and she listened and sorted it out and understood.

“I know. I know,” she said. “He's immature. More looks than brains.”

I took hold of the plastic stroller tray in front of me and shook it and it seemed to be just the advice my mother was looking for.

“You're right,” she said. “I've gone weak and one-minded every time he turned those big blues on me. Putty in his hands. But no more. It's time to get things rolling.” As if it were a pact we were keeping, she stopped and reached down and touched my head—a mass of curls that kept me prisoner until I was old enough to find the scissors and cut it myself. “Okay,” she said, “it's agreed upon, love pie,” and when she started pushing the stroller again, the wheels went straighter and we moved faster, though on a rutted dirt road that even the county wouldn't claim there was no such thing as speed.

Months before I was born, my mother had mail-ordered that stroller and x'ed off the days on Hinkley's Feed and Grain calendar until it arrived. “You won't be able to use it out here,” my father had told her,
but my mother was determined to do things right, to push me in a stroller like any other baby, despite the fact that the nearest sidewalk or park was a rough forty miles away. She used to tell people that we lived an hour and a half from nowhere, on a rocky ranch headed for no good, and she was just about right. In the southwest corner of Utah, amidst backcountry that was hallucinogenic in its loneliness and landscape, my father's family had slowly carved out a ranch.

The stroller proved difficult but not unmanageable out there, though my mother that morning had only one hand to use. When the wheels stopped in the ruts or hit loose dirt, she placed her hip against the handle, pushed hard with all of her one hundred and fifteen pounds, and got us moving again.