The Marble Quilt

by David Leavitt

  “Hello,” the counselor says, offering his hand, all smiles and affability and cool skin. “Christopher, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Good to meet you.”

  The counselor sits down. How odd! He recognizes the boy. But where from? Christopher is brown-haired, handsome in a rough way, and according to the report the counselor spreads out before him, just twenty-two. But why does he look so familiar? Something about the eyes …

  Then, quite suddenly and horribly, the counselor remembers: he and Christopher have had sex. Not slept together, just had sex, standing up, at a club a few blocks down Market Street. Maybe six months earlier. If he recalls correctly, he gave Christopher a blowjob.

  The counselor coughs. Suddenly he is as sweaty as Christopher. Punishment, he thinks, punishment for having taken pleasure in making the boy wait … meanwhile he dreads actually looking at the report. (Oh, what cavalier arrogance, not to have checked, before entering, whether the news he has to dispatch was bad or good!) And now, he asks himself, what if the boy turns out to be positive? The result, for him personally, will be several very hairy days, as he awaits his own test results. Did he swallow? He can’t remember if he swallowed. Probably not. Was there a lot of pre-cum? The counselor has bad gums, and therefore ought not to be in the business of giving blowjobs in the first place. Still, it’s a habit of which, despite logic and remonstrance, he has failed, over the years, to break himself. For though he would never suck off a man he knew to be HIV-positive, he feels no compunction in sucking off men (witness Christopher) whose names he hasn’t even learned. Ignorance, in the end, really may be bliss, or at least a prerequisite for bliss, just as safety may be less a condition than a boundary, the exact location of which we can only guess at, measuring a little with science, a little with hunches. Why listen to statistics when common sense—which tells him what he wants to hear—is so much more congenial a guide?

  “Well,” he says now, “let’s cut to the chase, shall we?” And glancing down at the piece of paper in front of him, he prays very quickly. Blinks. “You’ve tested negative,” he says, before he himself can even absorb the fact of it.

  “Sorry?” Christopher says.

  “You’ve tested negative.”

  “But that can’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because …” The boy leans closer. “Listen, are you sure you haven’t mixed up my results with someone else’s?”

  “We triple-screen to avoid that.”

  “But can’t the results be wrong?”

  “There are occasional false positives. Never false negatives.”

  “But they have to be wrong.”

  “Why?”

  Christopher doesn’t answer. Nor is the counselor—his own heartbeat decelerating with relief—in any mood to probe the matter further. Instead he goes into his negative drill, hands a rather shell-shocked Christopher a copy of The Gay Men’s Guide to Safer Sex, and shoos him out of the office.

  Through the waiting room, Christopher stumbles. Like the counselor’s office itself, the waiting room has been designed by a local architect who, after his lover’s death, decided to devote himself to the science of creating spaces that “minimize panic, maximize tranquility.” This architect is now rich from a practice dedicated exclusively to clinics, testing centers, hospices—rooms in which bad news is given, painful treatments administered. Yet to all that yellow and blue carefulness, Christopher is oblivious, immune. How can he be negative? Before he left, Anthony fucked him six times without a condom. He shouldn’t be negative. The news strikes him as a kind of curse.

  Out on Market Street, in brisker air, he goes into a phone booth, drops in coins, punches buttons.

  Two rings. “Hello?” Anthony says.

  “Hi.”

  A short silence. “Christopher, I told you not to call me. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “I got the results.”

  “And?”

  “Come meet me and I’ll tell you.”

  “No. I just told you, I don’t want—”

  “Then I won’t tell you.”

  “Oh, man! You’re crazy, you know that? I can’t believe I ever got caught up in this shit …”

  “Anthony, please.”

  “How could I have been such an idiot—”

  “You know what? The counselor was someone I tricked with.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck.”

  “Anthony, if you’ll just listen to me—all I want is to see you. Like old times. You owe me that.”

  “Why? You scare me, you know that? You’re dangerous.”

  Christopher laughs. “For Christ’s sake, man, I’d never hurt you. I love you.”

  “You love me like a suicide loves pills.”

  “But it’s not about dying, it’s about solidarity! That’s the point, to prove—”

  “It doesn’t prove anything.”

  “Why don’t you understand? You understood before.”

  “Before I was crazy too, a little bit.” On the other end of the line, Anthony beats his fingers against the phone. “Now I’m going to ask you just one more time. What happened?”

  “If you’ll meet me, I’ll tell you.”

  “That’s blackmail.”

  “But if it’s the only way I’ll get to see you, what choice do I have? I mean, Anthony, you’re all that matters.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Yes. Why not?”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t understand.”

  “I understand more than you think. If you’d just agree to see me, to sit down with me, you’d realize that.”

  Another silence. Then, “All right. Café Flore in fifteen minutes. But just to get the results, you hear me? Nothing else.”

  “Thank you, Anthony. I can’t wait—”

  Anthony hangs up.

  “Well, goodbye,” Christopher says to the dial tone. And hangs up himself.

  Gerald Takes Matters in Hand

  That evening, with an assurance the brazenness of which will later stun him, Gerald puts his plan into action. To begin with, he decides to enlist the aid of the old women in the lounge who have been gossiping about Laura’s misbehavior. To lure two or three of them into conversation after dinner, to express to them, “in strictest confidence,” his anxiety over his charge—not to mention his serious doubts as to the moral fiber of his cousin—turns out to be easy; after all, Gerald has spent most of his life in the company of old women. Unctuous and meek, he knows how to earn their allegiance. In many ways he is an old woman himself. A little confiding, a few whispered words of anxiety, and the entire female population of the hotel is set against Laura.

  At around ten o’clock, he returns to his room, where he spends a gratifying half-hour with Winckelmann. Then he steps into the corridor, walks to Bosie’s room, knocks at the door. As expected, no answer. Bracing himself, he heads down the hall, to the room his cousin occupies. Once again, with great deliberateness, he knocks at a door.

  Loud barks from that ersatz lamb, the Bedlington terrier.

  “Laura, this is Gerald,” he announces manfully. “I ask you to open the door.”

  Again, only barks.

  “I know that Bosie’s there with you. Now please answer the door, else I shall have to fetch the management.”

  A sound of rustling. Then the door cracks, Laura’s scowling face greets his. “What are you talking about? Are you mad? He’s not here.”

  “He is there, and I demand that you open the door.”

  “You’re mad! I’m alone, in bed.”

  “Laura, for the last time … I do not wish this scene to become public. Need I remind you that Bosie is a minor? Send him out to me at once.”

  The door closes in his face. The dog barks. A few seconds later, it opens again, and a teary-eyed Bosie emerges. Worse than that, a transvestite Bosie, dressed in one of Laura’s gallooned nightdresses.

  Some of Gerald’s ladies
, coming down the hall, stop in their tracks, stare in horror at the gauzy apparition.

  “You shall come with me,” Gerald says. And yanking Bosie roughly by the arm, he drags the boy back to his own room; shuts the door behind them. “Now get out of those ridiculous clothes.”

  Obediently Bosie pulls the nightdress over his head.

  “You should not have done this, Gerald,” he says. “I call it most unfair.”

  “Put this on,” Gerald says, thrusting a dressing gown at Bosie, trying not to notice his nakedness. For once, Bosie does as he is told.

  “Tomorrow we leave,” Gerald goes on. “I expect to see you packed and ready in the lobby at seven. Nor would I like to hear that you have visited my cousin in the night.”

  Bosie, subdued, watches with surprise and pleasure as Gerald moves toward the door.

  Perhaps the scariest thing about Bosie, particularly in his middle years: his malignant, even obsessive litigiousness. And not merely where Wilde was concerned. For though the degree to which he singularly compelled Wilde to take legal action against his father is debatable, what is a matter of public record is that after Wilde’s death, Bosie himself was involved in no fewer than ten libel actions. He himself brought libel actions against: the Reverend R. F. Horton, who had called a newspaper Bosie was editing, The Academy, “an organ of Catholic propaganda”; Wilde’s first biographer, Arthur Ransome, after he described Bosie as a man “to whom Wilde felt that he owed some, at least, of the circumstances of his public disgrace”; the Morning Post, after it accused Bosie of anti-Semitism; and the Evening News, which in 1921 falsely reported his death and described the Douglas bloodline as showing “many marked signs of degeneracy.” (In rebuttal, Bosie argued that even though in his youth he might have exhibited “symptoms of wickedness,” he was by no means a degenerate: “I am a horseman,” he declared proudly, “a good shot, a manly man, able to hold my own with other people.”)

  In addition, Bosie was himself sued for libel on three occasions: once by Wilde’s friend Robert Ross, once by his father-in-law, Colonel Custance, and once—amazingly enough—by Winston Churchill, whom Bosie had accused publicly and repeatedly of entering into a Jewish-led conspiracy to lower the value of government stock. Churchill had no choice but to bring an action against Bosie, who lost and was jailed for six months at Wormwood Scrubs. (While in prison, as Wilde had written De Profundis, he wrote In Excelsis, a sonnet sequence containing anti-Semitic slurs of a more than usually repellent aspect.)

  The case against the Evening News Bosie actually won, which is probably why he crows about it in his autobiography—yet what is curious is the moment when he chooses to crow about it. The reference comes just after Bosie’s seduction by Gerald Armstrong’s cousin. Like his rendering of the episode with Wellington, the account he gives here is brief—only a few paragraphs—and seems to be offered in order to challenge “the accusation which has been made against me of being what is called abnormal and degenerate from a sexual point of view. (By the way, the last time this accusation of being ‘degenerate’ was made against me was by The Evening News in 1921, and it cost that enterprising journal £1000 in damages to me and a good many more thousands in costs.)”

  Now that is an alarming parenthetical—alarming because its import seems to be, in essence, “Don’t fuck with me”: a warning even to the reader himself, who has presumably put down money to purchase Bosie’s book, that he would do well to avoid offending its author.

  It is the only instance I can think of, either in literature or that species of writing that purports to be literature, in which a writer has overtly threatened his reader.

  As for the details: what is striking to me about Bosie’s account is the degree to which it undercuts his putative intention, which is to establish once and for all his heterosexual vitality. Thus when Gerald decides he has had enough and knocks at his cousin’s bedroom door “demanding restitution of his ravished ewe-lamb,” the “ewe-lamb, reduced to tears and dressed in one of the lady’s much-beribboned nightgowns,” is delivered to his keeper “to the accompaniment of loud barks from the lady’s pet dog.” Hardly the paragon of boyish swagger, that description. Also, no explanation is given of why Gerald has come to think of Bosie in the first place as his “ravished ewe-lamb.”

  No, the transvestite frills in which the episode is dressed make it difficult to take seriously Bosie’s pouting claim that had well enough been left alone, “my lady love would at any rate have kept me away from baser promiscuities”—presumably those committed in the company of Wilde. Indeed, one has to ask why, if Bosie’s intention here is to prove his manliness, he chose to include the episode in his autobiography in the first place.

  The only surprise was that in the end, Gerald did find it in himself to challenge Bosie; to wrest him from his cousin; to drag him from that hotel on the Côte d’Azur.

  Courage. Perhaps it is not so surprising after all that timid Gerald grew up to be a war correspondent.

  On the Edge of the Abyss

  Where does it come from, this story? I’m still not certain. Probably it began with a newspaper article, something glimpsed three or four years back on the West Coast. According to this article, a San Francisco psychiatrist was noticing a dangerous trend among very young gay men: in essence, they were starting to abandon those very rules of “safer sex” that their elders had struggled so hard to instill and publicize. And this just at a moment when those rules were finally becoming second nature (and when as a consequence the rate of HIV infection was going down).

  What had happened? No one seemed sure. Certainly that generalized anomie of which so many young people complained in the early 1990s could not be ignored as a contributing factor: ours is an age of suicide, and what is unprotected sex anyway but—to borrow a phrase from Wilde—“a long, lovely suicide”?

  As for the gay teenagers themselves, the ones interviewed spoke not only of despair, but of exclusion; solitude; loneliness. Think about it: when everyone you know is HIV-positive, when everywhere you look HIV-positive men and women are banding together to form not merely families but a society—to serve the needs of which whole industries have cropped up—how can you not feel that you have been left behind? Bear in mind that this condition was unique to a few urban centers, San Francisco chief among them: cities in which the HIV-positive had their own magazines, rites, habits and philosophies and language; to weary further an already wearied word, their own culture. More potently, with one another (or so felt several of the boys interviewed) the HIV-positive could flout the totemic restraints of “safer sex.” Infection threw them free from caution, and so they could throw caution to the wind, and with one another do what they wanted, as much as they wanted, while on the outskirts the seronegative watched meekly, enviously, nursing their fear.

  It is hard for me—a child of a different (and perhaps more life-loving) age—to imagine a world where early death is the norm, and where therefore life itself may begin to seem like a death sentence.

  I thought about this article for months after I read it. Then I read a biography of Bosie, and the present and past did their alchemy. Out of the flames Anthony and Christopher stepped forth, naked, almost fully formed.

  As for the counselor, he is a character about whom, in my mind, an aureole of profound uncertainty hangs, perhaps because his private cowardices and hypocrisies reflect my own.

  I leave him now, to follow Christopher down Market Street to the Café Flore, where at a sunny table Anthony awaits him. Passing these boys, and being told that one was HIV-negative and the other HIV-positive, you might very well confuse which was which, since Anthony looks flushed and vigorous, while Christopher is haggard, thin, his chin pimpled, his elbows scaly with psoriasis. Across from Anthony, who drinks an iced cappuccino, he sits down shyly. “You look great,” he says. “Did you get your hair cut?”

  “Christopher, don’t waste my time. Tell me.”

  “How long has it been since you moved out?”

  “I d
on’t know—two weeks.”

  “Two weeks and three days.” Christopher smiles. “So I hear you have a new lover.”

  “Man, do we have to talk about this now? Can’t you see I’m sweating this out? I have to know. I deserve to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you’re positive, I did it to you. And that’s something, if I’m going to have to live with, I need to start coping with.”

  “If I’m positive would you stay with me? Take care of me?”

  “No.”

  “That’s blunt.”

  “I have to be blunt. Like I said, you scare me.”

  “Or I could sue you … like what’s-his-name with Rock Hudson. Say you lied and told me you were negative.”

  “As if I have any money for you to get.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do it for money.”

  Anthony stands. “I don’t have to listen to this,” he says. “I want to know, but not that much.”

  “I’m sorry. Sit down. Please sit down. I’m speaking from grief, can’t you see? I’m angry because I love you, because I grieve losing you, can’t you see that?”

  Anthony is silent. He sits down. Then he says, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t have asked me to do it. You wouldn’t have burdened me with—as if I don’t have trouble enough already.”

  “But you didn’t have to agree.”

  “You have more power than you realize. That’s why you’re dangerous. You act like you’re this innocent little thing, why me, why me, when all the time—”

  Christopher buries his face in his hands. “How did it come to this?” he asks. “We loved each other. Three weeks ago, a month ago, we would have sworn we were together forever.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t love me?”