“I have lived under this curse so long,” he confessed to her, in the breathless, nearly tearful tone he soon found himself slipping into, the equivalent in discourse of sinking to her feet, in a quest for certainty beneath them, “who’d’ve imagined anyone would see into it, to meet its terms so exactly . . . so honorably . . . Colonel Khäutsch was cruel, at least for as long as he was erect, Theign was content to have power and be obeyed, those were desires I could understand, but, but . . .”
“Before this is done with,” she informed him, “if it ever is, you will no longer imagine, you will believe.” Amused at the melodrama in her own voice but herself half believing what she’d said, her great eyes shining so. Cruelly, but that was the least of it. Except for a holidaygoer at Wigan once, whose words might have been partially obscured by a strange fried-potato sandwich, it was probably the most romantic declaration anyone had yet made him.
He kept on trying to understand. One could look out over London, from the top of the Earl’s Court Wheel at twilight, one by one as the lights came on and the drapes were drawn. It was going on behind every other window one could see, common as stars in the sky, the reversals of power, wives over husbands, pupils over masters, troopers over generals, wogs over whites, the old expected order of things all on its head, a revolution in the terms of desire, and yet, at Yashmeen’s feet, that seemed only the outskirts—the obvious or sacramental form of the thing. . . .
“Don’t get too spiritual about this,” she cautioned, though it was meant perhaps more for herself, and her own outlandish hopes on the subject. “You know it’s your body that loves this,” stroking him untenderly, “not only parts of your body traditional to such matters but slowly, as your education proceeds, you may be certain, with every square inch of it, every hair, whether left in place or painfully removed, every starved nerve. . . .
“This again.” She flicked at it with a scarlet fingernail, and he drew a sharp breath not altogether in pain. “You are thinking about a man. Tell me.”
“Yes.” He would not insist on “love”—but what else could one feel just at this moment? “Men, actually.”
“Yes. Not one particular man?”
He was silent for a while. “No. A generic shadow—with a substantial physique I suppose. . . . That doesn’t mean—” he turned to her, borne on a wave of undisguised tenderness.
“Don’t for a moment imagine that I shall crop my hair and put on a dildo for you, Cyprian.”
“I wouldn’t dream of asking. Of begging.” As if he could not quite resist, he added, “Of course if there were any changes I might make, hair, you know, wardrobe, maquillage sort of thing that you’d find more appealing—”
She laughed, pretending to examine him by the candlelight. “‘Of course.’ You’re nearly my height, your bones are fine and your features delicate enough, but the brain behind them is filled with little, I fear, beyond the usual boy’s delusions about the charms of womankind. As you are, you cannot rival the least clairvoyante of my friends.”
“And as I might be?”
“Am I your tutoress? Come here, then.”
LATE AT NIGHT they would lie together watching lights, moving and still, reflected in the canals.
“What was there for you to doubt?” she whispered. “I have loved women, as you have loved men—”
“Perhaps not ‘loved’—”
“—and what of it? We can do whatever we can imagine. Are we not the world to come? Rules of proper conduct are for the dying, not for us.”
“Not for you, anyway. You’re much braver than I.”
“We will be as brave as we must.”
IT WAS MID-APRIL, Carnevale had been over for weeks, and Lent was coming to a close, skies too drawn and pallid to weep for the fate of the cyclic Christ, the city having slowly regained a maskless condition, with a strange dull shine on the paving of the Piazza, less a reflection of the sky than a soft glow from regions below. But the silent communion of masks was not quite done here.
On one of the outer islands in the Lagoon, which had belonged to the Spongiatosta family for centuries, over an hour away even by motor craft, stood a slowly drowning palazzo. Here at midnight between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday began the secret counter-Carnevale known as Carnesalve, not a farewell but an enthusiastic welcome to flesh in all its promise. As object of desire, as food, as temple, as gateway to conditions beyond immediate knowledge.
With no interference from authority, church or civic, all this bounded world here succumbed to a masked imperative, all hold on verbatim identities loosening until lost altogether in the delirium. Eventually, after a day or two, there would emerge the certainty that there had always existed separately a world in which masks were the real, everyday faces, faces with their own rules of expression, which knew and understand one another—a secret life of Masks. It was not quite the same as during Carnevale, when civilians were allowed to pretend to be members of the Mask-world, to borrow some of that hieratic distance, that deeper intimacy with the unexpressed dreams of Masks. At Carnevale, masks had suggested a privileged indifference to the world of flesh, which one was after all bidding farewell to. But here at Carnesalve, as in espionage, or some revolutionary project, the Mask’s desire was to be invisible, unthreatening, transparent yet mercilessly deceptive, as beneath its dark authority danger ruled and all was transgressed.
Cyprian rode over with the Prince and Princess in their steam launch, embarking in the twilight from the landing at Ca’ Spongiatosta. For half an hour or so, as the moon rose and took over the sky, Cyprian had the disoriented sense that they had ascended, high above the Lagoon, the sky a smudged wilderness of illuminated smoke, colors everywhere more brilliant than expected, and from the perilous altitude he thought he saw far below merchant ships getting up steam, produce-boats on the way back out to Torcello and Malamocco, vaporetti and gondolas. . . .
They could hear the gathering for miles across the water. “It must have been like this a hundred years ago,” the Prince observed, “off San Servolo, with all the lunatics screaming.” The light ahead was a soiled electrical yellow, glaring off the water, intensifying as they approached. They pulled up to an ancient stone quay, the doomed palazzo swaying above them. Servants with torches, dressed in black tonight as Doge Gradengio’s cutthroat squad the Signori di Notte, escorted them inside.
NEAR MIDNIGHT, Cyprian, all decked out in a black taffeta ball toilette borrowed from the Principessa, an abbreviated mask of black leather over his eyes, his waist drawn in to an impossibly slender circumference, his small painted face framed by Signor Fabrizio’s re-imagining of Yashmeen’s hair, curled, powdered, sculpted, woven with seed pearls and Parma violets, was making a devastating high-heeled entrance down marble stairs and into the sea of masks and flesh below. Reef, up in one of the loggie, just about to light up a cheroot, stood gaping instead, not sure at first who it was, finding himself with an erection which now threatened to demolish the trousers of the Pierrot costume Yashmeen had insisted he wear. With some idea of getting a closer look, he wandered down into the general commotion, through which a small dance orchestra was just audible.
“Well howdy there, cowpoke.” It was Cyprian all right, his voice soft and amused, sent upward into a register suitable for dalliance, standing so close that Reef could smell his perfume, something floral, elusive, night-blooming. . . . Without delay the youth, out for mischief tonight, had reached his tiny gloved hand boldly to stroke first Reef’s nipples, also by now grown painfully rigid, and then, no this could not be happening, Reef’s penis, which, far from shrinking from the brazen assault, now continued to exhibit a mind of its own, Cyprian, his eyes hypnotically fixed on Reef’s, was about to say more when his playful hand was suddenly grasped and pulled away.
“Cyprian, I have spoken and spoken to you about this, and still you disobey me,” whispered Yashmeen, in satin domino, speaking from behind a lace veil that covered her face from hairline to just below her chin, “have you no shame? You
know you shall have to suffer the consequences now. Come along, both of you.” She took Cyprian firmly by the elbow and steered him through the crowd, some of whom took the opportunity to caress the misbehaving creature as he tried to pass. Cyprian could scarcely breathe, not only from the constriction of his corset, and Yashmeen’s intentions toward his body, but mostly from Reef’s presence, the dark energy just behind him, almost touching. They had never been all together quite like this till now, the proceedings had been limited to the two heterosexual legs of the triangle. What could she possibly have in mind? Would he be obliged to kneel and watch them coupling? Would she abuse him as she was used to, but openly in front of Reef, and would he be able to bear that humiliation? He did not quite dare to hope.
They found an upper room, full of gilt furniture and dark heavy velvet hangings. Pale amoretti, who over the generations had seen it all, lounged about the ceiling, nudging, smirking, grooming the feathers of one another’s little wings, passing world-weary remarks at the unfolding spectacle below, which would not in fact depart unduly from the erotic vernacular of these islands.
Yashmeen reclined among the cushions of a red velvet divan, allowing the already precarious hem of her costume to slide upward and reveal her much-commented-upon legs in black silk hosiery, which she now pretended to inspect and adjust. Reef took a step forward, maybe two, to improve his view. “No, stay where you are. Just there . . . good, don’t move. Cyprian, tesoro, you know where you must be.” Bowing his head, gracefully lifting his skirts as if to curtsy, Cyprian sank to his knees in a great rustling of silk taffeta. As Yashmeen had arranged them, he could not help noticing, his face was now level with and quite close to Reef’s penis, which Reef, at Yashmeen’s suggestion, was removing from his trousers.
It did not take nearly as long as Cyprian would have wished. He had grown fond over the years of preliminaries but now was able to get in no more than a few trailing tongue-kisses, a quick electrifying blink or two from his long eyelashes to the underside of the heated organ before hearing Yashmeen’s command, “Quickly now. Into his mouth Reef in one stroke, no more, and then you must be perfectly still and allow this wicked little fellatrice to do all the work. And you, Cyprian, when he spends you must not swallow any of it, you must keep it all in your mouth, is that understood?” By now she could barely maintain the tone of command, having aroused herself with kid-gloved fingers busy at clitoral bud and parted labia now sleekly framed among the foam of lace around her hips. “You are both my . . . my . . .” She could not quite pursue her thought, as Reef, having lost all control, came bursting in a great pungent flood, which Cyprian did his best to accommodate as he had been ordered to.
“Now come here, Cyprian, crawl to me, and heaven help you if you try to swallow, or let a drop fall, bring me that impudent little face, put your mouth here, yes just here,” as her strong thighs closed pitilessly on his head, his scented wig askew, her own adored hair, and her hands at the back of his neck keeping him where he was. “Now use your tongue, your lips, whatever you must, but I want all of it, out of your mouth and inside me, yes for you are nothing here but a little go-between, you see, you shall never, never, enjoy the privilege of having anything but your wicked mouth where it is now, and I do hope Cyprian you are not touching yourself without my permission, because I shall be ever so angry if you . . . yes, dear creature . . . exactly. . . .” She was wordless for a while, and Cyprian lost track of the time, surrendering altogether to her scent, her taste, Reef’s taste, the muscular enclosure of her thighs, until she parted them briefly and he thought he heard footfalls on the carpet behind him, and then large lawbreaking hands were lifting his gown. Without being told he arched his back and felt Reef, ready to roll once again, pull down the exquisite drawers Yashmeen’s seamstress had stitched together all of Venetian lace from Melville & Ziffer, praying that nothing would tear, and then the hard hands on his bared hindquarters as Reef laughed and slapped him there. “Well if this ain’t just the sweetest thing.” In one painful, well, not really painful slow lunge, Reef entered him. . . . But here let us reluctantly leave them, for biomechanics is one thing but intimacy quite another, isn’t it, yes and by now Reef and Yashmeen were smiling too directly at one another, with Cyprian feeling too absurdly grateful here held between them so securely as to make the vigorous seeing-to he was now receiving seem almost—though only almost—incidental.
FROM THEN TILL ASCENSION DAY, the day Venice got remarried each year to the sea, as the two young men, one who had never imagined the other, one who had gone beyond imagining and now only hoped that nothing would turn out to be too “real,” made firm the third connection in their triad, both wondered how close to “love” any of this might be venturing.
“It’s only gratitude, really,” Cyprian shrugged. “She was in a predicament once, it happened that I knew where one of the exits was, of course it all looks like a miracle to her, but I know better, and you should too, I suppose.”
“I’ve seen ’em swept up,” Reef argued. “This is the article, all right.”
Assuming it was no more than the kind of flirtatious dialogue he’d long grown used to, “You have developed a clinical eye for . . . this condition?”
“Love, ol’ buddy. Word make you nervous?”
“More like impatient.”
“O.K. We’ll see. Don’t suppose you’re a betting man . . . ?”
“A traveler on a budget right at the moment, I’m afraid.”
Reef was chuckling, apparently to himself. “Don’t worry, buckaroo, your money’s safe from me. Just, when you finally do get that face powder all out of your eyes, don’t come asking me for no free advice, ’cause I sure won’t know what to say.”
“And . . . the two of you . . .” managing to raise both eyebrows in what he hoped Reef would read as sympathy.
“Better ask her,” Reef with at least two expressions struggling for space on his face. “I’m just here on the extended tour, you might call it.”
“Reef is in the nature of a holiday,” she had admitted to Cyprian, “from all you complexos, so fascinating when encountered in the salons of the swank, yet in private able to grow tiresome with such remarkable speed.”
One day Cyprian had just emerged from about an hour of smoking and soaking in the tub when Reef strolled in. “She’s not here,” Cyprian said. “She’s off shopping.”
“Ain’t her I’m lookin for.” Cyprian had scarcely taken note of Reef’s expressively erect penis, before Reef had seized his hair and was pushing him to his bare knees.
“We mustn’t, you know . . . she’ll be ever so angry. . . .”
“What about it? lettin a woman ramrod you around like ’at all the time, hell if you’d just once talk back to her . . . They want to be told what’s what, ain’t you figured that one out?”
Once Cyprian would have snapped back, “Oh? Have you been ordering her around on a regular basis, I must’ve failed to notice that.” But now, kneeling demurely, he was content to take Reef’s penis into his mouth and gaze upward through his lashes at Reef’s distant face, slightly hazed by tears of desire.
Before long Reef was off on one of his rodeo rides and Cyprian was screaming into a lace pillow, as usual, and the air was vivid with smells of lilacs and shit and frangipani. Sunlight off the canal glimmered into the windows. Yashmeen was gone all afternoon.
“Our little secret, I imagine.”
“Don’t it ever—”
“What?”
“Guess I’m just curious. How a man can let somebody do that to him, without even—”
“Maybe you’re not just somebody, Reef.”
“Never mind that, now. I’m sayin if it was me, I’d want to kill anybody tried that on me. Hell, I’d have to kill ’em.”
“Well don’t worry, I’m not about to harm you. Dangerous as I am.”
“You don’t feel like that you’ve been . . . I mean don’t it hurt?”
“It hurts, and it doesn’t hurt.”
“Ja
panese talk. Thanks. Knew a certain Nip mystic, back in San Francisco, used to talk like ’at all the time.”
“The only way to find out if, and how much, and all that, Reef, is to try it, but you’d probably take offense if I even suggested that.” Once he would have been flirting all out, but now— “So I shan’t.”
Reef squinted. “You’re not talkin about”—he made circling gestures with his fingers, “you doin me, nothin like that.” Cyprian shrugged. “Not exactly no whanger you got there.”
“That much less to be afraid of. Isn’t it?”
“Afraid? Son, it ain’t the pain, hell, livin is pain. But a man’s honor—When it’s your honor, it’s life and death. You don’t have that, where you’re from? England?”
“Perhaps I’ve only failed to see a connection between honor and desire, Reef.”
Disingenuous as always—for Cyprian had in fact begun to appreciate that out “in the field” it was precisely his strong desire to be taken that offered him a practical edge, released him from wasting time and energy over questions of rectal integrity, or who in a given encounter would be dominant—that whatever “honor” meant, it no longer had much to do with these outmoded sexual protocols. Let others, if they wished, keep floundering along in the old swamps—Cyprian worked better on firmer ground.
On the other hand, it encouraged people who didn’t know him well to confuse submissiveness with sympathy, especially those with the curious belief that sodomites, having few troubles of their own, could never become bored listening to the difficulties of others.
In many respects a product of his home island, not given to nasal intrusion, Cyprian, bewildered as always by the American willingness to confess anything to any stranger at any length, now found himself more and more an audience for Reef’s confidences.
“And there was the days when I used to see em on the trains, sometimes be sittin right next to em, these young fellas who were out riding county to county, crossin em state lines, supposed to be looking for work but really just crazy to get away from the whole thing. Ain’t that they hate the kids. They’ll show you tintypes of the kids more often than not, hell, they love em chavalitos. Maybe they even love the wife, they’ll show you her picture, too, sometimes there in a pose, or got something on, or not on, that the authorities might call ‘calculated to arouse,’ and it’s clear as a drugstore’s front window, ‘Not bad, right? and if you as a normal enough fellow think she looks even a little wicked, well, odds have just improved there’ll be somebody else too, back there, with the same opinion, just as normal as you, who, maybe even right this minute, this complete stranger, is doin me a favor and he don’t even know it.’
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