When the Nines Roll Over (25 page)

I carried a blue bucket over to him, dipped a yellow sponge wrist-deep into the soapy water and then circled Hector the way I would circle a marble statue in the museum, inspecting him, front, flanks, and rear. Standing behind him, razor handle in my mouth like a pirate, I wrung out the sponge, watched the water cascade down his back, down the steep channel of his spine, through the cleft of his buttocks and down his legs before puddling at his feet. Hector was rocking gently back and forth, pressing himself against me and away, a sly, teasing motion.

I thought of the first boy I had fucked, a quiet punk rocker with spiked orange hair. We thought it would be funny to screw each other in the end zone of our high school football field, and it was, we were laughing hysterically as we tore each other nude. But then he grew abruptly silent, turned away on all fours, and offered himself to me. It was Saturday night, the school's lights all out, the crickets screaming, the wind rattling the pine branches. Stars everywhere, hovering above the hilltops, above the school's clock tower, above our own steaming skin.

But this was part of Hector's game. He wanted me to forget myself, to drop the razor and
do him
, here and now, standing on the wet tarp. I don't think our audience would have complained; they stared at us feverishly, waiting.

I dropped to my knees and lathered the twin-veined diamonds of Hector's calves. He stood on the balls of his feet, to flex the muscle, and it struck me how intimately Hector knew his own body, far better than I knew my own. He knew exactly how to stand, how to move, where to place his hands. He knew what rippled when he stretched his arms. Hector, I understood, enjoyed a lifelong affair with mirrors.

“Aren't you afraid?” he asked, looking down at me, his chin resting on his shoulder, his tone lightly mocking. “Shouldn't you wear gloves?”

“I'm not going to cut you.”

I rested the sponge on the tarp and began shaving him. Short, swift strokes, following the hair's path. I had forgotten to bring a strop, but Hector never allowed his body hair to grow for long—he needed the shave as much as a young girl would. This was an exhibition, after all. The blade stayed keen and I moved up his legs, careful and patient with the knee's tricky angles. I longed to ask him how he had created this body but that wasn't my role here; I had a nonspeaking part. I ran the razor along the muscled slope of his thighs, listening to the hushed rasp of steel over skin, and blessed the man who decided he could not make this party.

I shaved him from the sharp V of his pelvic girdle to the skin around his nut-brown nipples, from the flat hard wall of his belly to the vaulted arches of his armpits. I wished someone would strap tumescence-sensors to the cocks of all the men at the Republican National Convention, then let Hector strut naked to the stage. The Grand Old Partiers would have gouged their eyes out with their thumbs—Hector was irresistible.

“Turn him around!” yelled the photographer. “We don't want to see his
face
all day. Come on, show us his better side.”

I gripped his pelvis lightly and he followed my direction, faintly smiling, turning about-face. One of the twelve spectators moaned loudly. Another murmured “Amen to that,” and they all laughed. I scrubbed Hector's haughty backside with soapy water and he thrust against me, flirting with his hips.

“The real question,” said the critic, “is who the hell goes second?”

Hector arced his back and stared at me over his shoulder, forever half-smiling. There is a certain meanness to the coquette, the cat's cruelty, playing a game with a creature helplessly in its power. But even his cruelty thrilled me.

At last I was ready for his face. I pressed my chest against his, wrapping an arm around his waist to keep him still. Not that he needed to be kept still: Hector could hold a pose for hours. But I wanted my free hand down there, caressing his still slick hips. I shaved his throat, tilting his chin back with the thumb of my blade hand to keep his skin taut, shaved his jawline, shaved the hollow below his cheekbones. When I was finished I ran my palms over his face and body, checking for missed stubble. Finally I closed the razor and stepped back from my work. From the tarsal bones of his ankles to the edges of his long sideburns, Hector was immaculately hairless.

Hector spun on one foot, the other tucked against his thigh. The turn complete he stood on his right leg, bent forward from the hip, extended his right arm to the front and his left leg and arm to the back, parallel to the floor—an angle-perfect arabesque. I realized that Hector was a dancer, that such a fact should have been obvious to me: these were dancer's legs, elegant yet brutally powerful, dancer's arms, sculpted from years of lifting ballerinas, graceful from endlessly practicing the port de bras.

When I first moved to the city, one of my new friends told me never to date a dancer. “They're bitchy little queens,” he said. “The lot of them. You fall in love with their perfect asses and they shit all over you.”

The spectators applauded and Hector gave a deep bow, then took my hand and we bowed together.

The party kept going until early morning, the other men partnering up and shaving each other. Water fights, mock wrestling, ass slapping—the usual locker-room antics. But the electricity was gone. Nobody else had a straightedge. Nobody else had Hector. Every man in that room wanted to fuck him, but he sat with me, on satin-slipped pillows piled in a dim corner of the room. We spoke in low tones and the other men stared at us. The art critic seemed particularly amused; at one point he called over to us: “Beware, young men. Dancers and painters make ill-fated couples. Think of Isadora Duncan.”

We did not think of Isadora Duncan. We talked for hours, every now and then walking out to the living room to fetch new drinks and stare at the rainy city. I felt a little stupid ordering vodka from a pale girl while sporting a semi-erection, but she never looked at me, only stole quick glances at Hector when he was facing the other way.

“Come see me dance,” he ordered me, sipping from a glass of mineral water.

“I'd love to.”

“We open this weekend.
Rite of Spring.
Do you like Stravinsky? It's a very difficult dance, very harsh, very hard for the dancer.”

“Good luck with it.”

Hector widened his eyes in mock horror. “No, no. Never say
good luck
to a dancer.”

“Break a leg?”

He crossed himself. “God forbid. No, no. Never. Say, merde.”

“Merde? Really?”

“Merde.”

Hector told me he wanted to move on to acting; he felt that dance was a small world, that it limited him. Being the danseur in his company's biggest productions, Romeo in
Romeo and Juliet
, Prince Desiré in
Sleeping Beauty
, wasn't enough for him. He wanted an audience of millions. He wanted to be in movies.

I listened to him talk and worked it out in my mind. I'd abandon my paints and man the camera; Hector could be the star. I'd zoom in for a close-up and he could smile his famous smile, bright teeth shining for all of America, a wink for the world to swoon by.

Sometime after midnight he beckoned for me to follow him again. He led me down dark corridors and into a vast bedroom. The rumpled sheets of an unmade bed; the paisley pajamas sprawled across a bench by the bed's footboard; the leather-bound photo album splayed open, plastic sleeves filled with photographs of Hector—all blue-lit from the still-blazing city outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Hector, blue-skinned, placed his palms against the glass and stared at the neighboring buildings.

“Do you think anyone can see us up here?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. He was silent and I added, “Everyone in this city is a voyeur. Right this second hundreds of telescopes are trained on us.”

“I hope so,” he said, shimmying his hips and laughing. “Do you like me, Alexander?”

“God, yes.”

“Do you want me?”

I said nothing. I ran the backs of my hands up his thighs and began kissing him, everywhere, acres of tawny, silken skin. He set his feet wide apart and leaned into the window, and I thought:
If we should fall forty stories they can pry my smile from the pavement below
.

After the shaving party he hired me to paint his portrait. I hadn't done any portraiture since school; the last three years had been spent on my water-tower series, “Water Towers: 1- 59,” and I doubted that I could do Hector's form justice.

I was right; each study I began was an exercise in reduction. The full Hector wasn't emerging on the paper. He stood naked on the concrete floor of my Red Hook studio, a converted butcher shop that I had leased with Tulip, an on-again, off-again lesbian from Manitoba.

“If she's on-again, off-again,” asked Hector, after I had described my living situation, “why doesn't she call herself bisexual?”

“She thinks bisexual is a cop-out.”

Hector raised his eyebrows. “But fucking men is not?”

“Shut up and pose.”

“She should only fuck gay men,” he said, hands behind his back, smiling coyly to flash his dimples. “If she's worried about the politics.”

I looked up from my sketchpad. “Tulip's not your type,” I said, and Hector shrugged.

“You don't sleep with women?” I asked. “Do you?”

“Only when I want to.”

I resumed my work. “Don't flex, okay? Just stand still.”

He stuck his tongue out at me. “When does Four-Lip come home, anyway?”

“Any second now. Where you're standing, that used to be where the meat grinder was. The first six months after we moved in, the whole place reeked of beef.”

“Look at me,” he said, staring down at the small state of his cock. “Look at poor little me.”

“Are you cold?”

“No,” he said, “I'm lonely.” I dropped the pad and went to him.

The hardest part of Hector to capture on canvas was his feet. The rest of him was classically proportioned, the marmoreal angles and curves of Grecian statuary, but his feet were ugly. He had dancer's feet, lumpy with knots and contusions, hammertoed, yellow with thick calluses. But Hector was proud of them; he walked around barefoot even when he was clothed, which was a rarity indoors. His feet helped me to understand him. Hector was a Puerto Rican from the Bronx. For all his flirtatious strutting, for all his preening before the mirror, Hector was a tough guy, as much athlete as artist.

One night we were invited to a costume party in Scarsdale hosted by a magazine editor (Hector was invited; I went along as his guest). I picked him up at his apartment and gasped when he opened the door. He wore a black spandex full-length bodysuit, so tight I could read the veins in his biceps, could see that he wore no underwear.

“You're not actually wearing that,” I said. I grew up in a Pennsylvania town once known for steel and now known for birthing NFL linebackers; I always felt there was a fine line between gay pride and suicide.

“Of course I am,” he said, kissing me on the mouth. “I'm Catman!”

“Catman? There is no Catman. You mean Catwoman?”

“Fuck Catwoman. Catman!”

There was no getting out of it. I was masquerading as an investment banker: I wore a pin-striped suit with a red tie and red suspenders and would carry a five-foot-long penis, but the penis was inflatable, I didn't have to blow it up until we got to the party.

On the subway ride to Grand Central Station I sat on the bench, blushing, while Hector stood above me, refusing to hold on to anything, swaying back and forth to the train's rhythm and humming the same three bars of Prokofiev over and over. Behind him sat a row of elderly women gripping shopping bags. They never took their eyes off him. I had an idle fantasy that they might spring from their seats as one and devour him with gummy jaws.

In the great room of Grand Central, beneath the painted constellations, Hector actually cartwheeled—
cartwheeled
—three times in succession and laughed when he saw me biting my lip. He waved to a frowning cop who stood by the information kiosk, twirling his billy club.

“Come on,” I said to Hector, pushing him forward. “It leaves in two minutes.”

“The problem with spandex,” said Hector, pinching the fabric between his legs, “is it chafes.”

We boarded our train and chose an empty car. Hector sighed, frustrated at being cooped-up for forty minutes. A band of high school kids wearing their varsity jackets ran hooting into our car just before the train pulled away. The sight of them, their shaved heads and class rings, triggered warning alarms for me, but Hector seemed not to notice the boys. He rested his head on my shoulder and napped.