Searches & Seizures (29 page)

And he lay like that for half an hour, catching his breath, feeling his nerves coalesce, consolidating once more as a man, his hard-on declining, his flesh turning back into flesh, the pleasure lifting slow as fever. And thinking. So. I’m a sodomite. But not just any ordinary sodomite with a taste for sheep or a thing for cows, some carnivore’s harmless extension of appetite that drives him to sleep with what he eats. No. I’m kinky for bears.

And then, when he was ready, when at last he could once more feel his injured hand, he pushed himself up on his elbows and looked around. The bear was gone, though he thought he saw its shape reclined beside a tree. He stood up and looked down and examined himself. When he put his clothes back on, they hung on him like flayed skin and he was conscious of vague withdrawal symptoms in his nuts. He moved into the moonlight. His penis looked as if it had been dipped in blood. Had it still been erect the blood might perhaps have gone unnoticed, a faint flush; no longer distended, it seemed horrid, wet, thick as paint. He cupped his hand beneath himself and caught one drop in his palm. He shook his head. “My God,” he said, “I haven’t just screwed a bear, I’ve fucked a virgin!”

Now his old honor came back to chide him. He thought of Jane dying in the castle, of the wolf mask binding her eyes like a dark handkerchief on the vision of a condemned prisoner, of it binding his own and of the tan beard across his face like a robber’s bandanna. Ashenden shuddered. But perhaps it was not contagious unless from love and honor’s self-inflicted homeopathy. Surely he would not
have
to die with her. All he had to do was tell her that he had failed the test, that he had not met her conditions. Then he knew that he would never tell her this, that he would tell her nothing, that he would not even see her, that tomorrow—today, in an hour or so when the sun was up—he would have Plympton’s man take him to the station, that he would board a train, go to London, rest there for a day or two, take in a show, perhaps go to the zoo, book passage to someplace far, someplace wild, further and wilder than he had ever been, look it over, get its feel, with an idea of maybe settling down one day. He’d better get started. He had to change.

He remembered that he was still exposed and thought to cover himself lest someone see him, but first he’d better wipe the blood off his penis. There was a fresh handkerchief in his pocket, and he took it out, unfolded it and strolled over to the pond. He dipped the handkerchief in the water and rubbed himself briskly, his organ suddenly tingling with a new surge of pleasure, but a pleasure mitigated by twinges of pain. There was soreness, a bruise. He placed the handkerchief back in his pocket and handled himself lightly, as one goes over a tire to find a puncture. There was a small cut on the underside of his penis that he must have acquired from the bear. Then the blood could have been mine, he thought. Maybe
I
was the virgin. Maybe
I
was. It was good news. Though he was a little sad.
Post-coitum tristesse,
he thought. It’ll pass.

He started back through art to the house, but first he looked over his shoulder for a last glimpse of the sleeping bear. And he thought again of how grand it had been, and wondered if it was possible that something might come of it. And seeing ahead, speculating about the generations that would follow his own, he thought, Air. Water, he thought. Fire, Earth, he thought…And
honey.

The Condominium

“N
O DREAM,” he would write, “not a vision, not even a reverie. No fancy nor aspiration either. No crummy goal nor lousy aim. Something harder, acknowledged. More real than any of these. Something two-in-the-bush realer than any bird. Right up there with death and taxes.

“A place to live, to be. Out of what vortical history came spinning this notion of a second skin? From what incipit, fundamental gene of nakedness came, laboring like a lung, insistent as the logical sequences of a heartbeat, the body’s syllogisms, this demand for rind and integument and pelt? (Small wonder our daddies were tailors, needlers and threaders, or that our mothers threw up an archaeology on the dining room table, first the wood, varnished and glossed and waxed, then thick baize pads, next a linoleum, then a plain cloth and then a crocheted, a sheet of plastic over all with a bowl of fruit, a dish of candy, a vase of flowers, and none of this for protection and even less for ornament, but just out of dedication to weight as a principle, a tropism in the bones for mass and hide.) Out of what frightful trauma of exclusion arose this need, what base expulsion from what cave during which incredible spell of rotten weather?

“And never land, never real estate, the land grant unheard of, unimagined and unnecessary (what could you do with land?), even the notion of a ‘promised land’ merely religion, poetry. No. No great Mosaic East India Company tracts in the background, no primogenitive tradition of estates, properties, patents and dominions. Not land, not dirt, only what land and dirt threw up, its lumbers and sands and clays and ores and stones—its ingredients, like a recipe for cement.”

“His father,” he would write, “met his mother at ‘camp.’ There were tents but this may have been before tents. Somewhere there was a photograph of young men in bedrolls, his father and his shrouded pals like disaster victims laid out in a line in the sun. And the girls—Floradora, Gibson, Bloomer, whatever the Twenties term for their type may have been—with already about them a sepia hunt of nostalgia puffing their knickers, thickening their socks, bagging their sweaters, complicating their curls. Weekend fraternities—‘The River Rats,’ ‘The Crusoe Club,’ ‘The Peninsula Club’—and sororities—‘The Blueschasers,’ ‘The Flappers,’ ‘The Go-to-Hell-God-Damnits’—of the white-collar working class down to New Jersey on the train from New York, the city. He had spent more than half his summers there, but had no fixed memory of the place because it was always changing. When he was a boy it was like living on a sound stage, some studio town going up before his eyes. He watched the carpenters, the Phil-Gas, the diggers of septic tanks, all the electricians, all the Dugan’s and Breyer’s Ice Cream and Borden’s Milk and Nehi Soda people opening up routes, signing up customers, civilizing this wilderness as ever any missionaries or conquistadors civilized theirs. He saw electricity come in, city water, mail (the rural delivery boxes like the tunnels for toy trains,
PATERSON MORNING CALL
or
BERGEN MESSENGER
stenciled on the tin tunnels like names for the trains).

“So the tents came down (never having actually seen the tents, he nevertheless sensed them, or rather their absence, knowing that he walked not through fields and cleared woods but along lots and parcels, and that antecedent to these there would have to have been sites) and the bungalows went up, each summer some new section of the colony developed, the new bungalows put up in pairs or fours or half-dozens, as though speculators and contractors were incapable of dealing in anything but even numbers, their insistence on the careful geometric arrangements like architecture’s on some principle of equilibrium, a vaguely military hedging against the failure of their enterprise. Only his and a few of the other bungalows owned, or anyway mortgaged, not rented, by his parents and a handful of collateral old-timers, ‘pioneers’—some of them relatives, all of them friends—as they styled themselves, had been put up independently. (And didn’t he feel proud, aristocratic even, with the distinction imposed by ownership?)

“The bungalows went up and he went to meet the Friday night trains on the hill that brought the droves of what were still called campers for their weekend in the country. Saw with the gradual development the appearance of the fabulous ‘extras’—handball courts, an entire ball field with wooden bases, two or three tennis courts and, one summer (it had gone up over the winter) an actual outdoor roller-skating rink, which later, when the bungalows were finally purchased, the developers would fail to maintain so that he would see it literally reclaimed, the shuffleboard court inset within the oval rink the first to go, the painted numbers fading, fading, gone like a dissolve in films, then weeds springing up irresistibly through cracks in the cement that had not been there the year before and the once smooth white concrete overrun with sudden wolf-man growths and sproutings, the rink itself collapsing piecemeal, drowning in ivies, nettles, briars and poisonous-looking trees. Eventually not a handball court was left standing, not a tennis court, nor a single dock for canoes, the rollers rusted, jammed, as if the renters, now owners themselves, had no interest in the out-of-doors at all, had repudiated it, as if life were meant to be lived inside and the games they once played as bachelor boys and bachelor girls—‘The Good Sports,’ ‘The Merry Maidens’—were over, literally, the scores frozen, more final than Olympic records. (Though he and his cousins and friends still used the courts, their skills damaged by the disrepair.)

“But—this was the period of transition before the renters became owners—the developers themselves were now the aristocracy. Men like Klein and Charney, rarely seen and imbued with power and magic like emperors of Japan, not just through money or force (he’d seen Charney, an old, crippled millionaire driven in a limousine by a black man who smoked cigars, parked in front of his eight bungalows to collect the rents shyly offered up to him through the barely opened window of his car) but through ownership itself: men with houses, power to evict. That many of the bungalows stood vacant during the war didn’t detract from this power but reinforced it, as though men with empty houses were even more powerful than men with full ones. (Klein he’d also seen, a fat man like the Captain in the Katzenjammer Kids, walrus mustache and all, who always wore a khaki shirt.)”

(“And what, incidentally,” he would write in the margin, “was all this crap? This stroll down memory lane? I didn’t care a fart for my childhood, was more moved by someone else’s—anyone’s. Why, I was the kid who went to bed early, whose mother had me in the sack at seven o’clock, even in summer, whom daylight saving failed to save, imposing on me instead with its bright eight-thirties a sense—some of this was wartime, remember—of having worked night shifts, swing shifts, putting him—me—at odds, possibly forever, with the light.”)

“Later, the war over now, the bungalows were winterized. Roofs came down and insulation tucked into them. Porches were enclosed, rooms added on, showers moved inside, money spent. There were almost no bachelors left, though even when they were still around he had already begun to forget who went with whom, seeing the following summer what were still familiar faces in now unfamiliar conjunctions (realizing only later what had happened—winter with its cozy betrayals—and just as light stood for something hostile, so cold began to seem mysterious). Only his parents’ place, one of the first to go up, remained untouched, bungalows his had once dwarfed dwarfing his, bursting their boundaries, inching forward toward the road in a sort of architectural horse race, assuming complicated shapes, the original shell disappearing, swallowed in second and even third growth. Yet no one lived there in winter, or only a handful. The rest were small-time Kleins and Charneys themselves now, landlords casting their nets to catch the overflow from Pompton Lakes (where oddly violent industries had begun to spring up—a munitions factory, a quarry, a training camp for professional boxers, roadhouses that were said to be gambling casinos) but landing instead vague gypsy types, self-proclaimed migrants following nameless crops in unmarked seasons, New Jersey hillbillies with Italian names. As though—he understood what was going on: men of forty plotting their retirements twenty-five years hence where they had been thirty—being a landlord was a necessary first step in becoming a homeowner, as a knowledge of the names of the presidents and their incumbencies was a necessary first step in becoming a citizen. A gradual breaking-in period, in the three summer months they occupied the bungalows themselves learning the bugs of furnace and washing machine and garbage disposal before one dared live amongst such things oneself for any extended period. Meanwhile, in winter, they continued to live in apartments, marking time, getting down payments together, even moving from apartment to apartment as though this too were good practice.

“His parents stopped going in the summer, or went for only a couple of weeks every third or fourth year. The building had stopped entirely. Now, in its hodgepodge of composition roofs and variously synthetic fronts—imitation brick, tile, aluminum siding—it looked like a tub of mixed fonts waiting to be melted down. It was finished. It was awful. High, dangerous grasses grew in the infield, the outfield was a no man’s land, the river too low to swim in, the once presentable Ramapo Mountains behind them gone bald from too much blasting in the quarry. The bungalows, now houses of a sort, were locked into a permanent shabbiness which no paint or extravagance of metal awning could disguise.”

“Meanwhile,” he would write later in his preliminary notes, “in the early Sixties, a word went out:
CONDOMINIUM.

“At first one thought it was a metal alloy, or perhaps a new element. Maybe it was used to fashion industrial diamonds. There were those who thought it had to do with big business, international stuff—combines, cartels. Others thought it was a sort of prophylactic. It was strange that the very people who would later become most intimate with the term should at first have had so vague a notion of what it meant. Only after doctors tell him does the patient know the name of his disease. Condominium. (Kon´-d
-min´-ē-
m.)