Allan Stein (19 page)

Stéphane put his hand on my erection and let it rest there, brushing a few fingers through the cum. I didn't move or speak, but enjoyed the warmth of his hand. We lay there like this until my cock had become small and Stéphane took his hand away. He rose from the bed and I opened my eyes.

"Come to my room again," I said, "and I'll do anything you want." Stéphane did not answer but just walked away and left me.

T
he next morning I followed him. I hadn't planned on doing it, but at seven-thirty the sound of the boy's leaving rattled me awake and I sprang from bed, dunked my head in a sink of cold water, and got out the door, so that suddenly I found I was tailing him. The pleasure of it surprised me. This gap became charged, like the slim space between magnets, as when I'd tailed Louise. Stéphane set out while I was still maneuvering my bike from its place in the hallway. The morning was misty and cold. Miriam watched me leave but said nothing. She stood in the casement window above the garden, tired and unattractive, and watched me wrestle with the gate. A lurching green Fiat got in my way, a boxy little car whose driver tried pulling around stalled traffic and forced me to the wall while he passed. It put some distance between me and the boy. I mounted the pedals again and got the bike up to speed. The boy was purposeful. He came into sight, crouched low over his bike, aiming it through traffic. Where gaps opened, he traversed them. At the stoplights he kept ready, bent over like a stalking cat, and then he sprang when the light turned green. He was even less interesting to track than Louise, whose aimlessness had at least been unpredictable. The boy cared only for speed and economy, and we arrived at the rue Saint-Jacques within a few minutes.

I'd never known the streets were so crowded in the morning. At the corner of the rue Royer-Collard, Stéphane rolled through a crowd of boys and chained his bike to a battered metal rack. He swatted the hands of a few friends and stood with them in the cold. His self-involvement and the strung-out knots of walkers streaming between us kept him from seeing me. I stood with my bike, twenty or so yards away, watching. Why were these boys locked
out? More arrived, girls too, but the gates remained closed. Stéphane had his spot by the bikes, and it appeared he would stay there awhile.

From a café on the corner I could watch. A table came free by the window and I left my bike outside and went in the café and sat. I had sweated from the ride and felt clammy. There was a rack of newspapers and I took one, a French paper I didn't read. Even from this distance the boy was elegant and remarkable. He occupied a center around which his friends spun like minor satellites. His posture alone held them, that pliant slouch I'd seen in the garden, communicating his ease, his native superiority, even through two shirts, a sweater, and a thick parka. His friends puffed nervously on cigarettes, jostling around him, but he didn't smoke. I thought they all must want to suck his cock, but I'm sure that wasn't true. It seemed inconceivable that anyone could stand near him, near to the battered pucker of his fly, and not be overwhelmed by the gravity, the transcendence, of this need. Every one of them stood swallowing the wet morning air in great greedy mouthfuls, hungry for the life of it, and to me the boy's cock was exactly the same. How could they not reach for it?

A woman at the next table asked me a question. She gestured to the newspaper and I gave it to her. Cars moved past, blurred in a uniform light that seemed to issue from nowhere. Colors bled in the mist, which had become brighter. The school's concierge, a tall young man with a great ring of keys, shuffled from a small booth and undid the lock, and the sidewalk emptied of kids. They drained through the gate and into school. Within minutes they were gone and the gate was closed.

The trees of the Luxembourg Garden billowed in the cold air only fifty yards away, and I could see the mist breaking up beyond them. The sun would be out soon and the day would be warm again. The café was pleasant, so I caught the waiter's atten
tion and asked for more bread and some Camembert to spread on it. The hours passed. My attentions drifted, and then I left, circuiting the boulevards on Serge's bike until it was afternoon and I could return to the same table at the same café and watch the school let out again. The interval had been flat and featureless. Birds shook from the fences and made a blur across the sky, that part of the sky I could see. A man at a table near me also watched the school. He'd been nursing a coffee—letting it go cold, rather— and the pages of the magazine he'd propped on the table went unturned while he stared across the street. I thought he might be some kind of predator, lurking near the lyc
é
e to victimize kids and lure them into films. My school back home was in a constant uproar about this kind of threat and had organized a block watch of parents and staff to harass every unknown man who lingered near the school. Any man who paused, or was not in some kind of uniform, would at once be assaulted by a concerned and furious den mother shooing him away, which is why it was so handy to actually be a teacher there.

Dismissal time came, and the children flooded out the gate and filled the street. Traffic was closed where they loitered, and this gave room for the boys to swagger and pose. A lot of them ran around screaming, and some got their knapsacks tugged until they fell to their knees. Stéphane was nowhere to be seen. The man near me waved through the glass, then went outside and kissed a boy, a boy Stéphane's age, and they walked away together holding hands. The children dispersed until the street was nearly empty and then at last, as if in a coda to this brief symphony, Stéphane reappeared. He had been sitting in the booth with the concierge and they emerged now, still arguing over the plastic-sleeved cards they had exchanged. He looked up and grinned. He saw me.

What was I doing here? The boy shook hands briskly with his uniformed pal, then trotted across the street to the café smiling,
though not so broadly as to look foolish. We also shook hands and he dropped into the chair opposite, knapsack squashed between the chair back and his parka.

"You will come to my basketball?" he asked, drumming the tabletop.

"How strange to see you here."

"It is my school, right there." He pointed out the window. "I thought you had come for my basketball."

"No, I'm just here. Your school team is playing?"

"The school has no teams. My basketball club is playing, very soon. We are at the École Normale, in their gymnasium." The boy pushed his parka sleeve up over the ample hump of a lovely watch (my watch) and gazed at the scratched glass. "It is one-half hour, and then we play against the club team of Boulevard Kellermann."

"I'm afraid—one-half hour—I think I cannot. There are meetings this afternoon." I gazed at his rabbit teeth and dissembled. "It's my last week, and the meetings are becoming so much more important now. Where is this École?"

The boy frowned his disgust and snorted succinctly. He reached into his parka for a pen. "It is very near. If your meetings do not prevent you." He drew a map and left it with me.

I let him go, feeling foolish because I hadn't simply said Yes, I've come for your sports match. My surveillance was supposed to be clandestine. When he saw me, I was caught and I quite naturally tried to hide my mission. He trotted—sauntered, I guess—to the café door and out onto the crowded sidewalk. I was left alone with just my crumbs and cold coffee. As I watched Stéphane disappear down the rue Saint Jacques a terrible sadness welled up, and this abruptly gave way to bright contentment when I realized that now that he was gone it was possible to follow him again. Anyone looking at me would've thought I had terrible gas, so swift was this transformation from puzzled distress to surprised relief. I took the napkin
with its scribbled directions and went to the toilet. No point tagging along too closely. I already knew his destination.

The boy's map was economical, featuring only three streets and a great smudged star to mark the École. I got there easily, but the building was neither star-shaped nor obvious in its design. A woman in the concierge booth received my repeated question "
Le gymnase?
" with a hard, flat stare and her own repeated
"La salle du gym?" "Le basket"
I finally tried, mimicking the postures of basketball. She simply pointed. Nothing looked like a gym, no boxy freestanding structures, no great aluminum-sided wing sporting plastic windows around its top, no arched I-beams or grossly enlarged Quonset huts. The École was just a great sprawling stone building with windows and doors. I went in one, sniffing for sweat or the diesel smell of gym towels. Talk and some music drifted in the halls, but nowhere the echoing
ping-ping-ping
of the ball against the hardwood floor.

I wandered downward; these places are so often subterranean. A helpful girl pointed me along a musty hallway of iron plumbing and stored boxes. I found the lockers and then a room of toilets and showers. The boys of the Boulevard Kellermann walked by with their kits, dangerously close. I stepped into a dressing room and then a toilet stall and closed the door. It was a tiny stall with just the toilet and a very few inches of air between the door and the ceiling, and this gap looked out on benches and lockers. I squatted on the seat.

I'm not the sort of person who generally does this, so it was difficult to actually look out at anything. The room was silent—or, rather, it hummed with all the hidden machinery sealed inside the walls. Then voices, a voice, his voice, emerged from the dull rumble of the building's hallway and the door opened and slammed repeatedly. They were here, my boy's club team, shouting and swatting, unzipping kits and coats, parkas and pants (excepting those with steel
buttons to be pried loose). I quivered on my perch, gleaning clues from the air—the rustle of a dropped pant, belt buckles clanging to the tiles, the snap of elastic pulled off or on, fabric shimmying against fabric, or the click of a joint bending to let a tight sleeve slip off. Boys babbled in French and there were song lyrics and accusations, and then one voice came to the fore, a strutting shout, boastful, answered by some needling question that was murmured into submission. A long silence. A prolonged silence broken finally by a whoop, scuffling and laughter, ripping cloth, and bodies banging against the empty metal lockers. Blind, crouching, overwhelmed, I cobbled together a million scenarios. The stall door shook as a boy caromed off it, and then everything settled. I could smell them through the gap, sweaty and breathing, tangled on the floor, my head full of X-ray visions.

Gradually the boys left. Or some of them left. A whisper persisted, a whispering handful of them diminishing so that I thought they must suspect me (or, rather, the toilet stall) and be concealing a plan of attack. It wouldn't do to be found crouching. From beyond the walls the clean
ping
of balls echoed, bouncing on the hardwood. The game was under way, or maybe just warm-ups, each team beginning their choreographed weaves. A great spasm of the building's machinery shook the walls and pipes, swallowing the nearby whispers and the reports of their drilling teammates out on the court. The toilet rattled. Tiny waves mottled the water, tracing the disappearance of this huge sound, and then it was quiet again. I took a deep breath, flushed the toilet, and stepped out. The room was empty. A bench lay on its side, strewn with clothes. The distant hiss of steam heat mixed with the crowd's watery conversation from the gym.

Per and Miriam sat in folding chairs by the court, laughing and smoking. I strode into the gym, said hello, and we kissed and Per pointed to the bright lit scoreboard: 12 to 3, only a few minutes left
in the quarter. The boy glanced over, adjusted his sweatbands, and showed his indifference.

"Has he scored?" I asked Miriam.

"I don't think so. Per, has he scored yet?"

"Yes, he has, dear, he made that basket, that layup"—this was a bit of jargon Per was proud of—"when he took the ball from the other boy."

"He had a steal?"

"Yes," Miriam said. "He stole the ball a number of times."

"Stealing is his specialty."

"Defense is his specialty," Miriam corrected. "Stealing is just one facet of it." This surprised me, given the ease with which I had abused the boy in the park. But as he resumed his position it became clear he could prevent any of his opponents from scoring. There was some kind of tactical fussiness, a sort of elaborate diplomacy about the other team's offense that made their progress to the hoop slow and uncertain. Every movement forward seemed to be negotiated, like the visit of a foreign head of state, so that Stéphane's refusal to move when the other team wanted to kept them from getting to the hoop. Their game simply stalled out somewhere between midcourt and the foul line, until the boy finally took the ball away from them.

"Bravo," I shouted as he snatched it from the weak grip of his smaller opponent. "Slam-a-jammababy." This exclamation brought Per to his feet and Stéphane abruptly to a halt, as he stared at us and grinned, losing any chance for the breakaway layup I had anticipated. Time expired and we took a small hamper of fruit juice and yogurts to the boy's bench. The crowd was in fact not a crowd at all, but extra players who preferred to sit on chairs. Per and Miriam were the only "parents" in attendance. At the break these uniformed boys swarmed the court, dribbling and maneuvering in great bunches while the sweaty heroes milled around the sidelines with
their sports drinks and juice. Stéphane shook my hand and described the four steals I had missed, plus the layup, which was acted out with Per playing the part of the defender. Everything was normal now; I was normal, where a few minutes ago I had been so creepy. I glanced at the rafters. A running track hung there, riddled with cracks and great holes where its plaster had rotted and fallen. It was unlit, hovering in the gloom, so that a man might've been up there now, a sniper or voyeur, without giving any sign.

"Creepy place," I said. "Are all your games here?"