The Fisher Boy (5 page)

“I think you’ve had a few too many,” I told Ian. Then, without thinking, I repeated my gesture from years before, under the Gothic arches on the chapel’s crypt: I touched his shoulder.

And he repeated his response, this time in public, for my troupe and our entire audience to hear—“Take your fucking hands off me, you son of a whore!”

To my right, a straight couple was beginning a pitcher of beer. Everything felt tenuous, like the landscapes in lucid dreams; I felt that I could fly if I chose to. I said, “I don’t usually use props, but tonight I’m making an exception.”

Then I seized the pitcher of beer and emptied it over Ian Drummond’s head.

Chapter Six

The next day, Sunday, I went to church as a kind of penance, to the Unitarian/Universalist meetinghouse in Provincetown. It’s right there on Commercial Street, with its white clapboards and prim spire, amid the shops selling incense and tarot cards and tit clamps. Inside,
tromp l’oeil
paintings gave an added dimension to its ceiling and walls, pulling niches, cornices, pilasters, and rosettes from flat, oyster-colored plaster. Suspended from the ceiling hung a Victorian lamp, all prisms and glass globes, the sort Mary Lincoln might have read by. Pews which once held whalers’ widows and sailors familiar with Cape Horn and islands of cannibals were now filled with drag queens and software executives masquerading as beachboys.

I felt awful, for all sorts of reasons: for disgracing myself with my improv colleagues, for fleeing Quahog as soon the bouncer pried Ian and me apart. An angry friend is more dreaded than any enemy, so meeting Roberto or Roger Morton terrified me.

And I was wary that the Christian Soldiers, or whoever was responsible for the hate crime at Arthur’s, might sabotage a service at this most lavender of congregations. So when Edward settled into the pew in front of me, a little to my left so that I could observe him without his knowing, it was somehow comforting. Upon sitting, he began to pray, shutting his eyes as tightly as a child counting while playing hide-and-go-seek.

The first hymn was, ironically, “Forward Through the Ages,” that is, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” with lyrics editing Jesus and war out of the picture. Christian Soldiers, I thought, would haunt this service.

And I was right. When the congregation was invited to share its “joys and sorrows,” several people took the microphone to express concern for Arthur and the “spirit” or “soul” of Provincetown. A Canadian lesbian, an Olympic kayaking gold medalist, spoke sadly about “the five men—they looked like Christian Soldiers, they had the uniforms—who screamed insults at me and at my partner from a car on Bradford Street.” Some in the church clapped at compliments to Arthur, while others whirled two fingers above their heads, in the Unitarian “gesture of affirmation.”

Edward coughed into a tissue during the sermon, which was about hatred. The African-American minister, a lesbian graduate of Harvard Divinity School, said, “We have to look inside our hearts, to ask ourselves: Is there hatred within us too? What kind of garden are we growing within our souls? Is it full of nettles and thistles and briars? Or does it bring forth the sweet, nourishing fruit of forgiveness?”

Were Hollings Fair’s followers the forgiving sort? Fair himself had left Cape Cod the day after his speech at the town meeting. He was needed, evidently, at his trademark church, with its concrete angel with an observation deck lodged in her halo. Were the Christian Soldiers praying at this very moment, to a god who existed solely to punish, who’d refined hell into a Calvinist theme park for their despised? And how big, we all wondered, was their presence in Provincetown? We saw men in battle gear all the time now, milling on the streets, driving trucks and cars, but were there others, incognito, in this very church this morning?

During the moment of silent meditation, when the associate minister played his Tibetan singing bowls, I thought Edward wiped tears from his eyes. Then a soloist from the choir sang a spiritual, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” bringing the ache of the old South into our humid Yankee church.

After the service, there was the inevitable bottleneck at the door. Again, I worried about meeting the wrong people, but no one from Quahog materialized, thank God.

Some churchgoers were pausing outside, taking refreshments, participating in the post-service social. Edward was unlocking a bicycle from the rack in front of the church, lifting it gently, as if to avoid the violence of metal on metal, avoid the spokes of his wheels banging others. I recognized the bicycle as Arthur’s, but Edward’s clothes were new, a blue T-shirt advertising Quicksilver surfing gear, and black denim shorts cut to advertise his body. I remembered him kissing me in Ian’s bedroom, then scurrying away.

“Hello,” he said. “I heard you were at Quahog.”

Had he heard about my fight, I wondered, or were he and Arthur still frightened of the telephone, of those late-night hang-up calls Edward mentioned at Ian’s?

“How did you hear about our gig?”

Edward was now astride the bicycle, one muscular leg on its pedal and the other straight out, his toe
en pointe
on the ground in its fraying sneaker. “I saw you out front of Quahog before the show. Two friends of Arthur’s went, Elinor and Ginny. I saw them in Adams Pharmacy this morning.” He described the lesbians who’d intimidated the fundamentalist with the pamphlets.

“Did they give you a review of my performance?”

“They said…you made quite a splash.” Was that his wit or the lesbians’? We both laughed.

Talking to Edward, especially about Arthur, was an oddly formal experience in which every gesture, every phrase, seemed governed by some vast, vaguely hostile code of etiquette. He was protecting Arthur from intruders, so it seemed, the way Montezuma’s emissaries sought to bribe away Cortez with gifts of quetzal feathers and jade. Then, abruptly, he became accessible: “I’m sure Ian deserved it.”

I mentioned Edward’s early exit from Ian’s party. He’d found the swordfish “tough as an old shoe” and the chutney sour. Then, blushing, he began coughing. “Excuse me,” he said, choking, while I stood there helplessly, unsure whether this was an embarrassment or an emergency.

He dismounted from the bicycle, letting it clatter to the ground, and then rummaged through the leather pouch strapped around his waist. Retrieving an orange tube from the pouch, he turned away. He held the object to his mouth, his shoulders hunched like somebody with grandchildren. He had asthma, I realized. It was an inhaler, not amyl nitrate, Ian had seen him using in Arthur’s kitchen.

People kept streaming from the church. “Is your friend okay?” asked a woman I recognized as the lover of the lesbian author who’d spoken at town hall.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Let me get him something to drink.” I nudged my way through the crowd to the folding tables of refreshments for the social: sticky pink cake studded with pieces of peppermint, ginger snap cookies, jugs of lemonade.

When I returned with some lemonade, Edward was still coughing, being lectured by the famous author on illness as a metaphor for racism. Her child was sleeping through her speech in a sling on her back. “Perhaps you’re allergic to proximity of homophobia,” the famous author told Edward, then eased away.

Edward drank the lemonade, said, “Sorry about that,” and stopped coughing. “Thank you, thanks for rescuing me.”

I think I needed him at that moment as much as I’ve needed anyone: I still felt like the Outcast, the Idiot Who’d Wrecked the Show, so, impulsively, I offered to buy him lunch—and he surprised me by answering, “Great!”

I chose the Café Blasé, across Commercial Street from my apartment, where white metal tables with wide, fringed umbrellas stood beneath the twisting branches of an acanthus tree strung with fairy lights. Its porch was hung with Chinese lanterns made of loose, blistery-looking paper, and, enclosing all this was a white picket fence with flowerboxes brilliant with petunias and geraniums pink as prom gowns.

“We’ve both been virtuous, we’ve been to church,” I said, “so we can indulge.” I ordered a margarita, but Edward wanted nothing stronger than guava juice.

He borrowed a pen from our waiter, and then filled his placemat with sketches, with enough racing cars for an Indianapolis 500. “That Ian drinks like a fish,” he said, making me self-conscious about my great big blue cocktail.

“Margaritas aren’t my usual Sunday fare,” I said. “…Arthur was a bit soused the day of the party.”

“But since then, he hasn’t had a drop. I’ve been very strict, keeping him clean and sober. He looks awesome.” Edward paused. “That was such an awful thing—”

“To do to Arthur,” I said.

He stopped sketching. The pen was broken, leaking ink onto his fingers. “And to hurt that poor dog.” He put a surprising amount of emotion into his voice. “That was so cruel. I’m an animal lover. I believe living things have the right to live.”

That didn’t stop him from ordering a hamburger, heavy with bacon, with extra mushrooms. Considering his past, studying cooking, I thought he might choose something minimalist and broiled or full of sprouts and field greens, but I was wrong. I was midway through my grilled chicken sandwich and a second margarita before I had the courage enough to ask him the question I now realized was the reason for this luncheon. “How did you meet Arthur?”

Edward was eating his hamburger with a knife and fork, cutting it with quick, fastidious gestures that reflected his culinary background. “I’ll never forget the day I met Arthur. But not because of anything to do with Arthur.”

He had been hitchhiking to Provincetown. He’d gotten as far as the Orleans traffic circle without incident, receiving rides from traveling salesmen, a Seventh-Day Adventist minister, and a potter from Welfleet. “They were all very straight, very talkative, and very boring.”

Then, at Orleans, all of that changed. His next ride was in an old beige van. Edward would always remember the grubby fake fur on its steering wheel and the web of wooden beads slung over the driver’s seat. “For my sciatica,” the driver had said. The driver himself was somewhat generic. He wore a baseball cap and those silver reflecting sunglasses that make you feel like you’re talking to yourself. He had dark curly hair and a mustache graying at the edges. His skin was olive, gritty from years at a gas station or a marina; his fingernails were black.

He told Edward he could take him to Provincetown, but said little else. He played classical music, “lots of harpsichords,” very loud on his tapedeck; it made Edward’s ears throb. When Edward tried to make small talk, the driver shrugged and turned the music still louder.

By the time Provincetown came into view, the pond and sand on the right, Massachusetts Bay and that line of cabins on the left, Edward’s uneasiness was calcifying into fear. Something told him to bolt at the next traffic light. Unfortunately, it was green and the driver shot through, miles above the speed limit. Edward prayed for a police car to intercept them, but they seemed to have the road to themselves.

When they reached the exits for the East End of Provincetown, Edward screamed for the driver to stop and let him out. He knew there was panic in his voice; he knew the driver realized he wasn’t screaming just to compete with the music. For the first time, the driver smiled. Then he turned up the harpsichords, like instruments of torture.

The driver and the air-conditioning of the van both seemed to grow colder by the moment. “He just sped through the lights, red, green, it didn’t make any difference.”

Edward looked straight into my eyes, eager, I thought, to gauge my reaction. “He raped me.” He made it sound like a boast.

He elaborated. The driver swerved down a side road where there was nothing but woods, the dry black pines, the scrub trees that barely suck life out of the sandy earth of the Province Lands. He parked the van and then overpowered Edward, pinning his arms, wrestling him still, and dragging him deep into the woods.

Edward screamed but heard nothing except the dry hum of insects in reply. He remembered the driver’s hands, callused, smelling of turpentine, clamping over his mouth, and his feet, in new orange workboots, kicking and tearing through the brush on the overgrown trail. He remembered the man dragging him through poison ivy and having the ridiculous urge to warn him of its presence, hoping this small act of kindness might somehow temper his brutality.

The driver was squeezing him so hard he thought he’d fractured some ribs. Exhausted, too frightened to fight further, Edward went limp and the driver gathered him almost tenderly in his arms, slinging him over his shoulder. Edward said nothing; the woods were deserted, and he’d screamed his throat raw.

“He had a knife. I was lucky to get out alive.”

So, bleeding and all but broke, Edward had staggered into Provincetown. He bought a meal of fried dough and salt water taffy, then spent the night on the beach, where Arthur found him the following morning in back of his house.

Chapter Seven

Was he telling the truth? Or was this a fantasy cooked up like his bouillabaisse, his payment for my treating him to lunch? I had no idea, but I wanted to believe him, for Arthur’s sake and my own.

It had been three weeks since it had last rained and lawns were yellowing, farmers worrying and experts predicting a drought. But there was ample sunshine to be enjoyed, so I suggested Edward ask Arthur to come to the beach. I would drive and pick them up tomorrow at ten.

The next day, June fifteenth, broke sunny and hot. When I stopped at Arthur’s house in my rusting Volvo, Edward, alone, answered the door. “Arthur isn’t up to Herring Cove,” he informed me.

Bear in mind that I’d known Arthur for a good ten years, and here was this boy he’d found like a sand dollar four short weeks ago, suggesting my company was some sort of ordeal. A boy Arthur himself admitted needed a bottle of Kwell and a dozen showers before being allowed near good linen.

“What is there to be ‘up to’ about the beach?” Was the whole town going to shun me because of one night, one mistake? “Is Arthur okay?” I asked, loudly, so that my voice would travel well beyond the front hall, beyond the China trade umbrella stand and the Rowlandson prints of gambling rakes.

Edward used the full howitzers of his charm. “He’s napping now. He’s having a new security system installed. They’re coming this afternoon from Plymouth. But I’d love to go
.
”

Without waiting for my response, he gathered some beach things, Arthur’s things, from a closet, then grabbed a hardback book from the sofa. Arthur had bought Edward the clothes he was wearing, the ice-blue gym shorts and a polo shirt in a color catalogues that year called “mango.” “I think we’ll both feel better once the alarm system gets installed.”

My taking him to the beach alone had ulterior motives, of course: I could ask him about his background. Would he answer?

The upholstery in the car seared my thighs, even though it was only mid-morning. Edward was all coy silence, the silence of a withholder, as we drove slowly through this prettiest section of Provincetown. White picket fences separated lawns and gardens from the street. Many of the houses, barn-red, white, or cedar worn to a twig-like November-brown, were older than the country, older than the United States of America. They were overwhelmed by the greenery surrounding them, tunnels of sycamores and silver maples, of wisteria, rhododendrons, and masses of bridal wreath in their last vigor before drought finally sapped them.

Edward was ignoring the scenery, examining my car, grinning at the odometer and gas gauge as if they were tricks. He even had the audacity to open my glove compartment, to thumb through the Volvo owner’s manual.

“I don’t believe you’ve mentioned where you’re from.”

“Oh, we moved a lot. I don’t think about the past. I’m really sort of concentrating on my future.”

“Are you here just for the summer?”

“I’m not really sure.” He crammed the owner’s manual back in its place, then shut the glove compartment a bit too forcefully, as if to shut off my line of personal questions. His silences had an edge; he had a way of making
you
feel responsible for his share of conversation. “…Have you ever owned a Jaguar?” he said at last. “It’s been my lifelong ambition. Owning a Jaguar.”

He pronounced it “Jag-you-are” like British actors do in their commercials, but he was some sort of New Englander because he dropped his R’s and revved up his A’s.

“That’s beyond my budget, a Jaguar.”

“I thought all you preppies had big bucks.” He was grinning.

We’d come to the beginning of Commercial Street, where it meets the shore road. On the left stood the big hotel, the one that really belong in Hyannis; on the right were some houses, bleached wood, all Danish Modern angles. In front of us were the tidal flats and the granite breakwater snaking through them, and, in the distance, the dunes of the National Seashore, buff-colored humps like a lost piece of Arabia.

I took a right onto the shore road so that the lushness and history of the West End became just nature. We drove past salt marshes, ponds green with winking coverings of scum, and miniature pines draped with southern-seeming silvery-gray moss.

Edward was talking, but about Formula One racing. “Well, you follow the Grand Prix, don’t you? You’ve heard of Monte Carlo, haven’t you?” He began quoting statistics, about drivers and races and circuits, about Ferrari and McLaren and Maserati, all while running his hands over the luminous, icy fabric of his running shorts. He was doing everything he could to make his small talk as small as possible.

“This is our lucky day,” I said. I was gliding into a just-vacated space in the parking lot at Herring Cove Beach. In retrospect, that was stupidest remark I’ve made in my life. If I’d been the least bit psychic, I’d never have said that, never gone to Cape Cod that summer. We parked near the beige-wood-and-cinder-block snack bar so that we could smell hot dogs and relish cutting through the fragrance of salt and roses. Wild roses thrived along the parking lot fence, their loose pink petals trembling in what little breeze braved the heat.

“I hope you don’t mind a walk,” I said to Edward. “I thought we’d try the nude section.”

I thought that might get some sort of reaction. Since everyone assumed he was hustling Arthur’s money and that his brain was locked on all things carnal, I thought he’d play the prude and insist we stay here. Instead, he clasped my arm with the authority of someone older, taller, and stronger. He said, “Arthur says you’re an okay guy, so that’s enough for me.” As though he were the one who’d shared a prep school with Arthur, who’d toasted New Year’s Eve in front of his fireplace on Beacon Street.

There are just two buildings at Herring Cove Beach, the snack bar and the bath house, then sand and water. The beach is just a succession of sand and dunes that empties of people the farther you walk, except for the men’s nude section. The water that day was almost tropical blue, bursting into breakers that were the exaggerated white of shaving cream.

It was a hot, half-hour walk to the nude beach. The sand, gravelly and coarse at the water’s edge, sucked at our heels. It was littered with all sorts of gifts from the tides, the things that I’d collected as a child; tangles of kelp, like the combings of some sea god’s hair; clamshells with purple streaks the Indians had cut to trade as wampum; wet pebbles veined with greenstone that could almost pass as jade.

Continuing to do his best to avoid real conversation, Edward strode along just ahead of me, keeping enough distance so that we couldn’t be perceived as being together. I should say right now that I don’t break any mirrors. That summer I was twenty-nine, “considered good-looking” as the personals ads would say, 5’10”, slender, with reddish-brown hair cut as fashionably as Newbury Street could manage. Nothing for Edward to be ashamed of.

We passed the women’s section, then the clothed men’s section, then a Foreign Legion’s worth of empty sand, scorching and seemingly endless. Edward apparently knew his way because he accelerated his pace until at last we reached our goal. It was actually marked, this oasis, but not by date palms or some bubbling spring. Instead, two huge branches of driftwood had been screwed into the sand to form a fork, like the whalebone arches sea captains built for their gardens throughout nineteenth-century Cape Cod. Draped from one of these branches was a fading rainbow flag, along with countless strands of Mardi Gras beads—silver, lavender, gold—glittering in the still, blazing air.

Seeing no one I knew, I felt relieved in spite of myself. “Make yourself at home,” I called to Edward, who’d already begun settling in. He unfurled a towel Arthur had swiped from a hotel at Cap d’Antibes, then propped up a gauzy collapsible tent. Finally, with all eyes upon him—there were thirty or more men in the vicinity—he began disrobing, without the slightest hint of stage fright, until he stood stripped, desired, and unobtainable. You could see the effect in other men’s reactions: the lovers nudging each other to look, a middle-aged man putting down his Foucault just to stare. They saw what compensated for rent at Arthur’s—a chest with a delicate play of muscles, and a penis, that, liberated from his underwear, was large and seemingly moist, almost erect, bobbing as Edward rubbed his body with tanning oil.

“Need some help with your back?” a handsome black man was reckless enough to ask. A smile flashed then died on Edward’s lips when he answered, “Thanks just the same, but I’m fine.”

His body language was all about exclusion. I didn’t have the confidence to sit close to him, and he didn’t invite me, so I claimed a spot about fifteen feet away. He spent much of his time in the tent he’d borrowed, something Arthur had bought for his sister when she’d developed skin cancer. My lunch, fake crabmeat and a package of oatmeal cookies, decidedly downscale compared to some of my neighbors’ fare, was half eaten when I saw
him
and lost my appetite. Ian, of course. Ian Drummond. The cause of my disgrace, the reason I was alone.

He was with his crowd, gay Republicans with summer houses in the vicinity, including Barton Daggett. Ian was using his hoarse, bearish laugh, often unleashed at someone else’s expense. I turned away, wishing I could hide in Edward’s tent. Then Ian and his friends filed up into the dunes flanking the back of the beach.

It was gorgeous weather, hot, with a sky hard and blue as tile. The sun was burning; you could feel your shoulders cooking like sirloin. Don’t think of Ian, I told myself, don’t think of anything but this day. I swam every hour or so. The water was clear close to the shore, then aquamarine farther out, with a gem-like coldness that seemed to stop your heart when you dove in. It gave you a blade-like awareness of your body the first few minutes, then, once you swam in the slow, clear swells, it was marvelous, especially naked, with everything floating and free.

But most of the men stayed on shore, marking crossword puzzles, getting peeved at the grit in their sandwiches, and cruising Edward. There was little interaction between the groups on the beach; they sat on their towels, in close proximity but with vague distrust, like Italian city-states during the Middle Ages. Several times, as soon as I emerged from the water, Edward went strolling languidly toward it, always naked, always smiling as he passed me. To follow him back into the Atlantic would be an open act of shameless desperation, so I didn’t dare.

As the day wound down and the sun completed its arc across the sky, people began leaving the beach—Barton Daggett and his friends, the black man Edward had refused. But not Ian. Couples shook sand from their blankets and folded them as crisply as soldiers folding the flag at a military funeral. Guys wiggled back into sneakers, pressed fingers into reddening flesh to confirm they’d “picked up a little color.” They stuffed favorite beach stones into pockets to join guest house keys on long plastic lozenges, and began the trek back across the breakwater to town, or to the Herring Cove parking lot, full of all sorts of cars from all sorts of states with the same Celebrate Diversity stickers on their bumpers.

By late afternoon, only three people remained in sight: myself, Edward, and an Asian boy. The Asian appeared to be in his late teens, with spiky hair and studs in his ears that looked like droplets of mercury. He wore a black Lycra thong, and his dusky skin suggested he could be Cambodian.

Somehow his presence here felt validating, as though the bumper stickers about diversity were at last becoming true, and that war, emigration, and his parents’ prayers to a thousand joss sticks couldn’t prevent him coming here and being himself, on this beach at the edge of America. Finally, he too made gestures to leave, swigging the last of his Evian water, standing, brushing the sand from his tawny thighs, all the while glancing invitingly in Edward’s direction but getting no reaction whatsoever. Edward had emerged from his tent, but was absorbed with reading the bulky hardback book he’d snatched from the sofa at Arthur’s.

Then the Asian boy peeled off his thong, wrung the seawater from it, and walked across the sand, the DMZ separating him from Edward. I could hear snatches of their conversation, like the words, ragged with static, of broadcasts from Winnipeg and Calgary fading in and out on my late-night car radio.

Whatever the Asian’s line, it failed. He stepped indignantly into his briefs and jeans, then came marching in my direction. He was breaking through the erotic wall of silence that separates naked men at this beach, so I felt a little self-conscious.

“What’s with him, anyway?” The Asian had a chili-thick Texas drawl. “Talk about mixed messages, the way he parades around! You should’ve seen him carrying on while you were in the water!” Then he was off, late for tea dance.

I was shaking out my deck shoes when Edward approached, saying, “You’ve been awfully quiet this afternoon.”

Don’t psychiatrists call that “projection”? “It comes with the territory,” I said.

He was holding the book he’d gotten from Arthur’s sofa. “Arthur says you’re interested in this guy.” The book’s title was spelled out in gilt Gothic lettering:
A Prince Among Painters: The Art of Thomas Royall
. It was mostly plates, and contained little information. The one Royall biography was something rare published in the Fifties.

“He painted
The Fisher Boy
,” Edward said. “It’s in the museum back in town.”

He was kneeling now, exuding the scent of warm skin and tanning butter, flipping through Arthur’s book with his beach-greasy, damaging fingers. “They’re having a retrospective on Thomas Royall at the museum. Here in Provincetown.”

He actually seemed eager to talk, but, having been slighted the entire day, I felt less than flattered being the center of attention now that the beach was empty except for gulls, sandpipers, and some tiny figures in the distance by the bath house.

“Would you like to borrow it?”

He doesn’t want to carry it back, I thought. He wants me to lug this heavy book back to the parking lot, then drive him to Arthur’s.

“I’ll take a rain check.” A joke that year, what with the drought.