The Wild Swans by Peg Kerr

Author:Peg Kerr
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Published: 2012-01-14T05:48:16+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

[The swan] looks in the mirror over and over

And claims to have never heard of Pavlova.

—OGDEN NASH, “THE SWAN”

Elias and Sean didn’t go back to the baths together. They didn’t talk about the experience, either.

Sean continued to go, sometimes at Elias’s suggestion. But whenever Sean asked Elias whether he’d like to come along, too,. Elias would smile brilliantly and offer some excuse: “I just came from there,” or

“Nan, hard day at work today. Thought I’d just sack out tonight.” When he finally resorted to “Sorry, I have to wash my hair,” Sean got the hint and didn’t ask again. Sean continued to trick with others, but, by unspoken agreement, he never brought other men home.

There were several subjects they avoided discussing, Elias realized when he thought about it. It wasn’t that they didn’t have plenty of animated conversations. They could sit for hours in the garden of Yaffa Cafe, eating noodles and talking about Sean’s next article, or the books they’d picked up in an afternoon’s browsing at the Strand. They went to the Gray Art Gallery and analyzed composition and lighting in the photographic displays. They mapped out an itinerary for the world tour Sean always said he would take someday. (“Do you realize no one’s ever really bothered to take Irish music to the people of Java? Or Morocco, or Papua New Guinea? Not to mention the penguins of Antarctica. I think this is a terrible oversight.”)

But they didn’t talk about what had happened at the baths, or about how Sean sometimes went out at night and came back four or five hours later, without any explanation. Elias wondered if he went other places for sex besides the baths. Movie theaters? The parks? Back rooms in the bars? He didn’t know, and he couldn’t ask.

He thought a lot about it, as the icy grip of winter receded and spring began stealing over the city. The grass turned green in Central Park, and a fine green mist appeared on the trees. Elias sat on his favorite bench, watching the swans swimming and the endless motley parade of people passing by. He pondered the way silences could stake themselves out between two people, even two people who loved each other. His mother and father, for example, had let the silences grow so large and malignant that surely they were more bound together by the walls between them than by anything else. The silences became dead places, no-man’s-land where nothing grew. The thought that he and Sean might end up imitating his parents’ marriage frightened him.

A picture could be worth a thousand words, he remembered. Sean had given him a Pentax K1000

camera as a gift over the winter holiday. A solstice gift, Sean said; Sean didn’t celebrate Christmas. Elias had been experimenting with the camera ever since, taking pictures of Sean, the street in front of the apartment, the swans in the park. As spring turned into summer, he began playing with the prints of Sean in the darkroom after work, studying the moments without words between the two of them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.