The Flamethrowers (47 page)

Didier snickered. It didn’t seem funny to me, even if Ronnie was making it up.

“It’s just that kind of thing,” Ronnie said, pointing his chin at Didier, “that I associate with the commodore. A smirk. A muffled glee. He said everything he wanted me to do, or did to me, was for my good, but often it seemed like it was for his good. If it was for my good, why did he muffle his glee? Was I a slave of some kind? I suddenly wondered as I lay there in the dark between the two of them. All existence is slavery of one kind or another, right? Who isn’t a slave? And whatever dignity I sacrificed by accepting their gifts, by doing what they asked,
still, I was sailing the world with only the smallest of worries: the water is a little cool for swimming this morning, and where do we keep the Band-Aids, because I spiked my toe on a bit of coral.

“I heard Artemio quietly snoring from his station on the floor, there in our hut, in case one of us needed a glass of water in the middle of the night. Did I have to reject this new life simply because something else had come before it? I had no chores and no homework. I swam whenever I wanted, and every so often explored a new port of call, with the paper currency of its government slipped into my pockets by the commodore and also by his wife, each of whom seemed to believe that they alone delighted in spoiling me. Did I want to sail the world, explore remote islands? Or did I want to mow the front lawn, jerk off to the illustration of the lady in the Hoover vacuum replacement bag manual, and get beaten on occasion with Dad’s leather belt? Obviously, these were two different realities. I could simply choose between them. And yet I felt the crushing sense that there was only one correct choice. And so I didn’t really have a choice, because I had to choose correctly.

“The natives were resealing the
Reno
. Once it was repaired we were onward to the Coral Sea and then the Cocos Islands. Who knew what the Fates had in store. I did not face them. I could not shake the feeling that I had wandered off the track when I chose the
Reno
from among the yachts that reared up in my vision that day. I could no longer suppress the old life. With its drab and dull brutalities, I knew it was the real one, my real life. I’d lost the toehold on my new life, with the commodore and his wife. I didn’t understand it anymore. Lying in the dark hut that night—an endless night, a night of great confusion—the commodore snuffled in his sleep and nuzzled close to me. I felt his humid breath on my shoulder, in two little streams from his nostrils. His wife stirred as well, and turned her face in my direction. They breathed on me asynchronously, as if it was their duty to cool me in their sleep. All of a sudden I panicked. Who
are
these people? I wondered.
And why the hell are they naked?
”

We all should have laughed. Because if it wasn’t true, it was surely funny. But none of us did laugh. Outside, rain began to fall, but softly.
Cooler air came in through the loft’s big open windows, and there was a sound of wet tires on the Bowery.

“I got up and crept out of the hut without waking them. The surf pounded like a heart. I walked barefoot along a dirt path until I found a larger hut with ceremonial shells hanging from the front door. The local tribal chief. I knocked and explained my situation the best I could. We walked over to the municipal government headquarters, where there was a switchboard, and I cabled my parents.

“As I waited for my mother and father to arrive, I pretended everything was normal. I swam open-eyed over the coral reef, which curled and fluttered along the seabed, fleshy and white as skate fish. I ate lobster and crab, cuttlefish and breadfruit. I lay in the hut and listened to the surf, dreaming up errands on which to send Artemio, as my hours of having a servant at my beck and call were dwindling. And here I could begin to invent and you guys might not notice, not even Stanley and his bullshit detector. I could tell you, for instance, that the commodore and his wife both died under mysterious circumstances, and lead you to believe that it was at my own innocent boy’s hands that they died, and I could even declare my reasons for murdering them in a way that would leave you satisfied, in fact more than satisfied, that I had done the right thing and that the commodore and his wife had met an appropriate end. Even if you weren’t convinced of their guilt, or didn’t believe in such a crude moral axis as that of guilt and innocence. Still, your judgment would be informed by a simple fact that we can all agree on: that the notion of the sea and sailors
by itself
suggests the notion of murder. What is sailing, after all, but an extreme form of criminality? I didn’t kill them. Like I said, I’m letting you know that I could start inventing. But even if I did kill them, you would feel no sympathy for the commodore in his suspiciously crisp clothes, his wife, calculating and lustful, calling to the drunk and obscene monkeys hanging above her in the trees, flashing their swollen red anuses while she opens her legs for the tribal chief of Kokovoko, who lifts her dress with one hand, and grips, in the other, a phallus of scrimshaw—”

“Ugh,” said Gloria. Nothing else. Just “ugh,” but Ronnie got the message.

“Okay, okay. As the facts stand, my parents came and took me home, end of it. I resumed my old life, Malt-O-Meal and Fruit of the Loom, model glue, cut grass. Feel of soft flannel and coarse denim, crackly leaf piles and thumbed comics. Our dog Ansich and our cat Fürsich. Everything was normal again, except that I suffered from occasional headaches. And when I twiddled the knob of my shortwave radio, tuning in to late-night transmissions under the blankets, the Tongan news hour or Sumatran music, I closed my eyes and rode the equator, like I was living my own lost life.

“Then, a few years ago, I was installing an artwork at Helen Hellenberger’s and this elderly woman walks into the gallery. She puts her old hands on either side of my face. ‘Julian, Julian, it’s you!’ she cries. ‘I’ve found you after all these years!’ Apparently, during our time on the boat, they named me after their dead son.”

“Heavy,” Gloria said.

“Or I think he was just dead to them, disowned or something, maybe for being gay. I can’t quite remember. We went to a restaurant together and over lunch she filled me in on the details of our brief life at sea. I had forgotten a great deal of it, in the interest of reconnecting with my family. She actually had a photo of me in her billfold. I looked like myself, but bronzed and barefoot, in ragged shorts. Also, this was the weirdest thing: I was wearing a sturdy-looking four-point leather harness over my chest.”

Saul Oppler said, “This is like Robert Louis Stevenson meets Tom of Finland. I never would have guessed, Ronnie.”

Ronnie either pretended not to hear or wasn’t interested in responding.

“I asked about the harness,” he said, “and she claimed it was a safety precaution, in case I fell overboard. A memory, the clammy feel of wet leather on my bare skin, came back to me, but I didn’t know if she was telling me the truth. In the photo, she and the commodore weren’t
wearing harnesses. ‘You were a minor,’ she said in accounting for this, ‘we were responsible for you.’ There are a lot of unanswered questions. I close my eyes and see either electric blue water and wind-flapped sails, feel a sense of sunny goodness, or I see something else, nights spent with the commodore and his wife, lessons that continued into something I can’t revisit. But I could be making that part up.”

“
That
part?” Stanley asked. “And not the whole goddamn thing?”

“They still send me a Christmas greeting every year, those cards that are on color photo stock, with a sprig of holly printed on the white trim of the photo paper. It’s strange. They never get any older in the pictures. I think it’s actually the same picture they’re sending every Christmas, but reprinted with the updated year.”

“How bizarre,” Gloria said. “That’s so odd they would do that. Send the
very same
Christmas photo every year.”

“You think
that’s
bizarre?” Stanley said. “What about the fact that Ronnie was in bed with two naked people, for Christ’s sake, yachting around the world as their semiadopted son?”

“But that sounds
exactly
like something Ronnie would do,” Gloria said, and she got up to begin clearing dinner plates.

I needed to talk to him. That was how I felt as we ate dessert and the subject shifted, Didier poking his smoked-down cigarette into the center of an uneaten chocolate truffle and listening intently to Stanley, who was saying something about the old Indian in fringed deerskin who canoes past offshore oil rigs in that public service announcement on television, which ends with the Indian’s single shed tear when garbage is dumped at his feet from a car window.

“Iron Eyes Cody,” Ronnie said. “Actually Sicilian, but it’s a good ad, this uncaring world of garbage flingers. And their garbage is not even in a bag. It’s actual garbage, crumpled debris that fuck-you’s to a stop at the old chief’s feet. The message is clear.”

“What is the message?” Stanley asked.

“The litterbug is responsible for the genocide of the American Indian.”

*  *  *

Ronnie was the last to leave that night. I walked him out, said I needed to make sure I’d locked the Moto Valera.

“I plan to work for a bit, but do you want to come over?” he asked. “Keep me company, as they say?”

On the walls of his studio were cut-out images and articles from a magazine called
Boy’s Life,
all about sailing and what to do if you capsize.

Don’t abandon your boat! It may float

long enough for someone to rescue you.

An empty bucket can work as a flotation device.

Take off your pants and blow air into them.

Tie off the waist and ankles.

On the far wall was a sheet of butcher paper with a long list of phrases. They were titles, Ronnie said.

“For what?”

“My autobiography,” he said.

“Why do you invent?” I asked, scanning the list of titles. “Invent, and tell lies?”

“They aren’t lies,” Ronnie said. “They’re a form of discretion.”

He was organizing his worktable, putting things into piles.

“Ronnie,” I said, “what were you trying to tell me tonight?”

“I wasn’t trying to tell you anything. It was just a story. To entertain those moneyed rubes Erwin brought to dinner.”

“The woman toweling her hair. She . . . it could have been me and you know it. Tell me the truth.”

“It could have been you, yeah. And then what? You think you want to be with me? Act on some desire you felt long ago, that we both felt?”

I bit my lip.

“Look,” he said, and petted my hair. His expression held something like pity. “I have no problem carrying around a small curiosity about lying down with you again. About more than that, okay? Okay? About looking at your cake-box face and your fucked-up teeth, which make you, frankly, extra-cute. About some kind of project of actually getting to know you. Because I honestly don’t think you know yourself. Which is why you love egotistical jerks. But I’ll tell you something about us, about me and about you, and what happens when two people decide to share some kind of life together. One of them eventually becomes curious about something else, someone else. And where does that leave you?”

My heart was pounding. I felt an ache of sadness spreading through me, down to the ends of my fingers.

“You want another Sandro, and I can just screw whoever I want, to keep myself entertained? Because it wasn’t just Talia that he was gifting himself with. It wasn’t just Giddle, either, who, well, see Giddle is like a piece of furniture, necessary but ultimately insignificant, something to lie down on occasionally. And it wasn’t merely Gloria, who has been Sandro’s leftovers for at least a decade, picked up and discarded when he wants. In fact, gee. Name a woman you have met through Sandro, or that he has met through you, and you’ll find that—”

“Stop it,” I said, tears rolling down my face. “Stop. Why are you doing this?”

“To show you the uselessness of the truth,” he said.

Table for Two for One: An Autobiography

The Other Side of Tender: A Life

Married but Looking: My Story

Manhandled: An Autobiography

Who Ate All the Pussy? One Man’s Journey

Friendly Fire: My Trials and Triumphs

Potato in a Ski Mask: The True Untold Story

They Took the Liquor but Left the Girl: My Life

Partial View, Obstructed: A Memoir

Third Place (Victory Is a Seven-Letter Word)

Hamburger in Paradise: My Adventures

Bars and Stripes: Doing Time

Green Onions: Getting Out Alive

Can a Brother Get a Table Dance? My Life, Uncensored

Still in Love: A Confession

Patent Pending: My Becoming

Too Rich to Be Bothered (The Life of Sandro Valera, as Told to Ronnie Fontaine)

Suicide by Cop: The Path Not Taken

Suds and Duds: Clocking Time with Beer and Laundry

How to Pray and Get Results: The Diaries of Ronnie Fontaine

I Lived (He Died)

You’re Soaking in It: My Secrets

I
was alone again, like when I first arrived in New York, but it was a different alone. Things had happened. I’d walked under the plane trees with Sandro in the gardens of the Villa Valera in Bellagio. I’d tried to chew inedible bread under a fresco of drowning popes. I knew what it felt like to be teargassed. I’d been drawn in by three different men, Ronnie, Sandro, Gianni, and one woman, Giddle, and it would seem that I knew nothing about any of them. I owned a motorcycle. I rode it all over town. It wasn’t just transportation, it was an experience. I was a girl on a motorcycle. And I finally discovered what was behind the green door.