Tales of Desire Page 6

  By the time that Mr. Krupper arrives at the box and assures the usher’s neutrality with a liberal tip, the boy has plummeted like a stone to the depths of sleep, all the way down to the velvety bottom of it, without a ripple to mark where he has fallen. Head lolls forward and thighs move apart and fingers almost brush the floor. The wet lips have fallen apart and the breath whistles faintly but not enough to be heard by Mr. Krupper. It is so dim in the box that the fat old man nearly sits down in the boy’s lap before he discovers that his usual seat has been taken. At first Mr. Krupper thinks this nearly invisible companion may be a certain Italian youth of his acquaintance who sometimes shares the box with him for a few minutes, at rare intervals, five or six weeks apart, and he whispers inquiringly the name of this youth, which is Bruno, but he gets no answer, and he decides, no, it could not be Bruno. The slight odor that made him think it might be, an odor made up of sweat and tobacco and the prodigality of certain youthful glands, is not at all unfamiliar to the old man’s nose, and while he is now convinced that it is not Bruno, this time, it nevertheless makes him feel a stir of anticipatory happiness in his bosom, which also heaves from the exertion of having just climbed two flights of the grand staircase. In a crouched position he locates the other chair and carefully sets it where he wants it to be, at a nicely calculated space from the one that is occupied by the sleeper, and then Mr. Krupper deposits himself on the seat with the stiff-kneed elaboration of an old camel. It sets the blood charging through him at breakneck speed. Ah, well. That much is completed.

  A few minutes pass in which Mr. Krupper’s eyesight adjusts itself to the almost pitch-black condition of light in the box, but even then it is impossible to make out the figure beside him in any detail. Yes, it is young, it is slender. The hair is dark and lustrous, the odor is captivating. But the head of the sleeper has lolled a bit to one side, the side away from Mr. Krupper, and sometimes it is possible, in the dark, to make very dangerous mistakes. There are certain pursuits in which even the most cautious man must depart from absolute caution if he intends at all to enjoy them. Mr. Krupper knew that. He had known it for a great many years, and that was why he had observed such elaborate caution in nearly every other department of his life, to compensate for those necessary breaches of caution that were the sad concomitant of his kind of pleasure. And so as a measure of caution, Mr. Krupper digs into his pocket for a box of matches which he carries with him only for this purpose, to secure that one relatively clear glance at a fellow-occupant of the dark box. He strikes the match and leans a little bit forward. And then his heart, aged seventy and already strained from the recent exertion of the stairs, undergoes an alarming spasm, for never in this secret life of his, never in thirty years’ attendance of matinees at the Joy Rio, has old Mr. Krupper discovered beside him, even now within contact, inspiring the dark with its warm animal fragrance, any dark youth of remotely equivalent beauty.

  The match burns his fingers, he lets it fall to the floor. His vest is half unbuttoned, but he unbuttons it further to draw a deep breath. Something is hurting in him, first in his chest, then lower, a nervous contraction of his unhealthy intestines. He whispers to himself the German word for calmness. He leans back in the uncomfortable small chair and attempts to look at the faraway flickering square of the motion picture. The excitement in his body will not subside. The respiration will not stabilize. The contraction of his intestinal nerves and muscles gives him sharp pain, and he is wondering, for a moment, if it will not be necessary for him to return hastily downstairs to move his bowels. But then, all at once, the sleeper beside him stirs and half sits up in the gloom. The lolling head suddenly jerks erect and cries a sharp word in Spanish. “Excuse me,” says Mr. Krupper, softly, involuntarily. “I didn’t know you were there.” The youth gives a grunting laugh and seems to relax once more. He makes a sad, sighing sound as he slouches down once more in the chair beside Mr. Krupper. Mr. Krupper feels somewhat calmer now. It is hard to say why but the almost unbearable acuteness of the proximity, the discovery, now has passed, and Mr. Krupper himself assumes a more relaxed position in his hard chair. The muscular spasm and the tachycardia now are gently eased off and the bowels appear to be settled. Minutes pass in the box. Mr. Krupper has the impression that the youth beside him, that vision, has not yet returned to slumber, although the head has lolled again to one side, this time the side that is toward him, and the limbs fallen apart with the former relaxation. Slowly, as if secretively, Mr. Krupper digs in his jacket pocket for the hard candies. One he unwraps and places in his own mouth which is burning and dry. Then he extracts another which he extends on the palm of his hand, which shakes a little, toward the youthful stranger. He clears his throat which feels as if it would be difficult to produce a sound, and manages to say, “A piece of candy?” “Huh,” says the youth. The syllable has the sound of being startled. For a moment it seems that he is bewildered or angry. He makes no immediate move to take or reject the candy, he only sits up and stares. Then all at once he grunts. His fingers snatch at the candy and pop it directly into his mouth, paper wrapping and all. Mr. Krupper hastens to warn him that the candy is wrapped up. He grunts again and removes it from his mouth, and Mr. Krupper hears him plucking the rather brittle wrapping paper away, and afterwards he hears the candy crunching noisily between the jaws of the youth. Before the jaws have stopped crunching, Mr. Krupper has dug the whole bag out of his pocket and now he says, “Take some more, take several pieces, there’s lots.” Again the youth hesitates slightly. Again he grunts. Then he digs his hand into the bag and Mr. Krupper feels it lighter by half when the hand has been removed. “Hungry?” he whispers with a questioning note. The youth grunts again, affirmatively and in a way that seems friendly. Don’t hurry, thinks Mr. Krupper. Don’t hurry, there’s plenty of time, he’s not going to go up in smoke like the dream that he looks! So he puts the remains of the candy in his pocket, and makes a low humming sound as of gratification as he looks back toward the flickering screen where the cowboy hero is galloping into a sunset. In a moment the picture will end and the lights will go up for an interval of a minute before the program commences all over again. There is, of course, some danger that the youth will leave. That possibility has got to be considered, but the affirmative answer to the question “Hungry?” has already given some basis, not quite a pledge, of continuing association between them.

  Now just before the lights go up, Mr. Krupper makes a bold move. He reaches into the pocket opposite to the one containing the bag of hard candy and scoops out all that remain of the quarters, about six altogether, and jostles them ever so slightly together in his fist so they tinkle a bit. This is all that he does. And the lights come gradually on, like daybreak only a little accelerated: the once elegant theater blooms dully as a winter rose beneath him as he leans forward in order to seem to be interested in the downstairs. He is a little panicky but he knows that the period of light will be very short, not more than a minute or two. But he also knows that he is fat and ugly. Mr. Krupper knows that he is a terrible old man, shameful and despicable even to those who tolerate his caresses, perhaps even more so to those than to the others who only see him. He does not deceive himself at all about that, and that is why he took the six quarters out and shook them together a little before the lights were brought on. Yes, now. Now the lights are beginning to darken again, and the youth is still there. If he is now alert to the unpleasant character of Mr. Krupper’s appearance he is nevertheless still beside him. And he is still unwrapping the bits of hard candy and crunching them between his powerful young jaws, steadily, with the automatic, invariable rhythm of a horse masticating his food.

  The lights are now down again and the panic has passed. Mr. Krupper abandons the pretense of staring downstairs and leans back once more in the unsteady chair. Now something rises in him, something heroic, determined, and he leans toward the youth, turning around a little, and with his left hand he finds the right hand of the youth and offers the coins. At first the hand of the yo
uth will not change its position, will not respond to the human and metallic pressure. Mr. Krupper is about to fly once more into panic, but then, at the very moment when his hand is about to withdraw from contact with the hand of the youth, that hand turns about, revolves to bring the palm upward. The coins descend, softly, with a slight tinkle, and Mr. Krupper knows that the contract is sealed between them.

  When around midnight the lights of the Joy Rio were brought up for the last time that evening, the body of Mr. Krupper was discovered in his remote box of the theater with his knees on the floor and his ponderous torso wedged between two wobbly gilt chairs as if he had expired in an attitude of prayer. The notice of the old man’s death was given unusual prominence for the obituary of someone who had no public character and whose private character was so peculiarly low. But evidently the private character of Mr. Krupper was to remain anonymous in the memories of those anonymous persons who had enjoyed or profited from his company in the tiny box at the Joy Rio, for the notice contained no mention of anything of such a special nature. It was composed by a spinsterly reporter who had been impressed by the sentimental values of a seventy-year-old retired merchant dying of thrombosis at a cowboy thriller with a split bag of hard candies in his pocket and the floor about him littered with sticky wrappers, some of which even adhered to the shoulders and sleeves of his jacket.

  It was, among the cousins, the Complete Little Citizen of the World who first caught sight of this astonishingly agreeable item in the paper and who announced the tidings in a voice as shrill as a steam whistle announcing the meridian of the day, and it was she that exclaimed hours later, while the little family was still boiling with the excitement and glory of it, Just think, Papa, the old man choked to death on our hard candy!

  MARCH 1953 [PUB. 1954]

  The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen

  AT THIRTY-SEVEN Stephen Ashe was the youngest member of the Wall Street law firm of Webster, Eggleston, Larrabee and Smythe. He was quite as important a member as any of the four whose surnames comprised the firm’s title and the name Ashe was not included only because it was felt that five names to the title would overload it. The oldest member, fifty-nine-year-old Nathaniel Webster the Fifth, was on his way out, having suffered a stroke the day of President Nixon’s resignation and another on the night of his wedding to his nephew’s adolescent widow from the Arkansas Ozarks. The day that he mistook Larrabee for Smythe in the elevator ascending to the firm’s thirty-second floor offices in the Providential Building, Jerry Smythe had slipped a business card of the firm into Stephen Ashe’s pocket as they went down the elevator for lunch that day, giving Stephen a smiling wink and a slight pat on the butt. When Stephen looked at the card he saw that the name Webster had been scratched and the name Ashe appended to the three remaining, printed on it with a ballpoint pen.

  In the next few days the same conniving winks and little butt-pats had been delivered to Stephen by Jack Larrabee and Ralph Eggleston, and so it was now fully apparent to Stephen that there was no dissident voice on the matter, that is, none excepting that of the senior gentleman who was on his way out. Of course it was a bit unnerving the way that Nat Webster hung in. A workday never passed at the law firm without Nat, secretly known as the old hound dog, shouting out exuberantly, his door having banged open, “Pressure down five more points. I’m in the clear!”

  Stephen and Jerry Smythe went directly from work every evening to the Ivy League Club, for a splash in the pool, a massage, and a sauna. They each had an interest in keeping physically fit; both were under forty and on good days or evenings didn’t look like they’d been out of law school for more than a couple of years. They undressed in the same cubicle at the club. Smythe would wait until Stephen had found a cubicle that was vacant and gone in it and then Smythe would enter it, too, and as they undressed together, Stephen could hardly ignore how frequently Smythe’s hands would brush against his thighs and, once or twice, even his crotch.

  They had their massages on adjoining tables and Stephen’s was administered by a good-looking young Italian, and whenever this masseur’s fingers worked up Stephen’s thighs, Stephen would get an erection. He tried to resist it but he couldn’t. The Italian would chuckle a little under his breath but Smythe would make a loud, jocular comment, such as, “Hey, Steve, who’re you thinking of?”

  One Friday evening Stephen replied, “I was thinking of Nat Webster’s little teen-age wife.”

  “Oh, did I tell you, she’s got her kid brother up here, he was staying with Nat and her but Nat threw him out on his ass last weekend.”

  “Why’d Nat throw him out?”

  “Found out he was delinquent.”

  “Delinquent how?”

  “Jailed for lewd vagrancy, peddling his goodies, you know,” said Smythe, his voice lowered to a theatrical whisper.

  Stephen wanted, for some reason, to extract more information on the boy’s delinquencies but he refrained from pursuing the subject with Smythe because he found himself wondering, as he had sometimes wondered before, if Smythe’s freedom of speech and behavior with him were not a kind of espionage. It was altogether possible that Eggleston and Larrabee were using Smythe’s closer familiarity with Stephen to delve a bit more into his, Stephen’s private life. It was more than altogether possible that this was the case. Stephen remembered a little closed counsel among the partners a few months ago when they had discussed the advisability of discharging a junior accountant on suspicion of homosexual inclinations, a suspicion based on nothing more than the facts that he was still unmarried at thirty-one and was sharing an apartment with a younger man whose photograph had appeared in a magazine advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes.

  Stephen had felt himself flushing but had said nothing at this counsel. Smythe had spoken up loudly, saying: “I don’t see how it can affect the prestige of the firm one way or another.”

  Stephen’s head lifted involuntarily, it sort of jerked up, and he had seen Smythe’s eyes fastened on his flushed face.

  “What do you say, Steve?” Smythe had asked him, challengingly.

  Despising himself a bit, Stephen had cleared his throat and said, “Well, I don’t think it’s to our advantage to be associated in any way with this sort of deviation from the norm. I mean we don’t want to be associated with it even by—”

  For a moment he had dried up: then he had completed the sentence too loudly with the word “association!”

  “Exactly,” Larrabee had said.

  The junior accountant had been given two weeks’ notice that day.

  Now the Italian masseur had turned Stephen on his belly and was kneading his buttocks.

  Smythe was continuing his discussion of Nat Webster’s wife’s kid brother’s precociously colorful past.

  “In Arkansas he was involved in the beating up of an old homo who is still in traction in a Hot Springs hospital. Well, the old hound dog told this kid to hit the streets and I understand he is now living at the ‘Y.’ You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “Does it mean something besides living at the ‘Y’?” Stephen enquired with affected indifference.

  At this moment the masseur’s fingers entered Stephen’s natal cleave, and Stephen said, “Is there any truth in the report that there is going to be a merger between Fuller, Cohen, Stern and the Morris Brothers?”

  “Steve, are you in dreamland? Why, the Morris Brothers declared bankruptcy last week, and have flown to Hong Kong!”

  “A massage makes me sleepy,” said Stephen affecting a great yawn.

  One evening in early spring Stephen was viewing an old Johnny Weissmuller film on his bedroom TV set when the persistent ringing of the phone brought him out of a state that verged upon entrancement.

  “Aw, let it go,” was his first impulse but the phone would not shut up. At length he got up from his vibra-chair, turning the TV set so that he could still admire it while at the phone.

  “Yes, yes, what is it?” he shouted with irrepressible annoyance.
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  “Oh, I’m sorry! Did I interrupt something?”

  The precocious little girl voice, reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe’s, was recognizable to Stephen instantly. It was Nat Webster’s adolescent wife’s.

  “No, no, not a bit, Maude, not a bit in this world or the next one. In fact I was just about to phone you and Nat and invite you over for Sunday brunch to meet my mother who is flying up from Palm Beach for my birthday.”

  “You are havin’ a birth-day?” Maude exclaimed as if amazed that he had ever been born.

  “How is Nat doing, Maude?”

  “Let’s not discuss the condition of Nat,” Maude said with abrupt firmness.

  “Bad as that?”

  “It’s his lack of concern for the—sorry, I shouldn’t be botherin’ you about this, but, you know, Steve, you’re the only one in the bunch, I mean his Wall Street buddies, that I feel I can open up with. Now, Steve, maybe you’ve heard about my little brother payin’ us a visit from Arkansas.”

  “It seems to me that Jerry mentioned you had him with you right now.”

  “Look, Steve, I’m callin’ from a coin-box because I didn’t want Nat to hear this conversation. You see, a problem has come up.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, you see, I think that Nat resents my attachment to this sweet kid brother of mine.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, I’m not going to drag out the conversation, another party is waitin’ outside the booth. But the problem is this. Nat suddenly told me an’ Clove, that’s my kid brother’s name, sweetest, cutest little sixteen-year-old thing, that there wasn’t room enough for him in our eight-room penthouse on Park.”