by Laura Argiri
“Bond’s getting your supper,” said Lincoln.
“Oh, he needn’t, I don’t really want any. It’s late. It’s past nine, from the light.”
“I’d like you to eat it. You’re looking much stronger; you mustn’t lose the ground you’ve gained.”
It was not a bad idea after all, Simion realized, to have something to do in the midst of this excruciating unease. What he wanted was a cigarette, or five—but he wasn’t displeased with the supper, either. Lincoln’s indifference to food found expression in whatever was plain, bland, and cheap. If Simion had to do without Doriskos this summer, he would also do without glazed fowls and innocent-looking sauces that turned out to contain horrible Dijon mustard and all those other innovative torments dreamt up by a man with an eclectic tongue and, apparently, a stomach of galvanized steel. Bond brought him cinnamon toast, a pair of soft-boiled eggs, potato soup, and cold milk.
“This is nice,” Simion offered, between mouthfuls. “My…(housemate? the man with whom I share the house? employer? patron?)…my Greek professor is an amateur cook. He makes curry and things. I’m a little more tolerant than I was as a child, but on many nights, I eat eggs and get looked at reproachfully because I can’t stomach the heathen rice in hellfire sauce or pickled goose parts and beans, or whatever. He is the funniest man. He never eats the least particle of sugar. He hates it, can you imagine? Makes cake for me and eats an apple or pear and a piece of cheese for dessert.”
“Just so he doesn’t make you eat rice in hellfire sauce or pickled goose parts.”
“Oh, he doesn’t make me do anything. It’s mystifying.”
“No, it’s not,” Lincoln replied with a grin. The atmosphere eased a little. Simion wanted him to be wicked and mordant, to make some evil, incisive remark, but he didn’t. For a little while, they talked of trivialities; then Lincoln noticed the heaviness of his guest’s eyes and dismissed him to his bed.
Before turning in, Simion dug out the photograph that Doriskos had given him from under his shirts and contemplated it in the whiskey-colored light of the lamp. He was spectacularly photogenic but quite unable to produce a composed expression for the camera. His Byzantine eyes were wide and a little wild, they had a sort of startled stillness, and he wasn’t smiling. “The photographer wanted me to smile,” he’d said, half apologizing, when offering his gift. “But I actually couldn’t.”
“No need to look as if you’d just robbed a bank,” thought the boy; if what had gone between them were all put into mercilessly factual terms, it would barely amount to a sin! We lived in the same house. Through February, March, April, May, and part of June, we watched the flames of the suppertime candles in one another’s eyes. The score is two embraces and one kiss on the mouth. But the kiss had lit a brushfire in him. It had moved him to frantic and abject appetite on the train with Andy, in the hot little box of their sleeping compartment while the innocent landscape ran by in the black night and thickening humidity…Baltimore, Richmond, Raleigh marked with the musks of confined and energetic passion.
Falling asleep alone in this chaste bed, he pushed his thoughts against that photograph as if it were an icon. You look upset and, oh, I hope you are upset. I hope you miss me so much that you can’t sleep. I hope your Indian green gunpowder curry tastes flat as tapioca. I hope the thought of me keeps you writhing and tossing all night!
In truth, his desire for his loved one’s discomfort would have been amply requited. Doriskos had locked himself in the mural room and was lying on the floor watching a single candle burn down and wondering why he hadn’t been able to force the words Please stay with me up his throat; it was what he had been doing every night since putting Simion and Andrew on the train. This was indeed grief, but it was more than that also. He was holding on to that part of himself that had wakened when Simion came, keeping it awake, not letting it hibernate. And he was fishing about in the deep well of his daemonic brain, seeking an image.
So on both sides there was grief and anger about their proper parting, and Doriskos was unforgiven for his lack of audacity by both Simion and himself. Simion, though, was the one who got stomachaches from this kind of emotion, and sure enough it happened that first night on the island; he woke with his intestines cramping fiercely somewhat after two in the morning. He promptly lost interest in torturing Doriskos, or indeed anybody, in the duress of being tortured by his own body. He was also mad as hell that this was happening during his vacation. He had a bottle of brandy left from the joint stock he and Andy had kept in Andy’s rooms, and he dug it out of his trunk.
Lincoln found him out on the veranda with a double dose of cognac in hand.
“Since when do you drink brandy in the middle of the night like a seasoned dipsomaniac?”
“It’s medicinal. I’ve got one of my stomachaches.”
“Give me that.”
Puzzled, Simion did, and Lincoln leaned over the porch rail and poured it deliberately onto the sandy ground.
“Now, come inside and get me a glass from the kitchen shelf.”
Simion obeyed. He drank the dose Lincoln poured out for him.
“Aggh! Tastes ghastly!”
“Well, it probably wouldn’t do you any good if it didn’t,” said Lincoln, grinning, then thrust some sticks into the stove and lit it. “When the kettle gets hot, you can take the spearmint down from the shelf and make yourself some spearmint tea. That’s soothing and not nasty.”
“I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“You didn’t. I sleep and wake at odd hours now. I don’t even bother to get undressed for bed unless I’m sure I’ll sleep. Why didn’t you come and ask me for something?”
“I didn’t want to confront you first thing with one of my stomachaches. I haven’t managed to outgrow them. I earned my way to this one, I suppose—I’ve been eating bad stuff on the train.”
“I’m sure you have. You should ask my doctor for a dose to clear it all out if you don’t feel better in the morning. But aside from fried doughboys and sausage on the train, you’re nervous. I’ve rarely seen you so keyed up, even when you were small and in perpetual danger of having your brainpan dented.”
Simion made no answer to this. They waited for the kettle to boil. When it did, he located the spearmint leaves and put a handful in the pot, then poured in the hot water. “Not too revolting,” he said, once he’d tasted the brew. “It’d taste fine with sugar.”
“You can sugar it if you like; it doesn’t decrease its medicinal value,” said Lincoln. “May one ask what’s so heavy on your mind? Surely something must account for your skittishness and general apologetic manner, both of which are quite unlike you.”
“I, well…this year I seem to have changed a lot,” Simion managed. “I’m not used to myself anymore. I want things I didn’t use to think of. I feel as if I’m quite unlike my old self. And perhaps I’m a little afraid, or a great deal afraid. That you don’t know me anymore. And that when you do, perhaps you won’t like me.”
“I’ll like you,” said Lincoln. “And you know I hardly like anything or anybody. The world’s scarcely safe from my destructive contempt. I like Bond, and this house, and this scrubby little island. And I liked you before any of them, and more than any of them. What’s worrying you—we can talk about it, or not. As you wish. Only, if you do want to talk about it, it would be well to get to the point. And I know that unsaid things hanging on the air bother you, too, so for my part, I’ll tell you now: I think I’m dying, and the medical man agrees with me, and I wanted to see you. I’ll make it as little painful as I can—I think that’s best achieved by not telling lies.”
“You have some other clothes—why don’t you wear them?” asked Lincoln a couple of days later. He was by then in the midst of one of those spurts of near-normal energy he had from time to time in this guttering phase of his. It was as if the infection, sure of victory, granted him an occasional holiday. He felt well enough for a walk on the beach, and he and his pupil had gone perhaps half a mile. Si
mion, who had an almost religious confidence in the power of clothing to shape fate, was costumed as an urchin yet again, in knee breeches and barefooted on the warm sands.
“They’re hand-me-downs from my friend Andrew Carpallon,” he told Lincoln. “They’re quite elegant, rather like Andy himself…he’s going to be an opera singer…sharply cut and all. I didn’t want you to think I’d got conceited at college and turned into some kind of shot-up type.”
Lincoln grinned. “I adore the way you use the language. These bits of hillfolk idiom that find their way into the rest. I loved the epithets that found their way into your mouth in your childhood. This little all-eyes creature who could write good Latin and good Greek, squabbling in the schoolyard and yelling, ‘you stinker, you varmint.’ And pelting the guilty party with balls of muddy snow. It was marvelous. Some kind of shot-up type, indeed. Don’t stop. It gives you flavor.”
“Andy likes it too.”
“And does this Klionarios like it?”
“I believe so. Often I can’t tell whether he’s intrigued by something or if it just confuses him.”
“I think you ought to wear your new clothes. You know that if I ever think you’re in danger of becoming a shot-up type, I’ll tell you.”
“May I ask you an indelicate question?”
“You’ve never hesitated in the past,” said Lincoln, in vivacious exasperation. Perhaps he was trying to close the distance between them in his press for time, to get a taste of the adult friendship they might have had from this skitty adolescent who was used to being a child with him.
“Did you…when you were at college…have trouble with athletic types, drinking and carousing and card-playing types?”
“I shouldn’t have minded having trouble with them. No, when they heard my cough, which was fairly soon, they stopped ribbing me for being a grind and started pitying me for being a consumptive. I would have rather eaten wormwood raw. Once you’re pitied, you become a creature of neuter gender, almost if not quite like a woman, and other men will treat you with that same contempt and chivalry.”
Simion saw that this oblique approach of his had led Lincoln in a painful direction, so he tried to think of a radical detour. “What do you know about women?”
“Next to nothing,” said Lincoln, cheerfully enough. “Why ever?”
“My suitemates talked of doing awful things to them. And having them enjoy it.”
“Don’t you swallow that down whole. I bet your suitemates would run like deer if any decent woman looked them in the eyes,” said Lincoln, and started to cough.
Over the next few days, Simion’s attention was taken up by the gravity of Lincoln’s symptoms—above all, his cough, which might lie still all day only to crank up with no clemency at night. It was a tearing cough, as if his lungs were rotting alive and those great barks ripped through tissue that was live enough to hurt and yet corrupt enough to tear at a breath. After the coughing—and worse—came the torturous effort to clear his throat, as if he were trying to spit out ragged pieces of himself. When Simion got up once and approached the door, Lincoln looked up over his bloody handkerchief at him with real anger and choked out, “I told you to keep away when this happens! I told you! So do it! Keep away!”
So Simion kept away, feeling forced into good manners and bad faith. Having sensed in that anger Lincoln’s desire not to have his decline witnessed on a minute-by-minute basis, Simion absented himself from the house a great deal over the next few days. He slept poorly, interrupted by the coughing fits, but made up for his broken nights by napping through the afternoons on a blanket near a semi-concealed tidal pool. So solitary was the location that he could quite safely strip to the skin and take the sun in at every pore. He baked himself brown and somnolent, as he had in the isolated high pastures of his childhood. His hair paled from white-wine blond to his childhood’s flaxen. He bathed in the rough gray surf, but he liked the tidal pool better: a bath-warm basin of gentle saltwater upon which he could float in amniotic restfulness, sun dazzling the darkness behind his closed eyes. The sound of the sea was a sweet substitute for the endless tides of wind he had been accustomed to in the mountains, and for which there had been no surrogate in New Haven. As he’d done last summer, he read books for the upcoming year’s schoolwork, to be ahead; he read a little, let it settle, dozed, and repeated the process, working his way through the Prometheus, the Memorabilia, the Antigone, and Loomis’s Analytical Geometry. He enjoyed the primitive little pleasure of pissing outdoors. His fantasies, hot and brilliant, had a perfervid desperation to them as the days went by: pleasure that was almost pain, abjection that was absolute power, ecstatic shame—oh, Baudelaire!..
A couple of weeks later, Simion was killing time in the parlor of Snow’s Establishment while Lincoln saw his doctor. He was rereading, for about the tenth time, a bewildering letter from Doriskos. This letter made no allusion to the way in which they had bidden each other farewell, but it told him in all the detail he might ever want to know about the weather since he’d left. It complained in poetic fashion of feeling unanchored in a sea of solitude. It was like some of those highly chromatic preludes of Chopin that Doriskos liked to play, a mist of ethereal and focusless melancholy that did not state its cause. Moreover, in its annoying lack of declarativeness, it resembled all the other notes Simion had received from Doriskos. The tone in which Simion answered one letter had no influence upon the tone of the next one he received. He sat in that hot waiting room wondering about Doriskos’s correspondence and worrying about breathing consumption germs and any others that might be suspended in the stuffy, faintly carbolic-scented air.
Lincoln emerged from the consulting room in grim composure, and he and Simion got into the waiting carriage. The large and funereal landau and its driver had been placed at Lincoln’s disposal by the Reverend Micah Lyte, the Episcopalian bishop of Savannah, for when he visited the city. The vehicle was a relic of the 1840s, unwieldy but solid, upholstered in puce velvet. Its stifling stateliness gave one a feeling of being en route to one’s own funeral, especially when shut up with someone who could look forward so soon to his.
“What’d he say?”
“About six months,” said Lincoln. The silence fell between them, thick, like hot air full of dust.
“I think,” said Simion after a minute, “that you’re strong in ways that they don’t know about.”
“Perhaps six months is enough. Perhaps it’s all I want,” Lincoln said, half to himself. “I should be strong enough to be truthful, meanwhile.” He rolled up the shade on his side, letting in a sheet of hot glare, and spoke to the driver. “Drive. Anywhere. Someplace in the shade.”
“Yassuh.”
They drove down Bull Street, where the bishop’s house stood clad in white ironwork lace and flowering vines. It was hot, even here under the live oaks and palms, a thick, humid, stifling shade. On the island, a cool rain had fallen the night before, and there it was pleasant, but not here. The still air shimmered; the people who were forced to be out carried on in moist misery. Simion contemplated a cluster of wilting women, spines straight with corsets and decorum, their fair brows slick with sweat. He had noticed yet another thing that he and Lincoln had in common: They didn’t suffer from heat as other people did. In Haliburton, they had basked like cats in the occasional spell of hot weather that others found oppressive, and they did not suffer as most did in the south Georgia summer. Neither of them sweated much except in a fever or the very hottest weather, and this, at ninety degrees or so, was not the hottest.
“Poor devils! That’s one thing we don’t have to endure, isn’t it?”
“You’ve noticed that too?” said Lincoln. “Emblematic of something or other, I’m afraid. But how do you like this fair city?”
“I don’t mind it here. I like not being cold. But my great question is, why isn’t it doing you any good here?”
“Well, you know, it doesn’t come with a patent and a guarantee,” said the elder Simeon sourly. “I sometimes
wonder if the risk isn’t actually worse because of the hordes of people with lung trouble who come here to share our balmy air and winterless winter. But I shouldn’t complain. I could be stuck in the sanitarium here in the city, or in Charleston, as I once was for six weeks during the vile summer for yet another treatment that didn’t work. In Charleston, there are turkey buzzards in the streets just as there are pigeons in decent places. Maybe they got into the habit after the war. Speaking of emblematic! I shouldn’t moan to you, but I haven’t had anyone intelligent to moan to, so attend, please,” he continued. His pale eyes went paler, and he said in a loud harsh whisper, “I hate the South. I wish I could write it forty times in red on a wall: I hate it. I want to go to New Haven; I want to go to Cambridge and slake my eye on that coppery blue that the sky is in winter. I want to hear a bouquet of Boston and Maine accents and see snow from the windows of proper libraries and be a scholar and a man again. I would even settle for Haliburton and my little gray stone school if I could make an occasional journey into civilization, but I’m not going to do any of it. Well, at least between the two of us, we got you to Yale. And when you get back there, you write me letters, plenty of letters. You’ll only have to do it for the first term, if Legare’s right. You can omit the prattle about your studies. Just tell me what thoughts you have, what real thoughts. And tell me about those flaming elms in autumn and the colors of light and darkness on snow. I won’t go there again.”