A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (3 page)

He came there again two days later to be tormented by one of the worst forms of fatigue, that of erect immobility touched by many nervous hands, pinched and patient, measured, turned about, discussed, labored over. They stood him on a stool by way of a pedestal. The sharp mouths of two pairs of scissors played about him, as well as a quiverful of pins both black and nickel-plated, often piercing to the skin. He was as happy and nervous as a young martyr.

The excitement of the sisters increased as they worked. Out of some bright old rags, pins, coral beads, and a boy—a farm boy at that—they were creating a woman’s charm. It might have been a symbolical doll that they were dressing, to attract, by some rule of magic, out of the sluggish village to themselves, a multiple and passionate attention: rude young beaux dangerously troubled in the dim bowling alley, gray-haired lawyers and doctors stealing across the lawn with gifts, perfect husbands chosen finally after the most luxurious hesitations, coming there by appointment to carry them off … Their rather young faces of spinsters by accident grew still younger, the pure mouths and the pinched nostrils animated by laughter, imagination, sighs.

Disturbed by this hilarity in the decorous house, their old maiden aunt came to the head of the stairs and called down, “What is the matter?”

Even Carl, comparatively useless and at ease like a proprietor, regarded his cousins with a new interest and wondered at the indifference of his brothers who were old enough to fall in love with them. When they were silent and busy their mouths remained slightly open, as if the invisible forms of the tones of their voices stayed on their lips. Because of them he began to feel the approach of a certain excitement in the night before him: a tumult of masked girls, lawns resilient under fleeing and pursuing feet, games which would be only a pretext for taking almost painful kisses and for laughing at them once taken—the approach of a sweet disorder in which he was very likely to forget his less and less recognizable friend.

The work was done. The sisters and Carl led the bedizened youngster into another room to a tall mirror. He wore an old-rose satin dancing frock, and long kid gloves, and on his head a black velvet picture hat out of which there pressed against the nape of his neck and his temples one of the blond wigs which the maiden aunt had worn before she had felt obliged to change to gray, unpleasantly soft and audible, sweet with cologne-water. The full skirt had been tucked up behind so that it resembled the tumbled plumage of some lean, pink swan; and out of the square bodice rose his unfamiliar throat powdered and wound with coral.

“I declare, he is prettier than any girl in the village,” Lucy cried.

But during the vigorous remodeling which the dress had received at the sisters’ hands, the enervate satin had lost the last of its freshness; the worn ruffles and the pulled seams held together with a bedraggled tenacity; the fairy-tale pink was veined with mauve. Philip’s extreme youth of a boy made a woman’s maturity; and in the mirror his face had the frightened expression of a woman who feels that she is too gaudily, too youthfully dressed for her age.

Over his puckered sleeves the sisters, radiant and amused, were looking; and between their faces in the mirror Carl’s face, which astonished him. How could Carl’s appearance be changed by his metamorphosis—or was he merely seeing him with the eyes of the part he was dressed to play? Smaller than before, hardy and provocative, masculine to an enigmatic degree, smiling a humorless, drowsy smile … The disguised boy met the other’s glance, and thinking himself the cause of the equivocal expression, blushed.

Lois and Lucy said wistfully, “Have a good time,” and said goodbye.

Together the boys crossed the adjoining lawn toward Carl’s home. Philip was anxious on all occasions; in this preposterous costume, if he went into the house, he was certain to be teased unmercifully by Carl’s brother; so he resigned himself to going without any supper.

There was a great maple tree on the lawn, inside which, on the lower limbs, the brothers had built a platform. Carl threw his arms around his friend’s rustling knees and lifted him as high as he could. Philip caught a branch and carefully pulled himself up into the hiding-place.

“If you were a girl you’d gather your skirts together,” Carl said. Then he hurried indoors to dine and put on his evening clothes and false mustache.

The sun had set; there would be no moon that night, so it must have been the earth which filled the sky with overtones of foliage and with the pearls of its pale buildings and pale fields. Inside the tree everything was dim and still. The platform on which Philip sat was enclosed by the light-colored, slim, wayward pillars of the branches.

He could smell the food being served inside the house; that was the first penalty of his adventure; he began to feel that it would not be the last. Ants went up and down the branches of the tree; he kept watch that none should get into his flounces. This led him to try to feel his boy’s body inside them; he shook himself from head to toe, and decided that wearing women’s clothes was like being tucked into a luxurious, portable bed. A whalebone in the old corset hurt him and had to be pushed back into place.

He listened to bicycles going down the streets and the discords of the different kinds of bells all over the town. Then he heard something else, this time on the lawn below, and hunted for it through the foliage. It was Carl’s eldest brother, admirable, somber, and hurried. Philip shrank out of sight.

He was too young to find anything worth thinking about under such abnormal circumstances; so he let his imagination drift heedlessly, forgetful both of the nonexistent cousin from Milwaukee whom he was supposed to represent and the gallant widow, desperately eager to please, in weakened frills, whom in fact he did resemble.

Carl came back and climbed up in the tree until it should be time to go to the party. He brought the hungry masquerader some sandwiches and a bottle of root-beer. He lit a match, for it was almost dark, a flickering light among the dark, flickering leaves; and each adding to the somewhat exalted notion he had of his own appearance the comical image of the other, they laughed a little. Then they sat quietly and talked.

In spite of the difference in their ages they had entered high school together the September before, Philip coming from the farm to do so. The boys Carl had grown up with had been greatly inclined to bully the new, somewhat effeminate, rustic boy; Carl had defended him. In return, by the usual frauds, Philip had lightened for him the burdens of getting an education. On this basis they had become inseparable companions.

Philip’s gratitude for being championed was flattering. In a childish way he was eccentric, which contrasted well with his friend’s ideal banality, and his unpopularity satisfied in his friend rudiments of jealousy. He lacked common sense and offered instead the poetry of being surprised and being excited in all his five senses by everything and easily hurt. On the whole, Carl enjoyed in him qualities that he would later enjoy in women.

Outside the tree the swallows wheeled up and down, chattering, in front of the evening star.

The girl to whose fifteenth birthday party they were going might not have invited the new boy from the country, had she not had a weakness for Carl ever since an intimate summer afternoon in a forest when they were children. She wished to flatter him by acknowledging his right to be followed wherever he went by his small protege. Up in the tree Carl told Philip about that afternoon.

Philip, on the other hand, would not have had the courage to go, but for Carl’s insistence and the promise of protection which it implied. The latter, a little boastful about his knowledge of the world, replied to every expression of curiosity on his friend’s part by a recommendation of actual experience. Philip had often asked what happened at parties in the village.

Giving anxious attention to his false mustache, Carl smoked another forbidden cigarette.

For several years Philip had had a constant sense of growing up; it was less a sense than a sensation, as if he could actually feel cells expanding, new nerves winding like tendrils of a vine about certain muscles, bones hardening. Goodbye childhood; and his imagination, genuinely terror-stricken, crying to maturity—coming, coming, coming! Himself as a grown man looked forward to, cherished with vain anxiety, wondered about, feared and forecast in innumerable juvenile ways … Thus it was as a sort of Narcissus that he had been ready to bend selfishly, attentively, toward the mirror of the life of a somewhat older boy such as his friend. Desire for himself, his prospective self, was a large part of his affection.

His friend’s house poured out upon the grass a brilliant light, but it was almost silent. Only the nurse, hopelessly in love, was singing Carl’s little sister to sleep with a lullaby in which there were panting tones that Philip did not understand.

He was miserably innocent, or believed himself to be, imagining, as adolescents do, that there is more to know than there is. Up on the platform in the maple tree, in the attitude of Narcissus over the pool of darkness and grass, almost flat on his stomach in spite of his finery, he asked Carl questions about girls, hoping for answers about men—that is, about himself. Carl replied in a shrouded, muttering voice, taking advantage of his own excitement, dealing roughly with his own modesty. The questions and the answers did not quite match; one imagined that he was preparing for life, the other was getting ready to have a good time at the party …

Then, here and there in the town, the hour of the party struck, and they went. It was not far. Rita’s house reached through the trees to meet them with its arms of light lying loose and open in the grass, its cries of rough amusement made by many young guests. They put on their two small black masks.

A dozen or more dressed-up youngsters had arrived before them, as they had hoped. Carl got through the false introduction well enough, made very polite by the danger of laughing. Philip slipped into a chair which stood by itself in one corner.

In the rather rich rooms, untidy with imitation flowers and twisted streamers, red with paper lamp-shades, there were tramps who had tin boxes of hay-leaves for tobacco, Indian chiefs thrust full of rooster feathers, a soldier in the uniform of no particular country, two girls in wall-paper, a Fairy Soap girl carrying a bunch of millinery violets, a pallid dark-haired Irish girl as an Oriental dancer. These disguises were all the prettier for being hasty and imperfect, but there would be little left of them by midnight.

Philip should have received the prize for the finest costume, if there had been one, and did receive a great deal of sidelong scrutiny. Then the games began, which he was not asked to join, and with the games the rude flirtations.

A lamp shone in his eyes, but he preferred not to move. He was too young ever to have been so lonesome before. He could not make up his mind whether the other guests had recognized him. They had not done so in the first place, while he was being introduced; that much was certain. Later, to denounce him as an imposter, they would have had to confess their original gullibility. And the revelation of his sex and identity might have made him one of them; cunningly hostile, perhaps they realized this and preferred to let him sit there—ignorant of their opinion, that is, half-ignorant of his own identity—an equivocal wallflower. Whenever two or three of them withdrew to the adjoining rooms, he imagined that the hilarity he heard concerned him; they giggled as if it were their common secret who he was—not his own. Rita, their hostess, who knew, spoke to him now and then but scarcely tried to draw him out of his corner.

Carl left him to his own resources. He was having a good time and was so excited that he did not look happy. Sometimes he gazed across the room with the strange smile which Philip remembered, which, perhaps, he had provoked, which now testified to pleasure that he certainly was not going to share.

The eagerness and the provoking mockery of the group of masked girls was concentrated on Carl. They too glanced repeatedly at the unhappy figure in the corner; and whoever they thought it was, their gaze expressed the hatred which immature girls feel for an older woman, less lovely, less ignorant, more sumptuously dressed. Defiantly, they grew less and less reserved. Carl profited by this rivalry with a symbol.

Having with the aid of his cousins made a girl out of his country friend, he seemed to have lost his awe of girls, perhaps even his respect for them. Rough and dreamy at once, he teased and touched them all; his impertinence seemed involuntary and was not shamefaced; apparently no one took offence. Something had aroused his marauding instincts of a half-grown man, quickened the progress of emotions about which, up to that night, he had done little more than talk. He himself had a look of astonishment at the liberties he was taking.

The other boys in consequence grew coarser in their speech and gestures, hoping, if not to outdo him, to check his triumph by embarrassing the girls. In their turn they looked boldly across the room at his supposed cousin from Milwaukee, perhaps thinking of revenge; but not one had the courage to sit down in the conspicuous corner.

Rita’s mother, with great complacence, had begged them to have a good time and not to break anything, and retired to her bedroom.

The games were lively but not quite amusing. A ring on a string brought the slightly scarred and stained boys’ hands into contact with smaller moist hands and even among the folds of disheveled costumes. Humiliating positions and red-faced kisses were assigned as forfeits. A girl played the piano, but not many of them knew how to dance, and these seemed unhappy to be in each other’s arms under the eyes of their friends. Then chairs were placed in a row, around which they marched; the music stopped and started without warning, and they scrambled for seats; there were pushes and pinching and needless collisions. Sometimes one or two would pause by the dining-room door to stare at the pitchers of lemonade, the plates of sandwiches and cake covered with napkins; but Rita did not want to serve the refreshments too soon, lest the party come to an end.