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I Look Divine

With an Introduction by David Leavitt
Bruno-Bookserschienen am01.07.2013
Nicholas is beautiful, wealthy and hopelessly vain. With his older brother in tow, he jets from one glamorous scene to another. Whether it's in Rome, Madrid, or Mexico, what matters to him most is the admiration of others. Then one day, not even forty and his beauty faded, his life comes to an early end. His brother is left to pick up the pieces and make sense of Nicholas' untimely demise. 'I Look Divine' is a precisely told and moving tale about what lurks beneath the ripples of Narcissus' reflecting pool.

Christopher Coe's style has been called 'reminiscent of both Oscar Wilde's and Marcel Proust's late writings' (Publishers Weekly). Writer, photographer and cabaret singer, Coe lived in Paris and New York City. His first novel, 'I Look Divine', was published in 1987, his second, 'Such Times', in 1993. In 1994, Christopher Coe died of AIDS. David Leavitt's books include 'Family Dancing', 'The Lost Language of Cranes', 'While England Sleeps', 'The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer', and 'The Indian Clerk'. A new novel, 'The Two Hotel Francforts', will be published in the fall of 2013. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he is a professor of English at the University of Florida and edits the literary journal 'Subtropics.'mehr

Produkt

KlappentextNicholas is beautiful, wealthy and hopelessly vain. With his older brother in tow, he jets from one glamorous scene to another. Whether it's in Rome, Madrid, or Mexico, what matters to him most is the admiration of others. Then one day, not even forty and his beauty faded, his life comes to an early end. His brother is left to pick up the pieces and make sense of Nicholas' untimely demise. 'I Look Divine' is a precisely told and moving tale about what lurks beneath the ripples of Narcissus' reflecting pool.

Christopher Coe's style has been called 'reminiscent of both Oscar Wilde's and Marcel Proust's late writings' (Publishers Weekly). Writer, photographer and cabaret singer, Coe lived in Paris and New York City. His first novel, 'I Look Divine', was published in 1987, his second, 'Such Times', in 1993. In 1994, Christopher Coe died of AIDS. David Leavitt's books include 'Family Dancing', 'The Lost Language of Cranes', 'While England Sleeps', 'The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer', and 'The Indian Clerk'. A new novel, 'The Two Hotel Francforts', will be published in the fall of 2013. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he is a professor of English at the University of Florida and edits the literary journal 'Subtropics.'
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783867876599
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Erscheinungsjahr2013
Erscheinungsdatum01.07.2013
Seiten128 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse456
Artikel-Nr.2921868
Rubriken
Genre9200

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



My brother would not smile for a photograph. He smiled now and then in life, he was even known to laugh, but never for a camera. Even when we were growing up, when he was a little boy, Nicholas knew how he wanted to be seen.

He knew how he was willing to be remembered. Any camera would alert my brother s instinct for posterity.

In the years that we had grandmothers, one of them was the kind who liked to compose grandsons within a frame in front of a Christmas tree. She liked to pose the smaller boy in front of the bigger boy, the bigger boy holding the smaller one, me holding Nicholas, my arms around him, enfolding him from behind.

The idea, I think, was that this embrace would make us look like brothers.

Ours was a weak resemblance.

Nicholas would look at himself in the red glass ornaments hooked to the boughs, the ones that were silver inside when they shattered. He could see himself in them and in the presents wrapped in shining paper at our feet. He could find his face in the heaps of packages, of which more than half, every year, were invariably for him. He would be himself up to a point, as much as Nicholas ever was himself, until our grandmother would say, Say cheese.

We could not, even in those years, either of us, believe that we had that kind of grandmother.

Nicholas said that she came from a bad family.

He did not say this in those years; he said it later, in the years when he was fond of calling things de trop.

One year-almost thirty years ago-while we were waiting for the cheese, Nicholas stood on my shoes and reached behind us both. He put his hands in my back pockets and squeezed handfuls of me, the biggest handfuls he could get, clutching through the cloth. He held on to me, his feet planted on mine, and he tipped his weight forward, leaning with it, not to make us fall, but as though he wanted to take flight without leaving me behind.

I pulled him to me and smelled soap on his skin, starch in his white shirt, and the wool smell of his short gray trousers. I smelled tonic in his hair, and Listerine, and under them, I was sure, I smelled our mother s perfume. It may have only been the scent that her kisses left behind, but with his weight on me I imagined Nicholas looking at himself in our mother s mirror, splashing her Arpège into his hand, then lavishing it behind his ears, as she did. I could picture my brother stroking perfume on the pulse of his neck, with the thrill that is the point of the forbidden.

I imagined what must have been his rapture.

I squeezed him tighter, and while our grandmother squinted, trying to attach the flash, Nicholas took one hand from inside my pocket and forced it in between us.

He whispered, Goose you!

I felt his laughter in my feet. I felt it rise, I felt his laughter in his ribs, where I was holding him. My brother s laughter made me laugh. I felt it in his body, then in mine.

I thought our grandmother should have captured that. I thought that would have been a picture worth taking, worth having.

It would be worth having now.

Now it would be proof.

Nicholas and I were still laughing when she told us she was ready.

She called us boys.

She said cheese.

Cheese, boys, our grandmother said.

That was all it took to stop my brother s laughter. Nicholas stepped down from my shoes. He folded his hands in front of his body and made them mimic a boyish repose. I watched his face change in the ornaments.

He changed it to a face that he had taught himself. It was a face that a little boy will learn to make after hearing too often that he is a beautiful little boy, in the same way that children who have been told that they are smart are apt to teach themselves to act it.

It was a face that said, This is how I look.

Our grandmother said that she was waiting for Nicholas to smile.

I kicked his foot and told him to do it. I told him that the smile would only be for her, that no one else would see it. I told him that it would not end up on the cover of Photoplay or anywhere else that would embarrass him.

I told him that a smile was nothing.

Nicholas stepped forward, a step away from me. Then he turned his face all the way around and gave me a look of everlasting patience that did not want to last.

You are so oblibious, he said. How do I know who she s going to show it to?

He kept looking at me, kept giving me the look, and there was nothing else to see. There was nothing else in his face that I could make out under the look, and it occurred to me then, posing with my brother thirty years ago, that standing in front of me was a seven-year-old boy who had already vowed to show the world only the face that he wanted it to see and had done so at a time while he was still negotiating speech.

He stepped back, finally, into my embrace, turned to the camera and offered the unsmiling face, until our grandmother gave in and took the picture of Nicholas posing in the way he was willing to be seen.

There is no photograph of my brother standing on my feet. There is no photograph of my brother laughing. In the photographs from those years, in every one of them, I am the brother in the back, the one who always looks like any boy who ever smiled for a grandmother.

Nicholas is the one who always looks like Nicholas.

This is the room I thought that I would start in, and for the past several hours I have stayed in it, sitting on my brother s unmade bed, without starting.

I could start anywhere. Any room would do.

I could empty ashtrays, open windows, take down pictures, put books in boxes, check the kitchen for spoiled food. I could throw out old onions.

I could flip through the mail that has kept coming and pitch the junk.

I could pick my brother s clothes up from the floor and try them on for fit, then go through drawers and feel under folded clothes, under lining paper, for things he might have hid there.

Music could help me start, then help me hurry. I could hum Moon River.

That would be a record Nicholas would have. In another room, records fill a wall of shelves that do not stop until the ceiling. Everything that I could ever want to play or sing along to is here for me to play. I could pick out Broadway scores and belt out the big numbers over the stars who belt them on the records.

Or, as I used to see my brother do when he was a little boy, I could lip-synch in the mirror. I could close my eyes the way I used to watch him do, making them look closed but, I was always sure, keeping a space to look through, his eyelash space, so that he could see what he looked like with his eyes closed.

Nicholas used to do that.

I do not know for a fact that he stopped doing it.

He used to pretend that pencils were long cigarette holders and would glide around rooms flicking ashes into flowerpots, saying things like, Daddy, don t be droll.

That is something else my brother used to do.

I cannot say that I am sure he ever stopped doing it.

I cannot say for certain that he did not know he was being watched.

I cannot even say that my brother did not know I was the one who was watching.

There might be another way. Maybe I could pay to get this done, pay someone to pack up and empty this place out. There must be companies you can call, the way you do when you move, companies that come with cartons, with padded wrap, and do it for you.

There must be a way to get it done, without doing it yourself.

There must be a way to get it all behind you.

If not, someone has not been smart, someone has not been on the ball. Someone has overlooked a need, missed a calling, lost a chance, because doing this could be an industry.

Doing this could be a life.

But I do nothing that a company would do. I stay here, sitting on the cashmere blanket with the cigarette burn in it, looking at objects around the room, my little brother s things as he left them.

Of course, I have looked a bit in other rooms, but I have chosen this room-if chosen it is what I ve done-because this is the room with the best objects.

I do not mean best in the sense of necessarily to my taste, though I am thinking that I may take the lacquer table by the bed.

I can see myself in it.

Nicholas once told me the name for this kind of antique lacquer, for the old Japanese process that, over time, makes the black base show through in random patches under the red layers laid over it. The red is actually an orange-red, what is sometimes called Chinese red, but the name that Nicholas told me sounded Italian, not Japanese, not even Oriental, and it may have been that Nicholas did not know the real name.

Nicholas may have called it a name that the men who made it never called it.

I am wondering if Nicholas knew the name that the lacquer is called among the artisans. I am wondering if he ever got around to learning Japanese, as he used to threaten that he would one day, because he expected it would be fun to flirt with what he called little Japanese houseboys,...


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Autor

Christopher Coe's style has been called "reminiscent of both Oscar Wilde's and Marcel Proust's late writings" (Publishers Weekly). Writer, photographer and cabaret singer, Coe lived in Paris and New York City. His first novel, "I Look Divine", was published in 1987, his second, "Such Times", in 1993. In 1994, Christopher Coe died of AIDS.David Leavitt's books include "Family Dancing", "The Lost Language of Cranes", "While England Sleeps", "The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer", and "The Indian Clerk". A new novel, "The Two Hotel Francforts", will be published in the fall of 2013. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he is a professor of English at the University of Florida and edits the literary journal "Subtropics."