The Short History of a Prince (25 page)

As he was leaving she said, “You’ll give this place a kick, a run for its money, if you don’t let it stand in your way.” With her parting words she confirmed his suspicion that he had not done a very good job blending in with his fellow Ottenites. “We don’t have anyone of your ilk here, and you do so look the part.”

He drove home in his new two-door car that would be paid off in ten years. He didn’t want to think what she had meant by her farewell:
You do so look the part
. He had tried to look as much like himself as he could in Otten, and still every morning as he shaved he had to give his standard pep talk. “Be not afraid,” he said to the mirror. “You are funny, Mr. McCloud, and insightful. You once danced the part of the Prince. You have your secret: you sold a miniature set of lawn furniture to an intelligent, gorgeous, nearly divine movie star and her sculptor husband of twenty years.” He didn’t want to become Mrs. Denval’s traveling companion—she, the wealthy dowager, he, the queer, carrying her baggage down the narrow cobbled streets of Florence, Rome, Milan, Venice.

He would think about his car rather than about Mrs. Denval in her aqua chiffon robe with the matching slippers. Walter had never owned a car before, and he felt in awe of the thing. It seemed to him to be alive, to have digestion and spirit, to be a creature who had come to share his life. It was shaped like an egg, and had no legroom. It sputtered and groaned, it warmed to his words of encouragement. He stroked its smooth blue curve down the hood when he left it in the garage in the evenings, and on the weekends he washed it on his driveway. Most important, his brother-in-law, Marc, approved of the model and Walter’s maintenance schedule. As part of the Sunday ritual he dragged his canister vacuum out on the cement and cleaned the short gray shaggy upholstery, and he was always sure to have a Chap Stick and fresh water in the driver’s right-hand receptacle. On his bad days he told himself that it had been worth coming to Otten if only to experience becoming a car owner, if only to go through one of manhood’s most important rites of passage. In his darker moods he tried to remember that he had a few potential friends.

The band director, Cy Burns, wore his hair in a braid, the only adult in town who had the vestigial radical-sixties do. He and his wife asked Walter over for dinner on one of the last warm weekends in October. The four children ran around the backyard while Walter chased them. They threw sand in the salad. They pestered Walter until ten o’clock, when they were at last put to bed. When he finally sat down at the piano to accompany Cy on his sax, the wife, Stacey, came downstairs and told them they couldn’t play, it was too late, the party was over.

Walter liked Cy and his bossy Stacey, but they were busy with two careers and four children. Otten was a town for families, most of them descendants of the funeral-parlor family, the Stegemans, and the grocery-store family, the Ketterhagens. Children went to school and grew up and got married and some stayed on the farm, and many others found employment at the Quaker Oats plant by the river, or they drove twenty miles away to jobs in the munitions factory. Walter felt like a spinster, a witch, living on the outskirts in his ranch house with the deer rack, the six-pointer, hanging on the front of his garage. He was related to no one. Mrs. Denval wanted him to come to brunch every Sunday, and she wanted him to fight the proposed four-lane highway with her, to go to board meetings, to drive to Madison and speak about the rural charm of Otten. Walter didn’t yet know if Otten was a place that had charm, and supposing it did, he might not then be the appropriate champion, if it was true he looked his part.

With very little company to choose from, Walter found himself rabble-rousing after school. He revived the Forensics Club and marshaled his bright freshmen and sophomores into active duty. He volunteered to cook in the cafeteria for the senior pancake breakfast and the madrigal dinner. In January, after four months of teaching, it still took considerable energy to repair and maintain what he supposed was his self-esteem, particularly after his seventh-hour class. It was restorative to have his six top students, those who more or less saw the light, gather at 2:37 in his room to prepare their dramatic readings. During Team Spirit Week he helped Betsy Rutule paint slogans with bad puns on the dentist’s office window and the Laundromat. In the spring he would direct
South Pacific
, and the rehearsals would keep him in school long past supper.

There were a select few who inspired Walter, who kept him going, and there were occasions when a group moved him, when the basketball team ran down the court like a flutter of leaves, when the earnest pom-pom girls, all ponytails and leg warmers, rehearsed in the gym, when the music from the chorus drifted into his room during fifth hour. At the madrigal concert in the cafeteria at Christmas he had felt like a ninny, trying to fight back his tears. The singers were lost in their harmonies, absorbed by their own sounds, leaning to their conductor, quieting at the first motion of her hand to her mouth. Their sweet, untrained voices would never be more beautiful, and standing still on the risers they looked at once so vulnerable and all-knowing and unaware. He slipped out at intermission, drained by the simple fact of their youth.

Walter could readily find fault with the town. There was no place to buy a decent cup of coffee, the movie theater carried family films at the seven o’clock showing and real-man movies, blood-and-gore movies, at the nine o’clock. One hundred percent of the population was of Anglo-Saxon descent; there were hardly any sidewalks; the local library didn’t have
The Great Gatsby
, or
To the Lighthouse
or
Middlemarch
. He felt, too, that the place exerted its own strange pressure on him, that it was the townspeople who first looked with a critical eye at the oddity that was Mr. McCloud, and then, when they had sized him up, taken what they thought was his full measure, in one small stroke they erased him. He did not belong in a category that was of use to them. In his lamb cake of a car he made his way to work, parked, locked up, got out and felt along the shiny hood as he whispered, “Good-bye.” He had the peculiar sensation, stepping onto the sidewalk, that he made no sound, and when he crossed the grass he noted that his feet made no impression in the wet Wisconsin ground.

There were ten inches of snow on January 17, on the morning Walter was to meet Susan in Chicago. It was always quiet along his road, and when he woke up he did not sense the silence farther off, the stillness of the town. He had not gotten into the habit of listening to the country noises from his bed because, for the last two months, both when he
went to sleep and as his waking dream faded, he had thought of Julian Wright. He had made a ritual, a prayer, out of Julian Wright.

When he had met him in his box seat at Orchestra Hall in November, in Chicago, and after Pollini was done playing and the applause died down, Julian had turned to Walter and said, “You’re coming with me, baby.” It was all Walter could do to get his coat over his trembling arms. Julian had hailed a cab, and they’d sat primly behind the barrel-chested driver, who didn’t look as if he’d put up with any hanky-panky. They didn’t dare reach for each other, couldn’t have left it at one touch or a clasp. When they got to the apartment, Julian fumbled at the doorknob, pushed, pulled, heaved his weight against the glass. The key wasn’t turning in the lock. Walter, clutching Julian’s back, pressing against him, didn’t help. “Oh God, oh baby, open, open, open,” Julian said, rattling the large brass knob. The two of them, Walter thought, out of their skin with impatience, were comparable to nothing but themselves. They were two starved men who couldn’t stand the wait, couldn’t bear the last long minutes before they slammed the door shut behind them.

In bed, in Otten, Walter tried to bring Julian’s face to mind, as he always did in the early morning. When he should have been thinking about how best to make his sullen students take to the selected great works of literature, he instead conjured Julian, feature by feature, as best as he could recollect them. There had been no hint of a killer or masochist in the light brown eyes, the small oval glasses, the brown hair cut long on one side, short on the other, in the style Mitch used to favor. Julian had kissed Walter into the corner of the foyer that first night, “beautiful mouth mouth,” Walter kept trying to say, the literal and most appropriate translation from Italian to English of one of his favorite eighteenth-century Italian songs. But he could only manage “mouth, mouth—mouth—mouth” as they dropped to the floor in each other’s arms. They had both felt an urgency as they stripped each other, but they’d been tentative too, Julian lightly touching Walter’s face, Walter smoothing Julian’s dark hair across his chest before he admired farther down the long torso. This will soon be over, he thought. He would have liked to give himself up to the stranger and his sumptuous lips, and yet he couldn’t dismiss the voice saying, This will soon be over.

Later in the evening, Julian put on Patsy Cline and on the bed that time they’d gone leisurely through “That Wonderful Someone,” “Hungry for Love,” “Too Many Secrets,” “Don’t Ever Leave Me Again,” and at last, during “Ain’t No Wheels on This Ship,” Julian again brought Walter off.

It was remarkable, what they had in common, and that was not counting their love for Pollini and Beethoven. Walter examined Julian’s CD and record collection and believed that groove for groove in the classical section they had trenches in the same places. They owned many of the same books, they both exercised on a skiing machine, they were teachers. Julian was soon to sublet his apartment and move to New Orleans for a year, to teach poetry at Tulane. He liked to bet at the horse races, something that Walter could probably work up some enthusiasm for, and he was a poet, a sanctified poet, with not only a book of poems called
Until the Last Stop
but the Walt Whitman Prize to his name.

At four in the morning Julian sat at his piano playing a mournful piece by Aaron Copland. Walter, reclining on the sofa, thought how pleasant it was to have a cat moving like a wave against his bare legs. He was wearing Julian’s plaid bathrobe, admiring his lover’s bare back, the slender waist, the nicely rounded small ass in the white cotton boxer shorts. He stretched, feeling what he guessed was contentment. In fact he’d had an unusually prolonged sense of happiness, and for a little he let himself imagine waking up every morning on Belmont Avenue, in the old apartment with high ceilings and cornices very like those in the living room at Lake Margaret. It was Julian’s grandmother’s apartment, and although she’d been dead for seven years it was every bit the home of someone who had been born in 1898. There were antimacassars on the upright stiff cushioned chairs, a still life over the mantel, an armoire in the bedroom. The damp smell of the basement came up through the heat registers, gracing the house with that familiar mildewed fragrance.

Walter sat scratching the cat behind the ears. It purred and seemed to like him. He thought of a morning with Julian, eating toast, reading the paper, the cat up on the table daring to sniff at their plates. There might be another morning like the first, and then another, and
another, another, another—suddenly he could see a lifetime of mornings, flipping past him as if they were pages in a book. It came to him in a bolt that if he lived on Belmont Avenue, he might never get out of Grandma’s black cherry bed with the purple duvet. The tinkly china clock across the room would chime seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and he would not move from under the covers.

Walter would love Julian’s large lips, that extravagant mouth, so shapely it looked like wax. He would love the intelligent eyes, the fine soft brows, the poet’s words waiting on his tongue and in his hands. He would want to hold on, in that bed, to Julian Wright, and Julian Wright would spring up and make coffee, thinking of daylight and cat food and publishers and public readings and talented students. Julian Wright had a calling card as if he were a nineteenth-century man, a stack of ivory cards on heavy stock in a leather holder with his name, Julian Michael Wright, engraved in wedding-announcement script.

Walter would love and love and love; he would think he could love forever, and he’d say so. He would love until one of them changed, until the terrible moment. It might for once happen to him. What was so dear in the beginning—the hole in Julian’s red-and-blue-striped sock, the cat hairs on his wool pants, his untucked shirt below his waist, the hairy mole on the elbow, the habit of leaving cups on the piano, his lateness, his imperious nature, his laugh in the wrong places, the compulsion for betting on the wrong horse—what had been endearing to Walter in the first place would in one swoop lose its appeal. It was unbelievable the way, just like that, love stopped. He had seen it happen before, seen the shine go out of a lover’s eyes within the space of a few minutes. More often the love leached away slowly, painfully, over a period of weeks or months. No, he advised himself. Don’t start. Get out while you can. It was best to be leery of love, best to distrust the erratic heart. “Get out while you can,” he said under his breath.