Chapter 1: O R I G I N S

By middle age Edith Pelham dwelt at a discreet remove from her only offspring, Julian, b. November 1969, no less an enigma than his father, Eduardo Esmeralda, a steely interloper her patrician parents had despised at first sight, who had decamped with a few, loose hundred thousand dollars in 1975.

No trace of him remained on the leafy estate in rural Connecticut, where he had idled in restless rancor as the Vietnam War laid waste the brave vista of the self-proclaimed American Century.

Herself an only child of only children, Edith had resumed her maiden name, never mentioned the vanished man, devoted her days to the sun, wintering on chaise longues at a succession of southerly windows, in summer dragging an old aluminum recliner in a more voluptuous arc of sequestered recesses around the outside of the house.

Besides solar balm and solitude she wanted only gothic romances, crossword puzzles, cocktails at dusk and pills, episodes of nearly catatonic anomie being the sole ill effect of her abandonment. She had ample income, providing she rationed extravagance, especially cruises, that inveterate recourse of widows in similar circumstances, which in any case she was generally too languid or sedated to crave. To end alone, she told sympathizers and suitors alike, was not the worst that could befall a woman.

Julian had a docile childhood, but at sixteen began to behave peremptorily and do poorly in school. According to his principal, “He was just too precocious in his imagination.”

Never a rude or angry boy, without Edith’s cognizance he had grown willful and preoccupied—less sociable even than she was herself, nor did she see many other children to compare him with, nor had she ever had much use for youth.

He grew suddenly, rapidly fat. “I want to see how big I can get,” he said. At any hour he might be found in a silk bathrobe eating bowls of carbonara, cartons of cannolis, cans of cashews, cakes, quarts of ice cream, pizza-size omelettes. Once school was out, he had no need ever to leave the precincts, no hindrance to full-time, pensive expansion.

Mrs. Pelham hummed ti-dum, ti-dum, ti-dee about the house, adjusting drapes and windows to sun and breeze, keeping her peace while he made an end of the doe-eyed, slender, darkly beautiful boy, who had never, as all observed, much favored either parent.

After several days of separate lives in their spacious domain, she would be distressed to hear his heavy breath before he waddled through the door. By summer’s end his weight at 250 pounds, whose normal was 115. There was no question of his going back to school; the day came and went, unheeded by either.

“This must be dreadful for your heart,” she ventured, wincing at his sweat-beaded brow. “What makes you so perverse?”

“Research calls for sacrifice,” he said with a dauntless shrug, but by Christmas he was a bit downcast, sunk on the couch, like a dyspeptic sumo idol with an overloaded plate in his lap.

“You know,” she mused one day, slyly offhand, “I do believe your looks may be gone for good.”

Whereat he ceased to eat, was soon bound for ethereal slimness. “Way stations to nowhere,” he said with renewed cockiness.

She shared her vitamins while mulling how to impede this new, more menacing caprice. Impossible to play on his vanity, for his tubercular air was alluring. Transfixed and mute one moment, the next he was taken by tongues, unable to shut up or even slow down, words hurtling headlong, like “souls into hell,” she remembered from some long-ago sermon, his language English of a sort certainly, but peculiar, a garble of intergalactic lore—titanium robots with silicon brains, autonomous planets with cities inside, reverse time, curvatures of space, flight from cycles of crunches and bangs—foolishness nonetheless preferable to his juvenile obsession with weight.

He was, after all, just a dreamy kid with a right to his own ideas. She herself could not say what lights in the sky might mean, or how history came about, nor why people did as they did, and she half heard without demur his fantastic depictions of worlds within worlds beyond distance and time.

To her relief and his apparent disgust, his fasting did not last. Appetite won out. He had a few ravening days of gloomy defeat, then in better humor seemed to accede to the constraints of the flesh. Mrs. Pelham was just settling back into their old, by and large satisfactory routine of ignoring each other except in matters of immediate, practical moment, when he interrupted her renewed pursuit of tranquillity to report that he had been abducted one night she could not by any means recall herself. In this gap of mutually missing time he had been siphoned cell by cell through a beam of light into a translucent, multidimensional space module, and altered in his essence. The memory had just surfaced, but it was not an uncommon experience, merely a preparation already undergone by thousands of humans, perhaps millions, pending enlightenment of the planet by bodiless beings, who roamed the universe at the speed of thought.

After two minutes or so of this, she hummed ti-dummed her end of presence hum, pulled the hem of her skirt further up her shapely thighs to catch the late sun, and picked up her book again. But when he ran on regardless, to the effect that he was no longer a mere earthling but a graft from a vastly advanced civilization, with unimaginable technologies and totally different laws of physics—mind and matter being interchangeable shells of a prior, primitive phenomenon—she deemed it time to intervene.

“Perhaps you ought to do something,” she suggested, “since you’ve given up school.”

“Like what?” he wondered with scorn.

“Other people occupy themselves,” she said, “I mean besides just thinking.”

“Only because they have to,” he observed. “People do all sorts of things,” she said. “They find a job they like. They fall in love and get married. They have children . . .”

“What’s the point?” he said. “I’d rather wait and see if there’s going to be a nuclear war first, because if The New Intelligence takes over in time everything will be so changed that nothing anyone’s doing now will make sense.”

“Would you like to see a psychiatrist, dear?” “Cool,” he said, brightening.

She took him to Dr. Merckers, who had helped her cope with the absconded Eduardo, the only man she had ever succumbed to. Neither analyst nor office had changed. He looked the same quizzical cherub with prematurely white, unruly hair, wire-rim glasses, manicured hands, and immaculate, tan suit. His walls still offered the eye only the same large photograph of his wife, no less ageless and placid, holding a bouquet of fat peonies.

In the confusion of choosing chairs with Julian, aware of her quickening relinquishment of will, Mrs. Pelham’s knees felt a sort of rolling below, like setting out to sea, or perhaps regaining terra firma, she wasn’t sure, though by the time she withdrew to the anteroom with its pile of Travel and Leisure magazines the doctor’s familiar courtesies, so casual and cordial, yet astute, had renewed her hopes that human happiness was attainable, if only one could avoid unhappiness.

Julian himself seemed pleased with his first session and thereafter twice a week drove alone to the village, always returning in voluble excitation, which lasted until he smoked a joint and became withdrawn again.

“Should you smoke so much, dear?” she inquired. “It’s only marijuana,” he said. “I quit cigarettes and booze two years ago. It only takes a few tokes to get high, and it’s much better for the lungs than tobacco.”

“Even so,” she murmured. “It must be expensive.” “Not really,” he said. “I grow it out behind the barn.” “I never knew that,” she said, taken aback at his enterprise. “I didn’t want to worry you,” he said.

“Thank you, dear,” she said, a bit dryly. “Dr. Merckers wants me to cut down,” he conceded. “I really like it though, it helps me think.”

“That’s what worries me,” said she, fearful that morbid states came of introspection, as in her marital mishap, a thing in the long run doubtless a blessing.

Timothy Merckers was struck by the boy’s steady intensity. He seemed avid for guidance, lacking resentments, not at all fraught with loss, glad in fact to have no father, at least not the vanished one, whom he described as surly and cold. Edgy among his adopted resorts, he shrugged at his claims of special experience, disowned them without ado. Who he was, or rather, what he should become, was the real question.

The doctor himself began to be tried by the eager transference. Julian sat forward on his seat or lolled back in ravishment, absolute in his attentiveness, and very smooth-skinned.

Invariably the top button of his shirt was undone, affording a glimpse or—worse—the intermittent possibility of a glimpse of olive-hued throat and breast. Loath to terminate the face-to-face, Dr. Merckers prolonged the preliminaries, until one night he dreamt of them progressing to the couch together, and heard Mrs. Pelham croon, “Joolian, Joolian,” then his own mother’s spectral lament, “Johnny, Johnny Boone, they were like twins. Johnny Boone and Timmy. It’s so sad Major Boone got posted away, just when they’d made such good friends.”

He recalled the commonplaces his mother had helped him write, the pathos of school vacation dates, then the strange signature TIMMY in bird-track capitals that meant nothing more than Johnny Boone’s best friend, and last the stamp’s gummy stickum on his tongue.

For a while notes on blue stationery replied in Johnny’s hand, with the wistful assurance of his mother’s promises of a visit some day soon, and then the blue envelopes came no more.

Timmy had written and waited, written and waited, but his third-grade friend had gone into the void. Now, fifty-five years later, Dr. Merckers could conjure nothing—no face, no voice, not a single moment of their brief idyll—nothing but the radiance of the name Johnny Boone, dormant but undiminished bereavement of his own psyche that never since had felt wholly at one with another human being.

At their next session he told Julian that little could be expected of the therapy, that occasional mismatches occurred, but were injurious only if perpetuated. Dr. Cassandra Edenswald would be just right for him.

Pausing not quite without pity at the thought of vibrant Xandra taking possession of this cupid born to torment her, he saw Julian’s face fall.

“You’d prefer a man?” he said, very bland. “Yeah,” Julian said, ill-humored for the first time in his purview.

Timothy Merckers crumpled the leaf from his desk pad, upon which he had written her phone number, and dropped it into the empty, resounding wastebasket.

He wrote another name, folded the square once, thrust it endwise at Julian like a ticket. “Try to attach yourself to reality,” he said humbly, “and develop a philosophy of life. Dr. Occifento, now I think again, is the right one for you.”

Julian told his mother that Dr. Merckers had pronounced him “only a little bonkers,” in no need of further tinkering.

That didn’t sound quite right to Mrs. Pelham, though she was glad to inter her doubts without autopsy.

Moreover, Julian had stopped smoking pot, looked superbly healthy, if a bit lackadaisical, and was often absent from the end of supper till breakfast next noon, keeping, as he called them, his “vampire hours.”

“Did you have a nice time, dear?” she would inquire. “Not too bad,” he would say.

She was so thankful of his approach to normality that she was able to ignore the situation in the barn, a hay-smelling, old behemoth, now filling with household implements—toasters, blenders, colanders, skillets, vacuum cleaners, coffee grinders, juicers, grills, electric can openers, knife sharpeners, bathroom scales, a litany of domestic existence.

Subsequent visits revealed only accretion, nor did she venture its mention, since no matter how bizarre his activities, when asked he always had an explanation equally unsettling.

Upon expulsion by Dr. Merckers, Julian had felt the need to build something, but what? On impulse—he could not have rendered motive or rationale—he undertook to weld a grand ziggurat of gadgets to be inset with altars dedicated to gods he had yet to invent.

He got caught red-handed with what were described as “burglarious tools,” and his scheme came to a muted end, thanks to the police chief, whose imperishable flame for Mrs. Pelham was fed by her faithful, flirtatious remembrance of his chivalry once many years ago in lugging her groceries to her car in a downpour, then borrowing an umbrella to keep her dress and coiffure dry.

He knew Julian was no kleptomaniac. The boy was affectingly mortified and vague, very vague; gravel-throated Dr. Merckers provided technical explanations and assurances; the Village Weekly printed a short, dry report of a sort of extended prank, restitution promised; and with no little difficulty and embarrassment at least some of the loot got returned with apologies, although an unclaimed, untraceable smattering remained, eventually causing Mrs. Pelham to giggle helplessly when she thought of it.

By then it was clear that left to his own devices he might like his sire become an out-and-out idiosyncrat. He brusquely declined further counseling, shied from every ordinariness, seemed to have no life outside the house. Sunk in chagrin he hardly spoke, lived the whole next summer with the iron rule of a monk, baking naked on the roof by day, playing in the basement with his paints between dark and dawn, till he was swart, bleary-eyed, and muttering to himself, which state Mrs. Pelham called “nobody home,” and did not hesitate to assign to the same implacable bent for excess.

Still she forbore. The basement was a mess, his daubings deplorably many, vulgar and unseemly, phallic fountains of sperm, cannons on gonad wheels, petal-like whatnots—in garish acrylics—and she made but one clandestine investigation, then suppressed further interest, for if no one else saw them, what harm?

His tan, nearly as deep as hers, was a happier matter, his first unequivocal triumph. His whole sleek person glowed evenly on every inch of skin—armpits, insteps, back of the knees, under his chin—stunning in its absolute, dark dazzle.

The exquisite and exotic eased her acceptance—secretly she was not displeased—of the feminine persona he began to affect. He would appear late at night in a white gown and aura of perfume, nails painted, shining hair piled high, earrings a-glimmer. At first he borrowed her jewelry, but soon acquired his own—whence she refused to ask. His late-night fashion shows became frequent as fall came on; she could not fault his taste, and so long as he did not leave the house thus adorned she did not mind.

Amid the snows of February, as Julian, tan sadly faded, was consoling himself with mukluks and furs, an abominated mole upon the comely slope of his left pectoral muscle, the only visible flaw he possessed, suddenly began to act up. Strangely pigmented, bifurcated like a valentine, it grew larger, keeping its emblematic cast, by the end of March had become sore and rough with tiny, encrusted bumps that oozed, nor would it heal with the help of antiseptics and unguents.

The doctor without waiting for a biopsy ordered it removed. Grave and matter-of-fact, he sketched for the sobered matron and silent son the pathology of melanoma, laid an eternal ban on sunbathing—since childhood Julian’s one sure way to rest his mind—at the end of six months pronounced him provisionally cured, but consigned to self-vigilance and shade.

The scar shrank to an inch of candle wick, a chasm of fear—the longer the cancer didn’t come back, the less likely a recurrence—which vastly intensified Julian’s normal narcissism, prolonging his daily dalliance with the mirror. He looked up the word provisional, the first time he had ever used a dictionary: It did not mean problematical, but temporary. He did not know if the doctor knew the difference. Every day, every week, every month that went by, he stood on safer ground, but never again would ever be safe. He told no one of these milestones, his relentless sense of immanence; who was there to tell, except his mother, who had her own bright fear?

He now painted with large, apocalyptic apprehension, finishing with frightening speed every second or third day a horrendous new canvas of an erection in the guise of something else, meanwhile perfecting his female persona.

When his mother observed that he painted nothing but penises he said, “Sex is the least of what I mean.”

Pointless paradox could not allay her misgivings when she learned he was planning an exhibition in a new gallery in the village, with intent to preside at the opening himself, doubtless in high attire.

That Julian had tendencies neither doubted. She declined to picture the practice of Greek love, which she had been raised to regard as nothing to speak of, especially if it remained a platonic, English public school sort of prelude to maturity and marriage.

But when Julian began a new series of paintings of moon-like lawn fannies, pairs of bare, spread buttocks with lipsticked anuses, she bethought herself of one Murray Humber, the bearded son of friends of friends, who had moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts to paint, twenty years before, and met and married a poetess there.

By ordinary standards this would have been Julian’s high school graduation spring, and it occurred to her now—she broached the notion with trepidation—the place might supply him with a congenial milieu and edifying elders.

To her delight he was not averse, and dropped his show in the village with a shrug. He knew the name Provincetown—if nothing else—but got a vertiginous presentiment when he opened an atlas and found the printed word in tiny letters curving out into the blue sea from the tip of the great, embracing peninsula.

Mrs. Pelham pulled herself together, put off her appointments, packed a trunk for Julian with male clothes only, and at noon, July 11, 1987, took to the road.

Arrived toward the dinner hour, ensconced in the Holiday Inn, they set out to peruse the town in Mama’s immense Cadillac, inching the narrow neck of Commercial Street, thronged with the exodus of Tea Dance.

Slowly they rode to the breakwater, then past the sunlit salt marsh, and back along Bradford, till finally by blind, first-timers’ good luck they found a parking space, and after only a short wait got a window table at the Lobster Pot.

Mrs. P treated herself to a second double gimlet, courting a pang of appetite, while Julian drank Perrier and sampled the bouillabaisse, glancing from the glassy bay to the nimble waiters swiveling among the packed tables.

Of the town his mother had an impression chiefly of flowers, flowers everywhere, pastel-painted, clapboard houses cluttered with dormers, and hordes of tourists. The place seemed carefree, busy and benign, if rather too fond of sun.

“Don’t worry,” Julian said. “For me it’s Southern pallor and parasols.”

Back on the crowded street, after some cold shrimp and black coffee, she found the growing multitudes ingratiating. At the redolent door of the Governor Bradford, with belle’s impudence aged to hauteur and heightened by gin, she asked a loiterer, “Where’s the art colony?”

The man wore a grimy baseball cap backwards, had a stubble beard, squinted at her, then turned his head slightly to one side and squinted fiercely, as if the low sun had got in his eyes, or he were stumped for an answer.

“Come on,” Julian muttered, pulling her arm. But still she stood, a shortish, plumpish, much made-up dowager, in butterfly glasses, shiny pumps, and yellow dress a bit snug, and obstinately, insinuatingly, put her hands on her hips.

“Which way?” she demanded in pidgin, as if he were dimmer than he pretended.

He turned his unrelenting face toward hers again, and continued to squint, not exactly at her, but in some definite, personal vicinity, his mouth working, doubtless rehearsing a comeback.

She smiled implacably, raised an eyebrow, and waited with zest while Julian sidled off a bit and pulled a martyred grimace.

The man’s glower and mouthings having merely made Madam’s eyebrows climb the higher, he finally asserted his right not to suffer dolts on this side of the bar. Never meeting her gaze, giving only the least hint of a shrug, succeeded by an equally inconspicuous, circular action of one hand left hanging, like turning a faucet on and off, he took a last gander at the crowds, grunted and went back inside to finish his end-of-shift drink.

“Who was that?” asked his companion. “Who knows? They get crazier every year,” said he. Julian dragged his snorting parent to the car, drove back to the Holiday Inn, settled her, invincibly complacent, before the tv, and hiked back into town.

Amid the mob, he wandered up and down, then sat on the benches in front of Town Hall.

Immediately a young man swerved into the empty place beside him, gripped the bench with both hands, shook his head balefully, said, “Where y’all from?”

“Connecticut,” said Julian. “West Virginia,” the young man said. “I’ve been here a month, I’ve had five different dishwashing jobs, I couldn’t stand any of them. Know some place I could crash?”

“I just got here myself,” Julian said. “Good luck!” the young man said. His eyes darted, his head jerked left and right, he kept his white-knuckled grip on the bench. “One thing I do know. I don’t have to follow my dick. I’m not a slave, I’m a free man, I can go without, I can wait, I can wait five years if I have to, but I’m not going to be led around by my dick, I don’t care how desperate I get. I’m in control here, not my damn dick.”

Julian, nonplussed, plausibly nodded. “That’s why God gave me a brain,” the young man said. “Know what I mean? Take my advice.”

And he sprang up suddenly, rushed onward, turned back, gave an embarrassed laugh, “If you luck into anything let me know,” and went the other way.

Julian marveled at the many, very many homosexuals in view. In fact there were three now, and there were four, and there, just milling along, were too many to count. The females, now he took notice, were likely lesbians, though he had never seen one out before. Everyone seemed to be holding hands. This was going to be gay indeed.

The next morning, finding a vacancy sign on a well-kept, white house on a privet-lined lane north of Back Street, he was shown a small room by a cold-eyed lady with tightly curled, white hair and genteel speech.

Everything was clean, smelled of fresh paint, and the fixtures of the bathroom down the hall shone intimidatingly.

“I hope you’re not a messy person,” she said. “The previous tenant got sick, he was very quiet, he was here almost three years, he had to go home.”

“Oh no, I’m extremely neat,” Julian said. “I don’t drink or smoke.”

Mrs. Gurley nodded, relenting a bit. “You’ll find the sun porch very pleasant.”

“Thank you,” Julian said. “You could paint in the shed. Our sons used it for a workshop but they’ve been gone for ages and it’s nothing now but waste space for my husband’s rubbish, the accouterments of his life socalled,” she said with a grim little sneer.

“Great,” said Julian, and got moved in by noon.

Mama phoned the Humbers, and got an invitation for what she presumed would be cocktails, but proved to be Soave in water glasses, leftover cheese rinds, carrot sticks, and some pungent babaganoush, which Julian gobbled.

Mrs. P hated wine, nevertheless quaffed several alert refills, while Jane and Murray politely nodded at Julian’s cascade of opinions and plans. She gazed about, unsure what to think. They were crowded at the kitchen table, the only piece of furniture not dribbled with paint. There was no dining or living room, just the one all-purpose space, rather dusty and dingy, with spider webs in the corners and moths on the screens. Murray’s studio looked as jumbled full as a flea market compacted by a snowplow. She could not imagine how he got in, being none too slim. Through another door a bedroom lay, evidently Jane’s domain, with a desk made of a door with a cloth-covered typewriter on it. But there was really no room to move about because of the books, cases and cases of them, spilling over, piled in corners, shelved all the way to the ceiling on every wall, and it occurred to her that they must share some fetish, not a bit healthy. Still, who knew what might not make a marriage work? And they themselves were quite nice, and strangely authoritative.

“You seem to have found your theme,” Jane said as she and Murray held Julian’s slides up to the skylight one by one.

“Sell like hotcakes,” Murray grumbled. He was leery of this overwrought naif, and the mother gave him the creeps. What did she want?

All she said the whole time was that she had bought a sixtypound abalone shell lamp because she always liked to bring home a souvenir from everywhere she went.

At seven the Humbers wished Julian good luck, watched the preposterous pair descend the steep steps, Mama a little precariously, waved the mammoth Cadillac out of sight, went back inside, rolling their eyes.

“This kid’s going to get AIDS,” Murray said gloomily. “He’s awfully young,” Jane said. “Is he gay?”

“I don’t know,” Murray said. “He’s a . . . I really don’t know.” “He’s certainly strange,” Jane said.

“He’s flying pretty high,” Murray said. They put the pasta water on and finished the liter of wine. “I’m not going to be father to that boy,” Murray roared.

This time there were lines at every restaurant, night was coming on, the street burgeoning. In the strolling throngs they eddied a little way east, then a little way west of the benches.

At the Crown and Anchor three glittering drag queens raucously hawked the evening’s first performance. “It’s show time, Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s show time.”

“I think I’ll just go back to the motel,” she decided. “We may as well say good-bye now. I’ll be on the road early in the morning, and you can sleep late.”

Julian with constraint bent to kiss her forehead, hesitated, then started west very slowly, glancing back once, twice, at last lurched on, gangly despite his small stature, and was lost in the mob. An awful pathos bit her heart, she could not say just why.

At the motel she couldn’t get comfortable. It was humid, hot, dank and chill. She closed and opened windows to no avail. There was nothing she could stand on tv. Too depressed to get undressed and put on her nightgown, she sat thinking of the mauled baby rabbit she had rescued from the cat as a child, nursed for a week and finally let go—hop, hop and stop, hoppety-hop into the deep grass. How sad, how bereft she had felt!

She wished now she had said more than just good-bye, something more . . . more . . . comprehensive! But she couldn’t remember his address, nor his landlady’s name, nor could she visualize the house, nor how to get there, only the high, bee-bustling privet hedge, and how could she ever find him, lost in the crowds?

In panic she packed and fled the unendurable room, leaving the door open, lights on. At Snail Road, before turning onto Route 6, she swallowed a precious black beauty with a slug of sherry from the silver flask she kept in the glove compartment.

Their instantaneous beneficence cozied her for the long ride. Passing Pilgrim Lake, she decided that the dim silhouette of the dunes looked like a medieval king on his bier, and suddenly her house in Connecticut rose in her mind’s eye, without doors or windows, solid and ghostly as a mausoleum beneath a red, sickle moon.

In dread she let up on the accelerator. The perfectly tooled sedan coasted in silence, hardly losing momentum, then she pressed the gas pedal again, till the needle hit 70, and she set the cruise control.

Copyright (c) 2001 R. D. Skillings. All rights reserved.

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