“Your problem is very simple, Boz. Once you face it. Your problem is that basically you’re a Republican.”
“Oh, come off it, Shrimp!”
“Honestly. When you and Milly started living together, Lottie and I couldn’t believe it. It had always been clear as day to us.”
“Just because I have a pretty face doesn’t mean—”
“Oh, Boz, you’re being dense. You know that has nothing to do with it one way or the other. And I’m not saying you should vote Republican because I do. But I can read the signs. If you’d look at yourself with a little psychoanalysis you’d be forced to see how much you’ve been repressing.”
He flared up. It was one thing to be called a Republican but no one was going to call him repressed. “Well, shit on you, sister. If you want to know my party, I’ll tell you. When I was thirteen I used to jerk off while I watched you undress, and believe me, it takes a pretty dedicated Democrat to do that.”
“That’s nasty,” she said.
It was nasty, and as untrue as it was nasty. He’d fantasized often enough about Lottie, about Shrimp never. Her short thin brittle body appalled him. She was a gothic cathedral bristling with crockets and pinnacles, a forest of leafless trees; he wanted nice sunshiny cortiles and flowery glades. She was a Dürer engraving; he was a landscape by Domenichino. Screw Shrimp? He’d as soon turn Republican, even if she was his own sister.
“Not that I’m against Republicanism,” he added diplomatically. “I’m no Puritan. I just don’t enjoy having sex with other guys.”
“You’ve never given it a chance.” She spoke in an aggrieved tone.
“Sure I have. Plenty of times.”
“Then why is your marriage breaking up?”
Tears started dripping. He cried all the time nowadays, like an air conditioner. Shrimp, skilled in compassion, wept right along with him, wrapping a length of wiry arm around his bare, exquisite shoulders.
Snuffling, he threw back his head. Flip flop of auburn, big brave smile. “How about the party?”
“Not for me, not tonight. I’m feeling too religious and holy, sort of. Maybe later perhaps.”
“Aw, Shrimp.”
“Really.” She wrapped herself in her arms, stuck out her chin, waited for him to plead.
The dog in the distance made new noises.
“One time, when I was a kid… right after we moved here, in fact…” Boz began dreamily.
But he could see she wasn’t listening.
Dogs had just been made finally illegal and the dog owners were doing Anne-Frank numbers to protect their pups from the city Gestapo. They stopped walking them on the streets, so the roof of 334, which the Park Commission had declared to be a playground (they’d built a cyclone fence all round the edge to give it a playground atmosphere), got to be ankle-deep in dogshit. A war developed between the kids and dogs to see who the roof would belong to. The kids would hunt down off-leash dogs, usually at night, and throw them over the edge. German shepherds fought back the hardest. Boz had seen a shepherd take one of Milly’s cousins down to the pavement with him.
All the things that happen and seem so important at the time, and yet you just forget them, one after another. He felt an elegant, controlled sadness, as though, were he to sit down now and work at it, he might write a fine, mature piece of philosophy.
“I’m going to sail away now. Okay?”
“Enjoy yourself,” Shrimp said.
He touched her ear with his lips, but it wasn’t, even in a brotherly sense, a kiss. A sign, rather, of the distance between them, like the signs on highways that tell you how far it is in miles to New York City.
The party was not by any means a form of insanity but Boz enjoyed himself in a quiet decorative way, sitting on a bench and looking at knees. Then Williken, the photographer from 334, came over and told Boz about Nuancism, Williken being a Nuancist from way back when, how it was overdue for a renaissance. he looked older than Boz remembered him, parched and fleshless and pathetically forty-three.
“Forty-three is the best age,” Williken said again, having at last disposed of the history of art to his satisfaction.
“Better than twenty-one?” Which was Boz’s age, of course.
Williken decided this was a joke and coughed. (Williken smoked tobacco.) Boz looked away and caught the fellow with the red beard eyeing him. A small gold earring twinkled in his left ear.
“Twice as good,” Williken said, “and then a bit.” Since this was a joke too, he coughed again.
He was (the red beard, the gold earring), next to Boz, the best-looking person there. Boz got up, with a pat to the old man’s frayed and folded hands.
“And how old are you?” he asked the red beard, the gold earring.
“Six foot two. Yourself?”
“I’m versatile, pretty much. Where do you live?”
“The East Seventies. Yourself?”
“I’ve been evacuated.” Boz struck a pose: Sebastian (Guido’s) spreading himself open, flowerlike, to receive the arrows of men’s admiration. Oh, Boz could charm the plaster off the walls! “Are you a friend of January’s?”
“A friend of a friend, but that friend didn’t show. Yourself?”
“The same thing, sort of.”
Danny (his name was Danny) grabbed a handful of the auburn hair.
“I like your knees,” Boz said.
“You don’t think they’re too bushy?”
“No, I like bushy knees.”
When they left January was in the bathroom. They shouted their good-byes through the paper panel. All the way home—going down the stairs, in the street, in the subway, in the elevator of Danny’s building—they kissed and touched and rubbed up against each other, but though this was exciting to Boz in a psychological way, it didn’t give him a hard-on.
Nothing gave Boz a hard-on.
While Danny, behind the screen, stirred the instant milk over the hot-coil, Boz, alone in all that double bed, watched the hamsters in their cage. The hamsters were screwing in the jumpy, jittery way that hamsters have, and the lady hamsters said, “Shirk, shirk, shirk.” All nature reproached Boz.
“Sweetener?” Danny asked, emerging with the cups.
“Thanks just the same. I shouldn’t be wasting your time like this.”
“Who’s to say the time’s been wasted? Maybe in another half-hour …” the moustache detached itself from the beard: a smile.
Boz smoothed his pubic hairs sadly, ruefully, wobbled the oblivious soft cock. “No, it’s out of commission tonight.”
“Maybe a bit of roughing up! I know guys who— ”
Boz shook his head. “It wouldn’t help.”
“Well, drink your Koffee. Sex isn’t that important, believe me. There are other things.”
The hamster said, “Shirk! Shirk, shirk.”
“I suppose not.”
“It isn’t,” Danny insisted. “Are you always impotent?” There, he had said the dreaded word.
“God, no!” (The horror of it!)
“So? One off-night is nothing to worry about. It happens to me all the time and I do it for a living. I’m a hygiene demonstrator.”
“You?”
“Why not? A Democrat by day and a Republican in my spare time. By the way, how are you registered?”
Boz shrugged. “What difference does it make if you don’t vote?”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I’m a Democrat actually, but before I got married I was Independent. That’s why, tonight, I never thought, when I came home with you, that—I mean, you’re damned good-looking, Danny.”
Danny blushed agreement. “Get off it. So tell me, what’s wrong with your marriage?”