Gibby pulled Ash into his strong arms and slung him over his shoulders, limp and heavy as a corpse, and carried him back upriver, fighting the tide, Ash lifeless, and carried him to the beach. Ash had been unconscious underwater for two minutes. Gibby was screaming, a full-throated cry of fear. Two endless minutes, or hours—what did it matter now—followed by Diana through her binoculars, watching the death of her only son at the hands of her lover.
Gibby laid the lifeless body out on one of the quilts. He put his mouth to Ash’s—finally the kiss Ash must have so longed for, the kiss of death, the kiss of life—and blew air into his lungs, then pushed on his chest with sharp, quick jabs, again and again, then more air, mouth to mouth, then more pushing, harder this time, this routine over and over, again and again, it seemed hours. It wouldn’t help, and Diana was weeping fully now, unable to go to her beloved son. More air, mouth on mouth, more frantic pushing on Ash’s powerful chest.
Finally there was a choking cough, and water spewed from Ash’s mouth, and he finally breathed on his own. Gibby wept. He knelt on the beach and wept for his friend. Then he carefully, lovingly, dried him off with his shirt, avoiding Ash’s arms, which still reached up to embrace him, trying to pull him close, as a drowning man tries to pull the next man under. He wiped the blood from his face and covered Ash with all the quilts left on the beach, damp now from the dew, wrapping him like a mummy. As though he were folding the flag for a dead soldier. All this tenderly, with great grief, his beloved friend. He knelt over him for a long time, stroking his hair, wiping the tears from his face with the back of his hand, and then he kissed him on the forehead and the mouth, and rose unsteadily to his feet, picked up his clothes, and began to walk naked back to the house. Naked and alone, Ash bundled like a corpse on the beach. Walking away from all that was, from all that was left unsaid, that would never now be said, from the friendship that was now at an end, however they found a means to carry on. Embarrassment trumps forgiveness. Sad, but true, and Gibby walked with sagging shoulders and tenderness in his gait, away from Ash and all that was. It was almost dawn; the sky was beginning to lighten, a fan of rose on the distant shore.
She felt a sudden urge to vomit. She threw open the window and leaned out, her heart churning as the night, the whole night, fell to the ground below her. She wanted to run to Ash, but her legs had turned to stone. Her heart had also turned to stone. Her son, his “friend” in New York, the longing looks he gave as Gibby poured the wine, Rose’s arched eyebrow, it all seemed so clear to her now.
Sin, she thought, unspeakable sin.
Her son.
The child of her womb.
Undeniable, brave, young, and strong.
She collapsed softly to the floor, her knees giving way, and then the rest of her, falling to the rug her mother had brought back from China so long ago. Her eyes closed, and she lay as if dead, a wisp of her smoky hair falling over her pale face, rising and falling with her every exhalation.
And she lay there until the pale sunrise slanted through the window, and Gibby, dressed only in his damp khakis, naked from the waist up and smelling of salt and covered with sand, picked her up in his arms and carried her up the stairs, kissing her sleeping face here, and here, and there, and laid her in her bed, his hands caressing every part of her body, and ending the night with a gentle kiss on her forehead, leaving her asleep, a sleep from which she never wished to rise, and then leaving her alone, covered with a light silk coverlet, all the windows open to let in the cool air of dawn.
Independence Day was over. Day would follow on day, and nothing, nothing, nothing would ever be the same again. The snake had eaten its tail; the world had stopped on its axis. The heart that beat faintly in her chest would never ever ever be the same, and she had nothing solid to cling to, ever again. Her boy. Her beloved son. The end of the line.
But, love.
But love.
But always love.
22
IT WAS A house of shadows. Ash, battered and bruised, was silent at the table, drunk almost all the time, and solitary in his ways, avoiding Gibby as much as possible, eyes lowered when they passed in the hall or passed the salt at the table, setting the cellar carefully on the tablecloth, hands never touching, a strict observance of manners, no more. Gibby taking over the role of master of the house. Ash never asked his mother to brush his hair dry, or rub his feet at night, or say his prayers, because he knew, just as she knew when he was having a migraine, that she knew, that she had seen everything. For her part, for the second time in his life, she couldn’t approach him, couldn’t touch him. Her revulsion had triumphed over her love.
Nobody knew what to say. Only Rose, a peacock in a dying, withered garden, and Lucius, her shabby, paunchy foil, chattered on as though every night were New Year’s Eve. It didn’t matter to them that nobody responded. They were here to sing for their supper, and sing they did.
Only Rose swooped down on Ash, like a bright cockatoo, again and again, drawing him into the sunroom after dinner, draping the lamps with silk handkerchiefs she pulled from her enormous reticule of Chinese brocade for long conversations from which he often emerged clearly having been crying, Rose holding his hand like an older sister.
Pretending nothing had happened, he claimed he had a lot of business to do, much of it involving trips to his bankers in Richmond, three hours away, where he stayed for days at the Jefferson, unknown, beloved by the waiters and bellmen for his enormous tips, going to his tailor’s in the daytime, visiting gentleman’s clubs at night, often coming back drunk to the hotel, having lost his gloves or his ebony walking stick, accompanied by a young man like himself, drunk and elegant, a gleam in his catlike eyes, and they would ascend in the elevator, seen once, then gone. His body had lived through a lifetime underwater, but his heart had not. He was dead to the world, dead to opinion. He was surrounded in Richmond by people who knew him, knew the family, and of course word got back to Diana. She turned a deaf ear to the gossip. She wrote him long lavender-scented letters, explaining the complexity and profundity of her love for him, trying to say that nothing had changed without saying nothing had changed—because they both would have known that that was a lie. They both knew that everything had changed.
He hated leaving his mother alone with Gibby. He had seen the glances, the subtle, almost accidental touching of hands, the way she called on Gibby, not Ash, to help her get something off a high shelf—but he had to get away from both of them.
Diana grieved for her departed son, but she could not help herself. Left with her lover for days at a time, she was no longer hesitant about giving herself to him. She no longer thought of the difference in their ages. She became the predator, he the prey. She would find the secret places in the woods she had loved as a child, and in those places she would devour him, frantically tearing at his clothes until he was before her, entire, wholly her lover, his steel legs, his barrel chest, covered with a boy’s down, his hands that could grip her so tightly he could break her in half.
She loved sex with Gibby. With the Captain, it had seemed no more than a vulgar exertion in which she was not included. By the end, she would simply wait for him to finish and to leave, and then she would get into the bath and sit there until every trace of him was gone.
With the Captain, she had never been naked. Oh, she had taken her clothes off. But that didn’t mean she was naked. She protected herself so fully and with such might that he had access only to that part he desired, and when it was over, and it was over quickly, he had not touched her body, not really. With Gibby, her boy lover, she was entirely nude, every inch of her flesh available to him. Even dressed, she felt naked when he gave her the smallest glance.
Their favorite place, the most dangerous and perhaps favorite because of it, was the loft in the stable, stable boys coming and going just below them, bringing the horses in and out from their exercise, the nearness of discovery, the pricks of the straw on her back, sometimes leaving blood.
Love had no e
nd for them.
Her lover. Her beginning, after so long. Her entrance into the world of sensuality and adoration. After so much sorrow and terror with Copperton, the sweetness of love.
They could never marry. He would leave.
When he was on his deathbed, surrounded by children and grandchildren, he wouldn’t even think of her, wouldn’t even remember her face.
And that, as she lay with the hay tearing her back and her boy lover devouring her naked body, was all right with her. He had given more than he knew, and she had given all she had, and taken all there was.
This would not end well, Diana knew. She would die alone, or perhaps Ash would emerge from the shadows of his secret life to hold her hand as she whispered Gibby’s name so softly he couldn’t hear.
And then, suddenly, she stopped herself from painting this lurid deathbed scene, because she knew for certain in her heart one true thing:
She would outlive them all.
23
MEN PERCEIVE LOVE differently in their bodies than women do. When Gibby was walking with her, holding her hand, lying with her in a hayfield, or waiting outside her bedroom door at 3:00 a.m., his desire was complete, the whole world to him.
When he whispered in her ear, “I love you, madame,” chuckling, he meant it with an unbridled joy that he felt at the moment would never go away. It was, in its way, grotesque, this husky boy devouring every inch of a woman who was his best friend’s mother. Lurid, forbidden in myth and reality. As he made love to her, he said “I love you, I love you” with each penetration, deeper and, along with her, more defenseless. And he really thought he meant it, believed it. He never lied to her, not with his mouth or with his body. He was young. He was strong. These are the things he had to give her, and he gave wholeheartedly. The wisdom of the ages. The freshness of a perfect young body. This belief from the deepest part of his heart, from the oldest myth, that he was at that moment possessing the forbidden fruit, and yes, he knew he was flying too close to the sun, and yes, he was willing to die for it.
In Diana’s bedroom, in the dim and blue light of dawn, as they were lying entwined like the snakes of Laocoön, she raised herself from the bed and rested her head on her hand, looking down on her perfect, perfect lover, who was still covered with the sticky sheen of their love. She ran her finger through it and put her finger to her tongue. Sweet and clean. He would be here, and then he would be gone. There are things that age knows and youth does not imagine. She laid her hand softly on his chest. “Darling,” she said. “Tell me how this ends well.”
“We’re only just starting.”
“I knew you wouldn’t understand. It’s not your fault. I won’t ask again.”
“It ends in joy, or it ends in tragedy. Or it ends in boredom. You grow tired of me. Those are the only outcomes. Are you strong enough for those? However it ends, if it ends. I will never leave your side. I will always be by you. I will always be inside your body. You are the only home I’ve ever known. And broken animals always follow their instinct and go home. I’m broken. I’m lovesick.”
Later in the day, as though nothing had happened, she would sit and go over column after column of numbers with two dour, thin-fingered men from Richmond who tried to explain her finances to her, column by column, but she couldn’t pay attention. She was distracted by looking out the window. In the woods, near the house, so she could see him, Gibby had hung a gymnast’s rings and put on his leotard, pure white, skintight, and there he was exercising, the moves more and more difficult, finishing with the most difficult of all, the Iron Cross, during which he turned and looked toward the house to make sure that she saw him, until this or that curtain opened and her small hand waved. He wanted to be stronger and stronger for her, the strongest man in the world. Once seen, he would leap to a perfect landing, running with sweat, raising his arms in victory, thinking that he had given her something of worth, when what she wanted was the sweetness of his skin, his tongue against hers, and his penis painlessly inside her, the snake of love.
She wanted him to remember her, to love her in some small way.
“Do you. Do . . .”
“What. Anything.”
“Do you love me? Even a little bit?”
“Outrageously. Immortally. Disastrously.”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
He ran his hand along her thigh. He kissed her body at the curve of her hip, laid his head there. “Why would I ever do that?”
“I don’t know. Such a melodramatic answer.”
“But not insincere. You think, because I’m young, I’m like a toy. But it’s true. I love you beyond life. In heaven we are married. Forever, like Mormons. And thinking of this morning, up there on the rings, there is disaster in our future. There is no other way out of this. Secrets will burn a hole in our hearts sooner or later. But now, right now, and for as long as I can, I love you. And that is not the answer of a child or an opportunist. It is the answer of a man in love.”
“We’re doomed in so many ways.”
“But not now. Not tonight. Look at the moon. That is not a punishing moon. It is a loving moon.”
“Yes, but not for Ash . . .”
“I don’t know what to do with him now. He won’t talk to me. It doesn’t matter to me where his desires lead him, but I can’t be what he wants me to be. He always seemed so hidden . . . but now I understand. We slept in the same room for years. It must have been agony for him. I feel so sorry I couldn’t have been the kind of friend he wanted. But I didn’t want him. I didn’t know it then, but I was waiting for you.”
“Kiss me, please.”
He kissed her lips. He licked her nipples. He sought her clitoris with his tongue in that way that always makes women both sad and happy.
AS THE WEEKS wore on, she came to accept it, this deathless love, this love that took her where he led her.
On any given day, they didn’t know how much time they had. One wild day, even though the wind was blowing fiercely, and everything was tilting and thrashing, the sky darkening to a thunderstorm, Diana took Gibby down to her secret rock and showed herself to him, as she had to those boys all those years ago. A boat passed. The oystermen, all gathered on the side of the boat, raised their nets and slowed their engines and hooted and yelled and then fell silent as they watched something that most, but not all, of them would never have in their lives, the completeness of taking and giving. The sweet skin, the smooth hands, their own rough and cracked from hauling in the oysters in the coldest weather. The season was months away for them, not until the cold weather set in, a month with an R, but nothing like this awaited, so they watched, Gibby and Diana oblivious.
After they were done, as the rain began to fall, lashing down fiercely, with lightning over the river, Gibby told her to stand very straight and raised her like a board over his head, his strong arms holding her securely, and twirled and twirled her above him as the rain streamed from her body like a water sprinkler.
When he was forty, she would be sixty; when sixty, she would be eighty; with each revolution they aged in her mind, but it was too dangerous to think of the future—she couldn’t afford to wither and collapse at this height, this velocity. So she relaxed into it, pulling her arms in and out, watching as the spray grew small, then large, until he tired and expertly flipped her over and caught her in his arms, his skin now sunset red, streaked with rain.
24
AT SARATOGA, THE hands of time moved only in one direction. Diana wondered every day: Had she made Ash the way he was? As she pored over wallpapers and paint colors until she was sick of it, sick of Rose’s boundless enthusiasm, sick, in fact, of Rose herself, she found herself racked with guilt. Finally she sat down with Rose, as Rose had said she would, in the sunroom, with their golden Manhattans, and she poured her heart out, confessed her sins, all the nights she didn’t go, the years she didn’t pick him up, the rashes, the avoidance of the shining beauty of her only son, the misery of her marriage.
Rose sat for a
long time, sipping her drink. Eating peanuts, one by one, toying with each one like a cat with a treat.
“My sweet baby,” she finally said. “You wholly misunderstand. Ash’s . . . character, let’s call it for the moment; no, let’s call it what it is, his homosexuality—it has, I think, much more to do with the fake captain than with you. People always blame everything on the mother. I myself live on the dark side, spending whole evenings with dreadful catamites, mannish women dressed in white tie and tails, hair slicked back into pathetic ducktails, playing pool and smoking Cuban cigars. They’re always whining about their mothers. My mother was a wonderful woman, and my father was a great man, an honest laborer who worked at the same dull job his whole life, in a factory that assembled washing machines in Connersville, Indiana. I felt I was suffocating in their house, just two steps above a shotgun shack. I thought I wanted the lights and the cars and the sophistication, but what I wanted was women.
“I wonder if it’s not the same for Ash: he isn’t making a choice, he was born wanting men. It’s not what he does. It’s who he is. You must embrace not just him, but everything about the way he lives. Believe me, it is a life filled with punishments and humiliations and grief. He needs you now more than ever. Don’t let him push you away. Fight back with all the love in your heart. Have your fling with your young lover. Of course I know. Don’t look surprised. That is your salvation and your right. But Ash has rights, too.
“And I have the right to another drink.”
Calling for Priscilla, Diana reached for Rose’s hand. “I understand,” she said.