Allan Stein (12 page)

"Eh, branleur, t'as fini de
déconner
?"
she shouted at the tall basket-bully. Or was it friend Nod she addressed? Regardless, she gestured universally from her chair at courtside. Stéphane stared at the chaotic play of the foolish warriors on their pitched and cracking court, his perfect shoes still untested, and I went to him, rising from my midday drunk, and said, "Well, fuck them." This both surprised and cheered the boy (a trick I'd learned in school). I steered us away, my arm thrown around him like a pal's.

"Fuck them," he repeated, pleased with the feeling of these words in his mouth.

"They play like children," I went on.
Maman
took my wine and drank it, but that didn't matter; the boy's hip moved so gently in the cotton beneath my hand. What could it matter? We strolled away, away. "This isn't basketball they play, this is beach ball."

"What is beach ball?" He looked at me, cheeks flush, his eyes full of tears, and I became dizzy, recognizing that the boy had come close to crying.

It wasn't anything. "A child's game, a game in the sand. Basketball, real basketball in America is nothing like this. . . this chaos."

"You have gone to the NBA games?" Stéphane asked. His nose needed a wipe, but he wouldn't do it.

"Of course I have, everyone goes."

He swiped his wrist quickly, smearing the snot a little. "You see how these are stupid; they don't know the game."

"Mmm." I lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe his nose properly and let my free hand drift onto his belly while I cleaned him. "Mmm, there." Taut, sweet slip of a belly button, finger on the lip of it. This caress could not be called a seduction; there was no hidden algebra, no calculation; the gesture was complete in itself, a habit of my devotion. "So"—my hand to his chest—"come. We'll play real one-on-one." I nodded to a free, more forlorn hoop and the boy said yes.

Any teacher must be ready to play sports. I was graceful and effective in the game simply because I was at ease and I enjoyed the contact. Stéphane tried to guard me but he wasn't very good at it. When I moved forward he moved away and it was a simple matter to get to the basket and make a layup. When he had the ball I stayed close to him with my hands on his body. I have no idea whether it was legal, but it gave me pleasure to feel the shape of his hips and ribs and the way his body moved. He said that I was fouling him. Birds, the pigeons mostly, had settled in bunches around the court, a nattering audience that swooped and scuttled away whenever the game drove us near them.

"American basketball is much more physical," I explained.
Maman
, watching sweetly from my table, enjoyed the last of the wine. "Contact is allowed." We went on playing American basketball, and his hands felt good on me. I pulled my clinging Metallica T-shirt up to wipe sweat off my face and he watched. My clothes stank fully now. Once, he landed poorly and began to fall and I wrapped my arms around his back and held him. "Thank you," he said. I had the ball and I moved toward the basket ferociously. Stéphane reached to poke the ball away and my shoulder hit him squarely on his nose and he started to bleed.

There was a lot of blood. Everything was still—the birds and the day and the distant barbarians, all gray and muted; the boy and I, abruptly silenced, stood in place while the ball rolled away into the pigeons. He stared while blood flowed down his face and into his hands. My stomach felt uneasy because of all the blood. I took his arm to guide him, but he turned his back and hurried from me. Stéphane went to the metal table, where our drunk, alarmed neighbor pulled a diaper from her kit. She held it to his nose and cursed me, caressing the boy. I sat down in a chair near the empty wine while she held him and kept the diaper to his face until the bleeding stopped.

Stéphane had a change of clothes but I did not, so that by the time we arrived at the gate of the École Alsacienne I was not very presentable. He led me—rather, I followed, that is I tried to keep up, I mean to say I chased after him, still not speaking—across the Luxembourg Garden to a toilet where a woman took coins (my coins) and gave him a private stall to wash and change in. He was in there quite a while. I slouched on a bench by the woman. The march across had been painful, past Stéphane 's tiny admirers pondside with their boats and sticks, and mothers and policemen, all guessing what crime the mewling heavy-metal drunk had vested on the proud and bloodied French boy. When the boy emerged he was immaculate. His hair was neatly brushed behind his big ears, his face solemn and scrubbed, and he wore a clean shirt tucked into khaki shorts, with wool socks and sandals below. "We go now," he said.

The boulevard bordering the garden ran south to a roundabout. A few dull shops and vendors punctuated the long blocks, and I bought a cheese crepe from one of them. Stéphane wasn't hungry. I felt a little sick now and threw half the crepe to pigeons in the square where the boulevard ended. The rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs led away from it to the school. The boy hardly spoke, although he walked alongside me now, startling, beautiful, and angry.

Language was the least of our barriers. Stéphane hovered behind a scrim, trapped inside a body whose proportions and angularity perfectly expressed something to me . . . "becoming," I'd like to say, but it might have been nostalgia. His posture as he led me, the narrowing shoulders, the lilt of his arms and bounce of his blue knapsack that kept disappearing into the crowd, enthralled me by pointing elsewhere—away from him. The hollow of his back and then the turn at the hips, his long thighs, became abstractions, pure equations, so that he engaged that part of my mind that also loves geometry or angels.

The wind, which was uncomfortably warm and full, picked up, and the great branches shading the square shook and then settled again. Their leaves glimmered silver and gray when the tree shivered, and this made me think of winter or water emerging from snow, or the way a creek, when it is frozen over, still moves beneath its roof of ice. Since the accident the boy had ignored me so that a show of arrogant disinterest appeared to be the only coin I had left, of any value, for buying back his attention. For the last ten minutes I'd been heaping this upon him unsparingly and it had begun to work. A mere glimmer, a peep. "Look," he whispered, stopping sweetly. His relaxing thighs had become goose-pimply along their silky fronts, and he lifted the hem of his khaki shorts high enough for me to see this. "But it's so warm." I ignored him a moment longer, and this drew him out.

"It was horrible," he cajoled, his shoulder bumping mine. "When you hit my nose, I thought it was broken."

I turned to poor, wounded Stéphane and held his shoulders, gently inspecting the "nose area" with my eyes. "Mmm, I know." Eye contact, our first since the blow. "I thought we had done something terrible to it."

"Ouch." He was cross-eyed, hurting with anticipation as my fingers hovered by the sore nose.

"May I . . . touch it? "He whimpered a little, drew himself up, then said no.

A
pleasant chateau was settled in the courtyard, as if the rest of the school and Paris had grown up around it, out of fields, plowed clover, and the forests of Gaul. Stéphane led me to the small anteroom of the registrar, a trim woman who had been assigned to my case. Miss Ploquin, as she called herself (preferring Miss to Mademoiselle), was nervous as a birch mouse in fall. Her supplies—paper and stamps, clips, tacks, glue, books, and twined files—had been
hoarded in every cranny of the tiny room. Per must have given Miss Ploquin a line about Herbert Widener; she cooed and purred the good fortune of having
un professeur
é
merite
pry into the archives and let her eyes skip right past my catalogue of smells and stained garments. Paper was cleared from two chairs and we were invited to sit. The boy was my translator, but Miss Ploquin preferred the cosmopolitan pleasures of her schoolbook English. Stéphane sat obediently and fiddled with his tender nose.

What a pleasure, and the honor of a published scholar from blah-blah (mmm, published?) writing a book about the school and of course it is celebrated in France, even the boy must know this (yes he does) but rarely do the
éducateurs béats
of America (in English there is no word; "Smug?" Stéphane suggested bravely; No, no, silly boy, not the same) turn their attentions to France, the cradle of the Enlightenment, America its grave, for examples of progressive education, though l'École Alsacienne has pioneered a singular model for ninety years, God bless Jules Siegfried, you're aware it is the source of Gide's
Les Faux Monnayeurs
, the model of the school, Gide attended at the dawn of La Grande Époque of Siegfried.

"No, I wasn't."

Le Géranium calls it
l'école legendaire
, in his history, and it is he who has divided the periods into La Grande Époque
et
—that is, and—Les Temps Magnifiques, but of course you will have read that; I can set up for you a visit with Le Géranium—you must be patient, he is eighty—and inquire of the teachers whether classroom observation would be appropriate at this point in the . . .

"I'm only interested in a boy named Allan Stein." I put this in sideways while Miss Ploquin struggled after a word or phrase that had, in the instant, eluded her.

"Allan Stein?" She made the first name French and the second German, then looked at me across her paper-pinnacled desk like
a wronged dog, that sad look they give when you hide the wanted stick by your thigh and gaze into the misty field where you haven't thrown it. "A boy here?"

"Yes, he was a boy here in 1905 until 1914 or so, at least I believe he was." Stéphane had moved from the nose to the knees; he held his legs out stiffly, cradling the egg-yolk-shaped kneecaps in his long fingers and pulling up. Soft fuzz blessed the shins from the knees down, and it looked pretty in the dim office twilight. Herbert (aslumber now through all my afternoons, because of time zones) fetishized calves, and I'm certain he would have enjoyed these: muscular and rounded, then tapering to fine aristocratic ankles delicate as a bird skull or the wrists of a lemur. The boy's big feet bumped the desk and Miss Ploquin rose slightly to peer over it. "I would like to see anything you have about him."

"You are writing a book about this boy?"

I picked at my clinging shirt where the bubble-foam logo had folded, a tiny bit, into my belly. "Yes, a book." (Why not?) "He might not have gone here at all." Stéphane glanced at me and nodded, very impressed by something. Perhaps he hadn't known until now I was
the
Herbert Widener, writer of books.

"What is it," Miss Ploquin asked, "that is important about this boy Allan Stein?" Oh, where was Miriam when I needed her? Stéphane was still caught in his admiration for me, regarding my profile with new delight and listening, for goodness' sake, and this fact made me doubly anxious to export myself well. But without the Picasso painting as a touchstone, the point I had to make was, at best, abstract.

"Boys have this power, you see." Puzzled, distant, vague Miss Ploquin didn't see. "Over me, anyway, and I'm fascinated that they could be, Gods, which no man can be but a boy could." The spirit, if not the letter, was correct. Miss Ploquin looked at me, one beat, then turned to my translator, who produced an impressive stream
of French, peppered with "Allan Stein"s and ending to the marked satisfaction of the registrar.

"Eh bien, "
she replied, nodding.

I told her the dates I knew and waited. While Miss Ploquin rummaged and culled, Stéphane explained that he'd said Allan was "an American, a maker of D-Day, and a friend of France," which was at least two-thirds true. Smart boy, and quick on his feet. "But I do not understand what you are meaning to say about him," he whispered, enjoying the peril of our subterfuge. "It was confusing. I don't understand how he is actually important." I shrugged and said nothing. A chronicle of the day wafted from my person, buttery crepes, pointless soap at the John, the grime of sport, including ghostly dried estuaries of dirt that gathered at my wrists and fanned to outline my palms and fingertips, which were themselves left pink by the moistness of the ball. This effluvia smelled like garden soil, my palms like water, and the shirt simply stank. My knees ached. Miss Ploquin returned with a sour look and a box.

"The boy was here, you are correct." Her verdict was delivered in a somber tone, eyes downcast, as with the dreaded affirmation "we have found the body." "There is very little. Le Géranium has taken almost everything, and I'm afraid he can be very difficult." She handed me the box, and it was indeed nearly empty. Stéphane nosed in at my shoulder as I pawed through the yellowed documents: a few photos, tennis team, boxing club (Allan a rather meaty brute at seventeen but with a sweet smile); list of war dead (eight of twelve boxers); a dry lifeless moth, turned to powder at my touch; curricula for the forms (can these be copied? but of course, monsieur); and Allan's thrifty little script from 1910, an exam in German: Stein, Allan, 16 marks out of 20. (May I have this? Le Géranium must be asked; Oh, never mind, but please copy it too; Yes, of course, monsieur.) Who could read German? Miriam, the boy assured me, reads German.

How the air stayed so warm after nightfall I cannot say, but this night it did, and the bus through the dusk home was like a well-lit bed, firm, broad, afloat in the dreamy streets from l'Observatoire to the Place de Rungis. Serge had hung paper lanterns in the garden where the shelter of the walls kept the warm air still. Denis, Miriam's friend, was coming to dinner and we would eat outside. He worked at someplace called the "Carnival Ay" and wanted to meet me (that is to say, Herbert). I bathed. There was bubble bath and candles on the porcelain rim and incense from Stéphane , who promised silence, so that I fell asleep bathing, which refreshed me perhaps more than the hot water did.

♦8  
♦

I
t was pleasant to dress well. Pressed cotton slacks, white shirt, and a sweater, with a favorite silk tie (ducks) iust for the show of it. How should one dress for a garden party? Per was startling and fantastic in a Ricardo Montalban puffed white shin with Abbie Hoffman's flag-striped bib ovealls (one strap left undone). The man was an idiot savant of fashion, a genius who seemed to import most of his clothes from some American thrift store. Stéphane was our waiter, with his hair pulled back into a ponytail, big blushing ears all scrubbed and clean, white shirt buttoned to the top, plus a black bow tie and slacks. He carried the meal, tray by tray, down two flights of stairs and served.

Miriam and Per were in the garden drinking, and I joined them. I brought the photocopied German with me. We drank scotch; Per sprawled in a great overstuffed chair (American late-forties Levittown opulence, which he'd dragged from the basement), while Miriam and I sat primly on folding garden chairs. There were treats: nuts, bread, and (for me?) a bowl of Doritos. ln the window, top floor, Serge batted at smoke with a towel. "No, no," Per was telling Miriam. slouching in the shadowed comer of his chair. “You don't swallow it, just let it lie there, on your tongue. You'll need a lot of spit." "I don't have a lot of spit. What about scotch?

"No, never scotch. Even water has too much of a flavor. Herbert knows this; I'm sure he does it all the time." I smiled and leaned my chair against the brick wall.

"Here." Per pushed the Doritos toward me. "You just lay it on your tongue—isn't that right, Herbert?—curving downward like a shield. It's like a mint or an eau-de-vie, it must dissolve into the mouth." Miriam pressed one onto her tongue and worked it around softly to bring some spit up.

"Ith no woking," she slurred.

"Give it time, dear," Per scolded. "So, Stéphane has taken you back to the school today, has he?"

"That's right, yes, he did. He did a terrific job of translating, too."

"And was it the right school?"

"Oh, yes, 1907 to 1914. Allan actually got his degree in 1916, in Aix, for some reason."

"And what are these pages you have?"

"An exam in German. Allan wrote it in 1910." Miriam peered over my shoulder, breathing across her smelly chip. "Stéphane said you could tell me what it says." The garden door rattled, and Per strode to it. Miriam took the pages and pulled the chip from her tongue, where it stuck a little.

"Sixteen marks out of twenty, very respectable." Bright orange mouth.

"Denis,
bonsoir.
" Per stood hugging a huge black man, maybe a foot taller than he, and they both swayed like dancers.

"He writes about the floods," Miriam went on. "Very interesting story about the floods of the Seine in 1910." Stéphane tore out the door and leapt at Denis and Per, hugging them both midair before falling off and fidgeting foot to foot, belying his somber costume. "He mentions his Aunt Gertrude here, the things they did to help during the flood." I rose and Miriam looked up. "Oh, Denis."

"Denis Oppenheim, Herbert Widener," Per offered. "Though I believe you already know each other." I dearly hoped not! What a graceful man, not lithe but somehow tending upward, as though his feet touched earth only because he willed them down. On his great frame, a linen jacket and very drifty, thin cotton pants (tan jacket, blue pants), plus loafers whose excellence was in their simplicity and the neat fit on his tiny feet (so small for such a giant). Denis glided to the table like a perfume or a trained dancer. I held out my sweaty hand, fearful Denis somehow did 'know Herbert but did not know me.

"Not in person," Denis clarified. He grasped my damp hand. "But of course everyone at the Carnavalet knows of Herbert Widener." I blushed, laughing nervously, as he sang a few praises. The Carnavalet, it appeared, was no carnival, but a museum, and Denis was one of its exhibition directors. His kindness was flattering, creating that ticklish warmth in the viscera which is pride (despite the fact he was describing someone else's virtues and I was an impostor, one whose undoing might be etched in any detail of this man's detailed praise). His litany of all that Herbert had done—in fact, it seemed to have been gleaned from one of those tossed-together art world annuals—pleased me, even while its traps and hazards began to shadow the tiny garden of my stolen delights. A nice little valley, Herbert's, while I dwelt there, but destined, perhaps, for a great deluge.

"It's too much." I blushed the praise away. "Most of this"— two shows Herbert co-curated, Denis calling them brilliant, although he hadn't managed to get a look at them; thank God
I
had and could remember—"wasn't my doing at all, but the museum's. I was really little more than a spectator."

"That's your humility." Per.

"No it isn't."

"Please, everyone, sit." Miriam ushered our guest into the chair beside mine, while Per sank back into his sultan's throne.

"Denis," he wheedled, pushing the chips toward us. "You have to try these elegant American snacks, like a savory liqueur."

"It's funny," Miriam whispered to me, smiling. "I had the impression yesterday you were a historian or, I don't know, a novelist of some sort."

"Well, an art historian, and I am writing a book!" Half true.

She laughed, which smelled like cheese powder. "I'm embarrassed. There I was lecturing you about Picasso and
Meneur de Chevaux Nu
, like an idiot. I hope nothing of what I said was terribly stupid." Denis crunched a mouthful of the chips and said they tasted awful, like old sneakers.

"Not at all. I've been repeating exactly what you told me everywhere I can, claiming it as my own." Entirely true. We both laughed.

"You're so brutal, Denis, eating these delicate crackers like a handful of cheap candies." Per took them from him and tried instructing Miriam again.

"Herbert, what a pleasure." Denis drew close and touched my arm.

"Oh, Denis." We smiled circumspectly, glancing at each other a few beats too long, which established a certain faggish complicity.

"You're not at all like your photo."

"No?" I reached for the olives, and Denis watched my hand. "I've never taken a good picture, you know. What photo is it?"

"It is a tiny picture."

"It's probably very old. I'm sure I look like a boy scout in it."

"Actually you look very much younger in person."

"No." Said like a true Herbert. "Well, the camera always lies, doesn't it?"

"It doesn't do you justice."

"Flatterer. Do you have it with you?"

"What are you two on about?" Per interrupted.

"Tell me
everything
about the Carnavalet." I lurched, grinning like the idiot I was.

Denis smiled once more at me, then turned to the group. "Oh, it is terrible, everything is terrible, you know." Hmms of commiseration. "The building is so old and there is no money for anything to do. It is worse than America." He sighed. Idle chuckling. "I mean the French resistance to supporting good work is much more."

"Business," I put in, pouring myself a dollop of scotch, "the— um, industrialists are the only hope in America. Our museum depends on the largesse of a half-dozen tycoons."

"They do not meddle?"

"Pfff. It is a conspiracy of interests. They only collect what we tell them to and are well rewarded when the museum shows whatever it wished to in the first place." I pushed a handful of chips into my mouth, then slurped the scotch. Blech. "This" (crumb spit stuck on my lip and chin) "is only my view." Miriam pressed a napkin into my hand. "None of what I tell you is the museum's position, per se, but I take the liberty, here among friends." Solemn Stéphane , well behaved now, emerged from the doorway with glasses and bottled water. I poured some at once and drank.

"Very much the man now," Denis said, running his hand along the boy's back, praise and hand accepted. Miriam smiled. That is, she didn't smile; she was supposed to smile, as a token of her amusement, her good feelings about Herbert, Denis, and the evening, but she didn't and already the evening was going wrong. First, Denis had ambushed me with his ambiguous confidences, and now I'd looked to Miriam for her scripted smile and in its place was an empty vacancy, like a whitewashed billboard or a plate. I looked at her blank face, wanting the party scene to get back on track. Her failure betokened deeper resentments, maybe, some undertow that had surfaced in the wake of Denis's provocative gesture—the hand on the boy's back—a memory or intuition, so that now I read the blank
look as something meaningful or menacing, but this was little more than a fantasy triggered by my desire that she smile in the first place, as a gesture for my scene, my happy dinner scene, when in fact, she did nothing, for no reason, standing for nothing at all, and I saw nothing, and it bothered me a great deal. I felt, for a moment, like slapping her, an urge that rushed out my chest and along my right arm so I had to put the glass down and massage my knee, and as I did, she blinked and smiled. Miriam smiled.

"Not really yet," she whispered to me. "Or a very silly man who still sleeps with his stuffed revenger." Our shared secret: Stéphane's deep and ongoing involvement with his boyhood. I smiled, good actor, faithful to the scene, and soon the meat arrived. The boy hoisted his heavy tray and held it beside each of us. Succulent cuts of beef, sliced rare, fanned in a great circle. Serge, with a silver fork and spatula, lifted them up in threes, and laid them on our plates. The lantern light glimmered on the juices, on Denis's bright eyes, Per's delighted smile, Miriam. The boy fetched a tureen of pepper sauce, thick dark gravy made from the drippings of the beef and a great handful of green peppercorns, threads of steam drifting from it. He sat down on a piano stool at the foot of the table (Per, enthroned, was our king) and Serge produced wine, three bottles, dusty from the
cave
, to complete the pretty picture, and then I relaxed a little.

It's silly to think that a name, even unspoken, could alter a man's posture, but I found I sat differently as Herbert. My head rested on a sounder pivot. I slid down in my chair rather than slumping forward at the waist. I don't mean that I imitated Herbert; in fact, he usually sat up straight and was more deeply uncomfortable at dinner parties than I had ever been. I mean the name Herbert had been emptied out, like a terrific apartment an old friend has abandoned, which you finally see bare and clean, the walls broadcasting memories, but empty and available to you. "Herbert" was a big bare
room. The name left space for my new inventions, my ease. As Herbert I turned from conversation to conversation. I ate slowly and didn't finish everything on my plate.

Miriam was going on about the
muladhara
while the boy played with his gravy, making tiny boats with beef, which he pushed across the great brown lake of his plate before swallowing.

"How long do you sustain it?" Denis asked.

"Too long," Per gruffed from his chair. "There isn't a moment of quiet in this house any more." I smiled at Stéphane, with an ease and confederacy that surprised me. Being Herbert had the further advantage of putting me on an equal footing with the boy. If he was trapped inside a constellation of fantasies (mine), I would be too. We'd huddle together behind screens. I could play a role that interlocked neatly with the one I had scripted for him.

"Herbert described to us very beautifully a kind of kundalini of the boy," Per chirped to Denis. "He spoke with some brilliance about the Picasso painting of a boy who has a horse, and the boy's power, which maybe is kundalini; don't you think, Herbert, some of that power is the sex power?"

"That was Miriam who spoke about the Picasso."

"That's right, though I remember as if it came from your mouth." Which was in fact how I remembered it. "You share her view, don't you?"

"Yes, I think she read the painting beautifully."

"Herbert is writing about the boy in the Picasso painting, who was a real boy, apparently. What was his name?"

"Allan Stein," I told Denis. "The late nephew of Gertrude Stein, the American writer."

"The boy who is also portraited by Picasso, isn't he?"

"Yes, that's right." Stéphane , sent to the kitchen by Serge, reemerged with a tray graced by three ceramic bowls and the yogurt crock. There was soccer on television, which most of the neigh
bors watched. We could hear the announcers' voices, fluid and obscure, like distant birds, through the windows the neighbors left open because the night was unusually warm. The buildings flickered and glowed in bursts, the televisions all tuned to the same channel. Per stared at the boy, absently and without intent.

"It verges on a cult," Denis repeated, touching my arm. I was becoming drunk, and when Denis touched me I enjoyed it more than his argument, which I immediately forgot.

Per interrupted. "The bricks are still warm."

Denis smiled dismissively, then went on. "The Picasso Museum is not interested in the artists around him, only Picasso, Picasso as a God, the creator of everything." He massaged my forearm as he made his point.

"It
is
the Picasso Museum," Serge observed. "What else should they do?" He lifted one of the heavy bowls from Stéphane 's tray (long green beans, heavily buttered; in the other two, a smashed sweet squash with a glaze of Madeira and honey, and potatoes sliced thin and fried with pressed garlic). Our poor waiter had been standing by unnoticed for several minutes. Per reached above his head and took a blossom from the heavy branch of the plum tree. "The petals are warm too." He held it to Stéphane's nose; the boy smiled and breathed its odor, then he held it up to mine.

"I hate plums," Stéphane said.

"Every museum is a distortion," Serge argued.

"You used to like them," Per told Stéphane . He rolled the blossom over the boy's cheek. "You used to sit in the garden and eat them until you were sick."

"Did I?" The boy smiled. He was flushed because of the wine he drank. "I guess I ate too many."

"Is that why you hate them now?" Stéphane did not listen, and we were all silent for a moment. Something happened in the soccer game and the noise of the crowd rose, crackling and sibilant, like a
brush fire coming near. The buildings flickered more intensely and then became steady and dimmed.