The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  Now, by contrast, from some spring of deep lucidity came the realization that it would not even occur to Doriskos to think that Simion should be ashamed of himself because of those tracts. His night in the stable had been unnecessary; all he would have had to do was to knock on the door. He had mightily upset Doriskos and felt sorry for it. And that was another difference, for after his other crashing falls he’d been quite incapable of empathy or regret for any other creature for days or weeks, as barren of kindness as a scorched field.

  Yesterday’s clothes were hanging neatly on the clotheshorse, though his footwear was nowhere to be seen. He put his clothes on. He’d used to take little aversions to anything he’d been wearing when the world crashed down upon him, but that too seemed unimportant now.

  And in this spirit, he padded in his stocking feet down the upper hall, looking for his host. He found Doriskos in his studio, mixing pigments.

  “I like to mix paints when my eyes are too tired to draw,” said Doriskos, as if he needed to explain his actions, keeping away from more delicate issues. “It doesn’t disturb my perceptions of color, in fact they actually seem sharper, just as sounds seem very loud… How are you?”

  “I’m sorry I threw such a fit. I think I’m over being a baby about the tract party. I know I upset you and wasted your time.”

  “It upset me, true, but I didn’t consider it a waste of my time,” Doriskos said gravely. “By the way, I went over to North College this morning and retrieved those tracts and all of those awful flyers that I could find. I burnt them.”

  “You went and got them? Whatever did Peter say?” Simion asked, life reviving in him.

  “Not a word. He was passed out dead drunk, the swine. I didn’t wake him up—better to let him wake up sometime this afternoon and see that the garbage is gone, and get well and properly scared. His room looked as if he’d had an orgy in it, too.”

  Simion pressed his hand over his mouth and choked off a laugh.

  Doriskos looked hard at his feet, then brought out, “I…think…Peter…has one of those simpering obsessions that I used to see at Oxford. A pash, they called it, for passion. Poetry-writing and painting undergraduates mooning about younger boys or any decent-looking tutor they could pester. Well, I think Peter has a pash for me. I know how vulgar that sounds, but it appears to be the regrettable truth. And I believe he picked up on the fact that we’re…that I…that you and I have a rapport.”

  “He does seem to have noticed that, and to think of nothing else, and he seems to resent it greatly. I don’t know what he wants from me. He ought to be able to figure out that I have no control over things my father does—nobody has.”

  “Of course you don’t—I can’t imagine how anyone would think you did.” A pained pause. “Anyway, I believe that what Peter did yesterday was his vengeance, in the hope that he could make you leave college. A crude way of eliminating what he considers a threat. To the relationship with me that he hasn’t got in the first place.”

  Simion nodded, feeling that the subject could be put to rest. “That’s a beautiful guest room that you put me in,” he ventured.

  “That isn’t a guest room, that’s for you,” said Doriskos.

  “Huh?”

  “Let’s go downstairs and have breakfast and talk,” said Doriskos, more decisively than he was wont.

  Simion sat on the raised hearth of the shadowy kitchen watching Doriskos make their breakfast. Suddenly and exigently hungry, he ate some of everything offered him and drank two cups of hot chocolate, heavy with sugar and milk. Then he sat pensively still, feeling his bodily fires accept the fuel and reverse his depletion. It was a deep, intensely sensuous feeling. He wagered that people who ate well all the time probably missed this feeling of having food hit their blood like brandy and light this deep warmth in them. He felt loose-tongued and friendly, as if he were lightly drunk.

  “I didn’t know you could buy paint in such fancy colors, like the colors of that room,” he said.

  “You can’t, I made it,” said Doriskos.

  “You make all your own paints? Really! It seems there’s nothing you can’t do. And those are beautiful trees you painted. Everything you make is pretty. It’s as if it’s a trick of your personality—anything you touch is pretty and uncommon.”

  This compliment made Doriskos smile but also plunged him into an avid contemplation of his coffee cup.

  “I wish I were that way,” offered Simion.

  “But you are.”

  “How?”

  Another silence. Then Doriskos looked up, focused and intent. “Do you believe in reincarnation? In the immortality of the soul and its development?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do. I believe that beauty is the outward reflection of an inner grace. And by that standard, yours must be a holy soul. Pure beaten gold after many upward-striving lives. I…feel blessed by your presence. Just as the initiates at Eleusis felt blessed, as if I’d seen something that made me able to see and hear more of the balance and harmony in the world.”

  “I wish more people felt the same,” Simion said. “Certainly my suitemates can’t stand me. My tutor liked me, but he and I were a great deal similar, and understood one another,” he added. In his mind’s vision, Simion saw Lincoln’s haggard face lit up with welcome for him, and he thought that if anybody was a holy soul, Lincoln rather than himself was that person. It made Simion feel parched and starved for the care he’d gone without since Lincoln’s last stand on his behalf; he felt a sudden heat in his eyes. He remained quite still, in itself a form of approach, as Doriskos reached out and touched him lightly with one finger at the left cheekbone.

  “It does worry you, doesn’t it—what nasty people think?”

  “It’s hard not to worry about it. I live in a room right across from them. I can hear them breathe in their sleep.” The idea came to him: You could do something about this, and it would help me a great deal more than ethereal notions about Eleusis and reincarnation! But he was appalled at his own boldness in articulating this even within his own mind and at the harsh little blade of the idea itself. In his mind’s ear, he heard the brayings of everyone who’d ever shamed him. He heard them very keenly against Doriskos’s silence.

  Then Doriskos said, “But you needn’t. Live in a room across from them, that is. You…you like it here, don’t you? And I have things you haven’t seen, other things you’d like…books. I mean…why don’t you…stay? I just cannot stand the idea…you doing things like freezing yourself in that shed. I can’t bear that, I can’t live with the idea or the possibility. So…please? Will you at least think about it?”

  “You’re inviting me?”

  Doriskos nodded fiercely. “We could say that you’re my secretary. Everyone on the faculty seems to be writing some dreadful book. I’m not, but how’re they to know that? I could say I need you to help with my book.”

  “I could write your letters and do your errands,” said Simion, cooperating in this camouflage before the fact much as he’d cooperated with Simeon Lincoln’s subterfuges for protecting him. “I do that for Professor Apthorpe. And I took care of his horses during the summer. I could take care of your horse.”

  “I have no intention of making work for you to do, and I don’t write letters. I don’t have anyone to write letters to except my foster father, and I’m not much keen on him at the moment,” said Doriskos breathlessly. “Yes, there’s Gray Matter, you can ride him if you want, but the people at the livery stable can see to his upkeep as always. I don’t want to inflict the duties of a groom upon you.” A quite Italianate color had washed up at his cheekbones.

  “I’d like to be of some use. I don’t want to be a trouble to you.”

  “You couldn’t be trouble,” said Doriskos.

  “I was, just last night,” Simion reminded him, just wanting to make sure Doriskos knew what he was talking about. “I could go back home,” he suggested, though mostly to see the strength of Doriskos’s reaction. It was e
ven better than he thought. Again, Doriskos looked as if he’d been hit from behind.

  “To that awful person who wrote those pamphlets? Don’t be absurd. You aren’t a trouble to me. In fact, it’s the only thing I know that would make me feel at ease, having you here. And free to do what you want, and safe. You’ll be safe here. I promise,” he said. (Safe, thought Simion, now there was a word to be reckoned with, a word as beautiful as a warm wind through a host of trees, a word in an elite set of words—warmth, sleep, soft, summer, sweet, safe.)

  “I remember you last night,” said Simion, a picture rising in his mind’s eye suddenly and keenly. “You were the one who put the hot-water bottles in the bed to warm me up, and you bent down over me and fussed over my pillow to get it just right under my neck. I didn’t remember that at first, I guess I was tired out of my head, but you looked so worried, and you were doing all those things for me…”

  “And this means…?”

  “Yes. It means yes.” Which, come to think of it, was also one of those really fine words.

  By evening teatime, they had an agreement and a plan. Andrew had made his own contribution to the arrangement: that, perhaps, Doriskos might wish to use his professorial influence to secure official permission for Simion to move in with him, Andrew, at Durfee. None of them had mentioned the word camouflage, though it had run through two of the three heads present. “You could stay with me a couple of days every week, and have my rooms be your official residence. Put some of your things in my rooms, and most of them here. So you’ll have plenty of clothes in both places. And privacy about your arrangements,” said Andrew.

  “So Peter and Topher won’t be gossiping about my living here?” asked Simion. “Then again, they’ll gossip about my living with you, too, Andy.”

  “None of this is being done for the benefit of Peter and Topher,” said Andy. “And I think you had better toughen your lovely hide against gossip, because I can anticipate that it’ll be a constant in your life.”

  “It’s not fair,” said Simion, in what Andrew thought was his most juvenile tone. “I was the one doing my work and minding my business. They were the ones raising Cain and doing revolting things and getting drunk. They have nerve to burn to say the first word about me. And they started the whole thing. What’s wrong with people? Why are they so mean? Why aren’t they rational?”

  Andrew looked to Doriskos, wondering if he’d venture to explain these subtle realities. Then he realized that Doriskos saw nothing to explain; on his face Andrew read no irony, no grown-up’s amusement. Rather, he saw there an identical incomprehension, a sort of tender indignation; Doriskos ventured to pat Simion’s hand and say, “That’s all over now.” Andrew had no doubt that he really thought so. “What a pair of babes they are!” he thought. “There’s some funny way that they’re exactly the same. They really do suit each other.” He was aware that he’d lost Simion in the important way, the way that he fancied he wanted him when pinioned at the aching peaks of his exasperated infatuation. “And yet perhaps this is how it’s supposed to be. Perhaps nothing’s happened that wasn’t supposed to happen,” he thought, and did not give himself all the credit due for such a thought at the jealous and thin-skinned age of nineteen.

  The next day was a Sunday, its morning consumed in packing and moving Simion’s belongings to his two domiciles while his suitemates were in church. In the afternoon, Doriskos showed Simion his library. “I have an odd assortment of books. You like books, don’t you?” he said.

  “I love books, practically all books…”

  “You’d better come see these,” said Doriskos. He carried the lamp into one of the downstairs rooms to reveal rows of books, matched sets of English and French novels and poetry. Dickens, Hardy, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Poe, De Musset, Lamartine, George Sand, Mallarmé, and—“Oh, my God, Baudelaire!” said Simion, who had made several attempts to get booksellers to order him a copy of Les Fleurs du mal and been laughed off as if he were a ten-year-old requesting a gallon of whiskey.

  “You’ll have to read them—I don’t. My father sends me these novels, he thinks it’ll broaden me, or something, but I don’t like them. In fact, except for poetry, I simply hate to read. I’m happy they’ll finally be used.”

  “Don’t like to read?” asked Simion, incredulous even through his fatigue.

  “No,” Doriskos assured him, and damned if he hadn’t a smile of outright flirtation on his face. “Don’t like to read. Simply loathe to read. A great big ignorant recalcitrant. Don’t tell anybody.”

  “I won’t,” Simion protested in a sweet drawl, a voice he was surprised to hear come out of his mouth. He had never spoken this way to anyone in his life.

  “My guilty secret is safe with you, then?”

  “All your guilty secrets are safe with me. But what do you want me to do for you?”

  “Well…read…study. What you wish,” said Doriskos, who had not really answered Simion’s question. Simion obeyed him according to his terms, though; later that afternoon, he settled his own things in his bedroom, then stretched out on the rug before the comfortable fire and read. Periodically he paused to touch something and amaze his senses, feel the yield of the deep Aubusson to his body or shut his eyes and note the glorious absence of obtrusive human presence. He even crawled up under the bed and ran his fingers along the shiny, dustless floor. He was tired, his emotions overworked, but also in a mood of gathering exuberance at the possibilities in life—of making friends and living in nice places, of banishing nastiness and noise from one’s personal orbit. He would have to write and tell Simeon Lincoln about it and send him his new address.

  Indeed, he was making a mental note about this when he startled at the bang of a door against a wall, the first sound in this house in which he’d heard anger. He crept out on the landing, his face mildly shocked by the cold outside air that had come in. The front door stood open.

  Peter, loaded down with his drawing things, wavered in the foyer, and Doriskos regarded him with frigid distaste—indeed, with revulsion.

  “But my lesson—”

  “Your lessons with me are things of the past! What you need to learn, I can’t teach you, but I can get your sticky hands off my affairs and your sticky breath off my neck, I can avoid seeing that spoilt greedy face of yours, and you can go get yourself another teacher! If you can find someone who’ll have you, that is. Do you know what you are? You’re like a singer with a great voice and perfect pitch who’s an odious vulgarian and squanders his talent on every kind of musical dreck he can lay his hands upon. If you were a singer, you’d have the tenor lead in every piece of Italian slop that rots its way across the stage. As things stand, if a thing’s cheap and lubricious, you’ll draw it, and if you have the chance to do something hateful and contemptible, you’ll fall over your own feet in your rush to do it. And what you’ve done now is the proverbial Last Straw!”

  “But what is this that you imagine I’ve done?”

  “I know exactly what you’ve done, and so do you. Think about a certain party, think about some flyers you had printed and some insane tracts that you put on display, then reconsider that question. I ought never to have taken you for a student, private pupils are nothing but grief!” As Peter gaped, Doriskos took a step back from him, not in retreat but in sheer revulsion, and surveyed him witheringly. “I always was uneasy about you. Even when you’re being your own version of pleasant, you’re like some big, nasty cream cake just on the point of turning from the heat. It’s beyond hope that anybody’ll ever make an artist of you. You have that talent of yours like an extra limb, like a piece of somebody else you got by accident—the mechanical talent of a Millais grafted onto the mind of some backstreet dirty-book merchant! What a filthy waste of the ability to draw! And of my time! On a wastrel, a mean, drunken vulgarian and contemptible swine, without any kind of decency or manners and a mind as thick with filth as the Ganges River! I’d throw you out of my course at the college if I could. I can’t do that, but I’m thro
wing you out as my private student, you can consider yourself thrown! Now go, before I call my valet to make you go!”

  “What in damnation would you know about my parties or any tracts?” Peter asked rather than complying with that request.

  “I know,” Doriskos assured him.

  “Who told you?”

  “That’s for me to know and you not to find out.”

  “What’s it to you how I disport myself in my leisure hours? Besides, whatever there is about me to shock most people—I’d bet it wouldn’t shock you. I’d give a lot to know what’s stirred the waters so. I bet there’s a good story here to be told.”

  “I’m sure that eventually there will be: When it’s time for you to die, a big statue will come and knock at your door, and a crew of fiery little imps will come up through the flooring, and there’ll be nothing left but a very large grease spot on the carpet. And it’ll be none too soon, whenever it is.”

  “Tsk. I had no idea you could be so sarcastic. Or such a prude. At any rate, if I did appropriate some tracts and throw a naughty party, Professor Klionarios, what’s it to you?”

  “It’s a great deal to me,” said Doriskos.

  “Now, that I tend to believe. Because of all those little fauns that you used to sketch all around your grocery and supply lists, among other things, oh, any bit of paper that came to hand. It occurred to me when Simion arrived in town that they did resemble him uncannily, and at that point you stopped adorning your lists and scrawls with him, as if your little innocent habit were something to hide. What am I…and others, for that matter…to construe from such behavior?”

  “That I like his face and don’t care for yours, for one thing! Turn it in the opposite direction and start to move,” said Doriskos. He then shut his mouth tight and stood there in blazing silence.