Читать книгу Stella Maris - Michael Carroll - Страница 8

Primal Recognition

(to Ann Beattie)

DO YOU WANT to get on the good foot? Need to be assigned a red line just to stay within your boundaries? Are you able to ask others to stay within theirs? Do you have the stuff? Can you come up to snuff? What are you made of? And, oh heaven, are you able to break it all down to its constituent parts; and what are those? Can you stay in love sufficient to the cause? Is your general affection of a non–New Age variety, while disposing of tribal Judeo-Christian notions?

Are you—at the age of fifty—still wildly horny, with or without the aid of a hard-on pill?

Am I, well, up to snuff?

Are you on any other medications, prophylactic or otherwise?

Do I get in step, go on PrEP?

The boys these days are for skin on skin, flesh up inside another’s flesh. An outrage, a blessing.

They want to be able to assume, and Rick has been hesitating, although he longs for those old days. Gene used to say Rick’s verse reminded him of cruising for tricks in the old days.

“The quick exchanges between guys, almost like signs or advertisements. Terse words.”

This was shortly before Gene’s succumbing. Once Key West had meant freedom to Rick, but now it was a chaining-to: Coral rocks / under pirate nights / slice-moon and ragged cloud / passing over / nudged by sticky salty wind, / And time. Like Saturn, / eating the young / prancing past, / as fast food / as pick-up / or delivery / for bulimic gods. / Prometheus housebound.

Gene had gone to the hospital and never come home. Transferred to a hospice-prison, VA dime. Vietnam had not hurt Gene’s body, had barely scratched his spirit—rather, fortifying Gene’s cheer. He’d hit the ground boots-first from the tongue-out maw of a C-130. Taken his discharge to New York, found a roach trap on Horatio, lived a life. Worked at a magazine, cut his teeth, and was there at Stonewall. Author of a dozen collections. Subject of articles, studies, a biography. Had even sort of pushed the dark extents of his coming-out agonies. Had always been loved and for a long time remained physically enticing. Had the puzzlingly perennial body of “youth,” was a top, avoided AIDS, lost every lover until the deep eighties. Cried and gotten back up and gone to all the funerals, memorialized, spoken, risen back. Kicked drugs, booze, and cigarettes, was called the Slim Reaper. Only lines in his face, with monochrome author portraits like eternal acid etchings, happy, serious, derided, surviving. Until he began to forget things and then began to forget everything, his name, the president’s, his daily medications, his profession.

And was ending here, where the care was not so good yet the transfer back up north Rick could not countenance. The road trip with a babbler. Or the flight with a seat-shitting passenger.

Rick had caught Gene in the mid-nineties in London, where Gene was enjoying discovery by the English. A host of hosts, parties everywhere that warm summer, unharassed except by the lightest of rains. Gene was prize-heaped; he laughed at every new honor, a laugh so frequent and so bemusing it subsided into grief-chuckles. Rick had pointed this out—they shared everything and were mostly always honest—and Gene had liked it, calling his next collection Grief-Chuckles and dedicating it to Rick. It was supposed to go on, and seemed like it would forever go on.

When finally Rick had published his own first collection, he’d called it The New Terse.

Rick rarely picked up his cell. In the last days of lively, conscious, shared love between them, Gene had decided Rick’s drag name should be Mist McCalling. Gene could be fun, but wit was not his long suit. He was only unfrivolous on the page. Gene was a delight in a crowd or at a gathering, but his poems were hammeringly serious; at times hot-angry. He used one image or metaphor, then cut it into pieces and inserted hunks of bloody lamb, shards of the cross, cooling wedges of the Sunday-dinner apple pie in Greenville, 1959. It was his Southern charm, they said. It was all the things his readers and arch critics said, but it was ice-harsh, ladle-drafts of pain dipped up out of the beech-stand well, splashed into the surprised, grateful mouth before the hike home, and it was mystified confusion of the self, the farmhand that had dared, the farmhand’s wife that didn’t tell, the sister that had told. It was hell and adolescent mortification, a sense of condemnation, forgiveness wrapped in a sibilant hush, awareness of some God but no longer the Hebraic one, questioning, his early lowball achievement at school soothsaying abject failure.

Gene was beyond calling now. Rick was beyond being in touch with others. He set his phone to vibrate and biked up to Stock Island to the facility. His days were this. Keeping up with the bills and expenses, accounting. Waking up sober when he could (he should get clean), visiting.

They knew him and nodded as he took off his biking helmet.

Gene had a new roommate, a ginger man watching his overhead TV who said, as Rick was entering, “Can I have my life back? Not all of it, just the part you stole, you fucking troll.”

“Sure,” said Rick. “I’ll be right back with it, promise.”

The patient whimpered and his whimper faded.

The man was young, his most startling feature. He looked like an actor from an Iraq War movie, and had been to Iraq. Iraq wasn’t his problem, exactly. He might have developed what he had with or without the war. The disease had presented in the fourth decade. Rick understood this to be a little early, but they were still finding out things about chemicals that had been used over there, their side effects and more permanent effects. One side effect or development of the disease was the patient’s talking to the air, giggling, the giggling subsiding into private grievings.

“Just the part you stole, not the rest of it, you son of a—” and choked it off and sneered.

Something about the young man, whose name was Brian, made Rick a little happier. Of course a tragic lightness, in musing. Occasionally when he spoke he sounded like Peter Finch in Network, bemused, strident. But when he whimpered, Brian was a boy, a relative youth. For a moment each visit here and there, totaling no more than five minutes, Rick felt horrible. Brian otherwise lay looking innocent, hands up like paddles—and then he was tolerable, quite sweet.

Rick toed around the curtain to see Gene, who brightened blankly and said, “Hey!”

There was never any evidence that Gene recognized Rick. Gene started talking, too.

Gene said, “Hi, angel. I was just talking to Susie and she said you’d have that reaction.”

“What reaction?”

Brian said, “Have you seen Joe? He’s been redeployed! I just missed him, actually.”

Gene said, “Oh I wish she’d just shut up.”

There was a time when things were funny, but now the funny was just too weird. It was all a neurological glitch, the laughter around here. An automatic, allergic social reaction.

Gene said, “I remember when I hit my head on a root, a hard root. And I think that was the source of all this problem. It was all a mistake. Can you explain that to them? Can we go? It was an accident, and I’d like—if you could just tell them—I’d like to go now.”

Rick said, “I would love that very much, darling. Do you want me to call the doctor?”

“Is there a doctor here?”

“We’re in a hospital.”

“No, we’re not. We’re back at Clay Mountain. Right after I got home from the infirmary with measles. My mother said, ‘It’s the kind of night to build a fire.’ Can we build a fire?”

“I wish we could, darling, but there’s no fireplace here.”

“Where are we?”

“We’re at the hospital. No fireplaces here.”

“Shit. I wish we were back at Clay Mountain. Then we could roast a pig. Yum yum!”

“Is that where you hit your head on the root, Gene?”

“No, no!” Gene groaned as though insulted. “Back at Dak To near the border with Laos.”

Gene was no longer a part of Rick’s life, and Rick’s life was attenuated outside of the hospital. Gene was a few steps from gone, and Rick was in pain but only for a couple of hours each day. He counted those hours but only while he was visiting, leaving when Gene fell asleep watching TV.

When he would leave, Gene sleeping with reality TV turned down, Rick crept backward, despising himself, not cursing life or his life, merely wishing he were stronger, or something.

Brian was awake and said, “I had a boyfriend. Have you seen Joe? Is Joe dead, too?”

HE BICYCLED TOWARD a spectacular sunset. This had to be a poem, a moment, this circumstance.

Leaving you, / having, almost, / been you . . .

The days were longer here than up north. So close to the tropical zone. The canals were like twisted ways of water and mangrove. This, too, would have to go in—marrying Vietnam and their lives together later and lately. He biked over the causeway and thought he saw a red iguana deciding to call it a day and crawling into the brush. The stand-up paddleboarders were all gone, heading to the tourists’ seafood restaurants. You had to love the ocean to vacation here. It would be difficult for him to leave, even after Gene was gone. It had almost gotten too late to leave. New York had receded into this penumbra of impossibility, of impenetrability, and the rent would be ridiculous. He might even leave his small storage unit in Queens full and sleeping, like a tomb housing the nineties and early aughts. How could he even hope to return to it, unlock it? The truth was, he had things in both New York and Key West to return to, but Key West won.

Ivan was there. As he locked his bike on the side of the cottage, he heard rumbling within. Ivan was making chili. Once he’d presented a stew made from an iguana, a recipe he’d gotten from a Nicaraguan working in the same restaurant. Rick still hadn’t given him the key, thinking perhaps Gene would come home again, that a miracle trial would revive him. There was talk of one, the miracle drug that already was exhibiting success dissolving and eradicating the choking proteins that slouched on and smothered the neurons, defying the vital electrical signals, so he’d read, but it was too late for Gene. Clinical trials were for earlier on in the onset of symptoms, which Gene had been having for five years or so. Recently Ivan had brought Rick’s appetite back, but not for iguana.

Jorge says / with iguana broth / Gene will heal.

This generation, they would say anything to anyone. Ivan was just twenty-two. They’d met at the Renaissance Fair in Peace Park. Ivan was wearing a jerkin and tights and a hip pouch on a thin cord belt. No shoes. He’d gotten the outfit from his ex-girlfriend, Liz, who worked as a costumer part-time for the Little Coral Players theater downtown. The suede booties that might have completed his outfit were probably too small for Ivan’s feet. It had started to rain, one of those sudden September squalls. Rick had said, “Your outfit’s ruined!” and Ivan: “Oh, Liz knows me. I can’t surprise Liz anymore. It’ll be okay. Anyway, the show has closed up.”

That pouty Slavic whine, snarling the sinuses.

In his country, Ivan had said, what counted most to smooth over a problem or situation was knowing someone. The director, the mayor, the police chief. Everything forgivable.

No one ever got mad at Ivan, Rick bet.

The two-week run of Kiss Me, Kate had ended.

And Ivan and Rick were about the same compact size and had undressed together.

“I can give you some jeans and a T-shirt and a sweatshirt. Stay as long as you like.”

To call a place home, when the one who’d made it with you was not likely to return.

To begin to enjoy a little evening’s life a few nights a week. Taking some ownership.

Ivan would vault through the high, narrow bathroom window, launching from a stump.

Rick’s friend Joy had said, drinking a margarita, “What in the hell are you waiting for?”

“Oh well, a little heartbreak,” Joy would say—capable of saying whatever was necessary.

GENE WAS QUIET today. Something was happening, a corner turned, a corner leading to a darker passageway. His roommate, Brian, had to be restrained, his movements so jerky and at times too violent for such a small staff—and Brian would weep about his mother in Little Rock, which led to frenzies of chin-jerks and bright, frightening stares and simmering denunciations, “You bitch!”

Or he’d mutter a soliloquy: “It wasn’t the heat, man. I come from Arkansas, man. Try to tell me about heat? No, man. I know heat. I know heat I know heat I know heat.”

“I do wish he’d shut up,” said Gene suddenly but quietly.

“Honey.”

Confidently, smugly, Gene said, “He can’t hear me. He’s in Afghanistan or wherever.”

Gene wouldn’t eat. The tray was returned with its cellophane wrappings tightly intact.

And no TV. Gene had stopped asking and Rick had stopped offering.

The room was dim, so that you could concentrate on the clinical odors, bleach, armpit.

Brian calmed down, his medication taking effect, and Gene withdrew, turning away from Rick, and didn’t answer Rick’s questions, or snorted lightly at one of Rick’s dumb observations.

“You’re glad you’re in the air-conditioning,” said Rick. “It’s ridiculously hot today.”

Snort.

Rick was lying, which may be what it was coming to. To save another’s feelings or keep a soul intact, a decorum so that the mask would not crack and issue tears and howls.

Neither had religion. Rick was insulting Gene. They were supposed to be honest always.

Outside the light died earlier each day—soon the winter solstice. Christmas was coming.

It came to him in the dim hush. It occurred to him that he was alone. Didn’t need to be.

Only Gene needed to be, or had to be.

Foolishly a title for what he was working on came to him: Life of the Iguana People.

Then he thought, laughing innerly, Now that’s the limit, that’s really the limit.

Something his own mother would say. He got up to go, but it was painful, a rending.

On the other side of the vinyl accordion divider, Brian said, “Just listen to me.”

He ducked over to Brian’s side: “I’m listening, Brian.”

He was handsome, his life would soon be over, his mind heading out much sooner. He had been a lover to another man. It was hard not to fantasize about this, not the brutal and raw soldiering part but the tenderness, the most private and secret tenderness in love ever, probably.

Nothing.

“I’m listening.”

Neither roommate said anything. It would be a good time to believe in heaven, even if it was only a temporary holding space, a way station between life’s last flutters and black sleep.

RICK WORKED MORE. No one was making him, but he had a few requests for contributions, which kept him smiling when he was alone. Ivan’s hours increased since the holidays were merry with backbreaking work. Rick took an envelope he labeled IVAN and put Gene’s key in it and left it in front of Gene’s favorite appliance in the kitchen, the Cuisinart food processor, which was now Ivan’s favorite kitchen appliance. It wasn’t meant to be a grand gesture, it was more of a humble Sunday morning offering of gratitude and praise along the lines of: Thank you, Jesus, for helping me ace algebra this semester. Or was it already too little, too late?

Before London, before they’d met, Gene was spending a lot of time in France. His Gallic mindset had stayed with him—and sometimes Gene would refer to Rick’s goût, his goût de vivre.

“Sweetie, you seem kind of puny lately,” he said. “I hope you’re not losing your goût.”

It might be a hungover morning after a late night at the bars, which here closed at four.

He’d quit those bars a while ago, needing to make sure Gene was safe at home.

He’d gotten some of his goût back at those same bars, but he was getting older, aging out. He relied on serendipity. He hadn’t prayed on it or anything, but he’d somehow had faith, maybe because at this point he only stuck it in others. This had required training over time, once the sex between him and Gene had stopped. The other thing about Ivan’s generation, besides the short supply among them of accountability, was their open-mindedness. Were they less materialistic? And this seemed to extend all the way back to their bodies. Rick was jerking off late at night when Ivan couldn’t come over. He’d actually come to believe he deserved Ivan and Ivan’s body, his butthole, which never seemed to loosen, Ivan who was less than half Rick’s age. A top never got infected, or else it was nearly statistically impossible if not absolutely so. After Rick got the wet tights and jerkin off the boy (he remembered the light ass smell that would deepen in a bit), Ivan nudged him onto his back. Wildly enough, Rick’s wang was sticking straight up. Ivan spit on it and rubbed saliva into himself and swung a leg over and straddled Rick and fucked himself down on the nice fit. And never brought up the issue of a condom. Ever. He was assuming something, God knew what, but a member of Rick’s age group would not have frozen or hesitated but would have addressed the safety issue. Laid out the case boringly, established rules, clinically lectured on it as Rick knew he should, although he was lonely. And the warm damp-satin feel of his dick in the boy’s asshole—no stiff dick knew a conscience. Rick’s generation was all cads, but Rick was idealizing the kid because he was beautiful. He shuffled through all these tableaux, the ones of their weeks together, with their captions, You didn’t ask. You should’ve asked. You know others would’ve asked and what’s wrong with you . . . Asshole like a pussy. A man-boy unembarrassed.

Ivan was a gift from the gods. But he would leave soon, Rick could just feel it.

You could be a cad because at least you had a rubber. There emotional culpability ended.

He came and realized he had these feelings, coagulant and clean-smelling. Disposable?

“I don’t think you trust me,” Ivan said the next time. “You don’t think I’m true.”

“Of course I do. I gave you the key.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“I’m old.”

“But you don’t seem old.”

“I’m really grateful.”

“You don’t act grateful.”

“I have a lot on my mind.”

“I understand.”

Ivan lived in a sordid room blown about with clothes and tossed cigarette packs. Maybe he had debts. He mentioned owing his roommates two thousand dollars, which Rick gave him.

“There’s nothing attached.”

“There’s always something attached.”

These European youths, so realistic, so free. He wanted to grab some of that, fuck into it.

Ivan was living off the grid. He’d come like so many of the other Eastern Europeans on a visa for students and he couldn’t leave for fear of not being let back in, and he said, “I want to go home and see my family. It’s been three years, my father’s sick, he smoked and drank too much, and my mother’s sad and says she’s afraid she will never see me again.”

“We can get married.”

Ivan looked stricken. He waited. Then slowly he looked expectant, quizzed.

Rick followed up, “After whatever happens, though, if you can wait just a little. This is a terrible time. I’d do it out of love, not obligation, you don’t have to feel obligated. Obligated—”

“I know what it means, obligated.”

“Then you could go home, do anything you want. We don’t own each other, okay?”

“I know what marriage is. Marriage is serious. I would take us seriously.”

GENE’S CELL PHONE was stolen. It meant almost nothing, of course. He’d been trapped in Nam and Greenville mostly, and in their earliest shared moments in London and New York, and he didn’t seem to know he was in the Keys. It was only because a tech using the phone for Gene’s speech therapy—having Gene speak to Siri, asking her questions—had come in and found it missing.

Rick got a call from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, a Sergeant Luisa Gonzalez. It was nearly midnight, and her shift must have been about to end, or begin. “Mr. Sullivan, I just wanted to know if you have any receipts that the hospice care center can use for reimbursement. I know this might sound tacky, but technically theft is a crime. Hate to be the one.”

“You’re working late!”

He felt jolly because even though it was Christmas Eve he was expecting Ivan, who was working another late shift at a tourist seafood restaurant with a lot of needy, whiny diners.

“Well, sir. It’s my job.”

She wasn’t picking up on the mirth. She spoke evenly, and already Rick felt inexplicably bereft, out-of-body.

He said, “I wouldn’t know where to find the receipts. Let’s just not worry about it.”

“I understand you completely. Being that what has happened, I completely understand.”

He stopped.

“What’s happened.”

“Mr. Sullivan, legally I’m not at leisure to say anything. You should contact the hospice.”

He called the hospice, but it was Christmas Eve and the caseworker and the head nurse were both off for the holiday and he stared, stalking, collecting himself, but collecting himself why?

He got on his bike. They hadn’t had a car in years. It just hadn’t seemed necessary. He could do all his shopping and necessary errands on his bike: A car, a car, my kingdom for a car!

He texted Ivan. He’d be late. Something had happened. He’d explain later. What was there to explain? What had happened? His heart wouldn’t quit doing the rumba.

They wouldn’t let him into Gene’s room. Already his bed had been cleared, cleaned.

They took Rick into an office. It was all very sudden. A heart attack. A mercy, actually.

They gave him a large Ziploc-type bag—thick, clear plastic revealing the last of Gene’s effects, neatly folded T-shirts, a pair of sweatpants for his physical therapy, which had been worthless.

The bureaucratic mess of modernity. Accountability.

And he’d questioned Ivan’s sense of accountability. Ivan had only ever tried to get inside and talk to him. That’s what Rick had needed: talking-to, feeding, lovemaking. Ivan was noble, possessing this poetic, almost medieval nobility, this modernized gallantry, a warmth of yore.

But that was the mood Gene’s death had rapidly thrown Rick into.

There was a lookout they’d loved before Gene had become immobile. It was in the small, cliff-encased gorge of a town called Les Baux-de-Provence near the farmhouse they’d rented every August—a place for them to write lines and sometimes read them aloud over supper with friends or after the morning coffee and pastry. Their lives together were couplets, a good line being just everything.

They sat up in a café overlooking the valley. Gene drank lemonade—he had not touched alcohol in two decades—and Rick had two glasses of the local rosé because he was driving. The cliffs were pocked with caves where troglodytes had lived and, later, renegades fleeing from whatever kings.

It was the last high place before a plain, which, by turning left, you could inspect in all its flatness smoothing down to the Mediterranean. All the way, if you could just squint and peer, to the once-Roman town of Arles, with its ancient amphitheater and its more civilized tourists.

Civilized was a word Gene had always cherished, his head full of the American South, its inequities gradually being erased in the tears-moist clouds of nostalgia and primal yearning.

There, the end of a steep, raw, caching darkness,

and there, the beginning of human-wrought, calmed-wave beauty.

He was breathing heavily on the ride home. With maturity he should let his lines expand, be less terse, open up. He cycled harder, feeling his calves alternate their work with his thighs, a cooperating rhythm.