The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “My BATH!” yelled Doriskos.

  Kiril smiled indulgently. “Calm, Dorias, calm,” he said, and went to draw the water.

  Carrying a pot of blooming paperwhites, a volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and a brown paper sack, Simion crept up Klionarios’s walk at six o’clock. His hair was freshly washed even though it was seven degrees outside and no more than fifty-three in his suite. He wore the nicest suit that Andy had given him, a lightweight wool the color of maple sugar, and a cashmere greatcoat from the same source, which wasn’t heavy enough but was the only possibility he could imagine for an occasion such as this. Rather than ringing the bell at once, he sat down on the porch steps and set his presents down, then pulled off his third-hand boots and hid them under the lilac trees. He took his French evening pumps out of the bag and slipped them on, took his gifts in hand, and got up and rang.

  Once inside, he noted that the paperwhite smell in the house was very strong even before he brought his in. It came from a row of five pots in the chill window, their delicate frilled pallor clear and white against the darkness. Doriskos took Simion’s packages from him and exclaimed over them while Kiril slipped the guest’s coat off his shoulders and took it away to parts unknown. Seated, Simion glanced at the other paperwhites; Doriskos answered his look. “But I shall like these best,” he said. “The flowers that a friend brings one are special. Those one grows for one’s self…” He shrugged. “And you’ve brought me poems as well.” He didn’t say, “You shouldn’t have.” He looked innocently and completely pleased.

  White flowers have white perfumes, thought Simion. And it’s warm here, like it was in Andy’s house in New Orleans, perhaps even warmer. You needed more concentrated warmth here to make up for the outdoors. The unaccustomed heat threw him into a sort of sensitive drowsiness; each smell was a separate presence in his nostrils. White flowers, cooked blood and salt, a green vegetable. He sat at the table and at Doriskos’s urging tasted the delicious wine, which had a full-bodied floweriness and fruitiness; he somehow managed to down a glass before the food was on the table and was feeling marvelously numb and warm. He clicked glasses with Doriskos, fascinated by the candle flames reflecting perfectly in the liquid pitch of his eyes. If he had been able to paint, he would have painted a picture of this man lit like amber, a dark light in a dark room, looking at him over a bowl of white flowers. Nigrus sum sed formosus, o filii Jerusalem!

  They both drank a lot, rather fast. The wine seemed to get them over whatever had made their exchanges so torturous of late.

  “I hope I didn’t startle you by inviting you,” said Doriskos. “I know it’s not a conventional thing to do.”

  “It’s nicely unconventional,” said Simion. “It was agreeably startling.”

  “I hated the idea of spending my birthday alone. I never hated it before, but this year I couldn’t stand the thought of it, somehow. Not like me at all. I’m usually not social.”

  “No, not really,” said Simion truthfully. “I’m surprised you didn’t invite Andy. Or Peter.”

  “Peter is my student, and my student only,” said Doriskos, “and there is really little sympathy between us. And Andrew Carpallon’s endless arch mouth tires me.”

  “I’d heard that you hated parties.”

  “I don’t like drowning in a roomful of strangers, that’s all. A two-person party, with the chance to speak in quiet and privacy, that’s what I do like. I am…really…very shy.”

  “I’ve noticed that,” said Simion, taking another deep drink of wine. Then he added, also truthfully: “You know, you look like one of Edgar Poe’s dark heroes. You have the most beautiful eyes.”

  To this monstrous impropriety, Doriskos smiled, the glint of sun on dark water. Smiled, then cast down his eyes. Pleased modesty, though, not mortification or revolt. He sliced off a corner of his chop, and Simion felt that he ought to do the same. It was really good meat, seared on the outside and of a buttery tenderness within.

  “This is good, you know,” he complimented his host. “I usually dread company food, but this is nice. You haven’t put a bunch of disgusting sauces and French things on it,” he added. “I was dreading something fearsome and sophisticated, frogs’ legs or something of that kind. Andy is always poking something in my direction and badgering me to take a taste, but if it isn’t something sweet, I decline.”

  “Is that what you did in New Orleans—evaded frogs’ legs and sauces?” With a humoring but interested smile.

  “I also rode horses and had clothes fittings,” said Simion, sober enough not to let himself be drawn further. “This is delicious meat,” he said with fervor, “but I’d come to see you even if you gave me frogs’ legs.”

  “That I won’t do. What’s it like in New Orleans?”

  “It’s warm. I like heat. You’ve got a lovely warm house here,” said Simion. “And this wine’s good like I’ve always imagined wine would be.” He ate some of everything and refilled his glass more than once. By the time the subject of dessert was raised, he was stuffed and somnolent—this was the most he’d consumed in a sitting since his arrival at Yale—but he managed another glass of the Burgundy and a cordial-glass of Benedictine as Doriskos ignored his own tart and finished off with cheese and an apple. Intrigued by the beautiful velvety whiteness of the Brie, Simion took some and inwardly shuddered: It tasted like jism. Probably it had got some fungus in it and gone bad. He debated the wisdom of suggesting this to Doriskos, but before he could make up his mind, Doriskos cut himself a piece, spread the deceptively enticing creamy middle on a finger of toast and ate it with evident relish, then ate the rind. Maybe it was supposed to be disgusting, and sophisticated people appreciated it that way. Simion, for his part, decided on some more wine to chase this taste.

  “You’re supposed to make a wish,” he said to Doriskos.

  “Even at my age? But will I get my wish, no matter what it might be?”

  “If you blow this out in one breath, “ said Simion, unsteadily holding out one of the white tapers, “and don’t tell anyone what your wish is.”

  Doriskos blew it out with one breath. It carried the faint scents of meat and apple after the candle smoke and gently reached Simion’s face. You. I want you to live with me. He watched the boy flip through Sonnets from the Portuguese with a hand he wanted to cover with kisses, whose fingertips he wanted to suck gently, tasting the salt of the skin.

  “ ‘…for the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight / For the ends of Being and ideal Grace,’ ” Simion read.

  Ah, yes, Ideal Grace.

  “Have you ever felt that way about anyone?” asked Simion.

  “Yes,” said Doriskos with no hesitation. Simion’s silver eyes, seeming bigger than ever and unnaturally clear in the thin white light, registered the speed of this reply. Then he smiled sweetly and said, “Andy thinks I’m too mean and simpleminded to appreciate poetry, but I do.”

  They both appreciated poetry, it turned out, and talked about it while Simion tried to solve a curious problem that had ensued. The problem was that of getting up from the table. He simply could not, and after three tries it was impossible to lie about it.

  “Sorry! I’m not drunk, I don’t know…it’s being warm after being cold so much…and a little tired, I suppose…damn!” However, he was drunk, very. And it created some crucial break in the chain of command between his brain and his legs. The brain spoke; the legs slept.

  Doriskos appeared nonplussed, worried. Then he managed a reassuring smile. “You’re tired. Why don’t you just sit there and talk to me while Kiril clears up.” He rang for Kiril and addressed a couple of low, swift sentences to the manservant in Greek. They appeared to have a little argument, the russet-haired servant showing some anxiety. Simion caught nothing in the spitfire pace of demotic Greek. Whatever it was, they came to an agreement; Kiril left the room and went upstairs. Simion could not think of anything more to talk about. He felt like closing his eyes and sinking in
to the most delicious sleep of his life, right then and there.

  “I’m sure I can, if…” he heard himself protesting. Kiril had returned and was moving around snuffing candles; the light contracted. As if in the last ceremony of some solemn royal marriage, the manservant carried a light before them, and Doriskos lifted his guest as if he were an armload of azaleas. Simion felt his head tilt. Upstairs, Simion realized. He thought, “Well, whatever you want to do, you can.” He said it, too. He slipped under the warm water of his sleep and drowned. Anything could have happened.

  In Doriskos’s bedroom the fire was made, and the reflecting surfaces flickered with sumptuous orange light. Doriskos laid the child on one side of the bed to turn down the covers on the other side. He removed the boy’s shoes, smiling at the dancing pumps, and tucked him under the covers. He tried to tally up the amount of wine he’d allowed Simion to drink, but he’d had too much himself to tally it with any accuracy. He allowed himself the pleasure of holding Simion’s hands briefly, then tucked them under the quilts and sat down on a low ottoman and contemplated him. He was not just swift and astonishingly educated; he was also this marvelous tender creature to shelter and nurture, who pulled powerfully at instincts that Doriskos hadn’t even known he had. It won’t be my business to form him, Doriskos thought, but to keep him warm and let him form himself as magnificently as he’s meant to. I love him. I never knew it was possible to feel this much for anyone or anything.

  Drugged with an extravagance of wine and warmth, Simion did not come awake, merely uttered a sleep-fretting sound at being on his side and turned onto his belly with a murmur of satisfaction. His breathing slowed to the tranquil rhythm of the happy sleeper. About an hour into Doriskos’s thralled watching, the boy’s parted lips smiled. A smile from Arcadia, of sensual happiness that could have nothing to do with this place. His mouth had an unanticipated softness and sensuality in sleep or a smile. It was the dreaming smile of statues, of those enchanted marble sleepers of Canova who know a secret but will not tell it to people of mere flesh. Doriskos thought of reaching under the bed to get the leather music case in which he kept his secret drawings, but decided not to lest he wake his enchanted sleeper. The drawings, at any rate, had been equaled and exceeded and outdone.

  Within his mind, he said a prayer, a promise he had kept from childhood already: God of beauty, I am on my knees before you for life. By degrees, he got silently to his feet and in equal silence bent forward and impressed his kiss on the cuff of Simion’s jacket, then on one loose flange of his hair.

  A clock chimed. Two-thirds asleep, eyes yet closed, Simion counted the peals and came abruptly to full alertness when he counted the third. Light lay against his eyelids; it was not three in the morning. He sat up, his heart slamming in his ears, and knew a couple of minutes of utter distress and confusion until he figured out where he was. “Why, this is his room,” he realized.

  He’d wakened in a room with Persian-blue walls and curtains the color of the darkest apples; beyond them was a sky of pastel gray, full of incipient snow. His shoes were nowhere to be found. He rang the bell on the lamp table by the bed, which brought Kiril.

  “Oh, so you’re awake. I’ll bring your tea.”

  “Where are my shoes?”

  “You wait for Dorias,” said Kiril, not answering Simion’s question. He brought the tea, along with shortbread and muffins and an apple. Simion shrugged—he’d missed every class, so why get in an uproar? He half-filled a cup with cream and sugar, added tea, and ate and drank. He could remember nothing after Doriskos took him upstairs, yet his clothes were all on and his chastity, what remained of it, felt undisturbed. He was still feeling strangely acquiescent, scarcely himself. He had had shifting dreams all night, he realized, of someone putting his heavy hand very lightly over the thin skin and bone of his brow and of giving himself utterly to the touch; in his dream he’d felt himself a thin iridescence like a heat haze, or as if one bore him up; a hummingbird, a mere thin flash of ecstatic color.

  Then Doriskos knocked gently on the door, opened it, and tentatively smiled, waiting to be invited to come nearer. The truth surfaced then, like a hand reaching up out of a deep pool to proffer a golden ball.

  That, thought Simion, was him.

  The shock of recognition! It was the first time Doriskos had ever met anyone whose daemonic qualities seemed to match his own, and there is nothing quite like the moment of recognition when someone whose soul is full of flickering lightning rather than conventional soul-stuff finds someone else who is the same. Along with the shock, there was an uncanny ease to it; they were never as strange to each other as it seemed they should be. Two days later, they were having a covert lunch together (Doriskos’s classroom door locked, a cloth spread on the table nearest the ancient stove).

  “Cider this time,” said Doriskos. “Perfectly proper. Not hard,” he added seriously. “Really, I should have anticipated that you wouldn’t be used to wine.”

  “Oh, but I can get used to it! I hadn’t any idea it was so good. It was angelic! I’d only had cider—hard and soft kinds—and brandy, and nasty old whiskey for colds. I’d say I’m heartily sorry for tossing it back like I did and getting myself squiffed, only then I wouldn’t have got to sleep in your house, and I liked that too, and you’re somehow not mad at me, so I really am not terribly sorry. I had the best time ever.”

  “I’m glad,” murmured Doriskos. In a small paralysis of shyness—remembering how he’d had his left hand under Simion’s knees, Simion’s head drooping onto his right shoulder, as he bore his weight up the stairs—Doriskos studied the bread and cold meat and cheese he’d laid out and rummaged in his basket for napkins. His nervousness seemed to come and go like an intermittent fever; Simion could see its grip on him in the sudden tremor of his hands. He would have liked to tell Doriskos that they could be quiet together, that whatever his British education had told him about batting prattle back and forth like a badminton birdie needn’t apply to them.

  Doriskos found the napkins, starched crisp and edged with heavy lace. He handed Simion one. “But, people,” he began, “have you found any, are there any who are…how shall one say…comfortable for you?”

  “Andy Carpallon and you,” said Simion, who had the self-possession to look Doriskos in the eyes and to click glasses with him again.

  “You know,” said Simion to Andy a few days past his stay in Doriskos’s house, “I may yet learn to like this college.” His life had seemed more satisfactory of late, the last few days sweetened by jaunts into the countryside. He’d gone first with Doriskos, who had said that he wished to draw a snowscape but wound up sketching Simion and then building, with his help, a snowman in the rough likeness of the Myron Discobolos. And he and Andy were now returning after skipping afternoon chapel and riding out to skate at Spee Pond. He enumerated his redeeming experiences in his head: I’ve made friends with a professor and been to his house and drunk real French wine and eaten a fancy meal, I’ve had lunch with him alone too, I’ve made friends with Andy and been to New Orleans, I’m learning to skate on ice. I must write Mr. Lincoln and tell him about it. “I’m finally having some proper experiences,” he told Andy.

  “And some of the other kind! You’re a scandal, you and your French wine, and getting yourself carried upst-”

  Andy cut himself off in mid-word, for he’d spied a casual acquaintance who had no particular need to hear that. But as soon as they came abreast of him, the boy doubled up with laughter, and Andy was strangely certain that his laughter was for them. He felt a chill on his nape that told him that some very improper experience, in fact some bloody major unpleasantness, might be coming straight at them.

  “Is something the matter, Patrick?”

  “Oh—I say!” spluttered the creature, flown with wine. He seemed to be addressing himself to Simion. “That man who wrote those pamphlets! Is that dreadful man really your father? How very rum!”

  “What pamphlets? What dreadful man?” asked Andy. “Are you s
peaking to me? My father doesn’t write anything.”

  “His does!” crowed Patrick, and pointed an unequivocal finger at Simion. “Oh!…my!…Gawd!”

  Simion, whose guard had been down, stared at Patrick with open chagrin and as much shock as if the boy had spat at him. “Pamphlets?” he asked. “Tracts?”

  “Tracts!” shrieked Patrick, slapping his thigh. “That’s the word! Tracts! Hellfire tracts with naked people in ’em! Tracts! Go see ’em for yourself, Carpallon!” He dissolved again in helpless tipsy laughter.

  “Many thanks for your valuable information, and a very good afternoon to you,” Andy told Patrick icily. “Come,” he said to Simion, “it’s bound to be nothing but some asinine joke.” He took Simion’s arm and got him moving. “Let’s go up to your room, shall we?” Simion let himself be led, but he didn’t seem to hear anything Andy said on the way there. When they got inside the suite, they found it fireless, in a state of ostentatious neatness and order, and empty of human presence. With elaborate casualness, someone had left a flyer on Simion’s beggarly little desk. “The Satterwhite Gallery,” it read. “An Exhibition of American Folkloric Religious Art, Produced by the Reverend Father of Our Academic Star. Three to five, North College #41, February 23. Refreshments will definitely be served.” It was three-thirty. North College #41 was, Andrew knew, Peter’s room.