Читать книгу Allan Stein - Matthew Stadler - Страница 9

Allan Daniel Stein was born November 7, 1895, in San Francisco, the only child of Michael and Sarah Stein. Mike, the older brother of Leo and Gertrude, sold a streetcar business in 1903 and moved with Sarah and Allan to Paris. Gertrude and Leo had preceded them. Therese Jelencko, Allan’s teenage nanny and piano teacher, went with them:

“Among my parents’ most intimate friends at the turn of the century were Michael and Sally Stein. I was a so-called child prodigy but hadn’t a good piano. So it was arranged that I practiced on their Steinway every morning. Their little son, Allan, four or five years of age, began to study with me. And a celebrated musician of the time, Oscar Weil, heard him play and was so enthusiastic that he begged to give him theory and harmony lessons and congratulated his parents on choosing ‘such a marvelous teacher,’ etc. I didn’t realize then what a compliment it was, but the Steins made up their minds that when they went to Europe they couldn’t dream of going without me. Of course I was then all of about fifteen years old, fifteen or sixteen.

“This was my first trip to Europe. Actually I never expected to be able to get to Europe, certainly not at that age, and there was great excitement. I left with Mike and Sally Stein and their little boy in December 1903, and arrived at Cherbourg and was met by Mr. Stein’s younger sister and brother, Leo and Gertrude Stein. No, Gertrude wasn’t along; I’m mistaken there. It was just Leo. We actually arrived at Cherbourg about three o’clock in the morning, and I was thrilled and fascinated. I knew no French but was absolutely charmed. Leo took us to the old hotel; oh, dear, I’ve forgotten the name of it. The Hotel Fayot. It was the famous hotel in the Latin Quarter, facing the Luxembourg Gardens, where the Senators have their lunch; it was celebrated for its great restaurant. And that was an exciting night. I don’t think anybody slept a wink.

“We finally found an apartment on the rue de Fleurus, 1 rue de Fleurus, which was the same street as Leo and Gertrude Stein, who lived at 27 rue de Fleurus. I remember ours was an apartment three flights up. There was no such thing as an elevator, and of course it had no bath. We had to go up the street to Gertrude’s. They had a bath and were unique. I think in the whole street perhaps there was only one other bath. And the baths used to come around by cart. Pipes would be hoisted from the street into your apartment, the tin tub having been brought up ahead of time. And you ‘bought’ a bath, as it were. It was all very primitive and very exciting and very wonderful to me.

“The Michael Steins moved to the rue Madame, I think it was 58 rue Madame, and part of my duties as an assistant in the household was to take the little boy to school. I’m going back a couple of years. I’m going back a couple of years. He went to a private school a few blocks away. And each morning I would meet Degas, the painter, who lived a block away, and each morning he’d ask how my little boy was. Well, I was only ten years older than Allan, but just the same I never corrected him. I was very proud of him, this very handsome young boy. Degas was an interesting figure and must have been at the height of his painting career then. I was just stupid enough to be really only interested in music. Well, it’s hard to follow in detail. There’s so much detail.”

The last days of March, all crazy with cold weather, swooped and shifted around me like the torn, blown pages of an old book. My forced holiday had brought new pleasures, but it had also robbed me of any enduring structure. I woke most mornings to nothing. For six years there had been some necessity to getting up. The stack of marked exams, toast in a paper napkin, plus my leather satchel stuffed with books and what-have-you (torn from their nooks as I rushed to the door), and my head full of plans and anticipation for the children and the day, I had to catch one of those monstrous buses that filled our streets by seven just to make it to school before the concierge, with his paw full of keys, locked the great iron door shut for the morning. Those were sweet, rapid mornings, full of flight and arrival. They loomed behind me like the shimmering, silvery peaks that frame our city’s portrait, east and west: a magical, distant place—entirely unreachable. Now I was idle. I saw Dogan when he could arrange it. We had sex in the laundry room of his apartment building a few times. Twice we saw movies. I barely noticed the films, pinioned as I was to the minutest changes in his posture. I could never phone him. Lurking near the soccer field was out of the question, so I saw him less and less. The weather was terrible for a few weeks, and I stayed home and read. Herbert kept me supplied with books. It was an awful time, more destabilizing than I had then realized, and Herbert was my only reliable anchor.

On the last Friday of that disappointing March, Herbert called from work to invite me for dinner at the Hotel Grand. He’d made some great discovery about the Steins and wanted to share it over a meal with me and our friend Henry Richard. Henry always stayed at the Grand (a squat brick and glass monstrosity that rose from the edge of our “historic district” like a staging area for some kind of theme-park ride). Henry was in town just now, buying art.

Herbert, who really is extremely good at what he does, had discovered three “missing” drawings by Picasso—studies, he believed, for the 1906 painting called Boy Leading a Horse. (An utterly enchanting boy, standing nude beside a horse, which he seems to command without reins; the earth is tawny and burnished like the boy, while the sky is a festering storm of silver and gray, like the horse.) Herbert believed this boy might be Allan Stein. He’d uncovered a bill of lading sent by Allan to Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore in 1951, listing a portrait Picasso had painted of Allan, age eleven, during the same months that he painted Boy Leading a Horse—included with it were “three preliminary drawings.” The portrait arrived in America, but the drawings did not. Herbert thought these drawings might have been for Boy Leading a Horse. If Allan had posed one afternoon, during his sittings at Picasso’s studio, standing nude in the posture of the boy, he might, in some small way, be the Boy Leading a Horse. Finding the drawings could provide the link.

“Obviously nothing can be proven per se.” Herbert rambled on as we sat waiting for Henry at the Grand. “Given Picasso’s use of—well, virtually anything he could get his hands on to make his paintings, no one could prove Allan was the model in any conventional sense. But it’s just so tantalizing to think of finding ‘the boy,’ I mean, a real boy stuck somewhere in that painting. It’s a monumental piece.” Herbert showed me a once-tipped-in color plate he’d cut from a book at the museum. The painting was very erotic. The contours of the boy’s belly and chest were supple and inviting. “Any evidence linking it to Allan Stein would be, you know, more than delightful. No one ever mentions him in this regard.” Henry arrived now, but that didn’t keep Herbert from going on. “Everyone’s so ga-ga about Cézanne’s Bathers, Greek kouroi, or this weird grown-up Parisian delinquent who I’m sure was very important and blah-blah-blah, but why never a real boy?” I smiled hello to Henry, who looked very smart in his linen jacket. “Why wouldn’t Picasso look at an actual boy?”

Henry Richard, first name English last name French (Herbert simply called him “the Day-Glo king” [Henry made a fortune with a 1961 patent on psychedelic poster paints {the patent was his even if the idea wasn’t—his brilliant, druggy college roommate stumbled across it fooling around in chem lab, Henry saw the $$$ and offered the friend pot (to his credit a lot of pot) for the rights—and he licensed it out to manufacturers} without ever owning or running anything more than a postage meter at home] though Herbert only ever said this to me, not Henry), had spent the day with Herbert buying art. He liked to be called “Hank.”

Hank bought art with Herbert’s advice, while also buying Herbert’s advice with art. The payoff for these friendly consultations was paintings, given to Herbert by the artists he pitched to the Day-Glo king (at that time building a fantastically high-profile collection)—a little thank-you for making their rent and maybe their careers. It all gets very complicated when Herbert later curates shows featuring these same artists, borrowing from the collections of the dozen industrialists he has advised in the past and writing lavish essays that create great reputations and markets for everyone involved: the artists, the collectors who own them, and not coincidentally Herbert, who just happens to have pieces by every last one of them, tossed his way free like a bone to a good dog who, in the last reel, turns out to have been the star of the movie all along.

Hank snagged the waiter, and we ordered more drinks. Herbert handed me a photograph of the Steins, winter 1905. It was enchanting. The family is standing in the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus. Allan is ten, the only child in a group of six. The adults form a dark wall and Allan stands in front of them, chest high to Gertrude, dressed in a white sailor shirt and knickers; he is wielding a stick. His eyes are dark flowers, barely opened. Gertrude has her hands on his shoulders, like the claws of a bird, though it’s unclear if she means to protect or devour him. The Steins’ faces are hard and flat, like the cut ends of tree stumps; they’re all staring in different directions. Only Allan and Gertrude regard us directly, and this fact enchanted me—the directness of the boy’s regard. Hank took the photocopied bill of lading from Herbert.

“Mmm, I see it right there. ‘Three preliminary drawings.’ ” A good empiricist, Hank.

“I think Allan never sent them,” Herbert went on. “He was never very good with details in the first place, plus being sick and all. The drawings probably stayed in Paris and ended up in the hands of his family when he died.” The Grand management had scattered white narcissus willy-nilly throughout the dining room, so the air was pungent and cloying. Herbert performed a miracle with the encyclopedic wine list (thirty pages, possibly copied direct from the distributor’s warehouse inventory), finding an Oregon pinot to complement the ubiquitous floral perfume. This acrobatic wine also had the virtue of going well with the lamb we ordered. We dined in a sea of odors: garlic, sage, rosemary, more garlic, someone else’s cheese cut by my knife (an earlier dinner), lingering cleanser used to scrub grit from the tiles, plus the overpowering blooms.

“Do you know them?”

“Allan’s family? I certainly know of them—”

I interrupted. “That’s a very nice tie, Hank, very fine.” Hank’s tie interlocked salmon with clams in a kind-of Escheresque puzzle, a regional knickknack, I supposed, that he probably only wore on his trips north. It looked like a local bouillabaisse.

“Thanks very much.” He tipped his fork to me, chewing. Herbert grimaced and poked at the pink lamb on his plate.

“It’s a Jeffries,” Herbert put in. “We bought it right off the artist’s rack at his studio this morning. Hank is very lucky to have gotten the last one.”

“Mmm, I thought it looked like a Jeffries,” I improvised.

“Jeffries didn’t make it, he simply owned it. Don’t you read anything I clip for you? He’s selling a bunch of his old clothes, you know, with all the grime left in, signing them and selling them. Each one is dated so you can tell when he owned it, kind of a record of his own evolving bad taste.” Herbert cackled at this joke and then blushed when neither of us joined him. “This one’s from very early, before he had any kind of name, you see, so it’s especially sought after. Apparently it’s got blood and cum stains, Jeffries says so, anyway.”

Hank’s tie, with its generous swirl of fish and bivalves, slipped neatly into a collar that was immaculate. Despite the pleasure of good company, the tasty lamb, the odors, the talk (a pungent, literate conversation)—all the epicurean delights, that is to say, of good company in a well-serviced cosmopolitan setting—I couldn’t keep my mind from swimming into that beguiling collar, with its perfect single crease, which Hank kept lightly touching. The dry circumspection of this knife’s-edge crease, tie snug as if folded within a thin and expert crepe, transported me to the moment of its creation—the firm hand of the laundress pressing her flat, hot iron to the cloth, the burst of steam, twined cotton fibers minutely loosened (breathing like Turks in a cave of heated rocks), then turned and pushed flat against the board into their traditional, more orderly arrangement. Handed to shirtless master in a flash, touching the fold (simple curtsy, a dry dollar pressed into her palm), the crease became a warm tunnel of delight for Hank’s finger, which he slipped along the inner edge while flipping the collar up for the tie. And there was more in that fold, that neck-long fold of cotton—in the poorly lit, poorly designed, poor great dining room of the Grand—with its doing and undoing. My attentions slipped back and forth along the collar, following Hank’s absent caress, his paired fingers mimicking the skis that rushed out from beneath me down the steep snowy ridge of Hurricane Hill, high above “our meadow,” where my mother and I watched the trails of jets tracing their course across the bright ice-blue sky to Tokyo, LA, Bogotá, Miami, Corsica for goodness’ sake, because there is so much in this world to see (she said, laughing and pushing off to race me down the hill), so much; and with the guilelessness of a twelve-year-old I felt the great wobbling globe spin forward beneath us toward a future of fantastic communications and swift, glamorous transport across promising skies. It disturbs me to realize this is not an interruption; this blossoming, this rupture, is what is permanent, and the hollow wooden box of conversation, our simple evening meal at the Grand, the way Herbert glances at me when he drinks his wine, the timely, clever remark, are the disturbances, interruptions that distract us from the more permanent ether in which our lives swim. Herbert, who never knew my mother, tells me this is crazy. But how could anyone call such transports insanity when they dwell in something as plain and sober as the crease of a well-starched collar? Hank’s fold, at dinner, was a portal into life’s pleasing enormity.

“You know, Herbert, I still can’t find the cum stains,” Hank pointed out. “I checked the whole tie front and back before dinner.” He lifted it toward the inadequate candle. We scrutinized the tie.

“Up by the top.” I pointed, helpful. “You see, next to the clam’s neck, or whatever they call that thing. It kind of disappears into the knot.” Herbert and I leaned closer, but Hank couldn’t see because it was too high.

“Did Jeffries say it was his cum, or just cum generally?”

“Oh, definitely his cum,” Herbert assured Hank. “Commodification of the artist, the artist’s ‘body-of-work,’ and blah-blah-blah. I know the ideas are getting pretty stale, but he is limiting the number of items, and with his signature on it there’s no doubt of the value. We could ask him to stain it again if you like, I mean, if there really is no discernible mark. I’m sure he’d be happy to do that for you, Hank.”

Hank paid no attention to Herbert’s offer. He smoothed the tie proudly against his chest. “I’m giving it to my son,” he pointed out. “For his bar mitzvah.”

“Oh, hell yes,” I let out. “He’ll love it. Kids love goofy ties.”

An arcade ran around the periphery of this broad high-ceilinged room, with tiny shops full of gewgaws and magazines, sewing kits, tooth care and soaps, all the miscellanea of travel. The shops opened up both toward us—articulating glass walls drawn back like the flaps of a surgical wound—and outward to the surrounding streets (mere doors there) to encourage “flow-through.” Dogan, my very erotic and beloved ex-student, flowed through, his two parents in tow. Then they flowed right back out again. A miracle of architecture!

“Look, the important thing about the family, Allan’s family, is that they are very sharp, and if they catch wind of any reason why I should be pursuing these particular drawings, if they even suspect I want them at all, for God’s sake, the price is going to go right through the ceiling.”

“They’re not priceless already?”

“No, I don’t think so. Picasso drawings aren’t all that rare. He must have scribbled on every surface in Europe, like Napoleon sleeping. These are probably undated, maybe even unsigned. In any case, I’ve got to let the family believe there’s no special value in them, that just by selling me the drawings they’re taking advantage of me.”

“Maybe they sold them already—I mean, decades ago.”

“They might have. But the family is the only starting point, unless the Baltimore Museum turns up something.”

Hank held the photograph of Allan next to the color plate of Boy Leading a Horse. There was no similarity, per se. The face in the painting looked more like a mask than a face, a reduced emblem that seemed to hang in space before the body, not a rendering of something you might touch in real life. The genitals were a mess, so that he looked uncircumcised but you couldn’t be sure. It might have been a poor reproduction. His slim chest and belly were achingly beautiful, warm and rounded enough to feel with your hand. I kept catching glimpses of Dogan in the shopping arcade (with Mom and Dad, apparently returned). His loose-limbed grace and elegant head would flash at me like a snapshot from the shifting crowd.

“I wonder if Allan’s classmates cared that he knew Picasso?” (Dogan’s association with me, even when it was mere parental rumor, had lent him a glamour and worldliness that dazzled the mock sophisticates of Urban Country Day’s upper school. The girls flocked around him—martyred sexual decadent, grown-up seducer of men—and began to pursue this slim little boy who just weeks before had been nothing more than a charming but infantile halfback on the soccer team. Dogan had sex with many of these girls, seduced by the rumors of his homosexuality, and I could only swallow the bitter reports of my jealous heart.)

“You know, Herbert, if you’re not going to finish that lamb—”

Herbert slid the tepid plate to Hank, who smiled and asked me, “How is that school of yours?” deflecting attention from the flap of meat he then slipped into his mouth. Hank took a great interest in my school but thankfully had no information except what I gave him. He’d even met Dogan once, when I took the boy to the local sports palace to join Hank and his teenage son in an opulent sky box, replete with swiveling chairs, nifty curtains, sniveling help hauling beer and snacks, plus a huge TV, which was a big hit all around.

“My school?” It was doubtful Hank knew anything. “Actually, I’ve quit teaching.” Herbert glanced at me, then, pointedly, away. “I’m working with Herbert now, helping him out at the museum.” I could have caused two deaths with this single utterance, as it caught Herbert in mid-swallow of a glass of water, on which he began to choke, and Hank in the depths of chewing a tongue-sized lamb chunk, through which undercooked sinew he tried exclaiming, “Why, that’s just terrific!” A long draught of wine dislodged the meat and kept us from the ugly exertions of the Heimlich maneuver (invented by Dr. Henry J. Heimlich of Cincinnati, whose charming twin daughters I have met and enjoyed).

“That’s just terrific,” Hank repeated, after the wine. “Working together like a team. There’s nothing better.” Herbert didn’t seem to think so. “Herb kept mum about it the whole day.”

“Yes,” Herbert said. “I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.”

“What are you now, an assistant or a consultant of some sort?”

I was silent.

“He’s my assistant,” Herbert said, drinking my wine because his was empty. “I let him fiddle with all the machines, the faxes, the mimeographs, and all that.”

“Herbert’s no good with machines,” I explained.

“That’s right. It’s really very helpful having an assistant around to take care of them.”

“Sometimes I make the coffee.” I added. Hank laughed because this was obviously a joke. “Actually, I’ll be doing a lot of the footwork on these Stein drawings.”

“That’s right.” Herbert smiled at me. “Which is why I was so glad, Hank, that you were interested in seeing both of us for dinner tonight, because that is precisely the project we need your help on.”

“I’m always interested in helping,” Hank allowed. “Particularly if it’s going to be some kind of fun.”

“It will be fun, Hank. I want you to buy the drawings and donate them to the museum.”

Hank looked a little unhappy. “Just buy them?”

“Uh-huh, and donate them to the museum.”

“It sounds pretty dull to me.”

Poor Herbert. He looked completely undone by this small defeat. “Actually”—I rallied for my new boss—“the way, uh, Herbert has it all worked out”—here I smiled broadly at brooding Herbert—“we need you to go to Paris, Hank, for the whole … arrangement to work, am I right, Herbert?” Herbert nodded glumly. I went on. “Well.” I rattled the empty wine bottle, then sipped my water, while thinking. “We’re going first, or Herbert is”—I tipped my fork to him—“to poke around and see if these drawings are even what we think they are, and then, if they are, Herbert will insist on their worthlessness and make his pitiful little offer.”

“Which of course they’ll reject.” The curator spoke.

“Right, which of course they’ll reject … which is when you show up, Hank, and buy the pieces right out from under us. You see, this will give the family the pleasure of thinking they’ve taken you to the cleaners, because Herbert will have established that the drawings are nearly worthless except as wallpaper for some children’s hospital, and then you sweep in, the big rich bumbling American who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow—that’s the masquerade anyway, the part you’ll be playing—and the family sells to you at twice what we offered, thinking they’ve hit the jackpot. And voilà! you’ve got the drawings!” Herbert rolled his eyes.

“Voilà!” Hank echoed, smiling. “That sounds like fun.”

“Oh.” Herbert sighed. “I’m sure it would be.”

“I can do that,” Hank announced. “I mean, why not? April in Paris.” Herbert looked strangely disappointed. “Say, isn’t that one of your students?” Hank pointed his bent fork tine toward the crowded windows of the Hair Health and Vanity store, and there was Dogan, Mother beside him clutching a fresh wig bag, with Daddy evidently gone. “Donald, wasn’t it, or Doogie, that kid you brought to the football game?”

“Hank, have you seen the Grand Marble Bar yet?” I asked. “It’s really the highlight of the whole hotel.”

“Noah certainly did have a good time with him.” Hank strained to follow the swiftly moving boy but was distracted by his bladder.

I turned toward Herbert. “Herbert? The Grand Marble Bar? We seem to be out of wine in any case, and I’m sure Hank is sick of this dreary emporium.”

“I’ll join you two in a sec,” Hank offered, rising. “Gotta go to the pisser.” We waved a feathery good-bye, and Herbert glared at me.

“Are you mad about something?” I asked. Dogan, fragmented, drifting, afflicted my periphery.

“Where do you come up with these fantasies?”

“With what?”

“You certainly improvised well. I just can’t believe Hank swallowed all that garbage, flights to Paris to hobnob with the rich.”

“Come on, you’ll have a great time.”

“Look, Miss Double-oh-seven, the sort of espionage you described has nothing to do with art acquisition. One buys drawings at galleries. You know, like at a store?”

“You made these sound like the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

“Did I? Well they might be worth a small fortune, but I’m afraid the chances of their being at all important are remote to none. I was just fishing around to see how far Hank was willing to go with that checkbook of his.”

“Do you always rely on swindling the rich?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘rely.’ I’d say I ‘delight’ in it.”

“Well, Hank’s willing to go to Paris.”

“Going to Paris on this kind of wild goose chase—with Hank, no less—would be sheer torture.”

“It looks like you’re either going or backing out.”

“I can back out easily enough. Hank won’t mind. I would just appreciate it, Madame Assistant, if you would leave the whole affair alone for a while, the rest of the evening at least, and let things settle.”

In the bar, the Grand Marble Bar (massive countertop hauled from Firenze, installed on broad cedar stumps with a rough fir trim, brass fixtures from Berlin—spoils of the last World War—all this from the napkin supplied with my drink), we found Hank, and voilà! Dogan, without his mom or dad. The pair was installed at a small round side table with two beers, Dogan’s in a tall pewter stein (Hank’s largesse, no doubt, plus a nimble bribe of the waiter). The boy watched me.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Hank announced. “Doogie’s here.” I smiled at “Doogie” and Herbert shook his hand, introducing himself as my new colleague. Sweet Herbert.

Dogan sipped from the beer, leaving a mustache where no mustache could be. “I saw you eating.”

“Yes, that was me. Hello, by the way.”

“Hi. My mom and dad left.”

“I saw you shopping.”

“Yeah, Mom got her wig and they both had headaches.”

“Well, long time.”

“I guess so; I mean, a month.”

“A month’s a long time, though you must be busy with studying and sports and all, so it wouldn’t seem so long to you.”

“Doogie tells me the soccer squad has made it to the playoffs this year,” Hank put in, hoisting his beer. Herbert, utterly bored by the soccer squad, ordered himself an expensive scotch (Day-Glo money) and a Bombay for me.

“Oh?” I was surprised. “That’s terrific. It’s hard for me to keep track, you know with all my work at the museum.” Meaningful glance at Dogan, met, puzzled, returned. “I’ll probably be seeing them on TV before long.” The round table was minuscule, built for crowding onto the tiny sidewalk of a Parisian back street, and we were rather large. Getting anywhere near the drinks meant navigating an intimate slalom of knees and chair legs; I paid no mind to the press of Dogan (left thigh and calf) and Herbert (right knee).

“There was a picture in the newspaper,” Dogan announced, grimacing at the beer stein as he sniffed it and took a sip. “But I wasn’t in it.”

“Hardly worth clipping.”

“Are you gonna be in the yearbook?” my little waif asked.

“You know”—Hank leaned in, disturbing almost everything—“I don’t know if you’re on the yearbook squad or anything, Doogie, but I recall in fifty-three, my senior year, when Professor Schmatza—you’re a senior, right?”

“Sophomore.”

“That’s right. Well, when Professor Schmatza left our school midyear to join the Lucy expedition, the kids got together and dedicated the yearbook to him, just as a kind of tribute.” Herbert accepted his scotch from the waiter and handed me my gin. “I’m sure someone’s already suggested it in this case, I mean, it’s probably a fait acompli.” Hank smiled at me.

“I’m not on the yearbook staff,” Dogan said, but Hank wasn’t really listening to him.

“My goodness, Professor Schmatza was surprised—and pleased, of course. It was a terrific surprise for everyone.”

“As it would be for me,” I added. I clinked my glass to Herbert’s, Hank’s, and, with some prompting, Dogan’s nearly full beer stein.

“They’re putting extra pages in for soccer, if we make it to finals.” Dogan spoke only of what he knew, a habit that always charmed me.

“The I Love Lucy expedition?” Herbert asked. Like Hank, he didn’t seem to notice that the boy ever actually spoke. “Or was it The Lucy Show already?” He and Hank laughed at the joke.

“What are you drinking?” Dogan asked me.

“Gin. You wouldn’t like it.”

“I don’t like this beer. It’s warm.” I looked into the tall stein and saw a dark well of stout, rimmed with scummy foam.

“What is it?”

“It’s called Guinness. Your friend said since I’m a soccer player I’d like it.” How cosmopolitan the Grand Marble Bar was, serving Irish stout in a German stein to an underage Turk.

“You don’t have to drink it. Hank was just being friendly. He likes to buy things for his friends.”

“I remembered him from the football game. He’s really nice.”

“Did he see you shopping?”

“No. I saw him so I said hi.”

“That’s very nice of you, and nice of Hank to invite you along to the bar.”

“He didn’t invite me.”

“That’s not just Guinness, you know,” Hank pointed out, thinking I cared about the beer, “that’s a Guinness triple-X. This bar’s terrific. I haven’t seen triple-X since Hattie and I took Noah to Dublin for the horse races.”

“He didn’t invite you?”

“I told him I was supposed to meet you, and he said you were in the bar.”

“You don’t mind, do you?” Hank asked rhetorically, taking the boy’s beer and lifting it up to my face. “Just look at that foam, thick enough to raise kids on. You could build a house with that foam.”

“It’s remarkable, Hank.” Turning to the boy: “Is that what you told your parents?”

“Oh, no way.” Dogan dismissed this lunacy. “They didn’t see you. I told them I ran into a friend from soccer camp who was staying at the hotel. They think I’m staying overnight with him. They don’t care.”

“You don’t mind if Herbert tries it, do you? Go ahead, Herbie, after a sip of the scotch it’s a real high-class boilermaker.” Herbert sniffed the stein suspiciously and then tried it. I was surprised he seemed to like it.

“Tastes kind of like oatmeal, Hank. I mean with dirt and alcohol in it. That’s very nice, a very fine beer.”

“Well, that was kind of dumb,” I whispered to Dogan. “Now you can’t go home, plus there’s no ‘friend’ here to stay with.”

The boy rolled his eyes, then just looked at me.

So that now, to the delight of many of you and the horror of some, Dogan and I are going to spend the whole night together in the same bed (my bed, by the ill-paned window at home) for the last time, and in some detail. We’ll have unskilled, enthusiastic sex, minimal but valued conversation, and a snack at what was probably three in the morning. Those of you who can’t stomach any more of this sort of thing can skip ahead to Chapter 3, where the narrative resumes.

We shared a taxi home, Herbert, Dogan, and I. The boy insisted I make a ruse to Herbert about some book I was lending him, which I did, halfheartedly, and which sweet Herbert led the boy to believe he believed and also found unremarkable (“Oh, he mentioned that book to me just yesterday, didn’t you now, and how it must be lent soon; how convenient for everyone; I hope I don’t miss the eleven o’clock news”). Since the narrative hounds have all skipped forward anyway, I’ll just dispense with the clumsy linkages and survey some of the highlights of that night.

The slight weight of Dogan’s hand on my shoulder when we leaned in the doorway, worrying the lock open. The fact that he let the same hand drift along my back when the lock slid shut and we walked in. The ease with which he stood and peed and talked to me while peeing, and that I heard him through a bathroom door he hadn’t bothered to close. The vista in the dark. Him still fiddling with the buttons of his fly when he came out. Dogan—I don’t think I mentioned he was 5 feet 8 inches or so (two or three inches shorter than I), with a lanky floppiness that wobbled between puppy dog and deer, that his messy hair was fine and dark brown, that his eyes were large and deep beneath a single brow, or that he habitually kept his lips slightly parted as if about to speak—looking out the window at the city’s nighttime profile, then flopping back on the bed as if he lived in it. The elegance of his prone posture, like a poorly drawn swastika or a spinning ninja weapon that had tired and fallen in the midst of its long trajectory. These words: “Use both your hands.” Because we’d only ever had sex before in a nervous hurry, how he lay on the bed talking to me not undressing or rushing himself at all. I didn’t know what he thought, but I thought there were ruses ahead, long conversations or fidgeting, feints toward the couch or a sleeping bag, when in fact he lay down on the bed because he was there to sleep with me. I sat down so my hip touched his, and I let my hand drift onto his leg. “Use both your hands,” was his final instruction.

The spring of his puckered fly, when both my hands got there after traveling the length of the inseamed thighs. That he watched and smiled. His long arms fiddling against the window glass behind his head while he reclined. The crushed and folded paperback (Rousseau’s Émile) stuck underneath him, produced only after five or ten minutes when the arching of his back to push a tremulous and exposed organ deeper into my mouth made it convenient, I suppose, to grab the book and toss it to the floor. At this point he was just a long baggy bundle of soft clothes with an engorged penis protruding from the middle; I had my shirt partly undone—hardly the picture of romance. There was traffic outside, honks and the late-night blatting of taxis, periodic bus roars, and the drunken chatter of partygoers returning home. The railroad tower became especially interesting for a protracted minute or two that is difficult to account for. I simply lost my focus on the great slobbery organ for a stretch. It had slipped from my mouth again and, poking haphazardly, had found my eye socket and brow so that I pulled it aside in one hand, still enjoying its remarkable heat in my fist, and stared across Dogan’s pulled up shirt and long arms (drawn back behind his head) at the beautiful lighted masquerade of the window-framed city. The railroad tower, as I said, looked especially homely and real amidst the delicious fakery. It appeared, just then, to have an actual history and function. I wobbled the boy’s organ like a joystick, absent-mindedly, then saw him in the dark, staring out from the hutch of his baggy shirt like a rabbit in the nighttime forest. I kissed the head of his cock, then pushed it down flat against his belly, where I smushed it for a while. He groaned some, thrusting like an infant trying to reach the taut nipple, only not leading with his face: thrust, groan, thrust-thrust, groan, which was endearing, so I petted him like a dog. He turned on his side, and this petulance aggravated me. Rolling him over I pulled at his clothes without explanation, dragging the unbuttoned jeans and boxers sharply down to his shapely ankles and slipping the baggy shirt over his head so that he was all just flesh and startled as I rolled my hairy head all over him and began kneading his body with both great grabbing hands like a panicked shopper unleashed in the midst of a monetary collapse. This was quite unlike our usual furtive blow jobs. He took to it like a boy to wrestling, tore my shirt, and tugged my trousers down, all the while smushing himself in acrobatic variations on and against me and whatever else got drawn into the maelstrom: pillows, sheets, clothing, and the like. His breathing became furious and uncontrolled, his brow and back wet with sweat, until, flopping me down against the twisted bedding and straddling my hips to drive his soccer-drenched open-air thighs and slobbery organ over my tummy, he let out a great fart. We both stopped, and then he laughed. I really shouldn’t include this with the highlights at all, but it provides such a nice contrast to the idealized Dogan I’ve tried to preserve. Other contrasts: his chaste pucker when I whispered, “Can we kiss?” I don’t know if he had never kissed with an open mouth, or if mine offended him, but his closed eyes and pert, expectant lips endeared him to me. I pecked his cheek and whispered “there.” My alarm when, while rolling in our romp, I found myself on top of him, impressing the enormity of my body on the true prematurity of his; Dogan wasn’t merely lithe or gangly or slim, he was a little boy, a nervous, pulsing envelope of flesh and growing bones whose sexual development had rushed in advance of the rest of him so that this great, potent organ was appended to the birdlike frame of a tall twelve-year-old (by the calendar he was fifteen). I had to hold myself slightly off the mattress with a well-placed elbow or two to avoid crushing him.

Our conversation, after our last shared orgasm, lying now in the manner of spoons, Dogan in front, me behind, the boy dressed in hastily found boxers and T-shirt, me in nothing, while outside the window the city was mostly silent and dark:

“Are you really working at a museum?”

“Yes.” (Would I ever stop lying to him?)

“Do you have to? I mean, I thought the school gave you pay even though you had to leave and everything.”

“I prefer it. The work interests me.”

“What do you do there?”

“I’m a curator.” It felt oddly pleasant to be Herbert for a moment. “Do you know what a curator does?”

“Not exactly.”

“I help decide what paintings the museum buys and displays. I organize shows for them—not just paintings, actually, but drawings and photographs too.”

“Wow.”

“I’m going to Paris in a few weeks, to buy some Picasso drawings for a show.”

“Pablo Picasso?”

“Yes. You know Picasso?”

“Oh, sure.” Here the boy began singing—melodizing, I guess—in a soft whisper. “‘He was only five-foot-two, but girls could not resist his stare. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole, not like you …”

“I don’t think that’s the same Picasso.”

“Sure it is. ‘He would drive down the street in his El Dorado, and the girls would turn the color of an avocado; oh, he was only five-foot-two …’”

“Did you make that up?”

“No, it’s the Modern Lovers, ‘Pablo Picasso.’ He was an artist, right?”

“Yes.”

“Come on.” He shook his body a little, like wiggling an eyebrow, only in the dark. “Everyone knows Picasso. My mom took us to the Musée Picasso all the time when we lived in Paris.”

“Of course. I’d forgotten.” I let my hand turn the corner over his hip. “How long did you live there?”

“We moved there when I was six, and I had my bar mitzvah there, so seven years.” He stopped, everything stopped, while the boy evaluated the trajectory of my hand. “A little more than seven.” Now he stretched his leg out slightly, enough to let the hip turn open and encourage my hand.

“I need to hire a translator for the Paris trip.”

“You don’t speak French?” Where my hand brushed his boxers, a rounded fold of cotton pushed up, one pulse and then another.

“Not very well.”

“I speak it better than my English.” We both laughed a little. I had been hired to change that fact, but neither of us ever cared or worked hard enough to change it. I drew my other hand up along the backs of his thighs, along the crease where his legs met.

“I wonder if you could go with me, be my translator. You’d get paid very well.”

“Uhn.” He turned his hip a little more, pulling his free arm over his head, so my hand slipped onto the tented middle of his boxers, and I let it lie there, just cupping the drifting organ that moved and struggled under its weight. “I’m at school every day.” He kind of sighed. “I mean, and soccer.”

“Maybe during your break. You’d be an excellent translator.” Now I lifted my hand so the cotton lifted beneath it, then moved my fingers up and down its length.

“Yeah.” He simply breathed, pushing his hips out toward my wandering hand. I had turned too, to lay my other arm along his parting legs, brushing both thighs along the inside and up into his shorts, and now he tugged the waistband down and his erection flopped out onto his tummy, where I licked it, pressing my tongue along the underside onto its head, and he groaned, then lifted my head from him and whispered, “Can I, you know, in you?” And he slipped over onto me, pushing my legs up with his body, and we did.

Oh, yes, our snack, at 3 or 4 A.M.: a bland cheese (jack) and crackers, plus gulps of orange juice from a cardboard container in the fridge, first tasted leaning in the cool white light of that marvelous icebox, then seated on the bed, silent, puzzled, exhausted, looking out at the utterly dark and sleeping city.