The Fisher Boy Read online

  “I see you’re enjoying the bouillabaisse,” I said to Miriam. She tended toward vegetarianism when not lapsing into chicken or fish, but found the bouillabaisse “heaven.” And she had been reluctant to try it. “I got sick eating mussels once, in Barcelona.”

  “Edward made it,” I said.

  “So the treasure can cook,” Miriam whispered. “Does anyone else know Edward? I mean, he just came in with the tide. Arthur found him sleeping on the beach in back of the house.” She reverted to social work jargon, to M.S.W.-speak: “Marginal people can have issues.”

  So many guests were congregating on the terrace that plants in the garden were being damaged, some impatiens flattened, some hibiscus crushed. On Arthur’s silver maple, the leaves, upturned in the wind, looked dusted with metal.

  “Oh, there’s Roger Morton,” Miriam said, as a man as thin as his malacca cane came weaving through the crowd. His bony fingers were crowded with rings, with onyx, black opals, and rectangles of turquoise, and his vest from India was sewn with dozens of tiny, round mirrors.

  “Do you know him well? Could you introduce us?” I asked Miriam.

  Just then the twins, suddenly sporting strands of pearls, swooped onto Roger and began a conversation which threatened to be long.

  “We have this improv troupe,” Roberto told Miriam. “We need a break so bad!”

  “I think Roger books his acts by March.” Sensing our desperation, Miriam had become a little distant, and was also gazing distrustfully at her bouillabaisse.

  Then Roger Morton, his cane stabbing the flagstones, nudged the twins, Roberto, and me aside to greet Miriam, saying, “How wonderful to see you! I’ve refurbished the White Gull from top to bottom. You’ve got to see it!”

  Besides Quahog, Roger Morton owned the White Gull, Provincetown’s most elegant guest house, with its deep pillared porches, cobalt-blue hydrangeas, and an iron fountain of Triton blowing a horn of water. Roger recounted the improvements he’d made to the White Gull, then asked Miriam, “Have I mentioned the Great Furnace Catastrophe?” Roberto and I hovered at Miriam’s side, our smiles fixed on our faces, waiting for the caboose of Roger’s long train of thought. Miriam glanced sympathetically in our direction, but the color was draining from her face.

  “I hope I’m not boring you,” Roger said.

  “No, I think it’s this bouillabaisse,” said Miriam, whose slouch Roberto was imitating until I glared to make him stop.

  Then something clattered, like a trashcan tipping over. It came from Arthur’s direction, by the back steps to the house. Arthur was laughing, and so was Edward, at his side and holding something circular that shone like brass.

  “Excuse me, excuse me!” Arthur was shouting in his stage voice. “I have an announcement! Whoever sold me this Chinese gong owes me a refund. No wonder the Empress Dowager wanted to get rid of it!” While Edward hung the gong back on its teakwood rack, Arthur continued to speak, smiling and twisting his signet ring, his polka-dot bowtie askew, but his enjoyment of an audience undiminished.

  “Of course, I gave this party to welcome you all to Provincetown—and to inaugurate the season. And I’m happy to report that attendance is near one-hundred percent, except, I regret, we are missing the crew of our visiting tall ship, the Vasa. I refuse to believe they are confined to their hammocks with scurvy. And besides, our bartender has a plentiful supply of limes.”

  People laughed and glanced at the Vasa, floating far offshore.

  “There’s a lot of excitement in town this year, in addition to the solitary Swedes. Roger Morton has redone the White Gull, making it more beautiful than ever, if that were possible.”

  The twins started the applause, which Roger acknowledged with a limited wave of his hand.

  “And we have talent galore here today, theater talent, in the form of Mark Winslow and his friend…” Arthur had forgotten Roberto’s name. “…Mark and his amusing companion, who’s just too witty for words…”

  To my embarrassment, my amusing companion shouted across the crowd to our host: “My name is Roberto, Roberto Schreiber—and we’re looking for gigs in Provincetown this summer, doing improv comedy! Hey, we’re fabulous, honest!”

  “So hire these poor troopers!” Arthur laughed, missing a perfect opportunity to suggest Roger Morton do exactly that.

  “Now for a more serious note,” Arthur said, beginning his Swim for Scholars pitch. Though teeming with summer people and summer jobs, Provincetown suffered the highest winter unemployment rate in Massachusetts. Arthur was proposing a Labor Day swim across Provincetown Harbor to fund a college scholarship for local high school students. Most of the people on the terrace were listening to their host out of good manners or middle-class guilt. Except Ian Drummond. He was laughing and swilling beer with Barton Daggett. I tried to snag Roger Morton’s attention, but he was fixed on Arthur, avoiding eye contact with Roberto and me.

  “…It will be a worthy cause, with lots of beefcake,” Arthur was saying, as someone tugged at my elbow. It was Miriam, white and distressed. “Do you have a car?” she whispered. “I feel sick. I thought local mussels might be, you know, more benign. I guess I’m allergic.” Her shop was a short ride away.

  “I hope I don’t faint.” She clasped my arm as Arthur rambled on, and we slipped through the crowd, passing Ian, who got no response by cracking, “Chin up, Miriam, the party’s not that bad.”

  In the house, Miriam retrieved a shawl stitched with llamas from the dining room, then, shuffling in her thick leather sandals, led me toward the door to the street. She pushed open the screen door, wobbled, then screamed—a ragged cry of shock and rage. Then she fell against me and I caught the door as she began gasping and sobbing.

  There, on the granite stoop, lay the corpse of a dog, its belly bloated and slashed open—the first blood of that summer of death.

  Chapter Two

  I had first come to Provincetown as a small boy. My mother was singing at a club on the outskirts of town, out by the ponds where it seems that everything is just sand and pines.

  My mother didn’t plan to become a jazz singer. She was studying classical piano at the New England Conservatory when she became pregnant by my father. He was an officer on a destroyer. They’d met one evening at a jazz club, Lulu Wright’s, in the South End of Boston. He was handsome and smart, he’d been all over the world, but “the Orient,” as he’d called it back then, was his favorite. That evening at Lulu Wright’s, he folded my mother a piece of origami, a paper puzzle of interlocking cranes that in Japan was associated with ten thousand years of happiness.

  But longevity was missing from their relationship: it lasted barely ten hours. His ship was bound the next morning for the Panama Canal. She’d loved him “oh, so passionately,” they were “soul mates,” they’d talked about jazz at my mother’s apartment until dawn. “His name was Douglas,” my mother told me. “Douglas, don’t ever call me Doug.” No surname was ever mentioned, nor was the identity of his ship, and the records I’d consulted—the Navy’s, the Port Authority’s, the newspapers on microfiche at various libraries—yielded no clues. A Liberian tanker had docked that weekend, and a cruise ship, the Bimini Prize, but no American vessels, so my father became lost, stolen by long-ago tides.

  “Neither of us knew you were on the way,” my mother said. I arrived the first day of April, under the sign of the ram.

  After my mother dropped out of the Conservatory, she supported herself by singing jazz in clubs and acting in summer stock. She’d finished a run of The King and I at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis when she took the gig at Jubilee’s. The owner of the club was quite struck by her. Grenadian by birth, almost seven feet tall, he had skin the color of toffee and a diamond set in one of his canine teeth. He’d been baptized Alphonse, but everyone called him Jubilee.

  He put us up in an apartment in a series of shacks built out on a pier. It’s still there today, gull-gray and hung with ropes and lanterns and blue glass Japanese fishermen’s floats. It was suffi
ciently rickety to serve in my imagination as a pirate ship, and the smell of the sea permeated everything: our sheets, our clothing, even the corn flakes we kept in our refrigerator. I would play on the beach underneath the pier, between the wet, slick pilings, which, studded with periwinkles and barnacles, seemed part of the sea, like the wreck of a galleon full of skeletons and chests of rubies.

  Sometimes, late at night, after the club had closed and Jubilee had driven us home—I always attended my mother’s shows—we would sit outside on the pier in the dark, my mother drinking tea “with just a smidgen of gin” while I nursed a 7-Up and gobbled the barbecue-flavored peanuts the bartenders gave me to keep me quiet. My mother would still be in her “working clothes,” the long sequined gown, glittery like a boat’s wake in moonlight. She’d hum a few bars of “Satin Doll” or do some husky parody of a nursery rhyme and we’d both just stare out to sea. I’d always assumed she was thinking about my father, where he was and what he was doing, sailing off Madagascar, getting a tattoo in Yokohama…We’d stare out to sea like those whalers’ wives who kept watching horizons long after they knew their husbands had drowned.

  I don’t remember noticing the gay men in Provincetown that summer when I was eight. Raised in a house with brassieres but no neckties, with Midol and douche but no Cruex or Old Spice, all men seemed exotic to me. Yet that first summer in Provincetown, I vividly recall seeing my first naked man, not flesh and blood, but paint and canvas—Thomas Royall’s masterpiece, The Fisher Boy. In the Provincetown Municipal Museum.

  Since then, I’ve seen that painting a thousand times, on jigsaw puzzles and postcards, on tote bags and key chains and magnets, even parodied in pornography and political cartoons. It’s almost as ubiquitous as Michelangelo’s David, in the gay world, anyway—this naked youth, kneeling in a dory, holding a halibut so silver and unworldly it could be an idol of some sea deity.

  The light—on his chest and darker genitals, on the crests of the waves and emphasizing the scales of the fish—all this light on these naked surfaces made the scene throb with sensuality, as if the painting itself had a pulse. I wanted to plunge into that sea, swim to his dory, and have the Fisher Boy lift me from the water.

  “Who is he?” I asked my mother.

  “He’s some model, darling.”

  “Is he out in the harbor?”

  “I doubt it, Mark. This picture was painted in…1916, so I doubt if he’s hauling nets these days. He’s probably playing a harp.” She drew the tube of scarlet lipstick over her lips, as careful as I was with my crayons, careful to stay within the lines…From that point on, I saw Provincetown Harbor as full of the swimming ghosts of boys.

  ***

  I dreamt about The Fisher Boy the night after Arthur’s party. I saw the boy in the boat against a sky never navigated by jets. The same brigantine in the painting graced the horizon—or was it the Swedish tall ship, the Vasa? Then, as I looked at the Fisher Boy, I saw that he was holding something different—something brownish and swollen and wet with gore…

  I woke. It was already ten-fifteen. Luckily, the apartment I’d rented in Provincetown was close to the restaurant where I’d promised to meet Ian Drummond for brunch. Why he’d called me and scheduled this meeting, he hadn’t explained, but had stressed that it was “very important.”

  Not one to wait for anyone, Ian had already taken a table under a French poster of a chimp brandishing a bottle of cognac. Sipping a Bloody Mary, he was examining the long laminated menu with the confidence his ancestry and trusts bestowed, as though this restaurant, this town, the very world existed to please him.

  Without glancing up, he greeted me with, “You’re late, Winslow, by seven minutes. That will be five days of work squad, sweeping the chapel steps.” Ian enjoyed referencing the authoritarian aspects of prep school.

  “With all due respect, sir, you can shove it,” I said, as though talking back to a master.

  “No wonder you ended up at a state university, with that attitude.”

  What is it about a friendship forged in childhood that gives it such potency, an intimacy that can assert itself years later, almost against your will? Is it strong because you both were growing, formed when that friendship was formed? Is something embedded at your cellular level, something as fixed as your DNA? I had that with Ian.

  Though he had partied through Dartmouth and barely survived law school in the south, Ian took the “gentleman” in “gentleman’s C” very seriously. He sometimes teased me about the “plebeian shadows” of my background, but was careful, with one exception, not to reference the mystery of my paternity. He’d been gone from the east for two short years, but he seemed a changed man, from his musculature to his mood.

  “I’ve given up my job,” I told him, mentioning my plans for a show business career.

  His face became all solemn concern. “You can’t be serious.”

  I said I was trying to be funny.

  “This isn’t a punchline, Mark, it’s your life.” He seemed genuinely upset. Perhaps he felt an investment in my life, having once saved it.

  We were eleven, or Ian was, I was ten-and-a-half. We took one of his brothers’ rowboats and Ian rowed to Ten Pound Island in Gloucester Harbor. There wasn’t much there: a stubby unmanned lighthouse, some weeds, gravelly beaches, but its inaccessibility lent it a certain glamour. During my turn to row, on the way back, a storm blew up. The rain was warm and soft at first, then it began lashing like bullwhips. The sky blackened and fractured with electric-white lightning while the sea all but boiled. I froze at the oars. Blinded by my tears and rain and wind, I was sure we would never see dry land again. That’s when Ian took control and calmly rowed us to shore. Without comment, without scorn. He’d earned my undying gratitude.

  I diverted our conversation. “Isn’t it a little early for liquor? Not to mention your choice of a drink.” I was recalling my dream and the gore on Arthur’s steps.

  “I had to fortify myself to meet the star of the morning news,” Ian said.

  Of course, I’d been enraged at what I’d seen as a hate crime. At the very moment Arthur was giving back to Provincetown, marshalling support for his Swim for Scholars effort, some bigot was throwing the bloody corpse of a dog onto his doorstep. A similar incident had happened in Alabama, at a women’s retreat run by two lesbians; a dead dog, with a note referencing “bitches,” had been draped over their rural mailbox, beginning a string of hate crimes that culminated with gunshots and one of the women dead. There was no note with the animal at Arthur’s, but, tied to the dog’s neck was a reddish ribbon, seemingly mocking the AIDS awareness symbol.

  “You were the lead story on the Boston news.”

  I’d thought I’d been speaking to the local cable station.

  “Know what you want, guys?” the waiter asked.

  Ian wanted Belgian waffles with extra whipped cream, odd for a bodybuilder, I thought. I opted for blueberry pancakes without butter and fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  “Who would do such a thing to Arthur?” I asked.

  “Punks,” Ian said, “just punks. I don’t know why some people make everything political. There’ll always be mosquitoes and people who dump trash in national parks. It’s an imperfect world, but you liberals insist on redeeming it. You should learn to take the bitter with the sweet. God knows I’ve had to.”

  San Francisco had made something in him go sour. He still hadn’t mentioned the purpose of our brunch, but I assumed it was yesterday’s hate crime.

  “Did you rent your place the last two summers?” I hadn’t seen him in Provincetown either year.

  “No.” Ian owned a house at the beginning of Commercial Street, an ugly “futuristic” building from the mid-Sixties on a sandy hill overlooking the breakwater. All plate glass and redwood beams, it was circular, like the revolving restaurants that came into vogue when the Seattle Space Needle went up.

  “I couldn’t come here because of work, and I couldn’t rent my house because of these damn enviro
nmental regulations. I’m having structural problems with the house because the hill it’s built on is shifting.”

  The waiter bent his knees as he slid my plate of pancakes, flooded with butter, onto the scalloped paper placemat. Ian’s Belgian waffles came innocent of whipped cream and there was no mention of my orange juice. Before we could protest, the waiter zig-zagged through the tables, back to the kitchen.

  “Excuse me,” said a woman with an enamel pink triangle on her shirt. “You’re the man who was on TV, you were there,” she told me, as though I were confused about this fact.

  “I wasn’t at the party,” the woman began.

  “We’re trying to eat!” Ian said angrily, enunciating each word more precisely than its predecessor. “We were having a nice, peaceful discussion about my house caving in—”

  “An attack against one of us is an attack against all of us,” the woman said. “There’s a meeting at town hall, tomorrow night, at seven.”

  She left us just as our waiter returned. “How is everything?” he asked, before speed-walking off to the cashier to change a fifty for a group at a table across the room—some Middle-American people carrying books looking like Bibles.

  Chapter Three

  No one knew the meaning of what had happened at Arthur’s. Was it a hate crime directed at a specific individual, or against the entire gay community, using one man as a kind of totem? Like hundreds of other sweaty, sunburned people, Roberto and I crowded into the meeting about this outrage.