#monkeestuff

Michael kept the thing hidden where no roving hand, no landlord with a snoop’s appetite, no fool with a pickpocket’s itch, could come upon it unless he first pressed a palm flat against Michael’s own breast & felt the little secret resting there like a second, smaller heart with better manners than the first. It rode on a fine chain & lay tucked beneath his shirt, close against the warm plane of his sternum, where the heat of his body could keep the metal from turning mean with chill, & where each tattoo of blood through him might answer the minute hush of the mechanism sleeping inside. The locket was not some five-and-dime gewgaw, not a bit of rubbish cast in thin tin for schoolgirls with rouge on their collars and bubblegum on their tongues, but a proper treasure with old world gravity in it, a keepsake that looked as though it ought to have passed through dynasties, chapel smoke, railway compartments, mourning parlours, & velvet lined strongboxes before ever it came to rest against Michael’s ribs in 1960s Malibu, with the salt air coming off the Pacific & the sun bleaching every cheap thing in sight. Elk-tooth ivory formed the principal body, creamy & faintly lustrous, its surface worked into the façade of Saint Apollonia with such scrupulous miniature cunning that a man might near forget he was gazing at something scarcely larger than his palm. Her little countenance held that austere church window calm which could make a bruised soul behave for half a second. Beneath the ivory there sat a base of Rocky Mountain gold, not gaudy, not brassy, but deep & honeyed, the kind of gold that recalled old wedding bands, candlelight, & a field at sundown when the wheat takes on a sacramental burnish. About the saint, in no strict wreath & no regimented pattern, daffodils had been raised in high relief, each trumpet & petal modelled with a botanist’s care and an enamoured fool’s patience, so that the flowers appeared to cradle the ivory from every quarter at once, as though spring itself had gathered close & elected to keep watch. Michael liked that untidy clustering. It looked true to life. Love, in his estimation, never arranged itself with military neatness; it crowded, leaned, overlapped, breathed warm in the dark, & kept strange hours. This little contrivance did the same. Even closed, it possessed a hush of consecration, yet also the private sweetness of something thumbed often, kissed once or twice in weakness, & hidden in haste whenever footsteps came along the hall.

Within it there lived not merely images but music, & the tune imprisoned in its tiny works was one that had entered Michael so early he could hardly tell where memory ended & marrow began. When the spring engaged and the mechanism woke, the notes of ‘Oh, Come Angel Band’ came forth in a sound delicate as spun glass yet somehow warm, as though a child’s toy had swallowed a church service, a back porch dusk, & a deathbed hymn all in the same mouthful. It tinkled rather than rang; it sighed rather than proclaimed. The air around it never filled in a grand, brazen fashion, but seemed combed fine, thread by thread, until the room stood softly altered. That melody belonged to his momma before it belonged to him. It belonged to the evenings when she would lean over him with cigarette smoke lingering in the hem of her hair, her fingers cool from typewriter keys or dishwater, & sweep his unruly dark locks back from his forehead & ears with a tenderness so unadorned it could knock the wind from a boy harder than any fist. It belonged to those cramped rooms where bills bred like roaches in drawers & supper might be scant, yet her humming could still turn the whole shabby place into something almost stately. Sometimes she breathed the tune under her breath while hunting for a bobby pin, while mending, while counting coins, while staring a little too long at nothing. At other times she set down her handbag, crossed to the oak record player that had come to them secondhand & scarred by another family’s years, & let her attention settle upon it with a solemnity usually reserved for altars and legal documents. The oak cabinet, hand-me-down though it was, had a woody, resinous smell that mingled with furniture polish, warm dust, & a faint singe from tired wiring. The record player never sounded wholly pure; it had a burr in it, a grain, a crackle along the edges, & Michael loved it the more for that roughness, because it made every tune feel hard won. The hymn would rise, & his momma, coiffed as neatly as circumstance allowed & painted for the world with darkened lips that made her smile look both clever & heartbreakingly weary, would become for the space of three minutes neither harried secretary nor tired single mother but something nearer a votive flame dressed in a church suit. The locket kept that world in miniature. Every turn of its hidden works brought back the blue shadowed rooms, the pale washcloths, the smell of starch & parfume & ink ribbon, the soft drag of her thumb over his brow, the queer miracle by which privation & affection managed to occupy the same square footage without killing one another.

When the clasp yielded & the locket opened, it did not part into two plain halves like an ordinary sweetheart token. It unfolded into four delicate hearts, each heart a separate chamber, each chamber holding one sovereign attachment, until the whole thing resembled a secret paper flower cut from metal & sentimental memory. The first heart kept his momma. The photograph had gone soft with years of handling, black & white worn almost velvety with age, the corners fraying as though time itself had worried them between anxious fingers. Yet her image still held. Her inky black hair was arranged for Sunday church with that exacting, lacquered polish women of grit could contrive even when the week had mauled them. The pale horn-rimmed spectacles sat on her face with clerical precision, framing eyes the colour of coffee taken black in hue but sugared all the way through in feeling, dark & deep & bright with that rare sort of intelligence which could cut nonsense to ribbons without ever ceasing to care for the fool producing it. Her mouth, painted dark, did not grin in any broad Hollywood fashion. It made instead that small, self-possessed smile which hinted at wit held in reserve, at fatigue borne without theatrics, at devotion never advertised because advertising cheapens the article. There was secretary-sharpness in her carriage, a trim competence, a posture made from file cabinets, church pews, bus stops, & dogged perseverance. Yet Michael could not gaze long upon the tiny likeness without feeling the old domestic softness come over him, the particular ache produced by love too basic to ornament. He thought of milk heated in a saucepan late at night, skin forming on the top while the house breathed around them. He thought of pale blue terrycloth, laundered thin, wrapped about shoulders still damp from a bath. He thought of her voice when it dropped low & tired, of the heel of her hand against his fevered cheek, of all the little ministrations that had kept him in one piece when the world looked fully prepared to grind him into feed. In that first heart she remained neat, unspectacular in the way all true saints often are, & therefore all the more magnificent. Michael never kept her there from obligation. He kept her there because the architecture of himself had been drafted round her, & even now, in a beach town full of hot rods, stucco, surfboards, musicians, & clever wastrels, there were hours when he touched the closed locket through his shirt just to reassure himself that her face still lay within reach.

The second heart lay nearest his momma’s, & that placement had not come by accident, nor by any momentary fit of mooncalf sentiment, but by a reckoning Michael hardly dared speak aloud even to himself. Peter occupied that heart in a soft colourless photograph whose edges had curled a touch, not from neglect but from handling, because Michael, despite every effort to appear dry, capable, & ungiddy, was no better than some besotted schoolboy where Peter Tork was concerned. Peter’s smile in the little likeness did not blaze in a vulgar fashion; it arrived with gentleness, bright yet tender, puckish yet somehow beatific, like sunshine slipping from behind a bank of coastal cloud & laying itself across the sea in a broad satin road. The dimple showed plain, & to Michael that dimple possessed the force of a distress flare shot into a midnight sky over San Antone, a small indentation with enough authority to arrest thought clean in its tracks. Above the curve of that grin rode the beloved beauty mark, set near his lip like a deliberate dab from a painter’s brush, a detail so trifling in the abstract & so ruinous in practice that Michael sometimes reckoned he could spend a week considering nothing else & still not exhaust its charm. Peter’s teeth shone with that clean young brilliance peculiar to laughter, & his eyes, hazel & wide & autumnal, looked crinkled at the corners as though merriment had got there first & kindness had come along immediately after. Michael always thought Peter’s eyes did a queer alchemy. Whatever sourness entered their field seemed altered upon contact, swallowed whole & returned in some gentler form. Salt hazed Malibu light had haloed Peter’s hair in the photograph, those dirty blonde lengths turned by sea air into something between cashmere, corn silk, & beach grass at noon. The locks fanned along his jaw & nuzzled his lashes; even fixed on paper they appeared absurdly touchable. Michael knew the actual feel of them too well for his own peace, knew how silken strands could catch against fingers, how the fringe could cling to those lashes, how the scent there carried sun, shampoo, a trace of incense & weed, & the bright clean note of Peter’s own skin. His ears, salient & sweetly vulnerable, peeked half hidden from the fall of hair, & because Peter grew shy about them, Michael treasured them all the more with the ferocious protectiveness men reserve for the very features beloved people attempt to disguise. Beneath them the tiny ski-slope nose made its pert, elegant claim upon the composition, a nose Michael longed to trace with his forefinger from bridge to tip & finish with a foolish little boop, just for the private delight of it. Cinnamon freckles, those light scatterings Michael privately counted as though they were stars charted for navigation, crossed Peter’s face, ran down his throat, dusted the ears, & vanished beyond the frame into territories Michael’s imagination knew far too well. He had placed Peter nearest his mother because what he felt had already trespassed beyond camaraderie, beyond ordinary phileo, beyond any easy brotherly naming. Desire certainly moved in it, hot & sinful & restless, for Michael was no monk & Peter no abstraction. Yet the deeper current was more dangerous than lust, because it had in it awe, fidelity, tenderness, & that wild Shakespearean largeness which makes a man suspect he could gladly be unmade by another person if only that other would cup his face & call the ruin worthwhile. Peter, to Michael, was sunlight, sugar, & a sting of salt, & all of it lived folded inside that second heart like contraband grace.

The third heart kept Micky, & the instant one looked upon the photograph one understood why no calmer likeness could ever have served. The print had a slight tear in the upper left corner, a fuzzing at the edge, though the damage did nothing to damp the atmosphere of happy bedlam bursting from it. Micky’s grin spread wide as a pair of Klieg searchlights crossing above a première, all invitation & racket & impossible boyish cheek, the sort of grin that could start a scheme, a food fight, a fistful of trouble, or a whole evening’s hilarity before saner men had managed to sit down properly. His hair rose in a confusion of dark curls and frizz, a topsy-turvy briar patch with the energy of a tumbleweed cutting capers across some Yul Brynner Western set after the director had lost control of every horse in sight. The curls never merely lay there; even in a still photograph they looked as though they had opinions, appetites, & a plan for detonating something in the pantry. His hazel eyes had crinkled so tightly with merriment that only slivers showed, bright little crescents peering out from lids squeezed by delight, giving him the perennial juvenescence Michael alternately endured, laughed at, & loved with elder brother ferocity. There was manic sunlight in Micky’s face, a comic electricity, a sense that he had just finished pulling some surreal lark with chemicals, pulleys, slang, & half a sandwich, & considered the world monstrously improved for it. Michael, who pretended exasperation more often than not, cherished that photograph because it caught what words too often failed to manage about Micky. Beneath the frenzied clowning, beneath the appetite, the explosions, the misspellings, the crackpot brilliance, & the lunatic improvisations, there lived a warmth almost painful in its openness. Micky’s spirit rushed at life with both arms flung wide, & while that enthusiasm could scorch curtains, sink budgets, & reduce kitchens to a state fit for forensic examination, it also put light into rooms that had no business feeling cheerful. Michael knew the look of Micky asleep at odd hours with a biscuit crumb & a stain of orange juice on his shirt, the look of Micky laughing so hard he near folded in half, the look of Micky covering fear with nonsense because sense would let too much hurt show. All that clamoured from the third heart. The photograph seemed ready to bounce in its setting. Michael loved him there with the old Greek steadiness of brotherhood, though his version of brotherhood came armed with lectures, confiscations, spare cash quietly slipped where needed, & a perpetual readiness to yank Micky bodily out of whatever fool catastrophe he had tripped into this week. The little heart suited him because it made room for noise inside something delicate, which was Micky all over.

The fourth and final heart held Davy, & though it rested last in the unfolding, it did not for one second appear lesser than the rest. Michael had arranged no hierarchy of affection in the metal bloom, only a sequence, & Davy’s chamber possessed a glamour so immediate that it might have belonged in a cigarette case carried by a screen idol or a duchess gone improper. The photograph was black & white, sharp in its contrasts, with light & dark working upon his features in a manner that recalled German Expressionist chiaroscuro, all carved shadow, bright planes, and theatrical threat. Davy’s eyes were dark enough to merit the adjective Stygian in colouring, yet they held nothing deadened in their spark. Rather, they flashed with gasconade, moxie, & that nimble, streetwise audacity by which he could charm a room, taunt an enemy, & flirt with half the county before breakfast. His hair, thick & dark & handsomely ordered into its proper mop, lay with studied ease across his brow, while beneath it his brushy eyebrows seemed prepared at any moment to arch in mockery, invitation, or swift offence. The mouth in the photograph was pure Davy, the lower lip full & faintly pouty, the whole arrangement supple enough to look made for wisecracks, songs, cigarette smoke, kisses, & mutinous rejoinders. His teeth caught the light with almost indecent polish. That face drew devotees the way bright fairground music draws children, & Michael, who was as capable of irritation with Davy as with any breathing creature, knew perfectly well that magnetism in him was no accident & no empty vanity. Davy had built parts of himself out of pluck, theatre, hunger, & bravado, & the result was a figure at once dapper & dangerous, playful & deeply touchy, vain in spots yet game as a terrier when it counted. Michael kept him in that last heart with as much phileo as he lavished on Micky, though the quality of it wore a different cut, more smoke & sparring in the weave, more affectionate bickering, more little contests of nerve & language. Davy could needle the saintliness out of a stone monument, yet there were moments, private & unadvertised, when his courage showed plain, & Michael treasured those moments in silence because naming them might embarrass the little British peacock half to death. Thus the final heart shone with shadowed glamour & loyal affection both.