The End of the World as We Know It (22 page)

They were clean. The whole family was clean, although they
had no place to wash, except a big washtub on Saturday nights. Mary used to babysit for us with her husband, Andy, until my mother decided they'd stolen enough silver. Grandpaw was feeble but a hard worker, and Grandmaw was fat and smelled of asafetida, a balm she wore in a small bag around her neck. I don't know what for.

Part of the way they made their living was that the retarded uncle, Henry, would collect empty pop bottles from the side of the highway, on endless round-trips to and from town, and the family would return these for the two-cent deposit. Every Saturday morning, we would spend hours washing the bottles with a scrub brush, washing them inside and out, so that Mr. Russ at the general store wouldn't think they were dirty rednecks.

Between our houses, there was a wide field covered by dense trees and undergrowth. It was our endless private playground, so dense that in the high summer you could not see Roy's house from ours. It had a small meadow in the middle, not visible from either house. The meadow was covered with old empty cans of engine oil, and we would pour the excess from the cans and try to start small fires. There was a dark, dense place where grapevines grew into an arbor, a private arch I would crawl into, hidden from the world, and masturbate in the damp half-light.

One day my brother and I were in the field, lying in the tall grass with the rusted oil cans looking at the sky. Roy joined us.

“I've got a date tonight,” he said. “She's ready. I know it. We're going to do it. Tonight.”

He had our attention. Just the thought of doing it with somebody, of skin on skin in the back of a car, in the dark tall grass of a field, out by the river on a broad smooth rock.

“Just wish I had somebody to practice on. Yeah. I'd like to practice on somebody right now.”

I turned over on my stomach. I undid my jeans and slid them down. “Here,” I said. “Practice on me.” It was the summer I turned thirteen. He came inside me.

My brother watched. We never spoke about it ever again, afterward.

Roy never said a word about what had happened. We never knew what happened on his date and, when he moved away not long after, we didn't know where he had gone and we were getting older and more sophisticated and Mary and Andy had stolen the silver butter plates and we didn't go see Grandmaw and Grandpaw so much anymore.

I don't know whether any of these people are still alive.

Every part of my being was sexual. When I turned thirteen, I was four-foot-eleven, but changes were starting in my body, and soon I could come across my naked stomach, an orgasm followed by the searing burning that the boy, my first handsome instructor by the river, would never know. He would go on to take for granted the pleasures of his body, he would have sex with women, he would have children who would be whole and healthy and happy and untouched in their beds. These things would not happen to me.

My children would be deformed monsters. They would be spongy balls of pus. I would violate their innocence in the dark. Their mother would die.

One day a friend of my sister's was out to play. She was eleven. I found her alone in the sitting room and, wordlessly, I knelt beside her where she sat on the sofa. She knew what I wanted. I
wanted to touch her. I wanted to touch and kiss her and hold her and believe for one minute I was one of the cadets on Saturday mornings with hair on their chests and long thigh muscles that moved as they dived off the high board. I knelt beside her, knelt on the floor beside the sofa, and slowly slid my hand toward hers. I touched the little finger of her hand with the little finger of mine and I came in my pants and I was afraid for her and I ran from the room and I never touched her again.

For years, I waited for word, afraid for her. I was afraid to hear of her death, of the boils and running sores and searing pain inside her.

Anyone could have told me I was mistaken. Anyone could have told me it was not my fault. But I didn't tell anybody, for fear of the terrible thing that would happen. That thing will happen now.

I just wanted to touch. I just wanted to be touched.

My grandmother, my father's mother, Jinks, had a small summer cottage on the Potomac. We would stay there a lot in the summer. One year, my brother and I took along the boy who had masturbated down in the creek.

Next door lived a blond, athletic girl, a year older than I was, and she and I would ride out in the evenings, every evening after supper, across the tarmac and down the dirt roads that led through the creeks and the swamps of the big river. As we bicycled through all the dense heat, heavy with sweat, when the bees circled crazy drunk around the rotted apples lining the road, in the long summer twilights, she would sing me saccharine religious songs as we rode along. She had an amazing voice, rich and throaty.

It was a small house. I don't know where everybody slept. The grownups would stay up much later than we would, having fun, and they would always be up in the morning, so I don't know where they all slept or how many beds there were.

There was a portrait of General Nathan Bedford Forrest hanging in the living room. Every night we would eat crabmeat and tomato sandwiches. That's all we ever ate, it seems like.

The boys slept in a screened-in little guest cottage that had one room and a bathroom and a wide sleeping porch. The boys would all shower together after swimming, and one day we were horsing around and knocked the top off the toilet and I cut my foot really badly, right across the heel. I still have the scar.

We were miles from town and a doctor, so my mother bandaged it tightly and I hobbled around and stayed out of the river the next day. The next night, after supper, the athletic blond girl called me to go for our ride, and I went. I wanted to hear her sing, “He can stem the tide. . . .”

On the way back, we noticed that blood was seeping through my bandage. We stopped to rest, and we lay down in a soybean field off the road. The plants were up over our heads, when we lay back.

She kissed me, and then she kissed me more urgently, she put her tongue in my mouth and my tongue slid over her slick teeth and then she pulled down her shorts and then she pulled down mine and she stuck me inside of her. I was thirteen. She was a year older. I didn't even know what was happening.

When we were done, there was blood all over her legs. I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was something terrible,
something I had caused. It was blood from my cut. She washed herself off in a creek off the river before we went home.

I told my brother and his friend what had happened, lying in the mosquitoed dark of the sleeping porch. They didn't believe me. I told them again. I described it. They said prove it.

The next day, after swimming, we took the girl next door into the boys' sleeping cottage and there she took off her bathing suit and I did too and we got shyly under white sheets and we did it again. My brother and his friend sat on the other single bed and watched us.

My brother watched me do it with the girl next door.

The next winter, my grandmother got sick and died. The cottage was let go of, and I never saw the girl again. I heard she worked in a bank when she grew up.

T
HERE'S ONLY A LITTLE
bit more. There's not much more except more of the same. There's driving a beautiful girl on a dark night out to the river, a blond and lovely girl who had slept around and who had chosen me, for no reason, for some reason of her own knowing, or just simple hunger, maybe, and lying with her next to the river and not being able to touch her. Going swimming with her in my underwear in the black night, out in the black rocky water of the river, she in her bra and underpants, because I was too afraid of being naked, I was so thin, and she was embarrassed for me, too afraid of being aroused and touching her.

I have regretted that moment all my life. To think of it. The touches not touched. The kisses given in fear. The sex that did not happen, again and again and again. The sex that did happen,
the sex I think about every minute of every day. The ease with which other men wear their bodies, the urgency of their honest desire. Or so I imagine. So I suppose. The whole sensual life that was all I ever cared about that passed me by. That I let go of. Let go of hoping for. The life of the flesh and its pleasures. The silence in which my life has passed.

Just a little bit more.

He was tall and lean, with a big chest and broad shoulders and coal-miner's hands. The dense, close beard on his face grew in perfect lines, so that, when he was just shaved, he looked as though some careful artist had shaded his face with a brown pencil. He was four years older than I was, he was twenty-one, and we met by accident and I fell in love with him. He fell in love with me. He kissed me once on the forehead in a dark room, the room where he lived. The room was hung with multicolored gauze curtains. It was late, very late at night and raining, and he had just told me the story of his father's death, of the cruelties of his youth. He was an artist and a romantic. We both smoked cigarettes. It was the spring of my senior year in high school.

He smoked beautifully, dragging long and deep on the Lucky Strikes we all smoked then. He was handsome, even though his ears stuck out. In fact, he was beautiful in the way that only young men of that age can be, in full obedience to his passions, in full control of his body and its gracefulness. The clarity of his desire would fade in time, probably, but it had a pinpoint accuracy then. He loved women, and he loved to possess them. In high school, he had fathered a child that had been put up for adoption; he was to father another with the girl out by the river, a baby also returned to oblivion and, perhaps, to love.

Everybody loved him for his beauty, for the deep resonance of his voice, for his soft Southern accent and his longing eyes. He was like Patroclus, adored by Achilles. And he loved me with a blinding light that didn't interfere in any way with his absolute hunger for women.

I had never been in love before. He kissed me on the forehead and told me he loved me, and I burned with both love and shame. I didn't know what he meant. I didn't know what he wanted, or why he wanted something of me.

He was the kind of man I would never be. He had the kind of body I would never have. And he loved himself in a way that I would never know, even for a minute. If I had been handsome like that for fifteen minutes in high school, my whole life would have been different. On prom night. On a fall evening when men in short jackets burned leaves in the yard. On a night by the river with a blond girl whose name alone still brings a flush of shame to my face.

We talked for hours. I don't remember what we talked about. Surely we talked about love.

We lay on his bed in the dark, his arms around me, his face close to mine. I could feel his beard against my neck, a day's growth scratching. I could smell the nicotine on his breath. He said, “I wish I was queer so I could screw you.” He said he loved me. In an hour, he was in the arms of the woman he had chosen for that night. For that moment.

He was the only person I had ever allowed to touch me. I allowed him to touch me because I loved him and I wasn't afraid of him. For the first time in my life, everything was blessed by
love, a love that didn't invade or burn or bleed, a love that was urgent and heated and totally imaginary.

Nothing happened.

All that spring, all that summer, nothing happened that didn't feel illuminated by love and joy. Forever, it would be what love was meant to be. It was the model for everything that happened afterward, the men secret and dark and unspoken, the women public and too candid. And part of the joy was that, in public, to my family, we were perfectly ordinary friends, close but not perversely so.

There is a delicacy and an etiquette to a secret love. There are no scenes, no fights in restaurants; there are only whispered confidences in darkened rooms, lit by candlelight, illuminated by a bridled passion.

It is unreal. It is unforgettable. His tiny waist. His immense shoulders. The length of his white torso. The sound of his voice saying my name. It is without replacement.

Still I was haunted by the fear of dying, by the fear of killing him. And still the burning pain went on and on. And yet, when he whispered in my ear that he loved me, it was a fear that calmed, a pain that was forgotten. It was wrong, he had kissed me on my forehead and that was wrong, he had said he loved me and given me an erection and that was wrong, but the fact that it was wrong made the fear more bearable. It made the fear seem justified. It made the death not just desired, but deserved.

H
E LIVES NOW
in the Deep South, with a young second wife, and a brand-new baby. He would be almost sixty now. He
probably remembers almost none of it. If he remembers it at all, he rarely thinks about it. I think about it all the time.

Life replaces things. It replaces things once vital to you, to make room for other things in your heart. I think of him almost every day. I say his name when I pray for the people I have loved. Not for who he is now, I don't know who he is now, but for who he was then. He is untouched by time, in my prayers. In my prayers, I am untouched by time, and nothing fades.

M
Y FATHER'S CAR
broke down. That's all it was. That's all it took. A stupid Chevy Chevette on the side of the road between Weyers Cave and Staunton, choking to half-life in the half-light of an early September evening.

The boy who loved me had asked me to drive him to the airport to pick up his roommate, who was coming back to school for the fall. The drive was less than an hour and I asked my parents and they said it was fine and we went off, the man who loved me and I, and picked up the roommate and then the car broke down.

It was fine weather. I was leaving for college in two days. Summer's back was broken, but it was still hot and the light was fading, just beginning to turn to that blue haze that makes Virginia unlike any other place, a particulate light that falls on certain summer nights, a light like a mist.