The Canals of Mars

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but ugly is there for everyone to see. I can afford to speak so flippantly on the subject, since I was, and I say it in all modesty, beautiful indeed.

The operative word there, of course, is was. Was, before a vial exploded in the lab, and turned that beautiful face into a road map of Mars. In the novels, in the movies, this is where the handsome plastic surgeon rushes to the rescue, and by the next chapter-reel, I am Joan Crawford all over again, and on my way to becoming Mrs. Surgeon. Or, in my gay instance, Mister and Mister Surgeon.

Cut. First off, he was older than the hills and singularly unattractive. And he was already married and blatantly heterosexual. Don’t get me wrong: I have no objections to heterosexuals, so long as they aren’t too obvious. And, hell, if he had been able to make me lovely again, I’d have murdered her, had the change, and gone after the old codger regardless.

Three operations later, however, the mirror still showed me the surface of Mars. The craters had shrunk somewhat, and the canals had shifted, but it was still Mars. I balked at going under the knife a fourth time.

“No, it won’t be a dramatic improvement,” he said when I questioned him.

“In other words, I’m still going to look like something brought back up half-eaten? I asked, and the tone in which he assured me that I would look better told me that “better” still was not going to be very good.

Which was where we left it. Notwithstanding the pleasure of lying abed in a hospital (there is nothing quite like the personal touch of your own bedpan, is there?) and all that delicious food, I promised I would get back to him, without specifying in which life.

When you are damaged, as I was, they give you lots of money, as if that would compensate for what I had lost. I was grateful, though, that I did not have to work. Not because I am all that fond of lying about vegetating, but because I did not have to face all those slipping-away eyes that I was sure to encounter.

There were not many places one could go, however, without the same problem. Jason threw in the towel and was gone. Jason who loved “the soul of me,” who loved me “through and through,” was through. I told myself, “good riddance,” he was too shallow to be of much use as a lover, and I tried to not to think that I had mostly been just about as shallow most of my life. I definitely tried not to remember that I loved the bastard.

I am fortunate that I am comfortable with my own company, as many are not, and there is a certain bitter comfort in wallowing in self-pity. That wears thin, though, after a while, and the walls of my little apartment seemed to shrink inward with each passing day. So, when Douglas called me to say he was going to spend a month or two at his cottage on the shore, and would I like to come along, I jumped at the chance. I might not have in the past. I had always understood that Douglas was in love with me, whatever that meant. Jason had been in love with me, too, he said, and what had that amounted to? Who knew what “love” was? I didn’t.

In the past, I might have wondered at Douglas’ intentions, getting me all alone in that little cottage of his. He was Jason’s friend. I liked him well enough on the few occasions when I had met him, and he was a lovely person, just not my type. Not as old as that surgeon, probably, but, really, too old for my tastes, sixty if he was a day, maybe more. I didn’t really know. Anyway, what difference does a number make? There comes a point when you’re just old, doesn’t there? Though I have to admit, if you weren’t hung up on age, he was a youthful looking sixty whatever.

They say it’s an ill wind, however. With the face I now had, I did not have to worry about whether it was only my beauty that men were after.

I will give him credit. He was one of the few, the first maybe, since the accident, who did not flinch when he saw me. He even managed to look me straight in the face, and not quickly avert his eyes.

“Pretty awful, isn’t it?” I said. He had come out to help me bring my bags in.

He smiled. “I’ve seen worse,” he said. “I used to work in a burn center.”

“I hope that wasn’t meant to make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside,” I said, following him up the wide, shallow steps to the front door.

“No, I’ve got martinis waiting. That’s their job.”

They failed, however. All they did was lower the barriers I had so carefully raised. The martinis, and Douglas. He was an elegant man, suave and distinguished. He was also thoughtful and gentle; I hadn’t known that about him before. Of course I had never been alone at his beach cottage with him. Never, really, been alone with him at all.

He talked of all sorts of things, movies and people we both knew and recipes and the shore and the weather and, when I could bear it no longer and the tears began to stream down my cheeks, he stopped talking and just held me. He didn’t try to tell me it would be okay. He didn’t try to tell me that I was still beautiful. He did not swear it would all get better, or somehow magically go away, or any of the stupid, insensitive things that others had said that had only made me feel worse. He didn’t even chide me when I blubbered about the canals of Mars.

He just held me and gently kissed my cheek; not even the good one. He kissed the one that was scarred, kissed Mars’ canals as if they were the most natural things on this planet. He was the first person since the accident with the courage to put his lips to my flesh; the first, even, to put his arms around me. Jason had tried, and had paled and turned away before his lips touched me, and said with a sob, as if it were his heart breaking, “I can’t, I just can’t.” Then he left.

Douglas only held me and kissed my cheek, and when the tears stopped at last, he took me upstairs and tucked me into my bed like a little child, and brought me a cup of hot chocolate, and made me drink it, and sat and held my hand until I fell asleep.

*

“How long are you here for?” I asked him the next day. We were sitting on the little terrace. It was early in the season, the air still cool, but the sun warm, the ocean close enough for us to smell the brine and the seaweed. Too early for the tourists; too early, if only just, for the summer crowd.

“Till you’re better,” he said.

“Douglas, really, I’m all right,” I said. He gave me a mocking smile. “I will be, anyway. All right, I mean. You don’t have to look after me.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” he said with a snort. He got up from his chaise lounge and offered me a hand. “Let’s go for a dip, why don’t we?”

“I’m sure the water’s icy,” I said.

“No doubt.” He gave me a look that said he knew perfectly well that was not my reason for declining. “There’s nobody else around,” he said. “If anybody comes, we’ll see them miles off.”

Well, say I’m a freak if you will, but don’t call me a coward. I got up without a word and set my drink aside, and started for the beach. He fell into step beside me, whistling tunelessly.

I had planned to maintain my longsuffering attitude, to punish him. For what, I wasn’t quite clear, but surely no good deed should go unpunished. The water, however, wasn’t nearly so cold as I had expected, and the sun got warmer as it rose in the sky, and a warm breeze ruffled my hair. The gulls jeered at me, and when Douglas got tired of my standing stiffly in knee-deep water, toes firmly planted in the squish of sand, he splashed me, and I yelped and kicked water in his face and before I knew it, we were horsing around like a pair of kids, laughing and ducking one another, and I actually forgot that he was an old fart and I was a horror to gaze upon.

Until he said, “Shit,” very loudly, and I followed his gaze, and saw a couple clambering over the rocks, heading in our direction.

I ran out of the water, and grabbed my towel off the beach and started back toward the cottage, not wanting to be seen, knowing what would happen to their faces when they got close enough to see mine; and Douglas made a point of switching sides with me, so that he was between the scarred side of my face and the approaching strangers. They were probably not close enough to see, but I was grateful anyway. The canals were mine alone.

Well, of course Douglas was stuck with them too, but he seemed not to mind them. He did not pretend not to see them; he just didn’t seem to mind.

Except for that intrusion, though, we were alone. His little section of rocky beach sat in a cove, so it was mostly private even as the season got on and other cottages up and down the shore were occupied. That couple, they must have been day-trippers, were the only persons we saw the whole time we were there. The only ones I saw, at any rate. He went into town every couple of days for supplies, walking the five miles or so in and out, and came back to update me: “The Jeffersons are here, they’re the second cottage down,” or “The Wilsons are early this year.” No one came by, though. I had been here for a weekend once before, with Jason. There had been lots of neighbors dropping in, and we had made the rounds as well. Maybe he warned them off.

We swam nearly every day. I used to swim a lot, and loved it, but I was out of practice, and out of shape. It was good exercise, and a good way to work off my frustrations and my anger. I swam sometimes for two hours with only the occasional pause for rest. He didn’t swim that long, of course. He was old. When he began to tire and grow short of breath, he would go sit on the beach.

“And enjoy the view,” he said, looking at my still handsome body up and down and leering wolfishly. What he really did, of course, was stand guard, in case anyone should approach. I stopped watching for them myself, and trusted him. But they didn’t come.

Evenings, he fixed us martinis and I got into the habit of preparing dinner. I had cooked in the past, but I had gotten away from it. I found now that I enjoyed it. I took unexpected pleasure in fixing the things he liked, the way he liked them. Nothing too fancy: steaks or lobster or burgers on the grill, and when it turned out we both actually loved it, the tuna casserole that Jason had always turned his nose up at. The one with potato chips. I caught Douglas licking the salt off the chips and smacked his hand with the spatula. Later, though, I tried it myself when he wasn’t looking, and he caught me at it and smacked my hand.

“I was in the hospital for eight weeks,” I told him petulantly. “You’re not supposed to hit someone when they’re recovering from surgery.”

“Bullshit,” he said, and offered me a chip to lick. He wasn’t always elegant.

We ate sometimes on the terrace when it was warm enough, and at the kitchen table when it wasn’t, and some evenings it was cool enough for a fire in the fireplace and we ate in front of it. There was no television, but he had a radio and a stereo, and somehow he had managed to stock a shelf with most of my favorite music. Sometimes he sat beside me, and he would shyly put his arm around me, and I would lean against him and put my head on his shoulder while we listened to music together, and watched the fire. We didn’t talk much, but the silence was comfortable. Always, when he said good night, he kissed my cheek. The bad one.

After a week, when he started to turn away from me at my bedroom door, I said, “You don’t have to go to your own room.”

It took him a moment to realize what I meant. “Are you sure?” he said, uncertain and hopeful all at the same time.

“I’m sure.”

I would have turned the lights out, but he wouldn’t have it. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve dreamed of seeing you like this?” he asked. “I never thought I’d be so lucky.”

I was naked by this time. He looked me up and down with undisguised pleasure while he undressed. That part of me, at least, was still fine. I was glad, for his sake as well as my own. He deserved beauty. I turned the bad cheek away.

He was naked too now, seemingly unembarrassed by his old man’s body. He dropped on to the bed beside me.

“That was when I was beautiful,” I said. “And please don’t say, ‘you still are.’”

“You still are,” he said.

Without thinking, I put a hand to my face. “The canals of Mars?” I said.

“Where I shall swim in ecstasy,” he said and kissed the scars. I watched and listened and felt carefully with all my senses for some hint of reluctance, of disgust or even discomfort, but if he felt any, he disguised it completely.

He took hold of my hand and rubbed it across the pouch of his belly, where he had thickened about the waist. “If you’ll overlook this,” he said, and leaned over to kiss my lips.

*

It was good sex. Not great, but good. Of course, sex had been a solitary pastime for me since the accident. Jack off and think of Jason, think of Jason and jack off. Maybe at this point in time, anybody would have made it seem good. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I suppose that is one of the advantages of age, though: practice makes you, if not perfect, pretty adept. He was. He made love to me. I had never experienced that before. Lots of sex, none hotter than with Jason, but no one had ever made love to me. It was nice. I kissed him when it was over, and kissing him, actually forgot about how I looked. He stayed the night in my bed. I slept comfortably in the crook of his arm.

I realized when I woke in the morning that I had forgotten, too, how old he was.

*

After that, we slept together every night. He could not have been more tender, more loving, and I stirred myself to be as good as I could be for him as well. It got better, our sex. I wanted it to, and it did, it got very much better. I stopped jacking off remembering Jason. I didn’t stop remembering Jason, but I stopped jacking off, remembering him. Stopped jacking off altogether, to tell the truth. Who had anything left to shoot, the way we were going at it? He was insatiable. The old goat. It was flattering. Exhausting, but flattering.

One night when we finished, he rolled on his back with a gasp and said, “If you keep it up like that, you’re going to kill me. I’m an old man, remember?”

“You’re not so old,” I said. And, to my surprise, I meant it. I’d been to bed with men forty years his junior who weren’t the lover he was. Or, maybe they were. What I really mean is, that I hadn’t gotten the pleasure, the same kind of pleasure, from them that I did from him. Maybe that was in part the pleasure that I was giving. I had never thought of it like that before: taking pleasure in giving it. I wanted to make him happy. I wanted to please him. When I did, and he made it quite obvious that I did, it made me happy too.

That was a new one for me.

*

We divided up the housecleaning. The one who scrubbed the bathroom got to pick the music. Since that was not one of my favorite chores, we listened to a lot of Sarah Vaughn and Dinah Washington, both new to me, but I quickly fell in love. It would no doubt have looked a little funny to someone else, him scrubbing the tub and me mopping the kitchen, and both of us bellowing “All of Me,” along with Dinah. His lack of pitch didn’t seem all that important. It was a while before I realized that I hadn’t sung in years. Even before the scars. Where, I wondered, had the music gone?

I learned that he liked to read aloud. I’d never had anyone do that for me, but I found that I enjoyed that too. He had a lovely reading voice, multicolored and far more musical than his singing voice. He read Vanity Fair, a chapter an evening. Listening to him, watching the fire, it was easy to sink into the story. Becky Sharp winked at me from the flames. I liked her.

I liked the beach at night, too, maybe because I didn’t have to think about anybody seeing me. Anybody but Douglas. I would sit and watch the surf, and he would lie on his back and gaze up at the stars.

“I wonder,” he said one night. “When we look at them, is it the stars twinkling, or our eyes?”

“My eyes don’t twinkle,” I told him.

“Oh, but they do,” he said, sitting up with a grin and looking into them. “They get like Christmas lights when you’re about to come.”

“That is so ridiculous,” I said. “You are so full of shit.”

We made love in the warm sand, the murmur of the waves like muted strings to our dissonant chorus of sighs and moans. He went down on me, and just as I was about to go off, he jumped up over me and said, “There, they’re sparkling like crazy.”

I couldn’t help laughing, and he laughed with me, and hugged me. I had almost forgotten how to laugh.

After a while, I lifted my head and looked down at myself. “Were you planning on finishing that?” I asked.

“Try to stop me,” he said, sliding down in the sand.

*

Sometimes, after swimming, his hips bothered him. “A touch of arthritis,” he said, and I quickly got into the habit of massaging them for him.

“Are you going to massage me all over?” he asked with a naughty grin when I told him to strip and lie down on the floor.

“I’m going to work on the parts that are sore,” I told him primly.

“Oh, have I got an ache here,” he said with a laugh, and cupped his balls in his hand. I slapped his butt hard.

“Now you’ve got one there, too,” I said. But I kept my word, and massaged that for him as well. Everywhere he said he ached.

He kept finding new places.

*

He was getting ready to walk into town one day; it was a month or more after I had arrived there, though the time had passed with astonishing rapidity, when he asked with a sly expression if I wanted to go along.

“Don’t be fucking stupid,” I snapped, angry out of all proportion. “Did you plan to sell tickets?”

“Come here,” he said. He took my hand and brought me into his bedroom. There was a large mirror over his dresser. Mine had none. This one and the little one on the medicine cabinet were the only ones in the cottage. I could shave in the medicine cabinet mirror without looking at the scars. The whiskers didn’t grow on that side. There were advantages to having your skin burned off. Think about it, if you don’t like shaving.

When I saw where he was leading me, I held back. “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t be cruel. You know I don’t want to see.”

“But you do,” he said, and would not let go of me, and all but dragged me to the mirror. “Look.” I automatically turned the bad side away from the glass, but he put a hand on my chin and stubbornly turned my face.

It would be dramatic and exciting to say that the scars had disappeared. They hadn’t; but even I could see that they had faded considerably. I still looked like the surface of Mars, but viewed through an out-of-focus telescope. Someone, not everyone, but probably one or two here or there, could look at it and not want to vomit.

I put a hand up and ran my fingers over my cheek, as if to confirm that it really was my face, my present face, and not some photograph he had taped up to fool me. I couldn’t think what to say. I shook my head, bewildered.

He grinned and kissed my cheek, the bad side—the not-quite-so-bad-side now. “I’ll be back in an hour or so he said. “Anything you want?”

*

It was maybe a week after that, the day he went down to the beach alone. The weather had turned cool, and I decided to stay on the terrace and read. I read and dozed, and thought about what had happened to my face. I had only looked once since that first day, afraid that I would realize I was merely a victim of wishful thinking.

It wasn’t that, though. The scars were still there, but the ugly raw-liver red of the canals had faded to patches of dusty rose. I couldn’t understand it. I wanted to think about it. The doctor had given me a special salve. I hadn’t bothered using it, thinking there was little chance of significant improvement. Now I applied it assiduously morning and night, not minding the rotten-potato stink. If Douglas minded it, he never said.

Still, I was afraid to look, afraid to jinx whatever was happening.

*

Douglas shouted something from the beach, interrupting my reverie. I sat up and looked. He was holding a starfish aloft, waving it for me like a flag. I laughed and waved back, and he tossed it into the water again. Some would have kept it for a trophy, letting the living thing within the shell die. He wouldn’t. He was too good a man. I had never known a better one, my whole life, or one, and it surprised me to realize this, whose company pleased me more. Our days had flown by. How could I have thought him a bore in the past? How could I have been so vacuous?

He began to climb up the rocks, coming back. I watched him and it occurred to me all at once that he looked different. His waist was trimmer, and that little paunch had shrunk away. Seeing him like this, at the distance, he might have passed for a man in his forties. His early forties. All that swimming, I thought; all those hikes into town and back.

Or, something.

*

“Something is happening to us,” I said.

He smiled. I don’t think I had ever actually noticed what a sweet smile he had. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, look at us. Look at you. You look fifteen years younger than you did when we came here. Twenty years maybe.”

He lifted his head to look down at his naked body. “I’ve lost some weight. That’s your cooking. I lived on pizza in town.”

“But it’s not just your weight,” I said. I rolled onto my side and ran a hand across the surface of his belly, the way I had done our first night in bed. “Look, it’s hard as a rock.”

“That’s not the only thing, in case you hadn’t noticed,” he said. He took my hand and put it on his erection.

“Okay, case in point,” I said, but I did not take my hand away. “We just fucked, not even ten minutes ago. When was the last time you were raring to go so soon afterward?”

“The last time? Probably I was jacking off thinking about you,” he said. He rolled over to face me, and took me in his arms, and kissed me, and for a while, we had no more conversation.

Really, he was insatiable. The old goat. Damned good, now, but insatiable.

*

But he wasn’t an old goat anymore, either. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop looking at him. Before, at the beginning, I had mostly averted my eyes when he was naked, embarrassed for him, turned off for myself.

It wasn’t just curiosity that had me staring at him whenever I could now, though I was fascinated by the changes in him; it almost seemed as if I could see them happening. I looked because he was terrific to look at. It wasn’t only his body. He might have had the world’s most successful face-lift. The jowls were gone, the laugh lines, the furrows on his brow. His thin hair was thicker, and lustrous. He had always been handsome in an old-man way, handsome-distinguished. Now, he was just plain hot. Had he always been? Had I always been blind?

“Is this still sore?” I asked him, massaging one hip.

“Not since you started working on it,” he said. “You’ve got magic in your hands.”

I stared at him. At his round, hard butt. I still would not look at my scarred face. I was too afraid of what I would see. Or not see. But his butt was lovely to look at. I looked every chance I got. Both of us enjoyed the massages.

Of course, he wasn’t going to let me avoid that other sight.

*

“Look,” he said, holding the mirror up in front of me.

I turned away from it, like a vampire afraid that he will see no reflection. “No, I don’t want to,” I said sharply. “I’m afraid.”

“Look,” he said insistently, and again put the mirror in front of my face. I had no choice but to look into it.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“I see…” I hesitated. Did I really see what I thought I saw? It was almost, not quite, but very close, to what I used to see, in the past; before the accident. My face. Not that hideous thing that had been foisted on me, but the beautifully sculpted cheekbones, the mouth that Jason had always called “too kissable,” the little rounded chin.

The smooth, porcelain skin. “It’s me,” I said, in wonder. “The canals. They’re gone.” Nearly, at any rate. I had to lean toward the glass, peer closely, to see their faint vestiges.

“Yes. I wanted to say something sooner, but I wanted to be sure,” he said.

“I’m beautiful,” I said. I put my hand up to touch my face, still not able to comprehend.

“You always have been,” he said. “To me. It’s just the surface stuff that’s changing. That’s really not all that important. There never really were any canals, you know.”

I looked my puzzlement at him. “On Mars, I mean,” he said. “It was a bum lens in somebody’s telescope, badly focused, the way I understand it, and somebody mistranslated the word ‘channels,’ so it was all a misunderstanding. Later, when they could see it better, could look at it through a proper lens, and somebody corrected the translation, they realized there weren’t any canals. Never had been.”

“But mine were. And now they’re gone.” I looked at him, kneeling over the bed, at his firm, youthful body. “We’ve both changed. You look entirely different as well. What can it mean?”

“Maybe,” he said, putting the mirror aside, “we were just looking through the wrong lens. Maybe we’re just seeing one another now through the eyes of love. Maybe we had the word wrong, too. Maybe what we thought that was, was something else.”

Love. I thought about that for a while. Was that what this was? It wasn’t like anything I had felt before, nothing like what I had thought love was. Nothing, for instance, compared to what I had felt in the past, for Jason.

And yet, it felt good, in a way I had never felt for anyone before. It felt good knowing he loved me. Whatever it was I felt for him, that felt good too. I was afraid to call it love, though. What I had called love in the past had gone from me in a twinkling, had drowned in those canals on Mars. Before they got the telescope straightened out.

He saw my expression. “What?” he asked.

“I was just thinking.”

“About?”

I looked directly at him. “About Jason,” I said.

I could see that it had hurt him. His eyes, gleaming so brightly a moment before, went dull, although he managed to keep a faint smile on his lips. “Still hurt, does it?”

I sighed. I couldn’t lie to him. Maybe that was love, when you can’t lie to someone. How would I know? About love? “Yes.”

“You’re thinking, if he saw you now, just like you used to be, that he would fall in love with you all over again.”

Was that what I wanted? I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t say the idea wasn’t tempting. I remembered the last time, the regret and the shame on Jason’s face. What would it be worth, to see his expression change to something else? What was I willing to pay for that satisfaction? I said nothing, and after a moment, he read my silence, and sighed also.

“Well, there’s only one way to know, isn’t there?” he said. He sat up, and reached for his clothes where he had tossed them on the floor when we had undressed so hurriedly. I looked at his back, so firm, the muscles rippling the way a young man’s muscles did, his cheeks, when he raised them to slip his boxers on, round and firm and pale, as if they were carved of alabaster. I thought of how sleek they felt when I ran my hand over them, massaging him. I almost reached out to touch him.

Almost.

*

We drove into the city that same day, hardly talking. We left my car at the beach. “I can bring it in for you later,” he said. He never stopped thinking of ways to make things easier for me. Even now. Even taking me back to Jason.

He stopped at the curb in front of my apartment. I sat, looking for a moment up at the window on the third floor. Jason had promised to look after things, but I could see that the geranium in the window was dead.

I glanced sideways at Douglas. He was trying to smile, but the droop of his jowls and the furrows on his brow turned his smile sad. In the afternoon light, the pouches under his eyes looked like wet teabags.

“It’s all right,” he said, and put his hand atop mine. “Really, I mean it. You can’t know how happy you’ve made me these last couple of months. Whatever you decide now, it won’t take anything away from that. It won’t make me love you any less.”

I looked down at his old man’s hand, knobby and wrinkled. I started to reach for the mirror over the visor, and changed my mind. I didn’t need to look. I didn’t need to see Jason, either. I already knew what he was. And wasn’t.

“Take me home,” I said.

“Home?” He glanced past me, at the apartment building, wanting to be certain, not daring to misunderstand.

“The cottage. Our cottage. Please.”

He was silent for a moment. “You’re sure?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I had never in my life been more sure of anything.

He looked at me long and hard. I looked back, full face, not turning my cheek away as I had gotten into the habit of doing. I didn’t need to now. I knew that.

Finally, he leaned across the seat and touched my cheek, the scarred one, with his lips, and I turned my face and found his lips with mine, and kissed him.

He put the car in gear, and drove away from the curb. About halfway to the cottage, he began to sing, “All of Me.”

“You know, you never do get on pitch,” I said with some asperity.

“Well, then, you sing it,” he said.

I did. We sang it together at the tops of our lungs. People in the cars we passed stared. Some of them smiled. Some of them saw into the car, and looked away. Douglas grinned sideways at me, a boyish, devilish grin, and took my hand and put it on his lap.

“Guess what I want to do when we get home,” he said.

“You old goat,” I said, but I did not take my hand away.