Allan Stein. Matthew Stadler
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paste it unearthed from beneath the film was enjoyable. I could hear my friend Herbert, in the adjacent apartment, bellowing fragments of popular songs, which he only ever partly remembered. Herbert and I were always awake early, even while the rest of the city slept. He is the curator at the city’s art museum, and they let him keep whatever hours he likes. I had no reason to be awake. The school where I taught resolved some misgivings that arose over Christmas by granting me a paid leave of absence.
I was accused of having sex with a tenth-grader in late December. This student, Dogan, was Turkish, lithe and very beautiful. I have a picture of him here on my wall. I tutored him on Saturdays at his apartment after his soccer practice, but I had never imagined molesting him until the principal suggested it by notifying me of the charges. Amidst the dust and gadgetry of the principal’s meticulous office, his chair overburdened by the abundance he had squeezed onto its cupped seat, “had sex with the boy” floating in the well-lit air between us, my mind produced the following scenario (new to me):
On Saturday I arrive early. Dogan has showered after soccer, and water dapples the bare skin of his shoulders and chest. He’s wearing shorts, drinking a soda when I get there, drying his wet hair with a towel. His lips and nipples enchant me. They have similar skin, rosy and supple, thinner and more tender than the olive skin around them. “Let’s get started,” I tell him. He takes the book and I stand behind his chair as he settles. “Read the first poem out loud.” It is García Lorca. I put my hands on his shoulders as he reads.
“‘No one understood the perfume of your belly’s dark magnolia.’”
“Do you know that word, ‘magnolia’?” Both my hands slip over his rounded shoulders, so that my fingers reach his nipples. He keeps still.
“Magnolia is like a tree or a bush, right?”
“Yes, and a flower. Keep going.”
“‘No one knew you tormenting love’s hummingbird between your teeth. A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep in the moonlit plaza of your forehead.’” Here he stops and I’m worried he will get up, but he stays still. “Hmm, forehead.” It’s the imagery, not my seduction, that has him bothered. “‘As four nights through I hugged your waist, snow’s enemy.’” He slouches further into the chair as he reads, almost lying there, and I see his shorts tent and then relax. I move both hands over his ribs, then back up, pinching his nipples when he gets to the line about his waist. He is so slim I can feel his heart moving in the skin beneath my hand. If he didn’t want it I wouldn’t do it, I think I’m thinking.
“Those words should all be quite clear,” I say. “Just continue.”
“‘Between plaster and jasmines your glance was a pale seed branch.’” He holds the book in one hand and pulls the waistband of his shorts down along his hip with the other. His thigh is pale where he has exposed it. I slide my hand over his belly and into his shorts, and he drops the book. His penis is very shapely, curving up onto his belly, and it’s big enough to fill my hands. The glans of his penis has the same pink skin as his nipples and lips. I kneel between his legs and put it into my mouth. I pull it out and stroke the shaft and the head, pushing it around to inspect it. Dogan is tipped back in the chair with his hands entwined behind his head. His underarms are pale and damp.
I tell him, “Lorca’s poem might appear to be unreal, but its dreamlike consistency can supplant waking reality by the force of a new coherence and logic, so that one becomes lost in it, like in fantasy or sleep, and the logical yardsticks of waking life that make its measure false are completely lost from view.”
“Finish,” he says, pouting. He bumps his thighs against my face, and I finish the blow job.
So you can imagine the difficulty I had denying the principal’s charges. Why hadn’t I molested the boy? For no good reason I could find, except maybe a failure of imagination. The fact I had done nothing seemed to be a mere accident of timing.
“I’ve never had sex with him,” I said, in my defense.
“I believe you,” our fidgety principal replied (and I believed he did believe). “I know you haven’t done anything; the difficulty is proving it.”
“What did the boy say happened?”
“Oh, he didn’t say anything. His parents have accused you. They think he’s covering it up because he likes it.” He likes it? I was buoyed by this news, relieved to hear that my advances were welcome (never mind that there had been no advances, and no response and no victim, whose approval would still have been mere parental rumor).
“That’s a relief.”
“What is?”
“Nothing.” Only minutes after hearing the accusation I was already planning a seduction. I cannot exaggerate how subtle and profound these chameleon confusions were. Placed at the scene of a multicar accident, I might become Florence Nightingale or a competent policeman directing worried traffic past the pools of blood and metal. At a boxing match, I have no doubt, I would’ve thirsted for the most horrifying results.
I pursued him. In the end I succeeded in committing the crime I had been falsely accused of. The parents never found out (no one did). As it turned out, sex was exactly what the boy wanted, and he became very much the happy, satisfied child they hoped he would be, where before, during the months that I was blind to him, he had been miserable and distracted (precisely the condition, noticed by his parents, that led to their accusation). In light of the boy’s satisfaction, and the handsome salary I was then receiving for a great expanse of free time in which it became that much easier to meet him, clandestinely, for sex, I must admit that I sometimes looked on the whole horrifying affair as comical and ironic. After a while he grew bored or ashamed and stopped seeing me.
Herbert was the only friend I discussed this with. Others, especially my colleagues from school, were so moved by the weight of the “tragic accusations” that I could feel myself becoming tragic simply with the approach of their cloying, caring glances. Their eyes had the gleam and submerged instability of glaciers, vast sheets of luminous ice beneath which chasms creaked and yawned. One of them would appear uninvited before my table at a café, fat Mr. Stack the math teacher, for example, and shuffle toward me as if compelled by this hollowness behind his eyes, as slow and devouring as the ice that once crawled down the face of the continent. (My mother described a boyfriend of hers this way, one evening while she and I sat in a diner eating turkey sandwiches with gravy, a special treat she gave me far more often than I deserved. I was eleven years old. It wasn’t five minutes before this very boyfriend appeared at the window with his face pressed to the glass, miming hello and making a fool of himself. She winked at me, then looked right past him, blowing smoke from her cigarette, saying nothing. Finally he went away.) I have none of my mother’s cool reserve, so I avoided my colleagues when I could or, if forced by good manners to accept a repeated invitation to lunch, tried to speak cheerfully about my “new career” at Herbert’s museum, a fiction I had devised, which, like most lies, eventually became true. I learned a great deal about art from Herbert during the few weeks that he helped me perpetrate this lie.
It first occurred to me one cold March afternoon while we sat at a café drinking. Herbert likes to drink and so do I. We are compatible in many ways, and being neighbors a great deal of our lives became shared; watering plants, checking the mail, and chitchat soon became socializing, shared travel, and a natural intimacy that has made me more comfortable with him than with anyone. This particular café (that cold March afternoon) was called Shackles, under which name it masqueraded as a pre-Victorian public house. Nothing in our city is pre-Victorian, except perhaps the famous lakes and the view out.
Dark wood, patterned velvet, newsprint advertisements for nineteenth-century ales (enlarged, scarred, and varnished for display), wall sconces fashioned from gas fixtures, and poor lighting made up Shackles’s costume. Windows, curtained on brass rods at eye level, let us watch the street while easily hiding ourselves, if need be, by a simple crouch or slouch nearer the table. The unfortunate waiters were disguised as croupiers from Gold Rush-era Nevada (preposterous puffy sleeves, frilly red armbands frayed to the elastic, tidy vests with fake watch pockets and chains,