The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “Yes?”

  “Order me something that comes to the table on fire.”

  In the course of two glittery, fatiguing days, they made the rounds of the rug merchants, the riding school in Central Park, the shops, and restaurants that served flambéed food. It was not so much the taste of the latter as the idea of it that Simion seemed taken with, and the auspicious whuff! as the brandy was lit. He bought Doriskos a stair runner in a palette of misty blues and greens and washed pinks and cerises, a piece of carpeting unlike any Andrew had seen. He also bought himself a memorable dressing gown, a wearable picture in green and gold and amber figured silk—which Andrew praised to the sky, knowing how it would horrify Doriskos.

  That evening Andy and Simion heard Il Trovatore at the opera. Going back to the hotel in a cab, Simion leaned, half-asleep, into Andrew’s shoulder. He had not seemed wildly impressed with the piece, though cheerful enough.

  “So, what did you think of that?”

  “It’s very loud. And for something that’s supposed to be a recreation, full of cruelty and violence. And so realistic.”

  “Realistic, how so?” Andrew hadn’t expected this.

  “Well, you don’t see any happily-ever-after there. There are three people who seem to be full of imagination and sensibility, who tell stories in their arias, who run to help one another, and they’re the ones you find sprawled dead in the end while the piggy one who caused the whole mess is standing up, drawing air, and bellowing, ‘What happened here?’ You don’t see them end up in some nice little stone cottage in the Pyrenees, with the Spanish lady doing the sewing and the old gypsy dreaming by the hearth while the tenor goes game-hunting. Everything goes to Hell. How realistic can you want it to be? I say,” he said, brightening, “that tub in our suite’s big enough for both of us. Let’s take a bath together when we get back.”

  Andrew would end up looking back on that weekend with infinite regret in one sense and in another with none. On one hand, his actions created significant misfortune; on the other, he added a perfect pearl of memory to his life’s store. He spent half a term’s allowance on that weekend, leaving himself just enough for singing lessons and firewood. This bought him the chance to live for three days in a hotel that had gilt lifts carpeted in claret velvet, in a suite with misty pastel rugs on its floors, with vases of long-budded white roses, and with a bathtub big enough for two. The price of that hotel suite bought also the city of New York in a season of extraordinary beauty, a brief thaw when the cold was at bay and the night streets were laced and threaded with fog. The winter city, throbbing with gaslight refracted through an air soft and cottony with cold humidity, was like some great jewel, opalescent. Andrew’s money bought tickets to two operas and delicate food and iced champagne, both sweet and dry. It bought him Simion’s delighted, materialistic response to all the above and the chance to savor his friend’s beauty in bright modern pools of gaslight. It seemed that the brightest rooms in New Haven were afflicted with shadows in a way that even white carpets and milk-glass lamps could not exorcise. He felt that he had been right to take the chance then, because adulthood takes the edge off frank pleasures like these, creates self-consciousness and the sense that one ought to be somewhere else, doing something not so pleasurable. And, he would discover, not only the opportunities but the sensibilities change, and the same experience at different times is not the same. At twenty, the skin is thin, the memory is keen, and the sensual sap is almost inexhaustibly high. At no other time would this weekend have been so delicious. The person who has known such pleasure at twenty will try to replicate it at thirty or fifty and fail—but the person who has not will feel an aching lack that cannot, cannot be filled.

  Andrew had wanted to see what Simion was like, out of those puritan shadows. And there was only one really malicious element in the whole affair: He planned to take something that Klionarios wanted. Namely, the rest of Simion’s virginity, or that part of it that could be taken by possession of his body. Andrew had not been told about it, but he sensed that in spite of the marital apple pies that Klionarios baked and Simion’s calling him Dori, Simion and Klionarios had gotten derailed in this area, and Andrew had the chance to steal a march on Doriskos in the Intimate Sensualities department. He told himself, reasonably, that this was at least half for Simion’s sake.

  Simion liked Tannhäuser better, for music if not for plot. “So, what’s the matter?” he whispered. “He’s spent a little time with Venus; wouldn’t that make him a better husband? Practice and all? What’s all the fuss about?”

  Andrew replied, “It’s all about medievalism and German Catholicism and courtly love. I’ll show you a book on it someday. They liked their notions better than a good husband. People always like their pigheaded notions much better than having their lives run sweet and smooth. Besides, if people in operas solved things sensibly, there’d be no second act. Like novels. It’s impossible to write a novel about someone who behaves sensibly.”

  “Right. That would be boring,” said Simion, smiling. “The worse a person in a novel behaves, or the more confused he is, or both, the better. I prefer novels about criminals. I think someone ought to write an opera about Vautrin.”

  “Oh, me too! That really is a good idea, you know!”

  Wagner’s music told the true story; it seems to say all that people dream about in sex, but which it does not deliver to the timid. It is frenzy on the edge of a swoon, climax from sheer fatigue, insatiety personified. Simion liked it; he came out of the opera house looking contentedly bemused, as if he’d had a dose of some potent, dreamy drug. Andrew got them a cab and told the driver to take a swing through Central Park, where every tree branch and twig was gemmed out in a thin coat of new ice. It was getting cold again. They pulled up the lap robe, under which Andrew felt it safe to put his arm around Simion, and Simion laid his gloved hand on Andrew’s thigh. The driver persevered in talking to them, though at least not in any way that required an answer. Simion tired of the man’s talk. “Is there any way I could tell him to shut up?” he whispered. “After all, we’re paying for this.”

  “ ‘Shut up,’ that’s one way.”

  “I meant politely.”

  Andrew did not know of one. Shut up was not polite, however phrased. Simion then suggested, in his usual unvarnished way, going to some very nice place where they served those delightful sweet mixed drinks that got one so effortlessly drunk. When Andrew demurred—perhaps enjoying the diamonded night and their concealed gestures too much—Simion slipped his right glove off under the lap robe and petted him intimately, despite Andrew’s pinches and agitated whispers of, “Simion, no!” The cabman driving them, luckily, was busy telling them about shooting Georgians and burning plantations during the Great Rebellion, a period he evidently regarded as the climactic one of his life. Andrew began to look more kindly upon Simion’s proposal, considering what it might mean; Simion had never been more brazen than he was being this minute beneath the lap robe. He had the driver take them back to the Remington, where they found a small darkish table in the bar and proceeded to help support the American distillery industry and the vintners of France to the best of their ability until one in the morning.

  By the time they got through, Simion had made himself dizzy on champagne and fraise and green Chartreuse—“You’re drunk as you can be,” Andy observed, steering him into the lift.

  “It’s nice drunk, though. I’m not just out of pain, I’m happy,” said Simion, steadying himself by Andrew’s arm. “Feels…good. You wanted to make me cheerful, well, I am.”

  It felt wonderful, in fact—as if he’d lost his gravity and, while he might have some difficulty walking, he might also take to the air like a balloon on a strong puff of wind. When he was this drunk, all the normal little discomforts that plagued and tired him were quelled; the creature he really was beneath it all emerged, all the more impatient and hungry from long confinement. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself rising like Ganymede into the ether, the thin, deli
cious, amoral air.

  Back in the hotel suite, he flung himself onto the bed and laughed to feel it bounce. Andrew turned all the gas jets off and checked again to see that the door was bolted. When he came to smile over Simion’s happily prostrate form, Simion took him by the lapels and made him bend. “Come, get in bed quick,” he whispered. “I can feel everything now!” He meant that opening of the senses that sometimes happened for him—being drunk helped, although it had occurred independently of that. And how lovely it was—the ordinary areas of his skin seemed to wake up and get as sensitive as the acute places, like the roof of the mouth, were always, and for the moment he existed to be caressed, had no thoughts, and feared nothing; at such a moment, he was the creature whom John Ezra had so hated and, yes, feared.

  “Of course you can. You can feel just fine.”

  “Come on,” Simion cajoled him, with a note of heathen delight in his voice. “Don’t you know how to undress yourself in less than half an hour, at your age? And me?”

  Andrew leaned over him. “I won’t make you wait too long,” he drawled. He lowered one hand and stroked Simion’s chest through his shirt, a leisurely, libertine caress. Simion wanted to sit up and yank his clothes off, but his head felt too heavy, too light, too drunk for that. By concentrating, though, he could make his fingers negotiate the buttons. He undid them. Andrew slid his clothes off him, leaving his silk socks for last. Later Simion recalled quite clearly Andrew feeling the shape of his socked foot in his hands, taking his time, the aesthete, then pulling the socks off. Letting his hands travel lightly and gently up Simion’s legs. Naked as Simion was, the heat pulsed in his skin; he was entirely warm and relaxed and aroused. Wholly inside his arousal, as he’d been the first time, and aware only dimly of anything else. The room tilted gently around him as Andrew took off his own clothes and laid them in gentle, orderly fashion on the back of a chair, on top of Simion’s. As the mattress shifted gently with Andy’s added weight, Simion seemed to feel himself sinking farther and farther into it under those slow exploratory kisses; he began to wonder if he wasn’t too drunk for this after all. Then, again, being this drunk and having things out of his hands also felt splendid. It seemed that Andrew’s touches were also more thoroughgoing, more intimate than ever before, with no haste and yet tremendous urgency. He lingered, playing out each caress like a slow note on a viola.

  Andrew noted how different this was from their usual, which at its best was a matter of schoolboys indulging themselves in schoolboy familiarities in a somewhat dangerous setting, in haste, in the constant fear of discovery. A thing that might be done and forgotten about if it happened only once. Now they were in this lovely billowing bed expressly to make love, and they had all night behind a securely locked door four inches thick to do it in. Still, he supposed, one might feel some nervousness and fears obscured by those of discovery, etc., at college.

  “Am I scaring you?” he whispered, making a small pause even in his urgency. He lifted himself slightly from Simion and stroked his face, a bit of pleasurable tenderness such as one might show a child.

  “Scaring me? No,” Simion managed to say. He also got out, “Let’s try it.”

  “Try what?”

  “You know. Come inside me,” he whispered, feeling his own audacity. He meant what he and Doriskos had seemed on the verge of doing before the wire. It was not a thing you ever discussed.

  “You sure? Well, you tell me if you want me to stop…”

  “Want you to go ahead. While I feel so drunk and nice.”

  On his face, he seemed to sink more, though he could not be going anywhere. Then, the bed stopped yielding, and he was the thing that yielded next. A shock went through his whole body—pain, but not at full value—like thunder far off, and he felt it as one feels thunder. “Trust me,” Andrew whispered to him, with the gentling hand on his head that stayed his fright and kept the pain from becoming panic. At some point it began to be better, pleasant and hurtful at once in a way that would appall him when he contemplated it later. He pressed the pillow to his face to stifle the sounds he couldn’t keep from making, which sounded more like intense amazement than either pain or pleasure. When he hit the peak of it, it squeezed his other senses shut, and all he could perceive was the pulsing pressure of flesh inside him, hot as a heart. At the release inside him, he felt himself washed by a wave of delicious shame, then Andrew separated from him—very gently, but it still hurt, and the pain reached him. In that tilting dark, Andrew got a warm wet cloth and sponged something off him—blood? mine? he wondered. He thought he asked, but he didn’t. Andrew bent over him and would have murmured to him and stroked him, soothing the outraged child in him, but that the wine had its way with him then. He looked up, feeling Andrew’s hand on his cheek, opened his mouth to say something, and passed out.

  Perhaps that lack, falling into that drunk sleep with no time to be stroked and reassured, accounted for his shocked-sober awakening. The night and the morning seemed to have vanished in an eyeblink; he couldn’t orient himself at all until he saw that he had slept naked. Except for his socks; Andrew had put his heavy wool socks, not the gray silk ones worn last night, on him. His feet were cold in spite of the warmth of the suite and this bit of chivalric thoughtfulness, and he felt violently sore. He found his robe and put it on, noting a suck mark on his shoulder, then blearily took himself to the bathroom. He was beginning to form a memory of that miniature orgy last night. What they had done had hurt at first, and yet managed to turn into some sort of utterly disgraceful passive pleasure which, like three glasses of champagne in close and dizzying succession, he liked. (Then again, he thought, everything that I like except mathematics and horses is disgraceful. Nothing there to be surprised at!) There was a tray with chocolate and breakfast on the table, also a note: “Taking a walk. Love.” Simion drank the chocolate and was surprised to find himself attracted by the food, even hungry. He peeled an egg and ate it, ate a few bites of hothouse melon. His body and his emotions were at odds—the former sore but well content, the latter grading into alarm. It seemed he had not been damaged in any lasting way, probably less than a girl on her wedding night. He knew a lot about pain and could name instantly half a dozen things that had hurt worse and longer, and yet an almost panicky discomfort and sense of self-disgust were not slow in coming. He turned on the gold-plated bath taps and ran a tub full of water all but too hot even for him. He scrubbed himself all over; he washed his hair, and scoured his teeth with Andy’s toothpowder and then with bicarbonate. He put on tweed trousers, his Wellingtons, and a heavy gray high-necked jersey, and drew near to the fire to dry his hair with hard, angry strokes of both brush and towel.

  “Andy, you ought not to have done such a thing! And in that necrophilic way!”

  “Necrophilic way?”

  “I was drunk enough to piss out my ears! Too drunk to do anything about it! Or say anything!”

  “You did say something.”

  “What?”

  “You asked me to do what we did, and I’m a gentleman, and I would never dream of declining any reasonable request of yours,” said Andrew gravely. Then he smiled, inviting Simion to smile.

  “You oughtn’t to have got me drunk,” said Simion, beginning to feel the childishness of this even as it was coming out of his mouth.

  “I didn’t. I’ve never seen the occasion when I had to press wine upon you. You got yourself drunk as a lord without any aid from me. Three glasses of champagne and a good sampler of those sweet and sneaky French liqueurs. And you were very naughty in the carriage even before you had anything to drink—I blessed that big lap robe, for you took your glove off and put your hand under it, and your actions would have raised Lazarus.”

  “I wasn’t myself.”

  “On the contrary, you were exactly yourself, the most yourself I’ve ever seen you. And very delightful you were. Really, Simion. Think how infuriated your tract-writing father would be. And what we did, it’s better to do drunk the first few times, because oth
erwise it feels like being reamed out with a hoe handle. I know this for a fact. So I did seize my chance, but so did you, you see. As you ought. You’re going to enjoy making love in all the ways a person can; you’ve got the temperament for it. You’ll be able to do anything any man can do, and anything that any woman can do except get knocked up, and I think you’ll agree you’ve got the best of that bargain. You always act as if you’d pawned your own mother on such occasions.”

  “My mother’s been dead too long to care, but Dori would. What would he think if he knew! He’d like to do that, only he’s too shy. But I bet he wouldn’t like my doing it with you.”

  Andrew, who also bet Dori wouldn’t like that, knew better than to pursue the subject. He had always suspected that once anything had managed to dissipate the haze that surrounded Doriskos, reach down below that Brontëan fog to wherever the creature lived, he’d be capable of unpleasantly intense emotional antics—including jealousy of Homeric dimensions.

  “No need to inform him, you know,” Andrew said. “As far as he’s concerned, all you’ve done is go to the opera and ride the horses at Central Park. If you should wish to allow him the plenum et optabilum coïtum, you can always maintain the illusion of your virginity by crying and fussing that it hurts—and I’d bet it will, knowing what I do of his grace under pressure and adeptness in personal relations.”

  “The usual snarky Andy, jealous of Dori. He doesn’t say half such nasty things about you. I think light-minded is the worst epithet he uses. And farfallone amoroso.”

  “Farfallone amoroso, that’s not bad,” said Andy, stroking his chin. “That’s from The Marriage of Figaro.” He looked at Simion to check the progress of his persuasion. He seemed less angry, but there was still a prickly, bristly set to his chin and shoulders. Andrew sat down on the coral velvet sofa and gestured an invitation to sit beside him, but Simion shook his head. However, he took a step closer.