I will list the features of this final vista the boy and I shared: the disappearing train, a slinky metal worm, crawling along the edge of the rocks until it vanished beyond the third headland; small groves of plum trees in the broad, shadowed canyon carved by the river on its course from the hills to the sea; that woman with the flower cart, distant but still visible, pausing to shake dirt from her shoe, on her way through town to the hotel; signs, in French of course, pointing one way to AGAY, CANNES, NICE and the other to ST.-RAPHAËL, MARSEILLE; a calendar (notice how neatly these details triangulate our location) that was unreadable, obscured by distance and the warped glass of the stationmaster’s office window; the boy’s face (this my view), pale from sickness but utterly enchanting still, the wide gap between his rabbit teeth, small even nose, and brown eyes just slightly too close so that I kept focusing on the corners where they teared; a rounded chin and big mouth so soft he looked like he might still be suckling (he was fifteen); long, dirty, sand-colored hair, dull and stringy, pushed behind his wide blushing ears. The noon sun raised a painful glare off the platform and the boy put on dark glasses, which made him look like a pop star. The sky was squashed and bruised blue. To the south, beyond the sea’s curving horizon (Africa down there), distance sucked all order from the sky and left it washed out and miasmic.
There is no hour of my life I do not see this vista obscured by signposts, around a corner, through trees, on a wrong turn past the ferry dock, or while scrambling to the edge of a sand cliff that is crumbling in the waves of another sea. I smell it in the scattering swirl of snow around an open-windowed car driving through mountains or on a crowded tram in some foreign city whose park has just opened its scrubbed, pale gardens of rosemary and gravel and lavender. It billows and collapses, this perpetual memory, continually verging on the real. The tram, my stop, and all the day’s good intentions can be swallowed in the momentary rupture this constantly returning spectacle creates. In that breathless gap, marked by my reverie, space collapses into nothing and at the same time enlarges to monstrous, devouring proportions—rather like the panoramic view of a reader whose nose is buried in a book.
The boy went to the wall of the stationmaster’s office and sat on a slatted bench in the shade. He was still feverish, and standing in the sun made him dizzy. I had his blue knapsack with the bottled water, and I offered it to him. The hum and clatter of the rails, transmitting the train’s prolonged departure, diminished to nothing. Insects could be heard, together with the waves collapsing on the shore below us. The breeze made a huffing sort of dull whistle through the station’s entrance, where there was no door to prevent it. The boy spoke English when it suited him but just now he understood nothing, neither the word “water” nor the obvious gesture I made with the bottle itself. He stared past me, looking puzzled.
Adults, so cruel, can be amused in the face of a child’s suffering. Even while we comfort him, a part of us can be laughing at, for example, a hurt boy’s exaggerated pout. This doesn’t compromise our sympathy, it’s just amusing in a way the boy can’t possibly understand. It can’t be explained to his satisfaction. When I cried my mother used to laugh out loud with pleasure and weep at the same time, while holding me. Her laughter was baffling and upsetting, and it made me cry all the more, which prolonged both the laughter and the embrace until in the end we were both just exhausted and sobbing, holding on to each other, having said nothing. I was never so cruel to the boy, but that was because I loved him and because my mother’s cruelty had taught me not to be.
I have loved boys even when they despised me. This boy did not despise me, but that is perhaps because we had so little in common. In the garden he picked flowers and taught me to name them in French, but I quickly forgot all the names. I could only remember what his mouth looked like as he said them. What else do I recall? His bare hips, slightly turned as he lay in bed beside me. A glimmer of sweat limning the hollow of his back. Night, its gradual onset, and then our long slow recline. The boy (he was French, fifteen, as I’ve said, and he believed I could deliver him from a humdrum life and family that had begun to seem tedious and doomed) turned to me across the bunched pillows and let his soft chin rest on my shoulder. His nipples had softened and lay flat. His skin was warm from an increasing fever. I think it’s okay for you to take pleasure in these things. He took my hand in his and drew it along his ribs to his belly and hip, and then he let my fingers touch the perfect lip of his shallow belly button, where I stopped for a moment to dwell.
His name is not important. I have called him, at one time or another, noodle boy, le beau scout, Blaise, Tony, your nipples are delicate as cherry blossoms, Miss Pants, my pal, bougie, Monsieur Steve, Mister Sister, l’escalier, garçon vérité, thrush or dove, Dogan, bastard, son of a bitch, kike, Jew boy, death-star-in-pants, my White House ultimate love, Aki, anodyne, Alex, Rex, and Allan, but his given name was Stéphane. I lived with his family in Paris for two weeks before the events that brought us to the seaside ruin, and I’m certain they would be horrified by my story. I loved Stéphane; I might have already mentioned that. Though my account will lapse into coarseness, flippancy, lies, and pure pornography, you must never forget that I truly and impossibly did love him. I lived with his family under a false pretense (which I will tell you about shortly), but we became friends and only the mother blames me for what happened to their son.
My story began properly in the perpetual darkness of last winter (almost spring, it was March) in the city where I used to live. Typically I woke up in the dark, 6 A.M. on most days, delivered from sleep by the icy stream of air spilling in my open window. The lighted clock of the railroad tower said six exactly. This round clock of black iron and creamy glass was the first thing I saw in the mornings. No one was ever on the way to work yet, nor had the lumbering buses and trucks started with their tentative, practice engine roars. (Later, in clouds suffused with the bright yellow and opium-poppy-orange of the risen sun, they would billow in every district of the city like grim flowers and release their belched gray emissions, which gave a pleasant taste to the winter air.) I am a teacher, or had been, which explains the early hour.
Opening the window from bed, only my head and one arm untucked, was my first habit of the morning. It was independent of me, like shifting the buried, cool pillows to the top in the deep middle of the night, neither conscious nor strictly unconscious—something between a dream and the address of a friend, which I had scribbled while dragging the phone as near to the table as it would go before absently tossing the newspaper on which I had written it into the garbage, along with the bones of a fish, so that it was lost both there and in my mind until, when the brisk air of morning rushed in the open window, the whole address, neatly printed, leapt to view, bright and clear as the pinpoint stars, noisy as a child, and my mind’s eye, conscious, grasped it again, though only for a moment. Minutes later, in the chaos of morning, it was gone, but so was any memory of having lost it.
All my thoughts were thin and brittle when I woke. My expansive dreams, ideas that multiplied like the crystalline spread of urine released into space (which I have heard is a beautiful sight, witnessed only by astronauts, the discharge turning golden and immense in the black void), became whole great cities of geometrical fantasy, complex and beautiful as hoarfrost, before shattering suddenly into unreadable shards at the slightest touch of fact or feeling (a crease in the pillow bothering my cheek, for example, or the sour taste scraped from my teeth by a dull, swollen tongue). The scrim of night outside was fragile. Its thin black mask could not hide the sheer abundance of the day ahead, nor the fact that it was morning already elsewhere, evening again elsewhere still, and a bright summer afternoon somewhere so distant one passed through two accelerated days in the metal shell of a jet airplane just to get there. My mother, Louise, once asked me what separates one place from another. I was only a child, and of course I had no idea. Other places, I guessed, which begged the question.
The oatmeal I ate before bed and left too close to the coiled heater was covered by a film of dry