A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (24 page)

“You can call me Marshall.” Nick didn’t say whether he would or he wouldn’t. To fill the silence Marshall added, “Nice party.”

Nick stared. Marshall smiled under his scrutiny. Miss Naomi kept her eyes on Nick’s weathered face, waiting for Nick’s response. At last he said, “You think?”

Marshall looked at his watch: eleven-thirty.

“It beats
Nightline
.”

Nick chuckled, an easy laugh that lit his entire face. Flooding into the crevasses of his cheeks, momentarily visible behind his eyes, the illuminant made his face strikingly handsome. Miss Naomi smiled at Marshall in gratitude for this transformation. Nick reached out and roughly squeezed Marshall by the shoulder. Marshall laughed too, feeling the warmth enter his arm. Nick glanced at the other guests and his scowl returned. Given his sudden connection to the man, it was obvious to Marshall what Nick saw: restraint. Hardly anyone danced. Nick muttered from the side of his mouth, “It beats meat.” He looked at Marshall hard and said, his voice rough, “It’s going to improve.” He abruptly left the house.

Somebody guffawed. Miss Naomi giggled. “He’s in corrections,” she said, as if that would explain everything. Later it would. Marshall finished his vodka, possibly his second. After a while someone passed a pill into his hand. He swallowed it and took another drink. The party had subsided now to a low, nervous rumble. The dance music on the boom box had been replaced by something moody and indistinct.

Having passed some test of acceptance, he dropped heavily onto a couch next to a girl. “My name is Marshall!” he declared. The girl turned, appraised him for a few moments and offered him a joint. The smoke bubbled up through his cranium. The girl didn’t say her name, or if she did he didn’t hear it. He gave the joint back and she took a hit, sweetly pursing her lips where his had just been. He recalled that this was one of Miss Naomi’s friends, Dora. “Nice party!” he said, and she just bobbed her head. He lost the moments in which they crossed the living room and climbed a stairway. When they reached the landing on the second floor he became aware that he was gazing into her face, wondering whether he should try to kiss her—her face was flushed, her curls splayed across her eyes—and then he lost her. He looked in at the open doors to the unlit rooms and saw a few people smoking as if in cells
chained to their cigarettes. One guy was doing an abs set, squatting with his back and hands against the wall and straining to keep his position. Another guy was being dunked in the bath, with his clothes on, while his friends counted how many seconds he could hold his breath. Dora wasn’t there. Perhaps she had never come up.

The front door opened downstairs, allowing into the house a nimbus of cold air that rose up the stairs accompanied by more shouts and hurrahs, rescuing Marshall, halfway at least, from the dreamy abyss in which he hadn’t known he had fallen. Nick’s name was called out again. This was followed by sharp barking laughter and then a kind of humming sound: news wordlessly telegraphed around the living room and the rest of the first floor. Marshall remained on the second floor for a while, but he didn’t see any rooms in which he might have been welcome. One of the bedroom doors was closed. His head felt very warm and soft. He wondered whether this was a result of the alcohol, the pot, or the pill. He should at least have asked what kind of pill it was.

When he returned downstairs, fastidiously maintaining his grip on the banister, the dance music was up again, much louder now, and the living room seemed more congested. Nick stood by the drinks table with Miss Naomi, embracing her loosely with one arm as she buried her face in the shoulder of his jacket, her eyes closed. Nick surveyed the party from behind his sunglasses, unsmiling. Marshall tried to determine what had changed and saw at once that new guests had arrived, two young African American women at a party that up to now had been entirely white. Each held a drink in her hand and had drawn from the shadows several emboldened guests, including a few of the men. One of the women wore red short shorts and a loose silvery halter top that brought hoots from admirers every time she shifted position. Marshall saw another black, a young guy in a sweatshirt, his
hood still up. He had stepped away from the women and hadn’t taken a drink.

The party had been invigorated. Couples finally made their way to the floor to dance. A man was doing a shimmy with one of the black women. Nick must have picked them up nearby. Marshall presumed he had agreed to pay them somewhat less than would have been demanded by an incorporated escort service.

Another joint passed into his hands. He didn’t know who gave it to him. He brought it to the couch, intending to smoke it thoroughly. He was embarrassed by the hookers—he was still too old for this crowd—but now in the early morning hours the party had reached the tipping point. Alicia had unbuttoned her shirt to reveal a red lace push-up bra and was doing a mock grind to the music, listening intently. She moved in slow, smoldering rotations and once in every orbit she faced Marshall. Marshall locked on her eyes, trying to arrest her spin. People were making out in the shadows and one of the black girls filed into the bathroom off the kitchen with one of the men. They were having sex in the bathroom. Marshall wanted to have sex in the bathroom. He felt himself being lifted now on an enormous swell of anticipation.

The black guy, still hooded, had taken a joint too. He retreated back to the wall, watching everything, the tip of his joint glowing steadily. Alicia had stripped down to her pink boy-shorts, across which was patterned a foreign alphabet of scimitarlike curves and swelling inky spots. Marshall wondered if the grind was for his benefit. He felt enormously benefited—she had smooth legs and taut, high buttocks; the shorts neatly squared them off—but he knew that right now he was unable to leave the couch.

Marshall must have dozed off, at least for a moment, because he didn’t see the black guy take off his sweatshirt and reveal a head of cornrows. He was wearing a white T-shirt now
and was performing some clumsy swing moves with Miss Naomi while Nick watched, his arms crossed. Miss Naomi was grinning, allowing herself to be spun, and at one point she was dipped halfway to the floor, her partner’s hand on her leotard at the base of her spine, her back arched, her hair nearly grazing the parquet-tile floor. When they came up Alicia moved near them, hoping to get into the act. Nick reached over and whispered something into the black guy’s ear. The guy shook him off.

Another girl had taken off her shoes and stripped down to jeans and a brassiere. She was heavyset and moved with little grace, unable to keep up with the driving music. Her face was feverishly mottled. Two guys sitting within a barricade of beer bottles at the edge of the dance floor made ribald cat-calls and she turned and tried to shake her upper body at them.

“Come on, take it off,” Nick said. Marshall realized that he had said this two or three times already; the demand now carried a searing urgency.

Marshall first thought he was talking to the fat girl in accord with her hecklers, but Nick was looking at Miss Naomi and her dance partner. Something thumped in Marshall’s chest. Miss Naomi was still wearing her pink leotard top, her breasts smooth round scoops, her nipples hard little buttons rising beneath it. Yet Nick flicked his head at the guy’s white shirt. It was an ordinary Fruit of the Loom T-shirt, not quite filled out except at his upper arms.

The man said, “Not here.”

“Yes, here. Two benjamins.”

Scowling, the man mumbled, “It’s your party,” and peeled off his T-shirt, revealing that he wasn’t a man at all, but only a boy, perhaps fourteen or fifteen or two or three years younger than that, a thin boy whose ribs showed above a long hollow stomach, below a hairless chest. Only his sinewed arms looked
strong. When his shirt came off it revealed glowing, silvered skin and the party buzz shut down as if it had been hit by a sledgehammer.

Nick nodded that he should continue moving with the music. He didn’t look at anyone as he danced; his movements were athletic and unsuggestive. He was being watched now by everyone in the living room. Miss Naomi had stepped back and the other girls had stopped dancing. Miss Naomi seemed dazed, not quite sure what was happening. Nick motioned at the boy’s long baggy jeans. The boy shook his head, but the rebellion lasted only moments. He kicked off his running shoes and slid out of his pants. He kept his white cotton briefs. Nick suddenly grinned—the smile was death cold—and turned to the guests to see how the spectacle was playing out on their faces. Marshall sensed his contempt for them—for him—and for the pleasure they—and he, Marshall—were taking from this entertainment.

“The underwear too.”

The boy resisted again and Nick repeated the command, his voice bearing down. It was a voice you might hear in your sleep. After a moment the boy complied, almost tripping when he pulled off the briefs and igniting a burst of titters in the audience. The black youth was entirely naked now, surrounded by white people. Marshall hated looking at undressed men, whether at the gym or in the movies, but he was sufficiently tranquilized now to allow himself to be fascinated. The boy’s body was supple and unmarked, as fine as a piece of statuary. The youth maintained a fiercely sullen expression on his face, at odds with his private parts: his testicles had retracted and his uncircumcised dick was left hanging there, no more than a little hooded worm.

Nick had noticed the penis too. “You call that a cock?” He said to Miss Naomi, “I bet your preschoolers have bigger cocks than that.”

She shook her head, her eyes cast down. “Nick, don’t talk that way.”

“He’s shy,” one of the prostitutes drawled protectively. “He hasn’t done it before.”

Nick ordered the boy, “Make it hard.”

The defiance remained on his face, but Marshall saw through the youth’s glassy eyes his consciousness withdraw somewhere safe and remote. He showed no sign that he heard Nick or that his unclothed body was chilled. He hardly seemed to breathe.

“Show us what you’re made of, son. A few strokes. You know how to do that, don’t you?”

The boy slowly raised his right hand to his penis and gave it some halfhearted tugs while staring into space. Nothing happened. Nick raised his own hand and made a fist, shaking it vigorously in front of the youth’s eyes. “Come
on
!” The boy continued to rub the recalcitrant organ.

Nick was disgusted. “Look at these beautiful women here and you can’t get it up?” He gestured to Alicia. She had half buttoned her shirt but remained in her shorts, absorbedly watching both men. Nick said, “What are you, a faggot?”

The boy pretended to ignore him, to be entirely self-composed despite his inability to make himself hard. He rocked back on the balls of his feet as he worked at himself. His feet were large, much paler than his legs.

One of the other men produced a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag and placed it gently over the youth’s head. The boy’s square, brown, alien mask provoked a few chuckles and, from the back of the room, a mock-rebel yell.

Nick said, “Naomi, how about it?”

Miss Naomi grimaced and didn’t move. Little creases appeared on her forehead, as if she were trying to solve a very difficult math problem. Her eyes had gone dull in the course of the night and her lipstick was smeared. Marshall
recalculated her age downward: she was possibly just twenty.

“Give the fellow a hand.”

She stared at Nick to gauge his seriousness. His eyes were still opaqued by his glasses, leaving her entirely on her own. Marshall wondered if she recognized the other guests any longer: their faces were shiny and distorted by alcohol, drugs, the lateness of the hour, and a raw, primitive appetite.

“It’s not like you’ve never done it before.”

She took a step forward to the boy and then a half step back, looking not at him but at Nick. She was standing on a knife’s edge now. Her gaze implored and then faded. Around the room she found nothing but expectation. The boy had let go of his limp penis. She stooped toward it but didn’t fully extend her hand. Marshall could see that both of them, Miss Naomi and the boy, were trembling.

The moments rushed by yet Marshall remained motionless with Miss Naomi and the boy in a vessel of timelessness as time swirled around them, Miss Naomi poised only inches from the boy’s cock. Her head was still turned toward Nick, looking up. Marshall found words rising to the surface of his stoned, drunk, addled consciousness. He spoke:

“Nick, she doesn’t want to.”

The words echoed off the walls of the living room like the sound of a gunshot. The partygoers noticed Marshall for the first time. Nick’s attention fell on him as well and Marshall saw himself reflected in his sunglasses: small, in a dim, smoky, low-rent living room. He turned away. Miss Naomi’s eyes came into focus. She gave Marshall a stare expressing intense irritation. No, it was a look of disgust.

When she put her hand on the boy’s penis the boy flinched and the Big Brown Bag made a brief rattling sound. This was met by general laughter, good, easygoing, unironic laughter, the kind of sweet laughter you might hear on a playground. The boy kept his fists clenched. Miss Naomi’s examination of his
penis was thoughtful, clinical. She seized the penis in two fingers and very gingerly pulled on it. Then she clasped it and the organ disappeared in her hand.

Marshall’s few words of protest had sapped his spirit. It had been childish to think they would have made any difference. He sensed the other guests’ enduring animosity. He wondered what fantasies of self-righteousness and power had motivated him. The gesture had been as ridiculous as the one he made on September 11, when he had gone back for Lloyd. Why had he done that? What good had it done? He regretted that too.

The youth’s penis began to stir and take on weight, allowing Miss Naomi to make measured, regular strokes along its shaft. The organ gradually responded and every pulse of life ignited a round of laughter and whoops. The youth held his hands behind him and stood legs slightly apart, his back gently arched. You could hear his labored breathing now, amplified by the bag. When Miss Naomi went down to her knees she received further shouts of approval. She lifted the boy’s penis into her mouth for a few moments and pulled away from it, leaving it glistening. She flicked her tongue against the squared-off sheath and then put the entire penis into her mouth again. She left it there, gently rolling it around her tongue. Now the youth’s penis emerged nearly erect. She returned to it. Marshall felt his own dick stiffen.