The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “That’s fine. No hellfire preachers here.”

  “I’ll have to put them on before I go to sleep, but it’s so lovely to have them off awhile. I want to remember this climate with my skin as well as my head.”

  Andrew’s arm lay loosely round Simion—Andy was a subtle speaker of the language of touch, and he had picked up by his nerve ends the fact that Simion hated a tight clasp, particularly on his wrist or forearm. So he always laid his hand on fingertips first, and his embrace always gave Simion the chance to pull out of it. Thus he was making these advances with the intention of managing his own excitement; he was prepared to stop if he sensed the least opposition and try to make it appear that nothing at all had occurred. But he had not expected the sudden excitement that his touch evoked this time, and Simion himself had never felt anything like it either. The satin against his skin, the warm hand stroking his arm, seemed to galvanize every nerve in him. His head felt hot and strange. He shifted himself in the hope of concealing his excitement, but Andrew turned toward him and gave him a new version of his friendly kiss on the brow; Simion felt for a second the heat of his mouth, and the veins under his own skin there seemed to stretch; he felt as if he’d walked into a heat haze, a thick iridescent shimmer. Then Andrew’s humoring voice, mannerly, coaxing, but with some new urgency behind it. A little breathless, less musically controlled.

  “Come, don’t turn away. You let these heartless mirrors see you, now let me.”

  Simion heard himself make some frightened sound; he couldn’t speak. Nerves he didn’t even know he had were coming alive; he heard the fountain plashing, and his own pulse in his ears. As it continued, this helpless unstoppable arousal, Andrew touched mouth-to-mouth with him and kissed him, very gently, not pressing him to open his mouth. But Simion did, without coaxing. He was as helplessly inside his arousal as a baby is in a sheltering belly. It was the world. The tongue making its teasing and thorough exploration of his mouth lit a liquid fire of heat and hardness, lava and rock and flame. Andrew, thoughtful even in his own duress, set his hand on Simion at the waist and let it travel lightly down to touch him where it mattered most.

  But Simion wasn’t quite ready. Perhaps it was sheer sensory excess, perhaps the fact that Andrew’s hand was where no hand but his own had touched him before, perhaps the horridly specific picture of Peter on his knees before Topher that flashed before his mind’s eye, but Simion lost the erection that had embarrassed him so. Having it was embarrassing; losing it was more so. Too mortified to be angry, he pulled away and jerked his robe around him.

  “My God, what were we about to do!”

  “Neither murder nor grand theft, so don’t sound so scandalized,” said Andy—humor with effort if there ever was. He made himself lie down on his side by Simion and stroke him as one might stroke a scared animal, not to lose the connection they’d made. “I knew that was going too well to last,” he thought. “What did you think we were about to do?”

  “I thought…that disgusting thing I saw Peter and Topher and Gibbs doing.”

  “Seems to me there’s a lot of difference. Neither of us is a fat cochon-de-lait with a face like a bust of Nero or a lout from one of the more pessimistic works of Mr. Hardy. We’re not having a drunken orgy in a dangerous place. I would never do anything to endanger you. We’re entirely safe, and we’re very fond of each other, and it’s right that we should make love, because we want to. In this lovely city of mine, there are plenty of people making each other happy just as I propose that we should do tonight. Let’s make Hadrian and Antinoüs our guiding deities, and not let the grotesque antics of Topher, Peter & Company scare us and deprive us of each other.”

  “But I…”

  “Look…you have me in your hand. You can say no. But no is a wicked waste. It denies us both a deserved pleasure.”

  Simion considered, then nodded. The cornered look was beginning to go from his eyes. “And you’ll never tell anyone? Do you swear?”

  “I swear,” said Andrew, not letting himself smile—in spite of his own manifest randiness, he found this utter lack of humor both moving and, yes, funny, and if Simion saw that he did, he could forget about this for the next five years. “I’ll never tell a soul. And I’ll swear something else: that after we do it, you’ll be laughing happily at these qualms of yours. You’ll feel so blissfully relaxed that you’ll wonder what this fear of yours was about. And it’ll be much nicer than anything you can achieve by yourself. I promise you. It’s a pleasure that seems to contain all pleasures.”

  “What did Hadrian and Antinoüs actually do?” asked Simion, and Andrew took the well-timed chance to talk about something else for a few minutes.

  Andrew made up the story as he went along, a little poem in prose decorated with gems and snatches of brocade and perfume from Mallarmé and Baudelaire. Simion, who loved the decorative imagination in other people, relaxed; his breathing smoothed out. Andrew realized with delight that he had been cooperating with his calming tactics when Simion looked up with a smile and said, “Ready when you are.”

  He let Andrew help him out of his robe and ease him down. As Andrew shed his own robe, Simion looked up—first with the thin edge of alarm, then with frank awe and delight.

  “What?” Smiling.

  “You’re beautiful out of your clothes.”

  “Thank you,” said Andrew, whose voice tried to stick in his throat for once. “You’re beautiful in any circumstances I could name or imagine.” He bent over Simion and kissed his throat, then began working his way downward; Simion put his forearm over his eyes. Seeing all this, his own ignobly hungry response, embarrassed him; taking it as pure feeling, mouth to mouth, nipple to mouth, the dusk-red net of his blood beating in his eyelids, he could go along with it. He wanted to re-enter that red darkness he’d achieved before the fear got him. And the rush when it came was as Andrew had promised: the quintessence of pleasures, of all fields of flowers, all waterfalls, the sled down the perilous slope, the heat of every July of his life, all eagles on the wind, all leaping horses.

  “There, now, isn’t that pleasant?” said Andrew a little later. He might have been talking about ice cream from the tone. “And entirely harmless. There’s nothing like the first time you do it with someone. Plus, it’ll make you sleep just beautifully.”

  “I only wish it lasted longer,” said Simion, shaken and grateful. It had not even been ten minutes since, and he already felt silly about his skittishness.

  “Oh, it’ll last longer for you later on,” said Andrew, smiling. “I can show you how to draw it out. But I thought you ought to try it, first of all, and see if you like it.” He tried to explain these intimate facts in a way that made them seem innocent and natural, like arithmetic.

  “Oh, I like it. I’d have to be daft not to. Now do I do it for you?”

  “If you like. Only if you like.”

  “Have I got to swallow it?”

  “No.”

  “You swallowed mine,” said Simion.

  Andrew hugged him. “Oh, Simion, you’re one of a kind. Where else would I find anyone with your funny modesty and your lack of irony, and your interest in Justice?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Simion didn’t know whether to feel complimented by that remark.

  “What it says,” said Andrew, immeasurably touched by the image of this boy with his arm pressed tight over his eyes, shuttering his own vision while handing himself over to someone else’s eyes and hands, trusting in his mercy. “That I like you so much I barely know how to tell you.”

  “I like you too, Andy. But how…at college and all…in class…how are we to look each other in the eye now?” asked Simion, invincibly worried.

  “Like this,” said Andy, and promptly made a dive at him, pinioned him with gentle force, and bit him playfully upon the shoulder. Sprung tension made them giggle and struggle a bit, then Simion ceased and looked up at him with sudden seriousness, a look that asked nakedly for direct reassurance. Andy kissed him ov
er the left eyebrow, met his gaze, and said again, “Like this.”

  By the time the end of their Christmas break approached, they knew one another’s skins like home country. Simion found himself fascinated by the passion he could stir with one stroke of his hand and by this private act that was endlessly and inseparably power and abjection, abjection and power that melted into each other like the colors in a kaleidoscope. Also by the pure, primitive power of touch—how it warmed some part of him that had spent its life frozen like a stone. One night, sore from a day’s hard riding, he had let Andrew give him a massage that turned into something so delicately decadent that the mere thought of it lit him up like a lamp—those lightly oiled fingers exploring every accessible surface of his body, finding the pleasure nerves there and making them rise from the dead. His spine had loosened, tears of pleasure had slipped from his eyes. How Andy had taken his time, and how he had smiled…

  Riding north into winter, Simion wondered about love. Was the feeling he had for Andrew love? If you wonder whether you are head-over-heels in love with someone, it usually means you aren’t. Affection, gratitude, lust, and friendship, added together, certainly made something marvelous, and comforting as honey—but not love. Not Love, at least. Not that drastic arcane thing, dire and awesome, that he called Love. He tried to think what accounted for that resistance within him—after what they’d done, what was there to hold back? From someone, at that, who had taught him that his terrible nerves, so acute to pain, were acute to pleasure too—a thing he’d needed to know. And given him two trunks of clothes.

  “It’s mean of me,” he thought in self-reproachful mood. “I’m mean.” But later, not too much later at that, he would know why he hadn’t fallen in Love then. Because that event had occurred already. As when you threw something into deep, cold water, the ripples took a while to rise to the surface.

  When he was back at college and being asked by Klionarios what he did during his holidays, his throat tightened in a strange spasm, not entirely painful. Doriskos looked him over with a white-hot intensity barely distinguishable from anger. Simion had to cough. It makes no sense for him to be angry with me, he thought; what have I done? Or, at any rate, how could he know of it? Then he said, “I went to New Orleans with Andrew Carpallon.” Something went between them, like a slow electric shock.

  In the fortnight that followed, he was struck by the waves of agitation he felt from Doriskos, with whom he habitually exchanged greetings and remarks most days after class—nothing complicated, genial complaints about snowstorms and the like. The point was that it had been comfortable, unstrained talk until now. Now Klionarios made strenuous attempts at conversation that ended in numb, pinioned silences and added to Simion’s list of puzzlements.

  “What I want is a textbook of the emotions to help me figure this mess out,” he thought a few nights later, listening to the subdued noise of the card players in the next room.

  Just thinking about it all, his head was hatching a feverish ache. Since getting back to Yale, he’d suffered a constant and bone-deep preoccupation—those things that were fabulous and transparent as painted veils in Andrew’s world turned solid and maliciously mysterious outside it, acquired volume and darkness. Thinking about them brought about a confusion that dogged and fatigued him through the day and plagued his dreams. There were no precise terms to think about these things with! There was no code of manners spelled out in any book. It had all been so diaphanous that it might have been a dream, and so consequential that there was no turning back from it. According to his own reckoning, he was now a hypocrite in reverse (if such a thing were possible, as bad things generally were), because he’d taken money not to speak of a specific act in late November, and just after Christmas he’d done that thing himself.

  “Listen!” said Andy when he raised this subject. “You took the money in exchange for a promise not to talk about them doing it! You didn’t promise not to do it yourself!” And Simion thought, “That’s the letter rather than the spirit of the law if I ever saw it,” although it helped a little.

  I’m changed, Simion thought, and looked by candlelight into his own eyes in the mirror. He scrutinized his mouth and his hands, which he had put to this new use, looking for signs, for outward evidences of this gentle introduction to sex and himself. When he was older, he’d know it was no change, simply the submerged truth that had always been there declaring itself. It had been all very well and good to dream a child’s rebellious dreams about becoming a pagan, a sensualist, an anarchist. But becoming was not the right verb. He had just gotten a clear glimpse of the pagan, the sensualist, the anarchist he already was. Growing up is the slow process of learning to tell oneself the truth.

  Doriskos also suffered the pains of recognition. When he recognized Andrew’s outgrown clothes on Simion, Doriskos had a sort of silent, internal tantrum that gave him a violent headache and an acute desire to seek out Andrew and break every bone in his body. Even if he hadn’t recognized the pieces, Doriskos would have known them by the colors—Andrew-colors, the warm hues worn by that merry dandy almost to the exclusion of any others: cinnamon, nutmeg, sherry, maple-brown, cream; he knew them quite well from all those times he’d drawn that Clouet face and admired Andrew impersonally, as though he were an elegant hound. “Elegant hound is the right epithet, too,” thought Doriskos, with newfound animus against his model. The clothes were somewhat at odds with Simion, who needed things in dove-gray, pale blue, mauve, and every shade and variant of white, but Doriskos was more than chromatically offended by Andrew’s gifts. It is an uncanny thing how an unworldly, immured young man with no experience in the wide world of romance can see a gift of smart clothes on the back of a boy he idolizes and understand how that boy spent his Christmas vacation. “Those clothes mean something!” Doriskos realized immediately, and the veins in his head turned tight and hot. “Courtship! Intimacy even!”

  A virgin to jealousy, for he had never loved anyone before, from that moment of realization Doriskos suffered it keenly without even putting a name to it. He burned a slow and ceaseless coal of it. It was the heartburn of the emotions. (What villains and tenors alike say in Italian operas: I burn. He did.) His sleep was worse than usual, broken by dreams as bright and sharp as jagged glass.

  As he proctored his exam on the lyric at the end of the winter term, watching Simion write and write and write and Andrew alternately write and daydream, he thought that he simply must make some crucial overture himself. If he failed to express his feelings with a cryptic clarity—undetectable to others, perfectly unambivalent to Simion—he might miss out on the only thing he had cared about in his entire life, and all the rest of that life would be a wandering in the desert, a silent tragedy. It occurred to him that his fate had been trying its hardest, for a long time, to be just that, and that if he intended to fight such a powerful undertow he must act with what for him, for anyone actually, would be daunting daring.

  After several jealous, half-sleepless nights had brought him that much closer to his thirty-first birthday, Doriskos had a flash of supreme inspiration and impulsive courage. He got up and drafted an invitation to supper on the night of February 19, mentioning offhandedly that it was his birthday. “And I could not imagine anyone whose company I would prefer upon this dread occasion. I will be not only thirty but thirty-one—please come and console me for this fact.” And he was up early in the morning, burning and bold, to make the trek to College Station and slip the envelope into Simion’s box.

  That year’s was one of the 1870s’ notably harsh winters, with a February savagely cold. Simion had not even imagined cold like this; no Southerner ever does. Haliburton was the upper South, the mountain South, and it had long, cold, snow-dredged winters. But the air was dry and clean, and you were not a victim to the cold if you had the enterprise to take a small hatchet out to the forest’s edge and cut wood, which was free to all comers. In New Haven, you bought your wood by the bundle and paid well for it, and at the best of times you were at
bay to the dank, humid chill. And the cold in New England is a different kind of cold. It is the frigid exhalation of all those dead, once-murderous Puritans, whose vicious revenants are married to the Arctic weather currents. It is the pathetic fallacy in action, the violent, pragmatic American soul. It is cold from Hell.

  Simion could feel his body fight back at it; then an unsubtle flagging and sapping of his energies set in, a soporific fatigue that made the day a mountain to climb. Despite layers of clothing, even the heavy melton cloth suit he’d ordered, the chill invaded him at every pore; a walk across campus in the frigid late afternoon brought him home in a daze of sleepiness. He woke dreading the two half-hour periods in the unheated chapel like a whipping. His daydreams and night dreams of Klionarios incorporated a new element—heat—and its props of beaches and palm trees and the stifling shade under desert tents.

  In the midst of this depletion and misery, punctuated by several missives from John Ezra, came the note from Klionarios. Excited half to insanity, Simion dropped his acceptance into Doriskos’s mailbox and hied forth in the wolfish cold to shop for a gift.

  Doriskos, meanwhile, had spread out his own and Helmut’s cookbooks to consider the romantic possibilities of supper. For someone whose tastes he imagined to be on the austere side, which complicated things. He decided to aim for elegant simplicity, choiceness, balance—like English cooking on the rare occasions when it was good. He acquired some superb little chops, some hothouse vegetables—Boston lettuce for an Augustan salad, spinach that he would cream to green velvet. Potatoes. A sweet. He didn’t like them, but children did. Apple tartlets and Cheddar, he ultimately thought. A little Brie or Camembert, if he could find it. He overspent on a luscious wine, a Burgundy rich enough to hold its own with red meat. He wondered—for someone who’d never seen them, would this wine still evoke the summering fields of France? He wanted to balance whatever Andrew had managed to give their mutual friend; he cooked with all his force focused on this sensibility he knew only through a few polite and public words. He was amazed when five o’clock struck and everything was ready except the chops and his bath; he checked the table, the flowers, and found all Kiril’s work properly done. Then, like a rushed and late bridegroom, he pulled hard on the bell and called for his bath water. When you were over thirty, he wondered, did you suddenly start to smell stale in a way that a fastidious adolescent would notice? Then Kiril called back, “What, Dorias?”