The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "Perhaps you don't know all about our little mirrors in the window, which are present in most of the old houses. We can sit and do what we want to do and then we just look up quickly and we can see all along the street."

  I blushed and nodded with genuine enlightenment. Of course I had seen these spying-glasses; but I hadn't realised just how routinely nosy these people were. I began to feel that everything I did might be observed and censured from within the dark old windows of the town. "How was your weekend?" I said.

  "Oh, it was very good, thank you."

  "You'll have to remind me where it was you went. I know you said it's where a friend of yours has a house?"

  "Yes. It's in a small village that is actually in France, called St Ernest-allx-Sablonnières . . ."

  "Of course, I remember now, where St Ernest etc . . ." He nodded, and looked at me with slight concern, as if I might really have forgotten the whole rigmarole of our first lesson. "You must have had good weather—You even look a bit browner; if it was anything like it was here, you could almost have done some sunbathing."

  "I find it is too boring, sunbathing. But yes, the sun was shining and all was right with the world."

  "So." I pondered this vain concealment. "Tell me what you did. Who was there?"

  "Oh, it was just me and my friend Patrick. I think I told you before it is his parents' house."

  "Just the two of you, then?"

  "Yes, it was very quiet, we could just relax and well, do our work."

  "How cosy." And he looked away as if I were insinuating something, though in fact I was baffled by this lie and hurt to be lied to and had a will to chase and expose him. His mother was out today at the Cathedral, and we had no coffee to fill the pauses and neutralise our embarrassments. We were alone in the house . . . I stood up and walked to the window and made a frowning survey of the garden, two Japanese maples with twisted limbs in a combustion of bronze and crimson. My long, disappointed silence bothered him.

  "I have done the reading you told me to do."

  "Good . . . good . . ."I came back and sat down. I needed to reestablish the reality of the weekend. "We might as well be very British," I said gravely, and watched his forced smile fade into unease. "Tell me again what the weather was like."

  Relief and boredom. "The jolly old weather again! In the morning there was some . . . fog; then it went off and there was only small cirrocumulus formations."

  " Aren't your friend Patrick's parents worried about leaving their house unattended?" I was brooding on the dream-mirage of yesterday's sunshine on white stucco, a door left open, and he was adding and taking away, smuggling Sibylle out of the picture, touching in the stratospheric clouds that I had never looked up to see.

  "They aren't worried. My friend's father, Mr Roger Dhondt, goes there quite often. He is a writer and, well, he does his writing there."

  "So your friend Patrick's surname is Dhondt?"

  "Yes, have you heard of him? Roger Dhondt has had published books about nature and—ecologie . . . "

  "Ecology. No, I've never heard of him."

  "You know he used to be at Het Zwin, with the wild fowl. He is very interested in birds." I glanced at Luc, and saw he was troubled by my frown. "In fact," he said encouragingly, "their house is called Sea-Gulls."

  "I know, I know," I felt like mumbling, as even the vacant charm of that boarding-house, blue-skied name tarnished.

  "Sometimes in the summer there are people living on the sand. But they are bums and we are not worried about them." He grinned like a child who has no access to his parents' puzzling sadness and tries to entertain them, while they exchange a stony intimate look. "Sometimes they go into another house there, which has been empty for many years. We know they sometimes go into the garden, which is fine, okay, and make a fire and have a party. Now, my friend Patrick thinks there are people living in the house, but I don't know."

  "And why would he think that?" I said vaguely. "I mean, has he seen people there?"

  Luc was vaguer still. "He said he heard noises in the house, which is next to ours, to his. There was, you know, a guy around, that we kept seeing; he was a stranger, but I think he was a nice good-looking guy, quite rich, and not a bum who would break open the house." I stared at him, and saw him stir himself again—but as though not certain it was worth the effort—to a further pleasantry. "My friend Patrick says he could hear the sound of someone snoring, in fact, coming out of the house. But I think it was only the sound of the sea."

  It was on the journey back from St Ernest that Matt told me he would be going out of town for a week or two. He said it in so casual a way that I knew it must be something important, into which I shouldn't enquire.

  "I'll miss you," I said, and was surprised by the truth of my words.

  He said, "Yeah", in an ambiguous murmur; and after a moment mentioned some business things he hoped I'd look after for him. He fiddled in his breast pocket for a fat roll of notes and tossed it into my lap. I didn't like to count them while I was with him, but I felt a surge of undeserved good luck, whatever was involved. I'd been ignoring the money problem, burning up my good but sparse teaching-fees in drink and wasting my small reserves on romantic unnecessaries like my lobelia shirt—I had sort of decided that after the weekend I would make a decision to decide what to do. Then it turned out we weren't even to spend tonight together; and as he was leaving the next morning I was unexpectedly bereft. I wandered back to my room feeling wild and lonely.

  An envelope with beautiful, imaginative writing on had been slipped under my door, and lay on the threadbare rug. I tidied away an ashtray, a crusted coffee-mug, a bottle of milk precipitated into caramel grounds beneath faintly blue water—all out of respect to my letter and the capricious hint it gave of a finer life I could be living. I had no real idea who had sent it; I hoped it might be an invitation—someone's offer to look after me for an hour or two. But hardly anyone knew where I lived. I was dying to see Cherif again, but doubted if his writing, which I had never seen, could possibly be so rococo. Marcel's, I knew, was loopy and backward-leaning. And then my first idea came back, against my better judgement: that it was from Luc. Something he was too scared to say to me face to face—a kind of Valentine in a fancy script, or its opposite, the astounding note that said everything must end.

  It was from Paul Echevin, and I adjusted after a moment to the pleasure of that. Did I want to earn a bit of money by helping him out at the Museum? Sometimes it would be Helene's job of reading a novel in the hall and occasionally selling a ticket or a postcard; mainly it would be paperwork, checking references, proof-reading the English text of the Orst catalogue that he really must get finished before the coming summer, that was so many years overdue.

  I felt charmed, and a little intimidated—even though he laid the letter out as an inventive uncle might for a bright child, with a sketch at the bottom of himself disappearing under stacks of paper, and his name written with streaming tendrils for serifs, like the visiting-card of the South-West Wind in a children's book I'd had. I felt the ghostly oppression of work, the wrong way you had to do for money what you wouldn't do otherwise; I was thinking like a child who can't see the point of things, but whose questions to a jovial grown-up touch even so on some uncomfortable flaw. Then I saw myself, still about nine years old, sitting at Paul Echevin's immense desk, chin on forearm, in the first week of wintertime, in the teatime lamplight and gloom and the busy adult silence, lost in a world of words and pictures.

  It was dark on the stairs, dark in the room at the top, but the darkness there was like the darkness in films, where sleepers lie in blue shadow; or there was a phosphorescence in the air, the curtains, the sheets and pillowcase were mildly luminous. I stepped cautiously over dropped clothes, a screwed-up dress shirt, upsettingly jokey boxer-shorts, anxious above all not to tread on a pair of glasses. Luc was asleep, on his back, his pyjama-jacket open, his nipples wide, brown and rough, he held back the greedy duvet with a leather-gloved hand. I thought
if I could unbutton that glove at the wrist and coax it off those long, nervous fingers it would be a very beautiful achievement. I perched on the edge of the bed and looked minutely at his stomach as it dropped with the long-delayed breaths of deep sleep, the tongue-tempting crevice of his navel. His anatomy was grand and somehow luminous itself, and where the blue veins thickened in his neck they seemed transparent, as in a model or a chart. The model of a man . . . I pressed back the bedclothes devoutly and saw his cock asleep in the heedless gape of his pyjamas. It was heavy and warm in my hand, silky, the skin slid back with an intimate moist whisper. When he opened his eyes I was the first thing he saw. He was too moved to smile, it was love like a tranced levitation, cosy and radiant like divisi strings, a saint's vision perhaps of the timeless in the humdrum. It was ours. His arms circled my head and brought me down to him.

  When I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was a pair of shoes, made of webbed orange-coloured leather, shucked at forty-five degrees, the heel of one on top of the other, like a first position in ballet. They were intensely horrible, alien in design, scuffed and lopsided from wear. I was lying on my side at the mattress's edge, the bedding just reaching to the line of my shoulders and hips. I was afraid the weight of my stomach would topple me over on to the floor. The shoes were the focus of my dry misery, and I closed my eyes again and ran yearningly back through the dream-fade to catch and remember everything I could. How he had loved me. How he had clung to me.

  I was fixed in my position by the rough heel of a foot pushed against my calf and the lightly adhesive pressure of a biggish bottom pressed against my own. I tried shoving slowly but firmly backwards, but met with unconscious, heavy resistance. Squinting at my watch on the floor I saw it was only 6.15; daylight was hardening on the wall and all I longed for was warmth and oblivion. I slipped out of bed, walked round and climbed into the cold welcome of the other side. The pillow there had the yeasty smell of dried semen—fresh and stale at once.

  I looked at the big stubbly face of—who was it? Frits. From Holland. A keen uncritical lover of English literature. Perhaps the coppery lighting of the Cassette and the benign warp of drink had lent him a glow as he stood against the wall reading Of human Bondage—misled himself, I suspected, by that potent noun, but still stubbornly hoping after two hundred pages. He'd looked shelteringly big and artisanal, with a touching mixture of clumsiness and adroitness about him; I imagined him doing something expertly with wood.

  He seemed pleasantly surprised when I asked him back to my place, as if our talk about Maugham might have been an end in itself; as if I were offering him a lift that took me somewhat out of my way. "Thanks very much," he said. It was clear to me as we walked across the empty town that I had picked up a pretty heavy bore; every time I pushed the conversation gratingly towards men and sex he said "Yes, yes" as though he didn't quite understand, and then went on in his dogged English about Richard Adams. I began to wonder if he knew the Cassette was a gay bar.

  And then the Spanish girls, the voices in the woodwork, murmuring and shrieking in what felt like derision as I sat in Frits's lap in the armchair and slipped my hand inside his denim shirt and jiggled backwards and forwards on him until he had a big fat hard-on. "Yes," he said, "I began to know that the life of being in an office all day, every day, was not for me. I then needed to take time to find out what it was that I really wanted to do. I wanted to read good literature, and travel around the place. I had to get out of the mouse-market, Edward.

  I lifted the bedclothes a little and looked at his sleeping body in the greyish light, slumped, hairy, held in, it almost seemed, by a long brown hairless scar, the plump bud of his cock shifting and stiffening as he rose himself into the light of early dreams.

  Chapter 10

  "Hello."

  "Hello? Matt?"

  "Matt's not here, I'm afraid." A thoughtful pause.

  "Oh yes." The line went dead.

  I carried on sorting out the orders, clipped pink slips on which products were tactfully referred to by number. A good sprawl of post awaited me each afternoon on the floor of the porch—the business letters addressed to Matt, and occasional envelopes for a certain Wim Vermeulen, which I set aside and which aroused my curiosity more. I supposed he must be one of his old lovers or partners, or perhaps the previous occupant. Something kept me from opening them—I wondered raffishly if it might be thieves' honour.

  The letters from Matt's subscribers were often several sheets long, full of secret enthusiasm and not easy to read. "I can't thank you enough for introducing me to young Casey Hopper," one of them began. "What a 'doll'! I've quite fallen for him. It's such a pleasure to find a lad of that age who really likes to take it from an older—and bigger—man. And Casey, I am pleased to say, is certainly well set-up himself. He has such a pleading look as he lies there spread out, when his arms and legs are tied to the bedposts and I can gaze at his secret treasure. Sometimes it is 'all over' then, before anything else has happened.

  "Perhaps I should tell you a bit about myself. I used to be in the agribusiness in Ghent, where I have lived all my life. I am sixty-seven by the way, and have retired now, so I have plenty of time on my hands, and will certainly be getting in touch with you again. I like young men, eighteen to twenty-five or so, well-built, with short hair. I do not like boys with obviously dyed hair or who are effeminate in any way and wear ear-rings or jewellery. As you can imagine Casey Hopper tops my bill!

  "You may think it strange, but I have never much cared for sex, despite what I have been saying; nor would it have been easy for me. I live with my mother, who is now ninety-four but has only recently become fully blind. I have always relied on the clean and easy practice of what used to be called self-abuse. I'm proud to say that I have climaxed at least once every day since 1937.

  "Hot hunks 12 certainly lived up to its name! Please let me know if you have any further films with the admirable young Casey in . . ." The writing was clear, slanting, impatient. His was in every sense a busy professional hand.

  I could hardly think of a less appropriate person than Matt to confide in, though I understood the scientific attitude with which he would read a letter like this. His was a service industry, which entailed a certain respect for the fantasies it serviced. I had seen him at his silver-screened lap-top intently answering such queries; and listened to the muted rattling runs that followed the pause as he thought through some cruder provocation and gave a little cackle or a throaty "Oh yeah . . . " The trick, it seemed, was to be both direct and archly metaphorical, the result having an enthusiastic, illiterate tone, in its obscene way not unlike the work of my aunt Tina. Love was blindly introduced and as a prefix was fully interchangeable with fuck: love-poles were destined as a rule for love-holes, and at the end it was geysers of white-hot love-juice that (paradoxically) cooled the lovers down. I answered one or two of these enquiries myself and discovered a natural aptitude for it: "Pretty-faced Lance soon gags on Chad's massive love-meat, and Chad turns all his attentions to the youngster's pleading love-hole." Later on I tried variations drawn from Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Rick worships Cody's massive mansex . . . Doug and Darren dauntlessly double-fuck the freshman's dewy down-side . . ."

  I felt a little uneasy, though, in the half-world of Matt's room, treading on so many things. The long knots of the bedding looked a bit too squalid without him, lean and white, sprawled amongst them. I noticed more than before the musty smell of the bathroom where the soiled underwear that he stole and sold collected behind the door and stopped it from opening. There was something eerie, as the deaf woman banged and sang through the wall, about finding the right fuck-film and copying it on to a new tape on two parallel VCRs. I perched among the junk, wrapping stained jockey-shorts in tissue paper and adding an authenticating ticket whilst the machines worked almost silently, with steady red lights, and the ritual imagery of love-meat passed along the cables.

  The phone rang again.

  "Hello."

  "Hello! Matt's
not there, right?"

  "Did you ring before? Is that Dirk?"

  "Oh yes it is."

  "You probably want to know if he's got anything for you, don't

  You? Well, he has."

  "Who is this, please?"

  "My name's er—Casey; Matt's left me in charge of his things."

  "What, like Casey Hopper. That's really great."

  "Like . . . I don't think I know him."

  "Oh, you'd like him. Actually he's very popular."

  "I've got something very special for you. I think you know what it is, don't you?"

  "If it's what I hope . . . Is it from a certain young man?"

  I consulted a clipboard Matt had left. "It is. To be precise, it is from—Master David K—"

  "Shush, Casey, don't say it." I felt I'd entered a secret place. I wondered if my interlocutor, my customer, was naked. "Please be so kind as to describe it for me."

  I reached down at random for one of the items. "I hope you will want this, Dirk. Matt has gone to great trouble to get it."

  "Of course. Anything of. . . David's . . ."

  "Well, it's a white pair of briefs. Calvin Klein."

  "Such vanity," Dirk whispered.

  "Medium."

  "Mm, mm," Dirk affirmed. "Is it, is it enriched, autographed?"

  I twisted it round rather gingerly, and noticed the red name-tape of one P. R. Maris. "It has a firm primrose signature in the front panel. It seems he dresses left, by the way."

  "I knew it."

  "It will be quite expensive, though," I said, looking at the price Matt had underlined on the list. "It has the front marking, about the size of a franc, very rich, but also a clear . . . rearward indication."

  "Oh the wicked boy!"

  "Yes, a proud stripe."

  I could feel a flush coming down the line. "Such youthful haste and high spirits." I let the sagged item, with its legend of juvenile incontinence, drop to the floor. "Do you know, I saw him, the other day, coming out of the school gates as pretty as you please in his breeches and I thought, little do you know, my angel, that I'm wearing your shameful little soccer-shorts at this moment—so tight and small they were."