Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

She said very seriously, “I want to do something to you that no woman has ever done to you before.”

“Maybe we can talk about it,” I said. Back at the hotel later that evening, I called her room. She said, “Are you ready?”

Of course we didn’t do exactly what she had suggested, but we approximated it. From the moment I entered her room I was in her power. I long to relive that night, but what she did was so extreme I cannot imagine even mentioning it to any other woman, much less repeat the act. She was a virgin. She remained a virgin, but I think I lost my virginity that night.

In a way, I have been preparing myself for this event, this feeling, for years. As a painter, I know many older painters, sculptors, photographers — say, artists in my position. Something happened in the late 1950s and early ’60s. They met younger women, always the same sort of woman. Maybe I’m wrong, but I know of very few exceptions.

This woman was in her twenties. A woman of twenty doesn’t know if she has a place in the world, something about her age or our age. What will happen to her? Will she find a job? Will she find a husband? Will she ever have a child? Where does she belong?

She has no idea where she is going. She is anxious. She needs someone to intervene.

Here’s where the artist comes in. A painter or a photographer at sixty has either made it or stopped trying. If he has made it, he looks powerful — more than powerful, as indestructible as his art. But one thing he does not have: his youth. And he certainly questions the diminishing of his virility, what the Dutch call “the shutting of the door.”

He meets a twenty-year-old and is immediately smitten. She is so relieved to be rescued, like someone plucked from a deep sea, she believes she is in love with her rescuer. Not long after they meet, she is secure and happy, having been brought to safety, on shore at last.

Perhaps she has his baby, perhaps he leaves his wife, perhaps they live together and he paints her. Never mind, no matter — it is always a disaster. She leaves him. She has a life. He is destroyed by this love. And even if you know in advance what the consequences will be, you still pursue her, as I did. Her name was Lucy, and I was wrecked.

Years ago, I had been a waiter in Provincetown. My life changed when I met Ken and we moved to the far north of Vermont. People in the village accepted us as a gay couple. Twenty happy years passed. Ken died suddenly of heart failure. I spent two years being lonely. Then I decided to go back to Provincetown, just to see.

Because of complications, I spent only a few days there. The town had changed a lot. Rich gays had put up big houses. Many more people, but they looked nice, even outrageous in a nice way. They liked showing off. I heard one man say approvingly, “Look, billions of queens.” The butch gays had muscles. The lesbians looked pretty to me. I was happy, but those years in Vermont made me an unsocial type. I am shy in large groups. And I don’t drink alcohol.

“I’ll have a soda water with lemon,” I said at the Atlantic House. The upstairs bar was full of butch gays in cowboy outfits drinking beer out of the bottle. One was chanting, “Fudge till Tuesday!”—whatever that meant.

There was dancing in the downstairs bar. I just watched. One man on the floor was alone. He wore a fireman’s helmet and yellow rubber fireman’s trousers and rubber boots, but other than that he was naked. The rubber trousers were held up by suspenders. This man fascinated me. I had never seen anyone like him in my life. He danced so energetically he was covered in sweat. I loved watching him.

He must have noticed me. When the music stopped he came over to the bar. I was very worried, frightened that he’d talk to me, because I didn’t know what to say. He looked me up and down and smiled. He said, “Very nice.”

That’s all. That was the moment. Ever since, I have thought about him constantly, especially when life is hard for me or I’m lonely. I think of him, how he was dressed, what he said to me, and I am happy.

I was trying to think of a way of breaking up with my girlfriend, Paula, who was uncommunicative, always saying, “I’m not verbal like you.” In spite of this, she often corrected me. When I referred to a woman’s sex, she said, “You mean gender.” And she sometimes talked about her “goals.” I am suggesting that she could be rather irritating. Or was it me? She was gentle and very kind to me and good company in a quiet, listening-type way. She was passive, and I think I was looking for someone to take the initiative. She liked torch songs — that’s what she called certain love songs.

To break the news to her gently, I took her to an expensive club where a black woman sang these love songs. I thought I would offer Paula a good time, an expensive meal, the whole business, and later it would be easier for me to say, “We’re not really suited to each other.”

She loved the club. She loved the music. She sat transfixed, drank a little more than usual, and said that it was one of the most pleasant nights of her life. Back at her apartment, she interrupted me before I could tell her what was on my mind. She said, “Let’s make love.”

Not only was that unusual in this normally passive woman, but while we were making love, she said, “Can I tell you a secret?”

I must have said something. I was dazed. I hadn’t planned to be making love, but the evening had swept us up.

“I wanted to go home with her,” she said.

That was Paula’s secret, spoken in the darkness of her bedroom. I was overwhelmed. It became our secret. We talked about it all the time. I could not leave her. In the end she left me, and I was heartbroken.

Everyone was pretty much the same at my junior college, but after I dropped out to get a job, and started night school, everyone seemed different: it was the real world, much harder for me and much more complex. I was living with my meek old grandmother in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. I felt like such a failure — working in an art supply store, living with my grandmother, going to night school. I was eighteen years old, the youngest student in the class. One man was over sixty. Many were quite old, one or two were middle-aged men, some older women, some housewives. “I deliver bakery goods,” the man sitting next to me said. “I guess I eat them,” the woman in front of him said. The class was Economics for Small Businesses. Everyone was aiming to start their own business, but somehow I knew we were all doomed to failure.

The woman who had said “I guess I eat them” saw me standing at the bus stop and offered me a ride home. This happened a few times, until one night she stopped at a house and said, “I live here. Want to come in?”

The way she screamed at her child, who was upstairs, scared me and made me obedient. She put the light out, unbuttoned my shirt, and said, “Let me, let me.” It was the first sex of my life. It was heaven. Night school was three times a week — I couldn’t wait to go. After every class she drove me to her house and we made love. And after a few weeks she met me outside the art supply store. I saw her sitting in her car and I was joyous.

Some days I had errands to run and couldn’t see her, but even so, she stalked me and asked me to come with her. “I can’t, I can’t,” I’d say, though I wanted to. Another day Grandma was sick and I had to stay home. The woman came to Grandma’s house and banged on the door and begged to see me. Although she was sick, Grandma yelled at her, while I hid. Grandma won, the woman went away, and Grandma said, “No more night school for you.” So I went to New York, where I became successful in real estate. That was my first love, and I suspect hers, too.