When I was younger, I worked for some years as a tutor for a little boy who was the scion of a very wealthy family with its own peculiar culture and a whole battery of customs I never fully understood. I lived in a little cottage on the family property. Besides me and the boy, the other residents of this compound included the boy’s mother and his father—whom I saw but rarely, and always from a distance, as he was driven off to the city in a luxury car, or as he ascended the foyer stairs after returning from a work trip abroad—and a medium-sized but durable staff: groundskeeper, cook, and a house manager who had been the boy’s nanny until he turned ten and the family had hired me, and who despised me for taking her place and stealing the boy’s attention from her. And it was true: he was as cherishable and nice to look at as a little pearl.
The family matriarch was a youthful and friendly person, and although she wore a diamond bigger than my thumbnail, she liked to clean the morning walkways herself. I could tell she had not come from money, and that her beauty had somewhere-somewhen attracted the attention of the boy’s father and then they had produced their family. There was an older sister, too, whom I never met, because she’d moved into the city to live the young adult portion of her life and was busy becoming well-rounded in preparation for the bestowal of her inheritance.
I worked with the boy every day, as weekends did not factor into the family calendar, and in the compound time and energy moved according to the whim of my employers. The boy’s name is not important, but like “Horus” or “Apollo” it was incandescent with nepotism.
For four hours every day, we would read books together and then discuss them, and then I would play with him in the yard. In the autumn we’d toss a ball back and forth; in the summer we played with water balloons and a complicated sprinkler system the groundskeeper had devised specifically for the boy’s pleasure. In the spring we strolled through the garden, naming flowers and identifying their various parts, and I’d laugh when the boy told me he especially preferred the look of their sexual organs, and thought that if he could fertilize himself, he would do it, because the alternative sounded like it must hurt.
Once we found a warren of baby rabbits among the roots of a juniper tree at the far end of the property. I had an old volume of origin myths open on my knees and had been reading aloud as he tromped through the garden, enacting scenes or attributes of gods and heroes alongside my narration. His bare knees and elbows flashed as he moved between shadow and sunlight, undergrowth and the terminal edge of the lawn, which began at the patio nearly an acre away.
He broke character with an astonished gasp. “Look!”
I rose and joined him, and there they were at his feet, hidden in a depression among the juniper roots, no bigger than a handful of mice. Their eyes were closed; they quivered with exposure.
“They’re so little!” Sunlight shone pink through the translucent tips of his ears like the perfected analog of human joy.
“That’s you,” I said. “They’re all you.”
“Do you mean ‘yours?’” He smiled at me, showing me the gap between his otherwise perfect front teeth, which I had recently taught him to use to whistle.
“I do now,” I said, and wanted so much to ruffle his hair that I felt the aborted gesture as a pain in my hand. “How many are there?”
“Five, I think. How do you tell a boy from a girl?” He reached for one of the prone little bodies, but I stopped him with a click of my tongue. Reluctantly, he covered the kits with a brittle hank of grass clippings, and for the rest of the week he required that every lesson incorporate something “rabbit”. It was my pleasure to indulge him.
This was how I enjoyed him, and how we lived every day, until the housekeeper called us for dinner, or until the evening got cold and we went to the main house for warmth and entertainment until dinner, where everyone—family and staff—dined at the table together. After that, I’d return to my little house to prepare the next day’s lesson, smoke an herbal tonic, and go to sleep. We repeated this cycle undisturbed for two years.
Seven months after his twelfth birthday, my student began to change. While he was still attentive during our lessons, he vacillated between his usual friendliness and a laconic malaise that turned our meetings into micro-skirmishes of awkwardness and frustration. I could see him feeling hot and tight, chafed by his clothes, by the new-and-different chemicals foaming up his bloodstream. I wasn’t surprised when his mother came to me one night after dinner.
She put a dry hand on my elbow and guided me into the room they called a study, though it had no books and no computer.
“I know you must have noticed by now,” she said, and I told her I had, and she continued because my input was not exactly necessary for the sake of this conversation. “I–we, his father and I, we want you to talk to him about what’s happening. To help him; he’s breaking my heart.”
“You haven’t discussed it? Ever?” I found it very strange, would have been shocked had I not already lived for so long among them, eating their full and wholesome foods, breathing their attenuated airs, hearing the glib and stressful notes of their conversation—but my employer’s expression yanked me short.
“Of course not,” she said. “Family is a sacred thing, a safe and sane and sacred thing. What would happen if he thought his mother noticed those kinds of things about him? It’s almost too disgusting to think about. No–it needs to happen from outside-in.” Her eyes bulged at me, and I took a step backwards, apologized at once for my indiscretion.
“I’m only here to help,” I said.
So I made myself available for the opportune moment to arrive, which it did one evening, after dinner. The housekeeper, who managed to radiate disdain for me even with her back turned, or during a conversation with someone else, had opened the doors and windows to welcome in the rainy season, and the house was filled with the azotic after-smell of an afternoon storm. During the meal, the boy pushed food around his plate and held mouthfuls from his allotted half-glass of wine for too long, as though letting the alcohol clear some taste from his mouth. When he smiled at me across the salt and pepper, or between the tiered and tasteful candelabra, his teeth were pink.
I went through the open door and down the wet garden path as conspicuously as if I’d been whistling in the dark, or holding one of those quintessential candles. I sat at the rattan outdoor table and rolled a thin little smoke and watched the boy come towards me from the main house. Above him, around him, branches bowed under the weight of the water on their leaves, and it was clear to me that even the trees acknowledged the sovereignty of his position.
“How now?” I said, and blew smoke into the sky where it communed with the low-hanging clouds.
“I don’t feel very good,” he said and touched a bead of water on a dangling leaf with the tip of one finger. “I think something is wrong with my body,” and the angle of his eyebrows in his face told me he was ready to hear what I might have to say.
“Not wrong, but new,” I said, and told him about the changes he could expect, and about how long it might continue. I told him that though I couldn’t be sure how he’d feel once it was over, I suspected he’d be glad it happened.
“It happened to me, too,” I said. “It happens to everyone,” and then I told him he shouldn’t be surprised if the bodies of the people in his life—even his sister, even the housekeeper (we laughed together at this one), even his mother, even me—took on an ineluctable fascination. “It’s nothing to worry about,” I said, “but it’s also nothing to act on.”
“Act how?” said the boy.
Soft light came to us over the lawn from the big house and converged with the sterner light from the sky and made it possible to see what he would look like once his current process resolved itself into more bone and body mass. He was a very beautiful boy, and he would be a very handsome man. His eyes were the shape of a lifetime of pleasant dreams; his hair shone like money turning into more money.
“As this thing keeps happening to you—and maybe this has already come up and it’s why you feel so strange, I can’t tell you for sure—you’re going to start thinking a lot about other people’s private parts. You might even feel like touching them.” Briefly, I explained the body-body mechanics in some different configurations of up and down, in and out, hard and soft, fast and slow, wet and wetter. As I did this, his gaze moved dubiously from my mouth to my neck, then my breasts, and finally to the seam between my seated thighs. “And other people will want to play with yours.”
He was still too underdeveloped to quite believe me, so I rolled him one of my smokes—a blend of lavender, rose, and yarrow—to soothe his mind and to help him sleep when it was time, and we smoked together like our own little volcano, puff-puffing away, while I quizzed him affably on pieces of history we’d covered the prior week. Then he smiled and told me goodnight, and the beauty of his sharp little face stuck in my eye like the point of a star.
For the next few weeks, the boy’s mood and behavior were much improved. After another communal breakfast, his mother clasped my hand tight enough that her wedding band dented the skin on my knuckle and whispered a breathless thanks. I knew this meant a bonus would appear in the month’s monthly envelope, so I told her it had been my pleasure. “He’s a very special person,” I added, and she wrung her hands in happiness. Yes, of course, I really did think so.
The youthful matriarch was so pleased she couldn’t restrain herself.
“I shouldn’t tell you this at this stage; it’s still supposed to be secret from anyone but the family. This is actually the worst kind of luck. But you’ve been with us for so long, and you’re so good with him that I’m sure God will give us a dispensation!” She touched her shiny forehead, then her lips, then her sternum. “Our daughter is getting married.” Her eyes sparkled so hard I thought maybe she was crying, or that she’d caught the reflection of her diamond in each eyeball.
“Congratulations to everybody,” I said, then added conspiratorially that I couldn’t think of anyone better to oversee the celebration of such a meaningful and important event.
But there was more she needed to tell me.
According to something—culture, or tradition, or the family habits that bordered on compulsion—the brother of the bride was required to induct the brother of the groom into a feeling of mutual fraternity. My employer explained some rituals meant to engender this feeling, and I nodded to show her I was listening deeply, and considering everything she said, which I was not. What she described to me sounded trite and complicated. I thought of a recent lesson I’d given her son about adjectives, and thought it was time I taught him the word “masturbatory”.
Finally, she admitted that the timing of the boy’s body-process was more than inopportune—it presented a potential disaster, given his attitude and the distraction of being strafed by certain feelings (here I looked at the rug to give her some privacy).
“This makes you one of the most important people in our household right now,” she said suddenly, and gripped my hand again. “We’re counting on you to help him get through, no hiccups.” This time her hands were damp.
I had no idea how I might help in any meaningful way, as the only reason for my being there at all amounted to the circular talking and reading, talking and reading, talking and reading, reading and reading and reading, punctuated by talking, that looked like teaching, but the combination of her expectations and her total reliance on my capabilities and all the money in the room made a heady emotional perfume, and I told her of course: I would do what needed doing.
One day, after a shoddy math review that I ended early, the boy—my special student, my only one—told me that his new brother would arrive two weeks before the rest of the wedding party in order to participate in the bonding scenario that had already been described to me. The boy told me he was nervous, because he didn’t feel like he was naturally a very talkative person, and lately he had only wanted to spend time focusing on his new self and trying some of the things I’d described those few weeks ago.
“To see if I can get anything to happen,” he said brightly, and I nodded sagely but reminded him that while between us these conversations were fine—actually they were excellent, basically sacrosanct—that he should not invite his parents, his sister, or his new brother into this sanctum of thought and experience. I also told him that certain new responsibilities would come up alongside the pleasure and the change.
“They go hand in hand,” I said. “As you get older, you’ll learn that’s part of the good part. Self-discipline. Rising to the occasion. Earning pleasure by sometimes doing things you don’t want to do or that feel scary.” I surprised myself by realizing I was not lying to him.
The day of the arrival was hot and the staff watched the scene from behind the kitchen window. The family gathered in a cluster at the foot of the outdoor stairs to welcome the new arrival. Sunlight bounced from one glossy head to the other. A big black car pulled into the driveway and paused to deposit someone older than I’d expected—already balding, he had a thick mustache and wore his pants excellently because he was a little bowlegged. When he stepped forward to move his luggage out of the drive and to shake hands with his new relatives, it was obvious that he was animated by an incontrovertible masculinity. I could see it as clearly as I could see the paperwhites in the windowsill. It lined the shadows under his biceps, the dark hair on his arms and face, the spare lines of his arm and legs and shoulders, his throat and jaw and the shape of his skull under his face.
Through the window, my student looked as if he’d been struck in the balls.
At dinner that night he appeared more miserable than ever. His mother had invited her relatives to attend the occasion, and the boy and his new brother were the only men at the table. The female contingent treated the newcomer with pornographic courtesy. He didn’t serve himself or select the food on his plate—multiple sets of feminine hands did it instead. He received the attention and the food with unfailing politeness. The murmur of bass-toned “thank yous” reached all the way to the staff’s end of the long table.
Finally, after dessert and coffee, my student rose and commenced his performance. I watched him bend uncomfortably at the waist to speak into the man's ear, and I stared at the nearness of the masculine ear to the adolescent lips. I rose with my plate and knew that I should carry it to the kitchen but could not quite bring myself to leave the table. And then someone’s guiding touch landed on my shoulder.
“We have all the help we can stand, and it sure seems like you have something smart on your mind. Lots to think about before tomorrow morning,” said the housekeeper, and used her smile to drive me from the room.
I saw them together the next day at breakfast in the big house, and I was pleased to note that the boy seemed more relaxed. Invariably, the morning crept in through the windows and splashed their faces, making them—the mustached man and the pearlescent boy—into even more of a pair.
They left together as I sat down with my food, blustering loudly away from the table in a gale of male vigor, and the boy did not look back or respond when I called out to remind him to study his vocabulary list. Later, I’d watch as they tossed a ball back and forth on the front lawn and feel compelled to include “cliche” to our list.
The season changed, almost overnight. The days became hotter and close; the feeling of a month passed in five or six days. The cooling weekly showers I enjoyed so much became intermittent storms that boiled up irrationally and rattled the windows with thunder. The gardener’s plums and tomatoes came too early and dangled obscenely on the branch before rotting in a matter of hours. Inside the big house flowers opened and the halls filled with the smell of fresh blossoms. Every morning the housekeeper set out new flowers. And by the end of the night, the blossoms had spread open as wide as they could, releasing their pollen all over the credenza (or the mantle, or the tabletop) only to drop their petals in a heave of submission.
My student was completely wrapped up in the tasks and responsibilities that went into making a new brother and we saw each other only for the most cursory lessons: “Recap and review,” I called it.
During this time I saw the pair more frequently out of the house—in the yard or in the driveway on their way somewhere else. Once they went into the city together and the boy returned with a different haircut; another time they took a car with no driver into the low and nearby mountains and the boy returned with a sunburn. He was suddenly beyond me and occupied my mind most moments of the day. At first I identified this feeling as boredom, and then I thought it must be simply that I had become accustomed to spending time with him, and therefore missed him. But neither diagnosis was quite right. At night when I smoked my herbs and drank my hot water, and lay under the ceiling fan, I could only get myself to sleep by imagining him move silent and alone among the fruits in the garden.
On these mornings I woke up exhausted, as if I’d been wrestling with someone all night, my hair and thighs damp with sweat. I could feel that something in the household was different, and it wasn’t just the influx of seminal energy. There was a new dynamic among us: the boy and his future brother-in-law, usually notable for their absence but when present notable for their extreme togetherness. They talked low with their heads close, nearly touching, and often disrupted my meals with their laughter and fraternal jostling.
For the first time since I arrived from my own chilly district four years earlier, the boy missed a lesson, and when we met next revealed that he had also not finished the homework I assigned. Across the desk in the bookless study, he was tired and grouchy and more beautiful than he had ever been. More beautiful than he had been even that morning, and yet less beautiful than he would be by the end of the day. It had been almost three days since I’d seen him last.
“I’d like you to do the exercise anyway,” I said, and he rolled his eyes at me.
“When am I going to ever need to use all these words?” he said. He had never spoken to me in such a way, and the shock of it prevented my feelings from being hurt. His voice had lowered an octave, and his knobby hands and wrists and elbows had, too quickly, developed the rangy bones of a man. Where before I could rest my chin on top of his head when we embraced “good morning” or “good night”, we now stood eye to eye. And in his eyes, I saw a shadow; I knew he had experienced lust for the first time.
“You’ve been learning off the clock,” I said. I felt afraid for him, of him. I looked into the depth and complication in his face where before I had seen only guilelessness and money. Now he had a burgeoning awareness of his power. It made me afraid; I couldn’t help but imagine his hands around my throat, hefting my breasts, which lately had been sore ahead of schedule. “How old are you today?” I wanted to hold him against me, to protect him, to kiss his poreless face. But I also wanted to beat him—no, to see him beaten—until he understood, once and for all, the disposition of the world.
“How old are you today?” I asked again.
“If I round up, I’m thirteen,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“But I feel a thousand. How old are you?”
“Older than you,” I said, “and I don’t feel a thousand.”
He took out his notebook and pencil and began to work on the assignment.
The day of the wedding arrived. I and the other staff were not invited, but the youthful matriarch made it clear that our presence was required in the house at the end of the evening to make sure that the rooms felt full and festive. “No hiccups,” she said, and brushed her well-dyed hair away from her forehead and temples, then swept herself back to the various tasks devised to keep her busy and insane.
While family and guests attended the ceremony and reception, I helped the other staff fix up the bedrooms and refill the halls with fresh flowers from the overburdened garden. In the living room we laid out a buffet of pastries and red and purple fruits and alcohol, bread and meat and soft cheese that smelled like a bathroom that’d been abused by too many people.
My colleagues bustled up and down the hall with their laden hampers, and I couldn’t help but enjoy the sight of the freshly polished banisters and stiff linens. The big house looked beautiful; a thread of celebratory mania tied all of us together. It could be a joy to be helpful, I’d been thinking, and as I decided to discuss this fact with my student, my feet carried me into the fourth room from the top of the stairs.
The room was broad and spacious, perfectly suited to the dimensions of the man who’d claimed it. I imagined him sitting shoeless in the tufted velvet chair, ankles crossed on the ottoman, as though the room had been built to do nothing but accommodate his stinky feet.
The throat-tickle I’d had in our most recent lesson crept back, this time filling my entire esophagus before sliding down through my stomach and into my bowels. I thought of the boy and how his winsome little self had transformed, and I identified the man as the fulcrum that pivoted the transformation. But I suspected him of something else, too, and though I couldn’t say what, my suspicion urged me to open the sheets and smell them. To look for spoor.
There was nothing.
The man—the newcomer—had left no personal effects on the dresser; the laundry basket and little garbage can were both empty. I skirted the white rug along a strip of bare floor and went into the bathroom where there was no toothbrush on the sink and not a single black hair to be found on the pale slate floor or around the drain of the shower.
The housekeeper greeted me on my way down the stairs.
“I was coming to find you,” she said, and I laughed. “Because you weren’t in your cottage. Someone said you were here, ‘Giving a hand.’ They said, ‘You’ve been helpful lately.” She didn’t offer me a thank you.
“I thought I’d get the sheets,” I said. “But it’s done; everything’s done here.” I knew I hadn’t fooled her.
“He’ll be staying in the yard house tonight,” she said. “They need the room. You’ll sleep downstairs with everyone else.” She told me there were already people in the cottage putting away my few personal items. I’d stay in the basement dormitory for staff, adjacent to the rooms that comprised her little apartment.
As she talked, I thought of all the times she’d offered the boy seconds, or stopped him and zipped his coat up to the neck, or watched us approach the house from across the yard after evening lessons with her arms folded. All along I hadn’t known I was looking into my own future.
“There’s no other help necessary,” she said. “You can enjoy your day. Go look at a book.”
I brought a set of clothes to the cot someone had set up for me in the basement dormitory, and then spent the rest of the day in the yard, at a unit of lawn furniture invisible from the main house. I smoked. I had not seen anyone leave for the wedding. I hadn’t seen the boy at all, not even a glimpse of his arm or the back of his head, for two days. I had been helping, he had been being a family member. I thought about the child and adult struggling inside his body, like a snake wrapped around a rabbit. When it got too dark to read I went back to my cot and stared at the low ceiling and meditated on my displacement.
Around midnight I heard the pounding of many feet upstairs and went to see: the boy and his parents, the old and feminine relatives who had dined with us on the night of the newcomer’s arrival—and, surprisingly, the newcomer himself. I had thought that surely he would stay at the reception to chase girls in the wedding party, or at least to enjoy the feeling of their eyes on his suit and body. But no. He was here with the family as they tackled the buffet and helped themselves to more alcohol and put food on the porcelain plates I’d stacked as attractively as I could, and which were nearly as thin in the hand as a sturdy envelope.
The youthful matriarch came and reminded us of her speech earlier, confusing her words just a little, and said again that it was custom, family tradition that on nights of terminal joy they should share what they had with the people who facilitated the efficiency of their lives. Her eyes and damp forehead reflected the warmth of the room and the tightness of her dress on her still-beautiful body (both son and daughter had been carried by a surrogate).
When I looked from her face to the cluster of bodies in the living room, I expected the newcomer to be noticing but he was not. He was speaking as usual to the boy, who looked more and more like his mother’s son, as though he were achieving her beauty as he grew into the potent adult of her wishes. The boy had a full glass of wine on the floor at his feet. “Go sit with him,” slurred his mother, and, pretending to blush, I went.
Joining them was like stepping over a threshold of a dark and hot and silent room that in the common language of privacy told me I was not welcome, in spite of the pleasantries offered by its occupants: man and boy. I saw that, hidden between their seated thighs, they were holding hands.
My plate trembled and I dropped it. They bent in unison to help me and laughed and looked at each other with the delight and idiot surprise possible only in the first gush of infatuation. The remnants of the dish were tiny in the man’s enormous hand, and I couldn’t help but think of the boy’s pink and hairless body draped across him; it would be like seeing a child naked on a bearskin rug.
The feeling came back again, stronger than ever, and it made my ears ring and filled my mouth with a sour taste. Soon, when he was grown, the family would be done with me, but all my work would remain there inside him, untouchable. It would compound and condense with all his other gathered knowledge and finally turn him into the man he was becoming, alongside all the things he’d affect, and achieve, and buy, and discard, and control, once his body and mind reached their apotheosis.
So I spent the last hours of the night drinking the best wine of my life and bouncing my gaze from boy to man and back again. In the distant field of reality, the housekeeper stood within a cloud of hatred for me and the boy’s mother faded like a flower. In the hot night, the room had grown incredibly close. Across the room an auntie removed a top layer of her complicated outfit. People drooped over their plates and glasses, and the boy’s mother declared that everything should be left until the morning, so staff could have a night off in celebration of the celebration. She didn’t know or didn’t think that this meant staff would have to get up early to both clean and make coffee and breakfast, but the housekeeper thanked her effusively and got to the work of waking everyone and sending them to the correct room.
I lay on my cot for the second time that day and contemplated the ceiling. I listened to the sounds of the under-house at night once the housekeeper had retired to her little suite. One by one, the rest of the staff came downstairs: cook and sub-cooks, driver, cleaner and sub-cleaners, even the gardener would spend the night. I listened to their conversation and heard their accents change. I heard dogged collegiality, and I heard a joke about money and shit and how you can eat neither and yet both churn in the guts of the world.
And then I heard what I had been waiting to hear: “They looked very cozy.” The cook’s tone was as arch and brittle as a wishbone.
“Very cute,” said the gardener as his boots hit the floor. “Almost like father and son.”
“Do you think she noticed?” And then they noticed me listening and a look passed between them and someone turned out the light.
“Bad jokes, too much booze and too much work,” said the gardener, perhaps to me but perhaps to no one in particular. I didn’t say I was offended by their commentary; I didn’t say I was of a like-mind; I didn’t say I was my own double agent. I said nothing, but waited with my eyes glittering in the dark until it was time to go outside.
The night was cool against my feet and legs, my face and hands. The moon glowed overhead like a gardenia, or like the head of a bald woman with flowers blooming from her sinuses. I had entered an enchanted zone. When I looked behind me at the main house, all its windows looked like closed eyes and I knew no one was watching me.
My cottage lay at the end of the path, and it took ten thousand years to reach it. By the time I achieved the patio, the main house had been abandoned, demolished, and rebuilt a dozen times. Its inhabitants had died and been replaced with other people who died and were replaced and so on, until the whole thing swung back from the end to the beginning to the middle of time, where I was, and I stood in front of the little house that had been the housekeepers, then mine, and now the newcomer’s.
I went in through the door whose lock I had disabled many months before, in case the boy wanted to come ask me a question, or use my books to finish his homework. It was strange to smell my own smell and see my own things from the perspective of an interloper. I felt surprised it’d been so simple for the family to nudge me from my place.
The man was asleep in my bed. I could smell his sleepy breath and nighttime sweat, and the alcohol inside them both. I was no longer drunk. The room was hot, but he lay beneath both sheet and blanket and had stacked a wall of pillows around his head. I removed these, purposely, one by one, though I was not exactly sure what I was doing.
When I peeled back the final cover, I looked at his sleeping body. I was confused because I had become so very stupid. I lay down gently in the spot I imagined the boy might occupy, and I wasn’t surprised when I felt myself to be a perfect fit; after all the boy and I were now about the same size I felt the man’s prodigious heat and removed my pants. They’d put better sheets on the bed than the ones they’d ever given me; I could tell from their softness against my thighs that the thread count was very high.
I put my hand on his muscled chest. It was hairier than any other man’s I’d seen. He had back hair and shoulder hair, too; so much chest hair that I couldn’t see his nipples. It was like being in bed with a horse or a bear or a whole cord of wood. He murmured when I touched him again, clasped my hand in the dark.
“You’re here,” he said, and turned on the light. I covered my face with my hands and looked at him from between my fingers. When he saw it was me, he flinched, and I felt the shudder move his body all the way down to where we lay touching at the knees. He sat up cross-legged in bed, and I realized I was waiting for him to hit me, which he did not.
In the light, I saw that he and I were the same age. He sighed the sigh of a bonafide lover, a sound that contained such wistfulness I knew I couldn’t fail. His sadness and desire were the jambs of a door made for beating down, on the other side of which was my prize.
“I thought you were going to be someone else,” he said.
“So he’s disappointed both of us,” I said.
“That’s been happening to me almost since I got here.”
“He’s a child,” I said.
“Yes, he is. I try to remember, but it’s been more and more difficult.” We looked at each other for a long time. I lay there in my underwear and felt the man—the newcomer—looking at my female body as though he were looking over the quality of an object he was unsure about buying.
I put my hands at my sides and let him continue: “How did you know?”
“I have eyeballs in my head,” I said. “I’ve been seeing him change, and it hasn’t been my fault, or a mother’s love kind of thing.”
“I don’t know what to do about it.” The man rubbed his face.
“Let me help; I came here to help,” I said. The rest of this lie unfurled easily. I told him I wanted him so much that the feeling had slid through the needle-eye to become a desperate need. I understood how he felt, I said, because I felt the same desiring-despairing-absence, and that, though I knew I was a shabby substitute, I could at least offer him some relief (“Hasn’t it made you tired?”). And if anyone found us out, it was only better: the specter of the man’s woman-fucking would lead the attention of any suspicious adults down the path of an incorrect assumption.
The final push: “There were lots of people in that room tonight. Do you think young mommy doesn’t look at him when they’re in the same room?”
“Everybody knows she came from trash,” said the man. It was repulsive because it was true.
“But who else? So many aunts, and so many staff,” I said. “Women talk, especially to their employees.”
It happened over a series of many moments that I don’t remember well. We didn’t kiss; he didn’t remove my shirt. Mostly I used my mouth and put his hands gently around my neck because its skinny dimension made it the body part most reminiscent of the boy. He did not caress my face or touch my belly or ass. He grazed my shoulders here and there, and when I finally straddled him, he went soft until he held a pillow over his face with both hands. I tried again, then again, and later, when both of us finally reached success, we laughed like friends.
A knock on the door-glass woke us up. My companion went to answer, after I assured him that the bed could not be seen from the front portion of the little house, hidden as it was by the desk the family had bought me for my work, and the built-in bookcases that created the only sense of “here” and “there” in the floorplan. Through the volumes on the shelves, I watched as he slid open the door. His spine stiffened under its bolts of hair.
“Good morning,” he said, then managed: “I’m surprised you’re up.” His voice shifted both tone and direct: two people had come to call him this morning.
“Good morning! Are you fine? I thought you might like a fresh set of towels for the morning.” The housekeeper’s voice trilled so much inane pleasure I knew the boy was with her. I thought of the shadow in his eye and the final alchemy of my victory, its lesson: his subcutaneous understanding of what I had taken from him. I felt for my pajamas among the sheets, found them on the floor, and wrestled them over my nakedness.
“Hi!” the boy said brightly. “I saw her coming so I came too. I thought—” he cleared the unviolated column of his throat “—I thought we could do something this morning, before you left. Maybe we could go to the mountains again, or…”
I emerged from the bedroom, barefoot, lifting my hair out of my shirt, rubbing a crust of something from the corner of my mouth.
“Good morning!” I said. “I came to get a book! I couldn’t sleep!” I plucked one from the shelf at random: the red volume about apocryphal myths of world-origin. The housekeeper’s face puckered with fury; the newcomer stood with his hands at his sides, still shirtless, and blinked slowly. The boy made only one false step—a quick bleat of distress and surprise, low in his throat—before stiffening his face according to the social-emotional tenets of the money in his blood. He would not show me the wound, and inside my heart I saluted him.
“And now: breakfast!” I reached for the boy with a hand recently salt-damp from the body of the man who loved him. I did not love him. Above us, the morning sky showed the sun as it burned off the haze, but I knew that as low it might be, secret and invisible, the moon still hadn’t set. As man and nanny watched us from the door to my cottage, I led the boy away. He followed me like an animal on a rope, but the rope was his own arm, captured by my grip on his sweaty, boneless hand.
Across the lawn, the boy’s mother was a shape moving under the brick arcade of the patio where people were setting up the morning meal. Between the sounds of birds and our muffled steps on the grass and traffic and a distant train, I heard that she was crying. I heard her voice: “My girl,” she was saying, calling, “my girl, my girl, my girl. Where has my daughter gone?”
As I got closer, I saw that she was trailed by some relatives and a pair of female staff. I recognized the tenor of ceremony; she looked to be enjoying her performance. She was laughing through her tears.
“You did such a good job,” she said, seeing us emerge from the garden, and held out her arms in gratitude. I took us into them, and then she leaned on me, her fragrant hair in my face, her laughter punctuated by tears. I supported her along my side and wrapped a sororal arm around her shoulders. The son, unforgotten but extraneous, was absorbed by the others coming from the house, one by one or in pairs, to see about breakfast. I helped his mother sit then heaped my plate with bacon and eggs, sweet, watery fruits, potatoes and toast with a gratuitous dollop of jam.
Recommended reading: "The Ballad of Big Feeling" by yours truly, "Red Cavalry" by Isaac Babel, "Toddler Hunting & Other Stories" by Taeko Kono, "Ordinary Affects" by Kathleen Stewart, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" by Leo Bersani, "Cane" by Jean Toomer, "Malone Dies" by Samuel Beckett, the Gormenghast cycle by Mervyn Peake, "The Blue Clerk" by Dionne Brand, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (currently reading)
