Skinned Alive (7 page)

In the past, when Luke had paid these calls on relatives in nursing homes he’d felt he was on a field trip to some new and strange kind of slum, but today there was no distance between him and this woman. In a month or a week he could be as blind, less cogent, whiter.

He went for a walk with Beth through the big park the town of Henderson had recently laid out, a good fifty acres of jogging
paths, tennis courts, a sports arena, a playground and just open fields gone to weeds and wildflowers. On the way they passed a swimming pool that had been there over twenty years ago, that time Luke had served as Beth’s ring-bearer. Now the pool was filled, clean, sparkling, but for some reason without a single swimmer, an unheeded invitation. “Didn’t they used to have a big slide that curved halfway down and that was kept slick with water always pouring down it?” Luke asked.

“Now I believe you are one hundred percent correct,” Beth said with the slightly prissy agreeableness of southern ladies. “What a wonderful memory you have!” She’d been trained to find fascinating even the most banal remarks if a man made them. Luke wasn’t used to receiving all the respect due his gender and kept looking for a mote of mockery in Beth’s eye, but it wasn’t there. Or perhaps she had mockery as much under control as grief or desire.

They walked at the vigorous pace Beth set and went along the cindered jogging path under the big mesquite trees; their tiny leaves, immobile, set lacy shadows on the ground.

That sparkling pool, painted an inviting blue-green, and the memory of the flowing water slide and the smell of chlorine kept coming to mind. He’d played for hours and hours during an endless, cloudless summer day. Play had been rare enough for him, who’d always had early-morning newspaper-delivery jobs, afternoon hardware jobs, weekend lawn-mowing jobs, summer caddying jobs as well as the chores around the house and the hours and hours of homework, those hours his family had ridiculed and tried to put a stop to. But he’d persisted and won. He’d won.

When he and Beth reached the end of the park, they turned to the left, mounted a slight hill and saw a parked pickup truck under a tree. Two teenage boys with red caps were sitting inside and a third was standing unsteadily on the back of the truck, shirtless, jeans down, taking a leak. “Oh, my goodness,”
Beth said, “just don’t look at them, Luke, and let’s keep on walking.”

The guys were laughing at Luke and Beth, playing loud music, probably drunk, and of course Luke looked. The guy taking a leak was methodically spraying a dark brown circle in the pale dust. He was a redhead, freckled, tall, skinny, and his long body was hairless except where tufted blond. He looked like a streak of summer lightning.

“But they’re not doing any harm,” Luke said with a smile.

“You think not?” Beth spat out. “Some folks here might think—!” But she interrupted herself, mastered herself, smiled her big missionary smile.

Luke felt rage go coursing through his tired body and tears—what sort of tears?—sting his eyes.

Tears of humiliation: he was offended that a virus had been permitted to win an argument. He’d been the one to learn, to leave home, break free. He’d cast aside all the old sins, lived freely—but soon Beth could imagine he was having to pay for his follies with his life. It offended him that he would be exposed to her self-righteousness.

Aunt Olna invited them out to a good steak dinner in a fast-food place near the new shopping mall. The girls ordered medium-size T-bones and Luke went for a big one. But then he suffered a terrifying attack of diarrhea halfway through his meal and had to spend a sweaty, bowel-scorching thirty minutes in the toilet, listening to the piped-in music and the scrapings and flushings of other men. Aunt Olna appeared fussed when he finally returned to the table, his shirt drenched and his face pale, until he explained to her he’d caught a nasty bug drinking the polluted Paris water. Then she relaxed and smiled, reassured.

When they left the restaurant Olna told the young woman cashier, “My guests tonight have come here all the way from Paris, France.”

He berated himself for having lapsed from his regime of healthy food, frequent naps, jogging and aerobics, no stress. He was stifling from frustration and anger. When they returned to Olna’s it was already dark, but Luke insisted he was going jogging. Olna and Beth didn’t offer the slightest objection and he realized that in their eyes he was no longer a boy but a man, a lawgiver. Or maybe they were just indifferent. People could accept anything as long as they weren’t directly affected.

He ran through the streets over the railroad tracks, past Olna’s new Baptist church, down dark streets past houses built on GI loans just after the war for six or seven thousand dollars. Their screened-in porches were dimly lit by yellow, mosquito-repellent bulbs. He smelled something improbably rich and spicy, then remembered Olna had told him people were taking in well-behaved, industrious Vietnamese lodgers studying at the local college—their only fault, apparently, being that they cooked up smelly food at all hours.

The Vietnamese were the only change in this town during the last twenty-five years. Otherwise it was the same houses, the same lawns, the same people playing Ping-Pong in their garages, voices ricocheting off the cement, the same leashless dogs running out to inspect him, then walking dully away.

There was the big house where Beth had married Greg so many years ago in the backyard among her mother’s bushes of huge yellow roses. And there—he could feel his bowels turning over, his breath tightening, his body exuding cold sweat—there was the house where, when he was fifteen, Luke had met a handsome young man, a doctor’s son, five years older and five hundred times richer, a man with black hair on his pale knuckles, a thin nose and blue eyes, a gentle man Luke would never have picked for sex but whom he’d felt he could love, someone he’d always meant to look up again: the front doorbell glowed softly, lit from within. The house was white
clapboard with green shutters, which appeared nearly black in the dim streetlight.

On and on he ran, past the cow palace where he’d watched a rodeo as a kid. Now he was entering the same park where he and Beth had walked today. He could feel his energy going, his legs so weak he could imagine losing control over them and turning an ankle or falling. He knew how quickly a life could be reduced. He dreaded becoming critically ill here in Texas; he didn’t want to give his family the satisfaction.

He ran past the unlit swimming pool and again he remembered that one wonderful day of fun and leisure so many years ago. On that single day he’d felt like a normal kid. He’d even struck up a friendship with another boy and they’d gone down the water slide a hundred times, one behind the other, tobogganing.

Now he was thudding heavily past the spotlit tennis court. No one was playing, it was too hot and still, but two girls in white shorts were sitting on folding chairs at the far end, talking. Then he was on the gravel path under low, overhanging trees. The crickets chanted slower than his pulse and from time to time seemed to skip a beat. He passed a girl walking her dog and he gasped, “Howdy,” and she smiled. The smell of honeysuckle was so strong and he thought he’d never really gotten the guys he’d wanted, the big high school jocks, the blonds with loud tenor voices, beer breath, cruel smiles, lean hips, steady, insolent eyes, the guys impossible to befriend if you weren’t exactly like them. He thought that with so many millions of people in the world the odds should have been that at least one guy like that would have gone for him, but things hadn’t turned out that way. Of course, even when you had someone, what did you have?

But then what did anyone ever have—the impermanence of sexual possession was a better school than most for the way life would flow through your hands.

In the distance, through the mesquite trees, he could see the lights of occasional cars nosing the dark. Then he remembered that right around here the redhead had pissed a brown circle and Luke looked for traces of that stain under the tree. He even touched the dust, feeling for moisture. He wondered if just entertaining the outrageous thought weren’t sufficient for his purposes, but, no, he preferred the ceremony of doing something actual.

He found the spot—or thought he did—and touched the dirt to his lips. He started running again, chewing the grit as though it might help him to recuperate his past if not his health. The transfusion of wet dirt even gave him a new burst of energy.

I first saw him at a reading in Paris. An American writer, whom everyone had supposed dead, had come to France to launch a new translation of his classic book, originally published twenty-five years earlier. The young man in the crowd who caught my eye had short red-blond hair and broad shoulders (bodyguard broad, commando broad) and an unsmiling gravity. When he spoke English, he was very serious; when he spoke French, he looked amused.

He was seated on the other side of the semicircle surrounding the author, who was slowly, sweetly, suicidally disappointing the young members of his audience. They had come expecting to meet Satan, for hadn’t he summoned up in his pages a brutish vision of gang rape in burned-out lots, of drug betrayals and teenage murders? But what they were meeting now was a reformed drunk given to optimism, offering us brief recipes for recovery and serenity—not at all what the spiky-haired kids had had in mind.

I was charmed by the writer’s hearty laugh and pleased that he’d been able to trade in his large bacchanalian genius for a bit of happiness. But his new writings were painful to listen to and my eyes wandered restlessly over the bookshelves. I was searching out interesting new titles, saluting familiar ones, reproaching a few.

And then I had the young man to look at. He had on black trousers full in the calf and narrow in the thighs, his compact waist cinched in by a thick black belt and a gold buckle. His torso was concealed by an extremely ample, long-sleeved black shirt, but despite its fullness I could still see the broad, powerful chest, the massive shoulders and biceps—the body of a professional killer. His neck was thick, like cambered marble.

My French friend Hélène nudged me and whispered, “There’s one for you.” Maybe she said that later, during the discussion period after the young man had asked a question that revealed his complete familiarity with the text. He had a tenor voice I was sure that he’d worked to lower or perhaps his voice sounded strangled because he was just shy—a voice, in any event, that made me think of those low notes a cellist draws out of his instrument by slowly sawing the bow back and forth while fingering a tremolo with the other hand.

From his accent I couldn’t be certain he was American; he might be German, a nationality that seemed to accommodate his contradictions better—young but dignified, athletic but intellectual. There was nothing about him of the brash American college kid, the joker who has been encouraged to express all his opinions, including those that have just popped into his head. The young man respected the author’s classic novel so much that he made me want to take it more seriously. I liked the way he referred to specific scenes as though they were literary sites known to everyone. This grave young man was
probably right, the scandalous books always turn out to be the good ones.

Yes, Hélène must have nudged me after his question, because she’s attracted to men only if they’re intelligent. If they’re literary, all the better, since, when she’s not reading, she’s talking about books. I’ll phone her toward noon and she’ll say, “I’m in China” or “Today, it’s the Palais-Royal” or “Another unhappy American childhood,” depending on whether the book is a guide, a memoir or a novel. She worries about me and wants me to find someone, preferably a Parisian, so I won’t get any funny ideas about moving back to New York. She and I always speak in English. If I trick her into continuing in French after an evening with friends, she’ll suddenly catch herself and say indignantly, “But why in earth are we speaking French!” She claims to be bilingual, but she speaks French to her cats. People dream in the language they use on their cats.

She is too discreet, even with me, her closest friend, to solicit any details about my intimate life. Once, when she could sense Jean-Loup was making me unhappy, I said to her, “But you know I do have two other … people I see from time to time,” and she smiled, patted my hand and said, “Good. Very good. I’m delighted.” Another time she shocked me. I asked her what I should say to a jealous lover, and she replied, “The answer to the question, ‘Are you faithful,
chéri?’
is always ‘Yes.’” She made vague efforts to meet and even charm the different men who passed through my life (her Japanese clothes, low voice and blue-tinted glasses impressed them all). But I could tell she disapproved of most of them. “It’s Saturday,” she would say. “Jean-Loup must be rounding you up for your afternoon shopping spree.” If ever I said anything against him, she would dramatically bite her lip, look me in the eye and nod.

But I liked to please Jean-Loup. And if I bought him his clothes every Saturday morning, that afternoon he would let me take them off again, piece by piece, to expose his boyish body, a lean-hipped and priapic body. On one hip, the color of wedding-gown satin, he had a mole, which the French more accurately call a
grain de beauté.

Since Jean-Loup came from a solid middle-class family but had climbed a social rung, he had the most rigid code of etiquette, and I owe him the slight improvements I’ve made in my impressionistic American table manners, learned thirty years ago among boarding-school savages. Whereas Americans are taught to keep their unused hand in their lap at the table, the French are so filthy minded they assume hidden hands are the devil’s workshop. Whereas Americans clear each plate as soon as it’s finished, the French wait for everyone to complete the course. That’s the sort of thing he taught me. To light a match after one has smelled up a toilet. To greet the most bizarre story with the comment, “But that’s perfectly normal.” To be careful to serve oneself from the cheese tray no more than once (“Cheese is the only course a guest has the right to refuse,” he told me, “and the only dish that should never be passed twice”).