The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “I wouldn’t lay money on it if I were you. He just might,” said Andrew, wanting not to talk about it any further. “And I maintain that that locked room of his is more than just a charming eccentricity, and this thing between the two of you is definitely not like something in a Mozart opera; it’s more like something in a Verdi opera that ends up with everyone cut into several pieces and everything in flames. It’s too hot and fast…over-intense. There. I’ve spoken my piece.” He supposed that perhaps these two would comprehend one another’s appalling anxiety, but he wondered what anyone as dissolved upon the mists as Doriskos would do with Simion’s dire purposefulness—and with his astonishing anger. He supposed he might soon get the chance to find out. “Well, shall we do the dirty deed?”

  But they did not, for the honey jar was not on the shelf anymore. Kiril made himself pointedly evident in the kitchen upon their return, as if he had been the one to notice Simion’s encroachment and was rebuking it as keenly as he dared. Ashamed at having pried at Doriskos like a ham-handed thief going at a safe, Simion called off the key hunt. He didn’t think anything so specific as, Do I want to behave like this with someone I love? But he found that the thought of what he’d intended brought a guilty heat to his face, a new experience that led him to think. He was used to brutal mishandling for things he either hadn’t done at all or felt no guilt about if he had. It was a new thing to consider himself a free agent, not a helpless victim, and a new thing to feel guilty. And he’d begun to get an idea of Doriskos’s skinless sensitivity and real need for the privacy he was willing to go to such desperate lengths to preserve.

  This was the first season of peace in Simion’s life, and the first time he was able to afford the empathy for such thoughts. For the first time in his life, he was out of danger; he was also relieved of the inordinate physical stress that had figured in his life even when he lived upstairs at the school in Haliburton. He was interested in Doriskos’s feelings and responses, eager to please and be pleased in a way that was new to him.

  Gentle, sedulous, and almost catlike in his quietness, Doriskos pleased Simion even in such things as how softly and unsuddenly he moved around or reached out toward him. He would set a glass in Simion’s hands very delicately, as if Simion were precious to him and even his smallest enjoyments were important. Such gestures filled Simion with almost embarrassed pleasure, and he wanted to reciprocate. In this spirit, he asked Doriskos if he could be of use by sitting for him. “I’ll take my clothes off if you want,” he said helpfully. “Even Peter thinks I’m a good artist’s model. I don’t mind, so long as we build up a good fire in the room.” Doriskos looked at him with an expression Simion was at a loss even to describe, suffusing slowly with the deepest blush he had ever seen on a man. “It will not be necessary—about your clothes. I should feel privileged to draw you…with your clothes…on.”

  “Very well, with my clothes on,” said Simion. He would be puzzled from the first sitting on, for which he sat cross-legged on the studio hearth dressed from his chin to his toes, but feeling naked.

  Simion would have liked to ask Simeon Lincoln about all this, and in fact he wrote a great deal about Doriskos in his letters south. Unable to formulate his true questions in words, he wrote in detail about the lesser mysteries. “And, you know how we usually think of intelligence as sharpness or keenness, at least in a superficial way we think of it so. We think that sharpness means being adroit in an inductive and deductive way. Well, he’s the opposite of sharp. He never looks keenly alert; even when he’s nervous, which is often, I wouldn’t say his look is keen. Not the kind of look I think of when I imagine a competent individual. But the man is amazing. The things he can do! He doesn’t seem to be in a drawing mood lately, so in the evenings he’ll often practice the pianoforte, and I come downstairs to listen and have my Organ of Veneration expanded. He favors the weirder and more diaphanous pieces of Chopin and great long banging things of Beethoven, which just suit him; the music is just as moody as he is, and his great hand spread was made for it. It’s music to be played by a man like him, on a big loud modern pianoforte. I just lean back and either watch him or close my eyes, because the music releases pleasant pictures in my head; in my mind’s eye I see snowstorms, waterfalls, water turning to fire, flights of swans. Last night I asked him what the piece was, and he said, “The twelfth sonata of Beethoven, I think. In A-flat.” He played it without the score, as he usually does. I looked for the score in his library, and it was formidable, unrelentingly difficult. Even the sweet little pastoral bits were too hard for me. He can follow the thought of the piece so that when he arrives at those sweet bits, he seems to have gotten there in some perfectly seamless and natural way, as if the little pastorale were the only possible outgrowth of the violent cascade that went before it. Remarkable.

  “He told me that he hates to read, which is not precisely true. It is true that he doesn’t read much and doesn’t read anything long. But he has quite a library of poetry, actually. Poe is one of his great favorites and ‘Tamerlane’ is his favorite Poe. He says that Poe’s melancholy is familiar to him. He’ll read little bits and then sit back and muse. He reads as if he were inhaling a perfume. However vague he looks, though, he actually knows lots about it and has gotten me some books of new poets I hadn’t even heard of.

  “Likewise, he can cook like an angel and draw like a god. And with such a lack of conceit! He isn’t even vain of his looks. He is not a talker, but some of the things he says are remarkable. Hyacinths are flowering here, and he picked some for our table today. He said something about how the blue-black ones have a stronger smell than any of the paler ones, and I compared them, and do you know, it’s true. He also said that the perfume of the hyacinth is what spring water would smell like if it were vastly concentrated, how did he put it?—a scent that almost quenches a thirst. And it occurred to me that he was absolutely right, but I’d never in a thousand years have made that observation on my own. I think his senses are about five times keener than those of the average man, and he uses them; he doesn’t look observant, but he is. He’s a genuine mystery, not like something in a laboratory that you can cut up and understand; with him, I add little pearls to my collection of facts and observations, but I have not succeeded in lifting his veil. He has a room in this house that he keeps locked, and I think he goes in there alone at night. He says there’s nothing in it. Among other things, I wish I knew what a person does in a cold empty room at three in the morning.

  “You so enjoy smart people and remarkable people, I wish I could introduce him to you. And if we were together, perhaps I could ask you about some things that puzzle me. I am an unsubtle person in some ways, and in over my head with him, but you might well be able to guess my questions for me and help me ask them. I must close and do trig. I am sending you one of his sketches of me, isn’t it good?”

  Very soon after receiving this effusion, Lincoln had written back to offer Simion his hospitality for the summer. His medical man, he wrote, felt that there would be little chance of contagion so long as proper precautions were observed. “I have highly crucial and private intelligence to impart to you,” Lincoln told Simion in this letter, which enclosed a train ticket to Savannah and instructions for getting from there to Lincoln’s beach house on Caroline Island. Simion, quite naturally, accepted by return mail.

  After his exams were written and the term ended, Simion packed and hoped that Doriskos would try to stop him or at the least importune him to delay. But the most satisfaction Doriskos gave him was to make him a present of a photograph and to act agitated and politely miserable, worrying in an exaggerated way about the safety of the journey south. In the carriage, en route to collect Andrew, who was to meet the same train, Simion felt that he must have something more definitive. When Kiril had pulled Gray up outside Durfee for Simion to go and summon Andrew down, Simion did not go immediately, but pulled down the shades of the carriage windows.

  “We have to just shake hands at the train station, so if
there’s anything we want to say…or do…now’s the time,” he suggested in his usual forthright manner. In his own voice, he heard a certain exasperated edge. Doriskos heard it too, and said, “Pardon?”

  Simion took him by the lapel and pulled him nearly to kissing distance, then closed the gap with a firm kiss on the mouth. Doriskos twitched violently, gave him a look that could not be described—terrified and inflamed might perhaps be the best pair of adjectives. Then he took him in a sudden breathless grip and returned that kiss at full heat. Simion, thrilled to feel Doriskos’s full strength at last, also felt his own heart race and his thinking brain go down in flames. When Doriskos let go of him and pushed his British-bred spine against the seat back and shut his eyes, Simion took a moment to get his breathing back in order. It was just a kiss, he told himself, yet it somehow felt more intimate than any of the actual intimacies he’d yet experienced: It was a kiss he could feel in his fingertips, in his throat, in his spine. “If you ever make love to me, it’ll rock us both like thunder,” he whispered. With a sense of timing he hadn’t known he possessed, he touched Doriskos lightly upon the mouth with his index finger, and smiled, and got out to fetch Andy.

  VII. The Island

  The sky in Savannah was a pale and satiny blue, a Tiepolo blue, and in the noon stillness of the wind Simion felt the great heat when he arrived there. At this point he parted from Andrew, who was headed home for a summer of singing lessons. Inspired by some sudden devil, he bent and kissed Andrew on the forehead and gave him a wicked smile before getting off the train.

  Waiting for his trunk to be unloaded, he remembered his painful longing for Lincoln after his departure from Haliburton—he’d felt half to blame for the fact and manner of Lincoln’s exodus. They had parted with painfully unfinished business between them; he’d parted from Doriskos in almost as unsettling a fashion, at the pausing point of a first perilous kiss. Now he was torn between wanting to be with Lincoln already, to have the bond between them firmly remade, and the desire to find out when the next train left for New York. To retrace his steps back to Doriskos’s door, to find him out of the house if possible, and when he came home, to ambush him from under the covers of his bed—a delicious Botticellian naked surprise on the half-shell. But Lincoln’s pull was an old and powerful one, and the nearer he got, the more Simion wanted to immerse himself in Lincoln’s personality and hear his mordant voice expertly deriding some folly—even one of Simion’s own.

  Presently his trunk was disgorged from the baggage compartment. He reached into his pocket for Lincoln’s latest letter and consulted his instructions again. He found the sign that said Ferry Jitney, pulled the trunk over to it, and sat down on the trunk to wait for the omnibus that would take him to the quay. On board, in the shade of the vehicle’s green awning, he began to feel less tense. He unfolded his map and again identified Caroline, a mere speck in an archipelago of little cays off the south Georgia coast.

  He was wearing one of his hand-me-downs from Andrew, a sharp suit of oyster-white linen, and one of Doriskos’s ties. He looked smart. A trio of young girls under the guard of a governess or dragoness on the opposite bench surveyed him with interest. One of the girls, in a mint-green frock with dark-green ribbons, broke rank and asked him an apparently irresistible question: “Do you go to William and Mary?”

  “I go to Yale,” he told her, with a friendly smile.

  “You must be a very smart man,” said the maiden, practicing up for serious female wheedling, but the dragoness put a stop to that.

  “Elizabeth!”

  That was that, and too bad—he would not have minded talking. He thought: “I’d like to go to some fancy party here and tell them that I’m a blueblood from Virginia, from the tidewater. I bet I could get away with it in these clothes.” He was beginning to feel like an authentic article of some kind and accept his transformation, rapid though it was, as real. But he warned himself against displaying any affectations before Lincoln, who, he imagined, would be both displeased and vexed. “And if he thinks I’ve become an ass, he’ll strip me down,” he thought. He wondered if perhaps he shouldn’t have worn this jaunty getup after all. So compelling was this thought that he took his trunk well away from the others on the boat and scrabbled in it for some plainer stuff, which he changed into in the gentlemen’s waiting room. A band-collar shirt and snuff-colored trousers and schoolboy cap transformed him into a schoolboy again, but he felt inauthentic and costumed for play-acting in this outgrown incarnation too. Still, if it lessened or prevented the shock…

  He got off last of all, having watched the others off at Tybee, St. Simon, and a few lesser islands. Finally the ferry docked at the tiny sea island, which seemed, true to Lincoln’s letters, just big enough for one diminutive village. A green fingerling, with thickets of stunted trees. Freshened by a constant moving air straight off the windy Atlantic, there it was easily fifteen degrees cooler than in Savannah. “Dis Caroline,” said one of the uniformed blacks who worked on the ferry, while helping to drag out Simion’s trunk. “The Savannah Belle, she don’t stop here regular. You puts up da red signal flag dere if you wants to go to da mainland, and da ferry she stop roun’ ’bout dis time.”

  Simeon Lincoln’s new manservant Bond Foster, an enormous and funereal mulatto with a vast tragedy mask of a face, met the ferry and unhesitatingly identified himself to Simion. Then he drove him to the cottage in a pony trap pulled by two shaggy ponies. Simion wondered if his old teacher had hired the man on the basis of his ugliness alone. So thinking, he nearly jumped out of his skin when Bond addressed him in a voice of low and musical mournfulness—it was this sad cello of a voice that had startled him.

  “So you don’t tek no shock,” said the old man, “let me tell you now, your frien’ bad off, very sick. I spec he call you on account of his will. Me, I tek care of him. I wait on you as best I can, iron shirts and all, but he tek lot of nursing now, he brought very low.”

  “Has he had any crises lately?”

  Bond looked back over his shoulder but didn’t answer immediately.

  “Crises! Hemorrhages. Spitting blood. Bouts of high fever.”

  “Naw. He jus’ sink, he don’ eat, don’ read. When he don’ read, that a bad sign. He sit and look at the water all afternoon, and that a very bad sign, lookin’ out to sea. I spec he sleep now. Lef’ him sleepin’.”

  The beach house was deep in its afternoon stillness, a quiet as thick as honey, when they arrived. You could see the ocean from the parlor windows or porch and hear its peaceful, continual sough. Simeon Lincoln was sound asleep under a heavy quilt, propped up to a near-sitting position by several pillows; Simion, with his new interest in others’ private faces, inched the door open and watched him some minutes. Sleeping, he looked both phenomenally aged and innocent: an ancient child. Simion walked through the cottage and recognized the familiar objets and books from Lincoln’s Haliburton flat, but most of the furniture was wicker, summer furniture. The whole effect was comfortable but temporary, skin-shallow.

  Bond settled Simion in a room with an iron bed with a patchwork quilt on it, a washstand, an armchair, an old oil lamp on the mantel, and a bookcase partly filled with Lincoln’s books. Simion began to unpack his trunk, fighting a sudden imperative desire for a nap, which was compounded of grief, the desire to escape it, and plenty of authentic fatigue. Yawning, he became aware of Bond at the door.

  “You go to sleep. He won’ mind.”

  “I don’t want to be asleep when he wakes up. It’d look callous.”

  “You likely wake before him. If you don’, he won’ mind.”

  Simion allowed himself to be persuaded, securing an agreement from Bond to be wakened if Lincoln should begin to stir. He accepted Bond’s offer of milk and crackers and let himself go to sleep.

  “Why, it’s full dark,” he thought, emerging from that escapist’s sleep. He rubbed his dry eyes, then felt himself being looked at and turned to see Lincoln sitting in the small armchair.

  “O
h, I’m sorry—your man said he’d wake me up!”

  “And I told him on no account to do such a thing. It was your nap time, after all,” said Lincoln. He stretched out his hand, and their two hands linked. The old and accustomed physical reticence reassured Simion; the small sentimentality did not. “And how are you?” Lincoln asked, releasing him.

  “I’m well…”

  “I, as you can see, am not. Are you well awake? We should discuss the rules for keeping you well before anything. I consulted my medical man, and he thought there would be no danger to you now, while I’m not having an acute episode, so long as you didn’t eat after me or sleep in the same room, or share my towels and the like, or touch me. And if you do, you wash your hands with that blue soap by your basin. So, right now you wash your hands. When you want something to eat, ask Bond. He knows all the precautions. I wipe down the spinet keys with white spirit after I play, but it might be well if you wiped them down before you do, just as a double precaution. And if I have an episode”—he meant a hemorrhage; he called them that—“you can go for the doctor, but you’re not on any account to involve yourself with the mess. Can we agree on that?”

  “I’ll do anything that makes things easier for you,” said Simion. He got up and washed his hands with the medicinal-smelling blue soap.

  “I say these things first out of my care for you,” Lincoln said.

  “I know. May I light that lamp?”

  “Of course you can. You don’t have to ask permission for things in this house, why should you? You weren’t a great permission asker as a child. When you want something, tell Bond, and he’ll get it.”

  Simion took a match from a tin box by the lamp and turned up the wick to trim it, thinking of Doriskos’s diaphanous presence and his older friend’s concreteness: Even so diminished, shrunken as he no doubt was under the winter sweater he wore, Lincoln was absolutely here, real, unflinching, actual as a pile of rocks. When he carried the lamp over and set it on the small table between them, he saw that Lincoln had indeed gotten thinner. His eyes seemed paler and more prominent, the small eyes that were his face’s failure in beauty and success in character. Such a thin person should have large eyes, people expected it, to divert their eyes from the skull beneath the skin, but he didn’t. He seemed even more bloodlessly pale than before, the veins in his forehead and hands more apparent, more blue. Who was that painter whose people looked this way, with their lit eyes and long fingers? He consulted his memory of Doriskos’s print book: El Greco, né Domenikos Theotokópoulos.