Free Raw Silk (9781480463318) by Janet Burroway Page A

Egg, Florida, and East Jesus, South Dakota, but he said I was a friggin’ immigrant, and the next day my drawing board was a Union Jack. Malcolm didn’t believe in erasers. When he made a mistake he jammed the enemy page up and slung it over his shoulder. Sometimes at the end of the day he’d take a liking to a crumpled sheet, tape it to the skirting, pick up a brush and emphasize its contours into a hunched torso. Then he’d cartoon a face above it on the wall, with a hand reaching up to grasp the windowsill or a leg locked around the doorstop. The Survivors, he called these creatures, which were nevertheless swept out on Fridays while the wall grew dense with amputations and decapitations.
    On the other side of Mom Pollard and Dillis Grebe was a further panel that led to drapery design, and beyond that to the Jacquard card cutters, then to woven stuffs, tapestry design and plaids. Someone or other was always coming through to get our opinion of a color, or Mom’s advice on a technical problem; secretaries from Admin came to rifle the files for some mysteriously needed correspondence of six years ago; PR arrived two or three times a week to show us off to a batch of students, tourists or prospective investors. And Malcom was an unconscionable nuisance. I raged and railed against the interruptions, fumed at the scum on my pots in the too-efficient heating, toyed incessantly with the wing nut of my drawing board looking for the magic angle that would let me work. I ordered a microscope, on company funds, and procrastinated whole mornings in nearby fields picking specimens for cross sections that I never used. I indulged myself, angry with guilt, to eight coffee breaks a day. I always seemed to be cleaning up yesterday’s mistakes or flailing headlong into some sappy rubble of the idea in my mind, with never any satisfaction, never any sense of purpose. My style got looser, so I could no longer reproduce my brush strokes with a knife in the film, and I had to waste several days learning photographic screening. In short, I’ve never worked so well.
    Maybe I’d needed company. From the look of it we were an odd lot—a boyish queer with a mop of dark curls always ready to flop in affirmation, a mountain of a self-appointed Cockney mother figure, a California adolescent of thirty-odd, and a secretary we might have picked up in an Oxford Street boutique. We had among us a fair gamut of domestic worries, and Malcolm, Mom and Dillis had developed a rueful ease at intimacy into which I was absorbed at a single slurp. “You remember,” they’d say, forgetting, of some story shared a year ago. “ You know.”
    Malcolm’s domestic arrangements were at the moment the least troubled example of whatever it was they were the least troubled example of, part of the trouble being that this had no name. He had been whatever he had been, to or with, a King’s College history don named Gary Blenwasser for four years. But what? Married? They shared every aspect of that state except the official seal by which it earns its definition, and the social pressure to keep being it that is the inert cohesive force of marriages when they hit the rough.
    “I’m his what? Wife?” Malcolm complained. “Consort? Roommate ? ‘How do you do, this is my symbiot Gary Blenwasser?’ Let me tell you, there’s little enough to keep a homosexual relationship together without hiding it from the goddam dictionary. ”
    Malcolm had, at fourteen, confessed his bewildering tenderness for other boys to the family GP (“There are homosexuals that like men, and there are homosexuals that hate women; look you learn to distinguish them, m’dears, because you’re dealing with two separate species”), and had learned by the succeeding furor at home that his condition was excludable from the Hippocratic Oath. This experience left him paranoid in the one isolated area, whereas his (what? swain?) Gary was paranoid in a general they’re-after-me-today sort of