Authors: Edmund White
Skinned Alive (11 page)
The next user is a cheerful satyr named Marsyas. He cleverly learns how to imitate people with his tunes: “Prancing along behind them he could do their walk, fast or slow, lurching or clipped, just as he could render their tics or trace their contours: a low swell for a belly, shrill fifing for fluttering hands, held high notes for the adagio of soft speech. At first no one understood. But once they caught on they slapped their thighs: his songs were sketches.”
Apollo is furious, since he’s the god of music and his own art is pure and abstract. He challenges Marsyas to a musical duel:
Marsyas cringed before him like a dog when it walks through a ghost, bares its teeth and pulls back its ears. Anguished, he had slept in the hot breath of his flock; his animals had pressed up against him, holding him between their woolly flanks, as though to warm him. The ribbon his jolly and jiggling woman had tied around one horn flapped listlessly against his low, hairy brow, like a royal banner flown by a worker’s barge.
To the gods, as young as the morning, Marsyas seemed a twilight creature; he smelled of leaf mold and wolf-lair. His glance was as serious as a deer’s when it emerges from the forest at dusk to drink at the calm pool collecting below a steaming cataract.
And to Marsyas his rival was cold and regular as cambered marble.
Since Marsyas knew to play only what was in front of him, he “rendered” Apollo—not the god’s thoughts but the faults he wedged into the air around him. The sisters watched the goatman breathe into the reeds, saw him
draw and lose breath, saw his eyes bulge, brown and brilliant as honey, and that made them laugh. What they heard, however, was music that copied sacred lines, for Marsyas could imitate a god as easily as a bawd. The only trick was to have his model there, in front of him.
If Marsyas gave them the god’s form, the god himself revealed the contents of his mind. His broad hand swept the lyre, and immediately the air was tuned and the planets tempered. Everything sympathetic trembled in response to a song that took no one into account, that moved without moving, that polished crystal with its breath alone, clouding then cleansing every transparency without touching it. Marsyas shuddered when he came to and realized that the god’s hand was now motionless but that the music continued to devolve, creaking like a finger turning and tracing the fragile rim of the spheres.
The satyr was astonished that the muses didn’t decide instantly in their brother’s favor but shrugged and smiled and said they found each contestant appealing in different ways. The sun brightened a fraction with Apollo’s anger, but then the god suggested they each play their music backwards. The universe shuddered as it stopped and reversed its rotations; the sun started to descend toward dawn as Apollo unstrung the planets. Cocks re-crowed and bats re-awakened, the frightened shepherd guided his flock backward down the hill as the dew fell again.
Even the muses were frightened. It was night and stormy when Marsyas began to play. He had improvised his music strophe by strophe as a portrait; now he couldn’t remember it all. The descending figures, so languishing when played correctly the first time, made him queasy when he inverted them. Nor could he see his subject.
The muses decided in the god’s favor. Apollo told Marsyas he’d be flayed alive. There was no tenderness but
great solicitude in the way the god tied the rope around the satyr’s withers, cast the slack over a high branch of a pine and then hoisted his kill high, upside down, inverted as the winning melody. Marsyas saw that he’d won the god’s full attention by becoming his victim.
The blood ran to Marsyas’s head, then spurted over his chest as Apollo sliced into his belly and neatly peeled back the flesh and fat and hair. The light shone in rays from Apollo’s sapphire eyes and locked with Marsyas’s eyes, which were wavering, losing grip—he could feel his eyes lose grip, just as a child falling asleep will finally relax its hold on its father’s finger. A little dog beside his head was lapping up the fresh blood. Now the god knelt to continue his task. Marsyas could hear the quick sharp breaths, for killing him was hard work. The god’s white skin glowed and the satyr believed he was inspiring the very breath Apollo expired.
As I read his story I stupidly wondered which character Paul was—the Apollo he so resembled and whose abstract ideal of art appeared to be his own, or the satyr who embodies the vital principle of mimesis and who, after all, submitted to the god’s cruel, concentrated attention. The usual motive for the story, Apollo’s jealousy, was left out altogether. His story was dedicated to me, and for a moment I wondered if it was also addressed to me—as a reproach for having abandoned the Apollonian abstractness of my first two novels or, on the contrary, as an endorsement for undertaking my later satires and sketches. It was unsettling dealing with this young man so brilliant and handsome, so violent and so reflective.
At night Paul let me into his bed and held me in his arms, just as he sometimes rested his hand on my leg as I drove the
car. He told me that although Thierry often petted him, Paul was never allowed to stroke him. “We’ve never once kissed each other on the lips.”
We talked skittishly about the curse the gods had put on us. I pathetically attempted to persuade Paul he was really a sadist. “Your invariable rage after sex with your lover,” I declared melodramatically, “your indignation, your disgusting excursions into fag bashing, your primitive, literalist belief that only the biggest man with the biggest penis has the right to dominate all the others, whereas the sole glory of sadism is its strictly cerebral capacity for imposing new values, your obvious attraction to my fundamentally docile nature—” and at that point my charlatanism would make me burst out laughing, even as I glanced sideways to see how I was doing.
In fact my masochism sickened him. It reminded him of his own longing to recapture Thierry’s love. “He’s leaving me,” he would say. “When calls come in he turns the sound off on the answering machine and he never replays his messages when I’m around. His pockets bulge with condoms. He spends every weekend with purely fictive ‘German businessmen’ in Normandy; he pretends he’s going to visit a factory in Nice, but he’s back in Paris four hours later; he stood me up for the Mr. Europe Bodybuilding contest at the Parc de Vincennes, then was seen there with a famous Brazilian model…. He says I should see a psychiatrist, and you know how loony you have to be before someone French will suggest that.”
When a thoughtful silence had reestablished itself in the car I added, “That’s why you want to reach the desert. Only its vast sterility can calm your violent soul.”
“If you could be in my head,” he said, not smiling, “you’d see I’m in a constant panic.”
To be companionable I said, “Me too.”
Paul quickly contradicted me: “But you’re the calmest person I know.”
Then I understood that was how he wanted me to be—masterful, confident, smiling, sure. Even if he would someday dominate, even hurt me, as I wished, he would never give me permission to suffer in any way except heroically.
I drove a few miles in silence through the lunar valley, mountains on both sides, not yet the desert but a coarse-grained prelude to it—dry, gently rolling, the boulders the color of eggplants. “You’re right, except so many of the people I’ve known have died. I used to talk this way with my best friend, but that was in America and now he is dead.” That night, in Paul’s arms, I said, “It’s sacrilegious to say it, especially for an atheist, but I feel God sent you not to replace my friend, since he’s irreplaceable, but …”
A carpet salesman assured us the desert was about to begin. We had been following a river through the valley and at last it had run dry, and the date palms had vanished, and the mountains knelt like camels just before setting out on a long journey. In Zagora we saw the famous sign, “Timbuctoo: 54 days.” In a village we stopped to visit the seventeenth-century library of a saint, Abu Abdallah Mohammed Bennacer, a small room of varnished wood cases beside a walled-in herbal garden. The old guide in his white robes opened for us—his hands were wood-hard—some of the illustrated volumes, including a Koran written on gazelle skin. Paul’s red hair and massive body made him rarer than a gazelle in this dusty village. That night a village boy asked me if I had a “gazelle” back in Paris, and I figured out he meant a girlfriend and nodded because that was the most efficient way to stanch a carpet-tending spiel.
Paul continued with his stories. The one about the French woman he had loved and married off to the paratrooper, who had already become his lover. The one about the Los Angeles sadist he ridiculed and who then committed suicide. About his
second date with Thierry, when he’d been gagged and chained upside down in a dungeon after being stuffed with acid, then made to face a huge poster of the dead L.A. lover. The one about the paratrooper scaling the mountain at the French-Italian border while cops in circling helicopters ordered him to descend immediately—“and applauded in spite of themselves when he reached the top barehanded,” Paul exulted, “without a rope or pick or anything to scale the sheer rock face but balls and brawn.”
We’re too alike, I thought again, despairing, to love each other, and Paul is different only in his attraction to cartoon images of male violence and aggression. Unlike him, I couldn’t submit to a psychopath; what I want is Paul, with all his tenderness and quizzical, hesitating intelligence, his delicacy, to hit me. To be hurt by an enraged bull on steroids doesn’t excite me. What I want is to belong to this grave, divided, philosophical man.
It occurred to me that if I thought only now, at this moment in my life, of belonging to someone, it was because my hold on life itself was endangered. Did I want him to tattoo his initials on a body I might soon have to give up? Did I want to become his slave just before I embraced that lasting solitude?
The beginning of the desert was a dune that had drifted through the pass between two mountains and had started to fill up the scrubland. A camel with bald spots on its elbows and starlet eyelashes was tethered to a dark felt tent in which a dirty man was sprawling, half-asleep. Another man, beaming and freshly shaved, bustled out of a cement bunker. With a flourish he invited us in for a glass of mint tea. His house turned out to be a major carpet showroom, buzzing with air-conditioning and neon lamps. “English?”
“No. Danish.”
That was the last night of our holiday. The hotel served us a feast of sugared pigeon pie and mutton couscous, and Paul
had a lot to drink. We sat in the dark beside the pool, which was lit from within like a philosopher’s stone. He told me he thought of me as gay in the Nietzschean, not the West Hollywood, sense, but since I insisted that I needed him, he would love me and protect me and spend his life with me. Later in bed he pounded me in the face with his fists, shouting at me in a stuttering, broken explosion of French and English, the alternatively choked and released patois of scalding indignation.
If the great pleasure of the poor is, as they say, making love, then the great suffering of the rich is loving in vain. The troubadours, who spoke for their rich masters, are constantly reminding us that only men of refinement recognize the nobility of hopeless love; the vulgar crowd jeers at them for wasting their time. Only the idle and free can afford the luxury (the anguish) of making an absence into the very rose-heart of their lives. Only they have the extravagance of time to languish, shed tears, exalt their pain into poetry. For others time is too regulated; every day repeats itself.
I wasn’t rich, but I was free and idle enough to ornament my liberty with the melancholy pleasure of having lost a Bordeaux boy with a claret-red mouth. All the while I’d been with Jean-Loup I’d admitted how ill suited we were and I sought or dreamed of seeking someone else either tepidly or hotly, depending on the intensity of my dissatisfaction.
Now that Jean-Loup had left me for Régis, I could glorify their love and despise them and hate myself while sifting through my old memories to show myself that Jean-Loup had been slowly, if unconsciously, preparing this decampment for a long time.
When I am being wicked I tell people, “Our little Jean-Loup has landed in clover. He’ll soon be installed in the château for the summer and he can fill the moat with his
bandes dessinées.
The only pity is that Jean-Loup is apparently at Régis’s mercy and Régis is cunning. He holds all the cards. If he tires of Jean-Loup, the poor boy will be dismissed without a centime, for that wedding ring doesn’t represent a claim, only a—”
But at this point bored, shocked friends laugh and hiss, “Jealous, jealous, this way lies madness.” Jealousy may be new to me but not to them. My condition is as banal as it is baneful.
And then I realize that the opposite is probably true: that Jean-Loup had always dealt with me openly, even at the end, and had never resorted to subterfuge. As soon as he knew of his deep, innocent love for Régis he told me. I am the one who attributes scheming to him.
He always wanted me to describe his ass, so I’ll conclude with an attempt not to sound too wet.
I should admit right off that by all ocular evidence there was nothing extraordinary about it. It wasn’t a soccer player’s muscled bum or a swimmer’s sun-molded twin
charlottes.
It was a kid brother’s ass, a perfunctory transition between spine and legs, a simple cushion for a small body. Its color was the low-wattage white of a winter half-moon. It served as the neutral support (as an anonymous glove supports a puppet’s bobbing, expressive head) for his big, grown-up penis, always so ready to poke up through his flies and take center stage. But let’s not hastily turn him around to reveal Régis’s Daily Magic Baguette, as I now call it. No, let’s keep his back to us, even though he’s deliciously braced his knees to compensate for the sudden new weight he’s cantilevered in his excitement, a heavy divining rod that makes his buttocks tense. Concave, each cheek looks glossy, like costly white satin that, having been stuffed in a drawer, has just been smoothed, though it is still crazed with fine, whiter, silkier lines. If he spreads his cheeks—which feel cool, firm and plump—for the kneeling
admirer, he reveals an anus that makes one think of a Leica lens, shut now but with many possible f-stops. An expensive aperture, but also a closed morning-glory bud. There’s that
grain de beauté
on his hip, the single drop of espresso on the wedding gown. And there are the few silky hairs in the crack of his ass, wet now for some reason and plastered down at odd angles as though his fur had been greedily licked in all directions at once. If he spreads his legs and thinks about nothing—his fitting with the tailor, the castle drawbridge, the debs whose calls he can no longer return—his erection may melt and you might see it drooping lazily into view, just beyond his loosely bagged testicles. He told me that his mother would never let him sleep in his
slip
when he was growing up. She was afraid underpants might stunt his virile growth. These Bordeaux women know to let a young wine breathe.