The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  You ruin. You ruin both art and nature, the dreams said. You blight everything you touch. Now you’ve laid your ruinous hand on one of God’s wonders. If He’s just, He won’t forgive you. Just what have you wrought?

  As to what he did with this realization—he started collecting shells. Doriskos’s language was the drawn image, and Stratton-Truro’s epiphanies were written in junk.

  Being carried out of Athens in a basket marked the first radical derailment of Doriskos’s destiny, and Eton marked the second—violent changes, and one could only guess what he would have been without them; he had been severed from his presiding stars. More keenly than anyone else, he sensed that his life had been skewed out of orbit like some wild shooting light burning itself out in the black heavens. And he could not afford to let someone overpower him ever again. Having someone else’s order and balance imposed upon him could only make things worse; he would have to amend his own destiny, by rites and rules that he alone could discover.

  His drawing, his best magic, started him on that quest. At home after Eton, huddled in a corner of his nursery, he rocked himself until his mind went into a white and neutral realm of no pain. And after a long enough time of no pain, there was actual comfort. In his imagination, someone rocked him. He imagined that person: a companion, a creature who was child and god and omnipotent protector, and whose touch was perfectly kindred. He drew. He imagined that person, out in the vast world somewhere, missing and wanting Doriskos as Doriskos wanted him. He drew. As he drew, the face formed and refined itself. Had he seen one beautiful and sympathetic young face in the herd of highborn beasts at school, or had the future opened itself a crack to him in his extremis? For the face he saw in his mind was a very specific and unique one, not a collection of novelists’ clichés of beauty. The creature of his imagination was blond and pale and pagan. Its beautiful light eyes were neither green nor blue, but gray—what is drear and common in London weather is the rarest thing in the world in human eyes. He became convinced that somewhere lived the human who bore this face and that he must find this person, who, to the exclusion of all others, was his destiny.

  By the time Doriskos was fourteen, Stratton-Truro had decided that he was old enough to take the train by himself to Oxford for his lessons. Doriskos noted the odd fact that he began to enjoy the train trips again, almost as much as when he was little and they were a novelty. Some oppression lifted when the railway carriage chugged out of Paddington Station; alone, he was not lonely, but quite content. It began to take more than the ordinary force of will to get himself back onto the return train. One late May evening, dragging his drawing things, the sculpting tools he was beginning to learn to use, and a pint of ripe strawberries he planned to eat en route, he settled into the dusty carriage as usual. His lesson had gone swimmingly, the summer afternoon was grading into a delphinium-blue dusk, and Doriskos felt a slow swell of well-being and curiosity—a pleasant sense of submersion in the town’s secretiveness, which resembled his own. In his limited wanderings, he had found that Oxford was beautiful on the surface in all the places that the guidebooks described, but even better below its famous surface. With no effort at all, you could see fine gardens and ancient architecture, but he had found some wild places lovelier than the cultivated ones, some poor and ancient houses that interested him more than the storied estates. There were almost certainly more marvels concealed and unfound.

  He would have liked to wander through the gardens on the south side of town in the mist and the sweet gathering chill, to walk until it was quite dark, then go into a warm pub and eat supper. Lanterns in such places made a whiskey-colored light he’d have liked to be inside. Instead, at eight he’d be at his place at the lord’s dreary table. As the spires obscured behind him in a mist of dusty golden light, he realized, “If I get in here, I can stay here. And maybe this is where he is.”

  On the evening after his next lesson, he celebrated his new plan by overstaying and wandering through the Magdalen gardens and cloisters, peering into windows with a brand-new curiosity. He was struck by a group of handsome undergraduates in evening dress, whose white and black contrasted brilliantly in the sweet, precise, lingering light of English dusk. His eye took them avidly in as a picture, a compositional delight—the whiteness of their gloved hands and the black, crisp gleam of their evening pumps. Then it occurred to him that they seemed very happy together, companionable, genuinely friendly to one another; from their talk, he learned that they were going to a play. Perhaps some pair among them had found each other as he intended to find someone. He got home at midnight, finding Stratton-Truro divided between frantic anxiety and, then, delight that Doriskos had done something comprehensible—even in Sunday-school novels, boys run away.

  And Stratton-Truro was ecstatic that Doriskos wanted to go to Oxford. He thought some sudden birth of intellectual curiosity had spurred this decision and the surge of academic effort that followed. And he knew nothing different by the time Doriskos went up to Magdalen at seventeen, with a wardrobe of suits from Curle’s, a library of poetry books, an array of painting supplies, and a Greek manservant named Kiril Theros, whose wages Stratton-Truro willingly paid because he thought that Kiril might draw Doriskos out. Also, an inviolate secret. More than matriculating, he was going on a quest, and by then he knew exactly who he was looking for, and why.

  As a child, he had drawn his loved one and hid the drawings; as an adolescent he’d remained chaste as that child had been, furtively scanning crowds for the object of his search. The fact that he was looking for a boy seemed only one more way he was unlike other people, and as such was not much of a surprise. He had almost seen his beloved once, in the beautiful Lorenzo and Isabella of Millais—the exquisite young man, fine-boned as the greyhound under the table, who offers the girl the blood-oranges and the crystal chalice of his gaze. Doriskos went up to Oxford hoping that some loud noon or some hyacinth-blue evening, he would look across a table or a garden and find that chalice lifted to him.

  At Oxford, he was divided between profound pleasure and queasy nervousness. He had beautiful rooms overlooking the peaceful blue ribbon of the Cherwell, and a ready-made notoriety for his precocious artistic success. To his peers, he was an exotic creature, a member of a tragic and venerated nation. He had only to smile and show his usual distracted politeness to elicit sighs and ravings over the glamour he supposedly possessed. When he started running for Magdalen in the steeplechases, and winning, he became the object of much acute interest among both students and dons. Some of them slipped poems under his door. But no one, fascinated or aloof, wore the face he sought. This being so, Doriskos sweetly ignored all advances. Indeed, the lavender circle there maintained a running complaint about his obdurate chastity; he came to their parties, but he merely polished his social façade and gently brushed off friendly hands.

  After parties, the only sober man in the crew, he’d boost his fellows back over the walls of their colleges and climb an ancient plane tree to get back into his. All they got of him was his endless grueling running, up and down the hill between Headington and Oxford. He deplored the attention this got him. But he endured that and the other unpleasantries for the sake of the face that was rising in him. In the evenings, after he had finished his reading, he sat and drew. That face came to his fingers like a long-hidden knowledge and became more clearly nuanced each time he committed it to paper. He would not have been shocked to see it if he’d bent over some well of dark water, salted with stars, and looked for a pattern in the surface.

  The god he had invented for himself warmed his solitudes and blessed his art, which flourished. He won most of the undergraduate prizes for painting and sculpting with the afterglow of that wild energy, the best of which went to the secret drawings that he could not show. For his public, he produced awesomely skilled academic oils, pictures of Crete and Delphi and the local dignitaries. These public works were as dry and unrevelatory as he could make them, and yet they carried the aura of these secret things.

/>   And yet the embrace of even the most beloved chimera lacks something in light and heat. Doriskos was certainly capable of abnormal patience, of saintlike perseverance, and of living on almost nothing, and yet his deprivation began to cause him pain. Less because of his virginity than because of his long starvation for human communion, his frustrations wrought sickness in him. Always he’d had headaches; now they became full-fledged migraines, real blinders that put the stellar athlete to bed with one ice pack on his forehead and another on the back of his neck and the anxious Kiril beside him with a basin. These headaches left him feeling totally wrung out, weak, listless, with a slipperiness about his vision, and a vile sensitivity to light and sound that was guaranteed to make wretched his next few days. They were warnings that he’d walled himself up alive in an existence that was not rich enough, not wild enough, to sustain him, and that he would suffer for it. He did.

  Yet he pleased Stratton-Truro in five things. In his third year, he won the footrace ironically known as the Torpids and was carried, crowned with laurel, down the High Street; he took a surprisingly good degree; for a portrait of Ruskin, he won the highest undergraduate prize that the Slade had ever offered; he got a fellowship; and after a graduation tour of his home country, he produced a re-creation of the Periclean Telesterion which won him the Prix de Rome in architectural drawing. He came back to Oxford with this accolade and settled in as a tutor.

  Indeed, but for a certain tragedy of errors in June 1876, Doriskos might have remained at Oxford all his days as a capable don, eventually taking Ruskin’s place as Slade Professor. This might well have happened despite his creeping dissatisfactions and his unfound lover. He often took over classes for old Ruskin, who was getting more and more erratic in his gradual drift toward the madness that would take him toward the end of his long, painful life. Doriskos contemplated the unsalutary effects of lifelong deprivation and the possibility of being like Ruskin by 1920 or so: writing incomprehensible books, sheltered and sedated by his servants, with the dry glitter of discreet insanity in his eye. (One memorable time, when he was showing a few of his less scandalous nudes to Ruskin, the old man had bent over him and put a shaky hand to his hair; he gave a single strand a chary fingertip caress, then drew back as if he’d touched heat. “They beat me for asking for things, much less doing things,” he announced in a tone of incongruous glee. “So I learnt to enjoy…sitting on a chair…and looking at things…as if that were all!”)

  Frequently Doriskos had tea with Pater, who’d been instrumental in getting him his position. Pater would talk a little in his whispery voice, usually about literary criticism, and did not try to trespass upon Doriskos’s vocation of solitude. As a present for Pater, he made a self-portrait bust in marble, head slightly inclined under its weight of heavy waves, and the Gioconda smile he could produce upon suggestion; Pater loved that smile. If something brought it beaming somberly forth in his presence, he acknowledged it with a smile of his own and a whispery “Ahhh!” as if he’d seen the aurora borealis.

  Doriskos had his acolytes, mostly from the ranks of the kind of boys who had made him feel mildly revolted as an undergraduate—the boys who wrote poems, published racy literary magazines to scandalize old dons, talked among themselves about clothes, kept flowers in their rooms, drank sweet liqueurs, and giggled; they accepted without argument the distance he insisted upon, and he was careful not to teach any of them privately. But trouble did not come his way from this obvious source; it came in the form of the son of a powerful earl, Henry Aldergate by name. Aldergate was a big fellow even at barely twenty, as tall as Doriskos and perhaps a little heavier. He was one of those hulking blue-eyed beasts of Albion, a physical type that had never stirred Doriskos’s senses; in fact, his very lack of sensual appeal was reassuring. But the boy had artistic talent; not enough to justify his ambitions, true, but he also had a drive that Doriskos’s students with first-rate talent lacked entirely. For Aldergate he made an exception to his rule against private students and spent some not-too-tedious hours poring over his drawings. He’d not given a thought to what was going on in Henry Aldergate’s head; he had yet to acknowledge the romantic fever it was his gift to inspire, and the inflammatory dreams and misunderstandings he could ignite with his silences.

  At one of the year-end parties, in mid-June of 1876, he made the mistake of accompanying Aldergate from the celebration itself into one of the alcoves off the Magdalen refectory. Aldergate had a bottle of Perrier-Jouët. Doriskos, who’d been sleeping particularly badly and missed a couple of meals before coming here, drank some. It was a very fine bottle, icy and creamy and dizzyingly dry. Doriskos soon forgot his customary revulsion about swapping spit from the lip of the bottle as they passed it back and forth. The result: He got drunk. They both got drunk.

  “Oh, listen…time’s getting so short…there…is…something…I must say,” said Aldergate. He was too close, but Doriskos did not mind for the moment. Part of the reason he’d taken Aldergate as a student was the need for some benign presence, anyone’s. The night was cold, and the big boy’s physical heat, shoulder-to-shoulder, was not unpleasant now.

  “Well, Harry? Has his lordship given in about that Venetian summer I recommended?”

  “Deuce take his lordship…old chaw-bacon,” slurred Aldergate. “Yes, he put up a fight, but he’ll cough up. My question is, mightn’t you…be able to come, too? With me,” he added superfluously.

  “I couldn’t afford such a thing,” said Doriskos, on the edge of regretting that he couldn’t.

  “I could afford it for you,” said the boy, smiling, red-cheeked as a child of twelve.

  “I wouldn’t think of it.” It seemed too hot in here now. Though slouched in the depths of an old saddlebag divan, Doriskos felt an unsteadiness in his legs, as if he’d be shaky if he were to stand up just now. “It’s curious… I am really very hungry. Could I prevail upon you to return to the party and get me something, Harry? Some bread and cold ham would do famously.”

  He was alone for a few minutes. The leaded windows of the alcove looked through the black geometrics of the cloister. An austere lace of shadows fell on the grass. He thought how in every college there were parties tonight, too much wine, and alcoves lit with dim lamps, where people went to say their good-byes. He half disliked the prospect of the upcoming mass departure, he thought, before adjusting himself comfortably, considering how wonderful it would be to let himself fall fully asleep. He halfway did, which doubled the shock when he woke. Not to one hand on his shoulder and another proffering a ham sandwich, but to a knee between his legs, strapping strong arms clamping themselves around him, and the boy’s hot mouth, tasting of champagne and mayonnaise, upon his. He struggled partially free.

  “What do you think you are doing, Harry? Are you drunk?”

  Drunkenly: “Last…chance.”

  “It’s your last chance to take your hands off me. Do it now,” said Doriskos, his mouth tasting of sour spit and a familiar shocked feeling in his veins.

  Instead, Harry exerted his considerable strength to press Doriskos into a more horizontal position, weighting him down with a healthy two hundred pounds of insistent flesh. “Please…please… I think about you all the time. I want to and you want to too, you know you do!” He went for Doriskos’s mouth again as if he’d been dreaming of exploring it with his tongue for the past two terms, as indeed he had.

  Doriskos pushed against the back of the divan and rolled them both onto the floor, where he disengaged himself and struggled to his feet. Then he blundered out, ran, thought he heard someone, and flattened himself in the black shadow against the walls. His heart did its own version of a coloratura cadenza in the mad scene of a Donizetti opera, and between that and the dizziness from the wine, he could have keeled over. Adrenaline alone kept him vertical. Finally, he felt steady enough to leave; he straightened his mussed clothing and was about to return to the party, the nearest source of lights and people. The hard soles of his new evening pumps made echoing clicks
on the ancient stones. Thirty seconds, he thought. I won’t walk all the way around, I’ll cross the lawn and edge in a window—against the rules, but isn’t that just for undergraduates? Justifiable, I believe, for tutors who’ve almost been assaulted by same—

  Instead, he was grabbed by the lapels of his Curle swallowtail coat and slammed up against the wall and silenced by the same mouth, this time a kiss full of teeth. Doriskos had never been in a fight in his adult life, but some instinct brought his knee up to administer a good jolt and shake those hands off him. Aldergate, who had been in fights, stepped back swiftly, caught the knee, and shoved him over. The boy was standing over him, fists clenched as if he’d changed intentions and now intended to beat him bloody. The pain of his skinned palms, scraped raw and hot as he caught himself on the pavement, brought Doriskos out of his shock; he got his voice up his throat.

  “Help! Help me! I’ve been attacked!”

  “No, no!” This was Aldergate back within his real persona, a twenty-year-old boy who’d just transgressed sacrosanct bounds and was already beginning to panic. As if he’d never used them in force, his hands were extended in a horrified shushing gesture. “Please, I wouldn’t, I’d never! I didn’t mean it! I’m sorry!”

  “Get away from me, you devil!”

  At that point, if Doriskos’s memory served him, people began to come out, silhouetted against the lights of the celebration, and stared down at him and his skinned hands. Aldergate made one final mute appeal, and the very great mistake of taking a step toward his now-former friend and teacher.