Allan Stein (17 page)

I
t wasn't long, two days, before a letter from Allan's son dropped through the slot with the junk by the toilet. It was addressed to me. I mean to say it was not addressed to Herbert Widener, as it should 
have been, but to me, using my real name, so suddenly I knew that in a flash of sloth and carelessness I had signed my given name to the initial letter. Allan's son wrote to me to say:

"Thank you for your letter relating to your current research about Allan Stein.

"My father died when I was barely twelve. He had been ill, and our relationship had been—to use a euphemism—very limited and infinitely remote from the Steins' artistic and literary splendor I have only heard of in books.

"I have no document about my father beside some correspondence relating to his service in the U.S. Army during World War I. If you are interested, I'll try to find it and mail a copy to you.

"I regret admitting there is absolutely nothing else I can contribute to your investigations.

"I believe, however, my half-brother Daniel may have some pertinent items or recollections.

"Sorry to be of no help. I am sure I have everything to learn from your publication.

"Best wishes for the completion of your work."

The letter was bleak and discouraging. It read like a bloodstain showing the last known location of the missing body. Had Allan disappeared so completely? The sad trajectory of his life from a charmed boyhood into grim dissolution—an adulthood his family despised and turned their eyes from—became disturbingly complete. If his own son could tell me nothing, what trace could there be? I wrote a second letter, asking again for anything, and signed my given name, a little nervously.

I
have said I tend to become what others think I am, I gravitate toward their vision of me, and this happened again in the stalled languor of the days after dining with Denis and George. Denis's 
questions about my "love" for Allan Stein had resonated, growing louder and louder, like a great struck bell that sets the rest of the carillon to ringing in its particular tone. His interrogation gave shape to a set of desires that had been, until then, somewhat haphazard. I don't mean that love or erotics had never been at issue with Allan. I mean that when Denis asked was Allan erotic to me, the neatness of the question resolved every aspect of my interest into this thrilling and singular tone. It set an eroticism (nascent in every aspect of my pursuit of Allan) humming. This wasn't new per se, obviously Allan had aroused me, but now it became powerful.

Equally, the name Herbert was beginning to sink in, like a garment I'd worn so long it had shaped me. "Herbert" was a mask that trapped me at the same time as it made me visible, so that I felt a little like the bubble boy (my first boyhood crush), who could only interact with others from behind the complete shield of his enclosure. "Herbert" was the shield that let me get near the boy, where I wanted to be. Every flasher needs a trench coat, and mine was "Herbert." When I was fourteen, I would sometimes get out of bed at night, very late, and sneak through the apartment tugging on my dick, arriving at the open door to Louise's bedroom, where I trembled in the doorway, naked and pulling on my dick, banging the carpet softly with my foot, wondering what would be enough to wake her. I was a kept bird in a cage of hallways and bedrooms, my heart racing like a sparrow. I'd keep pulling and pounding, a little harder with each beat until the instant when the nightstand light came on and bathed me for a single pulse, and I ran, naked and almost coming, to my bed to hide. I flourished in the moment of her regard. And I think it is the same for Allan, as it is for me, or for Stéphane. It is the fate equally of the boy, the character, and the dead to blossom in the instant of our apprehension, in the moment of being seen, and in the next instant to disappear. Pinned to this flick
ering edge where there is the possibility neither of merging nor of giving up, we are all unreachable. Allan, dead, begs to be watched. He stands just out of reach, frozen at the entrance to the bedroom, unwilling to run until we wake and see him. The house is not his. Art or death trapped him here in a foreign architecture that has fashioned him one position: poised. He can neither disappear nor ever step forward to join us.

♦11  
♦

M
iriam and I went shopping in the district east of here, on a morning when the sun was still pleasant, ruling brightly in a violent sky of wild gusts and great towering white clouds. lt seemed unlikely that now, more than a week into my masquerade, any of them could believe I was a scholar or cura- tor at all. No one cared that I made no progress with the Steins, nor that my methods were so lame and haphazard. Not that it was any of their business, but we had taken an interest in each other's busi- ness from the first. I suppose Denis let them believe it was his doing; he was a very protective and giving helper.

Miriam brought canvas carrying bags, hung from the handle-bars of our bikes, and I was happy to find she lounged on her bicycle, rather than racing like Stéphane. She had a marvelous dex- terity and performed a near decathlon of unrelated tasks as we rode east along the rue Brillat-Savarin, toward “Chinatown.” She might have been sitting in the living room rather than traffic, given the ease with which she changed batteries in her small camera, snapped a shot of me, then rolled a cigarette and smoked it, all the while pedaling and keeping up her end of the conversation.

"After the Germans starved the Dutch, you see," she went on, kissing her lips to the first cigarette at rue Kuss, "they took all the hicycles, I mean while in retreat. They'd been defeated by the Ca
nadians, and in retreat they took the bicycles from us, and this is why we say, for example at a restaurant where a German is perhaps being rude, "
Godverdomme Duitser
, give me back my bicycle!"

"I didn't know that."

Miriam pointed to the left, where a narrow break between buildings opened onto a great common yard. Waist-high boys swarmed after a kicked ball, tumbling in bunches where scruffy grass broke through the paving. "Stéphane used to play here."

"When?" I brightened at the topic.

"A few years ago, when he was little, I mean as big as those kicking the ball there. He had friends here, from the school, and Per would bring him over in the afternoons to play." A man on a yellow moped cut in beside Miriam and pulled his helmet off,
putt-putting
along at bike speed. Gray smoke billowed from the tailpipe and filled the road's edge, rapid cars slipping past like fish, so that I was overcome with nostalgia, merely for an instant, for the buses back home and the winter air with its glorious cargo of fumes. I breathed it, deep and greedy, through both nostrils (a last farewell to Dogan), feeling hungry. I was always hungry, since arriving, and getting skinnier and skinnier, despite eating a great deal of everything I was served. Rich, exquisite meats and sauces, amalgams of diverse fats, really, melding threads of garlic and herbs and salt in their thickened splendors. I didn't feel sick at all, nor worried about the trim result of this lipidinous bacchanal. It happened whenever I traveled. Travel made the world erotic, and this increased libido raised my metabolism to adolescent heights so that I could devour everything—food, sleep, company—and burn it all so fast I became slimmer with each bonbon chewed and swallowed. Miriam wobbled along, rolling a cigarette for the boy on the moped. He caressed her arm in taking the cigarette, and she pushed him away, a farewell fuck-off gesture. The boy revved back into the rapid stream of cars and disappeared.

"Silly boy," she laughed. "They flirt with anything that breathes. I think it is all they know how to do."

"I noticed that. Everyone flirts here."

"Or else they find you useless. It's like the British being polite. They've been raised to do it, they have no choice." Miriam blushed, from self-consciousness or maybe the exertion. The gap between our bikes narrowed in the wake of the boy. Empathy pulled us together, and we rode side by side like drunks on a couch.

"Denis is an awful flirt."

"Oh, no, he's wonderful. I enjoy him very much."

"That's what I meant."

"Yes?"

"He's so warm and he enjoys it so much. I react to him like a flower to the sunshine."

"You like it, then?"

"Yes, of course, it makes him so happy." Which of us was speaking? It could have been either, but it was Miriam who praised Denis's attentions. He probably flirted with all of them, he was such an ardent practitioner.

"I enjoy it too." Our shoulders bumped lightly. "I was worried that he'd be frustrated if it came to nothing, but actually he seems to like it."

"Denis is very patient."

We had come to a fat boulevard crowded with people and slow cars. Tiny trucks, some on three wheels, were pulled onto the sidewalks, burdened with splintered crates, vegetables, and sacks of rice. We rolled across the big street to an ugly plaza full of people.

"My favorite grocery," Miriam said, handing a bag to me. "Tang Frères."

A knot of women filled the counter of a tented snack stand where
shu mai
steamed in faulty glass boxes. Three boys directed cars across the littered plaza to be parked in a cavern behind the store.

It stank of rotten meat and hot sesame oil where we stood, but then a breeze cleaned the air and the sun was warm.

"Denis tells me you will stay a few weeks longer to finish your project with the Steins."

A few weeks longer? "Mmm." My tenancy in this place had become so unstable. In the last few days I'd lost control over the shape and trajectory of it, so that the particulars of my time as Herbert were beginning to rupture and shift. We already know my mind gives in to suggestion.

"Did Denis say how long, exactly?"

"No. What should I tell the City University?"

"It's hard to say."

The store's cold interior was big as a warehouse, packed with carts and children, shelves, bins, stalls, and barrels of ash-covered eggs. Shoppers maneuvered past one another in their focused pursuits. Miriam led me into the flow of aisle one, and I pressed myself against her to stay close.

"There is a kind of bean I get for Stéphane's digestion," she explained over her shoulder. "A naturopath told me of it." Wet, aromatic bunched cilantro brushed my nose with the plastic-edged basket of a woman pushing past us. She used her burden as a wedge to pry a path to the canned bamboo shoots behind Miriam's long legs.

"Is his digestion a congenital problem?" Maybe a leaf or scrap got left on my nose, for I kept smelling the perfumy herb, together with a snapped root of ginger Miriam broke and held up to me before dropping it in her bag. Frilly blond cabbage, long mat beans, fuzzy to the touch, and a cucumber as veined and throttled as an old man's dick (sealed in plastic) got tossed in with the knobby ginger. We paused by the ash-blackened eggs.

"He's always been delicate in the stomach." The floor was sticky with spilled juice and my shoes tacked and snapped each
time I lifted them, a light percussive rhythm to the vocal rumble around us—multilingual shoppers' babble plus the shouted broadcasts of fishmongers tossing great black eels and crab from tanks to the wrapping men, who bound them, still squirming, in paper at the cold back end of the store. A fur collar, ermine, and the shoulder that pushed it past my face bumped between us, and I lost Miriam, pressing my hands to this billowing new fur and the soft nap of cashmere in the coat beneath it. My hand brushed down the coat's great backside, found a tough button (gut braided to make a lozenge large enough to slip into the belt and fasten it), plus dental floss, a short string left clinging to the coat, but this woman would not move. Rounded flesh inside the coat, brightly lit dirt-specked beets in a great bin (viewed through the ermine), clouds of lavender perfume and a cigarette (clove, sickly sweet), my feet stuck in place, and now a man jammed up behind me (unseen but a man for certain), I watched Miriam turn left past a great mound of porcelain teapots stacked in straw. This man pressed, poking, so that I got pushed against the cashmere, all round and forgiving (but unbudgeable—she browsed through the eggs, shaking them, dusting her fingers off between tries), and impressed with the growing prod in the prow of the man's pants behind me, evidently his purpose although I could not, would not, turn to ask him. Traffic kept me pinioned. I smelled the eggs when she lifted them, musty, sour, like basement storage. To my right, bent rustlers rummaged through bottom bins of cellophaned ramen, crackling red, pink, blue, yellow, green (lime and forest), tan, brown, and beige-bordered boxy packets (marked for promised flavors), their hands flashing in and out of the metal-caged bins. This hidden man's fingers found my hips, firm, like a good handshake, and I got a hole punched in my look of concentration by the pressure he engineered with the twin hip holds. A whole lack of concentration, in this shifting drifting frozen in-store air, slight and heady
puffs of clove smoke, widened my eyes beyond noodles, cabbage, dirt or eggs, beets, flack, floor gack, bulb roots, bin splints, dry-wrap fungus packs, green peas, cracker snacks, brine slime, fish powders, tiny paper clothing pin dolls, red and golden dragons, sleeve emblazoned, ruby candles (packs of forty), ginger candy, wrinkled tasty-wrapped rice paper; fancy fabric (cashmere) felt, my fingers fell on piled Pokey chocolate straw packets, feeling packet, packet, packet, and my butt got backed up, feeling prodding poker on me, some aroma from the fur, rain-fresh day, as if it had been winter out—last winter, hail blown down from the gray pigeon sky, trash carried up by the cold March wind— because this man kept pushing. I saw it all, every item in the list (but through the fur), and felt this grand expanding man, this catalogue he pressed on me, fecund and swollen, poking me like a noun, any number of nouns, all fattened so the room was full of them. He left me standing by the sugar beets.

Miss Cashmere placed an egg in her purse, napkin wrapped, then made her getaway into traffic. Mr. Prod was gone, unseen. I shifted my pants up a notch, stone-faced like the drunk who struggles dignified from the fountain, and smoothed my hips where he'd held them. Miriam's head was visible, ten yards away, above twin metal shelves of sake. The incident made me smug, knighted by the sword, so that I bumped my way through the crowd now with greater bravado, slipping my hips through gaps thin as paper and leading with my generous hands. It was remarkably easy to reach her this way.

I've been in love with women more often than men, I think because they're linked to boys in a way that men are not. Herbert complains that I'm not a true homosexual, as if my attractions were some kind of treason, and he's right, though I certainly don't think of myself as bisexual or anything ridiculous like that. Once he said that actually I was straight and a boy, to me, was just a woman with
a dick. "You look at a boy and you see a woman with a dick," he complained one evening at home viewing slides. "And you think, Oh, heaven, a woman with a great big dick, the most perfect creature imaginable." Herbert annoys me because these flippant asides get stuck in my head as if they were correct somehow, which is what happened with this notion. He was wrong, of course, but the collapsed image engaged me against my will, I think because the truth was smashed in there somewhere. A woman with a dick scares me, but a woman with a son is magical. I have swooned for this pair often enough for Herbert's crass reduction to ring true. Not only is the great dick kept right there on center stage with the mom around to admire it, but the boy's usual disappearance into brutal, ugly manhood is halted by her too. With Mom holding on, he stays a boy. Their relationship is sufficient: She loves him, and he loves her loving him. I like to get involved in this sort of thing, loving him with her, or loving her for loving him, or loving him as her, or, most pleasing, loving him and having her love me and him as a kind of two-headed dick. Miriam was still Miriam, not simply the boy's mom, but there was the ghost of an echo of a thought lurking, an inkling or a memory.

"Do you know sake?" she asked, as if nothing had intervened between us, no man, no hip handling, no thoughts. "Serge will make a teriyaki with fish, and he has asked me to bring home sake." I smiled, nodding no, and scanned the crowded lines of bottles. Their labels were all in Japanese, except for the repeated word "sake."

"Buy the most expensive one. My friend Herbert does that."

"You have a friend named Herbert?" She asked it absentmindedly, still fingering the tall bottles.

"Yes, odd, isn't it?" I shrugged and took a sake from the shelf. "Not a close friend, really, but he buys expensive wines, in any case, when he doesn't know the labels."

"I suppose they
are
expensive for a reason."

"Mmm, exactly." We picked the second-highest priced, a great elegant two liters of clear rice wine, and put it in the bag with the boy's special beans. The broken ginger and a paper sleeve of Chinese five-spice were pungent in the bags, and I pinched a spray of green chives to get the sharp onion smell on my hands.

"The law clients think this way. The more they are charged the better they feel about the service."

"Is that typical of the French, do you think?"

"Nothing is typical of the French. Though I do remember Serge chose the most expensive teacher of tantra, by this same method as your friend Herbert with his wines."

"You take lessons?"

"We did, with this very expensive, brutal German."

"He must have been the toast of Paris."

"She. There's certainly a cult of excellence in Paris, of finding 'the best' and paying a lot for it, but in fact this woman's students were mostly foreigners."

"Mmm."

"Serge was the only Frenchman. I guess there aren't that many French interested in paying to learn sex. Except, of course, the schoolboys."

"There were schoolboys?"

The density of things relaxed and the air became spacious in this long receding wake of my encounter. Tins of green tea filled a shelf at our hips. My hand caused an avalanche of shrink-wrapped dry fish bumping a bin we passed, and Miriam laughed at the great stream of them sliding to the floor around us. The fish were skeletal or like leather, beige and crusty with salt or brine. "Migrating home to spawn." Miriam smiled at my joke and helped me pick the packets up. "Has Stéphane got a girlfriend?" I asked suddenly,
breathlessly. A period of time elapsed, less than a second, in which my eyes moved, darting like caged birds back and forth in their prison.