A Boy's Own Story (3 page)

"Time for bed, young fella," my father said at last.

Downstairs I undressed by the colored light of the glass-brick bar and, wearing just a T-shirt and jockey shorts, hurried into the dark dormitory and slipped into my cot. Nights on the lake are cold even in July; the bed had two thick blankets on it that had been aired outside that day and smelled of pine needles. I listened to the grown-ups; the metal vents conducted sound better than heat. Their conversation, which had seemed so lively and sincere when I had witnessed it, now sounded stilted and halting, Lots of fake laughter. Silences became longer and longer. At last everyone said good night and headed upstairs. Another five minutes of moaning pipes, flushing toilets and padding feet. Then long murmured consultations in bed by each couple. Then silence.

"You still awake?" Kevin called from his bed.

"Yes," I said. I couldn't see him in the dark but I could tell his cot was at the other end of the room; Peter was audibly asleep on the cot between.

"How old are you?" Kevin asked.

"Fifteen. And you?"

"Twelve. You ever done it with girls?"

"Sure," I said. I knew I could always tell him about the black prostitute I'd visited. "You?"

"Naw. Not yet," Pause. "I hear you gotta warm 'em up."

"That's correct."

"How do you do it?"

I had read a marriage manual. "Well, you turn the lights down and kiss a long time first."

"With your clothes on?"

"Of course. Then you take off her top and play with her breasts. But very gently. Don't get too rough—they don't like that."

"Does she play with your boner?"

"Not usually. An older, experienced woman might."

"You been with an older woman?"

"Once."

"They get kinda saggy, don't they?"

"My friend was beautiful," I said, offended on behalf of the imaginary lady.

"Is it real wet and slippery in there? Some guy told me it was like wet liver in a milk bottle."

"Only if the romantic foreplay has gone on long enough."

"How long's enough?"

"An hour."

The silence was thoughtful, as though it were an eyelash beating against a pillowcase.

"The guys back home? Guys in my neighborhood?"

"Yes?" I said.

"We all cornhole each other. You ever do that?"

"Sure."

"What?"

"I said sure."

"Guess you've outgrown that by now."

"Well, yeah, but since there aren't any girls around..." I felt as a scientist must when he knows he's about to bring off the experiment of his career: outwardly calm, inwardly jubilant, already braced for disappointment. "We could try it now." Pause. "If you want to." As soon as the words were out of my mouth I felt he wouldn't come to my bed; he had found something wrong with me, he thought I was a sissy, I should have said "Right" instead of "That's correct."

"Got any stuff?" he asked.

"What?"

"You know. Like Vaseline?"

"No, but we don't need it. Spit will"—I started to say "do," but men say "work"—"work." My penis was hard but still bent painfully down in the jockey shorts; I released it and placed the head under the taut elastic waistband.

"Naw, you gotta have Vaseline." I might be knowledgeable about real sex, but apparently Kevin was to be the expert when it came to cornholing.

"Well, let's try spit."

"I don't know. Okay." His voice was small and his mouth sounded dry.

I watched him come toward me. He, too, had jockey shorts on, which appeared to glow. Though barechested now, he'd worn a T-shirt all through Little League season that had left his torso and upper arms pale; his ghost shirt excited me, because it reminded me he was captain of his team.

We pulled off our shorts. I opened my arms to Kevin and closed my eyes. He said, "It's colder than a witch's tit." I lay on my side facing him and he slipped in beside me. His breath smelled of milk. His hands and feet were cold. I kept my lower arm scrunched under me, but with the upper one I nervously patted his back. His back and chest and legs were silky and hairless, though I could see a tuft of eiderdown under his arm, which he'd lifted to pat my back in reciprocation. A thin layer of baby fat still formed a pad under his skin. Beneath the fat I could feel the hard, rounded muscles. He reached down under the sheet to touch my penis, and I touched his.

"Ever put them together in your hand?" he asked.

"No," I said. "Show me."

"You spit on your hand first, get it real wet. See? Then you—scoot closer, up a bit—you put them together like this. It feels neat."

"Yes," I said. "Neat."

Since I knew he wouldn't let me kiss him, I put my head beside his and pressed my lips silently to his neck. His neck was smooth and long and thin, too thin for the size of his head; in this way, too, he still resembled a child. In the rising heat of our bodies I caught a slight whiff of his odor, not pungent like a grown-up's but faintly acrid, the smell of scallions in the rain.

"Who's first?" he asked.

"Cornholing?"

"I think we need some stuff. It won't work without stuff."

"I'll go first," I said. Although I put lots of spit on him and me, he still said it hurt. I'd get about half an inch in and he'd say, "Take it out! Quick!" He was lying on his side with his back to me, but I could still look over and see him wince in profile. "Jesus," he said. "It's like a knife all through me." The pain subsided and with the bravery of an Eagle Scout he said, "Okay. Try it again. But take it easy and promise you'll pull out when I say so."

This time I went in a millimeter at a time, waiting between each advance. I could feel his muscles relaxing.

"Is it in?" he asked.

"Yep."

"All the way in?"

"Almost. There. It's all in."

"Really?" He reached back for my crotch to make sure. "Yeah, it is," he said. "Feel good?"

"Terrific."

"Okay," he instructed, "go in and out, but slow, okay?"

"Sure."

I tried a few short thrusts and asked if I was hurting him. He shook his head.

He bent his knees up toward his chest and I flowed around him. Whereas face to face I had felt timid and unable to get enough of his body against enough of mine, now I was glued to him and he didn't object—it was understood that this was my turn and I could do what I liked. I tunneled my lower arm under him and folded it across his chest; his ribs were unexpectedly small and countable, and now that he'd completely relaxed I could get deeper and deeper into him. That such a tough, muscled little guy, whose words were so flat and eyes so without depth or humor, could be so richly taken—oh, he felt good. But the sensation he was giving didn't seem like something afforded by his body, or if so, then it was a secret gift, shameful and pungent, one he didn't dare acknowledge. In the Chris-Craft I'd been afraid of him. He had been the usual intimidating winner, beyond excitement—but here he was, pushing this tendoned, shifting pleasure back into me, the fine hair on his neck damp with sweat just above the hollows the sculptor had pressed with his thumbs into the clay. His tan hand was resting on his white hip. The ends of his lashes were pulsing just beyond the line of his full cheek.

"Does it feel good?" he asked. "Want it tighter?" he asked, as a shoe salesman might.

"No, it's fine."

"See, I can make it tighter," and indeed he could. His eagerness to please me reminded me that I needn't have worried, that in his own eyes he was just a kid and I a high school guy who'd done it with girls and one older lady and everything. Most of the time I had dreamed of an English lord who'd kidnap me and take me away forever; someone who'd save me and whom I'd rule. But now it seemed that Kevin and I didn't need anyone older, we could run away together, I would be our protector. We were already sleeping in a field under a sheet of breezes and taking turns feeding on each other's bodies, wet from the dew.

"I'm getting close," I said. "Want me to pull out?"

"Go ahead," he said. "Fill 'er up."

"Okay. Here goes. Oh, God. Jesus!" I couldn't help kissing his cheek.

"Your beard hurts," he said. "You shave every day?"

"Every other.You?"

"Not yet. But the fuzz is gettin' dark. Some guy told me the sooner you start shavin', the faster it comes in. Do you agree?"

"I think so. Well," I said, "I'm pullin' out. Your turn."

I turned my back to Kevin and I could hear him spitting on his hand. I didn't particularly like getting cornholed, but I was peaceful and happy because we loved each other. People say young love or love of the moment isn't real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development, the mechanical elaboration of a crab canon with too many parts. I was aware of the treacherous air vents above us, conducting the sounds we were making upstairs. Maybe my dad was listening. Or maybe, just like Kevin, he was unaware of anything but the pleasure spurting up out of his body and into mine.

My father had started his own business fifteen years earlier in order to make money, be his own boss and keep his own hours. These were imperatives, not simple wishes, and whenever they were set aside he suffered, even physically. Money was for him the air superior people needed to breathe; wealth and superiority coincided, though when he said someone was from a "good" family, he meant rich first and only secondarily respectable or virtuous. But his real reason for wanting money, I imagine, was that it was a distinction as absolute, as genius and as solitary; any other thing people think is worth getting would have struck him as too arbitrary and congenial. Too sociable.

His need for independence was less explicit, more shaded but just as strong. Independence conferred upon him feudal rights of the purse and gavel and allowed him to dictate his fate and ours. The fate he chose for himself was misanthropic and poetic. He slept all day, rose at three at the earliest or five at the latest and by six, when the winter sky was already dark, he was sitting down to a breakfast of a pound of bacon, six scrambled eggs and eight slices of toast freighted with preserves. He took no lunch but at three or four in the morning ate a supper of a plate-size steak, three vegetables, a salad, more bread and a dessert, preferably sugared strawberries over vanilla ice cream. His only drink was spring water delivered to the house in big glass jugs, tinted a faint blue, inverted above an office-style electric water cooler. Before bedtime he had his snack of buttered chocolate grahams. Then he'd brush Old Boy in the basement and take him out for a long dawn walk; he talked to the dog in a man-to-man but deeply solicitous way, somewhat as though the animal were a great man gone senile. His hours gave Dad the cool and silence of the night and took away the populated disorder of the day.

He worked all night at his desk, wielding a calculating machine and slide rule and printing page after page of specifications and instructions. At home he sat in his office at the top of his house, which had been built to resemble a Norman castle, and from his windows he could survey the floodlit lawn. On the wall behind him hung a big, bad painting of waves crashing in the moonlight. He smoked cigars until the last hour before bedtime, when he switched to a pipe. Its sweet smoke filtered through the central heating or air conditioning into every corner of the sealed house. The pipe hour was the time to approach him for a favor or just a few pleasant words; I'd sit on the loveseat beside his blond mahogany desk and watch him work. Hour after hour he wrote with an onyx fountain pen in lowercase block letters that had the angle and lean elegance of Art Deco design; his smoke drifted up through the rosy light cast by the matching red shades on floor stands that flanked the desk.

Even at the cottage he would set up an office and work till dawn when he wasn't outdoors doing manual labor under artificial light, his "hobby." But now a houseful of guests had forced him to modify his hours and habits. Had Mrs. Cork been a beauty he might have suffered the presence of her family more gladly; he was a great fancier of women and they brought out in him a courtliness as rich and old as the best port. His irritable misanthropy vanished in the presence of a beautiful woman. She could even be a child, a lovely little girl; she would still excite gallantry in him. Once a ten-year-old charmer who was staying with us announced at midnight that she wanted chocolate and my father drove fifty miles to a nearby town, dragged the owner of a candy store out of bed and paid a hundred dollars for twenty opera creams. He once gave the same amount as a tip to a full-bodied, glossy-lipped singer in an Italian restaurant who had serenaded him with a wobbling but surprisingly intimate rendition of "Vissi d'arte" to an accordion accompaniment executed by a hunchback with Bell's palsy freezing half his face while the other half modestly winked and smiled.

The only part of his customary life my father could maintain during the Corks' visit was filling every waking moment with what used to be called "classical" music, though most of it was romantic, Brahms in particular. He had always had hundreds of records, which he played on a Meissen phonograph that stood as a separate, massive piece of furniture in one corner of his office.

I mention the constant music because, to my mind at least, it served as an invisible link between my father and me. He never discussed music beyond saying that the
German Requiem
was "damn nice" or that the violin and cello concerto was "one hell of a piece," and even these judgments he made with a trace of embarrassment; for him, music was emotion, and he did not believe in discussing feelings.

His real love was the late Brahms, the piano
Intermezzi
and especially the two clarinet sonatas. These pieces, as unpredictable as thought and as human as conversation, filled the house night after night. He could not have liked them as background music to work to, since their abrupt changes of volume and dynamics must have made them too arresting to dismiss. I never showered with my dad, I never saw him naked, not once, but we did immerse ourselves, side by side, in those passionate streams every night. As he worked at his desk and I sat on his couch, reading or daydreaming, we bathed in music. Did he feel the same things I felt? Perhaps I ask this only because now that he's dead I fear we shared nothing and my long captivity in his house represented to him only a slight inconvenience, a major expense, a fair to middling disappointment, but I like to think that music spoke to us in similar ways and acted as the source and transcript of a shared rapture. I feel sorry for a man who never wanted to go to bed with his father; when the father dies, how can his ghost get warm except in a posthumous embrace? For that matter, how does the survivor get warm?