Martin and John (16 page)

I’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER his chain of flowers. Originally, I must have noticed all the flowers in the apartment as vague scenery when we first made love. They were arranged haphazardly, spilling out of broad fat vases everywhere. I thought of these while I read about Martin’s chain; in his story he rolled the world into a clay ball and then stretched it out into a long, snaky coil tendriled in thousands of budded offshoots. The flowers emerged in yellow, lavender, orange, and blue balls, in long green or milky-white stems, in occasional leaves that hang like forgotten dancers in a corner but, when turned over, yield their own beauty: a lace-like webbing of veins that pucker the undersides of the leaves with their finely wrought patterns. This is the chain, the great thick chain, wound as thickly as a ship’s anchor rope, so strong that human beings can climb on it. In Martin’s story, only the children do. The adults pass by, ignoring its beauty, but when they go home perhaps they notice for the first time the dandelions that force their way through cracks in the sidewalk, and are reminded of
some time from their past, Christmas or a birthday, of little bits of wrapping paper dotting a wooden floor with spots of color and remembered goodwill. I tease Martin when he says there are flowers everywhere, flowers are the links on the great chain of being. I call him my flower child, at which he blushes, and his flushed pale skin resembles nothing so much as a pink-tinted carnation.

WE MET AT a friend’s party. Martin, I learned, was frequently a guest at Sue’s because he always hit it off with everyone: all the men and women chased him, but he always left alone. This was my first time at her place. I was new to the city and I was surprised when she pointed him out to me, told me she’d invited me with him in mind. He attracted attention as a peacock does, spectators gathering to await the unfurling of magnificent tail feathers. For Martin nothing so spectacular was required: he could play the piano and sing so that the most masculine-looking men rolled their eyes heavenward like queens, and the women leaned to one another and whispered, “Oh, if only.” Sue told me all this.

I approached him tentatively. Actually, Sue dragged me from a corner and sent me over with a drink for him, a tropical specialty of hers whose colored silhouette shifted in the glass in bands of mauve and orange and clear dark rum before they swirled together. Martin took it from me with thanks and, before I knew it, was talking to me quietly. Like everyone
else, I was captivated, and answered his questions as best I could, trying not to look doe-eyed. Dancing on the piano in front of him, a terra-cotta horse bowed its head under the heavy weight of its rider. Martin noticed me looking at it. “Do you ride?” he asked, still playing. I told him I hadn’t ridden since childhood. His words, fitted between the notes he pressed from the piano keys, “Why did you stop?” seemed to come only to me, while the music slipped past us to the people dispersed throughout the room. I remembered the horse I had learned to ride on when I was young, an older gelding, peaceful and stalwart, the ideal mount for a nervous rider like myself. I said, “The horse I rode died.”

“Do you know Bartók?” Martin asked me. “No,” I said, surprised, and Martin drifted gently from what he had been playing into a song I’d never heard; I assumed it was Bartók. “Tell me how it died.” “Well,” I said, and then I was off, remembering. Once, I arrived at the stable and someone else sat on the horse, riding next to one of the stallions kept there. The person repeatedly cropped the gelding’s gray back. I remember the horse frothing in discomfort and shredding the earth with dancing steps. And then, almost exactly as they passed in front of me, the rider brought the whip down hard across the gelding’s face.

The passage came to an end; without faltering, Martin began another, his eyes fixed on the ashen lines of the horse before him. “Vivaldi,” he said. “ ‘Autumn.’ ” I went on. It was too late after that to do anything: the horse reared back, and
its eyes were ringed with this vivid white line, and it exploded into fury, turning not on its assailant but on the stallion. Both riders lost their seats in the battle and were nearly trampled by the wild hooves. The gelding’s rage added strength and some kind of blind skill to its attack, but in the end the stallion crushed it underfoot and stood on it in triumph, his black coat bleeding on the gelding’s destroyed form, and all the while the stable hands and I looked on helplessly.

And another song ended. Martin took his hands from the keys to pick up the horse. “Thousands of these were found in a Chinese emperor’s tomb,” he said. “They were his soldiers, meant to guard him on his way to the next world. They were arrayed around his sarcophagus like a miniature army, a tiny, stationary, but perfectly created world.” He paused and then said, “We had horses when I was young.” He looked at me, smiled; his eyes seemed vacant. “Nothing so spectacular happened when I was growing up,” he nearly whispered, then looked back at the horse in his lap. The silence between us made others notice; some turned to look. A voice called for more music. “Well,” he said, replacing the statue after a moment’s hesitation, “what shall I play now?” and he patted the bench next to him with his right hand, opened the sheet music on the piano with his left. “Would you turn pages for me?”

Sometime later in the evening—and this was just fortuitous, pure luck—I left my seat and pulled a rose from a jade vase and, returning to his side, bit off the stem and placed the
half-open flower in his lapel buttonhole as he sat at the piano. His hands slowed; he improvised on the song he was playing and they drifted up to the higher keys, tolling out long, bell-like chimes. He sniffed the flower with closed eyes, then returned to his song. Later he approached me, the rose bleeding on his black jacket, and asked me if I wanted to go dancing. We slipped out, he first sharing something with Sue and pointing at me where I stood by the door, and then we were off, to the Cat Club. Once there, his gentleness disappeared in a gradually quickening twisting of his body. Even as we stood on line for the entrance, he began snapping his fingers quietly, quickly, in apparently random patterns, until I could hear the music more clearly, and could tell he was picking out riffs and trills, not just the beat. His eyes widened and sparkled, his feet tamped in place. Inside, he swam through the dark crowd like an eel, and I followed as he peeled off his coat and laid it over a chair, lifted the rose from the buttonhole and smelled it, replaced it. Then he was on the floor, and his feet began shuffling rapidly and his arms lifted from his body like a ballet dancer’s. Soon he was moving with graceful abandon, lip-syncing and grinding his body, occasionally dancing in close to me but generally apart, in a space that was soon yielded to his flailing arms and backward, forward, circular gait. I don’t know if he danced separately from me because he felt nervous about being half of the only gay couple in a straight club or if, as seemed natural, he preferred to move freely. At any rate, I, like the rest of the club, was a
curious spectator of Martin’s ferocity. At one point the DJ was playing an intense punk tune, and Martin’s dancing, almost out of control, seemed more like convulsing than rhythmic movement. I moved away, confused, a little frightened: an onlooker. He rolled his head back once and I saw his eyes: black impenetrable depths in the off-light, so wide now that a white line showed around the iris. Their blank gaze zeroed in on me once, and then, stomping, he turned away.

THROUGH THE MASKED expressions worn while we made love—lips furled exposing half-open mouths, sharp teeth; eyes open and vacant, or closed and strangely focused; skin covered in creeping red tones—I remembered Martin dancing. With sex there was no hint of the frenzy I had seen on the dance floor. Martin made love as, I imagine, a precocious pre-adolescent imagines it, slowly and tenderly, with an emphasis placed on total body pleasure, so that our final genital orgasms seemed merely a soft finale to the entire act. He lit small, many-colored candles for effect, burned amber cones of incense in each room, and made love to me throughout his apartment, as if conducting me on a dizzying private tour, which is when I noticed the flowers everywhere. But we finished finally on his bed, where we made love on sheets the color and softness of corn silk, not quite recklessly, but still ardently; the condoms, like everything else he used, were in bright colors: blue and green, yellow and orange.

He wooed me with a modern courtesan’s ploys for the next month: with flowers delivered daily, with notes FedEx’d to me when I visited my parents in Kansas for four days. With gifts: a few items of clothing, a new camera so that I could further my photography. With travels: a trip to Paris when I returned, and one to Jamaica the day after the first snowfall, where we lolled indolently upon the white-glass beaches and thought of the snow at home, still white when we’d flown out of JFK that morning. Then one day, four weeks after I met him, I entered his apartment with my bronze key, which still bore the scratches from its recent cutting, and he clucked and crowed like a preening rooster, and led me to what had been a closet, showing me a newly installed darkroom, telling me I could use it as often as I liked day or night, even if I didn’t want to move in just yet. I moved in. He tempered his romance then, slowly, over the next weeks. It was a maturity, though we still spoke with the words of child lovers. This was our highest moment: on the far stretch of a beach in Jamaica—our second trip there—he rolled on top of me and kissed my lips. I remember him saying, “I love you, I will always love you.” The sun shone on his back and filtered through his hair into my eyes. Far away from us, men slipped surreptitiously over an invisible but undeniable line of segregation at the beach, and I remembered once seeing two men kiss in the rainy street below the amber-shaded windows of Martin’s apartment. Martin’s face was a blur, too shadowed, too close to mine for me to see it clearly, and his words fell into my ears like the
sweat rolling off his nose. “And I,” I said, “I shall love you forever.”

IT’S STRANGE NOT to have to work. I have time to indulge myself, time to waste, time to dig through Martin’s journal like an archaeologist exploring a past life. I sometimes think that, like Martin, I’ll take a job that I enjoy, but I haven’t picked one yet, and Martin sees no reason why I should rush into anything. So I take a lot of pictures, roaming the city, first a tourist, later a resident, and just recently I try to look at it as a stranger with self-created expectations. I’ve made hundreds of prints, thrown most away. When I take pictures they come out stark; I remember trying to make the city more beautiful than it actually was when I held the camera, but to do that I had to cut out the people and the ground, the grimy colors, the filth, and so I have a pile of overexposed blanched white-on-gray pictures of the tops of buildings jutting into an unreceiving sky. They seem not so much pretty as empty and colorless; the clouds are just a skullcap to cover their baldness, and as I file them away, I think that I still have much to learn about technique, about lenses, about ways of viewing the world.

So I visited him where he teaches. I made a pretext of bringing him some papers he left at home, but really I only wanted to see him teach, see where he works and meet his children, whom I have heard of only through scattered
commentary. The room stood empty when I found it through the maze of hallways; it was near noon, so I assumed they were all at lunch. I walked in and looked around. The classroom seemed like any other in the city, at first. One wall had a row of windows, some panes frosted, others tinted, most dirty on the outside, so that the view was ever-changing as I walked down the length of the room. Two other walls were short, flat, and inconsequential—the two with blackboards. The final wall, opposite the windows, was covered by corkboard, the corkboard by paper. I walked to it, skirting the circles of many-colored desks clumped in the room like flowers. It was hard to see the children’s things clearly on the bulletin board, because the sun at my back cast a shadow directly where I wanted to look. Martin had mentioned to me that he simply let the students put up what they liked best: sometimes it was a poem written about the sun’s clarity, or pictures they’d drawn or finger-painted, always greens, blues, and yellows—light, cheerful tones in patterns like rainbows extracted from oil on water. I remember in particular one girl’s work. She had beautiful childish handwriting, and all she displayed were her penmanship papers. Just words written over and over—apple tree, apple tree, apple tree; brook, brook, brook; mother, mother, mother—all scrolled with a flourishing prosody. This, I learned at home when I asked Martin about her, after I had seen him teaching in his mask of smiles, soft words, and exaggerated gestures, gave a visible appearance to those objects she had never seen.

BEHIND THE NORTH wall of Martin’s apartment another building lingers: old, unused, and dirty. A large window in the den breaks on it, but the blind, painted with an arabesque pattern, is always drawn. It is in the den that Martin writes, with his back to the blind, so he can look out the room’s other window and see the river. Through the semi-clear shade the dirty water of the Hudson and, beyond it, New Jersey, turn golden and beautiful. What is he writing about? I wonder as I read through his pages. Just flowers? Just beauty and elegance and eloquence, of his own personal view of perfection? He’s told me imagination is like gathering the colored strands of the rainbow and braiding them together into white light. I imagine it: sometimes he sits at the back of a man—me?—with long, many-colored hair and weaves his braid; sometimes he’s a puppet suspended on seven different-colored strings, struggling until the strings tangle into a thick hanging chain. This isn’t a story, some would say, because there is no conflict within it; this is an account, long and flawless, multifaceted like a jewel, but forever the same thing. But when Martin puts down his pen, closes his book, leaves the den, I follow him through the rooms until he finds a place to sit down, raise the shade, and look out at the city; when that happens, I see him gaze at the pollution, the disarrayed lights like stars all out of kilter, the mad dashing of those who don’t move within his ordered world, ever, and I know what he writes
about, why it is a story. No, he said to me when I asked him if I could read his journal. This isn’t real. Its conflict is with reality. So I go to him after he writes and wait for a while, then close the blinds, light the candles and the incense, show him his flowers, make love to him, and give him his fiction, because I need it too.