— Do you take credit cards for payment? the Loon asked back.
— Ya, all kinds! Ve got da cross-now-pay-later plans for effrey-buddy! Climb aboard! he sang, and they did, the Loon somewhat apprehensively.
8.
On the crossing; which took a little over fourteen weeks, the king began to come out of his grim withdrawal. The first break came early the first night out. The dwarf, who seemed an excellent sailor, was whistling aft, busying himself with knots and scrimshaw. The king and the Loon lay on the foredeck, watching the full moon rise out of the ink-dark sea. — This afternoon I dreamed of disaster, the king informed his companion.
— No kidding, the Loon said.
— I saw a bloody moon hanging in a white sky. I saw a museum sculpture garden with all the statues carefully beheaded. I saw four sets of bloody handprints upon a white wall, and every hand was missing the middle finger. I saw two rooks fly into the sun, and only one returned. The king lapsed into a thoughtful silence.
— So what are you going to do? the Loon asked, studying the moon with affection.
— I don’t know yet, but I’m beginning to think that my wife had something to do with the deaths of my sons. It’s still only a feeling, but a strong one.
— Can you dig that moon! the Loon said rapturously.
9.
The third night out, the king walked onto the foredeck and saw the Loon lying on his belly, watching the moon rise out of the sea again. The king crept up behind his friend, dropped to his knees, undid the Loon’s blue jumpsuit, spread his buttocks, and silently sodomized him.
Finishing, he uncoupled and fell away. He leaned against the mast and began to talk about his childhood, which, to the Loon, sounded awful. The king, however, was speaking with fondness and the kind of hazy nostalgia that often comes over a man on a long sea voyage.
10.
After ten days at sea, the king talked constantly of his wife, the queen, and her nefarious plots against him and his sons. Also, he screwed the Loon at least once a night, much to the erotic delight of the boatman.
— I guess you don’t feel so guilt-ridden anymore, eh? the Loon panted.
— Not really, the king said, zipping up the Loon’s jumpsuit. — But after all, isn’t that what a pilgrimage is for?
11.
One night on the foredeck, the king, leaning exhausted against the mast, waxed slightly philosophical — I think that guilt, once perceived, i.e., experienced, is a passion, to be spent, like other passions. The meanings of most things, of passions, certainly, lie wholly in their enactments or in analytical description, i.e., reenactment of those things. The point of human life, when it comes right down to it, is simply to provide content for the otherwise empty forms of reality. The basic difficulty of human life is in knowing when a particular form has been sufficiently filled, or perceived, experienced — knowing when an experience has become redundant. Thus, most of the “good” life is an exercise in good taste, and I do mean ethically.
— Is it safe to assume, then, that you no longer feel guilty? the Loon asked wearily.
— Right! the king said, surprised. — You know, Lon, for a kid with no college degree, you certainly can think abstractly.
— Thanks, said the Loon.
12.
After one hundred days at sea, they docked in Liverpool, where they caught a train to London, a cab to the airport, and a jumbo jet for home, first-class.
— Good old American Express! the king said, raising his champagne glass in a toast.
— Yay, said the Loon quietly. He was thinking of the block of Moroccan hash he had brought as an offering for the Empire State and how much he was going to enjoy smoking it when he got back to the tree house. — Yay, he said, clinking the king’s glass with his own.
— Kiss-kiss, you little devil, said the king happily.
— Kiss-kiss-kiss, answered the Loon.
The king lit a large Cuban cigar. — “Yay,” huh? Heh, heh, heh. God, Loon, that’s rich! You’re such a disgusting faggot, the king said chuckling.
10
REMEMBER ME TO CAMELOT
A Novel
by Naomi Ruth Sunder
1.
“Be good to Kay,” Rex instructed his eldest son, Bif. “Your mother’s never been on her own before, she doesn’t know how to take care of herself, son,” he explained to the boy.
I stood somberly in the center of the living room with Hunter and Rory, fighting back the tears, proud of our three little boys, our little men, but proudest of Rex, my husband, because I understood the deep pain he was feeling at this, the moment of his departure. He was leaving us — perhaps forever.
Our country in her need had called him from the side of his loved ones, and he had no choice but to go. Rex was a major in the Air Force Reserve, and his unit had been activated for combat duty in Vietnam, which at that time I couldn’t even have located on a map. They needed all the veteran pilots they could get, and Rex, in Korea more than a decade earlier, before Bif was born, had been one of the best in the skies. He had been almost legendary, and, as he leaned down to kiss me good-bye, I saw him wink away a tear with a brave grin, and I knew that he was still one of the best.
We kissed, long and joyously, and then he patted each of us on the top of the head and walked out the door to the waiting car.
2.
It was true, what Rex had said to Bif — I had never been on my own before, and I didn’t know how to take care of myself. I had been the only child of protective parents, raised in Sarasota, Florida, where, as a fifteen-year-old girl trying out for the cheerleading squad, I had met Rex. He was two years older than I, a junior and the captain of the football team.
We fell in love that autumn, the season I made the cheerleading squad and the football team went undefeated, and from the first, ours was a love that never wavered or wandered off center. Rex was everything I wasn’t, and thus it was only with him and through him that I felt completed. He was stern and disciplined, sophisticated yet rough-hewn, gentle but at the same time demandingly straightforward.
And there was a sense in which I completed him, too, for I allowed him to be tender and naive, shy and insecure — character traits he otherwise would have been ashamed of and would have denied himself.
3.
As soon as Rex graduated from Sarasota High, we got married. It was the summer of 1950 and the second half of the twentieth century had just begun. How were we to know that war with the Orientals would break out and, within a year, with me pregnant, would separate us?
Rex went to Texas as an Air Force cadet and earned his wings in record time. I closed up our little apartment, put our wedding gifts and furniture in storage, and went home to live with my mother and father. Three weeks after Rex had left Texas for Korea, I gave birth to our first son, Rex, Jr., whom Rex in his letters instructed me to call “Bif,” the name by which he had been known when he played fullback for Sarasota High.
Even from that great a distance, Rex was a doting father. My parents and I would laugh gaily over his long letters filled with careful instructions as to how we should care for his namesake and how my parents should care for me. In some ways, Rex was able to make it seem that he had never left. In my heart, though, I knew how far away he really was.
4.
But now it was twelve years later, and just as the Vietnam War was different from the Korean, Rex’s absence from his family was different. Over a decade had passed between the wars, and our life together and our lives separately had changed in many subtle ways.