Allan Stein. Matthew Stadler
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to be Herbert for a moment. “Do you know what a curator does?”
“Not exactly.”
“I help decide what paintings the museum buys and displays. I organize shows for them—not just paintings, actually, but drawings and photographs too.”
“Wow.”
“I’m going to Paris in a few weeks, to buy some Picasso drawings for a show.”
“Pablo Picasso?”
“Yes. You know Picasso?”
“Oh, sure.” Here the boy began singing—melodizing, I guess—in a soft whisper. “‘He was only five-foot-two, but girls could not resist his stare. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole, not like you …”
“I don’t think that’s the same Picasso.”
“Sure it is. ‘He would drive down the street in his El Dorado, and the girls would turn the color of an avocado; oh, he was only five-foot-two …’”
“Did you make that up?”
“No, it’s the Modern Lovers, ‘Pablo Picasso.’ He was an artist, right?”
“Yes.”
“Come on.” He shook his body a little, like wiggling an eyebrow, only in the dark. “Everyone knows Picasso. My mom took us to the Musée Picasso all the time when we lived in Paris.”
“Of course. I’d forgotten.” I let my hand turn the corner over his hip. “How long did you live there?”
“We moved there when I was six, and I had my bar mitzvah there, so seven years.” He stopped, everything stopped, while the boy evaluated the trajectory of my hand. “A little more than seven.” Now he stretched his leg out slightly, enough to let the hip turn open and encourage my hand.
“I need to hire a translator for the Paris trip.”
“You don’t speak French?” Where my hand brushed his boxers, a rounded fold of cotton pushed up, one pulse and then another.
“Not very well.”
“I speak it better than my English.” We both laughed a little. I had been hired to change that fact, but neither of us ever cared or worked hard enough to change it. I drew my other hand up along the backs of his thighs, along the crease where his legs met.
“I wonder if you could go with me, be my translator. You’d get paid very well.”
“Uhn.” He turned his hip a little more, pulling his free arm over his head, so my hand slipped onto the tented middle of his boxers, and I let it lie there, just cupping the drifting organ that moved and struggled under its weight. “I’m at school every day.” He kind of sighed. “I mean, and soccer.”
“Maybe during your break. You’d be an excellent translator.” Now I lifted my hand so the cotton lifted beneath it, then moved my fingers up and down its length.
“Yeah.” He simply breathed, pushing his hips out toward my wandering hand. I had turned too, to lay my other arm along his parting legs, brushing both thighs along the inside and up into his shorts, and now he tugged the waistband down and his erection flopped out onto his tummy, where I licked it, pressing my tongue along the underside onto its head, and he groaned, then lifted my head from him and whispered, “Can I, you know, in you?” And he slipped over onto me, pushing my legs up with his body, and we did.
Oh, yes, our snack, at 3 or 4 A.M.: a bland cheese (jack) and crackers, plus gulps of orange juice from a cardboard container in the fridge, first tasted leaning in the cool white light of that marvelous icebox, then seated on the bed, silent, puzzled, exhausted, looking out at the utterly dark and sleeping city.
Allan Stein was the spoiled only child of progressive Jewish parents. A cultured, upper-middle-class boy in a prosperous city, he was the happy recipient of endless lessons: piano, tennis, boxing, language, crafts, horseback riding. He liked streetcars and went with his father to the “car house to watch his dearest cars being shampooed.” At his mother’s behest, he “played man, to show what he will look like when he is a man.” A raft of cousins from Sarah’s side kept him company in Berkeley, while back in San Francisco, at 707 Washington Street, Allan played with his bearded, bearish father, Mikey.
His mother posed him for photographs, once a week, and then every month of the first four years of his life, costumed for outlandish scenarios, which she mounted and labeled in great albums to be shared with friends: A Young Don Quixote, Paderovsky Up to Date, No More Dresses For Me No Sir, Champion of the Brawl. After nearly dying from loss of blood and an infection caused by the difficult birth of this ten-pound baby, Sally wrote to her sister-in-law, Gertrude:
“He has Mike’s forehead and horrifies me by moving the entire top of his head just as Mike does. Above an exquisite upper lip he has a nondescript nose whose nostrils he inflates in an alarming fashion. On the whole he is considered a very intelligent-looking but not a beautiful child.”
And later, “There certainly is nothing in the line of happiness to compare with that which a mother derives from the contemplation of her firstborn, and even the agony which she endures from the moment of its birth does not seem to mar it, therefore my dear and beloved sister-in-law go and get married, for there is nothing in the whole wide world like babies.”
Sarah was devoted to him. “I doubt if a happier, more attractive youngster can be found,” she wrote. When Allan was two, Sarah reported the boy’s “cute little sayings” to Auntie Gertrude—
“‘Poor mamma has wind in her odder leg, its a hoyyible fing to have wind, dear me!’ The little fellow will not play with children his own age and he regards younger children with disgust, but he dotes on boys and girls from eight to fourteen.”
In Paris, Allan was the only child of the four Stein adults, great big children themselves, who, with the sour exception of dour Uncle Leo, adored and doted on him. He went to the private École Alsacienne, an innovative school in their Montparnasse neighborhood. I imagine him on a cold day in the late winter, the rue Madame smelling of ice and coal. I have been studying the maps. M. Vernot, in blue coveralls, throws grit on the stone sidewalk to make it safe. Allan watches his breath in clouds and crosses the street to walk where there is no grit. The sky is slate gray and empty. On every street there are children rushing to school. Allan hurries down the rue de Fleurus and crosses the rue Guynemer to the iron gate of the Luxembourg Garden. He pulls his mittens off and fixes the satchel, then runs with it against the fence, making a dull accelerating noise. At the rue d’Assas, where bombs would fall during the Great War, Allan slows and walks. Boys from his class call greetings or hit his head with their mittens. His friend Giselin bumps his shoulder and they shake hands. Older boys stand by the wall at the Lycée Montaigne, blowing smoke and staring past them. Allan and Giselin say nothing. The courtyard echoes with shouting and the smack of hard shoes on gravel. Allan’s cap is grabbed and pulled down over his eyes, and he pushes it back up again. Cold mist hangs among the shouting boys, muting light from rooms where teachers write lessons on blackboards in chalk. The hard ball comes flying, unseen, toward Allan, and he feels the sting and then a sharp burn of pain on his bare calf when it hits him.
“If you went to Paris, Herbert.” We were at Shackles again. The day was sunny and warm, and Shackles had their articulating windows thrown open to the spring breeze. I was trying a rosé Tristan said was typical of Provence. Herbert had scotch. “I mean, to find those drawings: Wouldn’t the museum tack your vacation on after the work was done? I mean, a week or two of business, then ‘Herbert’s vacation’?”
“Naturally I could do that. I’m the one who accounts for my hours. It’s not like a factory time clock. What are you getting at?”
“I think you need a vacation.”
“Of