Read A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Online

Authors: Dianne Nelson,Dianne Nelson Oberhansly

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author)

A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (2 page)

BOOK: A Brief History of Male Nudes in America
6.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
A Brief History of Male Nudes in America

T
hey step from behind my mother's shower curtain, pose like acrobats and soldiers, they lie bound in the afternoon light of our downstairs bedroom. There are buttons on the floor. Someone's wallet on the dresser. On the back of a chair, a shirt leaves everything to the imagination. The shirt is blue, it is Oxford, it has sweat rings, a pocket, it's a workshirt with the smell of hay still in it, it's khaki, short sleeved, long sleeved, on the back
Sugarloaf Bowl
is machine embroidered with
Del Rio
below it.

I have my eyes open. I see them strut. I see them scurry from the bathroom back to my mother's bed, their big white butts trailing our household like bad winter colds. My mother is divorced and entertains at odd hours.

I get home from school and on the kitchen counter she has a peanut butter sandwich for me or Hostess Snowballs, raisins, applesauce, or a Mars Bar. Under her closed bedroom door there is a crack of light that reminds me of the depths to which we all fall, given time,
given enough rope and the disposition for making our own sorrow and then lying in it.

Karl Winckelman's truck is parked out front. My mother's Sheffield bedspread is probably folded back, in thirds, to the end of her bed where it is a silky white margin she tells Karl to keep his feet off. He has undoubtedly come here straight from work. As a construction foreman, Karl sometimes has the option of leaving his job early, and on those occasions he is in my mother's arms by two, the bedspread folded cleanly back by three when I get off the Highland Park High School bus. Karl and my mother move with the scheduled certainty of trains. No sound. The light from beneath my mother's door makes a line of chalk that divides our world—on this side the radio drones and on that side all reason is immediately abandoned. By four they're standing in the kitchen asking me about homework.

“Hey, kiddo,” Karl says, pointing at my opened math book. “1 have a way of multiplying with my fingers.”

For a simple man, Karl confuses me frequently and with great enthusiasm. He goes to work with his fingers, showing seven times six, eight times nine, how you get wild dogs to cross the street, how you get a scaffold to dance down the side of a building.

Karl leans against the refrigerator, and I can see exactly what my mother has had that afternoon: shadow and dark eyes, a square jaw, Noah sleeping with his legs wide apart. In the downstairs bedroom in the afternoon light, Karl stretches out beside my mother and turns white, blank as snow gathering snow, big as a barn, his heart racing on a fool's errand all for my mother.

“I'll tell you one thing,” he says, his tanned forehead wrinkling as a prelude to some deep thought. “The day they turn our numbers metric is the day I stop paying union dues. Can you imagine a 2- × 3-meter window? Come on!”

Karl is like a feed bag with a little hole in the corner spilling its contents slowly. Twopenny nails drop from his pockets onto our wood floors or behind the couch cushions. When he walks, his Red Wing
boots leave footprints of fine dust picked up from various construction sites.

“Ahhh, look Karl,” my mother says, thumbing his tracks caught in sunlight on the newly polished floor.

“What, babe, what?” Karl asks, and there is a real possibility that this man sees nothing, that dust is a given, maybe even the essential ingredient of his world.

“Karl's a darn hard worker,” my mother says to me, which is a way of explaining his presence in her bed, though we never talk directly of her bed—a place of sleep and haste and desolation. The expensive Sheffield bedspread cannot change that. Neither can the book she always keeps at her bedside,
Egypt in Its Glory
, an oversized photojournal she ordered from C. C. Bostwick's. My mother gets lost in that book—the beauty of the pyramids, the secrets of papyrus scrolls.

I imagine on their better afternoons that Karl takes my mother somewhere down the Nile, that the waters are soft, that the melon-colored sand eases them from their real lives. Birds stand on one leg. Marble cows low into the ancient moonlight.

Even with his pants down, Karl is all business. My mother has told me this as she sits with a cup of coffee, maybe picking at a cinnamon bun. I know that in the same way Karl creates a building out of rolled-up blueprints he engineers some deep and mysterious pleasure in my mother. I see her walk out of her bedroom with him, and she is flushed, something has been shaken loose, and for a half hour or more she is truly happy. She sits on the kitchen cabinet and eats Fruit Loops out of the box.

My mother doesn't mind discussing her life with me—an only child, a girl already taller than her mother. She explains sex as biology by candlelight. She describes her need and desire as electric impulses that are strong enough to roll a rock uphill. She characterizes her love
of men as something that happened to her in the cradle when her mother's back went bad and it was her daddy who held her against his rock chest and in his warm water hands.

She laughs and tells me that Karl likes her on top where he says she is pretty as a cream puff, though I tend to imagine her at that moment as wild-eyed and breathless—something stunned by headlights in a dark night. I don't know why my mother finds no lasting peace.

“Hey, nothing in this life is perfect,” she says more times than I can remember. It's meant as the kind of fleshy advice gained through experience, but, in fact, it's a statement my mother repeats so she will believe it. My mother's voice is strong, deep and assuring, but because I am her daughter—conceived on Chinese New Year, she tells me—I can hear the uncertainty. Sometimes when she's talking, if I close my eyes and drift, all I hear is bathwater running.

Karl is not the only one. I see the legs of men and bulls traipsing around our kitchen, looking for something to eat. They work up appetites at our house—man-sized. Cans of tuna, a dozen eggs, a raw red onion sliced thick—I've seen them make sandwiches I couldn't get my hands around.

My mother stands off to the side, sweet in a brocade robe or sexy in a yellow lotto T-shirt, and watches them work her kitchen with the sudden dexterity of hungry men. She points to where the crackers are. She shrugs when she's informed that we are out of milk.

In her way, my mother likes them all. It's not for money that she takes them to her bed, but for lack of words, for something gone wrong with my father that she has no way of explaining. He sometimes calls me from Newark to say hi. He asks me if I'm doing O.K.

“Sure,” I say. “Great.”

Karl asks me if I've finished my homework. Barry Rivers asks me where I got my green eyes; Tim French, if there are any more clean towels; a one-night Cuban musician, if our dog bites.

I want to tell the musician, “Yeah, he'll take your damn head off,” but I answer, “No, never has before.”

It's my mother who asks me to help her with Manny Del Rio. Sometime after eleven or twelve she comes into my bedroom and shakes me hard out of sleep. “April,” she says, “April, come help me with Manny. I think he's hurt.”

It's a Thursday night. This I am sure of because Manny bowls mixed league on Thursdays at Sugarloaf Bowl, then comes by our house for my mother's three-bean soup. Friday mornings he's usually still here. My mother tiptoes out of her room and signals me with one finger to her lips, a sign that has come to mean that all the men of the world are asleep, that they are dear to us in that state, camped out and heavy on our sheets.

In the bottom of our shower that Thursday night, Manny is all flesh—the torso of a grand duke and the short stocky legs of a pipe fitter. He looks up at us out of too much pain to be embarrassed.

“Where does it hurt?” my mother asks him.

Manny cannot decide. He groans, then curses in Spanish. The bar of soap is still under his right foot, the water still beaded across his chest and on his neck.

There is a way to stare politely, and I know how to do it, I've practiced, and I think it's fair to say I'm an expert with my eyes. I give Manny a slow once-over, and I see it all: the broad chest, the narrow hips, wet hair, the story of his life pink and small and lying to the side. I look up at my mother, who hovers over Manny like a dark angel, and maybe it's because I'm still sleepy, but it seems as if we are moving underwater—our hands slow, almost helpless.

“Is it your leg?” I ask Manny, trying to clarify the middle of this crazy night. “Your back? Your arm?”

There is an unbelieving look on his face as my mother and I attempt to pull him out of the shower and onto the cold linoleum floor. “Don't,” he tells us. It's as much as he can get out of his mouth at once. Spread, exhausted, Manny lies still and poses for us in our own bathroom, his hip shattered, though none of us will know this until later,
after he is picked up by an ambulance and X-rayed at Stormont Vail.

We cover him with a blanket and wait for the paramedics. It seems like a long wait, the three of us in one small room, Manny's hand squeezing the side of the tub in a sad gesture that I can't forget. He is a sweet old-fashioned guy who blushes at a kiss but loves my mother with the force of a bazooka.

We wait forever, which indicates how time passes in this house. My mother flicks her cigarette ashes into the bathroom sink. Realizing that silence is the best alternative here, she stops talking. Her cigarette, then hand, then arm move in one gentle line from knee to mouth and mouth to knee. She exhales with the deepest sigh, one that says life simply cannot be lived this way anymore.

Fat boy cupids, men of stone, athletes, bathers—they kiss and fondle my mother, then give me a sidelong glance. “This is April,” she tells them in the way of an introduction. “She's on the honor roll, she's in the choir. You can't slip anything by her, so don't even try. Look at that smile. She's gonna break some hearts in her time, huh?”

Late night or midmorning Judy Garland sings “You made me love you” off one of our old scratchy albums. They are mesmerized. Karl leans his head back in the brown easy chair, closes his eyes, and commits himself to that long languorous kind of beauty. “It's only a song,” I tell him. Tim French, in his boxer shorts, does a simple little four-step right there in the living room. He doesn't need a partner. He moves unselfconsciously, and everything moves with him—mind and body, dream and daylight.

At the top of the stairs or in the kitchen doorway, I am where I can see it all: Tim dancing in his own arms, Manny searching for his socks bare-assed, Barry scratching himself as he reads the newspaper. It is a precarious view for a seventeen-year-old. My mother pulls me close to her and says, “You just as well know now.” We stand and watch in
the doorway together, at the top of the stairs, near the piano, next to her bed, by a chair, by a blanket, by a rug, and in the deepest sense they are beyond us, these men who come visiting.

They step out of their clothes or my mother undresses them, and in the golden light of the Nile they are the bare figures of love and promise. In my mother's care, they see themselves twice their real size, agile, long-limbed, generous, hung like bulls, sweet as new fathers. They are fast to sleep and slow to awaken. She tiptoes out of her room in the mornings and puts her finger to her lips and our world is more quiet than the dark high rafters of a tomb.

BOOK: A Brief History of Male Nudes in America
6.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Immortal Scrolls by Secorsky, Kristin
Just for Now by Abbi Glines
Stir It Up by Ramin Ganeshram
Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus
The Enemy by Lee Child
Survivor by James Phelan
Blood Moon by A.D. Ryan