The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “Sit for me,” said Peter, “and I’ll show you.”

  “How can I actually see how you do it, though?”

  Peter gestured to the window seat beside him and offered a friendly smile. He had heard a lot from Topher about how girly-fussy Simion was, and what a know-it-all; besides, anyone whose looks made him a prospective portrait model was of interest to Peter, so he was eager for a leisurely view of this strange creature.

  “This’ll be interesting,” said Simion. “I don’t know anything about art.”

  “Oh? I thought you knew everything about everything,” said Peter, sweetening this little barb with a smile.

  “That’s scarcely accurate. I’m very good in math, and I’m a tolerable Latinist, and I’m fairly strong in Greek, but I’ve never had a drawing lesson in my life.” This, Simion’s unironic attempt at truthfulness, was pleasing to Peter, who himself was a most indifferent student.

  “Shall I put my shoes on? How shall I sit?” Simion asked, already full of curiosity about this process he’d never had a chance to watch at close range.

  “However you like,” said Peter.

  Simion chose to rest his back against the opposite frame of the window seat, pull his legs up, and circle them with his arms, right wrist in left hand. A reserved posture, demure, contrasting with the directness of his speech. Peter’s keen eye took him in. “Silver-blond hair like a Dane’s, and it doesn’t get greasy. He’s not a person who exudes very much,” he thought. “Doesn’t sweat much, doesn’t get greasy hair or skin, doesn’t let you know what he’s thinking except when he means to. Dignity.” Fine, light, sharp bone structure with an integrity and repose about it, and eyes he almost recognized, eyes very big for the face. Professor Klionarios, whose words were limned in lavender in Peter’s mind like Christ’s in red in the Bible, said that one of the major proportional tenets of human beauty was that the eyes are in a kind of aesthetic disproportion to the face. The eyes should be overlarge, and the face should be small for the features it contains—the most beautiful animals, horses and deer and cats, also had this disproportion.

  So he drew, thinking, and Simion tilted his head and watched. He was admirably still. After half an hour, Peter told him to get up and stretch, which he did gratefully, turning and stretching his arms up over his head and catching left wrist with right hand, tossing his hair. Peter thought of hair like this in Klionarios’s sketches—even in black on white, or colored chalks, it looked blond and nothing but blond, cornsilk-fair, live satin for the questing palm.

  It was then that the thought came to Peter, the thought that destroyed all possibility of friendly relations between them: “Why, I have seen him!” Where? There, in Doriskos’s studio. In drawings of Doriskos’s, some of them line drawings that didn’t even show the face but showed the creature in just this gesture, this stretching of his supple back and arms; in face sketches on the backs of grocery lists as well as in sketchbooks; as a character added to a commonplace crowd in aquarelles of scenes on campus. Some version of this creature appeared on the margins of cookbook pages and in Doriskos’s copy of Poe’s poems. When Doriskos was just sitting with a piece of paper in his hand and a pencil, his hand would draw almost reflexively, finding visual silence alien—and this was who it drew!

  And while he finished Simion’s portrait, Peter considered feverishly how on earth Doriskos could have actually met Simion before this year. He could barely wait until his next lesson at Klionarios’s house, when he could linger until he got invited to supper. During the interval while Doriskos and Kiril fussed over the cooking, he could make some little investigations and snitch a few things.

  Thus Peter practiced impious guile upon Doriskos: After his next lesson at Doriskos’s house, he pretended to have left some of his drawing gear in the studio and was absentmindedly waved upstairs to find it. Fifteen minutes of snooping and filching yielded three sketches of a reprehensibly young boy who looked like Simion probably had at fifteen; unfortunately, in all three the sprite was decently clothed. Still, a good and damning take. Downstairs, Peter asked Doriskos in quasi-casual fashion, “Have you ever been to West Virginia?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I hear it’s very beautiful,” Peter said.

  And when he next found himself alone with Simion: “Had you ever been to New Haven before you came for the comp? Or to England?”

  “No, neither,” said the model. “Why?”

  After a few more investigations, Peter had some grasp of the situation: These drawings were not actually of Simion himself, and Simion and Klionarios had not known each other in any accepted sense of the word before this year, but Doriskos had been drawing precisely this face, this form, for far longer than that—he must have been awaiting the descent of this special angel for years. Doriskos’s drawings were Simion without his mannerisms, the outward signs of his personality—empty vases, unperfumed but exquisite orchids.

  “And what’ll he do now that this creature’s here?” he asked in the silence of his heart. “If Klionarios gets to know him, I’ll lose them both in one stroke,” thought Peter, wearily resigning himself to hating the newcomer and making Simion hate him back.

  Peter got up early the next day and sat in on Klionarios’s Greek class, where he learned that what he had feared had already come to pass. Peter had already noticed that as of this September, Doriskos seemed wide awake for the first time since he’d known him. Listening to Simion and Doriskos exchanging remarks about Pindar, noting their rapt curiosity about each other, Peter knew exactly why Sleeping Beauty was awake. He could tell that they didn’t yet know each other, but wanted to. A crime deserving the severest reprisal, which Peter administered by way of Topher. He gave Topher an idea he hadn’t thought of for himself, that of shutting the window on Simion if he leaned out of it. Topher made prompt use of this suggestion and of the other excellent ideas that Peter gave him for assailing the composure of the overserious and overstudious little creature. And soon Simion guessed Peter’s role as puppetmaster and inciter and developed a raging loathing for him far in excess of his feelings for Topher, Peter’s stupid tool.

  Along with his unfolding rapport with Professor Klionarios, though, Simion had a stimulating new friend. The fabled “Coeur-de-Lion,” Andrew Saxton Carpallon, got his nickname from a graceful statue he resembled. In 1878, at nineteen, he was a sophomore at Yale. He was a dandy, a beauty, an actor, a fabulist—your canting puritan might say a liar—and he loved to make trouble for deserving parties, including himself. He did all this in a spirit of cheerful despair, being one who experienced sadness in the guise of intolerable restlessness rather than in its raw form. He had scandalized his public at Yale by declaring his intention to go on the operatic stage; he took serious singing lessons and neglected his other obligations without apology. Andrew was the boy who had planned to room with Jed Barnes this year, but had gotten himself put out of the room lottery for not attending chapel—also without apology. Jed enjoyed him as a sort of scandalous entertainment, believed nothing he said, and sermonized him on occasion.

  One evening early in October, Jed was sitting up over vile mathematics, wishing he could wake Simion up and beg some help. These considerations were interrupted by the familiar sounds of a mellifluous tenor, below in the night, singing a song from an old opera.

  “Dancez…dancez…nymphes légères…devenez…tour à tour…bacchantes ou bergères…que tous…vos pas…vos pas soient amoureuses…!”

  Jed went to the window and threw down his keys.

  “You’ve been out!” said Jed as Andrew stepped in with an exaggerated shiver. “I thought you were campused.”

  “I am, curfewed too, because the poor asses think it’ll make me study, but I’ve been out. I’d no cigarettes. But I daren’t go in at Durfee, because our preposterous tutor has his lamp lit—he’s lying in wait for me. I thought I’d bunk with you tonight and appear bright and early in class tomorrow to confound him. Besides, I finally made it to my class in the lyric an
d saw your little roommate, and he’s the most beautiful thing in the whole state of Connecticut, possibly in the entire Northeast. He’s like something out of Botticelli. He even entices Professor Klionarios to talk to him, and I wanted to meet him.”

  “Well, you can’t, not now. And keep your voice down. Simion’s asleep, as usual after nine.”

  “I can’t go in at Durfee!” said Andrew. “Come, wake up your little chum, and let’s make a pot of tea.”

  “I’ll do no such thing, he’d take my head off,” Jed whispered. “He’s keen on his sleep, and Topher and Gibbs have dedicated themselves to seeing that he doesn’t get it. They wait until he’s asleep, then drop the tongs and poker or something else loud to wake him up on purpose, and he’s getting militant about the issue. Topher’s a nasty piece of work, and Simion’s suicidal when it comes to retaliation. Last night he filled up their pots and put them out to freeze, and then, when Topher came staggering home in the dark and peed all over his own boots, I thought the yelling would raise the proctors. Topher damn near kicked our door in. This place is a madhouse. It’s your fault, too—if you hadn’t gotten yourself put out of the lottery, I’d be living with you and complaining about your pretty boys and your pianoforte rather than about that pair of brutes in there. Can you really not get back in tonight?”

  “I really can’t get back in tonight,” said Andrew, with his best smile.

  “Well, I’ll make you a pallet, but you’re to be quiet and let Simion sleep. Don’t just stand there, you can sit on my bed. I don’t have room for an armchair in here.”

  “D’you think that if I wait long enough, your roommate will extend some part of his person out from under those covers?”

  “Andy!” said Jed, mildly scandalized.

  Andrew gave him his best smile again, then stretched himself on the bunk and took inventory of his surroundings. Simion’s little desk was set catercorner in the far end; the shelves above it were packed with books, not new books but a lot of them. The pens and books and copybooks on the desk itself were neat, almost as a soldier or a prisoner might arrange his things. A folding screen, folded, was propped against the desk—odd. There was a candlestick so old-fashioned it might have been new when Jackson was president, with a candle in it; an oil lamp almost as old; a box of blue-tipped matches; and a pack of Richmond Straight Cuts and a saucer, evidently used as an ashtray but clean. After Jed had retired, Andrew listened to the breathing of the suite’s four sleepers. He noted Topher and Gibbs’s contrasting clotted snores and thought how light Simion’s breathing was, like the breathing of some delicate animal. Simion did not move all night, or at least while Andrew remained awake.

  Andrew was amazed that he himself slept at all, but he did; he woke a little after five at the stirrings in the top bunk. Simion climbed down the bunk ladder to the floor, a light and sure and completely awake movement. He took startled notice of Andrew, who tried to be extra-still. The boy lit his candle, and Andrew opened his eyes for a full, leisurely look at him. Simion stretched and yawned. He was dressed as for the worst night of January in union suit, turtleneck jersey, a couple of pairs of heavy wool socks, and a long nightshirt over the rest. He pulled off the nightshirt and put on his clothes over the inner layers of the costume, leaving off his boots for quiet’s sake. Then he did something Andrew would not have expected. He opened his desk drawer as if to take out paper and pens but took out a mirror and a hairbrush, an oval brush that looked to be of old ivory and might have been made for a lady. His mother’s, Andrew wondered, or a charming old trifle he’d gotten at an estate sale, a secondhand shop? He parted his hair in the middle and brushed it with gentle, caressing pleasure. “Yes, little boy,” thought Andrew, “you have very beautiful hair. And you are not unaware of that fact, are you?”

  He watched as Simion took from a shelf a saucepan and a couple of tin boxes that must have contained cocoa and sugar. He opened the window and took in a toby of milk he’d had chilling on the sill, then knelt before the banked coals in the study and made himself chocolate, which he poured into a cup and drank while evidently perusing last night’s homework at his desk. His profile offered itself to Andrew’s gaze in the thin light, which gave it an eggshell-like semi-real look, like the white faces of saints in Dutch paintings. It was like something painted in some creamy mercuric substance on the face of the prosaic dark. Andrew watched, watched, watched, while Simion reviewed. Finally he seemed to have satisfied his own very exacting standards for mastery of lessons. So, thought Andrew, we look like a medieval angel, and sleep in tons of clothes, and are anxious and hysterical about schoolwork. What else?

  The six o’clock bell bonged solemnly, and in an hour, the seven o’clock—and then the plot thickened. Simion, biting his underlip with annoyance, got up and fetched his boots and hastily drew his screen around his little desk. What the—? wondered Andy. Then he heard the disconcerting noises of awakening from Topher and Gibbs’s room. From Topher, “Annhhhh, my farking head! Christ’s teeth!” Thus Topher greeted the morning. Gibbs greeted it with a series of volcanic eructations—“Whatever can he have been eating?” Andy wondered. He had heard noises like that only from a cart horse that had gained unlimited access to a supply of blowdown green apples, and the horse had died. Puzzlement succeeded puzzlement: With a little exasperated click of the tongue, Simion situated himself at his desk, his back to the room and the screen between him and it. Andrew heard Jed roll out of bed with faint groans. Across the suite, gaseous eruptions from Gibbs and exquisite repartee from Topher.

  “Hey, Gibbsy, where were you when they fought the Civil War?” asked Topher amiably. “You could’ve stunk those farking rebels right out of Gettysburg! Hey, you, Jed and Simion! Wouldn’t you two have run at Gettysburg if you’d heard old Gibbs blow his horn?”

  “I would have run at Gettysburg on principle, out of a disinclination to be shot, even if I didn’t hear old Gibbs blow his horn,” said Jed. “You’re getting water all over the floor.”

  “So, come make me quit,” said Topher, then blew something out of his nose. It sounded like he had half a pound of jam up there: smoach, smoach, smoach, hnnnk. Topher seemed in a genial mean mood today, for he went on, “Simion, why’re you hiding behind that silly screen at this hour? Ain’t you got your petticoats on yet?”

  “We go through this every morning,” said Simion, unamused. “I got the screen to reassure you that I, for one, don’t want to look at your private anatomy while you dress. The less I see of you, the happier I am. What’s that you’ve got up your nose, glue?”

  “Want to see?” offered Topher.

  “Go show Peter,” countered Simion.

  “You smart-mouthed little shit. Peter’s just a farking pansy like you, only Peter ain’t got no airs and you’re full of them. Someone ought to sling you facedown over a fence one day and teach you what’s what.”

  “This is really appalling,” thought Andy.

  “Topher, the shades are up!” said Jed. “D’you want to get us all in trouble parading around bucky-tailed? For indecent something or other?”

  “I’ll tell ’em I’m doing it for Simion’s edification,” said Topher, and Andrew could picture him standing in the study, buck naked, with his face full of shaving soap and a half-stiff prick, which he no doubt imagined fondly to be a sizable one, on display. Topher carried on with his amiable banter until the last minute, when the pack of them left.

  Simion lingered, and when he was sure they were gone, he approached Andrew and shook him by the shoulder.

  “Excuse me, whoever-you-are, you’d better get up. It’s nearly chapel now.”

  Andrew opened his eyes, smiled, and offered his hand, and Simion put his into it tentatively, a child acting out of manners. “I’m Andrew Saxton Carpallon, you’re Simion Satterwhite, and I’m very pleased to meet you,” Andrew told him. “I do Greek with Professor Klionarios, only I didn’t make it to class until yesterday, so you wouldn’t have seen me.”

  “We’ll have to run,�
� said Simion, yielding a smile to Andrew’s smile. “I hate chapel,” he said. “I freeze in there.”

  “Then we shall skip chapel,” said Andrew. “Let that pair of running sores go to chapel and congeal there. And we shall go and have a really nice breakfast, and then—who knows?” What else shall I say, he thought—the world is full of possibilities? “The world is full of possibilities!” he said, with the famous Andy Carpallon smile that made them all seem close and plausible. “But before that, may I borrow your brush?”

  They had a really nice breakfast, which Andrew paid for. Simion drank more hot chocolate and took in his new companion. Though Andrew had slept in his shirt, it still managed to look paper-crisp. He had a faint French accent, like many natives of New Orleans—“N’olans,” he told Simion. “That’s how we really say it.”

  At his ease, Simion confided in him about his nightmarish suitemates; he had not been so comfortable with anyone since he arrived at Yale. He told Andrew about Topher, and Andrew told him that Topher had been a creature of legend even as a freshman. Prepared to exchange sympathies, Simion asked him if he had horrible roommates.

  “I have no roommates,” said Andrew.

  “What do you do to have no roommates?”

  “Pay extra money.”

  “Oh,” said Simion with a defeated sigh. “Peter hasn’t a roommate either, though he might as well live in our suite for all the time he spends there. I s’pose he can afford to pay extra money for a single room.”

  “He gets one, extra money or not, after his little débâcle of last year.”

  “What débâcle? Did he burn something down?”

  “He roomed with Topher, and after one of their parties, they did something to a freshman, and when he was back in his room, he did something to himself…cut his wrists. Made a considerable mess, too. The old biddy who had to mop up the mess on the floor went on about it for days. He should have known better than to go to their parties, which are true visions of the Apocalypse, I’m sure.” Andrew gave his airy shrug.