A Boy's Own Story (14 page)

The camp, when we finally arrived at midnight, was a sad, cold, empty place. The owner had to unlock a thick rusted chain that stretched from tree to tree across the narrow dirt road. When we reached an open field our car waded slowly, slowly through grasses as tall as the roof and wet and heavy with dew. At the foot of the hill glimmered the lake through a mist—more a chill out of the ground than a lake, more an absence, as though this fitful, shifting dampness was what was left in the world after everything human had been subtracted from it. I was given a bunk in a cold cabin that smelled of mildewed canvas; Ralph was led off somewhere else. As I tried to fall asleep I thought of him. I pitied him, as my mother wanted me to. I pitied him for his dumb animal stare, for his helpless search after relief—for his burden. And I thought about the plays I would direct. In one of them I'd be a dying king. In my trunk I'd brought some old 78s of
Boris Godounov.
Perhaps I'd die to those tolling bells, the Kremlin surrounded by the forces of the pretender, his face red and swollen with desire.

There was a week to go before the other campers were due to arrive. Some local men with scythes swept their way through the overgrown grasses. Someone else repaired the leaking roof in the main house. Stocks of canned food were delivered. The various cabins were opened and aired and swept out. A wasp's hive above the artesian well was bagged and burned. The docks were assembled and floated between newly implanted pylons. The big war canoes came out of winter storage and were seasoned in the cold lake. I worked from the first light to the last—part of my duty as a junior counselor. Ralph had no chores. He stayed in his cabin and came out just for his meals, led wherever he trudged by the big implacable bulge with the wet tip in his trousers.

Every afternoon I was free to go off on my own. The chill still rose off the lake but at high noon the sun broke through its clouds like a monarch slipping free of his retinue. The path I took girdled the hills that rimmed the lake; at one point it dipped and crossed a bog that looked solid and dry, planted innocently in grasses, but that slurped voluptuouslyunder my shoes. I'd race across and look back as my footprints filled with cold, clear water. A hidden bullfrog makes a low gulp and repeats the same sound but more softly each time under the steady high throb of spring peepers in full chorus. A gray chipmunk with a bright chestnut rump scurries past, his tail sticking straight up. Canoe birches higher up the hill shiver in a light breeze; their green and brown buds are emerging from warty, dark brown shoots. A hermit thrush, perched on a high branch, releases its beautiful song while slowly raising and lowering its tail.

I came to know every turn in the path and every plant along the way. One day, late in the summer, I pushed farther into the woods than I'd ever ventured before. I clambered through brambles and thick undergrowth until I reached a logger's road sliced through the wilderness but now slowly healing over. I followed that road for several miles. I entered a broad field and then a smaller clearing surrounded by low trees, although high enough to cut off all breezes. The sun burned hotter and hotter, as if someone were holding a magnifying glass over me. I took off my T-shirt and felt the sweat flow down my sides to my stomach as I bent over to pick blueberries from low bushes. The ground was wet. A huge bee hung buzzing, motionless, in the air.

I was so happy alone and in the woods, away from the dangers posed by other people. At first I wanted to tell someone else how happy I was; I needed a witness. But as the great day revolved slowly above me, as the scarlet tanager flew overhead on his black wings to the distant high trees, as an owl, hidden and remote, sounded a hoot as melancholy as winter, as the leaves, ruffled by the wind, tossed the sun about as though they were princesses at play with a golden ball, as the smell of sweet clover, of bruised sassasfras leaves, of the mulch of last year's duff flowed over me, as I crushed the hot, sweet blueberries between my teeth and then chewed on an astringent needle from a balsam, as I sensed the descent of the sunand the slow decline of summer—oh, I was free and whole, safe from everyone, as happy as with my books.

For I could thrive in the expressive, inhuman realm of nature or the expressive, human realm of books—both worlds so exalted, so guileless—but I felt imperiled by the hidden designs other people were drawing around me. The tender white bells of the flower by the rotting stump, the throbbing distillation of blue in the fringed gentian, the small, bright-green cone of the Scots pine—these were confidences nature placed in me, wordless but as trusting as a dog's eyes. Or the pure, always comprehensible and sharply delineated thoughts and emotions of characters in fiction—these, too, were signs I could read, as one might read a marionette's face. But the vague menace of Ralph with his increasingly haggard face, this boy at once pitiable and dangerous, who had already been caught twice this summer attempting to "hypnotize" younger campers and was now in danger of expulsion, who studied me at meals not with curiosity, much less with sympathy, but with crude speculation (Can I get him to do it? Can he relieve me?)—this menace was becoming more and more intense.

After the other campers appeared and the summer's activities had been under way for a week, I understood that I'd been betrayed. There wouldn't be any plays for me to put on, and I had exhausted myself for no good reason with all-night fantasies of the rehearsals, the performances, the triumphs. My mother's promises had just been a way of getting me out of the house for the summer. A few miles away my sister—shy to the point of invisibility in the winter, unpopular, pasty, overweight—had emerged once again into her estival beauty. She was Captain of the Blues, bronzed and muscular, her hair a gold cap, her enthusiasm boundless, her manner tyrannical ("Get
going,
you guys"), as though all she needed to flower was the complete absence of men and the intense, sentimental adoration of other girls. She'd always been able to command other girls, even when she had been a child and had ordered them to bring her belts for their own chastisement.

Once my sister and I were out of the house, our mother was free to pursue her amorous career; would she present us with a new stepfather on Labor Day, someone too young and handsome to seem quite respectable?

One afternoon, while the other boys were off on a canoe trip, my counselor showed me some "art photographs" he'd taken, all of a naked young man on a deserted beach. The cabin was quiet, the light dim as it filtered down through the old pines and the half-closed shutters, the blanket on Mr. Stone's bed rough under my bare legs as I sorted through the large, glossy prints. I'd never seen a naked adult man before; I became so absorbed in the pictures that the cabin vanished and I was there before the model on that clean white sand. My eyes were drawn again and again to his tanned back and narrow, intricate, toiling white hips as he ran away from me through a zone of full sunlight toward a black, stormy horizon. Where was this beach and who was this man? I wondered; as though I could find him there now, as though he were the only naked man in the world and I must find him if I were to feel again this pressure on my diaphragm, this sensation of sinking, these symptoms of shame and joy I fought to suppress lest Mr. Stone recoil from me in horror as it dawned on him my reactions were not artistic. Was my fascination with the model abnormal?

Mr. Stone inched closer to me on the bed and asked me what I thought of his art photographs. I could feel his breath on my shoulder and his hand on my knee. A thrill of pleasure rippled through me. I was alarmed. I stood, walked to the screen door, made a display of casualness as I stooped to scratch a chigger bite on my ankle. "They're neat, real neat, catch you later, Mr. Stone." I hoped he hadn't noticed my excitement.

At that age I had no idea that hair could be bleached, a tan nursed, teeth capped, muscles acquired; only a god was blond, brown, strong and had such a smile. Mr. Stone had shown me a god and called it "art." Until now, my notions of art had all been about castles in the sand or snow, about remote and ruthless monarchs, about power, not beauty, about the lonely splendors of possession, not the delicious, sinking helplessness of yearning to possess. That young man pacing the beach—with knees that seemed too small for such strong thighs, with long, elegant feet, with a blur of light for a smile, a streak of light for hair, white pools of light for eyes, as though he were being lit suddenly from within that delicately modeled head poised on a slender neck above shoulders so broad he'd have to grow into them—that young man came toward me with a beauty so unsettling I had to call it love, as though he loved me or I him. The drooling adult delectation over particular body parts (the large penis, the hairy chest, the rounded buttocks) is unknown to children; they resolve the parts into the whole and the physical into the emotional, so that desire quickly becomes love. In the same way love becomes desired—hadn't I desired Fred, Marilyn, my German professor?

I went running through the woods. The day was misty; someone had seen a bear eating blueberries and I turned every time I heard a branch snap. A thread of smoke emerged from a dense stand of pine trees across the lake. After I passed the rotting stump and the white flowers beside it I felt as though I'd pressed through a valve into my own preserve and I slowed down to a walk. I stopped to breathe and I heard a woodpecker far away, knocking softly, professionally, auscultating a hollow limb. The trees, interpreting the wind, swayed above me.

Where the path crossed the logger's road, Ralph was sitting in a sort of natural hummock created by the exposed roots of an old elm. He had his pants down around his knees and was examining his erect penis with a disbelieving curiosity, a slightly stunned look emptying his face. He called me over and I joined him, as though to examine a curiosity of nature. He persuaded me to touch it and I did. He asked me to lick the red, sticky, unsheathed head and I hesitated. Was it dirty? I wondered. Would someone see us? Would I become ill? Would I become a queer and never, never be like other people?

To overcome my scruples, Ralph hypnotized me. He didn't have to intone the words long to send me into a deep trance. Once I was under his spell he told me I'd obey him, and I did. He also said that when I awakened I'd remember nothing, but he was wrong there. I have remembered everything.

If my sister was happy with other girls in the summer, in the winter she sat home night after night waiting for boys to ask her out on dates she dreaded. Our mother had moved us into a large apartment and furnished it luxuriously—but no one came to visit. By now my sister was certain I was the one who'd been hurting her chances. With a brother so weird, who was in no way athletic or cool or neat, no wonder she had a reputation for being out of it.

Since my sister was only four years older than I, she knewprecisely what would appeal to my classmates—what sort of penny loafers, which red-and-white-checked short-sleeved shirt, what style of jeans, what manner of low-key joshing. She helped me buy the right clothes and she showed me how to wear them ("You've got to roll up the sleeves exactly three times—the folds should be tight, see?—and no more than an inch wide"). She taught me to say hi to as many people as possible in the school corridors, to notice with care who responded and to brave each blank stare with a glittery smile.

I kept a phone list of the people I thought I knew well enough to call in the afternoon and evening, and I'd work my way down systematically through all the names. Soon the list was so long, a good thirty names, that I needed three days to complete a full cycle. "Hi, it's me. What are you doing? Yeah, I mean right now—what'd you think I meant, stupid? Geez... chewing gum? You call that doing something? Naw... I'm staying in. My mom's on my back about the old homework. 'Sides, there's that weird new sci-fi thing on TV—yeah, that's the one. You? Janey coming over to study?' I like that blue sweater she had on, but the black loafers looked sort of hoody. I
know
she's not a hood—just see you two on a motorcycle, vrmm, vrmm—can you picture it? You are there: vrmm, vrmm."

And so on for hours, pure ventriloquism, nausea of small talk, a discipline nearly Oriental in its exclusion of content and its focus on empty locutions, the chatter of social fear confused with yearning, for I not only feared my friends, I also wanted to make them love me.

Until now, until this great conversion, friendship for me had been more a minor pleasure than a science. Friends had been people to sit with in the cafeteria, people who had the same hobbies or the same study hall, boys equally hopeless in gym class or girls in assembly whose last names started with the same letter as mine. I hadn't courted those acquaintances. I made no effort to draw them out, to elicit or reflect on theirconfidences, or to advise them. I required almost nothing of them, for if I wasn't attentive neither was I demanding. Practically anyone could be my friend. For me friendship was an innocent, unconscious habit that didn't confer prestige on anyone, that led nowhere, that scarcely bore thinking about, unremarkable as breath.