CHAPTER 1
GAYLORD LE CLAIRE LOVED THE space around him, the furniture, the rug, the etching, all of it. But as he looked around, he longed for something else. Longed for some demonstration to equal the bitter violence he felt within himself. He looked again at the etching and shutting his eyes, wished desperately for something to happen. The time was approaching for him to have a girl and act like a grown man instead of like a timid, adolescent child. Why, why, he cried within himself, can't I be like fellows my age … why can't I feel grown up. He stood still a second longer, a helpless figure in the brightness of the room. Somewhere, somehow, he was certain that in the pattern before him lay the answer to the old conundrum of his life. It was all dim and puzzling, baffling with its secret, and as he sought to understand, it blurred and spun even more before his closed eyes.
For many months he had felt this uneasiness grow. No one he knew was beset with the melancholia, emotional frigidity, or feminine symbolisms he found in himself. And instead of decreasing, as they should, they grew with each passing day. He wanted to fight them, but how? He could not fight things he didn't understand. Why couldn't he understand them. Why couldn't he be at ease among boys his age instead of drawing meekly away. Oh, if only he could. That would at least be one accomplishment.
With a feeling suspended between erotic hunger and intellectual curiosity, he thought of Joe Konarik. Joe Konarik. Big man. A father and only seventeen. His age. He could see Joe's huge physique turning over and over in the slow spiral, moving away from their schoolroom. From time to time one hand held a baby, while the other held the hand of his pregnant wife. The loose dress was at last all he saw of her and then Joe's face came back boyish yet manly in its youthfulness.
The vision left him with an uneasy feeling of being anchorless, adrift on an unknown substance. He did not sob, or weep like ordinary boys. He cried with a despairing stridency, like an animal, bound and helpless, which is being flayed alive with stones and cannot bear its agony.
He thought of Robert Blake. It came out of itself from deep within him. And as he looked admiringly at Blake's clear image, in the back part of his mind there was just a ghost of a suspicion it wasn't quite the proper feeling he should have.
I can't help feeling this way about Bob, he thought hotly. There's nothing wrong in liking him, admiring him. I only wish I were like him.
The thoughts rocked his bewildered state even more, but with it came a languished longing. He shivered on remembering the deep bronze face, set mouth grinning. Darn, Bob had the cutest grin. No wonder everyone liked him. He was so good-looking, so friendly, so sweet, so darn good-looking. It was the sort of face that made his fingertips itch to reach up and stroke; that made his voice drop deep in his throat, murmuring ancient, wordless, wonderful things.
Dreaming of Blake now, he found himself wishing again for his friendship. It could reconstruct his whole life. He even visualized the difference but it had blurred. It was only another dream, for the barrier between them had never been scaled. He was too shy to be the aggressor, and Blake, after all these years, didn't even know he was alive.
But he could not end his thoughts of Blake abruptly. He stood as if drugged, reminiscing of times he had come into a gathering where Blake had been. Afterwards, he found that he could remember precisely what he had worn, whom he had danced with and every careless word he had said. He remembered every detail in that bronze face. It was a face he could not forget, a face he had seen and marked, one that had troubled him in many a senseless dream.
And now he thought of Robert Blake neither timidly or morosely, but as a child longs for a new toy. "Bob," he murmured, and his voice caressed the word, like a lover breathing the name of his beloved. "Oh, Bob, why don't you ask me to go out with you some night? There's no one I'd rather go out with … no one … it would make me so happy … I wish you'd go riding with me … I wish I could ask you … why can't I ask you?"
He had no words when Blake did speak to him. Only a warm feeling in his blood and on his skin and in the burgeoning parts of his body, like a burning fever. He was drunk with admiration around this bronze idol. He was drunk too with the creative fury inside him, which was for him a book of prophecy revealing himself to himself.
Why was he so bashful? So timid and shy he couldn't go after the things he wanted? Others did. Had a support, a prop, been lacking in himself? Had he been born without a nerve others possessed? There was bound to be something. Something mysterious. The conflict that had been generated inside him had-grown with each passing minute, and now, they were magnified beyond all reason.
Gaylord sighed deeply. All love he felt for Blake grew within him. Even if it was strange, he couldn't stop this feeling. He had always felt strange around Blake. Yes, always … a feeling of something not understood surrounded Blake. Oh, God, he sighed, life's sure a mess.
He dropped his gaze to his clothes and moved slowly, his thoughts changing with every step, over the deep carpet of his upstairs room. He was dressed, ready to leave.
Yes, in a little while he would have to yield himself to another ordeal. A self-inflicted ordeal. First, he would drive to the auditorium, alone, where the dance was, then he would walk down the cracked sidewalk, alone, and the riddle would be repeated … you're scared … you're timid … you're a sissy. He could see the cunning glances thrown at him. He could hear their wise-cracks. And he would shrink into himself as he had always done when a crowd was involved.
Perhaps Blake would be outside. He doubted it, since it was quite late. Still, it would be nice to walk up with Blake and Joy. Blake was so friendly, kind. Not like the others. He could see and hear them in the blur before him, devoid of kindness or understanding. And the auditorium also aspired into a tantalizing web into which his life was woven with a deadly grip. It held fast, awakening memories of himself that he would never forget. A misunderstood boy named Gaylord, standing always alone.
With a degree of confusion he was a child again, sitting next to his mother, recalling her saying, "You know the first thing my nurse told me after you were born, darling? She said you were the most beautiful baby she had ever seen. You were so pink and pretty. Not red like most new born babies. Your aunt Emma named you that first night. She was going with a boy named Gaylord and when she suggested it, I liked it immediately. I was afraid your daddy wouldn't like it, not naming you after him, but he wasn't there that night and afterwards he liked it too."
His mother had told him about that night. About the small hospital room in which these words had been spoken. About the storm that had raged outside. She had made it all so clear, so real that even as a child he had heard the deafening blasts of thunder tearing at the shuddering, rattling window-panes. Had closed his eyes on visualizing the flashes of lightning sweeping through the room.
And when he had asked her where his father had been she had only said, "I don't know." A dim smile had curved her full lips and in her eyes had been a serene look he had not understood. "I don't know where he was," she had continued. "But he did come shortly afterwards." She had looked at him and opened her right hand. Pale pink color had flashed on the tips of tapering fingers before him and he had thought the hand excitingly feminine, though perhaps the skin a bit too rough, too coarse for perfect beauty.
"Mother, why are your hands so red?" he had asked.
"Mother's worked hard, honey. Before I married your daddy, I lived on a farm and girls who plow don't have pretty hands. I've worked hard with these ugly hands."
"But they're not ugly," he had answered, "they're just red."
His mother's stories flashed before him now and worked down deep into his mind. They spread before him like an oil painting of familiar interwoven lines and across it trailed a dirty road, rough and crooked. It continued by fields of cotton, white as the floating clouds, passed hay meadows and black earth and stopped at a farm house. Here, in this almost unpopulated setting his mother had lived and grown up.
He loved to hear her tell about how she had plowed the earth; picked the cotton. Tell about the wild tangle of weeds she rode over on horseback to school. Yes, he loved these stories that she told as they sat together cutting out paper dolls. But the story he loved best of all, was the story of how she had met his father. A story for young dreamers, a story that might happen to him.
It had happened at a country dance. He had asked her to dance and she had accepted. Even though she had not known him, she had danced with him all evening. And several weeks later he had asked her to marry him. She had accepted and they had moved, right after the wedding, to an oil field where he worked.
She had told Gaylord about the small house. About the wedding dress she had ordered from a mail order catalogue. She had shown it to him, for it had been in a box under the bed all wrapped in tissue paper and scented with sachet.
And now Gaylord remembered the first time he had tried it on. It had fitted perfectly. So had the white satin pumps. He and his mother had had fun that day and he recalled saying, "I wish I could wear dresses all the time, mother." And she had answered, "I wish you could too, darling—I prayed for a girl before you were born."
"Are you sorry I'm not a girl, mother?" he had asked.
"No, dear. I wouldn't trade you for the prettiest one in the world. You're just what I wanted."
It wasn't too many years back he had tried on the dress again. He had been alone this time. He would have been ashamed for even his mother to know he still liked to wear it. But to wear it again was no more. It was too small and so were the shoes. He had felt sad that day. Sad with the realization he was growing up. The happy hours of playing "lady" were over.
His thoughts moved away from his mother's stories but lingered on the dress. I wish I could wear it tonight, he thought. I wish I was a beautiful girl and I was all dressed up waiting for Bob to call on me. I wish I wasn't a boy.
For a second he considered the unfairness of it all. He thought of that girl, Joy Clay. She had come between dreams and reality. She would be in Robert Blake's arms tonight. He would hold her close and whisper things to her that Gaylord would never hear. Why should he? After all boys don't tell other boys about love. In fact he couldn't even gather up enough courage to ask Blake to go riding with him.
"I'll ask him," he said suddenly. "If I get a chance tonight I'll ask him to have lunch with me tomorrow. And I'll ask Joy too. It'll be easier. I don't know what I'd talk about with just Bob."
He thought this over a moment. It was a simple thing, an everyday occurrence. He was certainly capable of speaking to Joy. He reviewed his advantages. First, he had played with Joy as a child. They had been good friends. That was good. Blake had always been nice to him, had always spoken when they chanced to meet. They certainly had no cause to be ashamed of him. After all he was intelligent, wore good clothes; he wasn't ugly and didn't have pimples like so many boys his age.
He crossed the carpet and went to the bathroom; looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. He was hardly conscious of running a moist finger over each eyebrow, so engrossed was he that he had forgotten he had done the same before. He opened his eyes wide and viewed the contour of his face. He closed his eyes and thought of himself as a girl. A beautiful girl. The thought was not a strange one. It was the playing over, over, and over again of events in which he was the star figure. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be a beautiful girl, and his mind conjured up a picture of a large gathering, intimidated and cowering in the presence of this lovely female who insisted on this and that, who chose to be rid of them all except a bronze, handsome god. In these fantasies he had charm and wit, beauty and importance. He lived them. Without his knowledge, they penetrated his actions sufficiently to increase still further the distance between himself and his classmates. He did not understand them and they did not understand him. He was conscious of this now in a way that he.had never been before. A faucet inside him had suddenly been opened, breaking through his melancholy dreamlike existence.
Rebelliously, he leaned toward the mirror and ran a soft powder puff across his face. What did it matter if Blake was going with Joy, he tried to convince himself. After all, he had to take some girl. Joy was very pretty. She was sweet too. He was glad it was she and not someone he didn't like.
"Bob Blake will never take you to a dance," a ghostlike voice whispered, "why should he … you're not a girl … believing you are … why don't you get a date … can't you?"
As he listened, these words were engraved pitilessly on his mind, and yet the flow of his thoughts was not halted. We can double date … and I can get a date, he thought … I know girls too. Wanda would love to go with me. We can double date … yes, double date. His tense young face lightened. It was one thing to imagine the fact and another to be confronted by it. He was astonished to find his eyes dry. But his muddled-headedness was not affected by tears. He would not cry like he had done so many times.
He had come home from school determined to read all evening, had flung himself into a book but there were too many things interrupting his trend of thoughts. Try as he might the book was uninteresting, monotonous, and, feeling lonely, he had decided to go to the dance. What an idiot he had been not to have asked Wanda to accompany him. He had talked to her after school and she had hinted she didn't have a thing to do that evening. He was fond of her and liked to take her places. She wasn't too popular at dances … not as popular as some girls …
He found himself thinking of Thelma White. Yes, Thelma was popular. But he wouldn't take her if she were the last girl on this earth. He could see her smiling. He was reminded of devouring red lips and coiling snakes. The vision left him with a sick feeling in his stomach. He was reminded of a night long past but still vivid in his memory. He listened a moment to echoes of her voice that still rang in his mind, then shook his head as he realized he was hearing nothing.
Gaylord shuddered and passed his fingers over his eyes to brush away the panorama that had unfolded before him.
"I'm still going to this damn dance," he said with a determined air. "I don't care if Thelma will be there. I'll get to see Bob and maybe I'll get a chance to ask him about lunch tomorrow." He clenched his fists together and attempted a light-hearted laugh.
Gaylord finished his toilet in a daze of whirling thoughts about Joy and Bob Blake. He was not interested in the girl but he was mightily interested in making a good impression on Blake. He swore to himself that he would yet become the most correct, most admired, most warlike student at the auditorium. He screwed up his courage, and walked briskly toward the stairs. He pictured his parents in the living room, chatting with each other of the little events of the day, and between them the lamp, bright and silent. Gaylord thought for a minute. "Guess Dad will be glad I'm going out for a change. I've always stayed home too much, he says. From now on I'm going to go to everything. I'm going to go to every dance or party from now on. I'm not going to say no any more. If I'm a flop I might as well find it out now. I might as well."
Gaylord considered himself a mistreated hero; he still smarted under the insults of his classmates. But this would change too. They wouldn't have any reason to call him sissy again.
He hurried downstairs, thinking, not seeing the mass of shaded colors in the large oriental rug which almost covered the parquet floor of the living room. The soreness over his classmates' bitter words lessened gradually, and Gaylord began to be eager to be at the dance. The forlorn look was discarded. He was thinking of what he was going to say to Blake when he saw him.
The room was vacant but the lamp he had thought of was burning. He wondered where his parents were as he passed through the lovely rectangular room, filled with costly furniture, draperies, and vases. Gaylord noted with pride several roses in a crystal vase. He leaned forward to smell their fragrance.
"Well, you look mighty sharp. Where ya going, Gay?"
Gaylord jumped to stiff attention. The words brought him back into the room. He had been so absorbed he had not been aware of his father sitting in a large, carved upholstered chair. The words startled him, but instead of Blake who had been so vividly on his mind, there sat his father, Clayton Le Claire, who was the personification of things he had always longed for, assurance and polish.
He turned quickly, straightened his shoulders and forced a smile. "Oh," he said. "I didn't see you, Dad."
Clayton Le Claire held a newspaper in his large brown hand, and a cigarette with grey ashes of an unbelievable length was between his healthy lips. The light from the porcelain lamp shone brightly upon him and glistened on thick, curly hair, intensifying its blackness, and his dark brows gave his face a youthfulness which was most becoming. His linen was immaculate and as faultless as the small and closely clipped mustache. He looked a man of success and unashamed appetites.
"Got a hot date you didn't want me to know about?" he said. There was a twinkle of malice in his dark blue eyes as he went on. "What's her name, huh?"
Gaylord scanned his father's friendly face, awkwardly juggled the change in his pocket. "I don't have a date … I …" he said in a slow, strangled tone. "I could have gotten one … but … er … I wasn't going until all of a sudden …"
"Going where?"
"They're having a dance in the auditorium and I thought I'd go for awhile. That is if you and mother don't care."
Le Claire screwed up his eyes and peered at Gaylord as though he were in a very poor light. He flicked his ashes into a heavy glass ashtray. "Care?" he questioned in a pleasant tone. "Hell no … you go on and have some fun."
Gaylord's face brightened, and he regarded Le Claire warily from under his bushy eyebrows.
"Between you and me," said Le Claire in a fatherly way, "I'd rather go to a dance alone too. That way you can play the whole field. You don't have to dance with one gal all evening in case you take a lemon."
"I guess you're right," Gaylord grinned. He hadn't even told his father he never had a date but he had guessed it.
"Sure I'm right." Le Claire rose. "You run along and have a good time."
"Will you tell Mother?"
"Sure, I'll tell her."
Gaylord was not surprised, in fact it seemed to him the most natural thing in the world when his father put an arm around his shoulder and walked to the door with him.
"I'll have a good time," Gaylord said … "and … thanks, Dad." He had an impulse to kiss his father's cheek for the first time in years but …
"Good … don't stay out too late. Remember school tomorrow."
"I won't."
Le Claire watched Gaylord jump into the cream convertible he had given his son on his last birthday. As he continued to look at his reflection, he muttered to himself, "Walks just like me … looks like me too … he likes that car too … damn, I'm glad."
"Don't let those gals kidnap you," Le Claire yelled.
"I won't … bye."
"Bye." Le Claire smiled, but his eyes remained opaque and expressionless. "Have fun."
Carol Le Claire came to the door in time to see the car disappearing down the street. "Where's Gay going?" she questioned.
"Got a hot date."
"A date?" she questioned. "With whom?"
"I didn't ask." Le Claire turned and looked at her gratefully. He kissed her, and circling her waist with his arms said, "He's gone to a dance. You know, honey, that boy's okay. You did a good job of raising him. I wish I could have had more time with him, but you did okay." He held her closer to him. "You know, Carol, I think I finally bought him something he likes. He's crazy about that car."
After a while they walked arm in arm into the house. Through the vestibule, they strolled to the living room. Le Claire returned to his paper, and sank into the large chair in an excess of stupefied pleasure, still thinking with joy of his last glimpse of Gaylord, handsome in his simple sport shirt, dark hair in place, smiling up at him from inside the car. It was a perfectly satisfying picture, and he had no way of knowing that in his car Gaylord was crouched, shivering and afraid.
Carol Le Claire also sat down remembering a dance she had gone to some seventeen years ago. I hope he doesn't fall in love the way I did, she found herself thinking … I don't want to share him with anyone just yet … I guess I'm selfish, but I want him for myself a little while longer … I love him so much.