Mr. Bones (29 page)

One night we went to dinner at Jay and Marina's. I sat next to Jay. It was quite a large party, but after the other guests left, Jay kept filling my glass. He was very solicitous and complimentary. I must have had a lot to drink because after a while I realized that I was sitting alone with Jay. We were talking about Germany, and children, and the weather, and then he put his arm around me.

“Please don't,” I said. “What if Byron sees us?”

Jay laughed. “Where do you think he is?”

I had no idea. I didn't know what to say.

“He's upstairs with Marina!”

In my drunken state it took me almost a full minute to work this out. Byron was with Marina, therefore it was permissible for me to go with Jay, and somehow Byron's job depended on my agreeing to this.

But I sat there coldly until Byron appeared. “Let's go.”

“They're swingers,” Byron said, as though that excused his behavior. Some months later, after Byron had been demoted for a petty infraction, I had a brief affair with the nineteen-year-old son of some embassy friends. Byron and I have been utterly faithful since.

 

Split-up Revelation

 

After my wife and I split up, when we had nothing to lose by being truthful, she told me that she had suspected that I had a mistress, because I no longer made love to her with any passion or desire. And what convinced her was that I was so kind to her, as though because I was guilty of infidelity I was trying to cover it up with displays of kindness. I just smiled.

“Were you ever unfaithful to me?” I asked.

She shrugged and said that when she was sure I was being unfaithful, she went one night to a bar alone. Naturally a man came over to her and asked her if she wanted a drink. They talked awhile. She did not go home with him, but she agreed to meet him again. That was the night they made love. “He was very rough with me,” she said somewhat dreamily. He tied her to a bed, forced her to perform several extreme sexual acts, and then spanked her.

We had never done anything like this. Her describing it (in more detail than I expected) aroused me.

I said, “He sounds like an animal.”

She said, “He knew how to please a woman.”

I thought, What? And there was more, she said. He had a girlfriend. He made no secret of her. Sometimes they went out together, my wife, the man, his girlfriend. One night while drinking at his apartment, the man demanded that my wife and his girlfriend make love while he watched. My wife got into bed with the woman.

“What did you do?” I said.

“We cuddled. What women do.”

“And then what did the man do?” The anguish in my voice terrified me.

She smiled but wouldn't tell me any more. “It was a couple of years ago. You had your own girlfriend. It was retaliatory.”

But it wasn't. I had no girlfriend. My feeling had been that my wife had lost interest in sex. How I longed to be that man. And my wife—now my ex-wife: I had never believed this respectable schoolteacher capable of such debauchery.

 

My Lover's Friends

 

I had arranged to meet Susan on a particular evening. She was a successful advertising executive, highly intelligent and yet easygoing. “I've been too busy to get married,” she said. But she seemed perfect to me. We had been going out for a few months and she gave me to understand that tonight would be special—in fact, that she was going to let me stay the night. Sex at last. And not only that, but the sex would be passionate. She wasn't subtle: she conveyed this to me by various expressions, by touching me, the look in her eyes, the tone of her voice—the wonderful anticipation of lovers.

“Let's meet at my conference and we can go on from there.”

This was, she said, a weekly meeting at a colleague's house. I said, “Fine.” I went to the house at the appointed time. The conference was all women, six of them. They were business types. At first they were polite to me, and then I could see that they disagreed with everything I said. It was just before a state election. They supported the most right-wing candidate. We talked about capital punishment. They were in favor of it—electrocution. “All murderers are men,” one said. To change the subject I asked what they did for work. “I'm involved with start-ups.” “I design websites.” “I do marketing.” Susan just smiled and mentioned an advertising campaign she was doing on behalf of a man. “People talk about his wealth, but he earns every bit of it.” They talked about money, venture capitalism, interest rates.

On the way home, Susan and I got into an argument about her friends. I hated them. She defended them. But at her house, when she said, “Coming in?” I said no, made an excuse, and never saw her again.

 

My Graduate Student

 

I am sixty-two and know I look my age, but I am also the head of a well-respected department of political science at a famous university. I brought some of my foreign students to Washington, D.C., for a few days, to meet lobbyists, senators, and bureaucrats; to give these young people a notion of the political process firsthand; and to do some sightseeing. One of the students, Klara, was Polish, about twenty-four, rather small, with the classic Slavic look: clear skin, good cheekbones, a pouty mouth, and a slyness in her blue eyes. She stayed near me throughout the trip, was always friendly and respectful, but spoke to me only when no one else was around. She had read my work, she said; she was an admirer.

We were alone one of those days, walking along the Mall after visiting the Washington Monument. She said, “What if I told you I wanted to get you into my room and—”

And with a twinkle in her eye she described in detail one of the most extraordinary perversions I had ever heard. She was quite matter-of-fact, yet it was something altogether new to me and almost unimaginable.

This shocked me, but I managed not to show it. All I could say in reply (my mouth very dry) was “I suppose I'd ask you why you wanted to do this.”

She said very seriously, “I want to do something to you that no woman has ever done to you before.”

“Maybe we can talk about it,” I said. Back at the hotel later that evening, I called her room. She said, “Are you ready?”

Of course we didn't do exactly what she had suggested, but we approximated it. From the moment I entered her room I was in her power. I long to relive that night, but what she did was so extreme I cannot imagine even mentioning it to any other woman, much less repeat the act. She was a virgin. She remained a virgin, but I think I lost my virginity that night.

 

Twenty-Year-Olds

 

In a way, I have been preparing myself for this event, this feeling, for years. As a painter, I know many older painters, sculptors, photographers—say, artists in my position. Something happened in the late 1950s and early '60s. They met younger women, always the same sort of woman. Maybe I'm wrong, but I know of very few exceptions.

This woman was in her twenties. A woman of twenty doesn't know if she has a place in the world, something about her age or our age. What will happen to her? Will she find a job? Will she find a husband? Will she ever have a child? Where does she belong?

She has no idea where she is going. She is anxious. She needs someone to intervene.

Here's where the artist comes in. A painter or a photographer at sixty has either made it or stopped trying. If he has made it, he looks powerful—more than powerful, as indestructible as his art. But one thing he does not have: his youth. And he certainly questions the diminishing of his virility, what the Dutch call “the shutting of the door.”

He meets a twenty-year-old and is immediately smitten. She is so relieved to be rescued, like someone plucked from a deep sea, she believes she is in love with her rescuer. Not long after they meet, she is secure and happy, having been brought to safety, on shore at last.

Perhaps she has his baby, perhaps he leaves his wife, perhaps they live together and he paints her. Never mind, no matter—it is always a disaster. She leaves him. She has a life. He is destroyed by this love. And even if you know in advance what the consequences will be, you still pursue her, as I did. Her name was Lucy, and I was wrecked.

 

The Dancer

 

Years ago, I had been a waiter in Provincetown. My life changed when I met Ken and we moved to the far north of Vermont. People in the village accepted us as a gay couple. Twenty happy years passed. Ken died suddenly of heart failure. I spent two years being lonely. Then I decided to go back to Provincetown, just to see.

Because of complications, I spent only a few days there. The town had changed a lot. Rich gays had put up big houses. Many more people, but they looked nice, even outrageous in a nice way. They liked showing off. I heard one man say approvingly, “Look, billions of queens.” The butch gays had muscles. The lesbians looked pretty to me. I was happy, but those years in Vermont made me an unsocial type. I am shy in large groups. And I don't drink alcohol.

“I'll have a soda water with lemon,” I said at the Atlantic House. The upstairs bar was full of butch gays in cowboy outfits drinking beer out of the bottle. One was chanting, “Fudge till Tuesday!”—whatever that meant.

There was dancing in the downstairs bar. I just watched. One man on the floor was alone. He wore a fireman's helmet and yellow rubber fireman's trousers and rubber boots, but other than that he was naked. The rubber trousers were held up by suspenders. This man fascinated me. I had never seen anyone like him in my life. He danced so energetically he was covered in sweat. I loved watching him.

He must have noticed me. When the music stopped he came over to the bar. I was very worried, frightened that he'd talk to me, because I didn't know what to say. He looked me up and down and smiled. He said, “Very nice.”

That's all. That was the moment. Ever since, I have thought about him constantly, especially when life is hard for me or I'm lonely. I think of him, how he was dressed, what he said to me, and I am happy.

 

My Old Flame

 

I was trying to think of a way of breaking up with my girlfriend, Paula, who was uncommunicative, always saying, “I'm not verbal like you.” In spite of this, she often corrected me. When I referred to a woman's sex, she said, “You mean gender.” And she sometimes talked about her “goals.” I am suggesting that she could be rather irritating. Or was it me? She was gentle and very kind to me and good company in a quiet, listening-type way. She was passive, and I think I was looking for someone to take the initiative. She liked torch songs—that's what she called certain love songs.

To break the news to her gently, I took her to an expensive club where a black woman sang these love songs. I thought I would offer Paula a good time, an expensive meal, the whole business, and later it would be easier for me to say, “We're not really suited to each other.”

She loved the club. She loved the music. She sat transfixed, drank a little more than usual, and said that it was one of the most pleasant nights of her life. Back at her apartment, she interrupted me before I could tell her what was on my mind. She said, “Let's make love.”

Not only was that unusual in this normally passive woman, but while we were making love, she said, “Can I tell you a secret?”

I must have said something. I was dazed. I hadn't planned to be making love, but the evening had swept us up.

“I wanted to go home with her,” she said.

That was Paula's secret, spoken in the darkness of her bedroom. I was overwhelmed. It became our secret. We talked about it all the time. I could not leave her. In the end she left me, and I was heartbroken.

 

First Love

 

Everyone was pretty much the same at my junior college, but after I dropped out to get a job, and started night school, everyone seemed different: it was the real world, much harder for me and much more complex. I was living with my meek old grandmother in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. I felt like such a failure—working in an art supply store, living with my grandmother, going to night school. I was eighteen years old, the youngest student in the class. One man was over sixty. Many were quite old, one or two were middle-aged men, some older women, some housewives. “I deliver bakery goods,” the man sitting next to me said. “I guess I eat them,” the woman in front of him said. The class was Economics for Small Businesses. Everyone was aiming to start their own business, but somehow I knew we were all doomed to failure.

The woman who had said “I guess I eat them” saw me standing at the bus stop and offered me a ride home. This happened a few times, until one night she stopped at a house and said, “I live here. Want to come in?”

The way she screamed at her child, who was upstairs, scared me and made me obedient. She put the light out, unbuttoned my shirt, and said, “Let me, let me.” It was the first sex of my life. It was heaven. Night school was three times a week—I couldn't wait to go. After every class she drove me to her house and we made love. And after a few weeks she met me outside the art supply store. I saw her sitting in her car and I was joyous.

Some days I had errands to run and couldn't see her, but even so, she stalked me and asked me to come with her. “I can't, I can't,” I'd say, though I wanted to. Another day Grandma was sick and I had to stay home. The woman came to Grandma's house and banged on the door and begged to see me. Although she was sick, Grandma yelled at her, while I hid. Grandma won, the woman went away, and Grandma said, “No more night school for you.” So I went to New York, where I became successful in real estate. That was my first love, and I suspect hers, too.

 

Episode in Bangkok

 

As a sculptor and welder of large metal pieces I was always invited to the unveilings, especially when a big company was involved as the sponsor or patron. My Bangkok gallery sold one of my pieces to a bank for its courtyard's inaugural, and I flew there for the opening. My translator was a lovely young woman, very slender and pale. Hardworking and sleep-deprived, she was attractive to me: her weary fortitude made her seem waif-like and aroused me. Yet she was strong—stronger than me. I tended to fade in the evening while she was still alert. She was always early at the hotel in the morning to pick me up. She said, “Call me Pom. My real name too hard.”