The Marble Quilt

by David Leavitt

  At that time, in that place, people settled longer at hotels than they do now. Stays of several weeks or even months were not uncommon. It was never very much time before guests were forging alliances, staking out territories, waging wars. The tutor, having spent a large chunk of his childhood living in hotels, finds the mere prospect of all this wearying. He remembers vividly the hours he had to endure sitting next to his mother in tearooms, longing to run outside, which she forbade. (To some extent he still longs to run outside.) Medieval architecture is his passion. He does not relish intrigues, rumors, cold-shoulderings—the daily bread of hotel life. His charge, on the other hand, thrives in such an atmosphere. With his stalklike body, his pale, delectable features, Bosie might have been one of those white asparagus shoots that grow only in the absence of sun. Natural light did not favor him. His skin burned easily. He required interiority to blossom, the rays of a chandelier.

  He was nineteen now, and at the peak of his seraphic beauty.

  The tutor checks his watch: it is almost one, the hour at which he and Bosie have agreed to meet. And so, abandoning the mattress, which he would have liked to turn over (but what worse horrors might he have found on the other side?), he leaves his room and heads out to the covered terrace that overlooks the beach. Dressed in a striped jacket, mauve trousers, and broad-brimmed hat, Bosie leans dreamily against the rail, gazing at the promenade, where some old women are strolling. Really, the spectacle of him takes the tutor’s breath away. Bosie is narrow-shouldered, with light, wavy hair. His eyes, green and gold, recall the sun-mottled ground beneath a tree. Only his lips are less than classical. Narrow and bloodless, they close into a crooked line. Somehow this imperfection makes him more, not less, desirable to the tutor. Bosie’s face might be a girl’s face; it is certainly one that girls envy. Yet there is nothing girlish about his carriage—and that is the miraculous thing (and the thing about which everyone comments). Bosie is every inch a boy—albeit one who has to shave only twice in a week. This odd dressing up of essential masculinity in the trappings of feminine loveliness intoxicates the tutor. For the first time in his life, he is in love—a state to which, like most states, he feels unequal. With Bosie he never knows what to do or say. So he stands his ground, peering at Bosie’s back, waiting for Bosie to speak, to act, to tell him what to do.

  “Oh, Gerald, isn’t it beautiful, the sea?” Bosie asks. “I’m so happy we came here. If we’d looked at one more flying buttress, I would have gone mad.”

  Gerald, who reverences the flying buttress, only nods, and curses his weakness. After all, hasn’t he promised Lady Queensberry to divert Bosie’s attention from the very temptations the hotel incarnates—the temptations of “society,” to which Bosie is already so dangerously susceptible? Yet to this task, alas, he has also proven unequal. Instead of waking Bosie to the uplifting glory of medieval church architecture, he has allowed Bosie to sway his attentions from that holy pursuit. Instead of teaching him to love what he loves, he has let himself be dragged back into an atmosphere he detests, pettish and airless and reeking of eau de cologne.

  Gerald is a few years older than Bosie, at present without fixed employment but in future to serve as assistant master at a number of schools, then as a war correspondent. He is also a nephew of one of Bosie’s great-aunts. Their pairing up for this journey was the brainchild of Lady Queensberry, who had been worried lest her impatient son should have nothing to occupy him during the interval between Winchester (where he had finished in the spring) and Oxford (to which he would go down in the fall). A continental ramble under Gerald’s edifying and stolid management was quickly settled upon as the ideal solution. The trip would have an educative purpose—that is to say, Gerald would ensure that Bosie direct his energies toward the pursuit of cultural enrichment—but at some point the boy got the better of his tutor. Thus the abandonment of cathedrals in favor of esplanades, this hotel, “luncheon.”

  What the ladies hadn’t counted on was Gerald’s incipient homosexuality—and Bosie’s skills as a seducer.

  Most likely it started long before they reached the Côte d’Azur. Indeed, very possibly it was the reason their journey veered from its cultural itinerary in the first place. As I imagine it, early in the trip Bosie picked up on his tutor’s sexual anxiety—Gerald’s unspoken (and largely subconscious) looking. A challenge presented itself. By the end of his Winchester years Bosie had honed the skills he’d practiced so awkwardly on Wellington into an efficient set of strategies for which he might even have written down the rules, much as his hyperactive father wrote (or helped to write) the rules for boxing. To lure his randy schoolmates into bed, however, was by this time becoming old hat; to seduce a relation older than himself, and charged with the responsibility of keeping him out of trouble—now that would be proof of his power!

  Here is how I see him working. Though usually they secure two rooms at each hotel in which they stay, occasionally they have to share a double room. Imagine poor Gerald, then, coming in from his washing up, only to find Bosie naked before the looking glass, his very white behind thrust just slightly outward. Gerald stops in his tracks, stares a few seconds, before coughing to announce his embarrassed presence, at which point Bosie turns, laughs, pulls on his dressing gown.

  That night Gerald can’t keep the image of Bosie’s nakedness out of his mind. His curiosity is heightened in stages. The Douglas rules: after a first flash of exposure (ideally of the backside), take care never to show more than a delectable portion of yourself; only glimpses. One night Bosie’s shirt might flop open, exposing a nipple as red as a pomegranate seed. Or pulling off his socks, he might caress his own pale ankles. In his mind, meanwhile, the object of his campaign struggled to put the pieces together—a struggle made all the more anxious by the fact that the flash of entire nakedness with which Bosie had first enticed was even now fading from memory.

  Oh, Bosie is merciless! He is tunneling under, undermining the foundations of Gerald’s already weakened defenses. Each night poor Gerald suffers agonies of erotic dreamscape from which he wakes sweating, erection aching, on the brink of an ecstasy he cannot quite allow. In his dreams he pulses out phantom orgasms, and feels a consequent phantom relief. But coming in a dream is like eating or drinking or urinating in a dream: you wake, and the need is all the greater. Indeed, the more he suppresses it, the more the urge to uncover Bosie’s sweetly sleeping body intensifies in him, fevers him—which is just as Bosie intended.

  Finally there comes the night when Bosie goes in for the kill, lets Gerald walk in on him a second time, absolutely naked, but this time lying on his back. There passes a moment of invitation in which no words are spoken—Can you resist me? Bosie seems to be asking—and then Gerald, forsaking decorum, jumps on Bosie, pretends to wrestle him, inhales greedily his jasminelike scent. Squealing, Bosie rubs hot parts of himself against his tutor. Gerald thinks: just wrestling; perfectly acceptable. Only he can’t keep from letting his lips brush against Bosie’s cheek, he can’t keep his erection (mercilessly insistent, restrained only by layers of underlinen) from pushing into Bosie’s leg. Boys, boys together! Tremendous friends. And then they are looking at each other; the pretense of wrestling falls away; Gerald reaches down, kisses Bosie, wills Bosie’s mouth to open to its own devouring.

  They grope. Gerald screws his eyes shut, and suddenly sits up. Bosie looks puzzled. Prostitutes are wise to ask for payment before the act. For men sex means a lessening. Disgrace always lurks in afterglow.

  Bosie doesn’t understand what’s happened. He doesn’t understand that beneath all those layers, Gerald has just experienced a humiliating, even a defeating orgasm. He doesn’t know that among poor Gerald’s many woes in life is a predisposition to premature ejaculation, or as it was more often called at that time, “sexual incontinence”—not until Gerald rolls away, and sits on the edge of the bed, and blows his nose. Fear and shame arrest him in equal measure. He cannot say which fact is more painful: that he has committed a criminal offense, or
that he has done it so ineptly.

  He lifts his head; looks at Bosie. He’s braced for the worst: protestations, threats of exposure. His overheated imagination is already thinking blackmail, jail cells, suicide. But Bosie neither teases nor reproaches him. Instead he squeezes Gerald’s hand, smiles, and winks, before dashing over to the washbasin.

  Bosie’s nakedness is different now. It encodes no allure as he slips on his dressing gown, climbs into the bed.

  “Good night,” he says cheerfully.

  “Good night,” Gerald answers, shivering as he peels sticky cotton from his thigh.

  The woman, according to Bosie’s brief account of the incident, was a cousin of Gerald’s; in her early thirties, divorced from her husband, and on the run from a lover. In other words, a mondaine; an adventuress. That she happened to be staying at the same hotel as Bosie and Gerald was probably a coincidence. Or perhaps it was a coincidence that had been arranged between the cousins. I can’t know. I’m making most of this up. For now I’m going to say it was a coincidence, since it would not have been remotely in Gerald’s interest to meet up with that particular cousin at that particular moment. Quite the opposite. It seemed to him a case of extremely bad timing.

  Bosie gives her no name, and little by way of a description. I shall call her Laura. According to him she was simply “a lady of celebrated beauty, at least twelve years older than myself, the divorced wife of an earl.” To me she is elegant, if not exactly beautiful, with small raisin-colored eyes. Her black hair has a sharp, radiant sheen: think of Susan Sontag, Martha Argerich, Tess Gallagher. (Is it cheap of me to offer such comparisons? Probably. And yet this is what I am thinking.)

  The three of them meet in the hotel lobby. Exclamations of amazement. But what a surprise! Of all the places in the world! Bosie and Laura beam at each other, while Gerald hangs back, pretending enthusiasm even as he struggles to swallow his dread. Of course they must dine together, Laura says; of course Bosie agrees. And quickly, quickly the concierge is flagged down, tables are rearranged; Gerald, upon whose shoulders such masculine business matters seem always to fall, curses both his cousin and himself.

  He’s never liked her. He’s always thought her a tart. Flirting with his brother the way she did. It was positively obscene.

  At dinner they drink champagne. Laura and Bosie talk about society people in whom Gerald hasn’t the slightest interest. They talk about royalty. They gossip about Prince Eddy. Laura’s heard that Prince Eddy was Jack the Ripper.

  “No!” Bosie cries.

  “Yes!” Laura says. “They say he’s not quite right in the head, and that after the last murder, after he killed that poor girl in her room, the police found him in the vicinity and now he’s being secretly held in the palace under the care of doctors. Apparently her majesty is beside herself—absolutely beside herself.”

  “But that’s ridiculous!” Gerald interjects. “Tabloid lies. You shouldn’t believe such nonsense.”

  “Oh, silly,” says Laura. “What do you know?”

  “I think the murders were really ghastly,” Bosie says.

  “Ghastly,” Laura repeats. “You know, they say he took things—from the bodies. I wouldn’t like to say what. You might lose your appetite.”

  Bosie bursts into laughter. Gerald checks his watch.

  “I was chilled when I heard,” Laura goes on. “I felt as if it were me he’d gone after. Not that I had anything to worry about, since he only chose—well, you know: low women. Still, I had a dream one night. I woke up and there he was, bent over me with his knife. Breathing. I couldn’t see his face. I knew I had to switch on the electric light, that if I could switch on the electric light, then he wouldn’t kill me. And I reached over for the switch … and it wasn’t there.”

  “How awful!” Bosie says.

  “Awful!” Gerald repeats, a little mockingly.

  He calls for more champagne.

  The affair, in Bosie’s words, advances along “classic lines.” I take this to mean that it becomes a French farce in which Bosie plays the virginal initiate, Laura the sophisticated châtelaine. At night there are secret rendezvous; during the day delicious pretenses of innocence.

  The second afternoon, neither of them shows up for luncheon. Hot with jealousy, Gerald suffers alone the tedious gaps between the courses, then forgoes coffee to search out the pair, whom he finds soon enough in the hotel gardens, sitting in a sort of bower, under a cascade of roses, holding hands and laughing over what he presumes to be some inanity, while Laura’s unpleasant little Bedlington terrier—sculpted to resemble a lamb—growls at their feet. They don’t see Gerald. He lurks undetected among the trees. They kiss, and he cannot move. A debased yearning to see Bosie made love to by his cousin roots him to the spot. Cautiously Bosie slips his hand into Laura’s dress, cups her pear-shaped breast. Gerald thinks: I’m no match for her. Then he thinks: What am I, to put myself in competition with a woman?

  Disgusted, he flees his hiding place and returns to the hotel. In the brocade and velvet sitting room, some outraged old ladies are deploring the scandalous behavior of a “certain woman” who has come to the hotel and seduced a boy nearly young enough to be her son. Gerald, his eyes in a book, listens avidly.

  Eventually the old women get up to take a walk along the promenade. He doesn’t notice. By now he’s lost himself in the book—Winckelmann—soothing prose about Greek things. What he tries not to think about, what he knows from his own tutors, is that Winckelmann was murdered in a Trieste hotel room by a Tuscan cook. A bad end, but he was a sodomite.

  At around three Bosie strolls into the sitting room. “Hello, Gerald,” he says.

  Gerald doesn’t answer. Bosie takes the armchair opposite his. “Oh, Gerald, Gerald,” he says—and still Gerald doesn’t answer. So Bosie picks up a magazine from the table between the chairs and starts flipping through it. “The Women’s World,” he reads aloud, “edited by Oscar Wilde. Oh, look at this, an article by Mrs. Wilde! About muffs. Well, I doubt she ever would have got that published if she hadn’t been married to the editor, do you think?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, I’m trying to read.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “Winckelmann.”

  “Ah, Winckelmann. But I suppose Pater isn’t quite your thing, is he?”

  “Too subjective,” Gerald says.

  “Subjective!” Bosie puts down his magazine. “The trouble with you, Gerald, is that you’re so …”

  He quiets. Then: “She’s very nice, your cousin.”

  A deeper silence. Confidingly, Bosie leans across the little table that separates him from his tutor. “Gerald, may I tell you something?”

  “What?”

  “I think I’m in love.”

  Gerald puts down his book. “Do you mean with my cousin?”

  “Yes. With Laura.”

  “That’s nonsense. She’s a grown woman. You’re a boy.”

  “Ah, but does age really matter, to the heart?”

  “Your mother would not approve,” Gerald says. “I was supposed to take you on a tour so that you might learn something, not lounge around some boring hotel all day flirting with my damned cousin.” He sneezes. “No, this settles it. Tomorrow we leave.”

  “We shall not leave,” says Bosie.

  “I say we leave, and we shall leave.”

  “And I say we shall not. Or you may. You may do what you like.”

  “I would suggest your mother—”

  “I would suggest there are some things I might tell my mother.”

  Gerald stands. His face has gone pale. “What are you saying?” he asks stiffly.

  Then Bosie laughs. He laughs and laughs. “Oh, come now, Gerald!” he says, stands himself, and pats his tutor manfully on the back. “Must you worry so? You always worry! Don’t! If you’d let yourself, you could have a perfectly good time here. Why not let yourself?”

  “This is not what your mother had in mind.”

  “So what? M
ust she know?”

  Gerald shakes his head. Excusing himself, he returns to his room. The bed assaults him: the knowledge of that stain. He must come up with a plan, he decides, and comes up with one. It is not a bad plan. Certainly it doesn’t lack for courage.

  A Piece of Bad News

  “The doom room,” the counselor called his office; or “the fate gate”; or “the torture chamber.” Never to the faces of his clients, of course. To his clients it was “the consulting room,” and nothing else. Perhaps all of us use a different language in our heads than in the world; and certainly among his colleagues the counselor would never have admitted to amusing himself with such cynical word games. Still, so long as the brain’s private monologue cannot be wiretapped, he will not be fired for his thoughts; he will not be fired for thinking of his office as “the torture chamber,” or for dividing his clients into the doomed (positive) and the saved (negative): terrible, archaic locutions that go against every principle of his training, which is in large part why he takes such malicious pleasure in their use.

  At the moment the counselor is standing outside his office, by the water cooler. In his right hand he holds a fragile cone filled with purified water, in his left a piece of paper on which the future of a young man he has never met is spelled out. About five feet from him stands a door, behind which the young man sits, waiting, having no idea that the counselor, who is not in the least thirsty, has decided to drink another coneful of water instead of going in and ending the agony of his suspense. And why? Because he can. Nor will anyone (his colleagues, for instance) ever know that this little cruelty is intentional. That’s the pleasure of the thing. He is palpating, caressing his own power. For a few minutes, the young man is his slave, and as in certain sadomasochistic sex rituals in which the counselor has also taken part, he’s not going to be allowed relief until his master is good and ready.

  After he finishes his third cup of water, the counselor checks his watch. Five minutes. Yes, he decides, probably he’s kept the kid sweating long enough—to do so any longer would be to cross the border into detectable sadism—and dashing his paper cone into a recycling bin, he opens the door and strolls casually inside. The young man, in his seat opposite the empty desk, flinches. No surprise. His terror is so visceral it can be smelled.