Skinned Alive (19 page)

When Ray paid the boy, who aristocratically palmed the money without bothering to see how much it was, Ray used one of the few Greek words he’d picked up (this one at the laundry),
avrio
, the word for “tomorrow.” The boy nodded, or rather did what Greeks do instead of nodding, he clicked a
tsk
between his teeth and jerked his head down, lowering his eyelids. He pointed to this spot, to the ground in front of them.
Then he flashed ten and two fingers. “You like?” he asked, pointing to his own chest.

“Yes, of course,” Ray whispered, thinking: These men …

He told the whole story at breakfast the next morning to Ralph, who was courteous enough to appear envious. After their yogurt and honey and the French roast coffee Ralph was at such pains to secure, they moved into Ralph’s studio with its one small window looking down to the sea and the lighthouse. The studio had little in it besides a rocking chair, an old battered desk, a small kitchen table freighted with tubes of acrylics, a big, heavy wood easel and a rack for finished paintings. On the wall was a watercolor, poppies brilliant in a silky field of green and tan grasses. “Well, it’s the only solution. For you,” Ralph said.

Oh, he’s turned his envy into pity, Ray thought, pity for me, the ticking time bomb, the young widow, but my solution doesn’t seem all that much of a hardship.

As Ray napped in the hot, airless late afternoon he could feel a small painful spot inside him where the boy had battered into him and he smiled to feel that pain again. “Oy,” he said to himself in Betty’s accent.

That night the boy was there exactly on time. His hair was cleaner and shinier and he’d shaved (not the mustache, of course). But he was wearing the same jeans jacket, although the T-shirt looked clean. They went through exactly the same routine, for Ray didn’t want to scare him off. He wanted to build up a fixed routine, the same place, the same acts, the same price. Tonight the only innovation was that Ray pulled the kid’s jeans and underpants all the way down below his knees and discovered that his testicles hadn’t descended and that his ass was hairy with nice friendly fuzz. Nor did he have a tan line; his skin was naturally just this dark.

After sex the kid hopped over the fence and disappeared into
the night and Ray walked home, downhill all the way through the silent, cat-quick, jasmine-scented streets. He felt sad and lyric and philosophical and happy as he’d felt as a teenager; since these encounters with the boy—strictly sexual—seemed a strangely insufficient pretext for so much emotion, he also felt something of a charlatan. Objective correlative. That was the term. T. S. Eliot would have said that his emotion lacked an objective correlative.

The next night he asked him his name, which he discovered was Marco. “You must remember,” Homer said during the
volta
the following evening, “the Italians ruled Crete for hundreds of years. Maybe he has some Italian blood.” And again Ray had to describe his “find,” for that’s how the connoisseurs judged Marco. “Not the usual harbor trash,” Homer said, and he announced that he was going to start harpooning in the zoological gardens again, which he’d assumed had long since been fished out. Ray refused to divulge where he met Marco every night. He wanted one secret at least, his dowry, the smallest secret he could keep and give to Marco, and again he thought of that book and the way they’d compared marriage to death, or rather marriage to the exhumation of bones.

Once he asked Marco where he lived, but Marco only waved vaguely in the direction of the shantytown inland and to the west of the harbor.
“Spitt mou, to limani,”
Ray announced, which he thought meant “My house is on the harbor,” but Marco only lifted an indifferent eyebrow, the counterpart to the Frenchman’s weary
“Eh alors?”
when smothered by Americans’ doggy effusiveness. That night, Ray broadened his area of conquest and explored Marco’s taut brown stomach up to his chest. By now there were several white rubbers on the wet cement floor like jellyfish washed up on the bleak shingle.

By day, Ray would go swimming or motorbiking to old churches or ruined monasteries or hidden beaches, but all day long and during the endless evenings, he’d daydream about Marco. He bought a phrase book and pieced together Greek words for that night’s rendezvous.

Once Marco asked Ray if he should bring along a friend, and Ray agreed because he thought Marco wanted him to. But the friend was a portly sailor (“Greeks go off early,” Ralph had said, as though they were a temperamental triple-cream cheese, a Brillat-Savarin, say). Ray sucked them both at the same time, doing one then the other, back and forth, but his only pleasure was in imagining reporting it to the other Americans tomorrow. The boys seemed embarrassed and talked loudly to each other and joked a lot and Marco kept losing his erection and he sounded nasty and used the word
putana
, which surely meant “whore” in Greek as well as Italian.

Ray paid them both and was tempted to mutter
putana
while doing so, but that might queer the deal, so he swallowed his resentment (yes, swallowed that, too) and drew Marco aside and said,
“Metavrio,”
which meant “the day after tomorrow”
(meta
as in metaphysics, “beyond physics”). The delay was meant as some sort of punishment. He also indicated he wanted to see Marco alone from now on. Marco registered the compliment but not the punishment and smiled and asked, “You like?” pointing to himself, asked it loud and clear so the other guy could hear.

“Yes,” Ray said, “I like.”

As he walked home, Ray took a stroll through the zoological gardens, where there was also an outdoor movie theater. Inside people sat on folding chairs and watched the huge screen on which a streetlamp had disobligingly cast the shadow of a leafy branch. Tonight he sat outside but he could hear the end of
Querelle
, of all things, dubbed into Greek and offered to the
extended Cretan family, who chuckled over the perversities of northern Europe. In the closing sequence, Jeanne Moreau laughed and laughed a shattering laugh and the caged egrets dozing beside Ray awakened and started to chatter and call. Then the houselights came up, the families streamed out, for a moment the park was bright and vivid with crunched gravel and laughs and shouts, then car doors slammed and motorbikes snarled, the lights were dimmed and finally, conclusively, everything was quiet. Ray sat in the dark, listening to the awakened birds paddling the water, a leaf spray of shadows across his face like an old-fashioned figured veil. The jasmine gave off a shocking body odor, as though a pure girl had turned out to be a slut.

Ray regretted his spiteful decision to skip a day with Marco. The depth to which he felt Marcos absence, and his anxiety lest Marco not show up at their next appointment, made Ray aware of how much he liked Marco and needed him. Liked him? There was nothing to like, nothing but a mindless, greedy Cretan teen who was, moreover, heterosexual. Or worse, a complete mystery, a stranger, a minor tradesman with whom he was only on fucking terms.

Then Ray told himself he liked his own sense of gratitude to Marco, the silence imposed on them by the lack of a common language, liked the metered doses of sex fixed by fee and divergent appetites. He liked the high seriousness of the work they did together every night. He also liked stealing bits of affection from his co-worker, whose mustache was coming in as black and shiny as his eyebrows and whose chest (as Ray’s hand had just discovered) was sprouting its first hair, this young man who would never love anyone, not even his wife, as much as Ray loved him.

One weekend Ralph went off on a yacht with a Greek collector of his paintings; they were sailing over to Thera and wouldn’t be back till Monday. “Feel free to bring your child
husband to the palace while I’m away,” Ralph said as he pecked Ray on both cheeks in the French manner. And indeed that night Ray did say to Marco,
“Spiti mou,”
showed him the house keys and led him through town, walking a few paces ahead just as on that first night Marco had preceded Ray. On the street of ribbon shops someone hailed Marco
(“Yassou”)
and talked to him, and Ray, smiling at his own quick grasp of things, didn’t look back but turned the corner and waited there, in the dark. After all, it was a little town. And only last week a shepherd had discovered his son was getting fucked and had killed him, which Homer said most of the locals had considered fair enough.

Marco in his white Keds and Levi’s jacket came treading stealthily around the corner; he winked his approval and Ray felt his own pleasure spread over his whole body like the heat of the sun.

Marco was obviously impressed by the palace—impressed by its grandeur and, Ray imagined, proud that foreigners had furnished it with old Cretan furniture and folk embroideries.

Impressed? Nonsense, Ray thought, catching himself. Purest sentimental rubbish on my part. No doubt he’d prefer lavender Formica with embedded gold glitter.

Ray, who liked Marco and wanted to show that he did, felt a new intimacy between them as he led him into his bedroom. He gently pushed him back on the bed and knelt to untie the Keds and take them off, then the smelly socks. Then he made Marco wriggle out of his jeans; he started to pull the T-shirt over his head but Marco stopped him, though he, too, was gentle. Every one of Marco’s concessions meant so much more to Ray than all the sexual extravagances of New York in the old preplague days—the slings and drugs and filthy raps.

Ray undressed himself. He wondered what Marco thought of him, of this naked adult male body which he’d never seen before. How old does he think I am? Does he admire my
muscles? Or does my role as
poosti
on
parea
keep him from seeing me?

Ray worried that the whole routine—nakedness, a bed, privacy—might be getting a little too queer for Marco, so he was quick to kneel and start sucking him, back to the tried and true. But Ray, carried away in spite of himself, couldn’t resist adding a refinement. He licked the inside of Marco’s thighs and Marco jumped, as he did a moment later when Ray’s tongue explored his navel. Strange that his cock seems to be the least sensitive part of his body, Ray thought.

When the time for the rubber arrived, Ray thought that surely tonight might make some difference, and indeed for the first time Marco gasped at the moment of his climax. Ray said, “You like?” and Marco nodded vigorously and smiled, and a young male intimacy really had come alive between them, glued as they were together, their naked bodies sweaty.

Almost instantly Marco stood and dashed into the bathroom, pulled off the rubber, and washed while standing at the sink. Ray leaned against the door and watched him.

In this bright light the boy looked startlingly young and Ray realized, yes, he was young enough to be his son. But his other feeling was less easy to account for. It was of the oddness that a body so simple, with so few features, should have provoked so much emotion in him, Ray. Clothes with their colors and cuts seemed more adequate to what he was feeling—more, far more, than the occasion warranted. No objective correlative. Ray took Marco up to the roof to see the panorama of the sea, the harbor, the far-flung villages, a car burrowing up the mountain with its headlights like a luminous insect. But now that the transaction was over, the tension between them had been cut.

The next night Marco came directly to the palace and Ray persuaded him to take off his T-shirt, too, so that now there was no membrane except the rubber between them. Before
they got to the fucking part, Ray paused in his exertions and crept up beside Marco and rested his head on Marco’s thumping chest. Marco’s hand awkwardly grazed Ray’s hair. Ray could smell the rank, disingenuous odor of Marco’s underarm sweat—not old sweat or nervous sweat but the frank smell of a young summer body that had just walked halfway across town.

On the third and last night they’d have alone in the palace, Marco came up the steps hanging his head, not giving his hearty greeting:
“Ti kanes? Kala?”
He simply walked right into the bedroom, threw his clothes off, fell back on the bed and with a sneering smile parodied the moans and squirmings of sex.

“What’s wrong?” Ray asked. Marco turned moodily on his side and Ray was grateful for this glimpse into the boy’s discontent. When he sat down beside Marco he could smell beer on his breath and cigarette smoke in his hair, though Marco didn’t smoke. At last, after a few words and much miming, Marco was able to indicate that he had a friend who was leaving the next morning for Athens to begin his compulsory military service and the guy was waiting for him in a bar down beside the harbor.

Ray pulled Marco to his feet, gave him double the usual thousand drachmas, helped him dress, set tomorrow’s date back in the schoolyard and urged him to hurry off to his friend. He had a half thought that Marco understood more English than he was letting on. For the first time Marco seemed to be looking at Ray not as a member of another race, sex, class, age, but as a friend.

Friend? Ray laughed at his own naïveté. The boy’s a hooker, he told himself. Don’t get all moony over your beautiful budding friendship with the hooker.