by Laura Argiri
It happened that on that day in late autumn, the day directly after Simion’s windfall, Carmalt’s Bootery & Haberdashery put on display a shipment of dancing pumps from Paris. Indeed, Klionarios had learned about the shipment from Helmut Kneitel, while out to buy coffee beans, and had considered that the last pair of pumps made for him in London was showing wear. It was a bright, fair, unexpectedly mild Saturday, the kind of sweet weather Doriskos remembered from autumn in Greece during his tour there. He drifted toward the shop.
In its display window, one pair of the shoes was already out. They were not the usual culls the French bootiers palmed off on the Americans, but prime stuff—tapered but not pointy, made of black cabretta kid, with grosgrain bows. Their insoles bore the signature of Caillot & Rosier, furnishers to many monied gentlemen. Oddly, the display pair were boy-sized, almost child-sized shoes—exactly right for Simion. Doriskos wanted to take those evening slippers into his hands. He thought of Simion putting on the little pair in the window and fidgeted until he got the clerk’s reluctant attention.
“May I get anything for you, sir?” the clerk asked, at last.
“I want to see that little pair in the window,” said Doriskos. The clerk, inwardly sighing at the lunacy of this large man interested in these almost child-sized shoes, brought them out. Doriskos took them into his hands and turned them around, fingered the buttery leather of their linings. His mind gave him a sudden and feverish picture of Simion in velvet and satinet and slippers like these, to be unwrapped like the world’s most delicious present since God gave Lilith to Adam all wrapped in the veil of her hair. In his head, he caught the creature of his fantasy up in his arms, giggling, play-struggling to be put down, and Doriskos did not put him down, but rather kissed his neck and ear and felt him go suddenly submissive and willing, and one of his kid slippers came off and fell crisply to the floor.
He sent the clerk for the number elevens for himself, then sat down heavily and again turned the little shoes over and around in his hands. He ultimately decided that he liked the fit of the elevens enough to buy them and fumbled his money out of his pocket, regretfully deciding not to buy the little ones, taking a last, rueful look at them as the clerk put them back into the window.
But they did not remain there long. The bemused Simion, still tranced, had left South Middle with Peter’s money in his pocket and started for the haberdashery. He planned to handle and fondle everything there, but to spend only enough to have a warm and decent suit made. The clerk was in the storeroom having lunch when Simion let himself in; thus he had a few minutes to walk about and touch things. Simion was feeling a thick roll of shirting linen when the clerk strode back into the shop. Perhaps he thought Simion a trespassing urchin, for he greeted the small and shabby customer with a sharp “What do you want?” Simion turned to face him.
“I want to have a suit made,” Simion said. “I have money.” He pulled it out and showed it. “I need a suit.”
“Of what sort?”
“Something very warm.”
“Well, that’s sensible of you,” said the clerk. “Pardon me if I spoke short. It’s been an aggravating forenoon. That Greek professor, the one who always looks at people as if they’re green or growing horns, he’s been in here being his own peculiar variety of uncivil. You’ll be wanting woolen, I suppose?”
Simion said yes and was shown several rolls of plaid and tweed. He’d caught sight of some thick melton cloth, however, whose heavy substance he drew between his fingers. “This,” he said, already anticipating the thick, plush warmth of the garments.
“That’s not for suits. That’s coating woolen.”
“Well, I can have it if I pay for it, can’t I?”
“Nobody wears a whole suit made out of coating woolen. It won’t be the fashion. It’ll also be hot.”
“I want something hot. I am always colder than other people.”
“Wouldn’t be if you’d eat heartier, I daresay,” said the clerk.
“I don’t like to eat. On the other hand, I don’t mind wearing clothes. What I would like is a suit of that, if you please.”
“It’s your affair,” shrugged the young man. He wormed a tape-measure out of his trousers pocket and began briskly measuring. “This’ll take time, you know. Heavy stuff, hard to sew, like a greatcoat.”
“What was he talking about?”
“Who?” The clerk offered a faceful of patient resentment at the vagaries of his clientele.
“Professor Klionarios.”
“He didn’t talk a great deal. He bought some of these dancing pumps. And handled a little pair, just looking at them. The ones in the display. They’re from Paris, France.”
“May I see them?” asked Simion, almost more deeply scandalized at himself than by that tableau last night, for he had no use for dancing shoes. The clerk brought them. In haste, Simion got out of his boots and slipped his feet into those soft, light, beautiful shoes. He thought of Doriskos wearing their larger twins, and his longing for these shoes, both as object and symbol, became quite irresistible. He said that he’d take them and paid for both shoes and suit. The shoes were boxed, wrapped in print paper, and presented to him as if he were a grown person of consequence—or so he felt. There was no sadness in him now, nor even any panic about spending money; it was the first time in his life he had bought any item of joy other than a book. Out of the store, he broke into a run on the common and performed a series of balletic bounds over the blue puddles on the path.
“Look at him!” said Helmut to Moses, whom he was dragging to Carmalt’s. “You see, maybe he’s just bought himself something nice, and look what a happy boy he is now. You’ll be just as happy if you do as I say and get yourself some evening pumps.”
“Where do you know him from?” asked Karseth.
“Why, Doriskos tells me every day what new and miraculous things he’s said. For Doriskos he’s rather like an Advent calendar, every day a little revelation. And I talk to him myself in the stables. He’s a darling boy.” At which time the darling boy came within greeting distance and gave them a startled stare, as if they’d caught him being naughty.
“Good afternoon, Simion,” Helmut said genially. “Have you bought yourself something pretty?”
“Evening shoes,” said Simion breathlessly. “In case someone invites me to…a…party.”
“Well, high time. You’ll be beautiful in them.”
“Shameless,” Moses half-scolded as soon as Simion had taken himself out of earshot. “How can you talk to him of beautiful! He wouldn’t look out of place peddling lucifers in Whitechapel. The poor little urchin! Though one must admit, he does have rather nice hair.”
“Sometimes he looks like an utter waif, like something out of a Protestant tract, and sometimes he seems the complete opposite of that,” replied Helmut. “I stand by my choice of adjectives. He has this strange cool poise, and after his fashion, he’s absolutely exquisite. And to think that a face like that should come on an American! Oh, I’d like to be around when he looks into a still pool or a mirror and for the first time really sees his face.”
“Dangerous little jailbait, that’s what this Englishman would call him, and his face when you paid him that compliment was a study,” said Moses, with his dry laugh. “But what does that boy want with dancing slippers when he’s barely got trousers between his arse and the winter? Did he spend all his money on them? Why on earth should he do a thing like that?”
“Taking a little step on the way to self-knowledge,” said Helmut. “What all good boys are doing at seventeen.”
“He’s the strangest little creature,” said Karseth. “Fantastically bright, he is. And hard-working and earnest about his schoolwork the way people used to be about religion. I gather he disconcerts people, they can’t fathom him, and I can understand that. I’ve never seen someone so young listen, for instance, with that total concentration he has—”
“But where would you have observed him at such length?”
; “Oh, this is the most curious part of all. He insinuates himself into my lectures, every chance he gets. Hides up in the gallery so I won’t throw him out. I can’t imagine how he understands the material, but he keeps coming back. I couldn’t help but notice him early on, a freshman with a yen to listen to medical-school lectures is rather an unusual article. He looked more at ease today than ordinarily—high time for that.”
Indeed, this was Simion’s own thought. He went back to his room and took out his new shoes to admire them, ate some chocolate, read some French, and let his fancy rove free. His mind resurrected the library of his first Yale fantasy, the autumn weather outside and the warm, dim lights within, and the Persian rug. He added the warm, silky weight of good clothes on his flesh and the whisper of these shoes across the carpet—and Klionarios’s whispery voice, almost whispering, “And what are you reading?” as he bent his scented head over the fireside chair.
V. Learning to Tell Oneself the Truth
That was November. And after a few weeks of mutinous peace in the suite, Simion went home with Andrew to New Orleans for the holidays. He was supposed to go to Savannah and spend the vacation with Simeon Lincoln, but this plan fell through. The telegram came on the second of December: “Must cancel due relapse stop unacceptable danger contagion stop plus too ill to be decent company stop can you manage?”
“Of course you can,” said Andrew, patting the shivering Simion. “You’ll come home with me. Let’s wire your friend and tell him that you’ll be all right.”
“Are you sure? Won’t your father mind?”
“Why would he mind? He’ll be delighted to meet you. Ever since I went off to college, he’s been after me to find a friend who isn’t a wastrel, and now I’ve managed it.”
“But I’m scared about my friend, he gets so unwell. I wouldn’t take it aversely if he didn’t feel like talking to me. I’d just like, I don’t know, to be with him,” said Simion, hugging himself miserably. “I miss him.”
“I think he’d be happy to know that you’re in a safe, warm place, having a pleasant holiday with someone who’s fond of you. Besides, a person who’s sick enough to send a wire this early on isn’t up to receiving company,” said Andrew, and further exercised his persuasions until Simion consented to send that wire.
Simion had settled almost comfortably into approaching intimacy with Andrew, and that despite what he’d seen between Peter and Topher and Gibbs. That had made a delicate situation for Andrew. A couple of days past the telegram incident, Simion turned up at Andrew’s door long after he usually went to bed, with a look of queasy hysteria about him; for a couple of weeks he’d been sitting on the memory of that threesome like a tack, until he couldn’t stand it any longer.
“And you know, those degenerates, they call me names and imply that there’s something wrong with me, and they were…” He tried to explain by gesture, but he hadn’t enough hands or fingers to illustrate that extraordinary interconnection. Finally he bent to Andrew’s ear and described the scene in a horrified whisper.
“Oh, they do beat all!” cried Andrew once he had a mental picture of this. “How perfectly repulsive of them to do that with you asleep in the next room! It’s beyond vulgarity. It’s even more disgusting than the rumors that flew after their last party, which is really saying something.” (Having known Peter a while, he suspected that Peter might have actually wanted, in some secret and perverse way, to be caught in that act; Andy found Peter’s character a quicksand full of exotic and poisonous snakes.) “Still, it’s not as if they’d just invented something. The actual procedural stuff you’ve described…it’s fairly ordinary.”
“Ordinary? Three at once?”
“No, no, not three at once,” Andy hastened to explain. “But—I don’t want to shock you—but the rest of it, that’s just what people do, at least when you’re speaking of boys or men together. Nice people do it nicely, and beastly people do it like animals. It’s very different—Peter and Topher and Gibbs buggering one another in that sordid room, and Alexander and Hephaistion making godlike love in one’s imagination.”
“That didn’t look like love of any kind I could imagine. They looked like they knew they were doing something vile. And, Andy, he offered me money; I didn’t raise the subject, but they gave me this handful of money so I wouldn’t talk. They emptied their pockets! It’ll cover most of a term’s tuition. How bad must a thing be if you have to pay someone off like that?”
“It’s not that the act is so bad,” said patient Andrew. “Or so exceptional. They weren’t doing anything so dreadful or unusual, but they were doing something they need to hide. Because it’s thought bad, and it’s thought exceptional. People need some terror in their lives, that’s why they believe in religion and turn lovemaking into something wicked and arcane. There’s a difference between dreadful acts and dreadful people, though. You might see Peter and Topher playing chess, that doesn’t mean chess is a bad game. You know, you won’t be happy if you believe everything you hear from your hysterical father,” he said.
Then, strategically, he let the subject drop and these words of common sense sink in over the next few weeks. Simion was not so alarmed that he didn’t spend several nights a week in Andrew’s room, and Andrew did nothing to alarm him further. He gentled him like a shy animal, stroked him, occasionally kissed him on his blond brow. And then he took him home for Christmas.
On the train south, Simion mainly slept. At night, flat on his stomach in his berth, he slept ten and twelve hours at a span; in the day coach, he slouched against Andrew and napped half the afternoon. And when they arrived, he blinked awake into an afternoon of near-summery warmth, rested and, for the first time in weeks, calm.
Calm would be one of Andrew’s great gifts to him; Andrew existed in a sort of sensual amnios in which hysteria didn’t make sense and even looked silly and vulgar. Now Simion entered the household from which that lighthearted but deeply civilized creature drew his being and his confidence.
Andrew’s childhood had been spent in a tall, narrow old house in the French Quarter, a house dressed in iron lace, a house with lines as graceful as those of a willowy woman. The house was even more feminine than most of the houses in that odalisque district, full of silky and velvety textures and fragrant silence, as if offering itself in substitute for Andrew’s late mother, who had died shortly after he was born and left him, like Simion, half-orphaned. There was an enclosed courtyard where a fountain ran musically amid japonicas, camellias, green frills of ferns. The Persian carpets on the dark floors were very old, their colors muted by age to the dim, coal-lit glow that stained glass can have when you stand outside a church at night. There was a Pleyel piano, a library of scores. The Creole cook was a genius in her calling. The town house was full of big and little pleasures and comforts, as if it thought that everyone within deserved a soft and perfumed lap to lie in; as the Haliburton house had absorbed enmity and antagonism to human ease, the Carpallon house had absorbed and concentrated laissez-vivre. Simion stepped into that scented shade and breathed its sweet-drugged air with delight, almost without wariness. He felt an intensification of Andrew’s usual calming and mellowing effects, as if the house gathered and concentrated Carpallon-personality like incense. Relax, the house seemed to say. Unclench your neck, breathe deep and slow. Read my books. If you’re tired, sleep. Sleep, for that matter, whenever you want to. Sit on the veranda in the sun and watch the clouds go by.
As of two days past Christmas, Simion had managed to divert himself in numerous pleasant ways. He had borrowed Andrew’s horse and explored the French Quarter and practiced his French on the natives. He went to bed early that night, happily tired and freshly bathed. Winter here was a manageable enemy, held well at bay by a little fire in a toy fireplace like the one in this room. It had been Andrew’s late mother’s, and the sparse but choice furniture was of golden olive wood. There was also a peculiarly New Orleans detail, an ormolu gilt plant-stand that held an ancient and flourishing feather-fern pla
nt. A bookcase with bowed glass doors yielded a cache of French novels and poetry: George Sand, Balzac, Lamartine. Simion had awarded himself the pleasure of drying off before the fire and gone to bed in one of Andrew’s old silk robes. He had hung it on the back of a chair before the fire to warm while he bathed and slipped into it with a sigh of delight. Andrew had given him this robe; it was a heavy yet liquid damask silk the color of strong pekoe tea. He brushed his hair and thought how fine it would be to have someone else do the brushing so he could concentrate fully on the pleasant sensations and fell into one of those strange states that came upon him in this house, at once abstracted and relaxed and utterly alert. The mirrors in the room reflected him: the one above the fireplace holding him full-face, the two on the side walls offering his profile, still as a picture, hand and brush poised at the end of a stroke. And this was how Andrew found him when he knocked on his door and entered, wearing a sherry-colored dressing gown and looking particularly golden and godlike.
“You’re actually not cold?” said Andrew. He settled back against the headboard and ran an arm around Simion, inviting him to lean, and touched with light fingertips his bare chest. This touch elicited a flinch that was not really a flinch, an electric twitch.
“No, for once. But I’ve got no clothes on,” Simion warned him. They were comfortable enough together that one could sit on the tub rim and dangle a foot in the other’s bath water while chatting, and they’d shared the same bed in their prosaic woolen nightclothes at college. But that was different from being huddled in this gilt bed in lascivious silk and nothing else.