Often, Paul plays music on the hidden stereo—the music is his choice and unpredictable, although he sometimes asks for requests. Music floats over the island through speakers onto the back deck after dinner and onto the sundeck, where he and I are reclining on mats, sweating, although we came out early attempting futilely to stave off the heat. Today’s invisible music is from Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, Lotte Lenya rasping out Brecht’s lyrics. I know from their pursuing laughter that Stanty and Sonya are rowing and now and then diving into the water to swim.
The Threepenny Opera ends, and Paul says, “I enjoyed fucking Corina’s millions.”
“You really did that, man? Fucked her millions?” I taunted.
“Yes. Listen, man. I took all the bills she had with her—she carried hundreds—and I scattered them over her naked body; yeah, I even stuffed some between her legs. I straddled her and jerked off over her and her money. She rubbed my cum and her money all over herself and laughed, ‘Filthy, filthy.’”
Regretting my question, I turned over on my stomach, to tan my back. A fine film of perspiration and oil glistened on my body and his.
“My cum all over her fucken money—her filthy money.”
A bastard, a fucking bragging bastard. Yet—this baffled me, and disturbed me—I “liked” him. I couldn’t think of another word as he continued recounting his excesses. I was fascinated by his heated recollections, even though at times they angered me—and at other times baffled me, like now when he said:
“Once, man, I tested her about how filthy her money was. We were in Italy. There were beggars on the street, tattered men and women, and dirty, ragged children. I dug into her purse and scattered money on the street. They all scrambled for the money, but—get this—the merchants in the shops rushed out, pushing the vagrants away, snatching the money from them, knocking down the children. Your clowning demonic angels at their best, man, fighting for filthy beads!”
Not beads. Money. I had recognized a similarity between his story and mine in “Mardi Gras”—the costumed revelers I had depicted scrounging for beads; and I had detected sudden anger in his voice as he recalled the ugly scene. Anger at whom? Not the beggars, surely. At Corina? The shop owners? Or at himself for flaunting money to prove his disgust with it all? “And what did Corina do?” I said.
“What else, man? She laughed drunkenly. She was always drunk.” As if to wipe away the street image he had evoked—and perhaps his startling anger—he shifted his position, facing me, and I shifted mine to face him, both leaning on our elbows.
“What were you arrested for?”
“Hustling. I was inexperienced. A vice cop offered me money and then busted me.”
“You went to jail?”
“A friend bailed me out the same night, and I went home with him and hustled for the bail.”
“Good, man, good,” he approved.
He was disappointed, as I had suspected when I tantalized him about that event. He would have preferred a long prison term and a harrowing account of depravity. The reality of it was as grim, but I didn’t want to remember it. The island seemed to negate concerns beyond its perimeter. No, I did not tell him about the raids on gay bars; cops invading private homes to arrest men having sex, the sexual act being illegal; entrapment, lying, aroused cops, years-long prison terms, suicides, violence. I had been the exception in the quagmire of depraved laws—which ironically allowed a powerful attorney “with high connections” hired by my friend to get me off with two years in prison, suspended; and probation for the suspended time, probation I ignored in defiance of the rotten laws.
“But—” I tried sarcastically to assuage Paul’s heated anticipation—“that one night in jail, man, whew; I can’t even talk about it.” I left it there for his imagination.
Taking two puffs from a cigarette, waving away an intrusive wisp of smoke, he said: “As I read what you wrote, I didn’t realize until later that you shifted from past to present tense in the same sentence. What effect were you after?”
Following the confounding story he had told about the scattered money—and it would haunt me and I would try to decipher its meaning for him—and following the embittering memory of my arrest, I welcomed the new conversation. “I wanted to dismiss the separation between past and present, and, yes, the future, to assert an even level of time; and this, too … man”—I softened my too-passionate defense—“there’s no demarcation between time in memory, is there? And aren’t there memories that push into the present, so powerfully that they become a part of the present? That’s what I’m trying for in some shifts, and—and—” I waited for him to respond, agreeing or dismissing.
“I get that, man,” he said finally, with what I chose to believe was a touch of enthusiasm. “But”—I anticipated some rebuttal—“the infrequent capitalization?”
I shoved away a feeling that he had been about to grade me. I wouldn’t let that intrude on our conversation; I was basking in it. “I was trying out visual effects on the page like, I believe, in some editions of Winnie-the-Pooh.”
He laughed. “You mentioned that book before and you were serious?”
“Why should a writer limit his influences? I’ve been influenced by movies, good and bad: the abrupt shifts in location, dialogue like a voice-over along with shifting scenery—special effects in narrative, man. Look how Buñuel slides from realism to surrealism with only gradual clues of that shift; and I like to listen to music before I write, like Fats Domino and then Mozart, something like Eisenstein’s montage, in music, juxtaposing opposites, tension, and—”
We’re lying on towels on the grass of the expansive, expensive lawn under the shade of a tree allowing the impression of coolness. We left the sundeck when the heat became violent.
“—movie serials influenced me a lot, like pushing a character into a trap that seems impossible to escape and than letting him spring out, like Flash Gordon—and comic books, their exclamatory prose. Batman—I never cared for the boy Robin. I loved Saturday-morning movie serials, man, learning about suspense, adding details to deepen a mystery, not just withholding.” I was rushing on, breathless, excited, as if to make up for the years when I had separated myself into another world, where I played someone else, only street-smart. “—and take the power of suggestion in Val Lewton’s great B movies, and look at Cat People—an ominous shadow on the pool wall, growing darker, larger as it seems to approach the woman swimming, the water shimmers like shards of glass, which are always good for arousing tension, like in Persona, the broken glass and the actress walking past it, missing it—”
“—like Hitchcock letting the viewer in on danger the character doesn’t perceive, no?”
I liked his apparent agreement, but I didn’t like his arrogating my direction. “That’s an easy deduction,” I dismissed his remark, and aimed at him: “—and I picked up on the use of gestures as characterization, like the way you smoke, Paul, the way you—”
“Oh?”
That irritating “Oh.” “—snuff out a cigarette as if you—”
“Yes?”
I’d leave it there, taunting him. “Mathematics, too, a big influence. In high school, I—”
“Mathematics?”
“—was fascinated by the shape of algebraic equations plotted on a graph, the intersection of lines makes an X, man, and that’s the solution to the equation. It’s like two narrative currents that intersect at a point of possible reconciliation—the mysterious X, and—”
“You’re breathless, and you’re not making sense.”
“—then splitting apart.” I had leaped over his insult. I caught up with it, angered: “Fuck if I’m breathless, fuck if I’m not making sense.”
He laughed. I joined him. “Okay, man, I’m convinced,” he said. “You’re good, man.”
What can I say to this man who has, correctly—almost correctly—understood my intentions and is responding in admiration? Yes, what can I say, except what I do say, which is:
“Thank you, Paul.”
He fell back into the stream of his life:
“Corina was frigid.”