In his own bed that summer he thought about Tony and the garter snake. A quick little scene, all he needed. It went like this: The snake slipped into Tony’s trousers. Tony yelled at Gordon to get it out. Gordon fished around a bit and got it out.
This was before Gordon had heard of queers and when he was reconciled to marrying Beryl, a conspiratorial, hairy-armed girl who claimed him at tea dances. And yet he knew that his fantasy was trouble and not all right with Jesus. Some things you know.
Eventually he forgot about it. Or buried it alive, because when he recalled it again, thirty years and a hundred lurid fantasies later, it was like the exhumation of a baby he’d fathered or killed, guilt thundering through him like jungle drums. But that was just for a few seconds ahead of the memory itself, which immediately struck him as pathetic. And so obviously symbolic he wondered whether he was remembering a dream. Snakes like coils of rope. A long, long dream.
Al Yothers is describing an attack of crabs he caught in the army when Gordon remembers his first sexual fantasy. Although the memory makes him feel fragile about his young self, that foetal specimen who against all expectations outgrew the jar, he tells Al the fantasy to get him to laugh.
Al laughs, all right. He has a cruel, goofy laugh, but Gordon courts it because when Al laughs at him it is the only time Al seems to let loose.
This snake fantasy Al finds so funny he chokes, and Gordon has to thump him on the back. “What a jerk!” Al manages to get out between guffaws. “What a
friggin’ jerk!”
(He said the same thing in response to another masturbation story of Gordon’s. The one when Gordon was fourteen and got into ecstasies of soaping himself in the bathtub, and if the bathroom was occupied, taking a cup of water into his bedroom, locking himself in and doing it there, using a bar of his mother’s Jergens for its thick lather. He told Al how one day he had just lathered himself up in his bedroom when his father knocked on the door and he realized too late that he had forgotten to lock it. He scrambled into his closet before his father came in, but of course his father found him huddled on the closet floor, naked and soaped all over, limbs, torso, face, looking—he knew, he stood in front of his dresser mirror afterwards—like the deranged victim of a hideous skin condition. And all his father said was, “You’re liable to catch cold, son.”)
He and Al Yothers are in Al’s bed when Gordon tells him the snake fantasy. It’s the first time they’ve been in Al’s apartment because before that Gordon thought that a flophouse would be safer, provided they entered it five minutes apart. But on two different occasions a shifty-eyed character wearing a Sternway Jewellers sandwich board stared at him going inside, and he began to get uneasy. And, anyway, those dismal rooms with their stained, brown-flowered wallpaper peeling in fronds and their banging radiators sounding like outrage, and no matter what room they were in some wreck next door coughing his guts out—Gordon found them suicidally depressing, more so when the sheets were clean, any sign of decorum in places like that seeming grotesque to him, like lipstick on a corpse.
So this evening they go to Al’s bachelor apartment, and it turns out to be even more depressing. It’s new and expensive and what’s depressing about that is that when Gordon asks Al how he affords the rent, Al says, “Sugar daddies.”
A wrecking ball slams into Gordon’s guts. He figured he wasn’t the only one. He had no proof, though, and he never imagined Al would just hand it to him. He walks across the room to the two pictures, one of Einstein, one of the Marlboro Man, side by side. Each has been cut out from a magazine, or torn out and carefully trimmed, and nailed—
nailed
! big bloody three-inch spikes!—to the wall. What a dumb cluck, Gordon thinks miserably. He reads the caption under the Marlboro Man: A
lot of man, a lot of cigarette.
The pictures are above the room’s only real piece of furniture, a chesterfield upholstered in a prickly tin-coloured fabric. “Maybe you should ask one of your sugar daddies to spring for a chair,” Gordon says.
“Maybe I should ask you to.” Al is crouched in front of the record player. “This”— he says above the zipper sound of the needle bouncing off a record—“is”—he adjusts the needle—“for you.”
On comes “Mister Sandman.” Gordon doesn’t get it. “Bring me a dream,” the lyrics go … “Make his complexion like peaches and cream.” Is
he
the dream, or are the sugar daddies? Or is this a joke?
Al straightens, yawns. Brushes by Gordon, sits on the chesterfield and spreads his tree-trunk arms across the back. “Well?” he says.
In that surly face Gordon sees heaven. He hardens. He’s still nauseated, and now he’s hard. Fear, guilt, misery, humiliation, where these blossom is where he and Al never fail to meet. “Take your pants off,” he says.
“You take them off,” says Al, tapping his right hand to the music.
The chesterfield is a pull-out bed. The mattress feels like it’s stuffed with baseballs, and the grey sheets are brittle. From semen? Sugar-daddy semen? Gordon envisions huge guts and short pricks, or why would they have to pay for it? But he makes love this time as if he’s performing for an applause meter, and
forget winning two fur coats, he’d settle for a moan. When it’s over and as usual he’s the only one sweating and out of breath he asks, “Do you take your other men in your mouth?” He has to ask.
Al lights a cigar. “Does your wife take you in her mouth?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact she does.” Or used to. Probably still would, it occurs to him.
Al folds one arm behind his head. In the gloom his orange body hair holds its colour like a horizon. He looks at Gordon and says, “You know what I like about you?”
“No.” Hopelessly.
“Guess.”
Gordon sighs. “I’m your drill master.” Every time they meet, at some point, he has to quiz Al on encyclopedia entries up to D. The encyclopedias are neatly stacked beside the chesterfield, the top one lying open across the others, and before they pulled the chesterfield out, when the light was on, Gordon thought he was hallucinating because there at the top of the page was his own name—“Gordon”—and right next to that, on the top of the previous page—“Gonorrhoea.”
“Yep,” Al concedes. He exhales in little puffs. “But I’m thinking about something else.”
“What?”
“Go on, guess.”
Gordon fingers his bony midriff. “I can’t imagine,” he says. He envisions his rib cage on a sand dune, picked clean.
“I like how you wear your glasses the whole time,” Al says.
Gordon thinks about that. Snorts.
“I mean it,” Al says, sounding so innocent and sincere that love instantly crams Gordon’s chest. He cups the boy’s groin, his cool testicles. He moves down his body and sucks one testicle into his mouth.
“Not now,” Al says, pushing at Gordon’s head.
A whole harvest is still in Gordon’s heart. He raises himself
up on one elbow. “I lied about that other guy,” he confesses. “You’re the first guy I’ve ever… I’ve ever known … like this.”
Al reaches for the whisky bottle. “Shoot, you think I haven’t figured that one out?”
Gordon eases himself back down on the bed. Was he that inept, that desperate? Is he still? Al gets up and goes down the hall, and Gordon is left in the familiar, sweltering chrysalis of his mortification. He can hardly breathe. He reaches over to extinguish Al’s cigar as the toilet flushes, and in the flushing are the orgasmic moans and cries of every one of Al’s lovers, the seven or eight hundred Al estimates he’s had—“not including hand jobs.” Just as the voices lapse away, Al turns the shower on and here they come again. Olive-skinned Mario, Gentle George, all the Bills, Pete the poet, the bull-cocked Roger and, warbling above the rest, Tyrone the Irish sergeant major who sang “Mother Machree” while performing anal sex. According to Al the whole U.S. army was queer and horny. “You ought to have signed up,” he said, and then, impatiently, “Yeah, sure,” when Gordon reminded him that he did sign up, here in Canada, but was declared unfit because he was discovered to have a heart murmur. “You win the hundred-yard dash one day,” Al said, “and the next day there’s a war and, well what do you know about that? You’ve got a bum ticker.”
“I never won a hundred-yard dash,” Gordon said.
By now it’s January. The affair has been going on for two months, two nights a week. Incredibly, Doris seems to have no idea. Who’d have thought she’d turn out to be so gullible? Except that when Gordon thinks about it, the lies are hers, not his. Through some twisted coincidence what he is doing and what she wants to believe he is doing dictate that he arrive home drunk and stinking of cigar smoke.
She wants to believe that he’s making an effort at last to climb the industry ladder. She thinks he’s a genius who is rotting in oblivion because he’s too unsociable, too reserved,
and now that he’s out late she has decided that, as a result of a pep talk she gave him on his fortieth birthday back in October, he is spending his time at the roof bar of the Park Plaza Hotel where all the important writers, editors and journalists go after work to knock back drinks and talk shop. He reels into the bedroom at midnight, and just by agreeing with her he has his alibi. What a set-up. She’s so tickled that she gives him extra pocket money for his next night out.
“You don’t want to get a reputation as a cheapskate,” she says in her thrilled voice, taking out of her change purse a ten-dollar bill that has been folded—for safekeeping?—opening the bill as he imagines his daughters going barefoot, pressing it into his palm and saying things like, “Go on, Sweetie, let your hair down” and “Do what you have to do,” so that he sometimes finds himself gazing into her busy little eyes and wondering if he has underestimated her. If she knows, and either she’s a saint or the guy in the sandwich board has said, “Humour the sucker until I get a few more pictures.”
Part of him wants her to know. Craves her permission, or just to come clean. “Act normal,” he has to keep warning himself. Meaning, “Act how you used to act before you screwed Al Yothers and for the first time in your life felt normal.” Although the feeling of normalcy lasts only
while
he is screwing Al. Those fifteen or so minutes.
The rest of the time he feels unhinged.
Even when he’s happy. Because he knows that his happiness is not only temporary, it’s groundless. Does Al love him? That’s a laugh. And yet like a man loved madly he examines his naked body in the bathroom mirror, and the words “lean” and “sinewy” no longer have an implausible ring. He masturbates in the shower, and his erection should be bronzed. He plays his new “Mister Sandman” forty-five and belts out the line “And lots of wavy hair like Liberace!” During his lunch hour one day,
at a thrift shop, he splurges on a giant plum-coloured silk scarf and removes his tie and puts the scarf on in the presence of the beaming old queen who owns the place (suddenly he is seeing queers by the herd), and as the queen slaps his hands away and fussily arranges the scarf himself, working it like origami until it is a tiered and bulging cravat, he is as moved as if he were being decorated for valour on the field of battle.
He wears the scarf less than a block before tearing it off, almost hanging himself to get free of it. His mood can turn on a dime. All it takes is for an oncoming pedestrian to give him a wide berth and he’s a pervert. He stuffs the scarf in his pocket and looks up and down the street for a coffee shop or restaurant where there might be a washroom.
In this mood, washrooms are where he lives. He masturbates non-stop, but his erection repels him. It should be shot. He studies his lips in mirrors for syphilis sores, he presses under his ears for swollen glands. “I’m as clean as a whistle,” Al is always saying. And, “Ever heard of penicillin?” But in this mood Gordon believes himself to be a venereal sewer. He weeps for his daughters, because he’s already dead—or ruined and behind bars—so that makes them orphans. “Marcy is losing weight,” he tells Doris. “She’s withering away!” he protests, staggered by Doris’s unconcern. At the supper table he looks at Sonja’s good-natured, vacant face and later says to Doris, “I love her, but I’m telling you I don’t detect an active mind there.” Then he goes and sits on the toilet, masturbating and weeping for his ruined life, his stupid child.
There’s a kind of grisly peace in feeling so low, so depraved, at least when it comes to him and Al. Delete any decency and with it goes the real danger—the romantic dream of the two of them being together always. What you have left is two nights a week, cut and dried, wherein two gigantic queers “do what they have to do” and then go their own ways.
Except that that’s nothing like how it is, not when they’re actually having sex. They are a pair of gods then. They precipitate lightning and sirens. Beds collapse under them. “Do you know who I am?” Al whispers. “Yours,” he whispers. “Daddy, I’m Yours,” and Gordon thinks “I was made for this,” wondering how, when they’re
not
having sex, he can forget the immense relief. Screwing Al is the breakthrough cure. It’s worship. Al is as quiet as a church. He, Gordon, is the wild one. “If Doris could only see me now,” he can’t help thinking.
Here is how the affair ends. With Al banging the whisky bottle on the armrest of the pull-out bed and saying, “Time’s up.”
Gordon bolts awake. “What—“ he says, terrified.
Al is standing beside the bed. He’s wearing a white shirt.
“What’s going on?” Gordon says.
“You gotta skedaddle.”
“What time is it?” Where are his glasses? He swims his hands over the sheets.
“Five to ten.” This muttered into his wrist as he applies a cufflink.
“Is that all?” Gordon finds his glasses and puts them on, then reaches for his boxer shorts on the floor and pulls them up before coming to his feet. He has an erection, and when Al isn’t interested in sex he finds Gordon’s erections irritating. “What’s going on?” he asks again.
“I want you to beat it,” Al says, walking away. “That’s all.”
“Are you expecting company?”
No answer.
“I see,” Gordon says.
Silence.
“None of my damn business,” Gordon says. Hearing his guttered voice, he has a feeling he has said this before in an apartment where there was a hammer on the windowsill.