Stolen Pleasures (31 page)

 

THE REALTOR UNLOCKED the gate and stepped aside to permit the family to precede him. The family crossed the garden, the children, a small boy and a girl, maneuvering around and between their parents in order to lead the way. Not all of the family were present. Two of the older children were in boarding school and a third child
was in college. Rain had fallen only a few minutes before; steam was rising along the roof and a glittering was going on in the shade of the garden. A few doves were stirring in the trees. When the realtor moved toward the house the parents followed without lingering. The realtor spoke very little as he led the way out onto the terrace and back through the rooms, as if words were unnecessary since it was obvious that the property was to belong to this family. The mother was confused by the certainty. Before marriage she had been a hungry actress, and the years of her marriage—only the two younger children were hers—had not overcome her mistrust of certainty. She felt the need to catch the eye of the realtor and, even if her glance appeared to be flirtatious, convey to him her desire to comply. He did not meet her eyes but, his head bowed as if in solemn understanding, he moved away to lead the family farther.

W
HEN MILO JUKOVICH was nineteen he introduced himself to his father. The encounter took place at the unveiling of his father's
Three Angels
on the steps of the loftiest cathedral in Los Angeles, before the archbishop, film celebrities, the mayor, and a back row of priests. Spectators, massed on the sidewalk and street, were also witness to the sculptor's alarm at the approach of this finely handsome youth in a dark suit, esthetically tieless, a slender young man who evoked the sculptor himself as he may have been at that age, climbing the stone steps to his present self. The ceremony was over, the television cameras departing, the participants chatting in the shadow of the
Angels,
when Milo confronted his father.

Bowing his head in awe and fear, smiling with trembling lips, he said, “I wonder if you recognize me. I'm Milo, your son.”

Juri Jukovich leaped away. He leaped backwards, bumping into the archbishop, and that esteemed person's vestments, lifted on the wind, partially concealed the artist as he paused there behind the heavier man to take a long, piercing look at the stranger who
was claiming a relationship not less sacredly binding than that of mother and child. Then he fled into the dim and glowing interior of the cathedral.

Alicia, Milo's mother, had been Juri's one and only wife, and when their brief union ended—while their child was still in the womb—the sculptor declared publicly that he had never lain with a woman, that at the age of twelve he had vowed to remain celibate and was still so at forty-four. The several women who always claimed loudly, in cafés and in other artists' beds, to have been his mistresses were all invalidated. Shortly before his son's birth, his chisel struck the first block of marble from which a saint was to emerge, the
Santa Clara,
and his ardent devotion to his Saints Series was cited by one prominent critic as proof of the artist's chastity.

Alicia herself blamed Juri's extreme jealousy for the end of the marriage and disavowal of his only son. A beautiful girl, her long dark hair bound up with narrow satin ribbons, she was eighteen when they met at a welcome party for Jukovich, who, already famous, had come out from New York and with his own hands was building himself an adobe studio on the highest accessible mountain in Santa Barbara. All evening he kept his distance from her, never spoke to her and never let her out of his sight, as if her very presence threatened him with irreparable harm. But the next day he knocked at her door, his arms and his pockets filled with wild lupines, poppies, and rattler grass.

They were married soon after.

When Alicia told him she was pregnant, Juri begged her not to allow a child to disturb their sublime union. She refused to consider the ways and means of denying birth to the child within her and fled
to Yugoslavia, Jukovich's birthplace, where Milo, too, was born, in Dubrovnik. On her return to America she settled in San Diego, her own birthplace, and wrote to Juri, inviting him to come meet his son. Juri wrote back only to deny his paternity, and she sued for divorce. All this Milo was told at a very early age, and, though he could not understand it yet, he sensed the implications of it for him just by the way she held his gaze.

Unlike Jukovich, the man his mother married when Milo was four loved generously. An impresario, he was the bosom friend of singers, acrobats, musicians. Milo, wakened in the night by a man's voice tenderly singing, soft-footed his way to the study door and from there watched his mother's husband wandering the room alone, a glass of wine in one hand, a slice of panettone in the other, singing between sips and bites. At times, Milo felt that he would like to love this man.

Alicia and Milo clipped pictures of Jukovich from magazines and newspapers, most of them of the artist beside a saint sculpture larger by far than the man himself. So Milo observed with growing fear the change in his mother's contours after she explained to him that his stepfather and herself had created another person. He suffered nightmares about a monster boy far larger than other boys' brothers, and the fact that the boy was to be a half-brother caused him more trouble, not less. After that first half-brother was born, another half-brother came along, and then a half-sister, and Milo withdrew further and further at each birth, despite favors and kisses showered upon him by the mother and father of the other children.

At twelve Milo began violin lessons. He rode the bus once a week to his teacher's studio and often, on the way back, got off
the bus partway to transfer to another bus that took him to a park where his father's
San Diego
stood within a circle of treasured trees. Hidden behind a tree like a spy, he watched closely for holy vibrations, saw none and felt none. His father had created an ugly chunk of brownish stone with purple blotches, its face ridiculously small for the rest of it, but would never admit he'd created a living and breathing son, better looking by far than this thing called a saint. If your father was just an ordinary father and told everybody he had no son, people would call him a liar. But if your father was famous for all the saints he was making and said he had no son, then he had no son, period. Milo, distressed, wandered the park until dark and, returning home late every time, was always gratified to see his mother looking worried.

At the university he chose to major in art history, enrolling in the summer session. Since he was not a participant in human time—his birth unacknowledged by his father—he felt his own time was lost time and he studied relentlessly, hoping to catch up with everyone else. Girls hung around, for he was mature, eloquent, and scholarly, but his time was spent poring over art books in libraries and examining every sculpture and painting in museums and galleries.

Curious about his name, the students sent one among them to approach the subject. “You've heard the scuttlebutt about Jukovich?” the fellow asked, falling into step with Milo. “They say he had a son who died at birth, and he got this fixation he was being punished for making out with a woman. Worse, a married woman. So he decided he was finished with that part of himself. Tragic.”

“It's true he had a son,” Milo said, “but I never died.”

Not breaking his stride, Milo turned his head to see the effect of this. Awe. The student was in awe of him, as though Milo had just appeared on earth at that moment, fully formed.

It was then that Milo approached his father, having seen in the eyes of the prying student the terrific effect of his own presence on the world. But Jukovich's denial of his son, so publicly at the unveiling ceremony, was ruinous.

Milo writhed in his bed all night, burning with humiliation. For days he lay wrapped in blankets. The only food he could stomach was warm milk with bread pieces in a bowl, and this his mother brought him, always with a kiss for his brow. When he was able to sit up, he began a critique of the art of Juri Jukovich. Late into the night he wrote, examining with excruciating insight the artist's Saints Series. He pointed out the absence of faith and fervency in the figures, comparing them with sculptures of other renowned contemporaries, as, for example, the work of Henry Moore. The figures of that artist communicated with the universe, as did the Easter Island faces, as did Giacometti's minuscule and elongated figures, drawn out on the rack of cosmic anxiety, distillations of that artist's staring need to believe in something more than nothing. As for Jukovich's saints, they were born good children who never cried and who grew up unafflicted by doubts, their huge size a reward for obeying their parents and eating everything on their plate. They were unrelated to the emaciated saints on Byzantine frescoes in the monasteries of Cappadocia and Greece, their faces tormented by temptations, their hair years long, hanging to the ground. Often, in the still of the night, Milo laughed out loud at his own pedantry and presumptions, and more than the critique itself his laughter helped to heal him.

Signing the critique with a pseudonym, he mailed it to the university periodical. When a suspicious fellow student, periodical in hand, sat down at Milo's table in the café and asked him if he'd written the essay, Milo raised his eyes, so purely honest they left no doubt about the eyes as windows of the soul. “I figure it's the work of some shithead, some ignoramus, somebody holier than thou. One of those,” he said. “A nobody.”

Alicia was a woman of boundless compassion, always ready to grant understanding to the misunderstood, and when Milo gave her a copy of the periodical, without comment, the author of the Jukovich critique was kindly counted in among the benighted. She said he was probably a sadly envious young man, an iconoclast, a misfit. Then Milo wished he had never even learned the alphabet. With this attempt to bring down his father he had only revealed his own evil nature.

The next day in anatomy lab, leafing through the catalogue of a cat supplier, he was dismayed by photos of the warehouse interior with shelf upon shelf of cat cadavers. His mother was very fond of cats, and two or three were always asleep on his bed. Any day now a dead cat would be set before him. Then he felt that he himself would someday be as anonymously dead as these cats, each one's unique personality eventually forgotten by those who had named them and perhaps had loved them. Alone in the lab he bowed his head to the black counter, vowing never to betray again his kinship with all abandoned creatures.

On foot, with bedroll and pack on his back, Milo set out on his pilgrimage, wanting to find in each of Jukovich's saints that same love for all creatures of the earth who were abandoned or
thought they were. If he were to gaze long enough at each saint, he might find himself bathed in emanations of love and his existence prized beyond measure. Tucked in his breast pocket was the little book
Guide to the Jukovich Saints,
a publication of the California Tourist Bureau. His mother, as usual up earlier than the others, kissed him and adjusted his backpack, and he walked out into a summer that was to become the hottest on record for the entire state.

After trudging Highway 5 north for two hours, he was picked up by a couple his own age. He sat in the back seat with a huge dog whose gagging odor mingled with the heady fragrance of the joint the couple was smoking and of every joint they had ever smoked in that rattling car. They offered to share with Milo but he told them he hoped to alter his view of existence by other means. He told them he was the son of Juri Jukovich and on a pilgrimage to every one of his father's saints, and they told him that the
San Francisco
was located in the rose garden in Golden Gate Park, and if he ever made it up there he could crash at their house. He knew that the sculpture overlooked the Bridge, at a great height, but he did not correct them, for courtesy's sake. The girl turned around often to gaze into his eyes, a gaze he took for seductive longing, until he began to wonder if her face was reflecting a spiritual longing on his own face, an expression he was pleased to learn about. They left him off in San Clemente. No ride after that one was to be so pleasant.

The
San Clemente
—
aluminum, 8ft.
stood on the beach, affixed to a concrete base, unshakable by whatever storms might come sweeping in off the Pacific. Milo, reluctant to remove the beach
towels drying over its head, sat down to wait. A girl in the scarcest bikini he had ever seen sat down beside him. She asked him why he was sitting there with all his clothes on, and he told her he had come there not to hang out and enjoy the beach but to admire his father's sculpture, above them. She said he was wrong, that it was not a sculpture but a state-of-the-art sewage disposal plant and that's all it was. She wandered off, and toward evening the owners of the towels took them away. Then the face of the saint reflected the sunset clouds ablaze over the entire sky, and figuring this reflection was evidence of the spirit inherent in the sculpture, Milo lay down to sleep at its feet. Lovers around him in the warm dark kept him awake, but at last the sand cooled, the lovers left, and he slept. When he awoke he found himself within a vast, dense fog, and now he saw that the saint was desecrated by obscenities scratched over its surface. Cold and saddened, he gathered up his belongings and made his way out from the fog.