Summary
Juan and nene do not sleep through the night; instead, in the pitch black of the room, Juan seems to be the most alive, and nene hangs on to his words. Juan tells nene to give him one of his stories, but to make it a film. nene recalls that him and his former lover, Liam, used to recount plots of movies to each other during the night. Juan admonishes nene for not being familiar with the queer forefathers like Puig and Piñero. He wants him to give him the film version of one of his stories, and he wants nene to take his time.
nene tells Juan the film version of a story about a young man who visits an older man for sex. The older man wants Sal, the younger man, to wear a diaper and act like a baby. After the older man tells Sal he cannot sleep there, and wonders how old he really is, he asks Sal to tell him a story about his story. At the mention of another flashback, Juan says he hopes they do not spend the whole film "chatting in bed" (165). Sal tells a memory of him and his father at the beach and then he and the older man fall asleep.
In the morning Sal learns the man's name is Norwood. Sal has a memory of hanging out with the girls by the river in his hometown. nene adds something like a voice-over, which Juan rejects. nene backtracks: maybe Sal has been standing in the kitchen, "in a trance, blacking out" (169). Norwood comes around in a moment of sincerity, telling Sal that he liked the story he told about his father, that he would like to know more about the questions he asked him. At that moment Sal pivots, throwing Norwood's coffee in the sink. Juan declares him a brat, and nene says that for a long time in his life, he believed that "thrashing" (170) was the only way to get someone to love you.
The film enters into a montage of Sal making money through sex work. He still sees Norwood on the condition that Sal gets tested every few weeks; he makes the promise but he does not do it. All the men he sleeps with are white, and they ask him about his family, about his origins, and he says yes to whatever they assume he is. Norwood is the only man who knows about the small town where he grew up. In a bar where Sal picks up a lot of his work, he tells Norwood about the girls, about how they tried to teach him about sex, even though they knew he was gay, and how he felt like they were his protectors. Juan interrupts to ask nene if the girls ever got out of the town, and then nene attributes the question to Norwood in the movie. Juan laughs but says nene has rushed through the film, that there needs to be more in the middle of Sal and Norwood's relationship.
nene summarizes the middle of the film. Sal and Norwood kiss a lot; Norwood tells him to use less tongue. Norwood sometimes tries to introduce the diaper again, and Sal always refuses. Norwood is a jewelry maker and is financially well-off. Juan says some shots of him tinkering at his studio would be nice. Every morning, Norwood walks Sal down to the door to see him off. He is encouraged to come back late at night, after dinner. He has a duffel bag of clothes that stay in Norwood's house, and every night when he comes back he wonders if the dirty clothes will be washed. Instead, the dirty clothes that were on the ground around the bag are stuffed inside with all the clean clothes. In bed, Norwood calls Sal "his son, his little baby boy" (173).
Back in the bar, talking about his girls, Sal says there was nowhere for them to go. An older, rich looking man asks Sal if Norwood is bothering him. Sal seizes the moment to flirt with the older man, saying he could bother him, too, if he buys him a drink. The older man asks the bartender why he lets in young men like him; he finds it depressing, he says. The bartender, who has previously followed Sal into the bathroom and tried to initiate sex with him, says that he is not so bad. Norwood tries to stick up for him to the older man, but Sal laughs garishly.
He says that his girl, his favorite girl from home, had thick eyebrows like caterpillars. Every other girl and woman in town tweezed and waxed all the hair from their bodies, but his girl did not. Sal says they should leave the bar but Norwood wants to know the rest of the story about the girls. The viewers, nene explains, sense that Sal could never really finish telling the story, that he feels, deeply, that those girls should not be dragged into a bar like that and judged. Sal gets up and we can sense that he is beginning to feel too much like the entertainment, that he is not interested in it anymore. But then he breaks into a monologue, turning nasty, talking about the girls' mothers and his own mother. He enters a kind of fugue state, and when he finally gets out of it Norwood asks if he is in a trance. They take a shot, Sal says he will tell him a real story after, and then they return to Norwood's house, where he puts on the diaper for him.
Analysis:
The recurring setting of the pitch black of Juan's room at the Palace is another iteration of the blackout motif. In fact, at the level of the present action in the narrative, it seems fair to say that most of the action unfolds in the darkness in Juan's room. Though nighttime is usually associated with fear, with the unknown, and with quietness and sleep, for Juan and nene the nighttime is when they are most lucid. As he nears death, Juan grows more nocturnal, becoming less lucid during the day and more like himself in the dark of the night. In the darkness, they cannot see that Juan is dying; they cannot tell where they are, or who they are with, but can only follow the stories they share with each other.
The scenes where they tell each other stories like a film draws attention to the medium. The reader is not watching a film – we are reading a novel. If we were watching a novel, there would not be that much to look at, just two men sitting in the dark talking to each other. Juan makes complaints along these lines to nene's film, which at first is all dialogue. These meta conversations about film causes one to consider the differences in reading and watching, the differences in prose and film writing. What nene describes might be a boring film, but it is certainly not a boring novel, as we are reading it on the page in that moment.
It seems fair to say that nene uses the story of Sal to talk about his own life. He gives the young man a name other than his own, and they talk about him like a character at first, but in time Juan admonishes nene for Sal's behavior, and nene does not correct him. He is not troubled by the assumption that Sal is him, but likewise he never explicitly says that it is a story from his life. In this way, nene is emulating Torres, which we see most clearly at the end of the novel. He claims it is a work of fiction, but even in the post-script he blurs the line between nene's voice and his own voice, so it is not clear if what he is saying is coming from within the novel or from an outside place of authorial commentary.
The relationship between Sal and Norwood is one of several queer relationships in the book that nene describes to Juan in order to reveal certain longings and repulsions. During a time when he was doing sex work, there were many desires he witnessed and came up against. Norwood wanted nene to be a baby, his baby, but nene never wanted to do that. He did, however, come to realize that he would like to be cared for, would like to be loved in that kind of way. There is a kind of collaboration present in this scene, and it carries through the other relationships discussed in the novel: for nene, who does not really know what he wants, he learns by brushing up against what other people want, parsing his desires from theirs.
The discussion of the girls he hung out with by the river begs the question of authorial responsibility. Is it okay to write about people you know? Is it okay to take people's stories and make them a part of your own? For nene, the girls were an essential part of his adolescence in the small town no one knows he is from. The image of the caterpillar eyebrows belong to a real girl, with a real life. Sal, or nene, grows uncomfortable at the thought of bringing the girls into that barroom, as though to talk about them would be to conjure their presence. And there is a kind of conjuring, Torres seems to say – messing with time, invoking ghosts, walking between dreams and reality – in the act of storytelling.
