“I’m carrying the alumni group banner in the march this year,” Andrew says.
“Good,” says Nathan.
“I really wish you’d come. You’d like it. Everyone will be there, and it’s a lot of fun to march.”
“Drop it, Andrew,” Nathan says. “You know how I feel. I think that kind of public display doesn’t do any good to anyone. It’s ridiculous.”
“It does the marchers a lot of good. It does the world a lot of good to see people who aren’t ashamed of who they are.”
“That’s not who I am,” Nathan says. “Maybe it’s part of what I am. But not who.” He turns and looks at the rose garden outside the window. “Don’t you see,” he says, “that it’s a question of privacy?”
“In any battle for freedom of identity there can be no distinction between the private and the political.”
“Oh, great, quote to me from the manual,” Nathan says. “That helps. You know what’s wrong with your party-line political correctness? Exactly what’s wrong with your march. It homogenizes gay people. It doesn’t allow for personal difference. It doesn’t recognize that maybe for some people what’s politically correct is personally impossible, emotionally impossible. And for a politics which is supposed to be in favor of difference, it certainly doesn’t allow for much difference among the ‘different.’ ” His pronunciation of this word brings to their minds the voices of elementary school teachers.
“I think you’re underselling politics, Nathan,” Andrew says.
“Oh, just give me a break, Andrew, give me a break,” Nathan says. “You know the only reason you ever found politics was because you had a crush on what’s-his-name—Joel Miller—senior year. You had a huge crush on him and you were scared little Andrew and you were afraid to use the word gay. I remember distinctly all the little ways you had of talking around that word. ‘I’m joining the widening circle,’ was all you could say to Celia. I remember that. ‘The widening circle.’ Where in hell you came up with that phrase is beyond me. And then there’s hunky Joel Miller who’ll only sleep with you if you wear a lavender armband and talk about ‘pre-Stonewall’ and ‘post-Stonewall’ every chance you get and suddenly our little Andrew is Mr. Big Political Activist. Jesus. You’re right about your politics, about there being no separation between the private and the political.”
He turns away from Andrew, clearly disgusted, picks up the jacket of the Ravel record and begins to read the liner notes furiously.
“I can’t stand this anymore,” Celia says, then sits down on the sofa. Neither of them seem to have heard her. Nathan looks as if he might start crying any second—he cries easily—and a slick smile is beginning to emerge on Andrew’s face.
“Nathan,” he says, “do I detect a note of jealousy in your voice?”
“Go to hell,” Nathan says, and storms out of the room.
“That’s right, that’s right, run away,” says Andrew, marching after him to the library door. “Just go cry on Daddy’s lap, why don’t you, you just go tell him all about it.”
“Stop it,” Celia says. He turns around, and she is in front of him, her face wrathful. “Jesus Christ,” she says, “you two are children. He overreacts to you, and the minute he’s vulnerable, you just go for the balls, don’t you? You just hit him right where it hurts?”
“Give me a break, Celia,” Andrew says. “He’s been asking for it, he’s been taunting me all weekend. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be his little punching bag, not anymore. I’m the stronger one. What just happened proves it.”
“All it proves is that you can be as cruel to him as he can be to you,” Celia says. “Big shit.”
“He knows I’m sensitive about dancing, so he goes after me about it. He treats me like a heedless fool whose only purpose in life is to break all his parents’ precious possessions. Well, I’m not a fool, Celia, I’m a hell of a lot better put-together person than he is.”
“All the more reason why you shouldn’t hurt him,” Celia says. “You know all that stuff about the march, about his parents, you know what a sore subject that is for him. Not to mention Joel Miller.”
“And all that time I was seeing Joel, did he say a word to me? Did he even talk to me? No! That time, Celia, he hurt me more than I could ever possibly have hurt him.”
Celia laughs, then—a hard, shrill laugh. “Let’s add up points,” she says. “Let’s see who’s been hurt the most.”
Nathan and Andrew became lovers in Florence, the summer after junior year. It happened only a few days before their scheduled rendezvous with Celia in Rome. That summer, like every summer, Nathan was a wanderer, a rich boy, one of hordes of backpack-bearing students trying to make the most of their Eurail passes. Andrew was in Europe under more impressive auspices; he had won a fellowship to study the influence of Mannerism on the Baroque, using as his chief example the statuary of several late sixteenth-century Italian gardens. Celia’s journey began later and ended earlier than her friends’ because she didn’t have much money, and had to get back to slave at a secretarial job in order to earn funds for her next year in college. She had never been to Europe before, and when she met her friends in Rome, she was exuberant with stories to tell them about her travels in England and France. In particular she wanted to tell them about a tiny town in Wales which had a wall and a moat, and how—big and uncoordinated as she was—she had climbed to the top of the old stone wall and marched its perimeter, as guardian knights had done in the thirteenth century. From the top of the wall, she could see the town—snug houses crammed together, and ruins of a castle, and the bay where fishermen caught salmon at high tide. And there, above it all, was Celia. She felt a rare self-confidence, and for once she liked the way she imagined she looked to other people—smart and self-assured, aware of how to travel right, able to drink in the pleasures of Europe without falling prey to its pitfalls and inconveniences. Indeed, arriving in Italy, Celia was so distracted by herself that it took her a few days to figure out what was going on between Nathan and Andrew. She talked and talked, and they sat across from her, their hands in front of them, and listened politely. Then, on the third day of their week together, the two of them insisted on keeping the double room they were sharing, and keeping Celia in an expensive single, even though a cheaper triple had opened up. She wondered why, and knew. That afternoon they walked out to the Catacombs, and on the way they played a game called In My Grandmother’s Trunk. “In my grandmother’s trunk,” Nathan began, “I found an addlepated aardvark.” Now it was Andrew’s turn. “In my grandmother’s trunk,” he declaimed, “I found an addlepated aardvark and a bellicose bovine.” Celia twisted her hair around her pinky and thought about it. “In my grandmother’s trunk, I found an addlepated aardvark, a bellicose bovine, and a crenellated chrysanthemum,” she said at last, smiling, proud of her answer. Nathan didn’t even look at her, though he had laughed at Andrew’s response. She realized they were in love as well as lovers then—recognizing, she supposes now, a certain secretiveness in the way they spoke, the way they listened for each other’s answers, as if they were talking in code. They offered each other enervated earwigs and truncated turnips as if they were precious gifts, until the game became something which had no place for Celia. Andrew was not out of the closet, then, and as far as she knew, he and Nathan knew each other only through her. The meeting among the three of them had been arranged spontaneously over one of the dinners the three of them had together. “Let’s say, July twenty-fourth, in front of the Pantheon,” said Nathan, who knew Rome (he claimed) as well as he knew New York. Andrew and Celia, neither of whom had been to Europe before, both marvelled that it was even possible to plan here, in the New World, for actual rendezvous in the strange Old World of Marcus Aurelius and Isabella Sforza and Eleanora de Toledo. And Nathan, too, enjoyed his status, as expert, as experienced traveller. He would show them everything, he told them. He would be a marvellous tour guide. Falling asleep that night, Celia had thought of books she had read as a child in which tr
ios of children went on adventures together in distant lands and on other worlds. But apparently, Nathan and Andrew had made some other plans without telling her, to meet earlier, and alone; apparently they had been seeing each other without her, and without her knowing; apparently, she realized, walking away from Rome, they were no longer hers, but each other’s.
Celia finally confronted them over Orzata at a café on the Piazza Navona. “I want you to know that I’m aware of what’s going on,” she said, “and I think we should talk about it.” In fact, Nathan did all the talking, while Andrew wriggled, embarrassed and terrified. What Celia remembers most vividly about that afternoon is the overwhelming desire to bolt and run which took her over. She thought longingly of her town in Wales, and of the old, crumbling wall, and of herself atop it, and she wished she could transport herself back there, just for an instant, and regain—now, when she needed it—that rare feeling of freedom, of having surpassed the needy world.
She congratulated them (and thought, how stupid, as if it’s an achievement); said she was happy for them (and thought, why am I so unhappy for myself?); agreed willingly to stay in her single room. But should she stay at all? Wouldn’t it be better if she left, and left the two of them alone? No, never! Of course they wanted her, she must stay. So she did. A few days later, they visited the garden of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli. Andrew was doing his research, taking furious notes about certain bas-reliefs of men turning into fishes. Andrew read to Nathan from his notebook:
It is the final act of reclamation that moss is destroying their faces. What’s thematized here is an endless battle between nature and art. On one level, nature subjugates the men by turning them into lower forms of life, but really art is subjugating nature. The fishes’ mouths are part of the drainage system—a technical wonder in the sixteenth century—which allows the fountain water to ceaselessly recirculate, by means of a number of pumps. Only now is nature taking its revenge, by destroying these fish faces, a little at a time, year after year. Wearing them down, growing them over with moss. Moss and wind and time. How long can Tivoli last?
Triumphantly he closed the blue notebook, which was printed with the insignia of their university. “Well?” he said.
“How poetic,” said Nathan.
Andrew looked at him. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean,” Nathan said, “it’s all lovely and sensitive, but I really can’t believe you’re making all these claims when you have no basis in historical fact. How can you know that what you say is going on is what was intended?”
“Historical fact,” Andrew said, “is the historicist’s fiction. I don’t pretend I can know anyone’s intention. I’m doing a reading of the garden.”
It went on from there. Andrew accused Nathan of being a pedant, and Nathan accused Andrew of evading the rigors of scholarship. Already Celia understood more about them than they did about themselves: Andrew was impulsive, Nathan cautious; Andrew had a reason to be in Europe, Nathan had none (and was jealous). She found the matter altogether tedious, so she wandered away from them and fell in with a tour group from Oklahoma. The group was standing in front of the statue of Diana of Ephesus, her twelve breasts spouting water into an ancient urn, and the guide was talking about the Goddess being a symbol of natural fertility. “Some say she is related to Vishnu,” he said solemnly, “the God with the thirteen hands.”
“I’ll bet her husband was the guy with the thirteen hands!” a woman with a beehive hairdo bellowed, and everyone roared, and Celia—standing among them—realized suddenly that she, too, was laughing, and that she had to leave.
She went the next morning. At the train station, Nathan and Andrew pleaded with her, begged her to stay, but she was decided. She got on an all-night train to Calais, and a ferry back to England, and another train to London. And after a single night in a hostel in Knightsbridge she took all the money she had left and bought a round-trip ticket to her beloved little town in Wales. Almost as soon as she got there she checked into a bed-and-breakfast and went to look at the old stone wall. There was a group of children no more than nine or ten years old being led around it, children from some industrial town in the Midlands, with Mohawk haircuts and dirty black vinyl jackets on. They were fighting with each other over candy, pretending to push each other off the wall. Then they started yelling things at her—obscenities she could hardly understand—and she hurriedly walked away and stood on the grass of the town green and closed her eyes. The air was fresh with the smell of recent rain, as well as the smell of biscuits baking nearby. An old man sitting on a stone bench hobbled over to her, and started speaking to her, but his Welsh accent was so strong that she thought he was speaking in another language, Finnish or Dutch. “Slower, please, slower,” she said, until she finally realized he was asking her why she was crying. “Crying?” she said, and put her hands to her eyes, which were moist with tears.
Across a continent, Nathan and Andrew were not even thinking about her.
Although they’ve knocked repeatedly on his door, Nathan has apparently resolved not to acknowledge the presence of his friends this afternoon, and so, around three o’clock, Andrew and Celia take a walk to the beach. Celia is determined to spend most of the day outdoors, with or without Nathan. He has brooded too long, and she is losing patience with him. Andrew, on the other hand, cannot stop worrying about his friend; his brief triumph has left in its wake a weighty sense of guilt. “I guess I won,” he tells Celia, “and it felt so good. But now I wish I’d lost. I don’t like this feeling. You know, he’s won practically every argument we’ve ever had.”
“Don’t be too upset about him,” Celia says. “You know how he is. He broods. Anyway, I thought you were so happy to have put him in his place.”
“But that’s just it,” Andrew says. “I’m not supposed to put him in his place. I’m not supposed to do that.”
“Andrew, that’s ridiculous,” Celia says. “Things change in relationships, and maybe this means you’re breaking out of the old pattern.”
Andrew shakes his head violently, and pushes a mosquito out of his face. “It just doesn’t work that way,” he says. “For years I’ve had this idea of who he was and who I was. I knew I was more politically aware and had a healthier attitude toward sex and toward being gay. And I knew he was politically backward and closeted and conservative and torn apart because the fact that he liked to sleep with men contradicted everything he was raised to be. But all that time, he still had this power over me because he was the first person I slept with. He’ll never let go of the fact that I was a scared little boy and he knew exactly what he was doing.”
“I’m not so sure that’s true,” Celia says.
“But he did that for me, Celia. That first night we met in Florence, we were so scared, we both knew what we were there for, why we’d come, but we couldn’t even seem to talk about it. Every gesture—every mention of anything having to do with being gay—seemed very courageous, because I still believed, on some level, that he’d be horrified if he found out I wanted to sleep with him, and say something like, ‘How could you think I’d want to do that? ’ I mean, I really didn’t know about Nathan. I was going on instinct. And then, finally, we were both in the room in the pensione, and we were sitting on his bed, and he wouldn’t do anything. We just sat there, and five minutes went by, and not a word. I couldn’t move.”
“Why?”
“You see, it was understood that he was more experienced. And that he would make the first move. I can’t explain why, but it just was. And then he started coughing. Oh, God, I was scared. And I patted him on the back. And I just didn’t move my hand away again.
“He said, ‘You’re very suave,’ and then I hoisted my legs up on the bed—I was sitting and he was lying—and in the middle of getting up on the bed I got this terrible charley horse and started screaming and he just laughed. He bent me over and sort of wrenched my leg into shape again. And then—well, we made love. It was very greedy. No subtlety, no technique
. But it was still very definitely ‘making love,’ not just sex.” He laughs. “I remember there were these two drunk Americans who came into the room next to ours late that night from the Red Garter singing ‘Superfreak.’ And then around three one of them must have had a nightmare because he ran out into the hall and started screaming, and then crying. The other one tried to shut him up, but he just wailed and wailed. I remember exactly what his friend said. He said, ‘Hey, man, chill out, don’t freak.’ Nathan was asleep, and we were wrapped around each other in an incredibly complicated way. I could feel all the hairs on his body, and his breath, and his heartbeat. I lay awake all night.”
For several minutes they have been walking by the ocean without realizing it. The beach is almost empty except for a single sunbather, and a woman swimming laterally alongside the shore.
“The next day,” Andrew says, “we ran into this girl I knew from my botany class the semester before. Charlotte Mallory, you remember her? We had dinner with her. Nathan had his leg pressed against mine under the table the whole time. It was a wonderful secret, something to look forward to, what we’d try that night, everything I had to learn.”
He stops, smiles, and turns to face Celia. “This isn’t fair of me, is it?” he says. “Imposing this all on you.”
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