Martin and John Read online

  Praise for

  Martin and John

  “It’s an amazing feat for any writer, in particular a male writer, to expose so nakedly the need for closeness with a father that lies underneath a son’s rage … In this short book, Dale Peck has managed to pack the density and the depth of a human life. He is a brave and very talented writer.”

  —The New York Times

  “How do you write a novel that describes the impact AIDS has had on you and still take into account all the other people who are suffering the consequences of the disease? Dale Peck has come up with his answer in Martin and John—a book that marks the debut of a remarkably accomplished young writer. In this kaleidoscopic novel, separate stories come together to form a shifting picture of gay life in the time of AIDS … [Martin and John] simultaneously reflects one man’s experience and the experiences of many men.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Like the columns describing a medieval cloister—each different, all similar—Dale Peck’s couples may be rich or poor, sophisticated or provincial, but they all know something about homophobia, violence, incest, and the anguish of dying an early death.”

  —Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story

  “Alternative readings are the key to Dale Peck’s aesthetic—one so sophisticated and, for the most part, so masterfully realized that it is hard to believe Peck is only twenty-five. This is his first full-length work but, ingeniously, it functions both as a novel and as a collection of short stories … Peck can handle notoriously difficult subjects—AIDS, child abuse and sadomasochistic sex not just explicitly, but with a sincerity free of all melodrama. As he orchestrates a structural puzzle of fictions within fictions, he also moves towards a heartwrending autobiographical truth.”

  —The Independent

  “Dale Peck’s first novel is a wounding, extraordinarily honest story with a promiscuous narrative energy and honed stylistic gift that can only mark the arrival of a prodigious talent.”

  —Dennis Cooper, author of Guide

  “Martin and John could not have been written at any time but now and not by any other writer than Dale Peck. He is that rare phenomenon—an original—and his book is mysterious, solemn and full with feeling.”

  —Susan Minot, author of Rapture

  “Dale Peck’s novel is about the darkness and sexual chaos in the lives of middle-American families, and about love and passion in the midst of plague. From beginning to end, Martin and John is wrenching and unflinching—charged with the exhilarating magic of a bold, new voice.”

  —Joyce Johnson, author of Minor Characters

  “Peck writes so splendidly that it is a pleasure just to keep on reading. By themselves, some of these stories are among the most powerful representations of gay life written … An exciting first novel by a 24-year-old author.”

  —Library Journal

  “With this poetic, tightly compressed novel, Peck makes a head-turning debut on the literary scene. It is composed of a feverish sequence of vignettes, which the reader gradually learns are the reminiscences of John, a gay man, as he tries to come to terms with the death of his lover, Martin, from AIDS … Subtle but highly charged, the fragments carry the reader continually deeper into human mystery, and what we at first hear as a fugue on the destructive powers of sexual desire evolves rapidly into a lay psalm that proclaims both the necessity of love and its inevitable loss.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Books by Dale Peck

  Greenville

  Body Surfing

  Gospel Harmonies

  Martin and John

  The Law of Enclosures

  Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye

  The Garden of Lost and Found

  Nonfiction

  Hatchet Jobs

  Visions and Revisions

  Children’s and Young Adult Fiction

  Drift House

  The Lost Cities

  Sprout

  Copyright © 1993, 2015 by Dale Peck

  Originally published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux

  All rights reserved.

  Published in 2015 by Soho Press

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Peck, Dale.

  Martin and John / Dale Peck.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-484-0

  eISBN 978-1-61695-485-7

  1. AIDS (Disease)—Patients—Fiction. 2. Authors—Fiction.

  3. Gay men—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.E245M37 2015

  813′.54—dc22 2014030861

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  v3.1

  This book is for

  Joy Linscheid and

  Bruce Morrow

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Here is this baby

  Blue wet-paint columns

  The beginning of the ocean

  Driftwood

  Given this and everything

  Transformations

  Someone was here

  The search for water

  Tracks

  Three night watchmen

  The end of the ocean

  Always and forever

  Circumnavigation

  The gilded theater

  Lee

  Fucking Martin

  I divide my life in two

  Acknowledgments

  The water is wide,

  I cannot swim o’er,

  and neither have I

  wings with which to fly.

  Oh, give me a boat

  that can carry two,

  and both shall row,

  my love and I.

  Introduction

  for Robert Ready, who’ll always be my teacher

  I DIDN’T SET out to write this book. I didn’t set out to write a book at all, at least not this one. I was working on another novel entirely as my college senior thesis. My advisor on that project was also the teacher in the fiction workshops I was taking to complete my writing minor, and he told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t going to be submitting chapters from my thesis in his workshops. And so, while I churned out the requisite coming of age/coming out novel, I began writing a series of stories on the side, stories in which I drew on gay archetypes I’d encountered in books, plays, movies, and the news to create a collage of gay life in the late 1980s. The stories were topical but also unreal. I was a twenty-one-year-old college student, after all, with only borrowed knowledge of the lives I was describing. I wasn’t a hustler or a victim, let alone daddy or dandy, john or queen. I didn’t have AIDS and didn’t know anyone who did. Hell, I’d only had sex one time, an experience that could be described as perfunctory at best.

  The stories that grew from this infertile soil sprang up in the margins of my brain while I worked on my “real” novel and waited for “real” life to start. I had no plan when I sat down to write the first, “Always and Forever,” and it wasn’t until I began a second (which didn’t make the final cut) that I hit on the conceit of reusing the names. Even that was an accident. I’d always had a hard time coming up with names for characters. I borrowed friends’ names, or scanned my bookshelves and pulled character or author names more or less at random: Martin came from Martin Luther King, Jr. (Why We Can’t Wait), John from a boy I had a crush on, Henry from Henry James (“The Pupil,” “The Real Thing”), Beatrice from Dante’s Inferno. Susan was the name of the last girl I ever made out with, and it was in her room that I began the second story. There were two books visible on her bookshelves: a biography of Jim Morrison and a book of hi
s lyrics. I couldn’t stand The Doors and refused to acknowledge them, and I plugged along with an ever-growing cast of nameless characters, until finally the unsignified array of “he”s and “him”s and “she”s and “her”s grew too unwieldy and I borrowed from myself. “Always and Forever,” though only a month old, already felt like ancient history, yet even as I assigned its names to a set of new characters I could see the similarities between the two casts, especially its leads: an innocent boy, an experienced man, a desire that’s both mutual and exploitative, and grows in a world where women are cogs in men’s lives, necessary but almost invisible (“Blue Wet-Paint Columns,” the last story I wrote for the book, was an attempt to acknowledge that).

  By the time I left Sue’s room I’d lost interest in the story but had begun to glimpse the shape of a larger project, one in which my inexperience could be generative rather than limiting. The desire to mix up my characters’ attributes and reassign them to different contexts was invigorating. “Transformations” was the first conscious attempt at what I was already calling “a Martin and John story,” and after that they rolled out of me at the rate of one or two a month. Still, they remained tangential to the novel I was working on, a game I was playing, an assignment I had to fulfill, and I didn’t take the time to wonder if there was anything more to them until after I’d turned in my thesis and realized now I had to write another book. I was terrified. I had no clue how to turn these stories into a book and no idea what else I might work on, and so, more by default than anything else, I kept churning out material in that first summer after college (“The Search for Water,” “Three Night Watchmen”) and as a first-year MFA student (“Driftwood,” “The Gilded Theater”). But the stories came more and more slowly as I realized I’d exhausted the possibilities of the conceit, or at any rate my ability to exploit it. By then I had a mess of a dozen stories, none of which was really finished, and no idea how to put them together. It was my friend Bruce who saved me, and saved the book. He suggested I try my hand at what were then called short shorts, and which later acquired the sexier name flash fiction. “Given This and Everything” was the result, then “Circumnavigation,” my first attempt at writing about AIDS, which in turn gave me the courage to write “Fucking Martin.” The short form was liberating to me, whose stories have always erred on the longish side (of the twenty or twenty-five short stories I’ve finished, probably two-thirds are 7,200 words long, plus or minus a thousand words). I liked the counterpoint of the longs and the shorts, although I still hadn’t hit on the (let’s face it) pretty simple idea of alternating them. When my agent began sending out the unfinished manuscript in 1991, the short shorts were still clumped together at the top of the pile, and it was only after I’d read them through that I realized they felt like a single narrative. In fact the editor who eventually bought the manuscript preferred them that way, and I had to convince him they’d make a more shapely book if they were spaced throughout. (“Let’s use italics!”) I remember dropping the term “frame narrative,” not because I’d conceived of the short shorts as a frame narrative but because “frame narrative” sounded intentional, intelligent. The truth is, I was so unsure of the strategy that I didn’t actually read the book in its final form until it was in galleys.

  In a way my entire career has proceeded along these lines, each successive book a way of saying No, no, I got it wrong last time, this is what I really mean to say. I came up with the idea for The Law of Enclosures long before I finished Martin and John, but it was only after the latter was published that I decided to turn its heterosexual protagonists into a new version of John’s parents, who got short shrift in this book, just as I didn’t come up with the idea of adding an account of my own parents’ lives to Law until I saw the way readers misjudged them based on what I’d written in Martin and John. There were ideas for other books too, including the kernels of Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye and The Garden of Lost and Found, but linking them to Martin and John and The Law of Enclosures helped me shape them, not so much by dictating a form or content as by limiting the bewildering myriad of possibilities that confronts every writer at the beginning of a new project. I was vain enough to think of these books as a series, and even gave them a really, really terrible title, Seven Days and Nights of My Soul (although honestly, it was less a title than the name of the folder where I kept them on my computer). Later I came up with Gospel Harmonies, which is a good title, but my God, it creates some expectations, doesn’t it? Supposedly there’ll be two more novels in the series, followed by a final book of short stories called Without Measuring Things How Can You Say What You’ve Lost? Its seven stories are meant to recast the first six books based on my (future) understanding of them, then cap everything with a coda inspired by Bernard’s final soliloquy in The Waves (“Now to sum it up …”). The form of WMTHCYSWYL? mimics Martin and John and its title is cribbed from that very first short short, “Given This and Everything.” At twenty-six or twenty-seven, when I was first able to see the project as a whole, when I thought that my life and my career would both follow the same simple upward trajectory, I figured I’d have the whole thing done by the time I was forty. I’m forty-seven now. I guess I’m not finished yet.

  Dale Peck

  (November 2014)

  Here is this baby

  “Here is this baby, crying in my arms, and don’t he know just when to stop? He’s been crying all day, and not just in my arms. I’m a busy woman, can’t be carrying a baby around all day, and this house don’t clean itself, I’ll tell you that much. And it don’t matter if I hold him, or lay him in his crib in our room, which is quiet during the day, or put him in front of the TV—it don’t matter, he still cries. And I’ll tell you this too: there isn’t a woman I know can listen to her own baby cry for eight hours straight and not pick it up once in a while, and not get mad sometimes, and have to bite her lip to keep from yelling, and not think maybe something besides this ninety-degree heat and hundred-degree humidity is wrong. So I made the mistake of calling his father. And don’t you just know Henry? First of all he said, ‘Bea, I told you not to bother me at work.’ And then he told me, ‘Ain’t nothing wrong with John. Ain’t nothing wrong with my son.’ I tell you, sometimes it’s not too much to believe that when they cut the cord off me they attached it to him. But what’s the use in thinking like that?

  “Well, listen, I put a wet cloth on John’s head, and he pulled the end of it into his mouth and sucked on it for a little bit, and that seemed to help. But I have to tell you that he didn’t really stop crying until just now, until the car door slammed in the driveway, until the storm door slammed in the other room. And I’m not saying that John heard this, and I’m not saying he understood it either, but I’ll be damned if he’s not shutting up at just the right time, lying in my arms with his eyes wide open and innocent like he hasn’t done a thing, and don’t he just know who’s going to get it now?

  Blue wet-paint columns

  This is not the worst thing I remember: coming home from school one day to find my mother in a chair, collapsed. Her skin was the color of wet ashes, her head sat like a stone on her right shoulder, and a damp bloody mass pushed at her crotch, staining a maroon patch of darkness on sky-blue pants. Her legs were spread wide, and more blood, pooling on the yellow vinyl of the chair, showed up like the red speck in a spoiled egg yolk. Her arms were open too, and rested on the chair arms, and she seemed both empty and full, like a tube of toothpaste squeezed from the middle. When I walked into the room, I was ten years old, and the sound her blood made as it dropped to the floor filled my ears. Is she still alive? I remember thinking, and then, when I noticed the slow, small movements of her chest, I thought, She still isn’t dead. I ran into the living room then, where I called my father, and I waited for him on the couch, shivering. Not seeing her was worse than seeing her, because I imagined her, imagined the mound that had been building in her abdomen for months. It had grown even as the rest of her body had shrunk, until she seemed nothing more tha
n a skeleton covered by the thin fabric of clothing and skin. Just a skeleton, and that hard mound at her center, which my father sometimes ran his hands over as though testing a melon for ripeness. For years I saw that melon drop from my mother’s body again and again, pushing at the seam of her pants in a mess of blood and guts and lost life. Not the baby’s—my mother’s.

  THIS STORY STARTED before I was aware of it. Though two people were in a position to tell it, they were both, I believe, unable to speak. How could my mother, a housewife who remembered her high school graduation as a severe bout of morning sickness, sit me on her lap and say, “John, your father is killing me,” when speaking would reveal at least some level of complicity on her part? And how could my father, a construction worker who lucked into a lot of money when he opened his own company, sit me down and say, “John, all we can do is wait for her to die,” when he knew it was his fault she was dying? So no one said anything—I wasn’t even told my mother had miscarried, and no attempt was made to explain why I’d found her sitting in her own blood. In time my father referred to it as if I knew what had happened. “When your mother lost the baby,” he’d say, as if she’d set it down, forgotten where. Other things were set down with that baby, forgotten, and one of them was the woman who bore it: my mother, whose black-and-white past was obliterated by that technicolor moment in the kitchen. A too-bright image superimposed itself on a dark one and only occasionally could a piece of that hidden picture reveal itself.

  Over time I learned that my mother’s miscarriage was the product of a muscle disorder that lay dormant for years, waiting for something like the strain of bearing a baby to flare up. Someone once told me she’d been ill after my birth, but when I asked my father about it he only said, “You got out of the hospital before she did.” Now, looking back, this and a half dozen other signals pop up like road signs pointing to her illness. She was always dropping things: glasses held in both her hands still managed to slip to the floor, and forkfuls of food spilled to her lap on the way to her mouth. If she was tired this got worse, and sometimes, late at night, her speech became slurred, though she never drank with my father. When she got pregnant, her deterioration accelerated. My father joked it off: “Rosemary,” he’d say—her name was Beatrice—“and her baby,” and on the last word he’d rub the mound of her stomach. My mother never laughed at this, I noticed at once, but it took me a while to see that my father didn’t either. She’d turn back to what she was doing, cooking dinner maybe, or copying a recipe from a magazine. Years later, a flip through her card file revealed the definite progression of her disease: her handwriting started out smooth and rolling, and then in the years just before she miscarried it began to jumble about frantically like the lines of an EKG. And then gradually, inevitably, it became as flat as stagnant water.