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  I remember how Jean tried to turn it all into a joke, saying the only way to stop living underground was to move west. “Want to stay in a tomb for the rest of your lives?” she asked us as she carried out a box of Christmas decorations, tinsel and angel hair spilling behind her in a luminescent trail. For twelve years we had lived in the basement of a house whose upper stories, season after season, just never got built. Jean became sick of the dark, dank two-bedroom cigar box, of our sweaters always smelling like pee, and finally she grew tired of Eldon Hyde—a good-enough-looking husband but a poor architect, an idle carpenter, and, worst, a dreamless dreamer. Consequently, Jean drove the U-Haul west, I read the map, and Katie sullenly lost herself in the new Etch-a-Sketch Jean had bribed her with.

  In its way, California was good for us. The long, slow, rocky coastline set us free. Soon after we arrived Jean took Katie and me to Balboa Park and sat us down on a concrete bench in a garden steeped with bird of paradise and zinnias, where the colors rushed in high frequency and the air was glass, and she said, “We’re three women now. Comprende vous?”

  “We comprende,” Katie and I told her, and from then on Jean was Jean to us.

  Ten years later, like faithful traveling companions, like people who do not lose each other even after the road, the three of us returned together to the Midwest for the Hillcock reunion. It was June. It was right after Katie completely stopped eating. We came in on a smooth flight, Jean and I tipping a few bourbons, Katie drinking mineral water from a tall plastic container she pulled out of her carry-on tote. Katie had the window seat because, as she put it, she wanted her money’s worth.

  Katie was worried about money, though that was only indirectly the issue in her life. After two years of studying to become an X-ray technician, she had flunked the test for her certification. “Flat out flunked it,” she had said.

  “So what? You can take the test again in two months,” I told her.

  “Look,” she said, framed by the bay window in Jean’s pink and black ceramic kitchen. “If I don’t know the bones yet, if my best X-rays are more like vacation snapshots, then it’s over and I’m screwed. Trust me.”

  “Come on,” I said, “you were scared. You blanked. You were temporarily insane the day of the test.” But I could see that Katie had already cast those two years into a dismal, untalked-about void that she called her past.

  Toward the end of the flight into K.C. International we looked out the cramped porthole, over the wing, and down onto the endless farmland spread like a squared and colorful quilt, as strong in its way as the brown, slave-driven Rockies had been from the air an hour earlier. It’s probably true that one place is no better than another. Whatever your location, your heart either pounds with tenderness and love or it fails you. And yet, as I flew over the plains and down into the big, broken wheel of Kansas City I felt better, stronger. I don’t know if there are currents in the earth or if some mountains hold power or if certain places pulse with an unknowable energy, but when I finished my third bourbon and unbuckled my seat belt, I felt I was really home.

  The last three miles to the Hillcock reunion are on gravel road, and so my relatives slow down just a little, the flying gravel making its own song, dust layering the air brown and then pink. They know the road by heart: the sunlit curves and the soft, sloping shoulders and the old bridges that can spell trouble on a dark-enough night. Fall and winter, this road intimidates, but in summer it falls to its dusty knees, no more than a worn cowpath.

  My aunts and uncles and cousins, my half relatives and step-cousins arrive, honking their horns, looking for shade or a level place to park. They drive rusted-out pickups, little dusty Toyotas, one-ton Silverados, and Buick Electras. There’s a snub-nosed Ford Falcon next to the mailbox, and some dark-haired kid drives a burnt-out blue Triumph right up to the front porch. “Who is he?” Katie asks me, but I have no idea. He’s tall like the Hillcocks, dark-skinned like the Schirmeisters, yet the face has the blonde, softly bearded look of someone outside of memory.

  There are at least a handful of people at the reunion whom Katie and I cannot identify. Jean has eight brothers and sisters, all of them here, and they have in turn brought their children and their children’s children until the family becomes one of those unruly word problems from math class: how many people does it take to fill a yard starting with one man and one woman who multiply, spring and winter, good times and bad, hit-or-miss, right up into a June morning?

  I feel sure that the Hillcocks are a family who, in dire times, could continue to grow on only bread and water and radiant heat. They are not giants. They have worries and fears, sickness and grim crack-ups. Something burns in them, though, low and steady, something that most of them are not even aware of.

  My Uncle Samuel, for instance, simply cannot explain how he freed himself from the iron trap of an overturned cultivator. Caught in mud at the end of a row of beets, the big John Deere flipped and pinned him. He says his hands just kept digging for a way out, that he had no strength and that his life was not particularly a tender masterpiece worth saving to him at that moment, but his hands had a will of their own. With a crushed knee and a foot as useless as a flopping trout, he dragged himself halfway to the road, and the last thing he remembered seeing was the big, lilac, blockbuster sky.

  On the day of the reunion Katie is already so far gone that the sky means nothing to her. In cutoffs and a denim workshirt, she has taken herself past pretty into the delicate realm of an outline. Food is a quick, efficient link to her life that Katie has cut. Her long, blonde hair lies passively over one shoulder. She moves from cousin to cousin, smiling and wide-eyed, loosening the hold this jagged, green world has on her. Not once have Katie and I actually spoken about what she is doing, and perhaps it is not so much a plan that she has as a place into which she is gradually slipping. The failed test—and I truly believe this—is not the issue for Katie. There is something deeper—a black thread; a twisted, luckless ray of light—that she sees running the length of her life.

  “Katie,” I have said a million times before, trying to ease the something blue and indistinct in her. “Look out the window,” “Bite down hard,” “Breathe deeply,” “Make a fist,” “Color the leaves any goddamn color.”

  Her response has always been a tired, dreamy look that, if it were not for her lack of acting ability, would represent a cool, haunting Greta Garbo.

  Katie is under the big yellow and white canopy that has been borrowed from the Everest United Methodist Church and set up as the shady center of the reunion. She carries her bottle of mineral water—this in distinct contrast to the ice-cold cans and bottles my relatives carry: Orange Crush, Coke, Budweiser, Coors. The drinking starts at 9 A.M. and proceeds happily, unselfconsciously throughout the day. Twice someone goes into town for more ice. My cousin Bee fills two baby bottles with Coke, then gives them to her eight-month-old twins who sit in their matching high chairs where they are quiet mirror images of themselves. Her twins, six-pound Halloween baby boys, are children numbers six and seven for Bee, who still manages to pour herself into a pair of faded Levis, though there are those of us who wish she wouldn’t. To describe Bee as pear-shaped is to misrepresent the pear. Bee’s hips spread like hefty parentheses over the sides of the fold-out chairs which have also been borrowed from the Methodists and placed at random under the canopy.

  From a moderate distance—say, from the front porch or by the oak tree—it looks as if there is a small, miraculous circus in the yard and my relatives are the awkward knife-throwers and the left-handed magicians. Torn from use, having been folded too many times in the hands of the Ladies Bible Auxiliary, the big top canopy shivers slightly in the breeze like a threadbare tragedy waiting to happen on aluminum poles.

  I walk and talk and drink like the best of them, though I cannot say that I really know my relatives. Mostly, we are in a gravitational field where we are pulled together by the idea of a shared name. I suppose there are lesser ideas that have held together poorer p
eople. Day floats overhead, and the wet, penny-colored earth empties itself at our feet—we are that incredibly lucky. Jean says that luck has nothing to do with our lives. “It’s guts,” she would say, “and stamina and using your good, old noggin,” and she would tap her head repeatedly to make her point. But when I think back to the days just before we moved from Kansas I do not particularly see Jean as an example of logic and decorum. I can see her standing in the rototillered yard that my father, Eldon, had decided to make into garden, and with a sweep of her hand she said he could have it all: the blue-black sky and the house that could never get itself up to where a house should be. Jean yelled that all she ever wanted were some windows and a back door that didn’t open into a face full of sod.

  The basement bedroom where Katie and I slept had begun to show signs of seepage. In the corners and along the floor a coppery water gathered mysteriously. Eldon was in our room every other day with a tube of caulking. That’s how I remember my father: blonde, silent, his pockets bulging with putty knives and nails and the tools of what, for him, was a dying art.

  I think that even as we loaded the U-Haul Eldon didn’t believe we would go. He made one last-ditch effort to keep us. He brought in a load of lumber—some pretty white pine—and stacked it seductively out by the driveway, but we all knew, deep in our hearts, that the wood was destined to warp and turn gray in the seasons when Eldon could not find the right words or locate his good hammer.

  The Kansas sky is a lavender wave that extends from your outstretched right hand across countless miles eastward toward the muddy Missouri—the only American river I can never remember being mentioned in a song. It is not necessarily a kind sky. I have seen the brooding tails of tornadoes slip down from the clouds and rip northerly through Sedgwick and Lyon and Shawnee counties. I have watched Perry Reservoir shrink and harden into a wasp nest when the sky glazed over in late summer. But a sky like this at least tends to remind you who you are.

  On that June day we are the painstaking makers of a party where ice quickly becomes the most valuable commodity. Four styrofoam ice chests and three cooling watermelons make their demands. Then, too, the kids have organized a touch-and-go ice war which lasts until Serina, a six-year-old beauty belonging to one of my cousins, takes a cold, hard hit on the cheekbone. Serina cries and swears she’s going to die, but her mother holds her and tells her that it’s not that easy.

  Sitting under the canopy, dressed in the blue workshirt that bares the pale T of her throat and upper chest, Katie, I think, would agree—she is taking the long, hard way out. Her shoulders, somewhere beneath that oversized shirt, have lately assumed the resemblance of handlebars.

  “Close your eyes,” I have told her a hundred, a thousand times before. “Let it go,” “Make a wish,” “Turn up the radio,” but my advice has only been helpless, broad strokes.

  I don’t know what burdens we carry, why some of us are stranded on high ground and others simply washed away. I have looked for the answers, though, and I have spared no expense. For almost two years I paid Rhea Blanco, an overpriced therapist in La Jolla, to uncover what she said were my layers of blocking and denial. She sat me down in a leather chair and had me look at driftwood. I told her that I had been in and out of six serious relationships in the past three years, some of them occurring at the same time, and before that, there was a whole string of men and boys whom I validly cared for but could not, inevitably, stay with. Among other things, Rhea told me that I hated my father and that was why I could not be content with any man.

  Later Werner Kausman, a rolfing specialist and part-time primal rebirther, suggested that I loved Eldon far too much and that these feelings had thrown me out of balance. Werner had this great shock of white hair and huge, expressive hands, and one afternoon we started kissing in his office. Putting on my lipstick before I left that day, I asked him if he was going to charge me for an office visit or for a full-blown consultation. He didn’t think that was funny.

  It was Rosaline D’Ametri, the owner of Rosa’s Shrimp and Chips, who sat me down at her counter which overlooked the Crystal Pier and told me not to worry, that one man is simply not enough for a woman. “Maybe some day you settle for one,” she said, “but right now ...” She shook her head and patted my hand. We looked dreamily out the window together, into light fog and what passes for a sky in southern California.

  In Kansas there are no leaps of faith necessary when you look up—the sky veers suddenly into your path, deep and unavoidable. Sometimes it is a low, dark roof over your head, and at other times it is high-strung and electric.

  On the day of the reunion there is a sense that the sky is about to fall, that the wavy horizon is the not-so-distant edge where things begin to crumble. My sister’s eyes are hungry and bright, and her long, straight hair recalls both pleasure and beauty. My relatives don’t know her well enough to see what is happening. They think of her as thin and distant. Even Jean successfully ignores what she probably couldn’t do anything about. It seems like a long time ago—Balboa Park or the wet, marbled stretch of some beach—when Jean handed Katie over to me, just relinquished the best, most beautiful thing in her life without a word.

  On an early June morning Katie and I watch my relatives pack in the food that will feed not only us, but all the 4-H’ers on this side of the scrub-oaked Missouri bluffs. I watch with polite anticipation while Katie watches with something more akin to dread. All of the food is in Tupperware or under double layers of plastic wrap. Some of the food is cut into chunky, fist-sized pieces. The milk gravy is ladled with a coffee mug, and the big, broad serving spoons on the table suggest appetites that are beyond the body’s simple needs. In cake pans and chipped brown crockery, their food is a reckless affirmation of here and now.

  When it’s time to eat, someone says a short, quick prayer so that the major operating principle of the day won’t be compromised: hot food hot and cold food cold. We are people who are headstrong and in love with the world when we have paper plates in our hands. We can work a two-sided buffet line with a snap of our fingers. We have homing devices that can take us within inches of where the desserts are being hidden—the cherry pie with the sugared crust, the punch-and-pour chocolate cake. I take Katie a slice of banana bread and two brownies. “Let’s see,” she says when I put them in front of her, “would it be animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Any answer I give would not interest her, though.

  After the meal there is a lull under the yellow and white canopy. Bee’s twins are asleep in their high chairs, cracker crumbs spread in a three-foot circle around them. Their bald heads fall to their chests like sprung toys, and I ask Bee if we should take the boys into my grandparents’ house and lay a blanket on the floor for them.

  “Oh no,” she says. “They like to sleep like that.”

  As if in response, the breeze quickens and the huge trees—the oaks and the cottonwoods—stir with the softness of nets being cast. It is an old, cool wind that blows in off the Missouri, south through the Lansing orchards, and over the silent, seminal fields of wheat. It is a wind that carries the voices of the Hillcock children who are in the green and sunflowered pasture where only Pig Latin is allowed. Then, too, it is a wind that spirals up a thick, sweet smell from the storm cellar—a little homegrown that burns quick as rope and eases the teenaged boys into the afternoon. For them, the skating rink in Centralia has become boring. The shopping mall in Manhattan is no fun since they can’t drop snow cones onto the shoppers below anymore. For them, Kansas is the cold, dead center of an otherwise teeming world, but I could tell them differently. I could say that the miles of openness—green and gold and quaking silver—might be closer to reality than anywhere else they could drive; that in the seven miles between Circleville and Fostoria there is more meaning than in the entire Rose Bowl Parade.

  Sometime past two or three o’clock—I don’t know; time tapers and descends in those afternoons—the traditional softball game is started. We have no gloves and the ball is rock-hard and lopsid
ed from being left out in the rain, but if spirit counts for anything, we are rich and well supplied. The bases are marked by rags held down with rocks, but the overgrown grass in the pasture where we play makes the bases impossible to see, and so we end up simply running for each other—toward the first and second and third basemen, whoever they are. Once in a while someone hits the ball senseless, and then time flies as we formally search the grass for the ball—a dingy, white speck in a storyteller’s green ocean.

  My relatives do not make spectacular catches, and in the outfield they appear as shy, bighearted people among the goldenrod. Whoever steps up to bat is a good-for-nothing, a nearsighted dog, a puny traitor from the other side. The pitches range from halfhearted spitballs to loop-the-loops. Everyone gets a chance to knock the ball to hell, but mostly we tap it to the shortstop.

  My aunts and uncles and cousins are big, loose people. They run the bases, always looking forward. Their thick hair shines like a lesson in light, and when they bend to pick up the ball or merely to scratch their feet there is no misery or misfortune in the world.

  I like to think of the rest of that June day as the softball game. I like to imagine all of us—connected by blood or name or something even less tangible—in a pasture bordered by a creek that eventually runs past Meriden and Valley Falls and the Kickapoo Indian Reservation and empties into the dark, bridgeless Nemeha.

  In actuality, the day does not end in the pasture. It proceeds onto the porch and into the kitchen. There are those who gather in the living room to watch the six o’clock news, and in the front yard someone’s gallbladder operation is being retold with amazing detail and authenticity.

  My relatives do not give up a ship easily. They stay past dark, sometimes past their welcome. Their children are inventive and find games to play in closets and parked cars, at the side of the house, and in the rubble around the toolshed.