Nude Men Read online

  “Do you want capers on the chicken or not?” interrupts Charlotte.

  “Yes,” I answer absently. I stare at the ceiling, thinking about my filing, and tears come to my eyes. I could talk to Charlotte about it. I could ask her what she thinks I could do or say at work that would make them stop giving me filing. Charlotte’s a psychologist. But she’s mushy, like I am. She’s cottage cheese, I remind myself. She would give me a cottage cheese answer. I don’t say anything. I am too depressed, too lonely. I make myself think of Lady Henrietta, the painter of nude men. Even thinking of her and of our meeting Saturday doesn’t cheer me up anymore. I’m afraid, nervous, and anxious. Why did I agree to pose for her? It’ll just bring me humiliation, probably even terrible embarrassment. Perhaps—I realize in horror—even rejection. When Lady Henrietta, the painter of nude men, sees me, Jeremy the maggot, naked, she might just totally refuse to paint me and say, “Sorry, I made a mistake. A mouth is not a good representation of a naked body. It does not have clues and signs. Sorry.” What will I answer to that? Should I say, “Well, I’ll let you paint my mouth if you want”?

  I clasp my hand over my eyes.

  “Is something wrong?” asks Charlotte.

  I yank my hand away, startled. “It’s the filing,” I lie. “I hate the filing.”

  “Poor sweetheart. We must talk about that. We must think of something you can tell those monsters who are exploiting you. But right now supper is ready, so why don’t you go wash your hands and come sit down like a good little boy.”

  “Yes, Mommy,” I say, to please her.

  I go sit down.

  “You forgot to wash your hands,” she says.

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Yes you did. You forgot to go to the bathroom and wash your hands. You got up from the bed and you came straight to the table and sat down. You must be a little dazed from all that filing, Jeremy. Now run along and wash your hands before the chicken gets cold.”

  “Charlotte, I did not forget to wash my hands. I didn’t do it because I didn’t feel like it.”

  “You can’t eat without having washed your hands.”

  “Is that a new thing with you? You never talked about washing hands before.”

  “That’s because I always thought you did it.”

  “Charlotte, I have a confession to make. I never wash my hands after I go to the bathroom.”

  She looks at me in silent amazement for a while and then slowly says, “That is totally gross.”

  “But I wash my hands after I file. Does that make up for it?”

  “No. That is totally gross,” she repeats.

  “To please you, I will go wash my hands.”

  I get up and wash my hands. I come back and sit down. She is still standing there, staring down at the table.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “It is totally gross, Jeremy. I’m not sure I’ll be able to eat now.”

  “Relax,” I say, tapping her elbow. “A little shit on your hands once in a while isn’t the end of the world. It’s healthy.”

  “It’s abnormal. I’m worried about you, Jeremy,” she says, shaking her head slowly.

  “Oh well, let’s eat,” I say, trying to change the subject. “Come sit down, sweetheart. The chicken’s getting cold.”

  She remains standing, still shaking her head.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “No, not okay at all. I’m worried about you, Jeremy.”

  “Why? You think I have a psychological disorder?” I chuckle. She stops shaking her head and stares at me without answering.

  “What?” I say defensively, my mouth full of chicken. “You think I have a psychological disorder? Is that what you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I don’t always wash my hands?”

  “After going to the bathroom, Jeremy. It’s a sign. It means something.”

  “Would you like me to leave? Perhaps I need to be punished to be cured. Would you like to spank me?” I say, smiling mischievously to relax her.

  She looks at me sadly. “No punishment can cure you. You must find the strength within yourself.”

  “I’ll work on it. In the meantime, I’ll tell you what. Let’s play pretend. Let’s pretend I’m wearing that nice blue tie you like so much. I must be careful not to drip any grease on it, now mustn’t I? And let’s pretend I always wash my hands before and after going to the bathroom and that my paper cuts have been disinfected three times with alcohol. I even used the nailbrush. Look,” I say, holding out my hands. “You can still see the redness around the nails.”

  She sits down and starts eating her chicken.

  “It’s very good,” I say.

  “Thank you,” she replies.

  After the chicken, she brings dessert, a big, rich lemon chocolate cake. It’s something she hasn’t made for me very often, because she says it’s very difficult and complicated, but I must say that chocolate cake is the best I have ever eaten.

  “Do you want to cut it, or do you want me to cut it?” she asks.

  “It looks wonderful, but unfortunately I don’t think it would be wise of me to have any of that cake tonight. I’m on a di—I have stomach troubles.”

  “You’re on a diet? If you’re on a diet, just say so. You don’t have to pretend you’re having stomach troubles. There’s no reason to be ashamed. We all gain a little weight once in a while. And we must all go on a diet occasionally. Are you on a diet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, have some cake and start your diet tomorrow.”

  “I started it yesterday.”

  “Make an interruption tonight, since I made this difficult cake just for you. Go back on your diet tomorrow.”

  “Actually, I do, also, have stomach trouble.”

  “Are you going to have some cake or not?”

  I hesitate, realizing it may make a tremendous scene if I don’t have a piece of cake, but then I decide no, I cannot break my commitment to the destruction of the maggot in me.

  “I’m afraid I shouldn’t,” I say.

  “Does that mean no?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are so selfish. You ought to have your head examined.”

  “By you?”

  She doesn’t answer. We clear the table.

  Charlotte rarely wants to have sex. I guess she’s simply not a very sexual person. When we do do it, she just lies there stiffly. She must think that’s the romantic way to do it, the Snow White-ish way, the feminine way.

  So I suppose I’m a sexually frustrated guy. This evening we do not do it, which is just as well because I don’t really feel like it anyway. I go home feeling depressed, empty.

  That evening, my mother calls me, something she does about once a week. She’s seventy-one years old and lives alone in Mount Kisco, in Westchester County. My father was twenty-eight years older than her. He died of old age when I was four. I guess she’s lonely. She always asks me when I’m going to visit her. I go see her sometimes on weekends, and I bring my cat. She loves Minou and wants me to come every weekend so she can see us.

  Unfortunately, she also enjoys paying me surprise visits in the city, once every couple of months. She says, “There is nothing healthier in the world than having your mother visit you by surprise once in a while.”

  Her last visit was two weeks ago. It unfolded in the usual manner, as follows:

  My buzzer rings. I’m not expecting anybody.

  “Who is it?” I ask in the intercom.

  “It’s me.”

  I recognize my mother’s voice.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, Jeremy, it’s me.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m visiting you.”

  “But you didn’t call beforehand.”

  “You know I prefer it this way.”

  “I can’t let you up. You should have called me. I’m sorry.”

  “Of course you will let me up. Open the door.”

  �
��No, I’m sorry, you should have called. I’ve told you this before. If you want, I’ll come down, and we’ll go and have coffee.”

  Are you kidding yourself, Jeremy? She is not interested in going out for coffee. Five more minutes of begging, and I have no choice but to let her up. Sometimes, while she’s still begging downstairs, someone enters or leaves the building. Taking advantage of the open door, she enters and continues the begging in front of my apartment. Either way, I always end up letting her in, to my deep regret, because she lets out a loud scream when she sees the mess in my apartment.

  While she climbs up the stairs, I scramble to clean the filthiest things in the room, which almost always turn out to be my cat’s old vomited fur balls, lying in dried-out puddles of stomach fluid, like little orange sausages. There are usually about five of them, which I frantically pick up, sometimes even with my bare hands in the rush of it. I invariably miss one, which my mother invariably finds, and although I’m sure she knows exactly what it is, she goes down on her hands and knees, examines it from very close, and says, “What is that? It looks sad. Or dead. Is it a mouse? Oh, it must be your cat’s poopy. But no, it has no smell.” She then crawls over to the moldy, shriveled-up melon shells and shrunken avocado skins and, groaning, says, “Oh my God, I can't believe it, it stinks, it smells like the Antichrist... Etc.

  Thank God the last visit happened two weeks ago, which means I should have about six weeks of peace before her next one.

  When we talk on the phone, like tonight, she’s usually bearable and sticks mainly to asking me when we’ll see each other, although she does, naturally, lapse into a few criticisms of me and throws in some dull, nagging questions for free, like: “Have they promoted you yet?”

  “How’s it going with the goody-goody?” (her pet name for Charlotte) “Have you cleaned your apartment?” But these are too negligible to dwell on.

  The following day my muscles are hurting like hell. Good. The exercises are finally being felt. The maggot is dying. The Ugly Duckling is turning into a swan. But when I look in the mirror, Jeremy the maggot is still there. It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. You may think that there are no changes, but that’s where you’re wrong. There are tremendous changes, changes your untrained eye may not detect but that the expert eye of a painter of nude men cannot fail to notice.

  What’s this bullshit, Jeremy, what’s this bullshit? It doesn’t matter. It does not matter. Just do the exercises and don’t think.

  And then I stop. I suddenly stop. I get a revelation. I realize that there is nothing in the world I can do between now and Saturday that will make a difference. And if I exercise too much I will have a very hard time posing, because my body will be in such pain.

  I feel helpless and depressed. That night, I buy potato chips and take my cat to the tiny park near the river, three blocks from my apartment. In the park, I let Minou walk on the ground, on a leash. Then I put her on my lap and just sit there, on a bench. A man, slightly drunk, probably gay, and probably trying to pick me up, says, “Is that a little dog?”

  “Yes,” I say, not wanting to arouse his interest by saying it’s a cat.

  “What brand?” he asks.

  I know perfectly well he means breed and is too drunk to know it.

  “No brand,” I say. “He’s a street dog. A bastard.” '

  “The best kind,” says the man, and walks away.

  Saturday afternoon I am taking a shower. It is three o’clock. At six I must be at Lady Henrietta’s apartment. My buzzer rings. “Who is it?” I ask.

  “It’s Tommy.”

  A minute later, he’s up the stairs, walking through my door. I am dripping wet, with a towel around my waist. I haven’t seen Tommy in a month, since before Christmas. He’s half American, half French, and he went to spend the holidays with his extremely rich family in France. He’s eighteen.

  “I had a horrible Christmas” is the first thing he says. “Why?” I ask.

  “My sister is a witch.”

  “Witch as in bitch or as in fairy?”

  “As in bitch.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  Tommy is one of my only friends. And I wouldn’t even call him a real friend, I don’t think. We are not equals. He’s way above me. I am certain the reason he likes me is that he thinks 0f me as his little curiosity.

  We met in a cheese shop, where he started talking to me for no apparent reason. I was uncomfortable with him from the beginning. I felt he considered my choice of cheese dumb. I thought he was laughing, or snickering. In any case, he was smiling. I asked for some Brie. I said I wanted a piece that was very ripe. I pointed to the piece I wanted. It was plump, with the inside bulging out. And apparently Tommy found something funny in that. He started talking to me, saying this was the best cheese shop in the neighborhood, and such stuff. Then he asked me where I lived. But he’s not gay. He’s a playboy. Loves girls. Good-looking. He is very conscious of fashion and tries to dress in a manner considered cool, but he wears decorative pins on the crotch of his torn jeans, which is something I don’t like. What does he think he has under there?: Something very special? One of the pins has a buffalo on it. Another one has a bicycle under the words “Put some fun between your legs.” These little medals are like a crown for his dick.

  He collapses on my bed and clasps his hands behind his head. “I like you, Jeremy,” he says. “I like you a lot. You’re very comfortable.”

  But he’s not gay. He comes and talks to me when he has nothing better to do. He’s one of the only people I allow in my repulsive apartment. Even when he makes a comment on the filth, I don’t mind, because we come from two different planets, and his rare criticisms of my life have never hurt me.

  I sit on a chair, still dripping wet, cold. He finally leaves.

  It is 5:55 p.m. I arrive at her building. Her doorman rings her. When I step out of the elevator, the door to her apartment is wide open. I enter. There is no one in the large living room. There is an easel in the middle, with a big blank canvas, and tons of paint beside it. Behind the easel is a couch, covered with many pieces of long, colorful fabric. In a corner of the living room there is another couch, comfortable-looking, made out of parachute material, and next to that another couch, even more comfortable and luxurious, covered in beige suede. There are tables and curtains, thick curtains. The walls are covered with life-size paintings of beautiful nude men. I start getting more nervous, because I’m obviously nowhere near as beautiful as they are. On her coffee table there is a novel: The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. I’ve always meant to read it. Under the novel lies a large book of paintings: Mirage, by Boris Vallejo. Its cover has a painting of a beautiful naked woman with wings. I flip through the book and see many beautiful naked women. Some have wings, some have tails, some are half snakes, some are riding dragons, some are making love to naked devils, some are making love to naked men, some are making love to other naked women, some are warriors.

  “Boris is the painter who has influenced me most,” says Lady Henrietta, standing in a doorway.

  “I can see the similarities,” I say. “You both have a beautiful technique.”

  “Thank you. I call it the ‘more beautiful than life’ style.”

  “Indeed more beautiful than life.”

  I had almost expected her to come out in a satin dressing gown or something, but no, she’s perfectly normally dressed.

  “Please sit down,” she says.

  I sit on the couch, and she goes to the kitchen. She comes back a moment later with herb tea. I drink the tea and sit there, tense, knowing that any minute now I will have to take off my clothes. I am resting my elbow on the arm of the sofa, and I am resting one of my front teeth against the cap of my Bic pen, which I happen to be holding, I don’t know why. I took it out of my pocket without thinking. I often do this when I’m tense. The tip of my tooth is lodged inside the little hole at the tip of the cap. The tooth is supporting the weight of my entire head. I guess it relieves tension b
ecause of the slight danger involved. The danger is that sometimes the pen slips and stabs your palate. And that’s what happens to me now. My pen slips and stabs me right behind my front teeth. Blood is invading my mouth, gushing out. I lick it up and swallow it as quickly as possible. I don’t want the blood to spread in front of my teeth and be visible to Lady Henrietta. If she sees my mouth suddenly full of blood, she’ll think I’m weird. I make a mental note never to rest my tooth against my pen again.

  “Would you please take off your clothes,” she says.

  Does she mean right now, right here? She gets up, walks over to a corner of the room, and pulls back a curtain, revealing a little changing room, exactly like a fitting room in a clothing store. I’m very nervous, but I don’t want to seem like a chicken, so I walk to the fitting room and step inside. She pulls the curtain closed. There is an odd-looking mirror on the wall. It is very wide but very low. I can see myself only from the waist down. I undress. When I see the reflection of my naked stomach, penis, and legs, I want to change my mind. I feel very handicapped and awkward, not being able to see the top half of my body, so I lie down on the floor, on my side, to see myself full length one last time before revealing myself to Lady Henrietta.

  “Are you okay in there?” she asks.

  I did not realize my foot was sticking out from under the curtain. There is a space between the bottom of the curtain and the floor, and she is looking at me under the curtain, and I am looking at her, and she can see me lying down.

  “Why are you on the floor?” she asks, very nicely. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I’m feeling fine,” I say, still lapping up the blood and wishing she’d stop watching me. “I was looking at myself in your strange half mirror. Is there any reason why it is so low?”

  “I’m sorry if it bothers you. I feel it relaxes men not to look at their top half. The top half is where they can see their anxiety. And it’s not just in their face, it’s in the position of their shoulders, the way their arms hang. It’s bad for the nerves to see your own anxiety.”