A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Read online

  Karl is not the only one. I see the legs of men and bulls traipsing around our kitchen, looking for something to eat. They work up appetites at our house—man-sized. Cans of tuna, a dozen eggs, a raw red onion sliced thick—I’ve seen them make sandwiches I couldn’t get my hands around.

  My mother stands off to the side, sweet in a brocade robe or sexy in a yellow lotto T-shirt, and watches them work her kitchen with the sudden dexterity of hungry men. She points to where the crackers are. She shrugs when she’s informed that we are out of milk.

  In her way, my mother likes them all. It’s not for money that she takes them to her bed, but for lack of words, for something gone wrong with my father that she has no way of explaining. He sometimes calls me from Newark to say hi. He asks me if I’m doing O.K.

  “Sure,” I say. “Great.”

  Karl asks me if I’ve finished my homework. Barry Rivers asks me where I got my green eyes; Tim French, if there are any more clean towels; a one-night Cuban musician, if our dog bites.

  I want to tell the musician, “Yeah, he’ll take your damn head off,” but I answer, “No, never has before.”

  It’s my mother who asks me to help her with Manny Del Rio. Sometime after eleven or twelve she comes into my bedroom and shakes me hard out of sleep. “April,” she says, “April, come help me with Manny. I think he’s hurt.”

  It’s a Thursday night. This I am sure of because Manny bowls mixed league on Thursdays at Sugarloaf Bowl, then comes by our house for my mother’s three-bean soup. Friday mornings he’s usually still here. My mother tiptoes out of her room and signals me with one finger to her lips, a sign that has come to mean that all the men of the world are asleep, that they are dear to us in that state, camped out and heavy on our sheets.

  In the bottom of our shower that Thursday night, Manny is all flesh—the torso of a grand duke and the short stocky legs of a pipe fitter. He looks up at us out of too much pain to be embarrassed.

  “Where does it hurt?” my mother asks him.

  Manny cannot decide. He groans, then curses in Spanish. The bar of soap is still under his right foot, the water still beaded across his chest and on his neck.

  There is a way to stare politely, and I know how to do it, I’ve practiced, and I think it’s fair to say I’m an expert with my eyes. I give Manny a slow once-over, and I see it all: the broad chest, the narrow hips, wet hair, the story of his life pink and small and lying to the side. I look up at my mother, who hovers over Manny like a dark angel, and maybe it’s because I’m still sleepy, but it seems as if we are moving underwater—our hands slow, almost helpless.

  “Is it your leg?” I ask Manny, trying to clarify the middle of this crazy night. “Your back? Your arm?”

  There is an unbelieving look on his face as my mother and I attempt to pull him out of the shower and onto the cold linoleum floor. “Don’t,” he tells us. It’s as much as he can get out of his mouth at once. Spread, exhausted, Manny lies still and poses for us in our own bathroom, his hip shattered, though none of us will know this until later, after he is picked up by an ambulance and X-rayed at Stormont Vail.

  We cover him with a blanket and wait for the paramedics. It seems like a long wait, the three of us in one small room, Manny’s hand squeezing the side of the tub in a sad gesture that I can’t forget. He is a sweet old-fashioned guy who blushes at a kiss but loves my mother with the force of a bazooka.

  We wait forever, which indicates how time passes in this house. My mother flicks her cigarette ashes into the bathroom sink. Realizing that silence is the best alternative here, she stops talking. Her cigarette, then hand, then arm move in one gentle line from knee to mouth and mouth to knee. She exhales with the deepest sigh, one that says life simply cannot be lived this way anymore.

  Fat boy cupids, men of stone, athletes, bathers—they kiss and fondle my mother, then give me a sidelong glance. “This is April,” she tells them in the way of an introduction. “She’s on the honor roll, she’s in the choir. You can’t slip anything by her, so don’t even try. Look at that smile. She’s gonna break some hearts in her time, huh?”

  Late night or midmorning Judy Garland sings “You made me love you” off one of our old scratchy albums. They are mesmerized. Karl leans his head back in the brown easy chair, closes his eyes, and commits himself to that long languorous kind of beauty. “It’s only a song,” I tell him. Tim French, in his boxer shorts, does a simple little four-step right there in the living room. He doesn’t need a partner. He moves unselfconsciously, and everything moves with him—mind and body, dream and daylight.

  At the top of the stairs or in the kitchen doorway, I am where I can see it all: Tim dancing in his own arms, Manny searching for his socks bare-assed, Barry scratching himself as he reads the newspaper. It is a precarious view for a seventeen-year-old. My mother pulls me close to her and says, “You just as well know now.” We stand and watch in the doorway together, at the top of the stairs, near the piano, next to her bed, by a chair, by a blanket, by a rug, and in the deepest sense they are beyond us, these men who come visiting.

  They step out of their clothes or my mother undresses them, and in the golden light of the Nile they are the bare figures of love and promise. In my mother’s care, they see themselves twice their real size, agile, long-limbed, generous, hung like bulls, sweet as new fathers. They are fast to sleep and slow to awaken. She tiptoes out of her room in the mornings and puts her finger to her lips and our world is more quiet than the dark high rafters of a tomb.

  I never ask her why, and lately I never ask her who. Karl, Blair, Manny . . . men come and go according to a calendar that only my mother’s heart could know.

  Laureano, the Cuban musician, drums our coffee table until we have memorized the Latin beat, which he says is the same beat as the heart pumping—da dum, da dum. “That’s why you can’t ignore Latin music,” he tells my mother and me, “because it’s the same music as your own body.” He taps the left side of his chest where supposedly he has a heart, then winks and stretches out on the couch, dark and suggestive as deep woods. He has grown to love America, he says.

  Laureano is a one-nighter, a first and last course all rolled into one. My mother glows for him. She walks across the floor gently, as if it could fall in at any minute. She has filed her fingernails and painted them a soft pastel. She crosses her legs and taps her foot, anxiously pushing the night forward to the moment when she pulls back the bedspread and the air goes thin. My mother will not be satisfied until she has pulled every star from the sky.

  Upstairs, in my own bed, I give ten-to-one odds that Laureano will not even show for breakfast.

  Mornings are the worst. Everything from the night before has been used up, and it’s like starting over. Our lives begin with bare sunlight creeping over the floor, inch by inch. We drink strong black coffee and keep an edgy silence. We are trying not to wake someone, but I can’t remember who. Manny? Blair? Tim? They are mostly versions of the same body that scoot from my mother’s bed into the bathroom for an early morning pee.

  Laureano strolls, and when he looks up and sees me at the end of the hallway he stops short of the bathroom, leans against the wall, and smiles at me with the quick self-assuredness of a lion tamer. I have eyes and I use them. His body is tall and lean—a pen and ink sketch. He moves his left arm slowly up the wall as if he’s reaching for something, but nothing is there. He is casual in his nakedness, confident in this small makeshift love scene. I figure it’s my hallway, though, so I stare him down. My trick is to stare at the wall just behind him—try to blister the cool white paint. Laureano finally laughs, snaps the spell, and moves with no hurry to the bathroom.

  Evenings I sit at a desk in a corner of the living room that my mother insists on calling the study. I open my books and lose myself in homework, in thick black strings of numbers and in the pages of history where fate is swift and lives are not left to sputter and tumble. The yellow pencil in my hand guides me through the night, through the opening and
closing of my mother’s bedroom door, and through the dull watery sounds of people in the next room.

  It’s late when she stands over me and says I’m going to ruin my eyes, but she’s wrong. I can see every nail hole and scrape on these walls, I can see the smallest cigarette burn in the sofa, dust in the corner, a finger-length cobweb in the windowsill. I can see the storm that has crossed my mother’s face and left it soft and sleepy—obscured as if by the distance of an ocean.

  There is a place in me—just under my skin—where everything and everyone from this house is distinctly remembered.

  There are the long muscular arms of David, who sprays our house for termites in early spring. Under the eaves and around the baseboards, David has the golden reach of a boxer. He swears we won’t smell a thing. My mother stretches the truth, tells David that she’s seen the signs of termites: a bleached sawdust leaking where the walls meet. He’s standing on a ladder, and she looks up at him, her hair shining like a new quarter.

  I can see Gregory’s back and my mother, kissing his vertebrae one by one, careful and removed as a lady-in-waiting. She won’t let him turn around. He must endure what he is made of.

  I remember the strong Norman legs of my grandfather who visits us from Idaho and lounges all day in his robe, pockets full of Oreos, a milk ring on the table.

  I see shoulders without their wings. I remember a bruise as a place to be kissed. I recall Tony Papineau building a birdhouse in our backyard so our winter would be crossed with sparrows. My mother wears a green wool jacket and as his hammer sings she dances for Tony in the cold.

  I love the way that pages in a book feel: smooth and cold, the edges sharp enough to draw blood. My mother licks her fingers before she turns the pages of a book. “Easier that way,” she says. She reads about the far-away and long-ago, about primitives terrorized by the moon.

  When I open a book I want facts, dates, the pure honesty of numbers. I want a paragraph faithful enough to draw me away from what’s going on in the next room: my mother dragging herself to the bottom, some man thinking it is love.

  Blair makes the sound of a wounded duck, which is the combination of a honk and a wheeze. It is not something I would equate with passion, not a sound that I think of in response to my mother’s pear-colored skin. In the room next to theirs, I am reading, studying, fighting my way into a book, and that sound goes on forever. The walls of this house aren’t thick enough to keep that kind of sadness contained.

  I’m sitting at the desk with the English book in my hands, though it just as well be a jellyfish or a brick. The noise goes higher, louder, the duck becomes inconsolable. I strain, but the words on the page are futile hash marks.

  Ten steps and I am at the front door, then out into the night, walking as quickly as I can. I live on an old quiet street that’s blessed with big trees and where people still use push mowers. The houses are nothing special—bland with red brick, too symmetric with their sidekicker porches. I know some of the names here: Peterson, Barnett, Stanopolous. The only time I’ve seen the police on this street is the afternoon that Nelda Peterson’s eighty-year-old mother fell flat dead in the azaleas and lay there like she was floating until her son-in-law came home that night. That’s the only fatality I know of on this street—that is, if you don’t count my mother.

  When I get to the end of our block, I turn around, and back there is our house—2431—and from this distance my mother’s lighted bedroom window is no bigger than a postage stamp. My heart is beating recklessly and my hands would be so much better if they had something to hold. I take a breath—the kind that stings the back of your throat—and then I count to ten or twenty or a hundred thousand. Nothing changes. The lights do not flicker. The moon doesn’t dip. The sky does not go dark as oil.

  I turn around and continue on to the next block and the next, past a row of stores, beyond Ace Hardware, into other neighborhoods where both rambling houses and rattletraps perch at the edge of great lawns, where porchlights shine hot as meteors welcoming somebody home. When finally I don’t know where I am anymore, I get smart, as my mother would say. I turn and start back, and at last I’m calm on those sidewalks, I’m limp and light. I watch my feet all the way home, step after step—no melody, no rhythm—until all I know is the beauty of my own shoes.

  Evolution of words

  I tried to see the city as he must have seen it—a miracle of light, the rain-wet streets opening from Battery to Sansome and finally down to Grant. Judd hadn’t slept in four nights, and so, when he left his parents’ house on the fifth night and walked downtown, the city must have spun with music for him. He was seventeen and sleepless and that close to what his mother would later call “release.”

  We cried at that. Release. The idea of Judd walking in Chinatown the fifth night, change in his pockets, the on-and-off rain a passage into something we had no knowledge of. He liked it there—Chinatown—the piles of foreign newspapers, the boys with braids, with needletracks dancing up their thin arms. San Francisco was a waking dream that my cousin Judd walked through tirelessly. He didn’t want a car. Leslie Prada and Her Topless Love Act was something he had to see on foot, next door to The Condor, across from Dutch Boy Paints, and only a half block down from El Cid’s He and She Revue. “Get a job and you can have a car,” Judd’s parents told him, but he continued to walk from Nob Hill to Lands’ End in tennis shoes and T-shirt, with the long dark hair that would be cut before he was buried. No one knew where my cousin’s spending money came from.

  For months afterward I looked for answers by trying to re-create the scene of that shadowy fifth night, the world in rags. Even fish sleep, their bodies like silvery, shot arrows lining the Embarcadero and Baker’s Beach and spreading outward on waves to Sausalito. Fridays were open buffet at Song Hay, and Judd could have been there that last night, but the restaurant was so busy that the cashier couldn’t remember just one boy. An attendant at the Ginn Wall parking lot may have seen Judd, but there was nothing distinctive about my cousin’s face, and in the darkness at the corner of the lot a slouching boy in a denim jacket was the least of things to notice. With a Chamber of Commerce city map, I tried to reinvent his path, tracing the cold hard steps he might have taken past the Greyhound Bus Depot and maybe on to the Flower Terminal where the chrysanthemums must have glowed, to him, like an eerie experiment set in white rain. North or south from there, perhaps unable to hitch a ride to Sonoma, cold and breathless and stinging with enough life to ground three people, my cousin turned, wherever he was, and finally headed for the nailhead lights of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  That’s where I stopped reimagining the scene—the place where Judd put on his Walkman and stepped into air. No one knew how he got past the attendants at the tollbooths. Magic, determination—my cousin wanted to fly, the music pounding in his ears, the rough wind making its momentary promises.

  In the gloomy days before the funeral, no one thought about Judd’s hair, about the way he had wanted to be. By the time we gave instructions, we were too late. Hyberland’s Mortuary had already used army clippers on him.

  Judd’s mother, entranced, made endless pots of coffee, and it was not until months later that she said it: “release.” Sitting at the kitchen table, our hearts turned liquid and we finally caved in.

  Now, years later, there are other words we can’t get past: “winter,” “midnight.” Even “water” hits us like a clap of thunder.

  A Map of Kansas

  Early on a June morning my relatives come driving in from places small and windswept, places with the names of lost souls: Netawaka, Leavenworth, Skiddy, Sabetha. Those who live in the Far West—Liberal or Scott County—have driven through the night or stopped in one of the gray, mid-state, freeway towns where motels raise holy hell with each other in their war for customers. I’ve seen the signs and come-ons before—Better Queen Sized Beds, Super Satellite Cable, Free Ham and Egg Breakfast—and I’ve usually been fortunate enough to have somewhere else to stay. A desperate Imperial Inn or
Regal 8, say in Salina or Garden City or anywhere in the great slackened palm of mid-Kansas, can signal the beginning of a long and lonely night.

  My aunts and uncles and cousins, my half relatives and step-cousins, people who claim to be related to us, and people who belong to our family only by accident or indiscretion—all of them head home for the reunion early on a June morning. They do sixty and seventy miles an hour on the highways, the fields of wheat and sorghum and foot-high corn whipping by in a sweet fast-forward. The rural premise here is to get where you’re going. Their windshields fill with the delicate blue and yellow and black of early morning swarms. Almost always there is a baby crying from the back seat and almost always one of my aunts or cousins will turn around from the front seat with a bottle or a Tootsie Pop or a half-serious warning or begin to tiredly open up her blouse. My relatives travel the prairies at the speed of light to get home, maybe to be the first to arrive, maybe to get the long and lonely ride over with—star to star, town to town.

  I know long and lonely. I also know joy and comfort and being wanted. My life has taken a wandering path, and maybe I’m smarter because of this. Jean, my mother, thinks we’re smarter for having moved to California almost ten years ago, though the day we packed the U-Haul van and left our unfinished basement home in Holton, Kansas, was a hard day, a day with a lot of crying and swearing and promises. I was sixteen then and our leaving for California seemed like a long, interesting part of a movie to me, but my nine-year-old sister Katie was downright scared.