Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 16
But while Boy was sitting there in the dark, waiting, he must have been thinking, and this may have been what he was thinking or imagining. Since he wanted so much to go upstairs, he may have imagined himself doing it, pushing open the heavy door in silence, and watching the two of them.
The first thing he saw was a hundred candles, some guttering and colouring the atmosphere of the room with a layered blue haze, but most of them burning brightly, so that he felt a wave of heat as if he had opened the door onto a ballroom and its blazing chandeliers.
In fact what he actually saw were the two candles in the cut-glass candlesticks on Mother’s bureau, one extinguished and smoking, the steady flame of the other reflected and multiplied in the shining surfaces of the room, the mirrors, the polished wood of the wardrobe, the glass and the gilt frames of all the pictures, the burnished bronze. Each mitred pane on the bookcase held the reflection of a flame; behind the glass the gold lettering on the red leather spines of Mother’s library shone. The desktop itself shone as if newly French-polished; the light of the single flame also made the thighs and uplifted arm of the small bronze statue on top of the wardrobe (which Boy had not noticed before) shine as if the miniature athlete had just oiled himself. Above, what Boy had thought before was just red paint on the ceiling now seemed to be some kind of rich lacquer or gilding, and the glow of the multiplied candle flames was caught in that too; and the wallpaper which he had thought was just paper had become, by candlelight, a cut velvet brocade with a gold thread in it; and the curtains, which had been drawn back on the only other occasion on which he had seen this room, were now drawn across the window, and they were scarlet brocade, a deep thicket of scarlet foliage in which golden birds stalked, preened and courted. On the desk itself glittered Mother’s gilt-and-crystal scent bottles and her scattered jewellery, including the gold-set garnets; there was a single glass of wine which had been poured from a Bohemian ruby glass decanter. One bottle of scent was unstoppered, and the room was heavy with musk.
To Boy’s dazed eyes, the whole room was scarlet and gold – the curtain, the damasked walls, the Turkey rugs – and, in the midst of it, Mother herself seemed to be in scarlet too, wearing an extraordinary scarlet copy of her usually white and silver dress. Then Boy realised that it was the red room and the candlelight that made her scarlet; the crystal and sequin work of the dress reflected the colours around her.
O was sitting in Mother’s chair, with Mother standing behind him, so that Boy could see them both reflected in and framed by the oval mirror over the desk. They were watching themselves. O was naked, and shirtless, and his jeans and underpants were pulled down like hobbles around his ankles. His body was the only white thing in the room. His head was tipped back and was resting between Mother’s great breasts, and his throat was working like a baby’s when it is suckling; he was gasping for air. His face was half hidden; Mother had let down her hair and it had fallen and covered him. This was something which her public never saw; Mother’s great treasury of raven hair released from its silver pins one by one and let down, as heavy as a theatre curtain and as luxurious as a coat with a collar of lynx or wolf.
In the centre of a red room, then, Boy saw an oval mirror, and in the centre of the mirror, a white body, and in the centre of the white body the black target of O’s black-haired belly, groin and thighs; and in the centre of this blackness, O’s cock, and around it, the white and scarlet of Mother’s red-nailed left hand; for Mother has one hand cupped under O’s chin and with the other, the hand on which her diamond is shining, she has reached down to his erect penis and is slowly, slowly masturbating him. O’s genitals too are shining in the light; there is a small cut-glass jar of some ointment open on Mother’s desk and with this she has covered her hand and O’s cock, and his cock and all the black hair around it is shining and glistening as her hand moves steadily up and down.
Boy is not horrified to see this but fascinated. The way that Mother is touching O is so firm and so intimate that Boy guesses that this is the kind of lovemaking that old friends indulge in, or people who have been together for years; the kind of expert touch that evokes the memories of all the sex that has happened before. As Mother continues her firm strokes, going right from the head of his cock to the balls, Boy sees O’s stomach begin to tense and heave slightly, and hears him begin to whimper. Then he sees him reach up and pull a handful of Mother’s black hair into his mouth to stop himself from crying out, or perhaps to smell and feel it more fully, or perhaps without thinking but just because he wants something in his mouth. Knowing that he is nearly there, Mother moves her hand not faster but slower and slower, and slower, and O slowly arches back in the chair, and then he comes and his come splashes over Mother’s hand and flows down over her rings.
All this is done in silence, with only Mother’s hand moving, and the reflections of the candle flame wavering slightly.
And Boy wants to break the silence, he wants to let them know that he is there, he wants to just quietly say, I do that, I do that too.
Now Boy sees Mother slowly looking up from her task; as she looks up her hair is pulled out of O’s mouth and away from his face, and in fact both of them are now looking at Boy standing there in the mirror; from the way they look it seems that both of them knew all along that he was watching. The crystals of Mother’s dress crackle slightly in the candlelight as she shifts her weight and pushes her hair back with one hand; Boy can see now that the scarlet lipstick is wiped half across her face, and that there is scarlet on O’s face and around his nipples; and that his shoulders and neck are red where they have been rubbed and scratched by the beading of Mother’s dress. And he sees that the black of O’s eyes, the black of Mother’s eyes, and the black of O’s hair, and the black of Mother’s hair, is exactly the same black. O’s chest is still heaving from his orgasm. Mother places herself squarely behind him and puts her hands on his shoulders – a bit like the move that a barber makes when he has finished your hair and checks that the cut is perfect, or like that of an angel displaying the corpse of a saint. She seems to be displaying O or rather O’s body to Boy, and she smiles and she says, I know you do, I know you do that too, Boy. Take him, he’s all yours. No, really, he is all yours, but remember, I taught him everything he knows.
And Boy understands what Mother means, in the way that one does understand people in dreams, because he knows that what she says is true, that every trick and skill of O’s body, every sound he makes and position that he knows has been shaped by the advice and admiration of other men, and that Mother feels herself to be responsible for all the men who have ever slept with O, all the men he has ever met in her bar, that she has witnessed or imagined them all; that every phrase of his confessions, both filthy and tender, has been learnt or adapted from someone else under her jurisdiction or on her premises, and that now he has brought all of this history of his body, has brought it to Mother and confessed it to her, asking her permission to now give it over into the care of another. And that now Mother has indeed given her permission.
Boy was not sure, as Mother lifted O up out of his chair, and held him there with his semen splashed all over his stomach and thighs, if she was leading him, or pushing him, or giving him away; but he knew that she was somehow saying, This is what you get, here he is, take him off my hands. He’s yours now. He’s decided.
She bent forward, and gave Boy O’s hand. Did Boy imagine that she also gave him a big fat roll of money? Did she do that? Did he remember that right?
The other thing that Boy noticed in this scene and tried to remember later was the photographs. He looked again at the set of six portraits of famous women which he had thought were reproductions; and he saw that the paper was not the thin paper of a modern reproduction, but a thick matt paper with a look as rich as powdered skin. And he saw, written across Bessie Smith’s half-exposed left breast in fat brown ink, the words Missie, Miss, Mother, Mama – what the hell – Bessie. And he saw, written right across the silk draperies behind Billie’s beautiful face All of me – why not? – take all of me. And these words seemed to him to be a kind of confirmation or permission granted; specifically, the autographs on the portraits looked to him like the signatures of witnesses, signatures on the contract which he felt had been made in that scarlet room.
So anyway they came back downstairs, with Boy’s arm around O’s shoulders, which was the first time that we’d seen that particular gesture. They’d made their agreement, they’d confirmed their decision, they’d decided to live together, and they looked more ordinary somehow. A regular couple, just like an ordinary couple, as if they were going to start talking about a mortgage and furnishings.
We all said, Will it last? (And do you doubt it? Do you doubt this whole story? Do you find it strange that two men should come together like this and then stay together? Do you find it strange that we should have wanted so much for them to stay together? Do you?)
Mother said, It will last. She practised speeches about them under her breath while she sat there on her stool. Never had she seen (and she had seen so many in her years on that stool), never had she seen such a matching pair of beauties; never had she seen a pair so deserving of being a couple. My Boys, she called them, my dogs, my matching carriage pair; bitch and daughter is always the best pairing, they say, and that’s you two, my boys. Why don’t you two get married? she says in jest as she passes, why don’t you two get married? she says. Fall in love, get married, have a baby, she says, you’re so fucking gorgeous I can’t stand it. I’d pay good money to watch you two doing it, she says. You two walk hand in hand down the promenade and I’ll think the revolution’s come, she says. You two walk down the street holding hands and no one’s going to bring the knife down on you, Mother says.
Mother says: For this cause shall a man leave his Mother and his Father.
Robing the bride
I do not want to give the impression that this whole betrothal of theirs was strangeness and difficulty. Some nights they were so happy. I can remember watching them when Stella II was on one night, doing her ‘That Was Then But This Is Now’ selection, and Boy was mouthing the lyrics at O, Signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours, and they both laughed, O laughing longest until his laugh was stopped by Boy’s sweet kiss. They were always about to kiss, like actors in an Indian film, always about to kiss and making you want to see them do it. Of course they kissed all the time, in public, indeed they were notorious for it, they could even make me turn aside and not look, so passionate and personal were their kisses. And again when one time I was sitting near them and when O came back from the toilet he had an erection, I could see it, and Boy saw it too and smiled a dirty smile and O just stood in front of him and cupped his balls and his stiff cock in his hand, grabbing himself down there, and said to Boy, That’s how strong my love is, using the exact intonation that Otis Redding used in 1964. Oh, they were so happy, so very happy, I wish you could have seen them. It would do you good to see them. You know, sometimes you see two men, and you think, Oh, oh yes –
It would not have surprised me to have seen them at that time walk naked and hand in hand down the street, so proud were they of each other; or at least bare-chested and barefoot and sweeping the pavements with some extraordinary gowns, like saints, that was the way they walked when they were out together. They were so very much in love; I used to just stand and watch them. I had not seen so many men be that way, and I still could not quite believe that it could be that way. In fact these days I still cannot quite believe it, I cannot believe that an affair like that is either legal or possible.
You just can’t believe that these things happen.
This period was the height of their fame. We normally used the phrase the crown jewels to refer to the packet on somebody; but now the phrase began to be used of O and Boy when they were out together; you’d look round to see if they were in, and if they were, you’d say, I see the Crown Jewels are on display again tonight, which was mocking, but it was heartfelt too. We were so proud of them that year. We were glad to have them in our midst. Of course every year or so there is a new reigning couple, a new pair of heroes that the young men arriving look at and think, Oh, I want it to be me, I want it to be me, I want it to be me’, and that is why men like them are fabulous, in the true sense of the word. Because we need them to be. When people say, was it really like that? you want to say, yes, and you want to say, and it still is.
They had made their choice, they’d made their decision, they’d had their decision approved; they even had the money. Now what they had to do was name the day for the actual ceremony.
It happened at a very famous party, one of our best. The title for the evening was ‘It Was Twenty Years Ago Today’, and it took us weeks to get ready.
Mother had fake hardboard walls put up which made The Bar much smaller, even though she was expecting a capacity crowd. In the event, it was a real crush, which was correct, I mean it was historically correct, because, you see, everywhere was much smaller in those days, everywhere was upstairs or down the stairs, well hidden. Those places – you went in on a Friday night, and you’d come out on Sunday morning with no clothes left. The music was period (not that you noticed, because we had never really stopped playing the old music anyway), and the pictures were of curly-haired Californian boys in shorts, sitting astride logs in cut-off shorts, smiling. (You never see men smiling in these pictures nowadays.) And of course the costumes were period; things we never thought we would see again. I wondered how O and Boy were going to come, because I was thinking, I don’t remember there being affairs like theirs twenty years ago, you couldn’t do it in the same way. In the end they came as Banker and Rent, O in a velvet-collared overcoat and Boy taking pills in the toilet, it was quite an act.
The costume of the evening, predictably, was Stella’s. It had taken her weeks. She came as Mother, or, more precisely, as Miss, which is who Mother had been twenty years ago. The dress was relatively easy, since they’d persuaded Mother’s own dressmaker to make a copy for them. The wig too, because they’d found a photograph which showed the correct style. Mother was a blonde then. They even faked the diamond. The face was the hard part; Stella and Stella II had devoted a week of experimentation to recreating the effect of the period combination of panstick, powder and thick eyebrow pencil.
When I saw her come in, I was shocked. It was perfect. Mother herself paled slightly, and the cigarette she had been moving to her lips stopped in mid-gesture. Everyone turned to watch the confrontation. Stella, she who always looked everyone straight in the eye, as if to say, You got a problem darling?, even Stella had to look down and could not meet Mother’s eyes; she felt like she was at a presentation at court, and had to resist the temptation to drop into a full curtsey. Mother looked at Stella, then opened her handbag and took out a small photograph, which was in fact a snapshot of herself in those days. She was checking the accuracy of Stella’s impersonation. Then she lifted Stella’s face up by taking her under the chin, very regal, and said, said to herself as it were: ‘How lovely it is to see you again after all these years.’
And then she took Stella to the bar and bought her eight pints of bitter which is what she told Stella she used to drink of an evening.
She said to Stella, installing her on the stool next to her own, the seat of honour for the evening: ‘I think you know almost as much about all this as I do, girl.’
There were two Mothers in The Bar that evening; they spent the whole night talking. At the end of the party, O and Boy were summoned. Stella said: ‘Shall I be Mother?’
And Mother gave her permission, saying: ‘Be my guest.’
‘Well,’ said Stella, clearly relishing the role, ‘what we want to know is, just when exactly when are you going to make an honest woman of him, O? We need to know. After all, there will be sewing to do and suchlike. Name the Day.’
And of course, put like that, well, he just had to. He named the day, they got their flat and they went ahead and got married.
Immediately prior to the wedding there was the period of final preparation, which we referred to as The Robing of the Bride.
We all said this must have been very hard for Boy, no matter how much he wanted it, and some of us thought that O was going too far now, there were things he did in this period of the affair that we didn’t know whether to believe or not. And I for one at this point did wonder just why he and Madame were working so hard, so very hard, what it was they had to prove which meant they had to make such extravagant efforts, why they couldn’t make it just a little easier, especially on Boy.
The charades began in the living room of O’s flat, and they took a whole week.
The first costume was that of a drag queen, which in a way was the easiest to do. Stella told Boy sisterly stories of harassment and insult while ruthlessly criticising his appearance, rubbing foundation into the cuts on his hastily-shaved neck, working at speed, not deigning to comment on the half erection he got when he put on the high heels.
When he was ready, Stella called O into the room to see the finished transformation.
Stella said: ‘He looks terrible. Quite frankly, the whole thing is ridiculous.’
A week earlier Stella had asked Boy for a photograph of himself at school, and Boy had found one in his box of papers and had handed it over. This was in preparation for the second night, when, having gone to great trouble to find exactly the correct school uniform in a theatrical hire agency and having had it copied in a larger size, Stella made Boy look fourteen again. When she had done this she was so excited, she wanted to stay and watch the scene; but O sent her home. Then O pretended to be Boy’s teacher, and asked him questions that would have mortified Boy at fourteen; at nineteen, they made him realise how little he still knew, how easily he still blushed, how hard he found it to look in a man’s eyes, how he still didn’t have a way of talking about these things.
