Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (5 page)

Burnt and brown, his hair gold and stiff with salt, he seemed nearly a sea creature—ambiguous, amphibious. Something in him rose out of the water in the morning to bask in the sun, and something else detached itself from the jungle and came down to cool its heels in the surf. What brought him back to earth was the luminous band of flesh that girdled his ass, where he slung himself into a bathing suit on those days when he could not cavort like a wild boy. The body's whitest flesh, withheld from the body's turn to summer until the body's dreams and needs uncover it. I can't talk about this. I think: if I can bring it into words, I can know exactly what he was and put him to rest in me at last. But he has always been for me a creature of two worlds. My cock swelled against the saddle because of the given of David's flesh, the full white curve behind and then, as he turned, the reach and sway of his own cock. That was as it had been for fifteen years. But the clash of myths, the sea-god taken by the cowboy, aroused in me the will to break the mirror that two men who couple become. Be something with me, I thought as I came up to him. What I called love was measured in minutes. When David turned and squinted at the sun that rode toward noon behind my head, he tipped me over into the world of years. I have lasted so long, I thought. But for all that I had held out, now I could not go back.

As I rode closer, we looked hard at one another and established right away what sort of men we were. He walked out of the water to meet me, his eyes still locked on mine, a half-smile coming and going on his face. When we met, he brushed his shoulder against the horse's neck and reached his hand up and drew it along the front of my thigh, letting it rest on my knee.

"I thought this island was exclusive," he said. "I thought you had to sit on a corporation to live here. Unless you're married to someone who does."

I leaned my bent knee away from the horse, and his hand dropped between my leg and the horse's flesh. I watched his cock begin to lift.

"Do you sit on a corporation?" I asked.

"No," David said. "And I'm not married."

"Then I guess we're both stowaways on this island."

"Good. We'd better stick together and make a plan. There may be bounty hunters."

I dismounted and stood facing him. I pulled him close, and we rubbed against each other. Then he undid the buttons on my pants, licking at the hair on my chest. As he slipped the Levi's halfway down my thighs, he reached his hand around my cock and held it out tense, so that the pressure of his holding it doubled the heat of it as it swelled. Then he dropped to his knees and began to suck me. I gripped his head in my hands and brought myself farther and farther in as his mouth went up and down and he opened his throat. Then he pulled back, shook my hands from his head and, grabbing my wrists, fell back into the sand. I came down hard on the beach next to him, and we kissed and groped until he pulled back again.

"Get naked," he said. He lay back and put his hands behind his head to watch me. I had to stand up to take my boots off; and as I hopped on one foot, I looked up to see the horse cropping at the marsh grass. I threw one boot down and began to pull at the other. No more than a moment could have passed. But this time when I glanced over to the horse, there were deer all around him. Perhaps a half dozen, their eyes riveted on me to see what I would do. I couldn't believe they had come so close, fifty feet from us, without making any noise. And I remember being happy and wanting to laugh that they and the horse stood the same ground and caused one another no trouble. I held them there as I took off my pants, or they let me think so. It is probably the only time I have ever slipped off a pair of Levi's in front of a waiting lover without making some show of it. I tried to think of what to say, to tell David to sit up and look, when just as suddenly they leapt away in a single motion and were gone into the woods. So I looked down at David and saw, falling to his side again, that the time to tell it would have to wait.

I turned him over. He gasped as I inched into him, and I held him tight around the chest as we lay
connected.
And we heaved and buckled on the beach, rolling about as we began to feel there was no limit to the space we had happened on. Our legs splashed in the tidal pool. At last, still inside him, I hunched back on my knees and rotated him slowly on my cock, bringing him all the way round so that he faced me. When he came, he wiped the cum from his stomach and held his wet hand against my mouth, and the first smoky taste of it took me over the edge. I came staring into the sun.

In the quiet that followed, we exchanged names, keeping things in the odd order of gay love. But I have said enough about love. Once started, of course, I could flesh out in detail all the succeeding passions of that day on the beach, but I can see too that I have to
stop
talking about David and me as well, although I am perverse and find myself now reluctant to. But here is the skeleton of the flight from Georgia. David was staying at Sea Island with the mousy, clean-handed dean of his college, a closet case who had invited David there during the spring break of his senior year. Not to fuck him. Just to see him stripped down to a bathing suit. David understood the bargain he had struck and knew that he could cheat as well. So he spent his naked days miles from the house of the longing queen and came back late, giving the dean only the briefest glimpse of his dark and loaded body as he slipped into his room to dress for dinner. If David seems here like a mean whore, like the bastard Madeleine took him for, it has less to do with him than with the business of gay life. In one of the crueler customs of that country, the men who have made it out of the closet walk all over the men who stay in. It is the
closet
they are raging at; but the college deans and the priests and the live-in sons, paralyzed by their hidden wish, get beaten because they are in the way.

We rode back together in the late afternoon, David holding on behind me, his head resting on my shoulder. I tethered the horse at the front gate of the house, leaving it to my cocained sailors to lead him back up-island to the stables. I threw what little I had into the backseat of the Chevy, and David and I drove over to the dean's little cottage. I do not know what David would have said, but there was no occasion to explain, because the dean was fast asleep, getting through the day until David came back. While David packed, I stood in the kitchen door and waited. The dean had baked a cake and frosted it. He had arranged a tropical bouquet on the kitchen table. On a wheeled table, a clutter of bottles and glasses attended the cocktail hour, when he would unveil an intricate plate of hors d'oeuvres and lead the way to the terrace.

We drove all night and stopped along the road to make love at dawn, in North Carolina I think. I held back about mentioning the deer and have kept it a secret after all. I think now that I wanted something wholly my own out of that enormous act of change. They had waited in a circle around my horse to see what I would do, and because they ran when they did, they never found out. I know I have kept them to myself for my own reasons, but I have been true to their modesty as well. The deer have stayed free in my heart for knowing when to go. I knew I was doing the opposite. I gave up my freedom freely. You know that without knowing why, and you drive for a day and a half up the East Coast to see if it will come clear. It doesn't. But by then you are home, and you think you can accommodate the changes. There, after all, is your own bed in your own room. You've been
there
before.

"Madeleine," I said, coming out of a silence in which I tried to see what Madeleine wanted to warn me of,
couldn't
see it, and started to shake. "I haven't had a very easy year."

"Rick, I don't think you ever do."

"This is different."

"Is it?" she asked, sharper than she wanted to, or sharper than we are accustomed to, she and I. "Ever since that boy left, you've suffered like a goddamned widow. When the pain went away a little, you got angry. For years you've been trying to prove the pain is different for you. But it isn't."

I steered straight. My hands stopped shaking on the steering wheel. In
Bad Dream,
in 1931, Madeleine gets into a taxi at the Place de l'Opéra; she is leaving Charles Boyer for the last time, except he doesn't know it. "I'm out of cigarettes," she says through the window, and he takes out his case and offers her one, and then he lights it. The taxi driver seems to know that the scene is not over yet. "You know, Philippe," she says through the smoke, "I haven't been a woman for two years now." She means she has been a whore. "I feel so happy when I'm with you, but when I'm not, I feel like a widow. I have a dream where I open my closets and the clothes are all black." The cab drives off. Boyer is going to tell his wife tonight that he is leaving her, and he is going to meet Madeleine at the train tomorrow morning. But we already know she is on the way to the station now. It cannot be. And so I didn't expect to win this argument with Madeleine, but I had it out anyway. I wanted the warning where I could hear it plain.

"Then you think David is dead for me, and I just cling to it out of pride. But if there's nothing there, why are you so worried about me seeing him again?"

"Oh Rick, because you want the pain
back."

"Well, then help me."

"I will."

"Sing if you have to."

We had been driving south for forty-five minutes, and we had just turned off the main road. For a long time the highway had seemed to parallel the sea, edging a marsh at one point, blowing here and there with a sea wind. But now we had come into deep forest, the sea nowhere near. I do not like woods at all, and I have twice been trapped in the brute meeting of forest and rocky surf, once in Maine and once in Oregon. I have not revisited either friend who tricked me there. Madeleine was right that I was being testy, and I was probably doomed to feel alien on Mrs. Carroll's land, even if it had turned out to be Capri. But a narrow, tedious little Massachusetts beach was what I was hoping for. Imagine my relief when we nosed out of the woods and drove among the fields of the Carroll dairy. A couple of wide machines were busying up and down, doing the first haying, and the smell of grass was overwhelming. I saw plain, dumb cows in all directions. The pressure of the woods lifted, and I felt light and perky as we turned through the great stone gate and began to move across the fields toward the dairy.

"Rick?" There was something unexpected in Madeleine's voice, as if she were rearranging the songs for a midnight show. "Have you ever been here before?"

"No, dear. No one ever invites me to the country. Can you bear how pastoral it is?" A dairy, I thought. What can go wrong at a dairy?

"I know this place."

"From where?"

"I stayed here."

"When?" I asked. Most of Madeleine's life is public record. It is safest to assume, for any given month of any given year, that if Madeleine is not making a film or doing a nightclub tour, then she is vacationing in certain given places. In Monaco or Rio, Baden-Baden, Mykonos. Not in a starchy sea town off Route 3.

"In the war. An American woman I met in Paris, just after the war. I was out of money. I had to get back to Hollywood, but I was sick. She brought me here for a while."

"Was the name Carroll?"

"Yes. Beth Carroll. Is she still here?"

"I don't know."

Having crossed the fields, we drove among bleaching, rose-colored cow-barns and found ourselves in a kind of square surrounded by garages and the farmers' houses. Larger than a farmyard, and more formal, more architected. It was paved with gray flagstones, and the watering trough in the center circled a stone fountain. Like a little village—and from one screen door a woman with a face deadened by Novocain stared out at us. We were not fired upon. But unless David was shacking up with a sweaty farm boy, it was not clear how we were supposed to proceed.

"You go through that arch, Rick," Madeleine said, pointing between two houses.

"Wait a minute, Madeleine. When did you last see this woman?"

She turned to me and took off her glasses. As she often does, she lowered her eyelids by a fraction to get the effect of irony and disbelief that other people get by lifting an eyebrow. As if to say: I know people ask questions as stupid as this, but when did
you
start doing it?

"The morning I left. We weren't having a good time anymore. As I recall, we stood outside the garage. I wanted to go for a drive, and she said I couldn't go out in the car without the chauffeur. If it hadn't been that, it would have been something else. I picked up a shovel and swung it and cracked the windshield. It was a Mercedes."

"Oh." Lovers. I am not in the habit of being dumb about Madeleine's women friends. Sometimes there has been a secretary or companion who has remained with her for several months, but for the most part she and her lovers have touched glasses and passed on. She is a solitary woman who does not always keep her distance but who always knows how much she is keeping it or letting it go. She has had two husbands, neither of whom knew her very well, though she loved them after a fashion. She has had at least one friend, me, a decidedly mixed blessing. And then there have been the people she has simply
known
, as different as her escorts at chemin de fer in weary little casinos and the refugees she smuggled out of bomb zones in her entourage. The women she loved have constituted her most truly private life; and that, I think, is why they had to be left behind. Madeleine has not been evasive about being gay, though the world has chosen not to notice. But she has lived her life as a continuous international event, a kind of cultural touchstone, and has never had the time to love at length. She could not otherwise have become, in the rarefied company of stars that go on from sky to night sky—Garbo and Piaf and Marlene—the type of a woman in love. Her beauty endures hand in hand with her sense of the irony in this.

There is some truth in what I've said, and it is what I believed in June, believing that it showed how much I
appreciate
Madeleine. But I have buried the truth in left-handed compliments. My insights about her have been colored by my own clock of a heart, which still ticked in June and didn't feel and was the size of a river-washed stone that fits in your pocket. The women she loved were not half-loved. I can sing you (badly) every song she has ever done, but it is as if I have not listened at all.