UNCLE LOUIS STOOD before Starry Night for a long time, longer than he’d stood before Monet’s Water Lilies or Matisse’s nude dancers or any of the other paintings he’d come to New York to see. Morgan wandered off, and when he returned, Uncle Louis was sitting on a bench, cleaning his glasses with his necktie. Morgan thought he saw the trail of a tear on Uncle Louis’s dark cheek, but perhaps it was a gleam of light. Among the gallerygoers, Morgan had noticed, were a number of women who wore silver or gold things in their hair or around their throats or wrists. It was as if these women, both the tall, languid ones and the short, bustling ones, had all awakened on that spring day in 1984, when the air trembled with promising ideas, and decided that the light should reflect off themselves, wherever they went.
Uncle Louis settled his glasses on his nose and said, “I hear a rumbling in my stomach, Morgan. What do you hear in yours?”
Morgan, who was thirty-three and a day, who had celebrated his birthday with his girlfriend at a French restaurant in the West Forties the night before, said, “I could go for a cup of coffee.” When he’d wandered off, he’d stood in front of a Rothko painting for a moment or two. The dark bands of color had seemed to throb. It wasn’t a painting to look at when you’d had a lot of wine the night before. Neither was Starry Night, with its pulsating moon and stars and its cypresses that were like blackened tongues of flame. Nor, for that matter, were the stripes of Uncle Louis’s seersucker suit a sight that Morgan found easy to behold.
Uncle Louis rose from the bench. He was sixty-six then, two months older than Morgan’s father. He had a paunch upon which the end of his tie (striped, also, alas) lay. At one time he’d fed his stomach mostly alcohol, but he’d been completely sober for the past half dozen years, since the late seventies, and his stomach had almost seemed to swell in response, in joy or relief. When Morgan had seen Uncle Louis a couple Christmases ago, he had looked, next to Morgan’s slender father, the more robust of the two. And then last spring, when Louis began to have night sweats and to experience pain near his left eye, it was discovered that he had lymphoma. He lost weight and had to tighten the red Christmas suspenders that he wore almost year-round. During the summer, he was given radiation treatments, and by the fall his doctor had declared him to be mostly clean of the disease, except for a few minor pockets. The lymphoma was said to be “indolent.”
Uncle Louis had subsequently decided to light out for distant places. That winter, he had seen the sun rise in Cádiz and Tangier and Dubrovnik and Istanbul. In the summer, he was planning to take a train the length of Sweden to Lapland and paint the Lapps and their reindeer and the white nights. Now he was on his roundabout way to a Mexican beach. He’d said he was going to point his belly at the sun and paint the sky and the palm trees from that perspective. He said he was going to call it the Fat Vacationer series.
Uncle Louis patted his stomach. “Coffee it is. With a bagel and cream cheese on the side.”
As they descended the stairs to the museum lobby, Morgan imagined his father’s cousin trying to paint while lying on his back. It would be awkward, though Michelangelo and Tiepolo and all those guys had done it, hadn’t they? A man who had given up drinking ought to be able to paint on his back, surely.
They retrieved Uncle Louis’s hat from the cloak room and passed through the revolving doors onto Fifty-third Street. Uncle Louis somehow got caught in a busload of Japanese tourists. When at last he wriggled free, he said, “The one place I won’t ever travel to is Japan. I haven’t forgiven them for attacking us. And I don’t care for raw fish.”
They walked toward Fifth Avenue. A garbage truck swallowed black bags of garbage, car horns sounded, a jackhammer undid a piece of concrete, but there was something unmistakably sweet in the air, something that even Morgan, with his postbirthday hangover, could detect. Some hint of lilac or cherry had wafted down from Central Park, perhaps. Or maybe all the women in the city, when they left their apartments that morning, had released into the air some secret perfume. When Morgan had seen Gina go off to work at quarter past nine—he was still in bed—he’d noticed that she’d pinned her hair up off her neck and was wearing under her unbuttoned baby-blue cardigan a low-cut shirt. All that sleep-softened flesh was awake! He imagined that as she’d walked out of the building into the April sunlight some sort of chemical event had occurred, something even a doorman, had there been a doorman, wouldn’t have failed to observe. She was a beaker of compounds exposed to radiant energy.
By the walls of St. Thomas, a man was selling wind-up puppies that turned in frenzied circles and spun their tails. Uncle Louis bought two. One was for Jacques, his very old dog, and the other he presented to Morgan.
“Happy birthday a day late,” he said.
They walked down Fifth Avenue, Morgan with his wind-up dog and Uncle Louis with his, in the direction of a coffee shop where Morgan had lunched before. Morgan worked near Grand Central, for the magazine that covered the hotel industry, but he sometimes wandered uptown in search of a grilled cheese sandwich to write home about. He’d taken off work today.
People sat on the steps of St. Patrick’s, enjoying the sun, listening or not listening to a man in a houndstooth hat and too-short checked trousers preach against wickedness. Morgan had seen the man before and heard his sermon about how God had rained fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah and the other cities of the Plain. “Lo,” he said, in a high, sharp voice that strived against the noise of the street, “the smoke of the country went up like the smoke of a furnace.”
Uncle Louis said, “I trust that I won’t run into these religious fanatics in the afterlife.”
“Maybe there’ll be a special room for them,” Morgan said, though his actual view of the afterlife, as best as he could imagine it, was that it was pure nullity, a zero without even the line that circumscribes it. Normally, he tried to avoid the thought of this—everything (love, blue skies, the squeeze bunt) erased—for it struck terror in his heart.
“It’s fun to imagine, isn’t it—the Ayatollah Khomeini and this peckerwood exhorting each other in languages unintelligible to each? Ho! It cheers me up, Morgan.”
Uncle Louis looked upward at the spires of the cathedral, needles in the haystack of tall things. Morgan wondered if Uncle Louis actually entertained the possibility of an afterlife. If so, did he imagine a room—or something grander, perhaps—where bachelor uncles such as himself, closeted gay men, would spend eternity? An image of laughing, naked men sprawled beside a pool from which steam picturesquely ascended filled Morgan’s head. The preacher in the houndstooth hat had left the cities of the Plain to smolder and was now foretelling the end of the world in general.
Morgan asked about his father. A few weeks ago, he’d had a cataract operation.
“He’s still drinking milk and following your mother’s orders. I beat him in cribbage the other night.”
Small puffy clouds, like those in a children’s pop-up book, were moving eastward, but the sun ruled the sky. It gave a glow to Uncle Louis’s shaved but shadowy cheeks and made the lines in his forehead seem distinct as a philosopher’s furrows.
“And of course he is meting out justice again, with two mostly clear eyes.” Uncle Louis had flipped the clip-on sun lenses down over his glasses.
“Not respecting persons in judgment? Hearing the small as well as the great?” Morgan had several times heard his father recite this bit of scripture, his head held level, his French nose tipped neither up nor down.
“Naturally,” Uncle Louis said, as they proceeded up the street, away from the end-of-the-world man. “When we played cribbage, he told me about a Vietnamese fellow he tutors. Your parents’ church adopted the family. Your dad said he took Mr. Vu to the Rexall store, so Mr. Vu might become familiar with American toiletries.” Uncle Louis chuckled. “I think your dad has a shot at sainthood if he keeps it up.”
Morgan smiled at the thought of his father leading his Vietnamese pupil along aisles full of analgesics and salves and ear-wax remover and Ace bandages. He imagined his father and Mr. Vu standing before the array of hair products, chanting “Shampoo! Shampoo!”
Uncle Louis put a quarter in the cigar box of a blind man who was standing outside Saks, in front of a window containing a jumble of bare manikins.
Uncle Louis thumped his forehead. “I just remembered I need a bathing suit for my Mexican adventure.” He flipped up his sun lenses.
They wandered around Saks with their wind-up puppies, slowing down at the perfume counter so that Uncle Louis could sniff (“Oleander? Bougainvillea? Dubrovnik at dusk?”), fingering raincoats and neckties and dress shirts. Uncle Louis did the fingering. Morgan hoped only for a cup of coffee and a couple of Tylenols. They rode the escalators and at last found a table devoted to men’s swimwear. The style in men’s swimwear that year seemed to be no style: no plaids, no paisleys, no gaudy stripes. A few of the suits made nods in the direction of the tropics. Uncle Louis picked a modestly cut, pale blue one.
“Excellent choice, sir,” the hovering salesman said. “Anything for your companion?”
“My nephew is all set, thank you,” Uncle Louis snapped. Morgan had never heard this tone of voice from his father’s cousin. It made him wince in sympathy for the salesman.
As they descended to the ground floor, Uncle Louis said, “I know you aren’t, technically, my nephew, but I think of you as such.” He put his hand on Morgan’s shoulder.
Morgan again thought he saw a spot like a tear on Uncle Louis’s cheek, unchecked sentiment glistening, though the store was so full of light bouncing off shiny surfaces he couldn’t be sure. He said, “So, what did you think of Starry Night? I’ve always thought it looked like the work of a deranged child.”
“Well, yes,” Uncle Louis said, chuckling in his peculiar, almost private way that was like something bubbling underground. “I believe he painted it not long after he presented his ear to a prostitute. It is a little childlike and perhaps a little mad—or visionary might be kinder—but I would trade all my worldly goods, except for Jacques, to be able to paint one brush stroke like van Gogh. Then I could die.”
On their way out, they stopped for a second time at a table of men’s dress shirts. The shirts were yellow and blue and lavender and pink and the green of a Granny Smith apple. Uncle Louis selected four. They were for a friend of his in Mexico, he said. “I hope I have his right neck size.” He offered to buy Morgan a shirt for his birthday. “Do you like this blue one? It’s almost a van Gogh blue. Or this pink one? If men wore pink more often, there would be fewer wars.”
Morgan didn’t own a pink shirt then and he was against all wars except for the just ones, so he accepted Uncle Louis’s gift on the condition that Uncle Louis let Morgan pay for the coffee.
“And a bagel with cream cheese. I’m starved,” Uncle Louis said.
THREE MONTHS LATER, Morgan and Gina flew down to Louisville for a long weekend. It was ninety-eight degrees the day they arrived. In the evening, Mrs. Dupree enlisted Morgan and his father to help her water the yard. Everything was parched, she said. Gerald Boardman’s retriever had come over that morning and dumped his head in the birdbath and then slept in the English ivy below the dining room window until she sent him packing.
On their second night, Morgan and Gina went to see Uncle Louis and his new friend Lazaro. They shook hands with Lazaro, and then Lazaro retreated to the kitchen. Uncle Louis sent Morgan and Gina upstairs to his bedroom to change into their swimsuits. “Jacques will be there to attend to your every need,” he said. Uncle Louis wore a striped beachcomber shirt and he had scattered cologne (possibly a bit too much of it) among the creases on his neck. The lenses of his glasses were smudged, but the blue of his eyes was clear. It seemed to Morgan, as he and Gina climbed the stairs, that Uncle Louis was as happy as Morgan had ever seen him. Perhaps Uncle Louis had had a moment at the easel when something mysterious flowed down his arm into the hand that held the brush, when the resulting square of yellow on the canvas could pass for a box of God’s finest light. Perhaps he was still reveling in this. Or perhaps Uncle Louis’s state of mind was due to the presence of, as Morgan’s mother called him, “the Mexican houseboy.” Morgan’s father had said, “Lazaro has brought some spice into Louis’s life.” There was a hint of regret in Judge Dupree’s voice; it seemed that he and his cousin played cribbage less often.
Jacques was asleep on Uncle Louis’s bed, his grizzled part-terrier’s head on a throw pillow of lively south-of-the-border colors. When Gina sat down to pet him, Jacques didn’t lift his head or open his eyes more than a slit.
Morgan said, “He’s fifteen at least. Uncle Louis got him at the animal shelter.”
Gina put her nose close to Jacques’s moist black sniffer and said, “I forgive you for ignoring me.”
Uncle Louis’s room was neater than Morgan remembered it being when he was last in it, on that Thanksgiving in 1969. Perhaps Lazaro had taken a hand to it. The bed was made, anyway, and the tops of the dresser and night tables had been straightened. There was a stack of clean laundry on a chaise longue. The closet doors were shut tight. A panama hat had come to rest on a bedpost. Had Jacques been a decade or so younger, he would have jumped up, snatched the hat in his jaws, and eaten it in three or four bites.
Morgan picked up a guidebook to Sweden that was on a night table, then put it back, on top of a guidebook to Brazil. He was sweating through his shirt. Uncle Louis didn’t have air-conditioning, though there was a fan in the window. Morgan turned it on. Jacques raised his head an inch, as if in gratitude.
Gina said, “Hey, I think I recognize this kid.” She was looking at a photograph on the dresser, the one that showed Morgan and his brother and their father standing beside a steam engine in the Louisville and Nashville yards on Thanksgiving Day 1961. Though the picture was a touch fuzzy—dark had been falling when Uncle Louis snapped it, and rain, too—Morgan could discern his father’s smile, as well as the cowlick that the drizzle didn’t flatten. Crawford slouched and frowned, having for his own reasons renounced cheerfulness. Morgan saw in the tilt of his own ten-year-old head—buzz cut, with jug-handle ears and eyes a little raccoonish—a desire to please while not giving away too much.
“How did that little bald monkey turn into you?” Gina said, finding an ear beneath his long hair to tweak.
“Wheat germ for breakfast, organic peanut butter for lunch.”
Gina went into the bathroom to put on her suit.
Morgan, who still sometimes found it hard to resist violating other people’s privacy, opened the top drawer of Uncle Louis’s dresser where, all those years before, he’d found bullets for a pistol. What had happened to that pistol? Maybe Uncle Louis had hidden it where he couldn’t find it. Or maybe he’d discarded it when he gave up drinking.
Trying not to look at what his hand was doing, as if it were picking a name out of a hat, Morgan fished among balled pairs of silky hose.
“Lazaro is certainly a beauty,” Gina said. She’d left the door open.
Morgan said he guessed he was. He’d seen Lazaro only for that moment downstairs, a slight, dark young man with sharp cheekbones like an Indian’s.
Morgan found a pair of sock garters and one cuff link and a small round latticework box made of pale, delicate wood. When he opened the box, a piece of the latticework broke off. There was nothing inside.
“Do you think everybody in Louisville supposes they are lovers?” Gina pronounced the city’s name the local way—Lou-uh-vull—while making it plain that she found the pronunciation amusing.
“‘Sinners’ is the word some Louisvillians would use,” Morgan said, though it wasn’t obvious to him that his father’s cousin and Lazaro were lovers. The story Morgan had heard was that Lazaro had arrived in Kentucky a couple weeks after Uncle Louis had returned from his trip to the Yucatan. Lazaro had been waiting tables at a hotel on Isla Mujeres. He was hoping to study business at an American university, and Uncle Louis had promised to pull strings. In the meantime, Lazaro was minding Uncle Louis’s house and working on his English. “Though maybe their relationship is completely chaste.”
“If I were Uncle Louis,” Gina said, “I’d want Lazaro to lie down next to me at least twice a day.”
Morgan wondered if the box might be a cricket box. He’d had one as a child. It had sat on the red rolltop desk in his bedroom for many years, gathering dust, never a way station for a cricket. He hadn’t been the type to collect insects.
Gina came out of the bathroom. Her black two-piece suit—it was too modest to qualify as a bikini—was polka-dotted. Morgan had been in love with Gina for four years now. He always fell more in love when he saw her navel. Her navel was an inny, as sweet as a morning glory’s funnel, and he’d been known to linger there, like a bee with all the time in the world.
He said, “I’m thinking of getting down on my knees and kissing you. Would that be OK?”
“It would be OK if you closed the door all the way.” Sometimes he couldn’t believe his luck that out of all the men in New York, dashing men with impressive résumés, literary men and artistic men and men with trained voices and guys who juggled on crowded sidewalks, she’d picked him, who had taken trumpet lessons barely long enough to learn the scales, whose drawings of people made them look like bugs, who wrote articles for a magazine dedicated to the hotel industry.
He closed the door and they made love on a wool throw rug of many colors, another souvenir from Mexico, it seemed. He didn’t linger at her belly button. It went quickly; the colors of the rug bled into each other for a moment and then separated again. Their kisses and sighs didn’t rouse Jacques from his nap.
Gina said, “When do you think you’ll be ready to be the father of my child?”
“We should probably get married first, don’t you think?”
“We could do that,” she said.
He could get his mind around the idea of marriage, even if it did seem an awkward thing, like trying to get a bulky piece of furniture through a narrow door and then up a couple of flights of stairs. (Unmarried love was easy; you hardly needed furniture.) The idea of being a father, however, caused him consternation. Wouldn’t a child reject him on the grounds that Morgan had no experience being a father?
“Uncle Louis is going to wonder where we are,” he said, getting up to search for his swimsuit.
“I doubt he’ll wonder too much,” Gina said, wriggling into her suit bottom.
“Is a cricket in the house good or bad luck?”
“Good, I think. Do you hear one?”
“No. What if it’s dead?”
“Then it’s a cricket whose luck has run out.”
“When do you want to get married?” Morgan, still naked, was on his knees, looking under the chaise’s skirt for his suit.
“Are you proposing, Morgan?”
The wind-up puppy from New York was under the chaise. Morgan turned the key and the puppy jittered about on the floor, its stiff little tail rotating. Jacques raised his head two inches for this.
“Morgan? Is that a proposal?”
“When would you like to get married?”
“Would before I fall in love with Lazaro or somebody else be a good time?”
LAZARO CAME ACROSS the lawn carrying a trayful of drinks. He was wearing a long-sleeved white dress shirt and blue jeans that looked new. Morgan watched him from the diving board, trying to decide if Lazaro lay down beside Uncle Louis twice a day or once every other day or not at all. Lazaro walked slowly, with his head tipped to the side, as if he were trying to remember a verb conjugation. His face was coppery.
The lawn was a midsummer brown—the color of toast—where the sun struck it all day. The sun was low now, and it hit Morgan between the eyes. He bounced on the old, springless board covered with a disintegrating mat made of jute and dove into the pool, hearing in the moment he was airborne Uncle Louis’s voice and a bird he couldn’t identify. Morgan’s father had swum in this pool fifty years ago, when it was built, and so had Cyril, the goat that had belonged to Morgan’s grandfather. Five feet under, there was nothing to be seen but murk; neither the bottom nor the sides had ever been painted. The pool was a little concrete hole into which Uncle Louis put some chlorine that kept unwanted organisms at bay.
Boxwood grew unpruned at the corners of the pool, and when Morgan surfaced, he found himself among a constellation of leaves. Lazaro was setting the tray on a table between Gina and Uncle Louis, and Gina was gazing at Lazaro, as if she were trying to see herself in the lustrous black hair of his bent head. The bird that Morgan had heard when he dove was in the honey locust over near where Uncle Louis kept his rabbit hutches. Its voice was rapid and agitated.
“You want to go for a swim, Laz?” Uncle Louis asked.
“I prepare the dinner,” Lazaro said, edging away from the table.
“Is it something good? Hamburgers with your wicked guacamole sauce, I hope?”
Lazaro smiled a little, vaguely, and then turned back toward the house. He had left behind beers for Morgan and Gina and a glass of Coke for Uncle Louis and a bowl of cashews for all.
Morgan climbed out of the pool. The water had not soothed the postcoital ache in his groin. If he married Gina, would they still have quickies on other people’s rugs? What if she had twins or triplets or quintuplets? The bird continued to complain.
Morgan took a swig of beer and asked Uncle Louis if he’d painted any paintings while lying on his back on the beach in Mexico.
“You mean for my Fat Vacationer series?” He chuckled and his body shook gently. “I did a few sketches, but I was mostly just lazy. I’ve hardly picked up a pencil since I’ve been home, except to draw Laz. He indulges me.” He scooped cashews from the bowl and filled his mouth with them. Then he got up, stripped off his beachcomber’s shirt, placed his eye-glasses on the table, and announced that he was going to do a cannonball before dinner.
Morgan watched him pad through the grass in his blue Saks trunks, disappear behind a boxwood, and then, hairy belly foremost, reappear on the diving board.
“He told me that he’s afraid the lymphoma might be coming back,” Gina said to Morgan. “His eye hurts.”
“Really?” Morgan saw Uncle Louis rise on his toes, do a dainty test bounce. The Mexican cricket he’d brought into his house had not brought him luck. But the cricket had at least—or so it seemed—brought him happiness. “Maybe he’s mistaken. Maybe the problem is unrelated to the cancer.”
“Bombs away,” Uncle Louis said, grabbing at his knees as he jumped from the diving board. The water received him, rose in droplets that sparkled in the sunlight and rushed in waves toward the sides of the pool.
LAZARO WANTED TO see New York from the Empire State Building, so there they were—Lazaro, Uncle Louis, and Morgan—eighty-six floors above the street. It was breezy, and Morgan, who was afraid of heights, felt certain that the building was swaying. He looked down at his white Adidas with their stylish black racing stripes, the shoes that he’d circled the Central Park reservoir in, in an effort to lose his love handles, the shoes that had carried him around puddles and people living in boxes on the street and turds dropped by horses ridden by policemen in jodhpurs and helmets. Why was he up here, messing with gravity? He didn’t look down. He looked straight out at the sky, a piercing October blue.
Uncle Louis handed Morgan his point-and-shoot camera and stood beside Lazaro at the edge of the observation deck. Uncle Louis was wan and thin; he’d undergone another series of radiation treatments during the summer, not long after Morgan and Gina’s visit. The doctor had strongly recommended that Uncle Louis also take chemotherapy, but he’d declined. Instead, tomorrow, he was going to fly down to Belize to meet with a doctor who treated cancer patients with hormone shots and herbal remedies. “He promises I won’t lose my hair and won’t be upchucking all the time,” he’d said last night, at dinner at an Indian restaurant, where he’d contented himself with tea and nan bread. In the meantime, Lazaro, who was having visa problems, would stay in New York with Morgan. Morgan had bought an English-Spanish dictionary for the moments when English failed them.
“Say queso,” Morgan said.
Uncle Louis, who had worn his panama out into the morning sunshine, said, “Queso it is.”
Lazaro, whose eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, whose thick black hair the wind stirred only a little, whose cheekbones the sun glanced off of, was busy smoking a cigarette and didn’t say anything. Uncle Louis laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “Smile for posterity, Laz.”
Morgan pushed the button just as Lazaro opened his mouth. “I say New York, New York,” he said.
“One more,” Uncle Louis said to Morgan, putting his arm around Lazaro’s waist. Lazaro took off his sunglasses and Morgan saw again why Laz liked to hide his eyes: he didn’t want his hopes to be mistaken for foolishness.
Morgan saw Uncle Louis’s old, stained teeth and Lazaro’s young ones, white against his dark skin. He pushed the shutter release button. At that moment a wind came up, shifting (Morgan felt sure) the concrete under his feet and also picking the panama off Uncle Louis’s head and flinging it out into the blue void. The hat traveled westward, toward Macy’s, toward Penn Station. It caught an updraft and it mounted the air in a rush, as if it were looking for a cloud to alight on. It was a hat without a home before it became a speck, then something the day had absorbed.