“That makes it easier.”
“It does,” he agreed. “It didn’t make the years inside any easier, I have to say that, but if I hadn’t had money I might have spent them someplace even worse. Not that the place they put me was a pleasure dome.”
“I suppose you were at a mental hospital.”
“A facility for the criminally insane,” he said, pronouncing the words precisely. “The phrase has a ring to it, doesn’t it? And yet it was entirely appropriate. The act I performed was unquestionably criminal, and altogether insane.”
He helped himself to more espresso. “I brought you here so that I could talk about it,” he said. “Selfish of me, but that’s part of being old. One becomes more selfish, or perhaps less concerned about concealing one’s selfishness from oneself and others.” He sighed. “One also becomes more direct, but in this instance it’s hard to know where to start.”
“Wherever you want,” I suggested.
“With David, I suppose. Not the statue, though. The man.”
“Maybe my memory’s not all I like to think it is,” I said. “Was your lover’s name David? Because I could have sworn it was Robert. Robert Naismith, and there was a middle name, but that wasn’t David, either.”
“It was Paul,” he said. “His name was Robert Paul Naismith. He wanted to be called Rob. I called him David sometimes, but he didn’t care for that. In my mind, though, he would always be David.”
I didn’t say anything. A fly buzzed in a corner, then went still. The silence stretched.
Then he began to talk.
“I grew up in Buffalo,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been there. A very beautiful city, at least in its nicer sections. Wide streets lined with elms. Some fine public buildings, some notable private homes. Of course the elms are all lost to Dutch Elm disease, and the mansions on Delaware Avenue now house law firms and dental clinics, but everything changes, doesn’t it? I’ve come round to the belief that it’s supposed to, but that doesn’t mean one has to like it.
“Buffalo hosted the Pan-American Exposition, which was even before my time. It was held in 1901, if I remember correctly, and several of the buildings raised for the occasion remain to this day. One of the nicest, built alongside the city’s principal park, has long been the home of the Buffalo Historical Society, and houses their museum collection.
“Are you wondering where this is leading? There was, and doubtless still is, a circular drive at the Historical Building’s front, and in the midst of it stood a bronze copy of Michelangelo’s David. It might conceivably be a casting, though I think we can safely assume it to be just a copy. It’s life-size, at any rate — or I should say actual size, as Michelangelo’s statue is itself considerably larger than life, unless the young David was built more along the lines of his adversary Goliath.
“You saw the statue yesterday — although, as I said, that too was a copy. I don’t know how much attention you paid to it, but I wonder if you know what the sculptor is supposed to have said when asked how he managed to create such a masterpiece. It’s such a wonderful line it would almost have to be apocryphal.
“ ‘I looked at the marble,’ Michelangelo is said to have said, ‘and I cut away the part that wasn’t David.’ That’s almost as delicious as the young Mozart explaining that musical composition is the easiest thing in the world, you have merely to write down the music you hear in your head. Who cares, really, if either of them ever said any such thing? If they didn’t, well, they ought to have done, wouldn’t you say?
“I’ve known that statue all my life. I can’t recall when I first saw it, but it must have been on my first visit to the Historical Building, and that would have been at a very early age. Our house was on Nottingham Terrace, not a ten-minute walk from the Historical Building, and I went there innumerable times as a boy. And it seems to me I always responded to the David. The stance, the attitude, the uncanny combination of strength and vulnerability, of fragility and confidence. And, of course, the sheer physical beauty of the David, the sexuality — but it was a while before I was aware of that aspect of it, or before I let myself acknowledge my awareness.
“When we all turned sixteen and got driver’s licenses, David took on new meaning in our lives. The circular drive, you see, was the lovers’ lane of choice for young couples who needed privacy. It was a pleasant parklike setting in a good part of town, unlike the few available alternatives in nasty neighborhoods down by the waterfront. Consequently, ‘going to see David’ became a euphemism for parking and making out — which, now that I think of it, are euphemisms themselves, aren’t they?
“I saw a lot of David in my late teens. The irony, of course, is that I was far more drawn to his young masculine form than to the generous curves of the young women who were my companions on those visits. I was gay, it seems to me, from birth, but I didn’t let myself know that. At first I denied the impulses. Later, when I learned to act on them — in Front Park, in the men’s room at the Greyhound station — I denied that they meant anything. It was, I assured myself, a stage I was going through.”
He pursed his lips, shook his head, sighed. “A lengthy stage,” he said, “as I seem still to be going through it. I was aided in my denial by the fact that whatever I did with other young men was just an adjunct to my real life, which was manifestly normal. I went off to a good school, I came home at Christmas and during the summer, and wherever I was I enjoyed the company of women.
“Lovemaking in those years was usually a rather incomplete affair. Girls made a real effort to remain virginal, at least in a strictly technical sense, if not until marriage then until they were in what we nowadays call a committed relationship. I don’t remember what we called it then, but I suspect it was a somewhat less cumbersome phrase.
“Still, sometimes one went all the way, and on those occasions I acquitted myself well enough. None of my partners had cause to complain. I could do it, you see, and I enjoyed it, and if it was less thrilling than what I found with male partners, well, chalk it up to the lure of the forbidden. It didn’t have to mean there was anything wrong with me. It didn’t mean I was different in any fundamental way.
“I led a normal life, Matthew. I would say I was determined to lead a normal life, but it never seemed to require much in the way of determination. During my senior year at college I became engaged to a girl I’d known literally all my life. Our parents were friends and we’d grown up together. I graduated and we were married. I took an advanced degree. My field was art history, as you may remember, and I managed to get an appointment to the faculty of the University of Buffalo. SUNY Buffalo, they call it now, but that was years before it became a part of the state university. It was just plain UB, with most of its student body drawn from the city and environs.
“We lived at first in an apartment near the campus, but then both sets of parents ponied up and we moved to a small house on Hallam, just about equidistant between the houses each of us had grown up in.
“It wasn’t far from the statue of David, either.”
He led a normal life, he explained. Fathered two children. Took up golf and joined the country club. He came into some family money, and a textbook he authored brought in royalties that grew more substantial each year. As the years passed, it became increasingly easy to believe that his relations with other men had indeed been a stage, and one he had essentially outgrown.
“I still felt things,” he said, “but the need to act on them seemed to have passed. I might be struck by the physical appearance of one of my students, say, but I’d never do anything about it, or even seriously consider doing anything about it. I told myself my admiration was aesthetic, a natural response to male beauty. In youth, hormone-driven as one is, I’d confused this with actual sexual desire. Now I could recognize it for the innocent and asexual phenomenon it was.”
Which was not to say that he’d given up his little adventures entirely.
“I would be invited somewhere to attend a conference,” he sa
id, “or to give a guest lecture. I’d be in another city where I didn’t know anyone and nobody knew me. And I would have had a few drinks, and I’d feel the urge for some excitement. And I could tell myself that, while a liaison with another woman would be a betrayal of my wife and a violation of my marital vows, the same could hardly be said for some innocent sport with another man. So I’d go to the sort of bar one goes to — they were never hard to find, even in those closeted days, even in provincial cities and college towns. And, once there, it was never hard to find someone.”
He was silent for a moment, gazing off toward the horizon.
“Then I walked into a bar in Madison, Wisconsin,” he said, “and there he was.”
“Robert Paul Naismith.”
“David,” he said. “That’s who I saw, that’s the youth on whom my eyes fastened the instant I cleared the threshold. I can remember the moment, you see. I can see him now exactly as I saw him then. He was wearing a dark silk shirt and tan trousers and loafers without socks, which no one wore in those days. He was standing at the bar with a drink in his hand, and his physique and the way he stood, the stance, the attitude — he was Michelangelo’s David. More than that, he was my David. He was my ideal, he was the object of a lifelong quest I hadn’t even known I was on, and I drank him in with my eyes and I was lost.”
“Just like that,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he agreed. “Just like that.”
He was silent, and I wondered if he was waiting for me to prompt him. I decided he was not. He seemed to be choosing to remain in the memory for a moment.
Then he said, “Quite simply, I had never been in love with anybody. I have come to believe that it is a form of insanity. Not to love, to care deeply for another. That seems to me to be quite sane, and even ennobling. I loved my parents, certainly, and in a somewhat different way I loved my wife.
“This was categorically different. This was obsessive. This was preoccupation. It was the collector’s passion: I must have this painting, this statue, this postage stamp. I must embrace it, I must own it utterly. It and it alone will complete me. It will change my own nature. It will make me worthwhile.
“It wasn’t sex, not really. I won’t say sex had nothing to do with it. I was attracted to David as I’d never been attracted to anyone before. But at the same time I felt less driven sexually than I had on occasion in the past. I wanted to possess David. If I could do that, if I could make him entirely mine, it scarcely mattered if I had sex with him.”
He fell silent, and this time I decided he was waiting to be prompted. I said, “What happened?”
“I threw my life over,” he said. “On some flimsy pretext or other I stayed on in Madison for a week after the conference ended. Then I flew with David to New York and bought an apartment, the top floor of a brownstone in Turtle Bay. And then I flew back to Buffalo, alone, and told my wife I was leaving her.”
He lowered his eyes. “I didn’t want to hurt her,” he said, “but of course I hurt her badly and deeply. She was not completely surprised, I don’t believe, to learn there was a man involved. She’d inferred that much about me over the years, and probably saw it as part of the package, the downside of having a husband with an aesthetic sensibility.
“But she thought I cared for her, and I made it very clear that I did not. She was a woman who had never hurt anyone, and I caused her a good deal of pain, and I regret that and always will. It seems to me a far blacker sin than the one I served time for.
“Enough. I left her and moved to New York. Of course I resigned my tenured professorship at UB. I had connections throughout the academic world, to be sure, and a decent if not glorious reputation, so I might have found something at Columbia or NYU. But the scandal I’d created made that less likely, and anyway I no longer gave a damn for teaching. I just wanted to live, and enjoy my life.
“There was money enough to make that possible. We lived well. Too well, really. Not wisely but too well. Good restaurants every night, fine wines with dinner. Season tickets to the opera and the ballet. Summers in the Pines. Winters in Barbados or Bali. Trips to London and Paris and Rome. And the company, in town or abroad, of other rich queens.”
“And?”
“And it went on like that,” he said. He folded his hands in his lap, and a little smile played on his lips. “It went on, and then one day I picked up a knife and killed him. You know that part, Matthew. It’s where you came in.”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t know why.”
“No, that never came out. Or if it did I missed it.”
He shook his head. “It never came out. I didn’t offer a defense, and I certainly didn’t provide an explanation. But can you guess?”
“Why you killed him? I have no idea.”
“But you must have come to know some of the reasons people have for killing other people? Why don’t you humor an old sinner and try to guess. Prove to me that my motive was not unique after all.”
“The reasons that come to mind are the obvious ones,” I said, “and that probably rules them out. Let me see. He was leaving you. He was unfaithful to you. He had fallen in love with someone else.”
“He would never have left,” he said. “He adored the life we led and knew he could never live half so well with someone else. He would never fall in love with anyone else any more than he could have fallen in love with me. David was in love with himself. And of course he was unfaithful, and had been from the beginning, but I had never expected him to be otherwise.”
“You realized you’d thrown your life away on him,” I said, “and hated him for it.”
“I had thrown my life away, but I didn’t regret it. I’d been living a lie, and what loss to toss it aside? While jetting off to Paris for a weekend, does one long for the gentle pleasures of a classroom in Buffalo? Some may, for all I know. I never did.”
I was ready to quit, but he insisted I come up with a few more guesses. They were all off the mark.
He said, “Give up? All right, I’ll tell you. He changed.”
“He changed?”
“When I met him,” he said, “my David was the most beautiful creature I had ever set eyes on, the absolute embodiment of my lifelong ideal. He was slender but muscular, vulnerable yet strong. He was — well, go back to the San Marco piazza and look at the statue. Michelangelo got it just right. That’s what he looked like.”
“And then what? He got older?”
He set his jaw. “Everyone gets older,” he said, “except for the ones who die young. It’s unfair, but there’s nothing for it. David didn’t merely age. He coarsened. He thickened. He ate too much and drank too much and stayed up too late and took too many drugs. He put on weight. He got bloated. He grew jowly, and got pouchy under his eyes. His muscles wasted beneath their coating of fat and his flesh sagged.
“It didn’t happen overnight. But that’s how I experienced it, because the process was well along before I let myself see it. Finally I couldn’t help but see it.
“I couldn’t bear to look at him. Before I had been unable to take my eyes off him, and now I found myself averting my gaze. I felt betrayed. I fell in love with a Greek god, and watched as he turned into a Roman emperor.”
“And you killed him for that?”
“I wasn’t trying to kill him.”
I looked at him.
“Oh, I suppose I was, really. I’d been drinking, we’d both been drinking, and we’d had an argument, and I was angry. I don’t suppose I was too far gone to know that he’d be dead when I was done, and that I’d have killed him. But that wasn’t the point.”
“It wasn’t?”
“He passed out,” he said. “He was lying there, naked, reeking of the wine seeping out of his pores, this great expanse of bloated flesh as white as marble. I suppose I hated him for having thus transformed himself, and I know I hated myself for having been an agent of his transformation. And I decided to do something about it.”
He shook his head, and
sighed deeply. “I went into the kitchen,” he said, “and I came back with a knife. And I thought of the boy I’d seen that first night in Madison, and I thought of Michelangelo. And I tried to be Michelangelo.”
I must have looked puzzled. He said, “Don’t you remember? I took the knife and cut away the part that wasn’t David.”
It was a few days later in Rome when I recounted all this to Elaine. We were at an outdoor cafe near the Spanish Steps. “All those years,” I said, “I took it for granted he was trying to destroy his lover. That’s what mutilation generally is, the expression of a desire to annihilate. But he wasn’t trying to disfigure him, he was trying to refigure him.”
“He was just a few years ahead of his time,” she said. “Now they call it liposuction and charge the earth for it. I’ll tell you one thing. As soon as we get back I’m going straight from the airport to the gym, before all this pasta becomes a permanent part of me. I’m not taking any chances.”
“I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”
“That’s reassuring. How awful, though. How god awful for both of them.”
“The things people do.”
“You said it. Well, what do you want to do? We could sit around feeling sorry for two men and the mess they made of their lives, or we could go back to the hotel and do something life-affirming. You tell me.”
“It’s a tough one,” I said. “How soon do you need my decision?”
When the phone call came I was parked in front of the television set in the front room, nursing a glass of bourbon and watching the Yankees. It’s funny what you remember and what you don’t. I remember that Thurman Munson had just hit a long foul that missed being a home run by no more than a foot, but I don’t remember who they were playing, or even what kind of a season they had that year.