Free Family Dancing by David Leavitt Page B

centuries.”
    “We’d better get going, Doug,” Alex says. “Does Julie want to come hunt lobsters?”
    “Lobsters?” Julie says, entering the room. Her smile is bright, eager. Then she looks at Lydia. “No, you men go,” she says. “We womenfolk will stay here and guard the hearth.”
    Lydia looks at her, and raises her eyebrows.
    “O.K., let’s go,” Alex says. “Mark, you ready?”
    He looks questioningly at Lydia. But she is gathering together steel wool and Clorox, preparing to attack the stain on the bathtub.
    “Yes, I’m ready,” Mark says.
     
    At first, when he was very young, Mark imagined the lobstermen to be literal lobster-men, with big pink pincers and claws. Later, as he was entering puberty, he found that all his early sexual feelings focused on them—the red-faced men and boys with their bellies encased in dirty T-shirts. Here, in a docked boat, Mark made love for the first time with a local boy who had propositioned him in the bathroom of what was then the town’s only pizza parlor. “I seen you look at me,” said the boy, whose name was Erroll. Mark had wanted to run away, but instead made a date to meet Erroll later that night. Outside, in the pizza parlor, his family was arguing about whether to get anchovies. Mark still feels a wave of nausea run through him when he eats with them at any pizza parlor, remembering Erroll’s warm breath on his neck, and the smell of fish which seemed to cling to him for days afterward.
    Alex is friends with the local lobstermen, one of whom is his landlord’s cousin. Most years, he and Douglas and Mark ride out on a little boat with Henry Traylor and his son, Henry Traylor, and play at being lobstermen themselves, at hauling pots and grabbing the writhing creatures and snapping shut their jaws. The lobsters only turn pink when boiled; live, they’re sometimes a bluish color which reminds Mark of the stain on the bathtub. Mark has never much liked these expeditions, nor the inflated caricature of machismo which his father and brother put on for them. He looks at them and sees plump men with pale skin, men no man would ever want. Yet they are loved, fiercely loved by women.
    Today Henry Traylor is a year older than the last time they saw him, as is his son. “Graduated from high school last week,” he tells Alex.
    “That’s terrific,” Alex says. “What’s next?”
    “Fixing to get married, I suppose,” Henry Traylor says. “Go to work, have kids.” He is a round-faced, red-cheeked boy with ratty, bright blond hair. As he talks, he manipulates without effort the outboard rudder of the little boat which is carrying them out into the sound, toward the marked buoys of the planted pots. Out on the ocean, Alex seems to relax considerably. “Your mother seems unhappy,” he says to Mark. “I try to talk to her, to help her, but it doesn’t do any good. Well, maybe Julie and Ellen can do something.” He puts his arm around Mark’s shoulder—an uncomplicated, fatherly gesture which seems to say, this love is simple. The love of men is simple. Leave the women behind in the kitchen, in the steam of the cooking pot, the fog of their jealousies and compulsions. We will go hunt.
    Henry Traylor has hauled up the ancient lobster trap. Lobster limbs stick out of the barnacle-encrusted woodwork, occasionally moving. “Now you just grab the little bugger like this,” Henry Traylor instructs Douglas. “Then you take your rubber band and snap him closed. It’s simple.”
    “O.K.,” Douglas says. “Here goes.” He stands back and cranes his arm over the trap, holding himself at a distance, then withdraws a single, flailing lobster.
    “Oh, God,” he says, and nearly drops it.
    “Don’t do that!” shouts Henry Traylor. “You got him. Now just take the rubber band and fix him tight. Shut him up like he’s a woman who’s sassing you. That’s right. Good. See? It wasn’t so hard.”
    “Do that to your wife,” says Henry Traylor the elder,