Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan Page A

curious entered and stared. They confiscated the air … To the child’s fevered gaze the long bayonets of the soldiers seemed to reach the ceiling, as they filed past her bed, staring out of boredom and curiosity.
    Miss Polly passed us again. Apparently she’d changed her mind about the butter. We made a U-turn and trailed her to the cabin. Back inside they embraced. She buried her face in his coat, laughing and weeping. “Oh, sister,” he said, “I’m such an old fool, goddamn it.”
    I’ve wished at times that we had endured some meaningful falling out. In truth he began to exasperate me in countless petty ways. He needed too much, feeding and washing and shaving and dressing, more than he could admit to and keep his pride. Anyone could sympathize, but I hadn’t signed on to be his butler. One day I ran into the white-haired professor, who shared with me that Lytle had been complaining about my cooking.
    Mainly, though, I’d fallen in love with a tall, nineteen-year-old half-Cuban girl from North Carolina, with freckles on her face and straight dark hair down her back. She was a class behind mine, or what would have been mine, at the school, and she liked books. On our second date she gave me her father’s roughed-up copy of Hunger , the Knut Hamsun novel. I started to spend more time downstairs. Lytle became pitifully upset. When I invited her in to meet him, he treated her coldly, made some vaguely insulting remark about “Latins,” and at one point asked her if she understood a woman’s role in an artist’s life.
    There came a wickedly cold night in deep winter when she and I lay asleep downstairs, wrapped up under a pile of old comforters on twin beds we’d pushed together. By now the whole triangle had grown so unpleasant that Lytle would start drinking earlier than usual on days when he spotted her car out back, and she no longer found him amusing or, for that matter, I suppose, harmless. My position was hideous.
    She shook me awake and said, “He’s trying to talk to you on the thing.” We had this antiquated monitor system, the kind where you depress the big silver button to talk and let it off to hear. The man hadn’t mastered an electrical device in his life. At breakfast one morning, when I’d made the mistake of leaving my computer upstairs after an all-nighter, he screamed at me for “bringing the enemy into this home, into a place of work.” Yet he’d become a bona fide technician on the monitor system.
    “He’s calling you,” she said. I lay still and listened. There was a crackling.
    “Beloved,” he said, “I hate to disturb you, in your slumbers, my lord. But I believe I might freeze to DEATH up here.”
    “Oh, my God,” I said.
    “If you could just … lie beside me.”
    I looked at her. “What do I do?”
    She turned away. “I wish you wouldn’t go up there.”
    “What if he dies?”
    “You think he might?”
    “I don’t know. He’s ninety-two, and he says he’s freezing to death.”
    “Beloved…?” She sighed. “You should probably go up there.”
    He didn’t speak as I slipped into bed. He fell back asleep instantly. The sheets were heavy white linen and expensive. It seemed there were shadowy acres of snowy terrain between his limbs and mine. I floated off.
    When I woke at dawn he was nibbling my ear and his right hand was on my genitals.
    I sprang out of bed and began to hop around the room like I’d burned my finger, sputtering foul language. Lytle was already moaning in shame, fallen back in bed with his hand across his face like he’d just washed up somewhere, a piece of wrack. I should mention that he wore, as on every chill morning, a Wee Willie Winkie nightshirt and cap. “Forgive me, forgive me,” he said.
    “Jesus Christ, Mister Lytle.”
    “Oh, beloved…”
    His having these desires was not an issue—no one could be so naive. His tastes were more or less an open secret. I don’t know if he was gay or bisexual or pansexual or what. Those