When You Are Engulfed in Flames (12 page)
All the Beauty You Will Ever Need
In Paris they warn you before cutting off the water, but out in Normandy you’re just supposed to know.
You’re also supposed to be prepared, and it’s this last part that gets me every time. Still, though, I manage to get by. A saucepan of chicken broth will do for shaving, and in a pinch I can always find something to pour into the toilet tank: orange juice, milk, a lesser champagne. If I really get hard up, I suppose I could hike through the woods and bathe in the river, though it’s never quite come to that.
Most often, our water is shut off because of some reconstruction project, either in our village or in the next one over. A hole is dug, a pipe is replaced, and within a few hours things are back to normal. The mystery is that it’s so perfectly timed to my schedule. This is to say that the tap dries up at the exact moment I roll out of bed, which is usually between 10:00 and 10:30. For me this is early, but for Hugh and most of our neighbors it’s something closer to midday. What they do at 6:00 a.m. is anyone’s guess. I only know that they’re incredibly self-righteous about it and talk about the dawn as if it’s a personal reward, bestowed on account of their great virtue.
The last time our water was cut, it was early summer. I got up at my regular hour and saw that Hugh was off somewhere, doing whatever it is he does. This left me alone to solve the coffee problem — a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight. Once, in a half sleep, I made it with Perrier, which sounds plausible but really isn’t. On another occasion, I heated up some leftover tea and poured that over the grounds. Had the tea been black rather than green, the coffee might have worked out, but, as it was, the result was vile. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d try more than once, so this time I skipped the teapot and headed straight for a vase of wildflowers sitting by the phone on one of the living room tables.
Hugh had picked them the previous day, and it broke my heart to think of him marching across a muddy field with a bouquet in his hand. He does these things that are somehow
beyond
faggy and seem better suited to some hardscrabble pioneer wife: making jam, say, or sewing bedroom curtains out of burlap. Once I caught him down at the riverbank, beating our dirty clothes against a rock. This was before we got a washing machine, but still, he could have laundered things in the tub. “Who
are
you?” I’d said, and, as he turned, I half expected to see a baby at his breast, not nestled in one of those comfortable supports but hanging, red-faced, by its gums.
When Hugh beats underpants against river rocks or decides that it might be fun to grind his own flour, I think of a couple I once met. This was years ago, in the early nineties. I was living in New York and had returned to North Carolina for Christmas, my first priority being to get high and stay that way. My brother, Paul, knew of a guy who possibly had some pot to sell, so a phone call was made, and, in the way that these things happen, we found ourselves in a trailer twenty-odd miles outside of Raleigh.
The dealer was named Little Mike, and he addressed both Paul and me as “Bromine.” He looked like a high school student, or, closer still, like one of those kids who dropped out and then spent all day hanging around the parking lot: tracksuit, rattail, a wisp of thread looped through his freshly pierced ear. After a few words regarding my brother’s car, Little Mike ushered us inside and introduced us to his wife, who was sitting on their sofa, watching a Christmas special. The girl’s stockinged feet were resting on the coffee table, and settled between her legs, just south of her lap, was a flat-faced Persian. Both she and the cat had wide-set eyes, and ginger-colored hair, though hers was partially hidden beneath a woolen cap. Common too was the way they stuck their noses in the air when my brother and I entered the room. A little hostility was to be expected from the Persian, and I guessed I couldn’t blame the wife either. Here she was trying to watch TV, and these two guys show up — people she didn’t even know.
“Don’t mind Beth,” Little Mike said, and he smacked the underside of the girl’s foot.
“Owww, asshole.”
He advanced upon the other foot, and I pretended to admire the Christmas tree, which was miniature and artificial, and stood upon a barstool beside the front door. “This is nice,” I announced, and Beth shot me a withering look.
Liar,
it said.
You’re just saying that because my stupid husband sells reefer.
She really wanted us out of there, but Little Mike seemed to welcome our company. “Sit down,” he told me. “Have a libation.” He and Paul went to the refrigerator to get us some beers, and the girl called after them to bring her a rum and Coke. Then she turned back to the TV and glared at the screen, saying, “This show’s boring. Hand me the nigger.”
I smiled at the cat, as if this would somehow fix things, and when Beth pointed to the far end of the coffee table, I saw that she was referring to the remote control. Under other circumstances, I might have listed the various differences between black people, who had been forced to work for no money, and black, battery-operated channel changers, which had neither thoughts nor feelings and didn’t mind doing stuff for free. But the deal hadn’t started yet, and, more than anything, I wanted my drugs. Thus the remote was handed over, and I watched as the pot dealer’s wife flicked from one station to the next, looking for something that might satisfy her.
She had just settled on a situation comedy when Paul and Little Mike returned with the drinks. Beth was dissatisfied with her ice-cube count, and, after suggesting that she could just go fuck herself, our host reached into the waistband of his track pants and pulled out a bag of marijuana. It was eight ounces at least, a small cushion, and as I feasted my eyes upon it Little Mike pushed his wife’s feet off the coffee table, saying, “Bitch, go get me my scale.”
“I’m watching TV. Get it your own self.”
“Whore,” he said.
“Asshole.”
“See the kind of shit I have to live with?” Little Mike sighed and retreated to the rear of the trailer — the bedroom, I guessed — returning a minute later with a scale and some rolling papers. The pot was sticky with lots of buds, and its smell reminded me of a Christmas tree, though not the one perched atop the barstool. After weighing my ounce and counting out my money, Little Mike rolled a joint, which he lit, drew upon, and handed to my brother. It then went to me, and just as I was passing it back to our host, his wife piped up: “Hey, what about
me?
”
“Now look who wants to play,” her husband said. “Women. They’ll suck the fucking paper off a joint, but when old Papa Bear needs a little b.j. action they’ve always got a sore throat.”
Beth tried to speak and hold in the smoke at the same time: “Hut hup, hasshole.”
“Either of you guys married?” Little Mike asked, and Paul shook his head no. “I got pre-engaged one time, but David here hasn’t never come close, his being a faggot and all.”
Little Mike laughed, and then he looked at me. “For real?” he said. “Is Bromine telling me the truth?”
“Oh, he’s all up inside that shit,” Paul said. “Has hisself a cocksucker — I mean a boyfriend — and everything.”
I could have done my own talking, but it was sort of nice listening to my brother, who sounded almost boastful, as if I were a pet that had learned to do math.
“Well, what do you know,” Little Mike said.
His wife stirred to action then and became almost sociable. “So this boyfriend,” she said. “Let me ask. Which one of you is the woman?”
“Well, neither of us,” I told her. “That’s what makes us a homosexual couple. We’re both guys.”
“But no,” she said. “I mean, like, in prison or whatnot. One of you has to be in for murder and the other for child molesting or something like that, right? I mean, one is more like a normal man.”
I wanted to ask if that would be the murderer or the child molester, but instead I just accepted the joint, saying, “Oh, we live in New York,” as if that answered the question.
We stayed in the trailer for another half hour, and during the ride back to Raleigh I thought about what the drug dealer’s wife had said. Her examples were a little skewed, but I knew what she was getting at. People I know, people who live in houses and do not call their remote control “the nigger,” have often asked the same question, though usually in regard to lesbians, who are always either absent or safely out of earshot. “Which one’s the man?”
It’s astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex — trying to determine what goes where and how often. They can’t imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it. Who calls whom a bitch? Who cries harder when the cat dies? Which one spends the most time in the bathroom? I guess they think that it’s that cut-and-dried, though of course it’s not. Hugh might do the cooking, and actually wear an apron while he’s at it, but he also chops the firewood, repairs the hot-water heater, and could tear off my arm with no more effort than it takes to uproot a dandelion. Does that make him the murderer, or do the homemade curtains reduce him to the level of the child molester?
I considered these things as I looked at the wildflowers he’d collected the day before the water was shut off. Some were the color I associate with yield signs, and others a sort of muted lavender, their stems as thin as wire. I pictured Hugh stooping, or maybe even kneeling, as he went about picking them, and then I grabbed the entire bunch and tossed it out the window. That done, I carried the vase into the kitchen and emptied the yellow water into a pan. I then boiled it and used it to make coffee. There’d be hell to pay when my man got home, but at least by then I would be awake and able to argue, perhaps convincingly, that I am all the beauty he will ever need.
They looked like people who had just attended a horse show: a stately couple in their late sixties, he in a cashmere blazer and she in a gray tweed jacket, a gem-encrusted shamrock glittering against the rich felt of her lapel. They were my seatmates on the flight from Denver to New York, and as I stood in the aisle to let them in, I felt the shame of the tragically outclassed. The sport coat I had prided myself on now looked clownish, as did my shoes, and the fistful of pine straw I refer to as my hair. “Excuse me,” I said, apologizing, basically, for my very existence.
The couple took their seats and, just as I settled in beside them, the man turned to the woman, saying, “I don’t want to hear this shit.”
I assumed he was continuing an earlier argument, but it turned out he was referring to the Gershwin number the airline had adopted as its theme song. “I can’t believe the fucking crap they make you listen to on planes nowadays.”
The woman patted her silver hair and agreed, saying that whoever had programmed the music was an asshole.
“A cocksucker,” the man corrected her. “A goddamn cocksucking asshole.” They weren’t loud people and didn’t even sound all that angry, really. This was just the way they spoke, the verbal equivalent of their everyday china. Among company, the wife might remark that she felt a slight chill, but here that translated to “I am fucking freezing.”
“Me too,” her husband said. “It’s cold as shit in here.”
Shit
is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit, for how had I so misjudged these people? Why, after all these years, do I still believe that expensive clothing signifies anything more than a disposable income, that tweed and cashmere actually bespeak refinement?
When our boxed bistro meals were handed out, the couple really went off. “What is this garbage?” the man asked.
“It’s shit,” his wife said. “A box of absolute fuck-ing shit.”
The man took out his reading glasses and briefly examined his plastic-wrapped cookie before tossing it back into the box. “First they make you listen to shit, and then they make you eat it!”
“Well, I’m not fucking eating it,” the woman said. “We’ll just have to grab something at the airport.”
“And pay some son of a bitch fifteen bucks for a sandwich?”
The woman sighed and threw up her hands. “What choice do we have? It’s either that or eat what we’ve got, which is shit.”
“Aww, it’s all shit,” her husband said.
It was as if they’d kidnapped the grandparents from a Ralph Lauren ad and forced them into a David Mamet play — and that, in part, is why the couple so appealed to me: there was something ridiculous and unexpected about them. They made a good team, and I wished that I could spend a week or two invisibly following behind them and seeing the world through their eyes. “Thanksgiving dinner, my ass,” I imagined them saying.
It was late afternoon by the time we arrived at LaGuardia. I caught a cab outside the baggage claim and stepped into what smelled like a bad tropical cocktail, this the result of a coconut air freshener that dangled from the rearview mirror. One hates to be a baby about this kind of thing, and so I cracked the window a bit and gave the driver my sister’s address in the West Village.
“Yes, sir.”
The man was foreign, but I have no idea where he was from. One of those tragic countries, I supposed, a land be-set by cobras and typhoons. But that’s half the world, really. He had dark skin, more brown than olive, and thick black hair he had treated with oil. The teeth of his comb had left deep troughs that ran down the back of his head and disappeared beneath the frayed collar of his shirt. The cab left the curb, and as he merged into traffic the driver opened the window between the front and back seats and asked me my name. I told him, and he looked at me in the rearview mirror, saying, “You are a good man, David, is that right? Are you good?”
I said I was OK, and he continued. “David is a good name, and New York is a good town. Do you think so?”
“I guess,” I said.
The driver smiled shyly, as if I had paid him a compliment, and I wondered what his life was like. One reads things, newspaper profiles and so forth, and gets an idea of the tireless, hardworking immigrant who hits the ground running — or, more often, driving. The man couldn’t have been older than thirty-five, and after his shift I imagined that he probably went to school and studied until he couldn’t keep his eyes open. A few hours at home with his wife and children, and then it was back to the front seat, and on and on until he earned a diploma and resumed his career as a radiologist. The only thing holding him up was his accent, but that would likely disappear with time and diligence.
I thought of my first few months in Paris and of how frustrating it had been when people spoke quickly or used improper French, and then I answered his question again, speaking as clearly as possible. “I have no opinion on the name David,” I said. “But I agree with you regarding the city of New York. It is a very satisfactory place.”
He then said something I didn’t quite catch, and when I asked him to repeat it, he became agitated and turned in his seat, saying, “What is the problem, David? You cannot hear when a person is talking?”
I told him my ears were stopped up from the plane, though it wasn’t true. I could hear him perfectly. I just couldn’t understand him.
“I ask you what you do for a profession,” he said. “Do you make a lot of moneys? I know by your jacket that you do, David. I know that you are rich.”
Suddenly my sport coat looked a lot better. “I get by,” I said. “That is to say that I am able to support myself, which is not the same as being rich.”
He then asked if I had a girlfriend, and when I told him no he gathered his thick eyebrows and made a little
tsk
ing sound. “Oh, David, you need a woman. Not for love, but for the pussy, which is a necessary thing for a man. Like me, for example. I fuck daily.”
“Oh,” I said. “And this is . . . Tuesday, right?” I’d hoped I might steer him onto another track — the days of the week, maybe — but he was tired of English 101.
“How is it that you do not need pussy?” he asked. “Does not your dick stand up?”
“Excuse me?”
“Sex,” he said. “Has no one never told you about it?”
I took the
New York Times
from my carry-on bag and pretended to read, an act that apparently explained it all.
“Ohhh,” the driver said. “I understand. You do not like pussy. You like the dick. Is that it?” I brought the paper close to my face, and he stuck his arm through the little window and slapped the back of his seat. “David,” he said. “David, listen to me when I am talking to you. I asked do you like the dick?”
“I just work,” I told him. “I work, and then I go home, and then I work some more.” I was trying to set a good example, trying to be the person I’d imagined him to be, but it was a lost cause.
“I fucky-fuck every day,” he boasted. “Two women. I have a wife and another girl for the weekend. Two kind of pussy. Are you sure you no like to fucky-fuck?”
If forced to, I can live with the word “pussy,
”
but “fucky-fuck” was making me carsick. “That is not a real word,” I told him. “You can say that you
fuck,
but
fucky-fuck
is just nonsense. Nobody talks that way. You will never get ahead with that kind of language.”
Traffic thickened because of an accident and, as we slowed to a stop, the driver ran his tongue over his lips. “Fucky-fuck,” he repeated. “I fucky-fucky-fucky-fuck.”
Had we been in Manhattan, I might have gotten out and found myself another taxi, but we were still on the expressway, so what choice did I have but to stay put and look with envy at the approaching rescue vehicles? Eventually the traffic began moving, and I resigned myself to another twenty minutes of torture.
“So you go to West Village,” the driver said. “Very good place for you to live. Lots of boys and boys together. Girls and girls together.”
“It is not where I live,” I said. “It is the apartment of my sister.”
“Tell me how those lesbians have sex? How do they do it?”
I said I didn’t know, and he looked at me with the same sad expression he had worn earlier when told that I didn’t have a girlfriend. “David.” He sighed. “You have never seen a lesbian movie? You should, you know. You need to go home, drink whiskey, and watch one just to see how it is done. See how they get their pussy. See how they fucky-fuck.”
And then I snapped, which is unlike me, really. “You know,” I said, “I do not think that I am going to take you up on that. In fact, I
know
that I am not going to take you up on that.”
“Oh, but you should.”
“Why?” I said. “So I can be more like
you?
That’s a worthwhile goal, isn’t it? I will just get myself a coconut air freshener and drive about town impressing people with the beautiful language I have picked up from pornographic movies. ‘Hello, sir, does not your dick stand up?’ ‘Good afternoon, madam, do you like to fucky-fuck?’ It sounds enchanting, but I don’t know that I could stand to have such a rewarding existence. I am not worthy, OK, so if it is all right with you, I will not watch any lesbian movies tonight or tomorrow night or any other night, for that matter. Instead I will just work and leave people alone.”
I waited for a response, and when none came I settled back in my seat, completely ashamed of myself. The driver’s familiarity had been maddening, but what I’d said had been cruel and uncalled for. Mocking him, bringing up his air freshener: I felt as though I had just kicked a kitten — a filthy one, to be sure — but still something small and powerless. Sex is what you boast about when you have no exterior signs of wealth. It’s a way of saying, “Look, I might not own a fancy sport coat, or even a carry-on bag, but I do have two women and all the intercourse I can handle.” And would it have hurt me to acknowledge his success?
“I think it is wonderful that you are so fulfilled,” I said, but rather than responding the driver turned on the radio, which was of course tuned to NPR.
By the time I got to my sister’s, it was dark. I poured my-self a Scotch and then, like always, Amy brought out a few things she thought I might find interesting. The first was a copy of
The Joy of Sex,
which she’d found at a flea market and planned to leave on the coffee table the next time our father visited. “What do you think he’ll say?” she asked. It was the last thing a man would want to find in his daughter’s apartment — that was my thought anyway — but then she handed me a magazine called
New Animal Orgy,
which was
truly
the last thing a man would want to find in his daughter’s apartment. This was an old issue, dated 1974, and it smelled as if it had spent the past few decades in the dark, not just hidden but locked in a chest and buried underground.
“Isn’t that the filthiest thing you’ve ever seen in your life?” Amy asked, but I found myself too stunned to answer. The magazine was devoted to two major stories — photo essays, I guess you could call them. The first involved a female cyclist who stops to rest beside an abandoned windmill and seduces what the captions refer to as “a stray collie.”
“He’s not a stray,” Amy said. “Look at that coat. You can practically smell the shampoo.”
The second story was even sadder and concerned a couple of women named Inga and Bodil, who stimulate a white stallion using first their hands and later their tongues. It was supposedly the luckiest day of the horse’s life, but if the sex was really that good you’d think he would stop eating or at least do something different with his eyes. Instead he just went about his business, acting as if the women were not there. On the next page, he’s led into the bedroom, where he stands on the carpet and stares dumbly at the objects on the women’s dresser: a hairbrush, an aerosol can turned on its side, a framed photo of a girl holding a baby. Above the dresser was a curtainless window, and through it could be seen a field leading to a forest of tall pines.
Amy leaned closer and pointed to the bottom of the picture. “Look at the mud on that carpet,” she said, but I was way ahead of her.
“Number one reason
not
to blow a horse in your bedroom,” I told her, though it was actually much further down on the list. Number four maybe, the top slots being reserved for the loss of dignity, the invitation to disease, and the off chance that your parents might drop by.
Once again the women stimulate the horse to an erection, and then they begin to pleasure each other — assuming, I guess, that he will enjoy watching. This doesn’t mean they were necessarily lesbians — not any more than the collie was a stray — but it gave me pause and forced me to think of the cabdriver. “I am not like you,” I had told him. Then, half an hour later, here I was: a glass in one hand and in the other a magazine showing two naked women making out in front of a stallion. Of course, the circumstances were a bit different. I was drinking Scotch instead of whiskey. This was a periodical rather than a video. I was with my sister, and we were just two decent people having a laugh. Weren’t we?