Allan Stein (16 page)

"That's O-levels, isn't it?" George looked a little troubled by the thought of O-levels.

"Mmm."

"Oh, yes." Denis brimmed with insight. "I am understanding now your mood of this evening. You mean the boys of Stéphane's age."

"Mmm-hmm, exactly his age." Denis's curiosity was a tonic, and in bright contrast to the pinched and puzzled frown of George.

"And in America, your Turkish soccer player, he is maybe not much more than the fifteen of when you began to love him?"

"That's right, not much at all."

"Oh"—Denis, now stricken with concern—"what a torture the home of Serge and Miriam must be to you then, with the boy so close and your marriage which you explained to the Turkish lover." He held my hand.

"You're fucking a fifteen-year-old?" George asked bluntly.

"You're such a jealous man, George." Denis laughed. "I see you're mad that here is someone who has sex without you." He touched both of us on our arms with his great, well-manicured hands, so that his rather cutting accusation came across as pleasant chitchat.

"Actually, he's fucking me," I answered. Then I hid behind my drink, savoring a few clean swallows. I was certainly making a fine show on Herbert's behalf, ambassador to the world of European art museums.

"Yes, yes," Denis added. "I have understood from another friend that it is typical for the boy to fuck and not, as in the North African countries, for the man to fuck him. But, Herbert, can a boy really be very skilled at this in any way? What is the pleasure in this for you? Is it as a teacher of the boy?"

"These Picasso drawings are very interesting," George interrupted, silencing us. The wine arrived, to George's grim satisfaction, and we toasted my visit. The wine was peculiar, like seawater and blood, but I liked it more and more as the evening went on.

"The nude boy," Denis observed, of the Picassos. "There is so much about you that intrigues me, Herbert."

"Right, right, Denny, but these drawings won't be erotic in the least," George corrected. "I suppose the
Boy Leading a Horse
could be seen that way, the surfaces are so perfect and nuanced, but these sketches could not be very distinguished in any way, or else they would never have disappeared."

"Do you like the smaller cock?" Denis asked, still pursuing his subject. "I mean, that is an advantage of the boys that would distinguish them."

George silenced him with a loud phlegmy cough, then leaned in and caught Denis's eye. The cough became a question demanding some response.

"I think you are right, George." Cordial Denis. "Nothing of Picasso's that was at all finished or very accomplished in any way would have disappeared from us for this long."

"That's right, but I'm still intrigued by this little constellation that could be built linking the Stein nephew to the
Boy Leading a Horse
. You know the gouache at the Hermitage? A Picasso from the same time as the Allan Stein portrait?"

"Actually, Denis, a boy's cock can be quite enormous. You'd be surprised."

Kind Denis smiled, then turned to answer George. "Yes, in fact I've seen this at the Hermitage and the material is horrible, like pieces of garbage."

"It's a nude boy, and interestingly enough it's exactly the same pallet and materials as the Stein portrait. It could be from the same sitting. I'm sure Picasso smelled money from the Steins and agreed to the portrait, then scraped whatever he could find off the floor of the studio—he was dirt poor then, they all were— cheap old gouache and cardboard he'd probably been standing on for a year."

"Is it falling apart?"

"Oh, they both are, though I think the portrait is being taken care of. This nude is in awful shape."

"Mmm."

The
découpeur
arrived at our table with the roast bird, severing its meat from the nest of bones with the rapid application of his knives. He did not pause, so the serial slashes became a single extended gesture, like a
plier
, performed on the bird, which wilted when the knives withdrew. The waiter placed it on Denis's plate. I had the pork medaillons and George the cold sliced tongue.

"These missing drawings look like a good bit of fun." George slipped a nib of tongue into his mouth with some wine and swallowed it all at once. "Denny said there's a bill of lading that describes them as studies for Allan's portrait."

"That's right. I can get you a copy."

"So then, why do you think they're nude studies?" I had no idea. Why
did
Herbert say these might be nude studies?

"I think it is Herbert's wish, George." A smile with a great draught of wine; then Denis turned to me. "Is Allan Stein erotic for you, Herbert, I mean in the way a boy like Stéphane or your Turk can be?"

"Got to use the loo," George offered. Leaving must have become attractive for a number of reasons. Denis smiled, watching him go, then grasped my hand where it lay by the wine bottle. He squeezed my fingers complicitly. "I am wondering if the dead boy is interesting to you like the living one who might talk and be touched."

"Why?"

"For example, if you think of him in that moment, standing nude, watched by the painter."

I poured some wine. "Denis, I can't help but wonder what it is you're after." He shrugged, then shrugged again. "I do have a kind of longing."

"It is erotic?"

"Allan is erotic, but there's no scenario involved. There's no sex."

"What happens?"

"He's just standing very near and he's silent, staring at me— like in a photo, actually. The proximity is all that 'happens,' so I could touch him, though I never do. He's always poised there, but then nothing . . . proceeds." Part of Allan's appeal was his complete indifference to me. I liked the way he stared and stared, neither resisting nor responding to anything. In this way the dead are doubly fascinating. While the capture of them is impossible, they are also unable to defend themselves against our efforts to try, which means the delight of the struggle will go on forever, if that's what one wants. The fantasies I have pursued with the dead are inviolable; they can neither be realized nor resisted.

Denis leaned closer. "I have this too, with my father, a photo of him that I look at. He's standing, staring, but he can't move. His distance is permanent, 'poised,' as you say." I picked food absently from my plate and listened. Something like this was the case with Louise; I mean, even when she was with me, there was an impossible intimacy she promised that I could never have, and this fact presented itself over and over in the incompleteness of holding her, like trying to hold a torn-open body closed. "When the boy's cock is in you," Denis asked, "have you cried?"

The atmosphere was so unstable, the night air—that is, the cold which had pushed down from the sky (perhaps the heating elements in the stone were turned off)—that I shivered and pressed my legs together. A chill rose up my back and drew my eyes to the
stars, like certain painted saints who gaze upward. This circumstance made tears in my eyes, and that answer was all Denis needed.

He squeezed my hand and laughed, recognition, not derision, and I laughed too, but the cold air had gotten in me and the laugh felt like wind from the river, which had laved between buildings and naves, cradling the grotesque statuary, the gargoyles, and, spreading wide above the roofs, come to us in small downward gusts that blew through me and then whispered away into our silence. It's odd, describing this exchange, for the more meaningful it became, the less there was Denis and I had to say, and the less we spoke the more powerfully the night ruptured, so that the billowing places where, for example, Allan or Stéphane came rushing in—that is, the idea of Allan or Stéphane (for they dwelt equally in these uncharted interstices between the pleasantries of conversation, those silences and sighs where crushed thoughts could breathe and become huge)— these opened up, and we had only to be still and courteous to allow them to inhabit us or be inhabited. This is not a critique of language. I could have recorded every idea that was said or implied. It is a critique of "normal conversation," that pinched and narrow grid in which we take refuge every day. George desired it, "a decent conversation," as a barrier to our monstrous desires and all the deranged echoes their articulation might bring. What a gift, by contrast, to find Denis, whose appetite for this peculiar vertigo was generous and keen.

George returned and what was there to say? We laughed, which he took as a private joke, and now, as the evening ended, he sulked and I was at ease. Denis produced a fat cigar. We had had our way with the food, and now the sweet and bitter froth of a rich mousse was all that was left congealing on our plates. Amidst empty porcelain cups, laced with the tan filigree of dried espresso foam, and three snifters of
prune
, Denis puffed great sickly clouds of smoke into the air. The widow's "secretary" (Denis's word) had left a
garbled message with Denis's friend at the Musee Picasso. This was the phone call at the café. The Allan Stein drawings might be available, though the attendant wasn't at all sure which drawings these were. The widow was nevertheless interested in finding out more, and if the American, Monsieur Widener, wanted these mysteries, and they belonged to her, of course she would entertain any reasonable offers. How swift and clear and pleasing everything seemed to be just then, as, in the chilly black night, Allan Stein wavered and grew, emerging from the folds of someone else's history.

♦10  
♦

A
llan Stein's family left Paris every summer, usually to go to Florence, where they shared their vacation with Gertrude and Alice. The summer of 1913 they were going to Agay, a small fishing village on the French Mediterranean, and Sylvia Salinger was going with them. Sylvia and her friend Harriet Levy had taken an apartment by the Jardin du Luxembourg, just one block from the Steins. Allan saw them three or four times in a week, but always in the midst of exams and papers, boxing and tennis-—everything about Allan's life in Paris showed Sylvia that Allan was still a schoolboy. He did what he could, acting as Sylvia's tour guide, impressing her with his French and his riding, but next to her tea and shopping and concerts and shows, Allan's school-boy concerns were a constant reminder of the gap that kept them in separate worlds. In Agay there would be no gap. Sylvia and Allan became part of "the group," a self-absorbed crowd of young Americans, four women and Allan (with Mike and Sarah Stein to take care of them). That summer at the Hotel d'Agay was like an episode from the pages of some early Henry James novel. Sylvia recorded it in her letters:

"The trip down was delightful—we felt like regular Cook's tours—Mr. Stein kept the tickets, reserved the rooms at Marseilles, where we stayed ovemight—did all the tipping—just everything-
that's what I call traveling! And he is so nice to everybody that they do anything for him. Even the conductor on the train helped with the luggage when we changed at St.-Raphael. We got into Marseilles too late to see anything there, so we are going to stop over on our way back, for a couple of days.

"The Mediterranean is blue—just like it tells about in all the books—we go in swimming every morning about ten, and spend the rest of the time up till lunch swimming and drying in the sun. I have arms that are as red as coals, and I tried awful hard to be careful. The water is the kind that is so salty it just holds you up whether you want to stay up or not. You can float for hours, I am sure. The whole place is wonderfully like Carmel, only so much nicer. The food is wonderful—everything so well cooked—and all fresh— vegetables, fruit of all sorts—such peaches—fish—everything raised right here.

"The climate is perfect—just warm enough, and not too warm! The rocks are all kinds of red and beautiful, and most important of all, we eat on the verandah over-looking the sea. When we take walks in the woods we get the most delicious odors imaginable— all kinds of wonderful smelly flowers and pine trees and things. And yesterday I heard my first nightingale—the woods are full of them, and how they sing! I don't remember of ever having had such a feeling of perfect calm as you get here—there isn't one thing to complain of, not one. We have a little store just across the road, where we can buy all the regular country things, the maids are all pretty and sweet—everything is spick-span clean, and all the washing is done by the Italian women, in a river about a block from the hotel. I am trying to tell you all the details, but they seem to be slipping away."

In Agay, Allan bloomed. Photos show him content, sprawled on the lawn, surrounded by the four women of "the group." They depended on him for his French, his muscle, his constant joy and initi
ative, while Allan thrived on pampering them. He organized day hikes, bicycle tours, tennis tournaments on the one weed-infested court, taught them to swim, and tutored them on the peculiarities of the food and drink. There is little romance in Sylvia's letters home, despite the fact that Allan had fallen completely in love with her.

Sylvia was a good sport all summer, taking pride in a kind of tomboy fortitude Allan demanded and the other girls could not muster. When they toured she rode her bicycle with Allan and Mike, while the other girls took a carriage. On hikes, she walked the extra miles with Allan to fetch wine and food from the nearest village. She was physical and brash in a very American way, and she was becoming cosmopolitan:

"We have discovered something new about making our bathing comfortable. I have a big heavy bathrobe which I put over me, after taking off my wet suit, and sit in the sun. It feels so good, all the difference in the world; then we don't have to bring our wet suits up into our rooms at all. We just take them off down at the bathhouse and hang them on the line."

Notably, Allan never took time to write that summer. The letters he had habitually sent to Gertrude whenever his family took him away stopped in Agay. The earnest little boy who'd written long letters to his dearest Auntie Gertrude, bragging of his prowess as a reader and a boxer and a sportsman, had no time for that now. His life had begun to become his own. The formation of his pleasures, his satisfactions, became private and autonomous, unavailable to the adults who had treasured him.

His perfect summer went on and on, drifting toward its end.

In the early morning the boy stood in the garden again, shirtless, shoeless, his attention drifting from the warm blossoms to his small yellow pad of paper. He wore the torn khaki shorts. The wooden
toilet seat was cool and smooth against my knees, and I rested my elbows on the dusty windowsill, staring out at him. Was it homework? He was making lists, that much I could see, but what he saw or listed was swallowed in the clear morning air. Maybe it was flowers, or feelings for some awful creative writing class. (No, that would be an American affliction.) No one else was awake at that hour when he emerged, and I wouldn't have been either, except the soft shifting stairs he crept down past my door squealed, so that I woke these mornings to pee when he woke.

Sleepy, wearing just boxers, I ambled toward the door. The boy turned in the sun and smiled at me. Deep pleasure, the sunshine on my body warm so my nipples lay soft and flat, armpits a little dank with sweat, knees weak. I smiled too and was quiet, shuffling barefoot along the short stone path to stand by him. Really I wanted nothing more than this just now. The intensity of my pleasure was so great it required this silence, this spaciousness of intent, to even be bearable at all. His pad had names of birds, and we listened for a while without speaking. We heard a call so that he wrote another name down. We watched the trees of the park shift in the slight breeze beyond the garden's brick wall. The shadow by the wall was damp and cool, so the turned earth there gave out an odor that twined about the garden path, vaporous, and lifted to our nostrils with the warmth of the morning.

"The birds," he whispered. "I list them." He lifted the pad and smiled, and I said nothing but touched the pad with my hand, and then his shoulder, where I left my hand cupping the round of his muscle in my palm.