Mister Sandman Read online

  The chesterfield is a pull-out bed. The mattress feels like it’s stuffed with baseballs, and the grey sheets are brittle. From semen? Sugar-daddy semen? Gordon envisions huge guts and short pricks, or why would they have to pay for it? But he makes love this time as if he’s performing for an applause meter, and forget winning two fur coats, he’d settle for a moan. When it’s over and as usual he’s the only one sweating and out of breath he asks, “Do you take your other men in your mouth?” He has to ask.

  Al lights a cigar. “Does your wife take you in her mouth?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact she does.” Or used to. Probably still would, it occurs to him.

  Al folds one arm behind his head. In the gloom his orange body hair holds its colour like a horizon. He looks at Gordon and says, “You know what I like about you?”

  “No.” Hopelessly.

  “Guess.”

  Gordon sighs. “I’m your drill master.” Every time they meet, at some point, he has to quiz Al on encyclopedia entries up to D. The encyclopedias are neatly stacked beside the chesterfield, the top one lying open across the others, and before they pulled the chesterfield out, when the light was on, Gordon thought he was hallucinating because there at the top of the page was his own name—“Gordon”—and right next to that, on the top of the previous page—“Gonorrhoea.”

  “Yep,” Al concedes. He exhales in little puffs. “But I’m thinking about something else.”

  “What?”

  “Go on, guess.”

  Gordon fingers his bony midriff. “I can’t imagine,” he says. He envisions his rib cage on a sand dune, picked clean.

  “I like how you wear your glasses the whole time,” Al says.

  Gordon thinks about that. Snorts.

  “I mean it,” Al says, sounding so innocent and sincere that love instantly crams Gordon’s chest. He cups the boy’s groin, his cool testicles. He moves down his body and sucks one testicle into his mouth.

  “Not now,” Al says, pushing at Gordon’s head.

  A whole harvest is still in Gordon’s heart. He raises himself up on one elbow. “I lied about that other guy,” he confesses. “You’re the first guy I’ve ever… I’ve ever known … like this.”

  Al reaches for the whisky bottle. “Shoot, you think I haven’t figured that one out?”

  Gordon eases himself back down on the bed. Was he that inept, that desperate? Is he still? Al gets up and goes down the hall, and Gordon is left in the familiar, sweltering chrysalis of his mortification. He can hardly breathe. He reaches over to extinguish Al’s cigar as the toilet flushes, and in the flushing are the orgasmic moans and cries of every one of Al’s lovers, the seven or eight hundred Al estimates he’s had—“not including hand jobs.” Just as the voices lapse away, Al turns the shower on and here they come again. Olive-skinned Mario, Gentle George, all the Bills, Pete the poet, the bull-cocked Roger and, warbling above the rest, Tyrone the Irish sergeant major who sang “Mother Machree” while performing anal sex. According to Al the whole U.S. army was queer and horny. “You ought to have signed up,” he said, and then, impatiently, “Yeah, sure,” when Gordon reminded him that he did sign up, here in Canada, but was declared unfit because he was discovered to have a heart murmur. “You win the hundred-yard dash one day,” Al said, “and the next day there’s a war and, well what do you know about that? You’ve got a bum ticker.”

  “I never won a hundred-yard dash,” Gordon said.

  By now it’s January. The affair has been going on for two months, two nights a week. Incredibly, Doris seems to have no idea. Who’d have thought she’d turn out to be so gullible? Except that when Gordon thinks about it, the lies are hers, not his. Through some twisted coincidence what he is doing and what she wants to believe he is doing dictate that he arrive home drunk and stinking of cigar smoke.

  She wants to believe that he’s making an effort at last to climb the industry ladder. She thinks he’s a genius who is rotting in oblivion because he’s too unsociable, too reserved, and now that he’s out late she has decided that, as a result of a pep talk she gave him on his fortieth birthday back in October, he is spending his time at the roof bar of the Park Plaza Hotel where all the important writers, editors and journalists go after work to knock back drinks and talk shop. He reels into the bedroom at midnight, and just by agreeing with her he has his alibi. What a set-up. She’s so tickled that she gives him extra pocket money for his next night out.

  “You don’t want to get a reputation as a cheapskate,” she says in her thrilled voice, taking out of her change purse a ten-dollar bill that has been folded—for safekeeping?—opening the bill as he imagines his daughters going barefoot, pressing it into his palm and saying things like, “Go on, Sweetie, let your hair down” and “Do what you have to do,” so that he sometimes finds himself gazing into her busy little eyes and wondering if he has underestimated her. If she knows, and either she’s a saint or the guy in the sandwich board has said, “Humour the sucker until I get a few more pictures.”

  Part of him wants her to know. Craves her permission, or just to come clean. “Act normal,” he has to keep warning himself. Meaning, “Act how you used to act before you screwed Al Yothers and for the first time in your life felt normal.” Although the feeling of normalcy lasts only while he is screwing Al. Those fifteen or so minutes.

  The rest of the time he feels unhinged.

  Even when he’s happy. Because he knows that his happiness is not only temporary, it’s groundless. Does Al love him? That’s a laugh. And yet like a man loved madly he examines his naked body in the bathroom mirror, and the words “lean” and “sinewy” no longer have an implausible ring. He masturbates in the shower, and his erection should be bronzed. He plays his new “Mister Sandman” forty-five and belts out the line “And lots of wavy hair like Liberace!” During his lunch hour one day, at a thrift shop, he splurges on a giant plum-coloured silk scarf and removes his tie and puts the scarf on in the presence of the beaming old queen who owns the place (suddenly he is seeing queers by the herd), and as the queen slaps his hands away and fussily arranges the scarf himself, working it like origami until it is a tiered and bulging cravat, he is as moved as if he were being decorated for valour on the field of battle.

  He wears the scarf less than a block before tearing it off, almost hanging himself to get free of it. His mood can turn on a dime. All it takes is for an oncoming pedestrian to give him a wide berth and he’s a pervert. He stuffs the scarf in his pocket and looks up and down the street for a coffee shop or restaurant where there might be a washroom.

  In this mood, washrooms are where he lives. He masturbates non-stop, but his erection repels him. It should be shot. He studies his lips in mirrors for syphilis sores, he presses under his ears for swollen glands. “I’m as clean as a whistle,” Al is always saying. And, “Ever heard of penicillin?” But in this mood Gordon believes himself to be a venereal sewer. He weeps for his daughters, because he’s already dead—or ruined and behind bars—so that makes them orphans. “Marcy is losing weight,” he tells Doris. “She’s withering away!” he protests, staggered by Doris’s unconcern. At the supper table he looks at Sonja’s good-natured, vacant face and later says to Doris, “I love her, but I’m telling you I don’t detect an active mind there.” Then he goes and sits on the toilet, masturbating and weeping for his ruined life, his stupid child.

  There’s a kind of grisly peace in feeling so low, so depraved, at least when it comes to him and Al. Delete any decency and with it goes the real danger—the romantic dream of the two of them being together always. What you have left is two nights a week, cut and dried, wherein two gigantic queers “do what they have to do” and then go their own ways.

  Except that that’s nothing like how it is, not when they’re actually having sex. They are a pair of gods then. They precipitate lightning and sirens. Beds collapse under them. “Do you know who I am?” Al whispers. “Yours,” he whispers. “Daddy, I’m Yours,” and Gordon thinks “I was
made for this,” wondering how, when they’re not having sex, he can forget the immense relief. Screwing Al is the breakthrough cure. It’s worship. Al is as quiet as a church. He, Gordon, is the wild one. “If Doris could only see me now,” he can’t help thinking.

  Here is how the affair ends. With Al banging the whisky bottle on the armrest of the pull-out bed and saying, “Time’s up.”

  Gordon bolts awake. “What—“ he says, terrified.

  Al is standing beside the bed. He’s wearing a white shirt.

  “What’s going on?” Gordon says.

  “You gotta skedaddle.”

  “What time is it?” Where are his glasses? He swims his hands over the sheets.

  “Five to ten.” This muttered into his wrist as he applies a cufflink.

  “Is that all?” Gordon finds his glasses and puts them on, then reaches for his boxer shorts on the floor and pulls them up before coming to his feet. He has an erection, and when Al isn’t interested in sex he finds Gordon’s erections irritating. “What’s going on?” he asks again.

  “I want you to beat it,” Al says, walking away. “That’s all.”

  “Are you expecting company?”

  No answer.

  “I see,” Gordon says.

  Silence.

  “None of my damn business,” Gordon says. Hearing his guttered voice, he has a feeling he has said this before in an apartment where there was a hammer on the windowsill.

  Across the room Al mauls through one of the cardboard boxes he keeps his clothes in. Gordon buttons his shirt and watches him as he used to watch any beautiful man. It’s a gluttonous, suspenseful feeling. It’s like something stacked too high. Like something that should topple but won’t.

  “Shoot,” Al mutters. He throws several odd socks out of the box. Is he looking for red ones? He has told Gordon that if you go into a queer bar where nobody knows you, wearing red socks is a sign that you’re not from the vice squad.

  No, he’s looking for a navy-and-green argyle. He finds one and holds on to it as he continues his search.

  “Does he pay you less if your socks don’t match?” Gordon asks. This is not as sarcastic as it sounds. For the first time he is truly curious about the sugar daddies.

  Al finds the other sock and hops on one foot as he pulls it up. “You don’t know everything, Pops.”

  Pops? Where did that come from? Things are sliding downhill fast. Why tonight, though, their best night so far? They did it three times. In the shower, on the chair with Al straddling his lap, then half kneeling, half standing on the chesterfield, Gordon’s forehead butting the throat of the Marlboro Man. And when Gordon was lying on the bed and drifting off he felt Al combing a hand through his hair.

  “I always wanted my hair to be black,” Al said, one of his rare confidences. A few minutes later he added—or did Gordon dream this?—“I used to shoe-polish it, but you could tell.”

  Al goes into the kitchen and returns wearing grey flannel trousers and with a belt in each hand. Gordon has never seen him dressed so formally. From belt to belt Al scowls, back and forth while Gordon, overcome now by an almost pleasant lassitude, watches him. Believing himself to be nothing but mildly interested, he asks, “Are we going to see each other again?”

  Right past his face, missing him by an inch, one of the belts flies and lands on the bed.

  “Jesus,” Gordon murmurs.

  Al starts threading the other belt through the loops of his trousers. “You cuss too much,” he says.

  Gordon stands there, radiating some kind of hot wave. Maybe it’s relief. After a moment he asks, “What if we meet in the hall at work?” Funnily enough, it hasn’t happened yet.

  “Me, I’m blowing this turkey-trot town.”

  Gordon puts on his hat and coat. He walks to the door. No, this is not relief.

  “Hey, hold on a minute.”

  Gordon stops. What he wouldn’t give right now. Who he wouldn’t sacrifice.

  But Al is only handing him a pen. Gordon’s fountain pen. “I had to write a message,” he says.

  He looks sly, up to something. Gordon’s heart starts working. “For Christ’s sake, Al—“ Hearing the profanity, he breaks off, gives a weak laugh.

  Al’s eyes flicker out.

  And Gordon … Gordon gets hard again. He can’t believe it. He accepts the pen and pockets it in his trousers, letting his fingers brush the tip of his erection. He can’t believe it.

  “You know who you are?” Al says in a tone of having only just realized.

  Gordon waits.

  So does Al.

  “The pornographer of lost causes,” Gordon answers at last, more to himself.

  “A taker,” Al says.

  Gordon blinks, uncomprehending. It’s over this time. Dead. He knows it, but his hard prick is like fingernails still growing in the morgue, so he rips apart “taker” for a speck of hope.

  “Folks are either givers or takers,” Al elaborates. “You go around acting like you’re a giver but you’re a taker.” He shrugs. “Anyhow—“ He folds his Paul Bunyan arms over his chest.

  “I love you,” Gordon says. Even to himself it sounds false and grotesquely inappropriate, a stupid surprise like a squirt in the face from a carnation. Al grimaces. Gordon turns. He reaches for the doorknob, tears warping his vision. “Goodbye,” he says.

  “Adios,” Al says. “Watch your back.”

  Twelve

  This was six years ago. When Marcy was in grade one, it must have been, because she knew how to read but Joan hadn’t been born yet.

  It was morning. Marcy pushed open the bathroom door, and her father was in there, shaving. He was in his pyjama bottoms, and on his bare back there were letters.

  “Al was here,” Marcy said slowly, reading.

  Her father went still, holding the razor at his throat. “What did you say?”

  She pointed. “On your back. It says, ?1 was here.’”

  He jerked around to see in the mirror.

  “Who’s Al, Daddy?”

  “Jesus,” he murmured. That scared her. He whipped on his glasses, then grabbed her mother’s hand mirror and positioned it to see himself from behind. “Jesus.” He looked at her, wide-eyed.

  “I didn’t do it!” Before she could back away he gripped her by the shoulders. He had never hit her, but she thought he was going to. He brought his face right up to hers. His white foam beard, his sour breath. “I didn’t!” she cried, trying to squirm free. He was hurting her.

  “Shh.” With his foot he shut the door. He let go of her and began stroking her head, hard. “Honey, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

  “I was just reading what it said,” she whimpered.

  “I know. Honey, I know you were. Shh. Be quiet.”

  He told her that it was a joke. Somebody must have done it last night, he said. Written right through his shirt when he was Standing at the bar. Some joker. “Al?” she suggested meekly. Yes, that was right. Al. Ruining his good white shirt, which was why he swore. He said that he shouldn’t have sworn.

  Then he said, “We’d better not tell Mom. You know her, she’ll have a fit. I’ll just throw the shirt out and buy a new one, and that way we won’t upset anybody. Okay? We’ll keep it a secret, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  She promised, although she knew that she hadn’t heard the whole story, or even the true one. It didn’t make sense. Why would her mother have a fit over a measly shirt? Why would her father? And how could you write on someone’s back without the person feeling it?

  When she was undressing for bed that night she saw in the mirror that both of her shoulders were bruised, front and back. After the initial awe, after she had studied and fingered the bruises and would have been disappointed if they had turned out to be dirt, she quickly pulled on her pyjama top before her mother came in. Later, under the covers, she fixed her eyes on the line of light beneath the door. What if the man, Al, opened it? She would scream. She kept touching
her shoulders, pressing a little for the pain.

  Still later—it would have been the next day or the day after that—she went looking for the shirt. She couldn’t find it, not in any of the garbage pails, not in the laundry basket, not balled-up somewhere in her father’s workshop. Finally she took one of his soiled shirts out of the laundry basket and wrote AL WAS HERE on it herself, using his good fountain pen. She then shoved the shirt into a bag of rags. Because she had crumpled the shirt up before the ink was dry, the “L” had stamped out an “I” and the message actually read ALI WAS HERE. She didn’t know this, though.

  She is thirteen years old now. She has a nice boyfriend named Al. But “Al was here” is what she writes—her secret code—where otherwise she might draw a skull and crossbones. “Al was here” also means “bruise.” Any time Marcy and her friend Pammy spot a bruise on someone they say, “Al was here,” Marcy having informed Pammy that gangsters used to say this after they had been roughed up.

  “Who’s Al?” Pammy asked through her fingers.

  “Al Capone,” Marcy said. “Of course.” She has become an expert liar. She has become a girl after her mother’s own heart.

  Pammy is the opposite. She cannot tell a lie. Or recognize one. Or get over one. She is a person who believes everything and who is shocked by everything. One hand covering her mouth is her listening. She drives other girls crazy. “You’re so naive,” they say. But Marcy is in the last, flaming years of her pious period, and she has a feeling that Pammy is a lamb of God. So meek and mild. It was Pammy who pointed out that her own head is peanut-shaped—“See, I have a wide, wide forehead, then I go in here at my eyes, then out again here, and then I have this big chin”—to account for why she doesn’t have a boyfriend. “I’m not exactly a femme fatale,” she said, shocked at the idea.

  To Marcy, all girls are either femme fatales or frumps. To Pammy, they’re either femme fatales or not femme fatales. Pammy can’t say frump. She can’t say anything the least bit mean or even critical, the most obnoxious behaviour alarming her only a fraction more than normal behaviour does. Still, Marcy is careful not to alarm Pammy too much, not to alarm her away. She pretends that she has only one boyfriend and she says, primly, “We kiss,” when Pammy petrifies herself by asking if Marcy and her boyfriend neck. It is for another girl to clue Pammy in about hickeys. The two times that Pammy has seen them on Marcy she has said—Marcy is not kidding—“Al was here.” Pretty funny, if Pammy only knew.