Allan Stein (5 page)

"That's very nice of you, and nice of Hank to invite you along to the bar."

"He didn't invite me."

"That's not just Guinness, you know," Hank pointed out, thinking I cared about the beer, "that's a Guinness triple-X. This bar's terrific. I haven't seen triple-X since Hattie and I took Noah to Dublin for the horse races."

"He didn't invite you?"

"I told him I was supposed to meet you, and he said you were in the bar."

"You don't mind, do you?" Hank asked rhetorically, taking the boy's beer and lifting it up to my face. "Just look at that foam, thick enough to raise kids on. You could build a house with that foam."

"It's remarkable, Hank." Turning to the boy: "Is that what you told your parents?"

"Oh, no way." Dogan dismissed this lunacy. "They didn't see you. I told them I ran into a friend from soccer camp who was staying at the hotel. They think I'm staying overnight with him. They don't care."

"You don't mind if Herbert tries it, do you? Go ahead, Herbie, after a sip of the scotch it's a real high-class boilermaker." Herbert sniffed the stein suspiciously and then tried it. I was surprised he seemed to like it.

"Tastes kind of like oatmeal, Hank. I mean with dirt and alcohol in it. That's very nice, a very fine beer."

"Well, that was kind of dumb," I whispered to Dogan. "Now you can't go home, plus there's no 'friend' here to stay with."

The boy rolled his eyes, then just looked at me.

So that now, to the delight of many of you and the horror of some, Dogan and I are going to spend the whole night together in the same bed (my bed, by the ill-paned window at home) for the last time, and in some detail. We'll have unskilled, enthusiastic sex, minimal but valued conversation, and a snack at what was probably three in the morning. Those of you who can't stomach any more of this sort of thing can skip ahead to page 47, where the narrative resumes.

We shared a taxi home, Herbert, Dogan, and I. The boy insisted I make a ruse to Herbert about some book I was lending him, which I did, halfheartedly, and which sweet Herbert led the boy to believe he believed and also found unremarkable ("Oh, he mentioned that book to me just yesterday, didn't you now, and how it must be lent soon; how convenient for everyone; I hope I don't miss the eleven o'clock news"). Since the narrative hounds have all skipped forward anyway, I'll just dispense with the clumsy linkages and survey some of the highlights of that night.

The slight weight of Dogan's hand on my shoulder when we leaned in the doorway, worrying the lock open. The fact that he let the same hand drift along my back when the lock slid shut and we walked in. The ease with which he stood and peed and talked to me while peeing, and that I heard him through a bathroom door he hadn't bothered to close. The vista in the dark. Him still fiddling with the buttons of his fly when he came out. Dogan—I don't think I mentioned he was 5 feet 8 inches or so (two or three inches shorter than I), with a lanky floppiness that wobbled between puppy dog and deer, that his messy hair was fine and dark brown, that his eyes were large and deep beneath a single brow, or that he habitually kept his lips slightly parted as if about to speak—looking out the window at the city's nighttime profile, then flopping back on the bed as if he lived in it. The elegance of his prone posture, like a poorly drawn swastika or a spinning ninja weapon that had tired and fallen in the midst of its long trajectory. These words: "Use both your hands." Because we'd only ever had sex before in a nervous hurry, how he lay on the bed talking to me not undressing or rushing himself at all. I didn't know what he thought, but
I
thought there were ruses ahead, long conversations or fidgeting, feints toward the couch or a sleeping bag, when in fact he lay down on the bed because he was there to sleep with me. I sat down so my hip touched his, and I let my hand drift onto his leg. "Use both your hands," was his final instruction.

The spring of his puckered fly, when both my hands got there after traveling the length of the inseamed thighs. That he watched and smiled. His long arms fiddling against the window glass behind his head while he reclined. The crushed and folded paperback (Rousseau's
Emile
) stuck underneath him, produced only after five or ten minutes when the arching of his back to push a tremulous and exposed organ deeper into my mouth made it convenient, I suppose, to grab the book and toss it to the floor. At this point he was just a
long baggy bundle of soft clothes with an engorged penis protruding from the middle; I had my shirt partly undone—hardly the picture of romance. There was traffic outside, honks and the late-night blatting of taxis, periodic bus roars, and the drunken chatter of partygoers returning home. The railroad tower became especially interesting for a protracted minute or two that is difficult to account for. I simply lost my focus on the great slobbery organ for a stretch. It had slipped from my mouth again and, poking haphazardly, had found my eye socket and brow so that I pulled it aside in one hand, still enjoying its remarkable heat in my fist, and stared across Dogan's pulled up shirt and long arms (drawn back behind his head) at the beautiful lighted masquerade of the window-framed city. The railroad tower, as I said, looked especially homely and real amidst the delicious fakery. It appeared, just then, to have an actual history and function. I wobbled the boy's organ like a joystick, absent-mindedly, then saw him in the dark, staring out from the hutch of his baggy shirt like a rabbit in the nighttime forest. I kissed the head of his cock, then pushed it down flat against his belly, where I smushed it for a while. He groaned some, thrusting like an infant trying to reach the taut nipple, only not leading with his face: thrust, groan, thrust-thrust, groan, which was endearing, so I petted him like a dog. He turned on his side, and this petulance aggravated me. Rolling him over I pulled at his clothes without explanation, dragging the unbuttoned jeans and boxers sharply down to his shapely ankles and slipping the baggy shirt over his head so that he was all just flesh and startled as I rolled my hairy head all over him and began kneading his body with both great grabbing hands like a panicked shopper unleashed in the midst of a monetary collapse. This was quite unlike our usual furtive blow jobs. He took to it like a boy to wrestling, tore my shirt, and tugged my trousers down, all the while smushing himself in acrobatic variations on and against me and whatever else got drawn into the maelstrom: pillows, sheets,
clothing, and the like. His breathing became furious and uncontrolled, his brow and back wet with sweat, until, flopping me down against the twisted bedding and straddling my hips to drive his soccer-drenched open-air thighs and slobbery organ over my tummy, he let out a great fart. We both stopped, and then he laughed. I really shouldn't include this with the highlights at all, but it provides such a nice contrast to the idealized Dogan I've tried to preserve. Other contrasts: his chaste pucker when I whispered, "Can we kiss?" I don't know if he had never kissed with an open mouth, or if mine offended him, but his closed eyes and pert, expectant lips endeared him to me. I pecked his cheek and whispered "there." My alarm when, while rolling in our romp, I found myself on top of him, impressing the enormity of my body on the true prematurity of his; Dogan wasn't merely lithe or gangly or slim, he was a little boy, a nervous, pulsing envelope of flesh and growing bones whose sexual development had rushed in advance of the rest of him so that this great, potent organ was appended to the birdlike frame of a tall twelve-year-old (by the calendar he was fifteen). I had to hold myself slightly off the mattress with a well-placed elbow or two to avoid crushing him.

Our conversation, after our last shared orgasm, lying now in the manner of spoons, Dogan in front, me behind, the boy dressed in hastily found boxers and T-shirt, me in nothing, while outside the window the city was mostly silent and dark:

"Are you really working at a museum?"

"Yes." (Would I ever stop lying to him?)

"Do you have to? I mean, I thought the school gave you pay even though you had to leave and everything."

"I prefer it. The work interests me."

"What do you do there?"

"I'm a curator." It felt oddly pleasant to be Herbert for a moment. "Do you know what a curator does?"

"Not exactly."

"I help decide what paintings the museum buys and displays. I organize shows for them—not just paintings, actually, but drawings and photographs too."

"Wow."

"I'm going to Paris in a few weeks, to buy some Picasso drawings for a show."

"Pablo Picasso?"

"Yes. You know Picasso?"

"Oh, sure." Here the boy began singing—melodizing, I guess—in a soft whisper. " 'He was only five-foot-two, but girls could not resist his stare. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole, not like you. . . ."

"I don't think that's the same Picasso."

"Sure it is. 'He would drive down the street in his El Dorado, and the girls would turn the color of an avocado; oh, he was only five-foot-two . . .'"

"Did you make that up?"

"No, it's the Modern Lovers, 'Pablo Picasso.' He was an artist, right?"

"Yes."

"Come on." He shook his body a little, like wiggling an eyebrow, only in the dark. "Everyone knows Picasso. My mom took us to the Musee Picasso all the time when we lived in Paris."

"Of course. I'd forgotten." I let my hand turn the corner over his hip. "How long did you live there?"

"We moved there when I was six, and I had my bar mitzvah there, so seven years." He stopped, everything stopped, while the boy evaluated the trajectory of my hand. "A little more than seven." Now he stretched his leg out slightly, enough to let the hip turn open and encourage my hand.

"I need to hire a translator for the Paris trip."

"You don't speak French? " Where my hand brushed his boxers, a rounded fold of cotton pushed up, one pulse and then another.

"Not very well."

"I speak it better than my English." We both laughed a little. I had been hired to change that fact, but neither of us ever cared or worked hard enough to change it. I drew my other hand up along the backs of his thighs, along the crease where his legs met.

"I wonder if you could go with me, be my translator. You'd get paid very well."

"Uhn." He turned his hip a little more, pulling his free arm over his head, so my hand slipped onto the tented middle of his boxers, and I let it lie there, just cupping the drifting organ that moved and struggled under its weight. "I'm at school every day." He kind of sighed. "I mean, and soccer."

"Maybe during your break. You'd be an excellent translator." Now I lifted my hand so the cotton lifted beneath it, then moved my fingers up and down its length.

"Yeah." He simply breathed, pushing his hips out toward my wandering hand. I had turned too, to lay my other arm along his parting legs, brushing both thighs along the inside and up into his shorts, and now he tugged the waistband down and his erection flopped out onto his tummy, where I licked it, pressing my tongue along the underside onto its head, and he groaned, then lifted my head from him and whispered, "Can I, you know, in you? " And he slipped over onto me, pushing my legs up with his body, and we did.

Oh, yes, our snack, at 3 or 4 A.M.: a bland cheese (jack) and crackers, plus gulps of orange juice from a cardboard container in the fridge, first tasted leaning in the cool white light of that marvelous icebox, then seated on the bed, silent, puzzled, exhausted, looking out at the utterly dark and sleeping city.

♦3  
♦

A
llan Stein was the spoiled only son of progressive Jewisg parents. A cultured, upper-middle-class boy in a prosperous city, he was the happy recipient of endless lessons: piano, tennis, boxing, language, crafts, horseback riding. He liked streetcards and went with his father to the "car house to watch his dearest cars being shampooed." At his mother's behest, he "played man, to show what he will look like when he is a man." A raft of cousins from Sarah's side kept him company in Berkley, while back in San Francisco, at 707 Washington Street, Allan played with his bearded, bearish father, Mikey.

His mother posed him for photographs, once a week, and then every month of the first four years of his life, costumd for outlandish scenarios, which she mounted and labeled in great albums to be shared with friends.: A Young Don Quixote, Paderovshy Up to Date, No More Dresses For Me No Sir, Champion of the Brawl. After nearly dying from loss of blood and an infection caused by the difficult birth of this ten-pound baby, Sally wrote to her sister-in-law, Gertrude:

"He has Mikey's forehead and horrifies me bymoving the entire top of his head just as Mikey does. Above an exquisite upper lip he has a nondescript nose whose nostrils he inflates in an alarming fashion. On the whle he is considered a ver intelligent-looking but not a beautiful child."

A
nd later, "There certainly is nothing in the line of happiness to compare with that which a mother derives from the contemplation of her firstborn, and even the agony which she endures from the moment of its birth does not seem to mar it, therefore my dear and beloved sister-in-law go and get married, for there is nothing in the whole wide world like babies."

Sarah was devoted to him. "I doubt if a happier, more attractive youngster can be found," she wrote. When Allan was two, Sarah reported the boy's "cute little sayings" to Auntie Gertrude—

" 'Poor mamma has wind in her odder leg, its a hoyyible fing to have wind, dear me!' The little fellow will not play with children his own age and he regards younger children with disgust, but he dotes on boys and girls from eight to fourteen."

In Paris, Allan was the only child of the four Stein adults, great big children themselves, who, with the sour exception of dour Uncle Leo, adored and doted on him. He went to the private Ecole Alsacienne, an innovative school in their Montparnasse neighborhood. I imagine him on a cold day in the late winter, the rue Madame smelling of ice and coal. I have been studying the maps. M. Vernot, in blue coveralls, throws grit on the stone sidewalk to make it safe. Allan watches his breath in clouds and crosses the street to walk where there is no grit. The sky is slate gray and empty. On every street there are children rushing to school. Allan hurries down the rue de Fleurus and crosses the rue Guynemer to the iron gate of the Luxembourg Garden. He pulls his mittens off and fixes the satchel, then runs with it against the fence, making a dull accelerating noise. At the rue d'Assas, where bombs would fall during the Great War, Allan slows and walks. Boys from his class call greetings or hit his head with their mittens. His friend Giselin bumps his shoulder and they shake hands. Older boys stand by the wall at the Lycee Montaigne, blowing smoke and staring past them. Allan and Giselin say nothing. The courtyard echoes with shouting and the smack of
hard shoes on gravel. Allan's cap is grabbed and pulled down over his eyes, and he pushes it back up again. Cold mist hangs among the shouting boys, muting light from rooms where teachers write lessons on blackboards in chalk. The hard ball comes flying, unseen, toward Allan, and he feels the sting and then a sharp burn of pain on his bare calf when it hits him.

"
I
f
you went to Paris, Herbert." We were at Shackles again. The day was sunny and warm, and Shackles had their articulating windows thrown open to the spring breeze. I was trying a
rosé
Tristan said was typical of Provence. Herbert had scotch. "I mean, to find those drawings: Wouldn't the museum tack your vacation on after the work was done? I mean, a week or two of business, then 'Herbert's vacation'?"

"Naturally I could do that. I'm the one who accounts for my hours. It's not like a factory time clock. What are you getting at?"

"I think you need a vacation."

"Of course I need a vacation, just not in Paris. Are you fixing to send me away for a
long
time so you can take over? Madame Assistant leads the revolution?"

"No, I've got a much better idea." I left an obnoxious silence, which Herbert didn't bother filling. He just stared, sipping his scotch. "I should go to Paris in your place." This made him laugh, which I preferred to the silence.

"You're delusional. You
don't
work for the museum. That is a fiction, a lie we told Hank, just for—for I don't know what reason."

"I know that. I'm not proposing that
I
go to Paris, per se."

"Well then, how
will
you go, if not per se?"

"I'll go as you. As Herbert Widener. I'll get the drawings, have a fine time doing it, and take however long you want me to, and you can just disappear into whatever vacation your heart desires—paid, I might add, while everyone thinks you're off in Paris working." This put him into a much more involved silence. I fiddled with the decanter,
holding it up to the sun as if this could tell me something about the wine. Herbert thought and thought and thought some more.

"You'll go as me."

"Mmm."

"What if you run into someone who knows me?"

"Why would I?"

"I don't see why you would."

"The Steins don't know you."

"No, they don't."

"Does anyone in Paris know you? I mean by sight."

"Well, a few friends of course, but no one you'd have any reason to deal with." A long pause. "You
can't
stay at the Mahler."

"At the what?"

"The Hotel Mahler. All my friends
know
I stay there.They're probably checking the register every day, just waiting for me to show up."

"I won't even stay in the neighborhood. What neighborhood is it?"

"The Fourth—"

"Send me to the Fifth."

"No, farther. We've got to put you somewhere out of the way. It is, I would say, an intriguing plan, as long as no one who knows me sees you."

"So I'm going?"

"It's unthinkable." A sip of scotch. "Let me think about it."

M
y first passport was shared with my mother and our dog, Max. In the picture she is seated, holding Max, and I'm standing at her side. I was twelve. Louise wanted to take me to North Africa.

Louise kept a shrine on a small credenza in her bedroom. Among photographs and candles, postcards, and especially memorable traffic citations, Louise always had propped her folded and
dirty, lipstick-kissed, grad school transcript. She had studied anthropology—in fact, was studying to become an anthropologist—when the pursuit was interrupted by her pregnancy. Louise took a leave. After I was born, the plan went, she would return, Dad splitting the day care, but that never happened. She had two years of grad school, the last devoted to a professor named Margaret Chang-Sagerty (
her
red lips on the transcript), whose specialty was something about Morocco. We were going to North Africa to spend a month among the "Mohammedans" Louise had studied at school.

We planned to travel in winter, stretching my two-week Christmas break into four and deflecting the objections of my teachers with the promise of hard study and a special report when I returned. Louise insisted I take the report seriously, and I did, and she did too. Our report was astonishing, but I'll get to that. Louise liked to smoke, and she smoked more when she was happy. The weeks leading up to our trip were shrouded in a bluish haze, saturated with lists, borrowed luggage, special hats and phrase books, and punctuated by lessons in Spanish and French from friends of Louise who came to our house with bottles of wine and talked.

It was hard to concentrate at school. At lunch I pretended there was no water. I thought Fez was in the desert. Doug Hedges was my best friend, and I told him Louise and I were going to ride to Fez on camels.

"Fez isn't in the desert," he said.

"I know that," I told him. "We could still ride on camels."

"Why?"

Louise made maps and "itineraries" after dinner on beautiful, translucent onion paper that she'd lifted from work. We used different colored pens for the different days. She hated her job (insurance receptionist—"deflectionist," she called it) and asked her friend Constance Pruitt to phone in sick for her the first two weeks, then call and get a "medical leave." Constance sounded like Louise on
the phone. She hated "assless bosses" as much as Louise did, and this subterfuge appealed to her.

We thought of everything except the passport. On the day before our departure, Louise went to pick up the airplane tickets and they asked for our passport. We didn't have one which is how Max ended up in the picture. Three bulky suitcases and a knapsack ("only what can be carried"), one frantic boy, and a calm mother, all stuffed into Constance's car with Constance and the dog, we went in the morning downtown to Immigration on our way to an afternoon departure for Madrid. Louise held Max on her lap in the photo booth and I stood, and then we waited several hours for the paperwork to be completed. The dog was well behaved. Constance kept me happy playing cards. On the way to the airport we left Max with Jean-Baptiste (of the drunken French lessons) and arrived with about an hour to spare before our flight.

My private life at that time (every child has one) had become exceedingly complicated, mostly because of puberty. I stared in the mirror constantly and was embarrassed to be caught at it. I began forming elaborate ideas about myself and my mother—who we were in the world and who we ought to be. On the airplane I insisted on wearing a tie. It was ridiculous. We had to buy a clip-on at the drugstore because neither of us knew how to make the knot. Somewhere I'd gotten the idea that I was the kind of child who should travel in a tie. This evolving scenario included Louise, who needed to become a kind of Auntie Mame in order for the tie to really resonate properly. It wasn't a huge stretch—she had so much life and spine and humor—but no woman is Auntie Mame, and Louise had no interest in becoming her. On the airplane to Chicago, the first of three links to Madrid, she ordered a club soda and I was disappointed. I gestured to the champagne and said she should have some.

"Why?" she asked, wrinkling her brow.

"You love champagne," I said.

"Not on airplanes. It gives me a headache on airplanes."

"Well, I'd like to try a little." This from a boy who had always complained that wine stank like vomit, beer was urine, and liquor poison.

Louise laughed and turned back to her magazine. "What a ridiculous boy." Her rebuke surprised me but did nothing to diminish the elegant vision I had conjured. The story in my head was not a lie but a kind of reality-in-progress. I had all the guileless relativism of a child. Louise's rebuke didn't mean I was mistaken; rather, reality had not yet caught up to my imagination. (And of course at this point, in the guise of memory, my childhood has become exactly this kind of mutable, irrefutable thing.)

We made it to Spain but never Morocco. Morocco required a visa we didn't have, and now it was too late. Louise wrote most of my report in a wonderful cheap hotel in Barcelona where we stayed for four weeks, a long, elaborate fiction about our adventures in the market culture of Fez. The report was encyclopedic and stunning, with photos taken from a reference book and drawings, by me, of a Fez based largely on Barcelona's old quarter. Afternoons were spent in cafes on the Ramblas drinking colorful sodas and playing solitaire (or rummy with Louise, when she wasn't busy scripting seventh grade paragraphs). The nights went on and on into hours I thought even adults could not inhabit, and I was a great hit in my clip-on tie, dancing with Louise at a club called El Sol, where the waiters gave me free snacks and admired my cards.

I
was pleased that my second passport would not include Max. When Herbert finally agreed to my plan (against his better judgment, he said), it was a Friday and I had three days to get ready for my trip to Paris. Among the felicities that finally swayed him was the availability of a place to stay deep, deep in the Thirteenth arrondissement with a family that had nothing to do with art or museums. The Dupaignes offered a "suite of rooms" on the ground floor of their house to foreign scholars visiting the Cite Univer
sitaire, just a few blocks away. Herbert had a friend in the university's history department (another fruit) arrange everything on his behalf, and the rooms were secured for two weeks. Herbert Widener was expected in Paris April fifteenth.

Outside, the afternoons had become legendary and warm. I rescued my tired and neglected leather datebook from its place on the dusty window ledge. Traversing its many barren pages, its vast white field of empty days and weeks, I penned in this single appointment,
Arrive Paris April 15
, punctuated with a swift underline.

"I'm only doing this to rescue you from the scandal you're courting here in town."

"Courting? I'm not courting anyone."

"You can't go inviting twelve-year-old ex-students to sleep with you and expect nothing to come of it."

"Oh, everything came of it. He's fifteen, by the way."

"Exactly my point. You could be arrested."

"I've already been punished for it by the school. It's the least I can do, you know, to make the charges valid."

"That's certainly selfless—and stupid."

"I wish Dogan could go with me."

"It's out of the question. I'm the one who's going to Paris."

"I'm sure I'll keep to myself."

"Maybe you'll get this Turk out of your system, or at least develop the good sense not to sleep with him anymore."

"Hmm."

The bright blue days became crowded. I hadn't packed bags like this since my second trip with Louise (France at age sixteen), and it was relaxing to lift them in two hands and feel anchored by their weight. The neglected datebook got filled with errands and addresses, lists, phone numbers, and the pleasing finality of sharp check marks stabbed beside those tasks I managed to complete. Herbert was disappearing to a vast ranch near Petaluma to take pharmaceuticals, drink chilled fume blanc, and lie in the sun with an
architect friend of ours who had everything one could ever want in life except company. The "rest cure," Herbert called it.