I Love Dick (28 page)

Cyril's voice droned on in favor of the Diocese's liberal stand against apartheid to general clucks and nods. “Let's go to Butterfly Creek!” Eric said again. “You drive out through Petone, turn right on Moonshine Road, drive past the Eastbourne Cattery. Did you know it's owned by Alexander Trocchi's former wife? She moved out here from London. You park up in the hills, and for the first two hours walking it's native bush, all dark and jungly. And then you come out to a clearing, a meadow really, and there's a brook and waterfall. And everywhere you look there's butterflies.”

They walked deeper into the bush, along a narrow track shaded by macrocarpa trees and kowhai. They'd left the meadow and its brilliant sun behind. The ground was cold and damp. Hardly any light penetrated the broad umbrella canopy of punga ferns. The boy stopped to catch his breath. He looked up in the sky through a tiny crack in the deep green foliage. And he was overcome with wondrous signs.

28. Your “previous engagement” Friday night, April 7, turned out also to be mine. And here things start to get a little strange. Our “previous engagement” was an opening of the Charles Gaines/Jeffrey Vallance/Eleanor Antin show at the Santa Monica Museum. The Antin piece, an installation called
Ghost Story
—
Minetta Lane
, had just been moved out here from the Ronald Feldman Gallery in Soho.
Ghost Story
was the piece I wrote to you about last January in
Every Letter Is A Love Letter
. The piece I'd Fed-Ex'd out to you in February before arriving on your doorstep in Antelope Valley. The piece that, if you'd read before I got there, might've made you be less cruel.

My stomach flipped when I saw your yellow Thunderbird in the Main Street parking lot. I moved closer to my friend and escort Daniel Marlos as we crossed the street and entered the Museum courtyard. “He's here!” I said. “He's here.” And sure enough, I saw you talking to a group of people as I crossed the room to buy a drink. You saw me too—threw up your hands as if to shield yourself from danger. Then you pointedly ignored me as you circled round the room.

The Gallery rocked back and forth like a drunken boat. I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse's elite salon in Flaubert's
Sentimental Education
—a paranoiac treasure hunt, incriminatory, clues planted everywhere around the seasick room. Everywhere I looked I found you, eyes turned away, yet seeing. I couldn't move.

Finally I resolved to talk to you. After all, we weren't enemies. We had a date for Saturday afternoon. I waited 'til you were alone with just one another person, a young man, a student. “Dick!” I said. “Hello!” You half-smiled and nodded, waiting. You didn't introduce me to your friend, your creature. Waited for me to start some conversation, so I burbled on about the show. When this dead-ended I stopped short. “Well,” I said. “I'll see you later.” “Yes,” you said. “I'll see you very soon.”

That night your Thunderbird got broadsided and my rental car got towed. Coincidence Number Two. And isn't schizophrenia just an orgy of it? You got drunk after the opening, spent the night at a motel.

29. Eric Johnson caught a Railways bus from Wellington to Ngaruwahia. It's sometime in the early '80s. Félix called these “the Winter Years.” Eric is now 34 years old. He doesn't have a bank account and he's carrying about 50 dollars. In desperation, after counselling, Vita-Fleur and Cyril finally cut off his allowance. “I'm looking for a job of work,” Eric says to anyone he sees. Voice rattling through his hollow chest and craggy body, he looks like Hamlet's father's ghost wandering the moors in King Lear's storm.

Katherine Mansfield craved a slice of life so badly she invented it as genre. Small countries lend themselves to stories: backwaters where the people stuck there don't have much to do besides watch each other's lives unfold. Eric's carrying an army surplus rucksack, an oilskin parka and a wool jersey knit by Vita-Fleur. The rest of his possessions are a sleeping bag, one extra pair of longs, a knife and a canteen. After 13 years of vagrancy, more or less, Eric knows a thing or two about survival. The bus lets out on the Main Street of Ngaruwahia's downtown.

“Jerusalem! A Golden Land!” was how he'd described this place years ago to Constance. Ngaruwahia, with it's wide river, rolling hills, was the scene of Maori legends about ancestors as mythic as Greek gods. There'd been a rock festival here 15 years ago, then a commune. But now at 4 p.m. with thunderheads rolling in across this late spring sky, Eric curses the very size of it. Walking, walking, past used appliance shops and greasy burger bars. Eric was back from travelling “overseas.” He'd got as far as Sydney, failed. Somehow he never caught the drift of what it was he was supposed to do. Social work? Ceramics class? He'd never met the right people. For every affirmation there were a hundred qualifying negations. Sort-of-raping Constance in the backroom of Bert Andrew's country shack when they were two years out of school had been his only foray into heterosexuality. And yet he wasn't queer. He'd figured that one out in Family Therapy. Voices spoke; they never told him what to do. Eric walks ten blocks down Main Street to the edge of town, sticks out his thumb to hitch a ride to Vincent's, keeps walking. At least it isn't raining.

A week before in Wellington Eric'd had the most confusing visit from Constance Green, who he hadn't seen now in eight years. She'd tracked him down on one of her whirlwind trips from the East Village in New York by phoning Cyril Johnson, now Archbishop of the Auckland Diocese. Shallow, flighty Constance, still a welter of opinions and hip clothes, asked Eric if she could shoot a video of him. “About what?” he asked cautiously. “Oh, you know,
you
,” she'd said. He turned her down, mobilizing his large voice behind his chiseled features: “Why should I let you make fun of me?” This stopped her cold. Perhaps the distances between them were not so interesting.

30. On Saturday, April 8 we spent a perfect afternoon together. You arrived at the motel around noon and I was kind of shaky. Instead of going to the gym that morning I'd stayed home writing about Jennifer Harbury. She was in the news that month after almost singlehandedly bringing down the military government of Guatemala. Jennifer, an American leftist lawyer, had spent the last three years demanding that the Guatemalan army exhume the body of her husband, a disappeared Indian rebel leader. Jennifer's story was so inspiring…and I was glad to've discovered it, even though my only motivation to write about her story was to take the heat off you. I'd cut back and forth between Jennifer and Efraim, me and “Derek Rafferty.” You'd been so horrified to see your name in the last two stories and I thought if I could write about how love can change the world then I wouldn't have to write about you personally.

Fuck her once, she'll write a book about it
, you or anybody else might say.

I was becoming you. When I pushed you from my thoughts you came back into my dreams. But now I had to prove my love for you was real by holding back and considering what you wanted. I had to act responsively, responsibly…I was spewing words and syntaxes I remembered reading in your book,
The Ministry of Fear
.

31.
Why can't I get just one screw

Why can't I get just one screw

Believe me I'd know what to do

But you won't let me make love to you

Why can't I get just one fuck

Why can't I get just one fuck

Bet it's got something to do with luck

But I've waited my whole life for just one

DAY
…

32. We talked awhile and drank some fruit juice. You liked the way I'd rearranged things in the motel room. (It was crammed with talismans and artworks that my LA friends had given me, thinking rightly that I needed some protection.) We looked at Sabina Ott's scratched-up yellow drawing, Daniel Marlos' photo of people with banana-dildos in the desert. You were intrigued by this, by images of sex that weren't heterosexual, a bit disturbed that dicks could be the butt of jokes. The photos of Keith Richards and Jennifer Harbury—motifs for this bogus story about my fictional cowboy love for “Derek Rafferty”—scotch-taped to the wall didn't go unnoticed. We talked some more and you explained how you'd ignored me at the opening last night because everything was getting too referential. I understood. Then both of us were hungry. We ate lunch at a soul-food restaurant up on Washington and I told you all about the failure of my movie. Then you confessed how, over the past two years, you'd stopped reading. This broke my heart. Outside the storefront restaurant the East Pasadena Saturday afternoon was clanging. You paid the bill, then we drove my rental car up to the wilderness preserve above Lake Avenue.

“Let's go to But-ter-fly Creek!”

Walking up the dirt track along the still-green mountain, everything between us flattened out. You seemed so open. You told me all about yourself at 12 years old, a young boy sitting at the edge of a playing field somewhere in the English Midlands, reading stories of great emperors and wars in Latin. You'd read your way into the world just like my husband. You told me other things about your life and what you'd left behind. You were so unhappy. Emotional seduction. The sun was very warm. When you took your shirt off you seemed to be inviting me to touch you but I refrained. To yearn responsibly. You had the softest palest skin, an alien's. “The Pacific starts here,” I said. The landscape on the hill reminded me of New Zealand.

Run down catch'em at the top of the stairs

Can I mix in with your affairs

Share a smoke, make a joke

You gotta grasp and reach for a leg of hope

Words to memorize, words hypnotize

Words make my mouth an exercise

Words all fail the magic prize

Nothing I can say when I'm in your thighs

There weren't any butterflies on the hill in Pasadena. But come out to a clearing, and there's a waterfall, and then I told you how I admired you, and you said or you implied that what I'd done had helped you burn through some things in your life. And everything seemed as pliant as a macrocarpa branch, fragile as an egg.