Allan Stein (18 page)

"Stéphane ? His guitar and his basketball I think are his lovers. He's very much a boy, you know, even as old as he is."

"Mmm."

"You're very silly."

"Yes."

"He's my boy."

"Yes." "

We hung the bags on our bike handles. The plaza was packed with people and cars stuck in lines as if on a stage set waiting for scene two to commence. Sunburst, lights, cue wind and rain, blustery breeze, wet trash under tires, another cigarette; we rolled north along the Avenue de Choisy, east into a tangle of streets, and under a lofted metal trestle where the subway train rode, bright strung boxes of light in the washed-out sky. The rain was soft, as diffused and ubiquitous as the dull light from the sleek bodies of passing cars. Misty green heather bush, black iron fence, colorful garbage spilled into the street. The rain felt good on my face, bicycling home in the queer light.

H
erbert?"

"Who else would it be?" "Are you drunk again?"

"Well, 'hello' to you too. What on earth is going on over there?"

"Hello. I mean, of course it's nice to hear from you."

"You're not sleeping with that boy, are you?"

"Wait."

"Wait? Wait what?"

"Everyone, I've got the phone," I called into the house. There was no answer. "I think it's okay."

"You're keeping secrets from them?"

"Of course I'm keeping secrets, my name to begin with, and no, I'm not sleeping with the boy. I have no interest in him."

"Pfft. That's an enormous lie. If you're not sleeping with him, why are you still over there?"

"I'm getting you the drawings; that's why I came in the first place."

"Forget the drawings. I don't even want them."

"I want them. And I'm on the verge of getting them, just a few more days."

"Come back tomorrow, come to Jimmy's. I'll pick you up at the airport."

"I can't come back tomorrow. I'd be lucky to get a flight, even in the next few days."

"I'm not asking you. I'm telling you I can't stay away longer. I've got to get back to the museum, and I can hardly return while they're still paying for me to stay in Paris."

"When do they expect you?"

"Monday."

"I'll leave on Saturday."

"One day at Jimmy's? That's ridiculous."

"I can't go sooner. I'll fly straight home and meet you there."

"Jimmy will probably never speak to you again."

"Tell him I'm sorry."

"I'm not speaking to you."

"Herbert."

"Tell him yourself."

P
er was raking garden compost into the flower beds, wet and silent in his ragged shorts. Miriam was on the porch, and I went out
and stood with her in the rain. It was nearly dark, the last light draining out the edge of the sky, that narrow westering edge, and we were quiet for a while, which was a pleasure to me. The silence left the air uncluttered so I could see farther beyond the dimming horizon, smelling the turned earth of the garden, while my mind stretched over the fat dusty hills where Jimmy and Herbert, doubtless, walked now with a straw basket, getting stoned so they weren't sure if they'd gone miles over several hours or just a few yards in the moment since leaving the door. I couldn't be there, and I couldn't be here entirely either, and so I went back inside.

Serge cleared the kitchen table and let me cover it with my work (Allan) while he pared artichokes by the stove. He had a whetstone in a cloth on the cutting board and kept sharpening the knife he used to pry the tops from the blossoms—
swack-swack-swack
, like a predictable sword fight, and then his contented humming, punctuated by the occasional thump of a severed stem falling from the artichoke when he cut it. Stéphane , bored by his homework (which turned into a nap at the desk, face pressed to the pages of
L'Idiot
that had put him to sleep), scooted onto the bench beside me and offered to help. A crease marked his flushed cheek.

"And how is
The Idiot?
"

The boy shrugged. "I help you." He pawed through the papers spread across the table, registering nothing.

"What can you do? " In the gray light by the living room window, Miriam arranged herself on the couch with a book. Serge smiled over his artichokes.

"I will make a time line." The boy sat with his leg against mine, and that was enough. It didn't matter what he did. Music billowed from below. Per played jazz records, which turned the evening's repose into a cool nightclub sexiness: Serge the proprietor, DJ Per, plus a smattering of guests (three) taking shelter from the rain.

"In Santos they use the severed paws of dogs as charms to bring luck," Miriam said from the couch. No one answered her. The boy's plastic tackle box of art supplies was fetched from the cupboard, and a swath of white paper got pinned to a board. Per bounded up the stairs and settled in the kitchen with Serge.

"
Artichauts fourrés
. "

"I will need the photos of Allan," the boy announced.

"Stuffed with what?"

"
Des noix, du beurre, et du foie gras
."

"A light snack."

"The photos can't be glued or anything, I've only borrowed them."

The boy frowned at my objection. "I draw him from the photos."

"The paws got passed from father to son. I guess they were more valuable than houses." Theolonious Monk broke into dissonant bursts, fragments of the galaxy he'd been constructing, while Per danced his hands along the countertop. The pages I held were meaningless, billowy fields of text on which I couldn't focus. My gaze relaxed into a blur, so that I saw paragraph shapes and margins but no words. A raw green smell, the artichoke stems, cut through the old tobacco, and I smelled rain from the window.

"Né en 1895?"

"Mmm-hmm."

"His face is very ugly as a man."

Talk is screwy, like machine welds that tack a sheet of metal to a frame. Per and Serge drank
kir
in the kitchen, knee-to-knee on stools beside the stove. Serge peeled beets and smoked. Steam from the boiling kettle of artichokes threw up a scrim between us. Thelonious Monk kept me from hearing anything but their murmured laughter. The boy scrawled a great ugly brute on a horse in
the box above 1914. I peered over his shoulder, letting my arm rest on his back, and admired the poor draftsmanship. "What dates have you marked?"

"The birthday, then Paris 1903, the painting of Picasso 1906 when he is a boy, the
École
Alsacienne beginning 1907, and then the World War in 1914, when he is still eighteen years old."

"What about his teenage years before the war?"

The boy frowned at me. "He was in school, you have said, which is very boring."

"You might include their trips to America and Italy." Stéphane glared at my suggestion. "In 1906 and 1910 he and his parents went to San Francisco. For six months after the great earthquake, and for almost a year in 1910." The boy wiped his nose again but made no note of what I'd said. "And they went to Italy every summer between these trips."

He raised his eyebrow at my trivia. "This is not important for a time line. I do not include vacations."

The artichokes, by the way, were delicious, plump and slightly braised on the outside, soft as butter in the middle, where Serge had stuffed them with walnuts and goose liver; the beets were exceptional, boiled and then caramelized (plus, also, the usual excellent wines), so that I got lost in the details again, especially the metal tang of the second wine, like running my tongue over a sheet of steel, and the sweet dissolution of burnt sugar in my mouth with the flesh of the ruddy beet, a great red doll's head, forked and maneuvered toward my teeth. The boy stared at me over the lip of his watered-down wine with no intent. I glared back, fixing my gaze on his collarbone, where the stretched neck of his oversized T-shirt left a glimpse of skin visible. It sometimes bored me, this constant awareness of the boy, his body, and the possibility of sex with him (a monotony equaled only by Stéphane's perpetual unawareness, his complete
disregard for the scenarios tumbling in my head), but there we stared, I through him and he through me, while the conversation burbled on around us.

"Apparently, there are no birds."

"Now or ever?"

"Ever, at least that Lévi-Strauss noticed. I mean, that's not really forever, but there is no record of birds."

"Of course not, he had no interest in them."

"Listen."

We paused and watched Per listen—the hum of the refrigerator, sibilant traffic and rain, Miriam's indigestion, the cold dropping down from the clouds (so cold, frost had begun to frame the win-dowpanes). The sky streamed high above us, black or invisible, breaking up into daylight somewhere above the ocean, between here and Herbert and Jimmy and Dogan on the far edge of the next continent, where it was still morning, Dogan struggling from sleep, Herbert swimming laps in the pool. I listened, hearing them, and no one spoke at the table until the boy asked if we were done and could he leave.

T
he sky was so interesting then, in the days before Stéphane and I left Paris. It broadcast conflicting reports—one day a languid summer haze dispersed by a wall of freezing air, and the next angry winter storm clouds dissolving into a muggy, cloying afternoon. The city and its parks became leafy, billowing green even while morning frost clung to the windows. A lazy stroll in the warm sun of the Jardin turned bleak and forbidding upon crossing into the narrow treeless streets around it.

Sandblasting spread from the Parc Montsouris to the graffitied walls of the Cité Universitaire, where Stéphane led me through a labyrinth of fences and gates to an empty concrete basketball court
perched beside a glade of chestnuts. I sat on a stone bench admiring the view while the boy trotted up and down the court, practicing his fast breaks. I did my part, watching. The boy seemed to glisten and swell, held in my sights. His skin was wet with sweat and his cheeks blushed red. Below the court and the trees a half-dozen women raced around an oval track in the cold sun, passing batons and clearing hurdles. The wind or air or distance made them inaudible, so the race became melancholy, like scarred footage of boats unloading soldiers from the Great War. Around and around and around as the sun disappeared into thick clouds and then trees and then the horizon.

It began to rain again. Stéphane continued, and we both became soaked. The women left when the rain broke, slowing down to a jog, hands on their wide hips as they gathered and stretched by the track before leaving. They were gone, everyone was gone, and finally the boy stopped, having reached a hundred.

"You don't need to stretch?" I had no idea. Stéphane ignored my sentence and led us through the gates. "I could massage you." Again, nothing. Car traffic was grim and slow, lurching along the wet boulevard, and we simply walked through it to the park. It was night. At the mouth of the metro, commuters filled the sidewalk.

The boy spoke. "Do you know
Nostalgie
, the film of Tarkovsky?" He stopped at the bright lit news kiosk to buy a comic book that I paid for.

"Is he French? I saw a movie called
Passion
, but that was in Japanese."

"You will see it with me, if you want." We joined the rope of commuters trailing into the park.

"Tonight?"

"This week after my school. Tonight I sleep."

"Right after dinner?"

"There is not dinner. No one is home."

In the dark house Stéphane hurdled upstairs to the shower. I laid my wet clothes on a rack in my room and stretched out in bed beside the drainpipe. The soapy water flowed on and on and on, warm and cascading over him, and I listened until it stopped; then I put my boxers on and lay back down.

I supposed he would sleep but he knocked on my door and I said come in. There he was, bundled in fresh cotton, a big white T-shirt, corduroy pants, and thick socks, wet hair brushed and tied back, plus a guitar in his big clean hands.

"I have learned the Pink Floyd."

"Sit here."

"It is very difficult."

"I'll listen." I lay back, drowsy, mostly naked, as he arranged himself on the bed by my feet. The curve of his back as he bent over the instrument, thinly clad in the white cotton shirt, was exact, religious, nearly Pythagorean.

"I play."

Stéphane played the Pink Floyd song. When he made a mistake he would stop and begin again. I moved my leg so it pressed against his hip. The pressure there and the movement of muscles in his hip made a sweet sensation in me. My heart began to race, and I breathed more deeply, like a dreaming sleeper. We were together, alone. The room's warm air touched me along my nipples, my bare stomach and thighs. It seemed to breathe under the elastic hem of my boxers, shifting the hem against my skin. My cock grew so that it brushed the loose cotton, turning itself around as it pulsed, and the head pushed against the elastic. Stéphane watched me. He'd begun repeating one phrase of the song over and over.

He twisted toward me, still playing, and stared at my belly, the hollow under my arm, my chest and sternum, then down the line of hair to my navel and past it. His look slipped along the
frayed hem of my shorts into the shifting folds of cotton, and I pressed my leg harder against his hip. Stéphane kept plucking at the strings. The touch of his look brought the blood through my back and legs, pulsing in my balls, which I felt fatten and become sweet. The hem of my shorts was pushed from my skin and my erection swelled so the sewn cotton slipped down off the head and along an inch of the shaft before stopping. Stéphane watched, hitting a few notes. It was slow like this, and detailed, marked by the diminishing music, so that these few minutes had the measured exactness and clarity of a paragraph. I closed my eyes, and the world became nothing but the force of the boy's gaze. He was hitting just one string now.

The air on the swollen head of my cock made it feel sweet, and I worked the pulse of it so the hem slipped farther like a dry tongue running slowly down my erection. The boy's hand struck a constant note and the weight of his body fell on his elbow by my side. Was that the air or his breath across my belly? The air, or a hand? It touched me, roughly, and the light felt substantial, raking across the shaft so strong a broad hollow sensation gathered suddenly in my balls, and then it burst through me and cum leapt out into the air. It was a miracle, like a wooden saint that sheds tears on Easter. It fell, warm and liquid on my belly, and I smiled and gasped once for breath. Cum pulsed again, over the glans, and dribbled in runs down the shaft. I could feel the weight of the boy's body pressing down on the bed beside me. His face was near my belly and he leaned on one elbow. I felt his breath, which was irregular, like mine. He'd stopped playing.