Читать книгу Stella Maris - Michael Carroll - Страница 9

The Leisure Classless

HOMOSEXUAL LEISURE COMPOUND (palms, chlorine). Evening.

Outdoor hot tub.

They were telling me about a straight couple they knew.

“She was a stage actress and he used to run a big pharmaceutical. But down here, we’re the perfect neighbors. At Christmas he started this thing of giving us sex toys. She loves that.”

“So we got a bunch of stuff from Leather Chest in one of their gift baskets, by delivery.”

“Gift bow and everything.”

I was thinking that if they asked, sure, why not. Tip right into that. Get off, go home.

Then I went ahead and offered. I was that horny. And this despite their age.

“Any time you want it, guys, I’ll just hike it in the air.”

They just sort of laughed and continued soaking and lightly splashing the bubbling surface and once while none of us was saying anything the (even) older one got out to reset the jets.

The loss of Carsten had unsprung me. Where once I’d had my own German unicorn from Munich, where they breed them especially (all that social democracy granting leisure hours, time off for young Mutti und Papa, fresh food, a passion for soccer), I just needed someone, one after another, back there giving me grief. I needed to be serviced back there. This is the PBS version.

I started to get out and thought I should say something to save face, if that was possible:

“So I’m going out to the bar and doing some work, finishing an article due yesterday.”

Here at Fantasy House I can lean this way or that, into leisure or else into my living.

“Oh. Okay. You can do that, work at the bar, write with all that distraction?”

“Sure,” I said, and made a little innuendo-joke, though I don’t remember what.

Anyway, they weren’t really asking, they were just being polite. They were happy as is.

American manners. I study those. I study them by going abroad, on the cheap. Not that they interest me—I just write about manners since we are, as Americans, fucking freaks. I write about them to let them go in my mind, to feel free of and above them. Caught and released.

I’m so obviously a writer, right?

A travel writer, but that’s just an outgrowth of my lifestyle. More professionally, I’m an accomplished guest. Inherited a little, but had all these contacts, not all of them rich but a lot of them. And most of them aren’t sexual, most of them are women, in fact. I buy a ticket to a tony destination where they live and they send for me at the airport, have me driven me to their digs.

They live in nice areas, so I can expense what I want to (dinner out the last evening) and rent a car and see the harbor, the nature preserves, go to restaurants, write it up. Internet content.

Sometimes their drivers take me around, show me the old kirk of Glen Shee, take me to an inn near Balmoral for a luncheon in front of the roaring hearth on the house.

Not exactly professional of me to accept, but who’s going to care what my opinion of the shepherd’s pie is as long as I say it’s traditionally prepared and tasty?

Look at the times we’re living in. No one cares or pays much attention.

A digital blink, a data shrug. Everything is click bait for selling something else; so am I.

I have been known to be dodgy. Pick up the customer receipt when my hostess takes the credit card receipt, then send in a pic to my accountant, lying that I prefer to pay cash. Not getting rich, I’m breaking even. I have no savings. I’m waiting to finish the guest travelogue that inevitably is coming out of this mass of sloppy, somewhat careless blogs. A title: The Unaccomplished Guest (because self-deprecation is important). Or else make it The Leisured Classless. My savings are spare. I own no property. And my work is like vacation.

But at the advice of my potential editor, I’m leaving out the sex.

Which, again, there’s not a lot of.

Except when I’m down here in the balm. (For the sex, I have a thin, wan journal.)

I take a little off the top in my tax reporting and my expenses to give myself leisure when I want to take my time contributing to the blogs. I have maybe twenty conscious years left in me and I want to mess around, and I’m not on the apps. I’m on the scene. I like talking to the guys, live men. And Fantasy House, the compound, affords me this, and I can just afford Key West.

I live in a friend’s room off the kitchen of his Craftsman.

The freelance writer’s life, not that different from an existence of promiscuity.

It is nearly a perfect life and I should quit dreaming of having my own house. My friend and landlord, Teddy, nearly lost his during Irma, when suddenly she’d curved right. The fucker was put together with pegs and came from the Bahamas where it was first pegged together, then unpegged later, loaded onto a barge, then floated up the Gulf Stream. It has stood up to at least a hundred hurricane seasons. It inhales then it exhales. Teddy is seventy and he huddled in the center closet with his cat, Lily, while I was off in Utah, where there were all these fires distant from my cabin scorching across the ranges—one more apocalypse deferred. But it is coming, a reckoning that’s partly environmental, the other part neoliberal, the climax of greedy, need-heavy humanity. It’s coming, you ready? Because there’s a journalist social media–market for that, too.

What are these sodden roots and rotting branches? When the noonday sun peeks into the spaces between the wet branches? It can’t get in to evaporate the water that decomposes things here so quickly. Rainfall feeding humidity turning wood into crumbles like termite leavings.

No snow or ice, just the polar system slamming into the warm moist air. Huge rainfall.

I think I’m going to call it The Unaccomplished Guest. Sounds about right. It’s funny.

THEN I’M IN Salisbury, taking a look at the cathedral. My editor has connected me with a lady novelist. I’m not denigrating her. Her novels are capable, romantic, with a faint sexual odor.

Her husband is an earl, some lord. His ancestral lands sprawl. We walk through a forest on his land full of gorgeous, promiscuous blooming bushes, rhododendrons originally from Asia. Cultivars, adaptations. They bloom outrageously, fuchsia, sky, eye-harsh violet. My host says, “What perfect tarts, but they’ve been in the family forever, a fusillade of Wiltshire impudence.”

He pronounces fusillade very Frenchly.

Whenever I’m in the UK, I always have to look up a word or two. Once I went pheasant-shooting in Scotland, in the highlands, having come up from the Mull of Kintyre. The laird there referred to himself as a “wingshot.”

Well, we hunted in my family, too. We just didn’t have words like wingshot.

Later, perhaps needing cash for the manor’s upkeep, the woman novelist stops publishing fiction and becomes a hypnotherapist. And disappears into Facebook with 253 followers.

Understand, I come from trash. For my relatives hunting was for squirrel, an oily, mealy quarry. Some quail. Deer but my father decided in middle age that he didn’t like venison’s taste.

Northeast Florida. Hunting cabin. Gray greasy squirrel floating amid gloppy dumplings.

Those of my blood remaining there do not miss me. I don’t miss them.

Between the Bible and the big bosses of the unionless, leisureless, and classless “middle-class” rabble, all hugely in debt—a term that would describe me in destiny before my gay escape to college, thanks to a full-ride scholarship—our family bonds were gossamer to begin with.

I’m the only homosexual in the clan. For a time my liberal cousin was like my sister, and when my father was sick, she messaged me (because who spends time on the phone anymore?): “You should go see him. He’s just so pitiful. And your momma could really use your support.”

That “momma” so offensive and egregious to me, and on my phone I typed, “Just no.”

“Your daddy, remember how quickly he accepted you when you came out to them.”

I waited. She was the first to offer me support when I initially came out.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s the version you got, the legend.”

“What do you mean.”

“Men from our part of the country all have to be the stars of their own heroic sagas.”

“Now he wasn’t perfect, but he was a good man and you know it.”

“Again. Please mind your own business.”

I sort of lost her, too. Haven’t heard from her since the day after the election. We’d commiserated, but then I think she got like a lot of people, wait-and-seeish, and just gave in.

I was forty before I was able to lay it out candidly for people getting on my nerves.

“Well,” she said, “I just know what I’ve been told, and that’s all I know, but I know it.”

As for Southern women, that’s another story. Their garrulous way of acting objective.

The women in my family, talkative, breathlessly self-assured social hurricanes. Tribal.

Heathrow. Text from Teddy: “Irma a teapot tempest here, no biggie, just some mold along your doorstep. Hurry home and help with branches if you don’t mind.”

I’m on a low-cost carrier, where I’m suddenly charged seventy-five pounds for carry-on.

Teddy and I met at Fantasy House. He’s from Alabama, and it was mostly started with fun and jokes, but there’s nothing like two Southern escapees. He and I will get into kimonos and do scenes out of Flower Drum Song. We order out. We drink vodka. Go separately to bed.

Like I said, there’s precious little sex in this telling that’s not past or not pure imagining.

But there were times. There were times in my twenties and thirties, with women even.

I LOVED ANOTHER greatly once: Marion, the environmentalist half a generation older than me.

We met at a pollution photo installation at Customs House. Marion was friends with the photographer. My jaw dropped as I listened to her mic’d speech: warmly, almost intimately, she spoke about plastics in the ocean; the photos were gorgeous, in the way that cancer cells captured by electron microscope are like art: colorfully hideous, perfect killers that are invisible to us and smarter than us because they’re just doing their job uncomplaining. Marion spoke unhysterically and that heightened the effect of dread and looming annihilation. I was instantly enraptured, and I enjoyed pleasing her, keeping her house neat while she wrote her magazine articles, learning to cook vegetarian, and being criticized quietly, in that same undamning tone, for getting it wrong.

Before she died, in the hospital in Miami, she said, “I hate having to say we fucked up.”

She meant humanity. As her adoring helpmeet, I knew this implicitly.

“Uh-huh.”

She loved only plants and animals and waited then added, “But I think we fucked up.”

I kissed her tan, leathery hand. I was losing my life by losing her—such a decade, when I almost had it together, and meeting Marion was like standing in front of a statue inhabited by the great fertility goddess of this or that ancient kingdom. I recalled the afternoon drinks I poured.

I said, “I know, darling.”

She wasn’t gaga, just exhausted from the process of letting go, tissue by tissue.

The hospital floor was a tomb.

“The world . . .”

“I know,” I pursued, “the world is lost. We’ve lost the world, we’ve done a good job.”

She curled her lip. The tan was evacuating from her beautiful, sun-ruined face. (She’d birded all through the southeast, knowing plumage, sighting evolutionary livery.) She sneered. I hadn’t done enough, the sneer was telling me. Or maybe she just hated dying. She’d loved life because she’d watched it slip away all around her. It was her profession to get it all done. She loved life.

She’d never married but had a grown son, a corporate lawyer whom she didn’t resent. It didn’t even occur to her to disapprove of her own son for helping cause global mayhem.

“I could’ve loved you more, argued less. I could’ve been better.”

“No, you couldn’t,” she said evenly, and I watched her all through the night, so shrunken.

Then I dreamed that she said, “You haven’t listened to me or understood me at all.”

I’d fallen asleep between four or five in the morning when the nurse woke to tell me.

MY FATHER HAD lost some of his money. When he got cancer I flew to Lake City to be near him. Jim had a drainage tube curling away from his abdomen and dripping into a plastic bucket next to his bed. On the ugly linoleum floor. I observed how disgustingly peeling and upcurling the edges of the linoleum tiles looked. Now I was more disgusted by the sordid VA facility (a come-down for my father) than I was by him. And in that moment, briefly, I felt pity nearly like an old love.

In the bright next day my mother drove me to the bank to open and look into their safe-deposit boxes. Amazing assets. I was now the executor. I took home keys and codes. Then my father recovered. Once, I’d recognized their marriage as what a friend had identified as this great love coupling, meant to dispel the want and neglect of what I’d known growing up. They’d paid more attention to each other than either of them had to the rest of us. Primally, I was glad of his recovery, and that feeling had lasted for a while—ending around when the love and pity did, too.

I wanted to believe I had it in me to survive long and hard, too, just through heredity.

We were on the phone some months later and my father said: “Well, I’ll never go through fucking chemo again. Fuck that. Know what I’ll do when it comes back? Get out a shotgun and stick it in my mouth and pull the goddamn trigger.”

He’d served in Vietnam and talked unapologetically like a soldier and taken us to church.

They’d had five more years, more love for each other and more reticence, and even—I’d say—more diffidence and probably disgust toward their offspring. Since we’d survive them. He got sick again, as he no doubt knew he would. They’d said it would move to the brain next; it did.

So after seven years, according to the police report, he’d taken out the shotgun, loaded it, and found my mother while she slept and taken care of her first. Life can be surprisingly ugly.

Then you move on.

NEXT I’M IN Tuscany, on the fabulous estate of two unrepentantly fussy queens. Olive groves, vines. A vegetable garden and, for the more leisurely inclined guests, a swimming pool and gracious gardens. The house itself has been expanded. I won’t swim, ashamed of my torso. They are so judgmental that nothing escapes them. All is taste, manners. They drive me into Lucca for their special pasta, which is simple (it’s good), and when I have to write home about it I brag about the freshness of the peas, the velvety simplicity of the elephant-ear pasta. I’ve had too much wine, it is pointed out to me. They laugh as we walk atop the medieval city walls: “Wine is the sibling of a meal. Let’s get you home, you souse. We have a painting to show you. You’ll be amused . . .”

I know what they want. I’m not going to give it to them, this understood privilege.

They’re American, one rich, the other pretentious. The pretentious one talks much more.

The painting was from the Bourbon era, the last good one, they said—the Risorgimento a bourgeois nationalist turn in the wrong direction. I was supposed to resemble a baron but didn’t.

They were supposed to be getting me into bed, me a generation younger, but they didn’t.

They came from Chicago and had begun buying into their taste. And there I said it.

WHEN I’M AT home, I’m in Teddy’s room watching cable on a big flat-screen TV. And all I need are cable news and PBS. The South Florida PBS I love because it’s soothing. Nothing’s so soothing as basic cable in the evening, when night has gathered above the back garden you can smell with the windows open, the air carrying the green and colored odors from the wet leaves and flowers, and you know not much is happening anywhere else on your island. No, taste and sex—to me—are the greatest violence, assaulting you, questioning your motives and impugning your worth. It is a nice thing to be a sentient mammal with language, without a past necessarily, without a thing called taste, and with your libido and hunger for sex and the questions it drags in its wake behind you. If you don’t feel like eating, you don’t eat anything. Teddy upstairs is in bed by six or seven.

Sunday PBS is my favorite, for its symmetry and logic. The British procedural detective drama I watch stars an actress who had her day in the nineties but waned because the films she’d been chosen to play the lead in were so painful to watch they lost every foreign Oscar. Whatever he had directed, I implored my friends to go out and see by this English genius. I won’t say they lost me those friends, but I’ll say with certainty I went down in their estimation. I was the snob—but I’m no snob! I’m the opposite of a snob! I’m the original of me, myself. No pretensions. I hope you can spy that. I come forward and lay out the truth of my simplicity. I’m not much.

I like spying out the formula of the British crime drama starring the Celtic actress—who should have won that Best Actress back when and, since she never did, is consigned to BBC.

Here’s the formula. Something terrible has occurred in the city in the north of Britain not far from the Scottish border. Every week something terrible if not outright heinous, unspeakable.

Her lieutenant is taller, handsome, blond, but he’s just learning, watching her move, act.

She has her gestures, working the shrug, the frown, her voice a kind of detached whine.

The gestures and voice are couched in what I call her patented bemused declarative.

I think this is what I relate to, her bemused declarative tone, when she cross-examines.

“And then what happened, dear. You had to make it look like an accident, didn’t you.”

You can barely hear the question mark at the end of every weary, bemused declarative.

The guilty are either rich or portrayed by sexy young, let’s say it, flowers of Britishhood.

“And in order to save the affair and cover it up, you had to drown the bairn in his bath.”

Initially I had to look up bairn, the Scots for “child.”

Overall the series makes great use of bairn.

I LIKE TO be in for the night by four or five, though one evening I was running late, having been at the homosexual leisure compound. I’d gotten into a lovely conversation with a youth who was acting enchanted. I never understand young people who take an interest: What do they need of us when now they have everything? He’d left home, he said, suddenly. Left Montgomery. Jay was living at Fantasy House, where this account begins. I was taking an indoor hot tub. Kids now, or some of them, come swinging in naked. On the walls above the Jacuzzi, there’s a reproduction of a Matisse, naked men with their hands enchained, dancing or greeting the sun. They enjoin with Nature, whatever, painted in acrylic (acrylic, I assume: more moisture-resistant) on the sheetrock of the hot-tub room. It serves. I sound pretentious writing that, but it does inspire. Ignore it, and it doesn’t matter. It’s part of the atmosphere. Nudity, good. Sensuality, premium. It’s all good.

I WAS RUNNING late. I locked up my bike and turned to pick up my groceries from Fausto’s.

A shabby figure of a man came loping along, his clothes storm-wrinkled and dried again. His hair hadn’t been cut in a while. He hadn’t shaved. He stopped, turned in the wintering gray.

“Oh, wait,” he said, complete stranger, and pointed at me. “I’ve got a story for you.”

I was drunk and the next few lines are a hallucination, a melding of two timeframes.

But back to the hot-tub scene, and then forward to back home later.

“HEY MAN, IT’S so nice and warm in here. I’m dating the owner. I’m free to be, man, I’m free to be myself. You’re so interesting-looking. How old are you? You look full of experience.”

“A generous way of putting it, full of experience.”

“I know guys of your generation are still uptight because of AIDS. I think it’s more fun not to give a shit. I’m on PrEP, you know what it means. I can fuck, be fucked, not a problem.”

I said, quite prissily, and insincerely, “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves.”

“No we’re not. You like my moustache? I’m sort of self-conscious about it.”

“I think it’s handsome. It doesn’t work for everybody, but for you—”

He smiled, pleased. Then nothing happened. Nothing happened and then I left the compound, not unhappily, but contentedly weary and completely impotent.

“WEIRD THING JUST happened to me. A girl was crossing Truman and she looked at me and she just sort of giggled, waving. Then she turned and stepped right the fuck into the path of a truck.”

“LOOKS GREAT,” I said. “It goes well with the angles of your face. I’m not looking to hook up.”

I’ll never get it up with this kid—too vital, too young.

“Oh no, man. I wasn’t trying to say that. I was just talking. Where you from? I’m Jay.”

The two older gentlemen who had told me the sex-toy anecdote earlier got in with us.

Jay got busy talking to them, too, and I knew: he didn’t care about age, or anything else.

He just wanted sex for hire. And I respected that. Blog-wise, I too was sex for hire.

Travel is sex for the upper-annuated, the timid, and maybe the broken and disappointed.

More and more I know my place, the me I’m approaching.

IN THE LAST couple of years I loved, in quick succession, two younger men totally wrong for me.

The first was too young, I’ll admit. He came and found me, then each time, each episode, went screaming out of my life, crying abandonment, then crawled back until by some lack of will he wouldn’t crawl back anymore, bless him. I learned about personality disorders that way.

The other was closer to my age but couldn’t find in me what he needed. Unremarkably, unsurprisingly, he liked them younger and prettier than me. And also he needed to be supported financially. I got it. Look at me, living behind someone’s else’s kitchen. But happily. Without a couplehood, I was free. I didn’t have to buy two dinners out a night. Or any, if I wasn’t hungry.

I didn’t feel poor. I didn’t feel bound. Just morning-horny. The acceptable age where a man could still fuck me—my back to him—or eat me out was going gradually up. Loneliness, not an issue in those twenty minutes. Transcendent pleasure that like the wonder-thrill of a nice dream doesn’t last. I’m cursing and ordering and begging. I’m asking for approval, reassurance.

The unwritten law of promiscuous sex is obliging, whether through pleasure or abuse.

“That is my cunt! That is my cunt! My cunt!”

“It sure is.”

“You like it?”

“Sure, it’s okay.”

“I LEFT MY mom and stepdad back at Wicker Guesthouse. We almost lost everything with Irma up in Big Pine, but we found out today, good news! We can rebuild the trailer. With government funds and help. And I was just thinking, DJ, pay it forward! And so I had thirty dollars and I see all these people without hope or homes or help—and I start taking people to lunch at Subway.”

“That’s wonderful,” I say, wanting to take my groceries in and listen to Laura Nyro.

“But here’s the sting. I want to do it again tomorrow. My mom and stepdad have gone back up to Big Pine to look into things, and I’m with the dog, and I just need ten-twenty dollars.”

“I’m sorry. I have to go.”

NOW THAT I no longer drug, I sit with my feelings. I’m lucky in that I have a place to stay, some money to eat on, but I feel on the edge as well. I have it better than some. I don’t have it as well as others. I’ve lost my youth. Once I was beautiful. The loss of it I take as a sharp, black strike.

I go into the night’s utopia. It’s all wine and vodka.

My back doorstep smells of bleach, for clobbering the category-three mold.

But the garden remains, the bromeliads, the outrageous blossoms of bougainvillea, exotic bushes that climb and entwine and do well anywhere that’s warm and there’s enough rain.

You move away from the bleach smell and you smell color and green and warmth.

When I was five my father’s baby brother seduced me. My father was celebrating a first million, and Billy was tagging along. My parents were drunk on the beach of St. Thomas outside the hotel ground-level door. Billy was between things, not knowing what to do after high school, not ready to commit to college—hoping to avoid the draft. I was five and Billy was eighteen. I think about it more and more, although I’d like to let it go. Years of therapy helped a little. Not that I blame him. I haven’t for a long time, anyway. Sometimes I do lie here and think about it.