Boarded Windows (17 page)

The book’s title and racy cover seemed to make my neighbor uncomfortable, but he voiced no complaints. He began with Pauvert’s intro, translating slowly and, it seemed, inexpertly. We both got bored before he finished. I took the book back, opened it at random, and, after a few whimsical loops and spirals, landed my index finger on a sentence. Keeping my finger planted, I handed
Le sexe
back to my neighbor. He had trouble with these first fruits of my bibliomancy: “‘Of course, clitoral masturbation’”—here I foolishly giggled, but he kept reading—“‘persists more or less’ … ‘assiduously’—maybe there we have the false friend—‘during adolescence, contrary to the theories of Papa Freud.’”

“‘Papa Freud,’ that’s cute,” I said, taking the book back and randomly choosing another sentence. This one was harder, and I’ve accordingly omitted internal quotation marks, since I didn’t write down the page number and can’t now sort out Zwang’s translated words from my neighbor’s guesswork and commentary: “Exploratory furor—the word might be
passion—
makes something or other—wow, these are hard words—is … vulva? … and the lazy—I don’t think the word is lazy—”

“The lazy vulva?” I said. “Sounds like a band name.”

“I don’t think the word is
lazy,”
he said.

“Papa Freud and the Lazy Vulvas—no, Vulvae.”

“Shall I continue on?”

The third sentence didn’t go much better, and by then we’d finished our frozen pizza. I’ve since discovered that the University of Wisconsin’s Milwaukee campus has an original edition of
Le sexe
in the rare books room of their Golda Meir Library, which I plan to visit soon, though it will mean finally buying that new intake manifold for Wade’s former hatchback.

I
N MID-DECEMBER OF ’91, ON MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY, Wade, Wanda, Maryanne, and I assembled at the apartment for a makeshift dinner and a few tokes, after which we’d walk to the oversized, vaguely bohemian corner bar where Wade possibly did business. The phone rang as I was finishing my tuna sandwich, and soon my mother was wishing me a happy birthday in a vowely, asperous, often incomprehensible voice—“hot potato voice,” it was later suggested, that being one of the symptoms of peritonsillar abscess, or quinsy as it’s commonly called. I stretched the phone as far away from Wade as I could, not wanting my mother to hear his voice in the background. I thanked her for her card, a grievance woven into my gratitude since a card seemed a puny maternal gift for a son’s twenty-first birthday. She had a sore throat, she said, was having trouble swallowing. “Hubble’s hollow men?” I teased. She repeated herself. She hadn’t seen a doctor yet. I told her to see one right away, but perhaps my concern seemed perfunctory. I thought about asking her a few questions about Martha Dickson but figured it wasn’t the time. She told me she loved me. She said she was proud of me. “For what?” I said, to my later regret, but at least I mumbled that I loved her too and thanked her again for the card. Next I should have called my aunt. My aunt and mother, despite their proximity (roughly fifteen miles), weren’t in close contact with each other just then, but certainly my aunt would have chauffeured Marleen to a clinic or hospital on my request. Probably I shouldn’t forever berate myself for not leaping to action over what I took to be a bad sore throat.

It was a Friday night and the bar was crowded, lots of people trying to hail a waitress or squeeze up to the bar, others walking their drinks oafishly, gingerly, or in one case sexily back to their booths or tables, for instance with two pints raised above bumping level in the semaphoric
U,
an image I now suspect I’ve recalled not from that night but from a Michelob commercial. “Nothing bad had happened,” as Michael Krüger wrote in
The End of the Novel,
published around the time of that twenty-first birthday, “except that everything was getting worse in the most cheerful manner.” We found a booth near the jukebox, the air around which, Wade said, was doing some kind of violence to a song he’d always liked. There are some public spaces, he said, that in some moments can enrich and revive a record, even a record seemingly parched by overexposure, public spaces and collections of bodies and historical forces that can work miracles of restoration, returning, for instance, all the impudence and alienation, all the endless flux and eternal striving, to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”; and there are some public spaces, he went on, that will invariably debase or deform a great record or song, though this debasement or deformation doesn’t normally happen in drugstores or elevators (where traditional Muzak, if you’ll excuse the oxymoron, was still played in the early nineties, whereas now my neighborhood druggist plays the Staple Singers and the Ramones, though I’ve not yet heard “I Wanna Be Sedated”), but rather in places where authenticity and individualism are respected, but stupidly. It was this latter fate, this kitsching and vitiation, that befell the songs limping from the corner bar’s jukebox that night, Wade argued. I started to feel sympathy for the songs I liked, exaggerated contempt for those I didn’t.

Wade invited me to the pool table. Predictably, he was an excellent, theatrical, erotically limber player. That’s one of the things he was in general: a player, ein Spieler. He threw a strict dart too, slaughtered me at around the clock and football. When we rejoined Wanda and Maryanne, he leaned under the table to find his shearling coat, pulled from one of its pockets an unwrapped paperback of Goethe’s
Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers.
“You’ll pick it up,” he said when I recalled my two inattentive years of high school German. Wanda’s gift was a pair of saddle-brown cowboy boots with a tan-and-red filigree that I immediately began tracing with my index finger. Wade had helped her pick them out, she said. Maryanne gave me a deck of playing cards that I’m pretty sure she just happened to have in her purse.

Our plan had been to maintain a noncommittal buzz at the corner bar for an hour or so, then pile into Wade’s car and claim my free half bottle of cheap champagne at Minneapolis’s leading nightclub. This plan was losing its appeal, but I couldn’t think up a better idea and figured that even a mild expression of ambivalence or discontentment would come off pathetically on my birthday, which really was proceeding nicely, only I no longer felt like being in a crowd. “Maybe we should just go back to your place and play records,” Maryanne said, as if she’d sensed my change of heart. “We could have our
own
dance party,” she added in the movie-voice of the kid impresario, then laughed her intoxicatingly sharp laugh.

Back at the apartment, I wiped the fog off my glasses while Wade looked for his bootjack. “Are we barefootin’?” he said. “Not me, pard, I’m wearin’ ma new boots,” I said, struggling to pull them on. “Bend your knees,” he said. They fit just fine, were more comfortable than I’d expected. My twills weren’t in perfect sync, as Wade needlessly pointed out, but I tucked them in the boots and earned compliments all around. Wade sat on the couch and rolled a couple numbers on a Judith Butler book, while Maryanne sang the chorus to “No Parking on the Dance Floor” in the standard robotic nasal and with accompanying gestures. Wade swayed slowly up from the sofa, holding a lit joint in each hand, his face to the floor, his hair like fresh blacktop descending a hill in the Coteau du Missouri. I scissored one of the joints from his fingers and took a long, swooning hit that seemed to relax my shoulders till they fused with my hips. Maryanne turned up the stereo.

I won’t carry on about the songs we played. I’ve in fact just deleted a complete (and, I concede, largely falsified) set list from our utopian three-hour dance party. It should be clear and will become clearer that I’m no dogged opponent of inventories or nostalgia, though I’d like to think my nostalgia is defensibly more personal than historical, that my sentimentalities over the hour of my youth have to do with my youth, not its hour (though one can’t separate oneself from history), but even if I could remember the full dance-party set list, and could then conquer the temptation to edit the list, deleting errors of taste or attributing them to one of the other dancer-deejays, inserting hipper or squarer selections, making the list broader, then narrower, then more worldly, then more provincial, then more multicultural, then more ethnocentric, then more masculine, then more feminine, then straighter, then queerer, then more timeless, then more period, even if I had magical recall and could overcome all obstacles of self-consciousness, I’d still be disinclined to trivialize this memorial polestar with a droning roll call of pop songs, which isn’t to say I think the songs themselves were or are trivial, which is to say the opposite.

In Goethe’s novel—I read it in translation years after Wade left Minneapolis—Werther says that when dancing with Lotte he was “no longer a person.” That seems the best way to describe the transcendence I felt dancing that night. It was something like meditation, I think, though really I can’t say, having not tried that. My mother Marleen meditated for a year or so in the figurative seventies (it was the eighties, but she wasn’t always in her time, a trait she passed on to me, though not genetically). At any rate, I felt easy, unselfconscious, and transported that night. Voided. Maybe I skimmed the Christian ideal of Philippians 2:7, in which Jesus is said to have “emptied himself.” The comparison is absurd and, obviously, blasphemous; I’m letting it stand only to humble myself for having thought it, and because I did feel blissfully emptied that night, some kind of just-Windexed mirror dumbly taking in everyone and everything. “Voided” was too strong, however; were that accurate, I doubt I’d remember having been voided.

Everyone danced better than they were. Wade Jaggered and Browned, spun and twisted, held out one leg, made circles with his calf, rotated an ankle, clapped and kicked, skated and snapped, punched and chopped the air, whirled his forearms around themselves like a lawnmower blade, like a Temptation (I was surprised when he told me he favored sweet-but-not-sugary Eddie Kendricks over salty-but-not-coarse David Ruffin). He pretended to dry dishes and dial rotary phones, did the Monkey and the Chicken and the Dog, all those animal dances, did none of the dances correctly, to the extent that I could judge, yet did all of them perfectly. He wasn’t afraid to use his hips that night, and neither was I. Wanda did the same narrow sway all night, wore the same monotonously contented smile, never stopped dancing, even during songs I knew she disliked. She wore her moth-eaten sweater longer than seemed comfortable, but finally pulled it off midsway. Her tight, stop-sign-red tank top was sweat stained underneath her small breasts and around her lower spine, and when she turned away from me, her upper back looked beautiful, especially the shadow that sometimes formed between her pronounced shoulder blades. During one song I gently touched her back with my palms—really I was trying to just hover over her skin, but I couldn’t be so exact while dancing and would often slip and make contact. Then I tried to touch only the fine hairs on her pale arms, never the skin, and the hairs seemed to reach out for my palms (manutropism, I believe this is called), until she herself reached out for me and we kissed for a long time. It felt like a goodbye kiss, and filled me with longing for routine kisses in the distant future.

Most of Maryanne’s moves, like Wade’s, were overtly referential, but never predominantly ironic. At one point she grabbed one of our mismatched dining-room chairs, a metal one with a blue vinyl seat-cushion marked with thin, wandering rips like rivers on a map, straddled it, and pushed it over and shook with a mock ecstatic frenzy that, as just indicated, wasn’t really mock. Not long after she put her hands against the wall and walked in place, as on a treadmill, her camp shirt rising up her jeans, inviting one or more of us to imagine a police search, inviting me to kneel on the floor and run my hands up her thighs and ass and kiss the small of her back.

I refused this invitation, which hadn’t really been made, and didn’t dwell on my refusal. Our Saturnalia was hugely sexual, but not hugely lustful; when the four of us laid out our blankets and coats and prepared mutely for sleep on the hard living-room floor, there was some touching and neck kissing but no significant removal of clothes, unless some were removed after I nodded off, and I doubt that anyone felt stupid, ashamed, regretful, or even hungover the next morning, when the phonograph stylus was perhaps still stuck in the slick limbo between the last band and the paper label, and was thumping like a heart all night, though I doubt that as well, since my turntable back then was a nearly inerrant retractor.

O
N THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19 OF 1991, I CAME HOME from the closing shift somewhere around ten thirty, carrying in each of my parka pockets a new CD for myself, though I still hadn’t done any Christmas shopping. None marked my entrance. Wade was probably making deals at the oversized corner bar. It was dark in the living room, dining room, and kitchen, but a lot of light was coming from the bedroom. Wanda didn’t answer when I called her name, but she was home, naked and asleep in bed, lying on her back, her left knee slightly bent, her right arm forming an L that finished above her head. I lingered a moment in the doorway.

How to characterize her condition? She seemed in a state of unconsciousness shallower than death but deeper than deep sleep; I could see her breathing, but it was like the breathing of a statue. The bedroom’s overhead light was on, its lopsided fixture basketing many dust-cushioned, capsized insects while frost-shading two white bulbs of Wanda’s preferred one hundred watts, hard glare-pears unchanged during Wade’s renovations. The light made her look even paler than she was, and against that heightened paleness her acne-reddened face and a few other faint lines of color, on which more soon, seemed particularly contrasting, something like the pink carnation pinned to a white coat in the old Marty Robbins song, or, to exaggerate the contrast, like a crab-apple tree after a snowfall, menstrual blood on a new white sheet. I never liked how strongly Wanda’s ribcage pushed at her skin, and often thought her stomach looked and felt weak and papery, but it looked beautiful that night, stretched like clay, her oval naval like a surprised mouth on a long face. Although she was naked or nude, not even partly covered by a blanket or sheet (recall how hot it was in our apartment during winter), from my doorway vantage she seemed somehow clothed. I held a blink as if to reset my vision. Once, not long ago, at a public swimming pool to which I’d escorted a friend and her toddler, my eyes were arrested by a woman’s leg clad in fishnet stockings, odd poolside attire outside of pornography, and my penis rose out of my swimsuit’s undernet. My doubletake, however, revealed that there was no woman at all, that a metal, mesh-top patio table had cast a retiform shadow on the bony legs of a prepubescent girl. Legs not unlike Wanda’s, I suppose, though shorter. She—Wanda, not the poolside girl—stayed unstirred when I walked in the bedroom, in spite of my ka-thunking cowboy boots. Looking down on her, I saw that her skin was adorned with creases, marks, impressions, and other pinkened traces of rope. My later research suggested that these were more specifically traces of decorative knots such as a five-lead by seven-bight Turk’s Head, or rather four traces of that knot, forming dimple-bracelets around each ankle and wrist. There was a fainter, complicated tortoiseshell pattern latticing her torso, vestigial I suspect of a presentational wrap derived from Japanese kinbaku or shibari bondage.