The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “Stand back, get away! Someone get hold of that man!” cried Doriskos, somehow more panicked now than he’d been at the height of his danger. Someone did get hold of Aldergate, who made no move to go anywhere, but put his face into his hands.

  “What is the meaning of this?” asked Dr. Featherstone, the top man in Chaldean and Sumerian—looking at both of them as if they were something found dead down cellar.

  “Don’t look at me as if I were a reptile,” said Doriskos. “He’s a reptile—a spoilt parasite—and after all I’ve done for him regardless of the weakness of his talent, this.”

  “And what…might…this…have been?”

  “He crept up on me and put his hands all over me, that’s what, then chased me and threw me down and—”

  “There must be some misunderstanding,” said Featherstone, then turned to the spectators. “That’ll do. Go back indoors and don’t be discussing what you don’t understand. We have something to resolve here.”

  “There’s nothing to misunderstand!” said Doriskos—meaning to say it with these people here to remember. “He crept up on me, stuck his tongue in my mouth, then threw me up against the wall. He intended to work his will on me. He didn’t succeed in that, and he’s not getting away with the attempt!”

  “I’m sure,” Featherstone offered, “that it would be best to discuss this in a private place, in a civilized fashion”—praying for Doriskos’s cooperation, but Doriskos, who considered this no matter for silence, did not give it.

  Two days later, in the sodden afternoon, in the chambers of Stratton-Truro’s solicitor…

  “The young man’s counsel would like to know what…arrangement we might make. To put down the scandal and get the two of you out of this without the kind of stupid damage you’ve courted.”

  “What arrangement?” said Doriskos, thinking of the One for whom he had almost been spoiled. “There’s no question of an arrangement. The only thing to be arranged is getting that filthy fiend sent down. I’m going back to Oxford to speak with his tutor and the provost.”

  “And tell them what?”

  “That he tried to rape me.”

  “It is not possible, Mr. Klionarios, for a man to rape another man.”

  “Well, young Lord Aldergate certainly seemed to think it was, and he gave it his best try,” Doriskos snapped.

  “And just what d’you think they’ll do about it? Do you think they’ll believe you? And even if they believe you, do you think that they will take your side? Don’t you realize who the young man in question is?”

  “I know—his father’s an earl,” spat Doriskos. “I don’t care about him, his father, or earls. If those things matter to him, he ought to have been thinking of it before he put his hands on me.”

  “You should know what the response to that will be. He could say that you started it. As he almost certainly will.”

  Doriskos let out a bitter splutter of laughter. “I don’t start things of this kind. As, I believe, is quite well known in the local circles which interest themselves in these matters. And I was the one on the pavement with my clothes torn and my hands cut. There were witnesses to this.”

  “So, you absolutely intend to pursue this?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “Then there is something you should know: that your foster father—your very displeased foster father—has made it very clear that he will not pay your legal expenses.”

  Any Englishman in Doriskos’s position would have understood that he could not prevail. Doriskos, however, did not. He promptly went and made his report to the provost.

  Surprisingly enough, this was the end of Aldergate’s career at Oxford. Unsurprisingly to everyone but Doriskos, it was the end of Doriskos’s as well; his position as the victim of the affair was unimportant, he was simply half of a mess that had to be cleaned up, a scandal that had to be suppressed. And soon he found himself having the worst conversation of his life with Stratton-Truro, who was as angry with Doriskos as Doriskos had hoped people would be on his behalf.

  “I have never in my life seen such an ass! You not only can’t think for yourself, but disregard my instructions when I try to do it for you. Now you’ve lost your position, and you bloody well deserve it. Do you think I like cleaning up your messes? You really have no idea what’s going on, do you?”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” said Doriskos, who had begun to appreciate that this was unimportant but couldn’t help saying it.

  Stratton-Truro regarded him with grim contempt. “That’s entirely immaterial. Who cares who’s at fault?—little enough occurred! Stop acting like a bloody female.” Having delivered this, he paused to evaluate the effect. “Well, I see it’s no good discussing it. I am going to tell you what I propose, and I want you to understand that it is the only option I intend to offer.

  “America, that is. I believe I can arrange something in America. A while back I gave Father’s Peruvian antiquities collection to Yale College, after the Victoria and Albert said they didn’t want it. The Americans seemed most appreciative of that primitive junk—maybe they can help me out in return. But it’s the last mess of yours I try to clean up. You botch this, you’re on your own. I have never regretted anything so much as I regret seeing you in a laundry basket in your mother’s filthy little house and thinking I had to have you. I thought I loved you. But you’ve been the most difficult, the most unsatisfying… I ought to have gotten a dog or a horse, I suppose—a beast can’t make stupid scandals and ruin one’s good name!”

  “I haven’t done anything to ruin your good name, or mine, or anyone’s. I never do anything,” said Doriskos, who was considering all the others who’d done the innocent thing of sharing a bottle in a quiet place that night.

  “That’s just as bad,” huffed Stratton-Truro. “It’s worse. That’s the eternal story with you: You never do anything. God’s arse!—if I had your looks, the world wouldn’t be safe from me! I’d have enjoyed the young earl and fifty more like him! I’d have eaten…the world…up!” spat Stratton-Truro. “I wouldn’t be so angry if it were some robust manly scandal of the sort I’d like to have made myself! I wanted you to do everything I couldn’t and tell me what it was like, and you won’t do it! God’s the only one who can fathom what you do want! Oh, you make me sick—you never fail to make the least of everything that happens to you! If you go to America, find yourself a rich girl and marry her as fast as you can, and tell her you can’t handle your own affairs, because this is the last thing I do in that department. Well?” asked Stratton-Truro, after sixty seconds of silence that felt like a decade. “Have you anything to say for yourself?”

  “You’ve treated me like some fancy animal in a cage,” said Doriskos. “I suppose you must have got me because you loathe yourself. And after this, I think that’s quite reasonable of you. I wish you had left me where you found me.”

  After this exchange of unforgivables, the arrangements could not be made too fast. Stratton-Truro wrote several letters and obtained satisfactory responses; Doriskos and Kiril packed his things. That was how Doriskos got to Yale, and into Karseth and Kneitel’s warm kitchen.

  Unluckily, theirs was not the only acquaintance he made at that time. For he arrived in a fragile state, a mood in which bad judgment came naturally and unsatisfactory connections were easy to make. This was nothing surprising for someone who’d been ripped out of the only mildly comfortable niche he’d ever found for himself, and through no fault of his own. He felt like some horridly fragile glass half on and half off the edge of a table; he felt still breathless from the danger that no-one else had thought important. Above all, the Grail within him, the part of him that was important and supernally fragile, and that was meant for only one person to touch, had nearly been fouled and desecrated. And that was what he’d been expected to gloss over for the sake of someone’s perverted notions of caste and manners and obliging noblesse, or whatever name they put to it!

  He was not very good at being careful and was too angry to
do it anyhow; he gave in nervously and resentfully to the senior faculty’s polite pressure to socialize. And at a faculty wife’s musicale that he had been more or less told to attend, right after the opening of his first Yale term, he first met Peter Geoffrey.

  Doriskos minded playing for people less than talking to them. Professor Apthorpe’s wife had played the slow first movement of the soulful sonata known as the Moonlight, Professor Silliman’s thirteen-year-old daughter played the minuet, and Doriskos played the prestissimo finale—without the score, which seemed to impress people. The applause made his face burn; he wished he could have asked them not to clap. He wondered why he so hated having people look at him—most handsome people didn’t. As he took his seat, he felt himself being studied acutely, minutely, and looked up to find the eyes and challenge them. The starer was a big, fair, ash-blond boy with, he couldn’t help but notice, a wonderful complexion, a tight white-and-pink like a child’s. It was not his favorite type, he favored a glowing pre-Raphaelite pallor, but very nice of its kind. Doriskos noticed his watcher’s sharp clothes and something queanish in his demeanor that he knew well from Oxford.

  Moses Karseth made the introductions: “Professor Klionarios, this is Peter Geoffrey, our prize-winning student artist. He can barely add and subtract, but he can certainly draw. No doubt you’d have met him shortly even if you hadn’t elected to come today.”

  “I didn’t precisely elect to. I was told that I would find it advantageous,” said Doriskos.

  The student took Doriskos’s bare hand in his white-gloved one. “Oh, this is an honor, sir!” said he in a custardy drawl that he would later explain to Doriskos as characteristic of the highest Charleston aristocracy, intimating that he belonged to it, though this was not strictly accurate. In fact, he’d been born and raised on a rice-and-tobacco plantation in Valdosta County, Georgia, a place with the deceptively romantic name Belle Reve. “And what a beautiful performance—I’ve never heard a man play before—I mean, except at real concerts.”

  He would talk for half the afternoon to Doriskos about his Art, definitely capitalized Art. He leaned close; he smelled fresh-washed, perfumed with Florida water. Yet Doriskos had a merciless, clearly defined thought: “Repulsive.” Reflexive though this was, it was something very particular, very definitive, despite its lack of definitive cause.

  And yet somehow this was the student who became his acolyte, his bad satellite, and very soon. Not even a week had passed before Doriskos found himself sitting on a picnic cloth with Peter in an isolated spot in the country, drinking Madeira out of the bottle. Peter had the gift of usefulness, a surrey and two matched bays that he kept at the local livery stable, and a knowledge of the beauty spots outside of town; he developed a way of appearing periodically upon Doriskos’s doorstep and offering to show him local oases, and he tended to have a pleasant picnic packed for the excursions. It was easy to accept his offers. He had an uncanny ability to pander to Doriskos’s kind of laziness. He helped him with tedious practicalities; he would be quiet and draw, responding to anything addressed to him rather than trying overtly to draw Doriskos out. He offered all the subqualities of compatibility without compatibility itself. He was also a very foreign foreigner to Doriskos, who was sick of elegance and rank and who found Peter’s American bumptiousness and affectations interesting and amusing.

  By Christmas, Peter was established as young Professor Klionarios’s acolyte and protégé, shadow and not-infrequent nuisance. Doriskos recalled taking an inventory of the boy there by Spee Pond on the first of these excursions while talking technique with him: Had he looked too close? At nineteen, Peter was quite the looker in his epicene fashion: peachy skin, china-blue eyes, a small delicate nose probably inherited from a small delicate mother, and a fat-baby Caravaggio mouth of great sensuous possibilities, an insatiable mouth. That was the bad part—it was a mouth-dominated face, and Doriskos had a long-standing bias for faces ruled by the eyes. Peter’s chin was weak, his bone structure inadequate, something that youth could just barely camouflage but that age and appetite would no doubt reveal without mercy. Doriskos preferred, along with a glowing pallor, a hard gemlike flame rather than a tropic swamp of sensuality. Peter’s ashy hair was a mass of thick, tight curls, the textural suggestion of a touch of black or Marrano blood far back; Doriskos had seen Levantines with that kind of dense hair. Peter was not exactly fat, but of a languorous bodily habit that suggested he would be ere long.

  Doriskos had not taken long to recognize that Peter had his own kind of technical facility in drawing and painting. An awesomely talented boy—visual perfect pitch. Could copy anything. Knew a lot about art in the library way though innocent of all travel, including all real museums. Had a swishy yen for Fragonard and other frilly Frogs. In class, Peter slipped easily into the role of assistant, taking over the explanations and demonstrations when Doriskos felt too heartsore and tired to talk; at gatherings, the creature materialized at his side and bantered happily, endlessly. “It’s fine,” Peter assured him. “You’re silent and mysterious, Byronic or Brontëan or something like that. Everyone’s in love with you,” he whispered. Everyone was an exaggeration, but Peter certainly was.

  After Peter’s private lessons, Doriskos would often discover something choice hidden for his finding—a wheel of Brie wrapped up in violet leaves and crowned with a single violet, an angelic bottle of French wine he wouldn’t have afforded for himself, hothouse ferns. They were charming things that he would have enjoyed getting from someone he loved, just as the little game of hiding them and finding them was a game he would have liked to play with someone he loved—not with someone he anxiously, intolerantly tolerated. He should have put a stop to Peter’s gift game if to nothing else; he knew that, but he somehow did not. He should have put a stop to that confidential hot-whisper-in-ear way in which Peter had come to address him. “I should tell him it’s improper,” he thought, knowing that Peter would just open his eyes very wide and ask what was improper. So Doriskos put up with him until the end of the year and shuddered with relief when he’d departed for his home. Doriskos had no idea of the talk that was all over the college by the end of his first year there, the nasty things said about the two of them. Peter had given these rumors his most feverish encouragement, also unbeknownst to Doriskos—with a blush here, a suggestive wink or giggle there, and numerous quite good pictures of Doriskos, none of which Doriskos posed for, upon his walls.

  III. Ille mi par esse deo videtur,

  a line that is perhaps literally not just right but that expresses a stunned wonder that is just right, that is the emotion of the person meeting fantasy made flesh…

  Doriskos was expecting nothing beyond the unpromising usual when the aspiring class of 1882 descended upon Yale for the June entrance examinations. He had been elected to sit on the admissions committee along with professors Thatcher, Silliman, Perrin, and Karseth. The room was suffocating long before the hour when the first candidates were to be admitted. Through the window Doriskos perceived Moses, his black gown over one arm. He answered Moses’s greeting vaguely when he came in, watched him toss down his robe and open every window in the stifling hall. Moses looked in a mood of dreadful good cheer, and was; he adored competitive examinations. Competitive examinations had gotten him out of the East End and all the way to his tenured chair. He didn’t understand why boys in general neglected their opportunity to have a ripping good time in these situations and stood in line looking as if they were waiting to be shot. He was possibly the only one of the crew involved with the oral part of the examination who had sallied forth willingly into this languorous first flush of heat.

  Doriskos had wakened in a mood that, if not his worst mood, was morose and hopeless and complicated by a queasy, thumping headache. The chore at hand did not improve this in the least; he had to listen to Greek as perverted by every accent in the Americas. The applicants were resplendent in their usual American forwardness and that scrubbed-potato look of people who are rarely so clean as the
y are at that moment. Yet the air thickened steadily with their sweat, and Doriskos’s own pasted his clothes nastily to him under his robe. After three hours of this, he decided that he must excuse himself, at least to take the robe off and let the stickiness evaporate, drink a cup of coffee, and numb his temples with valerian. He decided to take one more, then make a run for it.

  Before him stood a raw-boned seventeen-year-old from Berea, Kentucky, a locality that might as well have been Mars as far as Doriskos was concerned. He had a great Adam’s apple that had bobbed in a jerky, seasick way while he answered Doriskos’s questions. Now his hysterical bright eyes fixed Doriskos with a begging look as he stood there with admissions papers in hand. Doriskos realized that he’d gotten tranced by the bobbing lump in the boy’s thin throat and hadn’t heard a word he said. He gave him the benefit of the doubt and signed his name over the magical phrase recommended to accept. For this he was rewarded with a fervent, “God bless you, sir!”

  “Tell God I’d like to be rid of this headache,” said Doriskos. Americans exasperated him with their nattering about God, in whom most of them apparently believed in a sloppy, fatuous fashion—as if he were a benevolent grandfather in a distant city.

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “Nothing!”

  Karseth had been having a ripping good time with the next candidate and was protracting it, first for amusement, then for amazement, then to see how long he could keep it up. Karseth was listening to Simion as to some Bach sarabande perfectly played, watching him sketch the problem out confidently on the slateboard.

  “Call your polygon ABCDE, then…choose a vertex as A and draw lines AC and AD, like so, and prolong a side as CD in both directions. Through B, draw a line parallel to AC to meet CD in G, and through E, draw a line parallel to AD, meeting CD in F. The triangles ACB and AGC have a common base AC and equal altitudes, since parallel lines are equidistant, according to theorem 79, and the area of a triangle is equal to half the product of its base and altitude. So triangles ADE and AFD are equal, and triangle AGF is the triangle you require.”